While I’m still liking Paul’s metaphor, where in he points out that some firms are like the springs in the mattress the entire economy lies upon, Felix Salmon plays with a nice alternative, the weather. Most of the companies listed on the stock market aren’t, and they should be able to weather a financial storm [...]
WANs are wide area networks, like the internet, and LANs are, local area networks, like the wifi in your house. PANs, personal area networks, are – i thought – a joke. Presumably each Borg has a PAN so his headset, pda, cell phone, and ankle bracelet can talk to each other and when he sits [...]
Evernote is a cool idea. They want to enable you to keep copy of all those random notes. In this example I drew a quick sketch on an index card (on this topic). I held it up to the little video camera on my Macbook and took this picture. Then I dragged the resulting image [...]
David Huynh and I worked together at in the Simile project (simile.mit) for the past few years. We burnt through our funding and many of us have moved on; he moved to MetaWeb. MetaWeb makes the horribly named Freebase. Freebase is this era’s version of AI knowledge representation (think frames). People these days tend to [...]
Tim Oren relates this aphorism “Systems dump excess energy in the form of structure.” He credits James Burke. Delightful. If true it goes a long way toward explaining why large firms, who almost by definition succeed in capturing proportionally larger rents, become less adaptable. Comfortable abundance gives you the luxury for polishing all your policies [...]
“Out of the vast mass of undifferentiated powers certain functional deities appear; and the Kami of Japan to-day who preside offer the gilds and crafts of industry and agriculture, over the trees and grasses of the field, the operations of the household, and even the kitchen-range, the saucepan, the rice-pot, the well, the garden, the [...]
This is fun. You install Adeona on a device; it then gleans information about the location of the device as best it can; and it streams that information into a distributed store. Later you or somebody you trust pulls those records from the store. Their example use case is recovery of a stolen laptop. The [...]
Boy you know times are changing when a Republican Senator suggests reducing the national speed limit! In other news, on a week long road trip I was amazed that everybody was driving the speed limit, particularly the truck drivers. People were also driving much more smoothly. The very few who weren’t really stood out. Watching [...]
This is a lovely article about a man who is methodically riding all the bus routes in the Seatle area. It reminded me of the people who walk all the streets in Manhatten. My wife and I once ate in every resturant on Mass Avenue, well at least a large segment of it, once a [...]
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