Monthly Archives: October 2011

Humor / People / Science & Technology — No Comments
20
Oct 11

Steve Ballmer… Microsoft’s wacky CEO

Microsoft CEO On Android: “Only A Computer Scientist Could Figure Out How To Use It”

Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer took his appearance at the Web 2.0 Summit as an opportunity to publicly press the dislike button on Android, Google apps, and the iPhone.

Microsoft is planning to release new Nokia phones powered by its Windows Phone operating system at Nokia World on October 26 and Ballmer told Web 2.0 interviewer John Batelle that he thought iPhone was the main competition. Though Google’s Android software has gobbled up market share to become the most popular smartphone operating system in the United States, Ballmer was dismissive of the competitor.

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Business and Politics — No Comments
19
Oct 11

Top ten list: Tax evaders’ wall of shame

Sunday, April 10, 2011 – Ad Lib by Catherine Poe

When you read about GE paying no corporate federal taxes in 2010 while getting a $3.2 billion rebate, does your blood start to boil?

If you listened to the corporate whining, you probably thought companies like GE paid 35% in federal taxes. Not so. It’s a rare company that ponies up that amount.

For too long the American public has been hornswoggled by this century’s “robber barons.”

Remember, it was our tax dollars that saved the hides of many of these multinationals with colossal bailouts, and how do they say thanks?

By not paying their taxes. Nada, zero, zilch. And it’s legal, thanks to Congress.

However, I am betting you’ll pay your 2010 taxes on April 15th.

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Music / People — No Comments
19
Oct 11

Chuck Berry – 85 years young…

Legendary guitarist, singer and songwriter, Chuck Berry (b. Oct. 18, 1926) is 85 today and is often referred to at the King of Rock and Roll – or as John Lennon put it: “If you tried to give rock and roll another name, you might call it ‘Chuck Berry’”

In the film Hail! Hail! Rock ‘n’ Roll! Eric Clapton states ‘If you wanna play rock and roll – or any upbeat number – and you wanted to take a guitar ride you would end up playing like Chuck…because there is very little other choice. There’s not a lot of other ways to play rock and roll other than the way Chuck plays it; he’s really laid the law down…”

In 1992 Keith Richards told Best of Guitar Player “Chuck was my man. He was the one who made me say ‘I want to play guitar, Jesus Christ!’…Suddenly I knew what I wanted to do.”

Berry’s showmanship has been influential on other rock guitar players, particularly his one-legged hop routine, and the “duck walk”, which he first used as a child when he walked “stooping with full-bended knees, but with my back and head vertical” under a table to retrieve a ball and his family found it entertaining; he used it when “performing in New York for the first time and some journalist branded it the duck walk.

Source: Wikipedia

Art / My Photos — No Comments
19
Oct 11

Orange on Green – Project Flickr: Round

Art / My Photos — No Comments
19
Oct 11

Mosaic on Blue – Project Flickr: Round

Books / Science & Technology — No Comments
19
Oct 11

A sign of the times

By James Milstid

E-Readers, the Internet, and digital audio books have changed the way many of us are reading.

Sure, real books have a certain warm and cozy je ne sais quoi and appeal that I’ll never deny. But electronic books have won me over for convenience and ease. I’m sure that my being a techy has something to do with it too. But having read at least thirty books on my nookcolor (and several more on my iPhone before I had a nook) puts me way beyond the exploratory mode. My e-Reader is my preferred media for books.

I’ve been interested for some time how digital media is affecting publishers, bookstores, libraries, and the like. So it was with some interest that I read this article in the New York Times. It certainly is a sign of the times…

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Science & Technology — No Comments
19
Oct 11

O. M. G. I’m salivating…

Canon Unveils the 1D X: One DSLR to Rule Them All

As the rumors foretold, Canon has announced a new DSLR today combining the 1D and 1Ds line of DSLRs into a single camera: the EOS-1D X. This beastly DSLR is an 18-megapixel jack of all trades. It’s full frame, but still shoots 14fps using 61 autofocus points and a 252-zone metering system. ISO can be boosted up to a whopping 204,000.

There’s a large 3.2-inch LCD screen on the back, and a futuristic optical viewfinder that offers things such as a dual-axis electronic level and an on-demand grid. For remote shooting and file transferring, there’s a handy built-in wired LAN connection. In terms of video, camera can also do 1080p recording at 24/25/30fps, along with 720p at 50/60fps. You’ll have to start saving up though — the 1D X will cost $6,800 when it’s released in March 2012.

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Science & Technology — No Comments
19
Oct 11

What the Hell Magnets? Why Are You So Amazing?

By ANDREW LISZEWSKI

You don’t need to be a physicist, a PhD student, a geek, or even a member of the Insane Clown Posse to appreciate the awesome capabilities of superconductors and magnets as demonstrated in this video by Tel-Aviv University.

An unidentified member of the university’s Superconductivity Group School of Physics and Astronomy shows off the quantum locking, or quantum trapping, effects of a magnet that’s been super cooled with liquid nitrogen. Now we’ve probably all seen demonstrations of super cooled magnets floating above a track before, with promises of them facilitating high-speed trains zigzagging across the country. But this video goes one step further, showing how the position and angle of the magnet can be locked in a magnetic field while it’s in motion. The moral of the story is that it makes for an impressive demo, and I better see hoverboards popping up in toy stores by Christmas.

Via GIZMODO

Health / Science & Technology — No Comments
18
Oct 11

The Science of Irrationality

A Nobelist explains our fondness for not thinking

By JONAH LEHRER

Here’s a simple arithmetic question: “A bat and ball cost $1.10. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The vast majority of people respond quickly and confidently, insisting the ball costs 10 cents. This answer is both incredibly obvious and utterly wrong. (The correct answer is five cents for the ball and $1.05 for the bat.) What’s most impressive is that education doesn’t really help; more than 50% of students at Harvard, Princeton and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology routinely give the incorrect answer.

Daniel Kahneman, a Nobel Laureate and professor of psychology at Princeton, has been asking questions like this for more than five decades. His disarmingly simple experiments have profoundly changed the way that we think about thinking. While philosophers, economists and social scientists had assumed for centuries that human beings are rational agents, Mr. Kahneman and his scientific partner, the late Amos Tversky, demonstrated that we’re not nearly as rational as we like to believe.

When people face an uncertain situation, they don’t carefully evaluate the information or look up relevant statistics. Instead, their decisions depend on mental short cuts, which often lead them to make foolish decisions. The short cuts aren’t a faster way of doing the math; they’re a way of skipping the math altogether.
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Science & Technology — No Comments
16
Oct 11

Use a QR Code for Your Vcard

If you have a Barcode/QR code scanning app on your smartphone, scan this QR code and it will create my contact info for your address book.

Transferring business cards to your smartphone address book can be a real pain. Those tiny keypads work well, but it still requires some dexterity. QR Codes are a quick and easy way for your contacts to add your own contact info to their smartphone address books. Without typing!

I generated the QR code to the left and added it to my business card. All the recipient has to do is scan it with the smartphone’s scanner app. Most apps will take the info and create a new contact entry in the address book. It also works well on a website, social network, email, or even printed on a scrap of paper.

You can easily generate your own for free at several websites. I created this one at
http://snapmyinfo.com/vcard. You simply enter your contact info and the site generates the Vcard code and the QR code. Right-click on the QR code and save the image to your folder of choice. Simple as that!

My info created the following Vcard and converted it to the QR code seen here.

BEGIN:VCARD
N:Milstid;James
ORG:James Milstid Photography
TEL:253-670-4469
EMAIL:papajames@milstid.com
URL:http://jamesmilstidphotography.com
END:VCARD

I’m using a barcode scanning app called QuickMark on my iPhone. It’s also available for Android-based smartphones.

~James Milstid~

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