Month: December 2008

Psystar

i hope apple gets cut down to size. they are worse than ms in the proprietary department

Price Symmetry

Retailers aren’t going to be able to support artificially high prices based on information asymmetry anymore.

Stuck Academia

But universities are stuck, like auto plants – like newspapers – like TV Studios – like the US Armed Forces – with infrastructure and unionized workforces that cost a bomb. Like the newspapers or auto makers, they will soon be faced with a dilemma. They cannot get their revenues up to cover their costs. Like papers they will have to cut “content”. At some point like the newspapers they will be left with being expensive and poor value. Already, we’re one of the few countries where 25- to 34-year-olds are less educated than older workers.

Too many people going to “college” learning too little.

1 Timezone

With increased globalization, however, I think it’s time to just throw the whole time zone thing in the trash and have 1 universal time.

Food Timeline

onions & garlic 5 ka, ice cream is 5 ka. fried chicken 2 ka, and olive oil 7 ka.

GM sells 6 cars

GM said sales dropped 41%

excellent

Optical Trapping

One of those techniques, called optical trapping, uses a highly focused beam of light to capture and precisely position particles.

Laptop Cop geolocate

stolen laptops phoning home using gears, presumably

Mathematica Image Processing

wow. a potential shell of the future will do these kinds of transforms for everything in your field of view.

One of the main advantages of doing something like this in Mathematica is that you can trivially replicate operations for many images. Sure, you can write PhotoShop scripts; I’ve done that many times, and every time I end up swearing at the thing wishing I could use a real language (and now that Mathematica 7 is out, I finally can). Beyond a certain level of complexity it’s simply not efficient to mess around with dialog boxes and script editors: you want a real language with a real syntax and a real API.

Wolfram Blog

using mathematica aggressively in education would do more to overcome innumeracy than anything else i can think of