Month: July 2009

Eatertainment

Fat, sugar, and salt are the crucial elements for “eatertainment”: Frito-Lay is trying to create “a lot of fun in your mouth”, others to “unlock the code of craveability,” or to “cram as much hedonics as you can in 1 dish.”

IC 5067

in may 2009, i spent a night at kitt peak national observatory, the largest on the planet, to take a picture of IC 5067. IC 5067, also known as the pelican nebula, is 2000 light years away on our spiral arm of the galaxy, the orion arm. it is 15 light years across, and an active region of star formation.

the picture was taken on a 0.5m telescope with a SBIG STL 6303E CCD camera, cooled to -15C. exposure time was 40 minutes each for red, green, blue and 2 hours for luminance.

Exodus to the virtual world

Virtual worlds have exploded out of online game culture and now capture the attention of millions of ordinary people: husbands, wives, fathers, mothers, workers, retirees. Devoting dozens of hours each week to massively multiplayer virtual reality environments (like World of Warcraft and Second Life), these millions are the start of an exodus into the refuge of fantasy, where they experience life under a new social, political, and economic order built around fun. Given the choice between a fantasy world and the real world, how many of us would choose reality? Exodus to the Virtual World explains the growing migration into virtual reality, and how it will change the way we live–both in fantasy worlds and in the real one.

Interesting read. Argues that as more people experience virtual worlds, they will demand the apt policy design in games to be applied to the real world. Result: a fun maximizing society.

Memristor minds

a fundamental element of electronic circuits, predicted in 1971, is now being used to build neurons in hardware. leon chua will probably get a nobel prize for his prediction.

Saving capitalism

The perception of many is that financial markets are parasitic institutions that feed off the blood, sweat, and tears of the rest of us. The reality is far different. This book breaks free of traditional ideological arguments of the Right and Left and points to a new way of understanding and spreading the extraordinary wealth-generating capabilities of capitalism.

2012-10-10:

They suggest that the government should give green cards to all foreigners who come to America to study science, technology, engineering or maths. Some are more innovative. Exchange-traded investment funds, which have gone from nothing 10 years ago to a trillion-$ industry today, leave promising new companies vulnerable to the fickleness of high-frequency traders: so why not let them exclude themselves from such funds’ baskets of shares? SOX is reducing the supply of new companies in the name of protecting investors: so why not let smaller firms opt out of SOX so long as shareholders are duly warned? The authors also argue that university technology offices should lose their monopolies, giving professors more freedom to exploit their innovations.

Innovative Deflation

Those who are making money in the knowledge economy are making pennies per $ in the old markets that they’ve eliminated with their innovation. This isn’t because we haven’t found the right monetization scheme yet. It is because innovation is leading to efficiency and not growth and that is exerting deflationary pressure on bloated industries. Moreover, it is largely being done by us, the end-user, in our free time, because we want to create and share, not just consume.