Rants, Raves, and Rhetoric v4

Month: January 2012

  • Prettier hair and hats

    Everyone should take a few minutes (meaning a few hours once you get sucked in) and take a look at Quora. The concept of the site is to use crowdsourcing for answers to questions. Questions are asked of the community. People choose to answer. For example, someone asked: “Why did people wear more hats in the…

  • Precise Shock Therapy

    Consider this Cyborg Stephen Hawking Part II. Our understanding of the brain is so very underwhelming. Ran across an interesting article: Brain electrodes fix depression long term. Deep depression that fails to respond to any other form of therapy can be moderated or reversed by stimulation of areas deep inside the brain. Now the first placebo-controlled…

  • Cyborg Stephen Hawking

    Stephen Hawking missed his 70th birthday party this past weekend. He was not feeling well. There has been quite a bit floating around the Internet about how he as survived decades after getting an estimated months to live. Even Intel talked up how they are working on a way to help him speak faster. Speaking…

  • Flickr: Most Interesting 2011

    David Wilkinson has a cool tool I like called Flickr Set Manager. It daily looks at my photos and updates several sets of my photos. One is my most interesting 120 photos. The others are the most interesting 30 photos for each year. Below is a slideshow for 2011.

  • Read Later Shotgun

    Back in my Netscape 3 days, my bookmark.html was incompletely saved losing about 2/3rds of the file. Researching how to fix it revealed to me the file was just an HTML file. My new editing skills could not recover it, but I could make a new copy and fix individual entry losses. Making a copy…

  • To Blog or to Share?

    This blog has suffered from my sharing on social media. Where I used to post every day, even just one liners to go check out a web site or a story, that activity is now all on Facebook, Twitter, Google+. HackEducation does a weekly post of news. I am thinking about doing something similar for…

  • Some Stats

    According to Google Analytics, between Jan 1 to Dec 31, 2011 this blog saw: 146,718 Unique Visitors 208,520 Pageview 174,104 for Quotes to Make You Think Sources: 138,144 Google 20,055 No referrer (application like desktop email? Twitter?) 8,445 Bing … 843 Facebook … 68 Twitter These could be somewhat under reported depending on the rates by…

  • Fee or Discount

    In this day and age, I find it surprising enormous corporations have not figured the difference in the perception of a fee vs a discount. Adding a fee causes consumer uproar. They feel the faceless no good bully is trying to make money unfairly. Even people who probably will avoid ever paying the fee on…

  • Resolutions 2012

    The reading list went pretty well last year. The only problem is it made me buy a bunch of books. Inventorying my books (thanks to the Goodreads app) made me aware I own a ton of books I ought to read. So this years goals are books I already have. Reading goals: Complete unfinished novel…