Just discovered a great app: Better Touch Tool. You can assign pretty much any action to any multi touch gesture. Now i can four finger swipe in different directions to move between spaces. works with the new magic mouse too, so now I might even get one…
I am going to an OKC Thunder v. Dallas Mavericks game tomorrow night.
Does anyone know who, other than Kevin Durant, I should be watching and/or rooting for? This is my first NBA experience, other than when I went to an NBADL game two years ago (ouch!).
I hope that Dallas-OKC becomes a good rivalry. The match up shows promise since they are both in the same conference and people from both states don’t like each other, even though we are basically the same.
I’ll let you know how it goes…and how many times this classic Garth Brooks song plays over the loudspeakers.
I’ve been playing with this really cool GPS app for the iphone. If you are rockin’ a 3g or 3gs, you should be rockin’ this app. It will let you do most of what you’d want to do with a dedicated hand held gps (maps, tracks, waypoints, etc.), plus it lets you download those maps over wifi or the cell network, take and geotag photos, and share your location via FB, twitter, or email, send yourself kmz or gpx files of where you’ve been. In addition to google and bing maps, you can download maps from the totally open source OpenStreetMap, which I didn’t even know about (Zmurder, did you?). I seriously think that in a post iphone world, electronics that are not connected to the interwebs will seem increasingly dumb.
The light version is free and awesome, but I think the 2.99 upgrade is worth it, if for no other reason than to support what they are doing.
Wow this little tidbit was cool in a story I was reading on the right whale having a great breeding year. Check it out:
It was the first time researchers had successfully sedated a large whale of any type, according to NOAA. To do so, they had to use two cups worth of tranquilizer and a foot-long needle. Two drops of the concoction would be enough to kill a person, said Jamison Smith, NOAA’s large whale disentanglement coordinator.
Amazing!
Lifehacker linked to a howto for roasting coffee with a heat gun and claims the hand held devices give more control than a popcorn popper. Anybody tried this?
Might be a good excuse to buy a heat gun. Packrat has one that looks just like the one in the pic, and it’s a hell of a lot of fun to play with / burn yourself with.
Since June 2007, I haven’t had a television in my residence. For a two-month stint last year, I didn’t have a computer. I became well acquainted with the programming schedule of my local NPR station. On Thursday nights, they broadcast a program that actually makes my life better, and I have downloaded all the podcasts that are available.
The program is called Radiolab and is produced by WNYC in, well, NYC. It is hosted by Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich. Krulwich is a science correspondent for NPR and hosted Frontline on PBS-a legit journalist. Abumrad is a producer (music/documentaries).
I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that I’m the last one of us to discover this program. It’s all about science and human existence. This show is absolutely fascinating, and I encourage everyone to give a the episodes a listen. It reminds me of the conversations we had in college over an OE 40.
If you need a starting point, I recommend Sperm or Placebo. Enjoy!
Obama may be wearing the pants now, but we still have a country filled with people like these:
42% of Americans support state-sponsored torturing.
55% of Republican Americans support state-sponsored torturing.
65% of Republican American men support state-sponsored torturing.
I could give this more nuance, but I’m not.
Normally I wouldn’t care about a new bar on dickson, but this one sounds pretty sweet. I’m hoping to check it out while I’m home for Chrismahuanakwanza
Flyer Profile: The Smoke & Barrel Tavern :: Fayetteville Flyer
As of Friday at about 10:00p.m. I am an engaged gentleman. Not necessarily engaged in political discourse, discussions involving the word “nanoscience”, or a grappling match. No, I’m engage to be married.
Her name is Lauren Vanderlip, and she’s a 2L at Oklahoma Law. We met via my friend Amira, who some of you may remember from UA.
Since we both have friends strewn across the globe, we’re recording a short announcement/introduction video this weekend to send out. I’ll keep you posted once it’s posted.
We haven’t set a date yet, but I suspect some time next summer.
We’re thinking CO for the honeymoon* so Ben’s roommate density theory is panning out. I guess that would make me an orbiting electron.
*Yes, I know that I’m basically Zach Johnson, Jr. Going to a Big Ten university for grad school, marrying a girl named Lauren, honeymooning in Colorado. I’m sure dancing on ice and drunken blog posts are soon to follow.
It’s been around for a little while, but now that jttm is all up to date we can actually use it to post to our little blog. You can even use it to post photos using the iPhone’s camera (like this one of ben sitting on daniels floor).
I’ve been putting it off for way to long, but I finally got around to upgrading to the newest version of WordPress.
The site may not seem much different, but the inner workings should be much improved, and hopefully this will help us get the comment spam under control.
If you see something broken or if you are missing a feature that was there before, let me know
If you see this guy, Tony Jaa, don’t fight him. If you missed his first big movie, Ong Bak, check out the highlights here. Then check out the promo for Ong Bak 2, which is coming in December. I’ve heard he’ll beat you up if you don’t watch these videos right now. Need more?
If you haven’t visited www.ted.com, now is the time. The site offers tons of “inspired talks by the world’s greatest thinkers and doers.”
Here’s their quick self-summary:
“TED stands for Technology, Entertainment, Design. It started out in 1984 as a conference bringing together people from those three worlds. Since then its scope has become ever broader. The annual conference now brings together the world’s most fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes). This site makes the best talks and performances from TED available to the public, for free. More than 200 talks from our archive are now available, with more added each week.”
This one, is far from the most interesting, but there’s an incredibly amazing octopus at the end that I think everyone needs to see.
least skip to the end where an octopus will blow you away.
It’s a little long, but it’s worth watching:
It’s a video of an elephant painting a portrait of an elephant, and it’s good.
I’m gonna try to do some research and hopefully find out more about this elephant, but in case I don’t get around too it I wanted to share the video.
I really want to know a few things like:
- is this an original composition or is it copying something a person drew
- can it do other poses?
- is it a self portrait?
- is this a relatively unique skill or can other elephants paint too?
- can I buy one of these paintings?
- can I buy one of these elephants?
stay tuned.
In the past six months or so, I serendipitously have stumbled upon two artists that have really captured my imagination.
Aya Takano. I first came across Aya Takano in Barcelona, during a visit to the Miro Museum. It was kind of strange, because I went to the Miro Museum to see the work of its namesake, Joan Miro. But the museum also has some gallery space dedicated to visiting exhibits. During my visit, they were featuring the work of Aya Takano, who made much bigger impression on me than Miro.
I think I’m drawn by the soft, playful colors and the cosmic strangeness of her scenes. You have to be careful though, as she depicts a lot of skinny young women, often undressed and often in superficially erotic contexts, so it can be mistaken for kiddie porn.
James Marshall (Dalek). I discovered James Marshall just this week, on a walk through my old neighborhood in Washington, DC. Apparently, the dodgier parts are now thriving with wine bars and art galleries. One, the Irvine Contemporary, is currently featuring Marshall’s work.
I was immediately drawn to his bright colors and intricate compositions. You can spend hours finding new details in each of his designs.
What do both Takano and Marshall have in common? This guy:
Takashi Murakami. Evidently, both Takano and Marshall spent time at Takashi’s Kaikai Kiki gallery before venturing to do their on exhibits. There’s a name for Takashi’s style of art: loosely, Superflat, and it’s really my thing.
Today, I taking a train to New York, and luckily for me, the Brooklyn Museum is featuring a temporary exhibit of Takashi. Man, I hope I wake up in time…
Found this little gem going through some stuff at my parent’s house.
I’m not sure how many people besides Joel/Boo/Me are watching and loving Battlestar Galactica, but if you aren’t you should be. I just found this picture of the cast posing as Da Vinci’s Last Supper, as if the show didn’t have enough religious overtones….
The Macbook Air has arrived. Click the link for the skinny. Pardon the pun, couldn’t resist.
I just released the World Freedom Atlas — my project for the past 6 months or so (on and off). I describe it thusly:
The World Freedom Atlas is a geovisualization tool for world statistics. It was designed for social scientists, journalists, NGO/IGO workers, and others who wish to have a better understanding of issues of freedom, democracy, human rights, and good governance. It covers the years 1990 to 2006.
The beast includes over 300 variables from dozens of datasets. It is meant to complement efforts such as GapMinder World and the World Bank Online Atlas of the Millennium Development Goals, though I intended my atlas for a somewhat more expert audience (social scientists and the like). This was a great project for me. I solidified my knowledge of Flash/Actionscript, learned a bit of PHP, even some Python, and worked for the first time with mySQL databases, web servers, and whatnot.
I have been lucky enough to get some attention from the blogosphere — so far the foreign language blogosphere. Check out this Spanish blog and this Italian site.
