Giancarlo Angulo's Blog
Video at the linked site!!
Roger Ebert’s New Voice
Cancer took his voice, but technology gave it back. Watch as Roger Ebert talks to his wife for the first timein years thanks to a computer program that uses voice clips from his oldTV shows
via See How Technology Gave Roger Ebert His Voice – Video – Oprah.com.
This is a slide show of Barrack Obama’s factory/lab visits, funny commentary.
October 23, 2009: MIT
Obama is back in his pensive mode, except this time he has thrown in an open-mouthed gape to demonstrate how awestruck he is with this jar of dirt.
via A History of Obama Feigning Interest in Mundane Things — Daily Intel.
Cut the credit card!!!!!!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Make it Rain – Bank of America | ||||
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I actually do this a lot. I try to minimize the pain I have with any task I have to do. This means exchanging merienda/lunch so that I don’t have to go through the trudgery of testing some bits of code that I find extremely boring. This is what we should do. Find the happy bits in our life and maximize the fun. Sometimes this means finding a new job, sometimes this means letting go of some of the comforts we enjoy, sometimes this means having to take less money (ehem), sometimes this means taking on bigger more challenging projects (ehem), and it obviously means knowing yourself and being flexiblre about yourself enough to be able to change and to be able to be inflexible.
Most everything about happiness in this life is about knowing oneself, controlling for the fear and want for comfort we have that is preventing us from doing what would make us happy. This blindness is the blindness of fear and the least action. If we can get through this hump, this fear I believe this is the easy 80% of happiness we get if happiness obey’s the Pareto Principle.
Ah, we all think we get paid to be brilliant, funny thing is that we usually enjoy the stuff we are brilliant at.
It’s the drudgery that exacts its price on our souls.
Wouldn’t we all take a pay cut if it allowed us to only do the bits of our job that we enjoyed? I would.
-Hugh McLeod of GapingVoid.com
If you are going to be something don’t do it because it’g going to be a stepping stone to somewhere.
See few people really know what the real stepping stone to where they want to be.
Based on my obviously worthless observations during the long trudge towards our dreams, we get more information. This information helps us to have a clearer view two ways. It shows us if where we are dreaming of being is really where we want to be. It also shows us if where we are currently walking/traveling would bring us any closer to our dreams.
This makes me realize that stepping stones are not really that bad. It’s just that stepping stones limit your choices because we have to choose , excluding other paths. It is this that really irks me. It is this blind-sidedness some people have towards what they do with their lives.
We only have one and we have no idea how long our stay here would be, barring any 4-5 sigma medical advance we are not going to live forever.
You should at least try to live. No I have to repeat. You have to LIVE in all caps.
Law Degree for Sale
Some enterprising lawyer in San Francisco has decided to sell his law degree on Craigslist.
Awesome stuff.
From the sale description:
“After several years of practicing law I have come to the conclusion that my law degree is useless and I don’t want to be a lawyer anymore. Though I spent over $100,000 on it I am willing to sell it for the bargain basement price of $59,250, which is the current value of my remaining student loan balance.
This priceless collectible will permit you to be surrounded by hobby-less assholes whose entire life is dictated by billing by the hour and being anal dickheads. Additionally, this piece of paper has the amazing ability to keep you from doing what you really want to do in life, all in the name of purported prestige and financial success. Finally, girls in the Marina will swoon with retarded thoughts of sugar daddy when they hear you went to XXX prestigious law school and are a lawyer.”
I love bitter lawyers. Nicely done.
via Law Degree for Sale | Mendelson’s Musings.
Remember those professors in college who dumped 4 long exam results at the end of the last meeting, or even worse those professors who didn’t give results at all. Well there is now empirical evidence that they were hurting your performance.
Kettle and Haubl asked 271 students to give a four-minute presentation as part of a university course. Their performance would be judged by their peers and it would count towards their final grade. The students were told about the date of their presentation and when they would hear about the results, with waiting times ranging from a few hours to 17 days later.
The duo found that students who anticipated the quickest feedback achieved the higher grades. On average, those who knew they would hear back later on in the day scored within the top 40% of the group. Those who thought they would hear back 17 days later received scores that skirted the bottom 40%. It seems that even the anticipation of quicker feedback can boost performance.
via Quicker feedback for better performance : Not Exactly Rocket Science.
Click through to read the new report being criticized.
Most news content that isn’t simply the reporting of fact is an attempt to find – or manufacture – deeper meaning in events. This isn’t trivial work, of course, because there often is deeper meaning. But the inability to recognize coincidence or understand how patterns are established means that the habit of drawing conclusions from like events can look, well, stupid.
What struck me about this as interesting, though, is that MSNBC’s headline is perfectly accurate, and conveys precisely the right amount of fear and worry-making, about precisely the wrong thing. That is, nature is out of control. In a fundamental way, that’s the definition of climate change – nature gone wildly out of control, destabilized and with all that implies. We know this is happening because it is already happening – we can document that natural disasters related to climate change are happening more often. The mainstream media is trying to whip up fear about something that is actually occurring – but when it comes to climate change, the mainstream media mostly publishes “he said, she said” articles that lend wait to the denialists, implying that there was an equally credible case on both sides. We know that there is every reason to be afraid that more and more people will endure floods, droughts, wildfires, famines, heatwaves, storms…. – and we’re trying to find meaning in coincidence.
via Of Course Nature is Out of Control – Duh! : Casaubon’s Book.
Everytime I read something like this. It reminds me of how much Bush II policies have paused stem-cell research’s success. I don’t know but I have a feeling that this may be his greatest blunder , and if you were awake the pass 10 years you know the blunders are immense.
Add one more name to the ever growing list of diseases that have been defeated by stem cell treatments: HIV. That’s right, according to a recent report in the New England Journal of Medicine, a stem cell transplant performed in Germany has unexpectedly removed all signs of HIV from a 42 year old American patient. The unnamed white male was treated two years ago for Leukemia with a dose of donor stem cells and his HIV RNA count has dropped to zero and remained there since. While the treatment was for Leukemia, Dr. Gero Hutter and colleagues at the Charite Universitatsmedizen in Berlin had selected the stem cell donor for his HIV resistant genes. While there are still many questions unanswered, this is the first such case of stem cells treating HIV that has been reported in a NEJM-caliber publication. Ladies and gentlemen, this is not a “cure” for HIV/AIDS, but it is certainly a remarkable and promising find. There’s more you need to know about the situation, so read on.
via Stem Cell Transplant Defeats HIV? Patient Still HIV Free After 2 Years | Singularity Hub.
Schneier: CCTVs don’t make us safer
Bruce Schneier has written an outstanding essay for CNN on why sticking CCTV cameras on every corner doesn’t make us safer, and can make us less safe by opening us up to abuse, and by causing police resources to be misallocated. This is required reading for the twenty-first century. Bruce points out that where there’s a specific threat in a specific place — casinos worried about cheats, shops worried about shoplifters, parking garages worried about skulking muggers — CCTVs have some use. But as a catch-all solution to crime, they just don’t work well enough to justify their expense in resources and liberty.
Pervasive security cameras don’t substantially reduce crime. This fact has been demonstrated repeatedly: in San Francisco, California, public housing; in a New York apartment complex; in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; in Washington; in study after study in both the U.S. and the U.K. Nor are they instrumental in solving many crimes after the fact.
FROM HERE : Spy cameras won’t make us safer
This was cool, wii mote controlling a host of percussion instruments!!