More on Steve Jobs
Breaking news from CNN: “Apple CEO Steve Jobs takes leave until end of June; Jobs says health issues “more complex than I originally thought.”
Blog Posts
All my blog posts and articles
January 2009
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2009-01-14
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2009-01-11
Madoff Scammed His Sister, Too!
Check out this post Madoff Scammed His Sister, Too!: "A division has appeared in the Madoff family: Those who invested all their money with Bernie (such as his now wiped-out sister)…and those who didn’t (including his sons Mark and Andrew and his brother Peter). Forgive us for tentatively concluding that the Madoff family members who didn’t lose their shirts on the scam knew or suspected that something was going on." (from: from Clusterstock)
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2009-01-09
I think Bono would have said: “What an honour”
Check out this post Greg Mitchell: Bono Replacing Bill Kristol at New York Times?: "What an honor," said Bono. "I’ve never been great with the full stops or commas. Let’s see how far we can take this." (from: from Huffington Post: Front Page)
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2009-01-09
Something wrong with this picture?
Take a close look at the url and the page -
2009-01-07
30+ Must-Have Updated Firefox 3 Extensions
Check this post 30+ Must-Have Updated Firefox 3 Extensions from Mashable!: We’ve put together a list of 30+ must-have Firefox 3 extensions that we know you’ll enjoy, whether you’ve upgraded to Firefox 3 and are looking for something new to add to your browser, or have yet to make the upgrade and are looking for a reason.
Lots of good stuff there if you are a FireFox 3 user. Check ’em out!
Originally posted on Jun 27, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
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2009-01-07
Update on Jobs’ health
In case you didn’t see this, it’s kind of interesting if you follow Apple and our pal Steve Jobs: ““I have been losing weight throughout 2008. The reason has been a mystery to me and my doctors,” Jobs, who turns 54 in February, said today in a statement. “After further testing, my doctors think they have found the cause — a hormone imbalance that has been ‘robbing’ me of the proteins my body needs to be healthy.” (from Bloomberg News)
Read the rest of the article about Steve Jobs Health. It’s basically commentary. The key is the paragraph above.
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2009-01-05
Michael Lewis and Harry Markopolos
In an excellent article on The End of The Financial World as We Know It, an even more fascinating story about Harry Markopolos: In his devastatingly persuasive 17-page letter to the S.E.C., Mr. Markopolos saw two possible scenarios. In the “Unlikely” scenario: Mr. Madoff, who acted as a broker as well as an investor, was “front-running” his brokerage customers. A customer might submit an order to Madoff Securities to buy shares in I.B.M. at a certain price, for example, and Madoff Securities instantly would buy I.B.M. shares for its own portfolio ahead of the customer order. If I.B.M.’s shares rose, Mr. Madoff kept them; if they fell he fobbed them off onto the poor customer.
In the “Highly Likely” scenario, wrote Mr. Markopolos, “Madoff Securities is the world’s largest Ponzi Scheme.” Which, as we now know, it was.
Wow!
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2009-01-04
Using Google to make community standards transparent and objective
Read more →This New York Times article, “What’s Obscene? Google Could Have an Answer” is pretty interesting, and makes sense at some level: “Judges and jurors who must decide whether sexually explicit material is obscene are asked to use a local yardstick: does the material violate community standards?” (from “What’s Obcene?”)
and then:
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December 2008
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2008-12-31
Remember to change your clocks tonight
“Revelers will have an extra second to enjoy the New Year celebrations.
Drunken party goers may not notice but, thanks to the Earth’s erratic rotation, the countdown to 2009 will last a moment longer.
British physicists and official timekeepers around the world will insert a “leap second” to bring the most accurate atomic clocks in line with the astronomical day[…]” from Big Ben Adjusted for Leap Second
Happy New Year. Bon Anja, Tur Kos Bon!
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2008-12-29
Kevin Kelly writes about pervasive (or is it ubiquitous) screens
Read more →I always love Kevin Kelly’s writing and thinking and this article in a recent New York Times Magazine doesn’t disappoint. I have a hard time summarizing the article: Video is becoming more ubiquitous than static print as the main mode of visual communication – not just TV etc, but on any and all surfaces in public and private. This will lead to ways in which regular civilians can create, modify, scan and consume video with infinitely greater ease.
It’s a good argument. Here’s a semi random thoughtful bit:
“Some popular...
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2008-12-26
Dumb as we want to be?
Thomas Friedman with another thought provoking column. I know not everyone likes his perspective but I find myself in violent agreement more often than not: “All I could think to myself was: If we’re so smart, why are other people living so much better than us? What has become of our infrastructure, which is so crucial to productivity? Back home, I was greeted by the news that General Motors was being bailed out — that’s the G.M. that Fortune magazine just noted “lost more than $72 billion in the past four years, and yet you can count on one hand the number of executives who have been reassigned or lost their job.” (from New York Times, Time To Reboot America?)
Time To Reboot? Read the whole article, please.
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2008-12-24
The most beautiful book?
Now here‘s a recommendation: “I recently got a hold of what I consider to be the nicest mathematical book in my collection. As a matter of fact, it’s the nicest book I own, period – even though I posses bookshelves teaming with terrific titles on mathematics, science, programming, computer science, photography and so on.” (from Math-Blog)
That goes right onto my wish list!
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2008-12-24
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2008-12-23
Is twitter for people or for marketing?
Read more →As you may have noticed, I am using Twitter a little more often now. As much as anything it is to learn more about what it’s like, because we are working on full Twitter support in BlogBridge, which should be cool. The question is, what should it look like? Anyway, more on that on the BlogBridge blog. For now, here are some interesting pointers I have come across that you might find enlightening:
To learn about raising money for your favorite charity using twitter you are interested in Using Twitter for Distributed Fundraising
If you obsess about your Twitter popularity, check ...
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2008-12-20
MINT and security
Read more →I have a new favorite web service: Mint. It’s a really nice implementation of kind of a “Quicken” online, but with a few unique wrinkles. Here’s what it does:
Automatically and periodically downloads all the transactions from all your various accounts, banks, credit cards, etc.
Automatically categorizes the transactions based on the indicated vendors. This works about 80-90% of the time
Allows you to manually override the categorization if you know better (and it learns from that and applies it to other transactions.)
Automatically suggests a set of budget rules, which it then monitors for you. These are also fully customizable.
Generates useful pie charts and in...
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2008-12-19
Support Club Passim in Harvard Square!!!
Read more →Hey! If you live in Boston or Cambridge, and you like music, especially Folk music, then you’ve probably been to Club Passim in Cambridge – Harvard Square actually. It’s a lot more than a ‘Coffee House’ – it’s an institution where many of your favorite 70s acts got their start. Passim is a tiny little folk music club in Harvard Square that’s existed years and years and where musicians like Joan Baez and Bob Dylan played at the very beginning of their careers. I am friends with various people at Passim, over the year we have attended lots of shows there.
We have been members for ...
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2008-12-18
More on truly weird medical condition
Suddenly when you learn about something once, you start seeing it everywhere… “Dr. Paul Grabb, a pediatric brain surgeon, said he was surprised when he discovered a small foot growing inside the brain of 3-day-old Sam Esquibel. “The foot literally popped out of the brain,” Grabb told TheDenverChannel Wednesday.” (from Colorado Doctor Finds Foot in Newborn’s Brain)
This is another example of a Teratoma which I wrote about recently. This story is even weirder.
The secret Howard Stern in me wants to make a joke about this along the lines of “even worse than putting your foot in your MOUTH!” But I would never say that. It would be in such bad taste.
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2008-12-17
A Craigslist for Service?
Read more →Something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is the need for some kind of platform to match local community projects with resources to do them. For example the project might be to build a playground, clear a lot, raise money for the school. And resources might be sources of money, people and things who’d like a way to contribute to their community.Seems to me that there’s a spot for kind of a .org to create and operate a system like that and offer it for free or very cheap, locally, then nationally and globally. One thing I’ve been working on is to see whether this need is real, and what exists out there to address it.0Check out this post ...
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2008-12-17
A little more about “Outliers”
Read more →Since I wrote a somewhat negative post mentioning Outliers and Malcolm Gladwell the other day, I thought this was a worthwhile follow-up,“Lost in the Crowd” from the New York Times, which starts sounding positive: “As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought — the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social contagions, memes. His book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama age. It could lead policy makers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that peop...
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2008-12-16
Back Channels May Add, But They Also Subtract
I totally agree. Is it just part of the tendency of those people to always want to be the center of attention? Check this post Back Channels May Add, But They Also Subtract from McToonish: “Rick Schwier and I were actually talking about this last week and then Stephen Downes blogged about it today. Is it rude for people to use laptops, cell phones (for texting) and other hand-held devices while sitting in on somebody else’s conference presentation? I know that this will likely be unpopular with the crowd that I run in, but I happen to think it is. [snip…]” (from Back Channels May Add, But They Also Subtract)
Originally posted on May 13, 2008. Reprinted courtesy of ReRuns plug-in.
