Super Jellyfish

Preview of cool new Google Earth at New Recruit.

Wow… the ability to view 3D renderings of city skylines, view subway lines and bus routes along with all their stops (and get directions!)

Pretty awesome..

Great article by Gene Weingarten on Eskimos living in Savoonga, Snowbound.

Sort of a depressing story, but uplifting in some parts, too. The question remains, what is the point of subsistence?

“Out there in the enveloping whiteness, it had been possible to lose yourself, fishing with Eskimos in the Bering Sea the way it has been done since the age of the igloo. There was no village, there were no dead kids, no fog of denial, no generation in agony, literally bored out of its mind. There were no soul-wrenching choices between survival of self and survival of a culture… It was possible to comprehend the joy of surviving by your skills and savvy on the bounty of the Earth alone, in defiance of whatever hell nature and fate throw at you. And it was possible to understand why, lost in that moment, you could want to live that way forever.”

• Moviegoers are Staying at Home [NYT]
  Article comments on the shift from consuming movies in the theatre to consuming entertainment on our couches. Not surprising. Consumers are increasingly demanding more control over what they watch and when they watch it.

• Fun with Amazon Images
  Amazon has ” a system that generates each requested image. The details of size and format are built into the image’s URL. What that means that, if you want, you can create URLs that generate odd and unlikely Amazon images.” Aaah, fun fun fun.

• 11 Steps to a Better Brain [New Scientist]
  My favorite? Use a method to improve mental capacity (work on the ability to remember 600 names)

Here’s an interesting, but dated (sort of — prior to the November election) assessment of “Two Americas: One Rich, One Poor? Understanding Income Inequality in the United States.”

The study takes Census data on income distribution and “normalizes” it to account for differences in cash and non-cash income, number of persons, hours worked and effects of taxation.

The results?
“The top fifth of the population has $4.21 of income for every $1.00 at the bottom” vs. the results from the raw Census data which showed that the top fifth have $14.30 for every $1.00 at the bottom.

I think this is an interesting analysis, however, I think the inclusion of Medicare and government benefits should be excluded from the analysis… (That would be the effects of taxation component to “normalizing” the data.)

I agree those benefits have value, however, I think we should try to look at a situation where people (unaided by an outside hand such as government) attempt to earn income, live and survive. Obviously, the government sets the rules, but a direct redistribution and giving the bottom segments income credit for that seems a bit flawed in my opinion. The people at the bottom are not really “earning” that income — they are just given it.

We should look at the data normalizing for the number of people, the hours worked and non-cash benefits.

Interesting article on the economics of superstars by Sherwin Rosen, a professor economics at the University of Chicago.

In the article, Rosen discusses the excessive salaries paid to titans in industries such as entertainment, sports and business.

He examines:

“The phenomenon of superstars, wherein relatively small numbers of people earn enormous amounts of money and seem to dominate the fields in which they are engaged. “

Yet the thing about these superstars is that they are not 10x as talented as the tier below them, however, they are paid more than 10x as much. Why is this the case?

(more…)

“Don’t aim at success — the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue… as the unintended side-effect of one’s personal dedication to a course greater than oneself.”

— Viktor Frankl, an Austrian psychologist

Check out these cool T-shirts from the website killertofu.com (disclosure: the operator of this site is related to me) — however, I still think the shirts are pretty neat.

The website logo t-shirt is $18. They also have a neat CGI Walkman shirt for $26.

I’m going to place an order today.

Turns out that Blockbuster sends out extra DVD’s from time to time to compensate for delays in shipping DVD’s!

Per Hacking Netflix, one Blockbuster customer received an email from customer support saying:

You may have noticed a delay in the shipment of your DVDs early last week. And, by now, we hope you’re enjoying the extra discs we sent you as a token of appreciation for your patience.

Once we identified and fixed the problem that caused your delay, we immediately sent you TWICE the number of titles you were to have received. That’s right — if you had two available slots in your list of Shipped Movies, you should have received four titles to make up for your delay.

Guess my extra DVD wasn’t a mistake after all!

• A keyboard without key labels [NYT]
  Supposedly for geeks, the keyboard features nothing printed on the keys. Apparently the keyboard also causes increases in typing speed, since all users have to memorize the keys. Each key is also “weighted by location to be more or less resistant to touch.” If you have $80 to spare, buy it here.

  I’m still more interested in the dvorak.

• Loud, Proud, Unabridged: It Is Too Reading! [NYT]
  This article from the NYT examines the increasing popularity of audio books. Is listening to a book equivalent to “reading” one? Hmm, another use for the ipod!

“Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so.”

— J.S. Mill