Dropping the Register from my subscriptions

I agree, I’ve just unsubscribed from the Register feed as well. Besides finding little worth reading there, I find a headline only feed to be pretty useless anyway

Harvard man loses 3,000 weblogs | The Register. Dave Winer popularized Netscape’s RDF syndication format, which has since splintered into nine incompatible formats.

This is just troll bait.

I’m unsubscribing to the register. The news there has gone tabloid. Obliviously they’re after traffic for ads. Wankers.
[Steve Hooker: cyberSaps business]

Listen to the sound of the Universe on your iPod

I’ve downloaded the mp3s, but they haven’t made it to my iPod quite yet. Maybe tomorrow.

Listen to the sound of the Universe on your iPod.

universe on an ipodThe New York Times had a great story about Dr. Mark Whittle, a professor of astronomy at the University of Virginia who has taken the cosmic background radiation of the universe and made a series of sounds.

For the first 400,000 years, Dr. Whittle said, it sounds like a descending scream falling into a dull roar.

So of course the first thing we did was google him, find the site and turn the .WAV files in to MP3s for our iPods!

Right click / option click this link to download a zip file of the 13 sounds we also combined them all in to one MP3 which is in the zip as well.

If you d like to read more about Dr. Mark Whittle s work visit his site, there are a lot of presentations and information regarding Big Bang Acoustics.

[Engadget]

Congratulations Alan!

Congratulations indeed! I used to wish that Alan would publish more, but I finally realized that Alan’s choice was an engineer’s choice to build stuff because it was interesting and not worry about where the credit fell. Nice to know that nice guys practicing old fashioned ways can still win after all.

Congratulations Alan!.

Congratulations to Alan Kay for winning 2004 Kyoto Prize in addition to the ACM Turing Prize and the NAE Draper Prize earlier. He’s really “cleaning up” this year. This is cool. He deserves it.

Hope this helps the Squeak project too!

more info on the Kyoto Prize

By Joichi Ito joi_nospam_@nospam_ito.com. [Joi Ito’s Web]

Download the US Constitution for your iPod

Something to have handy while waiting to go through security screening at O’Hare.

Download the US Constitution for your iPod. An anonymous BoingBoing reader says, “The Constitution of the United States has just been released for the iPod. This is cool on several fronts, not the least of which is the fact that it was produced by the American Constitution Society, a progressive lawyer’s group associated with Mario Cuomo and Janet Reno. To my knowledge, this marks the first time a major DC policy group has attempted to use the iPod to accomplish its goals.” Link [Boing Boing]

Can adults learn?

Something to think about. No surprise, I’m sure, but I view the continued capacity to learn as the important factor here. Which generally depends on the capacity to not know and the capacity to be comfortable with not knowing.

I was lucky enough to go to schools that did not systematically crush and destroy that capacity. I guess that means I am still a kid. Fine by me.

One curious thing about being willing to not know. If you do succeed in getting conventional credentials that suggest that you have learned a lot, people assume that your claims of ignorance and not knowing are a strategy, not a simple claim of fact. They’re not.


[Seb’s Open Research]

Step away from the laptop

Another bit of fun from Dina. I’ve been engaged in this argument for almost as long as there have been personal computers, perhaps longer than that. In fact, I think I will follow this advice now and call it a night. There’s certainly no way I’m going to catch up with Scoble anyway.

Conversations !.

This is for all blog spouses – Judith sent me the link this morning – thanks J !

A picture named new_yorker.jpg

Do you find yourself in this situation ?

I do sometimes :):):).

[Conversations with Dina]