And you are here why?

Brought to you by E.D.E.K.A Its amazing what you can accomplish with Peizo sensors and an Arduino..

Shes got an article up on Bloomberg where she basically sez. " If your workplace discriminates, its basically being 'creative' and 'promoting growth '" Check out these gems Over the years, creative rebels have often behaved poorly in their creative workplaces. Do most of us approve? Hardly. Nobody likes, say, the way the great creator of   Apple Inc. (AAPL) , Steve Jobs , treated many colleagues. Riiight.  So if Apple instituted a policy saying " Front-office jobs to be done only by the Swedish Bikini Team ", thats OK right?  They're just being "creative rebels"? Her action may reduce the very kind of access she enjoyed for those who followed her. Setting Kleiner Perkins aside, consider the rest of the sector. Human-resources specialists aren’t idiots. They see how much Pao, still merely alleging, is costing a firm such as Kleiner Perkins: time, image and distraction from its main work, finding value. Other businesses will work

The point behind the title isn't So what? , but more of a Why do I say that? And the answer is - because thats what the data are showing. Jordan Weissmann at The Atlantic summarizes a couple of annual report s releases by the National Center for Education Statistics to come up with the following chart The key points from the above? Starting 1995, more women have graduated w/ Bachelor's degrees than men.  Or, to cast this slightly differently, this has been going on for the last 17 years (and counting) The trend lines have been dominated by women since 1975, i.e., At best , the increase in the percentage of men getting degrees is the same as for women (and its usually worse!) The bottom line here is that at some point in the future, a significant majority of the - educated - workforce will be women.  I suspect this may finally take care of the gender pay gap (23%!).

From visual.ly a spectacular infographic. Click to embiggen massively

Which team that I am not interested in am I more interested in? I don't particularly follow the #NHL.   Given that, I really don't follow the Los Angeles Kings. The New Jersey Devils? meh city Which basically leaves me with a conundrum - when I'm in a business setting, and people are going on about The Great Game Last Night , WTF am I supposed to do? I guess I could just read the sports section of the paper, and pretend, but that still leaves me with the choice of a team.    I suspect the best solution is to emulate a buddy of mine and conflate the NHL and the NFL - say, did you see that great touchdown last night?

There is a paper out by Google on how they migrated from MySQL to F1 for AdSense . Its fascinating reading on its own, but its got some key take-aways for scaling and reliability.  I'd recommend going and reading it, but these two are worth emphasizing Scaling Eliminate the R in ORM .  In short, instead of building out a nice layer (hibernate, whatever) between your DB and your code, go the other way, and deliberately expose the workings of your DB to your application developers.  This actually makes tremendous sense - in many ways the advent of NoSQL has been due to people specifically picking data stores that map to their application requirements .  Need a key-value store? Use Riak .  Need a document store wht guaranteed writes?  Use CouchDB .  Hiding the specifics of your data store behind an ORM layer is - increasingly - becoming irrelevant, and Google quite probably just made it official. Fault-Tolerance Use 5 replicas. 5? Why 5?   Why not 3? Because, as G

Les Misérables was the first Major Musical that I ever saw, and it made an indelible impression on me.  I must have seen it at least half-a-dozen times in the U.S. since '89 when I saw it at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago (shout out to Printer's Row , the pre-theater restaurant that I had been to many a time), I've seen it in London, and even at the Paper-Mill playhouse (NJ) in an awesome off-broadway production. And the soundtrack! Brilliance - I must  have listened to it - oh - an infinity of times.  Slightly obsessive about it? Quite possibly, but the music is sheer genius, and I still get chills down my spine when I hear the opening chords. On my own, Do you hear the people sing, I dreamed a dream, One day more , and on, and on, every song is brilliant. So why this sudden burst of nostalgia for Les Mis ? 'cos the Trailer for the latest movie version is out, and it looks staggering, quite probably one of the first movies in a long time that I'm actu

Most people have one of three perspectives on the FDIC U.N. sponsored gummint agency, that makes black helicopters for use by the Trilateral Commission Something to do with medicine approval? Something to do with regulating banks? If you ignore the Trilateral wingnuts, and the numb-nuts who mix the FDA and the FDIC up, you have the vast majority of people out there who realize that the FDIC has something to do with banks, but no real idea what. As it turns out, there is actually a perfectly valid reason for the existence of the FDIC - and it has to do with Banks, and Nash Equilibrium . To put it simply, a Nash Equilibrium is the equivalent of a self-reinforcing law, i.e., one that nobody has an incentive to break, despite the absence of a police force , because you end up worse off breaking it than if you don't. Or ask XKCD puts it "Huh? Whut?" " What on earth does the above have to do with the banks?" I'm glad  you asked. Consider

I have the solution! It came to me as an epiphany! It is brilliant, sheer brilliance I tell you! Huh? What? Oh, right, its the solution to the EuroCrisis, the chaos going on in Europe / Greece / Spain / Italy / etc. Its really simple - what they need is a central banking authority that can print Euros!  See, you print up a bunch of Euros, and that deals with the short-term balance of payments issue, banking issues, solvency issues, etc., and you agree on a long-term fiscal compact to prevent chaos from occurring again.  But in the short term, all you need is a central bank that can print Euros. Simple, no? Huh? What? There is already something called the ECB? Really? Dammit....

Biometric identification systems are all the rage - heck, they've been the rage for years now.  The problem, of course, is what biometric signs to use for identification. Fingerprints ? D.H. Kaye showed in 2003 that the statistical evidence showing that fingerprints are unique is not at all conclusive As HackLaw puts it No court has ever challenged the expert-ness of an expert witness who purported to be an expert on fingerprints. Why not? To be an expert in something, there has to be a body of knowledge for you to know about.Where is the body of knowledge about fingerprints?   They swirl around, we know that much right?   But, it turns out that there is no publicly available database of this evidence (really!) It gets worse Fingerprint evidence is difficult to deal with in trial because the examiner offers his or her "opinion" as if it were indisputable fact. In truth, the examiner identifies a number of points of comparison and then, if similar t

Seriously, for sheer camp spectacle, can it be topped? Exhibit A - Pasha Parfeny - pretty much speaks for itself :-)

Needless to say, I feel monstrously inadequate

When I travel, I tend to walk the fairly thin line between obsessively prepared and lightweight travel . The point here is that in this day and age you can pretty much buy anything you need at the destination if you really need it, and the only allowance you need to make is that you can survive if you show up on a Sunday - when all the shops happen to be closed. But even that is changing! Germany - which has some of the toughest Sunday trading laws around - recently ruled that "condoms, porn DVDs and sexy skin lotion " are acceptable for sale on Sundays since they are (get this!) "legitimate travel supplies"! "This is the decision of the court … since the above articles can be considered 'travel supplies,' regardless of their content,"   Mind you, this decision explicitly said that sex toys were not legitimate travel supplies, but " sexy skin lotion " was. Thats pretty entertaining to begin with, but as Local World repor

Theres a ridiculously cool map out from IDV Solutions titled 56 years of tornado tracks, by F-Scale . It is, as you would expect, 56 years of tornado tracks overlayed on a map of the U.S. And boy oh boy, is it ever a doozy - check out the hard stop as you move west... Small version below, but click to embiggen...

Zillow brings you an interactive map of the U.S. showing you all the underwater homes. And yes, its as frightening to me as it is to you... (Click to go the actual site)

Check out the latest Scientific American - its got a great article on water usage by country , and what it is used for. For my money though, the fascinating part is that A vast amount of water is used to produce the food and products that nations consume. Large population is the greatest factor, but inefficient agriculture or dependence on water-intensive cuisine can exacerbate demand; meat consumption accounts for 30 percent of the U.S. water footprint. Given the sheer amount of water that India uses (and exports!), the importance of the monsoons makes sense - around 80% of India's water comes from the Monsoon , as does a huge chunk of its energy.  Its pretty harsh - this is a ton of water and its all dependant on one - finicky - annual event.  As the Economist puts it Yet the drought underlines a grim truth. India’s extremes of hydrology, poverty and population present vast difficulties for water management which it has never mastered. And they are growing. Increasingly f

Star Wars edited to leave behind only the characters saying The Force . (Yes, of course, the original Star Wars...)

Seriously. Its like waiting to get into an overcrowded club. In Chicago. In Winter. The following video brought to you by Outside Online ...

My phone has started auto-correcting see as sex . Which makes phrases like I'll see you later this morning somewhat fraught, especially when sent to the wrong person (Sorry Tammy!)... Seriously Mr. Google, " sex " is not, *Not* a valid replacement for " see "!!!

As you might expect, Jer Thorp has the answer at blog.blprnt.com Captain America, thats who... (click to - massively - embiggen) Interestingly enough, Iron Man isn't all that far behind...

When we heard that Charlie Trotter's was closing, we had to go back for one last meal.  We've been there many a time, and the experience has always been memorable ( more here ...), to say the least. I remember the first time we went - when we got married, our friends (major shout-out to Mirabell, Tom, Ed and Sarah!) bought us dinner there, and, it was awesome.  Awesome not just because of the "Newly married" glow, but awesome in that timeless decadent sense of a brilliant haute cuisine experience. But this time, this time , Charlie pulled a full-on George Lucas on us last night.  In one shot, he not only managed to clobber stuff that I held dear, he managed to retroactively rewrite my memory so that they were never cool in the first place! Seriously, the rip-off-ness was awesome, Awesome I tell you!   We walk in, and the hostess says, and I quote, "Do you have a last name?" Huh? Somewhat puzzled, but perfectly willing to play along, I responded

via @pavlobaron

The NY Times has the brilliant and heartwarming story of Phoenix Products , which produces the leakproof drip pans that the Apache Helicopters need because, well, they have some oil drip issues. Being a helicopter, and one for the DoD at that, you'd expect stuff to be expensive.  And that it costs $17,000, well, its possible right? I mean, we're not talking about something like the Plews Lubrimatic ($9.80), or Cox ($4.56). These are military drip pans, and are quite probably gold-plated or something. So yeah, $17,000, I'd buy that.  Except, it turns out that there are peoples selling equivalent drip-pans to the DoD for $2,500 Bob Skillen [...] designs drip pans that his company sells to the military for a different helicopter, the UH-46, for about $2,500 per pan, or about one-eighth the price that his Kentucky competitor charges. The pans attach beneath the roof of the helicopter to catch leaking transmission fluid before it can seep into the cabin. “It’s no

Because Shower Technology has been stagnant far too long... Theres the Loop   The shower’s contours have drawn inspiration from the motions of waves. Designed by Diego Granese, the Loop re-defines   outdoor shower   systems. And the best part is, it can be parked anywhere on your property, at the backyard or within the four walls. So while the Loop may not be the only outdoor shower system to try your hands at this summer, it is certainly one worth considering.  And The Arc The alluring Arc-shaped shower can switch from normal shower mode to an energy-saving mode for less water and electricity consumption. The concept will use a 500W domestic water pump to maintain a constant water circulation and recycle warm shower water. The control panel has access to all the functions with a touch interface. So far, so good, unless you are fine with bathing in your leftover shower water. The Arc shower features a luxury design and anyways for that huge a shower you need to have a sp

From Dealbreaker .  Not The Onion.  Who knew they had it in them? Speaking of news, have you seen the latest from Pew Research ?  It turns out that Americans really, really don't care about the shit-fest going down in Europe. Check it out, pretty much everything polls higher than "European economies", including Yet Another Plan Bomb Plot (who cares?  really?). I mean, its not like the world is going to go into a depression or anything, right? Sigh.  We are so turning into a nation of navel-gazers  

Because you asked for it. On YouTube, video below ---> We live in great times I tell you, in great times... Oh, there is also Vacuuming a Cat ...

Yup. As the title sez. - Vacuuming a cat. On YouTube In all its glory - video below ---> We live in great times I tell you.  In great times... Oh, if you really want it, there is also Vacuuming a Corgi ...

Dan Woods has an article at Forbes about " How Hadoop and SAP HANA can accelerate Big Data Startups ".  Its pretty hard to read - you have to get past the obvious shilling for SAP  (the byline is a bit of a giveaway - " He has written several books and created other research and educational content for SAP "), and after that, you have to ignore the Hadoop-centric nature of the post (there are other fish in the sea, you know?) You have to get all the way to the end of the article before you get to the meat, which boils down to ... can SAP make it as easy to experiment with SAP HANA as it is to download and use open source? ... will developers buy into SAP’s efforts at being open and making SAP HANA easy to use? (If it is) Priced too high or with onerous terms, SAP HANA won’t make sense to startups. And these points, in the end, are what its all about. A significant - and somewhat under-reported - aspect of the current BigData boom is that people ar