A friend and client, Luis von Ahn, gave a great TEDx Talk at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. Luis runs through the creation of the captcha, his project reCAPTCHA, and his new language learning project, Duolingo.
One of my favourite things about working with Luis, is that one of his lead developers and co-founder of Duolingo is actually blessed with the name Severin Hacker.
Updated the previous post with a link to the presentation video:
A Brief History of Mozilla.com (and .org)Reporting today on location in sunny Mountain View, California and the lovely Mozilla headquarters.
I’m doing a talk in the Mozilla lounge about the history of the mozilla websites called A Brief History Mozilla.com (and .org) today (April 12, 2011) at 12:30PM Pacific time (4:30pm Atlantic time for those back home on Prince Edward Island). The talk will be streamed live from the Air Mozilla website. Come watch.
The slides for the presentation are available in a few different formats. The video will also be archived - I’ll update this post with links when the video is available.
Update: Video of the talk is now available download or watch directly (if you have Firefox 4+ or Chrome): A Brief History Mozilla.com (and .org) - 14Mb Ogg Theora file (35 min). The lighting in the video favours the slides, so you can't really see me. Just picture someone handsome and dynamic in the dark to the left of the slides.
You can also download the slides in OpenOffice.org Impress format, PowerPoint format, or as a PDF.
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David Byrne’s talk at the TED Conference, “How architecture helped music evolve”, he takes a walk though the history of venues and their accompanying influence on musical styles. Apparently birds adapt their music to the venue too.
I am proud, grateful, and generally delighted to be one of the many smiling faces in this photo:
Photo by Gen Kanai.
This animated map of nuclear explosions from 1945 to 1998 is remarkable to watch. Note how France and England both have extensive tests, but none on their own mainland. Watch through to the end to see an overlay of all explosions. Since this animation was compiled, North Korea has conducted two nuclear explosions.
According to an article from Scientific American about the idea of using a nuclear explosion to seal the Gulf of Mexico leak, the Soviet Union regularly used nuclear explosions for domestic projects:
The Soviet program, known as Nuclear Explosions for the National Economy, was launched in 1958. The project saw 124 nuclear explosions for such tasks as digging canals and reservoirs, creating underground storage caverns for natural gas and toxic waste, exploiting oil and gas deposits and sealing gas leaks. It was finally mothballed by Mikhail Gorbachev in 1989.
While lamenting the state of the ongoing oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, my wife pointed out that, as consumers of oil, we’re all a party to it. I seemed so obvious that I was embarrassed that it hadn’t occurred to me earlier. Most things in my life - the heat in my home and office, the gas in my car, and the plastics in so many of the good we consume - are all derived from petroleum products.
I don’t know if any of the oil I use (either directly or indirectly) comes from BP, or from the Gulf of Mexico. If anything, though, this lack of knowledge makes my role even worse.
Of course, if rules were broken (or the rules were inadequate), we should do our best to ensure that the same thing doesn’t happen again. Still, we can’t eschew our own role in creating the type of economic and regulatory environment where this type of of disaster can happen. They were drilling that oil for us.
On their 20th anniversary as a band, Sloan has release their best album in a while. The Double Cross arranges song order, bleeds one song into another, and calls back to hooks from other songs in the way that made their 1998 album, Navy Blues, so amazing.