Not sure if you all have used Google Sky yet (part of Google Earth), but I saw this link today on the Google Earth Blog: Exoplanets. Being able to look and see where all of the known planets in the galaxy are at a moments notice is pretty darn cool in my book.
Movie recommendation for the week: Lions for Lambs. This film has been stirring up some controversy apparently, but trust me: it’s worth the $10. Proud to be an American.
-J
There are two very fundamental skills which I see becoming more and more important, but which fewer and fewer people are actually able to do effectively:
They are the foundation of all human knowledge. How can one expect to function in a demanding environment without them? The information age requires them of us more and more, as electronic communications mediums become more and more efficient, widely used, and commonplace. The telephone is antiquated, and for good reason. It still serves it’s purpose, but how can a phone call to 30 people compete with the clarity, precision and speed of a well written email?
I work on a large program which consists of many hundreds of people at the moment. I see it daily. Hundreds of people supposedly working towards a common goal, primarily interacting with each other verbally, despite the company’s best attempts to take advantage of electronic doodads. Person A hears Person B and C say something he thinks is wrong, be it in a meeting or a hallway conversation, but really doesn’t even know what the conversation was about to begin with, or got mixed up, and goes and starts spreading a tiny rumor, which then propagates, compounding along the way, until it finally somehow makes it back to the true originators, B and C, who, if they are a) smart and b) lucky, realize the potential ramifications and impending disaster that could be caused by said rumor to a design, procedure, program, or process, and then spend the remainder of their day either talking or writing to try to mitigate the situation and correct all the falsities that crept in.
Everyone fights the new, efficient, parallel communication medium. Even some of the young people, who have grown up with it. Some can handle it, and some can’t. Stores of human information are compounding at insane rates. Look, I’m adding to it right now. How can one person possibly keep up with it all?
One can’t. Not all of it We have limits. We are human. Our brains and bodies have physical capacities and bandwidths.
But one can under sample the information. We don’t have to read every word. There are patterns. High level constructs. Orders of knowledge. One can start at a higher order, absorb the important aspects of the configuration and format, and then head down the chain, absorbing only the levels of detail required at the moment.
It’s called skimming. Speed reading. It takes effort. Mental effort. You have to force yourself to do it. Learn how to do it, or prepare to get trounced by the coming oceans of expanding knowledge. We’re only at the tip of the iceberg.
I just logged into my bank account today and guess what: I had a deposit from Google for $0.65!!! Pretty cool. Thats $0.65 I didn’t have to do any work for, aside from keeping my site going!
I flew on Friday morning again. The focus was “spin entry and recovery”. Well, lets just say we did a little more than entry and recovery =). I was feeling good about it, so after Joe demo’d a couple entries, and then a couple full spins (or two?), he had me try a couple. Holy cow, what a rush! It’s about a million times better than a roller coster because, yes, you are in control! The basic procedure: