More good insights to follow.

Strange Attractor.

Suw Charman joins Corante blog family with Strange Attractor (RSS feed) exploring patterns in the blogoshpere:

If you could visually represent the ebb and flow of my thoughts, you'd find a lot of swirly folded patterns emerging. The cause? Blogs - my very own strange attractors.

But blogs have a far wider effect than just making me think in swirly folded patterns, they are perturbing the business world as well. A disruptive technology that is more often than not smuggled in through the back door by evangelist employees, blogs are helping to unite previously scattered communities of interest.

Like instant messaging, blogging is gaining such a strong foothold amongst business users that by the time the management realises they have been infiltrated, they no longer have the power to switch it off. The corporate cat has to sit back and watch as the Trojan Mouse struts its stuff.

Loved the title: although there are not many formulas left in my head from my first degree in mathematical modelling, I still think about the world in terms of strange attractors and bifurcation points :) 

[Mathemagenic]

6:18:31 PM •  • comment  

You've just got to love this stuff! Some engineer is always dreaming up something new and improved. Great lessons in why good engineering doesn't equate to feasible systems in the real world.

Transportation Futuristics.

I would advise not clicking on the Transportation Futuristics link unless you have 30 minute or so to kill, because the Berkeley online exhibit is chock full of yesterday's future today, and if you're like me it's impossible to stop looking at all the kooky ideas. Even better, as much as I love design concepts (like this aluminum commuter helicopter), a lot of the strange devices are actual prototypes that failed to take off (literally or figuratively).

Read - Transportation Futuristics [BerkeleyEDU via BoingBoing]

[Gizmodo]

6:16:01 PM •  • comment  

Kudos to Jack for this endorsement from Dennis Kennedy. Jack used to post great comments on my blog and drop me an email from time to time. I kept twisting his arm to start his own blog, which he finally did about a year ago. Now we all benefit from his insights.

The Definition of a Great Blog, Example #1

I am such a fan of Jack Vinson's blog, Knowledge Jolt with Jack, which covers knowledge management and work practices.

Here's how good it is.

Jack writes a post called Annual Ammonia Symposium. Not only do I look at it, but I read it, think about how it might have application to me, and now I am blogging about it.

For me, Knowledge Jolt with Jack is a blog that matters. Jack has earned my confidence and trust with his consistently excellent posts and now I'm ready to follow his interests wherever they lead. That's a pretty damn good blog.

Today's example: The Information Snowflake and Snowballs.

4:39:21 PM •  • comment  

The ATM is one of the now ubiquitous technologies that make up the backstory of our digital lives. If you want to grasp where things are today and where they are likely to go, one excellent way to start is to invest some time and effort in understanding how this backstory fits together.

History of the Automatic Teller. XopherMV writes "The line was long and slow, and he became increasingly irritated as his lunch hour dribbled away. All at once, he had a flash of inspiration. 'Golly, all the teller does is cash checks, take deposits, answer questions like "What's my balance?" and transfer money between accounts,' recalls Wetzel, now 75 and still living in Dallas with his wife. 'Wow, I think we could build a machine that could do that!' And with a $4 million go-ahead from Docutel's parent company, that's exactly what he and his engineers did. Read more about the story of the ATM." [Slashdot:]

4:08:39 PM •  • comment  

While I have no time for it, sign me up anyway.

New O'Reilly magazine: Make. Today, at OSCON in Portland, Dale Dougherty and I announced a new O'Reilly magazine called Make. It'll be a quarterly, full-color magazine filled with fun projects and hardware hacks involving technology. (Dale is the editor and publisher, and I'm the editor-in-chief. Thanks to BB's own John Battelle for getting me involved!)

Make will have 5-minute tips you can use to improve your gadgets, networks, and computers, as well as much longer projects that might take several days (or weeks) to complete. The first issue is coming out in January. If you're interested, visit the web site and sign up for the newsletter. I'll also be running the Make blog on that page. I hope that a lot of BB readers become Make contributors, too. Please send me your ideas for hacks, tips, tricks, workarounds, neat things to build, useful tools, etc. Link [Boing Boing]

3:58:43 PM •  • comment  

The corollary here is that the harder something is to get at or repair, the more likely that it will fail at an inopportune moment.

Adams on Murphy. Adams on Murphy --

"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
    -- Douglas Adams (1952 - 2001), Mostly Harmless

(From Quotes of the Day - The Quotations Page.) [Frank Patrick's Focused Performance Blog]

3:55:06 PM •  • comment