It seems maybe I’m the last to know but I just found out about TED Talks. TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) is apparently a conference bringing together people from all different disciplines to share their ideas and inspire each other.

Those talks are available online at www.ted.com and they extremely inspiring. They are each only allowed to be up to 20 minutes so they are very easy to watch or listen to. So far of the ones I’ve watched these were the most inspiring for me.

Alan Russell: Why can’t we grow new body parts? O…..M…..G! Star Trek medicine is HERE!

Jeff Hawkins: Brain science is about to fundamentally change computing. I hope he succeeds!

Carolyn Porco: Fly me to the moons of Saturn. She is so passionate you can’t help but be infected with her enthusiasm.

Vilayanur Ramachandran: A journey to the center of your mind.

Theo Jansen: The art of creating creatures. This guy is crazy! He’s making self running robots that run on wind power.

I still have many to hear. Check them out and tell me your favorites!

I found out about this site called CatalogChoice.org who is trying to make it easier to opt out of receiving catalogs in the mail. According to them more than 19 BILLION catalogs are mailed out each year. I know that I rarely want the catalogs I get in the mail. Some companiese are particularly agressive and send a new catalog every 2 weeks. I even get catalogs for about 6 previous tenants.

If you are getting catalogs you don’t want here’s a very simple way to cancel them.

It looks like it’s finally moved. I’ve turned comments and the forum back on. I’ll cross my fingers things are all working again.

My friend 6955 showed me this yesterday….What’s wrong with this picture?

Here’s a closer look. According to Hilton, this is Japan

Tokyo and Narita are practically a 1/3 of the country apart from each other even though they are actually in the same area? Tokyo and Tokyo Bay are some how magically on opposite sides of the country? Osaka is on the southern tip? And does that look anything like Japan?

Here’s a map of Japan

It might seem like a small matter but come on, would it be okay if they had a map of the USA with New York on the West Coast and JFK Airport somewhere near Maine. No, it wouldn’t.

Facebook seriously sucks. I don’t really understand how it got as big as it supposedly is. I can’t connect with the person sitting directly in front of me because Facebook only lets me search for people who have registered in the same company, or college. WTF!

Honestly I really want nothing to do with Facebook. In Japan there is a service called Mixi. It’s arguably 2 or 3 times the size of Facebook at least in terms of market penetration. Where as MySpace seems to be mostly high school students and Facebook mostly college students, Mixi covers the entire population in Japan. And, there is are no restrictions on who you can connect with. Meet someone at Starbucks and ask them if they are on Mixi then connect if you want. No need to be in the same school or company.

Mixi does some things which would seem to work against it. It’s 100% closed from the rest of the net. You must log in to see any of it so it’s not searchable by any of the search engines (Yahoo, Google, etc…)

One interesting feature of Mixi is called “footprints”. It basically shows a list of the last 50 or so people that looked at your page. I think it sparks conversation. It feels good to know one of your friends was checking out your blog even if they didn’t leave a comment.

Anyway, in Japan, Mixi is almost a part of life for most people it seems. So, the only real reason I’m on Facebook is because a couple of Japanese friends, who I assume are under the mistaken impression that Facebook is like Mixi in the states, are trying to reproduce their Mixi activities on Facebook. As such they end up trying to direct all correspondence through Facebook as they would have with Mixi in Japan.

Oh well. I hope someone comes and replaces Facebook with a service that doesn’t suck.

Popup ads and pop behind ads. I thought they were universally loathed. They have been the topic of quite a few comedy sketches. A few famous ones are the Dave Chappelle skit about a world where popups appear in real life. Conan O’Brian’s staff trip to India which starts off with them and another I remember off the top of my head is Interfection from Aqua Teen Hunger Force.

So, my question to you is. Do you hate popups and pop behind ads? Are they bad or do you care?

Those of you that have a Nintendo Wii probably know that it has a News feature. It’s kind of neat in that it shows the articles and shows a marker on a 3d globe map of the world where the story takes place.

Unfortunately it leaves a little to be desired in terms of matching the names of places to their actual places on the globe.

So much for Nintendo being a positive influence on children :-p

I don’t know San Francisco that well yet but in the interest of trying to prevent something like that happening again here’s a map.

Consider the red areas places my best guess at places you should not go. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be careful everywhere but those areas in particular seem more dangerous.

I don’t know how long they’ll be up but if you’ve never seen them check out The Secret Life of Machines on Google Video.

The Secret Life of Machines is a program that aired on the BBC in the late 80s, early 90s that explains how lots of machines work in super simple ways. It also used to run on the Discovery channel. It’s crazy how simple some machines really are. One example, they make a tape recorder by showing that if you put rust on a piece of tape and manually run it across a recording head it will record on to the rust.

Some of the cooler ones:

Did you know the Fax Machine was invented in 1843 over 160 years ago and the first working fax machine was made in 1860! It’s older than the telephone.

The refrigerator was actually invented to chill beer!

One I also found very interesting is the one about the Sewing Machine. First off I didn’t know how they worked but more interesting to me was some of the history of clothing.

According to the program except for very rich people, most families used to have to make their own clothing and that included up until relatively recently. They show some ads from like the 1950s for women and sewing machines. My mom used to make clothing for us. I used to always think it was just a hobby and I’m sure it was but I wouldn’t doubt that hobby was influenced by the previous generation that might have grown up making their own clothing.

The sewing machine also made it possible for there to be a wide spread fashion industry which is also what made it less of a fixture in people’s households.

There’s actually quite a few sites about the show. The webpage of the main guy, Tim Hunkin. Dang that guy is amazing! He even runs a homepage for the show.
Each episode is about 25 minutes. I hope they stay available. I wish they’d make some new ones too