I love new and novel approaches to data visualization.  So I'm not sure how I missed this TED talk from earlier this year, but it is way cool:

I love last bit, where you see atoms and electron probabilities visualized (have been into quantum physics for a long time). 

I am beginning to think that experienced game developers could carve out a nice little niche in the data visualization market.  Since I got my iPhone I'm also thinking that smart phones will play a key role in showing private data to users, especially with augmented reality.

I realize that Twitter's gotten a TON of publicity lately, but I was sitting the in airport last night when I saw a Best Buy ad that featured a Twitter address instead of a bestbuy.com:

It'll be interesting to see how they do with this, if they actually manage to get a decent following they could end up as the first company with instant access to a decent chunk of their customer base.

So far they have 5,116 customers, and this commercial was running on CNN.  I don't know how long it's been running for, but CNN seems like it would have a more tech savvy audience.  I would love to see some demographics on Twitter usage, but I would bet it's a pretty young crowd, not CNN.

Yes, I know about the 15 year-old kid from Morgan Stanley who claims that nobody he knows uses Twitter.  I can only tell you that the teenage girls that I know in my family use it all the time to follow celebrities they like.  I see no reason why they wouldn't subscribe to feeds that they like also.

I find this interesting because for all the years RSS has been around, nobody has ever tried to push it like this.  It makes me wonder if RSS is just too conceptual for most people, but they understand Twitter because it has a name and somebody famous explained it to them. 

Sticking an RSS button in the corner of a site just looks like a weird picture to most people, but do they understand a Twitter URL?  Will be interesting to watch how Best Buy's experiment works, what's cool is we can watch it in real time via their subscriber count.

Look, I know why you're here.  There's only one reason that you'd be searching for this, which is to put an advertisement for your product or Nigerian investment opportunity on somebody's site.

The civilized world calls this behavior "spamming" and it is frowned on EXTREMELY heavily.  I mean, seriously, you'd better not tell people what you do at parties.  Make up a decent lie, like you're an IRS agent or a lobbyist.  Definitely don't tell your dates, if you can get them.

You know, you might want to sit down and re-evaluate your life.  Wouldn't it feel better to contribute something to society?  Help to move mankind ahead a little bit?  Are you really going to feel happy about what you're doing right now when you look back on your life?

Anyway, your IP address has been logged and is being forwarded to the major social networks for blacklisting.  It's for your own good.

Um, yeah, so this is kind of a weird post, but for some reason people were showing up at my blog looking for this stuff.  I figured I'd better say something to them.

This is a follow-on to my post the other day about peer-to-peer debt.  It's some of the stuff I've been drawing on napkins for a couple of years, an idea for building a peer to peer service network on top of BitTorrent.

I try not to use words like that too loosely, either.

This banking system is dying.  I don't talk about it too much anymore because there's nothing that can be done to stop it at this point, but the Bretton Woods monetary system that has been in place since 1944 at the conclusion of World War II is coming to an end.  An interest-bearing debt based monetary system, which is what we have, has a finite life span from the moment it's born, and this one has reached its unsustainable peak and is on the way back down, fast.

It's sixth-grade math, you can't deny it, there is no wishing it away.  It just is.

So then, the question is what will rise as the next monetary system.  Never complain about me giving problems and not answers, here's a doozy.  I've been sketching these ideas out for several years now, and I've finally found a few other people who are thinking along the same lines.  If the current crisis has the end result of giving an alternative monetary system critical mass then it may be worth it.

Cisco decided to stop paying for my cell phone, so I FINALLY went out and bought an iPhone yesterday.  (Short review:  I love love love love love love love it.)  Have been waiting for this thing for like two years now, but it rocks.

My car, which runs a version of Windows CE (the stereo head unit, to be exact), has been perfectly content playing music from my iPod.  However it does not like my iPhone because of the iPhone 3.0 software, and it turns out that I have to patch my stereo in order to control my iPhone with it.

I was struck by the fact that I had just experienced a version compatibility issue between my phone and my car.  How crazy is that.

A mathematician, an accountant and an economist apply for the same job. 

The interviewer calls in the mathematician and asks "What does two plus two equal?"   The mathematician replies "Four." The interviewer asks "Four, exactly?"  The mathematician looks at the interviewer incredulously and says "Yes, four, exactly."

The interviewer calls in the accountant and asks the same question "What does two plus two equal?" The accountant says "On average, four - give or take ten percent, but on average, four."

Then the interviewer calls in the economist and poses the same question "What does two plus two equal?"

The economist gets up, locks the door, closes the shade, sits down next to the interviewer and says "What do you need it to equal?"

...

And that little economist grew up to be Lawrence Summers.  (Kidding.  Kind of.)