Category: Uncategorized

Berkeley Professor Richard Muller teaches Physics for Future Presidents, aka Physics 10. I’m no physicist (nor am I a future President, most likely), but this is a pretty fascinating site. I’d say he’s angling to replace Richard Feynman as the people’s physicist, and this site certainly goes a long way to establishing his capabilities. Prof.…

Jason Kottke discusses blogging and the development of peer-to- peer journalism. He asks “is the weblog network efficient at journalism?” He grants that the question may be beside the point, but I think he’s on to something. Blogging, whether it’s used for journalism or for knowledge management (John Robb’s K-Logs group at Yahoo! Groups explores…

The New York Times reports that Plantronics used IP.com to protect an idea it had last year. The idea is to take advantage of what’s known as “prior art” – if prior art exists that adequately describes the subject matter of the patent application, the patent will not be granted. IP.com allows companies to register…

Bloomberg.com : Technology News reports that the trust-busting folks in the European Union want to now limit the protection afforded software companies through the granting of patents. This is the same commission that prevented G.E. from merging with Honeywell last July. The commission seeks to disallow business method patents (like Amazon.com’s 1-Click patent). (Side note:…

Here’s one founder’s take on why her start-up failed. Talk about bitter! Now, there’s almost certainly another side to this story (like the VCs who would probably say that the founders didn’t know how to run a business, couldn’t shift the business model fast enough to respond to market conditions, and couldn’t expand their customer…

MIT Comparative Media Studies Director looks at blogs as the “digital renaissance”. I just came from a dinner in L.A. with a friend who spends a lot of his time thinking about knowledge management, and got to explain the concept of blogs to him. This article does a good job of explaining the concept to…

Last Saturday, I wrote about (and linked to) a Slate article about the Dvorak keyboard and its apparent superiority to the standard “QWERTY” keyboard. Many thanks to tins reader T.A. for a pointer to this Reason magazine article from June of 1996 debunking the Dvorak myth. The article is a lengthy and entirely worthwhile read…

The future of money? Who knew I was this interested in payment technology? I’ll stop obsessing about PayPal, but this week’s article in The Economist certainly makes PayPal look outdated. It describes currency that is wired, can be programmed, supports authentication and unique identification, and is purportedly counterfeit-proof. The technology discussed in the article is…

Note: See the update posted on February 12 that addresses the Dvorak keyboard “hoax”. Make Mine Dvorak – One writer’s love affair with the other keyboard layout. Twenty years ago my parents bought an Apple ][+ (in an odd way, typing those matched brackets still looks cool to me), and my infatuation with computers began.…

Just upgraded to Blogger Pro. (Side note: paid my $35 via PayPal!) So far, so good…