JAMES COOPER | icebox500

Cool story on NPR about the chemical composition of a Bloody Mary.

From NPR:

… Da Costa has used every trick in the chemist’s book to analyze each ingredient, and the cocktail as whole. He presented his findings at a meeting of the American Chemical Society this week. Da Costas, an expert in food flavors, is chairman-elect of the group’s agriculture and food chemistry division.

With gas and liquid chromatography, Da Costa isolated the wide variety of compounds that give the bloody mary its unique flavor. The drink covers much of the taste spectrum: sweet, salty, sour and umami — the savory taste of glutamic acid.

For loving this camera.

Yeah, its probably over priced and over styled but it just looks like it would feel good in the hands…

Overview from dpreview.com

Recently there have been a few different charts and graphics that attempt to to explain the level of radiation exposure that is happening in Japan and with nuclear energy in general. This one is by far the most impactful in it’s demonstration of daily versus risky exposure.

From informationisbeautiful.net via Fast Company

Hmmph, some interesting statistics here about how much certain things have ‘improved’ and others deteriorated over the last 10 years.

To be honest, I think I’m starting to miss the days of a rotary dial phone and snail mail…

So what’s changed? Technology has gotten unimaginably smaller and better — just look at the differences between an iMac in 2000 and an iPad in 2010. The world’s population has grown, and for the first time more people live in cities than in rural areas. China’s electricity consumption has quadrupled. And the costs of technology are becoming more apparent than before. But really, the data speaks for itself.

io9.com

10 years ago my pocket wasn’t nearly big enough to carry an iMac around in.  After spending 10 years looking for a bigger pocket, it would appear that technology has made this unnecessary.  If technology continues to accelerate at current rates, future devices will either be so small and disposable they’ll be unrecognizable or I’ll have a CRAY super computer in my pocket.

geekosystem.com

Then again, maybe iHave.

There are an awful lot of ‘infographics’ floating around the interwebs these days.  It seems its all the rage and any one with two numbers and a couple circles thinks they are somehow adding value.  This is not the case.

However, here’s something cool - a free interactive way of playing with some very interesting stats about the world population, health, technical prowess, etc…  I stumbled upon Gapminder.org via this article in The Economist about Hans Rosling’s new BBC TV show all about statistics.  Boring right? Nope, just the opposite. Check out the included video to see the possibilities.

Hans Rossling – The Joy of Stats

Super cool.  Finally got my virtual desktop hardware setup with the VM server. We have converted nearly all of our servers to a virtual environment already and are prepping to setup 200 virtual desktops.  I’ll admit I’m a bit nervous about it but so far the experience is great.

I have a 24″ Samsung nc240 connected to our VMWare host via PCoIP.  The machine is wonderfully fast (faster than my new Mac Mini with 4 GB of RAM) and, so far, very stable.

It is, however, not bug free.  I just tried to setup my Microsoft wireless mouse this morning and the VM refused to see it.  Maybe we can fix that but it was a disappointed.  The iPhone and nearly all other peripherals have connected without a problem.  The one glaring issue that concerns me is a lack of support for Webcams.  We actually do a decent amount of Polycom and Skype calls here and USB Web cams are as of yet not possible. VMWare says there’s a fix coming down the road first quarter of next year.

The reason we made this move is that most of the desktop computers we have are ancient and should be recycled.  Rather than continuing down the road of supporting 200 different pieces of hardware with disk failures, RAM issues, etc… we wanted to centralize the maintenance and save time and money.  The initial outlay isn’t cheap but should have paid for itself by year 4 of the project.

Cool stuff for sure. Let’s hope the real users love it as much as I do.

One of the primary reasons I bought the iPad was my addiction to The Economist.  I had partially justified the purchase by canceling my print subscription under the assumption that reading it online would work out great on the iPad.  That was only partially true.  Reading the Web page was possible (I have an online subscription through work) but a pain in the rear at the same time.  Finally, The Economist launched a true magazine app last week.

Flipping through it (I like it) made me think about the experience of reading any magazine on the iPad. Prior to The Economist I had tried Wired, Popular Mechanics, Zinio, and Branson’s new iPad only magazine called Project.  Clearly its a very immature market at this point and has been interesting to watch.

The latest magazine I’ve tried is Project.  It does a nice job thinking outside the box of print by having a very cool multimedia cover and some neat multimedia effects inside.  In many ways the layout reminds me of Wired (the writing doesn’t do a whole lot for me… maybe I’m too old…) as does much of the functionality.

Short of Zinio, most of the magazines seem to have adopted the functionality of flipping left right to get to the next or previous article while scrolling up and down to remain on the feature.  I’m not convinced it works yet and isn’t simply ‘cool factor’ for the user experience.  Frankly, it confuses me often and leaves me longing for a simple flip, flip, flip experience.

I’m  excited by the concepts and look forward especially to watching what Wired comes up with.  I think they have done the most innovative design for a magazine transitioning from print. On the other hand, I love the simplicity of how The Economist had gone about hit and how it nearly perfectly emulates the paper experience.

I think what is key here is that there is and ought to be a different experience for different types of magazines.  Perhaps in the near future, the more pop-culture style ‘zines will blow the entire concept out of the water.