Movin Gmap

now this is a perfect example of the enabling power of both internet services, and high level languages.

I love the idea of snaking together things you have and building things you want, using fast flexible small tools.

It's the dream of hackers everywhere, I think, to be able to wrest new things from the sea of known functionality with ease and grace on an as needed basis. Automated Design Tools will put this kind of integration within the reach of anyone interested, and vastly decrease the time investment.

Look forward to it. The futures, they are bright.

Pharyngula::Tuesday morning logic games

Logic (with a capital L) tends to attract either really unhinged platonic types, smart people otherwise gainfully employed noodling hobby-like on weekends, and the truly escapist, who try to use verbal reasoning to semantically bind reality, like poor medieval magicians, trying to make perfect Sympathetic Energies to make their desires manifest.

Occasionally I dip into symbolic logic for some quick fixes, but I wouldn't recommend it for much. It tends to descend into word games and 'assumption' chasing that actually weakens your real world problem solving skills.

Coming Soon to a Hard Drive Near You | Musings

I've been neglecting the blog for a few reasons, one, so busy; two, less public to talk about.

As my work gears up, I find that less and less of my daily experience is ameneable to public discussion.

I read about that idiot blogger who got fired from Google after just a few weeks. I really can't imagine why people think that blogs are somehow special and reserved from good company practices. In short, talk bad about your employer and coworkers, purchase ads for your blog in violation of company policy, Continue blogging after a warning from company higher-ups, yeah, you're fired, "surprise".

Blogging can be useful for individuals, to get certain messages out, to organize thoughts and disseminate materials quickly. They're not a free pass, and they aren't good for their own sake. If I thought they were, I'd have more of them. A blog for every subject in my life. (that might be an interesting experiment, but it'll have to wait).

I'm leaving this weekend to visit SLC for Valentines Day.

t/Space: Transformational Space Corporation

more fun than a barrel of monkeys.

Somehow this private tiny company has managed to get into the bidding for NASA's CEV, a potentially enormous project, which it is competing with the very big defense dogs, so to speak. It's championing a simple, inexpensive open architecture, with private commercial suppliers driving cost down, and innovation up. They're using rapid prototyping and good solid interface design to explore the space and garnering partnerships with small private aerospace companies that already exist, like AirLaunch and LunaCorp.

Before you ask, Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites is involved, but no word if Paul Allen's Vulcan or Virgin Galactic are.

Vewwwy interesting.