I’ve got your missing links right here (16 July 2011) | Not Exactly Rocket Science

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Top picks

“I feel the percussive roar on the skin of my face, chest, arms. I am physically connected to Atlantis now.” This is my post of the week. Karen James’s magnificent description of watching the Shuttle launch is better than anything else I’ve read on this topic. And more on why I love the piece here.

“We did not learn enough from the mission to justify the death of the dog.” Jennifer Ouellette on Laika, the space dog

Bear paternity tests – why were they expensive, what was the point? Great post from Kevin Zelnio, where he calmly & brilliantly sticks up for science

“This is the National Health Service. It’s free.” We in the UK like to bitch about the NHS, but here’s what it looks like to someone who has never had one. Steve Silberman on his run-in with socialised medicine

I am LOVING Google+. This is me.

“As a reporter, I feel like I’ve been holding my breath.” Beautiful, brave piece from Kai Nagata on why he quit TV journalism.

40 yrs later, a comprehensive reflection on the Stanford prison experiment, with Zimbardo, a prisoner, guards whistleblowers and more. A must-read.

How China’s “suddenly wealthy” are ...

Iron Nail?

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I found this old looking nail while out walking the dogs. It seems to have a very thick head and had no rust on it. This is how I found it. I live in Stonehaven, Scotland and there is an iron age site about 200 yards from where I found this.

I'm trying to find out more about it. How old is it? What

When Will We Be Transhuman? Seven Conditions for Attaining Transhumanism | Science Not Fiction

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The future is impossible to predict. But that’s not going to stop people from trying. We can at least pretend to know where it is we want humanity to go. We hope that laws we craft, the technologies we invent, our social habits and our ways of thinking are small forces that, when combined over time, move our species towards a better existence. The question is, How will we know if we are making progress?

As a movement philosophy, transhumanism and its proponents argue for a future of ageless bodies, transcendent experiences, and extraordinary minds. Not everyone supports every aspect of transhumanism, but you’d be amazed at how neatly current political struggles and technological progress point toward a transhuman future. Transhumanism isn’t just about cybernetics and robot bodies. Social and political progress must accompany the technological and biological advances for transhumanism to become a reality.

But how will we able to tell when the pieces finally do fall into place? I’ve been trying to answer that question ever since Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution was asked a while back by his readers: What are the exact conditions for counting “transhumanism” as ...


The fist of an angry cloud | Bad Astronomy

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I glanced out my office window the other day and saw what is clearly a sign that the weather is ticked off about something:

Go cloud! Punch that sky!

I was thinking at first the cloud was the result of a big convective updraft; warm air screaming upwards and forming a puffy column. A couple of weeks ago I saw this happen in a ginormous cumulonimbus storm cloud. There were several rapidly rising columns air moving up so quickly they were forming pilei, which are caps of water vapor that look like little shock waves at the top of the cloud.

However, when I was looking at this fist cloud just a few minutes later as it blew east toward my house, I saw this was just a perspective effect, and it was just a normal puffy cloud.

Too bad. I was getting into it. Give it to the man! Fight the stratus quo!

Related posts:

- Weather satellites capture shots of volcanic plume blasting through clouds
- Like the fist of an angry god
- Alps lapse
- From space: video of five days of tornadoes


Terror Attack in Mumbai. India.

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There was terrorist bomb blasts in Mumbai India. This is third time Mumbai has been attacked. My house is located around 5 Km distance from blast sites. Due to grace of God I am safe.

One of the blast was in jewellery market called Jhaveri Bazzar. Second one was at Diamond market called Panchratna,

Seamless or Welded Fittings

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Dear Experts,

Vendor supplying double seam welded fittings with a joint factor of 1 (100%RT and welded from both side) but Client is rejecting saying that Single seam is allowed but double seam is not allowed at all...

ASME Sec viii div 1, UW-12 part e says that seamwelded to be treated in same wa

Jogging Every Beach in Florida

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His name is Luther Rupp. He’s jogging all the way around the State of Florida–the entire perimeter of the state–via the beaches. Even after reading his blog, I’m still not completely sure why he’s doing it, but who needs a reason? Looks like he’s having a great time and meeting lots of nice folks. I’ve [...]

Irish Island Price Drops

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irishThe Irish Times is reporting that the price of islands in their small but beautiful corner of the world is coming down. The times is reporting that some islands are available for less than €200,000, making private island ownership highly accessible to the average European. Here is what the Irish Times had to say. 

 The island of Ireland is surrounded by hundreds of islands - from large inhabited islands to tiny uninhabitable ones. Private Irish islands don’t come up for sale too often but this year there’s a handful on the market, with asking prices much reduced since their peak.

Dominic Daly, a Cork estate agent, has been selling islands for over 40 years and currently has islands on his books in west Cork, the Shannon Estuary and in Donegal.

Daly says that some islands are owned by tradition, by farmers, others have been bought as a luxury item.

“The trend is for international businessmen to buy them. They have the funds,” he says. Enquiries are mainly from overseas - he even had an African chief looking at an island a few years ago.”

To read the full article visit the Irish Times

Steele Island

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steele-island-ontario-1 Steele Island is a pristine .23 acre island located in the beautiful Georgian Bay Ontario Canada. This three bedroom cottage truly is a jewel. It offers sunrises and sunsets, attractive granite shoreline, close proximity to the Ojibway Club and deep water for swimming and boating. It was recently renovated and is the perfect blend of old cottage charm with a new modern kitchen, bathroom and décor.

The cottage is surrounded by generous decks and the interior of the cottage boasts a stone fireplace, tongue and grove pine ceilings, a modern kitchen with a dishwasher and stainless steel appliances and ample windows to capture the multi- directional views.

The deep water approach to the island greets you with two floating docks, a wharf dock with ample storage sheds and a small beach.

Stewart Metcalfe, Broker of Record. (416) 274-8987. For more information visit Private islands Online

How to Vacation Like a Billionaire

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Billionaire IslandsIt is no secret that celebrities love private islands, but they are also the playground of the world’s super rich. Along with yachts and private jets, private islands are among the ultimate status symbols for those with whom money is no object. Forbes.com recently featured a number of private islands that have been attatched to some of the world’s most prolific billionaires. Here is what they had to say.

 Sir Richard Branson’s Necker Island, the first of many highly publicized private island resorts. Branson built Necker as his own home but you can be a paying house guest. Things may have changed, but for many years it regularly lost money, and I doubt profit is high on his list of motives for keeping Necker as an awesome escape, since he spends so much time there. Likewise, Julian Robertson, of Tiger Fund fame, the original mega-rich hedge fund guy, turned his New Zealand dream home into a posh boutique resort – you can even stay in his actual house.

I’ve never been to Necker Island, but know lots of people who have, and the charm is obvious: your own private Caribbean island with an excessively huge staff. I’ve been to other Branson “resorts” and can vouch that the record retailer/airline founder/space traveler/rail magnate knows how to put on the show. I’m including this because it is a famous and longstanding example of the theme. There are plenty of competing private islands out there these days, most notably Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz’s newer Laucala in Fiji. (Necker is almost always rented for ‘exclusive use’ meaning to one party of up to 28. Rates for this are $54,500 or $56,000 per night – around $2000 a head if you fill it! – and includes everything, from booze to boat transfers to the airport to a staff of 60 that indulges your every whim.

To read the full article visit Forbes.com

Hop On The Gravy Train

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Sometimes, you just have to follow your heart. This is exactly what Ann Hsu Kaufman did when her husband’s work took them from Washington D.C. to Kuala Lumpur. Her site invites you on a culinary journey around S.E. Asia, a view of their home life and the birth of their son (Gravy Baby). No, it’s not his real name. Now, back in Charleston, S. Carolina, her writings will continue to tantalize your taste buds.

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The Middle Kingdom

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Matt and Tara Banker packed it in, or in reality, packed it up and moved to Beijing, China. After spending the last few years living/working there, they have created The Middle Kingdom to write about their experiences and help others who are choosing the same path. As Tara states: “Not in Kansas Anymore”.

© Gretchen for TravelBlogs, 2011. |
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Lake County medical school celebrates new facility – Chicago Daily Herald

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Lake County medical school celebrates new facility
Chicago Daily Herald
The school is part of the newly built William J. and Elizabeth L. Morningstar Interprofessional Educational Center on the North Chicago campus. It's named after the parents of a university alumnus, Dr. George W. Morningstar of New York, who died last ...
Lake Forest Resident Heads Rosalind Franklin's Foray Into Pharmacy CollegePatch.com

all 2 news articles »

California Cuts Weigh Heavily on Its Colleges – New York Times

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Patriot-News
California Cuts Weigh Heavily on Its Colleges
New York Times
The medical school's research building at UC-Riverside is almost finished, but it will not be seeing any students this year. By JENNIFER MEDINA RIVERSIDE, Calif. — The doors to the state's newest medical school are already open, technically. ...
Some California university degrees disappear amid budget cutsSacramento Bee
Pitt raises tuition 8.5 percent; PSU on a similar pathWashington Observer Reporter
Pitt raises tuition by 8.5 percentAltoona Mirror

all 57 news articles »

Technology Partner Spotlight: Push IO

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Welcome to the next installment in our blog series highlighting the companies in SoftLayer’s new Technology Partners Marketplace. These Partners have built their businesses on the SoftLayer Platform, and we’re excited for them to tell their stories. New Partners will be added to the Marketplace each month, so stay tuned for many more come.
- Paul Ford, SoftLayer VP of Community Development

 

Scroll down to read the guest blog from Joe Pezzillo of Push IO, a SoftLayer Tech Marketplace Partner powering the mobile app explosion. To learn more about Push IO, visit http://push.io/.

One Day Soon, Everyone Will Have an App

It seems like only yesterday that Dan Burcaw and I were sitting at a diner sketching out our vision of the mobile app industry’s future.

In our vision, the mobile industry was poised to rocket through the next decade on a trajectory like the one the internet and web have been on since the 90s.

And the parallels don’t stop there.

Just like in web 1.0, the early days of mobile are characterized by custom development of the wild west variety, with everyone rolling their own solutions to a set of commonly recurring problems. Think back to the earliest days of the web and recall what it was like to add a shopping cart to your website. It was a team of developers and a year of time. Now, if you’re not careful to uncheck the box when buying a domain name, you end up getting a shopping cart added to your site for a couple bucks a month.

That same transformation from custom to commodity is also taking place in mobile right now.

And so, at that same diner table, we decided to create a company with the goal of providing the picks and shovels for the mobile gold rush that was already underway, with the idea that one day we’d help power a world where everyone had their own app.

Then, when Apple announced iOS 3.0 with features that required developers to provide servers, we knew we had an opening. Less than two weeks later, we founded Push IO.

Since Dan and I both have deep engineering backgrounds, we set out from day one to build the best possible software platform for getting data onto mobile devices in real-time, and we knew it would have to be designed to support the complex needs of large scale apps. We started with a completely virtual solution expecting that eventually we’d transition to a mix of virtual and physical servers. We didn’t know this transition would come so fast.

We were using a different provider when we started seeing a couple of apps for our sports broadcaster customers really taking off, all of which were demanding constant improvement in performance. So demanding, in fact, that we knew we had to shift to the hybrid-cloud system sooner rather than later, a technically involved move that was not yet being done by other providers in our space.

And that’s where SoftLayer comes in.

SoftLayer has been a key partner in our growth, supplying our hybrid-cloud infrastructure as we take on new customers and expand our platform from big sports broadcasters to multi-national businesses. SoftLayer gives us control of our own destiny, helping us avoid some of the high-profile problems that the multi-tenant virtual hosting providers have experienced, and providing us with the geographic redundancy and continuous availability we need to serve our demanding broadcast customers.

Proof of our platform’s success was revealed recently, during Apple’s WWDC 2011 Keynote announcement that they have shipped 100 Billion Push Notifications on iOS. From this we learned that Push IO has shipped 2%…2 Billion!!!…1 in 50 of those!

This summer Push IO made an exciting move: We acquired TapLynx (http://www.taplynx.com), a simple yet powerful platform that helps businesses, designers, publishers and even developers quickly create apps with no knowledge of Objective-C code required. All you need are RSS feeds and an idea of what content you want streaming into your app. Things like push notifications, In-App Purchase and user control over content updates help app creators to maximize their users’ engagement and monetize content.

Acquiring TapLynx is a huge step towards our vision, where “everyone has an app” becomes a reality. We know SoftLayer will continue to play an integral role in supporting Push IO during this exciting next step: scaling our industrial strength platform to the growing number of people who want their own mobile apps.

Many thanks to our friends at SoftLayer for making this possible and letting us share our story!

- Joe Pezzillo, Co-Founder, Push IO

Me and My Android

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Last weekend I went to an outdoor concert where I saw a pretty decent Beatles tribute band that hails from the great state of Texas and goes by the name Me and My Monkey. The entire excursion from home to the venue and back again lasted just about six hours. I was pulling into my driveway engaged in a phone conversation with a friend about which fake Beatle was her favorite when my Android gave a strangled beep, cut us off and powered down.

At first I thought it was a glitch, but a quick attempt to turn it back on showed me otherwise. I was out of juice. My battery was drained beyond the point of no return — or at least no return without access to an electrical outlet. I wondered if I had forgotten to charge the phone the previous night. After all, I was outside with friends, food, and music all evening. My phone was snug in my pocket on standby … Or was it?

I was the first to arrive to the venue, so I made a call to let the my freinds know I had staked us out a shady spot. After that, I fired up go sms to coordinate getting the right number of chairs, and I used it again while searching the parking lot for my friend’s car to help her carry those chairs. During the Sgt. Pepper set in an attempt to settle an argument, I “Googled” which year the Beatles officially broke up (turns out it was 1970 but the break-up dragged out until 1975). Sometime between Strawberry Fields and Hello, Goodbye I got an email from the office, so I logged into my handy SoftLayer App to check on a support ticket.

During the intermission, a local radio station was piped through the sound system and someone asked me to Shazam what turned out to be a Florence and the Machine cover of a track off Abbey Road. Since my phone was at the ready, I was the point person to find out whether the chorus to I Am the Walrus really said goo goo g’joob. I didn’t have a lighter on me, but my Virtual Zippo did the trick nicely during Hey Jude. And did I mention I don’t wear a watch because if I just hit the power button on my spiffy smart phone … ta-da, I get the time!

It’s a funny feeling when you realize how something that didn’t really exist five years ago has managed to ingrain itself so deeply into your everyday life. That’s what I found myself thinking as I was drifting off to sleep Saturday night, me in my bed and my Android recharging on the night stand … Well, that and who are the eggmen? Goo goo g’joob.

-William

HostingCon, Here We Come!

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On August 8, the hosting world will converge on the San Diego Convention Center for HostingCon 2011. I’d say that SoftLayer will “be there with bells on,” but a better way to put it would be that we’ll “be there with megaphones.” There are times to blend in and participate, and there are times when you follow Winston Churchill’s advice:

“If you have an important point to make, don’t try to be subtle or clever. Use a pile driver. Hit the point once. Then come back and hit it again. Then hit it a third time – a tremendous whack.”

This year, SoftLayer will be Bigger, Better and Badder in the conference sessions, on the expo hall floor and at the biggest HostingCon party ever.

Conference Sessions
We’re honored to have SoftLayer employees speaking in six different sessions at HostingCon 2011:

Social Media/Branding Panel
Kevin Hazard, Social Media Ninja
9:00am – Monday, August 8
Marketing + Sales Track
The Power of Innovation
Nathan Day, Chief Scientist
9:00am – Monday, August 8
Business Development Track
Build vs. Buy: The CTO’s Dilemma
Duke Skarda, CTO
10:00am – Monday, August 8
Technology + Operations Track
Small Business & Big Government: Public Policy and the Hosting Industry
Suzy Fulton, General Counsel
10:00am – Monday, August 8
Business Development Track
Clearing Up the Cloud: Hosting Providers Share Strategies for Competing in a Crowded Cloud Market
George Karidis, Chief Strategy Officer
2:00pm – Tuesday, August 9
Emerging Trends Track
How the Big Buyers Look At Acquisitions
Lance Crosby, CEO
3:00pm – Tuesday, August 9
Business Development Track

Over the next few weeks, you can keep an eye on the HostingCon Blog for more information about these sessions. To kick off the fun over there, they posted a preview to my session: “Setting Cloud Expectations Before Creating Cloud Strategy”

Expo
When you’re not learning from one of our SLayers in the conference sessions above, we hope you’ll swing by Booth #421 in the Expo Hall to chat with our team, get some SoftLayer swag and try your hand at the infamous Server Challenge. We’ll have live video coverage of all of the action at our booth, and given the geek credentials of HostingCon attendees, we’re expecting record-breaking times … so start studying and training now to give yourself the best possible chance to win the iPad 2 we’re bringing for the Server Challenge Champion!

HostingCon Party
Since you’ve read so attentively to this point about the ‘work’ side of HostingCon, it’s time for some ‘play.’ At 9pm on August 9, SoftLayer, cPanel and Resell.biz will hosting the biggest HostingCon Party in history. 1000 lucky attendees will come together at 4th & B for networking, food, drink and THE DAN BAND!

Attendance will be strictly limited, and you watch the tickets dwindle before the event sells out at http://hostingconparty.com. SoftLayer customers, leave a comment on this blog or contact us via Twitter (@SoftLayer) and we’ll hook you up with a promo code that comps your registration … But remember, even if you’re our best customer ever, you need a ticket to get in the door, so please register while you can!

Yes, Mr. Churchill, SoftLayer is bringing the pile driver to San Diego.

-@gkdog