Douglas L. Ross - My Personal Reflections

Wolfram Alpha is endlessly facinating. For example, I learned a little trivia factorid today that my wife and I were both born on a Thursday [by putting our birth dates into Wolfram Alpha and comparing them.] It also instantly computed that someone with the equivalent of my current salary would have been making about $23,000 / year in 1946 when I was born. There is a great list of examples here .

This is pretty cool..."a physical place designed to facilitate creativity and incubate ideas via collaboration." The AlloSphere at the California NanoSystems Institute, UC Santa Barbara

Stephen Wolfram is at it again. This time he's going to show that you can make all human knowledge "computable" so that you can ask a computer (albeit one with "access to a huge system, with trillions of pieces of curated data and millions of lines of algorithms") any factual question and it will "compute" the answer. What a guy, I just love the way he fearlessly tackles these massive undertakings. Assuming it works, if there was ever an application that could rival Google search, it could be something like this. See Wolfram's blog entry for more detail Wolfram Blog : Wolfram|Alpha Is Coming!

My friend Bill Loughrey has written a new book entitled Political Will that modestly attempts to answer the questions; "how America became great, what went wrong, and how to fix it?" I haven't finished reading the book yet, but I tip my hat to Bill for even trying to answer these great questions. I'll do a review when I finish it.

PW Singer on military robots and the future of war Video on TED.com Listen to this talk by P.W. Singer about military robots. It's pretty scary. Singer is right, it's not our war machines that are the problem, it's us.

Photographer David Bergman took this amazing photo at President Obama's inauguration with the GigaPan system. GigaPan uses a mechanical device called the Gigapan Epic plus an ordinary digital camera to take overlapping images (~220 in this case) and seamlessly stitch them together via special software to make one giant, high-resolution photo (this Obama inauguration photo apparently has 1.57 gigapixel resolution). On the GigaPan.org website it's possible to pan/zoom the photo to an amazing degree of detail. For instance, some ordinary people on the Mall will be able to identify themselves in this picture and show that they were there on January 20, 2009. I believe the software which stitches the photos together involves fractal geometry technology similar to that which astronomers use to piece together images of the sky. Bergman is selling prints of this photo here for ~$90+ and if I had been there I would deifintely buy one.

Is it just me or does this sound like an economic "Mission Accomplished?"