Joe: “First, I would like to make a correction as I have not been digging the basement for 15 years as reported but rather for the past 7 years, as I began hauling dirt in June of 2005. However, I have been into the radio controlled heavy commercial hobby from 1996, and I acquired my first R/C construction model kit in the summer of 2001.

Every year, I excavate about 2 to 3 cubic yards of material. I mine it from the walls during the winter, put it through the crusher, screen it, and then haul it out during a summer’s worth of Sundays.

Every now and then you can see some amazing model railroad setups in basements or rec rooms. This particular take on an unfinished basement is something else. Pictures and Videos and additional postings at the link.

Hobbies. They keep the mind alive and soul in peace.

Facebook has become pure noise. The reason it is pure noise is that I was an inexperienced social media user when I first started using it. I added whoever to my friend list. Now I get random political messages from both sides, people promoting their businesses, and information that is generally worthless to me. The reason I don’t use Twitter is now the same reason I always depart from a visit to Facebook with a sour taste in my mouth: unfiltered junk information.
…
G+ gives me high value information. I think I now get the true power of circles. I am not sure how much algorithmically is happening behind the scenes, but the circles I have subscribed to (mostly tech information, with a dash of Japanese) provide much more valuable information.

The same problem exists with RSS feeds. It is easy to collect them but when the feed reader says you have more than a thousand headlines every morning, it can become a chore filtering those down to ‘quality information’ where quality is defined as something useful or interesting to you at the moment you find it.

Email, too.

This is a giddy time where there is a lot new and your friends likely share with you what is novel or unusual as well as ‘quality information’ and it can become a royal pain to separate out the good stuff from the other stuff. Then there’s the battle against spam, trolls, fraudsters, and others who want something from you.

I don’t know about you but I need all the help with this storm I can get. I’ve got the email flood down to ankle level, RSS feeds are undergoing significant repair and maintenance, and Facebook is there simply to experiment with a better way of controlling comments on blogs like this. I’ll have to check out G+ and see if there is something usable there.

Or, just maybe, Google is the Borg as some seem to think. I’ll have to be careful.

Human beings are not simply to sit on a beach and enjoy the beauty of creation. Nor are they simply to sit in a cathedral and enjoy the beauty of God. Rather, they are to be actively involved in creation and cathedral, being fruitful, multiplying, and exercising dominion. This suggests that we will be truly content as creatures when we are doing that for which we have been created. Moreover, by implication, if we are not being fruitful in our lives, if we are not exercising dominion over creation, then we will be rightly discontent.

Why build stuff? Why belong to clubs? Why work the bands? Why maintain and improve one’s self and one’s things?

We are social and find meaning in what we do for ourselves and for others. If it’s not vocation, then it’s avocation. If it’s not avocation then it’s the honey-do’s. If all of that is taken away or is lost, then what?

I saw a show about lightning last night. A lady sitting on the beach by herself doing nothing in particular had her life changed. A bolt from the blue, as it were. Yes, a break is needed now and then and the Bible even tells us to reserve one day a week for the Lord, but the other six days in the week need something in service to give us meaning and reason for who and what we are.

People often describe certain individuals as “natural-born leaders,” but the truth is that business leaders are made, not born–shaped through the assignments they receive and the experiences they have. That formation can happen by accident or by design. Leaving leadership development to chance can be chaotic and unpredictable; organizations that want to ensure that they have the leaders they need, now and in the future, would do well to embrace leadership development by design.

This is the genes versus environment argument. There are a few who may make it on their own but many are most influenced by the jobs the find and the management they suffer. It is why I suggested to some high school students that they look for mentors and role models in choosing jobs, careers, and further academic pursuits. It is very difficult to rise through an environment of failure. It takes effort to escape mediocrity. Being in the light of success will leave some shine no matter what you do.

Up until now, there’s been three omnipresent ways of performing an action; menus, toolbar buttons and keyboard shortcuts. Recently we’ve also gotten gestures, but I’ll overlook them in this context. In a computer program, they are just different representations of the same thing. There’s limited space on the screen, so you can’t have too many buttons. Menus are more efficient, but still wastes a lot of space. Moreover, they’re usually filled with items you never use. They’re there to serve other users needs, or even just as fill-up or decoration! Many applications actually have a menubar for the sole purpose of looking more similar to other applications. They’ll have a menu structure like File > Exit and Help > About and nothing more.

The point is that this Shuttleworth Ubuntu effort is towards having the computer learn what you want and how you do things rather than forcing you to learn how the computer does things.

We’ll resurrect the (boring) old ways of displaying the menu in 12.04, in the app and in the panel. In the past few releases of Ubuntu, we’ve actively diminished the visual presence of menus in anticipation of this landing. That proved controversial. In our defence, in user testing, every user finds the menu in the panel, every time, and it’s obviously a cleaner presentation of the interface. But hiding the menu before we had the replacement was overly aggressive. If the HUD lands in 12.04 LTS, we hope you’ll find yourself using the menu less and less, and be glad to have it hidden when you are not using it. You’ll definitely have that option, alongside more traditional menu styles.

“Overly aggressive” in making changes? That is probably the best way to put it.

The plan is about HUD – head-up display.

This is the HUD. It’s a way for you to express your intent and have the application respond appropriately. We think of it as “beyond interface”, it’s the “intenterface”. This concept of “intent-driven interface” has been a primary theme of our work in the Unity shell, with dash search as a first class experience pioneered in Unity. Now we are bringing the same vision to the application, in a way which is completely compatible with existing applications and menus.

The basic idea is that of a look-ahead search through the menu tree that is context based and inferential. You may not know exactly what you want or how to spell it but you can guess and see what is in the menu tree that might fit. Instead of walking through the menu branches taking guesses about which one might have what you want, you can have the system help you find it.

Shuttleworth is not working in a vacuum and he is aware of the other efforts on the same problem.

There are other teams interested in a similar problem space. Perhaps the best-known new alternative to the traditional menu is Microsoft’s Ribbon. Introduced first as part of a series of changes called Fluent UX in Office, the ribbon is now making its way to a wider set of Windows components and applications.

He notes that the ‘M’ in WIMP is for menu and refers to the menu idea having a 30 year history with no revolution. Back when the functionality of programs was rather small, grouping them into a hierarchy of the 5 to 7 things a human could have in mind at one time wasn’t a hassle. These days, that 5-7 comprehension idea is getting stretched so far that the complexity and capability of modern applications is getting cumbersome. We live in interesting times and it appears we will be seeing a revolution in how we access the capabilities of our computers and applications.

There are three parts of the circuit. The coin cell battery status monitor LED uses a ‘power supply supervisor’ chip that makes it easy to check the lithium coin cell to make sure it is providing the needed voltage. Another part of the circuit splits the battery voltage in order to provide the reference op amp with the supply voltages it requires. The reference op amp simply converts the signal from the dropping resistor into a voltage that can be read on a DVM in a convenient way to determine current.

I guess that these days the input impedance of voltmeters isn’t that much of an issue. It was that long ago (it seems to me) that a 20k ohm per volt meter was something significant. Vacuum Tube Volt meters were the cat’s meow when it came to measuring voltages and current. That was when you needed a vacuum tube to get a high impedance amplifier to isolate the input and get enough output to drive a D’Arsonval meter.

an aside: I am in the process of redoing the post categories and immediately after a first pass to try to make sense of things, along comes another interesting topic that doesn’t quite fit. Where do I stash a ‘build your own’ and ‘circuit theory’ and ‘measurement theory’ ?? I’ll have to think about this. There are tags for individual posts so I’ll have to use them until I can figure out a better solution.

To understand why ambiguity makes a language more efficient rather than less so, think about the competing desires of the speaker and the listener. The speaker is interested in conveying as much as possible with the fewest possible words, while the listener is aiming to get a complete and specific understanding of what the speaker is trying to say. But as the researchers write, it is “cognitively cheaper” to have the listener infer certain things from the context than to have the speaker spend time on longer and more complicated utterances. The result is a system that skews toward ambiguity, reusing the “easiest” words. Once context is considered, it’s clear that “ambiguity is actually something you would want in the communication system,” Piantadosi says.

The difficulty arises when the speaker and listener do not have the same goal. The listener uses ambiguity to distort and twist the meaning the speaker is trying to convey. That forces the speaker to devolve into excessive explanation and definition of concepts to reduce the ambiguity.

The purpose of the study probably isn’t to understand flame wars on the I’net. It is more likely aimed at helping those working in natural language processing (NLP) so devices can respond to spoken commands more like humans do.

The thing to keep in mind is that you really don’t want to be on the ragged edge of seeing every last pixel in your display. There is also the issue of viewing angle with the wide screen displays. As a computer monitor, being close for extreme detail and having the screen occupy a wide swath of your vision real estate might help productivity. For media viewing, the opposite might be better. So, a 32″ HDTV calculated at best at a 4′ viewing distance might be good for computing from a distance of 3′ and for media viewing at 6′ –

Rules of thumb can be useful but keep in mind that they aren’t specifications!

If the definition of death as expressed by the AMA et al has validity, it should be possible to compare this recent criteria against the widely accepted and time-tested “doornail” standard. We did just that.

We subjected a large doornail (see Figure 1) that was forged in 1986 to thorough examination, prolonged close observation, and an electroencephalogram (EEG).

Their studies resulted in 4 findings that conclude “that the criteria for death as described in modem medical literature 1,2,3.4 is valid and may be used with confidence by clinicians.”

Caution: the post contains pictures of the subject under examination that may be disturbing.

OK. so now we know. That door nail was indeed without life. Or at least the one the doctors subjected to examination met the criteria. Maybe other nails?