Lethbridge artist and activist Andy Davies shows his support of local MP candidate Mark Sandilands with his modified bike.
Andy is a friend of mine and asked me to shoot a few photos for him.
This American Life on the Financial Crisis
If you’re confused about what caused the greatest financial crisis since the depression, let This American Life teach you in words you can understand, how the mortgage lending crisis started, with their episode The Giant Pool of Money and follow-up with their episode Another Frightening Show About the Economy in which we learn:
- How and why the credit markets froze?
- What are “credit default swaps” and how do they propagate hardship to every sector of the economy?
- Why aren’t “credit default swaps” regulated?
- What will the bailout do and is it a good thing?
If this interests you, you might also want to check out the NPR: Planet Money Podcast.
Update: Now there is a movie about all this (by Adam Davidson no less) called The Big Short. I highly recommend it.
Barack—Up Close
My cousin Amie and her husband Matt got up early this morning to attend one of Barack Obama’s rallies, this one just a few miles from their house. They got some great photos of the future president!
Adobe Photoshop CS4 Release Date Announced
I’m happy to hear that Adobe will be releasing their newest version of Photoshop in just a couple of weeks. The entire Creative Suite 4 (CS4), is targeting a release date for October 15, 2008.
Here’s a quick video demonstrating one of Photoshop CS4’s amazing new abilities (which was foreshadowed here) to scale intelligently based on the content of an image.
It opens up a whole new can of worms in the ethics of editing photos department, but at the same time, it looks REALLY fun to use.
Hit play or watch Content Aware Scaling on YouTube.
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Whiteboard Tower Defense
It’s a terrible time waster, but if you’re looking to kill your afternoon, try Whiteboard Tower Defense.
Five must see open course video lectures
Since the introduction of open lectures by progressive thinking educational institutions like M.I.T., Stanford, Duke, Yale, and others, many exceptional presentations have bubbled to the top and should be watched.
Here are five must see open course video lectures as recommended by Virginia Heffernan of the NYTimes.
- Walter H. G. Lewin, Powers of 10, M.I.T. (At about 2:40 watch Power of Ten video that is cut from the lecture)
- Randy Pausch, Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, Carnegie Mellon
- Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, Duke and M.I.T. (the rest of his short clips)
- Langdon Hammer, Modern Poetry, Yale
- Christine Hayes, Introduction to the Old Testament (Hebrew Bible), Yale
I also recommend Mark Schlissel, Introduction – The Cell Theory, Bacteria, Animal Cells, Evolution (Viruses and Midochondria). (The good stuff starts at about 13:00).
I listened to about a quarter of all the lectures from this course—most of which were over my head, but the first and second (mp3) classes are fascinating and make me wish I studied biology at school.
jeffmilner.com Wordle
Another wordle, this one is comprised of the words I use most when posting to this site.
Sarah Palin 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant
I came across a youtube video this morning that shows Sarah Palin (Sarah Heath) sporting a swimsuit in the 1984 Miss Alaska Pageant. The video was pulled shortly later, but in the meantime I contacted Waxy.org’s Andy Baio and he, having more foresight than me, made a copy and is now hosting it himself.
Obama / McCain Wordle
I downloaded the transcripts of all of Obama and McCain’s speeches from their respective official websites from March 25th, 2008 to the present and then put them each into Wordle.
Wordle gives greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text.
I used 51 speeches by McCain and 61 by Obama.
McCain’s site only had transcripts from March 25th to the present and I figured that was plenty of data for my purposes.
Sarah Palin Hockey Mom
Matt Damon condemns John McCain’s choice of hockey-mom Sarah Palin for Vice President. He compares the situation to a “really bad Disney movie” and says it’s crazy that this woman could become President.
Hit play or watch Damon Condemns Palin at YouTube.
It’s one of those situations that is funny because it’s true (albeit also frightening). The geniuses at CollegeHumor have taken the idea and run with it. Here is the fictional trailer to her, unbelievable, real life story:
[Sarah Palin Disney Trailer on YouTube]