Out of nowhere, I got into the mood to lis­ten some Amy Wine­house this after­noon. It struck me as a real shame she nev­er got to record a Bond theme, among the many dis­ap­point­ments of los­ing her. Wine­house just had the per­fect sul­try, throw­back voice for a Bond film intro. I real­ize that it was ‘attempt­ed’ and, hon­est­ly, hav­ing a duet by Alishia Keys & Jack White is a pret­ty good con­so­la­tion. “Anoth­er Way to Die” is a great song, but I can’t help but won­der what could have been…

When I Met Scotty

The Time I Met Scotty

Over Memo­r­i­al Day week­end in 1999, Angela, her cousin, Jonathan, and I went to the Star Trek Con­ven­tion at the Cum­ber­land Sci­ence Muse­um to see James Doohan, who played engi­neer Mont­gomery Scott on Star Trek. Jonathan brought along cards for us all to get signed. Almost 15 years lat­er, I man­aged to find mine.

After three years with­out a sin­gle report­ed case of polio, India was declared free of polio. It’s been so long since polio was a epi­dem­ic in the Unit­ed States &emdash;which goes a long to way to explain­ing our cur­rent anti-vac­ci­na­tion and anti-sci­ence culture&emdash; that is hard to grasp how mon­u­men­tal this news is for so many peo­ple. The BBC reports that there are only three coun­tries left where polio is endem­ic: Pak­istan, Afghanistan and Nige­ria. Wired recent­ly had an excel­lent long-form piece on the effort to erad­i­cate polio from the planet.

As some­thing of a fol­low-up to Fri­day’s piece on com­pa­nies like Net­flix mov­ing towards con­tent cre­ation and apps on new­er, third-par­ty devices, I not­ed my employ­er’s CEO being quot­ed in a Engi­neer­ing News Record piece on Bent­ley’s recent announce­ments (empha­sis added):

[Greg] Bent­ley cred­it­ed the rapid pro­lif­er­a­tion and repur­pos­ing of con­sumer prod­ucts, such as the iPad, into wire­less­ly con­nect­ed field tools for con­struc­tion as accel­er­ants to the devel­op­ment of new process­es for the col­lec­tion and exchange of project and asset infor­ma­tion. He says it is a “tremen­dous” moment for soft­ware devel­op­ers, who no longer have to strug­gle to find hard­ware capa­ble of sup­port­ing inno­va­tions. “Thank good­ness we don’t have to invent it, just take advan­tage of it,” he said.

Bent­ley does­n’t make any hard­ware and their acqui­si­tions that once did (such as Inter­graph) now exclu­sive­ly sup­port third-par­ty hard­ware. Tak­ing advan­tage of hard­ware on third-par­ty devices to move them into new and cre­ative mar­kets ben­e­fits every­one in that three-par­ty arrange­ment. (via Rick Sta­van­ja)

I have read numer­ous times how Gene Roddenberry—the cre­ator of Star Trek—pre­ferred the eyes and mouth of an actor play­ing some alien not be obscured by make­up. The the­o­ry goes that this allows the actor to actu­al­ly, well, act and the audi­ence bet­ter empathize with the char­ac­ter. This makes good sense on a series like Star Trek, where the inter­ac­tion with aliens is often less shoot ’em up and more diplo­ma­cy and moral dra­ma. How­ev­er, I had nev­er con­sid­ered this point extend­ing to dogs.

Great post, video, and com­ment dis­cus­sion regard­ing Ed Cat­mul­l’s grad­u­ate research film which involves one of the ear­li­est (if not the first) 3D ren­dered com­put­er ani­ma­tion. Cat­mull would go on to form Pixar in the fol­low­ing decade. Many of the con­cepts and tech­nolo­gies used in this short film are used today in infra­struc­ture to dig­i­tize road­ways, build­ings, bridges, etc. into point clouds. (via Kot­tke)

I’ve been a fan of fan­ta­sy pret­ty much my entire life. No mat­ter how much I got a cer­tain amount of enjoy­ment of the scant­i­ly clad women war­riors from artists like Frazetta or Lar­ry Elmore, much of the—uh, armor?— that some women wore did­n’t seem like it would be of much help in a sword fight. Or keep them from freez­ing to death in a cool breeze. Or even just stay on them, for that matter.

Some­one has cre­at­ed a handy Tum­blr blog so we can all enjoy know­ing that there are plen­ty of sen­si­ble women in the make-believe worlds of fan­ta­sy. Enjoy some of the great art at Women Fight­ers in Rea­son­able Armor.

I may even make some self-res­cu­ing princess art for my daugh­ter from some of these.

I often hear from oth­ers and even find myself say­ing “I’d pay more for a ver­sion of prod­uct X if it were made in the U.S.” Accord­ing to this Forbes piece by Steve Den­ning, most com­pa­nies could­n’t man­u­fac­ture or even design a lot prod­ucts here, even if they want­ed to. The facil­i­ties and know-how all got shipped over­seas along with the jobs and money.

One exam­ple that struck me:

The lithi­um bat­tery for GM’s [GM] Chevy Volt is being man­u­fac­tured in South Korea. Mak­ing it in the U.S. wasn’t fea­si­ble: recharge­able bat­tery man­u­fac­tur­ing left the US long ago.

Some efforts are being made to res­ur­rect recharge­able bat­tery man­u­fac­ture in the U.S., such as the GE-backed [GE] A123Systems, but it’s dif­fi­cult to go it alone when much of the exper­tise is now in Asia.

Inter­est­ing, giv­en that my neigh­bor here in Franklin, TN—Nissan—will be man­u­fac­tur­ing the bat­ter­ies for the Leaf in near-by Sym­r­na, TN (one of their larg­er plants in N.A.) by next year. I think it is far too ear­ly to make any claims as to the via­bil­i­ty of one choice over the oth­er, as both cars just hit the mar­ket and pro­duc­tion lines have prob­a­bly yet to even hit any sort of reg­u­lar­i­ty. How­ev­er, that seems to be a glar­ing hole in the argu­ment that bat­ter­ies, at least, can­not be made in the states.

Or, on the oth­er hand, it may soon serve to prove that point. Only time will tell. I, for one, am root­ing on Nis­san to make it work.

I’m an Apple fan and as much as I’d like to write some­thing on Steve Jobs’ retire­ment, the Inter­net is pret­ty much already filled to the brim with rumi­na­tions on the top­ic. If you do choose to read a piece on this, I sug­gest MG Sei­gler’s piece at TechCrunch. It sum­ma­rizes why Jobs’ leav­ing is broad­er than just a tech news piece and delves into what is next for Apple.

I will sum­ma­rize why this mat­ters to me: Apple was formed a few months before I was born and Jobs retired on my 35th birth­day. I have grown up with Apple in a very real sense. From play­ing “Ore­gon Trail” on an Apple ][ to car­ry­ing a device ripped from a sci­ence fic­tion nov­el as my phone, these devices have real­ly mat­tered to me. The atten­tion to detail in them and the amount of vision it took to get them in my hands has always been phe­nom­e­nal. The fact that so many oth­ers are tak­ing note of this change in lead­er­ship means that they meant a lot to all of us, regard­less of what com­put­er of phone we use. It was always so much more than just that.

The sto­ry of how a cou­ple of guys used Kick­starter to raise the funds to pro­duce a great prod­uct idea.

On July 11th, 2010, Tom Ger­hardt and I had an idea for an iPhone acces­so­ry: a tri­pod mount that dou­bled as a stand. Five months lat­er, cus­tomers began to receive our prod­uct, the Glif, in the mail. This turn­around, from idea to mar­ket in five months by two guys with no retail or man­u­fac­tur­ing expe­ri­ence, sig­ni­fies a shift in the way prod­ucts are made and sold — a shift only made pos­si­ble in the last cou­ple years.

This is has become a dar­ling exam­ple of how a great idea and some smart exe­cu­tion can lever­age a flat world to make some mon­ey, and right­ly so. (via Gruber)