San Luis Cultural Preservation
The oldest continuously operating business in Colorado is R&R Markets. It's about to celebrate its 150th year anniversary of doing business. The anniversary will be celebrated on June 30th, 2007.
The oldest continuously operating business in Colorado is R&R Markets. It's about to celebrate its 150th year anniversary of doing business. The anniversary will be celebrated on June 30th, 2007.
It's always a pleasure reading the posts by The Skeptical Optimist. In his latest, he recommends The Origin of Wealth, a book I look forward to reading. In fact, I'm adding it to my Amazon wish list.
Live Writer 1.0 Beta is released. I've already been using the pre-Beta and really like it.
Update: I haven't used it a lot since it got released, but my blogging has slowed down considerably.
Coyote, who writes a great blog, asks Is there anyway to keep a third party from using your email address in this way? The short answer is no, but it can give you a moral sense of doing the right thing by using Sender Policy Framework. This poorly named technology allows people that own a domain to say what servers they are allowed to send email from. Currently only a tiny fraction of the domains implement this, but if you get an email that fails SPF, you can definitely throw it away.
Does this help with you receiving spam? No, not really since so few people implement this. However, if 1% of the domains implemented this and 1% of your spam was forged from these emails, you could reduce your spam by 1%. Does it stop people from forging your email? No, they just laugh about it since so few people are using the technology. Now, if you're getting a lot of forgeries from Ebay, Hotmail, etc., it could be useful, because these big names DO implmenent SPF.
I'm still hopeful that SPF will some day achieve critical mass and become useful.
A great blog by Coyote lead me to Reason Magazine, which has an article about tall people being smarter:
Economists have long been irritated by the weird fact that tall people have better jobs and earn more money. Many explanations have been offered, various forms of social and individual discrimination first among them. But two Princeton economists disagree: "In this paper, we offer a simpler explanation: On average, taller people earn more because they are smarter."
The Abstract of the article says:
It has long been recognized that taller adults hold jobs of higher status and, on average, earn more than other workers. A large number of hypotheses have been put forward to explain the association between height and earnings. In developed countries, researchers have emphasized factors such as self esteem, social dominance, and discrimination. In this paper, we offer a simpler explanation: On average, taller people earn more because they are smarter. As early as age 3 — before schooling has had a chance to play a role — and throughout childhood, taller children perform significantly better on cognitive tests.
It's interesting to think of this in a Freakonomics way. Before reading the abstract, I was sure that this phenomena occurred because in a manner similar to the hockey players discussed in Freakonomics. They call this the relative age theory. So in short, taller kids would be perceived as older and more mature. As a result, they are treated like they are more capable. It follows they get experience quicker and so on, it snow balls. But then the abstract says that it's even as early as age three! Personally, it's hard to believe I treat my 18 month old daughter any different, but the differences are slight and add up over many parents and many children.
Personally, I blame Disney. It's clear that taller kids get to ride ("You must be as tall as Mickey's hand...) on Disney rides earlier than shorter kids. Clearly these rides are accelerating their development. :)
I've started experimenting with www.Reddit.com which seems similar to digg. These sites are a combination of user entered links and ranking so that the best links or sites bubble to the top. You can check out my page. on Reddit and my page on Digg. Interestingly enough, Reddit has been added as a search provider to IE7 on the OpenSearch: Add searches to IE7 site.
Over at neosmart, they make the point that Open Search for IE7 is truly open and is one way that Microsoft shows it is now committed to standards. It's a great thing that you can add very specific searches to a browser without having to add a toolbar or a plugin or <shudder> an activeX control. Very clean implementation, and we applaud Microsoft for using OpenSearch.
Hurricane Ernesto is expected to make landfall sometimes Tuesday night Wednesday morning. We are mostly ready.
Sean Carroll hits a home run in explaining some recent science about showing the existence of Dark Matter. I initially had used the word prove, but in science you really never prove anything; you instead add evidence in favor of a theory. Some theories, like evolution, have so many compelling experiments and observations crossing discipline boundaries that they become compelling to the point of proof.
I urge your to read the article above. This is probably the most interesting experimental results in the last 20 years. Wow. From the article:
astrophysicists led by Doug Clowe (Arizona) and Maxim Markevitch (CfA) have now compared images of the gas obtained by the Chandra X-ray telescope to “maps” of the gravitational field deduced from weak lensing observations. Their paper is available here in pdf, and will appear on astro-ph this evening. And the answer is: there’s definitely dark matter there!
Congratulations, Doug and Maxim! Thanks, NASA! What a great job!
Sandi Hardmeier who is a well known MS MVP for Internet Explorer was kind enought to review OpenSearch: add searches to IE7 and add it to her websites www.msmvps.com/spywaresucks and http://www.ie-vista.com/search.html.
On these sites, she covers common issues, problems, and resolutions of Internet Explorer.
