Monthly ArchiveMay 2009
nada Sara on 21 May 2009
I love our president
President Barack Obama bends over so the son of a White House staff member can pat his head during a family visit to the Oval Office May 8, 2009. The youngster wanted to see if the President’s haircut felt like his own. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
And the little boy is wearing a little tie! It is all too much.
nada Sara on 19 May 2009
Wolves
Some days I love the internet. This morning I had been sent the same link from 3 different people, and found it on twitter and digg as well. What I found on the other end was highly entertaining to my sophomoric sense of humor. Entertaining in that same way that David Sedaris is entertaining somehow. And all they are are user comments for the most awesome tee shirt with wolves on it I’ve ever seen.
nada Sara on 15 May 2009
Bringing data to the browser
I was blown away by the Wolfram Alpha screencast today. You will be too. (This is not an endorsement of his book!). We’ll see about the scalability. I mean, this is the guy that developed Mathematica, so no dummy. Just not sure how much a world “super computer” is a the answer.
commentary Sara on 06 May 2009
Data nerdery
I was catching up on my reading and came across this excellent, albeit long, post on the Google blog. From the height of this place by Jonathan Rosenberg, SVP of Product Management at Google.
Some particularly nice passages:
Putting the power to publish and consume content into the hands of more people in more places enables everyone to start conversations with facts. With facts, negotiations can become less about who yells louder, but about who has the stronger data. They can also be an equalizer that enables better decisions and more civil discourse. Or, as Thomas Jefferson put it at the start of his first term, “Error of opinion may be tolerated where reason is left free to combat it.”
and
Hal Varian likes to say that the sexy job in the next ten years will be statisticians. After all, who would have guessed that computer engineers would be the cool job of the 90s? When every business has free and ubiquitous data, the ability to understand it and extract value from it becomes the complimentary scarce factor. It leads to intelligence, and the intelligent business is the successful business, regardless of its size. Data is the sword of the 21st century, those who wield it well, the Samurai.
