Andre Garrigo

Original Miami Heat Theme Song Video

I shot this video while skiing in Park Ciy, Utah earlier today.

Stick around until the end for a funny surprise.

He never missed a beat.

That is why A-Trak is one of the best djs around.

Impossible is nothing. 

This kid is only 12 years old, yet he is programming apps for iOS.

Oliver Kreylos, a data analysis and visualization professor at UC Davis, has successfully hacked a Microsoft Kinect controller into capturing 3D video.

From Hacker News: ”Kudos to Microsoft for creating something that developers are excited about again.”

And a follow-up video: “Measuring Virtual Objects [with Microsoft Kinect]”

Mark Zuckerberg on Facebook’s recent acquisition-spree:

If you want to build an entrepreneurial company, you need to acquire entrepreneurs.

Katharine Seelye from the New York Times:

The Gavin Power Plant burns 25,000 tons of coal a day and is located adjacent to the former town of Cheshire, Ohio. Cheshire was plagued by pollution from the power plant and the power plant was plagued by complaints and legal actions (threatened and actual), not only from townspeople but also from regulatory authorities. The owner of the plant had invested almost a billion dollars in pollution control equipment, but pollution levels remained problematic for the town.

Rather than continue to battle the townspeople and face potential litigation from them for health damages (liability risk was apparently a real concern), plant operators chose instead to buy the town. They paid $13 million for the 90 or so homes in Cheshire. There were some holdouts initially, but eventually everyone went along. The residents eventually moved away and the town no longer exists. (Bing Maps gives an eerie perspective on the town - the streets show up on the satellite photo but the houses are gone.)

Cheshire, Ohio affords us the rare chance to apply the Coase theorem to pollution control in the real world.

In environmental economics, the Coase theorem states that if a market is efficient then it doesn’t matter who starts off with property rights as everyone - through bargaining - will get what they want.

In this case, the townspeople wanted to live in a pollution-free environment. The power plant stood in the way of that. On the other hand, the power plant wanted to operate sans complaints from the townspeople.

Three solutions existed:

1. The power plant shuts down
2. The townspeople move away
3. The two parties continue to coexist

Bargaining involves two (or more) parties compromising on a certain issue. In this situation, the compromise reached was for the power plant to buy out the townspeople (they move away). Everyone ends up happier than when they started out without any government intervention! 

+1 for the free market.

I felt inspired over the weekend to ingest quite a few TED talks.

The acronym TED (Technology, Entertainment & Design) represents a series of conferences formed to disseminate “ideas worth spreading.” Originally they were geared towards merging the topics of technology, entertainment and design. Nowadays the talks seem to run the full gamut of general knowledge.

Out of all the talks I saw over the weekend one struck me as rather disruptive. This one happened to be given by one of my favorite authors, Seth Godin. Though the talk was given more than 3 years ago, the ideas the Godin proposes have a seemingly timeless quality to them.

Check it out, I’ve embedded it above.

According to TechCrunch, “Google has a secret fleet of automated Toyota Priuses.”

Google says it gathered the best engineers from the DARPA Challenges (an autonomous vehicle race that the government puts on) to work on this project.

Very smart. As always, Google went for the cream of the crop.

They also note that these cars never drive around unmanned in the interest of safety.

Not true, see the embedded video.

A driver is always on hand to take over in case something goes wrong, and an engineer is always on hand in the car to monitor the software.

I’m not sure how much software monitoring an engineer can do in real time. This isn’t the Matrix. It is unrealistic to say that you have someone monitoring your software in real time. Assume something were to happen. By the time an engineer notices it would be far too late.

Google also says they’ve notified local police about the project.

We don’t live in a police state, so shouldn’t they have notified the local community instead of the police?

So has it worked? Apparently, yes. There has been one accident so far, but it was when someone else rear-ended one of these Google cars.

Until Google proves to me that this has actually happened I don’t buy it. I’m supposed to believe that someone got in an accident with one of these freaky looking cars and and the press didn’t report on it? Until I have verifiable proof that an accident did occur (at the fault of another) I will take this to be a cleverly gimmicked PR move.

Google notes that 1.2 million people are killed every year in road accidents — they think they can cut this number in half with the tech.

I’d like to see some statistics that this safer than a human. I believe myself to be an extremely competent driver (as I’m sure everyone does). I would not want to put my life in a computer’s hands. It’s tough enough to get a mainstream market publicizing their location (Foursquare). Imagine getting those same paranoid people to put their lives in a computer’s hand. Not happening.

It will also cut energy consumption and save people a lot of time.

How could having enormous data centers, “which can process the enormous amounts of information gathered by [their] cars” possibly cut energy consumption? All I need for energy is a Power Bar (and maybe a Red Bull). What do you need? 1000s of kilowatts? Damn, I win.

At the moment there are over 13,000 active satellites circling the earth.

Though the sky may look crowded, you must remember that the relative size of each satellite compared to the earth is very small. The average size of a satellite is around the average size of a modern day home.

This collection by Analytical Graphics shows the real time positions of 13,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. How cool is that?

Media polarization between the right and left has created a vacuum in the middle for political pundits to fill.

John Avlon, in a post titled ”The Comedian Political Takeover,” argues that comedians are now the driving factor behind political debate.

As we saw last week, comedian Stephen Colbert is well-entrenched in the political realm.

In the above video we see comedian John Stewart calling out the hypocrisy of his own party. Calling out your own party’s hypocrisy? Now that is something MSNBC, Fox News and others rarely do.

So Mark Zuckerberg’s $100 mil donation to the New Jersey Department of Education was enough to land him a spot on Oprah.

Let’s recap what happened:

Gov. Chris Christie’s recent campaign against the current New Jersey school system has been playing itself out in the public spotlight. 

Zuckerberg, obviously looking to make a superstar PR move, decided to come forward and give a $100 mil grant to the New Jersey public school system knowing full well that this would launch both him and his company into the public spotlight in a very good way.

Sure, he claims that he wished to remain anonymous, but I’m not buying it. If you truly wish to remain out of the public spotlight then why would you ever detail your personal life — including your modest home — on Oprah?

Feel free to form your own opinions after watching the embedded video.

Update: And the official Facebook announcement.

According to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Bureau of Labor Statistics, there are nearly 31 million people currently unemployed. That figure includes both the under-employed and all discouraged workers.

In the face of the worst economic upheaval since the Great Depression, millions of Americans are hurting. “The Decline: The Geography of a Recession,” as created by labor writer LaToya Egwuekwe, serves as a vivid representation of just how much.

Watch the deteriorating transformation of the U.S. economy from January 2007 (approximately one year before the start of the recession) to the most recent unemployment data available today (August 2010).

Original link: The Decline: The Geography of a Recession (better quality version)

The best congressional testimony ever.