“At its developer conference, the company has a set up a network of 525 sensor motes. Each small electronics board monitors temperature, humidity, ambient light levels, air quality, audio noise, and radio-frequency noise. And with footstep detectors, some monitor where people are going at the conference, too.”

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-57584514-93/sensor-motes-sniff-out-google-i-o-data-trends/

These are the aroma standards for a Belgian Dubble:

Aroma: Complex, rich malty sweetness; malt may have hints of chocolate, caramel and/or toast (but never roasted or burnt aromas). Moderate fruity esters (usually including raisins and plums, sometimes also dried cherries). Esters sometimes include banana or apple. Spicy phenols and higher alcohols are common (may include light clove and spice, peppery, rose-like and/or perfumy notes). Spicy qualities can be moderate to very low. Alcohol, if present, is soft and never hot or solventy. A small number of examples may include a low noble hop aroma, but hops are usually absent. No diacetyl.

How amazing does that sound?

I’m not particularly interested in a perfumey beer. I’m more interested in a mildly spicy beer, perhaps with a little banana sweetness.

This is where it gets cool: I looked it up on my DVR using an app on my phone an set it to record. It will be there when I get home.

Even just 5 years ago, this transaction would not have been as seamless, and less than 10 years ago: impossible.

I love technology.

I watched a few of these, but this one is my favorite so far: how to generate basic descriptive statistics in r.

This may be the only time in my life when I use “whimsy” and “statistics” in the same sentence. Brace yourself: Adam Damico uses whimsy to make learning a statistics package fun. There, I said it. Now go enjoy those videos.

The risk as I see it is that our society is changing from a society of explorers, thinkers, makers, and doers – people who did what they wanted and tried new things without asking for permission – to one where everything, yes lots of simple things are illegal and you’re basically just skating around hoping to not get caught. There didn’t used to be rules for everything. Now there are. And a lot of them cost you a lot to defend against. Almost enough to make you want to stay in bed.

I constantly wonder if things various things (like beer) would be invented today, given the risks of creating a substance that causes intoxication, or the infringement of someone else’s intellectual property on the transformation of water, hops, and barley into beer.

What can we do about this? Stop trying to legislate everything. Seriously. Instead of making new laws, why don’t we enforce the ones we have? And stop trying to legislate behaviors. Legislate outcomes. Let people deal with their own behaviors. I believe people are inherently good.

Oh, btw, here’s a fun comic from Tom The Dancing Bug that explains in a lighthearted way how you’re probably breaking at least one federal law today.

MUSIC VIDEO FOR HEY CHAMP “COLD DUST GIRL” from MTP, Inc. (Michael Thelin Produc on Vimeo.

Have you ever tried to solve this problem? It’s not a trivial one to solve. But the results are pretty important, at least in what I do.

Here’s the problem: given two trees of arbitrary complexity, identify a similarness quotient of the two trees, where 0 indicates that they’re completely different and 1 indicates that they’re exactly the same.

My trees are basically hierarchical data sets that represent the process classification framework, a hierarchical functional decomposition of business processes. I need to compare these trees because each release of the PCF is slightly different than the previous one, and I need an easy way to identify these differences.

The black dot on the bottom right is the root node. The image was generated by this tool: http://www.aharef.info/static/htmlgraph/

Right now, comparing these trees is a manual process involving a lot of copying and pasting, and some Excel wizardry.

The algorithm I’m envisioning is one that will be used recursively. It will operate on nodes of arbitrary complexity (i.e. the node may carry arbitrary information, and the algorithm will consider it all in making the comparisons). It will operate on trees of arbitrary topology and depth. The similarity quotient will depend on how many of the node attributes are the same across the various nodes and how much the topology is the same across the two trees.

I can’t seem to find any relatively simple examples of this work, but I’m open minded. Have you seen such an algorithm or can you point me in the right direction?

I just installed the Facebook plugin to my WordPress blog. This involved me creating an app on Facebook and copy/pasting a few simple values from here and there. Now when I make a post on Facebook, you can read it on my wall. I already had Twitter integration set up. Next I’m going to get Twitter Cards working. Then maybe LinkedIn connectivity with the blog.

This level of integration a few years ago would have required a lot more coding. Now it just took a few dedicated minutes and some curiosity.

http://www.beyond-bedding.com/pirate-ship-boys-kids-bedding-set.html