Your iPad vs. Caged Chickens
March Madness 2011
It is March, which means that March Madness is just around the corner. Last year I made a graph that showed the history of the tournament since the 64-team format was implemented. As pretty as I think the graph is, it did come with some problems, the biggest one being that it is easy to assume that each one of the four areas represents a specific region (currently named Midwest, West, East and South). Well, that is not the case.
This year, I wanted to get rid of that problem, but it was not as easy as making sure that the regions were always in the same spot because the regions are not always paired the same way (leaving aside the naming changes that have also happened.)
So here is what I decided to do for this year:
- All 4 regions are grouped into one
- Each team is shown individually – 1664 teams are shown
- Teams are arranged by date
My plan is to post a few more of these graphs over the next days and weeks but I figured that it would be good to start with the Champions. I hope you like it and find it useful when filling your bracket this year.
Recommendations - 2010
This is the first time I get around to writing a recap of the year in the form of recommendations. Some of the things are not from 2010 but I got to know/use them for the first time this year. I hope it is useful to some.
Movies. This year was not big on movies for me. I became a father back in February so time has been limited. The Hurt Locker was by far the best movie I saw in 2010 and one of the best I've seen in my life. The low budget film Moon was not great but was very enjoyable. Taxi Driver... yes, I saw it for the first time this year. I know you know it is good. Other worth watching films: Sherlock Holmes, Riding Giants and 180 South. Disappointments: Religulous and Capitalism: A Love Story.
Books. My brother gave me The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata and it was such a pleasure to read. I might be biased because I enjoy Go so much, but it also got Kawabata the Nobel Prize for Literature. Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis is a fascinating and infuriating book to read about Wall Street. Food Rules by Michael Pollan is a compilation of simple – and sometimes obvious – rules about food that is worth having. Finally, Solve Your Child's Sleep Problems by Richard Ferber is a life saver.
Music. I was really disappointed when Apple shut down Lala.com, I then signed up to Rdio and I definitely recommend it even though it is missing some great music (like Vampire Weekend). Jack Johnson may be the artist that I listen to the most, in part because I listen to his music with my son, he made the soundtrack for Curious George which is fabulous (The Sharing Song, and The 3 R's are my favorite songs in the album). Jack White's third band The Dead Weather is awesome and so is Mumford and Sons. I discovered in 2010: The Raveonettes, Florence + The Machine, The Von Blondies and The Avett Brothers. On my rotation: Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Them Crooked Vultures, The Roots, Kings of Leon, Gnarls Barkley, Gorillaz, The Kills, Vampire Weekend, The White Stripes and The Raconteurs. But I cannot finish this list without mentioning the song Fuck You by Cee-Lo.
iPhone Apps. Communication: Facebook, Twitter, PingChat and Google Voice. Photography: Camera+, iMovie, Hipstamatic and Instagram. Reading: Instapaper, Reeder, NYTimes and iBooks. Games: Angry Birds, Fruit Ninja, Osmos and Zen Bound 2. Music: Rdio and Pandora. Miscellaneous: Google Earth, Dropbox, Posterous, MLB At Bat 2010 and Netflix.
iPad Apps. Flipboard is fantastic, Twitter works great, iBooks, NYTimes, Instapaper, Pandora, Netflix, Google Earth, MLB At Bat 2010 and World of Goo which plays great on the iPad.
I think that is it. Again, I hope you find this list useful and please let me know if you have any recommendations for me.
Best wishes for 2011!
A hot dense soup of quarks and gluons
Large Hadron Collider (LHC) generates a 'mini-Big Bang'
"At these temperatures even protons and neutrons, which make up the nuclei of atoms, melt resulting in a hot dense soup of quarks and gluons known as a quark-gluon plasma."
Quarks and gluons are sub-atomic particles - some of the building blocks of matter. In the state known as quark-gluon plasma, they are freed of their attraction to one another. This plasma is believed to have existed just after the Big Bang.
Fascinating.
My pre-review of Sam Harris' "The Moral Landscape" [UPDATED]
So, Sam Harris is coming out with a new book titled "The Moral Landscape." You can learn more about it here. I have not read it – it comes out tomorrow – but I've found that every time he talks about his idea about a moral landscape he has to explain why he thinks that science can and should be involved in morality. This is a good question on its own, but what bothers me is that this question is never asked to all the other institutions that claim that they can define morality.
More important questions are: Why should morality be defined by any religious institution and not by science? and based on what?
We've taken sets of moral values for granted. They were here when we were born and they had been here for centuries. But what most people choose to ignore is that these set of values can be traced back to a set of people who did not follow a scientific method to define them. And although some can claim that they came from divine inspiration, this claim cannot be proven.
So, could these sets of moral values that were defined by people centuries ago be improved by people now? I bet.
Should the process used to improve these sets of moral values be scientific? I can't find a reason for it to be any other way.
UPDATE: Here is Sam Harris @ The Daily Show (10/4).
