Category: General

Not much today:

The Gigapxl Project. Its is a group who are taking ultra resolution images of well known locations. By ultra resolution images, I mean images with so much resolution, they have taken photos of the San Diego skyline from across the harbor and were able to zoom in to see the contents of individual hotel rooms several km away. Not only are the photos they’ve taken stunning, the technology behind how they are able to do this is really interesting. Despite the name, they actually have to take the photos on film becuase there are no CCD’s capable of taking images of this resolution. They have some very ambitious plans on capturing many of the significant places around North America.

Del.icio.us. I’ve been goofing around with Flock the last few days. I really like it so far. Its not so much a new browser as just an enormous plug-in or wrapper for Firefox. It has integrated Flickr and blog support. I’m writing this post with the built in blog tool. The use of del.icio.us is an idea who’s time has come. Using online bookmarks really a no brainer. I think this is something that Google could comeout with at anytime. Not only would it be trivial (for Google) to make, but it would be invaluable in knowing the relative popularity of the sites they index. The link for del.icio.us above is to the bookmark list I created over the last hour. If anyone else creates a bookmark set in del.icio.us, leave a link in the comments. Its an easy way to share interesting sites you like.

Interesting things in the news:

• Minneapolis High school offers online gym class
• Space Elevator Games
• Noam Chomsky: Ub3r Capitalist
• Intelligent Design proponent admits “astrology is a theory”
• UN report released in MS Word format shows edits and deletions made to document
• A new browser (based on Firefox) is available. It seems to just be a wrapper with goodies like RSS and blog updating built in.
• A new version of Open Office is available. I’d say its 90-95% as good as MS office, but 100% cheaper.
• If you don’t like the OO word processor, download Abiword, which is the first open free word processor with a grammar checker.

I read once that Jews in Europe considered it bad luck to drop a book, and if they did they would kiss it after they picked it up. That was how much reverance they had towards reading and literature.

Today I cleaned out my bathroom of magazines.

For most of you, you might have a magazine or two in your bathroom, but I had a lot. I mean a LOT. Those of you who have been to my house know what I mean. I had so many, I had a serious fear that they would collapse and bury someone while they were on the toliet. I wish I had taken a photo. Five years worth of magazines, journals, newsletters, and books. Everything from the Planetary Report, Forbes, tropical Fish hobbiest, and Foreign Affairs. I think it was like 6 boxes of magazines. Probably better in terms of quality and quantity than most high school libraries.

I feel bad about throwing away any literature. I’m not a pack rat in general, but I can’t throw away periodicals. I always want to have them around for reference, even if I know I’ll never read it again.

On a positive note, the bathroom is once again safe, even though you wont learn as much while your there.

In the comments of one of my previous posts, Scott Fitchet wrote

“I have no idea where this project will go” … I hope you pick some kind of angle for your “show” that has some kind of positive affect on the world. “here is a photograph/video of everywhere on earth” is just “i touched it first”. what else do you have in mind besides the fun tech aspect?

I’m responding here just because my answer was getting too long (and Scott went to Hamline so I figure I should post it where he will see it…..)

When I say I have no idea where this project will go, I’m don’t mean I have no idea of what I want to do, but rather I have no idea how big or involved it could get.

I have a very clear idea of what I want to do. The technology is not going to be a focus; it’s just a means to accomplish what I want to do. I talk about it a lot here because it’s a planning issue I have to deal with, but hopefully everything will be transparent to the people who read the site.

First, I should make clear that I’m not doing this to make a positive effect on the world. Maybe I will, but that isn’t my motivation. I’m doing first and foremost because I want to see the world. In particular, I want to see it in a different way than I have before. Prior to any plans of making a website or doing video, that was the original motivation.

The idea for the project isn’t all that unique. There certainly isn’t an “I touched it first” aspect to what I’m doing. I think I’m just going to take it to another level from what has been done in the past. It has been done before to a certain extent by Jim Rogers and Mike Pugh. I got a large amount of inspiration from The Jason Project, which I remember watching Tivo’d episodes from the National Geographic Channel. The Jason Project did live shows for classrooms on location from wherever they had set up their science camp that particular year. It was very interactive and even though it was aimed at children, I was fascinated at what they were doing and how they did it. It was some of the best television I’ve ever seen.

As I thought more about what I could do and what had been done in the past, the more I began to realize that I could really make something much more out of this than just a trip around the world. I think most travel shows like you see on the Travel Channel, are boring and predictable. They provide no depth, and really can’t, given the limitations of the medium. Most travel blogs are nothing more than “we did this today” summaries of what the travelers did that particular day. Not very educational.

I don’t just want to take photos of the Taj Mahal. I want to talk with other visitors, I want to talk to the groundskeeper, I want to talk to the guy who runs it, I want to talk about the history of it, and I want to talk about what it means to India, I want to see the places where most tourists can’t get to go and I want to see all the vendors selling cheap Taj Mahal souvenirs. I want to put up all the content that would otherwise make the cutting room floor of a travel TV show, as well the photos and thoughts of my time there.

I also think, in my humble opinion that I’m in a unique position to pull something like this off. 1) I have the means to do it. 2) I have some experience with international travel, so I’m not doing this totally green. 3) I have enough exposure to science that I could speak intelligently on such subjects. 4) I have enough exposure to business that I could speak intelligently on such subjects. 5) I have enough exposure to politics and international affairs that I could speak intelligently on such subjects.

There is a reality TV element to what I want to do also. I want people who will never be able to make such a trip to be able to follow along every day (or every few) and be able to communicate with me while I’m on the road. I want to be able to meet people from the website, eat dinner with them, and record what they have to say. I could also get people to travel with me for certain legs of the trip.

When I was in Argentina, I met the husband of the colleague we worked with from the University of Buenos Aires. This was a fascinating guy. He was an Argentinean of Swiss/Italian descent who worked for an Italian company which ran a water utility in Honduras, which he ran. Talking to him over the several times we had dinner was really interesting, and while I was I doing it I wished I had a camcorder with me to record it. It was exactly the sort of thing I wanted to put on the site.

If the project can gain momentum, I think there is lots of neat stuff I can do. I have no idea how many people would watch or follow something like this. I think I could get enough video footage to edit together something interesting for a cable channel on a regular basis. I could write a book. The primary motivation for all of that would be to cover the costs of the trip and allow me to go places where I might not otherwise get access. I could do interactive things with classrooms too. I think that would be fun.

But I’m not planning on the project gaining any momentum. If it does, great, but if it doesn’t, oh well. I think it’s possible to do something beyond just taking tourist photos. As with any project of this type, I’m probably the only one who can see the potential of this if it is done properly.

I do have one big concern. I don’t know if I can pull this off alone. I’ve been around the world alone before, but I did it in 3 weeks and had people to meet me at each stop. Even if I have people back in the US as support, I won’t always be able to be in contact with them. There are some issues as simple as working a camera by myself and trying to talk or interview someone that will be hard. It’s not like you can just ask someone to drop what they’re doing and follow you around the world for a year, even if all the expenses are paid. It’s not just being away from home for that long, it’s having no home at all for that long.

Anyway, this is a more fleshed out answer to what I want to do and why I’m doing it. It might not be totally coherent, but there it is.

The Powerball Lottery is upto $340m. It is time to play.

Here is why…..

If you look at the odds on the Powerball website, your odds of winning the grand prize are 1 in 146,107,962. When making bets, what matters is the expected value of the bet. Example: How much would the payoff have to be to be $1 on a coin flip? Answer: $2. A that point you would break even becasue your expected value of each bet would be $1, or equal to the wager.

Powerball tickets are $1. What matters isn’t the total amount of the prize, because that amount can only be distributed over a period of 29 years. The exptected value of your $1 ticket isn’t over $1 when the prize gets to $146m, because the actualized value of the jackpot is actually much less, either in terms of the payout or factoring interest over 29 years, and taxes. Assuming the cash payout is 50% of the total amount of the pool, that is the point at which the expected value of your $1 purchase is over $1. It is now clearly above that.

When lotteries get a payout above the expected value of the ticket, they almost always end immediately because the number of tickets purchased is so great.

One thing I’m also omitting is the odds of multiple winners. This is a real possibility when this many people start buying tickets and I have no idea what the odds are of multiple winners, because you can’t know the number of tickets purchased before the draw, and you can’t know the number of unique numbers picked. This would also decrease your expected value of the ticket.

….but, when you get right down to it, its only $1.

(The title of this post is really really obscure. Bonus points to anyone who can figure it out. Its not the most direct reference to this topic)