eman - where have you been? Where are the blog posts?
Sorry to have “gone silent” for a while - about 4 months. Let’s just call it summer vacation. Now that Fall is soon to arrive and the sun is setting earlier in the day, I’ll try and get back to making a few posts from time to time.
It’s been quite a summer…. hurricanes, housing bubble, credit crisis, fuel costs, etc.
Hey, but we’ll try and keep it light, thought provoking, and inspirational on emansviews.
I leave you with something new to check out - Karma Tube. Have a look - it will do you good.
We know humans are the most intelligent species on the planet, but how much do we understand or even recognize the intelligence of the other species. Watching the precision and artistry of these elephants is quite profound.
Randy Pausch is a remarkable computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon University who taught courses in developing virtual reality worlds that became an on-campus phenomenon. Randy has terminal pancreatic cancer, and on September 18th 2007 said goodbye to the CMU students and faculty with what was called The Last Lecture. This was not talk about cancer, but about achieving your childhood dreams, or even better, helping others achieve their dreams. But there are a couple of “gotchas” in the talk - such as, the talk was really about how to live one’s life.
In September, Randy only had three months to live. Now ~7 months later he is still doing well and his progress can be followed on his blog. He has been a guest on Oprah, and interviewed by Diane Sawyer. His recently published book, The Last Lecture is fast becoming a best seller. I hope you take the time to watch this highly inspirational talk.
A few days ago, I ran across a video of a pretty spectacular game that provided a nice demonstration real time physics simulation, or simply put - game physics. The game is called Crayon Physics Deluxe and it was a finalist at the 2008 Independent Games Festival. The goal of Crayon Physics is create objects that interact with a ball such that the ball moves and runs into a star elsewhere on the “sheet of paper”. Each “level” of the game provides new challenges for you overcome in reaching this simple objective. Of course these words don’t do the game justice. You have to take a look at the video to truly appreciate this application. A much simpler version of the game is available here.
Now before you make jokes about physics in games, you might want to have a look at this interview with Brian Beckman, physicist and Principal Software Architect at Microsoft. Brian provides a brief history of game physics and explains why coding a flight simulator is much easier than a race car simulation game. This interview is well done, complete with the complex equations!
emansviews now resides here at emansviews.com. Welcome. I hope you made the trip as successfully as I did. Given the popularity of my wordpress.com blog, I decided to set up my own hosted blog site to provide more control over the look and feel of the site. Setting up on a hosted site allows me to embed different objects, especially TEDTalks,without worrying about the HTML embed tags being removed. I’ve looked over every blog posting and added the appropriate TEDTalk link as necessary. I think the site looks fantastic, especially with the MangoOrange Wordpress template. I hope you like it and continue to visit the site.
Ever since seeing Jay Walker show his original version of a Saturn V Flight Manual during TED2008, I wondered if I could get hold of a copy. Lo and behold the power of the Internet. You can download a pdf version of this manual at this link. The manual is dated 1 November 1968. Fascinating!
Zooming into the left window…. What’s that I see? Well I’ll be, it’s my iPod, but without the lithium battery, because that’s not allowed on the Shuttle - only alkaline batteries.
A while back I posted on Douglas Merrill’s talk about innovation at Google. I have to say I was a bit disappointed in that talk - I didn’t really take away any clear messages to apply to my own work. Recently however, Jonathan Rosenberg, Senior Vice President of Product Management and Marketing at Google, delivered a fantastic talk at his alma mater, Claremont McKenna College, called Inside the Black Box: Technical Innovation at Google. Jonathan gave a very compelling talk outlining 16 key principles to innovation at Google. This outstanding talk is well worth the time. Watch the video to understand these principles more fully.
Hire the Best
Ideas Come From Anywhere
Practice Sharing & Openness Fully
Morph, Don’t Kill, Ideas
Users Come First, Not Money
Data Drives Decisions
Iterate a Product (don’t use a Project Plan)
Make Your Vision Simple, Understandable and Share It With All
20% Time
Think BIG
Bet on a Trend, or Fall Victim to It
Accept a Smaller Piece of a Larger Pie
Feed the Winners, Starve the Losers
Avoid Hippos (highest paid person’s opinion)
Never Surrender to Lawyers, Auditors, or Bureaucrats
Dave Eggers was recently noted in Time magazine as one of the Time 100: “Many writers, having written a first best-seller, might see it as a nice way to start a career. Dave Eggers, 35, started a movement instead.”
He is successful writer, publisher, as well as philanthropist and teacher-at-large. Dave recently won a TED Prize and described his work in setting up a variety of tutoring labs across the country. His talk is now available - see below. A very entertaining and uplifting talk.
Given the need to edit the talk to ~25 min, some other wonderful examples of how the tutoring labs have significantly changed students’ lives (e.g. improved grade levels, increased focus on school work, etc.) were omitted. Trust me, there were several more wonderful inspirational examples of how this work is effecting the lives of students and their families. Awesome work, and fantastic talk describing how “the movement” began.
eman - where have you been? Where are the blog posts? 
is fast becoming a best seller. I hope you take the time to watch this highly inspirational talk.
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