Via Ezra Klein, why not:
Turtles Eating Strawberries
Month: November 2011
Horseshoe Bend
I suppose this lookout doesn’t lend itself to the most original photography composition. Over the summer, I shot this: Then the other day, I saw this on Terry White’s blog:
Missions to Mars
This is just a nice infographic: And this was just a weird movie.
Eric-Schmidt Backed “Slice”
Via Techcrunch, Eric Schmidt is backing a new start-up, Slice, that aims to organize and track your online purchases by querying purchase data from your inbox. I gave it a shot earlier this week, and found it to be surprisingly accurate and useful. I generally don’t use online life organization tools (e.g., Mint), but I found this to be a bit different. Instead of simply helping you to analyze your own purchasing behavior, it helps you anticipate and track outstanding items that are either en route or have been held up for some reason. So rather than log onto various sites to track your orders, you can just log into Slice, which has already identified the tracking numbers for shipped
Creepy Things From Japan
The Japanese have designed a robotic polar bear to “gently smack snorers in the face.” I’m not sure how this is supposed to work in practice, but the video makes it look even creepier than it sounds:
Maps
Via xkcd:
How to Value an Early-Stage Start-Up Company
I’m taking a class on early stage capital. It’s primarily focused on finding angel and venture funding for a start-up company, and structuring subsequent investment agreements. When a start-up receives funding, it’s pretty important to “know” what the start-up was worth before the funding was received. Otherwise there’s no way to determine what portion of the company is owned by the founders, and what portion now belongs to the new investors. Since most start-ups fail, and the one’s that are successful often blow through their financial projections, traditional discounted cash flow approaches are pretty meaningless. So how do you value an idea? I’ve always wondered about this. It’s a subjective process, but start-ups are valued often, so I knew there must be some
The MIT Mood Meter
It was just written up in Popular Science: The Mood Meter came about when a team of researchers at the place from whence all awesome things come, MIT’s Media Lab, hooked up a camera and screen (or projector) to some nifty facial recognition algorithms that can spot faces and smiles in real time. And, after assuring campus security that they wouldn’t be recording any images, they placed the installations in four different locations across MIT’s campus. Faces deemed to be smiling are augmented on the screen with a big, cartoon smiley face. Frowning and neutral countenances get an emotionless overlay, instead. The software also estimates how big each person’s smile is, on a scale of 0 to 100, and averages
The Black Keys Are Back!
Lonely Boy, off El Camino, scheduled to be released December 6th:
MIT Sloan Brews Beer
Last night a group of us from school went out to Barleycorn’s Craft Brew store in Natick, MA and made 60 gallons of beer. There were 4 batches: an Imperial Hefeweizen, a Tripel Beglian Ale, a Pale Ale, and a California common ale. Robin Bose created a photo blog of the event with lots of shots of the entire process. We still need to make labels for these brews, but here are a few the group came up with last year: