Sam Kornstein

Lasers for Space Broadband

Posted on May 27, 2014May 27, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in Cartoons, Technology

Speeds of 622 Mbps from the moon: Wireless broadband service went cosmic in a demo conducted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s (MIT) Lincoln Laboratory and NASA, in which a laser-based communication uplink between the moon and earth beat the previous record transmission speed by a factor of 4,800. … The team’s Lunar Laser Communication Demonstration (LLCD) transmitted data over the 384,633 kilometers between the moon and earth at a download rate of 622 Mbps. In addition, data was transmitted from the earth to the moon at 19.44 Mbps, a factor 4,800 times faster than the best radio-frequency uplink ever used, MIT said. Other moon-laser applications here:

Are There Hats?

Posted on May 13, 2014May 13, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in General

South Boston Filmed from a Drone

Posted on May 10, 2014May 10, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in General

Heartbleed Explanation

Posted on April 13, 2014April 13, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in Cartoons

This is great:

So I Started Counting My Steps

Posted on January 4, 2014January 1, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in General

My brother gave me a Fitbit One for my birthday back in August. I was initially skeptical about where or not I’d find it useful, and actually didn’t even start using it until 3 weeks ago. It’s an activity tracker, which essentially logs daily steps walked and stairs climbed using an accelerometer. It’s less accurate than GPS based apps such as RunKeeper, but the benefit is that you just keep in on a belt or in my case in a pocket, and it just passively logs what you do. And the USB-based rechargeable battery lasts about a week. I was skeptical because while this type of information might initially be interesting, it doesn’t really serve much of a long-term purpose

One Month Rails Update

Posted on January 3, 2014January 1, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in General

As previously mentioned, I’ve begun the One Month Rails course to learn a little bit about coding. Unfortunately, given some time constraints, it’s looking more like it will be a Three Month Rails course. I’m about a third of the way in, and so far, I like it a lot. The quality isn’t impressive, the narrator isn’t too polished, and there are lots of small mistakes or oversights (especially for PC users), but the method is great. It’s much more practice than theory, providing only the necessary context, while putting focus on resources, tools, frameworks, etc that are necessary to build applications (e.g., using GitHub). The benefit of this approach is that within less than an hour, you already have

Predictor of Stock Market Returns

Posted on January 2, 2014January 1, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in Economics

I found this post from the ‘Philosophical Economics’ blog to be very thoughtful. It offers some interesting ways of thinking about equity price levels, and what drives them. The author makes a convincing argument that despite the fact that many believe price changes are largely a function of valuation multiples (e.g., P/E ratios), they are actually caused by relative changes in the aggregate investor allocation to equities. Essentially, the post makes the case that aggregate demand for equities as a proportion of all financial securities — or average asset allocation to equity across all investor portfolios — does a much better job of explaining subsequent returns than traditional mean-reversion metrics. When demand for equities in aggregate increases (decreases), expected future returns

Happy New Year — Some Year End Website Stats

Posted on January 1, 2014January 1, 2014 by Sam Kornstein in Photography

Happy near year! Thanks to all my followers for continuing to support this site. While my written posts definitely declined in 2013 — in part due to a more intense schedule — I began providing Adobe Lightroom Preset downloads which drove quite a bit of traffic growth last year. I spent a little time today analyzing the data, looking at which presets were downloaded when, and came up with a few visuals to share. In total, there were over 44k free downloads of my presets in just over a year (this doesn’t count the subset of paid downloads). Here’s a high level interactive view across all the presets: Learn About Tableau Speakeasy, Behind the Scenes, and Bright Eyes were clearly

Caution Falling Ice

Posted on December 29, 2013December 29, 2013 by Sam Kornstein in Boston/Cambridge, Current Events

My coworker just outside our office: Classic. Happy holidays.

How Y’all, Youse and You Guys Talk

Posted on December 29, 2013December 29, 2013 by Sam Kornstein in General

The NYT has a brief survey that seems to be effective at predicting the origin of the way you speak. Not surprisingly, mine shows up as just generic Boston/NY/NJ. Interestingly, a friend who’s from Tennessee, but spent a good portion of his childhood in Europe around a fairly diverse community of English speakers, was told his dialect’s origin is a mix of Northern Tennessee (the exact region he’s from), the Midwest, and San Francisco. The latter two likely being s lot of what he picked up in Europe. He was very impressed that it was able to tease out the specific Tennessee portion. It seemed to work very well for his family as well. If you have a few minutes,