Month: March 2019
📺 Innovate Pasadena – Chuck Chugumlung | YouTube
Innovate Pasadena President Beth Kuchar interviews Chuck Chugumlung - Art Center alumnus, creative director and co-organizer of IP's Friday Coffee and Design X meetups.
Hat tip Chuck Chugumlung. He’d mentioned this to me a while back, but glad to finally have some time to catch it. Chuck is definitely doing some interesting work both in and for Pasadena.
📅 RSVP WordPress Pasadena General Meetup, Mar 2019: It’s a Spring Clean Thing | Meetup.com
Tue, Mar 26, 2019, 7:00 PM
Welcome back everyone! We took off February and now we're back at it!
WordPress Pasadena is back in beautiful Old Town Pasadena at one of the first (and finest) Co-Workin' spaces in town, CrossCampus (http://www.crosscamp.us/).
My Fall/Winter math class will be over, so I can go back to attending the Pasadena WordPress Meetup!
Removed some old (and hopefully unused) plugins from my website yesterday. I probably need to do a full audit soon. With any luck it’ll speed the website up a bit–something I should specifically look at in the near future.
Attending Innovate Pasadena Friday morning coffee meetup
I had hoped for a lot more here, but was a tad disappointed. I heard her speaking slot had been pushed up, so perhaps there wasn’t as much prep, but I arrived about 10 minutes late to hear her speaking the words, “That’s all I’ve prepared…” Fortunately the crowd had a bunch of interesting questions that filled up the empty time.
I was disappointed to hear a lot of “blockchain is so awesome” evangelizing without any actual concrete examples of useful and successful stories at all. I’m still of the opinion that it’s purely for suckers and that it remains largely vaporware in every incarnation I’ve heard it being used in.
📺 “The Americans” Born Again | Amazon
Directed by Kevin Dowling. With Keri Russell, Matthew Rhys, Lev Gorn, Annet Mahendru. Gabriel has surprising information; Elizabeth begins to take family matters into her own hands.
👓 There Are Whales Alive Today Who Were Born Before Moby Dick Was Written | Smithsonian
Some of the bowhead whales in the icy waters off of Alaska today are over 200 years old
An interesting idea to contemplate given the span of time.
Fri, Mar 8, 2019, 8:15 AM
5G is a transformational change from 4G. 5G has the potential to provide 20X faster data speeds and carry a massive amount of data for a large number of simultaneous users.
Like the innovations that changed the world before, 5G is making a whole new era possible. 5G will enable giant advances in VR, AR, AI, robotics and totally new technologies. 5G is the fifth generation of wireless technology. But users will know it as one of the fastest, most robust technologies the world has ever seen. That means quicker downloads, outstanding network reliability and a spectacular impact on how we live, work and play. The connectivity benefits of 5G will make businesses more efficient and give consumers access to more information faster than ever before. Super-connected autonomous cars, smart communities, industrial IoT, immersive education—they all will rely on 5G.
A recent episode of the New York Times’ The Daily podcast provides some more sober analysis and thought about 5G and what it means for the world economy compared to the presentation which had a far too rosy picture: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/25/podcasts/the-daily/5g-technology-huawei-china-us.html
And for those interested in delving in further, here’s a very recent and more technically accurate (and reasonably accessible) discussion of 5G and its current state following the recent Mobile World Conference:
It features Stacey Higginbotham a journalist who has covered telecom, the FCC, and technology for the past decade+.
See the related checkin.
📅 Journey of a CTO | Meetup.com
Fri, Mar 15, 2019, 8:15 AM
Join us for the journey of CTO Barbara Bickham. She’ll take us from what first intrigued her about computers and entrepreneurship, her career choices and the chances she took along the way-- to becoming a CTO, leader of a Blockchain accelerator, and startup advisor. She’ll also share her vision of the tech horizon.
Barbara Bickham, CTO with extensive experience in Technology and Entrepreneurship. Her current areas of expertise are in the Internet of Things, Blockchain, Augmented Reality and Artificial Intelligence.
Justin Johansson (Twitter)"if you want control of your own happiness, don’t tie it to someone else’s scoreboard."https://t.co/40Ob8rnSoC
— gunar.d.ts (@gunar) March 11, 2019Suspect this article is right up your alley of interest @ChrisAldrich !
— Justin Johansson (@indiescripter) March 14, 2019
Thanks! I’d bookmarked it a week ago, but haven’t had time to plow through it yet. I’ll bump it up the list.
🎧 The Daily: Bribing Their Way Into College | New York Times
A major college admissions scandal has laid bare the price of entry for some wealthy families — and the cost for everyone else.
🎧 The Daily: How ‘Medicare for All’ Would Work (or Not Work) | New York Times
As the idea gains traction in mainstream circles, we look at its roots in progressive American politics.
👓 How long do floods throughout the millennium remain in the collective memory? | Nature
Is there some kind of historical memory and folk wisdom that ensures that a community remembers about very extreme phenomena, such as catastrophic floods, and learns to establish new settlements in safer locations? We tested a unique set of empirical data on 1293 settlements founded in the course of nine centuries, during which time seven extreme floods occurred. For a period of one generation after each flood, new settlements appeared in safer places. However, respect for floods waned in the second generation and new settlements were established closer to the river. We conclude that flood memory depends on living witnesses, and fades away already within two generations. Historical memory is not sufficient to protect human settlements from the consequences of rare catastrophic floods.
This is intriguing particularly when thinking back to our earliest world literatures which all involve flood stories.
I wonder what the equivalent sorts of things would be for C. elegans, drosophila, etc. for testing things on smaller timescales?