Skip to content

Seen, Heard, Said

Things I’ve seen, heard, or was told by someone. Item in this category usually originate from the Internet.

Bloomberg: The Largest U.S. Banks Aren’t Really Profitable At All

This makes me frustrated. No one should ever be “too big to fail”. That’s a poppycock soundbite to maintain the status quo. How do we, as everyday citizens, bring about actual change for things like this?

From www.bloomberg.com:

“In other words, the banks occupying the commanding heights of the U.S. financial industry — with almost $9 trillion in assets, more than half the size of the U.S. economy — would just about break even in the absence of corporate welfare. In large part, the profits they report are essentially transfers from taxpayers to their shareholders.1”

  1. Emphasis added ↩

How to Improve American Presidential Elections in Four Steps

It’s obviously never as easy as it sounds, but I think there are some good ideas here. In particular, I would be in high favor of amending the Constitution to move our election system to Instant Runoff Voting (or similar) system.

While such a system could be done at the Electoral College level, my opinion is that it would be better to abolish the Electoral College entirely if we moved to an IRV (or similar) system.

via Alex King

The art in assertiveness is to ask strongly for wh…

The art in assertiveness is to ask strongly for what you want then to let go of it if the answer is No. You tread the fine line between consistent perseverance and the stubborn persistence that can feel to others like abuse. Passive people do not ask for what they want. Aggressive people demand (openly) or manipulate (secretly) to get what they want. Assertive people simply ask, without inhibition of themselves or pressure on others.

Eulerian Video Magnification

Better described as “a method to amplify and visualize temporal variations in videos that are difficult to see with the naked eye.” Anything that has a rhythm to it can be enhanced. They have a particularly cool example of motion magnification in natural videos that shows how the ever-so-slight change in your arteries as blood pumps through it can be picked up.

As Kottke points out, this technology already can be seen in products such as the iPhone Cardiio App, which “uses your phone’s front camera to analyze the amount of light reflected off of your face” to determine your pulse rate.

Welcome to the future.

Today I Learned: Two True Things I Didn’t Know About 9/11

  • Rick Rescorla, security director for Morgan Stanley in the WTC, predicted airliners crashing into the towers, drew up a detailed plan accordingly, and used it to swiftly evacuate all but 13 of 2700 Morgan Stanley employees and hundreds more. He died when the buildings collapsed.1
  • Alicia Esteve Head fabricated a story about being on the 78th floor of the south WTC after it was hit. She became the president of the WTC Survivors Network. She was in Spain during 9/11.2

  1. via reddit ↩

  2. via reddit ↩

Physical Face Cloning

The most interesting thing was how they used physics simulation of the materials to determine and optimize the material geometry and actualization parameters for the servos.

The result: cloning a real humans’ face onto an animatronics figure.

The top comment is perfect as well:

mas8705: So Disney is Skynet. You would think we would have seen this sooner…

You’re Not Listening

I relish articles like this not only for the off-chance I somehow get thrown into a leadership position, but also because it’s a good life skill. Rands does a consistently good job of mapping engineering speak to life, imagine a career counselor who not only was good as his job, but also spoke geek—it’s as awesome as it sounds1.

The problem starts with the word: listen. Of course you know how to listen. You sit there and let the words into your head. Perhaps your definition is more refined. Maybe your definition of listening involves hearing because you’re aware of that switch in your head that you must flip to really hear what a person is saying. It’s work, right? Pulling in all the words, sorting them in your head, and mapping them against the person who is speaking. That is listening, that is hearing, but if that’s all you’re doing and you’re a leader of people, then you’re still only halfway there.

Let’s start with the most basic rule of listening: If they don’t trust you, they aren’t going to say shit.

  1. the correct answer is: very awesome ↩