Hans Cathcart’s Homepage

Physicist David Deutsch presents a fascinating view of the problems we face in the world, how to think about solving them, and then much more in these three talks at TED.

• Our place in the cosmos
• A new way to explain explanation
• Parallel universes and you

A really well produced 3D simulation of the ditching of US Airways 1549 into the Hudson River.  The air traffic control tapes are playing in the background and you can see what Sully and Skiles say to each other during their descent towards the Hudson.

2010 Update:
I just finished reading Captain Sullenberger’s book Highest Duty.  What a fantastic and inspiring book.  My favorite line is a quote from his wife: “Sully, life is not a checklist.”

In the past decade, Web design has evolved significantly. This article “70 New, Useful AJAX And JavaScript Techniques” goes on to discuss some of the new functions that have been developed. It’s boring, but the improved calendar pop-up date selectors are my favorite useful feature improvement. Unfortunately, while Web design has evolved the ‘proper use’ of URL/URIs has not. Sir Tim wrote an article over a decade ago suggesting how to build good URIs.  It’s still a good read.

Today, Barack Obama was sworn in as the 44th President of the United States of America. The ceremony was held in front of thousands of people who had flooded into DC to witness the event. This CNN link shows an interactive satellite picture of the crowds on the National Mall. As Obama was being sworn in the White House web site transitioned to the 44th President at whitehouse.gov — ask me some time how that was accomplished, it’s an interesting story. At the same time millions of people were watching the event Online, with web sites from CNN to CSPAN to FoxNews webcasting the event, many using the delivery services of my employer.

This evening I created an advertisement, well… I got suckered into personalizing an ad and sending it to one of my friends. Meetup.com created this cute animation, and then gives you the opportunity to personalize the message to send to your friends.  Pure genius!  The pull-downs are so seductive that it doesn’t feel so much like an ad, but rather a way to poke fun at someone who you know would get the joke.  So, I sent one message.  Yes, only one.  I’m sure everyone else is spamming the planet.

The amazing thing about this site is that it does exactly what Marshall McLuhan envisioned back in 1960.  Shown here in a TED talk by Peter Hirshberg, McLuhan comments: “If the audience can actually become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it’s happy.” (skip to 14:30)  To describe McLuhan as a visionary is a massive understatement.  I suspect that if he had time-travelled to today and seen Facebook and MySpace he would not have been surprised.  The rest of Hirshberg’s talk is also really quite interesting.

The BBC is producing a fascinating series called “Britain from Above” that combines GPS tracking, data collection and sophisticated computer visualizations to give viewers a view of the UK that no one has ever seen.  It’s absolutely captivating to watch the planes entering and exiting British airspace, or seeing the nation’s telephone network come to life.  The Daily Mail wrote an article about the series that includes some images.

Let it be said that 2008 will be the last year that I don’t got to AirVenture in Oshkosh.  For the uninitiated, it’s the Mecca of Aviation every year.  Now that I’m an EAA member, with an instrument rating I really have no excuse not to go any more.  This year they announced the Icon, the SPOT Messenger was apparently a big hit (I just ordered one to document my flights), and an all-electric airplane flew.  Two of my friends (Lisa and Adam) were there, and apparently Esther Dyson was there.  I did not know she was into aviation.

You’re spending too much time on YouTube, aren’t you?  You’re at work, yes.  Ok, that’s probably alright.  If you haven’t been to TED, the site — cause getting into the actual event is like impossible, you’re missing out.  To start you off, watch Ze Frank’s presentation from 2004.  The Hans Rosling talk is a classic.  Jill Bolte talks about her brain.  And Johnny Lee plays with Wii.

An interesting presentation at Stanford’s ACM on how facebook works behind the scenes with images. It talks about Akamai (my company) a bit and mentions how they are able to off-load 99.8% of their profile picture traffic. They also discuss their server-side Cachr project which is based on the memcached project.

CAPTCHA. You’ve all seen it on web sites where they want to read an image and then type the letters to ensure you’re a person and not a computer program. Well, a couple of guys at the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University figured out how to make this annoying process into something that actually benefits humanity. Recaptcha.net helps digitize books from the Internet Archive.