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

In anticipation for my trip, one that is sure to be epic, I have finally given in and setup a twitter account.  Feel free to follow me here, follow me there, just don’t say I didn’t warn you.  And yes, I’ll be cross-posting to facebook as well.

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.

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.

Today I made my first contribution edit to this page on Wikipedia.  I was actually able to add some relevant content, information about the FAA’s decision to extend the expiration dates on first and third class medical certificates for pilots under 40.  Quite amazingly, looking at the history of the page I discovered an old friend of mine who, it turns out, is a flight instructor.  Small world.

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.