Eternal youth

The “holy grail” of aging research is the ability to actually reverse the aging process. Or in other words, turn the clock back on this aged fellow on the left and transform him back into the handsome young thing on the right:

Of course, as with all things biological, nature figured this out long before any pharmaceutical/cosmetics company or scientist did. The creepy thing though, is that the solution nature came up with comes in the form of a jellyfish. An immortal jellyfish.

Turritopsis nutricula has a magical gift which countless celebrities would kill for — it has the ability to become young after each round of mating. As far as I know, no other species can do this, and as far as scientists can tell — this little jellyfish can “become young again” (as in return to its “juvenile” polyp form) as many times as it wants.

The consequence? It’s spreading like a cancer — where it once was only in the Caribbean, it’s now everywhere. Imagine if Paris Hilton never died because she never aged. But, she kept reproducing. Yeah, that’s how intense this is.

So, pick how you want the world to end:

- collision with an asteroid in 2036
- black hole from the Large Hadron Collider
- or invasion of immortal unstoppable jellyfish creatures

The key to success: date a banker

I posted a few days ago about the wonderful DABA girls who despite being “over leveraged with Saks and I’m not talking about Goldman” are making quite the splash on the “interwebz”. And, now they’ve taken it to the next level. It turns out everyone’s favorite ladies who date bankers have landed a book deal.

As Fashionista reports (HT: Megan McArdle):

This morning, ex-Lucky Beauty writer Dawn Spinner came out as a DABA in the New York Times’ profile of Dating A Banker Anonymous, a blog for women having a rough time with their men due to the tanking economy.

Well now we hear Dawn and her fellow DABA’s, Laney Crowell, a beauty editor at StyleCaster and lawyer Megan Petrus are getting a book deal.

What will the book be about? How to stay beautiful without your boyfriend’s black Amex? Where to shop when you have to spend your own money?

I have no idea. The real question I have is whether or not the DABA girls will have their book out before or after my two favorite “Fob” ladies get their shot at the published spotlight.

Times are changing

I’m a bit late to this story, but it’s about time Presidential portraits were brought into the 21st Century.

Mr. Obama goes to Washington – and gets the first presidential portrait taken with a digital camera (and I’m sure along the way he downloaded a H264 movie on his laptop, immediately converted it to flash video using his graphics card, uploaded it over a prototype LTE network to YouTube, and Twittered about it)

And what camera took this sharp photo? Thanks to the photo’s EXIF data, we know (according to Engadget) it was a 21.1 mega-pixel Canon EOS 5D Mark II taken with no flash, using a 105mm lens stopped to f/10 at a 1/125 exposure with an ISO of 100.

The real fallout of the mortgage crisis

… is apparently the creation of a class of female victims so desperately forlorn that we must immediately bail them out with taxpayer dollars. Ladies and gentlemen, meet the DABA girls — DABA as in “Dating a Banker Anonymous”.

Or, as the post “Buy American” puts it:

I couldn’t comprehend why people were so insistent that America’s automobile industry had to be saved.  We import safer more fuel efficient cars from Asia.  No big deal.  Survival of the fittest, that’s my motto, or was, until my FBF broke up with me.  He explained my termination as follows:

“Princess, we need to talk.  How do I explain this?  You are a costly investment.  During better economic times, I was happy to spend a little extra to buy American, but now we are all being forced to make tough decisions and, well, bottom line: I can quite literally get more bang for my buck if I invest with a foreign model instead.  Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

And that my fellow DABA girls is more or less how my girlfriend services were outsourced to an underage Russian model who was willing to provide services substantially equivalent to my own but at well-below market value and without the regulatory hassle.  F*cking mercenary.

I hope the government earmarked some bailout money for ex-DABA girls.  Without my FBF subsidizing my lifestyle, I am seriously over leveraged with Saks and I’m not talking about Goldman.

Who can resist such patriotic charm?

Partner bingo

At my firm, we have a lot of respect for the partners. Not only do they source the deals that keep our paychecks coming, they are oftentimes active members of the community (serving on the boards of various non-profits and charities) and very accomplished and respected members of the business world. I have yet to meet a partner who did not immediately impress me with his or her gravitas and intelligence.

But, just because we respect them doesn’t mean we can’t have a little fun with them at the same time.

Having been consultants for years, Partners are neck deep in consulting-lingo, something which some of the associates have taken advantage of in a game that we like to call partner bingo.

How do you play this incredible(-y nerdy) game, you ask? It’s simple, make a 5 x 5 grid and place in it phrases that you’d expect the partners to say. Things like “outperform the competition”, “focus on the core business”, “expand to China”, or, the most bittersweet, “I know we don’t have the data for this, but…” (bitter because it implies that some poor associate will spend the next couple of days finding this data).

Bring it to the next big team meeting, and enjoy as the senior partners of your firm discuss big business ideas while filling up your bingo board. First person to get a row, column, or diagonal wins.

Don’t you want to play?

(Image Source)

Scienc-norance

From Slate (HT: Marginal Revolutions):

The world of scientists remains distant and bizarre to most Americans. Only 18 percent of Americans know a scientist personally, according to a 2005 survey (subscription required), and when asked in 2007 to name scientific “role models,” the results were dismal. Forty-four percent of Americans couldn’t come up with a name at all, and among those few who did, their top answers were either not scientists or not alive: Bill Gates, Al Gore, Albert Einstein.

I’ve said this before, but its worth saying again. Despite living in a society that depends so much on science and technology for its wealth and military supremacy over the world, there are a surprising number of Americans who pay it little attention and, as this quote points out, there’s an even larger group of people who seem woefully uneducated about it. This is disturbing as America is a democracy (or so I’m told) — and when a society that depends on science and technology is run by a population who knows very little about science and technology…

Updated RSS Feed

As my RSS Feed provider, Feedburner, is now part of the Google empire, they’ve decided that (for some reason) every feed needs to be moved to a different system. I’ve updated all the links on my blog accordingly, but please re-set your RSS feeds to my new feed address: http://feeds2.feedburner.com/bnjamminsblog

Oh, and enjoy these cute RSS symbol cartoons (HT: Teresa of MMIAF fame)

We shall overcome

When I was in elementary school, I participated in a competition to recite Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech (brought to you by the wonders of YouTube). Although I didn’t win, even as a naive little boy, I could feel the power of Dr. King’s words – and I could hardly believe that such a world – where an entire group of people was blocked from basic rights and due process simply for the color of their skin – had ever existed.

Flash forward many years to today. I’ve now been tempered with an unfortunate cynicism which I can only attribute to “growing up” and “learning how things really work.” I have a better grasp of the fact that the comfy, meritocratic suburban elementary school bubble that I grew up in is not the world that many people grow up in. There is still a great deal of racism, sexism, homophobia, and a long other list of –ism’s and –phobia’s to conquer. And the beauty of this day (at least in America) and this particular speech is that it inspires us to look past our cynical and narrow world-views and to aspire for something better.

Or, as Dr. King put it:

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God’s children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

Free at last! Free at last!

                Thank God Almighty, we are free at last

Talk the talk

The consultant mystique – explained in 8 brilliant panels (by Dilbert of course):

I love doing “transformations” and “forming centers of excellence”…

Zii changes nothing

Last week, I posted on Creative’s “ambitious” ad campaign for their new Zii product, the one laden with “intense” PR-speak proclaiming the dawn of an age of “stem cell computing”.

Well, as expected, this was somewhat overhyped.

Now, don’t get me wrong the Zii chip architecture (block diagram to the left) is very innovative. The basic idea is to design a chip with one main processor (in this case the 2 ARM CPU cores, “ARM-0” and “ARM-1”) to play quarterback to 24 “processing elements”, programmable chunks which can be used to do the high-speed mathematical computations which are needed to handle things like graphics, video, and sound.

But, not only does this fail to live up to the overhyped claim of “stem cell computing”, it’s not even that much of an original concept:

• The chip which powers Sony’s Playstation 3, the Cell Broadband Engine, runs on a similar concept – one main “quarterback” processor (a PowerPC core not unlike the ones that used to run the Macintosh machines before Apple switched to using Intel chips) and 8 “synergistic processing elements” (their name, not mine) which can be programmed to do high-speed math calculations. The result is a very flexible chip which Toshiba has adapted to help with high-def video in its Qosmio laptops and Cell TV designs and IBM has adapted to make supercomputers.
• FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) have probably already captured the “stem cell computing” crown (and they were invented in 1984 – some 25 years before Creative’s claim). Unlike most chips which have their circuit wiring set to do only one thing, FPGAs can be reconfigured on-the-fly to do anything – need a digital TV chip? Just reconfigure. Oh, sorry, not a digital TV chip, but a digital stereo chip? That’s no problem, just reconfigure.

Normally, I wouldn’t ride so hard on one company’s bad PR except for the fact that I sat through a horrendous video where Creative misappropriated and misused stem cell science to try to position the Zii as some amazing technological revolution that will change everything with “all of the benefits [of stem cell research], none of the controversy”.

That crossed the line for me.