joeldg - navigating the surface

Got a couple new toys this week:

First up is the Flytech Dragonfly, which is a remote controlled dragonfly that actually flaps it’s wings, it is pretty cool and we all have had some fun flying it around the office, it is remarkable how you can cease productivity so quickly on the entire floor of a building. Here is an image I took of the box.

Next up is a solar powered bluetooth GPS unit that manages about 100hrs run time from a full charge, and recharges in the sun.

Yea, I am on a roll today doing two posts.

I have spent some time lately looking at various libs to use on a site I want to design, and by design I mean make it a true little piece of genius (and maybe learn something new while we are at it). I am not looking for a prototype replacement, I am looking more for a way to NOT use script.acuo.us, Dojo or the other libs that I thing are interesting, but they just seem to rub me wrong. I checked out the Adobe SPRY lib, decided it was too much other stuff, and eventually I kept finding myself coming back around to YUI which is pretty swanking and basically handles everything that I would have needed five others to bring together all the things I need. It is also split up in the various parts so you only bring in what you need as you need it see some code samples that I found and love, yay

Anyway, the yui grids css is nice for doing grid-based layouts and there are some really nice bookmarklets about that you can use to do your layouts. Just drag these to your firefox quickbar
Translucent Grid overlay

Fixed overlay grid

And speaking of design (something I generally avoid if possible) check out this.

From here.

As a science buff, and a scientist (albeit computer scientist) I like to see things in fair light. One of the things I like to do is see both sides of an argument and determine for myself what is going and who and what say what and not just blindly follow things that journalist as saying as most journalist are just after a “story” and are full of themselves pretty badly and when it comes to science and the internet they almost always get the story wrong because they don’t have the foundations of science and technology to know what to include, and what to cut.

Given this I found the movie “an inconvenient truth on demand on my cable and watched it, and I really liked it, I thought there was some good stuff there and Gore (who was voted president but screwed by the courts) was clear and had a lot of good points, however, I had some questions about the scientists involved and was wondering just who it was and so I checked out the site, they have some blurbs and quotes taken by scientists but I didn’t know the context of the quotes.

I started poking around looking for information on the “global warming deniers” as I know that any scientist who says anything against the current global warming are summarily and publicly shamed. I found this interesting and some guys in the UK put together a scientists speaking on global warming documentary called “the great global warming swindle” which you can watch online a few places) which is basically the major guys in climatology and climate research at NASA, MIT, Cambridge etc etc.. saying that global warming as we know is more political chaff than fact and that most of the real science is ignored in favor of fantastical things. Much of the current global warming political rhetoric is based on the mistrust the west has with the middle east and the need for a push/incentive to move away from reliance on foreign oil. If you watch one side of the story, you owe yourself a gander at what scientists are saying vs. politicians and journalists.

It is interesting to see both sides if anything, and responsible to yourself.

As always there is disputing sides to every story .. Still it is good for an informed choice.