I’m not sure I completely get it. My understanding is that I would have my personal instances of applications like gmail, calendar, Facebook, Imgur, Twitter, etc., within my POD. I assume my POD can then communicate with other people’s PODs whom I’ve invited – it’s just there’s no central Facebook to fuck us hold the data for us. Is this one way to explain it? Is our data on our own machines or distributed across millions of computers?
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As I currently understand it from an hour of mucking about:
Your data lives in the POD. You control how much or how little of that data is publicly available.
The data (this is the part I’m really still wrapping my head around) is in a format which is generic enough that lots of different apps can access, arrange, and handle it in lots of different ways. So, for example, just because you were using one calendar app for a while does not tie you to that app forever – the next calendar app will be able to read your data just as well.
You pick the apps you want to use to handle your data, including sharing that data with other people. That includes anything from photo albums to meeting invitations to song collections.
In other words, they just removed the reason for Gmail, Facebook, Imgur, Twitter et al to even exist. Even if someone were to implement, say, a Twitter-like thing in a POD app, there would be no central “Twitter” space where all the tweets were recorded. It would be more like an RSS aggregator.
This means apps would be a lot more… porous as well. So for instance, I might use an off-the-shelf app for something, but have fun with the CSS to give it the colours and fonts I want.
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Thanks – I’ll keep my eye out for more info as it becomes available – layman’s understandable info that is.
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I don’t fully get it either, but if anyone could reinvent the Internet, it’d be the guy who pretty much made it accessible in the first place.
And it sounds interesting.
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Something to check out this Monday. A Mars probe is landing with a drill to get under the surface as explained in this comic.
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As a kid in school our science teacher was telling us about how scientists were learning about the earth by trying to drill down through the crust to the mantle. I asked how they knew it wouldn’t pop like a balloon. That was one of many strange looks I got from a teacher while she tried to think of an answer. 
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An interesting reexamination of Blackbeard and the pirates of the age. Maybe this is known by people who’ve studied this but news to me.
Their motives may have been mixed, but popular opinion was on the pirates’ side. Authorities regularly complained to their superiors in London that many of their subjects regarded the pirates as heroes. Lt. Gov. Alexander Spotswood of Virginia fumed that his citizens had “an unaccountable inclination to favor pirates.”
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- earthquakes, sea-floor spreading, subduction, and the occasional asteroid would have already popped such an Earth. And there’s a big dent opposite Nix Olympus which would have popped such a Mars too.
- mass estimates for the Earth would be a problem. not sure whether they would be impossible. also for Mars.
- seismography would not detect s-waves moving in the upper mantle if it wasn’t reasonably solid.
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- Air tends not to have magnetic field.
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This is from 2011, but still very interesting. This is an address to the California Academy of Sciences, where Sapolsky was/is a Fellow.
The real money quote to me, and the reason this talk stuck with me, comes in the answer to the very last question, at 1:14:40. Dr. Sapolsky is asked about the differences in human and chimp genomes now that we’ve sequenced them both.
Where are the genes that are relevant to the brain? And it turns out, there are hardly any. And the few that have been identified make perfect sense. Because these are not genes that make it possible for us to have metaphor, or genes - because going back to that first slide, we’ve got the same nervous system basically that chimps do, there’s only one difference, we’ve got like three times as many neurons – and what the genetic differences are, are genes having to do with the number of rounds of cell division during fetal brain development. Essentially what that says is, take a chimp brain fetally and let it go two or three more rounds of division, and you get a human brain instead, and out come symphonies and ideology and hop-scotch and everything else there. What that tells you is, with enough quantity you invent quality. It’s just sheer numbers, and out of that emerges in this non-linear, non-reductive way, all this stuff that makes us human. What those genes are about is producing a brain, a human brain, of a certain sort of level of qualities, but it has nothing to do with what particular qualities there are.
Stanford posted all 25 or so of his lectures from a class he taught there (except the lecture on religiosity, Stanford wimped out on that one) and they’re all worth hearing IMO.
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I’m in! Dude, crowdsource this one. Pullease. I want it.
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So basically he has created common protocols for all the common big apps like email, calendar, notifications, music, etc.
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It’s a bit Abe Simpson, but interesting nonetheless.
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that must be the burliest gymnast I’ve ever seen.
presumably the bulk gives him an inertia bonus for the distance?
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I’m no physics professor, but overall mass shouldn’t have anything to do with it. Beyond the accuracy involved, it looks like the primary difficulty is gaining enough rotational momentum to launch, and then transferring the horizontal momentum back into rotational momentum at the other end. Both of these would put a lot of strain on the shoulders, elbows, wrists, and fingers, which would benefit from being strengthened, but any additional mass beyond that would just act to increase the stresses involved.
That said, having more mass may allow the gymnast to attain the rotational momentum with less effort, but my instincts tell me that height would be more benefit than bulk, assuming you have enough strength to get yourself vertically above the bar in the first place.
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Typically, the bigger gymnasts do better at the vault, so it might be an advantage for this type of manoeuvre.
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