Photo Panoramas

Microsoft Research produces some real gems. Image Composition Editor stitches an arbitrary set of tiled photos together with no effort. Outputs the usual formats, plus HD View and Silverlight Deep Zoom for really huge images.

EconTalk

Russ Roberts has put togther an impressive collection of economics podcasts. Many of the podcasts provide great background to aspects of the current crisis in the the finance markets. Here's a selection:

• Arnold Kling talks with Russ Roberts about the economics of the housing market and the role of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
• Robert Shiller of Yale University talks with EconTalk host Russ Roberts about the current housing mess and related financial market problems. Shiller argues that the decade-long run up in housing prices was a bubble where speculative fervor outweighed any economic fundamentals.
• John Taylor of Stanford University talks the role of the Federal Reserve, monetary policy.
• Milton Friedman talks about his research, inflation, the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan and Ben Bernanke, and the future.

Error message haiku

Three things are certain:
Death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred.

David Dixon - Salon

Advertising Gem

Paper puppets and stop motion animation with score by Herbie Hancock and Chinese Pianist Lang Lang. Too bad the product isn’t as good.

RAND : How Terrorist Groups End

How Terrorist Groups End -

"This research brief describes an analysis of how terrorist groups end. The evidence since 1968 indicates that most groups have ceased to exist as a result of police and intelligence actions or of political accommodations, not military efforts."

who knew

Sir Ken Robinson on Education

Education, reform, thinking, creativitivity - Sir Ken Robinson's talk as he picked up his RSA Benjamin Franklin Medal.

Steam

Once in a while a steam train travels from Christchurch station to Rangiora. There’s a reason why the most common icon for a train is a steam train…

video from “living on the edge”, opentech 2008

About the Internet cloud and the edge. How we might restructure the Internet so that our personal and important moments aren't hosted by Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Blogger, but rather on our own machines.

Bye Bye Facebook

Well my experiment with Facebook has come to an end. The final straw was the user-interface. As they used to say about IBM products, it may be slow, but it’s hard to use (just for fun point YSlow at your profile page - 30 JavaScript files, 12 style sheets and 75 CSS background images - what were they thinking).

But the real problem is that Facebook lacks all the things that make the web great. How do you send a link to a Facebook album to someone who’s not on facebook? Your profile isn’t indexed by search engines and even if it was, see point one. And it isn’t open - you can’t easily take your stuff away.

So for now it’s flickr+delicious+twitter/jaiku etc