I just came across this post over at Engadget talking about an augmented reality project at MIT. It uses a handheld pico projector to display information about objects in front of you. I’ve been so focused on the use of head mounted displays for augmented reality that I never even thought about what could be accomplished using a pico projector. Since a picture is worth a thousand words I’ll refrain from trying to explain it, just watch the video!
My brother is currently in the trenches of high school and for his Economics class was assigned to interview a local business owner. He choose to interview me as a freelancer who is building an LLC out of Mind Kitchen Media. We got started in person, but unfortunately didn’t have enough time to do the whole thing, so he emailed the questions to me instead. I figured this tells a lot about how I think, so here are my responses to the interview.
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Business name: Freelance web design as Randall A. Gordon, sub-contracting web development to Vitaliy Mikitchenko; Soon to be partners of Mind Kitchen Media LLC
When was the business started: I’ve actively prospected clients since November of 2007; I’ve taken on various projects since the age of 16.
Names of owners: Mind Kitchen Media LLC will be owned by Randall A. Gordon, Vitaliy Mikitchenko and Marta McCasland
1. Describe the business
Although I work as a freelancer currently, I am in the process of setting up an LLC with a partner who, to date, I have simply subcontracted work to. Also in the mix is my fiance who is actively and passionately learning the ropes of the business both from and with me. As such I’ll mainly be speaking from the viewpoint of a soon-to-be LLC owner with insights from my work as a freelancer.
I seek out clients in the local area who I can assist by bringing their communications abilities with their customers and within their business up to date with what is possible using today’s technologies. This means I am far more than just a web designer. I have to be a multimedia maven who can take on many hats.
I have to understand how a business operates so that I am able to identify deficiencies and lay out plans to correct them. Sales and marketing are important to master, not only to get my own company’s name out there, but because the larger part of my work involves marketing and connecting a client with their customer base. Not to mention the very wide variety of talents that development for the web requires in today’s technology landscape.
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Hi, my name is Randall A. Gordon, and I have a problem. I’m addicted to blogs.
*phew* Now that that’s out of the way… I’d like to start sharing with you some of the blogs I read. Every so often I’ll select a new one to introduce you to. And the first I’ve chosen to share is Bad Astronomy.
One of my favorite things to contemplate is the vastness of the universe. Not just in size, but also in the vast variety of phenomena that occur throughout the universe. Most people never think about the possibility of a supernova boiling us alive
in an absurdly high energy blast of solar radiation. But, then there are people like astronomer Philip Plait, the author of the blog Bad Astronomy.
Each day Philip introduces his readers to new astronomical phenomena, blasts hokey science and reports the latest news from the field. And to top it off, his humorous, sometimes sardonic style of writing ensures that his posts will not only expand your knowledge, but keep you close to falling out of your chair laughing. For a great example of the hilarity, be sure to check out his dissection of a fake NASA shuttle image.
On the interesting side, in a recent post Philip describes the downright extreme conditions on planet HD 80606b orbiting a star in the constellation Ursa Major, better known as the Big Dipper. What makes this planet extreme? Well, there’s the extremely elliptical orbit that swings the planet as close as 4 million kilometers from its star, while Mecury swings around our Sun more than ten times further away at 46 million kilometers. Then, there’s its massive size—four times larger than Jupiter! And there’s also the winds that make Earth’s hurricanes look like a summer breeze clocking in at 5 kilometers a second…Google tells me that’s 11,184.6815 miles per hour! And there’s more crazy facts awaiting you, just read his post!
If you have even a passing interest in astronomy, be sure to check out Bad Astronomy. You’ll be amazed and amused.
Everyday new research in the fields of nanotechnology and synthetic biology, among many others, bring us closer to huge shifts in how we manufacture many of the goods and products we use on a daily basis. Sure, it won’t be anytime soon that we have goodies like universal molecular assemblers that can produce any structure we can give it a blueprint for. And while we could see synthetic biology bring us industrial scale biofuel production in the next several years, it could be multiple decades before the technology is applied to manufacturing complex structures of molecules and polymers. But I find it interesting to think about the implications.
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We’ve got a bunch of nifty technologies that will soon be prominent in the consumer sector. When combined these technologies have the power to change the way we work with computers dramatically. Today I’d like to tell you about a few of them.
First, we have more and more processors popping up with multiple cores. It started in 2005 with the first dual-core chips from Intel. Then AMD got in the game so Intel fired back with a quad-core. Now…all hell is ready to break loose. Intel’s new processor, once known only by the codename “Nahelem”, the Core i7 comes out of the gate with four cores. Add to that Intel’s HyperThreading and you’ve got eight “logical” cores. Then, just to add the cherry on top, expect an 8-physical core, 16-logical core, version of the chip to drop on the market sometime later in the year.
But it doesn’t stop there. Intel is working on multi-core chips that go far beyond just four or eight cores. Instead, try eighty of them. You read correctly, that would be an eight followed by a zero. Eighty cores to crank away at whatever computing whim you might have. These chips push out computing power in excess of one teraflop—more than one trillion “floating point operations” per second. And they do it using less than 100 watts of power.
Now, some people are naysayers and argue that graphics cards have been up in the teraflop range for a couple years now, however these cards use GPUs, Graphics Processing Units. While not inherently different from any other processor, it is only a recent development that this computational horsepower can be used for anything—not just graphics. But really, who cares where the computing power is coming from as long as we have it? The point is, the common consumer now has access to computing power that is mind-boggling even to seasoned geeks.
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This is an essay I wrote about a year ago. Finally decided to post it up here on the ‘ole personal blog. I’ve learned a good bit more since I wrote this and intend to write a follow up to take care of a few loose ends. For instance, there are now some references that simply don’t make sense, such as Google supporting OpenMoko—we’ve all heard of Android by now, and I’m also trying to make Objectivism, free markets and the Open model “jive” a bit better in my mind. But a follow up isn’t a follow up unless the original is available, now is it?
It also bears mentioning that my use of the terms “socialize” and “socialization” would perhaps be more clear using a different word. What I mean to imply is that the information and knowledge is moving in the direction of becoming part of our intellectual commons.
Without further delay…
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Throughout history we have seen technology do amazing things. When Gutenberg gave the world the printing press in the mid 15th century, time-persistent communication went from requiring a person learned in print or calligraphy to requiring someone able to swap metal die plates in and out of the press. The time required to distribute information was reduced, and information become more social. Nearly four hundred years later, early in the 19th century, Joseph Henry and Samuel Morse moved the telegraph into use around the globe. The time required to distribute information was reduced, and information became more social.
Before the end of the 19th century, the brightest minds of the world had produced methods of recording and disseminating all types of information. Joseph Niepce took the first photograph. Thomas Edison made the first record player. Eadweard Muybridge became the father of motion picture and Coleman Sellers showed the world the Kinematoscope, the first motion picture projector. Potentially of most importance, Maxwell predicted radio waves, Hertz proved they existed and Marconi and Loomis demonstrated how to apply them to transmit information without wires. The time required to distribute information was reduced, and information became more social.
This was all before the 20th century even rolled around on the world’s calendar. The 20th century gave us fixed-wing flight, rocket engines, vacuum tubes and transistors, and in 1969 we have ARPANET. The beginnings of the Internet, it only involved a connection between four universities but grew quickly to more than two hundred connections in 1981, causing compatibility issues as each connected computer often required custom software to communicate. And then in the year of my birth, 1982, a standard protocol called TCP/IP emerged. The basis for what we know as the Internet had arrived. The time required to distribute information was reduced to mere seconds and information became a truly social resource.
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