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More mountain lion shots!

This camera gets a lot of lion traffic but this is the first time we’ve seen a side view — usually the cats are walking directly towards the camera. Our guess is this one is about six feet long and probably a male. 

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It's physics, get me a metaphor!

These advanced concepts are so much easier to understand when you put it that way. Thanks New York Times!

According to the Standard Model, the Higgs boson is the only manifestation of an invisible force field, a cosmic molasses that permeates space and imbues elementary particles with mass. Particles wading through the field gain heft the way a bill going through Congress attracts riders and amendments, becoming ever more ponderous.

Without the Higgs field, as it is known, or something like it, all elementary forms of matter would zoom around at the speed of light, flowing through our hands like moonlight. There would be neither atoms nor life.

Sports heroes run amok

Curt Schilling has apparently lost his baseball fortune in a bad video game company investment. No one told him about the sacred concept of Other People’s Money.

“We didn’t raise capital. We didn’t get private capital. At the end of the day, when you look at all the things that we did, I put all the money I said I’d put in, I guaranteed the things I guaranteed from a loan perspective, I never took a penny out, and we spent the money exactly how we defined it in all the documentation with the state. And the one thing that we always listed as a going concern, we couldn’t execute and we could not raise private capital. For a litany of different reasons — I’m sure if you ask anybody, they’ll give you one or more reasons — the hard part, and probably the most painful part, for the first time in 5 1/2 years, we were so close. And it just didn’t work out.”

And for completely different reasons, Terrell Owens is stuck playing arena football in an attempt at rebuilding his own bank account.

The way he sees it, he doesn’t want much. “I’m not asking to be rich,” he says. “I’m just trying to be financially stable. I just want to be stable. That’s any average American that’s working hard for their money. I’m trying to get myself back to a situation where I don’t have to be stressed out at night, worrying what my mom is thinking or my kids.”

It remains much easier to lose a fortune than to make one. (Both links courtesy of Jason Hirschhorn.)

Not my Yahoo anymore (or, beating a dead horse)

I’ve been a long-time My Yahoo user, in fact it is probably the only Yahoo property I use regularly. Sure, I Flickr occasionally but really nothing else at Yahoo is habit anymore. But I doubt I’ll keep that habit much longer. Here is why:

It is not because there are ads on the log-in screen, that has been common on Yahoo and many other sites for a while. But within the last few months, Yahoo has started to force me to log-in much more frequently. I don’t know exactly how often, but I would guess at least once every two weeks and maybe more. Given that I have 4 devices (two computers, iPad and iPhone) that I access this page from, I feel like I’m now logging into this page every other day or so.

Which is great for Yahoo — more ad views of that log-in page and I’m sure a very high CPM given the size of the ad — but a much less functional page for me. I’m not going out on a limb in saying that trading usefulness for business model is rarely a good way to build a business. But I can promise it’ll work beautifully for destroying one.

 

If the National Enquirer covered tech

I seriously love the Business Insider headline writers.

Blah blah blah Pando blah blah blah disclosure.

Mike Daisey’s reality distortion field

It’s been interesting reading all of the press around the outing of Mike Daisey’s “coverage” of Apple’s manufacturing issues and specifically the retraction by This American Life of the content behind its most popular episode. John Gruber did one of the better take downs of the hypocracy behind Daisey’s story. SF Weekly also stands out getting to the heart of the matter — Daisey has probably done more to make people doubt the veracity of any story about Foxconn going forward.

But I think Jeff Yang of Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy blog has one of the most interesting points-0f-view, comparing Daisey’s fabrications to Steve Jobs’s own reality distortion field:

People want to believe in Daisey’s stories, because they want to have faith in the ability of individuals to change the path of history with their actions. They want to believe they can think different, act different, and — as crazy as it sounds — make the world a better place. It is, again quite ironically, exactly the same enchantment Steve Jobs always depended on to sell his magical devices — you may not believe me, but you want to believe in me, and what I’m saying is that this is changing the game, changing the industry, changing the world.

I’ve always had a hard time with the idea of journalism as Truth with a capital T. Everyone has a bias and pretending otherwise is just dishonest. Clearly, journalists have a higher standard to tilt at than a marketer — or a storyteller — and Mike Daisey’s problem as much as anything else is that he slipped from storyteller into journalist, even if by omission. But the idea that Daisey the storyteller was playing by no different rules than Jobs the marketer is an interesting angle that I think is being underplayed here.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think Daisey is equivalent in stature to Steve Jobs any more than he is to Mark Twain (whose quote Daisey led off his blog post with). But there is nothing inherently wrong with using a reality distortion field to make a point. Daisey’s only failing (and I realize it’s a whopper) was to let people think he was a journalist. Oh, and writing this post. Don’t pretend that it‘s about truth when it really isn’t.

Another mountain lion, this time with video (sort of)

We moved the camera that took these shots about 50 feet west to get a better view of the clearing where we’ve seen a lot of deer and more than a few mountain lions. Today, we collected a series of shots from around 7pm last week that I was able to turn into a video of sorts. The mountain lion walks in, plops down, gets up, lies down again and then walks away.

Our guess is that it’s a male about 30 inches tall or so (based on size comparisons to people in the same place) but we really have no idea. Update: a friend who knows better believes it’s the same female from the previous shots we got in this area.

 

Is getting ripped worth it?

I just love Quora.

The infomercial shoot came around and I spent 14 hours in an old warehouse in downtown Los Angeles doing all sorts of crunches as a background model while the spokespeople for the exercise videos read their lines. It was fun because two of the co-hosts were actresses from Baywatch. After probably 3,000 sit ups while maintaining a goofy grin on my face the shooting was over and I went home for about a week of recovery. I wanted to laugh at myself for agreeing to get lubed up in vegetable oil and participate in something so Hollywood-esque, but it hurt too much to laugh so I laid in bed motionless until my laughter no longer resulted in whimpering.

What I can say about “getting ripped” in the look-at-me-I’m-so-ripped-and-good-looking sense is that it isn’t worth it. It takes a ridiculous amount of work both in terms of adherence to a strict diet and a lot of exercise. Also, once you get to that point, then what? Stay ripped and miss out on eating a cookie every now and then? Screw that.

Indeed.

Gary Carter, 1954-2012

I’ve always been a baseball fan but nothing reinvorgated my love of the sport more than the 1986 World Series. And no one was more important to that Mets win than Gary Carter. He will always remain a favorite, may he rest in peace.

Respect my authoritah

“...I think there should be some more respect for capital.”

Janice Hester-Amey, CalSTRS Corporate Governance portfolio manager, lectures Mark Zuckerberg how to treat his new set of friends