GROUNDBREAKING

Collaborative Creative Studio, specializing in avant-garde treatment to problem solving. These are the writings on our walls

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Ferrari: Under the Skin

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The great red

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Happy birthday Dave Grohl! Check out 21 of his most amazing musical cameos.

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The best camera is not a camera

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One of the primary open questions of astrobiology is whether there is extant or extinct life elsewhere the Solar System. Implicit in much of this work is that we are looking for microbial or, at best, unintelligent life, even though technological artifacts might be much easier to find. SETI work on searches for alien artifacts in the Solar System typically presumes that such artifacts would be of extrasolar origin, even though life is known to have existed in the Solar System, on Earth, for eons. But if a prior technological, perhaps spacefaring, species ever arose in the Solar System, it might have produced artifacts or other technosignatures that have survived to present day, meaning Solar System artifact SETI provides a potential path to resolving astrobiology's question. Here, I discuss the origins and possible locations for technosignatures of such a prior indigenous technological species, which might have arisen on ancient Earth or another body, such as a pre-greenhouse Venus or a wet Mars. In the case of Venus, the arrival of its global greenhouse and potential resurfacing might have erased all evidence of its existence on the Venusian surface. In the case of Earth, erosion and, ultimately, plate tectonics may have erased most such evidence if the species lived Gyr ago. Remaining indigenous technosignatures might be expected to be extremely old, limiting the places they might still be found to beneath the surfaces of Mars and the Moon, or in the outer Solar System.

[1704.07263] Prior Indigenous Technological Species

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Sometimes, by sheer good fortune, promise and opportunity collide. If there were ever an individual who personified the concept of genius in every aspect, from its ingredients to its far-reaching impact, it would be Leonardo da Vinci. Born in 1452 to unmarried parents, Leonardo began life in a stone farmhouse in Italy’s Tuscan hills, where olive trees and dusky blue clouds blanket the Arno Valley. From these simple beginnings, Leonardo’s intellect and artistry soared like Schopenhauer’s comet. The breadth of his abilities—his artistic insights, his expertise in human anatomy, his prescient engineering—is unparalleled. 

Leonardo’s pathway to genius began with an apprenticeship with master artist Andrea del Verrocchio in Florence when he was a teenager. Leonardo’s creativity was so robust that in his lifetime he filled thousands of pages in his notebooks, which brimmed with studies and designs, from the science of optics to his famed inventions, including a revolving bridge and a flying machine. He persisted no matter the challenge. “Obstacles cannot crush me,” he wrote. “He who is fixed to a star does not change his mind.” Leonardo also lived in a place (Florence) and at a time (the Italian Renaissance) when the arts were cultivated by wealthy patrons and inventiveness coursed through the streets, where great minds, including Michelangelo and Raphael, jostled for acclaim.

(via What Makes a Genius?)

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1.      Enterprise as the engine of the economy

Enterprises are the engines of theeconomy. They invent most of the inventions and they generate workplaces. There are 3 essential factors to start a company: a business opportunity, resources and the right people.

2.      Enterprise as a process

The process covers all the actions from the business opportunity to ceasing the venture. This 4 step process is the following: 1. Preparing to start a business 2. Starting the company 3. Operating the venture 4. Decision about carrying on

3.      Enterprise as creation of value

A company has to create value: by serving customers needs, by enrichment of the entrepreneurs or the shareholders and by supporting employees.

4.      Enterprises as economic organizations

A company is a purposeful and acquisitive economic organization. You can define organizations by many aspects: Size (small, medium sized companies), Legal form (Ltd, Non-profit), Nature of business (Supporting companies, saleable companies) or Business model (product/service).

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We’re getting fans to pay for music again. We’re connecting artists to fans they would never have otherwise found, and we’re paying them for every single listen. We’re not just streaming, we’re mainstreaming now, and that’s good for music makers and music lovers around the world.

$2 Billion and Counting | Spotify Blog

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I just bought a new TV. The old one had a good run, but after the volume got stuck on 63, I decided it was time to replace it. I am now the owner of a new “smart” TV, which promises to deliver streaming multimedia content, games, apps, social media, and Internet browsing. Oh, and TV too. The only problem is that I’m now afraid to use it. You would be too — if you read through the 46-page privacy policy. The amount of data this thing collects is staggering. It logs where, when, how, and for how long you use the TV. It sets tracking cookies and beacons designed to detect “when you have viewed particular content or a particular email message.” It records “the apps you use, the websites you visit, and how you interact with content.” It ignores “do-not-track” requests as a considered matter of policy. It also has a built-in camera — with facial recognition. The purpose is to provide “gesture control” for the TV and enable you to log in to a personalized account using your face. On the upside, the images are saved on the TV instead of uploaded to a corporate server. On the downside, the Internet connection makes the whole TV vulnerable to hackers who have demonstrated the ability to take complete control of the machine. More troubling is the microphone. The TV boasts a “voice recognition” feature that allows viewers to control the screen with voice commands. But the service comes with a rather ominous warning: “Please be aware that if your spoken words include personal or other sensitive information, that information will be among the data captured and transmitted to a third party.” Got that? Don’t say personal or sensitive stuff in front of the TV. You may not be watching, but the telescreen is listening.

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designers and engineers need a deeper understanding of each other’s craft to create truly great products. i’m convinced that engineers need to understand the experiences designers aim to create, even as designers need to understand just know how engineers will make those experience come to life. when the two groups interact for the greater good: they build phenomenal products, with minimal time resources. the notion of deep, cross-discipline understanding isn’t limited to software development. it can be just as effective when developing hardware, hardware/software systems, and even for manufacturing. it’s not even new. design for manufacturability and assembly methodologies – where designers actually consider whether their designs can be easily assembled and built – have been around for decades.

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Being a smoker I have always been conscious about what gets into my Mac (since the IIsi) and keyboard.I use a 25Litre compressor that I also use for checking the tyres on my car (garage gauges are so unreliable) and for blowing dust away when I'm doing a bit of woodworking in the workshop. Every six months or so I get my son to lug my Mac Pro to the conservatory, blow out all the dust from inside the machine, brush off residue with a 2-inch paint brush and then vacuum all the fans. My workshop vacuum doesn't generate static electricity (avoid vacuum tools made of plastic).With the older keyboards I used to remove all the key tops and soak them in foam cleaning solution, rinse them, polish and refit keys. Amazing what you find under the key tops. With the new keyboards, I spray the foam cleaning stuff onto an old t-shirt and run the cloth over the key tops then vacuum the whole keyboard. The monitor gets opened once a year, dusted & vacuumed and the LCD gets treated with glass wipes.My stuff always looks (and behaves) like it's brand new. My kids all think I am anally retentive, because I open up their Macbooks for similar treatment.

LeTap commented on Advice from an Apple tech: Battle the dust bunnies | Macworld

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With his latest business venture, Mitnick has switched hats again: This time to an ambiguous shade of gray. (via Kevin Mitnick, Once the World's Most Wanted Hacker, Is Now Selling Zero-Day Exploits | WIRED)

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Avoid the paralysis of long negotiations

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nowaternomoon:

Photo by sourcesofinsight.com

Don’t let any kind of negotiation last too long. On Monday you tell the party you’re negotiating with that you’ll make up your mind and converge on the decision by the end of the week. Not surprisingly you fire an email declaring the conditions you’ll be happy with on Sunday. Unless you make special efforts, the entire week leading to that Sunday would be spent in unproductive two-player non-cooperative game simulations in your head. Then the next two days are spent weighted down by the background process responsible for waiting for an email and wondering what the reply would be. You get the reply on Monday evening next week, think about its contents and a day later send off the updated list of your terms. A couple of days later you get the reply promising a phone call at some point that or next week. Just think about it: two weeks and counting are wasted on the low-intensity process which doesn’t let you focus on anything else. Don’t be trapped by the decision-delay in the important dialogues you hold. The dialogues related to your employment or several-years long commitments requiring the change of your town/country of residence are examples of this. Be done with those dialogues as soon as possible. Otherwise, you risk being paralyzed in over-analysis, idleness and constant unease. All the loops you haven’t closed will chase you. So close the loops. ASAP. And move on with your life. 

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The single most important change you can make in your working habits is to switch to creative work first, reactive work second. This means blocking off a large chunk of time every day for creative work on your own priorities, with the phone and e-mail off.

Mark McGuinness, ‘Manage Your Day-to-Day’

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- You mentioned Mark Zuckerberg. When you look at what he’s done, do you see some of yourself in him?

- Oh, sure. We’re both Harvard dropouts, we both had strong, stubborn views of what software could do. I give him more credit for shaping the user interface of his product. He’s more of a product manager than I was. I’m more of a coder, down in the bowels and the architecture, than he is. But, you know, that’s not that major of a difference. I start with architecture, and Mark starts with products, and Steve Jobs started with aesthetics. 

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The Top 10 Electrifying Insights from Stanford Superstar Feross Aboukhadijeh

10) Don’t be a talker, focus on building! My advice to future hackers is to focus on building stuff. Be very diligent about being a doer and not just a talker. The world is full of talkers. The ratio is some ungodly number like ten talkers for every doer. These people just like to talk all day about projects. They’re very smart people. They know about a lot of things. But at the end of the day, they don’t produce anything. They don’t execute. They don’t build. Be a person who balances those things very well. Spend some time thinking high-level about what you want to build and then spend a block of time building that thing. Maybe it will fail. Maybe it will succeed. Don’t just have it at the idea stage forever, just talking about it. Once somebody else does it, don’t say “That was that idea I had a year ago, I thought of it before they did.” So many people do that, just think of Facebook. Be relentlessly focused on building and doing. 

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Read Quote of Eric Conner's answer to What are the most profound life lessons from Stanford Professor John Ousterhout? on Quora