Solar Power, it’s not just for granola-chomping hippies anymore. Solar power generation has been increasing exponentially for decades, but as futurist Raymond Kurzweil once said, nobody notices exponential growth until it hits the “knee of the curve“. Fortunately for us and our planet, it nearly has.
Between 2000 and 2004, the increase in worldwide [...]

The gloom in the air is almost palatable. For years now, most Taiwanese people I’ve known have not just been glum, but been down right pessimistic about the economy.
In one sense, it seems irrational. While Taiwan’s GDP growth since 2000 has been very poor, much of that can be attributed to currency fluxuations. [...]

I’ve long been a fan of Richard Dawkins’ books. I read the Selfish Gene as a teenager and found it absolutely fascinating. Not only was that book the foundation of sociobiology, but it also coined the term “meme”. Little did I know that a few years later, millions of people would be [...]

I’ve been interested in the Vancouver-based startup D-Wave for over a year now. They make quantum computers. And, unlike any other company in the world, they’ve actually made working ones. This week they’re demoing a pattern recognition test that’s very difficult for traditional computers– scanning pictures and quickly identifying which ones are [...]

Recently, Michael and Karl have expressed some surprise and doubt at the claim that the Taiwan dollar has fallen over the past several years. Here are some graphs that should show it quite clearly.
This first graph is based on the Euro, and the TWD is compared to the Korean Won, the US Dollar, the [...]

It hasn’t even been that long since the last time the sky fell, and once again the market is taking some dips. Over the past five days, with the S&P 500 down by 3.4%, the Nasdaq down by 6.2% and the Xinhua China 25 Index down by 11.4%, several of my holdings have taken [...]

I’m no fan of posts about the Top 5 thisses or Top 10 thats, but even I can hold out against the tide for so long.
The Top 5 Top 5 Blog Posts EVAR!

The Recycled - this list will be comprised of only of points that you’ve seen in other lists, almost definitely in the same [...]

Last week, I saw Stephen Petranek give an interesting talk in the Technology, Entertainment, Design conferences. It was from a presentation he gave in 2002, titled 10 ways the world could end. He takes a rational, scientific look at ten of the most underestimated threats humanity faces and proposes solutions for each.

One thing [...]

This is fascinating video about Daniel Tammet, a twenty-something with extraordinary mental abilities. He’s capable of calculations to 100 decimal places in his head, and he can acquire functional fluency in a foreign language in a single week. Most interesting is that unlike the vast majority of savants, he can communicate with and [...]

I just got home from the Muddy Basin Rambler’s CD party.

It was pretty fun. I met up with old friends, like Eli “the fraud”, Michael “blogs at the speed of thought” Turton, Angelica “the battlepanda“, Wayne, and Franc. Other bloggers, I hadn’t met before, such as Robert “the red” and Patrick Cowsill were [...]