Month: September 2011

Day in brief – 2011-09-12

  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/pafpXce Michel & Sven – Der Tischdeckentrick – Teil 4 #
  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/Hkc2Zqb Oscilaciones de la cuerdas de una Guitarra #
  • Shared: A tipple on a massive scale http://t.co/5NRy3i3 #
  • Shared: Marking 10 Years Since 9/11/2001 http://t.co/8ZynYbH #
  • LAUGHS! on Vimeo http://t.co/HLzGPbW #
  • I favorited a @YouTube video http://t.co/3YddEmU Tim Vine Live At The Apollo #
  • Shared: The most awkward situation… http://t.co/YarrnSX #
  • @alex_exler толковые клиенты (андроидный и веб) умеют показывать in reply to или conversation. #
  • Every day I check delivery menus for salads and fresh juices. And they I buy a roast sandwich and a coca-cola from the kiosk nearby. #FML #
  • Speed reading is very easy. Load a Flickr slideshow, set it to 1 second interval, enjoy. You are now reading at 1,000 words per second. #
  • Saving sanity at a boring meeting… http://t.co/ADX4LLT #
  • I am spilling out forex trading secrets here … http://t.co/9uZGmML #
  • Missing Missi the cat – old, but good designer story http://t.co/JmhCqRd Articles #

Cyprus crude oil production by year

All the recent hype about oil and gas reserved discovery and exploration off the shores of Cyprus got me digging into the subject.   Here is one of the first graphs I found, which helps so much in understanding the current state of affairs.  Courtesy of Index Mundi website.

Just in case you prefer it in a table with raw data form, they have it for you there as well.

Food timeline : marshmallows

By accident I came across Food timeline website, which covers the history of some foods.  For example, I had no idea about marshmallows:

“Marshmallows are one of the earliest confections know to humankind. Today’s marshmallows come in many forms, from solid…to semi-liquid—to the creme-like or as an ice cream topping. Originally…marshmallows were made from the rood sap of the marsh mallow (Althaea officinalis) plant. It is a genus of herb that is native to parts of Europe, north Africa, and Asia. Marsh mallows grow in marshes and other damp areas…The first marshmallows were made by boiling pieces of the marsh mallow root pulp with sugar until it thickened. After is had thickened, the mixture was strained and cooled. As far back as 2000BC, Egyptians combined the marsh mallow root with honey. The candy was reserved for gods and royalty.

Modern marshmallow confections were first made in France around 1850. This first method of manufacture was expensive and slow because it involved the casting and molding of each marshmallow. French candy makers used the mallow root sap as a binding agent for the egg whites, corn syrup, and water. The fluffy mixture was heated and poured into the corn starch in small molds, forming the marshmallows. At this time, marshmallows were still not mass manufactured. Instead, they were made by confectioners in small stores or candy companies.

By 1900, marshmallows were available for mass consumption, and they were sold in tins as penny candy. Mass production of marshmallows became possible with the invention of the starch mogul system of manufacture in the late 19th century…

In 1955, there were nearly 35 manufacturers of marshmallows in the United States. About this time, Alex Doumak, of Doumak, Inc., patented a new manufacturing method called the extrusion process. This invention changed the history of marshmallow production and is still used today. It now only takes 60 minutes to produce a marshmallow. Today, there are only three manufacturers of marshmallows in the United States, Favorite Brands International (Kraft marshmallows), Doumak, Inc. and Kidded & Company.”

On policy making and profit protection

TorrentFreak runs an inspirational piece, which touches upon civil liberties, policy making, and profits of the large companies involved in movie and music making.

The job of any entrepreneur is to construct a use case and a business case that allow them to make money, given the current constraints of society and technology. They do not get to dismantle civil liberties, even if they can’t make money otherwise. That goes for Blackwater Security as well as the copyright industry as well as every other entrepreneur on the planet.

Media landscape after 9/11

GigaOm runs an article on how much media landscape changed since 9/11.

But what strikes me every time I think about September 11 is how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news.

When the attack happened, we were still in pre-social network era.  No Twitter or Facebook or Google+.  And even though quite a few people had blogs, the majority of the news were still coming from the TV and newspapers.  For those of you, who don’t remember, most news websites were dead for a day or two immediately after the attack.  Slashdot – a popular IT news website which is very much used to having tonnes of traffic was on the edge of collapsing too.  Here is their article for this year with a link to the September 11th, 2011 archives.

I remember working in PrimeTel office at the time.  I was involved with a project that dealt with video walls and window TV ads in multiple branches of a client’s business.  I had a large 40-something-inch plasma TV mounted on a stand next to my desk.  I was working on a piece of software that would combine video clips and images into a continuous playlist.  I was using sample ads from the client as well as a bunch of landscape photography images for my tests.

Once the attack happened and most of the news sites went down, we established a public folder where all colleagues could drop images and videos they found anywhere on the web and those would get automatically added to the continuous video that was playing on the TV.  I remember it was quite something.  By the end of the day people from other departments and other floors started to come by to watch it.  I remember even the owner of the company came in for a few minutes.

What I couldn’t realize then was how social that thing was.  It wasn’t me or anyone else in particular.  It was a collective effort of a few people.  Each one would come across something and then share it in the public folder.  That was very similar to how social networks like Twitter and Facebook distribute things these days.  And with the last 10 years, it was proved several times of how well this works.

As Mathew Ingram notes in that GigaOm article:

Now try and think about what it might have been like if September 11 happened today, with ubiquitous smartphones featuring cameras and video and web access. Although cellular networks were overloaded in the aftermath of the attacks, some Blackberry messages got out of the towers — and today, we would almost certainly have gotten a real-time flow of tweets and images and video from people in the towers, at the Pentagon, even on the plane that flew into the ground in Stony Creek, Pennsylvania.

Update: Joe Wilcox of BetaNews also reminds that there was no YouTube back then.