Jascha IS Me

Watched an interesting segment on 60 Minutes tonight on Sugar.

This is the presentation that spawned the above segment. Some convincing arguments to cut out as much sugar as you can.

I was thinking if I win the Mega Millions lottery tonight at $640mil what I would do to piss people off (just for fun). My first thought is to give my enemies $100k each in pennies. So I did the math:

A penny weighs 2.5 grams

100 pennies in a dollar

So in $100k of pennies there is 25,000,000 grams = 55,115.5655 pounds

Which is 27.5577827 short tons!

The average armored truck can carry 1.25 tons. So it would take 22 armored trucks to deliver $100k in pennies!

The FitBit

Recently I came across a newer gadget called the FitBit. It is a small clip on device to track your steps, calories burned, miles walked, and flights of stair climbed. The devices uses an accelerometer and a altimeter to determine the steps taken and logs the data to be synced when you are near the base station. This uploads the data to the FitBit site which has a nice SaaS  site to monitor and chart progress. You can manually enter food, water, exercise, weight, and other data points. FitBit also offers a robust API to tie in with 3rd party services like Endomondo, which tracks workouts via phone GPS tracking. Another interesting thing the FitBit does is measure one’s sleep by coming with a strap you put on your non-dominate arm which monitors restlessness to get a picture of how much restful sleep one gets.

Along with the FitBit I have also decided to give a targeted regiment of supplements and diet a try to see if it helps with my sleep and any other health complaints. So I am breaking it down into key parts:

• diet
• exercise
• sleep/relaxation
• supplements

These are the four high-level things I will be covering and looking at in this experiment. I have been using the “Paleo Diet” as the basic underlying for my food intake. Along with various supplements I will outline shortly.

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Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.

A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society. It requires a complex interaction between a handful of vendors—in all likelihood, a couple of dozen—and the ability to ship ingredients vast distances while keeping them fresh. The cheeseburger couldn’t have existed until nearly a century ago as, indeed, it did not.

Read more. . .

(Cross post from my Google+)

I have always been a die-hard paper book lover. Nothing to me smells better than a old used book store. But I have recently finally given in to the eReader boom. I have had a Viewsonic gTablet I hacked with Android Honeycomb for about 6 months. On it I have Kindle and started playing with it, downloading sample chapters and a few full books. It quickly grew on me. Then with the release of the Amazon Cloud Reader it has put me over the top.

I enjoy being able to highlight and notate things in the mostly non-fiction books I read. Along with being able to access the books from my phone, tablet, and desktop. Most books I read are technical or startup/business related so my notes come in very handy with the research I do.

Some things that won me over:

• Notations in-line of the books with notes
• The ability to make black on white text and vice versa (big plus when reading in bed)
• Ability to make multiple bookmarks to reference things previous
• Access to books from many devices at once
• Saving a tree or two
• Lightening my load when it comes time to move to another residence

My biggest complaint about Kindle books is the disproportionate pricing compared to hardback or paperback books. Many times the price is only a few dollars less.

A very interesting talk about ideas from William Baumol and Sir Harold Evans. Being that idea maturation is one of my prime research interests this discussion is especially of importance to me. The video is almost 2 hours long but well worth a watch even in increments.

I spend a good deal of time monitoring trends in patents and patent applications. Along with reading most any news articles related to patents. They can be a good gauge to determine future technological convergences and rates at which GNR is accelerating. More recently in the news there is much discussion of “defensive patents” and patent trolls who do not invent anything. They just own a lot of patent rights and make money by suing (or threatening to sue) startups and companies creating new technologies that may fall under their broad patents.

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I got a Viewsonic Gtablet as a birthday present a few weeks ago with the intention of hacking it with custom ROMs and getting Android Honeycomb on it. It is a good tablet being that the hardware specs are very similar to the Motorola Xoom at half the cost (seen as low as $275 new). The only downside to it is that the default Android 2.2 build that is on it sucks to say the least. Many 2.2 and 2.3 ROMs are available on XDA and Slatedroid to fit your needs.

The only real downside to the Gtablet is the bad viewing angles on the screen but this does not bother me too much since I am not using it to watch movies with others or something that would require more than just me looking at it.

I have finally got Honeycomb on it and am happy with it even though it is an Alpha release since it is a hacked ROM being that Google is not releasing the source for Honeycomb. So aside from a few bugs it is great. You can also over-clock the CPU to around 1.5Ghz with no real impact in terms of overheating using CPU Master. Once you over-clock the tablet screams compared to a Xoom.

A few posts ago I wrote about How Management Kills Innovation and wanted to touch upon this concept a little more.

I have been compiling some notes on ways to foster innovation and help turn around the lack of innovation in companies I have seen first-hand. This is a working copy basically that I will add to and tweak as needed:

• Have no more than 3 governing rules for a team
• Follow the Lean Startup ideas of Build -> Measure -> Learn and repeat
• Create an environment of experimentation
• 6 people tops per team
• Do not keep teams in a vacuum
• Promote cross-pollination between teams (openly share ideas free of fear)
• Customers decide on what the MVP is not the stake holders. Double down on what the customer wants and uses. Drop the rest.
• Ask the right questions (don’t put the answer before the question)
• NEVER allow process over innovation!
• Remove barriers to teams getting new products/features
• Individuals don’t build great companies, teams do
• 98% of meetings are a waste of time
• Just in time not just in case.