Disposable cups are better to the environment

An interesting paper conducted by a University of Victoria professoer in 1994: Reusable vs. Disposable Cups(http://www.ilea.org/lcas/hocking1994.html).

There are many arguments like this one, which teaches us not to judge by its sterotype image, in this case; disposable cups are bad to the environment.

Dropbox, it's huge

I wrote a relatively lengthy article about Dropbox a couple days ago, and to my surprise and joy, the article has drawn so much attention from our readers. I was a bit worried that not as much readers would appreciate the huge potential that this venture company possesses as I do. The result; I saw the most huge response on a famous Japanese social bookmark service. Even though virtually nobody knows about Dropbox even in the US at this moment, it could have a gigantic impact on computing. It could change the whole picture of consumer computing. Go check this demonstration movie by yourself, if you are a techie. They'd blow you away. The idea, services and technologies are not necessarily impressive on their own, but just imagine what could be done with it. One example which occured to me as soon as I knew the service was putting your photos directly to your local Windows folder to publish them on Flickr. You can edit those pics without downloading and uploading them each time. Now, who needs a local hard drive? They are woking on Web APIs.

I'm too lazy to translate my Japanese article, but it contains a whole lot more info that I heard from the CEO via email. He seemed like a nice guy and revealed the technologies that they use or developped on their own.

Does age matter? Sure, of course

Here's a blog entry which contains an interesting graph: http://blogs.yahoo.co.jp/pingpongjuggler/16895006.html.
(The text is written in Japanese, but it should cause no problem).

This graph shows the progresses of 5 ball cascade by hobby jugglers, who are a father and the son, 38 and 11 years old respectively. The number on the X axis is the number of days past, and Y axis shows the best record(the number of catches).

The father is the pink, and the green is the kid. As you can see, the kid has been making a bit faster progress, however, I don't think the difference is significant considering the fact that the father practices less while the kid practices long hours after school.

Having said that, I lately saw a graph of visual acuity in general population, which shows an undeniable fact that the ability to catch fast moving object peaks out at the age of around 21-23 and then slowly goes down with age. Memory, whatever it means, should play a significant role in learning a pattern, and we all know that it decays slowly as you age.

Having a positive attitude may be an essential key that keeps someone going, but if every factor is the same, age must be a defining factor. ``Hell, age doesn't matter!'' sounds nice, but it would be just a non-sensical bullshit if you mean what it literally means.

DxO Optics Pro rocks!

OMG, DxO Optics Pro rocks! Here's some photos corrected by the superb software. Put the mouse cursor on the photo and you will notice the differenc beteween before and after the correction I'm using Nikon D80 and Nikkor VR 18-200, which suffers from annoying distortion.

http://d-code.org/blog/archives/2007/04/dxo_optics_opti.html