If you have a few minutes to waste...

Check out this creative and funny animation.

66,795 push-up's

That's exactly what Dan Ciruli claims he did this past year. His resolution for last year was to start with a push up on 1st Jan and keep adding one every day ending with 356 the last day of the year.

Reminds me of a story of a young man who could lift a bull, the story goes the young man started lifting the bull when it was just a little calf. He did so every day and as over the years as the calf grew and turned into a bull the young man could still lift him.

I am not sure if this legend is true. I do find Dan's achievement inspiring.

A memorable quote

Yvon Chouinard in Let My People Go Surfing: The Education of a Reluctant Businessman quotes Antoine de Saint Exupery, the French aviator.

Have you thought, not only about the airplane but whatever man builds, that all of man's industrial efforts, all his computation and calculations, all the nights spent working over draughts and blueprints, invariably culminates in the production of a things whose sole and guiding principle is the ultimate principle of simplicity.

It is as if there were a natural law which ordained that to achieve this end, to refine the curves of a piece of furniture, or a ship's keel or the fuselage of an airplane, until gradually it partakes of the elements purity of the curve of the human breast or shoulder, there must be experimentation of several generations of craftsmen, In anything at all, perfection is finally attained not when there is no longer any things to add, but when there is no longer anything to take away, when a body has been stripped down to its nakedness.

Jack's predicitons..

Jack Biddle a.k.a Southeast VC of Novak Biddle Venture Partners predicts collapse of Web 2.0 and ad supported business models. I am not sure I agree with him and his outlook for 2007, but I do completely agree with the last thought in this post. Working for passion, creating value, having fun and all that leading to monetary reward - now to me that rings true not just in the end of 2007; I think that is timeless.

My prediction is that by the end of 2007, people won't venture for profit. They will venture to do really cool things, because they can.

And 10 years later... the best of the best will get paid despite the fact they had the time of their lives.

Next generation newscast

Is it time for cyborgs to deliver all news? All automated with no auditing or editing from humans?

Check out News at Seven - a project by Nate Nichols and Sara Owsley, Computer Science graduate students at Northwestern University's Intelligent Information Laboratory (InfoLab ).

The site claims,

News at Seven is an automatic system that crafts daily news shows. It finds the news you are interested in; edits it; finds relevant images, videos, and external opinions; and then presents it all using a virtual news team working in a virtual studio. News at Seven is a uniquely compelling experience that can present traditional news--augmented with supplemental images, videos, and opinions from the blogosphere—all without human intervention.

Techcrunch has some comments on them, basically saying that they did not find it useful for anyone. Nonetheless the technologist in me is thrilled. It is a pretty good news product. Services such as News at Seven have the potential to form the bridge between the way *majority* of people across the world are used to consuming news and the evolving new way in which news is being delivered.