Skydiving

I jumped out of a plane at 13,000 feet last Sunday. It was amazing. Tara and the kids watched from the ground as I landed. We swooped in and landed 10 feet in front of them. They were all really excited to see me.

Why

Kelly wrote a great blog post about product reinforcement at the 3Ones blog. It’s inspired by the Simon Sinek’s TedX talk. Here’s the video of his talk:

http://video.ted.com/assets/player/swf/EmbedPlayer.swf

I think I posted it here previously. I’m a huge fan of Sinek. Go buy his book “Start With Why“. This guy actually called Kelly to personally thank him for the evangelism. I love personal touches like that.

In conclusion, here’s a photo of my leg.
Aaron Fulkerson's LegNo reason other than it’s an awesome photo and Kelly included it in his blog post. 🙂 Kevin Baird snapped the photo at a wine event MindTouch hosted in San Diego a couple years ago.

Sentient Machines

A senior astronomer has said that the hunt for alien life should take into account alien “sentient machines”.

via BBC News – Alien hunters ‘should look for artificial intelligence’.

Coincidentally, just last week at work I quoted Terry Bisson’s 1990 short story: “They’re Made Out Of Meat“.

It’s very short and starts like this:

“They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“Meat. They’re made out of meat.”

“Meat?”

“There’s no doubt about it. We picked up several from different parts of the planet, took them aboard our recon vessels, and probed them all the way through. They’re completely meat.”

“That’s impossible. What about the radio signals? The messages to the stars?”

“They use the radio waves to talk, but the signals don’t come from them. The signals come from machines.”

“So who made the machines? That’s who we want to contact.”

Read the whole thing, it’s great.

“Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!”

Russia in color, a century ago – The Big Picture – Boston.com

Earlier today I found this photo log of the Russian wildfires on Boston.com: http://bit.ly/azxrOC. They’ve also posted color photographs taken between 1909 and 1912 in Russia by photographer Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (1863-1944) who undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire with the support of Tsar Nicholas II. These are fantastic.

Armenian woman in national costume poses of Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin, circa 1910.

An Armenian woman in national costume poses for Prokudin-Gorskii on a hillside near Artvin (in present day Turkey), circa 1910. Google Map, (Prokudin-Gorskii Collection/LOC)

via Russia in color, a century ago – The Big Picture – Boston.com.