Michael McDaniel’s Dawning Awareness

Like most of you, I was taught that there’s no such thing as centrifugal force: the outward force you perceive is the thwarting of your bodies tendency to continue in a straight line.

Finally, my smug (but also cool) physics teacher, Mr. Gonzalas, is put in his place:

xkcd on centrifugal force

If you live in the Seattle area and you like Bruce Hornsby, you owe it to yourself to see him live. He’s playing Chateau Ste. Michele Saturday night at 7. Tickets are a little pricey at $33 for lawn seating, but it’s a great night of music!

Hansa
Originally uploaded by mdm.
Photo: Barb Feldon

Hansa was the first elephant born at Seattle’s Woodland Park Zoo. We saw her within a week of her debut to the public, waiting in a very long line to spend a few minutes watching her in the elephant barn. We’ve enjoyed seeing her during our visits to the zoo, and I particularly remember her walking along kicking a laundry basket with her hind legs as if she were playing kick-the-can. She had a sense of humor and a winning personality.

During our recent trip to the zoo, we saw Hansa playing outside with her mother, Chai. She was rolling her big orange ball around and seemed to be doing just fine. Nine days later, she died.

Hansa brought much joy during her 6 years of life. She is missed.

Baby Sumatran Tiger
Originally uploaded by mdm.

Went to a very crowded zoo, but lucked into seeing the baby tiger right before they closed up for the day.

Guy Kawasaki today published Ten (or so) Questions with Richard Stearns, President of World Vision. I love getting insight into why people do what they do, and this interview was chock full of that. Highly recommended.

Question: What’s the biggest obstacle to get rich people to care about poor people?

Answer: The obstacle is that poverty is often not personal. If your next-door neighbor’s child was dying and you could save her for $100, you wouldn’t think twice. But a child 10,000 miles away whom you have never met, that’s just different.

About 29,000 kids die every day of preventable causes–29,000! These kids have names and faces, hopes and dreams. Their parents love them as much as we love our kids. We’ve got to make poverty personal. Stalin once said: “A million deaths is a statistic, one death is a tragedy.” We must try to see the face of the one child.

We drove up to Mt. Vernon for the Skagit Valley Tulip Festival this past week. The tulips were all ablaze and it was a great day to go - not too sunny and not raining. Lovely soft light for taking pictures. Of course, with the kids along, there wasn’t much of THAT to be done. Still, we had a fun time, and the kids like their tulips, so we HAD to go!

Saw Music & Lyrics tonight. Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore in a movie only they could have starred in. Imagine classic Hugh and classic Drew and make him a has-been songwriter and her a plant waterer and then go from there. It practically writes itself!

Seriously, though, it’s a great date movie, and I was chuckling most of the time. Definitely recommended.

Here’s a great article by the founder of Apple’s Human Interface Group. He argues that no individual detail about the iPhone is revolutionary, but that it’s about integration:

What’s important is that, for the first time, so many great ideas and processes have been assembled in one device, iterated until they squeak, and made accessible to normal human beings. That’s the genius of Steve Jobs; that’s the genius of Apple. It’s also speaks to the limited vision of the cell phone industry.

Well worth a read if you want to understand why Apple is brilliant.

[via TUAW]

I’ve been looking for something like this for a long time. Back when I was DJ-ing in college, we used to categorize songs into up (fast), medium, and down (slow). We did that because we thought back-to-back slow songs was going to turn users off. So we had this basic pattern (UMDUM) between commercials.

When I shuffle iTunes music by genre, for example, there’s no analysis of the upness or downness of songs. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could pick songs by tempo or heaviness of beat?

Enter Tangerine from Potion Factory. It quickly analyzes your iTunes library and notes beats per minute and beat intensity. You can then pick songs and export those playlists back to iTunes. Slick!

It’s a beta now, so it’s free to download. Send in a bug report or blog about it and they’ll send you a license when it is released. Very nice. AND, they have the coolest icon EVER!

(via TUAW)

My friend Carol’s daughter Erin has just started working as a janitor. At McMurdo Station in Antarctica! She’s really enjoying it so far and is keeping a blog of her experience and posting some awesome pictures. Check it out!