Todd Hoff

"So I went to Bret Victor’s session, arriving about fifteen minutes after he’d begun. There was an animated fish on the screen, and a worm on a hook, and sometimes bubbles, and sometimes a little wheel (that I later learned was a timing element). Bret was demoing the most recent iteration of his Dynamic Pictures research. The idea, as I understand it (and my understanding of it is just beginning, so this is all memory, exploration, interpolation, and probably full of mistakes and gross oversimplifications), is that math is not only about language, as in an abstract set of symbols, either mathematical symbols or programming code. Instead, math is also about geometry, visual representation that can move and be acted upon directly through a UI that nevertheless asks the user to think abstractly about what’s happening “concretely” in the visual representation one is manipulating." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

I don't know how it is to live there but it sure is clean and lovely. - Todd Hoff

"Meet the career con man who made a fortune selling illegal pharmaceuticals online—and pulled off a federal sting that forced Google to pay $500 million." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

It's hard to stop something when you are getting paid. - Todd Hoff

"A new, and potentially dominant, ruling class is rising. Today’s tech moguls don’t employ many Americans, they don’t pay very much in taxes or tend to share much of their wealth, and they live in a separate world that few of us could ever hope to enter. But while spending millions bending the political process to pad their bottom lines, they’ve remained far more popular than past plutocrats, with 72 percent of Americans expressing positive feelings for the industry, compared to 30 percent for banking and 20 percent for oil and gas." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"Methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus CDC/JANICE HANEY CARR A protein-lipid complex that naturally occurs in human breast milk can increase the sensitivity of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) and other drug-resistant strains to multiple classes of antibiotics in animal models, according to a study published yesterday (May 1) in the PLOS ONE." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"The entire ad placement network is one of the most complex computational systems on the planet. Behind The Banner is an attempt to understand the underlying interactions that define this ecosystem, and how they impact our daily use of the web. " - Todd Hoff

"The most hateful tweeters in the United States tend to live in the eastern half of the country, according to a new map that pinpoints hate speech from Twitter across country. The map, created by geography students at Humboldt State University in California, looks at more than 150,000 geocoded tweets (tweets that say where the user is located) between June 2012 and April 2013, sorting for those that contained a racist, homophobic or anti-disability word. The researchers then decided whether or not the tweet was using the word in a hateful way." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"Since we love open source hardware hacking as much as we love to share open source code, we decided to team up with the O'Reilly Data Sensing Lab to deploy hundreds of Arduino-based environmental sensors at Google I/O 2013. Using software built with the Google Cloud Platform, we'll be collecting and visualizing ambient data about the conference, such as temperature, humidity, air quality, in real time! Altogether, the sensors network will provide over 4,000 continuous data streams over a ZigBee mesh network managed by Device Cloud by Etherios." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"I bought a Tesla Model S earlier this year. It’s a dream car: comfortable, responsive, spacious, and great looking. It’s a total geek dream gadget, and I feel good about owning an environmentally sensible electric car. It’s 95% of the way to perfect – and it’s fun being part of the ongoing experiment to find the last 5%." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

This is what "trust" buys you. - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"When a group of genetically identical mice lived in the same complex enclosure for 3 months, individuals that explored the environment more broadly grew more new neurons than less adventurous mice, according to a study published today (May 9) in Science. This link between exploratory behavior and adult neurogenesis shows that brain plasticity can be shaped by experience and suggests that the process may promote individuality, even among genetically identical organisms." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"Three-quarters of our driving is powered by electricity. Even with the addition of the Volt, which we charge every night, we still don’t have an electric bill. We’re at the point where we’re much closer to using all of the electricity our panels produce, but we’re not there yet. And we’ve cut down on our gasoline expenditures as a direct result of both the car and the solar panel system, saving around $200 per month that we used to spend. That works out to $2,400 a year in gasoline savings and when added to the $2,500 in electricity bills we’re no longer paying each year, you get $4,900 in net cash flow savings. Divide that figure in to the net cost of the solar panel project and it works out to 5.96 years before break-even. Best of all, the payment for the Volt is slightly less than the Acura payment was, but I don’t consider that as part of the solar panel payback. There was a recent intangible benefit gained by the solar investment, as well. Just before we bought the Volt, we... more... - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

Man I wished I lived in a place where an EV made sense. Local energy production + EV = win - Todd Hoff

Within the memory reconsolidatation window if you train the brain to think a queue is safe then fear is gone more or less permanently. With CBT the changes are not permanent, stress can bring back your fears. - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

I still haven't watched this movie. Why does Azog (who should actually be dead anyway) look like a cross between the Na'vi from Avatar and Panthro from Thundercats? - Victor Ganata

I didn't like it either. Very cartoony. - Todd Hoff

"Mr. Moss, 57, a New York Times reporter who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the meat industry (he’s responsible for bringing the phrase “pink slime” to light), paints a fairly grim portrait of American eating in his book, depicting it as a never-ending meal of foods salted and sugared to extremes. Even snacks like pita chips and cereal bars, which wear the woolen ponchos of good health, are revealed to be as bad for you as Doritos or Snickers. To the problems Mr. Moss’s book describes, Mr. Pollan’s book offers a solution: cooking, the way to avoid frozen meals, fast food and any other product developed in the name of convenience." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"And it's hard to argue with their results. By attaching incredibly fine nanotubules to plant cells and drawing the electrons from them, the team has been able to direct the electrons down a wire as electrical current. Testing the strength of the current, they found that it was twice as powerful as electricity gathered from traditional solar cells of the same size. Not bad for a technology in its infancy. While the process of affixing nanotubules leaves a bit to be desired from an ease of use standpoint, the team at the University of Georgia envisions a world where our electricity needs are met by plant-based electrical grids. Houseplants could power our computers. Trees could keep our refrigerators running. If they're right, the future might just have gotten a whole lot greener." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"In this series, Barbara, a gardening friend who has a wealth of knowledge to share with us and has graciously done an extensive interview for this site, today she tells us about raising chickens, having a U-Pick garden for customers, the choice to raise goats, and her recommendations of perennial flowers and berries. Enjoy!" - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

Eh, I actually think the main purpose of speculative fiction (like any fiction or any art in general) is to examine the present, not necessarily to chart the path to the future. (If that were the purpose of SF, every work of speculative fiction is a spectacular failure.) If writers are creating dark dystopias, well, that's a reflection of the times we live in. - Victor Ganata

Dark like evil is the easy way out. Doing the harder thing is both more interesting and more rewarding. - Todd Hoff

"A 105-year-old woman from Richland, Texas says that the key to long life is bacon. Pearl Cantrell’s love of bacon is so strong that the Oscar Meyer Wienermobile made a stop through town last week to wish her a happy birthday, all because she told a local news station her amazing secret. “I love bacon, I eat it everyday,” she told a reporter for Abilene-based Big Country Homepage in April. “I don’t feel as old as I am, that’s all I can say.”" - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

"Women who engage in "fat talk" -- the self-disparaging remarks girls and women make in relation to eating, exercise or their bodies -- are less liked by their peers, a new study from the University of Notre Dame finds." - Todd Hoff from Bookmarklet

It's a hard thing, but if you can be confident and natural in your own skin the things you think matter most don't matter as much at all. - Todd Hoff

We found some locally. Released and eating away. Aphid perfidy will not be tolerated. - Todd Hoff