Weblog

As follows is a paraphrased clip from Michael Nielsen's "Is scientific publishing about to be disrupted?":

The problem is that your company has an organizational architecture which is, to use the physicists' phrase, a local optimum. Relatively small changes to that architecture ... don't make your situation better; they make it worse. So you're stuck gazing over at [a guy] ... who is at an even better local optimum, a local optimum that could not have existed twenty years ago ... unfortunately for you, there's no way you can get to that new optimum without attempting passage through a deep and unfriendly valley

Writes NPR Music,

If you ever have trouble remembering lyrics, Regina Spektor has a song for you.

"It's like forgetting the words to your favorite song," Spektor sings in "Eet," a track from her new album, [Far] . . . "It's more about the sound than the food intake," she says in reference to the phonetic spelling of her song "Eet." The spelling hearkens back to Spektor's childhood: She was born in Moscow and came to the U.S. at the age of 9. She had to learn English, and she initially knew words only by their sound.

Spektor learned how to play piano by practicing on a Petrof upright that was given to her mother by her grandfather. The family emigrated, when permitted, during the period of Perestroika, Regina had to leave her piano behind [1].

Mozilla's worldwide Real-Time download site graphs Firefox 3.5 downloads per second.

Labels: Firefox

This article pertains to Windows Vista. Users of Windows XP can find help here.

To find the version of the Windows Vista operating that's installed on your Windows PC, click:

Start / Control Panel / System and Maintenance / System

(I found this information on Apple's website, the number 1 Google search result on the day I checked.)

Labels: Vista

For those of us (newbies) who experienced great pains upgrading from 7.** to 8.** (and are still afraid to even think about upgrading to Ubuntu 9.04), this seems like good idea:

A project led by Canonical's Design and User Experience team to improve user experience in Ubuntu by identifying 100 small points of pain for users, or "paper cuts", and healing them!

Via ars technica, Canonical to boost Ubuntu usability by tackling "papercuts"

This Microsoft article describes how to remove the .NET Framework Assistant for Firefox from your computer. The article also describes how to update the .NET Framework 3.5 SP1 for the .NET Framework Assistant 1.0 so that the component can be disabled.

Here is what some of our chain-food favorites will cost us in time spent doing common exercises.