My Favorite Top 1% Statistics

I heard a great statistic this week on the top 1%.   12% of Americans are convinced that they are in the top 1%.

35th Anniversary of the movie Annie Hall

Today, Friday the 20th, is the 35th anniversary of "Annie Hall."  The Woody Allen movie beat out Star Wars that year and won Best Picture in 1977.   It is one of my all time favorites.    Annie Hall is an all time classic.

There are so many great lines from Annie Hall:

Alvy Singer: [addressing the camera] There's an old joke - um... two elderly women are at a Catskill mountain resort, and one of 'em says, "Boy, the food at this place is really terrible." The other one says, "Yeah, I know; and such small portions." Well, that's essentially how I feel about life - full of loneliness, and misery, and suffering, and unhappiness, and it's all over much too quickly. The... the other important joke, for me, is one that's usually attributed to Groucho Marx; but, I think it appears originally in Freud's "Wit and Its Relation to the Unconscious," and it goes like this - I'm paraphrasing - um, "I would never want to belong to any club that would have someone like me for a member." That's the key joke of my adult life, in terms of my relationships with women. 


Alvy Singer: I feel that life is divided into the horrible and the miserable. That's the two categories. The horrible are like, I don't know, terminal cases, you know, and blind people, crippled. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me. And the miserable is everyone else. So you should be thankful that you're miserable, because that's very lucky, to be miserable.

Duane: Can I confess something? I tell you this as an artist, I think you'll understand. Sometimes when I'm driving... on the road at night... I see two headlights coming toward me. Fast. I have this sudden impulse to turn the wheel quickly, head-on into the oncoming car. I can anticipate the explosion. The sound of shattering glass. The... flames rising out of the flowing gasoline.
Alvy Singer: Right. Well, I have to - I have to go now, Duane, because I, I'm due back on the planet Earth.

Alvy Singer: Don't you see the rest of the country looks upon New York like we're left-wing, communist, Jewish, homosexual pornographers? I think of us that way sometimes and I live here. 

Alvy Singer: Don't worry. We can walk to the curb from here. 

 

Alvy Singer: A relationship, I think, is like a shark. You know? It has to constantly move forward or it dies. And I think what we got on our hands is a dead shark.  

Alvy Singer: It's mental masturbation!
Annie Hall: And you would know all about THAT, wouldn't you?
Alvy Singer: Hey, don't knock masturbation! It's sex with someone I love. 

 

Alvy Singer: I remember the staff at our public school. You know, we had a saying, uh, that those who can't do teach, and those who can't teach, teach gym. And, uh, those who couldn't do anything, I think, were assigned to our school.  

Alvy Singer: In 1942 I had already discovered women.
[Young Alvy kisses girl in school]
Alvy's Classmate: Yecch. He kissed me, he kissed me. Yecch.
Miss Reed: That's the second time this month. Step up here.
Alvy at 9: What'd I do?
Miss Reed: Step up here.
Alvy at 9: What did I do?
Miss Reed: You should be ashamed of yourself.
Alvy Singer: Why? I was just expressing a healthy sexual curiosity.
Miss Reed: Six year old boys don't have girls on their minds.
Alvy Singer: I did.
Alvy's Classmate: For God's sake, Alvy, even Freud speaks of a latency period.
Alvy Singer: Well, I never had a latency period. I can't help it. 

 

 

Alvy Singer: [narrating] After that it got pretty late, and we both had to go, but it was great seeing Annie again. I... I realized what a terrific person she was, and... and how much fun it was just knowing her; and I... I, I thought of that old joke, y'know, the, this... this guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, "Doc, uh, my brother's crazy; he thinks he's a chicken." And, uh, the doctor says, "Well, why don't you turn him in?" The guy says, "I would, but I need the eggs." Well, I guess that's pretty much now how I feel about relationships; y'know, they're totally irrational, and crazy, and absurd, and... but, uh, I guess we keep goin' through it because, uh, most of us... need the eggs.  

I used the line below on Julie on our first date.  Luckily, she did not see Annie Hall two years earlier :-)

Alvy Singer: Hey listen, gimme a kiss.
Annie Hall: Really?
Alvy Singer: Yeah, why not, because we're just gonna go home later, right, and then there's gonna be all that tension, we've never kissed before and I'll never know when to make the right move or anything. So we'll kiss now and get it over with, and then we'll go eat. We'll digest our food better.

 

Five Year Anniversary of VT Tragedy

Today is the five year anniversary of the tragedy at Virginia Tech.

My thoughts and prayers go out to all the families, relatives and friends of those who lost their lives on April 16th, 2007 in this senseless tragedy.....

The picture below was on the Collegiate Times in 2007 at VT:

 

There is a permanent memorial at VT. The Collegiate Times has a nice article describing the memorial.

My memories of last April 16th started with a phone call from my wife. Julie called and said, "just wanted to let you know that John is fine." At the time I was on my SunRay reading email while on a con call when she called my cellphone. She never calls me during theday since she is a school teacher. "Why would John not be be fine?" I asked. She asked me if I was watching TV or listening to the news. Of course I was not watching TV or listening to the news. She explained what was going on. I immediately interrupted the Sun folks on the con call and quickly said, "I had to get off the call, there was a shooting at my son's school."

It was then that I turned on the TV and was shocked to see the peaceful and beautiful VT campus on the news. I started getting emails, phone calls from literally around the world checking on John. You sometimes forget in casual conversation that you mentioned something about your kids that your friends and colleagues remember. Every time a call came, I paused the DVR. I was getting the current updates from friend, colleagues\s and family all around the world via email and non stop phone calls. As the numbers kept rising, it became more and more surreal.

 My son John was working for the Collegiate Times during his freshman year.  He put together a very nice week long history of events starting on April 16th through April 23rd that shows what happened each day.

I can not imagine the horror the students and faculty must have felt. There was an article in the post today by Nick Miroff, titled, "A Year Later, Virginia Tech Is Still Healing" is a well written article worth reading. As Miroff points out:

"Virginia Tech students have learned to talk about it in shorthand, if they talk about it at all. This Story

• A Year Later, Va. Tech Is Still Healing
•  Special Report: Va. Tech Shootings 
•  Essay: In Blacksburg, An ER Physician Still Tries to Heal
•  Blog: Va. Tech Students Remember  
•  VT: One Year Later - Living With Cho

They do not use the words massacre, or

shootings, or rampage. They call it "April

 16th," and sometimes not even that. To
 say "four-sixteen" is enough. Everyone
 knows." 

I have been back to VT many times since April 16th, 2007 both as a parent and working for Sun Microsystems where I have given talks and brought down Sun's thought leaders to speak at VT's ACM where my son John is President.  Each time, the first thing I do is visit the memorial

          Governor Kaine has did a good job demanding there was the VT Task Force.  Governor Kaine stated:

"On April 16, 2007, Virginia Tech University suffered a terrible tragedy. Today, my thoughts and prayers are with the victims and their families and the entire Virginia Tech community.

"In the year that has passed since that horrible day, we have grieved for those we lost and prayed for the comfort of their loved ones. We have rejoiced in the recovery of those who were injured. We have been inspired by the unfaltering hope and Hokie spirit of Virginia Tech. And we have renewed our commitment to do even more to learn lessons from that day and to make our campuses and communities safer.

"As I think about the victims' families, I am at a loss for words to express what is in my heart. The courage and strength they have shown in the face of such tremendous, tragic loss is awe-inspiring. We have been inspired by the resilient Hokie spirit of Virginia Tech, both in Blacksburg and around the world. Since that tragic day last April, the unshakeable sense of unity and hope demonstrated by the Hokies has touched the lives of people around the world. Their focus on pulling together to support their school and each other in the days after the shooting, and their commitment to public service through the VT Engage program in the months that followed has moved us all.

"We still have work to do. A continued commitment to improvement is the best tribute we can pay to those who lost so much. And as we move forward, we will continue to be inspired by those in the Hokie Nation."

VT seems to have made the right changes. The VT Task Force seemed to not pull any punches when it came to how the University should have dealt with the events on the morning of April 16th, 2007. As the AP reported and I FULLY AGREE with Governor Kaine about purchasing firearms at gun shows. Virginia needs to get its act together.  This loophole is INSANE!

"Gov. Timothy M. Kaine proposed mandated background checks yesterday for everyone who attempts to purchase firearms at gun shows - legislation that he called critical to helping prevent future tragedies like the shootings at Virginia Tech. Many families of those killed or injured in the April shootings have called on legislators to close Virginia’s so-called gun show loophole, which allows people to purchase firearms from unlicensed sellers at gun shows without having to submit to background checks. Under current Virginia law, only licensed dealers are required to run background checks on customers.
“If by doing this, we can keep one family from having to go through what these families have suffered, it will be the best thing that the legislature will do this year,” Kaine said at Virginia State Police headquarters, surrounded by several of the victims’ families."

VA continues to be a backward state and allows the gun show loophole.   I also called into the Kojo Nnamdi Show when he had an anniversary show on the VT shooting.   If you go to the 11:52 mark, you can hear my statements and question that goes until the 13:14 mark.

 

"Courage is the first of human qualities because it
is the quality which guarantees all others."

Winston Churchill

The tragedy at Virginia Tech is still heart wrenching. As a parent of a VT freshman, it is still hard to comprehend the magnitude of this tragedy. There
were many heroes on VT's Campus on April 16th, 2007. Many
are well documented in the press.

There are five individuals who were behind the scenes
that are absolute heroes in my mind. Those five heroes are
the individuals who run online Collegiate Times which is
VT's main online paper and kept the world informed on the
latest breaking news coming out of VT on this senseless
tragedy. These five individuals were literally working
around the clock, giving up sleep to keep their fellow
students, parents, family, friends, faculty and the rest of
the world informed.

These five unsung heroes all have the "first of human
qualities" - courage. It would have been perfectly
understandable if these five individuals would have given
up when their servers went down. But they did not. They
had the courage to literally work around the clock to get
the server back up *and* keep the rest of the world
informed of the latest updates to one of the most of
horrific days in the history of our country. The five
individuals are:


Chris Ritter, Online Director
Tim Tutt, Web Developer
John Edstrom, Associate Web Developer
Gabriel Martinez, Associate Web Designer
Collin Smith, Multimedia Editor

One of the many amazing statistics is that the
Collegiate Times received up to 53 million hits by
early afternoon on Monday April 16th.

Wikipedia has a nice history of the Collegiate Times with the
picture that appeared on the Collegiate Times April 17th, 2007,
edition titled "Heartache."




Below are just some of quotes on the fantastic work that
these five unsung heroes did under
tremendous pressure.

The OnLine Newshour on PBS

"The Internet became a prime place for people to
get the news out of Blacksburg. The college
newspaper, the Collegiate Times, scooped the major
media, getting the story online, right after the
first shot rang out, and staying on it non-stop
ever since.

The 104-year-old paper received up to 53 million
hits by early Monday afternoon, forcing the site
down for a time. It also listed some of the dead
early Tuesday morning, prompting the New York Times
Web site and other news outlets to link to the
Collegiate Times."
The Shield - University of Southern Indiana Student Newspaper
"The information on the Web site is remarkable.
Besides the list of confirmed deceased, the site
provides a graphic map of the shootings, a photo
gallery, personal accounts and interviews and
related stories ranging from emerging donation
details to the impact on the nearest hospital. The
staff has handled the facts correctly, but not
without compassion, which is a difficult task.

The Collegiate Times editorial says, "When
considering the number of deceased victims, 32 is
devastating, but those lives are not just a number,
each one is a member of our community." Journalism
cannot be disregarded due to a personal tragedy,
since citizens rely on journalists for information.
Such journalists must remember, however, that
although horrific tragedies stir media attention as
sensational, there is nothing sensational about
human suffering and coverage must be conducted
tastefully.

Well done Collegiate Times staff.

To those that believe campus newspapers are a waste
of time and funding, let this tragedy serve the
purpose of proving the necessity of campus
newspapers nationwide."Chronicle of Higher Education

"National Public Radio is among news organizations
that have profiled and praised Virginia Tech
student newspaper, The Collegiate Times, which has
become a crucial source of information for other
reporters covering Monday's events.

The papers online edition, said NPR's Larry
Abramson, has grabbed international attention
indeed, on Tuesday The New York Timess home page
linked to the student publications list of
confirmed victims of the shooter. Mr. Abramson
also pointed out that Collegiate Times staff
members know how to mine Facebook for information
inaccessible to many older reporters who are
unfamiliar with the social-networking site." -WGHP Fox TV VIDEO:


"The team at The Collegiate Times, the campus
newspaper, will remain. So far, they have been
setting the pace for all journalists"Middlebury Campus


"The face of a crisis, the writers, photographers
and editors of Virginia Tech's student daily, The
Collegiate Times, transcended their roles as
college journalists to not only inform their
community, but to inform the world. With many local
news sources shut out, only limited comments coming
from Virginia Tech officials and an entire campus
on lock-down, the importance of these students'
work was heightened to an extreme. The written,
photographic and video posts to The Times website
throughout the day were among the most vivid and
honest portraits of the campus available. Working
from computers outside of their offices, the
students held nothing back, and produced a raw,
emotional narrative of the tragedy. Their reporting
was effective, critical and in every sense, brave."

Editor and Publisher


"While the editors of the student newspaper went
about their work with inspiring leadership,
internal communications by Virginia Tech
administrators showed the University was less than
fully prepared. As more and more details about the
sequence of events have been released, it has
become clear that administrators did not notify the
entire campus or order a full lockdown until more
than two hours after the first round of shooting
began. Whether or not any of the deaths in the
second round of shooting could have been avoided,
we should realize the need for all institutions to
prepare for the unimaginable. And in the face of
this shooting, college administrators everywhere
should recognize the need to share information with
their communities quickly and clearly, even as the
full extent of a crisis may remain unknown."


"The college paper at Virginia Polytechnical
Institute kept a running account of the tragedy
that struck the campus today, with more than 30
students gunned down in at least two areas of the
campus, a dorm and a classroom. The shooter is
allegedly dead as well, but not identified. It is
not known if he was a student ...

Here is how the student-run Collegiate Times
reported it, blog-style, with the most recent
posting first. A full article is now posted there,
which includes the note that police "are also
investigating if it has any relation to the recent
bomb threats on Tech's campus."


Seattle Post Intelligencer


"For unique reporting on the massacre read the
Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's student-run
newspaper."University Daily Kansan

"While news organizations like CNN have done a
thorough job in covering Monday's events, I'd like
to point the readers of kansan.com to Virginia
Tech's student newspaper, the Collegiate Times.
After overcoming early technical difficulty when
the news initially broke, they've done what I feel
is an admirable job as the student voice of the
Virginia Tech community.

In the process of learning about these tragic
events, be sure to not overlook the students
themselves. http://www.collegiatetimes.com"WRAL

"I found a couple sites with unique angles on this
story. One of the most interesting is The
Collegiate Times, which is VT's student newspaper.
Their staff apparently first reported this shooting
this morning. The server is overwhelmed right now,
but it will be interesting to check their coverage
in the days and weeks ahead."Forbes

"Monday's shooting at Virginia Tech provided a
grim, real-time stress test for the effectiveness
of Web 2.0 technologies. And on Monday, all of them
seemed to work: Information flew through text
messages, blog posts, Web sites, online videos and
social networking sites.

The Internet reacted to the event immediately--and
more quickly than Virginia Tech administrators, who
took two hours to warn students, via e-mail, about
a first shooting. The Web site of VT's student
newspaper, the Collegiate Times, crashed when
students flooded it after the first shooting. As a
replacement, students created a low-tech blog,
CollegeMedia.com.
It posted the first entry about the event at 9:47 a.m.,
minutes before the second shooting began."
Yahoo News

"The student newspaper, the Collegiate Times,
regularly updated its website proving to be a
valuable resource for the campus as well as the
national media."
Daily Californian


"And as this happened, students at the Collegiate
Times, the Virginia Tech student newspaper, were
able to live-blog the days events. The Web site
began the day with a post at 9:47 a.m. EST,
reporting Shots were fired on campus and
provided continuing updates throughout the day. The
entries of the papers staff provide an
illuminating window into the fear and questioning
that doubtless gripped the campus in those
uncertain hours."


"The Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's campus newspaper,
was the first media outlet to break the story Monday with
on-line reports of shots fired on campus."Manhattan Mercury

"No amount of on-the-job experience or education
could have prepared Kelly Furnas for what he's
faced this week in his capacity as an editorial
advisor to the campus newspaper at grief-stricken
Virginia Tech University.

.....

To be honest its been pretty much non-stop working
with the student newspaper I have not had time on a
personal level to sit down and digest everything
yet," Furnas said.

The Collegiate Times, Virginia Tech's campus
newspaper, was the first media outlet to break the
story Monday with on-line reports of shots fired on
campus.

"I can't put into words how proud I am of our
students," Furnas said. "They have provided
desperately needed information to their readers,
and they have done that with gusto. I think the
campus newspaper's reputation with the students
here has helped a lot."

The Age (Australia)

"'The school's student newspaper, The Collegiate
Times, filed up-to-the-minute online dispatches. At
4.44pm: "Police have confirmed that the shooter
took his own life." At 4.54pm: "University
Relations has confirmed 31 deaths at Norris Hall,
in addition to two deaths at West Ambler Johnson."Gulf Times

The Collegiate Times (its server quickly crashed
and a blog written by editors with messages from
students appeared instead on the web site of the
newspapers owning company), as well as to media
outlets around the world, including CNN and the
BBC. Regardless of where the contributions are
aimed, the back and forth on facebook.com and other
social networking sites are equally an instant and
new resource for news producers and reporters


NPR


"As reporters from around the world descend on
Blacksburg, Va., one publication stands out:
Virginia Tech's student newspaper, Collegiate
Times, is doing a truly remarkable job of covering
the story."

About 15 staff members were rushing to update the
site about every 15 minutes with news of the
convocation, shooting investigation and candlelight
vigil plans.

"We're getting like 10 billion phone calls,
everyone from Al Jazeera to tiny radio stations in
Iowa," Kendall said.LA Times


"The paper's scoops included eyewitness accounts of
the shootings, interviews with a classmate of the
shooter and a list of victims' names that was
posted late Tuesday. A reporter was one of the
first to question administrators about why they
didn't warn students during the two hours between
the two shootings Monday morning."
Poyneronline

"The Web staff for Virginia Tech's student
newspaper, The Collegiate Times, was also
scrambling for solutions after its servers crashed
around 10:30 a.m. the day of the shootings.
Online editor Chris Ritter's main goal was to get
the site back to its original state -- a large,
graphical and Flash-intensive homepage. When that
couldn't happen, Ritter and his staff opted for a
simple text page with blue background -- to ensure
they could communicate information quickly to
users. After that page continued to overload its
own server, The Collegiate Times tech adviser,
Scott Chandler, suggested that the staff use the
College Media server, the parent company which
hosts the publication's site.

Once the site stabilized on the additional server,
The Collegiate Times began posting photos and
videos to a third server usually reserved for
design research and development. To prevent
crashing again, a Virginia Tech server is now
hosting videos and photos for the site.

Monday night The Collegiate Times staff redesigned
its homepage from scratch to have a Web site that
was "intuitive and a graphically pleasing display"
of its special content for the shootings. The
Collegiate Times began creating breaking-news
multimedia when escaped convict William Morva shot
two police officers at Virginia Tech on the first
day of school last August.

Since then, Ritter said users are looking at the
Web for information more than ever before, and the
staff has adopted a Web-first attitude change."
Roanoke Times on CT:
Coping Through Journalism Video

 

Hopefully the healing will continue for those directly affected...

 

Multitasking: Paging and Swapping

Multitasking: Paging and Swapping

Apr 11, 2012

By  Dave Edstrom
NOTE:  This is an article I wrote for the April 2012 Edition of the IMTS Insider

In modern operating systems there are lessons learned from the concept of multitasking that can also be applied to human beings. These lessons have to do with how computer systems deal with limited memory to allow applications to exceed the amount of memory available, as well as how many applications can all run on the same system. Since both computers and humans have finite memory, I thought it was a topic worth exploring.

A brief discussion on computer architecture using simple math is necessary to understand the basic fundamentals. Disk drives are cheap and slow, whereas memory is fast but expensive.   Memory is sometimes confused with disk drives because both use capacity terms such as gigabytes. The big difference is access speed – speed in both the time it takes to go access memory, as well as the speed at which you can then transfer that data. We will concentrate on access speed because it is the most important of the two variables. It takes 200 nanoseconds (billionths of a second) to access memory, whereas it takes on average 9 milliseconds (thousandths of a second) for a disk drive to move or seek to a given spot on a hard disk.

Nanoseconds and milliseconds both sound fast. But, it is important to understand the magnitude of the differences, so let’s compare the access times of memory and disk. A disk drive accessing information at 9 milliseconds can also be stated as taking 9,000,000 nanoseconds. This means accessing information from disk is 45,000 times longer than from memory. Let’s put it in layman’s terms. We will round up the access time of memory to keep the math easy. Let’s say for comparison purposes it takes 1 second to go to memory. Keeping that ratio, a request seeking to a spot on disk drive would then take 12.5 hours. Now here is the kicker – your operating system is doing this THOUSANDS and THOUSANDS of times per second. This is why your best bang for the buck when buying any computer is to put your money into lots of memory. 

At the beginning of the home computer revolution, it used to be that the size of your program you were running could never exceed the available memory in your computer after you factor out the operating system and any start-up programs. Computer architects realized, from day one, that the speed and amount of memory is an absolutely critical component in computer design. The concept of virtual memory was applied from other operating systems to the home computer market back in the 1980s. Virtual memory is the memory management framework that treats RAM and disk drive storage in a similar fashion. The bottom line on virtual memory is it allows the amount of memory that all of your applications and operating system needs to exceed the amount of physical RAM in a computer. How does this work?

When you power up your Mac or PC, the first step is loading the operating system, all the necessary start-up programs, and finally the login screen. All of these programs move from slow disk drives to fast memory. When you start up your applications, the same process happens – slow disk drive to fast memory. If you keep clicking on software applications that you can run, eventually your PC or Mac slows down.

Is the number of applications limited by the amount of physical memory you have? No, virtual memory allows the amount of memory needed with your applications to exceed the physical memory. The operating system will allow you to keep starting up applications. We have all seen this before when a system has become just dirt slow. When a system has too many applications running, it slows down because it is “thrashing,” or is spending a good deal of its time paging in applications to run in physical memory and then paging out applications from memory to an area of disk called swap space so new applications can be paged in to run. A page is simply a defined size of a program or data.

Think of dividing applications into pages and your data into pages. These pages are read in before you need to run them or use them on your computer.  What does an operating system do when it realizes that it is spending too much time paging applications in and out? The operating system decides enough is enough and instead of paging in/out nonstop, it gives each application more time to run and to actually accomplish something. It does this by swapping out entire processes versus dealing with applications and data on a page-by-page basis.

Let’s look at another layman’s example of paging in and paging out of applications. Imagine memory is your dishwasher, your sink is your disk drive and applications are your dishes. If you have a huge sink, a small dishwasher and lots of dishes, you will spend every minute of every day loading, running and unloading the dishwasher. If you have a huge dishwasher, small sink and just a medium amount dishes, you will only need to run the dishwasher every other day. This demonstrates the importance balance in any type of system.

A more interesting question to ponder at this point is how does your operating system deal with the problem of having a memory shortage and how does this relate to humans?

When you are at your job and have countless tasks you are working on, if you are going from one task, to another task, to a different task, you are exactly like a computer’s operating system which is thrashing or spending most of its time paging in/out. Many studies have been done demonstrating that when someone is interrupted when doing a complicated task, it takes 8 minutes to reload all of the thoughts to get back to the same point you were at prior to the interruption.

While having lunch with my good longtime friend Brian Raymor in Seattle, the topic of human multitasking came up. Brian was kind enough to send me the Multitasking Stanford Study done  and conducted by Stanford researchers Eyal Ophir, Clifford Nass and Anthony Wagner. The article was written by Adam Gorlick and Jack Hubbard.

It is a great study. The link above also has a video with it. This is a must read article in my opinion. There is a great statement made in the video, "multitaskers are lousy at multitasking."

Here are a couple of points from the article:

"High-tech jugglers are everywhere – keeping up several e-mail and instant message conversations at once, text messaging while watching television and jumping from one web site to another while plowing through homework assignments. But after putting about 100 students through a series of three tests, the researchers realized those heavy media multitaskers are paying a big mental price.”

"They're suckers for irrelevancy," said communication Professor Clifford Nass, one of the researchers whose findings are published in the Aug. 24 edition of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Everything distracts them."

The recommendation to reboot or start killing off applications are the two most obvious suggestions to make your system responsive again. How do humans stop paging, reboot or kill off applications? Bottom line is your memory and your computer’s memory are both very precious.  You’re not a computer, but you have a lot in common with computers – balancing the number of tasks, setting priorities and not getting caught up where you are doing nothing but paging in/out tasks is critical. Even an operating system understands the difference between being busy and being productive and so should you.

String Theory Simplified - Video

I thought this very short video was quite creative in describing string theory.

Is Sugar Toxic? 60 Minutes Special

I thought this special 60 Minutes had on sugar was very interesting.

A calorie is not a calorie....   Checkout the Small Dense LDL that are associated with heart disease graphics if you want to change your diet.  Limiting sugar can help reduce cancer according to this special as well.   Turns out sugar is very addictive.  It goes back to the age old phrase, "everything you know is wrong - again".

Akhil, Kevin and Tim at Hilton Head Redfish and Shark Fishing

During spring break, we went to Hilton Head, SC and stayed at Vallemare at Palmetto Dunes.  We brought along my youngest son Tim and his good friends Akhil Gowda and Kevin Taggart.   We had a place right on the ocean.  We did all the normal beach stuff including jet skiing, skim boarding, boogy-boarding as well as fishing in Palmetto Bay.   Below (from left to right) is Tim, Kevin and Akhil and they are on the Mighty Mako with Captain Dave Fleming.

Above is Akhil reeling in a monster Redfish.  Below is Akhil holding the huge Redfish he caught.  It was so big, Captain Dave Flemming pulled out HIS camera to take a photo.

Above is Kevin catching a Bull Shark.  Kevin brought it up to the boat and the Captain decided not to use a net and it slipped out of his hands, but it absolutely still counts as a catch for Kevin.
 


Above is Tim catching a Shovelhead shark.

Above is Tim holding his Shovelhead shark he caught.   Tim did catch a record flounder a couple of years ago in Ocean City, MD.  Here is the link and below is the photo from the Coastal Fisherman.