More Shocker

Work on the shocker continues. Check this out!

Stack Overflow

Awhile back a friend and co-worker showed my Stack Overflow. I never really got into at the time, but lately I have had need to ask some questions. Mostly, I really love the way they have organized the workflow and ratings of question/answer. It goes way beyond the email list thread idea. On top of that it is something of a social site as well. Your user gains reputation from posts/answers and voting. I was amazed at how quick I got answers but more than that how thorough people are to provide a clear and concise answer. The reputation aspect really encourages others to answer well.

Also, they are a service which uses Gravatars (see previous post).

Gravatar

Check out Gravatar! A very interesting concept of creating a persistent avatar that can be used with other web services:

In my early days at LLNL my co-workers called me "alpha geek" cause I am fairly knowledgable about a lot of software development and technical topics. I used to do ontology modeling with Stanford's Protege project and have always enjoyed the protege nerd that is their mascot. I "borrowed" him (I'm hoping he is under some sort of commons license) and twiddled him to match an idea I had to create the alpha geek. Mostly I wanted to make him look a little more like me so I shortened his glasses, put him in a T-shirt and put the greek alpha letter prominently in the middle. I then thought I don't claim to be a great teacher so I removed the pointer stick and replaced it with a thumbs up!

Here he is as my Gravatar. What do you think?

Are kids natural born physicists?

While walking to the park my daughter, walking ahead, looked down, pointed and said "Mommy, Daddy, look! My shadow!" Lori, then quizzed, "Mason, what's the difference between a shadow and your reflection". Mason, gave a barely a moment's thought, and said "There's no light."
Of course, when you think about it, it's a perfect text book answer. It may be possible that she was taught the definition at day care, and not really some miracle child, but in any case an answer like that coming from a three year old was enough to blow us away.