and a perfect location on the Memorial Union Terrace.
Race for the Cure Photos
North Rim, Grand Canyon: California Condor
The Key Ingredients for a “Great City”
Paul Graham ruminates on the essence of a technology hub:
I think you only need two kinds of people to create a technology hub: rich people and nerds. They’re the limiting reagents in the reaction that produces startups, because they’re the only ones present when startups get started. Everyone else will move.
Do you really need the rich people? Wouldn’t it work to have the government invest in the nerds? No, it would not. Startup investors are a distinct type of rich people. They tend to have a lot of experience themselves in the technology business. This (a) helps them pick the right startups, and (b) means they can supply advice and connections as well as money. And the fact that they have a personal stake in the outcome makes them really pay attention.
Bureaucrats by their nature are the exact opposite sort of people from startup investors. The idea of them making startup investments is comic. It would be like mathematicians running Vogue– or perhaps more accurately, Vogue editors running a math journal.
Grahams words are a must read for local politicians. Madison’s (Wisconsin) biggest challenge with respect to new business development is it’s parochialism. Living in San Francisco years ago, I was impressed by the general willingness to try new things and take risks. We have a world class University, lots of bright citizens but not so many people willing to take financial and career risks.
Email Addresses to Steer Snail Mail?
The U.S. Postal Service was recently asked to start delivering packages and letters based on someone’s e-mail rather than street address.
he request is from Los Angeles-based Inventerprise LLC, which wants to conduct a trial run of its so-called Shelmail e-mail-to-snail addressing system sometime in 2008.
The Shelmail proposal is noteworthy because it suggests that e-mail addresses are a better means of delivering physical mail than what the postal service uses now.
Put another way, Shelmail questions just what constitutes someone’s “address” nowadays. For now and probably decades going forward, it’s a description of a physical location, in the form “101 Second Street, San Francisco, Calif., 94105.”
An answer in search of a question?
Garden Blogs
Including Adventures in my Urban Garden.
Vivisimo Criticizes Search Engine Personal Data Collection
Mr Valdes-Perez is also a critic of the behavioral technologies that the large search engine companies use to try and improve the search experience by collecting personal data. Clusty.com does not collect any user data which means that there can be no privacy breaches, accidental or subpoenaed.
“Users search based on their whims at the time, and not on past behavior. It is much better to provide a user with several options on what they are searching for and allow them to choose,” he says.
Hickman Bridge
N 38? 17.470′ W 111? 14.004′
Best 2006 Car Deals
Chop isn’t the only one hacking prices down to size. Car buyers remember 2005 as a goldmine for car deals, because major American manufacturers, including General Motors (nyse: GM – news – people ) and Ford Motor (nyse: F – news – people ), made employee-pricing plans available to the public for a period of time. In comparison, 2006 has been something of a letdown so far, at least from the consumer standpoint. But the year is still young, discount deals are out there and the domestics might have these kinds of fire sales again.
Don’t Stop….Start
If you want to change something in your life, it’s common to try to stop the behaviors you don’t like. While this certainly seems logical, it seldom works. The reason is simple – it unintentionally creates a vacuum where the old behaviors used to be. And since nature hates a vacuum it will fill it with anything it can find – usually the very behaviors you’re trying to stop since they’re so familiar. Instead of stopping certain behaviors, try focusing on what you want to create – and the new behaviors you need to get there. Eventually, with practice, new behaviors will develop enough muscle to naturally replace the old ones.