Invention: Self-Stirring Pot

Another addition to the list, Beautifully Simple Things I wish I had Thought Of (and that will probably make an enormous amount of money, a la Spanx):

Self-Stirring Whirlpool Pot

The Man's Library

100 Must Read Books: The Essential Man's Library (from The Art of Manliness)

I haven't reviewed the whole list yet but most of the ones you would expect are on it. I hope that it also reveals some hidden gems.

College Value, Part 2

In part one, we heard from Frank Bruni of the NY Times. Now, the engineers are speaking out. In IEEE's Tech Talk blog Prachi Patel asks, Is College a Good Investment?

Does it make economic sense to invest in a college degree? If you’re studying engineering or can get yourself into a private research university, especially an Ivy League school, the answer is a whopping ‘Yes!’... On average, engineering schools had ROIs of $603,362, more than double that for liberal arts schools ($245,943), and more than triple that of business schools ($141,014).

Emergency Get Home Bag

If you are stranded on a deserted island after a 3-hour-tour-gone-wrong, this bag probably won't help. But if your adventures are less 1960's sitcomy it might be a good idea.

Frank Deford, Sportswriter

I have always enjoyed Frank Deford's weekly radio commentary on NPR but I had no idea he has written, or done, so much.

Video: Civilization

In the tradition of Connections and American Experience PBS is airing Civilization: The West and The Rest, a companion TV series to Niall Ferguson's popular book by the same name.
If you are interested but don't have an hour, the author's TED talk (also an internet hit) hits all the high points.   

Rangers Lead The Way!

infidelsincorporated.com

Somehow this story flew under the Tako radar, but thankfully friend of the blog JR sent it over.

Army leaders have begun to study the prospect of sending female soldiers to the service’s prestigious Ranger school — another step in the effort to broaden opportunities for women in the military.

Leadership Lessons from Ike

The Art of Manliness: Leadership Lessons from Dwight D. Eisenhower #1: How to Build and Sustain Morale

Dwight D. Eisenhower had unarguably one of the longest and most taxing leadership roles in American history. For two decades, the lives of thousands, sometimes millions, of people and the fate of great nations hung on his decisions.
As Supreme Allied Commander during World War II, Eisenhower oversaw the greatest amphibious assault in history, organizing the largest air and sea armadas ever assembled and commanding 160,000 men in the momentous Operation Overlord.
After the success of that mission helped bring the war to a close, Eisenhower dreamed of going home to a happy and peaceful retirement. Instead, he went on to serve in five more globally pivotal positions: Head of the American Occupation Zone in Germany, Chief of Staff, president of Columbia University, Supreme Commander of NATO, and President of the United States of America.

States approve AVs

California is now the second state to make legal room for autonomous vehicles. 2 down, 48 to go.

Protect your Time

Good advice from Eli Broad: "Let's move on."

Time is the most valuable thing you have--and I’m not just talking about the minutes for which you’re paid. 

I try to be in control of all of my time--from the first hours after I wake, to the slower hours before bed, to all those little minutes that get eaten up by idle chatter during meetings. Being stingy with your time is the key to working 24/7 but still getting 8 hours of sleep, as I do almost every night. 

The best way to take control of your time is to know what you must do.
Thinking that everything is important, that every request from other people has to be answered with a yes, will make 24 hours seem inadequate. In fact, there are very few things that you truly have to do. This category should include only the things that make you run--the things you couldn’t live or work without. Nothing else comes close to being crucial.

Military-Business Cooperation

ThreatPost: U.S. Cyber Command Using Classified Intel To Scare CEOs To Action

The U.S.'s Cyber Command is using special, classified briefings with private sector CEOs to scare them into greater vigilance about the threat of cyber attacks

 This is a big step in the right direction for an inclusive and layered national defense.

Wise Browsing

Wired: How to Use the Internet Wisely, for Your Health and Your Country's

There's a lot of bad information out there online. This guide can help you avoid the crap and become a savvier citizen of our digital age.

The War is older than the Soldiers

The newest troops to deploy to Afghanistan can barely remember 9/11.

The newest wave of troops hitting the Afghan battlefields are 19 or 20 years old, meaning they were roughly between 8 and 10 when al Qaeda crashed planes into the World Trade Center, Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field. The fourth- and fifth-graders knew something big had happened but were often unable to understand why it mattered until years later. Such a mismatch hasn't happened since the country was founded, largely because its greatest wars have tended to be brief interludes, not semipermanent features.

Computers Do Lie

Two recent cases of banking IT errors illustrate the pitfalls of a computerized world. But what should be more concerning is the fact that the experts don't understand the errors.
Computers are making millions of decisions on their own and when they make a mistake we don't understand them enough to fix it.
Scary.

Bilingual is Better

A new study on the Benefits of Being Bilingual finds that in addition to being able to eavesdrop on unsuspecting strangers' conversations, being bilingual is very handy.  

-a team of psychologists led by Boaz Keysar at the University of Chicago found that forcing people to rely on a second language systematically reduced human biases, allowing the subjects to escape from the usual blind spots of cognition. In a sense, they were better able to think without style.

-The scientists also found that thinking in a second language reduced our cognitive inconsistencies.

-Nevertheless, learning how to cope with this constant interference – having to toggle back and forth between different forms of description – comes with lasting benefits.

Being able to communicate and relate to an entire group of people different from your own is pretty good to.

 

The Future (of cyber crime) is Now

It's not just your personal data that needs protecting, now your ideas are vulnerable too. Why steal a bank account number or diamonds from a jewelry store when you can steal a Billion dollar idea?

Kickstarter Data Breach Publishes 70,000 Startup Ideas

Be Active

healthveda.com

It doesn't take much to be healthy says Gretchen Reynolds, the author of “The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer,’’

Solar Powerhouse

Why SolarCity is succeeding in a difficult solar industry: The secret is using existing technology (from Technology Review)

After a steady stream of bankruptcies, poor earnings reports, and canceled IPOs for clean-energy companies, this week SolarCity bucked that trend by announcing that it had filed the necessary paperwork with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an IPO.

The key difference between SolarCity and many other clean-energy startups is that it isn't trying to take on incumbents with new technology. It makes money by deploying existing solar technology with a novel approach to financing...

Education Reform: MOOCs II

Harvard and MIT have jumped on the MOOC bandwagon and new startups are starting up everyday. 

"I believe we can work with a billion people around the world and change education in a fundamental way as it really hasn’t changed in 1,000 years," Anant Agarwal, who stepped down as head of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab to take the reins of edx, tells Fast Company.

The new nonprofit venture, dubbed edx, pours a combined $60 million of foundation and endowment capital into the open-source learning platform first developed and announced by MIT earlier this year as MITx.

Policing or War?

Richard Betts (via Abu Muqawama) on the difference: 

Some attempts to use force in this multilateral and limited manner – such as in the second phase of the Somalia intervention in 1993, “pinprick” punishments in Bosnia before 1995, or the initial assault on Serbia in 1999 – proved ineffectual and surprisingly costly. This was because the U.S. and NATO forces found themselves acting not as police suppressing individuals or small groups, but in acts of war, confronting organized mass resistance by force of arms. This was discomfiting to those who unleash force for humanitarian reasons because they do not like the idea of killing people and breaking things even for good purposes. They hope for clean application of force without casualties, or at least combat in which only the guilty are destroyed and large numbers of civilian deaths are an aberration.

Browse Wisely

This is you browsing the internet

Here is a solid article from the NY Times about maintaining some level of privacy when using the internet.  It covers tools and methods

The bottom line:

"Companies like Google are creating these enormous databases using your personal information,” said Paul Hill, senior consultant withSystemExperts, a network security company in Sudbury, Mass. “They may have the best of intentions now, but who knows what they will look like 20 years from now, and by then it will be too late to take it all back.”

“I have nothing to hide, but I’m uncomfortable with what we give away" 

Science and Entrepreneurship

The author talks about applying the scientific method to entrepreneurship.

Vice President

I think being Vice President would be better than being President. You get all the perks without most of the stress or headaches.
Apparently, you also have an 8 in 47 chance of being remembered for doing something that mattered.

Counterpoint to CJCS

In a counterpoint to out last post about the CJCS, Robert Goldich, former senior military manpower analyst for the Congressional Research service, thinks GEN Dempsey is a knuckle-dragger without vision:

I see official remarks and documents that seem to me to be nothing more than a stringing together of contemporary pop phrases in military-strategic affairs, dispensing conventional wisdom. There seems to me to be a lack of intellectual rigor in his published statements of policy. I found his first CJCS reading list to be amazingly puerile, filled with that most suspicious of categories of written material, best sellers on general booklists.

I think Goldich is an academic who's brain is getting in the way of his ability to see the world as it is.

CJCS on future conflict

I agree with Tom, this is good stuff from GEN Dempsey:

Video: McChrystal on Leadership

Shame Works

"...parking for a very handicapped person or a very inconsiderate (unscrupulous) person."

Full story over at Freakonomics.

Finally, a realistic notion of body armor--from the top

How does this guy move or fight back?

The deputy chief researcher from the Navy recently voiced his opinion on the extreme state of armor:

"A real warrior would like to go to combat with a weapon, a loin cloth and a light coat of oil.”

Here's the rest from Gear Scout:

Video: Current Big Wave World Record

On November 1st 2011, Pro Surfer Garrett McNamara set the current world record for biggest wave ever ridden, 78 Ft! And here is the video to prove it:

Insurgents and Gangs

Springfield, Mass., Fights Crime Using Green Beret Tactics, How is this news?

In early 2005, my unit in Iraq was replaced by a Army National Guard unit in which many of the members were cops. It is hard to believe that seven years later, law enforcement organizations are just now realizing that lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan can be useful.

Education Reform: Fractional Scholarship

The Rise of Fractional Scholarship and the Ronin Institute

Transportation Revolution?

We are excited about the promise of commercial autonomous vehicles but there is another, less popular,  advancement that promises to solve the problems with mass-transit in urban areas not addressed by autonomous vehicles: Personal Rapid Transit (PRT)

-"sort of like a miniature trolley or monorail, but utilizing much smaller, driverless vehicles that don’t run scheduled routes. The point is to eliminate the four main reasons people whine about mass transit: having to get to and from a station or bus stop; having to wait for the bus or train to arrive; having to make a bunch of stops and possibly change buses or trains; and being stuck with a large group of people who may be as crabby as you are about the whole ordeal."

-"PRT schemes call for cars to be summoned on demand, sort of like an elevator, and there would be so many cars in the system that you wouldn’t have to wait much more than 30 seconds for your ride."

Cord Cutting: Strike One

Silly cord cutter, you will pay for cable. Oh yes.

The rumors that Hulu may soon require subscribers to have a cable TV subscription is the perfect cautionary tale for why the companies that make and distribute content shouldn’t own the pipes that deliver that content. And if the rumors are true, it’s not just a cautionary tale, it’s the new playbook by which pay TV providers will force consumers to buy a special pipe for “the Internet” and a second pipe for TV, despite the fact that technically they are becoming the same thing.

Education Reform: College Value

Here at Tako, we keep our eye on modern education issues and The Imperiled Promise of College is near the top of the list. 

UBL, still winning

In a recent commentary, David Ignatius argues that Osama Bin Laden accomplished more for his cause than we realize. Highlights below.

Link Catch

I haven't been able to keep up with all of the post-worthy items lately so here is a list of links, eight arms full.

Death of Spy, Zipped Into Bag, Spawns Theories and Inquest (NY Times). Update: this is officially a murder.

The Wrong Celebrities

How many of these are really worthy of our interest?

This is amazing. I had no idea that I have so much in common with Simon Doonan. 

Soldier's Poem

We only want to take our wounds away 

To some shy village where the tumult ends, 

And drowsing in the sunshine many a day, 

Forget our aches, forget that we had friends.

By a lieutenant in WWI

Success in Afghanistan?

From Gary Anderson, adjunct professor at the George Washington University's Elliott School, via TBD: 

"we went in to rid the country of al Qaeda and associated foreign fighters. In 2001, the country was ruled by the Taliban, and they were giving sanctuary to Bin Laden and his minions; so we toppled their government, and put one in that would not tolerate al Qaeda [Tako: this is debatable]. In the process, we decimated the terrorists' haven there. That is pretty much where we are today." 

"The real benefit of the lessons we have learned in Afghanistan through the expenditure of much blood and treasure may be in keeping places from Yemen and Mali from getting to the point where Afghanistan was in 2001." 

"We haven't lost Afghanistan, it was never ours to lose, but we have given them a chance to decide what they are going to be. That's likely to be as good as it gets."

Help with eMail

Fast Company: 5 Simple Tools That Make Email Suck Less

Safe Driving App

App Tracks Your Teenager's Driving Habits

I will be needing this product pretty soon.

Wilderness Tracking

Greenside Tracking and Target Science

Domestic Drones

I bet you had no idea that so many organizations were flying robots over your head.

Physics and Religion

Theoretical physicist, Lawrence Krauss, set off the latest brouhaha between science and religion with his book A Universe From Nothing: Why There Is Something Rather Than Nothing. Prominent atheists loved it and others hated it. One of the most popular criticisms was a review in the NY Times written by another scientist. 

Krauss discusses his book and responds to the criticism in this interview with the Atlantic: Has physics made philosophy and religion obsolete? 

Autonomous Vehicle News

Honda is developing a system that analyzes your driving to minimize gridlock: PopSci and Wired

Google looks for a robot car producer

MIT: Human vs. Robot Car

Do robots make mistakes: Who is to blame when a robotic car crashes and  The real problem with driverless cars.

Would you pay $3000 extra for a car that drives itself? Hell yes.

New Intel Organization

According to the ODNI's website, the US Intelligence community (IC) is made up 16 different Intel organizations--each with their own mission. Soon it will be 16 + 1.

Back in 2004 the 9/11 Commission Report determined that the IC was unorganized and stove-piped. It recommended the establishment of the ODNI to take responsibility for the IC. A massive layer of bureaucracy was added on top of a notoriously bureaucratic community like the icing on a cake.

Well now the DIA is splitting off its defense-related covert activities to create a separate organization: the Defense Clandestine Service (DSC).

I hope this is a good thing.

Reader Poll: Transition vs. PAL-V

There are at least two different consumer products coming out to solve our problem of not having wings like a bird or at least a car like George Jetson.

On Saving Snail Mail

I am undecided on whether or not the US Postal Service should be saved or allowed to go the way of the VHS, but I thought this article from the Atlantic made a compelling argument. Here are some highlights:

The Postal Service Is a Civic Institution, Not a Business

the U.S. Post Office [is] older than the Navy, the Marines, and the Declaration of Independence 

The delegates to the Constitutional Convention of 1787 saw the operation of information channels as a core function of government: the power "to establish post offices and post roads" is one of the explicitly named grants included among the enumerated powers of Congress 

Should the Post Office cease to exist, we will lose the last public guarantor of free communication in the United States.

 

Record Skydive Suit

To keep you interested in the upcoming attempt at a 140,000ft free-fall, PopSci has a cool article on the flight suit that Felix Baumgartner will wear.