Author: peteware

Technology

Solar System to Scale

peteware

If the Moon Were Only 1 Pixel A tediously accurate map of the solar system

In line with an earlier post talking about the the scale of the solar system checkout if the moon were 1 pixel gives you a visceral feel for the size of the solar system.   I only made it out to Saturn.  It took a long, long time to scroll.
It makes you imagine how long an interplanetary trip would take.  There is a lot of nothing. It was so boring just scrolling for a few minutes. Just black. No air.

  • Traveling from Earth to Mars would take about seven months.  
  • Earth is at 150M km;
  • Mars is at 225M km.
  • Jupiter is a 13 month trip and is at the kilometer marker 750M. No rest stops.
Technology

Tech firms conspire to drive down wages

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From How Silicon Valley’s most celebrated CEOs conspired to drive down 100,000 tech engineers’ wages:

In early 2005, as demand for Silicon Valley engineers began booming, Apple’s Steve Jobs sealed a secret and illegal pact with Google’s Eric Schmidt to artificially push their workers wages lower by agreeing not to recruit each other’s employees, sharing wage scale information, and punishing violators.

…
The secret wage-theft agreements between Apple, Google, Intel, Adobe, Intuit, and Pixar (now owned by Disney) are described in court papers obtained by PandoDaily as “an overarching conspiracy” in violation of the Sherman Antitrust Act and the Clayton Antitrust Act, and at times it reads like something lifted straight out of the robber baron era that produced those laws.

And don’t forget how H1B visa’s essentially limit immigrants ability to change jobs for a better salary and drive down non-immigrant wages with a lower salary employees.

Technology

Solar System

peteware

Here is a table if you wanted to make a scale version of the solar system. It’s based on making the Earth a 1in sphere and then gives how far from the Sun each planet should be and how big of a ball to use for each planet.
This is from frink a programming language based on accurate representation of units. If you are into really nerding-out take a look at the unit data which describes lots of possible unit conversions.

Name Distance from Sun Diameter
Sun 9 feet, 1.3 in
Mercury 378 feet, 8.8 in 0.383 in
Venus 707 feet, 7.6 in 0.95 in
Earth 978 feet, 4.5 in 1.0 in
Mars 1490 feet, 8.8 in 0.533 in
Jupiter 5090 feet, 3.7 in 11.221 in
Saturn 1 miles, 4068 feet 9.46 in
Uranus 3 miles, 2936 feet 4.012 in
Neptune 5 miles, 3011 feet 3.887 in
Pluto 7 miles, 1715 feet 0.178 in

Scaled speed of light: 1.337 mph

Technology

rdio.com: Using rdio and collections

peteware

How to use rdio.com?

Collection

The collection is like your record/cd collection. It’s nice for browsing. You can use it to impress people with its size, or variety, or depth of your 80’s music. Whatever you like. Rdio’s algorithms use it to help suggest other music.
It’s nothing like your physical record/cd collection because nothing has to be in your collection for you to listen to it. You can listen to an album by searching for it, or see someone else is listening to an album, or that it’s popular. Just click to play to listen as easily as as if it was in your collection.
You can add individual songs to your collection, entire albums, or every album by Duran Duran. It doesn’t take up any disk space; it doesn’t cost you anything more; you don’t run into some limit on the number of songs. Adding to your collection has zero cost and similar worth.
The Collection is a traditional way of organizing your music.

Technology

rdio.com: Using rdio and playlists

peteware

More on how to use Rdio

Playlists

Playlists offer the ultimate flexibility — it’s the modern version of a mix-tape. You can make your own Duran Duran “Greatest Hits” album — it’s just called a playlist instead of an album. You can have as many songs on your playlist as you want: “My favorite 50 Duran Duran songs” or “My favorite 500 songs”.

Screenshot 11 21 13 11 02 PM 5

A song can be on as many different playlists as needed.
I have a couple standard playlists. The one I listen to the most:

  • “Dark”: Whenever I find something new (or old) that I like a lot I put it here. I usually keep it around 20 songs. After I get tired of something I move it to one of the following playlists for old favorites.

When I run into an old favorite I’ll put it onto a playlist organized by decade. That’s because it tends to be a “objective” way for me to organize songs. The answer to “is this rock or alternative” seems to change day-to-day for me.

  • “60’s”
  • “70’s”
  • “80’s”
  • “90’s”
  • “naughts” (2000’s)
  • “10’s”

I have a few playlists for occasions:

  • “Pre-Dinner” for before a dinner party
  • “At Dinner” while eating
  • “Post Dinner” for some louder, funner music.
  • “Sunday Morning” some classical music

I have a playlist that I just dump stuff on to listen to later:

  • “Try This”

You can also just add music to your “Up Next” list. More about that later.
Then I have some silly project playlists:

  • “Sidereal Days” I was collecting songs from a book about the early days of Rock&Roll
  • “NYC” Songs about New York City.

Feel free to create playlists however you like to think about music. You are no longer bound by the constraints of the album.