Interstellar Economics

For those of you not subscribed to my Shared Items, here is some silly research on the economics of interstellar travel.

First Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade: When trade takes plaec between two planets in a common inertial frame, the interest costs on goods in transit should be calculated using time measured by clocks in the common frame, and not by clocks in the frame of trading spacecraft.

Second Fundamental Theorem of Interstellar Trade: If sentient beings may hold assets on two plaents in the same inertial frame, competition will equalize the interest rates on the two planets.

Worm-Free Lettuce

I'm considering doing my grocery shopping online, and I'll probably use this website (Hebrew). I was browsing it today, when I came across this - they charge you 1 NIS more to ensure your lettuce is worm-free.

Shared Items Feed & More

Hello guys, today we have several topics:

Shared Items

I finally really settled on Google Reader instead of a desktop feed reader. The advantage of being able to read RSS everywhere without any hassle outweigh the downsides. Also I get the benefit of easily exporting a Feed of Shared Items (both RSS and Email.

I think I will stop/reduce posting links to interesting items that I find on my RSS and instead just mark them as shared, so if you want to keep using my information filtering services be sure to register :)
In addition, here is a link to all previously shared items.

Google Notebook
If you've recently Googled you may have seen the "Note this" added to every link.



It's a useful new very useful. Upon clicking it copies the current content of said web page into your Google Notebook, a cool service that organizes your web clippings.
It opens up right on your search result page and has a full page interface as well.





Unfuddle free SVN hosting
If you're doing any non-trivial software assignment with partners, you should consider using source control. So far, I've used source control for large projects of course, but never in an assignment from Technion - back when I was an undergraduate student I was largely oblivious to source control and I didn't take any programming courses in my 2nd degree - until now. Now I actually have a few non-trivial homeworks at Managing Data on the WWW (writing an http proxy is one of them), and so far I didn't take up the trouble of setting up a source control. Well, it appears it is no hassle at all, at Unfuddle you can setup a project page, SVN server, RSS and email updates on checkins, project management and more in less than 5 minutes and no cost. Unlike some alternatives, putting your code there doesn't mean it's now open source and free to the world, you get control over who accesses your code.

TwoThree

This is a cute math game I'd recommend to anyone learning addition, and in general :)
You shoot two's and three's at numbers trying to subtract from them and get exactly zero.

User Generated Content

Now, on the map. Check out these three services:

• Twitter Vision - see what people are updating on Twitter all over the globe.
  
• Flickr Vision - For photos
• Wikipedia Vision - Only anonymous edits to Wikipedia.
  

Aya's Birthday

We've only had time this year to celebrate Aya's birthday with our families so far. We went to the Haifa Science Museum and then pick-nicked at Afek Reservoir. Here's how I had fun in the museum playing Tower of Hanoi in 40 seconds:



And for comparison:



The photos are on Facebook, for whoever wants to see:





UPDATE: Updated the link so people who aren't registered to Facebook can still view photos. Annoying how this is not the default, but inside the photo album there is a link that allows this.

Researchers Discover Gene That Blocks HIV

At Slashdot
a

Read one guys comment as he tries to explain the other techies why this is not yet a cure for AIDS:

"
*sigh* he's saying that this is one thing we might change on the program. A patch for the human code, say.

We only have a small problem ... the program is stored in a few trillion copies (all of which need to be changed), of extremely complex molecules (which we can't reliable modify (we can't even reliably read them) even when we have only 1 outside of the body).

Let's say it's this way. We have a patch for a flaw in your windows. Except it's on paper. And the computers won't boot until the patch is applied, so we need to take out the hard drive and *manually* change the bits on it. We have an electron microscope that *sometimes* has been used to change some random bits on the harddrive, which has once or twice resulted in a "mostly" correct change. Oh yes, and we have a billion computers, all of which still need to be operational after the change.

That's where we are. We know what to change (or so we hope), it's just ... "a bit" hard to get to the bits.
"