phyllostachys 59: Minute Tech 44 show notes

44 - What is Ice Skating?

Good morning, this is Alex Landefeld with episode 44 of the Minute Tech podcast -

coming to you for Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

On this tech podcast about the broader meanings of technology, we'll mention:

- Oil is up, Oil is Down, Imus is up, Apple is Down;
- What is Ice Skating?
- Toyboxcar Leads Me to Scribd.com.

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Minute Tech podcast is brought to you in part by:

Larry Tolbert's Sunday Morning Taiji - learning tai chi and qi gong 9:30 am every Sunday morning at the Dunamis Baptist Church, in Wilkinsburg, PA. "Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji" - e-mail leonardtolbert-[at]-hotmail-[dot]-com for more info.

And:

Ravelings, by Carol. Pittsburgh-region classes in needle-craft - encompassing crochet, embroidery, knitting, & tatting, as well as an associated lace collection. For more information, contact Carol at carolb207-[at]-alltel-[dot]-net.

Tech News:

Oil goes up, oil goes down. Very cyclical. Very Tao.

Bloomberg reports this morning that the spot price of crude oil is on it's way down again due to evidence that OPEC is stepping up production to avoid....for our sake, not theirs...continuation of $100 per bbl, and also in part due to the slight lessening of tensions over Iran. Why Iran, you may well ask? It seems that a US Intelligence report suggests that Iran's current ability to produce "the bomb" is not as near as originally feared. This seems a long way off from the turmoil surrounding the Valerie Plume episode of US Intelligence.

As of Tuesday morning in London, crude was trading down at $88.74 dollars per bbl, nearly 10 percent off the high close of $99.29 reached on November 21st.

In other news, "Chimps exhibit superior memory, Outshining Humans"...and "Don Imus Steps Gingerly on the Air". You may draw your own conclusions from that juxtaposition, provided inadvertantly by news.google.com.

Also, in Minute Tech 43 I mentioned that Apple is on the rise insofar as market share goes...but the stock sure tanked on Monday. Why is that - it could be many factors: a new patent-infringement lawsuit brought against Apple and AT&T for the "visual voicemail", regarding two patents from 10 years ago; the fact that NBC has officially pulled video programming from Apple's iTunes marketplace, since Apple wouldn't allow them to raise prices; or because, as Fast Company is quoted as saying in a ZDnet article, Apple is a hermetically sealed company in an increasingly interoperable world.

Tech Question:

What is ice Skating?

Wikipedia has a fine article on this. Suffice it to say that ice skating is the act of sliding along on a smooth surface of frozen H20 with rails of a hard substance strapped to the bottom of your feet, either for the purpose of hitting a little black pancake with a stick, of leaping with a partner in twists and turns, of sliding at breakneck speed around a tight racecourse, or for touring up a frozen river in search of adventure.

wikipedia lists five types of ice skates: Figure, Hockey, Bandy, Racing and Touring. The principle differences between hockey and figure skates is the serrated toe "pick" on the front of figure skates, to allow for certain jumps, spins and stopping maneuvers, and the uppers: hockey skates typically have hard plastic & leather uppers for stiffness, whereas figure skates are primarily leather, which still provides significant support.

Touring and Speed skating skates have blades longer than hockey or figure skating - touring skates may be designed to be attached to the bottom of the shoe or boot, and some speed skates have hinge attachements for the boot.

Bandy skates generally have a shorter boot, not covering the ankle, and wikipedia says that the bandy skate is designed to reduce injury to other players. Bandy is essentially field hockey on ice, with a curved-end stick and a bandy ball, as opposed to a hockey puck.


Podcasting - Blogging News:

On gmail this morning I got a notification that "toyboxcars" is following me on Twitter. Who? What? Following the link provided in the e-mail, I come across the Twitter home page of somebody following 201 people, with 6 followers and 0 posts. Why am I going to follow somebody who's not starting out with contributions, but just lurking? Toyboxcars, if you're listening, I'll follow when you've started contributing to the twitter-verse.

Toyboxcars did have one interesting item: he or she had a link to a page on a web site I'd never heard of: www.scribd.com. Scribd, with two primary slogans of "Publish yourself online" and "Scribd is for Writers" appears to be a site for publishing documents of various formats that you want others to read. The three big buttons on the first page are basically:

1 - Upload document - we accept all major formats - free unlimited storage!
2 - Share with the world: (a) Publish to a wide audience, (b) Get feedback from Scribd's community, and (c) Embed your docs anywhere on the web;
3 - Explore our Library: eBooks, Schoolwork, Sheet Music, Legal Docs, photos, Presentations, Zines, Poetry, etc.

Hey, this could be interesting. Looks like lots of abuse via spam, but also some useful stuff - a search on "wu style", ostensibly searching for anything on wu style tai chi, yields a long listing, including a PDF of Bartlby.com's The Sayings of Confucius...with selectable text. I'll finish with this except - I was able to highlight in the PDf, but not copy/past... remember to check out www.scribd.com:

The name Confucius is the latinized form of the Chinese characters, K'ung Foo-tsze, meaning, "The master, K'ung." The bearer of this name was born of an ancient and distinguished family in the district of Tsow, in the present province of Shen-tung, China, B.C. 551.

Thats all for today on Minute Tech podcast.
you can reach me at minutetech@gmail.com -
and my blog is at minutetech.blogspot.com

"Move with the motion of the planet - move with Taiji"

- Oil is up, Oil is Down, Imus is up, Apple is Down;
- What is Ice Skating?
- Toyboxcar Leads Me to Scribd.com.

Go to the Minute Tech iWeb page to subscribe or listen to this podcast: Minute Tech.