Y. Karp? Why Not!

The question "How many people keep a daily journal" on  Askville by Amazon provoked responses that range between "more people" and "less than half". Whatever the real number, people have been keeping diaries for hundreds of years. Wikipedia says that a work called To Myself by Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius could possibly be one of the first diaries ever written. One might think that keeping a diary is a more feminine passtime. However, the appropriately named website, artofmanliness.com, provides a short list of famous men who kept a journal: Theodore Roosevelt Thomas Jefferson Charles Darwin Benjamin Franklin Lewis and Clark Andrew Carnegie Ralph Waldo Emerson Captain Cook Winston Churchill Sir Edmund Hilary Sir Ernest Henry Shackleton artofmanliness.com gives three main reasons to keep a journal: Your children and grandchildren will want to read it. It can bring you to your senses. Journaling grants you immortality ( Woody Allen : ...

In a conversation with the Mars Curiosity team at NASA, US President Barack Obama asked them to call him if they find aliens . Later on he said: It’s really what makes us best as a species – the curiosity we have, yearning to discover, the pushing boundaries of knowledge. But these sentiments don't jive with his proposed 2013 budget, which includes drastic cuts to NASA funding . In his opinion, government-funded space research and exploration (even with its valuable tie-ins with military advancement) should not be the government's concern. Despite the obvious advantages to the economy and defense, space is just not a priority. But Obama has badly misread the landscape. The world is abuzz with space news: the Curiosity mission to Mars (Aug 2012) the death of Neil Armstrong (Aug 2012) the international space station (Sep 2012) the retirement of the Space Shuttle Endeavor (Sep 2012) amazing images beamed back from Voyager 1 from the edge of interstellar space (S...

For the past few weeks I've been zipping around town in my brand new Hyundai i800 CRDi 2012. The nine-seater car was converted from the commercial version to a passenger vehicle to accommodate a pneumatic wheelchair lift. The back panels were removed and tinted windows were installed. A proper floor and ceiling were put in the back, along with air conditioning and seats. For all intents and purposes, you can't tell that this was once a commercial vehicle.   Purrs Like a (Large, Overweight) Kitten The i800's build quality seems very good. The internal fittings are simple, but the car seems to be constructed solidly. The only rattling sounds come from the wheelchair lift, which has so many moving parts, it can be forgiven for groaning a bit when I hit a bump in the road. Road noise is higher than I would have expected, and the diesel engine isn't very quiet, but it's by no means a loud car - at least from the inside.   Leviathan The car is a beast to drive....

oldcomputers.net I was introduced to computing in the 5th grade. My first computer class was in the school's brand-new Apple IIe computer lab. On that first day we had no idea what to expect. Our teacher held up a 5¼" floppy disk and proceeded to demonstrate how not to treat it. He threw the disk across the room, he crumpled it in his fist, tossed it on the floor and jumped on it. He then attempted to rip the disk open with his bare hands. He let loose on the disk with a pair of scissors, dropped it into a metal waste-paper-basket and set it on fire. The folks at Verbatim would have been horrified; we thought it was funny. And from that moment on, the teacher had our attention. I probably still have a bunch of floppys sitting in a box somewhere. I used floppy disks all through university, so I still may have some assignments I wrote using Zardax , an Apple IIc word processor. Alas, the floppy disk is a relic of a bygone era. File sizes have far surpassed the capabilitie...

After quite some time in an irrationally self-inflicted exile on the bench, I started jogging again. No, really, it's true. Over the last two years it's been an on-again, off-again affair, but I think I'm jogging consistently enough to consider myself back on track. I recently read through my Jerusalem marathon training blogs from 2009 and 2010. They were very inspiring. I read how I started off on the treadmill at the gym and then progressed to running on the street. I read of how I completed my first 5 km run, my first 10 km run and ultimately how I smashed my PB in the marathon by about 4 minutes. I didn't blog about this, but in September 2010 I took a leisurely 20 km jog around Ramat Beit Shemesh, just for the fun of it. Since then I lost momentum and added weight. Now I'm back at the beginning - I have to do it all over again. For the last few weeks I've been schlepping myself around Ramat Beit Shemesh, trying to recapture my former glory. I'm w...

When I was growing up, an afternoon at the library, browsing through a seemingly infinite number of books, was a common Sunday activity. Mostly, the library was a quiet, air-conditioned sanctuary where everyone had equal access to as many books as they could poke a library card at. St. Kilda Public Library, Melbourne, Australia (Click to enlarge) Considering the number of librarians employed at the local library, it doesn't take much to realize that to own all those books would be an expensive undertaking and an organizational nightmare. My father once built a huge floor-to-ceiling bookshelf and my mother cataloged all of our books, Dewey Decimal System -style. Alas, with the rest of us kids running (around) the house, maintaining this private library was nigh on impossible. But it was a valiant attempt. Today, e-books are cheap and sometimes even free . One hand-held device can contain thousands of books, easily sorted according to title, author, genre, subject, date or...

In 1927, Warner Bros produced the first talkie, The Jazz Singer , on a rather large budget of $422,000 ( about $22 million in 2012 terms) - approximately 1.5 times what most silent films had cost to make until then. In 1995, the Los Angeles Times reported that the average cost of making and marketing a feature film was approximately $50.4 million . In 2011 it cost around $65 million to produce the film plus another $35 million to market it - that's a cool $100 million. 3D movie production company, False Creek Productions , calculates that 3D movie production will set you back an additional 19% ( PDF ). Mega-3D-blockbusters, like Avatar , reportedly cost somewhere between $280 million and $500 million to produce (plus marketing costs). In stark contrast to this, according to NuWire Investor : The cost of producing indie [independent] films varies widely depending on the project, anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $20 million or more. Some indie films, while not usua...