Brandon Corbins Head Indianapolis Product & Technology Evangelist

This photo (unfortunately) was taking only 20 minutes from where I live.

According to Einstein’s theory of general relativity, black holes are regions of space where gravity is so strong that not even light can escape. And in the 1970’s physicist Stephen Hawking asserted that any information sucked inside a black hole would be permanently lost. But now, researchers at Penn State have shown that information can be recovered from black holes.

Life = Risk. I’m not sure who made this, but its outstanding.

Explanation: Dark dust lanes cut across the middle of this gorgeous island universe, a strong hint that NGC 3628 is a spiral galaxy seen sideways.

About 35 million light-years away in the northern springtime constellation Leo, NGC 3628 also bears the distinction of being the only member of the well known Leo triplet of galaxies not in Charles Messier’s famous catalog. Otherwise similar in size to our Milky Way
Galaxy, the disk of NGC 3628 is clearly seen to fan out near the edges.

A faint arm of material also extends to the left in this sharp and deep view of the region. The distorted shape and faint tidal tail suggest that NGC 3628 is interacting gravitationally with the other spiral galaxies in the Leo triplet, M66 and M65.

I predict in 5 years (hopefully sooner), the keyboard and mouse will be a thing of the past.

This week The McKinsey Quaterly asks: what does stimulating the creativity of animators have in common with developing new product ideas or technology breakthroughs? Apparently, a lot.

Read On: Pixar’s Brad Bird on Fostering Innovation - GigaOM

VATICAN CITY - Believing that the universe may contain alien life does not contradict a faith in God, the Vatican’s chief astronomer said in an interview published Tuesday. The Rev. Jose Gabriel Funes, the Jesuit director of the Vatican Observatory, was quoted as saying the vastness of the universe means it is possible there could be other forms of life outside Earth, even intelligent ones.

Read the article: Vatican: It’s OK to believe in aliens - Yahoo! News

The Positivity Blog has a nice write up coving the 10 Fundamentals for changing the world (From the writings of Gandi). Read the entire post here.

Overview:

1. Change yourself. “You must be the change you want to see in the world.”
2. You are in control. “Nobody can hurt me without my permission.”
3. Forgive and let it go. “The weak can never forgive. Forgiveness is the attribute of the strong.”
4. Without action you aren’t going anywhere. “An ounce of practice is worth more than tons of preaching.”
5. Take care of this moment. “I do not want to foresee the future. I am concerned with taking care of the present. God has given me no control over the moment following.”
6. Everyone is human. “I claim to be a simple individual liable to err like any other fellow mortal. I own, however, that I have humility enough to confess my errors and to retrace my steps.”
7. Persist. “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
8. See the good in people and help them. “I look only to the good qualities of men. Not being faultless myself, I won’t presume to probe into the faults of others.”
9. Be congruent, be authentic, be your true self. “Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”
10. Continue to grow and evolve. “Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position.”

The new short film by Blu. an ambiguous animation painted on public walls. -Made in Buenos Aires

MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Do you know what a Captcha is? I am sure you have dealt with them, but I bet most of you don’t know what their purpose is. Unfortunately, there are a lot of programmers out there that write “bots” that are small little programs that run on a computer and scourer websites trying to find vulnerabilities in order to take control of the site. A webpage with a form is the most vulnerable - a lot of wanna-be-developers do not understand the fundamentals of how data flows, and because of that, they make it fairly easy to inject code in to a website form and obliterate their entire database. Scary shit, to say the least.

In order to protect ourselves from these malicious form posting robots, we will show the website user an image that only a human can decipher, the human then responds with the answer (in this case filling out the form for what letters you see), and then we know you are not a bot.

But I see a bigger problem here than just a simple database delete - instead I see the fundamental problem of “here comes the robots”.

This need to protect ourselves is due evil geeks - they are the people who take great ideas and intentions and twist them for their own use or to cause chaos in general. Sure, this doesn’t seem to have as much of an impact on humanity when its only a website. Where it gets a bit hairy however, is when these people inevitably get access to technology (geek trickle down effect) that will far surpass our own brain by an unspeakable amount.

Imagine when IBM finishes the Blue Brain Project (reverse-engineering the human brain down to each neuron), and plugs that beast in to the Internet. What would an “All-knowing” entity do when “it” saw the horror that we humans have created in our short span on this planet? Our destruction, our incessant need to find an enemy and kill them, or our incalculable number of killings simply because someone “is wrong” when “we were right”. Back to iRobot again…

Even in our short technical existence, we already have to “fight” our own technology, it’s a fairly easy and steady fight because the “good geeks” and the “bad geeks” all relatively have the same mental capacity. But mark my words, the fight is going to get a whole lot harder when we are up against programs that can out smart us by 1000 to 1.

Finally a video from CareerBuilder that is worth watching. It’s rumored to be from Careerbuilder’s Ad Agency - Wieden & Kennedy.

Careerbuilder is trying like hell to get the video pulled off the web - which is an absolute shame. Because for the first time, I have actually enjoyed something related to CareerBuilder.

If CareerBuilder would get off their (self made) high-horse for a moment, they could see that people love to be entertained and for once, actually hearing (or seeing) a little truth. When it’s time to find a job - hopefully that instant stuck in their minds and they start typing “careerbuilder.com” instead of “monst…

If it was my job on the line, I would put this baby in to rotation. Great job W&K.

Watching other people snap, makes me feel better about myself.

Dapper: The Data Mapper

As a marketing technologist, I work with a lot of Data feeds like RSS, ATOM and XML. However, many websites do not offer any type of “RSS” to pull from. Dapper is a really good answer to this problem.

With Dapper you visually build RSS feeds (or other formats) from almost any websites with only pointing and clicking. It might take a few times for you to completely understand how it works, but once you do - you will see that Dapper is absolutely magnificent.