Todd G. Simpson

This is one of the better books for laymen that I have read in a while.  In large part, I think this is due to the fact that I knew very little about the recent developments in astronomy, and was surprised to find that Neutrino Telescopes are alive and well.  The last time I had looked, it was so hard to detect a neutrino, that even thinking of a telescope was absurd. While the book follows many of the pioneers of the area, I was most intrigued with the storyline that exposed how neutrinos come in three flavors, which can change through interaction with mass and/or time.  Thus, an electron-neutrino at birth, may be a tau-neutrino upon detection.  This is visualized well by Close as neutrinos being like harmonics of several frequencies which interact in wavelike ways as the neutrino travels through space and time.  It is interesting that this is the same visualization invoked by superstring theory. To explain the flavor-changing behavior, neutrinos (or a...

With Borders scaling back so many of their stores, I have ended up buying more books than I normally would. One I picked up is "What is Life?" by Ed Regis.  It is a good short read, although it is now 2 years old, which is a long time given the rate that "artificial life" is moving at.  Since the book came out, Craig Ventor claims to have created the first artificial life . One thing I did not know was that Schrodinger wrote a book with the same title in 1944 which predicted the existence of a DNA-like molecule;  Crick actually credits Schrodinger with inspiring some of his early work. Ed Regis points out that Schrodinger's book never actually defines what life is; that is left hanging.  Interestingly, I felt the same about Regis's book.  While he argues that life is defined by having an "embedded metabolism" that argument still seems weak.  Carl Sagan pointed out, many years ago, that cars have a metabolism, which is hard to argue against....

It is gut-check time. Do I cheer for San Jose or Vancouver? I have two conflicting logic trees: I am Canadian Vancouver is in Canada Therefore, I should support Vancouver San Jose has 22 Canadians on their Roster Vancouver has 16 Canadians on their Roster I am Canadian Therefore, I should support San Jose So, I have turned to "How We Decide" which I just recently read to see if it has any answers. Jonah Lehrer would suggest that I check two aspects.  My emotional brain, and my rational brain. My emotional brain screams "Vancouver"; obviously there is a stronger emotional link between location (Canada) than roster. My rational brain says "San Jose".  In the last three years, I have never watched a Canucks game, or followed the team very closely.  However, I have been to many Sharks games, enjoy watching there progress, and even listen to quite a few games on the radio. Lehrer suggests that typically your rational brain is the one to follow. I...

A lot of the press today is claiming that Microsoft overpaid for Skype.  I am not so sure. Here are some numbers for comparison. Skype has 560 million registered users, of which about 2% (say 11 million) are paying customers with an average ARPU of $8.  Thus, Skype should be generating about $8*12*11M ~ $1B/year in revenue right now, with an EBITDA of about $250M.  So, Microsoft is paying about 8X revenue, and 32X EBITDA. T-Mobile US has about 33M subs, with an ARPU of about $50.  So, T-Mobile's revenue should be around  $21B/year.  AT&T is paying about 2X revenue, and 7X EBITDA. Thus, Microsoft is paying a 4-5X premium for Skype compared to what AT&T is paying for T-Mobile. The obvious question is : Can Microsoft leverage Skype 4X more effectively than a traditional mobile carrier?  To that, I think the answer is yes: 1) Skype is not a major enterprise player, yet.  Microsoft should be able to make this happen.  That alone...