Yet another Eitan's blog

2007-08-16T22:03:00.001+03:00

Garbage 2.0

Blog relaunch?

2007-08-16T20:29:00.000+03:00

It's been a while since I wrote here. Didn't have much to say :)
It seems like times have changed, though. I'm thinking of relaunching blogs on specific interests I have: Lifehacking & environment. Got some nifty ideas and hacks I just have to explore, and it seems like blogs are the right medium for this. So, on my 27th birthday (Wish me a Mazal - tof :) ) - I'm posting some cool stuff - stay tuned.

Lijit | My Network

2007-06-23T22:44:00.000+03:00

Lijit Search

SundanceChannel.com

2007-05-25T22:46:00.001+03:00

See what I've got from SundanceChannel.com's quiz :-)

Two bacterias talking, 2 Billion BC

2007-02-19T12:47:00.001+02:00

Just read a funny conversation from Ray Kurzweil's book - The Singularity is near. It goes something like this:

Bacteria A: One day, 2 billion years from now, 10 Billions of us will join together to form gigantic bodies capable of amazing things and forming self-awareness. Each bacteria specializing in its own thing to serve this huge body. We won't have to worry so much for food, because the body as a whole will take care of this.
Bacteria B: You're delirious.

Ha, ha,... How true... How could 2 bacterias even imagine that humans will emerge. Now, let's try to make this mental leap once again - what will happen when humans make this next leap??
This idea of a Singularity is totally mind-boggling. Joining the minds of humans with calculation power to a kind of "Gia" that operates as one body... Seeing this happening right in front of our eyes... Truely amazing.

http://www.kurzweilai.net/

How come I didn't know about Keynesian multiplier before???

2007-02-12T20:53:00.000+02:00

Just found out how powerful is Keynesian multiplier in economics... Let's say the government spends a 100$ on foot massages for the Prime Minister. Then the Physical Therapist goes and buys herself a nice meal in a restaurant with 80$ out of them, then the Chef goes and buys himself some nice shoes in the shop with 64$ out of them, and so on and so forth... So... These 100 bucks generated tons of economic activity.

Now, I started to think about green consumerism... I guess the same effect happens here... Environmentally concerned consumers prefer to buy goods from environmentally concerned businesses which in turn buy their services from other green service providers, and so on and so forth... Which generate tons of green business activity towards a green revolution! Now, isn't it empowering to generate so much green economic activity from every buck you spend on green products/services??

Update: Hmmmm... As some of my economist friends have noted, on a second thought, this analysis is much too simplistic. Oh well...

Tu Bishvat Hegia

2007-01-31T19:15:00.001+02:00

Energy flows where attention goes

2007-01-12T01:41:00.000+02:00

Just listened to Bono on TED Talk 2005:
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=bono
Highly recommended!

Made me change my 43things list:
http://www.43things.com/person/eburcat

And another thing about 43things... The thing most people want is "lose weight". About 17000 people chose this goal. In contrast, www.lo-od-mas.org claim that 56000 people signed the petition to keep the low tax on their leased car. Hmmmm... Is there a connection?? I see an interesting opportunity here...

15 Miliseconds of fame

2006-11-02T23:57:00.000+02:00

Me, and Minister Gidon Ezra in Hot News:
http://news.walla.co.il/?w=/3802/1000728.

The phenomenon gets naked - we're all against the Safdi plan!

2006-10-04T17:40:00.000+02:00

You can read about it here:
http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-3308469,00.html
Some more references exist here:
http://israblog.nana.co.il/blogread.asp?blog=217336&blogcode=4935582

Reporting from the ghost city

2006-07-18T01:31:00.000+03:00

Went to get some fresh air this evening. They say that Haifa has turned into a ghost city, well... It's not far from the truth. Some bars were open but all of them were almost empty. Some reporters were editting stuff in the cafe we sat in, and cars were driving at 100kph in Moria street on the right lane (which is usually full of double parking cars honking at each other).
Tayelet-Lui was packed with reporters from some American networks, Spain, Romania and the Israeli channels. We couldn't hear the studio, but it was amazing to see how questions from the United Stated are getting transmitted to the reporter's ear piece, and to see how his answer is being transmitted back to so many people throughout the world - and all of this just in front of us. Truely inspiring all these communications we have today. So many satelite dishes were transmitting through us, that I fear for my children's life :).
On the way back to the car a siren started. So I jumped into a nearby restaurant and asked for their protected area. They had one. Only me, the manager, two waitresses and two cooks from Thailand were there. The Thais asked us if we heard a "boom boom". We didn't. We said "no boom boom". Although I saw how the waitresses pledge their clients to come with us to the protected area - no one even bothered to put down his capuchino. I guess that if there was a "boom boom" the situation was different.
The rest of the evening I kept listening to my mp3-disco-kid-fm-radio till I got back home. Tired, a bit disturbed, but happy.

Have a safe day/night,
Eitan.

Effective advertisment

2006-05-30T19:49:00.000+03:00

Clean the beach

2006-05-27T23:11:00.000+03:00

The amount of plastic and glass trash on the beach in Haifa has gone beyond anything I have ever seen. I feel like I'm in Guatemala again. If you don't know, in many 3rd world countries - people take their home trash to the bus, in order to throw it from the window - far away from home. When I saw the beach today, it reminded me just that. And who gains money from all of this? Coca Cola, Prigat, Goldstar. The rest of us get a poluted beach. I'm really ashamed of this.
In 3 weeks I have a 2 hour course from the ministry of environment. I'll get certified as a "Neeman Nikayon", so I'll be able to fine people that trash like this. I'm considering running a campaign to stop this filthy habit of trashing our beach. We'll see if I can do something effective. Seems to me like a nice challenge. He he, I hope that in the 2 hours they also teach self-defence :). Who knows, here in Israel...

ClimateCrisis.net

2006-04-24T10:29:00.000+03:00

A couple of months ago I've published a link to a clip from Al-Gore's presentation about our climate crisis. Apparently, a movie is coming up. The trailer looks breath-taking.

I hope it will show up in theaters in Israel also... They have a better marketing engine then my blog.

Bookmarking the future

2006-04-23T20:50:00.000+03:00

A couple of days ago I had a meeting about mpTrips. When I got home, instead of my regular summary, I sent the attendants a "future bookmark". I'm still not sure about the name of this, but I wanted to share the idea. It's been a while now that I use del.icio.us in many ways. I use it to bookmark all my stuff, I use it to discover new sites - using the tags folksonomy, I use it to "spy" on my friends that also use del.icio.us - using the user-RSS-feeds, and now - I use it also to give people future-bookmarks. You see, every time I encounter a site that is related to mpTrips, I tag it with the mpTrips tag. So now, my future-bookmark: http://del.icio.us/eburcat/mptrips contains not only all the sites that I have already found that are related to mpTrips, but in the *future* - every site that I'll encounter that is related to mpTrips - will also be tagged like this. So, if people subscribe to the RSS feed of my "future-bookmark", they can stay on top of my latest updates about mpTrips. Isn't that just the coolest thing??? Bookmarks that get updated on the fly???
So, to kick start my future-bookmarks, I've created these gems:
http://del.icio.us/eburcat/my_toolset - that contain the tools I use almost on daily basis.
http://del.icio.us/eburcat/ecommerce_israel - that contain my latest "market research" about easy solutions for internet-credit-card-payment in Israel.
and of course
http://del.icio.us/eburcat/mptrips - with the latest updates about mptrips.

Some podcasts I recommend

2006-03-11T02:23:00.000+02:00

Udi asked me about it, so I decided to compile a list of podcasts that might be of interest to many of my readers.

itconversations.com - The best lecturers giving their best lectures at the best conferences and interviews about science, business, technology and much more stuff. Opens the mind to the world. Highly recommended.
ecotalk - A really good reporter for environment issues. 37 minutes a week of world environment perspective. She's also Jewish :)
MSR: Fitness podcast - Sports-Motivation coach that herself got rid of some tens of pounds - now help the world to follow her footsteps. Very American, still I love her ;-) .
Betty in the sky with a suitcase; Fly with me - (2 separate podcasts...) This flight attendant and pilot are hilarious! They just brings the best stories I've ever heard. Pure fun.
History According To Bob - The most bizarre history lectures I've ever heard. Sex in the civil war is one of the funniest topics.
In Business - Peter Day from the BBC. Excellent reporting.
The word nerds - Well produced show about exciting things in the English language. Contemporary and fun.
And of course - my mptrips which sadly are not for wide distribution yet, but I might let you listen to it if you'll ask kindly enough :).

Cheers,
Eitan.

Tall managers

2006-01-20T13:02:00.000+02:00

Ever wondered how come managers around you are physically tall? The height of the CEOs in the fortune 500 is significantly above average. I remember my previous workplace was like that also (damn, you could almost mistake the management for a basketball team :) ). Reading "Blink" a couple of weeks ago, opened my eyes to this phenomenon. We all have prejudice wired into our thoughts in levels that we don't pay much attention to. Even black people have prejudice against black people, and apparently the same thing happens with height. The
Project Implicit lets you test your own prejudice. Personally I have a moderate preference to straight people over gay people, a strong preference to European American over African American, and a neutral preference to Muslims over other people (Looks a bit weird to me...). Getting rid of these preferences is crucial to reading people, and understanding situations in life. In "Blink", Galdwel demonstrates how a salesperson can harness an avoidance of preferences to become successful. I'm sure this translates to many other situations in life.

Great book.

I love it when it happens!

2006-01-04T21:51:00.000+02:00

Camera phone food diary
A couple of weeks ago I thought that a service that tracks your food intake through the cell phone camera could be really neat and useful for diet building. Well... As it is with these things - all you have to do is to wish for it, and it happens. Hahahaha... I love it!

More good news

2005-12-08T22:35:00.000+02:00

My brother, Gidon, is going to marry Michal this February. Ha, ha! Mazal-tov, Mazal-tov! I guess everybody will freak out around here quite soon, getting prepared and everything :) I'll go drink for this tonight.

Cheers,
Eitan.

Podcasting on the news.

2005-11-28T12:40:00.000+02:00

The news of Channel 2 in Israel had a short piece on podcasting last Saturday. They featured a short introduction to the phenomenon, the TCast, a short talk with Izhar Ashdot, and a podcast "addict" (hmmm... sounds familiar to me :-) ). Podcasting will become mainstream sooner or later, and I'm glad to see it catching up in Israel too. We still have a lot of issues to solve here, though. The language (ahm) is a barier both on the content side and on the ways of promotion and distribution. And iTunes - which in other countries bring a lot of mainstream listeners - is not common in Israel at all.

World Community Grid - Home

2005-11-26T12:04:00.000+02:00

For a long time I wanted to join a distributed computing project that I believe in more than SETI@home. Well... www.worldcommunitygrid.com lets me fold proteins and search for a cure for AIDS. They even have a version for linux :). Looks like IBM did a fine job here.

What are the chances???

2005-11-20T02:05:00.000+02:00

Just tried this spanglish chat room someone recommended on 43things - a way to study Spanish. He was right. It is a neat way to practice the language. In the chat room, a Dutch girl started chatting with me (in Spanish, of course) - and apparently we've both been in Casa Argentina in Xela, Guatemala - more or less in the same time, possibly exactly in the same time. What a tiny twisted world :).

Technorosh & Environmentalism

2005-11-03T14:54:00.000+02:00

Each year we have this Technorosh contest in the Technion (where I study for my degree now). It's a contest of giving a creative, engineered solution for an invented problem. The problems till now were "Safely dropping an egg off a 9 storey building" or "Pouring wine to a glass from behind a pool and a slope". Creative, entertaining and quite useless as a problem on its own. (The enthusiasm around the contest is another story - this creates a great positive effect as I see it).
I have 2 problems with this:
1) The problem is fake. If so many people invest so much time, why not solve a real problem? Don't we have enough of them in our world around us?
2) The whole concept of a competition is counter productive. Instead of cooperating on finding a creative solution to a problem, use the collective mind and reach really high - the groups compete and reach solutions that are probably less than optimal from what they could have reached if they had cooperated.
The solutions?
1) Choose a real problem, like making the environmental footprint of the Technion's campus smaller. The solutions can save money in the short and long terms, serve as models for other places, and achieve a real impact in many aspects.
2) The prize will be 20% of the prooved cost reductions to the technion, and will be distributed between everybody - so people will be incouraged to cooperate in order to make the prize bigger, and get more money. The winners will take 10% of the prize, and the rest will be distributed between the rest of the groups.

Does this make any sense?
This looks to me more win-win in nature than the previouse Technorosh contests.
Oh well,
Eitan.

Shana Tova! (The text version...).

2005-10-04T05:12:00.000+03:00

For everybody, far and near
I wish - happy new year
And since most of my readers
Are hebrew speakers
I'll finish this in hebrew
(And it's easier for me to rime, too).

האמת שהיה פה שיר קצר, אבל אחרי שהשוויתי את יכולות החריזה שלי לאלו של יולי זרגן אז העדפתי להעלים אותו גם מתאי הזיכרון לטווח קצר של המחשב שלי :)

לכל מכרי וידידי,
תודה על הרגעים הנפלאים אותם חלקנו השנה,
כן ירבו בשנה הבאה,
איתן.

Shana Tova!

2005-10-03T13:41:00.000+03:00