You might want to sit down for this. We want to tell you that we found another name - Occipital. Here's a list of all the reasons why we like Occipital, and we were even able to get Occipital.com. We've had a lot of fun here, but we all knew it was going to be temporary right? If you could get your feed readers to switch to http://feeds.feedburner.com/occipital, that would be great. You can keep all the posts we've put up here for now.  Anyways, we wish you all the best, maybe we'll see you around some time.

Vikas, Jeff. Abhishek and Shun
Occipital.com

Now you’re kind of screwed. That big photo is going to take a long time to upload. This is going to annoy your user. And it’s not good for you, either: You’re going to pay for, easily 100 times more bandwidth than you actually needed, because the first thing you’re going to do if you’re smart is resize the photo down to an itty bitty thumbnail (You thought about this, and you decided that the ittier, the better, because you’re going to have to display hundreds, if not millions, of these photos as soon as Feld decides to do a month-long series on your cool new website.)

You wonder how Facebook solved this problem, and you discover that they have a special browser plugin thingy. Crap. You don’t know how to make a plugin thingy. And obviously your website is going to be really big on all the major platforms (Windows, Mac, Linux, DOS 6.22), so you’d need multiple. But even if you had one or more thingys, you haven’t quite achieved the household name status. (Except in your household, where your name is easily in the top ten household names.) Where were we? Oh yeah, even if you had an upload plugin thingy, nobody would trust you, and you’d be back to uploading monster images.

What now?

Fortunately, you remember reading about FJCore on a bathroom stall at the bar last night. FJCore, of course, is a JPEG codec that works in Silverlight and supports JPEG resize in the browser. Sweet, so now you can shrink the profile photo before you upload it without scaring off the user. Hell, maybe you’ll even allow multiple profile photos (there’s no chance your competition will see that one coming.) You could even squish the photos together to create one ultra profile photo strip. You feel so empowered that you decide to buy the FJCore guys a beer the next time you hit up that dive bar.

What’s the catch?

Right. There’s always a catch. Silverlight itself is a Microsoft browser plugin thingy… so your users still need to have Silverlight installed. But, like Flash, we expect it to be more or less taken for granted (For one thing, the Olympics will be webcast with Silverlight.) And we’re fans of Silverlight; It can do some cool things Flash can’t do (notably, FJCore relies on the ability to access a file before upload. This isn’t possible in Flash today.) And competition with Flash is good for driving innovation.

Why are we posting this today?

We just released the full-fledged source code to FJCore (on Google Code) today, so although we've had a working example online for a while, this is the first time you can just grab the code and build your own uploader.  Better yet, you can join our open source project and contribute an uploader for everyone to use (except your competition, they are way too dumb to find it) based on FJCore.

We started talking about the question "Is this cool?" and we realized that the meaning varies greatly based on the context of what you're doing with your hands and body while asking the question. Here are all the possibilities we came up with (the red arrows indicate hand/body movement):

Figure 1

In Figure 1, modeled after what Ben's friend did, the asker's hands are moving around in a vague circle. The asker is checking whether the situation around the himself and the askee (a party, a funeral, a ballgame,etc) is cool.

Figure 2


The asker in Figure 2 is either checking if the drink he is consuming is considered cool, or he's wondering whether it's cool that he got another drink on your tab even though you told him he's cut off.

Figure 3

If an unfortunate confrontation has occurred and a verbal exchange has seemingly ended, one can use "is this cool?" accompanied by the body and hand movement shown in Figure 3 to certify that the situation has been resolved. It's important to note, however, that this will only work if the asker is reasonably bigger and stronger than the askee.

Figure 4


Asking, "is this cool?" in a normal, relaxed voice accompanied by the back and forth hand gesture shown in Figure 4 means that the asker is romantically interested in the askee and is wondering if the situation between them is cool. Asking, "is this cool?" with the same gesture but with a lowered, more intense voice means the asker is interested in going with the askee to her or his place for the night.

Special thanks to Krista and Austin from TravelFli, and Adam from Ignighter for being "situation models".

Andrew Hyde recently put up a clip commemorating the first 30 days for the 2008 TechStars companies in Boulder. The ten companies have come a long way in a short time. In fact, so has TechStars itself: Check out David's post detailing the inception of TechStars. Here's my summary of how well he had it figured out:

"Hey d00d [David Brown], let's lure entrepreneurs to Boulder with couches and shit."

Just kidding, sort of. We love you David.

Here's Andrew's masterpiece, but check out more on the community site:

While the burrito is still hot, let's dive into a little compare/contrast.

Many of you may not be familiar with one of these items, so I'll give that item a quick introduction:  A fish burrito is a mexican entree fashioned most typically out of fish, lettuce, a tortilla, and an interstitial sauce of some kind.

Now that we've covered that, you are probably thinking, man, that's almost identical to NLLS.

And you're right.

• Both the burrito and the mathematical technique are customizable.

• Both are subject to local maxima -- if you start looking for a fish burrito in the wrong town, you will end up with the best of the worst.  NLLS will end up with with a solution near the initial guess, but not necessarily the best overall.  Overcoming this problem, in both cases, can be done by randomly jumping around periodically (with an airplane and random number generator, respectively).

• When someone says "fish burrito," there's obviously a lot of ambiguity.  It could mean an authentic, south-of-the-border creation -- a homemade fish burrito fashioned from leftovers -- or, as in today's case, a fish burrito from Illegal Pete's.  Saying "Nonlinear least squares" is equally unspecific.  Everyone's left wondering, do you mean a gradient-descent NLLS?  Do you mean MATLAB's lsqnonlin function?  Or, as in today's case, do you mean the Levenberg-Marquardt algorithm?

Despite these similarities, we can't end without pointing out the key difference:

• Fish burritos do not require an estimate of the Jacobian.

Because the walk to Sydney's coffee was just too far away (and closed on weekends).

Here's an old video of the rear-projection physics whiteboard referenced in the podcast. Maybe one of these days we'll set it up in the Bunker and record the creative madness that ensues.

And this concludes my First Blog at Fluxcapacity…cheers to that!

Jill's extremely rare condition is called hyperthymesia. Given any date after 1980, she can describe almost every detail of what happened that day from her point of view. This includes things that most people forget a few days later like the weather, what was on television, and what she had for lunch. Remarkably, this condition doesn't seem to have negatively affected her other thinking abilities in a significant way.

I found it interesting that she said her ability is both a gift and a curse. Her memories can be automatically triggered by any of her senses - a smell, a song, a name. Because of this lack of control, she often has to relive horrible memories along with the good ones. She describes her memories as a picture in picture that's always playing. So if something triggers a memory of a loved one dying, she is forced to experience it along with all the emotions she felt at the time. They showed photos of her over time, and it is clear that the condition has taken a toll on her.

Diane Sawyer of 20/20 asked Jill many questions like, "what happened on January 17th, 1983" and Jill was able to answer every time. Incredibly, one of the books that was used to question Jill actually had a mistake that she was able to catch.

All of the questions, however, were based on date and time. On the show Jill was never asked questions like, "when was the last time you were in Chicago?" or "who was the first person you met in college?" If she can only answer questions based on date and time, then it would seem to imply that while the temporal "index" of her brain was accessible to her in a controlled manner, she can't use other "indexes" based on location or her senses in the same way. I would love to ask her some questions to find out if this is the case. Also, I'd like to find out what happens if she is experiencing something incredibly happy in the present, and then a bad memory is triggered. What effects her more, the past or the present?

It's a fascinating case, and scientists are apparently learning a lot about our brain and memory because of her and others with the same condition.