Google Sky compiles sky surveys from several observatories and renders them in the visible, infrared, and microwave. Like Google Maps, but looking up and not down, Sky uses the Maps code and interface and thus Mercator projection, which cannot project the northern and southern celestial poles. Using 3-dimensional projection, however, desktop app Google Earth can render these maps. http://earth.google.com

Google Sky accepts some Google Earth markup files to present customized data onto the Sky. It can also render the planets, the Moon, and the Sun at their current locations.

Companion sites similarly map and render Moon and Mars surveys.

Manfred Warmuth, professor of computer science at UC Santa Cruz and probiotic food enthusiast, presents this workshop on making tempeh, a cultured soybean product. In traditional tempeh making, the starter culture often contains other beneficial bacteria that produce vitamins such as B12. In western countries, it is more common to use a pure culture containing only the fungus Rhizopus oligosporus.

See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tempeh

On the themes of choices in life, following your heart, living almost every day as if it were the last…one of the most inspiring speeches i've ever heard. Made two summers ago, it remains inspiring. Knowing the history of Apple, NeXT, and Pixar makes it all the more.

A direct link here made available as a free download by Stanford University via Apple iTunes store, Stanford also makes available the video of the speech. At http://YouTube.com/watch?v=D1R-jKKp3NA is a another. At http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html is the text.

Blue Dot and Ma.gnolia are among the most flexible and expressive social linkmarking sites on the Web today. This wiki teaches some obscure and advanced features, such as tagged search, named friends groups, importing and exporting linkmarks.

Last fall an outdoor exhibition The Urban Forest Project took root in New York City. One hundred eighty-five celebrated designers and artists levered the idea or form of the tree to make a powerful visual statement in banners displayed throughout Times Square.

“The tree is metaphor for sustainability, and in that spirit the banners from the exhibition are being recycled into totebags designed exclusively for the project by Jack Spade. Profits from the sale of the totebags benefit Worldstudio AIGA Scholarships and the AIGA/NY Mentoring Program to sustain the next generation of design talent.”

In December 1999 at age 28 a friend took a $5000 workforce reduction buyout and quit his web team job at Xerox, to begin reading and training in earnest to hike the Pacific Crest Trail. In April 2000 he left Rochester to walk 2658 miles from Mexico to Canada, to meet life friends, reconnect with the American West, assess life choices, and then move to Portland.

That adventure begins here linked in a self-hacked Perl travel blog written from the Trail on a Palm III and uploaded using a handheld acoustic modem coupler through public payphones.

Well before the age of Google and Yahoo maps and satellite images, i followed this adventure using paper road maps and http://TopoZone.com. At 1:20000 scale, the digitized United States Geological Survey topographical maps traced the Trail in purple. Alongside i could see the woodlots and feel the hills. I hungered for the West, and still read these epistles from year to year for inspiration.

(Ben, please send corrections if i'm wrong with details. I also syndicate my Blue Dot feed to http://people.tribe.net/jlam .)

As usual, that's me going out on a limb just to get a shot. To boot, i never even got the branches pushed aside enough, or had wide-enough a lens, or found good enough an angle for that spectacular view: no matter how raging the currents, chocolate-ty brown water is chocolate-ty brown water. Saturday, however, was a nice spring day.

In comparison with other social linkmarking services, Faves uses the http://del.icio.us/help/api and can (with some caveats) use existing tools built for Del.icio.us such as Cocoalicious http://SciFiHiFi.com/cocoalicious/ from SciFi HiFi.

In /The Tipping Point/, Malcolm Gladwell argues a tiny minority of unusually informed, persuasive, well-connected influentials drive trends. The idea sounds intuitive and compelling—we think we see it happening all the time—but it's wrong. Think about it: these charismatic individuals would need to drive the meme beyond two degrees of separation, through people they don't know.

Instead, trends take root when a sufficient number of open-minded adopters propagate the meme in chain reaction, depending more on prevailing culture than key opinion leaders.

Too much uninformed skepticism does our economy no good. This in part seems to be Rochester's problem. Even as a freshman in college, my friends and i noted how Rochester seemed years, even decades, behind in smart worthy trends.

Update: this Harvard Business School Review article is now hidden behind a paywall. At http://harvardbusinessonline.hbsp.harvard.edu/hbsp/hbr/articles/article.jsp?ml_action=get-article&articleID=R0702A&ml_subscriber=true is a synopsis.