Today I Found Out:

This tradition is mostly thanks to Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadian Band. While their work is largely unknown to those born in the last few decades, the band has sold over 300 million records to date. Guy Lombardo himself has three stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he was once the “Dick Clark” of New Years before Clark and his “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve,” attempting to appeal to younger audiences, started supplanting “Mr. New Year’s Eve,” Guy Lombardo.

“Auld Lang Syne” is another one of those songs most of us don’t know the words to – like the Canadian National Anthem.

Death and Taxes:

A Reddit sleuth posted this list of movies and TV shows that will be purged from Netflix in January, 2014. If you have time off from work between now and January 1, it might not be a bad use of your time to binge-watch some blockbusters (“Braveheart,” “Top Gun,” “Platoon”), art house flicks (“Being John Malkovich”) and the entire series run of “The Kids in the Hall.”

I wonder if it’s less a “purge” as is being reported (it really doesn’t make any sense for Netflix to remove movies) or rather, Netflix’s contracts/agreements for those films are expiring.

Regardless, some of you may have some Netflix binge-watching to do New Year’s Day!

Pew Research Center shares some trends revealed by US public opinion surveys.

In the course of conducting public opinion surveys and demographic analyses, the Pew Research Center found a wide range of data milestones, breakthroughs, peaks and valleys in 2013, including record support for same-sex marriage and the legalization of marijuana; record levels of distrust of the federal government; record numbers of mothers who were the primary breadwinners for their families; and record numbers of Millennials living with their parents.

Always interesting to see successful companies experiment with new methods of organization. As companies grow in size, the lines of communication grow more complex. The hierarchical tree structure is the most commonly adopted solution, but it brings in a host of problems of its own.

During the 4-hour meeting, Hsieh talked about how Zappos’ traditional organizational structure is being replaced with Holacracy, a radical “self-governing” operating system where there are no job titles and no managers. The term Holacracy is derived from the Greek word holon, which means a whole that’s part of a greater whole. Instead of a top-down hierarchy, there’s a flatter “holarchy” that distributes power more evenly. The company will be made up of different circles—there will be around 400 circles at Zappos once the rollout is complete in December 2014—and employees can have any number of roles within those circles. This way, there’s no hiding under titles; radical transparency is the goal.

Looking forward to watching this play out.

Last Friday, we posted a link to a graphic that detailed the process HTC goes through to vet new versions of Android. The multi-company hoops that need leaping, as well as the incredible number of devices that need to be tested, are both barriers to adoption of new Android revs and contributors to fragmentation.

Apple has announced their latest adoption rates for iOS 7. 78% is a huge number. Compare that to the KitKat adoption rates:

In contrast, though Google has not updated its own official developer statistics since Dec. 2, its most recent data showed that just 1.1 percent of Android devices were running that mobile operating system’s latest version, known as Android 4.4 “KitKat.”

And then compare to the percentage of users who are not even at Jelly Bean:

The largest share of Android users are running some form of “Jelly Bean,” which ranges from 4.1.x to 4.3. But a significant 24.1 percent of Android users are still running versions 2.3.3 to 2.3.7, also known as “Gingerbread” — an operating system version that was last updated in September of 2011.

To me, this is the biggest hurdle to developing for Android. Modern apps are built for iOS 7. They may be written for iPhone or for iPad, or for both. That’s the vast majority. Pretty simple, right?

If you want to build for Android, you have a much more complex tree to explore. Which translates to either a smaller market for you or a much bigger budget.

Focus is a beautiful and easy to use pomodoro timer. Built exclusively for iOS 7 and OS X Mavericks, Focus is the best way to focus on a single task for a period of time.

What is the Pomodoro Technique?

The Pomodoro Technique is a time management philosophy that aims to provide the user with maximum focus and creative freshness, thereby allowing them to complete projects faster with less mental fatigue.

The process is simple. For every project throughout the day, you budget your time into short increments and take breaks periodically. You work for 25 minutes, then take break for five minutes.

Each 25-minute work period is called a “pomodoro”, named after the Italian word for tomato. Francesco Cirillo used a kitchen timer shaped like a tomato as his personal timer, and thus the method’s name.

After four “pomodoros” have passed, (100 minutes of work time with 15 minutes of break time) you then take a 15-20 minute break.

Focus lets you enter and manage your task, work with customizable session length, see you completed tasks and incorporates the latest technologies. It helps you to focus on your tasks and stay productive all the time.

Focus is available for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch with iOS 7 and also for OS X Mavericks.

Tag the sharks with shore proximity sensors so the sharks tweet when they get too close to shore. Such a great idea.

In an innovative move to curb shark attacks, more than 300 sharks in Australia have been tagged with transmitters so that an automatic tweet warning is sent when they are dangerously close to the shore.

The unique project in Western Australia means beach goers can make an informed decision about whether to go in the water knowing a shark is nearby.

To give you a sense of the value of this project, check out this picture of some surfers in southern California (Manhattan Beach) with a photobombing shark. Yikes.

Interesting take on the economics behind Bitcoin. At the heart is a quote from this article:

Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things. Underpinning the value of the dollar is a combination of (a) the fact that you can use them to pay your taxes to the U.S. government, and (b) that the Federal Reserve is a potential dollar sink and has promised to buy them back and extinguish them if their real value starts to sink at (much) more than 2%/year (yes, I know).

Placing a ceiling on the value of gold is mining technology, and the prospect that if its price gets out of whack for long on the upside a great deal more of it will be created. Placing a ceiling on the value of the dollar is the Federal Reserve’s role as actual dollar source, and its commitment not to allow deflation to happen.

Placing a ceiling on the value of bitcoins is computer technology and the form of the hash function… until the limit of 21 million bitcoins is reached. Placing a floor on the value of bitcoins is… what, exactly?

If you are at all interested in Bitcoin, start at the Krugman piece, then dig in to the linked pieces. Thoughtful reads all.

This is so awesome!

Hidden among the racks of servers and disks in the CERN Computing Centre, you’ll find Hawaiian dancers, space aliens, gorillas… all LEGO® figurines! These characters were placed about the Centre for the arrival of Google’s Street View team for the world to discover.

We’re pleased to announce our first global scavenger hunt! Spot three LEGO® figurines using Google’s Street View and you’ll be entered to win a gift of your choice from our CERN Gift Guide.

Go. Enter. Find those Lego figures. Win a prize.

Each question in the quiz presents some dialect options. You pick the option that feels most comfortable to you.

Most of the questions used in this quiz are based on those in the Harvard Dialect Survey, a linguistics project begun in 2002 by Bert Vaux and Scott Golder. The original questions and results for that survey can be found on Dr. Vaux’s current website.

The data for the quiz and maps shown here come from over 350,000 survey responses collected from August to October 2013 by Josh Katz, a graphics editor for the New York Times who developed this quiz. The colors on the large heat map correspond to the probability that a randomly selected person in that location would respond to a randomly selected survey question the same way that you did. The three smaller maps show which answer most contributed to those cities being named the most (or least) similar to you.

With each answer you provide, the quiz shows a map showing what your choice says about where you are from via a distribution map. I took the quiz and it did an excellent job picking up the place where I grew up.

Just watched The Fugitive with the fam, then saw this.

Chef Eduardo Garcia lost his left hand after being electrocuted in a hunting accident in 2011, but has since gotten a Bluetooth-activated bionic hand. Though he’s still getting used to its 25 different functions, Garcia says the prosthetic comes with a few benefits to his trade — he can now pick up hot things without getting burned, and doesn’t have to worry about accidentally slicing his fingers.

Interesting the way he smashes a garlic bulb with his prosthesis. He’s clearly lost a lot of dexterity, but if you have to lose a hand, glad that science is there to add in some new capabilities. Prosthetics has made some great strides, but there’s so much more we can do as our mastery of robotics becomes more refined.

Here’s a link to the prosthetic hand’s product page.

Fantastic news for anyone with a place in their heart for the Atari 2600, Atari 7800 Pro System, ColecoVision, Magnavox Odyssey², or the Astrocade. The Internet Archive has posted playable emulations of all five of these old consoles on their site.

To play a game, pick a console, then pick a game (there are hundreds), then click the “Run” link on the right side of the page. Finally, read the instructions, then press the space bar to start.

Some of the games work well, others not so much. Clearly, this is a work in progress. If you run into problems with one browser, try switching to another.

Big wave of nostalgia for me.

Wow.

Robert W. Wilson, a retired New York hedge-fund founder who committed his life to giving the fortune he made from investing to charities, has died. He was 87.

He died Dec. 23 after leaping from his 16th-floor residence at the San Remo apartment building on Manhattan’s Central Park West, according to a person with knowledge of the incident who asked not to be identified because family members hadn’t been notified. Police said an 87-year-old man was found in a courtyard at the rear of the building and pronounced dead from an apparent suicide. He suffered a stroke in June, Gary Castle, his accountant, said yesterday in a telephone interview.

Bored Panda:

When the weather forecast announced unexpected cold from -9°C to -12°C last week, photographer Angela Kelly decided to take an advantage of it in one truly creative way. Together with her 7-year-old son, Kelly combined the home-based remedies – dish soap, karo syrup, and water – and went out to blow bubbles and take pictures as they freeze and melt.

-9°C is 15+°F. Or as we Canadians call it, “The month of May”.

BuzzFeed:

Like many casual fans, we assumed we could immediately pick it up and dominate. We were very wrong.

Check the article out if for no other reason that the GIFs.

And the “tip” at the end? Not gonna happen!

Bored Panda:

Nina and Gramps have been married for 61 years, however, all they’ve got from their wedding day is a single photograph. On one of the most important days of their life, the couple got stood up by their photographer. In order to fix this, their caring granddaughter, an event designer Lauren Wells, organized a beautiful anniversary photo session, inspired by the famous Pixar animation movie “Up“.

61 years of marriage. Most of us haven’t even been on the planet that long, let alone married. Congratulations to them!

TIME:

King Wenceslas didn’t start Boxing Day, but the Church of England might have.

During Advent, Anglican parishes displayed a box into which churchgoers put their monetary donations. On the day after Christmas, the boxes were broken open and their contents distributed among the poor, thus giving rise to the term Boxing Day.

Maybe.

Even though TIME doesn’t answer its own headline question, the article still might be instructive to our American friends who have heard about “this weird Canadian Holiday”.

This is cool. What a lot of work though.

BuzzFeed:

My advice to TV shoppers has evolved: Consider the off-brands. Are you building the ultimate home entertainment system to show off to your friends? Then sure, shell out for the Samsung. But if you’re not…perhaps it’s time to take a look at one of those sub-$350, 40-plus-inch TVs.

Purists will scoff but he’s not wrong. And with “good enough” TVs coming down in price, it makes it less and less likely Apple will be interested in trying to sell their own high margin sets.

As you buy and read eBooks, your eBook device collects data on your reading habits. Do you tend to buy lots of books and only finish a small percentage? Do you stick with a single author? Do you binge-read?

This family of data is useful to publishers and authors, but it sits in the virtual hands of the eReader software. Over time, the eBook companies will figure out a way to monetize that data, either by selling/renting the data itself, or by using the data to enrich the experience of their devices and to make it easier for their customers to spend more money.

Interesting article. I suspect this is just the tip of the iceberg.

This is a great story, via MG Siegler, who was there when it happened.

Jonathan Mann is a pretty talented musician and publisher of the “Song a Day” YouTube channel. MG Siegler is, among other things, a writer for TechCrunch. This story takes place in the summer of 2010, in the midst of Antennagate.

I had just learned that I lost a big video contest, and I was feeling pretty down. It also happened to be the eve of Apple’s “Antenna-Gate” press conference. The anti-Apple hype was at a fever pitch, and I thought the whole non-story was ridiculous. I decided to write a song defending Apple. I hoped that MG would post it, and maybe I’d get some decent traffic. I wrote the song in about 2 hours and spent another hour on the video. I posted the song, sent it to MG and went to bed.

Wonderful read (follow the headline link). Here’s the video. Enjoy.

Rolling Stone’s roundup of the twelve best metal Christmas tunes include a couple of my favorites, like Rob Halford’s “We Three Kings” and Dio’s “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” (with Tommy Iommi on guitar).

Steve Martin told a joke. It got mangled and misconstrued. Twitter exploded. Here’s the center of the kerfuffle, from Steve’s blog:

I was riffing on Twitter, inviting people to ask me grammar questions. I replied with what I hoped were funny answers. For example, a person might write “What’s the difference between “then” and “than?” I would say, “then” is a conjunctive preposition, and “than” is a misspelling of “thank.” I have done similar things to this on other occasions, and there is a great spirit of fun between me and the Twitters followers.

I was going along fine when someone wrote, “How do you spell “lasonia?” I wrote: “It depends if you are in an African American neighborhood or an Italian restaurant.” I knew of the name Lasonia. I did not make it up, nor do I find it funny. So to me the answer was either Lasonia (with a capital), or Lasagna, depending on what you meant. That they sounded alike in this rare and particular context struck me as funny. That was the joke. When the tweet went out, I saw some negative comments and immediately deleted the tweet and apologized. I gathered the perception was that I was making fun of African American names. Later, thinking it over, I realized the tweet was irresponsible, and made a fuller apology on Twitter.

Was he wrong? Was that apology owed? Follow the headline link and read the whole story. As Steve says, comedy is treacherous.