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If you’ve seen Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow then this won’t sound too out-of-this-world. Literally.

Ever wonder what the big deal about Scientology was? Here’s a quick and entertaining overview of why you might want to stay home and stare at your roommates fish collection instead of going to one of their meetings. Good exposé from TIME mag as well. Oh and the Southpark episodes of it have been great.

Via TuckerMax.

What are the odds?

As a kid I used to collect baseball cards. And I loved perusing the monthly card guides (e.g. Beckett) to see how much each one of them was worth. Well, come to find out that these were suggested prices based on a culmination of various statistics aggregated from numerous sources such as trade shows. They were originally designed to help amateur’s barter with professional card dealers — to even the playing field. However, if you’ve ever tried to sell your cards to a dealer you’ll find out a couple of things. First, dealers are usually only looking for specific types of cards and second they have their own subjective evaluation of what a card is worth.

While this topic deserves some professional investigative attention (especially in terms of inflation, scarcity and what Upper Deck “accidentally” did years ago), this is not the reason for the post.

This is about my favorite social networking site, Facebook. Apparently they are up for sale and recently turned down $750 million. They want $2 billion. Now while some pundits may claim that the entity is not worth this, the reality of the situation is, they are only worth as much as someone is willing to buy them for (e.g. Subjective Theory of Value).

A quick history of headline purchases in 2005:

eBay buying Skype for $2.6 billion (plus another $1.5 billion over 3 years).
News Corp buying MySpace for $580 million.
AOL buying Weblogs Inc. for $25 million.

And who could forget Yahoo buying Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com for $5.7 billion back in 1999?

So the multibillion dollar question is, are these firms worth it? Is there some objective metric for such valuations? Interestingly enough, I know someone who is finishing up a book on this very subject — on adding real substantive value to a business prior to selling it. I’ll keep you posted on that.

And my own personal opinion as an avid user of Facebook, I think they still have time to seperate themselves from other me-too copycats but their time is limited. Many moons ago I noted several features that would certainly keep users logged in throughout the day (such as adding the ability to upload resumes and interact with potential employers), unfortunately they have not been implemented. Ignoring these innovations only leads to leaving money on the table. I don’t think it takes a graduate student to point out that the millions of college users want a job some day and what better place would it be to try and network with companies than a college social networking site?

Nope, instead the managers and directors decided to “branch out� and let highschool students in. This smacks of a desperate attempt to increase unique users rather than increasing the amount of time a user spends on the Facebook — it is a vein attempt to copy sites such as MySpace. I predict it will not only fail to achieve higher numbers than its rival, but that in the process will disenfranchise the core users: one of the draws for me and everyone I know is that it is exclusive to the collegiate realm. No offense to the demographic group, but I don’t have a strong desire to socialize with a bunch of highschool students; hence one of the reasons I do not goto the mall or hang out at Starbucks. And I really have no desire to do so virtually either.

This is a great video showing just how much “Aggie Spirit” the Old Army has at times…

It’s that time of the year again on campus. So here’s a sneak peak at my killer campaign:

If you’ve read the series, you might find this CROWS system a little dejavu-ish.

Those poor film producers, have somehow gotten the German populace to help fund their movies. Of course, stranger things happen, like paying for a war that ended over 100 years ago.

Before someone can answer who owns “the Internet” one must first answer, what is “the Internet.” This is not a post that will answer those questions, rather this is a stub — a place holder for that discussion that will take place many moons from now. If you are interested in some commentary. geekoid Sean Lynch tackles some of the propertarian issues in light of claims from Doc Searls.

And to wet your mouth a little more, some network engineers put together a map of nearly 135,000 routers and who owns them. This is routers, and not actual fibre or cabling which could be owned by someone else.

An associate pointed me to yet another gem from Forbes, Is College Worth It? The conclusion is simple, unless you goto a nationally recognized brand-name institution like Yale, Harvard or 20 some odd schools the answer is no. One of the most interesting points the author notes is that,

Search engines such as Google have ushered in the era of open-source learning. Society is rapidly progressing to the point where any Googler is on equal footing with a Widener Library pass-holder.

When I was an undergrad (history/economics) I found many of the works we discussed in class to be available online for free (e.g. all of the Western Classics are in the Public Domain and can be found in digital libraries like Project Gutenberg). The other two main points he makes are worth reading as well, so leas.

The Associated Press also ran an interesting story discussing the uptake of podcasts at institutions of higher education across the country, specifically one liberal arts school. The moral of the story, innovative faculty members at a State-university in Georgia have created easy to use supplements for students or as administrators call it: value-added. This is just another continuation of the digital university meme.

Or Will Wright would have you believe. I do recall that back in the day, when I attended computer gaming tournaments in highschool, talking with game modders added a nice little twist to the event. They are a different breed altogether because they are content creators, writers, artists and otherwise innovative people that like to think outside the box — which is fairly easy to do in virtual worlds (moreso than meatspace). Sometimes they smell though.

Over the last 4-5 years I have been an outside observer to a movement known by several names. Some call it transhumanism, others extropianism or even anti-agism (not towards seniors but rather the physiological condition of aging). In truth these all describe different concepts that tie together. Some forward looking academics and scientists (i.e. Futurists) suggest that in reality medical doctors are really engineers and that our bodies are simply a composite of hundreds of interdependent systems. One in particular is a Englishman by the name of Aubrey de Grey. Over the past several years he has published numerous articles detailing what he believes are the seven ways in which aging can be prevented, reversed and ultimately fixed (i.e. a permanent cure for aging). This of course runs contrary to the line of thinking that no matter what happens in life, we all cease to live at some point: “it is the natural way.”

Members of the anti-aging movement argue that this mentality is negative, cynical, backwards and simply flat out wrong. They note that discovering how to fix these systems, these tiny engines of life, is not a matter of if, but when.

And not everyone agrees with them, including Jason Pontin, the editor of the magazine MIT Technology Review. He has put together an independent board of inquiry, along with a sizable purse ($10,000) to prove that Dr. de Grey & Co. are incorrect in every facet of the word.

While I certainly consider myself an educated layman in this debate, I would note that I do not believe that there is anything magical, mystical or otherwise unexplainable in the form or function of the human anatomy. In other words, every function can be quantified in some manner and ultimately, described in engineering terms. Thus, while the board of inquiry may find Dr. de Grey’s postulates and publications to be invalid, the central meme, of physiological engineering will still remain when the dust settles.

Round 1, fight.

Does Dean Kamen have anything to fear with this gizmo?

Many moons ago I mentioned that steroids do not make someone a better baseball player. Now comes a statistical study on this recent bugaboo. I now stand justified empirically. Anyone keeping score?

Last fall, The New Yorker published an interesting article on the history of the SAT and its use by the Ivy League. Now the Chronicle of Higher Education recently published a somber and concise history of why essay’s are no longer used by admissions offices — replaced by a faceless multiple choice exam.

Ever wonder if there was a “digital divide” in corporate offices? Do greying executives send one another text messages throughout the day? Wonder no more as CNN Money put together an all-star cast of interviews on who is addicted to the BlackBerry — along with those who do not even own a simple cell phone.

Remember Chevy Chase and Dan Aykroyd in ‘Spies Like Us‘? Do you recall the scene when they act like doctors in an operation room and totally botch an operation? Well, that has nothing to do with the eye-opening article on How Islamic inventors changed the world. Oh and they did give us a scalpel…

Again, why can’t learning be fun? In an effort to ease the pain of training future programmers, instructors at Carnegie Mellon University have tapped the makers of “The Sims” to redesign a computer programming tutorial.

And speaking of innovative ways to teach in “fun” ways, Eagle’s Flight, a corporate training firm, tries to use an out-of-the-box approach to conveying management principles in a board-like role playing game. Neat-o.

If you don’t have Damn Interesting on your RSS reader yet, articles like this one should help sway you to do so. The gist of it is, throughout the tens of thousands of years of human evolution our bodies have physiologically adapted to the day-night cycle. Due to the invention and use of artificial lights we have thrown our body into a tailspin. Why? Because the light now enables us to work when and where we want to, including at night time — which is the natural time that our bodies want to sleep. As a result, some studies suggest that this causes all sorts of negative side effects. Including ugliness. Well, maybe not ugliness, but apparently it does not help stress levels.

I’ll be honest, I hardly goto movie theaters. And it’s not because I download a pirated copy. Think about it this way, unless you truly enjoy the ginormous movie screens and fantabulous speaker system, there is no reason to really goto a theater instead of just watching it at home. I should also mention that I do not enjoy going to concerts or sporting events anymore — because I can simply watch them from the comfort of my home. In addition to not wanting to pay $7.50 for a ticket how hard is it to wait just a couple more months and rent it for half the price a month or two later?

Enter Lucas and several others who want to make the theater experience worth your money. And for the record, while I am not swayed by his argument, I do have a sweet spot for the $1 theater (which I tend to patronize more often than the big box ones he is promoting).