Eideard

Like many of my colleagues in Silicon Valley, I was having a fantastic day today. It is crisp in the shade, warm in the sun. The skies are a magical blue with puffy clouds floating like dreams. And when all seemed to be going well, an email in my inbox — without as much as the new message sound — arrived: Letter from Steve Jobs. It was as if the inbox was observing the solemnnity of the occasion. It is an end of an era.

The first thought that ran through my head was about Steve’s health, and I thought to myself that this cannot be good. I don’t care about him being the CEO or head of Apple. What I really do care about is his health. He wouldn’t be making this decision unless things were pretty dire.

It is incredibly hard for me to write right now. To me, like many of you, it is an incredibly emotional moment. I cannot look at Twitter, and through the mist in my eyes, I am having a tough time focusing on the screen of this computer. I cannot hear the sounds of the street or the ring of my phone. The second hand on my watch moves slowly, ever so slowly. I want to wake up and find it was all a nightmare.

And while I wish for him to have more time with his family, I am also being very selfish. I will miss the thespian who made inanimate objects like a computer become a thing to behold. A few years ago, I compared Steve to Howard Hughes using the line, “Some men dream the future. He built it…”

Jobs (and by extension, Apple) has taught me (and I am sure others) a big lesson: If you want to change something, you have to be patient and take the long view. If Apple and Steve’s incredible comeback teaches us something, it’s that when you are right and the world doesn’t see it that way, you just have to be patient and wait for the world to change its mind.

Today, we are living in a world that’s about taking short-term decisions: CEOs who pray to at the altar of the devil called quarterly earnings, companies that react to rivals, politicians who are only worried about the coming election cycle and leaders who are in for the near-term gain.

And then there are Steve and Apple: a leader and a company not afraid to take the long view, patiently building the way to the future envisioned for the company. Not afraid to invent the future and to be wrong. And almost always willing to do one small thing — cannibalize itself. Under Steve, Apple was happy to see the iPhone kill the iPod and iPad kill the MacBook. He understands that you don’t walk into the future by looking back. If you do, you trip over yourself and break your nose.

Thanks, Steve.

Thank you, Om, for bringing insight and understanding to sadness. Thanks for opening the door to the future – that seemed like it was ready to be shuttered by the naysayers who never believed in anything enough to fight for it with their whole being.

Click the link in the post and read the whole letter. I’ve posted about half of it here.

After 14 years as Apple’s CEO, Steve Jobs resigned his post on Wednesday and was replaced by Tim Cook, who previously was the company’s Chief Operating Officer. Jobs, in turn, was elected as chairman of Apple’s board of directors.

“I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple’s CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come,” Jobs said in a letter addressed “to the Apple Board of Directors and the Apple Community.”

“I believe Apple’s brightest and most innovative days are ahead of it. And I look forward to watching and contributing to its success in a new role,” Jobs wrote. “I have made some of the best friends of my life at Apple, and I thank you all for the many years of being able to work alongside you.”

“In his new role as Chairman of the Board, Steve will continue to serve Apple with his unique insights, creativity and inspiration,” board member and Genentech chairman Art Levinson said in an Apple press release. “Steve’s extraordinary vision and leadership saved Apple and guided it to its position as the world’s most innovative and valuable technology company. Steve has made countless contributions to Apple’s success, and he has attracted and inspired Apple’s immensely creative employees and world class executive team.”

Jobs had been on a medical leave of absence since January 2011. He continued to hold the CEO title while Cook oversaw the day-to-day operations of the company. At the time, Jobs told Apple employees he was taking a leave from his day-to-day duties to “focus on my health.”

The full text of his letter of resignation and the board of directors’ statement are here.

It’s been six years since I bought my first Apple computer. The shiny new Mini had just been introduced and offered me an affordable way to experiment with Apple’s OS X operating system Like any longtime geek, I had spares of monitor, keyboard, etc. to hook up.

I credit Steve Jobs for what he did to make that change so easy for me. As someone who’s spent a long and varied career involved with commerce around the planet, I also appreciate the cultural and social boundaries he’s set aside in the process of building Apple into one of the most successful firms on the planet.

Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Low turnout in South Korea’s first vote on a social policy on Wednesday left in place a program in Seoul providing free lunches for 810,000 elementary and middle school students, a victory for the liberal opposition, which had urged a boycott.

Though the voting, like the lunch program, was confined to Seoul, the capital, it took on national proportions with all political parties joining the debate in a sign that, after decades of bickering over civil liberties, the economy and North Korea, they were now entering the unfamiliar field of social welfare.

Mayor Oh Se-hoon, urging more restraint in welfare spending, had asked voters to limit free lunches to only lower-income children, at an estimated savings of $100 million a year. His conservative ally, President Lee Myung-bak, supported him by joining in his denouncement of “populist welfare.” The liberal opposition urged supporters of universal free lunches not to vote, so the result would not be valid.

When the polls closed, only 25.7 percent of the city’s 9.4 million eligible voters had voted, lower than the 33.3 percent minimum for a valid result, leaving in place the broad lunch program set up in January by the opposition-dominated City Council. By law, the votes of an invalidated referendum are not counted.

“I humbly accept the voting result,” Mr. Oh said. Earlier he had vowed to resign if the proposal he backed lost.

The opposition called on Mr. Oh to immediately step down. “Because of one politician’s selfish decision,” said Lee Yong-seop, spokesman for the opposition Democratic Party, “our society had to suffer a terrible ideological conflict and social unrest.”

RTFA for the ins and outs of the discussion, of the considerations forced on voters because of beancounter politicians who wanted to save money by exaggerating class differences.

Sound familiar?

The three daughters of Jimmie Lee Scott said in their lawsuit filed in the Circuit Court of Montgomery County that after their mother died, her body was handed over to Ross-Clayton Funeral Home.

The firm oversaw an April 2010 funeral service for Scott and her casket was taken to the Oakwood Cemetery Annex in Montgomery for burial, the lawsuit states.

The daughters and others in attendance left after a graveside service, where the casket was positioned over the plot where Scott was to be interred, court papers indicate.

Later, daughter Dakota Scott went to take flowers to her mother’s grave, but found the tombstone was far away from where she remembered the service being held, the lawsuit said. Nevertheless, the funeral home is said to have assured her the site was correct.

A representative of the funeral home later contacted Scott and told her the funeral home would have to move her mother’s casket and body, because another family owned the plot, the lawsuit states.

But when workers dug up the grave, no casket or body was found in the plot where Jimmie Lee Scott’s headstone had been placed, the court papers said.

The same day, other graves were dug up in a vain search for Jimmie Lee Scott’s body, which has still not been found, the lawsuit said.

“The plaintiffs have been forced to relive some of the saddest days of their lives — the death and burial of their mother — whom they deeply love and for whom they desire a peaceful and certain resting place,” attorneys for the three women wrote in the lawsuit…

The lawsuit does not say how old Jimmie Lee Scott was when she died.

But, obviously, her children are going to be a heck of a lot older before they find out where their mother was buried. If ever?

The grand final of this year’s Electrolux Design Lab 2011 competition is fast approaching. The field has been reduced to the last eight solutions for compact living and video presentations of the concept designs produced.

The young designers will get their chance to pitch for victory in front of the judges on September 7 in London, but before that Electrolux has opened up the ballot box for the People’s Choice – a chance to reward your favorite design with some of the limelight…

This year’s finalists will present their design to the Design Lab’s panel of judges at the Business Design Centre, London on September 7. Entries will be judged on intuitive design, innovation and consumer insight. The winner will receive Euros 5,000 and get to spend six months as a paid intern at one of the company’s global design centers. Runners up will walk away with Euros 3,000 and Euros 2,000 for second and third place respectively. One of the final eight will also be crowned the public’s favorite with the People’s Choice Award.

Check out who you feel is most deserving, have a look at the concept presentation videos. And to vote for your People’s Choice champion, head over to the poll page on Facebook before 14:00 CET, September 7.

A spill of frozen bull semen bound for a breeder in the state of Texas triggered a scare on Tuesday that temporarily shut down a U.S. interstate highway during the morning rush hour.

The incident began when the driver of a Greyhound bus carrying the freight alerted the fire department he had lost a part of his load while negotiating the ramp on a highway near Nashville. “We didn’t know what it was, but we were told (the canisters) were non-toxic,” said Maggie Lawrence, a fire department spokeswoman.

When firefighters arrived on the ramp, they saw “four small propane-sized canisters (that) began to emit a light vapor,” Lawrence said. In addition to the vapor, the canisters also let off an unpleasant odor and the ramp was closed while emergency personnel tried to determine what was in the containers.

The bus driver turned around to retrieve the canisters. Once emergency personnel learned the smoking canisters were nothing hazardous and that they simply contained frozen bull semen that had been stored on dry ice, Tennessee Department of Transportation and fire department workers cleared the ramp.

There’s apparently no truth to the rumor the shipment was for Rick Perry’s weekly inoculation against brains and learnin’.

Six years ago, researchers at the University of Birmingham discovered that more than half of the cancers of white blood cells they looked at responded in the test tube to the growth-suppressing properties of psychotropic drugs, including amphetamine derivatives such as ecstasy and weight-loss pills, and antidepressants such as fluoxetine (Prozac). Building on this previous work, the researchers have now discovered a modified form of MDMA, commonly known as ecstasy, they claim has 100 times more cancer-busting properties than the designer drug itself.

Although the scientists discovered the cancer-fighting properties of MDMA six years ago, the team realized that producing a usable clinical compound would present serious problems; largely because the dose of MDMA required to treat a cancerous tumor would also kill the patient. They therefore set about breaking down the actions of the drug to isolate its cancer-killing properties from its general toxicity.

Working in collaboration with researchers from Western Australia who produced the new compounds for them, the University of Birmingham scientists found specially modified forms of ecstasy that had their ability to attack and destroy cancerous cells boosted by a factor of 100. More importantly, they believe they now understand the mechanism behind this.

“Together, we were looking at structures of compounds that were more effective. They started to look more lipophilic, that is, they were attracted to the lipids that make up cell walls,” explains Professor John Gordon, from the University of Birmingham’s School of Immunology and Infection. “This would make them more ‘soapy’ so they would end up getting into the cancer cells more easily and possibly even start dissolving them. By knowing this we can theoretically make even more potent analogues of MDMA and eventually reach a point where we will have in our drug cabinet the most potent form we could.”

Although the researchers don’t want to give people false hope, they believe their research has the potential to in the future provide an improvement in cancer treatments for cancers like lymphoma, many types of which remain hard to treat. The team is now looking to develop pre-clinical studies.

Bravo!

The scene at sunrise this morning – Soto’s SUV at the right

Update 5:10 a.m.: César Meléndez, the 5-year-old boy abducted by his father Tuesday after a shooting in southwest Santa Fe is safe and in the custody of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office.

His father, 39-year-old, José Meléndez-Trillo, was located shortly after midnight Wednesday morning and, after a short police pursuit in southwest Santa Fe, barricaded himself and the boy in a 1997 Ford Expedition off County Road 56 west of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport.

After about a four-hour standoff with police, Meléndez-Trillo released the boy and immediately turned a gun on himself around 4 a.m., according to Sheriff’s Office Lt. Adan Mendoza. Police fired no shots and Mendoza credited all local law-enforcement for their assistance with the case.

Update 12:54 a.m.: Lt. Adan Mendoza of the Santa Fe County Sheriff’s Office has confirmed that the suspect in Tuesday’s fatal shooting, José Meléndez-Trillo, has been found off County Road 56 west of the Santa Fe Municipal Airport, and officers are negotiating the release of his 5-year-old-son. Mendoza said the man and his son are in a vehicle, but could not elaborate.

The road toward La Cienega was blocked off at Huey Road, one mile west of N.M. 599. By 1 a.m. members of the Santa Fe Police Department’s SWAT team were beginning to assemble near the scene. One officer said Meléndez-Trillo was still armed and officers were in the process of moving the road block east to N.M. 599.

RTFA. This is why we didn’t get any sleep, last night. It all happened just beyond the bosque behind our home.

Around 4AM we heard the shot which must have been Soto killing himself – after releasing his little boy.

Another Republican the Kool Aid Party hates

If the debt-ceiling showdown made your blood boil, if the shutdown of air-traffic-control work related to the airline-ticket tax drove you crazy, then you should unplug your TV and power down your computer in late September, as the deadline for extension of the federal gasoline tax draws near.

…A sizable chunk of Republicans, led by Senator Tom Coburn of Oklahoma and Representative Jeff Flake of Arizona, want to abolish the tax that pays for the federal highway program and replace the whole system with one overseen by individual states.

This insurgency, inspired by the Tea Party, reflects flawed thinking on economics, transportation policy and even American history.

Like many other excise taxes, the federal highway tax comes up for periodic renewal, which is usually noncontroversial. But not this time. If Congress doesn’t act to renew the tax by Sept. 30, gas stations all over the country have to stop collecting it; the highway trust fund will never get the money; and new work on federal highway projects will come screeching to a halt.

A delay of just 10 days in renewing the tax would mean the permanent loss of $1 billion in highway funding (and layoffs for thousands of workers). Longer delays would measurably increase the national unemployment rate.

…Tea Partiers and their allies on this issue haven’t given up the fight over ending the tax; if they can’t abolish it outright just yet, they’ll push to allow states to opt out.

Read the rest of this entry »

ScanEagle ready for launch

Individually, insects have proven a deep well of inspiration for robotics engineers looking to mimic designs refined over millions of years of evolution. Now Boeing has demonstrated swarm technology for reconnaissance missions using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) that is similar to the way insects communicate and work together as an intelligent group. Potential uses for the technology include search-and-rescue missions and identifying enemy threats ahead of ground patrols.

In flight tests over the rugged terrain of eastern Oregon last month, different types of UAVs worked together to search the test area by autonomously generating waypoints and mapping the terrain, while simultaneously sending information to teams on the ground. The mission used two Insitu-manufactured ScanEagles and one Procerus Unicorn from The Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory (JHU/APL), which communicated using a Mobile Ad Hoc Network and swarm technology developed by JHU/APL.

“This is a milestone in UAV flight,” said Gabriel Santander, Boeing Advanced Autonomous Networks program director and team leader. “The test team proved that these unmanned aircraft can collect and use data while communicating with each other to support a unified mission.”

JHU/APL principal investigator Dave Scheidt says that the decentralized swarm technology demonstrated in the flight tests has the potential to improve response times while reducing manning requirements when compared to current systems. A broader demonstration of the swarm technology is planned for next month.

Rock on! Living in the southern Rockies we get to witness search-and-rescue technology at work all too often. The better and faster we can make it – the better it will be for folks who look for adventures in the wilderness.