Daily news rundown

• S&P cut BP’s debt ratings from AA- to A
• MySpace Co-President Jason Hirschhorn has left – MySpace seems to be dying a slow death
• Criterion Capital Partners bought Bebo from AOL for 7 figures – AOL paid $850m for Bebo in 2008 (ouch)
• Agricultural Bank of China proceeding with $23b IPO
• Apple sells 600k iPhones on first day of pre-orders – I’m one of them, despite AT&T’s overloaded servers
• Conroy still pursuing Aussie net filter – seriously, dude, in the next election I’m going number every single senatorial candidate on the ballot just so I can put you at the bottom (I did it back when Alston was in govt) Link
• Mexico-France: 2-0 – wtf?
• Lakers win NBA playoffs

  9:57pm  •  Current Affairs  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

The Velluvial Matrix

Atul Gawande, who Charlie Munger sent $20,000 to for an article he wrote on healthcare in the New Yorker, gave Stanford Med School’s Commencement speech this year. In it, he talked about the shift in the medical profession as the field has grown over the last century:

You come into medicine and science at a time of radical transition. You have met the older doctors and scientists who tell the pollsters that they wouldn’t choose their profession if they were given the choice all over again. But you are the generation that was wise enough to ignore them: for what you are hearing is the pain of people experiencing an utter transformation of their world. Doctors and scientists are now being asked to accept a new understanding of what great medicine requires. It is not just the focus of an individual artisan-specialist, however skilled and caring. And it is not just the discovery of a new drug or operation, however effective it may seem in an isolated trial. Great medicine requires the innovation of entire packages of care—with medicines and technologies and clinicians designed to fit together seamlessly, monitored carefully, adjusted perpetually, and shown to produce ever better service and results for people at the lowest possible cost for society.

  9:34pm  •  Science & Technology  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

New OK Go MV – timelapse & slomo

OkGO has another video out and this time they play with time. Very cool, as usual:

“The fastest we go is 172,800x, compressing 24 hours of real time into a blazing 1/2 second. The slowest is 1/32x speed, stretching a mere 1/2 second of real time into a whopping 16 seconds. This gives us a fastest to slowest ratio of 5.5 million. If you like averages, the average speed up factor of the band dancing is 270x. In total we shot 18 hours of the band dancing and 192 hours of LA skyline timelapse – over a million frames of video – and compressed it all down to 4 minutes and 30 seconds! Oh and don’t forget, it’s one continuous camera shot.”

  11:45pm  •  Music  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  • 

Real-life Portal Gun

Incidentally, Portal 2 was just showcased at E3. And the WCC appears to be back.

Here’s the gameplay video for Portal 2.

  10:05pm  •  Computing  •  Humour  •  Tweet This  •  Add a comment  •