Viewing profile — sparkman55

Funny you should mention meteorological use cases. At a previous startup, we built global historical weather data sets (at 5km resolution, 30+ year hourly time series), accessible …

Ground speed doesn't seem like a feature to me - after all, the ideal is an unblinking 'eye in the sky' that provides high-resolution video for large regions a la ARGUS. A stationa…

For a long time, public satellite imagery came from satellites flown by the US Geological Survey (USGS). They came in two flavors: geostationary and low-earth orbit. The geostation…

"Pixel Perfect" - awesome! The google logo looks particularly 'pixel perfect.' Seems like some "sub-pixel" texturing could be done by drawing different characters a la ascii art. S…

Well, the innovation is really about storing electricity. We've been generating and transmitting electricity for over a century now. Once we can store electricity (in batteries, fo…

RINSE - https://www.rinse.com - Santa Monica, CA and San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an…

I couldn't believe that the new 49ers stadium (in Santa Clara) cost a trillion dollars, so I looked it up. It cost $1.2 billion [1] - a "gigabuck" rather than a "terabuck." To put …

RINSE - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential…

The oft-cited statistic is "97% of climate scientists believe in anthropogenic climate change" and the wikipedia article [1] is actually quite thorough. I personally do not know an…

They have bunch of blends to choose from, and serve carefully-made single-drip "Third-wave" coffees. The order process is a bit chaotic, which makes the whole thing seem nice and q…

Google Ventures invested in Blue Bottle. Their (excellent!) designers-in-residence showcase the work they did to help: http://www.gv.com/lib/behind-the-scenes-with-blue-bottle-and.…

In rural areas, it's actually common to have a gas pump near the garage. After all, what are you going to do, drive your tractor to town to fill up?

There is an excellent New Yorker article on fecal transplants and gut flora. The article spends considerable time talking about the donors, and the rigorous screening process to ma…

A space railgun is theoretically possible, but you'll still need a rocket to circularize the orbit. In practice, a rocket goes up (out of most of the atmosphere) before going fast.…

I've built a number of teams, and have repeatedly had the fortune of anchoring the back-end with a senior engineer over age 50. Experience matters, and it helps the entire team fro…

RINSE - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential…

For cables, Monoprice is also a good alternative (and, generally, price-competitive with Amazon). Another commenter mentioned that Monoprice's HDMI quality has declined; I haven't …

As I understand it, there are fins that deploy in order to steer the rocket on the way back down (the first stage). They are really cool "Grid Fins" [1] that work even in supersoni…

RINSE - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential…

There's a difference between requests that the user "expects" to take a long time, and those that can never be fast enough. For example, POSTs, credit card transactions, and things…

Rinse - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential…

If you're already charging batteries for a hybrid electric drivetrain, perhaps the electric supercharger makes more sense? After all, the electric motor itself is used for extra to…

This makes great sense! I'd guess this would be (relatively) easily integrated with a standard hybrid system, although the powertrain would be quite expensive (hybrid system PLUS t…

Rinse - www.rinse.com - Design District, San Francisco, CA Rinse is a technology-enabled dry cleaning and laundry delivery service. We've been growing our service at an exponential…

If you're not sure if you want to play Diplomacy, you might read this article: http://grantland.com/features/diplomacy-the-board-game-of-th...