I mean. Hell I’d love to have been working for Facebook and have some options, or whatever.  But that’s obviously something that never happened.

But I’m not buying Facebook today, and I’ll tell you why.

Somehow people think this is the next Google. Google started at an IPO of $85 and went up to start at $100 on the market, then climbed above $600 (and even higheR) and have been there since then. But is Facebook the next Google?

Now if you can get an early buy as a day trader I bet the price immediately skyrockets, but then it’s a game of how quick can you sell it… And then… I think the price drops. But I could be wrong. It could stay up for awhile. If you look at most of the hot IPO’s the stock prices now are lower than when they opened, even after an initial jump (Pandora, Groupon, Zynga, etc).

Now granted Facebook isn’t any of those. It’s more than all of them combined. I realize that, but are they Google/Apple/Microsoft level?

I mean what am I missing. They have a social network, which gets alot of eyeballs, but I think it’s SOFT eyeballs. Ew, not like that.

I have close to 300 friends on facebook, which is a fairly modest amount. Of those I’d say 20-30 post regularly at least every few days. A few more comment, and there are a bunch of “lurkers”, but… That’s soft.

See Apple makes computers, operating systems, phones, ipods…

Google has their search engine, and ads all over the internet, and analytics, and half a million other products like google documents, or the calendar, and mail…People USE their software, regularly. Plus Android.

Facebook… Is a social network. They have no hardware. They don’t sell ads outside their space. It’s a website.

Yes the ads are very targeted, but as we see from GM backing out, they don’t always work so well. People ignore them.

So it’s people using a website. THey could leave. They left Friendster and Myspace and AOL. Why isn’t everyone on AOL? AOL WAS IT. “You’ve Got Mail” was the ubiquitous voice of recieving email. They even made a damn romantic comedy starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan out of it.

And they’re dead now.

No, not Tom Hanks or Meg Ryan.

Or AOL.

But they’re not having a 100 Billion dollar IPO.

Facebook has eyeballs right now, but a “new big thing” comes along, and I think Facebook could very quickly lose those eyeballs. Like insanely fast. I think anyone who thinks that Facebook is going to be the king of Social spaces in 10 years hasn’t been watching the Internet the past 10 years. The past 20 years.

Could they remain huge?

Sure. And I”m sure people are betting on that.

But I think most of the investors right now want a quick buck on a hot new IPO.

I just remember when that IPO was Netscape.

But ALL the 4.0′s are pretty cool. We also picked up Furno 4.0, Surge 4.0, and Jawblade. They’re all neat, and Lego has done a great job on them. But no. The boys fight over Rocka 4.0

My almost 3 year old will follow him around saying “Rocka pleassssssse!”.

At least he’s being polite.

Except for when we’re telling him to go to bed, and he’s too busy crying because he wants Rocka.

Seriously what is it with this robot? He was one of their favorite 3.0′s as well. He was a lion, and really one of the main characters of the whole storyline that ‘season’. He was a 2.0 who went to the whatever it was…. jungle planet…. where the Witch Doctor was. He got the lion helmet. He was the big hero. Plus there was a Rocka XL which was the massive version. So we had a Rocka 3.0 AND a Rocka XL (which my 5 year old put together immediately after his grandparents gave it to him for his 5th birthday… he sat and put that puppy together inside of 20 minutes.)

He’s done it a couple other times, but obviously Rocka 4.0 is easier to put together than a more advanced set like Rocka XL, epecially considering that who knows how many of the little connector pieces for Rocka XL are lost now. I wonder if he could even do it these days.

But the boys… They love their Rocka 4.0. I don’t really get it. I would think Furno 4.0′s would be more popular. Furno 4.0 has underwater jets that you could say were helicoperty or something. I don’t really know why Rocka is such the star. He’s even more of a star in Breakout too. I mean I guess Stormer was the start of 1.0, and maybe Furno was of 2.0? He was the Rookie. But 3.0 was Rocka, and now 4.0 is Rocka as well? What gives?

By the way… The voice actor who plays Daniel Rocka?

Tom Kenny

Guess who else he voiced?

Spongebob Freaking Squarepants.

Wild.

The eclipse will begin over the Pacific Ocean (so often these things are over water… It reminds me how we should call our planet “ocean” rather than “earth” (I think Arthur C Clarke said that). Anyway, then south of the Aleutians… But then before sunset it goves over the California coast, Nevada, Arizona, Utah, New Mexico and even slightly into Texas before sunset.

Here’s a map of the path and where you can catch it.

http://nature.nps.gov/features/eclipse/wheretoview.cfm

It’s worth a trip up from Phoenix, or down from Salt Lake, etc.

Why’s it called an annular eclipse? If you say it’s because it happens every year you’d be wrong. An annular eclipse is an eclipse where there still is a small rim of sun all the way around the moon. A ring of fire per Johnny Cash. The name actually comes fr0m the Latin word annulus which means ring (or circular opening). Eclipses like this happen when the moon is at (or pretty much at) it’s furthest orbital distance from earth during the eclipse.

Wait, you say… The moon’s orbit isn’t a perfect circle? Why no! Good question. It’s not. The moon’s orbit is slightly elliptical. Orbits are measured by eccentricity or ‘e’. The e of the moon is 0.0549 which is a measure of “how round” something is. 0 is perfectly round. 1 is infinitely elliptical.

For comparison, the e value for Halley’s Comet is 0.967.

So yeah, just that little bit of eccentricity 0.0549 is enough to change a firey ring to total darkness. Pretty cool.

http://www.google.com/trends/hottrends?q=lost+in+space&date=2012-5-14&sa=X

The weird thing is that none of the links seem to really indicate anything in particular that are related, and the related searches are pretty weird too.

Related searches:
frequency, heather graham, autotrader, star trek, nba playoffs

So… people are searching for “lost in space” and doing other searches for heather graham, autotrader, star trek, and the nba playoffs… Oh and frequency…

Um…That’s just weird.

Why are people searching for that, moreso than normal, today? What’s going on that would cause this spike?

Looks great, though I have to admit this clip seems edited. They get through that atmosphere awfully fast. I’m wondering if it’s edited down to shorten the landing sequence for this clip or something. I dunno. They’re in space, then they’re down. Boom. Just feels edited, or is it me?

Not that it would keep me from going to see it…

{Hi|Hello} there, {I found|I discovered} your {website|web site|site} {by means of|via|by the use of|by way of} {Google|Bing} {whilst|while} {searching for|looking for} a {similar|comparable|related} {topic|matter|subject}, your {site|web site|website} came up. {I have|I’ve} added it to my bookmarks. Thanks for the {share|post)!

Awesome work on that one. I nearly fell for it.

He allows the only cheat is Nick Fury from the 90′s Iron Man cartoon, but otherwise it’s all from the old Marvel cartoons. Really a fantastic job. Though what’s with the sperm monster at the end standing in for whatever it is in the Avengers movie?

Seriously which original cartoon was that from, and what kind of monster was it? Pretty weird.

Also I liked that they had Hawkeye in it looking like Hawkeye, and they managed to find Black Widow. I didn’t even know they did a version of black widow in the old cartoons. Shows what I know.

Very cool stuff.

But it does sort of bring that aspect of sports back into my mind, and makes me think about my kids. You can’t prevent all injuries in sports, and at least with me I got pretty wrecked early on, but I don’t regret it, much. I wish I could still ski, but other than that I can live with it.

But that’s because I don’t have brain damage.I absolutely do not want my children participating in sports where you run headlong into other people running headlong into you. Or skating. The human body just wasn’t designed to have that happen to it. You can run straight into a wall and hurt yourself, but for the most part we can withstand injuries pretty well if they’re at a ‘natural’ speed. But when you double that with someone spearing you with a solid helmet… well you might as well say good night.

Hockey is even faster and worse.

Boxing… Forget about it.

I don’t judge people who play these games, and I even enjoy watching them. Some might call me a hypocrite for that, but I’m not saying I don’t want anyone to do so. I’m just saying I don’t want MY kids to do it. I won’t even prevent it. I just won’t encourage it. I’ll encourage sports without massive potentials for brain injuries. Like soccer, or baseball. Mostly soccer though. If someone else doesn’t want to do that and wants their kid to play football? Great. More power to you. I’m not judging. I’m just saying my decision is to not encourage it in my kids.

Because if you wreck your knee you might not be able to ski.

If you wreck your brain… You’re just done.

So I had fun with my previous Marvel Comics Infographic, so I decided to do a new one. This time a London Underground Map inspired infographic showing official Avengers membership over the years, for the silver and bronze ages. Avengers issues 1 through 256 (nice round binary number).

click to embiggen

I show the various main writers, a number of covers over the year, as well as all the official members, and a couple of highlight points like the Kree Skrull War.

It’s interesting seeing the makeup of the teams change, from the initial classic lineup under Stan Lee, to Roy Thomas’ run where he introduces characters like The Vision and Black Panther culminating in the Kree Skrull War. Moving onto Englehart  and eventually Jim Shooter and the Korvac Saga where every major Avengers character to date joined together (along with the Guardians of the Galaxy). Finally into the 1980′s and the new lineup moving into Roger Stern’s run including Captain Marvel, Starfox, and the Black Knight.

All in all I like this infographic. I have a few different versions of it that just didn’t work. Skyscraper long ones. Ones with various underground themes like lines criss crossing the graphic. I like this one best though.

Enjoy!

I have another site that is mostly forum based, and really anything goes there, but it’s within reason. It’s not like a porn site, and we actually do a pretty good job of making sure that while it’s aimed at adults, not children, and sometimes risque stuff goes on there, it’s not full on rated X. It’s rated R…but I can’t make money from Google Adsense on that site.

Within a week of throwing up Adsense ads, Google told me that there was offending content on the site, and that I’d either have to pull my ads, or they might shut down my entire account. Of course they never really mentioned WHAT content it was, I had one example, and it was a forum post, with no pictures, with a joke drinking contest for sexual activities. Yeah I wouldn’t show it to my kids, but therefore I can’t have ads on my entire site? I knew there had to be more, so rather than risk having my entire account frozen, I had to pull my adsense off the site, my largest trafficed site…

So really my anger here has more to do with Google playing censor. We have this kind of anti-censorship image of Big Brother from Orwell, but is it the government censoring us, or is it corporations now. Apple won’t allow certain apps, books, or other content in their stores. Google is the same way.

Is that any different than say Sears not selling pornography magazines back in the 70s? Well yes and no. Yeah a retailer or company can choose how something is used, but we’re not talking about pornography here, we’re talking about mature content, and I think there’s a difference.

With Facebook removing pictures of mothers breasfteeding, Google pulling ads from websites that use naughty langauge (not even pictures… just bad language… I’d give you an example but I don’t want my ads pulled… see? that’s not good right?) and Apple rejecting content to a closed system for no explained reason…

At least in this case reason was seen, and the video was reinstated with a content warning. But the whole “ban hammer” mentality of these companies is still disturbing.

Well It makes me uncomfortable, and gives me a reason to post a video of Kate Upton dancing the “cat daddy” in a skimpy swimsuit.