At least year's TED Conference, Blaise Aguera y Arcas demoed some new technology coming out of Microsoft labs. The software being released is called Photosynth, which is pretty cool in its own right, but I was really excited by its underlying technology. Paraphrasing, Seadragon lets you interact with vast amounts of visual data. It doesn't matter how big the collections are or how big the images are. The only thing that limits your performance is the number of pixels on your screen. The moment I cooed was when he zoomed in on a block of text that turned out to be Bleak House in its entirity. More importantly it wasn't an image of text, it was actual text.

Seeing this in video, which you can do below, makes it clear how this could Greatly improve the computing experience. You can start with a bunch of thumbnails of everything in a folder and just keep zooming in to use it, instead of having to open an application. It would make the experience completely seamless. The software probably wouldn't have advanced word processing or image manipulation built in, but software providers could potentially create a hook into Seadragon so you can have the power of Photoshop built into your finder application.

Enough talk though, check out the video and see what I mean.

Earlier this week, it came out that the star of Man vs. Wild and the production team have been staying in hotels during survival challenges. Since the show purports that star Bear Grylls (supposedly that's his actually name) is toughing it out on his own, many are upset that the show is not 100% real.

To those people I say, do you see that rectangular glowing box in front of you? It's a television and very rarely shows anyone's real life. Did you consider the camera crew with him and what would happen if Bear were in danger? Do you think Bear is an expert in every area he visits or do you think maybe he gets some help?

The show is about explaining how to deal with extreme situations and I'd rather see him in the field with a little help than in the hospital battling dehydration. If he has to spend some time in a hotel, fine by me. I'm sure that I'm better off with his tips than I am without.

One of my favorite features of New York Magazine is the Approval Matrix. They place a bunch of items on a two-dimentional axis with Brilliant/Despicable on the x-axis and Lowbrow/Highbrow on the Y-axis. I've always wondered if everyone else reads it like I do. So, I thought I'd show you how I read it. Here is this week's matrix if you want to check it out yourself.