Benjamin M. Hill

"Gomphocarpus physocarpus: Asclepias physocarpa is the former botanical name, Goose plant, Giant swan milkweed, Hairy balls, Family jewels , Oscar, Cotton-bush, Balloon plant" (snort) Henry dove right in.

Mondays, bleagh.  Coffee helps.  Giant bug now as long as a penny helps even more!

Henry grew a lot in the past 2 days.  And feelers!

I  finally  found a monarch caterpillar on my home-grown milkweed.  (I had no idea cold-stratification was a thing for seeds to sprout, nature is weird).  Henry is now living in a jar at my desk and being fed milkweed that grows around the office. Henry is about 3mm.  (penny for scale)

Someone was kind enough to crawl all of Reddit.com and produce a TB sized extract of all posts . This was cool.  I ran it through a small loop that said for each author if they post next in another subreddit (link strength from old sub to new sub)++" Then some trimming: keep the top 5 outbound connections from each sub, and top 20 inbound links.  Mix with some gephi layout and coloring , and voilà - how everything is connected! It would be fun to do a neurons firing lightning sort of animation - "pick a starting place based on popularity, and fire/light up one possible path the author takes from there"

I came across a Raspberry Pi by chance (bought it off a friend at work that had an extra one).  It is a whole lot of nerdy fun for $35.  However, there was a lot of Googling involved to get it to sit up and play nice. So, I documented my setup process, in the hope that it helps someone else who can't wait to get up and running with it doing something fancy. Disclaimer: The tutorials are your best bet.  I'm a beginner and please tell me if these steps can be improved! Supplies I didn't have the suggested minimum: no USB keyboard, and no 5V Micro USB power supply.  However, I didn't need them!  I plugged the Pi into a USB hub that I have hanging off the back of the Airport router, and the power was enough.  I also did the entire setup in "headless" mode, so got away without needing a keyboard or HDMI cable. Raspberry Pi "B" (the one with an ethernet port) Spare 8GB SD card Spare Micro-USB cable and somewhere to plug it into that has "e...

With some needed brain-break time between recruiter calls, I wanted to visualize the national debt.  Inspired by the NYT tree-map visualization of our next proposed budget , and unsatisfied with the "if the national debt was dollars it would encircle the earth X times " type of answer.  I get it, it's big.  Very big. But, how big? So I started out with a nice slider (now easy in HTML5) and a picture of a crisp new $100.  (It's all about the benjamins!)  Apply some exponential math to the slider, and whammo... I crashed my browser. No problem, rookie mistake and I'm just exploring, let's have some stacks of $10,000, the amount of a federal bundle of $100 bills.  When the amount of images on the screen is too big, switch to the bundles.  Problem solved, right?  Wrong, browser crashed again. Er, ok. How about stacks of million dollars?  Easy, some casino had a stack in a glass case and everyone took pictures.  Stacks o...

There are many ways to comprehend all the new communication methods available through the Internet.  One method is to chart the methods on their relative investment per communication (how much time and effort you put into each outgoing message) vs. the audience size of the communication (how many people might see your message).  This allows a comparison of twitter, SMS, IMing, blogging, spamming, and traditional media, as well as highlighting the empty space that twitter filled, providing clues as to why twitter has seen so much recent success. Check out the positioning at my SlideShare site: Communication Spectrum

Every PM/PjM's daily worry: How do you know how your team is doing?   How do you identify what is working well vs. what needs fixing before it becomes a serious issue and kills your timeline?  How do you take the temperature/check the pulse of your product in a way that helps instead of adds overhead?  How do you stop frustration before your team gets bogged down and productivity tanks? Which got me thinking: What would be the minimal amount of information (lowest process overhead) you need from your team to take the pulse of the project?  Potential answer that I'd love to impose on my next team as a COB daily form, with some sort of automated system that harasses anyone that forgets to fill in the form before they sign out for the day (and allows you to fill out the info via a mobile web interface during your commute home): Locate today on a X/Y graph:  X=How intense was today? (not at all to crazy intense) Y=How frustrating was today? (not at all to ...