The best snorkeling in Orange County

My neck is all busted up. Too much surf paddling. I’m shore bound.

But, you can’t keep a good watermen down. I’m gonna head out and do some leisurely floating and watching with some kicking, i.e. snorkeling.

My research shows that Shaw’s Cove is the best in Orange County:

“One of the most popular dive sites in Orange County. It is well-protected from large swells, making it highly suitable for the beginning beach divers.”

“Have dove here twice and so far it is my favorite shore dive in Laguna. Vis was excellent two weeks ago at about 35-40 which is great for this area. I saw a lot of fish live. I spotted two octopi, sea hares galore with one that was huge. It has a nice wall to dive near. There are a lot of divers on Saturday mornings because the conditions are usually good for the dive classes. The hike to the shore can be tiring depending on where you get a parking spot. It is a residential area so parking on the streets fills quickly and early on the weekends. There are about 40 stairs that you get to hike up as well. Great cardio workout.”

Of course, there are 7 other notable places to check out. Here is a full list from shorediving.com.

I will have to investigate to see which one I think is best, but I’m definitely starting with Shaw’s thanks to this personal video:

This is the first video I’ve ever shot in my life. I’ve been wanting to make some videos to share with my non-diving friends & family why each moment beneath the water is so special to me. I purchased a FlipHD and Ikelite housing for it, with their lighting system. The color is uncorrected and video is unenhanced. Conditions were a bit rough for the locale, but I’m overall happy with the quality of the output. Shot a few hours of video in the morning then edited down to 5 minutes. Enjoy!

Debbie Beacham a pioneer in womens surfing

Last week I attended the induction ceremony for the Surfing Walk of Fame where Debbie Beacham was honored. She seemed shy as she walked onto the stage making the comment that PT forced her to write a speech. What came out was fascinating.

I grabbed two minutes of it on my iPhone. The sound is great but the shot is too distant to get a good shot of Debbie.

Debbie is a true unsung hero of womens sports and womens surfing. After retiring from competition she plunged into the hard backroom world to make it a viable profession.

For several decades she repp’ed womens surfing by putting on events, organizing tours, getting sponsor money, producing movies for girls, and more. Now she is the Vice-President of the International Surfing Association (ISA), the official governing body of surfing.

I am a big fan of womens surfing and it’s great to see heroines like her in person.

Debbie in 1983 when she was world champion.

—

If you’re a fan of womens surfing check out this great online magazine – Jetty Girl.

MTV’s first day on YouTube (with all 24 hours)

“Ladies and gentleman…rock n roll”

Says announcer John Lack after the space shuttle Columbia takes off and so begins MTV.

You can catch that and more on this awesome new YouTube channel, MTV The First 24. It features 10 minute sections of that first day, all 24-hours, that will autoplay if you leave it on.

Or, you can quickly browse through the sections looking for nuggets of gold. Each section typically has a video at the beginning and end, with commercials and the VJ’s in the middle.

I’ve been watching it for hours (as I work) and it’s super awesome. The music videos are classic, the VJ’s are weird, and the news bytes are no Kurt Loder.

You can definitely tell how beta the launch was. There are lots of dead space moments where they were switching out VHS tapes (lol), but it has that “we’re doing something new here, we think it could be amazing, but we really have no idea what we’re doing.”

The videos really do make the show, with cult classics worth watching for their quality, 80s fashion, and pre-punk attitudes. Although, I could do without the Rod Stewart ‘butt’ moments.

Notable first videos:  The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star // Pat Benatar – You Better Run // The Who – You Better You Bet // The Pretenders – Brass in Pocket.

The commercials are so old that that every product is funny or classic, worth it for that alone.

Here is the second video because the first contains 10 minutes of the space launch. This one has 4 more minutes of the launch, so skip to 4:16 if you want the real deal Holyfield.

MTV's first day on YouTube (with all 24 hours)

“Ladies and gentleman…rock n roll”

Says announcer John Lack after the space shuttle Columbia takes off and so begins MTV.

You can catch that and more on this awesome new YouTube channel, MTV The First 24. It features 10 minute sections of that first day, all 24-hours, that will autoplay if you leave it on.

Or, you can quickly browse through the sections looking for nuggets of gold. Each section typically has a video at the beginning and end, with commercials and the VJ’s in the middle.

I’ve been watching it for hours (as I work) and it’s super awesome. The music videos are classic, the VJ’s are weird, and the news bytes are no Kurt Loder.

You can definitely tell how beta the launch was. There are lots of dead space moments where they were switching out VHS tapes (lol), but it has that “we’re doing something new here, we think it could be amazing, but we really have no idea what we’re doing.”

The videos really do make the show, with cult classics worth watching for their quality, 80s fashion, and pre-punk attitudes. Although, I could do without the Rod Stewart ‘butt’ moments.

Notable first videos:  The Buggles – Video Killed the Radio Star // Pat Benatar – You Better Run // The Who – You Better You Bet // The Pretenders – Brass in Pocket.

The commercials are so old that that every product is funny or classic, worth it for that alone.

Here is the second video because the first contains 10 minutes of the space launch. This one has 4 more minutes of the launch, so skip to 4:16 if you want the real deal Holyfield.

What Is a Data Scientist?

After performing some research on data visualization, I came across an explosion of articles on “data scientists”. This term seems to be the latest craze in Social Networking. All these web 2.0 companies with millions of users and their data, but no income. Why not find a way to turn that data into profits.

The trouble is that all this is very confusing…to everybody. So let’s start at the beginning.

What Is a Data Scientist?

According to Ryan Kim of Giga Om: “It’s someone who can obtain, scrub, explore, model and interpret data, blending hacking, statistics and machine learning. It’s a set of skills that go beyond many existing job titles and it’s increasingly in demand.”

Which is pulled from Bit.ly’s data scientist who goes into the taxonomy:

  • Obtain: pointing and clicking does not scale.
    • Getting a list of numbers from a paper via PDF or from within your web browser via copy and paste rarely yields sufficient data to learn something `new’ by exploratory or predictive analytics. Part of the skillset of a data scientist is knowing how to obtain a sufficient corpus of usable data, possibly from multiple sources, and possibly from sites which require specific query syntax. At a minimum, a data scientist should know how to do this from the command line, e.g., in a UN*X environment. Shell scripting does suffice for many tasks, but we recommend learning a programming or scripting language which can support automating the retrieval of data and add the ability to make calls asynchronously and manage the resulting data. Python is a current favorite at time of writing (Fall 2010).
  • Scrub: the world is a messy place.
    • Whether provided by an experimentalist with missing data and inconsistent labels, or via a website with an awkward choice of data formatting, there will almost always be some amount of data cleaning (or scrubbing) necessary before analysis of these data is possible. As with Obtaining data, herein a little command line fu and simple scripting can be of great utility. Scrubbing data is the least sexy part of the analysis process, but often one that yields the greatest benefits. A simple analysis of clean data can be more productive than a complex analysis of noisy and irregular data.
  • Explore: You can see a lot by looking.
    • Visualizing, clustering, performing dimensionality reduction: these are all part of `looking at data.’ These tasks are sometimes described as “exploratory” in that no hypothesis is being tested, no predictions are attempted. Wolfgang Pauli would call these techniques “not even wrong,” though they are hugely useful for getting to know your data. Often such methods inspire predictive analysis methods used later.
  • Models: always bad, sometimes ugly.
    • Whether in the natural sciences, in engineering, or in data-rich startups, often the ‘best’ model is the most predictive model. E.g., is it `better’ to fit one’s data to a straight line or a fifth-order polynomial? Should one combine a weighted sum of 10 rules or 10,000? One way of framing such questions of model selection is to remember why we build models in the first place: to predict and to interpret…
  • iNterpret: “The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers.”
    • Consider the task of automated digit recognition. The value of an algorithm which can predict ’4′ and distinguish from ’5’ is assessed by its predictive power, not on theoretical elegance; the goal of machine learning for digit recognition is not to build a theory of ’3.’ However, in the natural sciences, the ability to predict complex phenomena is different from what most mean by ‘understanding’ or ‘interpreting’…

The ability and the skills to perform all of these processes makes the person highly valuable and, in my opinion, very interesting. The career pages of Facebook, Google, Twitter, Foursquare, LinkedIn and a host of other social sites are boiling over with requests for these folk. It is a super hiring phase to get the best employees.

It appears that LinkedIn is leading in innovation right now with their Data Science Team, though I suspect that Facebook, Amazon, and Google are not far behind. Some of the features that the LinkedIn team has built are:

  • “People You May Know”
  • “Jobs You May be Interested In”
  • Groups You May Like”
  • “Talent Match” (Post a job on LinkedIn and see the magic)
  • “Signal” (news feed feature)

Which is funny because all sites seem to have these features. I can just imagine an arms race of sorts to build the next great “data science” feature so they can keep bringing us back to their sites (and hopefully get some ad money along the way).

 

BlogHer, Not My Thing

I wanted to like BlogHer. I did. A conference about blogging for women. I’m a woman. I’m a blogger.  Perfect.

But as a first-time conference goer, I found myself unable to tap into the enthusiasm many attendees seemed to genuinely possess.

Maybe it was the fact that in almost every session I attended, someone in the audience asked what SEO is (I’m not saying this is bad, it just illustrates there were a lot of newcomers to the web and blogging in attendance). Or maybe it was every woman I met (who were all friendly and welcoming) happened to be a “mommy blogger.” Or it could have been the Expo Hall felt way too much like a 1950s cliché, dominated by packaged/prepared food, cleaning supplies and kitchenware vendors. Or it could have just been that unlike many of the women who were repeat attendees reuniting with friends, I was out of my geographic comfort zone without a posse to hold court with. Whatever the case, I didn’t fall in love the experience.

In BlogHer’s defense, I don’t typically go gaga for conferences (with the exception of my maiden voyage to SXSW), for the same reason I don’t like smorgasbords: a lot of broad, general content, without a lot of nuance and quality. While the speakers I heard from were knowledgeable, it felt like too often, they catered to the lowest common denominator. Not really the speaker’s fault, more a consequence of the format, but less than satisfying for me nonetheless. Perhaps if there were beginner, intermediate and advanced tracks, this would have been less of a problem. And perhaps if I had gone to any of the parties (I heard the parties are a big part of BlogHer’s appeal), I would have gotten more out of the networking aspect. But I didn’t. And I also didn’t go nuts for the swag. I heard a lot of women talking and tweeting about the swag. I’m not really a swag kind of gal.

Finally, I’d be remiss if I failed to mention one obvious aspect of the conference…men (or lack thereof). I missed them (although there were a few in attendance). As someone whose been one of a handful of woman at similar-sized conferences comprised of mostly men, it feels unnatural to me to have just one gender talking about issues and content that are not gender specific. My motivation for going was to increase my knowledge of blogging. The fact that I’m a woman was secondary.

So while I understand the value of BlogHer, whose mission since 2005 has been “to create opportunities for women who blog to gain exposure, education, community and economic empowerment,” I’m more interested in focusing on the blog over the her.

To each her own.

The 100 Year Starship: My Three Ideas

It’s the end of an era. The space shuttle was retired last month (July 2011) after 30 years and 135 missions. Now NASA becomes a massive data collection organization.

Which allows us, as a nation, to pivot and move in a new direction. A worldwide call for ideas is on the table and it sounds like fun.

DARPA is in the game with the 100 Year Starship symposium asking the world’s researchers to submit abstracts.

Which is where I get really excited. Here we sit on the brink of a new era. The field is wide open and the opportunity to create the future is upon us.

Or, at least my amateur fanboy-ism thinks so. Still it is fun to share ideas, even crazy ones. So here is my attempt at space domination.

Please, feel free to share your own sci-fi ideas.

Space Ship not Space Shuttle

I think space travel involves two different kinds of travel: planetary and galactic.

Planetary travel involves moving around with all the gas, gravity, and debris of planets. To which we seem to have mastered.

We have innumerable methods for getting around like cars, planes, and boats, and not forgetting a shuttle to get us out of the planet and into space.

We can travel faster than sound and pretty much get anywhere on the planet in a matter of hours. The only real next step here is to develop some “beaming” technology, not to improve our travel, rather to cut down on the time of the journey (or the traffic).

On the other hand, we have yet to do any serious work on travel in the galaxy. Do we actually build engines for the vacuum of space? Is it possible to build a galactic engine from within a planet?

If it were up to me I would make building space ships, not space shuttles, a priority. Perhaps, this will have to wait a few decades while the private sector lowers the cost of these shuttles. But, eventually, we will have to get down to the business of building space engines in space (not in office cubicles).

Gravity

I really want to know what gravity is. I generally understand that it’s something magnetic and the force of which gets exponentially stronger as mass increases. To which I equate, “everyone likes to look at a car crash”.

That’s the best I can do.

And, I’m not sure the best and brightest can do any better.

Something tells me this is important for our future in space travel. Men and women are going to be spending a lot of time up there and we will need a way to mimic Earth so that we don’t damage our bodies in any way (so it becomes more like riding the bus than NASCAR).

Also, the force is so strong that it can keep a moon hanging around. Maybe we can harness it?

In order to travel in space and get anywhere we will need to travel at very high speeds. Which will mean creating a way to not kill humans going at death-defying speeds, and finding energy powerful enough to move that fast.

I just feel like this mystical gravity holds the answer..

Satellites like cell towers

I think it would be awesome if every planet in our solar system had a satellite in orbit around it. One that could take pictures and send/receive messages.

The ability to monitor our surroundings and communicate between them seems critical. Like if we send a ship to Mars it can communicate with satellites back on Earth and the Moon.

Or, maybe I’m just a kid who grew up in a cell phone world and think’s its scary to travel in space unless you’re always connected 🙂

“Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings. And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.” — Bruce Springsteen

[quote]”Poor men wanna be rich, rich men wanna be kings. And a king ain’t satisfied till he rules everything.” — Bruce Springsteen[/quote]