Ted Roden

Are you excited?

Are you excited or not excited† about your week.

For the record, I’m super excited.

† “Not excited” may include “dreading.”

"My Backyard is Sand Hill Road"

That was in a pitch from a VC-type who wanted to be involved in “the next round of funding.” It’s hard not to read that as, “I can see Russia from my house.”

And no, I’m not looking for (or accepting) funding on any projects.

Crying

Today I stumbled across a question from Fancy Hands user Andrew Morgan who asked:

Ok, you know when you are about to cry, and a lump forms in your throat?

Please find any data explaining the physiological reason for that lump.

After reading it, I wanted to see how we responded. Not only because I wanted to ensure we had a good response, but also because I really wanted to know the answer. When I checked, I was very pleasantly surprised. With Andrew’s permission, I’m posting both the question and answer here. 

The nervous system can be divided into several parts, the biggest division being between the central nervous system (CNS), which contains the brain and spinal cord, and the peripheral nervous system, which contains all of the nerves and ganglia outside of the CNS. The peripheral nervous system can be further divided into two sets of nerves: voluntary and autonomic. The voluntary nerves are what you use to walk, to write, to sing, or to do anything else that you can control. The autonomic nerves are what your brain uses to run all of the functions of your body that you do not control, like digesting food, or pumping blood through the heart, or shivering when its cold.

One of the functions of the autonomic nervous system is to react to stress by changing how the body operates, to better deal with whatever is causing the stress. Emotions such as sorrow, fear, or anger are translated as stress to the autonomic nervous system, because the only causes of these emotions in our primitive mammalian ancestors were stressful situations. All mammals (and most other vertebrates) have developed a “Fight or Flight” response to danger, which gives the individual the speed to run, or the strength to fight, when attacked by another animal. To accomplish this, the stress of being attacked triggers the autonomic nervous system to increase the flow of oxygen and sugar to the muscles, so that they can be used more actively.

The increase in oxygen is accomplished at several levels: blood flow to the muscles is increased by making the heart beat harder and faster, and by decreasing blood flow to the internal organs; absorption of oxygen into the blood is increased by making the lungs breath faster; and air intake into the lungs is increased by opening the throat and mouth. The side effects of this are panting, heart pounding, and nausea. In the case of crying, which is the autonomic response to sorrow or grief, most of these effects are easily recognized.

An important part of opening the throat to allow the lungs to get more air involves expanding the glottis - the muscle which controls the opening from the back of the throat (pharynx) into the voice box (larynx) - so that more air can pass through it. So part of the autonomic response of crying is to use throat muscles to open the glottis as wide as possible. This doesn’t pose a problem until you want to swallow; swallowing involves closing the glottis, so that food doesn’t get into your larynx. So if you try to swallow while you are crying, the muscles for swallowing are fighting against the muscles for crying, and this tug-of-war over the glottis is perceived as a lump behind your larynx which makes it difficult to swallow.

As an aside, the autonomic nervous system has two parts: sympathetic and parasympathetic. These function together much like the gas and brake pedals in a car. The sympathetic nervous system activate the heightened response to stress, and the parasympathetic nervous system reduces stress activity and promotes more recouperative activities. One of the chief purposes of the parasympathetic nervous system is to coordinate and run digestion, which includes swallowing. So the lump in your throat is caused by both the sympathetic and parasympathetic nerves of the throat being activated at the same time.

Here’s the website where I found it:

http://www.madsci.org/posts/archives/mar97/855114309.An.r.html

If you’ve had a great (or bad) response, let me know and I’ll post it here.

Hax0ring my phone

So much fun to see the linux innards on the Evo.

Just for fun

Just for fun, I’m predicting these will end up in the @newsycombinator twitter feed today.

• http://www.spheredev.org/wiki/Git_for_the_lazy
• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jEd0fjXsk8w
• http://blogs.hbr.org/bregman/2010/06/why-i-returned-my-ipad.html
• http://www.eblong.com/zarf/essays/rule-based-if/
• http://www.grocerycouponguide.com/articles/10-things-i-learned-eating-on-1-a-day-for-a-month/

(This list was generated by code. I just want to make the claim where people can see if I’m right/wrong)

What is BP most worried about?

This is the last BP related post of the night, probably.

Finish this sentence. The executives at BP are most worried about the…

1. loss of oil
2. bad PR
3. cost of the cleanup
4. environmental impact

Tough call, right?

Filming for 'Smurfs' Movie Scheduled for Thursday, near 7th St & Ave A

eastvillagefeed:

via evgrieve.com

Get off my lawn!

I’m sure that I sound like an old man here, but backslashes are the only thing that should be used to escape characters. Under no circumstances should single quotes be used to escape single quotes… that’s crazy talk.

Keep in touch

I’ve never been a huge fan of blogs that ask more questions than they answer, which means that I’m not a fan of most startup/tech blogs. So many articles seem to be regurgitating a product release announcement followed by a couple of questions.

• “This could be a great service, but can it scale?”
• “This is a crowded market, why do these guys think they can succeed?”
• “How can they make it without outside investment?”

Having launched a number of projects, I read this type of thing about my projects all the time. The latest article about Fancy Hands (not Fancy Pants) asks “So… what do you think? Where does Fancy Hands get the employees, and who are they?”

I suppose he’s more interested in engaging his readers by soliciting comments than informing them by giving them answers. Otherwise, I can’t imagine a reason why he’d decide not shoot me an email and ask that exact question. He could certainly find it, my name is plastered all over the site and on every article about it. Finding my email address is probably one of the easiest things that someone can do on the internet.

But, my point here is simple: if you have any questions about my projects, just get in touch. Even if you’re not writing an article, or if you’re writing a scathing review and only want me to make some bone-headed quotes. I’m always happy to answer these types any questions. Also, most other small developers/startups would be happy to answer these types of questions, just ask.

As for hiring, where do I get the people? Well, the job application process at Fancy Hands is a bit of a test. Every step along the way is designed to weed out people who wouldn’t measure up. There is a huge series of questions they must answer, they must do sample tasks (not for actual clients), and they must display a couple of signs of technical and interpersonal saviness. But the simplest, easiest way for me to weed people out is making the application process non-obvious. Sure, I could get a lot more applications if I had a big “make money” link on the homepage, but I don’t want more applications, I want better applications.

1. I tried contacting the author to supply the answer anyways, but I couldn’t find an email/twitter link anywhere.
2. And no, it doesn’t involve emailing me personally.

Working on something new

kylewritescode:

I’m really thrilled to announce some big changes for me professionally: I’m now working full-time on my new project, Forrst. Forrst is an invite-only community for developers and designers that aims to let us share and interact with one another around focused bits of content — code, links, screenshots, and soon, questions. I’ve got a lot in store for Forrst over the next few months, and the community, while young, is already full of great, smart people.

While I’m no longer CTO of Cork’d, I’m still pitching in from time to time to help them roll out their new content-focused model.

I’m really thrilled about what the next year holds for me and for Forrst. If you’re a developer or designer, definitely get in touch (I’m @kylebragger on Twitter) — I’ll be seeding invites to existing members around May 1st, so stay tuned for that.

The bottom line: I’m pumped that I’m able to work on a project in a space that I’m truly passionate about.

—Kyle

Glad to see the official announcement. Congrats!

Redwood: Ruby Trees

mwunsch:

Redwood is my newest project: a simple implementation of a tree data structure in pure Ruby. It provides a few things:

• The redwood command-line tool: a Ruby hack/rewrite of the Unix tree program.
• A Module providing tree-like methods for your objects.
• A Redwood::Node class as a basic implementation of tree creation.
• A Redwood::FileNode class for representing directories in a tree-like way.

gem install redwood to get started.

Learn about, enjoy, and fork the redwood project over at GitHub. For help with the redwood CLI, read the redwood(1) manpage.

My favorite thing about Redwood is that you get the awesome tree view for all of the tree objects that mix-in Redwood:

Redwood
|-- bin
|   `-- redwood
|-- Gemfile
|-- lib
|   |-- redwood
|   |   |-- filenode.rb
|   |   `-- node.rb
|   `-- redwood.rb
|-- LICENSE
|-- pkg
|   `-- redwood-0.0.1.gem
|-- Rakefile
|-- README.md
|-- redwood.gemspec
`-- test
    |-- helper.rb
    `-- test_redwood.rb

Redwood was created mostly to facilitate this kind of thing, and as a bit of a brain-teaser. The redwood CLI is, honestly, totally inferior to the original tree (written in C). I was getting frustrated working on Prism, and I created Redwood to get my mind wrapped around the concept of tree structures. While there are several implementations of tree data-structures in Ruby, I wasn’t really impressed with any of their APIs. And none of them created the tree-view that you get with the Redwood#view method.

Redwood began life as a thought-experiment and I hope you are able to use it whenever you need something resembling a tree.

He’s on fire!