Computer-generated map of Pluto from Hubble images, synthesized true color

When picking up The Daughter, I was horrified to see a montage of the solar system on the wall of an adjacent classroom with nine planets.

NINE PLANETS?!?! That’s so 2005.

It’s not that I have anything against Pluto. The problem is that it was mislabeled as a planet when it was discovered because of some bad observations of Neptune. I read Planets X and Pluto a few weeks ago so I had still had a bunch of history and science in my head.

By coincidence, March 13 is the day that the discovery of Pluto was announced. So I put together a post on GeekDad: Happy Pluto Discovery Day.

If still think there are nine planets, you definitely need to read Happy Pluto Discovery Day.

Some of my recent GeekDad posts:

1. Assembling LEGO Creator Super Speedster
2. Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Neptune Carrier
3. 20 Geeky Images from Space
4. Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Turbo Typhoon Sub
5. Own Your World With Location-Based Mobile Games
6. Catalog Your Books Online

GeekDad

The latest book was Shades of Grey, by Jasper Fforde.

Since the book had a compliance angle to it, I posted my review on Compliance Building: Weekend Book Review: Shades of Grey by Jasper Fforde.

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Will the world of book publishing be subject to the same revolution as the music industry because of digital content? With the Kindle (or iPad or Nook) do to books what the iPod did to record albums?

It’s not my question to answer. But Jason Epstein from the The New York Review of Books has an excellent view on this in his article: Publishing: The Revolutionary Future

Digitization makes possible a world in which anyone can claim to be a publisher and anyone can call him- or herself an author. In this world the traditional filters will have melted into air and only the ultimate filter—the human inability to read what is unreadable—will remain to winnow what is worth keeping in a virtual marketplace where Keats’s nightingale shares electronic space with Aunt Mary’s haikus. That the contents of the world’s libraries will eventually be accessed practically anywhere at the click of a mouse is not an unmixed blessing. Another click might obliterate these same contents and bring civilization to an end: an overwhelming argument, if one is needed, for physical books in the digital age.

The schedule for Pax East has been released. What is PAX East?

PAX East is a three-day game festival for tabletop, videogame, and PC gamers. We call it a festival because in addition to dedicated tournaments and freeplay areas we’ve got nerdcore concerts, panel discussions, and an exhibitor hall filled with booths displaying the latest from top game publishers and developers.

It’s happening March 26th to 28th at the Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

I will be on a panel with several of the GeekDad writers on Friday night at 7:00. The panel, titled “Bringing Up the Next Generation of Geeks,” will include Dave Banks, Natania Barron, Matt Blum, John Booth, Doug Cornelius (that’s me), Michael Harrison, and Corrina Lawson. We described the session as:

How young is too young for The Hobbit? What should my kids’ first LEGO set be? How can I control my disgust if my child tells me he likes Jar Jar and the Ewoks? When should I buy my kids their first non-six-sided dice? These questions and many more will be discussed by writers for Wired.com’s GeekDad blog and other geek parents. Come share your stories and advice for how to make sure our kids grow up to be geeks like us! Don’t have kids? Show up and find out what may be in store for you if you ever do!

If you are coming to Pax East, please stop by the Wyvern Theatre on Friday night and say hello.

There is also a story in the latest edition of the Boston Business Journal: Geeks and gamers to descend on Hub. Rodney Brown notes that Pax East will be the third largest recurring event in the first quarter, after the Yankee Dental conference and the International Seafood Show.

The Son has been highly interested in the LEGO Atlantis collection. Yesterday, when he got the LEGO Atlantis Neptune Carrier, I decided to film him assembling the kit. This is our second attempt at this experiment. The first was assembling the LEGO Atlantis Turbo Typhoon Sub

You can see more in my latest post on GeekDad: Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Neptune Carrier.

Some of my recent posts on GeekDad:

1. 20 Geeky Images from Space
2. Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Turbo Typhoon Sub
3. Own Your World With Location-Based Mobile Games
4. Catalog Your Books Online

Being a real estate guy, I have a big interest in maps and the visualization of the land around us. Google Earth has provided a treasure trove of information. That system provides has some great images of weird, cool and geeky things as viewed from space.

I picked 20 of the geekiest images I could find. You can see then in my latest post on GeekDad: 20 Geeky Images from Space.

Below is a map of all 20 and a few others that I found. Click on an icon to zoom in. Use the arrows and scale to pan around and zoom in or zoom out.

View Geeky Images on Google Earth in a larger map

from FailBlog: New England Road Sign Win.

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Compliance Bits and Pieces for February 19

February 19, 2010
Here are some interesting compliance related stories from the past two weeks. (I reserved last week for my blogoversary.) Details Emerge on SEC Office of Market Intelligence by Bruce Carton in Compliance Week One of the first tools that the Securities Exchange Commission launched after it ushered itself into the Internet era in the mid-1990s…
Read more »

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New York City Enacts New Rules for Its Pension Fund Investments

February 18, 2010
New York City Comptroller John C. Liu announced sweeping changes in the way New York City pension funds make investment decisions. Following the lead of New York state and several other states, New York City is changing how it deals with gifts, campaign contributions and placement agents. Ban on Campaign Contributions Comptroller Liu declines any campaign…Read more »

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Securities Class Actions in Canada

February 18, 2010
With the winter Olympics going full swing in Canada, I thought I would look to how that country is dealing with securities class actions. NERA Economic Consulting just released their 2009 Update on Trends in Canadian Securities Class Actions. Some tidbits: Eight securities class actions were filed in 2009, compared with the 10 filings in 2008. There…Read more »

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Media Leak is not Protected as a SOX Whistleblower

February 17, 2010
Leaking information to the media about bad financial controls is not protected by SOX whistleblower retaliation clause. Nicholas P. Tides and Matthew C. Neumann were working as “Audit IT SOX auditors” at The Boeing Company. They made several complaints about auditing deficiencies to their supervisors. They claimed “that Boeing’s auditing culture was unethical and that…Read more »

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The Economist: Special Report on Financial Risk

February 16, 2010
This week’s The Economist has an excellent special report: The Gods Strike Back. The title comes from Peter Bernstein’s Against the Gods: “The revolutionary idea that defines the boundary between modern times and the past is the mastery of risk: the notion that the future is more than a whim of the gods and that men…Read more »

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President’s Day

February 15, 2010
Washington’s Birthday, the federal holiday was originally implemented by the United States Congress in 1880 for government offices in the District of Columbia (20 Stat. 277) and expanded in 1885 to include all federal offices (23 Stat. 516). As the first federal holiday to honor an American citizen, the holiday was celebrated on Washington’s…Read more »

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Weekend Book Review: In Fed We Trust

February 14, 2010
It is only fitting that I am writing this book review on a Sunday. In Fed We Trust: Ben Bernanke’s War on the Great Panic starts off by telling about the importance of a few Sundays in 2008. In March, there was the Sunday when the Federal Reserve announced an unprecedented action to lend…Read more »

The Son has been highly interested in the LEGO Atlantis collection. Yesterday, when he got the LEGO Atlantis Turbo Typhoon Sub, I decided to film him assembling the kit.

You can see more in my latest post on GeekDad: Assembling the LEGO Atlantis Turbo Typhoon Sub.

Some of my recent posts on GeekDad:

1. Own Your World With Location-Based Mobile Games
2. Catalog Your Books Online
3. 10 Things Parents Should Know About The Princess and the Frog
4. A Visit to the Patee House Museum

With all of the non-traditional sport focus on the Olympics, I nearly missed the news that the America’s Cup sailing competition was happening in Valencia Spain. The BMW Oracle team triumphed over the Alinghi team. That means the US boat beat the Swiss boat.

Part of my family comes from Newport, Rhode Island, so I’ve had an interest in the America’s Cup. The sailing race was based in Newport starting in 1851. Then in 1983, an Australian boat won the cup and took it down under.

In 1983 the Australians won by using a radical design in the hull of their boat. The Australia II used a winged keel. They also made extensive use of kevlar and carbon fiber.

The BMW Oracle Racing boat, USA 17, was also a radical design. It is a tirmaran that is nearly 90 feet across. It also uses a rigid sail wing instead of a sail. The wing is almost twice as big as the wing of a 747.

Congratulations to Larry Ellison and BMW Oracle Racing.

There is no news on where the next America’s Cup race will be held.

Sources:

• U.S. Yacht BMW Oracle takes back America’s Cup with 2-race sweep
• BMW Oracle Racing website
• USA 17 in Wikipedia
• Australia II in Wikipedia
• No Oracle announcement amid gaiety
• America’s Cup in Wikipedia