The Wisdom of Emergent Crowds of Tipping Points

I’ve recently finished three books that all have more to do with one another than they might expect:

The last one, while not as well written, does acknowledge the space it’s in by referencing the previous two books. (and mentioned our own Dave Pennock)

At some point I want to sit down with all three of these again and write down my slowly gelling thoughts on all of this. This is how we should design software and build robots.

L’Ennui

A French collegue handed out these chocolates wrapped in paper with pithy french statements on them, like fortune cookies. Mine said “L’ennui naquit un jour de l’uniformité”, which means (i think) “Ennui was born from Uniformity”.

Talk about your apropos fortunes….

ZigBee stuff

ZigBee is a newish RF radio protocol at the same frequency of Bluetooh and 802.11b (ISC 2.4GHz). Unlike both of those protocols, it doesn’t suck (power). It’s meant to sip on batteries for months while still being part of a ZigBee mesh. And it seems to be designed to better deal in noiser environments (which the 2.4GHz band is definitely now).

There’s been at least one article in Circuit Cellar about it, I need to re-read it.