Ann Arbor For Better Or Worse

Robert Asprin - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
[Ann Arbor's own] Robert Asprin passed away [at 62] 22 May 2008, dying quietly in bed where he had been reading a Terry Pratchett novel.

Asprin was important to me because he was a very successful SF writer from my home town.  I enjoyed the first few books in the THIEVES WORLD and MYTH series. Too bad his life and career was cut short.

Camera Spots Wolverine in Sierra Nevada - The Huffington Post

SACRAMENTO, Calif. — A research project aimed at weasels has turned up a bigger prize: a picture of a wolverine, an elusive animal scientists feared may have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada long ago by human activity.

The discovery could affect land-use decisions if the wolverine is declared an endangered species, a step the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering, although the animals typically live at high elevations where there is limited development.

A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range.

Moriarty was trying to get pictures of martens, which are slender brown weasels, for a project she was doing with the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Southwest Research Station.

She said that when she saw the wolverine in the picture early last Sunday morning, it was a “complete shock. It was not something I would expect by any means.”

News of the picture surprised scientists, who thought wolverines, if they still inhabited the Sierra, would be found only in the southern part of the range, not in the Lake Tahoe area.

There had been sightings of wolverines by reputable people but no solid proof they were still in the Sierra, said Bill Zielinski, a research ecologist for the Forest Service who was working with Moriatry.

“The conventional wisdom was that they were pretty much gone from California,” said Zielinski. “There’s been a lot of other camera work and a variety of methods used to track rare carnivores. Those same methods, if wolverines had been around, would have detected them, we thought.”

Official Google Blog: Hello, Pittsburgh

On Tuesday, March 4, the Google Pittsburgh office will open its doors to the technical community for a special evening. We’ll kick things off with some mingling over beer, wine and snacks, and then transition into a tech talk with one of our local engineers, Pat Stephenson.

Pat will discuss the implementation of Dapper, a low-overhead system for monitoring the performance of large, distributed applications at Google, and the tools his team has built to analyze the data in a talk titled “Dapper: It’s 11 p.m. and do you know where your RPC is?”

This is annoying because Google’s Ann Arbor office has been open for a year now and still has nothing but call center jobs. Yuk, what a disappointment.

Shaky Jake dies Sunday at the age of 82 - Latest from the Ann Arbor News - MLive.com

Shaky Jake was perhaps Ann Arbor’s most recognizable resident, walking around town with his trademark dark sunglasses, hat and one-string guitar.

The colorful icon whose nickname was often shouted out by passersby died Sunday evening at the age of 82.

First Bo, now this. End of an era!

AADL Receives Space Needs and Facility Study for Downtown Library | Ann Arbor District Library

As an aside, I have my family in other parts of the US in awe over the fact that I walked into a branch of our public library at 9:00 and walked out with HP 7 at 9:05 a.m. this last Saturday, thanks to your organizational abilities, service, and spectacular website!

They also had zoom lend copies still available when I visited West Branch at 5 pm — which is also impressive! Great job AADL.

Some excitement in our neighborhood yesterday — it’s been so dry that our neighbor’s lawn caught on fire. We suspect a sparkler dropped by neighborhood kids.

Kelsey saw the fire and told Cheryl and me. We came running across the street — our neighbor is 89 years old and frail. I pounded on the door, and Kelsey alertly found Esther in her back yard. I put out the fire with a hose.

Wow — like living out west with wildfires!

mediabistro.com: GalleyCat

Would Borders Merge With B&N?

What are we to make of the fact that the Pershing Square Capital Management hedge fund revealed in a recent SEC filing that it owns shares in both Borders and Barnes & Noble? David Polonitza of SeekingAlpha focuses on Pershing’s track record for shareholder activism to speculate (very wildly) on the possibilities of a merger between “the number #1 and #2 big box book stores in the country.” He explains the logic behind the hypothetical move: “There would be considerable cost savings in merging the two companies with respect to distribution, management, along with the increased purchasing power. Each company’s online presence is still not competitive and they might fare better combined…a much stronger competitor to the likes of Amazon than they are apart.”

From a cost-cutting corporate shark point of view, why not? The two companies have essentially duplicate infrastructures and there is no really significant differentiation in their value propositions. Why not put all the stores under a common management and get rid of half the infrastructure?

Just as long as it’s not the Borders half they get rid of … that would be a horrendous blow to Ann Arbor, already reeling from the loss of Pfizer.

Technorati Tags: Borders, Pfizer, Ann Arbor, BGP

Official Google Blog: We made the list

The Santa Monica office is a small but growing enclave with +200 Googlers. We’re a close-knit bunch, enjoying company-sponsored happy hours every week at different Santa Monica hotspots plus several other non-work functions. What’s great about working in Santa Monica is the opportunity to really make a big splash in the “sea of Google” with lots of visibility at all levels of the company. We work on projects ranging from customer-facing ad systems to Picasa to Google Video to the Google Search Appliance, and more.

Why indeed? I hope the Ann Arbor office follows this model and becomes more than just an Adwords call farm.

AAPS Board of Education: 2006-07 Contact Information

2006-2007 AAPS Board of Education
Email the entire Board of Education: boe@aaps.k12.mi.us

Technorati Tags: Schembechler

North Korea Times: Google to open new center in Mich.

Google will build a research and administrative facility in Ann Arbor, Mich., that could employ as many as 1,000 people.

Michigan Gov. Jennifer M. Granholm was set to make an announcement Tuesday at a news conference at the state Capitol in Lansing, The New York Times reported.

Larry Page, one of Google’s founders, earned his undergraduate degree in engineering at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

The big search engine has been seeking as much as 240,000 square feet of office space.

Technorati Tags: Google, Ann Arbor, North Korea