inkbluesky

leaves with glass reflection 

Ok I finished by homework. This is my reflection project (tutorial here). I did add my own little bit. Once I was finished with the step by step from Planet Photoshop the reflection wasn’t glassy enough for me so I flattened all the layers, selected , copied and pasted the reflected part and dragged over a very transparent glass style. If you do not like Photoshop’s standard glass styles try here. Search under Photoshop and styles for glass.

Nine Legislative Efforts that Must Be Stopped in 2006 

I was thinking as I was reading through that surely there would be one that didn’t really matter. I was wrong, they’re all important.

Waiting for the lights to go out 

Jones has found that we are currently in a quandary comparable to that of the Red Queen in Through the Looking Glass: we have to run faster and faster just to stay in the same place. Basically, two centuries of economic growth in the industrialised world has been driven by scientific and technological innovation. We don’t get richer unaided or simply by working harder: we get richer because smart people invent steam engines, antibiotics and the internet. What Jones has discovered is that we have to work harder and harder to sustain growth through innovation. More and more money has to be poured into research and development and we have to deploy more people in these areas just to keep up. “The result is,” says Jones, “that the average individual innovator is having a smaller and smaller impact.”

Like Huebner, he has two theories about why this is happening. The first is the “low-hanging fruit” theory: early innovators plucked the easiest-to-reach ideas, so later ones have to struggle to crack the harder problems. Or it may be that the massive accumulation of knowledge means that innovators have to stay in education longer to learn enough to invent something new and, as a result, less of their active life is spent innovating. “I’ve noticed that Nobel-prize winners are getting older,” he says. “That’s a sure sign it’s taking longer to innovate.” The other alternative is to specialise — but that would mean innovators would simply be tweaking the latest edition of Windows rather than inventing the light bulb. The effect of their innovations would be marginal, a process of making what we already have work slightly better. This may make us think we’re progressing, but it will be an illusion.

One of those big expansive articles that is akin to intellectual spinach. I didn’t really want to eat it, but knew that it would be good for me to. The problem as a reader is after you’ve read it what can you do about these seemingly overwhelming challenges.