"Papers" on Mac OS X

See this "Paper" for Mac OS X, that let you organize and read PDFs. It looks pretty useful and I am very tempted to try it.


Basically, there are two kinds of approach to organize a large collection of files:
1. file system approach. It works for everybody by copying the metaphor of a tree structure. This approach is good if you browse more than you do search.
2. List structure, a.k.a the iTunes approach. This is great, if you search more than browse.



I like iTunes, and its search feature is a godsend>. If I want to listen to Beethoven, I just need to type "Beethoven" and all his 1 to 9 symphonies are all there. I would not want to go to the file system to drag beethoven music into Winamp.

Obviously, Paper is looking to do an iTunes approach. The pre-release app looks beautiful, but it runs very slow after importing 50 PDFs. Probably memory alloc/retains bugs? Yea I am sure they will fix it in a few weeks, but...

... I am still stuck in the "file system" approach, as I tend to put PDF books of different publisher in the same folder. And Spotlight serves me well for now? Everybody has resistance switching to something new afterall.

Gapminder at Google

TED 2007 has Hans Rosling's passionate speech about opening useful data to everyone.

Now you can see the animated stats interface on Google.

References:

1. Gapminder World 2007, at Google

Jeff Hawkin's Numenta opens its "Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing"

Just woke up and read Slashdot that Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform is now available.

I did read Jeff's On Intelligence book about his idea of HTM, though I forget pretty much everything by now :-). But I am pretty excited about this, especially the 3 components have python bindings.

Go check it out.

References

1. Numenta Platform for Intelligent Computing (NuPIC) downloads


2. Introduction to Numenta's Research Release from Jeff Hawkins


3. Numenta Blog