For all the math geeks in the house, HP released financial calculator applications for the iPhone that render exactly like the old vintage HP12C financial and scientific calculators. Download it on iTunes here

Via Cool Hunting

The Arizona legislature has just sent a bill to the Governor that would allow concealed guns in bars.

Critics of the measure say guns and alcohol are a dangerous combination. “We don’t let people drink and drive, why should we let them drink and carry guns?” said Sen. Paula Aboud, D-Tucson, who voted against the bill.

Ah, really?…a dangerous combination? Nothing makes me more comfortable than going into a bar full of gun totin’ drunken fools. It may truly be the Wild Wild West.

I came across a great site today called Flip Flop Fly Ball. The site’s author Craig Robinson essentially takes run of the mill baseball statistics and information and turns them into graphic works of art. For example, the chart below displays the direction that the batters face within each of the MLB stadiums (click to see the full sized image).

There is a great visual of the price variance of MLB tickets (with the Yankees leading the way), the types of MLB stadiums, and my personal favorite, the monetary value of MLB’s stolen bases if they were actually stolen.

On this day, June 29, 1905, Moonlight Graham played in the only game of his major league career.   Archibald “Moonlight” Graham’s short career is significant because its a central storyline in W.P. Kinsella’s book Shoeless Joe, which was the basis for ( in my opinion) the greatest baseball movie ever made, Field of Dreams. Here is his MLB career line:

The story of Moonlight Graham was depicted semi-accurately in the movie:

On June 29, the Giants were the visiting team against the Brooklyn Superbas. For the bottom of the eighth inning, Graham was sent in to play right field, replacing George Browne. In the top of the ninth inning, Graham was on deck (scheduled to be the next batter) when his teammate Claude Elliott flied out resulting in the third and final out. Graham played the bottom of the ninth in right field but never came to bat, and that game turned out to be his only appearance in the major leagues.

After his short visit to the majors, Moonlight completed his medical degree and moved to Chisholm, MN where he served that town as “Doc” Graham for close to 50 years. In the movie Field of Dreams, Burt Lancaster brilliantly plays “Doc” Graham in one of the great sequences in movie history. One of my favorite lines from “Doc” Graham:

Well, you know I… I never got to bat in the major leagues. I would have liked to have had that chance. Just once. To stare down a big league pitcher. To stare him down, and just as he goes into his windup, wink. Make him think you know something he doesn’t. That’s what I wish for. Chance to squint at a sky so blue that it hurts your eyes just to look at it. To feel the tingling in your arm as you connect with the ball. To run the bases – stretch a double into a triple, and flop face-first into third, wrap your arms around the bag. That’s my wish, Ray Kinsella. That’s my wish. And is there enough magic out there in the moonlight to make this dream come true?

The way Lancaster delivers this line is amazing. You can see the twinkle in his eye and you get the feeling that he is just dying to jump into the batters box. So on this June 29th, pay an ode to “Moonlight” Graham, and to the idea that you can achieve what you want, even if it is for only half an inning in the field.

Microsoft appears to be considering delivering Windows 7 on Flash Drives instead of CDROM’s, primarily because netbooks are so prevalent and they don’t have CD/DVD drives installed in them. Its a long way away from the old floppy discs of Windows 1.0.

• Interesting….Google Tries Hand At Targeting Consumers With Good Credit http://bit.ly/vUn8r #mediapost #
• Come on Golden State…let Stephen Curry fall to the Knicks!! And Minny, don't trade my man Jonny Flynn to some backwater team like Memphis #
• Watching rebroadcast of USA v Spain…almost as good as live. Can't believe they beat Spain. Looking forward to final on Sun #
• RT @TheJames: RWW: The Day Facebook Changed Forever: Messages to Become Public By Default http://bit.ly/viKri – Yes. #
• Wow! Go USA Soccer with HUUUGE 2-0 win over Spain! Not the World Cup but great win none the less #
• I'm in need of an iPhone from #squarespace #

Now here’s a useful application. CardStar is an iPhone application that enables you to put all your loyalty “reward cards” on your iPhone. Right now, I have six of these “fobs” on my keychain. With this application, instead of handing over your keychain to the cashier, or holding onto all sorts of loyalty cards that you use maybe once every few months, you can have all of them at your fingertips via your iPhone.

And I’ve got to think that the cashiers would be psyched that they don’t have to handle every person’s set of keys that have been sitting in a pocket or handbag. This alone could cut down on the spread of Swine Flu. OK, maybe not.

Man, I need to get an iPhone. Apple, when will it be on the Verizon network?

The consumer product company OXO has developed an exclusive line of office products for Staples.

I’ve been working on the interface and design of the site a bit this evening. So if you see some bugs and quirks (and I know you will), please bear with me for the time being.

• RT @johnbattelle: Reading OPAs deck on how clicks are wrong way to measure ads http://bit.ly/SkjrL #
• RT @SocialMedia411: Is Social the Future of Online Ads? Volvo's "Microsite in a banner" (Portratz): http://bit.ly/UvRoY #
• How about them Washington Nationals!! #
• Cool…got my FB URL: http://www.facebook.com/sgclark #

Another downturn in the economy, another rung falls off the career ladder. An interesting article over at the HBS blog argues that the current staffing cuts and furloughs that have been executed by multitudes of companies in this recession is taking us one big step further away from the antique concept of the 5 day, 40 hour work week.

But the idea of furloughs, particularly for managers and professionals, is planting the seed of a new way of looking at work in our minds. Suddenly companies have asked us to work, say, 32 hours a week rather than 40. Hmmm. What does that really mean? Most of us were never working 40 hours – we might have been working 50 or maybe even 60. We were answering emails at odd hours, writing in the early hours, calling Singapore at night. Does this mean that we should now work 20% less than we were before . . . or does it mean we should work literally 32 hours?

For many, I believe the conclusion will be that we should work the hours specified by the company and perhaps do other things – start new businesses on the side perhaps, sell stuff on eBay, take another job, go back to school, whatever – with the other time.

This shift sits well with many in Gen X who have already tended to bind their involvement more carefully than have the all-out Boomers. But for both generations, it will be a new way to look at work – another step on the slippery slope of recessionary lessons moving us from (1) you don’t have a job for life, to (2) you may never find full time work with one employer, to now (3) even a full-time job is really only a contractor job in disguise.

There is an emerging metric bubbling to the top that I find interesting. A non-profit team has developed a Goodguide metric, which measures the “corporate stewardship” of a company and its products.

You could say social value is how well a company practices good corporate stewardship, something the typical may not concern himself with in the aisles of Walmart, but early adopters, buzz-spreaders and health-involved purchasers often do. For GoodGuide, good corporate stewardship includes product ingredients free of carcinogens, aren’t brought to market via cruel animal testing and whose packaging is environmentally friendly.

It will be interesting to see if this really catches on and if consumers will actually lean on this in their purchase decision making process.

An Iowa teenager who has had a cellphone for all of eight months won a national texting contest and took home a cool $50,000. I guess that prize money will cover last month’s cellphone/txt bill. From the article:

In the final showdown, she outtexted 14-year-old Morgan Dynda, of Savannah, Ga. Both girls had to text three lengthy phrases without making any mistakes on the required abbreviations, capitalization or punctuation. Moore squeaked through by a few seconds on the tiebreaking text, getting the best two out of three. As she anxiously waited for confirmation of her win, tears streamed down her face.

Great speech and presentation from Clay Shirkey from the TED site.

Via Mashable

I think I could use this in my basement. The fiasco of wires under my desk is beyond repair. With all the technical advances in our lives, is there no way for all these device manufacturers to figure out a way to reduce the number of wires that we have to deal with?

Via Engadget