I was introduced to TED talks a few years ago.  Every now and again I remember to go and check them out as they are truly awesome talks that are very interesting and sometimes very inspiring. 

I came across the talk below yesterday and had never heard of Juan Enriquez.  I started to watch this video and was enthralled in just a few seconds of watching.  One thing I have read and heard about restring an economy after a bust is there needs to be a wave of innovation.  Juan thinks that wave is in the biotech industry.  I don’t disagree with him in the slightest, especially after seeing his case for it.  What I am worried about is after the bust of the biotech industry what is going to be the next wave of innovation to get us out of an economic disaster?

I think one of the major things that Juan misses here is discussing the root cause of economic cycles.  If he would only take a look at the Federal Reserve and talk about money creation and monetary policy it would go a long way in his presentation.  The fact that he completely omits it is disappointing.  He doesn’t leave his audience any smarter than when they came in, just more informed about the next bing innovation wave and opportunity for the Fed to create an environment to have malinvestments in ideas that shouldn’t be invested in due to cheap money.

At any rate, Fed monetary policy and the effects it has on investment and innovation is a whole other topic.  If you’d like a starting point I would suggest reading about the late 90’s dot com boom and bust.

Enjoy the video!

Food Stuff:

While browsing I came across this tidbit.  I guess I could be called a “foodie.”  Although, probably not as much as a foodie as others, but this next article would be a nice thing to see.  I don’t know how it would really pay for itself, considering how inexpensive stickers and label makers are.  Would still love to see it so I don’t have to pick off stickers or create stickers while at the super market.

Laser Labeling Coming Soon to Fruits, Vegetables

New laser labels. Photo: ARS/USDA.

Political Stuff:

This past weekend was the huge rally in Washington D.C. by the “Tea Party Express.”  The World Net Daily has a decent article about it.  The main thing I was looking for was a rough estimate of how many people where there.  It looks like there really is no “rough” estimate, thanks to our wonderful media outlets.

Though crowd estimates vary from as low as 60,000 to 70,000 according to ABC News to a high of 2 million by London Daily Mail, photographs and videos of the march and rally demonstrate its enormity. (WND)

It’s a good thing that Obama was fully aware of the rally taking place or was he?

The White House said Friday it was unaware of the rally. President Obama has traveled to Minneapolis, Minn., to promote his health-care plans at a rally there. (WND)

At any rate, below is a picture of the attendance.  You decide if you think it was a success or not.  Looks to me it was pretty successful and rivals some of the largest protests in our nation’s history.

Awesome Stuff:

This one needs no explanation.  It’s just awesome!

The Hurt Feelings Report – a.k.a. The Cry Me a River Whine Report

External Links:

• Juan Enriquez shares mindboggling science
• Laser Labeling Coming Soon to Fruits, Vegetables
• A million or more rock Washington
• The Hurt Feelings Report – a.k.a. The Cry Me a River Whine Report

Take for example, the Meta widget.  I wanted to do something easy and just remove three of the links: Entries RSS, Comments RSS, and WordPress.org.  I went to the widgets page in the admin section to just click the options to remove those links.  To my surprise there were no options to do this!

I then started my day long quest to figure out what I could do to remove those three links.  First, I went to Google and started searching for solutions.  I found two that seemed promising.  One I found on WordPress.org in a message thread.  The solution was to create a text widget.  However, this wouldn’t solve the problem of wanting to have the login, register, logout, and site admin links available.

Cross this option out.

The second option I found was a blog post on how to remove the links from the widget PHP code.  Problem was that the post didn’t go into any details about how to do this.  It just said to edit a file and make sure to back it up.  It was not helpful.

Cross this option out.

After about an hour of research I decided to just dive into the code.  I figured I’ve customized earlier versions of WordPress and other software packages so how hard could it really be?

I went and read the documentation on WordPress.org about widgets, how to create them, how to incorporate them into your current theme, etc.  What I found really wasn’t too helpful.  However, it did give me direction as to where to start and a great overview of how widgets work.

In order to customize the Meta widget I would have to look in the /wp-includes directory for the super class in the widgets.php file.  This file has all the methods for registering your widget with WordPress so it knows it is available to use.  Next, I found the default-widgets.php file.

This file actually has a lot of classes in it that have all the default widgets that WordPress comes with.  It’s in this file which you need to edit.  Around line 280 you’ll find a class called WP_Widget_Meta.  This is the class you’ll want to edit.  You’ll find the following code:

<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('rss2_url'); ?>" title="< ?php echo esc_attr(__('Syndicate this site using RSS 2.0')); ?>">< ?php _e('Entries <abbr title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS'); ?></a></li>
<li><a href="<?php bloginfo('comments_rss2_url'); ?>" title="< ?php echo esc_attr(__('The latest comments to all posts in RSS')); ?>">< ?php _e('Comments <abbr title="Really Simple Syndication">RSS'); ?></a></li>
<li><a href="http://wordpress.org/" title="<?php echo esc_attr(__('Powered by WordPress, state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform.')); ?>">WordPress.org</a></li>

That is exactly what I was looking for!  I just commented out those three lines of code and uploaded the file to my site and customization done!

Conclusion:
Although I find WordPress to be a great blogging software package and very easy to get up and running, some of the custumizations are just difficult to figure out.  If you know code it shouldn’t be an issue, but for those who don’t it’s just too difficult.  I really hope that in the future WordPress sees the weaknesses of their default widgets and does something to improve their usability.  Maybe I’ll do a little more research on widgets and actually create a useful Meta widget.  If that’s something you would find useful let me know and I’ll probably take the time and create it for the community!

Techie Stuff:
Check your unread Gmail from the command line
For all you techies out there this is for you!

Understanding Stuff:
Why It’s Called Pi
I’m very grateful that someone finally took the time to have a visual representation of how PIE got it’s name. Makes things so much easier to understand!

Art Stuff:
Crazy Contortionist Art: Bodies in Urban Spaces
I love this kind of “out of the box” thinking when creating “art” don’t you?

Ginormous Handknit Pink Bunny in the Alps
This is just so messed up I can see it sparking a new rage around the world!