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Nikola Tesla arrived in Colorado Springs on May 17, 1899. He was met at the train by patent lawyer Leonard Curtis, and was taken by horse and carriage to the Alta Vista Hotel, where he would reside while in Colorado. Tesla was greeted at the hotel by a group of reporters, one of whom asked him why he chose Colorado for his operation. Tesla replied, “I might as well tell you the truth, I have come here to carry on a series of exhaustive experiments in regard to wireless telegraphy — I come here for work.” The reporter asked if he was going to “flash [his] message from Pike’s Peak to Long’s Peak or another mountain of Colorado?” The question appeared to irritate Tesla who tersely replied, “No, I am here to work. It is not pleasure. I am very busy and life is short and there is a great deal to be done.”

Text taken from this history of Nikola Tesla. We should all know more about Tesla.

A link from WiFi Networking News points to QSR Magazine, the trade mag for the quick service restaurant industry (think McDonalds and Taco Bell). The connection here is that McDonalds plans to offer wireless access in 13,000 locations. With McDonald’s off the market, WiFi hotspot operators are looking to hook the next big fish, and that’s why WiFi Networking News is linking to QSR’s Top 50 Chains list.

Some technologists would speak about how we’re moving ever closer to the time when we have ubiquitous hi-speed wireless. I’m more interested in the fast food.

The list of top restaurants helps me identify the places I need to go next. White Castle. What-a-Burger. Steak ‘n Shake. I’ve been missing out on American culture. Yeah, I’ve been to Carl’s Jr. and In-N-Out Burger, but there are so many others.

Then look at QSR’s industry outlook paper, Food Fight. It’s from 2002, but is loaded with insider gems like the debate about serving beer. This stuff is even cooler than Beverage World.

UK markets first reported it, then Australia’s record industry tried to suppress it, now US sales figures suggest the trend has spread here: record sales are up. Yes, despite the RIAA’s whining and lawsuits (and P2P’s continued growth despite those lawsuits), record sales are up in the US.

BBC News reports US record sales up 9% after a claimed four year slump.

This story deserves more attention, but for now I’ll just have to link to my earlier stories about music industry wackiness:

Music industry using P2P to drive sales

The coming copyright war (it’s actually already here, you just don’t know it)

P2P, DMCA, RIAA, lawsuits

Why somebody should bitch-slap the record industry

You can burn DVDs of your home movies (and you probably ought to, just for backups), but what if you want to make a movie library to match your computer-based music library? Watching video on a computer is no more fun than listening to MP3s on the computer’s tinny internal speaker. The solution may be one of a new generation of products that link the TV in the living room to the computer in the office.

Elgato’s EyeHome, does just that (reviewed by GiantGinkgo). Like the D-Link Wireless Media Player (both products appear to be sourced from Syabas), it allows you to browse and view movies, pictures, music, and the web in a small set-top box connected via ethernet or WiFi.

NewsMap displays current news in an explorable two dimensional space. Headline sizes appear to be weighted based on the number of related stories. Like PlumbDesign’s Visual Thesaurus, it’s a truly new use of computer in the display of information.

Vonage is starting to look like the ma-bell of VoIP. It’s not that there isn’t competition — there is, but they just don’t have the profile that Vonage has. It looks like Vonage has picked up the early adopters, now they have to start converting others.

The market seems to have three fields: computer-to-computer only, software client with POTS bridging, and hardware client with POTS bridging. I don’t much care about the computer-to-computer systems, AIM and iChat take care of that well enough. I need to call phone numbers on the standard phone network and I want a real phone number for people to call me back on.

Mobitus and Nikotel seem to be in the software to POTS business. SIPPhone claims “use your normal phone” and provides a telephone adapter, but it’s a UK number (which could be cool). Broadvoice so far distinguishes itself by offering the first WiFi VoIP phone that I’m aware of.

I got excited about WiFi VoIP a little while ago, but I really wish I could get the Palm SIP software to work on my Clie TH55.

A graph from Orgnet plots book purchasing patterns by politics.There’s not much middle ground there. “These political books are preaching to the converted. The extreme book titles on both sides reveal a focus on hate, instead of debate. In a year of presidential election, is this the new arms race?”

Could it be that our book readers are key opinion leaders in their communities? An opinion leader is someone whose influence spreads much further than their immediate circle of friends & family. A current business book, The Influentials, by Ed Keller and Jon Berry, reports that reading “is [an influential’s] leading hobby”.

Meanwhile, Fundrace has a fancy map showing campaign contributions. It’s no surprise that cities are centers of Democratic funding and Middle America funds the Republicans, but look at the details.

NASA’s X43 scramjet test plane flew at speeds exceeding mach 7 and altitudes of 100,000 feet today. I believe that’s a new air-breathing speed record. GlobalSecurity.org has a nice wite-up on it.

The font designing folks at Chank have a nice list of free fonts to pick from. Sure, they’re not the fonts you use to design flyers for the church social or nursing home holiday dinner, but that’s sort of the point. Isn’t it?

Anyway, they also link to nerfect where you’ll find other cool designey things.

Information about Lamson Library’s portal integration at Plymouth State University. I’ll expand this story later, but I want to put the link here now to get it in Google’s index.

“The skill of writing is to create a context in which other people can think.” –Edwin Schlossberg

Far too often the mainstream press lets politicians get away with revising or misrepresenting their previous positions. Far too often the press is complicit in their lies. Not this time.

Hopefully Quoticus will develop into a very useful historical truth machine to prevent revisionism. Hopefully.

Who would have figured old Dr. Seuss was so political? Rick Minear at UCSD has collected a number of the good doctor’s works as chief editorial cartoonist for the New York newspaper PM. “Because of the fame of his children’s books (and because we often misunderstand these books) and because his political cartoons have remained largely unknown, we do not think of Dr. Seuss as a political cartoonist,” writes Minear.

Thing is, I think I like his politics. Whether he was a doctor or not, I don’t know. But his real name was Theodor Seuss Geisel, 1904-1991.