:Michael Anuzis

I didn’t know there was another Mike Anuzis… Apparently he died in World War II… His name is engraved on a memorial in Georgetown, Illinois. I’d like to visit one day to pay my respects.

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What a clever idea – allowing gamers to leverage their skills to help solve protein folding: http://fold.it

Excerpts from the site…

Foldit is a revolutionary new computer game enabling you to contribute to important scientific research.

What big problems is this game tackling?

Protein structure prediction: As described above, knowing the structure of a protein is key to understanding how it works and to targeting it with drugs. A small proteins can consist of 100 amino acids, while some human proteins can be huge (1000 amino acids). The number of different ways even a small protein can fold is astronomical because there are so many degrees of freedom. Figuring out which of the many, many possible structures is the best one is regarded as one of the hardest problems in biology today and current methods take a lot of money and time, even for computers. Foldit attempts to predict the structure of a protein by taking advantage of humans’ puzzle-solving intuitions and having people play competitively to fold the best proteins.

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I’m on a roll predicting social-impact entrepreneurial startups that should come into existence! First I nailed some green technology stuff. Now I see that the open-bounties on innovation idea I described last march has pretty much manifested in the form of innocentive.com.

It’s not quite there yet as they still need to find a way to open the bounties up so anyone can contribute their $50-2,000 to the innovative dilemmas challenging humanity, but aside from that they’ve pretty much got it. The incentive is there to open it up since it’d mean growing their revenues exponentially, but they’d probably no longer be able to take 40% of the cash, and would have to find a way to handle the complications that come up when multiple people with somewhat differing objectives pool money for a common innovative cause.

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You heard it right – I’ll lay down $ for tiny ninja doodles. They could be doodles of anything ninja related. It could be a bunch of ninjas in a tree. Could be a ninja disguised as a pirate. Could even be a corn on the cob dressed like a ninja. I need as many mini-fun ninja doodles as possible to incorporate into ninja-based educational material.

You can come up with the craziest/zany-est ninja doodle idea you can think of and let me worry about finding a way to incorporate it into the lessons. No limits on the funky kind of stuff I’ll buy. I’m thinking of paying around $5 per doodle, purchasing up to ~20-50 doodles, so, up to around $250. I know my price is cheap, but it’s also a reflection of how small the doodles are I’m willing to accept. They could be 2″x1″, 3″x2″, 1″x1″, any random ninja doodle. (I actually would like a corn on the cob in ninja garb, if someone can doodle that; probably around 1″x1.5″)

The only thing is the doodles need to be in a digital form, e.g. a JPG or GIF file. If you can doodle it on paper and convert it to digital without it looking too weird that’s fine.

So, if you’re interested go ahead and send me a sample of what you can do! 1-2 sample doodles is fine, & if your stuff is usable we’ll chat about an on-going ninja-doodling deal based on how many you’re interested in making.

If you’re not much of a ninja doodler yourself, but you know someone who is please pass this post on to them. I could really use a great doodler. Thanks!

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I’ve been blogging for over a year about designing a gadget that tracks the unified environmental efforts of millions of people and allows everyone to celebrate their contribution. A few weeks ago it looks like Google released a gadget called ‘Energy Saver‘ that does just that.

It doesn’t allow people to track their contributions in as many ways as I’d like to see, but it does provide a beautiful/simple way for people to make a difference with hardly effort at all by “Enabling and optimizing your computer’s power management settings to help save the world energy.”

If I wasn’t already working on a different startup, I’d love to take this idea to the next level with my domain greenolution.com. Previous posts of mine detailing that business model & vision:

- The Greenolution Pitch
- Three Design Opportunities for a Brighter Future
- Anyone Join Me for $25 Million
- Count Down Your Carbon

If you combined CDYD and Google’s Energy Saver gadget and threw in a global goal, a gadget easier for people to paste on social networking sites than the Google Gadget, and some greentech product recommendations on the most cost-effective technologies currently available, you’d have my idea for greenolution.com.

Aside from possible ad revenue, you could add an e-commerce portion of the site to sell the greentech conveniently to consumers/businesses, or at least collect affiliate earnings.

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That’ll be the headline in a few months after my latest startup goes live. I’ve already discussed severe inefficiencies & redesign opportunities with the current educational systems. The time has come to take action.

This startup has been under development the past several months & it’s nearly time to unveil it to the public. Half a year ago I released a couple low-quality Game Theory lessons on YouTube to see the kind of response I’d get and what kind of market was out there for the concise teaching of academic material. Below shows some interesting feedback (see the comments.)

F’d up comment aside (hey, can you say he’s wrong?), if that’s the feedback for the junk recorded while hardly awake yet, I’m excited to see the impact & education I can provide when I invest significant time & effort and make it twice as fun. Wish me luck.

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If you haven’t seen Randy Pausch’s ‘Last Lecture’ where he shares his thoughts on life & death, you’re missing out. I couldn’t agree more with his approach to making the most of life despite a rapidly impending death.

I’ve embedded Randy’s full lecture below (1h 15m)

Some of you may prefer this shortened (12 min) version he provided on Oprah.

& for some different thoughts with the same aim, you might enjoy this podcast where I share some of my personal strategies for keeping it positive despite impending death. Enjoy!

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I don’t normally post music videos (in fact this is the first one ever), but being the most amazing video editing I’ve ever seen I wanted to share it with you. Watch it full screen if you want to catch the hidden stuff.

Fun Fact: Played soccer with Joe (red tie) in elementary school. His hair hasn’t changed since.

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Just finished recording an mp3 that I’ll be using in place of an alarm clock every morning when I wake up. I’m using Jakes MP3 Alarm, free software which will play an MP3 at a time you specify. I used Audacity, free MP3 editing software, to record the mp3 and overlay a pleasant background to my voice.

In the spirit of full disclosure, I didn’t stick to my last morning routine for even a week. I think the weakness was that all too often when I’d wake up I just wouldn’t have the instant self-discipline to tear myself out of bed and start exercising. The night before I could always sit there for a moment and say “When I wake up I WILL exercise and meditate,” but by the time my alarm would go off the previous night’s determination would have faded away.

I’ve always thought Jackie Chan had it easy in this regard. His dad threw cold water on him and forced him to wake up and work out for an hour. Chan didn’t have a choice, so sure enough he got up. I might not have someone over here throwing water and then forcing me to get up, but I’ve always liked the idea and leveraged it in the Mp3.

Another weakness of the previous routine was that all the items in my first option set were hard-core cardio, and some mornings you simply don’t wake up feeling cardio. This time I’m including the hard cardio option (Kung Fu), but also including Tai Chi and Qi Gong as options. Millions of Chinese people wake up to Tai Chi every morning and enjoy stellar health. It should at least be an option.

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