Plane crashes vs. Car Accidents

Most of us travel on planes with not much worry, but for some reason, we do tend to worry just a tiny tiny tiny bit. True? Am I over-exaggerating? When we drive a car somewhere however the "worrying" never enters our mind. Why is that?

Whenever we hear of a plane crash, just like the recent news of the Iran plane crash killing 17 we tend to re-think (or just worry) about our own plane travel plans. Airplane crashes make people more worried than any other type of accident (including car crashes). Why is that? We all know that the risk of us dying in an airplane crash is so small that it cannot even begin to be compared to car accidents.

This latest report from Aircraft Crashes Record Office in Geneva, Switzerland tells us that 879 people died from airplane crashes worldwide in 2008.

Compare that with World's Health Organization annual report (released recently) - 1.3 million people die from car accidents every year worldwide!

Compare that with just data for United States: National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's 2008 report here the number of fatalities from car accident just in United States from car accidents is 37,261! More stats and probabilities are available here.

So when 879 people die from airplane crashes worldwide, compared to 1.3 million people dying from car crashes, why is it that we are more nervous about plane crashes then car crashes? Obviously we know our risk is much smaller with the airplanes....

Everything I've read about this, suggests that its mental. We are creatures of control, we all love to be in control. In a car, we feel we are 100% in control, we turn it on, we have the wheel in our hand, we shift, we stop, we control our fate. Its all in front of us. In a bus, we have less control, but we can see the driver, and we can all relate to driving a car or a bus, so this is nothing too foreign for us. In some way we still have control. With an airplane, we loose that control. We cannot see the pilot, most of us have absolutely NO IDEA about flying a plane, and hence we worry much more. That loss of control makes a plane trip a much more riskier travel option.

Since I do a lot of traveling (especially this summer) I see this phenomenon a lot with many people. I'm interested to know what you think of it? What are your thoughts?

Wolfram Alpha - killer for Google?

I know I know, I have not written much on my blog recently. Thats because I've been traveling for quite a while now, and just have not had much time for the blog. I did want to get back into it, and what better way then talking about Wolfram Alpha. I've been itching to do a post on it all this time I've been playing with it since late May. You guys know what I'm talking about? Wolfram Alpha is a project launched on May 15th, 2009 and started by Stephen Wolfram who is the founder and CEO of Wolfram Research. Back in March, 2009 Stephen Wolfram wrote on his blog that he is working on a new search engine that is capable of answering questions written in english language. As everyone knows search is dominated by Google, it holds about 65% of all search done in US. Everyone in tech community flipped and lots of headlines appeared. Why?


A bit about Stephen Wolfram

Stephen Wolfram published his first scientific paper at 15, and earned his PhD in physics from CalTec when he was 20. Smart guy? I guess so...

He formed Wolfram Research in 80s and soon after released the its very very very well-knows Mathematica software. Mathematica is used across industries: finance and engineering, it does very high-end computation number crunching. And actually the very same algorithms from Mathematica are used to run Wolfram Alpha!!!

One of Stephen Wolfram's goals was to be able to ask a computer anything youw ant in plan english language. Natural language recognition is hard, Wolfram Alpha uses a lot of algorithms to recognize patterns in your query.

You can read more about Stephen Wolfram here.


Wolfram Alpha

Wolfram Alpha launched on May 15th, 2009. Unlike Google, Wolfram Alpha does not organize and index world's info, it uses computation to come up with the info. Google crawls the web for sites and adds them to its directories. If a site has a lot of links pointed to it, Google ranks it high and presents it high on the results page. Wolfram Alpha DOES NOT scan web for sites, it actually take the data from databases which are created by Wolfram Research employees. There are over 10 trillion pieces of info on Wolfram Alpha's servers. Thats a lot of hard data!

To use it - simple type in what you're looking for: type a math problem and it will solve it and show you steps on how it did it, type a city name and it will tell you all the info about that city currently and its history, type a date and it will tell you everything significant about this date, type a food name it will tell you nutritional info, type a few companies it will will give you a comparison... Again - Wolfram Alpha is not a search engine, so no pictures of places, cheapest fares, all the jazz, this is only information about the world.

I hope by now you understand why people started talking about this when Stephen first mentioned Wolfram Alpha on his blog. Business model is not clear yet, but some hints to utilizing the same advertising model as Google has have surfaced. Stephen Wolfram and Sergey Brin actually talked before the launch in May, and Mr. Brin was very impressed. This is definitely the same direction Google wants to head.

I urge you guys to try it out and let me know what you think.

The MP3 Experiment - ImpovEverywhere

So, I know that most of you know that I love these guys, and love what they do. In fact I'm currently trying to set up a meeting through an intro to Charlie Todd to just get to chat with the master! These guys are "creativity in action". Every one of these "missions" is full of excitement, imagination, and passion from everyone involved! I'll be in NYC this summer and cannot wait to participate in a mission myself in July!!!

Feel free to check out all of their missions here.


Enough rambling, here is the latest and greatest from our man Charlie Todd at Imporov Everywhere:

10 Simplest, Free, and most useful apps!

Ok - I found myself constantly suggesting the same free software packages to people. There are tons of software packages out there, a lot of them are expensive, complex, require lots of resources, and truly are un-necessary! Same tasks can be accomplished by a FREE application which uses a fraction of the resources the alternatives use and is SIMPLE to use. In the light of having SIMPLE, FREE, and RESOURCE-EASY software I want to share with you these must have software packages.


To get rid of viruses, I do not like Norton, McAfee and the giants that take over your machine, instead I've been VERY successful with these tools (I run both of these):


1.) http://www.malwarebytes.org/


2.) http://spybot.com


For cleanup of your PC (making in faster and deleting all the gunk and junk) these are the best free tools:


3.) http://www.ccleaner.com/ - cleans up the junk on your computer


4.) http://www.defraggler.com/ - best free degrag tool I know out there


To burn Audio, Video, Data CDs, burn ISOs, or copy CDs this is the best:


5.) http://infrarecorder.org/


To manipulate images and convert to many other image formats as well as create transparent images this is the best free tool:


6.) http://www.irfanview.com/


To play Divx, DVD, and most video encodings:


7.) Media Player Classic


For easiest, simple, free email client:


8.) Mozilla ThunderBird


Best and simplest free Word Doc to PDF converter:


9.) http://cutepdf.com/


Best and simplest free PDF to Word Doc converter:


10.) http://hellopdf.com

CrossLoop - Mac Releasing buzzing all over!

Yes... it's here!!! And yes... we have Mac and PC guy hugging on front page of our Crossloop coverage post here. It's been a long long long road to this point, lot's of emails from users asking for this, and we've been overjoyed to announce the release of the Mac client. The response has been phenomenal. We've had hugs:

We've had friendships:



It has been phenomenal to scroll through all the great coverage people have given us!!! We could not have been more happier with the reception on the net, you can look through the specific stories and link here:, but here is the great collage of all the places that covered our release:

MagPie - Your Thoughts?

I know I have not blogged for a while... I have been buried under people. Been incognito... I'm slowly coming back to normal life from all the craziness, and wanted to ask people's opinion of this controversial little app titled: Magpie Magpie is actually a type of a bird - go figure right? Twitter.. birds... i don't see any relation. In any case, as an Stanley's guest blog post points out people can generate a pretty decent amount of cash by simply tweeting advertisements. I am still a bit skeptical and uneasy about, will this be the beginning of the conversion or Twitter into MySpace? As Mrinal puts it in his Tech Crunch post here the behavior of Twitter is really starting to lean toward main stream, myspace, ads, and all that stuff that make you loose interest in a social network. Magpie might be the latest addition to things that are starting to make Twitter more like Myspace. What do you think is next? Will twitter take any actions? Will more Magpies start to surface? What do you think?

Trouble with Twitters

I am sure all of you have heard of "Twitter" by this point, even NPR is even talking about it these days! In any case - here is a short HILARIOUS little film about "Trouble with Twitters". Pretty funny! Enjoy!