Forty years ago today Apollo 8 orbited the moon, sending this photo back to Earth as a Christmas present.

Here's the Apollo 8 flight log. When we see another Lunar Christmas?

Though The Russian Kettlebell Challenge came first, it's best treated as a sequel to Enter the Kettlebell which emphasizes the basics of kettlebell training for strength and conditioning, The Russian Kettlebell Challenge provides additional exercises for variety, and guidance for designing sport specific programs.

The Boston Globe piece Paradigm Lost, talks about how economists missed the economic crisis triggered by the housing bubble, but did they? While many did fail to foresee the current mess, some did predict that something like this would happen. Why didn't more people listen to the latter?

People tend to prefer favorable predictions and economic predictions are often all over the map. Why not pick one that supports doing what you really want to do anyway? Economics is complex enough that most economists focus on simplified models covering subsets of the larger economy. They can easily miss the forest for the trees.

Behavior economics has demonstrated that people often fail to behave as the perfectly rational economic decision makers that most economic models assume. Economies are complex systems with individuals, governments, and non-government organizations pursuing a variety of goals. Agent Based Models offer more realism, though they may only provide qualitative predictions. These may be more useful than the quantitative models that offer great precision, but end up being wilding inaccurate.

In this study on location-based services, the acceptance and utility of location tracking versus location aware services was measured for a group of college age people in a controlled environment. In this experiment, the subjects found location tracking more useful, but had privacy concerns about the technology.

I suspect that in a more diverse and unpredictable environment, privacy issues would be more critical and the utility difference between location tracking and location aware services would be smaller. We can then expect location aware services to see faster market growth than location tracking services.

Following Armadillo Aerospace's Lunar Lander Challenge level 1 win, Pixel experienced a failure in their attempt at the level 2 prize. John Carmack reports that they believe the caused by an engine cutoff switch that can go intermittent in some vibration regimes. This is a reminder that adding safety devices can have hidden costs, in this case lower reliability.

I've seen claims that going barefoot leads to stronger and healthier feet and joints, but haven't gone barefoot regularly since I was a kid. I bought a pair of Vibram FiveFingers in an after Christmas sale last year. However, I didn't wear them much, just around the house a little and a couple of workouts.

Dan John recently reported that after regularly wearing FiveFingers for a week, some hip pain he's had for a year went away. I dug mine out of the closet to give them another try. They're a little weird to wear outside the house, so I may also try something like this Vivo Barefoot for getting out and about.

Flybot is an electromechanical device that mimics a flying insect. How cool is that?

Today is the 67th anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The Japanese are friendly now, and the message is that we must remain vigilant agains unexpected threats.

Apache CouchDB has just hatched from the Apache incubator. CouchDb is a distributed, fault tolerant, semi-structured database designed to scale both up and out. The engine is written in Erlang for robust concurrency. The API is RESTful HTTP. Data structures are JSON. It's not relational, though relations and schema could be built upon it. JavaScript is the default scripting language, though Python, Ruby, and others have bindings.

CouchDB looks very promising for Web 2.0 applications. A complete web app can be built with JavaScript and CouchDB. I've installed version 0.9 from svn and begun playing with it a bit. Though still alpha, installation was fairly straightforward on Fedora 9 and it passes the unit tests. I'll dive deeper in the coming days.