zenpundit.com

One of the blogosphere’s few true 800 lb gorillas, Professor Glenn Reynolds of Instapundit fame, interviews best selling novelist Steven Pressfield:

Interesting.

For one thing, I hadn’t realized Reynolds does short, Larry King-style vignettes. Considering that the MSM and the social media crowd have been going around the last few years saying “blogging is dead”, bloggers who can roll out professional quality television type productions without anyone batting an eye testifies to the durability of the medium.

Secondly, Steve probably sold more books with an Instapundit appearance than any other media venue, with the possible exception of a NYT book review.

From Thomas P.M. Barnett:

Wikistrat Grand Strategy Competition – Summary and Conclusions

….We also think the competition proved itself as a useful method for attracting and identifying talent within our burgeoning online community of strategists.  There are literally thousands upon thousands of professional, apprentice (like our grad students) and avocational strategists out there on the Web generating useful analysis, and, in a disconnected sense, you could say they’re all collaboratively competing for our attention with their blogs, sites, etc. 

But when Wikistrat pulls them into an online venue explicitly designed to foster that collaborative competition – directly, then we turbo-charge the dynamic by concentrating it to an unprecedented degree.  The International Grand Strategy Competition was a brilliant demonstration of that potential: no established “stars” among the 200-plus individual team members, and yet collectively they pushed each other to generate a constant flow of innovative strategic ideas.  And the longer the competition went on, the higher the flow and quality of those ideas – innovation feeding off innovation….

Wikistrat also has a new look.

This was pretty cool, from Lewis Shepherd’s blog, Shepherd’s Pi:

Virtual recipe stirs in Apple iPad, Microsoft Kinect

Who says Apple and Microsoft can’t work together?  They certainly do, at least when it involves the ingenuity of their users, the more inventive of whom use technologies from both companies (and others).

Here’s a neat example, “a just-for-fun experiment from the guys at Laan Labs” where they whip up a neat Augmented Reality recipe: take one iPad, one Kinect, and stir.

Some technical detail from the Brothers Laan, the engineers who did the work:

We used the String Augmented Reality SDK to display real-time 3d video+audio recorded from the Kinect. Libfreenect from http://openkinect.org/ project was used for recording the data coming from the Kinect. A textured mesh was created from the calibrated depth+rgb data for each frame and played back in real-time. A simple depth cutoff allowed us isolate the person in the video from the walls and other objects. Using the String SDK, we projected it back onto a printed image marker in the real world.” – source, Laan Labs blog.

Shepherd has more on the technology here.

If AR is doable on an iPad fast and dirty by wizardly geeks then Apps for the casual technoprimitives cannot be long off.

My son discovered this, his first official contribution to ZP:

Noted foreign policy commentator and academic Anatol Lieven has a new book on Pakistan, and holds forth at length here on the always excellent Conversations With History.

For my part, diplomatic relations with Pakistan amount to our stage managing their elite’s LIC war against us, Afghanistan and India at what our elite perceive as a tolerable level of affront , deceit and violence. And we are doing it as expensively as possible.