Today the Sun reaches its northernmost point in the planet Earth's sky. Called a solstice, the date traditionally marks a change of seasons -- from spring to summer in Earth's Northern Hemisphere and from fall to winter in Earth's Southern Hemisphere. Pictured above is the 2005 Summer Solstice celebration at Stonehenge in England.

APOD: 2006 June 21 - Sunrise Solstice at Stonehenge

If you were to examine the birth certificates of every soccer player in next month's World Cup tournament, you would most likely find a noteworthy quirk: elite soccer players are more likely to have been born in the earlier months of the year than in the later months. If you then examined the European national youth teams that feed the World Cup and professional ranks, you would find this quirk to be even more pronounced. On recent English teams, for instance, half of the elite teenage soccer players were born in January, February or March, with the other half spread out over the remaining 9 months. In Germany, 52 elite youth players were born in the first three months of the year, with just 4 players born in the last three.

A Star Is Made - New York Times

On Net Neutrality:
“To me it boils down to this:

The best employees at Yahoo, eBay, Google, and other major content providers are engineers.

The best employees at Comcast, Cox, SBC and other access providers are lobbyists.

For both of these types of companies, everyone else they hire is just good enough to support and monetize the work of their best employees.”
-Derek Scruggs

Long or Short Capital » Quotes Entirely Relevant to Investing

Social fallacies are particularly insidious because they tend to be exaggerated versions of notions that are themselves entirely reasonable and unobjectionable. It's difficult to debunk the pathological fallacy without seeming to argue against its reasonable form; therefore, once it establishes itself, a social fallacy is extremely difficult to dislodge. It's my hope that drawing attention to some of them may be a step in the right direction.

Five Geek Social Fallacies

If you're a Windows user, open Notepad and type in this phrase, without the quote marks and with no carriage return: "Bush hid the facts". Now save it and open it again.

27B Stroke 6

The photographs displayed above capture the aftermath of an accident that occurred on the evening of 13 February 2006 on Interstate 70 near Hays, Kansas. The driver of a semi-tractor trailer that was hauling a track hoe excavator on a flatbed misestimated the clearance at an overpass, and the boom of the hoe collided with the overpass and knocked a 45-foot gap through the deck of the bridge.

Urban Legends Reference Pages: Photo Gallery (Hoe Down)

As more and more entrepreneurs start building what Fred Wilson referred to as second derivative companies, I think they run a big risk of designing a product/service that is targeted at too small of an audience. Too many companies are targeting an audience of 53,651. That’s how many people subscribe to Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch blog feed. I’m a big fan of Techcrunch – and read it every day. However, the Techcrunch audience is NOT a mainstream America audience.

A good review in Techcrunch can get a company their first 5-25K beta users very quickly. However, I’d strongly caution entrepreneurs from taking their initial consumer adoption metrics and extrapolating them too far into the future. I believe startups will find it difficult to cross the “Techcrunch chasm” between the Web 2.0 geeks and Mainstreet USA.

If we could get access to the usage logs of the top 10 Web 2.0 properties, I would bet that their 10,000 most active users would all be the same.

As I evaluate new startups these days I’m finding it harder and harder to see the big ideas that will appeal to a large, non-geek consumer audience. Thoughts?

Exactly.

Redeye VC: 53,651

Some secondary thoughts: If you have a proprietary algoritm that picks Poseidnon as a likely hit, it’s time to get a a new algoritm. Libor 230 is an insanely low risk premium for the chance of losing all your money if Mexico has an Earthquake in the next three years; to compare the market pricing for secured near investment grade debt is L 220. If a Mexican offered me that deal, I’d build a fence around him on the spot.

Long or Short Capital » Diversification, a Euphemism for Crappy Investment Option

For years there’s been a stereotype of developers being socially challenged, solely left-brained back-office kids who didn’t know a thing about the businesses they were coding for. The idea was that while companies needed developers to produce products (like assembly line workers), they shouldn’t be allowed outside of the office, never put in front of a customer, and should be micro-managed like children (don’t bother giving them the big picture, just feed them simple-minded to-do lists).

The majority of people (developers) I met this week were exactly the opposite of this stereotype. They were real entrepreneurs – well rounded and articulate. They are both right brained and left brained, genuinely interested in helping their customers, and have a keen sense of the businesses they are trying to build.

Hats off to the new (age) developer.

Watch Dick deliver a compelling and dynamic introduction on Identity 2.0 and how the concept of digital identity is evolving.

“Dick Hardt is brilliant. Watch (and copy) the style. Learn tons from the substance.” - Lawrence Lessig

OSCON 2005 Keynote - Identity 2.0