Three useful graphs about China’s expanding car ardor. First, monthly demand has doubled since January 2009 …

… and the per capita ownership of cars in China is 1/20th that of Europe, or 1/40th that of the U.S. …

… while the growth in China’s auto penetration rate isn’t really that high (yet), compared to neighbors like Korea.

[via J.P. Morgan]

This morning I had the chance to get a tour of The Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, MI, along with Dale Dougherty, creator of Make: and Makerfaire, and Marc Greuther, the chief curator of the museum. I had expected a museum dedicated to the auto industry, but it's so much more than that. As I wrote in my first stunned tweet, "it's the Louvre of the Industrial Age."

When we first entered, Marc took us to what he said he said may be his favorite artifact in the museum, a block of concrete that contains Luther Burbank's shovel, and Thomas Edison's signature and footprints. Luther Burbank was, of course, the great agricultural inventor who created such treasures as the nectarine and the Santa Rosa plum. Ford was a farm boy who became an industrialist; Thomas Edison was his friend and mentor. The museum, opened in 1929, was Ford's personal homage to the transformation of the world that he was so much a part of. This museum chronicles that transformation.

The machines are astonishing - steam engines and coal fired electric generators as big as houses, the first lathes capable of making other precision lathes (the makerbot of the 19th century), a ribbon glass machine that is one of five that in the 1970s made virtually all of the incandescent lightbulbs in the world, combine harvesters, railroad locomotives, cars, airplanes, even motels, gas stations, an early McDonalds' restaurant and other epiphenomena of the automobile era.

Under Marc's eye, we also saw the transformation of the machines from purely functional objects to things of beauty. We saw the advances in engineering - the materials, the workmanship, the design, over a hundred years of innovation. Visiting The Henry Ford, as they call it, is a truly humbling experience. I would never in a hundred years have thought of making a visit to Detroit just to visit this museum, but knowing what I know now, I will tell you confidently that it is as worth your while as a visit to Paris just to see the Louvre, to Rome for the Vatican Museum, to Florence for the Uffizi Gallery, to St. Petersburg for the Hermitage, or to Berlin for the Pergamon Museum. This is truly one of the world's great museums, and the world that it chronicles is our own.

I am truly humbled that the Museum has partnered with us to hold Makerfaire Detroit on their grounds. If you are anywhere in reach of Detroit this weekend, I heartily recommend that you plan to spend both days there. You can easily spend a day at Makerfaire, and you could easily spend a day at The Henry Ford.

P.S. Here are some of my photos from my visit. (More to come soon. Can't upload many as I'm currently on a plane.)

• Hagen: U.S. addicted to energy/debt (Source)
• Scrip as private money, monetary monopoly, and the rent-seeking state in Britain (Source)
• Skidelsky: Future generations will curse us for cutting in a slump (Source)
• Critical Transitions in Markets and Macroeconomic Systems at Macroeconomic Resilience (Source)
• Lead Investors, Dipshit Companies, and Funding Every Entrepreneur (Source)
• Is America the Next Lithium Powerhouse? (Source)

From GE, a nifty visualization of our aging societies around the world. (Note that the applet is slightly larger than the space available here, so go to the GE site if you want to see it with all controls working properly.)

The whole thing is big, so … after the jump.

I am responsible for over a dozen miles of 4 and 5 strand barbwire fence. A good reliable wire cutter is a godsend, and this is it. It's ingenious and simple. The key part is the lock mechanism. It's a sliding lock. You hold it "jaws-down," press the grips and it locks. You are now free to place it in a slash or slot pocket on typical painter's/carpenter's pants. When you need it you pull it out, hold it "jaws-up," and it unlocks. Ready for use. No more "sprung" pliers or vise-grips stuck in rear pockets impossible to pull out while you have only one hand free!

Companion 8 in. Wire Cutters
$10

Available from and manufactured by Sears

Identifying local landmarks and uncovering hidden coupons are fun augmented reality applications, but "Programming iPhone Sensors" author Alasdair Allan has a loftier AR goal.

"I'm terrible with faces and names," he said during a recent interview at OSCON. "So, I want those little glasses where you see someone and it's like: 'This is Gary. You met him in 2005. His wife is called Mary. He's got three kids. His birthday is ...'. That sort of thing. That's my ultimate goal."

Allan's ideal is based on facial recognition, which is a step above facial detection. But you can't have identification without detection, and detection is something we're close to seeing in real-time. Allan himself successfully built a real-time face detection demo on the iPhone 3GS. The iPhone 4's improved hardware makes the same functionality easier to implement. (Not trivial ... just easier.)

Allan touched on a number of additional topics during our OSCON chat, including:

• How (theoretically) a geolocation database -- like SimpleGeo -- could be matched up with a cloud-based facial recognition database.
• How iPhoto's Faces tool could influence FaceTime and other real-time video applications.
• He closed with a brief rundown on the types of sensors commonly found in many smartphones ... and why the introduction of gyroscopes in Android phones is now a near inevitability.

The full interview is available in the following video:

Related:

• Mobile accelerometers and gyroscopes explained
• How to do augmented reality in Processing
• Augmented reality and the ultimate user manual
• Augmented Reality: A Practical Guide
• Programming iPhone Sensors: Rough Cuts Version

1. The No-Twinkie Database -- These are all the Twinkie Denial Conditions described in my “Bad Game Designer, No Twinkie!” Designer’s Notebook columns. Each one is an egregious design error, although many of them have appeared in otherwise great games. A collection of "don't do this" for app designers. (via waxy)
2. Cloud Privacy Heat Map (Forrester) -- a map showing the degree of legal support for privacy and data protection across various jurisdictions. (via azaaza on Twitter)
3. Wesabe on GitHub -- Wesabe has closed, but is open sourcing its code.
4. Laurie Santos TED Talk -- monkeys make similar irrational decisions as we do. "The errors we make are predictable and immune to evidence." Sound like you? Watch this excellent talk.

Disney's announced purchase of Mountain View gaming startup Playdom, follows on the heels of EA's purchase of London-based Playfish last November. Based on active users, Zynga remains by far the biggest online social gaming company. But what other independent companies are growing?

To see which companies are expanding, I used our data warehouse of online job postings1 to detect recent hiring2. Zynga and Playdom put out the most job postings over the last three months, with Watercooler, a Redwood City startup, finishing a distant third3:

While I focused on online social gaming companies, I checked to see which companies were showing interest in games for smartphones, and found not too many were mentioning the iPhone or Android platforms on their job posts. Outside of Zynga, Playdom and Popcap Games, none of the other companies had (many) job postings that mentioned the iPhone/iPad or Android platforms4:

(1) Data for this post is for U.S. online job postings through 7/25/2010 and is maintained in partnership with SimplyHired.com. We use algorithms to dedup job posts: a single job posting can contain multiple jobs and appear on multiple job sites.

(2) Online job postings are from thousands of sources, and there are no standardized data formats (e.g., a field for company name). I quickly normalized company names for this post, but the results remain at best approximations.

(3) Our data is for U.S. online job postings, so it does not reflect hiring for overseas subsidiaries (e.g., Playfish/EA is based in London). Moreover, we did not include social gaming companies based outside the U.S. In the Facebook ecosystem, some of the top gaming companies have headquarters in East Asia and South America.

(4) iPhone does seem to be the (smartphone) platform of choice for these companies. Of the Jan-to-Jul 2010 job posts placed by the companies listed above, 23% mentioned the iPhone/iPad and only 2% mentioned Android.

• Entry Level Car Segment Stumbles (Source)
• The new science of morality (Source)
• Phytoplankton in retreat (Source)
• Will California Pizza Kitchen Deliver for Private Equity? (Source)

"Apple is 'Evil' and Facebook is 'a Photo-sharing Site'" -- Fred Wilson, VC (investor in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga).

It's the ultimate form of respect when the competition vilifies and diminishes your accomplishments, so take respected VC and blogger Fred Wilson's comments in that light. After all, he's got investments in a number of companies that Facebook is a potential threat to.

But let's face some facts. Love or hate Facebook, you don't grow to 500 million users if you are not doing something incredibly right.

Moreover, you don't engage those same users to the point that 50 percent of the active user base logs in daily unless you have found a way to turn the social equivalent of lead into gold.

Mind you, this is a service legions diss, dismiss and outright distrust. A service with customer satisfaction levels that rank below the airline industry.

It begs the question: Why isn't this ship sinking, as opposed to being an unstoppable force that's swallowing up the web one 'Like' and Facebook Connect sign-on at a time?

My take on this is that Facebook's success is a case of people generally not trusting Facebook, nor specifically wanting the company to push more and more of their "friends and family" content and conversations into the public bucket (as Facebook seems committed to getting them to do). Nonetheless people default to a simple truth. Namely, that no one else has matched Facebook's ability to seamlessly connecting the dots between content, conversations and social contexts -- wherever it promulgates.

Facebook, for all of its failings, is delivering the consummate 1 + 1 = 3 experience.

Think about it. Facebook Connect and the Like function is increasingly being hardwired into virtually every website. And because Facebook knows how to build a platform, they have facilitated better integration of the myriad popular services on the Internet within Facebook, such that your Facebook news feed is becoming a must-read, must-engage service.

No less, they are already mining the heck out of that data, such that you can already see how, despite Google being the one that taught us about contextual advertising, it's Facebook that will be the one to actually execute in delivering ads that users will actually want to click on. Maybe not today, but very soon.

Case in point: Facebook knows that I "Like" the band Rush and am a fan of the HBO series "True Blood" because, over time, I have fed it that information via profile, status and news feed updates. Facebook isn't shy about using that same information to recommend other shows, bands, fan pages and the like.

It's the same reason that in asking "Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?" and knowing the answer (i.e., not really), my usage -- and that of the people I know -- is only on the upswing.

Consider the various ways that Facebook has inculcated itself into my daily online workflow:

• Sending/receiving Facebook feeds via the TweetDeck social dashboard client.
• Creating a Facebook fan page for my company.
• Building multiple iOS apps that integrate with Facebook feeds.
• Playing several iPad games that post to my Facebook feeds.
• Micro-posting via Posterous that "auto posts" into Facebook.
• Uploading of photos from my BlackBerry to my Facebook wall.

And for all of these reasons, liking, commenting and conversational back-and-forth actions are becoming more frictionless by the day.

Moreover, it's the same reason that when Facebook formally pursues the search engine play -- and they will, because they have an unbounded opportunity there -- Google, the king of all disruptors, will suddenly understand what it feels like to be on the disrupted side of the equation.

A final thought. It's a topic that's best saved for another post, but if Apple, the king of mobile, mobility and post-PC, and Facebook, the king of social, were ever to strategically align so as to orchestrate a frontal assault on Google's loosely coupled approach ... now, that would be a battle royal!

Related:

• Is Facebook a Brand that You Can Trust?
• Ruminations on iPhone 4, iOS and mobile video
• Five reasons iPhone vs Android isn't Mac vs Windows
• iPhones, App Stores and Ecosystems

So you decide you want to make pizza at home. And you quickly discover that there is just no substitute for a pizza baked on brick or stone. The crust just isn't the same. No problem - you get a pizza stone. You then discover that sliding a 12" pizza from a peel onto a 14" stone (that just fits) in the bottom of a 500F oven is possible but not easy. It's much more difficult than sliding a pizza into a large pizza oven at shoulder-eye level in your local pizzeria. After multiple smoky smelly messes caused by overshoots, misses, fold-overs etc. of the pizza when attempting to place it neatly on a stone, you retire the stone. For good pizza, you go out. Otherwise you live with metal pan pizza.

But suppose you had a peel which had a built in conveyor belt? The Super Peel is, as difficult as it is to describe, a baking peel that has a built in conveyor belt that allows you to deftly lift the delicate sticky dough off any surface and onto the board for easy transport.

By placing the corner of the pizza onto the peel, and slowly retracting the peel while pushing the board forward the sticky dough simply slides on. And to put it back on any surface or stone simply lower the board until it touches and reverse the process.

Don't get it? I didn't either at first - but this short clip of the Super Peel is worth thousands of words:

More video of the Super Peel in action can be found over at Breadtopia.

This is definitely a cool tool that prevents needless baking and pizza disasters.

Super Peel
$37

Available from Amazon

Manufactured by EXO Products