Monday, October 08, 2007
Creators of internet call it outdated
"The Internet wasn't designed for people to watch television," [Larry Roberts] says. "I know because I designed it."
Aging: Disease or business opportunity?
Some HGH controversy regarding this surging demographic gold rush of anti-aging.
Inside France's secret war in the Central African Republic
Imperial habits die hard:
"... The CAR itself is a base from which the French can access resources all over Africa. That is why it is so important. They use it to keep the oil flowing to French companies in Chad, the resources flowing from Congo, and so on. And of course, the country itself has valuable resources. CAR has a lot of uranium, which the French badly need because they are so dependent on nuclear power. At the moment they get their uranium from Niger, but the CAR is their back-up plan." So this is, in part, a war for nuclear power? " Yes, but also a lot of this money has been funnelled, through corruption, straight back into the French political process..."
Golddigger gets assessment and proposition from potential Wall Street match
From craigslist. Straight up vanity meets straight up market logic.
Hitachi's new CP-A100J short-throw LCD projector
... 48-inch picture standing just 0.5cm back from the wall, and a 200-inch picture from 3-feet 9-inches back...
Snadboy's Revelation -- recover forgotten passwords
Well, it's saved there (the asterisks are there), but you can't recall what it is.
Memory myths exploded
Like the primacy and recency effects meaning we should take a 5 - 10 minute break every 30 minutes.
Freeman Dyson's rosy projection
Climate change is nothing to worry about, says the eminent physicist. Let's celebrate genetic engineering and our ability to design a new world of plants and creatures.Previous post of an article from him here.
Surveillance video of Gotbaum's last moments at Phoenix airport
After displaying some agitation (somewhat physical with others), Carole Anne Gotbaum was subdued:
The witnesses that saw her just before she went into the holding tank say she was completely listless and unconscious," said [family attorney] Manning.She was cuffed to a bench in the cell and found dead after some time. The initial explanation from the police was that she had strangled herself with the chain on the cuffs.
Demotivational posters
Custom-made; a few are good.This one reads, "Because she just might want to hear about your 12th level Paladin."
Here is another site for, yet again, just a few good ones.
Link between schizophrenia, autism and maternal flu
It turned out that after a single dose of a specific cytokine known as interleukin-6 (or IL-6), a mouse would give birth to offspring who, at maturity, exhibited the familiar schizophrenia- and autism-like behaviors.
Internet business is killing the 80/20 rule
How the Long Tail is taking over:
Another online Pareto Principle killer is at Zappos.com where they’re statistics show that 20 percent of the top products create about 50 percent of the company revenue with the bottom 80 percent creating the other 50 percent.
Image recognition for pet trap door
[Flo the cat] also has a habit of catching various animals, dragging them inside through the cat door, and letting them loose so they can be chased for hours. Very cruel. To put an end to this we have built a computer-controlled device that visually determines if Flo is carrying anything in her mouth when she enters, and if she does, it simply does not let her in.
LiveMocha -- social language-learning online
Self-study modules, but then you step up to interaction with real people.
India-Pakistan nuclear war would kill a billion, cause agricultural crisis in rest of world
Links to a couple of related articles. Here's a quote from one:
Then there's the ozone destruction.Earlier studies have suggested that such a conflict would throw five million tonnes of black soot into the atmosphere, triggering a reduction of 1.25°C in the average temperature at the earth's surface for several years. As a result, the annual growing season in the world's most important grain-producing areas would shrink by between 10 and 20 days.
Helfand points out that the world is ill-prepared to cope with such a disaster. "Global grain stocks stand at 49 days, lower than at any point in the past five decades," he says.
Hans Rosling -- new insights on poverty and life around the world
From TED again in 2007. Same message of hidden improvement, but also pointing to the dimensions that need our attention and how our efforts are not wasted. Funnier moments than previous year. Previous post of '06 video here.
Levels of losing from The Sports Guy
The various dynamics of losing using various moments in sports history.
Change the registered owner in Windows
He seems to think it's useless. Aren't there some legal contexts where it is important?
Ziitrend -- latest social prediction website
You simply make a prediction, and ZiiTrend’s neural-network algorithm blends your answer with everyone else’s to come up with a statistically valid answer that captures the crowd’s intelligence. Rather than revolving around trading, which is hard for many people to grasp, the site’s main appeal is designed to be more around social news exchange.
Mother-of-pearl inspires superstrong plastic
"It is hard to imagine that a combination of pretty mundane everyday materials like clay and PVA can give such unique mechanical properties," says Kotov. Stiffness and tensile strength are at least 10 times greater than any other nanocomposite made before, he adds.
Exoneration using DNA brings change in American legal system
A few too many overturned convictions is necessitating some changes.
Private firefighting
The insurance company doesn't want to pay for the possible damage for an advancing fire, so they hire out a skeleton crew to fireproof the houses with retardant.
German vs. Chinese culture, a pictogram presentation
Pictorial contrasts of German culture compared to that of the Chinese. This one is entitled "The Boss".
Genes may hold keys to how humans learn
The reason we looked at these three individual genes in the first place, out of a huge number of possible genes, is that we have a computer model that examines how dopamine mediates these kinds of reinforcement processes in the striatum and prefrontal cortex...
Sunday, October 07, 2007
Terabitz -- customizable reader for real estate
... drag in modules to add information - local foreclosures, recent sales, listed homes, schools, even fast food restaurants.Also now,
... new feature - the ability to create a map with various modules included and then embed it on another website. So any site that wants to add a Google generated map that includes, say, local businesses and restaurants (a hotel, for example) can now do so easily.
Does closing economic inequality make the lower tier happier?
The argument here is that redistribution of the haves' wealth screws up incentives and doesn't make anyone happy. It's actually mobility and opportunity that buoys one's views.
Urbanspoon -- restaurant reviews
Enough traffic would get user reviews, I guess. Otherwise, there are reviews from more official publications. Nice maps interface.
Steve Pinker: a history of violence
Can't say I'm persuaded that data from two regions is supposed account for millenia of prehistory for the globe. Also, in my mind, recent decades of peace just means that those with war memory need to disappear from the political scene before the elements for a wide conflagration can rear their heads.
Rumi-mania
A collection of links from The Spark at Yahoo about Sufi mystic Mawlānā Jalāl-ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī.
Preparing for cybercatastrophe
Fire sales and such. Coming to realize the security vulnerability of a wired society.
Thanks to Julio.
Thanks to Julio.
Divorce going down in the U.S., not up
Amazing how a meme or conventional wisdom has its own momentum.
On reading the numbers here.
On reading the numbers here.
Map FTP to a drive in Windows
I periodically receive inquiries from friends asking for the easiest way to access files and folders on a FTP server. They normally have their own FTP server setup at home, and they want to ensure fast access to their files without having to mess with third-party applications. Is it possible to quickly map a FTP to a drive? You bet!
Evolution of language
What songbirds, dancing, and knot-tying can tell us about why we speak.Some info on genetic underpinnings.
GarageSeek -- ratings of mechanics
You can get ratings for everything at Yelp. Can GarageSeek survive?
Fascist America, in 10 easy steps
Naomi Wolf itemizes from history the necessary steps to firm control in a society.
Customize your right-click menu with ShellExView
Too cluttered? Missing something? Customize to your heart's content.
The Pudding -- free phone calls in U.S./Can, if you let them advertise to you based on your conversation
Call out from PC only:
Phone conversations are monitored only by computers, not actual human beings. The company also does not record any of the conversations or log any of the topics discussed.
Females deem aspects of past influencing future as more probable than males
... female children and adults more frequently predicted that characters [in stories] who encountered “similar perpetrators” would feel worried because they thought the new person or animal might cause the same harm as the one from the past.
India needing to outsource its work
Many executives here acknowledge that outsourcing, having rained most heavily on India, will increasingly sprinkle tasks around the globe. Or, as Ashok Vemuri, an Infosys senior vice president, put it, the future of outsourcing is “to take the work from any part of the world and do it in any part of the world.”