GnuTrade -- not buying stocks, just betting on markets
More game-like interface. No brokers or transaction fees.
I don't know what this is about, but it doesn't seem to be regular brokerage. Please advise if I'm getting it wrong.
Monday, October 15, 2007
Mother love not required
... while I long for the idea of a mother -- a mentor, a role model, a learned woman who serves as my career and life guide, a best friend, a blanket that offers comfort -- my mother was none of these things, and I have developed my own familial construct: a life inhabited by strong, supportive, loving people who couldn't imagine their lives without me in it (and vice versa).Family would seem to have something to do with real bonding rather than mere genetics. Take this story about two mothers who had their babies swapped at birth, but are unwilling to switch back ten months later upon discovering the mistake.
Primer on the next step, structured Web
Involving:
- The rise of APIs
- The proliferation of vertical applications that run on top of existing data
- An increase in classic Semantic Technologies and Microformats
- The spread of RSS as an information delivery mechanism
Symptoms shouldn't be ignored so easily
Check with your doctor. It could be anything beyond what this list says. Some are acute, but some aren't. Here's a back pain possibility:
#16 The Warning: Severe back pain
What it could be: Aneurysm
Similar to the kind of agony you’d expect if you’d just tried to clean-and-jerk a wardrobe. The usual remedies - heat, rest, OTC painkillers - offer no relief. If it’s not related to exercise, sudden severe back pain can be the sign of an aneurysm. The pain subsides after your body’s main artery bursts. A less threatening possibility: You have a kidney stone.
A CT scan reveals the size and shape of an aneurysm. Your doctor will prescribe blood-pressure medication or surgery to implant a synthetic graft.
Tim Ferriss on doing on doing more with less
The guy who wrote The 4 Hour Workweek encourages time gain with ideas for offloading and actually executing schedules.
Your brain is not your friend
Cognitive biases and such. Psychology demonstrates time and again how we're not very well wired for accuracy and truth.
More here.
Knights Templar win heresy reprieve after 700 years
The most titillating part of the documents is the so-called Chinon Parchment, which contains phrases in which Pope Clement V absolves the Templars of charges of heresy, which had been the backbone of King Philip's attempts to eliminate them.Wait. Does this mean that their gnosticism has become acceptable?
Tom Murphy -- getting by in a park one chess game/instruction at a time
At the time of the article, he was staying at friends occasionally if not in the park in D.C. He would actually do okay playing and teaching blitz chess, but would lose the money to drink and gambling in other games.
Autism may result from wrong amount of MeCP2 protein, wrong number of synapses
A mutation of the MeCP2 gene results in too little of the protein which further results in girls developing Rett syndrome. Boys with too much MeCP2 have spasticity and mental retardation with autism-like behavior.
Free tools to encrypt everything
The title link will take you to a list for IM, VoIP, email, ...
Here is a Lifehacker walk through TrueCrypt, one of the apps on that list for local file encryption.
See Mike Draw -- fine comic panel
This one is entitled "The shocking footage you were never meant to see."
Fake craigslist postings
A roundup at Buzzfeed.
From there, here's the link to the Wired article on how to spot a fake, and also this warning about rental scams.
Various ways not to lose money
Mutual fund, real estate, credit cards, etc., but there's also:
Never hire a roofer, driveway paver or chimney sweep who is going door to door.and
When you shop for electronics, don't pay for an extended warranty. One exception: It's a laptop and the warranty is from the manufacturer.
Telomeres involved in cancers dividing forever?
In cancer cells, the telomerase enzyme keeps rebuilding telomeres long past the cell's normal lifetime. The cells become "immortal", endlessly dividing, resulting in a tumor. Researchers estimate that telomere maintenance activity occurs in about 90% of human cancers.
DeleteOnClick -- securely delete files
It was once explained to me that the normal delete function simply rids of easy access to a file; this is evidenced by the undelete products out there. DeleteOnClick goes further in some way.
Sunday, October 14, 2007
Dreamcade 2.0 -- home arcade
$1899 plus S&H, but it has a trackball as well as four stick stations for multiplayer games like Gauntlet. Comes with over 145 official titles like Red Baron and Dragon's Lair.
Distinctions of the U.S. deep south
Miss Cellania compiles some aphorisms. Like
If you hear a Southerner exclaim, "Hey, y'all, watch this," you should stay out of the way. These are likely to be the last words he'll ever say.
Quote from Søren Kierkegaard on free speech
"People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use."
Flightstats -- best status site
Or so the WSJ says. It also has historical punctuality ratings, airport info, frequent flyer promotions, ...
Why medical care is costing so much
Tyler Cowen's review of a book on the matter:
the American health care cost spiral comes from suppliers and their entrepreneurial abilities to market expensive and highly specialized services of dubious medical efficacy... Medical suppliers, and not insurance company overhead costs, are the main villain of the piece.
Stixy -- free-form collaboration and file sharing spaces
"A desktop-like space in the browser where you can upload and share files." However, quite free-form interface:
For example, photo files are displayed as small versions of themselves and sticky notes can be stuck anywhere. Therefore, Stixy is less like a traditional operating system desktop and more like a bulletin board.
Defraggler -- defragment your files
Free:
It differs from other defrag tools on the market, by enabling you to quickly and simply defrag the files you want to, without having to process the whole drive.
Barbie's Fashion Fever Shopping Boutique
You daughter can pretend to go shopping with a credit card with no limit. The video at the site seems to imply that a swipe activates audio declaring the price of the item in some congratulatory manner.
And some imaginary Barbie sets here, like Trailer Trash Barbie.
More income without the extra job
Mostly going to the region, industry (or part thereof) or skill set where the demand is high, supply low:
During his third year as a high-school teacher, 36-year-old Jonathan Ring earned $44,000 -- respectable, but in San Francisco barely enough to keep his studio apartment stocked with Top Ramen. Scott Shepherd, 34, teaches high-school students in Atlanta. In his third year, Shepherd will make nearly $80,000. Why the difference? Ring toils at an inner-city public school, while Shepherd tutors rich kids full-time from suburbia for $75 an hour.
Ultimate Consumerist guide to fighting back
Roundup of some of consumerist.com's posts about not taking it from The Man.
Robert Frank on the difficulty of intro economics education
It’s not that we’re stupid, but we use heuristics, we use rules of thumb, and the heuristics work well enough on average across a broad range of circumstances, but unless you really understand the logic of weighing costs and benefits, it’s very easy to be fooled into making the wrong decision.So,
You can get information into the student’s brain in the form of equations and graphs, yes, but it’s a lot of work to do that. If you can wrap the same ideas around stories, around narratives, they seem to slide into the brain without any effort at all. After all, we evolved as storytellers; that’s what we’re good at.
Artificial cornea
We lay masks on them and apply a special protein to the edge of the cornea, which the cells of the natural cornea can latch onto. In this way, the cornea implant can firmly connect with the natural part of the cornea, while the center remains free of cells and therefore clear.
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.
Hitler banned from iSketch
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.
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.”
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