$40 eyeglasses?
Ah, the power of the internet. I don't need eyeglasses quite yet, but I do know some who would benefit from this.
Thursday, December 27, 2007
250 things to ensure success in public speaking
But maybe trying to remember 250 items will make me nervous!
Stop cars with a microwave beam
Kind of big right now, but hoping to get it down to 50 lbs. with a 600 ft reach.
iMedix -- health search + patient social network
It's ludicrous that it took this long for this to appear.
NYT's 2007 list of interesting ideas
Like craigslist vengeance and circulating playing cards pictured with cold cases to develop tips.
ID code on every printout out there
... he came across a rumour, saying that various manufacturers printed an invisible code onto each page that comes out of one of their laser-printers. The US government had supposedly requested that. The secret code was said to contain the date, down to a second, and the equipment’s serial number. The EFF.org (Electronic Frontier Foundation) was reported to have cracked that code.
Cool first dance for a wedding couple
They decided to go for cool, understanding the public and performance nature of their day. Thanks to Julio.
Doctored photos create false memories
For example, those participants shown the doctored photograph of the protest in Rome, in which figures placed in the foreground give the impression of violence, rated the event as being significantly more violent and negative than it actually was. In their comments, they also provided false details, such as conflicts, damages, injuries and casualties that did not appear in the photos and were not documented at the event.
Michael J. Fox waxes philosophical
That’s one of the things the illness has given me: It’s a degree of death. There’s a certain amount of loss, and whenever you have a loss, it’s a step toward death. So if you can accept loss, you can accept the fact that there’s gonna be the big loss. Once you can accept that, you can accept anything. So then I think, Well, given that that’s the case, let’s tip myself a break. Let’s tip everybody a break.
Campylobacter jejuni infection increases anxiety-like behavior in the holeboard: substrates for viscerosensory modulation of exploratory behavior
Holeboard? What the hell is a holeboard? I just linked this for the bit about GI tract being relevant to anxiety or its abatement.
Zetix blastproof fabric resists multiple car bombs
With a bungee example:
However, if you coil a line around the bungee cord, something that defies logic will happen: the whole structure will get wider as it stretches. As you can see in the image, the line around the bungee cord becomes taut, making the bungee itself flex outward. This principle is called helical-auxetics. When you put two of these threads together, you have what Reed Richards would call an auxetic structure.
Divorce360 -- not just feel-good stuff
Given how entangled divorce can get, thank goodness a useful service like this is around.
Each category has four sub-categories (legal, financial, emotional, children). Each page has content relevant to the category - paid contributions by journalists, blog posts by users, a Q&A section (with questions and answers provided by users) and video.
When does self-deception do the most good?
Not quite the same as the previous denial post. Another Inner Economist interview.
In the lower rungs of the company, however, I would favor overly optimistic people, those who are motivated by the idea that they always have a chance of being promoted or earning more money. The higher up you are, the more I would prefer realism. A president who won't listen can be pretty disastrous.
Plastic optical fiber could solve the "last mile" conundrum
Plastic optical fiber isn't as fast as traditional glass, but its 2.5GB/s transfer speed still represents a meteoric leap beyond copper.
Alex Goldberg -- NY teen prince of schmooze
I can't tell whether he's 12 or 14, but he's already rubbing elbows with celebrities:
Next up: Jamie Foxx. The actor was near the bar, giving a woman a massage, and saw the crowd now gathered around Alex. Foxx offered to buy him a drink. What do you want, little boy? “A piña colada,” Alex said. The crowd laughed, and he got one, virgin.
Alex’s adventure ended hours later, at Nobu, where the pool crowd had migrated to feast on junket sushi. He had been chatting up Venus and Serena Williams at a nearby table, and mugging for cameras with a cigar hanging from his lips while eating a bowl of ice cream. Then the faces at his table went blank. Alex looked up and saw what they saw. His mother.
Fixya -- customer support, products repair, manuals and troubleshooting on Any product
Just remember, they're not going to have absolutely everything quite yet.
Does a rock have consciousness?
I remember how this was slipped into the last lecture of my intro physiology class.
Now, Nagel reasoned, the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves — features that, in the right combinations, add up to our inner thoughts and feelings. But the electrons, protons and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.
Collection of in-jokes in PIXAR films
As the story goes, a few folks at SIGGRAPH 1987 told John that they thought that it was really clever that "Red's Dream" had referenced Pixar's first SIGGRAPH submission, "Luxo Jr." Which suggested that there was some sort of connective tissue between these two animated shorts.
Which -- let's be honest here, folks -- was NOT what John Lasseter & his team of animators were trying to do when they were working on "Red's Dream." Truth be told, these guys were just looking for a quick-and-dirty way to add some additional color to that film's dream sequence. But given they seemed to get extra points with the people at SIGGRAPH for trying to be clever ... Well, in-jokes and self references then became a way of life at Pixar Animation Studios.
The secret to raising smarter kids
How do we transmit a growth mind-set to our children? One way is by telling stories about achievements that result from hard work. For instance, talking about math geniuses who were more or less born that way puts students in a fixed mind-set, but descriptions of great mathematicians who fell in love with math and developed amazing skills engenders a growth mind-set, our studies have shown. People also communicate mind-sets through praise. Although many, if not most, parents believe that they should build up a child by telling him or her how brilliant and talented he or she is, our research suggests that this is misguided.
Dinosaur mummy found i.e. with skin, tissue
The hadrosaur, or duck-billed dinosaur, was discovered in 1999 by then-teenage paleontologist Tyler Lyson on his family's North Dakota property.
Some more interesting cases of memory
National Geographic's take on a couple of cases. Make one reconsider personhood.
The Wonderful Icon -- app launch or other functions from right-click or hot key
Free taskbar application The Wonderful Icon gives those who do a lot of window shuffling a range of customizable actions in one handy taskbar icon or a set of user-chosen hotkeys. Choose from a list of useful functions like saving and restoring clipboard content, text replacement and window tiling, or create your own app launchers and function shortcuts.
Deleted Norway sequence from Michael Moore's Sicko
The controversy is the approach to convicts, where future outcome is more important than retribution for the past. Bear in mind, they have oil money. Hit the link for many tax numbers in the comments.
Fever can temporarily unlock autism's grip
The parents recorded fewer aberrant behaviors, such as stereotypy (repeated, ritualistic movements), irritability, hyperactivity, and inappropriate speech during and immediately after a fever.
The behavior improvement occurred regardless of the severity of the fever and the illness. As expected, the improvements in behaviour ended when the fever broke.
Business lobby presses agenda before ’08 vote
Business lobbyists, nervously anticipating Democratic gains in next year’s elections, are racing to secure final approval for a wide range of health, safety, labor and economic rules, in the belief that they can get better deals from the Bush administration than from its successor.
One way to try to figure out what someone really thinks
More Inner Economist excerpting:
To get a person’s real opinion, ask what she thinks everyone else believes…If people truly hold a particular belief, they are more likely to think that others agree or have had similar experiences.
The weirdness of physicist Hugh Everett
Hugh Everett, the originator of the multiple worlds interpretation of quantum physics, was a strange fellow. He left physics when Neils Bohr refused to take his ideas seriously and went into defense work where he made millions.A BBC documentary, Parallel World, Parallel Lives, looks at his relationship with his son:
They lived in the same house for nearly 20 years and barely spoke. The first time Mark touched his father was when he found his stiffening corpse, still in bed and still in the suit he always wore. Mark himself, unusually for a rock star, wears a suit on stage. A devout atheist, Hugh told his wife to throw his ashes out with the trash, which, after keeping them for a bit in a filing cabinet, she duly did.New Scientist interview with son, Mark, here. This is all from Marginal Revolution.
Criticism of Paul Krugman's book
The couple of interesting points in the excerpt include how excessive soaking of the rich just lowers investment into companies (which employ people in general), and that unions are most successful in non-competitive industries. Plenty of comments to peruse.
Task Killer -- terminate those runaway processes
Slim alternative to task manager, or for those who don't even have task manager.
Cheap, passive solar heater for a room
Uses pennies on a board, paint everything black, that kind of thing.
Easy FREE Home Heat! - The best video clips are here
Yawcam -- motion-detecting on feature on webcam
A simpler alternative to webcam software out there. Can ftp, email or straight hard drive save footage. Free, Windows.
A search to find full TV episodes online
A warning to non-U.S. readers that you may be frustrated with the results by licensing limitations.
Philosophy cognitively healthy for kids
Compared with 72 control children, the philosophy children showed significant improvements on tests of their verbal, numerical and spatial abilities at the end of the 16-month period relative to their baseline performance before the study.Two years later, the advantage persisted.
Inter-ethnic violence a matter of geographic arrangement
Researchers... have shown that a mathematical model -- based purely on the geographic distribution of ethnic groups -- can provide a highly accurate prediction of where violent conflict will occur.
10 hottest girl gamers of 2007
From a GTA IV site. Not all on the list necessarily spend a lot of time actually gaming, but may be hosts of gaming shows, etc. Number 2 Rachelle here seems to be the real deal.
Rare brain disorder robs children of language and leaves doctors perplexed
“The hallmark feature of Landau-Kleffner syndrome is a loss of receptive and expressive speech and language skills,” says Sharon Willig, associate director of speech-language pathology for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA). The inability of those affected to understand the spoken word eventually hinders their own language skills, thereby rendering most of these children gradually or suddenly mute. It’s for this reason that LKS children are often misidentified as developmentally delayed or possibly hearing impaired.
Canada's coming DMCA will be the worst copyright yet
If this law passes, it will render all of the made-in-Canada exceptions to copyright for education, archiving, free speech and personal use will be irrelevant: if a technology has a lock that prohibits a use, your right to make that use falls by the wayside. Nevermind that you've got the right to record a show to watch later -- or to record a politician's speech so you can hold him to account later -- the policeman in the device can take that right away with no appeal.
120 U.S. war vet suicides each week
That's back in 2005.
Active-duty soldiers, however, are only part of the story. One of the well-known characteristics of post-traumatic stress injuries is that the onset of symptoms is often delayed, sometimes for decades. Veterans of World War II, Korea and Vietnam are still taking their own lives because new PTSD symptoms have been triggered, or old ones retriggered, by stories and images from these new wars. Their deaths, like the deaths of more recent veterans, are written up in hometown newspapers; they are locally mourned, but officially ignored. The VA doesn't track or count them.
Denial an important part of getting on
White lies and glossing over help to ease the the frictions within a society.
Windows add/remove programs substitutes
I don't know how complicated it could get, but there are more than a couple.
Excellent documentaries at Google
Conspiracy of Silence -- Pedophile Ring in Washington DC (religious and political leaders; unaired), Big Sugar and Zeitgeist can be found on this list.
Pedophiles have less brain white matter
On average, they're also shorter with lower IQ, and have increased frequency of lefthandedness.
Fatdoor -- social network for neighbors
I thought of this too far back, when social network platform didn't exist yet. I'm just too busy now.
Brilliant social psychology studies
Mostly conformity studies, but also a study about threats reducing favorable outcomes.
Genes are necessary but not sufficient for heritability
Yeah, you can carry, but a trait doesn't have to manifest.
Guide to freezing food
Really now?
Many vegetables contain a number of enzymes which cause them to lose their colour and flavour when frozen. Blanching (putting the vegetables briefly in boiling water) stops these enzymes from acting.Blanching guide list with times for each vegetable.
Funny medical moments
I was caring for a woman and asked, "So how's your breakfast this morning?" "It's very good, except for the Kentucky Jelly. I can't seem to get used to the taste," the patient replied. I then asked to see the jelly and the woman produced a foil packet labeled "KY Jelly."
Anger myths
The one that bothers me most is how venting is supposed to be good for you. The evidence says that one just gets angrier.
Scientists create fearless mouse
No toxoplasma infection here. Just good ole fashioned genetic engineering of olfactory capacity.
Bad day at the office (compilation)
Haven't seen a couple of these. Song is Bad Day by Daniel Powter.
British nukes were protected by bicycle locks
To arm the weapons you just open a panel held by two captive screws - like a battery cover on a radio - using a thumbnail or a coin.
Inside are the arming switch and a series of dials which you can turn with an Allen key to select high yield or low yield, air burst or groundburst and other parameters.
The Bomb is actually armed by inserting a bicycle lock key into the arming switch and turning it through 90 degrees. There is no code which needs to be entered or dual key system to prevent a rogue individual from arming the Bomb.
What makes us moral?
A consideration from Time. Their quiz here (the types of dilemmas presented in studies).
Western Union still relevant as migration continues
Long synonymous with Morse code, the company now advertises in Tagalog and Twi and runs promotions for holidays as obscure as Phagwa and Fiji Day. Its executives hail migrants as “heroes” and once tried to oust a congressman because of his push for tougher immigration laws.
Everyone's Guide to By-Passing Internet Censorship for Citizens Worldwide
Yeah, that's the title and it's a pdf.
Cancer studies wasted millions
Study in the U.K.It found some scientists have failed to carry out simple and inexpensive checks to ensure they are working with the right forms of human tumour cells.
Rust and scratch decals for your vehicle to deter theft
Just stick 'em on and communicate lower value.
Oprah helps hoarding woman remove 75 tons of garbage from her 3000 sq. ft. home
Well, that much stuff and a home that big... My guess is that she could have afforded some maid service earlier.
Browsershots -- test your web design in different browsers
I certainly know a prop shop that could use this.
23AndMe: for $1000, screen your DNA for conditions
Not your full genome, as far as I know (there is service that charges $350k for that). Still useful, but consider legal and economic consequences for merely knowing.
Want democracy? Abolish corporate peronhood
In 1886:
The Supreme Court ruled on an obscure taxation issue in the Santa Clara County vs. The Union Pacific Railroad case, but the Recorder of the court - a man named J. C. Bancroft Davis, himself formerly the president of a small railroad - wrote into his personal commentary of the case (known as a headnote) that the Chief Justice had said that all the Justices agreed that corporations are persons.And in so doing, he - not the Supreme Court, but its clerical recorder - inserted a statement that would change history and give corporations enormous powers that were not granted by Congress, not granted by the voters, and not even granted by the Supreme Court. Davis’s headnote, which had no legal standing, was taken as precedent by generations of jurists (including the Supreme Court) who followed and apparently read the headnote but not the decision.
The Boy with the Incredible Brain
Documentary on a math savant. How he comes to an answer is neurologically distinct from the rest of us.
Pedophiles' secret code on the Web
FBI intelligence bulletin on symbols and logos to indicate sexual preference.
Keeping arguments under control
Don't use absolutes, and maybe actually try to feel the other side's position.
Ideas that will change the world
Like self-modeling robots.
Here's an earth hack about controlling the cow methane problem, thrown in for good measure.
Rules of genetics keep changing
For example, it used to be believed that a single gene had a very specific, single purpose. Not so true anymore.
Health vs. Pork: Congress debates the Farm Bill
"Fruit and vegetable farmers, on the other hand, receive less than 1 percent of government subsidies."
Breaking down the mechanism of amyloid-beta clumping in Alzheimer's
The researchers thus discovered that gene mutations in A-beta increase the flexibility of the protein's loop, enabling it to join easily with loops of other A-beta proteins to form clumps. The loop is also located in the region of the protein that regulates the formation of A-beta and its amount.
Understanding how the toxic A-beta clumps form in the brain could aid the design of new drugs that both block the production of A-beta and prevent it from clumping.
Buying a residence not always the right move
Weigh everything out, crunch the numbers.
Myths about renting or buying here.
Affordable hydrogenases on carbon nanotubes to catalyze hydrogen fuel cell function
The researchers combined hydrogenase enzymes with carbon nanotubes, submicroscopic strands of pure carbon that are excellent electrical conductors. In laboratory studies, the researchers demonstrated that a good electrical connection was established using photoluminescence spectroscopy measurements.
These new “biohybrid” conjugates could reduce the cost of fuel cells by reducing or eliminating the need for platinum and other costly metal components, they say.
True Knowledge -- another natural language search engine
Right now, all of these seem to be in private beta. Lexxe is available right now.
Wednesday, December 26, 2007
Why self-governance works better than you think
Worried about pure anarchy? There's a lot of self-regulation in nature:
Many mechanisms of self-governance rely on reputation to secure good conduct. It’s not difficult to see how reputation can in many cases prevent cheating even where government enforcement is not an option.
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