Saturday, August 09, 2008

Pay-as-you-drive insurance: MyRate drive monitoring device goes national

With Progressive Insurance:

The little blue box plugs into your car's ODB II diagnostic port (all cars made after 1996 have one), and studiously records your driving habits, wirelessly sending the data back to Progressive HQ (it's not clear exactly how). Every six months, Progressive will crunch the numbers and issue a new rate for you based on how you drive -- savings of up to 40 percent are possible.

People with real superpowers

Choi Yeong-eui, later changed to Masutatsu Oyama... was born in Korea in 1927 and later moved to Japan, where he studied karate...
He used to have live public demonstrations where he would fight and kill a bull with his bare hands... All in all, Oyama fought and killed 52 bulls, three of which were killed instantly with one blow. Forty-nine had their horns chopped off with karate blows. He gained the nickname of The Godhand and was considered the living manifestation of the Japanese warrior's maxim "One strike, certain death."
If you're thinking his skills only worked against livestock, you should know that Oyama once tested himself in a kumite, a series of two-minute fights against different opponents, each of which you must win to continue. Oyama took on 300 men over the course of three days.

KeyScrambler Personal -- protect against keylogging

In all parts of your Web browser. There's a premium version for other software, like productivity and such.

The quality of medical advice in low-income countries

...doctors in Tanzania complete less than a quarter of the essential checklist for patients with classic symptoms of malaria, a disease that kills 63,000-96,000 Tanzanians each year. The public-sector doctor in India asks one (and only one) question in the average interaction: "What's wrong with you?". In Paraguay, the amount of time a doctor spends with a patient has nothing to do with the severity of the patient's illness...these isolated facts represent common patterns...three years of medical school in Tanzania result in only a 1 percentage point increase in the probability of a correct diagnosis...One concern with measuring doctor effort through direct observation is that the doctor may work harder in the presence of the research team.

The original American cannibal

Alferd G. Packer holds a unique spot in American jurisprudence. He is the only U.S. citizen ever charged, tried, and convicted for the crime of murder and cannibalism.
The crime was committed in 1873, but the trial began in 1884.

Monday, August 04, 2008

By 2012, Canadian ISPs to charge extra beyond commercial set of websites

Maybe by 2010. Bell Canada and Telus looking to rid of net neutrality in Canada.

Subtle racial slurs still shock, humiliate targets; federal officials see increase in complaints

Tomeika Broussard thought it was so absurd when she overheard her supervisor refer to her as a "reggin" that she just laughed. Then she realized it was the n-word spelled backward.

The only African-American in the small medical clinic in Los Gatos, Calif., Broussard said she was subjected to racial slurs almost daily. They were not the overt ones that most people would immediately recognize, but rather subtle, surreptitious code words that sometimes take a while to figure out.

Predicting the weather with clouds

Clouds can easily be broken into four categories. These categories are high clouds, middle clouds, low clouds and clouds with vertical growth.

Clouds are also identified by shape. Cumulus refers to a "heap" of clouds. Stratus refers to clouds that are long and streaky. And nimbus refers to the shape of "rain" because we all know what rain looks like.

Tricks to manage multiple accounts in Gmail

Various ways.

Meditation can alter brain structure

MRI scans of long-term meditators have shown greater activity in brain circuits involved in paying attention. When disturbing noises were played to a group of meditators undergoing an MRI scan, they had relatively little effect on the brain areas involved in emotion and decision-making among those with the most experience of meditation...
Long-term meditation seems not only to alter brain-wave patterns: early research suggests that it may also result in changes in the actual structure of the cortex, the outer parts of our brains. “We have found that brain regions associated with attention and sensory processing were thicker in meditators than in the controls,” says Dr Sara Lazar, an assistant in psychology at Massachusetts General Hospital.

Is it Africa's turn?

Links to analysts' status reports. Not all confident, but...

Ken Banks: "African entrepreneurs are discovering that the current technological environment enables them to remove those shackles for themselves. They need not rely on a donor agency or international trade agreement to hand them the key."

Researchers pushing their own bodies for science

In 1929, Werner Forssmann was a surgical trainee who wanted to learn about the heart. Unlike other wimpy doctors at the time, instead of learning about it from books or dead animals, he went for the more classic investigatory approach of "poke it with something."
Without any supervision, advice, or regard for that concept you call "survival," he cut a hole in his arm and pushed a catheter all the way up the limb and jammed it into his still-living heart.

Sunday, July 13, 2008

Number joke

Plastics unite to make unexpected metal-like compound

When laid side-by-side the two materials are physically unchanged, but the way electrons behave is subtly altered along the interface where the different materials are in close proximity, says Morpurgo. In tests, they tried cooling down the combined materials, expecting the odd behaviour to disappear because the two plastics become more insulating at lower temperatures.

Instead the interface became a better conductor, just as metals offer less resistance to electricity when they are cooled.

Change IP Country

Proxy. It keeps reloading, though, and thus changing the IP -- tough for streaming stuff.

Globalization must go on

Yes, the benefits of a good safety net are well established, but globalization is not the primary source of trouble for most American workers. Health care problems, bad schools for our children or, in recent times, bad banking practices have all produced greater disruptions — and these have been fundamentally domestic failings.

Albinos doing worse in Tanzania

Police officials are at a loss to explain precisely why there is a wave of albino killings now. Commissioner Paul Chagonja said an influx of Nigerian movies, which play up witchcraft, might have something to do with it, along with rising food prices that were making people more desperate.

The heroes of SARS

In early April, however, a 71 year-old doctor named Jiang Yanyong began to speak out against the official policy. Unlike most Chinese dissenters, Dr Jiang openly identified himself, and made no secret of his role as a senior military doctor in the People’s Liberation Army, and a lifelong member of the Communist Party. Perhaps he owed his doggedness to his advancing years; while he understood the authorities’ efforts to maintain prestige and public order, he was convinced that the free flow of information would be needed to halt the spread of the disease. If SARS were to rampage unchecked among the 1.3 billion Chinese population, the best disease-control efforts of other countries would be in vain.

Overview of successful transit systems

Seventy percent of Curitiba's (Brazil) population uses transit or bikes:

This system is said to be the most efficient, cost-effective public transportation system in the world, and more than 80 countries have adopted it.

Mini buses pick up people from residential neighbourhoods and “feed” them to buses travelling in dedicated bus lanes that circle the city. Passengers alight and get on buses from tube-like bus stops that have outlets such as post offices and public phones. To speed up the movement of buses and passengers, passengers pay their fares at these bus stops rather than on the buses.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

Magenn air rotor system finally floats

"Pierre Rivard, president and CEO of Magenn, said the MARS is intended as a renewable energy source for industrial customers seeking to replace diesel generators or who need to use energy in remote locations... Traditional wind power works best on flat land, where there are fewer obstructions to block wind flow. However, only about 15 percent of the earth's land mass is flat. Rivard says the MARS technology can help provide wind power in areas that aren't flat."

Clever uses for lemons

Remove warts
You've tried countless remedies to get rid of your warts, and nothing seems to work. Next time, try this: Apply a dab of lemon juice directly to the wart, using a cotton swab. Repeat for several days until the acids in the lemon juice dissolve the wart completely.

Are soap operas a form of birth control in Brazil?

Summary of methodology at Population Media Center.

You know you're from California when...

18. Both you AND your dog have therapists.

Woman who died watching TV sat unfound for 42 years

Uh, well... maybe?

World's oldest woman had a healthy brain

It is generally assumed age-related cognitive decline is a normal process that is common to all people, and that Alzheimer's Disease is an inevitable consequence of aging; the risk of Alzheimer's increases exponentially past the age of 65, and affects more than 1 in 6 people aged over 80.

Although this is just one case study, it may lead researchers to reconsider some of their assumptions about Alzheimer's, because it shows that cognitive function can remain unimpaired far beyond the age at which they normally decline, and that Alzheimer's and other forms of dementia are not necessarily inevitable.

Ironically, the woman weighed little more than 1.5kg at birth, and was not expected to survive for long. On autopsy, a tumour of 7cm in diameter was found in her stomach, but the authors suggest that if she had not died from cancer she could have lived for several more years.

Tracing the history of Pink Floyd's pig

[Berlin:]But he was so big that he knocked a ton of bricks off the top of the Wall when he inflated. Actually, it was a very, very impressive piece of engineering by Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park. So that was the next incarnation. He never escaped because he had no ass. He was just a head and shoulders. So he had no chance to fly, sadly.

How to eavesdrop on or inject audio into a Bluetooth headset

Well, it seems that you're catching the mic, so only half a conversation.

Popular Science's green megacity

A flash tour of what technologies a properly green city would probably employ.

How to improve your posture

Some Alexander Technique tips.

Monster parents emerging in Japan

Within the category of monster parent Professor Morotomi identifies the most potent strain: the “teacher hunters”, who conspire in small groups to ensure that a particular teacher is dismissed. Occasionally, he said, this involves physically mobbing their victim at the school gates and screaming abuse until a letter of resignation is signed on the spot.

Some history of eugenics

Indeed, this "reversion towards mediocrity" was suspected by some historians to be a major contributor to the fall of the Roman Empire. The gloomy prediction of mankind's decline was dubbed dysgenics, and it was considered to be the antithesis of the eugenics movement; but it was not considered inevitable. It was believed that a society could reverse its own genetic decay by reducing breeding among the feebleminded and increasing fertility of the affluent.

KeyScrambler encrypts keystrokes

Plug-in for browsers; can pay for other apps.

Iconoclastic discoveries about the brain

Glial cells are now known to regulate communication between neurons and to control blood flow through the capillaries in the brain. They can also communicate with neurons, with each other, and with blood vessels, and a study published in April of this year shows that glial cells can generate action potentials.

Journalism prof Michael Pollan In Defense of Food

On the history of the American diet and the philosophy and economics informing it. Very informative.

Quikmaps -- doodle on GoogleMaps and Earth

You know -- draw lines and markers and make notes...

E-mail sent to those left behind after the rapture

Users can also upload up to 150 megabytes of documents, which will be protected by an unidentified encryption algorithm until the Rapture, then released to up to 12 nonbelievers of your choice. The site recommends that you use that storage to house sensitive financial information[?].
In the encrypted portion of your account you can give them access to your banking, brokerage, hidden valuables, and powers of attorneys... There won’t be any bodies, so probate court will take seven years to clear your assets to your next of kin. Seven years, of course, is all the time that will be left. So, basically the Government of the Antichrist gets your stuff, unless you make it available in another way.

Experimenting with smart drugs

Some of my friends who relied on crushed Ritalin during college used to joke about how the drugs were great for late-night cramming sessions, but that they seemed to suppress any kind of originality. In other words, increased focus came at the expense of the imagination. It makes perfect sense that such a cognitive trade-off would exist. Paying attention to a particular task - like writing an article - requires the brain to ignore all sorts of seemingly unrelated thoughts and stimuli bubbling up from below. (The unconscious brain is full of potential distractions.) However, the same thoughts that can be such annoying interruptions are also the engine of creativity, since they allow us to come up with new connections between previously unrelated ideas.

Particular skin tumor type and immune system allows for T cell cloning treatment

From a sample of the man's white blood cells, they were able to select CD4+ T cells which had been specifically primed to attack a chemical found on the surface of melanoma cells.

These were then multiplied in the laboratory, and put back in their billions to see if they could mount an effective attack on the tumours.

Two months later, scans showed the tumours had disappeared, and after two years, the man remained disease-free.

The new cells persisted in the body for months after the treatment.

Ways to start an earthquake

Mine a Lot of Coal: Coal provides more than half the electricity in the United States and an even greater percentage in China. That means there are a lot of coal mines working overtime to pull the fossilized fuel out of the Earth. In total, miners pulled 6,195 million metric tons of coal out of the Earth in 2006 alone. And coal mines often have to pump water out along with the coal, sometimes extracting dozens of times as much water as coal. Add it up and you have a huge change in the mass of a region, and huge mass changes refigure the earthquake stresses of an area, sometimes increasing the chance of an earthquake and other times lowering it. Klose's work suggests that more than 50 percent of the human-triggered earthquakes recorded came from mining operations.

The rise and fall of Atari

So he and a friend chipped in $250 a piece to start a company called Syzygy (the name given to the configuration of the sun, the earth, and the moon when they ‘re in a straight line in space)... That’s what Bushnell wanted to name it… but when he filed with the state of California, they told him the name was already taken. Bushnell liked to play Go, a Japanese game of strategy similar to chess. He thought some of the words used in the game would make a good name for a business, and company legend has it he asked the clerk at the California Secretary of State’s office to choose between Sente, Hane, and Atari.

She picked Atari.

Friday, July 11, 2008

Pilot's pen

The LED needs a single AAA.

How Obama did it

Re Democratic nomination:

Not until the morning of the caucuses did the campaign reach its goal of 97,000 Iowans pledged to support Obama that it thought it would need to win. Then came the real question: Would these people show up? Show up they did, shattering turnout records...
The Iowa playbook, as everyone now knows, hasn't always worked. In Texas, for instance, the grassroots operation counted on more African-American voters than actually turned out. In California, organizers expected more young voters. But while Obama rarely managed a clean win against Clinton in the big states — the ones that will count most in the fall — he kept winning delegates even when he lost primaries.

Cat saves rail transit company in Japan

Railway officials laid off the station's staff in April 2006, but Tama -- whose mother was a stray that lived at the station -- didn't leave. She became a popular fixture among riders, and railway officials formally named her "stationmaster" in January 2007.

Cats are considered good luck in Japan, and Tama's promotion made her a national sensation. Tourists flocked to the station to take pictures and buy souvenirs -- postcards, erasers, notebooks and pins. Ridership rose 17 percent in the month after her appointment, and rose another 10 percent the following year.

Woman wakes after 17 hours of brain death

"There was no life there," her son, Tim Thomas, told the Charleston Daily Mail. "Her skin had already started hardening, her hands and toes were curling up."

"Uniquely" human traits now found in animals

Morality:

A classic study in 1964 found that hungry rhesus monkeys would not take food they had been offered if doing so meant that another monkey received an electric shock. The same is true of rats. Does this indicate nascent morality? For decades, we have preferred to find alternative explanations, but recently ethologist Marc Bekoff from the University of Colorado at Boulder has championed the view that humans are not the only moral species. He argues that morality is common in social mammals, and that during play they learn the rights and wrongs of social interaction, the "moral norms that can then be extended to other situations such as sharing food, defending resources, grooming and giving care".

Origins of office words

Learning the ropes:

Before an old-time apprentice sailor could really help out on a big ship, he had to learn which ropes had what effect on which sails. Before he did, he wasn’t much use to anyone. After he "learned the ropes,"
he could finally hoist the right mast - and avoid being flogged.

How much progress have psychology and psychiatry really made?

... the field of psychology began making important and cumulative progress when it ceased to be a social science, and became a natural science. Psychology is really a branch of biology or zoology [evolutionary psychology, behavior genetics, and cognitive neuroscience].

Monday, July 07, 2008

Seadragon (scaling way down or up through many images) and Photosynth (synthesizing disparate photos of given image)

Skills every man should master

10. Buy a suit: Avoid bargains. Know your likes, your dislikes, and what you need it for (work, funerals, court). Squeeze the fabric -- if it bounces back with little or no sign of wrinkling, that means it's good, sturdy material. And tug the buttons gently. If they feel loose or wobbly, that means they're probably coming off sooner rather than later. The jacket's shoulder pads are supposed to square with your shoulders; if they droop off or leave dents in the cloth, the jacket's too big. The jacket sleeves should never meet the wrist any lower than the base of the thumb -- if they do, ask to go down a size. Always get fitted.

Post-American world: rise of the rest

The U.S. doesn't really have to underperform that much compared to the past. It's just that the rest of the world is vaulting forward, jumping on the capitalism bandwagon.

PoopReport -- bringing toilets to India

Donation pitch for toilets for low-caste girls studying at the Pardada Pardadi School, Uttar Pradesh, India.

People killed by their own inventions

Franz Reichelt was a tailor who was convinced that the next big thing was a coat that doubled as a parachute. So he got busy sewing and developed just that. To test the coat/parachute (coatachute? Paracoat?), Reichelt climbed up to the first deck of the Eiffel Tower. He told authorities that he was going to use a dummy to test the invention, but at the last minute he strapped himself in and jumped to his death in front of a large crowd of spectators.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb's life tips via a Sunday Times article

1 Scepticism is effortful and costly. It is better to be sceptical about matters of large consequences, and be imperfect, foolish and human in the small and the aesthetic.

2 Go to parties. You can’t even start to know what you may find on the envelope of serendipity. If you suffer from agoraphobia, send colleagues.

3 It’s not a good idea to take a forecast from someone wearing a tie. If possible, tease people who take themselves and their knowledge too seriously.

4 Wear your best for your execution and stand dignified. Your last recourse against randomness is how you act — if you can’t control outcomes, you can control the elegance of your behaviour. You will always have the last word.

5 Don’t disturb complicated systems that have been around for a very long time. We don’t understand their logic. Don’t pollute the planet. Leave it the way we found it, regardless of scientific ‘evidence’.

6 Learn to fail with pride — and do so fast and cleanly. Maximise trial and error — by mastering the error part.

7 Avoid losers. If you hear someone use the words ‘impossible’, ‘never’, ‘too difficult’ too often, drop him or her from your social network. Never take ‘no’ for an answer (conversely, take most ‘yeses’ as ‘most probably’).

8 Don’t read newspapers for the news (just for the gossip and, of course, profiles of authors). The best filter to know if the news matters is if you hear it in cafes, restaurants... or (again) parties.

9 Hard work will get you a professorship or a BMW. You need both work and luck for a Booker, a Nobel or a private jet.

10 Answer e-mails from junior people before more senior ones. Junior people have further to go and tend to remember who slighted them.

Unconscious brain has already decided

On average, the volunteers took about 22 seconds to press the button and felt that they consciously decided to do so about a second or less before they made the movement. But the fMRI data told a much different story. Two parts of the brain - the frontopolar cortex and the precuneus - showed activity that predicted the choices that the volunteers made and in the frontopolar cortex, this activity happened a whopping 7 seconds before the subjects were consciously aware of their decisions.

These astonishing results suggest that by the time we become consciously aware of a decision to move, our choices have already been influenced for several seconds by the actions of the frontopolar cortex. The study goes well beyond Libet's original work. It shows that this preliminary activity is far from a general and non-specific curiosity, but can actually predict a decision. Nor can it be explained away by inaccuracies in measurement - the timescales involved were far too long for that.

Another take here.

Tuesday, July 01, 2008

Two-mile high Ultima Tower design mimics termite mound

The ultradense solution to sprawl.

IEEE's singulary report

Thorough roundup of articles, videos, panel discussions.

Harsh discipline makes aggressive children worse

Crucially, unlike aggressive parenting, the greater use of calmer reasoning techniques for disciplining children was not associated with a subsequent increase in the children's aggression (although it didn't reduce aggression either).

Canada's Linda McQuaig likes reopening NAFTA

Here's the problem: NAFTA contains a clause that effectively prevents us from cutting back exports of our energy to the United States – even if it means there will be energy shortages in Canada.

This "proportionality clause" is highly unusual. Indeed, according to a new report by the Alberta-based Parkland Institute, it is "unique in all the world's treaties."

Gamma-secretase modulators (GSMs) for Alzheimer's are "astonishing"

Although the GSM's alter enzyme activity that produces the protein that forms the clumps, now it seems they also act on the amyloid beta itself.

World's most dangerous gangs

Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC), Brazil:
... On Friday, May 12, the city of São Paulo came under siege as anonymous attackers burned buses, banks, and public buildings, gunning down police and instilling chaos as they went. Simultaneously, 73 prisons around the state erupted in rebellion. For days, the city and the prisons were at a standstill while local leaders floundered, unsure how to respond.

Teeth grown in lab

Still a ways away from dentin and enamel restoration. Also at Wired here.

Modular robot self-assembles when kicked apart

Changing belief in free will can cause students to cheat

This time, instead of just reading a passage, two groups of students read a booklet fifteen phrases such as "A belief in free will contradicts the known fact that the universe is governed by lawful principles of science," and were required to ponder each phrase for a full minute before turning to the next page. Another group read similar statements advocating free will, and another group read neutral statements. A final baseline group didn't read any statements at all. Everyone was given the same test, which was composed of 15 problems from the GRE exam, a rigorous test designed to assess applicants for graduate school.

One determinism group, the free will group, and the neutral group took the test in sets of 2 to 5 individuals. For these groups, a tempting possibility of cheating was introduced. The experimenter told them that she had to leave the room for a meeting, and that they were to take no more than 15 minutes to take the test, which they should grade themselves. She would not see their test sheets: they were to be destroyed in a document shredder in the room. Then they could award themselves $1 for every correct response from an envelope of coins she left on a table in the room.

The other two groups (the second determinism group and the baseline group) were tested individually, the experimenter graded their tests, and paid them based on their actual scores...

The beauty of this experiment is that the experimenter honestly didn't know how much money each person in the "cheating possible" groups took. She could only count the money after they left and find the average take per person. She couldn't even assess their answers on the test -- those were shredded. Yet those who had read the determinism statements took significantly more money when they were given the opportunity to cheat. The fact that reading about determinism didn't lead to higher scores when cheating was not possible suggests that indeed, cheating was going on, not just super-performance due to reading about determinism.

What the bagel man saw -- economics of the honor system

''But I found that as the unemployment rate goes down, dishonesty goes up,'' Paul F. says. ''My guess is that a low rate of unemployment means that companies are having to hire a lower class of employee.'' The data also show that the payment rate does not change when he raises bagel prices, though volume may temporarily fall.
A separate experiment at Kitchener's City Cafe Bakery.

Neurochemistry of fairness

The new research shows that, despite the apparent significance of this behavior, it's remarkably easy to manipulate responses to the UG by tweaking brain chemistry. The authors of this study recruited volunteers that ingested a drink that was either a placebo, or one that would produce a short-term drop in the neurotransmitter serotonin. Five hours later, when serotonin levels should be stably depleted, the subjects with reduced serotonin rejected unfair offers at significantly higher rates than the placebo population. No difference in behavior was detected in offers that are typically viewed as fair.

Scientiest killed or injured by their experiments

In 1898, Curie and her husband, Pierre, discovered radium. She spent the remainder of her life performing radiation research and studying radiation therapy. Her constant exposure to radiation led to her contracting leukemia and she died in 1934. Curie is the first and only person to receive two Nobel prizes in science in two different fields: chemistry and physics. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Some time with some Gypsies

Rough in France, but it's Gypsy culture itself:

They forget their French and keep their children out of school and marry them to their first cousins aged fourteen. They accept bribes to vote for Mayor Alduy. They lose their teeth and are too frightened to go to the dentist. They die of minor diseases against which other French people—people who go to school—are inoculated. And they don’t leave a trace.

Common cooking ingredients that act like medicines

One of my favorites for reports of possible Alzheimer's prevention:

1. Turmeric. As anyone who has ever treated a head cold with a nice hot Indian meal already knows, turmeric is one of the best healing herbs available to us today. It contains the anti-inflammatory curcumin, which may function in the same way as some pharmaceutical arthritis drugs.

The next time your joints are aching, just have a healthy serving of curry and see if your symptoms respond to the exotic spice. Researchers recommend a daily serving of 400 mg.

TeaCubes -- retractable spool timer

Adjustable time? Good for the hurried life, not for those serious about tea.

Eligible bachelor paradox: game theory explains dearth of appealing men

Where are all the good men?

You can think of this traditional concept of the search for marriage partners as a kind of an auction. In this auction, some women will be more confident of their prospects, others less so... In fact, game theory predicts, and empirical studies of auctions bear out, that auctions will often be won by "weak" bidders, who know that they can be outbid and so bid more aggressively, while the "strong" bidders will hold out for a really great deal.

What dictionaries and optical illusions say about our brains

Mark Changizi is bent on determining why it works that way... [He] has demonstrated that the shapes of letters in 100 writing systems reflect common ones seen in nature: Take the letter "A"—it looks like a mountain, he says. And "Y" might remind one of a tree with branches. He also showed that across different languages most characters take three strokes to write out. That's because, he says, three is the highest quantity a person's brain can perceive without resorting to counting.

Pixar's Brad Bird on fostering innovation

Then there’s our building. Steve Jobs basically designed this building. In the center, he created this big atrium area, which seems initially like a waste of space. The reason he did it was that everybody goes off and works in their individual areas. People who work on software code are here, people who animate are there, and people who do designs are over there. Steve put the mailboxes, the meetings rooms, the cafeteria, and, most insidiously and brilliantly, the bathrooms in the center—which initially drove us crazy—so that you run into everybody during the course of a day. [Jobs] realized that when people run into each other, when they make eye contact, things happen. So he made it impossible for you not to run into the rest of the company.

With 3G, next cellphone battle will be between Apple and Google

Since iPod, Apple has been very significantly been about overpriced, propietary trendiness, making it more The Man than Google.

But no phone maker today is poised to take advantage of the software chinks—however small—in the iPhone's armor. Companies like BlackBerry may have excelled at direct, no-frills interfaces, but with the flood of new iPhone applications due to arrive July 11, it will take a true software giant to mount any sort of defense.

A giant like Google.

This mob is big in Japan

Most Americans think of Japan as a law-abiding and peaceful place, as well as our staunch ally, but reporting on the underworld gave me a different perspective. Mobs are legal entities here. Their fan magazines and comic books are sold in convenience stores, and bosses socialize with prime ministers and politicians. And as far as the United States is concerned, Japan may be refueling U.S. warships at sea, but it's not helping us fight our own battles against organized crime -- a realization that led to my biggest scoop.

Extra vitamins can counteract faulty genes

Rine and Marini inserted variants of the human gene for an enzyme called MTHFR into yeast cells, where they were able to measure the enzyme's activity. They found five mutations that impaired the enzyme's function – but for four of them, the problem could be fixed by providing extra folate.

Famous failures

SafeManuals -- manuals online

So much time wasted looking all over the place for the instruction manual to tune the tv-set, find the printer cartridge replacement how-to, the meaning of the blinking led on the dashboard...
On this site you will easily be able to find the required instruction guides and user manuals that you need.

The trust-me drug that makes you take social risks

Just oxytocin:

The researchers found that—in the trust game, but not the risk game—OT reduced activity in two brain regions: the amygdala, which processes fear, danger and possibly risk of social betrayal; and an area of the striatum, part of the circuitry that guides and adjusts future behavior based on reward feedback.

Baumgartner and colleagues concluded that their findings showed that oxytocin affected the subjects' responses specifically related to trust . . . "If subjects face social risks, such as in the trust game, those who received placebo respond to the feedback with a decrease in trusting behavior while subjects with OT demonstrate no change in their trusting behavior although they were informed that their interaction partners did not honor their trust in roughly 50% of the cases."

Business scams that failed miserably

Using Corbin's influence to get an audience with the President, the pair would argue to [Ulysses S.] Grant that selling gold was a terrible idea that the government should avoid at all costs. The wily pair also used their influence at the White House to secure a position as assistant treasurer of the United States for Daniel Butterfield, who would warn them if the government started to sell gold.

With their connections in place, Fisk and Gould started buying up gold in September 1869, quickly driving the price of gold up by around 30 percent.

Once Grant and his advisors got wise to the situation, though, the government quickly sold off $4 million in gold to break the corner, effectively killing the inflated prices on September 24.

Scoutle -- promoting blogs through social networking

Promote your blog, attract more interested visitors, get your blog rated continuously and meet bloggers like you. Just work on the quality of your blog, Scoutle will do the rest.

Customs you need to know before visiting Japan

5. Thresholds
Take off your shoes at the entrance to all homes, and most businesses and hotels. Usually a rack will be provided to store your shoes, and pair of guest slippers will be sitting nearby; many Japanese bring a pair of indoor slippers just in case, though.
Never wear slippers when you need to step onto a tatami mat (used in most Japanese homes and hotels; the standard unit of measurement for area even today), and be careful to remove the toilet slippers waiting for you in the bathroom.
It is extremely bad form, for example, to reenter the main room of a house wearing slippers that have been running across dirty linoleum.

Altruism needs selfish gene after all

"[In species excluding ants, bees and wasps] the data is much more limited, but it points in the same direction," says Hughes. "You always have ancestral monandry when eusociality evolves." In other words, close genetic relatedness is crucial to the evolution of altruism.

Selsam flying wind Superturbines

"Resembling a field of wind-swept reeds swaying on the horizon, these floating wind spires boast an ultra-efficient design that flexes with the wind, taking advantage of air currents along the length of their shaft to generate electricity. Selsam’s prototypes produce 6000 watts in 32.5 mph winds - six times more power than a similarly sized seven foot single-rotor turbine can produce. The turbines can be easily deployed by land and by sea, and their effectiveness can be amplified even further via an air-born blimp."

Chef Grant Achatz profiles

of his approach to life, and thus his kitchen at Alinea. Reaction to his tongue cancer would seem to be typical.

Some guy's list of 1001 books

Ones he's already finished and ones yet to be read.

Satanism is really just libertarianism

From the Wikipedia entry re the Satanic Bible:

This can be compared favorably to the arguments of ethical egoism--that what sometimes benefits others can be beneficial to oneself, but that one must always have one's own interests first in mind. LaVey never suggests that love is not a natural emotion in man, and on the contrary suggests that loving select individuals is very natural, but he does claim that to love all people is not only a philosophical mistake but is in fact impossible and even damaging to the ability to truly love those few individuals who deserve it.
... like love, it is senseless to universally apply hatred to all mankind.

Global slavery in 2008

Bonded Labor occurs when labor is demanded in order to repay a debt or loan and the cyclical nature of debt and work can enslave the person for the rest of their life. Some conditions are so controlled that slaves are surrounded by armed guards while they work, many of whom are slaves themselves. This has been found in Brazil. It is estimated that there are 20 million bonded labourers in the world.

Space euphoria: Do our brains change in outer space?

The overview effect:

He describes becoming instantly and profoundly aware that each of his constituent atoms were connected to the fragile planet he saw in the window and to every other atom in the Universe. He described experiencing an intense awareness that Earth, with its humans, other animal species, and systems were all one synergistic whole. He says the feeling that rushed over him was a sense of interconnected euphoria

How to get and keep Windows XP after June 30, 2008

... you'll be able to buy XP on certain mainstream PCs at least until January 31, 2009, and possibly beyond. The cutoff date is even later for some ultra-low cost notebooks, as well as low-cost desktop PCs commonly called nettops, such as those made by Asus, Dell, and other manufacturers: They'll sell with XP until June 2010. As for technical support, that has a lot of life left as well--officially, Microsoft will provide at least some forms of support until 2014.

From Russia with Hate -- state of hate movements

You see Nazi salutes and swastikas and you realize that ideologically, Russia actually lost (or is now losing) the war and Hitler won (just not in Germany). My understanding is that there is a lot of unofficial backpatting from the government. I don't have a link in this blog, but there was a time when Putin was publicly encouraging harassment of ethnic Georgians in Russia.
Previous post on more ideologically native youth militia/sex camp here.