Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Robins can literally see magnetic fields, but only if their vision is sharp –
• Drowning Doesn't Look Like Drowning – Drowning is not the violent, splashing, call for help that most people expect. Except in rare circumstances, drowning people are physiologically unable to call out for help. The respiratory system was designed for breathing. Speech is the secondary or overlaid function. Breathing must be fulfilled, before speech occurs.
• New York Magazine: Parenting – All Joy and No Fun – Why parents hate parenting, and the difference between moment-to-moment happiness and a long-term purposeful life.
• Analysis of the "Flash Crash" – An analysis of the May 6th stock market abnormalities, that is both simple and seems to make perfect sense.
• An Introduction to Drilling Offshore Oil Wells –

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Hot Dog Security – Two of my favourite common-sense bloggers find each other.
• Being an Emotional Minority – We all seem to outgrow our own emotions. The things I held sacred in my youth are no longer so. This seems to happen not just to individuals, but to the whole human race. As we have become more rational, many superstitious and prejudiced beliefs and rituals have faded away.
• NY Times: The Evolution of the World Cup Ball – What I've always thought of as "the" football is apparently the official ball of the 1970 world cup.
• WSJ: The Oil Disaster Is About Human, Not System, Failure – A letter to the editors detailing a sequence of mistakes and obvious red flags, ignored by the engineers at the Deep Horizon rig.
• The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and Crisp French Fries – A detailed investigation into the art of making French Fries

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• NY Times: The Naked Truth on Credit-Default Swaps – Credit-default swaps are, in reality, insurance. But the people who dreamed up credit-default swaps did not like the word insurance. It smacked of regulation and of reserves that insurance companies must set aside in case there were claims. So they called the new thing a swap. That decision, perhaps more than anything else, enabled AIG to go broke
• TEDTalks : Elizabeth Pisani: Sex, drugs and HIV — let's get rational – Behaviour that seems irrational – sharing needles etc – may be perfectly rational given the choices available to people.
• TED: Julia Sweeney has "The Talk" – Despite her best efforts, comedian Julia Sweeney is forced to tell a little white lie when her 8-year-old begins learning about frog reproduction — and starts to ask some very smart questions.
• The Tragic Cost of Google Pac-Man – 4.82 million hours – Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of time (beyond the 33.6m daily man hours of attention that Google Search gets in a given day). $120,483,800 is the dollar tally, If the average Google user has a COST of $25/hr. For that same cost, you could hire all 19,835 google employees, from Larry and Sergey down to their janitors, and get 6 weeks of their time.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Why Chinese Is So Damn Hard – Whatever the reason they started, every single person who has undertaken to study Chinese sooner or later asks themselves "Why in the world am I doing this?" Those who can still remember their original goals will wisely abandon the attempt then and there, since nothing could be worth all that tedious struggle.
• The Radioactive Clock In Your Teeth – How bomb testing in the 1950s is helping scientists determine a person's age.
• NY Times: Diet and Exercise to the Extremes – The ultramarathoner Scott Jurek needs 5,000 to 8,000 calories a day to fuel his running regimen, and he gets them without consuming any animal products.
• Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team | Video on TED.com – Some research into the "marshmallow problem" , where teams try to build the tallest tower out of dry spaghetti, one yard of tape and a marshmallow. Which kind of team will win, and why?
• Lies, damned lies and statistics (about TEDTalks) – Using statistical analysis on TEDTalks to come up with a metric for creating "the optimum TEDTalk" based on user ratings.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• A Farewell to Floppy Disks – Sony announced that they will stop selling floppy discs this year, making them the final manufacturer to halt their production.
• Archaeologists unearth 6th century Ikea-style temple – Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed the remains of a 6th century BC temple-style building complete with detailed assembly instructions which they have likened to an Ikea do-it-yourself furniture pack.
• Why content is a public good – In economic terms, content (movies, music etc) has never been a rival good and recent technological progress has made it practically non-excludable. Content is a public good. Which is not saying that content is free, or cheap to make. But it does mean that old business models based on content being a club good simply don't work.
• NY Times: The Estrogen Dilemma – New science is showing that estrogen’s effects on women’s minds and bodies may depend upon when they first start taking it.
• NY Times: Volcanic Ash Closes Down Air Traffic in North Europe – Authorities closed airspace and shut down airports as a high-altitude cloud of ash drifted south and east from an erupting volcano in Iceland. When volcanic ash gets into a jet engine, it can melt, causing the engine to flame out and stall.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• NY Times: Unshaven Women – Free Spirits or Just Unkempt? – Many women believe shaving is part of good grooming. Others say, go ahead and break the rules. (Note: read the comments section!)
• The Economist: Defining what makes a country – UN membership? Diplomatic recognition? Issuing passports?
• Helium – Going, Going, Gone – The second most common element in the universe is increasingly rare on Earth—except, for now, in America.
• Machine Knits Socks by the Yard – Video demonstration of an antique (75 years) sock-knitting machine that turns out socks by the yard. Socks are made pretty much the same way today.
• YouTube – Making of the natural gas commercial –
• YouTube – Knitted commercial for natural gas –

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Times: Iceland prepares for possible second volcanic eruption – After a small volcano eruption this weekend in Iceland, the danger is that it will trigger the much larger Katla. The outlook isn't good: Eyjafjallajokull has blown 3 times over the last 1000 years, and Katla always followed. A big eruption can have global consequences.
• Economist: Metabolic syndrome: A game of consequences? – Some scientists are now saying that being fat, long thought to be a bad thing, is actually a protective mechanism against other, more damaging effects of overeating.
• Why are carrots orange? It is political. – Carrots used to be white, red, orange and purple. Now they're almost all orange. Why? Because of 17th century politics.
• Gay marriage: the database engineering perspective – Starts as a stream of consciousness about equal parts nuptial rights and Structured Query Language and finishes up moving into graph theory.
• Code Bubbles Project: Rethinking the User Interface of IDEs – "The file-based nature of contemporary IDEs makes it prohibitively difficult to create and maintain a simultaneous view of such fragments. We propose a novel user interface metaphor for code understanding and maintanence based on collections of lightweight, editable fragments called bubbles, which form concurrently visible working sets."

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• The international war over exit signs – The classic American emergency exit sign has bold red letters spelling out E-X-I-T. The rest of the world thinks this is nuts, and mostly use some version of the ISO standard, a green pictogram showing a man running through a door.
• Can better signs help pedestrians understand London? – London is putting up signs to help pedestrians find their way, and to reduce Tube congestion.
• Charles Stross: CMAP #5: Why books are the length they are – Why are novels generally the length that they are? It looks obvious at first — novels are the length they are because, well, they're novels — but in truth, the length of a novel varies depending on the prevailing publishing industry distribution model when it's written.
• Scott and Scurvy – How a known cure for scurvy was lost.
• The Economist: Gendercide – The worldwide war on baby girls – Technology, declining fertility and ancient prejudice are combining to unbalance societies

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Charles Stross: CMAP #4: Territories, Translations, and Foreign Rights – If you're an author and you rely on your North American rights, you'll be on the bread line. To actually earn a living, you really need to exploit other territorial and language rights.
• Charles Stross: CMAP #3: What Authors sell to Publishers – The rights of authors, and how they are managed, parceled out, sold and compensated for.
• Charles Stross: CMAP #2: How Books Are Made – It is a common misconception that "the only two people that matter are the author and the reader (one puts creativity in, the other money: the rest add cost)". To be direct: a manuscript is not a book. The author's job is to write the manuscript. The publisher's job is to turn a series of manuscripts originating from different suppliers into consistently produced books, mass-produce them, and sell them into distribution channels.
• Charles Stross: Common Misconceptions About Publishing: #1 – Publishing is a recondite, bizarre, and downright strange industry which is utterly unlike anything a rational person would design to achieve the same purpose (which I will loosely define for now as "put authors books into the hands of readers while making a profit, to the satisfaction of all concerned").
• TED Talks: Daniel Kahneman – The riddle of experience vs. memory – About how our "experiencing selves" and our "remembering selves" perceive happiness differently. When choosing a vacation, if you knew in advance that at the end you'd be given an amnesic drug and all your photos would be deleted, would you choose a different kind of vacation?

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• The Economist: Printing body parts – A machine that prints organs is coming to market. Simple tissues to begin with, but larger organs should be possible, too.
• NY Times: When It Comes to Salt, No Rights or Wrongs. Yet. – New US dietary guidelines due this spring may lower the recommended level of salt. Is this going to be a repeat of the low-fat debacle, where the advice actually led to worse diets?
• Wired: How Google’s Algorithm Rules the Web – Google's basic algorithm is being tweaked continuously, teaching it about names, synonyms, context etc. There are so many changes to test that on most Google queries, you’re actually in multiple control or experimental groups simultaneously.
• Fortsatt kaos i tågtrafiken – SJs tåg kan på en dag dra på sig uppemot 30 ton is, som måste tinas innan tåget kan tas in på verkstad för service. Avisning kan ta 4 till 8 timmar.
• SJ skyller på regeringen – Tågnätet är överlastat och det satsas för lite på underhåll. Tågen byggs och testas i Mellaneuropa där det visserligen kan bli kallt men inte så här fuktigt.
• The Story of P(ee) – In which phosphorus, a substance present in every living cell, is being used up and flushed away. The world’s supply of phosphate rock, the dominant source of phosphorus for fertilizer, is being rapidly — and wastefully — drawn down. By most estimates, the best deposits will be gone in 50 to 100 years.