This Blog Needs No Name » Favourites on the web

Bookmarks for June 18th through July 9th

Helen — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 20:00:04 +0000

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 –

Bookmarks for June 6th through June 17th

Helen — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 21:07:04 +0000

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

Bookmarks for May 24th through June 1st

Helen — Tue, 01 Jun 2010 19:00:50 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for May 2nd through May 23rd

Helen — Sun, 23 May 2010 21:00:20 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for April 15th through April 27th

Helen — Tue, 27 Apr 2010 20:04:06 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for March 23rd through April 13th

Helen — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 19:00:20 +0000

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 –

Bookmarks for March 11th through March 21st

Helen — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:01:09 +0000

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."

Bookmarks for March 7th through March 9th

Helen — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 19:00:48 +0000

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

Bookmarks for March 1st through March 4th

Helen — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 20:00:19 +0000

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?

Bookmarks for February 21st through February 25th

Helen — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 21:00:23 +0000

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.

Bookmarks for February 6th through February 20th

Helen — Sat, 20 Feb 2010 21:00:02 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

Lingonkoefficienten – Måndagen 8 mars framträder Four Tops och Temptations på Cirkus i Stockholm. Båda grupperna har bara en originalmedlem kvar. Hur mycket lingon måste det finnas i burken för att den ska få kallas lingonsylt?
Why the Maya used a 260-day calendar – The Maya actually used three different calendars. The Tzolk’in ran on a 260-day cycle, and the Haab’ used a 365-day cycle. Then there was the Long Count, which counted days since a mythical beginning of time and also included the other two.
The Economist: Economics focus: Diversity training – Some developing economies are rich but crude, while others are poor but sophisticated
The Atlantic: Have You Ever Tried to Sell a Diamond? (February 1982) – The history of the De Beers diamond cartel and their PR campaign to make diamonds an essential part of every engagement.
Temporal User Interfaces – Humans mostly use two dimensions to organize and identify things: Space and Time. People are pretty good at thinking in the dimension of time. We can take advantage of this ability when designing human interfaces.

Bookmarks for January 30th through February 5th

Helen — Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:04:39 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

NY Times: Scientists Offer More Evidence on What Dinosaurs Looked Like – Colourful, apparently, like many of today's birds.
The Prometheus Society: The Outsiders – Maladjustment in children and adults with high IQ
Setting STUPID goals – This guy shares my distaste of setting SMART goals for yourself, and explains nicely why.
The Guardian: England's most hated building to be demolished – Bournemouth council to spend £7.5m razing leisure complex (built in 1998) after it wins a poll for England's most hated building.
NY Times: It's Not Hockey, It's Bandy – Bandy, a hockey-like game common in Sweden, used to be played elsewhere, too, but lost popularity in the 1920s because of warmer winters and because it requires larger rinks.

Bookmarks for January 18th through January 27th

Helen — Tue, 26 Jan 2010 20:00:30 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

Hilbert Curve + Sorting Algorithms + Procrastination = ? – Beautiful visualizations of sorting algorithms
NY Times: James Patterson Inc. – Patterson may lack the name recognition of a Stephen King, a John Grisham or a Dan Brown, but he outsells them all; even all of them combined. This is partly because Patterson is so prolific: with the help of his co-authors, he published nine original hardcover books in 2009 and will publish at least nine more in 2010.
The Economist: The price of salt – THE stuff is everywhere, but in snow-blanketed Britain there is not enough of it. Fears grow that the gritting salt that is keeping the country’s transport system open is running out. Britain’s salt mines are working round the clock and rationing is on the cards.
Schneier on Security: The Abdulmutallab that Should Have Been Connected – Why the notion that U.S. intelligence should have "connected the dots," and caught Abdulmutallab, may seem sensible but isn't. The dots are only visible after the fact.
Mother Earth Mother Board – Essay from 1996 by Neal Stephenson about the laying of a new submarine fiber optic cable.
Maailma lindude nimetused – The names of the birds of the world, in Estonian, Latin and English.

Bookmarks for January 13th through January 17th

Helen — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 21:00:45 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

YouTube: The Hazards of Sugar – Why fructose is, effectively, a poison, and how it will hasten your death. (90 minutes)
NY Times: The Americanization of Mental Illness – In recent years, American ideas about psychiatric disorders have spread around the globe. “Western mental-health discourse introduces core components of Western culture, including a theory of human nature, a definition of personhood, a sense of time and memory and a source of moral authority. None of this is universal.”
DoubleDawgDare Series: – GeePawHill takes on a horrific smush of legacy code – real, not rigged — and refactors it towards the direction of art.
Toxoplasma — A Conversation With Robert Sapolsky – Toxoplasma's effects on mammalian behaviour. It might not just affect cat behaviour, but humans, too.
Psychology Today: "I'm sorry" is not enough – What does it mean to "take responsibility"?

Bookmarks for January 4th through January 12th

Helen — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 11:00:27 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

Improving Bug Triage with User Pain – Combine bug type, priority and likelihood into one measure
The Little Manual of API Design – Describes the characteristics of good APIs, suggests a design process, and provides design guidelines
The Economist: Difficult languages – In search of the world's hardest language
The Economist: Being foreign – For the first time in history, across much of the world, to be foreign is a perfectly normal condition.
The Death Of Dynamic Range – A Chronology Of The Loudness War – A visual chronology of the recording industry's practice of digitally mastering albums with progressively increasing levels of loudness and reduced dynamic range.

Bookmarks for December 31st through January 4th

Helen — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 09:04:47 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

NY Times: With New Technologies, Do Blind People Lose More Than They Gain? – With text-to-speech and mp3s, many blind people no longer learn Braille. Does it matter?
Cousin Marriage Conundrum – By fostering intense family loyalties and strong nepotistic urges, cousin marriage makes the development of civil society in Iraq more difficult.
NY Times: Scientists Discover Origin of a Cancer in Tasmanian Devils – New findings suggest that the facial tumor disease afflicting Tasmanian devils can be traced to a single cell in a single animal. The cancer is now spreading like a parasite.
Against Schedule Pressure – Even when all deadlines and schedule pressure is removed, teams set up their own deadlines, because of habit – and perhaps because it is easier to aim for a deadline than for perfect quality.
YouTube – Confessions of a Converted Lecturer: Eric Mazur – Harvard physics professor talks about the ineffectiveness of traditional lectures and presents an alternative method: peer instruction.

Bookmarks for December 21st through December 31st

Helen — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 14:01:47 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

Yahoo News: Solution to killer superbug found in Norway – Twenty-five years ago, Norwegians were losing their lives to MRSA like the rest of the world. But Norway's public health system fought back with an aggressive program that made it the most infection-free country in the world.
"Superatoms" Mimic Elements – Researchers have shown that certain combinations of elemental atoms have electronic signatures that mimic the electronic signatures of other elements: the molecules titanium monoxide, zirconium monoxide, and tungsten carbide are superatoms of nickel, palladium, and platinum, respectively.
NY Times: Hard Choice for a Comfortable Death: Sedation – Inducing sleep with drugs near the end of life is a widely used treatment even as it vexes families and doctors.
NY Times: Turning Every Stone for a Perfect Fit –
How to Say Nothing in 500 Words – Advice aimed at college students forced to write essays, but works for the rest of us, too

Bookmarks for December 17th through December 21st

Helen — Mon, 21 Dec 2009 20:00:08 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

NY Times: Studying Young Minds, and How to Teach Them – New research on when young brains are best able to grasp fundamental concepts could reshape early education.
Agile is Not Scrum –
Economist: The Harry Potter economy – As carmakers teetered many people put it about that one in ten American jobs depended on the industry. As a single-handed creator of jobs and wealth, though, few can match the writer Joanne Rowling.
NY Times: When Does Death Start? – A new approach to organ donation doesn’t require waiting until the donor’s brain death.
How to Say Nothing in 500 Words – Advice aimed at college students forced to write essays, but works for the rest of us, too

Bookmarks for December 11th through December 15th

Helen — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 22:00:13 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

The myth of idiot-proofing – Obstacles which are incidental to the task are safe to ameliorate. Obstacles which are an intrinsic part of the task are risky or even counter-productive to remove. Removing these obstacles doesn't make the task any less difficult, but it removes the experience of difficulty.
Rock Solid HTML Emails – First, you should keep it simple. Second, you need to take your coding skills back a good decade.
SvD: I kläm mellan mätbart och upplevt symtom – Människor med diagnoser som ångestsyndrom, depression, långvariga ryggproblem och olika värkdiagnoser upplever sig som sjukare, mer arbetsoförmögna, än vad medicinens och sjukförsäkringssystemets verktyg förmår att mäta. Frågan om hur man skall hantera dem har diskuterats sedan införandet av den allmänna sjukförsäkringen 1955.
SvD: Skeppsmask hotar vrak – Skeppsvrak som klarat sig utan angrepp sedan 1300-talet riskerar nu att ätas upp av skeppsmask, som klarar sig bättre i Östersjöns bracka vatten nu när det blir varmare.
Browser market share – Nice visualization of browser market share over time.

Bookmarks for November 29th through December 8th

Helen — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 21:04:51 +0000

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

The Economist: America’s food-waste problem is getting worse – A study found that the average American wastes 1,400 kilocalories a day. That amounts to 150 trillion kilocalories a year for the country as a whole—about 40% of its food supply, up from 28% in 1974.
The Economist: Media: A world of hits – In “The Long Tail”, Chris Anderson argued that demand for media was moving inexorably from the head of the distribution curve to the tail. Instead, both the head and the long tail are growing, at the expense of the middle.
One Million Years of Isolation – Interview about the technical nature of nuclear waste storage and what it means, on the level of geological engineering, to quarantine a hazardous material for more than one million years.
The Daily WTF: Special Delivery – Try to imagine for a moment how you would unload a mountain of coal worth million-and-a-half dollars. Craigslist does have its limits, after all.
How Our Addiction to Corporations Killed Our Communities – When we represent corporations and institutions, people respond to us differently. We become much more powerful than we would be without the associations. Most of us do not make the distinction between the power of our positions and our own power, and start behaving as though they are one and the same. This eventually becomes addictive, and the idea of doing anything for our local communities starts to look so insignificant and boring