Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure – A game made by a 5-year-old girl, with ponycorns, rainbows, dinosaurs and an evil lemon.
• When states are sinking: I am a rock, I am an island | The Economist – How submerged islands could keep their statehood
• I det effektiva samhället lever robotdrömmen | SvD – En recension av vad som låter om en mycket intressant bok, om "teknologins omförhandling av fundamentala, i grunden icke-teknologiska, begrepp. Intelligens och minne ges som två exempel på företeelser som redan har genomgått en transformation under datorteknikens inflytande; Turkle förutspår att tillit, gemenskap och omsorg står på tur."

I am in love with Pinterest and wasting much time there. Beautiful stuff beautifully presented, and very “moreish”.

I’ve been thinking for a while that I need a better way to store my bookmarks of pretty stuff – decorating ideas, craft project ideas, or just things that are beautiful. I don’t want to blog all of them; I don’t want to save local copies of images that I then cannot trace back to their source; I don’t want to save them in delicious. This visual collection of bookmarks is exactly the right solution.

Yesterday’s comic at XKCD includes an interesting bit of Wikipedia trivia: “if you take any article, click on the first link in the article text not in parentheses or italics, and then repeat, you will eventually end up at "Philosophy"”.

I tried a few random Wikipedia articles (a random link from the Wikipedia front page, cucumber and Georgia) and it worked in all cases. The tendency became obvious after just a few hops: we skirted linguistics, science, then information, and via quantity on to philosophy.

From philosophy it’s six hops back around to science and you can go another round. The full loop is Science > Knowledge > Fact > Information > Sequence > Mathematics > Quantity > Property_(philosophy) > Modern_philosophy > Philosophy > Existence > Sense > Organism > Biology > Natural_science > Science. So you could equally well argue that all Wikipedia queries have their root in Existence, or in Knowledge, or in Information. Whatever you think is the most fundamental of all – take your pick.

Now some developer has actually made a tool for you to try this on your own: xkcd wikipedia steps to philosophy.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Gut Bacteria Divide People Into 3 Types, Scientists Report – NYTimes.com – In the early 1900s, scientists discovered that each person belonged to one of four blood types. Now they have discovered a new way to classify humanity: by the bacteria in the guts of people.
• The 24-Hour Movie and Digital Technology – NYTimes.com – You used to watch movies in a cinema, together with other people, while it was running. Now you watch them on your own in the darkness of your home, when you want them. How does this affect our movie-watching experience? How did the cinema affect us?
• Så vandaliserade kommunen en skola – DN.SE – Mycket bra artikelserie om den svenska skolans förfall. Läs även övriga artiklar i serien – länkar finns på sidan.
• Lexadecimal – colour codes with meaning
• The “One Team” defined as a gift economy – One way to define a team (of developers, for example) is that it's a group of people who have strong enough social ties to each other to do favours to each other, for no particular reason.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Is Sugar Toxic? – NYTimes.com – Sugar might be behind not just the obesity and diabetes epidemic but also many common cancers.
• Legal disclaimers: Spare us the e-mail yada-yada | The Economist – Automatic e-mail footers are not just annoying. They are legally useless.
• Flat-Folding Steel Grocery Bag – Does what it says on the tin. Bag. Whatever.
• SpaceX's Falcon Heavy could make for cheap moon missions – Each Falcon Heavy launch is so cheap, and Hollywood movies so expensive, that you could almost run a mission to the moon on money from the media rights. Well, not quite, but they should certainly make a double-digit percentage contribution to the budget.
• Så vandaliserade kommunen en skola – DN.SE – Mycket bra artikelserie om den svenska skolans förfall. Läs även övriga artiklar i serien – länkar finns på sidan.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• what a programmer does for a living – If you're still wondering what I do at work
• Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie –
• The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See – Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.
• Americans smile all the time as if they are plugged in – Why do Russians smile so little (and Americans so much?)
• Pick a number from 1 to 10…for SCIENCE! –

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Danny Hillis: Understanding cancer through proteomics | Video on TED.com –
• Winning the War But Losing Our Soul | threatpost – The IT security industry has finally gotten the attention of law makers, Pentagon generals and policy makers, but is now in mortal danger of losing its soul. In its desire to combat the threat of cyberwar, they are becoming indistinguishable from the hackers they fight.
• Cryonics and Technological Inevitability | CHRONOSPHERE – Why did the Romans not invent hot air balloons? Why do we not have nuclear batteries?
• Everything You Know About Fitness is a Lie –
• The Blind Man Who Taught Himself To See – Daniel Kish has been sightless since he was a year old. Yet he can mountain bike. And navigate the wilderness alone. And recognize a building as far away as 1,000 feet. How? The same way bats can see in the dark.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Military communications: Liquid radio | The Economist – America's navy is developing an antenna made of seawater.
• In Sweden, a Small Rebellion Against Traditional Names – NYTimes.com – Unhappy with their boring, too-common -son names, Swedes pick new ones. Some go the other way: one couple wanted to change their name to Mohammedsson.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• London Names – Smith, Smith, Smith, Patel, Patel, Patel, Begum, Jones.
• How Facebook Responded to Tunisian Hacks – Tunisian Internet censors were in the process of stealing an entire country's worth of passwords. Facebook reacted.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com:

• Economist: Wrong Numbers – Global league tables are interesting, but not always reliable. Few people pay attention to margins of error. Combined indices in particular can be very sensitive to small changes in underlying data.
• Earn Trust By Never Doing Anything For Your Children – As parents, we often find that it’s easier to do a task ourselves than to spend time teaching the children how to do it. After all, they’ll learn when they’re older, right?
• Paracetamol hade inte godkänts i dag – Paracetamol is dangerous even when not overdosed (which can lead to a nasty death) – its hormone-disrupting effect is three times stronger than that of phtalates which everyone is worrying about. (In Swedish.)