Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Några få röster kan vända valet – DN.se – Just 298 votes – for the right party, in the right districts – could give the Moderates a majority.
• Distantsilt: pildikesi Eestist – Eesti Päevaleht – (In Estonian.) A Spaniard living in Estonia comments on Estonians' un-service-mindedness and their general habit of not being particularly nice to strangers. This is why I am not even considering moving back to Estonia.
• Design Thinking vs. Data Thinking – “Data thinking”: present the problem as a mathematical formula like any other, come up with systematic solutions, then employ testing until a final result is produced. What's pointedly missing from this approach is the human factor: there is no empathy in the process. It lives or dies entirely by the “sword of data”.
• TED Talks: Barry Schwartz on the paradox of choice – Why more choice does not lead to more happiness

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• TED Talks: Richard Dawkins on our "queer" universe – How the human frame of reference limits our understanding of the universe. We're equipped to perceive things that are roughly as large as us, and move at speeds roughly close to our own, so those are the things we understand. We have no intuition for understanding the very small or the very large.
• Salon.com: Having kids made me a movie wuss – It's not just me, then.
• Regrets of the Dying – When questioned about any regrets the dying had or anything they would do differently, common themes surfaced again and again. This blog post lists the most common five.
• BBC News – Death rate doubles in Moscow as heatwave continues – Moscow's heat wave is the worst in 1000 years.

Some fresh bookmarks from delicious.com

• Charles Stross: Space Cadets – Why colonizing space would be fundamentally different from colonizing the Wild West, and why the libertarian-leaning people who like to talk about space colonization wouldn't like the reality.
• Life without language – The case of a profoundly deaf Mexican immigrant who grew up in a house with hearing parents who could not teach him sign language. At the age of 27 he still had no language.
• xkcd: Period Speech –
• Bad code isn’t Technical Debt, it’s an unhedged Call Option – Call options are a better model than debt for cruddy code because they capture the unpredictability. If I slap in an a feature without cleaning up then I get the benefit immediately. If I never see that code again, then I’m ahead and, in retrospect, it would have been foolish to have spent time cleaning it up. On the other hand, if a radical new feature comes in that I have to do, all those quick fixes suddenly become very expensive to work with.
• YouTube – Domino's Pulling the Cheese – All the work (and all the tricks) that go into shooting a pizza ad. Tweezers, screws, blowtorches…

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."