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.

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.

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.

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.

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"?

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.

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.

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