January 2010
91 posts
Apples and Oranges →
Waxy points to a nice essay about the iPad. The whole thing is worth a read, as it highlights many of the reasons that so many people have been down on the device, but what really got me was this quote:
Is a stick shift better than an automatic? No. Is an automatic better than a stick? No. This misses the point. A better question: Is a road full of drivers not distracted by the arcane inner...
“It’s never too early to teach your kids about financial responsibility....”
– These Fake Plastic Pennies Cost Only 4.5 Cents Each - The Consumerist
Health Discounts →
skybarn:
mikehudack:
heyitsnoah:
This is great. People who make lots of healthy decisions should pay less for health insurance than people who make lots of risky decisions. It’s common sense, and the fact that this isn’t currently the case is one of many reasons why our healthcare system is broken.
I’m going to tell my 18 month old that he needs to stop making all of the risky decisions...
“We teach kids to do all sorts of things, but we don’t teach them to think about...”
– Saving The Inventive Way Of Life | AttentionMax
“But if the banks want us out of their business, they should get out of our...”
– The rest of the article doesn’t really go anywhere, to be honest, but this paragraph was too good to not share.
The little-known reason why investment banks got too big, too greedy, too risky, and too powerful. - By Daniel Gross - Slate Magazine
Health Discounts →
Whole Foods has an interesting new initiative to encourage healthy behavior amongst its employees:
The pricey grocery chain will give 30% discounts to those who don’t smoke and have low blood pressure, cholesterol and body mass index (BMI) rates, says CEO John Mackey … Employees will fall into four categories: bronze, silver, gold and platinum. Those showing “platinum”...
This is why it's worth learning about advertising
rafer:superamit:stammy:rinich:
…
Verizon launched a Droid ad two months ago that essentially let the world know how doomed they were. The ad showed a bunch of “iDon’t”s. iDon’t have 5 megapixels. iDon’t have multitasking. Item after item of flaws in the iPhone that this new technology could solve.
Apple, meanwhile, showed a phone that could speak foreign languages at you, identify birdcalls...
Zero Rupee Notes →
I like good ideas, and this one qualifies. In India, where corruption (and the bribery that comes along with it) are a big problem, an organization called 5th Pillar has taken to printing zero rupee notes (so far it’s printed over one million of them). The basic premise is that when someone is confronted by a corrupt official for a bribe they give them the zero rupee note, allowing them to...
Response →
The Awl has the best comment yet on the iPad:
Still, I’m a little taken aback by the immediate and vocal lack of enthusiasm for the product. What does it lack? What was everyone hoping for that did not materialize? This is a very rough thought that I may or may not refine, so take it as such, but the iPad is a lot like Barack Obama: Everyone was able to project their own fantasies and...
“Why does the United States alone among advanced liberal democracies extend to...”
– NEJM — Tobacco Control and Free Speech — An American Dilemma
“I suspect that what we saw with Sarkozy is Davos 2010 in a nutshell: while...”
– How to give a Davos opening address | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters
Dangerous Friends →
I swear I read more than the FT, but again I’ve got a link to a story from today with a little more info on the Google China hacking. This one sheds a little more light on just how the hackers mad it happen:
The most significant discovery is that the attackers had selected employees at the companies with access to proprietary data, then learnt who their friends were. The hackers compromised...
Chinese Internet Habits →
The FT has a really interesting piece on how Chinese web users are different than European/American ones. It’s full of nice nuggets, like this one about typing:
Foreign companies have taken a long time to figure out - then adapt to - one of the key features of Chinese consumers: they do not like to type. “Typing is a pain in Chinese,” explains Zhang Honglin, demonstrating how he...
Why Tumblr Is Kicking Posterous's Ass →
jayparkinsonmd:
How come Posterous is eating dust from a small startup started by a high school dropout?
The answer is as easy as it is counter-intuitive: Tumblr is a New York company and Posterous is a Silicon Valley company.
Or, to put it another way: Posterous is an engineered product, while Tumblr is a designed product.
While I don’t disagree with any of the stuff they mention in...
Old Guys on YouTube →
The best part of this FT review of the upcoming book Game Change (a behind the scenes look at the 2008 campaign/candidates), is this description of McCain and his cronies on YouTube:
During the duller moments on the campaign bus, John McCain and his colleagues Joe Lieberman, the renegade Democratic senator, and Lindsey Graham, the Republican from North Carolina, would watch the legendary...
Fauxnovation →
I couldn’t quite decide how to connect this to my post about innovations in crayons, so I decided to just split them into two.
This is a more negative take on the innovation that the market forces. Krugman on financial creativity:
At this point, there is no reason to take it on faith that cleverness in the financial industry is a net social good. Unless you can provide some clear evidence...
Crayon Innovation →
The other day while surfing Buzzfeed I ran across this chart depicting the evolution of color’s in a Crayola box: From eight in 1903 to 120 today. At first it just seemed like a nice and interesting image and I quickly posted it on Tumblr (that being what you’re supposed to do with data visualizations about nostalgic subjects).
Then later I was thinking about it some more and clicked...
“OK, this isn’t quite the classic definition of chutzpah, which is when you...”
– Krugman’s response to this, “Wall Street’s main lobbying arm has hired a top Supreme Court litigator to study a possible legal battle against a bank tax proposed by the Obama administration, on the theory that it would be unconstitutional, according to three industry officials briefed on...
“The guy who was introducing me whispered in my ear as he went to the podium, ‘we...”
– A Brazilian’s reaction to first hearing the acronym BRIC.
FT.com / Reportage - The story of the Brics
Digital Gastronomy →
This project from the MIT Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces Group sounds pretty amazing:
Cornucopia is a concept design for a personal food factory that brings the versatility of the digital world to the realm of cooking. In essence, it is a three dimensional printer for food, which works by storing, precisely mixing, depositing and cooking layers of ingredients.
Even better than this ...
“If you’ve always suspected that high-end audiovisual equipment is sort of...”
– Lexicon Puts $500 Blu-Ray Player In New Case, Charges $3000 Markup …And Gets Caught - The Consumerist
Conan puts the Tonight Show on Craigslist →
“4 SALE: BARELY-USED LATE NIGHT TALK SHOW – MAKE ME AN OFFER!!!” [Via Bunch]
“No less an authority than MovieGuide, “the family guide to Christian movie...”
– “Four Marxes and an Obama” … Ha!
The conservative attack on Avatar. - By Tom Shone - Slate Magazine
Living in the Future →
It’s hard not to love past predictions of the future, especially when they come in children’s book form. Someone was kind enough to dig up and post every page of a 1972 book called 2010: Living in the Future. It includes some completely absurd predictions (“In the year 2010 everyone wears a jumpsuit”) and some that seem pretty spot on:
Now you are up and dressed it is time...
“It was found that, despite this warning, subjects walked onto the stationary...”
– The broken escalator phenomenon. Aftereffect of wa… [Exp Brain Res. 2003] - PubMed result
“I miss Tumblarity.”
– There, I said it.
“Google reports to the Ministry for Information Industry on network issues, the...”
– Yay bureaucracy!
FT.com / Lex / Technology, media & telecoms - Google v China
“Hmmmm. It’s illegal to steal power by putting coils on your roof if you...”
– Interesting question from a Consumerist commenter on the Wifi harvester.
Airnergy Charger Generates Electricity From WiFi Signals - The Consumerist
Beginning →
Rex spotted a question that I get fairly often myself: “if you were starting from scratch as one of The Olds (which I am, vis-a-vis most people who learn Python as a starter language), what would you do? What would you read? How would you practice?”
His answer is pretty much exactly what I would say. He starts off by explaining that at its most basic it doesn’t really seem to...
