January 2009
40 posts
Old Jews Telling Jokes (video) →
Droevig als u niet bij de Rabobank werkt...... →
Want daar is het heel gezelli. De video zegt genoeg. En als u niet genoeg kunt krijgen van gezellige Rabobank-muziek vindt u bij Flabber nog meer. Fijn weekend!
New Ads That Watch You →
Pandanapper writes to tell us Yahoo is reporting that if you find yourself watching an ad on a video screen in a public venue, the ad may be watching you as well. “Small cameras can now be embedded…
Charts: 3 →
(Charles Platt is a guest blogger)
To what extent do we feel overcrowded, as a species? I’m not talking about resources; just psychological factors.
To create this chart I turned to…
UK fingerprints foreign six-year-old children at... →
If you bring a child to Britain from outside the EU, be prepared to have her fingerprinted, even if she’s only six years old. That’s because the British government now leads the world in undermining…
45% Of Dutch Media-Buying Population Are... →
Anonymous writes “A non-government study in the Netherlands found that 4.7 million Dutch Internet users 15 years and older downloaded hacked and pirated DVDs, games, and music in the last 12 months —…
Marijuana Could Prevent Alzheimer's, New Study →
Chickan writes “‘A puff a day might keep Alzheimer’s away, according to marijuana research by professor Gary Wenk and associate professor Yannic Marchalant of the Ohio State Department of Psychology….
MySpace Passed On Buying Facebook For $75 Million →
According to a new book on MySpace, four years ago, MySpace CEO Chris DeWolfe met with Facebook cofounder Mark Zuckerberg and the pair talked merger. Eventually Mark asked Chris if MySpace…
“Broadly, a “liberal’ subscribes to some or all of the following:...”
– Forbes commentary
Wired's February Issue Is 3 Millimeters Thin →
More evidence of the abominable ad market: Wired’s February issue is so thin, its binding is thicker than its actual pages. It feels startlingly flimsy to the touch. The issue numbers just…
Google's PageRank Predicts Nobel Prize Winners →
KentuckyFC writes “The pattern of citations between scientific papers forms a network that has remarkable similarities to the network formed by the web. So why not use Google’s PageRank, the world’s…
Study: Rich Men Give Women More Orgasms →
So there you have it.
Perfect Credit Is For Losers →
After listening to officials from governments around the world announce plans to stop foreclosures and twist the arms of banks until they cry uncle and start lending more to riskier…
How are poor foreigners different from us? They... →
I got an email today from kiva.org and it prompted me to review my portfolio. I put $650 in on July 4, 2007. I’ve made 7 loans totalling $1000 to folks in Ecuador, Peru, and Tanzania (some of…
Young girls married to frogs for disease... →
The Times of India reports that two young girls have been wed to frogs in Tamil Nadu’s Villupuram district, “to prevent the outbreak of mysterious diseases in the village”. The girls, Vigneswari…
Sorry Google, You Missed the Real-Time Web! →
The era of dominance is shrinking. IBM dominated tech longer than Microsoft did, and Google’s period of dominance will be even shorter. As with IBM and Microsoft, a great and wealthy company…
Stimulus Bill Contains Net Neutrality Provision →
visible.frylock writes “Cnet is reporting that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (PDF), currently in the House Appropriations Committee, contains Net Neutrality provisions: ‘The…
Google Finally Hiring Salespeople To Sell Google... →
Put to rest any doubts that Google Apps (GOOG) isn’t a direct attack on Microsoft’s (MSFT) cash cow, the MS Office suite. No longer content to let customers come to them, Google will soon…
The Pattern, by Arnold Kling →
Actor
The Promise
The Reality
Financial Executives
Brilliant Risk Management
Catastrophic Losses
Eliot Spitzer
Mr. Clean, Financial Reformer
Celebrity Prosecutions, Real Abuses Untouched, and…
Del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter leaves Yahoo... →
Hack your brain: How to hallucinate with ping-pong... →
After outcry over anti-gay invocation speaker,... →
Where are all the Robots? →
I found this chart from the IEEE Spectrum showing the worldwide breakdown of industrial robots to be fascinating. I’m not surprised that Japan has the highest density of robots per…
AP Source: Ebay CEO Meg Whitman Will Run To Become... →
Goldman, Merrill Saved Clients From Madoff... →
Time to applaud Goldman, Merrill, and other major Wall Street firms for paying attention to the Madoff red flags and protecting clients from disaster. This caution makes the confidence of…
Serious Text Fail →
Submitted by Daniel B
Netflix Film Rental Streaming To Be Built Into LG... →
“But what’s different from Weber’s era is that it is now the rich who are the...”
– Dalton Conley in The New York Times
Do ads work? →
If the local bank were offering a sale on dollar bills, ninety cents each, how many would you buy? Most rational people would say, “I’ll take them all please.” Especially if you had thirty days to…
Universities Patenting More Student Ideas →
theodp writes “Working as a NASA intern, grad student Erez Lieberman had a eureka moment, resulting in an algorithm that detects whether a person is standing correctly or is off balance….
Parental Testimonial Fail →
Submitted by Heidi F
“Er, what exactly is intellectual about 1300 hours of busy work? I fully support...”
– jey
“So did the Gang of 500 actually write Wikipedia? Wales decided to run a simple...”
– Who Writes Wikipedia? (Aaron Swartz’s Raw Thought)
Top 500 worst passwords →
From Mark Burnett’s 2005 book Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication, a table of the “Top 500 Worst Passwords Of All Time.” (via Beschizza’s Twitter) UPDATE: As…
Volvo Introduces a Collision-Proof Car →
carazoo.com sends along a story on Volvo’s upcoming crash-proof car. The company will introduce a concept car based on the S60 this month at the Detroit Auto Show, looking ahead a few years to the…
I Know You're Listening →
Why People Own Bonds →
A 2008 performance snapshot from QVM Group. Bonds are the dotted blue line.
What was that about how ALL asset classes performed terribly in 2008, and there was NOWHERE to hide?
See…
The Secret Origins of Microsoft Office's Clippy →
Harry writes “Most folks think that Microsoft Office’s Clippy, Microsoft Bob, and Windows XP’s Search Assistant dog were perverse jokes — but a dozen years’ worth of patent filings shows that…