warston
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Chinese DIY inventions.
The caption accompanying this one:
Chinese farmer Wu Yulu sits next to his robot “Lao Wu” at his home on the outskirts of Beijing, on September 3, 2003. Wu, who only managed to finish primary education, started to build robots for fun more than a decade ago.
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Amazon vs. Apple vs. Facebook vs. Google
What’s up with these?
They all want to be the uber-company. That is, a company which has a complete user experience with the following elements:
Hardware — mobile device(s)
An app ecosystem
Streaming media
Cloud services—at the least, as a delivery mechanism for the above
And why do these companies aspire to be competitive in all four of these areas? There are two reasons: The first is that a customer who starts using your hardware is more likely to (or may have no choice but to) use your software, and the reverse is also frequently true. All four of these companies (and, yes, Microsoft) have created their own “walled gardens,” which means that once you’ve bought media or apps from them, or uploaded data into their mutually incompatible services, you’re stuck. That’s by design: Having invested so much time and money into their ecosystems, the energy barrier for a consumer to switch to a competitor is so high that it gives each company room to maneuver and, if they have an advantage, maybe even gain market share. Ecosystem lock-in is like a ratchet on the size of your base of customers: Even if you mess up once in a while, it’s hard for your market to shrink, and every chance you differentiate, you can grab a few more people. -
Dots - a game about connecting Are you playing Dots? If not you should. Here’s the strategy guide, courtesy of Quartz. If you think you can beat my high score, follow me on Twitter and compare (what? a cheap technique?)
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What is it about lists that we find so irresistible? As far as I can tell, no one has tried to figure it out (though it’s possible there are psychologists who have solved the mystery, and I just haven’t seen their work). Maybe it has to do with the promise of something both finite and complete, distilling the world down to something you can manage and then be done with. The world is full of photos of cute corgis, but these 37 are the cutest, and once you’ve seen them not only will your day be a little sweeter but you need search no more for cute corgi photos. It could also be the attraction of something easy to read—because it’s broken into small pieces, you know it won’t require too much work to read, you’ll be able to skim it easily, and if you want to read part of it and then stop, you’ll be able to. — What is it about lists that makes them so compelling?(via explore-blog)
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Subtitles A very nifty app for the Mac which automatically downloads the appropriate subtitles for your movies and TV shows. Developed by Alberto Garcia Hierro.
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The Stanford researcher Cheri D. Mah found that when she got male basketball players to sleep 10 hours a night, their performances in practice dramatically improved: free-throw and three-point shooting each increased by an average of 9 percent.
Daytime naps have a similar effect on performance. When night shift air traffic controllers were given 40 minutes to nap — and slept an average of 19 minutes — they performed much better on tests that measured vigilance and reaction time.
Longer naps have an even more profound impact than shorter ones. Sara C. Mednick, a sleep researcher at the University of California, Riverside, found that a 60- to 90-minute nap improved memory test results as fully as did eight hours of sleep.
Research confirms that, counterintuitively, relaxing makes you more productive. Of course, Thomas Edison knew that sleep is the key to success.
Artwork by Golden Cosmos
Go to sleep, relax.
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We are all used to see Russian dash cams of exploding cars or incredible accidents and all.
Here is a video compilation of positive dash cams, where people help grandmas cross the street and save children from death.
Don’t forget: we see a lot of Russian inside-car videos because Russians use these videos to fight insurance fraud.
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What philosophers think PhilPapers conducted a survey back in 2009 asking faculty philosophers and graduate students what they thought about diverse matters. Follow the link for more results and the demographics of the survey, here are two interesting results:
Trolley problem (five straight ahead, one on side track, turn requires switching, what ought one do?): switch or don’t switch?
Accept or lean toward: switch 635 / 931 (68.2%)
Other 225 / 931 (24.2%)
Accept or lean toward: don’t switch 71 / 931 (7.6%)Zombies: inconceivable, conceivable but not metaphysically possible, or metaphysically possible?
Accept or lean toward: conceivable but not metaphysically possible 331 / 931 (35.6%)
Other 234 / 931 (25.1%)
Accept or lean toward: metaphysically possible 217 / 931 (23.3%)
Accept or lean toward: inconceivable 149 / 931 (16.0%) -
The History of Typography.
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Why we’ll never meet aliens Hint: it’s not because we don’t want to or they don’t exist.
If you combine all our current knowledge of statistics and astronomy, it’s nearly comical to believe we’re the only intelligent life in the universe. It’s easy to get lost in the numbers thrown around—there are billions of stars and planets in our galaxy and billions of galaxies. Humans are rather bad at fully understanding such large numbers. Despite where this article might lead, it isn’t really about science. It’s about thinking big. Big enough to consider that if there are any aliens with the ability to come visit us, they would almost assuredly not care to.
