Nima Badiey’s Favorites
After comparing present-day wealth, health, and education rates with those of 1961, Charles Kenny thinks many "developing" countries have graduated to the next stage: Italy's annual income per capita in 1961, according to the late economic historian Angus Maddison, was...
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April Fulton surveys it: In a fair taste test between seeded and seedless watermelons picked fresh from a field, "the triploids always win," [NC State's Todd Wehner] says. The triploids — the seedless ones — have three sets of genes...
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A 2010 study published in Sleep tested participants in increments of 5, 10, 20, and 30 minutes. The nano nap may be the best: The 10-minute nap produced immediate improvements in all outcome measures (including sleep latency, subjective sleepiness, fatigue,...
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Blog: down the avenue
You Want to Talk When? It’s happened to the best of us: we plan for months to get away from it all, leaving the laptop and the smartphone back home, while taking in the cliffs of the Grand Canyon, or the coves of Kauai. But, as you’re setting up your vacation auto-response with one foot out the door, an R&D team manager says they’ll be ready to present early next week, or your coworker explains that he just doesn’t feel comfortable dealing with a client on his own, or your CEO schedules a review at the exact moment of your tee time. For business professionals, taking off on a jaunt to some remote location is a fleeting reality when people in your business and personal life expect you to be connected all the time. MobileDay is a new app which launched earlier this month, which provides one-touch access to any conference call in North America, without the need to remember call-in numbers and access codes. It's great for connecting when you otherwise wouldn't or find difficult to. Need to discuss last month’s business plan with your boss from the top of Deer Valley? Want to review projections with your team from the scuba rental shop in West Palm Beach? Or, outline next steps with product development from the Victorian Grand’s porch at Mackinac Island? With MobileDay, you can handle this with ease on your smartphone, which surely you'll need for all the cool Geocaching you plan to do with your family on vacation anyway.
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I'm working on a final post on this later. Meanwhile, three emails that stood out to me in the in-tray: You are both wrong and being a bit of a jerk about it. Sally Ride came up in a really...
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Blog: Internet Tubes
It's buried in the bigger article, but nice to see public validation of what I'm working on: That said, the CloudFoundry ecosystem is strong and growing fast via www.forbes.com
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While some people are looking forward to the Games, many in its host city are not among them: [Londoners have] become acutely conscious of the high cost and monumental inconvenience of hosting a global spectacle. London, a sprawling city of...
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Evan R. Goldstein profiles eccentric neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth. Hayworth is working to create a complete map of a brain's neural circuitry (aka the connectome), and believes brain preservation holds the key to immortality. How he envisions the future procedure: After...
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The world's biggest producer of sex toys is having some trouble sorting out the knock-offs from the real deal: Police in China rescued a sex doll from a river, mistakenly believing it to be a drowning woman. The doll was...
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Cuttlefish will go to great lengths to deter competitors, displaying different patterns on each half of their bodies. Re the footage above: [Researcher Culum Brown] saw a male cuttlefish swimming between a female and a rival male, and displaying different...
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Mathematician Richie Cotton has been crunching the numbers since he and his girlfriend started trying to get pregnant: [A]lmost half of the (healthy) 25 year olds get pregnant in the first month, and after two years (the point when doctors...
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Meet Charidotella sexpunctata: More than 30 years ago, golden tortoise beetles became the first known insect species with the ability to rapidly change colour during copulation. They also do it when disturbed or agitated by predators. Since then, other species...
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Jonathan Lerner profiles "Hiriko, a two-passenger electric vehicle developed by the Changing Places research group at MIT’s Media Lab": Hirikos measure 100 inches long, compared to a two-door Mini Cooper’s 146. But for parking they collapse to just 60 inches,...
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