"This lovely toy will superimpose a live digital representation of your digit on a couple of equally unsettling scenes and costs about $30, though it's only available in Japan for now (and probably forever)" - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"charges in connection with Britain's biggest cash raid." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"Jurors were also told that a few days before the raid Mr Allen visited Herne Bay, where his mobile phone signal was detected near the Dixons' home in the early hours of two consecutive mornings." I wonder if this means that the police can trace people's movements from mobile phone tower records, even after the fact? - Simon
"A group of Canadian human-rights activists and computer security researchers has discovered a huge surveillance system in China that monitors and archives certain Internet text conversations that include politically charged words. [...] The Chinese servers retained personal information about the customers who sent the messages." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"he found a number of "top secret" images, diagrams and sketches that have since been confirmed as MI6 material. We're talking photos of rocket launchers, hand-drawn graphics of terrorist links and all sorts of other information not at all intended for civilian eyes." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Vincent Laforet got his hands on a Canon 5D MkII for a weekend. Rather than shoot some quick stills, he rounded up an entire film crew and put them to work using the amazing 1080p video capture it offers." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
Doh. The video has now been removed: "Canon has asked Vincent to ask us to take down the footage." Apparently Canon is hosting a 1/4 down-sampled version of it here http://www.usa.canon.com/dlc/c... - Simon
Holy cow. Best sales pitch ever. Although "pics just like Simon's!" would be just as compelling. - Richard Chen
"The Recording Industry Association of America is declaring attorney-blogger Ray Beckerman a "vexatious" litigator. The association is seeking unspecified monetary sanctions to punish him in his defense of a New York woman accused of making copyrighted music available on the Kazaa file sharing system." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"Now new research findings suggest there is a good reason for this impasse: scientists may have been thinking about the causes of aging all wrong. Instead of being the result of an accumulation of genetic and cellular damage, new evidence suggests that aging may occur when genetic programs for development go awry." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
I feel like that idea is expressed in Lord Ridley's 1999 book. It's really just a rephrasing of the notion that adaptive pressure only keeps you healthy until the end of reproductive age, no? Or maybe I'm just missing something. But whether the elevator pitch is novel or not, the result itself is interesting. - j1m
"According to the study by BusinessWeek and Interbrand [...] Google showed the strongest gain, with a value that increased 43 percent to $25.6 billion". - Simon
via Bookmarklet
Measuring "brand value" is obviously such a precise science that they can report the value to 3 significant figures. Here's a different article from April 2008: "The search engine's marque is worth more than $86.1bn according to the Brandz list ". http://www.independent.co.uk/n... - Simon
"[Ex Formula One driver] Riccardo Patrese drives wife crazy in Civic Type-R" The contrast between the serenity of the driver and utter terror of the passenger is quite a sight to behold. - Simon
via Bookmarklet
The pair only realize at the end of the lap that there is a camera in the car... - Simon
"A method of electronically pairing a sensor and a garment, comprising:(a) establishing a communication link between the sensor and the garment; (b) determining if the garment is an authorized garment; and(c) electronically pairing the garment and the sensor." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"Sharing a bed with someone could temporarily reduce your brain power - at least if you are a man - Austrian scientists suggest. [Women's] stress hormone levels and mental scores did not suffer to the same extent as the men. [...] Professor Gerhard Kloesch studied eight unmarried, childless couples in their 20s." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
Sharing a bed with a zombie is especially bad. - Jim Norris
"I’d like to share some of the reasons why I haven’t chosen to spend my life worrying about the Singularity, instead devoting my time to boring, mundane topics like anthropic quantum computing and cosmological Turing machines. The first, and most important, reason is also the reason why I don’t spend my life thinking about P versus NP: because there are vastly easier prerequisite questions that we already don’t know how to answer." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"...if the Singularity ever does arrive, I expect it to be plagued by frequent outages and terrible customer service" - Eugene
Another wikipedia entry to read: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C... " With a decrease in the number of pirates we have seen an increase in global warming over the same time period.
Therefore, global warming is caused by a lack of pirates. " - Robert Felty
"An independent U.S.-based group called World Public Opinion.org asked 16,000 people in 17 countries. [...] An average of 46 percent of the people polled in each country blames al-Qaida for the attacks. Kull says an average of 15 percent say the U.S. government plotted the attacks. [...]
in Germany, 23 percent have the view that the United States was behind the 9/11 attacks." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
I haven't heard of that polling organization and it's hard to gauge how reliable they are in polling. According to their FAQ: "WorldPublicOpinion.org was initiated by and is managed by the Program on International Policy Attitudes at the University of Maryland." - Simon
"Print, film, magnetic, and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002 [...] telephone, radio, TV, and the Internet -- contained almost 18 exabytes of new information in 2002" - Simon
via Bookmarklet
I must get a digital copy of both Yes Minister + Yes Prime Minister, I still have a VHS set of both series - Duncan Riley
It's pretty amazing (and depressing) how timeless the two series are. - Simon
Ah! One of the most brilliant of Britcoms. Timeless. I own both YM and YPM on DVD and watch all of the episodes every 6 months are so. Though they have a 80's quality in terms of production values, the ideas espoused are classic. - Sudhakar Chandra
The books have even more humor in the form of editor's notes. - sridhars
UK release date: 11 Sept. For some reason I feel much more comfortable reading the UK version of books by authors from England. Reading them with US spelling and US phrase translations just seems strange. It might be because whenever I encounter a US phrase ("wanna shoot the breeze") I'm constantly trying to guess what the original version was ("fancy having a natter"). - Simon
via Bookmarklet
A pretty detailed account of the background behind Chrome: " 'When I joined Google in 2001, Larry and Sergey immediately said, "We should build our own browser,"' Schmidt says. 'And I said no.' " - Simon
via Bookmarklet
"When you improve things by an order of magnitude, you haven't made something better — you've made something new" - Phil "Barack" Smirnov
"the prevailing mentality [...] has been to focus on isolated discoveries by single teams and interpret research experiments in isolation. An increasing number of questions have at least one study claiming a research finding, and this receives unilateral attention. The probability that at least one study, among several done on the same question, claims a statistically significant research finding is easy to estimate." - Simon
via Bookmarklet
Essentially, on average 1 out of 20 times you'll be able to claim something is statistically significant at the 95% level even if it is not. So if 20 teams do the same experiment with a non-existent effect, it's quite likely one of the teams will obtain statistically significant results, and that team will receive all the attention. - Simon
How did you find this? I was about to friendfeed it after reading about the study in Edward Tufte's "Beautiful Evidence" :) - Sanjeev Singh
A friend of mine (MarkP) placed a copy of the paper on my desk :) - Simon
it was also on Norman Swan's Health Report program on Radio National in Australia - a program I quite like. - A Puri
