http://www.skype.com/intl/en-gb/allfeatures/togo/#toGoCountriesTab Skype-backed calling card service that works like a regular calling card (i.e. you call a number from a regular phone, then enter the number you want to call) but you can top up credit online, it remembers your password/code and previously called numbers, etc. Works well! 11:24

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2010/01/from_
the_study.php Two years ago, New York City passed a labelling law requiring all fast-food chains to display the calorie count of their foods alongside the price, in the hope that this would lead to consumers reducing their calorie intake. A study performed on Starbucks data revealed that the law did lead to customer consuming 14% less calories in Starbucks food (either by ordering lower-calorie foods, or less food), but for some reason the amount of calories consumed via drinks remained about the same. (A New York Times piece about the same story shows that during the holidays, calorie consumption reverts to pre-labelling levels!) 10:33

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2009/12/the_decade_in_news_
photographs.html The Big Picture’s “decade in news photographs.” 18:28

http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/12/16/dont-waste-your-time-
waste-theirs-a-guide-to-writing-to-ministers/ How to write to Ministers. This basically amounts to: how to take up their time, but in a more or less sincere and serious way. Australian, but applicable elsewhere. 18:45

http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety An alternative to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that foreign airlines have a worse safety record than US airlines because of cultural issues: it’s because foreign pilots haven’t had as much practice. (Includes some slightly picky criticism of Gladwell’s aviation knowledge.) 18:38

http://groups.google.com/group/alt.usage.english/browse_
thread/thread/f2d185162dbe596a Discussion from alt.usage.english in 1998 regarding the graffiti: “Chloe is a slut but she has big tits.” e.g. “Is the author implying that sluts normally have small tits?” and “should there be a comma after ‘slut’?” 19:33

http://www.geekologie.com/2009/11/video_of_bugatti_veyron_
crash.php Video of a $1.6m Bugatti Veyron being driven into a lake! The owner apparently claimed to have been distracted by a “low flying pelican,” but no such bird is to be seen... 18:50

http://cdn.okcimg.com/blog/mofo_mysteries/American-Geniuses.png U.S. map showing percentage of people who responded “Yes” to the question “Are you a genius?” on the dating site OK Cupid’s. (More information in their blog post.) 22:51

http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/10/23/the-superfreakonomics-
global-warming-fact-quiz/ Freakonomics authors suggest investigating a geoengineering solution to global warming. (The post is apparently written in response to environmentalists who, they say, are mixing scientific and social/moral issues.) 21:46

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/blog/robotics/robotics-software/
automaton/irobot-soft-morphing-blob-chembot A shape-shifting robot! Looks rather like a self-inflating soccer ball. 22:14

http://www.dyson.com/fans/ Electric fan from Dyson (vacuum cleaners, etc.) that someone manages to move air around without blades. Rather strange that the video showing people’s initial reactions to the fan show the purported blast not at all moving the hair on their heads. 22:02

http://jwz.livejournal.com/1094930.html Jamie Zawinski summarises what’s known about the thieves who stole from a Swedish money-storing facility: “Now this is how to rob a bank.” (Among other things, they planted a bag marked “bomb” outside the police heliport, so that they could not be purused by police helicopters.) 15:04

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walking_ghost_phase “The walking ghost phase of radiation poisoning is a period of apparent health, lasting for hours or days, following a dose of 50 sieverts of radiation. As its name would suggest, the walking ghost phase is followed by certain death.” This condition is mentioned as a potential disadvantage of the neutron bomb—troops surving the initial explosion, and in this phase “would likely be aware of their inevitable fate and react accordingly.” 14:00

http://streetbonersandtvcarnage.com/streetboners/street-
boner-906/ “If there’s one thing Brooklyn’s petty thieves care about, it’s some rich bitch’s faith in humanity. Is she going for a naïve world record?” [Picture] 12:44

http://www.newsweek.com/id/215825 Nice overview on how the U.S. Air Force has changed: less fancy fighter, more UAVs. “From 1947 to 1982, all 10 generals who served as Air Force chief of staff were bomber pilots. From 1982 until last year, all nine generals who occupied that position were fighter pilots. In 2008, a new era in warfare was beginning, and Secretary Gates asked President Bush to appoint a different kind of chief of staff: Gen. Norton Schwartz. He came up through the ranks flying neither bombers nor fighters but C-130s, the bulky cargo planes that haul troops, weapons, and supplies from bases and supply depots to the battlefront.” 12:59

http://typophile.com/files/sbpx2_5653.gif Teeny font with an x-height of 3 pixels. (Subpixel-tuned by hand!) (More.) 20:55

http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2009/sep/04/mobile-phones-
telephone-mark-lawson How having phones, or not having phones, has shaped the plots of novels and movies over time. “Novelists are now routinely obliged to explain why their detectives or victims don’t simply ring someone for help.” 13:59

http://www.paulgraham.com/determination.html “In most domains, talent is overrated compared to determination—partly because it makes a better story, partly because it gives onlookers an excuse for being lazy, and partly because after a while determination starts to look like talent.” 21:44

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_inventors_killed_by_
their_own_inventions Wikipedia, I love you. Also, one inventor so killed was a Thomas Midgley, Jr., who managed to invent both leaded petrol and CFCs. (Although the effects of CFCs on the atmosphere weren’t known until well after his death, he does seem to have been involved in suppressing information about how workers were harmed by working with lead.) 20:37

http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2009/08/facebook_status.html “Asserting your social status with your Facebook status.” e.g. one update is glossed as: “Your life is worthy of envy, but it is not perfect — otherwise everyone would hate you, and we can’t have that. And so the fabulous undershare must strike a counterbalance, and the results can be fantastic. This updater’s status, nominally a complaint about a nasty hangover, is really a subterranean boast that (a) the updater has a Dionysian appreciation for the high life, (b) has rather limitless supplies of Rose [sic] wine, and (c) is in Ibiza.” 21:57

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/99680a04-92a0-11de-b63b-00144feabdc0.html “The Iraqi who saved Norway from oil.” The surprising story of an Iraqi who moved to Norway and apparently became instrumental in establishing the Norwegian oil industry, and especially the way in which it is regulated.

The real achievement, in other words, was not finding oil but coping with its discovery. Norway faced the same dilemma as every other new oil producer with no experience of the industry: if you rely too much on private foreign companies, too little of the oil wealth benefits the country in the form of government revenue or economic development; if you go too far in the other direction, you risk a bloated, politicised oil sector that evades both accountability to the people and competitive pressures to be efficient.

Since 1996, all state profits from oil have been put into a savings fund, which is now equivalent to a year’s GDP. 09:08

http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/2009/afghanistan-troop-
casualties/ Not sure if this is anything to be proud of: but British fatalities in Afghanistan, on the increase since 2006, have actually decreased as a percentage of troops deployed. And Canadian forces have an astonishing 20% chance of being killed or seriously wounded. 07:05

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/29/business/energy-environment/
29iht-sustain.html?pagewanted=all David MacKay’s book Sustainable Energy - Without the Hot Air features some helpful simplifications relating to energy use that make it easier to see the consequences of various energy choices such as wind power versus nuclear. In this article he compares the energy consumption per unit area of various countries (10 watts per square meter for Bahrain, 0.1 watts per square meter for South Africa, 0.01 for Botswana) to the amount of energy that different schemes can generate, per unit area (15-20 watts per square meter for solar, 11 watts for hydro, 2.5 for wind, 0.5 for energy crops) to make it easier to see how much land needs to be given over to energy production for each country to achieve energy self-sufficiency. 13:05

http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-09/st_thompson A literacy revolution? “Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment.” 11:23

http://nymag.com/fashion/09/fall/58346/ Annie Leibovitz owes $24m and is in a bunch of financial trouble. “There was only one man Leibovitz deemed qualified to work on anything involving air-conditioning or ductwork at either residence, and he lived in Vermont.” 23:41

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gv1uLfF35Uw Video of Anne Sullivan and Helen Keller demonstrating how Sullivan taught Keller to speak. 23:19

http://martinfowler.com/articles/obamaSoftware.html The voter information gathering and fundraising software used by Obama, and other big political campaigns in the US. 07:22

http://www.ibiblio.org/apollo/ForDummies.html There’s an emulator for the hardware used on the Apollo missions! This is the gentle introduction. 23:50

http://www.slate.com/id/2223018/pagenum/all/ Positive review of Spotify, the free and legal music streaming service available in the UK and some other European countries. Note that according to the FAQ you can get access to Spotify from other countries provided you login from a country that has Spotify access every 14 days or so—or know someone who can do this for you... (Spotify worked for me when I was on holiday in Singapore and Melbourne, so I know this works.) Also, Spotify Premium, the $16.50/month version, does not have this restriction. 08:57

http://www.slate.com/id/2222936/pagenum/all Dahlia Lithwick:

“So consider this: Republicans came into these hearings with nothing to lose. They were never going to block this nomination, but they could have used these days to make it clear they are not the party of Rush Limbaugh and Joe the Plumber. They could have questioned Sotomayor about her record, her views, even asked a tough question or two about wise Latina women. They opted not to.

“Democrats also came into these hearings with nothing to lose. They were going to seat this nominee, tee up the next two, and school the American people on why the Supreme Court matters and how it’s letting them down and explain why balls and strikes are half the equation. They opted not to. When you think of it that way, beyond just being a waste of time, these hearings were also a waste of a thousand opportunities.”

21:12

http://stuffwhitepeoplelike.com/2009/07/13/127-where-the-
wild-things-are/ Stuff White People Like #127: Where the Wild Things Are. “It is a guarantee that whenever it is announced that a popular book is being turned into a movie, white people will get upset. This is partly due to their fear that something they love will be made accessible to more people and thus enjoyed by more people which immediately decreases the amount of joy a white person can feel towards the original property.” 20:15

http://pipeline.refinery29.com/street_seen/get_shot_by_sartorialist.php Flowchart of how to get photographed by The Sartorialist. (I don’t agree that he favours cigarettes. He just doesn’t go out of his way to avoid them.) 19:30

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/07/obama-gets-a-sense-
of-putins-super-villain-soul/ “Vladimir Putin ... has a knack for making first impressions. In 2001, he showed President George W. Bush his mother’s crucifix to give Dubya a sense of his soul; the same year, he surprised Azerbaijani President Heidar Aliyev by presenting Aliyev with his 1949 graduation certificate from Leningrad’s KGB academy. He also knows how to make a thoughtful gift: Putin gave canine-averse German Chancellor Angela Merkel a toy dog.” 19:17

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/
06/17/AR2009061702801.html Michael Kinsley on reverse discrimination, and Sonia Sotomayor’s membership of an elite women’s only club. “Sotomayor will feel right at home on the Supreme Court, where justices have made heroic efforts to pretend that affirmative action is one thing and that reverse discrimination is another.” 08:24

http://jwz.livejournal.com/1055120.html jwz has a Palm Pre, and so asks some questions and writes a small review. “Copy and paste only work [sic] with text fields, not the contents of mail messages or web pages.” Really? 21:30

http://i.gizmodo.com/5284638/when-pro-doesnt-mean-pro-anymore “It’s kind of amazing how much Apple got right yesterday—and what they got wrong: Their product lines are completely scrambled. The Pro designation has become meaningless and $99 iPhones look just like $499 iPhones.” 09:48

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/06/army-to-afghan-farmers-
trade-opium-for-saffron/ The Army has commissioned a 22-page report on saffron as an alternative cash crop to the opium poppy for Afghan farmers; the piece also notes that it’s nice “to see the military studying aid and development models so closely.” Unfortunately, opium is an “almost ideal” crop, and would probably be about 50% more profitable for the farmers than saffron: “it is a high-value, low weight crop that requires minimal water; the paste collected during the harvest is easy to store and transport; and the buyers come to directly to you.” 17:53

http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/06/
07/the_day_pain_died_what_really_happened_during_the_most_
famous_moment_in_boston_medicine/?page=full One the first use of anesthetic in an operating room, and the the moral and medical environment of the time: “Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. ... In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients’ base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health. ... Most doctors still believed it was only pain that kept patients alive through the trauma of operations. System failure due to shock was a frequent cause of death during surgery, and the loss of sensation was believed to make it more likely. A screaming patient, however tormented, had a better prognosis than a limp and lifeless one.” 14:15

http://www.slate.com/id/2218847/ Christopher Hitchens on the lessons to be learnt from Sri Lanka’s victory over the Tamil Tigers: “It’s just not true, as some liberals tend to believe, that insurgencies, once under way, have history on their side. As well as by nations like Britain and Russia, they can be beaten by determined Third World states, such as Algeria in the 1990s and even Iraq in the present decade. Insurgent leaderships often make mistakes on the “hearts and minds” front, just as governments do, and governments are not always stupid to ban the press from the front line, tell the human rights agencies to stay the hell out of the way, and rely on the popular yearning for law and order.” 21:50

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/8087736.stm Curious interview with Kim Jong-il’s eldest son, conducted in what seems to be a glass lift on Macau. He speaks excellent English (better than his Japanese interviewer), and is about as casual and low-key and comfortable as is imaginable for any any head of state’s offspring. 14:56

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/07/us/politics/07lawyers.html “When Justice Department lawyers engaged in a sharp internal debate in 2005 over brutal interrogation techniques, even some who believed that using tough tactics was a serious mistake agreed on a basic point: the methods themselves were legal.” 09:33

http://www.salon.com/tech/col/smith/2009/06/02/askthepilot322/
index.html Salon’s resident pilot Patrick Smith on Air France Flight 447, including why turbulence and lightning are typically nothing to worry about. 09:32

http://www.random-walk.com/index_en.htm Some nice visualisations of various stochastic phenomena, produced with Processing. e.g. Benford’s Law, the output of pseudo random number generators. 23:28

http://www.viceland.com/int/dd.php?id=1881 [pic] “From now on if it’s getting onstage it better have a guitar and testicles and if that doesn’t sound right to you, we’ll just keep adding more until it does.” 13:37

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tb_e3tllSfE Video of General Motors crash tests conducted in the 60s. It’s carnage out there! 00:17

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/27/books/27garn.html Yet another theory of what made humans successful: fire—because eating cooked food is more efficient way to consume it, and the behaviours surrounding it (women doing cooking, and so forth) themselves provided an evolutionary advantage. 16:25

http://www.airliners.net/photo/Etihad-Airways/Boeing-777-
3FX-ER/1008034/L/ Etihad’s 8-bunk crew rest area above a 777’s cabin. (Many more photos linked from the bottom of this AskThePilot column.) 06:39

http://googlemobile.blogspot.com/2009/05/sky-map-for-android-
mobile-planetarium.html Identify stars with Andriod: point a G1 at a star, and, using GPS, accelerometer, and compass, it’ll tell you what you’re looking at. (Does the iPhone have a compass?) 02:07

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Moskovskaya_Peterburg_
metrostation.jpg [pic] Moskovskaya subway station in St. Petersburg has platform screen doors with stone (instead of the more typical glass) surrounds, which makes the platform look more like a lift lobby. 06:54

http://www.withouthotair.com/ Sustainable Energy: Without the Hot Air: very educational and informative (free) book by David MacKay (Cambridge professor of physics) on how we can reduce the amount of carbon web pump into the air. Serious, responsible, realistic, and not shrill. (Except occasionally, when irritated by particularly wrong-headed energy saving schemes, such as the advice to unplug your phone charger when not using it.) Towards the end he presents five sample energy plans that vary in their energy source mix (more/less nuclear, etc.). As he says, there’s something “unpalatable” about every one—but these are our choices. I’m impressed (and glad) that it’s currently #54 on Amazon UK’s best-seller list. A few misc things I was surprised by: (a) Wind farms take up an enormous amount of space (“if we covered the windiest 10% of the [UK] with windmills (delivering 2 W/m2), we would be able to generate 20 kWh/d per person” (p. 33); the UK average energy comsumption per day is 125 kWh/d (p. 104); (b) I knew air travel dumped a whole lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, but it turns out this is mostly because of the distances involved; travelling to Australia by car, for example, is about as efficient as flying there (p. 128). 10:40