Quick links

What has caught my attention lately:

• "Ads are often annoying ... [and] the practice of running annoying ads can cost more money than it earns" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Robot plays beer pong, but the real story is the clever bean bag robotic gripper using the "jamming phase transition of granular materials" ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Good list of features a modern phone should have but does not ([1])
  
  
• "At this point, Apple is basically an iPhone company with a few other side businesses ... The iPhone accounted for ... a staggering 69 percent ... of Apple's revenue." ([1])
  
  
• "We were not building the phone for the customer — we were building it for Jeff [Bezos]" ([1] [2])
  
  
• "One of the biggest problems in organizations is that the meeting is a tool that is used to diffuse responsibility" ([1] [2])
  
  
• Pew poll on how opinions of US scientists differ from the US population, and public's perceptions of scientists ([1])
  
  
• Pair a "brash, young scientist" with a "wiser, older scientist" to maximize innovation ([1] [2] [3])
  
  
• Google Earth Pro is now free, lets you get high res stills and movies of anywhere on the planet ([1] [2])
  
  
• People told a placebo was "expensive" had twice the improvement as measured by physical tests and brain scans ([1])
  
  
• Blind men successfully train themselves to "see" using echolocation, and brain scans determine that they are using the otherwise unused visual centers of their brains to do so ([1] [2] [3] [4] [5])
  
  
• Rather than modeling crowds with attraction and repulsion between agents, only avoiding anticipated collisions behaves closer to real humans ([1])
  
  
• Xkcd comic: "I can't wait for the day when all my stupid computer knowledge is obsolete" ([1])
  
  
• Xkcd What If: "Getting to space is easy. The problem is staying there." ([1])