I really hope that Taxi Magic succeeds. With GPS and radio dispatch, there’s no reason why ordering a taxi should be such a mystery.
I normally find YouTube response videos to be pretty worthless, but here the value all comes in the retort. Via Buffingtron.
Original:
Response:
Some good data on preventing onion tears. Instead of buying onion goggles, you should learn to cut onions correctly. I particularly like this part:
The placement of various foreign objects between one’s teeth (wine corks seem to be a particular favorite) is of questionable value, except when used as an excuse - if indeed one were needed - to open another bottle of wine.
Every once in a while you run across a completely insane story. Today I came to Ian Hibell, famed long-distance bicyclist, by way of the Darian Gap, an uncharted, impassible piece of Panamanian land that separates North and South America. Ian Hibell was the first person to do an overland passing of the Gap as he cycled from Cape Horn to Alaska in 1970-72. Here is a video of Ian during this trek:
In a sad twist of fate, Ian was killed at 74 years of age, struck by a car while riding his bike in Greece. The Economist and The Times both published touching obituaries for Ian. This quote is from the Economist:
Bikes rarely let him down. Escaping once from spear-throwing Turkana in northern Kenya, he felt the chain come off, but managed to coast downhill to safety. He crossed China from north to south—in 2006, at 72—with just three brake-block changes, one jammed rear-brake cable and a change of tape on the handlebars. In his book, “Into the Remote Places” (1984), he described his bike as a companion, a crutch and a friend. Setting off in the morning light with “the quiet hum of the wheels, the creak of strap against load, the clink of something in the pannier”, was “delicious”.
I hope to find a copy of his book.
The New Scientist reports on a study suggesting that direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads may be ineffective. The best part is that the study uses the natural divide between French- and English-speaking Canadians to create a perfect cross-sectional study (Canada forbids pharmaceutical ads, but US television does not).
The author of the original Dr. Who theme song, Delia Derbyshire, recently passed away leaving behind hundreds of previously unknown recordings from the 60’s onward. On one track, she notes, “uhh, forget about this, it’s for interest only” and proceeds to drop a track that could very well be in the Warp catalog.
Radiohead has just released an amazing video for “House of Cards” that uses no cameras, only lasers and visualization, to produce a sort of vector video game effect:
If you’re interested in the technique, you should check out the making of the video, which includes a cameo by visualization superstar Aaron Koblin. Oh, and they open sourced the data. Holy crap that’s awesome. Go Google, Radiohead and Aaron.
Over the past couple of weeks, I have been getting some random messages from friends on Friendster (this is probably the first time in over a year). The first three or four, I didn’t think anything of it, but finally a good friend sent me a message, so I logged on and found this:
Which is obviously some sort of spam, possibly from a XSS hack. This reminds me of the first effective email worm I ever experienced, where someone I thought highly of (a professor at MIT) sent me a link about photos of Anna Kournikova, and of course I clicked… never again.
Until now. It goes to show how important the sender is in propagating a worm; a really intelligent spammer would take this into account, use the email/social network address book to determine who the likely influenced people are, and message these people first.
Amanda pointed me to an Economist article about the dabbawala, a food distribution group in India that is being noticed for their ingenuity in business structure and supply chain logistics. The group pays all 5000 members equally, and has achieved a 99.9999% delivery accuracy. Watch them in action:
We were discussing recently the goal of being photographed jumping in front of all Seven Wonders of the World. Turns out there are at least seven lists of seven wonders of the world.
This is the personal weblog of Cameron Marlow, research scientist at Facebook. You can find a comprehensive list of content in the archives, or you can simply search using the box above.
