September 22, 2008 – 10:32 am
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 [...]
September 2, 2008 – 8:42 pm
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 [...]
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 [...]
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.
I just received an email noting that the Harvard Book Store is for sale. I know that online book sales has limited the ability for book stores to succeed, but I personally think that Harvard Book Store is the best in the world. I hope this sale doesn’t affect its standing.
New York Magazine has an interview with Xiaotu Zhang, founder of Grand Sichuan in New York City, who has some interesting things to say about Chinese cooking. And which NYC Chinatown is best? Flushing, of course.
The long-form article summarization service Brijit decided to close its doors today. It would appear that their business model (paying people to summarize long-form news articles) was not viable. I may be in the minority, but I used the tool as a clipping service, subscribing to feeds of articles about the industry (Facebook, Social Networks, [...]
