Letters Remain

Month: February 2008

  • The Worrying State of ‘World’ News

    Alisa Miller of Public Radio International is speaking at TED 2008 – for her talk she posted a background video depicting the shocking state of U.S. cable and network news organisations’ reportage. “The US accounted for 79% of the total news coverage” on American news outlets dedicated to international news stories in 2006! I’d love…

  • Higher Price Makes Cheap Wine Taste Better

    Obvious stated, still fascinating. Mind Hacks: Higher price makes cheap wine taste better: A new brain scanning study has supported what we’ve suspected all along, more expensive wine tastes better partly because we expect it to. […] What the volunteers didn’t know was that there were only three different wines, and two of them were…

  • Tragedies ‘Warping Government Policy’

    Good to see someone in power and in the public eye stating this for the record. Government policy is often badly formed because it is drawn up in response to tragedies and problems, the Government’s new head of risk management has said (Sam Coates writes). Rick Haythornthwaite, head of the Risk and Regulation Advisory Council,…

  • Feel Safe Flying? Stay Away From Here, Then

    From The Guardian The Professional Pilots’ Rumour Network is a publicly accessible online forum where airline pilots discuss their work. So if you want to maintain the belief that you are in safe hands… stay as far away from it as possible. Thanks, Matt

  • UML: Not Good and Not Funny

    An hilarious diatribe on UML and it’s practices: The Teaching Assistant for your OO-101 class has instructed me to approach you directly about the D-minus grade I got on my term paper “An evaluation of the proposed Unified Modeling Language (UML)“. I hope you will consider changing it to something better — a plain D…

  • Furniture Knock Offs as Copyright Theft

    With two of my main interests being personal finance and copyrights (and wrongs), I always get giddy when the two collide. Recently, Plonkee made me think: is condoning (buying) knock off furniture comparable to condoning copyright theft? There are quite a few people who get quite passionate about the undesirability of knock offs. Check out…

  • Mona Lisa: The Science Behind That Smile

    Why does the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa appear to be both smiling and not smiling at the same time? The smile part of the Mona Lisa’s face was painted by Leonardo in low spatial frequencies. This means that when you look right at her mouth, there’s no smile. But if you look at…

  • Honour System Bars

    Imagine going into a bar, drinking as much (or as little) as you want, and then only paying what you think is fair. Sounds good, right? Well, Jürgen Stumpf owns three wine bars in Berlin that do exactly that: For the price of 1 euro (about $1.50), you rent yourself a glass and get to…

  • London Underground – Brought to You in Conjunction with Hugo Chavez

    …Londoners on Income Support can get a card to allow travel on London buses and trams for half price. At the bottom of the [advertisement] are the proud logos of Mayor of London, Transport for London, and, incongruously, the Bolivarian Government of Venezuela. I presume that this is the fruit of Hugo Chavez’ visit to…

  • Lying for Education

    “Now I know some of you have already heard of me, but for the benefit of those who are unfamiliar, let me explain how I teach. Between today until the class right before finals, it is my intention to work into each of my lectures … one lie. Your job, as students, among other things,…