Based on molecular genetic sequence analysis, as a human our nearest relatives are—in order—primates, flying lemurs (colugos), treeshrews and then rabbits and rats.
These are the Euarchontoglires, or Supraprimates.
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Our True Ancestors
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The Seed Salon
I’ve just discovered Seed Magazine’s Seed Salon and am enthralled.
Each ‘episode’ is a short, ten-minute conversation between a scientist and an artist or humanist. It’s like a conversational TED Talk.
via Kottke
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Reverse Dictionary
Know the concept but just can’t find the word—or similar words—for it? A thesaurus is no use. A dictionary’s just torture.
Help is here in the form of the reverse dictionary; I’ve got a feeling this is going to come in handy quite often.
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First Song Downloads. Now Organic Chemistry
The rise of university textbook piracy: the scourge of the textbook publisher, a blessing for students.
All forms of print publishing must contend with the digital transition, but college textbook publishing has a particularly nasty problem on its hands. College students may be the angriest group of captive customers to be found anywhere.
Compared with music publishers, textbook publishers have been relatively protected from piracy by the considerable trouble entailed in digitizing a printed textbook. Converting the roughly 1,300 pages of Organic Chemistry into a digital file requires much more time than ripping a CD.
Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about the price of textbooks.
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Communicating Design Decisions
Primarily meant as an article on how to communicate design decisions to clients, Smashing Magazine also gives us some tips on good website design:
- Pretty doesn’t mean effective: statistics are your friend
- Every design should have a measurable goal
- Your site should have one clear path
- Remember the Swiss army knife
- Provide performance metrics
Conclusion: Your clients aren’t designers, so don’t treat them like it; give them the information they want.
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Wep App Start Screen Designs
If you need design inspiration for a website’s start screen, this screen shot collection of Web app start screens (AKA, signed-out Home Pages) from around the Web is a great starting point.
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7 Lies Stopping Us Starting Our Own Company
Waiting for the right moment to start your own company seems like a perpetual waiting game. There’s always a reason not to, right?
LifeRemix tackles the 7 lies preventing us from starting out own business:
- I’m too busy right now. I’ll start when I have more time.
- After I get an MBA, I’ll be ready to start up.
- I hate sales.
- I’ll do some research after South Park.
- I don’t know anything about business.
- I don’t have start-up capital.
- Before doing anything else, I need to write a business plan.
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Start-Ups Are Where You Want to Be
I suppose you could call Ooga Labs a conglomerate of start-ups. On their ‘About’ page they give a compelling argument to join their company, but more enticing is the open letter from their CEO imploring everyone to avoid the prestige (hype?) of big companies and do something entrepreneurial.
So you’re going to take a cube job[…]?
C’mon! Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich, CT by 0.2% above the S&P Index?
Has no one taken you aside and said, “Wait! You’re about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!”
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A 14-Year-Old and John Lennon Discuss Peace
In December 1969 John Lennon and Yoko Ono held one of their famous “bed-in for peace” protests at the King Edward Hotel in Toronto. This was when a 14-year-old Jerry Levitan sneaked into their hotel room and secured an interview with Lennon on the topic of World Peace.
38 years later Levitan produced an animated film of the interview, using the original interview recording as the soundtrack. You may recognise it; the film was nominated for Best Animated Short Film at the 80th Annual Academy Awards (2008).
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Godwin’s Law
Godwin’s Law is an adage formulated by American attorney and author Mike Godwin in 1990. The law states:
As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one.
The rule does not make any statement whether any particular reference or comparison to Hitler or the Nazis might be appropriate, but only asserts that one arising is increasingly probable. It is precisely because such a comparison or reference may sometimes be appropriate, Godwin has argued that overuse […] should be avoided, because it robs the valid comparisons of their impact.
As an ex-regular of Wikipedia’s Talk:Main_Page, this humorous law is permanently etched into my psyche.
(Mike Godwin was the first staff counsel of the EFF, and is currently general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation.)