Letters Remain

Category: interesting

  • The Age Wave: Are Retiring Baby Boomers the Recession Culprits?

    Did the American economist Harry Dent correctly predict the recession, and is it really the fault of retiring baby boomers? Dent popularised the ‘age wave’ theory through his research on “the highly predictable nature of consumer spending based on a family formation pattern”. Some experts expect the worst consumer recession since 1980 to occur when…

  • Green Roofs

    Malcolm Gladwell chats with environmentalist Amy Norquist about the real benefits of ‘green roofs’ (what GOOD Magazine calls, “one of the most unsung and low-tech green solutions out there”). MG: So you have this technology, and there are three arguments for it: an aesthetic argument, an economic argument, and an environmental arguments. Which of those…

  • Attenborough on Creationism

    I’m considering treating someone (possibly myself!) to David Attenborough’s The Life Collection: the full set of David Attenborough’s Life series, consisting of over 60 hours of some of the best nature footage in history. As is the norm when I’m intrigued by anything, I head over to Wikipedia and read all I can on a…

  • Top 10 Real Estate Resources

    Lifehacker’s list of the top ten real estate search tools is mostly (completely?) US-centric, but useful nonetheless given that I am determined to move across the pond in the near future. Find what a house is really worth at Zillow. Google Maps + Google Base = Google’rific house searching Track housing trends with Trulia. Instantly…

  • List of Eponymous Laws and Adages

    We’ve all heard of them: Boyle’s Law, Keynes’ Law, Metcalfe’s and Murphy’s. Wikipedia’s list of eponymous laws is your one-stop resource for those observations and predictions that are named after a person. For others that don’t make the cut, see the ‘adages’ category.

  • Higher IQ = Longer Life

    According to Lab Notes, new research is suggesting that a higher IQ is an indication that you may live a longer life. A number of recent studies have been finding that people who score lower on intelligence tests (notice how careful I am not to say “smarter people”) tend to die earlier than those who…

  • The Journey of North Pacific Pollution

    The North Pacific Gyre is the ocean current vortex responsible for transporting huge amounts of pollution into the ocean from the land alond the Pacific coastline. In this Greenpeace animation, we can see how trash moves around the Pacific over a 6-year period, eventually accumulating as the Pacific’s ‘trash carpet’. It’s also worth noting that…

  • Britain, LSD and Stephen Fry

    Following Nature‘s review of Albion Dreaming—a book on the history of LSD in Britain—Mind Hacks provides us with a wealth of interesting resources on the history of LSD in the UK, including this great quote from Stephen Fry: I don’t know if you have ever taken LSD, but when you do so the doors of…

  • A Short History of Fingerprints

    Cabinet of Wonders provides us with everything you’ve ever wanted to know about fingerprints, but were afraid to ask. I particularly enjoyed this tidbit: Spider monkeys, whose prehensile tail-tips are so sensitive and flexible that they can pick a dime up off a floor, also have prints on the bare spot at the end of…

  • Deep Brain Stimulation

    Deep brain stimulation (DBS) is a procedure in which a ‘brain pacemaker’ is implanted into a patient’s brain. This ‘pacemaker’ then sends electrical impulses to specific areas of the brain in order to alleviate the symptoms of typically treatment-resistant conditions. Mind Hacks has made a list of the conditions treated using DBS: Obesity Writer’s cramp…