January 28th, 2012 § § permalink
Image by circulating via Flickr
wow, what an awesomely fun project from my fellow Slovenians.
I can well imagine those dusty librarians having immense amount of fun packaging these together and trying to imagine the reader who will have receivedThe Stranger, 1Q84 and The Little Prince in an existentialists pacage, and how that will impact her life from that point onwards, and how she will  become a better person and help older people cross the street, and gather courage to divorce that annoying husband after 15 years and start having relaxed fun in life again.
i got a bit carried away here, but the project really sounds like something libraries should do more often. people like to get surprised in real world.
Last year we saw both people and dogs loaned out by libraries, but it would seem there’s still plenty that can still be done with books as well. Aiming to introduce more fun into library loaning, The National and University Library of Slovenia recently ran a program offering mystery packs of books to their customers.
via: www.springwise.com
January 24th, 2012 § Comments Off on reblog: The conditions for survival and prosperity § permalink
amazing analysis / view / info-graphic almost, on the expected lifespan of personal computers companies.
Yesterday’s post described the history of personal computing platforms over the past 37 years. It showed a distinct shifting of “eras” between traditional personal computing and the emergent mobile computing represented by device-based platforms.
Underlying these lives (and deaths) of platforms were the growth (and decline) of fortunes of companies
via: www.asymco.com
the chart is potentially good argument against apple-skeptics: they are in the business twice the time everybody else is, surely they learned more about users of personal computers than anyone.
January 17th, 2012 § § permalink
Image via Wikipedia
I hate cold. it makes me angry and antisocial. nothing special, just the way I am. I can take cold if necessary, I just know that I don’t like it. I don’t see why I would change that. I’m assuming I’m not the only one, but also expect that there are some cold-lover out there as well.
However, this condition made me specially sensitive to some social phenomena. the latest one, that I really really don’t understand is people’s behavior on public restrooms. They seem to be either specially designed for cold-lovers, or there is much more cold-lover out there than I imagined.
a) more often than not they are without heating. I get that, landlords are cheap and save money on heating. it’s not nice of them, but nobody spends lots of time in public toilets anyway. and I can handle my anger in small quantities anyway.
b) more often than not, there is an open window right behind the toilet seat. again, I can understand the reasons, even though they annoy me – nobody likes the smell of the person before him, and landlords are cheap and save money on ventilation.
c) roughly half of public restrooms don’t offer warm water. again, cheap landlords. however, in the other half that does, more often than not, like 80% of the time, the hot/cold water faucet is turned all the way to the cold one. let’s ponder a bit on this observation:
- every time you use public restroom, someone else was there before you and you inherit their ‘preferred environment’. this means the water temperature preference is being suggested to you.
- a lot of public restrooms don’t offer hot water, but those that do are not being used most of the time.
- there is no way that so many people would be making a mistake in turning the faucet. all the faucets on the planet use the same direction for hot / cold water – all the faucets everybody is using at home, in their own bathroom and kitchen, use the same layout. they should be programmed to instinctively know which way to turn for warm.
Now, the question I have is this: does this experience mean, that 80% of people are actually cold-lovers and prefer being exposed to cold elements? Do they wash the dishes with cold water then? maybe that’s why they invented washing machines – so they don’t have to be exposed to warm water for too long?
I just don’t get it.
January 17th, 2012 § Comments Off on Martin Luther King Jr Quotes: 12 Inspirational Excerpts on Tumblr § permalink
no other words necessary.
Many in the United States got the day off work Monday in celebration of the birthday of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., a civil rights leader and minister credited with bringing equal rights to African Americans, and tangentially, many other minority groups. Even after his assassination in 1968, his legacy as well as his moving speeches have inspired p
via: mashable.comÂ
January 16th, 2012 § Comments Off on Reblogged: IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms § permalink
wow! i find it amuzing how they neatly separate ‘theoretical’ from ‘engineering’ problem here – as if the ‘theoretists’ these days weren’t building complex machines to perform experiments as well…
Image via Wikipedia
IBM smashes Moore’s Law, cuts bit size to 12 atoms
Instead of just storing all your songs of a drive, breakthrough also will let you store all your videos
IBM announced Thursday that after five years of work, its researchers have been able to reduce from about one million to 12 the number of atoms requ
via: www.computerworld.com
January 4th, 2012 § Comments Off on reblog: These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language] § permalink
AMAZING!
Every year Lake Superior State University bans a bunch of words and phrases from the English language for good. They just released their list today and, I must say, it is amazing. Oh wait, we can’t say “amazing” anymore.The number one word for removal was “amazing,” which people say is overused but I say is actually quite handy. How can you get ri…
via These Words Are Now Banned from the English Language [Language].
… or should I say, AWESOME!
December 19th, 2011 § Comments Off on reblog: If you hate Big Government, fight SOPA. § permalink
not sure if everyone is aware of this, but it is incredibly important piece of legislation, that has come far in the legislative process in US already. technically it is trivial to circumvent it, so there won’t be any real problems for users, but the message of the law will be criminalizing much more than just pirates. and Europe won’t be far behind…
Nobody who opposes Big Government and favors degregulation should favor the Stop Online Piracy Act, better known as SOPA, or H.R. 3261. It’s a big new can of worms that will cripple use of the Net, slow innovation on it, clog the courts with lawsuits, employ litigators in perpetuity and deliver copyright maximalists in the “content” business a holl
via If you hate Big Government, fight SOPA..
… it is also proof that US economic policy-making is no better than slovenian.
July 24th, 2011 § § permalink
every time you buy something, you contribute to increasing the risk of the next large scale armed conflict on the planetary scale.
Image by Getty Images via @daylife
until further notice, fossil fuels remain this planets key resource. they are causing the largest political and economical benefits and risks for all the coutries in the world. they represent 95% of worlds enery sources and as basis for cheap plastic, they are part of nearly every product, without much ability to recycle them.
if we dont discover efficient replacements for both and actually start using them before we run out of oil, the world will experience resource shortage like never before in history. people stop being polite when they are hungry.
if we take processed food as prime example, lets compare a bag of flour american consumer buys today, with a bag of flour farmer brought from the mill only a hundred years ago. todays flour is enhanced, bleached, delivered with trucks accross the states several times, packaged in plastified containers. all of this is an ‘upgrade’ from plain flours core value, and all of this requires energy to to do.
Image via Wikipedia
an even better example is bottled water. no need to explain the amount of excess energy needed to deliver it to your glass instead of the tap one. we could list infinite number of everyday things that got this ‘upgrade’ in the last century, from basics like water, flour and butter, up to frozen microwave dinner. even the apparently fresh fruit for instance – there is nothing fresh about most of it – it’s all last years crop, deeply frozen or preserved, so that they can guarantee even supply troughout the year. in other words, strawberries picked up now dont go to the shops, last years do.
if you could actually see the energy contained in the packaging and delivery of all the food you buy these days, your fridge would shine like a smal star. this shinning has to be powered by some sort of energy, most of the time that energy comes from oil. this shining is your everyday contribution to world conflicts that are caused by energy trade.
you can imagine the same applies to the content of your closets, storages, garages, offices, cars.
of course, you need this food and some other stuff to survive and to be able to do things yourselves. hopefully you do good things, that will offset your contribution to potential third world war.
the more unnecessary things you buy, the more unnecessary processing is involved in producing and delivering them, the lower your chances of successfully offseting the risk are.
August 27th, 2010 § § permalink
I never liked haggling, so I was terrified when I first heard there are places you can visit, like Arab countries, where sellers get literally mad at you if you don’t participate in their ritual of arguing, going away, being disappointed, and after some time eventually settling on price of the already ultra cheap piece of pottery.
Running a business of my own, I slowly learned that the art of negotiation is a good skill to have, and one you never stop improving. It is a social game that demands whole person to contribute. Not just oral skills, body language, imagination, improvisation are equally important, as well as intelligence and empathy to be able to guess and predict opponents motives and lusts.
So eventually I also realized the true source of rage for those Arab merchants – by ignoring their custom, you refuse them opportunity to practice their skills.
But, i believe there is a even a higher cause, a systemic function to this ritual, that makes it universal across all human societies, and most visible in the ones based on trade. Haggling and negotiating is ultimately about setting the price, or value of an object or service. Since the value of goods and services is something we made up and is not their natural attribute, it can exist only trough infinite debate, that is constantly questioning and confirming it’s place and value for the society at large.
By refusing to haggle, you also refuse to participate in this culture-wide debate and refuse to make society better. Anybody on the other side should be insulted with such ignorance.
Now, this is true in cultures like traditional arab was/is. I am not trying to say that we should all start haggling in supermarkets. In western world, it is often illegal not to be able to quote a price and stick to it. Let’s take a brief look at what happened here.
The process of figuring out the optimal price was, just like everything else, converted into science. Today, the science of marketing and market research is responsible for going out on the field, analyzing audiences, identifying markets, and defining price points that are optimally aligned with targeted market segments willingness and ability to pay.
Because we have built theory that can calculate optimal price and because we have trained society to conform to the model, haggling is not necessary anymore. Even more, it became unwanted, a bad word. If as a seller you don’t know exactly how you price your service, it means you didn’t do your homework. Instead, you are wasting my time as consumer, because you were lazy or incompetent of reading my mind.
Granted, I am exaggerating. We also have supply-demand game mechanism built into the theory, and all of this is more true for store-sold goods for mass consumption than for services and luxury items, but still, i believe that culture-wide mind shift is apparent and profound.
And understanding the origins and history of contemporary phenomena always helps hacking them 😉
September 7th, 2009 § Comments Off on 13 more things that don’t make sense § permalink
13 more things that don’t make sense |
Strive as we might to make sense of the world, there are mysteries that still confound us.
Michael Brooks presents thirteen of the most perplexing. Cracking any one of them could yield profound truths.
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Radiation left from the big bang is still glowing in the sky – in a mysterious and controversial pattern
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Something unseeable and far bigger than anything in the known universe is hauling a group of galaxies towards it at inexplicable speed
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Tens of millions of years ago, the average temperature at the poles was 15 or 20 °C. Now let’s talk about climate change
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Space probes using Earth’s gravity to get a slingshot speed boost are moving faster than they should. Call in dark matter
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The fusion of two distinct evolutionary lines is not supposed to work – but the seas are teeming with chimeras that prove it can
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