January 2012
17 posts
Opposites (don't) attract
Although we love to repeat this optimistic cliche about human nature, decades of psychological research have demonstrated that the truism isn’t true. Rather, people seek out people who are just like them. This is known as the similarity-attraction effect, or SAE. Although there is slight variation in the strength of the effect, the SAE has been shown to exist in nearly every culture, from Western...
“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
You fritter and waste the...”
– Pink Floyd
“If aliens decided to visit us then the outcome might be similar to when...”
– Stephen Hawkings on BBC News - Today - Hawking on the future of mankind
December 2011
22 posts
WatchWikiLeaks: The Great Visa Escape (by WikiLeaks)
“I would kill for these young, sweet little feline souls, these two boys. I would...”
– Robert Downey Jr., on his cats Montgomery and Dartanian.
In the 1980s, Pablo Escobar's Medellin Cartel...
November 2011
32 posts
Steve Jobs Was Right
Back in April, Apple had a bit of a PR problem when it was discovered that iPhones were storing a cache of data on which GPS locations that handset had visited in an unencrypted file. The whole thing was just a bug, but the controversy was dubbed LocationGate, and Apple even had to testify in front of the Senate about the matter.
The whole fiasco even prompted an email from Steve Jobs, which...
I did some good today.
From Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales
Google might have close to a million servers. Yahoo has something like 13,000 staff. We have 679 servers and 95 staff. Wikipedia is the #5 site on the web and serves 450 million different people every month – with billions of page views. Commerce is fine. Advertising is not evil. But it doesn’t belong here. Not in Wikipedia. Wikipedia is something...