Random links
- No Copenhagen, that’s not good enough
- Part of a blog devoted to Dutch cycling and bicycle infrastructure, this piece suggested that some cycling infrastructure spending recently done in Denmark was inadequate. An interesting quote: "The budget for this almost 18 kilometer route was 13.4 million Kroner (€1.8/US$2.4 million). To compare, the Dutch spend about one million euro per kilometer, ten times as much!" Some example videos of Dutch bike paths. I was also amused by this post.
- Bitter battle rages over Canada’s sugar industry
- Quotes someone from the libertarian Cato Institute on US sugar production: "Sugar is probably the most protected, coddled and subsidized agricultural crop of any." Something to think about given obesity-related problems.
- How we die (in one chart)
- A comparison of the rates and causes of death from various factors and how they've changed between 1900 and 2010.
- The Inevitable Nature of Failure
- On computing using one of the current buzzwords - "The report followed 13 cloud providers since 2007 including industry heavyweights like Microsoft, Amazon and Google. Results showed the services racked up a combined 568 hours of downtime. 2009 was especially tough for Microsoft and Amazon, as both experienced multiple outages, amounting to roughly 48 hours." The design-for-failure approach to writing software seems to be the way to go, probably even spanning across multiple cloud providers (of course that's - keeping in line with the article's title - inevitably going to fail as well... it probably just won't fail as often.)