Rotundus.com

Power (Dis)Play? Teams In Black Draw More Penalties

"Hockey teams wearing darker-colored jerseys are more likely to be penalized for aggressive fouls than teams wearing white jerseys, according to new research."

Will Electric Bicycles Get Americans to Start Pedaling?

"Globally, electric bicycles outsell electric cars by a wide margin. An estimated 29.3 million e-bicycles were sold in 2012, with perhaps 90 percent of those selling in China, which has more electric bikes than cars on its roads. E-bicycles are popular in Europe, too, selling about 380,000 a year in Germany and 175,000 in the Netherlands in 2012. By comparison, about 120,000 electric cars were sold worldwide." Incidentally, electric bikes are illegal on Calgary bike paths.

Conversion Confusion

"Did a widow with seven children get 15 years in an Egyptian prison for becoming a Christian? Not so fast." It gets more complicated than either a simple "yes" or a "no".

Japanese Fruit Shops

By comparison a lot of foodie purchases seem downright cheap. Want to buy some cherries for $5 each or perhaps a $200 mango?

How to bring Canada’s sky-high air fares back to earth

"domestic air travel in Canada, measured by passenger miles flown per-capita, is only about 40 per cent of the corresponding U.S. level. This is especially surprising given that Canadian cities are generally further apart than are U.S. cities; if anything, we should be flying more than Americans, for whom driving is often a feasible alternative."

Give War a Chance

A fairly interesting journal article on how multinational peacekeeping / NGO efforts are often ineffective or can make the long-term situation worse.

‘Real men wear kilts’.. The anecdotal evidence that wearing a Scottish kilt has influence on reproductive potential: how much is true?

"Methods and results: Analysis of literature concerning scrotal temperature and spermatogenesis and fertility. Wearing a Scottish kilt in a traditional (‘regimental’) way may have clear health-related benefits. Kilt wearing likely produces an ideal physiological scrotal environment, which in turn helps maintain normal scrotal temperature, which is known to be beneficial for robust spermatogenesis and good sperm quality."

Filler (linguistics)

What sounds / words get used as filler in different languages

I've got to hand back my Macbook Pro in a while as I don't actually own the thing and so I've been investigating whether to buy a laptop and, if so, what to buy. The release of Windows 8 seems like a good reason not to buy a Windows-based machine (even if it'd probably be running Linux most of the time in any case). Looking for ideas as to when the next round of Macbooks is out I came across the following description of some new Intel chips being released to the world in June from when they were originally announced back in :

It will be the successor to the Ivy Bridge architecture, which has yet to ship for 2012, and is built on the same 22nm process but promises up to a 20-fold reduction of overall power consumption.

Not a whole bunch of technical details were revealed on the Intel Haswell, but the promised performance of the new chip architecture was jaw-dropping. A laptop running on the Intel Haswell chip can reportedly run for 24 hours on one charge and remain for 10 days on connected standby. And because the 22nm 3D transistor architecture uses so little power, it can run on a solar cell.

Battery life has in the past been one of my main deciding factors in determining laptops to buy. Now, hearing of the chips being released in June, the answer seems to be to wait

(Now if only I didn't discover today digging my Intel i3 / 4 gig RAM laptop out of hiding that the Windows registry on the machine is unrecoverably corrupt and there appear to be no system restore points to restore the machine's state to).

This song got forwarded my way yesterday. It's a bit strange and not my typical style of music but I like the video: