- Survivorman is back... June 30th
- The site has a 3 minute preview. Unfortunately my cable package doesn't include OLN - anyone feel like recording it for me?
- Car Rentals for the ‘Eco-Curious’
- Talks about how Enterprise is trying to integrate electric cars into its fleet and the problems that they're having getting consumers to rent the things. They mention "range anxiety" which for me seems pretty big for the rental car market. They mention initial problems renting hybrids which went away after consumers got used to them, but I'm not sure to what extent the same will apply to electric vehicles. Personally I rent only when I can't get places reasonably view transit which often means driving basically non-stop for 100-250km, outside the range of many electric vehicles. Enterprise does seem to be trying out a rent-by-hour approach in some locations for electric vehicles - which seems like a great. It's not exactly new though, akin to the car share programs that have been in existence for some time or even Hertz on Demand from one of Enterprise's competitors.
- One nicotine vaccine injection may help smokers quit for life
- Previously noted as an approach with the potential to treat cocaine and heroin addictions - seems to work for smoking as well.
- The Rise of Digital Urban Tribes
- "In addition, our research shows that typical parents are just as "addicted" to media and technology as are their teenagers, just in different ways. In an ironic and telling shift, the teenagers we interviewed complained that their parents' use of technology was inhibiting quality family time." (HT: JH)
- Update: Kuwait leader rejects death sentence
- Why democracy isn't necessarily always a good thing... "Kuwait's ruler has refused to pass a bill previously voted through by parliament that would allow Muslims who insult Islam to be put to death and would harshly penalize Christians and other non-Muslims." (there'd be a minimum 10-year jail sentence for these other cases). It does seem as though the Kuwaiti parliament can overturn this ruling though with a sufficiently large majority.
- ESL Vocabulary Acquisition: Target and Approach
- "Goulden, Nation, and Read's (1990) intervention indicates that the receptive vocabulary size range of college-educated native English speakers is 13,200 - 20,700 base words (Goulden, Nation, & Read, 1990), with an average of 17,200 base words. ... A recent study (Cervatiuc, 2007) suggests that the average receptive vocabulary size of highly proficient university-educated non-native English speakers ranges between 13,500 and 20,000 base words, being comparable to that of university-educated English native speakers"
- Guardsman impaled by own bayonet in Parliament Hill mishap
- From the Canadian capital: "A member of the Governor General's Foot Guards was seriously injured during the Changing of the Guards ceremony on Parliament Hill Wednesday morning." Oops!
- Eurozone's banking union will not be credible; FDIC-type fund seems out of reach
- "Nobody questions the credibility of the US government as a rescuer of last resort of the US banks. And that is because the US banks’ total liabilities only represent 1x the GDP of the US. ... The largest US bank – JP Morgan – has liabilities equal to 13% of US GDP. By contrast 20 European banks have liabilities of more than 50% of their home country's GDP." Apparently Irish bank liabilities are worst, totalling over 700% of the region's GDP if I'm interpreting a figure on the page correctly.
- Lipstick, the Recession and Evolutionary Psychology
- "Dating back to the Great Depression, times of recession have consistently yielded anomalous gains for the beauty products industry, even while consumers reign in spending on household goods and recreational products. Journalists have dubbed this curiosity the 'lipstick effect.'" The writer reports on studies they conducted and published which "confirmed that the lipstick effect is not only real, but deeply rooted in women’s mating psychology."
NIMBYism in action.
HT: NYT
- 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.)
Pages
