I thought Guns, Germs and Steel was a brilliant book; and this work from Jared Diamond far surpasses it. We hear many important messages all the time, but there’s nothing like a good story to add impact. Except, maybe, a true story. Or maybe a dozen true stories. If you pick up this book in [...]
I came across Swivel today, and it’s a fascinating place. It’s a repository of publicly-uploaded data (and corresponding auto-generated graphs, it seems like) on anything under the sun. Today’s front page shows me interesting graphs on the falling US contribution to physics, top reasons why books get banned, and airline accidents and fatalities over the [...]
Although I’d vaguely heard of it before, I just tried it out, and it’s great. If you use Firefox, the better gmail extension is a must have! Some of the things are really useful – like Saved searches (I’ve actually written feedback to Google to include this feature) and displaying the unread message count first [...]
The Washington Post is an oasis of sanity in a desert of inexplicable fanaticism: Through a marvel of modern publishing, advertising and distribution, millions of people will receive or buy “The Deathly Hallows” on a single day. There’s something thrilling about that sort of unity, except that it has almost nothing to do with the [...]
At first sight, the scorecard is hard to believe. Scotland made 152 in 30 overs, and yet the target for the Windies was a “revised” 165. Turns out it’s due to the Duckworth Louis system, as the match suffered from two rain delays and was twice reduced in the first innings, first to 42 overs, [...]
A nice touch by Google – they now have a flash-based web viewer for powerpoint presentations.
James Earl Jones, whose lent his voice to the unforgettable Darth Vader, will read the Declaration of Independence at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, USA (via). If only we could hear a slightly modified version… “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary to dissolve Rebel scum…”
From The Economist: The danger in developing a gadget that tries to be a phone, internet appliance and iPod all in one is that it can fail to accomplish each as well as it might… simply making a phone call is more cumbersome than it should be, requiring up to half a dozen different steps. [...]
Recent links