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thalecress

25 karma · joined June 17, 2011

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thalecress··on Save your eyes, start using f.lux
Has anyone done a rigorous experiment, even on just themselves, with f.lux or redshift?

Sleep-monitoring wristband data + "did I see a screen, a red-shifted screen, or no screen" would be really interesting to me.

thalecress··on Assault Weapons Tracking
I understand that guns aren't hard to make - never mind 3D printing, any machinist can make a submachine gun. [1] But what about ammunition?

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2624298/sten-mk2-complete-machine-...

thalecress··on Assault Weapons Tracking
Ever hear of a booster bag? [1] Faraday cages aren't hard to make. It wouldn't shock me if a gun locker blocked signals too.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Booster_bag

thalecress··on The Insourcing Boom
On one hand, outsourcing rapidly transferred several decades of manufacturing and design knowledge to GE's soon-to-be competitors. (I haven't seen a Haier fridge on sale in the US yet but it's a matter of years, not decades.) On the other, maybe it juiced executive bonuses for a few years and may have permanently removed organized labor from the US private sector.

I wonder to what extent insourcing represents surrender for US firms seeking access to the Chinese market. China's leaders don't seem keen on idea of letting foreign firms sell in China longer than it takes for Chinese firms to pick up knowledge. The licensed production of Russian Sukhoi-27 warplanes comes to mind - the Chinese agreed to pay for 200, assembled from kits with Russian assistance. After 100 had been built, the Chinese said "no more" - and started advertising an indigenous copy for international sale. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shenyang_J-11#J-11

thalecress··on The lactose-tolerance mutation
Calories. Cheese has only about 60% the calories of a starting volume of milk. [1]

Plus, animals can graze on land you can't farm, and they're very portable.

[1] http://westhunt.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/the-indo-european-a...

thalecress··on Mobile Playbook by Google
When I try to read the text in the upper left, I keep getting distracted by animated numbers falling into the bottom right.
thalecress··on Turn your 404s into lost children alerts
I don't understand your objection. Do you see a meaningful distinction between "cars are safer" and "cars are driven more safely"?
thalecress··on The Fixie Bike Index
"There are more bikes offered for sale in Brooklyn than Manhattan, but only 8.3% of them are fixies versus 9.5% in Manhattan."

This is key. Fixies as fraction of for-sale bike population <> prevalence of fixies on streets.

From a purely anecdotal angle (supported by BikeSnobNyc's recurring photographs of DIY fenders), there's a lot of cheap mountain bikes in Brooklyn. In contrast, a Manhattanite who commutes by chauffeur or all-Dura-Ace, not-for-sale-on-Craigslist Colnago isn't part of the sample.

thalecress··on Amazon.com begins rolling out new homepage design
One man's anchor is another's ball and chain. Lots of "binding' elements tend to imprison information by cluttering the screen.

Edward Tufte seems like an influence on the redesign. https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Edward_Tufte

thalecress··on In Case You Wondered, a Real Human Wrote This Column
I'm skeptical of the claim that a program could win a Pulitzer. How does it decide what to write about, who to interview, and what questions to ask?

Reporting a day at the races or the markets is easy because we know which kinds of data are relevant and we have them available.

thalecress··on A fall spring-cleaning - Google products getting shut down
I use Google Desktop dozens of times daily. I suspect lots of enterprise users are in the same XP boat without a fast search paddle.