http://www.tennismetro.com/bruno/posts/114-100-gift-card-giveaway
woot! I want a pair of new Nike’s!
Just realized this while watching the WWDC ‘09 keynote. They made such a big deal about video recording and voice dialing, that even my 3 years old LG Chocolate phone has. And still no MMS for AT&T customers, ha! Sometimes it feels like they are one giant marketing company. They surely are effective though…
BTW, I <3 the new MacBookPro’s :D
Interesting talk on TED. Basically, Mr. Posada claims that 1/3 of the kids who successfully fought off their temptations to eat marshmallows for 15 minutes to be awarded with another one, all grew up to be successful later in life, and the other 2/3 of them all grew up to be losers. Sounds like an oversimplification, and borderline deterministic. I say don’t be devastated if your kid succumb to the temptation, or use the smallest possible marshmallows :-P Supposedly, he’s pretty big in Korea. Yeah… Korean parents would do *anything* to see their kids grow up to be successful — including depriving them of marshmallows :D
Cockroaches… just hearing the name brings “ew…” reaction.
Cockroaches are known to cause asthma and allergies. In Fresh Air this morning, an entomologist claimed that pre-ground coffees are possible cause of allergies because these coffees are made from stock piles of beans that are infested with cockroaches, and they get ground up with the coffee… a major WTF EWW!!!
You can read the summary here and listen to the full interview here.
Oh, and same goes for chocolates (and most likely lots of other food)… oTZ…
No, this post isn’t about the “Swine Flu” virus.
Over the weekend, I saw a news clip about a study that claimed people with bigger smile tend to have less divorce rate.
The less intensely the subjects smiled, the more likely they would be divorced later in life, while the biggest smilers had lower divorce rates, according to a study published online this month by the journal Motivation and Emotion.
There’s another claim that happy parents beget happy babies.
Medina explained that newborn babies internalize the parental stress in their environment. In fact, researchers can predict the trouble in a marriage by taking a 24-hour sample of the baby’s urine and looking at the levels of stress hormone. How? A baby may be able to sense the intensity of voices around it, a disruption in routines or its needs being met sporadically, he said.
These findings may be obvious, but if you think about it, it means that happy parents -> happy child -> happy grandchild -> … and so on. It’ almost as if “happiness” is like a virus or gene that gets passed through the generations. But if this was true, wouldn’t millions of years of evolution have eradicated un-happiness gene by now? Hm…
To continue on the apocalyptic theme…
After watching Flow, you will want to drink a clean cup of water and will be thankful that you can. It’s a very important documentary that shows various aspects of upcoming water crisis, including:
- privatization of water in poor countries (seen 007 Quantum of Solace, anyone?),
- hazardous chemicals in our water supply (rocket fuel in SoCal water supply! will it give us wings?),
- environmental impacts of supplying water, etc.
Water is so ubiquitous to most people, that those of us who have easy access tend to take it for the granted. But the film goes so far as to suggest that the next global catastrophe will be triggered by lack of clean water supply – last one, being the comet that wiped out the dinosaurs. I wouldn’t go so far (at least in our life time anyway), but it’s definitely a big problem, if we continue to the current route.
Forget Financial or Energy or Water Crisis. All those are important, but it seems most of us have been ignorant of the Raw Material Crisis
This chart show how little of the raw materials we have left on Earth. And these estimates are using current rate of consumption, which will undoubtably only increase. It’s like playing Star Craft, when SCVs have no more raw materials to gather, and all there left to do is fight to the finish — there’s one for my geek cred -,-;; In all seriousness, all raw materials will end up in land fills, and I’m guessing the reverse process of recycling raw materials from junks will be very costly and won’t be 100% efficient — so essentially, we can only delay the impending doom, at best :(
An interesting pop-psychology about how people associate lower price to lower quality.
Why did the cheaper energy drink prove less effective? According to Shiv, consumers typically suffer from a version of the placebo effect. Since we expect cheaper goods to be less effective, they generally are less effective, even if they are identical to more expensive products. This is why brand-name aspirin works better than generic aspirin, or why Coke tastes better than cheaper colas, even if most consumers can’t tell the difference in blind taste tests. “We have these general beliefs about the world⎯for example, that cheaper products are of lower quality⎯and they translate into specific expectations about specific products,” said Shiv. “Then, once these expectations are activated, they start to really impact our behavior.
That may be the case some (most?) of the times, but I’ve definitely been burned a few times for buying cheaper stuffs. It really depends on the type of products, your trust in the particular retailer, among many other things.
Continuing my Safari posts…
Glims is a must-have all-in-one plugin to bring best of Firefox features to Safari. It gives you:
- Focus last tab (on tab close)
- Restore last sessions (tabs) on start
- Keyword search (no need for Keywurl plugin)
- Undo tab close (Cmd-Shift-T in Firefox)
- Show Favicons on tabs (debating whether I should keep using this)
- Pretty search suggestions (no need for Inquisitor)
- Full Screen browsing
- and much more…
And best of all, it’s FREE (unlike Saft which costs $12) Hope it’s not a memory hog… so far, I have not noticed any slow downs or noticeable CPU usage jump when using this plugin.
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