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Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. XVI

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    Monday Links from the Bench: Vol. XVI

    Oops, a bit late today - I've been mucking around with the new forum and lost track of time. Luckily, it doesn't take me long to whizz through my bookmarks and bring you another selection of gubbins:
    • Seth Godin: The Truth About Shipping - no, not the floating kind. "The lizard brain hates failure, and thus it hates creativity or the launch of anything that might make a fuss (which can lead to failure)... The resistance is behind all those seemingly benign suggestions you might hear at the conference table when you present to the committee."

    • Theater of the Absurd at the T.S.A. - "In late October, Christopher Soghoian... created a Web site he called 'Chris’s Northwest Airlines Boarding Pass Generator.' To thank Mr. Soghoian for helping the government identify security weaknesses, the T.S.A. sent him a letter warning of possible felony criminal charges and fines."

    • Wii-diculous - "One of my friends is a manager at a local movie theater, which uses a digital projector to show advertisements between features. After seeing the It Burns When I Wii video, we figured we could one-up it with the equivalent of a 344" television screen."

    • Pharmacogenomics - "What if when you went to the doctor's office, instead of making an educated guess about what medication to prescribe, your doctor gave you a genetic test that indicated which medication was right for you?... In the future, pharmacogenomics could find uses along the entire drug discovery and development timeline."

    • Excerpts from 'Expert Judgement on Markers to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant' - How do you mark a nuclear waste repository such that, thousands of years from now when our civilisation has long vanished, people (or whatever they have evolved into) with a completely different culture and language can understand the dangers? This report from Sandia Labs makes a number of suggestions. "Some designs use images of dangerous emanations and wounding of the body. Some are images of shunned land...land that is poisoned, destroyed, parched, uninhabitable, unusable." (The entire report is available as a PDF.)

    • Longest Word in English - Wikipedia - I don't usually link to Wikipedia, but this page deserves a mention if only for the protein whose full chemical name is 189,819 letters long "...also known as titin."

    • How to Detect a Sociopath - Some handy hints from Anil Dash. "You know how, whenever they interview a serial killer's neighbor on TV, they always say 'He seemed so normal!'? Well, online you can tell these people are crazy if you picture the back-story for the things they write."

    • Stargate Studios Virtual Backlot Reel 2009 - Interesting YouTube video showing just how much of your favourite TV shows are filmed before a green screen with the scenery filled in afterwards.

    • 7 Insane Ads That Have No Clue What They're Selling - "Off-the-wall ads are nothing knew; advertisers know weird-ass ads will get people talking. But some commercials just get the 'bizarre' part down before shutting off the cameras and going home for the day, producing a worrying number of insanely ineffective and downright baffling commercials which for all their quirky weirdness forgot to actually market a product." (2 pages, inline YouTube videos.)

    • The Words David Foster Wallace Circled in His Dictionary - "Below you'll find the complete list of words that David Foster Wallace circled in his American Heritage Dictionary." Indeed



    Happy invoicing!
    Last edited by NickFitz; 19 April 2010, 18:26.

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