Backlog of Links Part 1

Must read: the national debt clock runs out of zeros.

Must read: Nathan Mhyrivold (former chief tech officer at Microsoft) started an R&D group composed of chemists, chefs, and artists to produce... a cookbook - of scientific proportions.

Missle silo bachelor pad, must see.

3D fractal renderings (from Wired). I have some odd feeling that this is the distant future of architecture. Think about it... you could build an entire structure using the same mass produced piece, and accuracy would be nearly perfect.

Paul Krugman on why the Fed is powerless to do anything and shouldn't raise rates for a long time.

The Scots really do invent everything. There are actually a few I think they left off the list (for example the ghillie suite of WWI that snipers still use for camouflage to this day, the Scots used it to catch livestock poachers). I had been planning to write a whole long post about this, but apparently someone else has watched too much History Channel too and noticed that everything during the industrial revolution was invented by people from the poorest country in Europe.

A tour of the Leica factory... ugh. Anyone got $11,000 for one of those f .95 Noctilux lenses? They make one of the nicest 35 mm cameras and possibly the best glass (lenses) in the world.

New earthquake proofing technology in Istanbul looks impressive as hell.

Videos of rockets exploding during launch including a 1 billion dollar spy satellite.

Military Youtube... sort of. The military can record footage of an entire area, say a city, and if there's a bombing they can basically rewind the tape and see who planted the bomb...? Just read it.

Most sushi you eat isn't what it says it is. Many of the fish are from protected or over fished areas.

Interesting geodesic domes in California.

This has been a long time coming. Road trains. Safer, faster, more efficient.

Foreign Policy Magazine posted a collection of beautiful photos of slums.

Hahahaha, fuck Vista.

A movie gets pirated all over the internet, it's producers are ecstatic; finally.

This is mostly for my reference. Microscale chart... fun.

Wonkish developmental economics talk about the inability to explain growth in the third world - the drunkard's walk.

Scientists say waterboarding is bad... apparently people will tell you anything when they're being tortured.

Philosophical musings as to whether or not we exist.

Recession over - like 3 months ago.

Hilarious - dead salmon fools fMRI.

Plug and charge, cool but... dumb. If it isn't cheaper than conventional energy, or somehow provides something that is more convenient then it won't work economically. Still interesting though.

Plants recognize and react differently to their siblings.

Nudge - how to make more people use the stairs. Psh, turn them into a piano obviously.

Someone finally won the Netflix Prize which was basically a million dollars given out to the team that could improve Netflix's own movie recommendation algorithm by more than 10%.

America's infrastructure is failing massively, not very surprising. Wired talks about the lack of any current "super projects" in the US and the America Society of Civil engineers say we need to spend 2.2 trillion dollars on infrastructure just to bring it up to par. Yikes... this is interesting to me because people don't realize how much these things affect everything. Roads, water, electricity - these are the basic things that allow America to have a strong economy. It's so basic it's painful.