Thoughts and wanderings around the internet, e-government and geekdom.
It had never crossed my mind that there was a good business reason for the minimum monthly payment. There is: people pay their debts down less quickly and therefore the card issuer makes more money. Read more in The Fiendish Genius of Credit-Card Minimum Payments.
Freakonomics looks at auction sites like MadBid and describes them as All-Pay Auctions. Looks like I was right to be wary of these things. The thought of protecting ones investment in bidding costs is exactly what people will protect, and therefore end up spending substantial amounts.
Here goes with some thinking. MadBid currently has
Freakonomics looks at auction sites like MadBid and describes them as All-Pay Auctions. Looks like I was right to be wary of these things. The thought of protecting ones investment in bidding costs is exactly what people will protect, and therefore end up spending substantial amounts.
Here goes with some thinking. MadBid currently has
Cobian Backup looks like it might be the thing I need to automatically back up my laptop to my portable hard drive. It does open files using volume shadow copy which is very important for me.
New meta analysis shows that research on weight loss funded by industry had significantly higher quality data. Now how to allow industry funding and weed out the bad apples?
Using light to reduce skin wrinkles?. Maybe the Aerogarden has even more benefits than we thought.
Horses can match voices to faces. Based on some clever object permanence-type tests on hosses. Wiffy is delighted.
Together for London is a collective venting portal for tube and transport travellers. Nothing earth-shattering there yet. As the acronym might suggest, this is run by TfL. I particularly like the campaign “I will control my flatulence”.
The Hajj and Eid al-Adha. How many Christian ceremonies are celebrated in the same way across the world (here I’m thinking of the sacrificing goats, prayer for Eid)? Does the tolerance and inclusiveness of Christianity cause it to lose some cohesion when faced with a rival religion like Islam?
Green Sahara. Where to start. I love the giraffe petroglyph, especially given it is around 8,000 years old.
But what about this: sand has a memory of when it last saw light. Yes, that´s what I thought to. Apparently you can date recent to c. 500,000 years old based on various luminescence techniques. The marvels of science, heh?