Monthly Archive for January, 2010

Twitter Updates for 2010-01-28

Daily Mail: can give you cancer

Great that the group has pulled this list together. I’m going out for a candle-lit dinner tonight. I hope I make it back.

iPad, not

Glorious 2-year old MadTV parody: “Fast upload with no water bloating”.

My 2 cents?

  • The real iPad looks like a lovely piece of industrial design, as always
  • I’ve become convinced that battery life issues aren’t germane any longer (pretty well everyone has to charge their smart phone at home and / or work each day, technology will get this one sorted, it is just taking a while)
  • Would you replace an existing laptop / iPod with it (will it fit an iPod sound dock?, how would you print from it?)
  • Does that mean it’s another gadget to have around, and you’d select from the range you have for the purpose in mind? Not game changing, then, but maybe niche expanding.
  • I want to see what the competition does in response: I’m loving being able to improve my phone weekly thanks to the sterling work of the development community around Android.

Twitter seems to have 15m active users

That’s a much smaller number than I was expecting, but they have such a high new sign-up rate and seemingly reasonable 20% stickiness that it shouldn’t be a problem.

Reporting polls

Very good PhD comic:

Terrible science

Sad to see such poor trial design around the use of animals in experiments (not knowing how many primates you were using is pretty damning; it’s not as if they are small or quiet). However, there aren’t many disciplines where this would be exposed as an integral part of the exercise of the discipline. Let’s hope this leads to tightening up of protocols here and in other facets of scientific research.

Get walking

I very much like the idea of a walking route calculator that avoids main roads and pollution. Seems to work OK on the “route home when the tubes and buses are closed”.

Classic interview

Truly marvellous American humour. “I wear a size 10 1/2 or 11 shoe, but that’s an American size. What’s that in England? Five pounds? A litre?”. “13 volumes is 15 volumes too many”. The discomfiting of the interviewer is just lovely.

Things not to do

Don’t install anti-parking bollards like this:

Don’t try and create energy from nothing – I’m amazed so many people are still trying.

Don’t repackage a $500 blu-ray player and sell it at $3,500.

Don’t make a Thunder Generator at home.

Don’t use “rockyou” as your password. Who would do that anyway?

How to do profile pictures

Is it best to show some body? Should you flirt or be holding a cute hamster? A fantastic piece of analysis from OKCupid of over 7,000 average members’ photos and interactions throws up some seriously unexpected facts. Good to see that they have updated guidance on the site because of the evidence they have gathered. Maybe government should take notice? [Disclaimer: I am not a member!]