I’m giving it a shot, if for no other reason then to see what Google is up to. I can’t say I woke up yesterday wishing I had access to a new social networking site. In line with that sentiment, via xkcd, this is timely:
Google+
Month: June 2011
Facebook + Twitter =
Google+. This is far from an original observation, but here it is nonetheless: + = Judging by my Facebook newsfeed, I get the sense that making Google+ invite only – for some undisclosed amount of time – was a very good idea. After all, it worked for gmail. Everyone seems to want in, even though there really isn’t much going on yet. At least in my “circles.” Oh man, that will get old.
Yellowstone National Park, Part 2
To add to my previous post on my Yellowstone visit, here are some additional shots: There really were just a lot of buffalo. Everywhere: Microbes that thrive on the hot rocks add a fiery orange to the landscape: There were also quite a few natural hot springs, some of which had vents in the rocks releasing boiling water:
Yellowstone National Park
I was completely blown away by Yellowstone. I expected lots a trees, some lakes, some animals, and a big geyser. But it turned out to quite possibly be the most impressive natural landscape I’ve seen. Apparently much of the park was created by a supervolcano eruption that occurred 640,000 years ago. The explosion essentially ripped a hole in the Earth, exposing active geological phenomena that would normally be hundreds, if not thousands of meters underground. But that’s about the extent of my understanding of the whole thing. So take a look: Gas containing lots of sulfur spews out of rocks next to a frozen lake: A grizzly bear spotting: This is where the bear came from: Buffalo milk: A gigantic pool of gray clay:
Yeast, Unite!
Two of my favorite topics are evolutionary biology and brewing. It’s rare that they overlap in the same article. It looks like brewer’s yeast has been coaxed to evolve to do more than make beer: IN JUST a few weeks single-celled yeast have evolved into a multicellular organism, complete with division of labour between cells. This suggests that the evolutionary leap to multicellularity may be a surprisingly small hurdle. Multicellularity has evolved at least 20 times since life began, but the last time was about 200 million years ago, leaving few clues to the precise sequence of events. To understand the process better, William Ratcliff and colleagues at the University of Minnesota in St Paul set out to evolve multicellularity in a
My Favorite Economic Dashboard
An update of one of the simplest and most useful economic dashboards I’ve seen. You need to click through, but take a quick look: I would still love to see a dynamic version of this, updated daily. It’s not quite as relevant as it could be when it’s released June 22nd with data as of May 31st. Nonetheless, I like it.
Joe Biden
Via xkcd:
How Many Households Are Like Yours?
Via Chartporn, the NYT will tell you many households are like yours: I’m not sure why, but if I were a betting man, I would have guessed that more than 0.2% of the households in the country were like mine.
Here’s a Real ‘Computer’ Game
Via Ezra Klein, the first version of ‘The Oregon Trail’ game: “With no monitor, the original version of Oregon Trail was played by answering prompts that printed out on a roll of paper. At 10 characters per second, the teletype spat out, ‘How much do you want to spend on your oxen team?’ or, ‘Do you want to eat (1) poorly (2) moderately or (3) well?’ Students typed in the numerical responses, then the program chugged through a few basic formulas and spat out the next prompt along with a status update. ‘Bad illness — medicine used,’ it might say. ‘Do you want to (1) hunt or (2) continue?’ Hunting required the greatest stretch of the user’s imagination. Instead of
Charging with Fire
Outdoorsy Japanese Cooking Pot Charges Phones Over a Campfire: