A study on the “impressiveness” of the British accent: “The main significant effect found in this study was that people who’d lived at least three months outside the US rated the English accent significantly lower than people who’d only lived in the US. In fact, Americans who had not lived abroad considered the English-accented person to be much more intelligent than themselves, but the people who had lived abroad rated the standard American accent more intelligent than the standard English one.” Chris Blattman comments: “It was my first five minutes of watching British television in Britain that burst the bubble. Turns out, there is so much stuff PBS does not re-broadcast.”
Month: July 2011
Joshua Tree National Park
It was 116 degrees today at Joshua Tree. And it felt great. Happy fourth weekend.
That Alloy Converted Heat Into What?
Via Popular Science, a new alloy can convert heat directly into electricity. I always had a hunch that turbines were overrated. Here’s the gist of it: “The new alloy — Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10 — undergoes a reversible phase transformation, in which one type of solid turns into another type of solid when the temperature changes, according to a news release from the University of Minnesota. Specifically, the alloy goes from being non-magnetic to highly magnetized. The temperature only needs to be raised a small amount for this to happen. When the warmed alloy is placed near a permanent magnet, like a rare-earth magnet, the alloy’s magnetic force increases suddenly and dramatically. This produces a current in a surrounding coil…” Oh, Ni45Co5Mn40Sn10. Of course.
Google Bicycles
I picked a friend up at Google today. This is how employees get around the campus:
Multiplying Fish
Well, I (kind of) lied. But it’s even cooler:
Maybe It’s A Chance To Start Over
Ezra Klein has an interesting take on Google+: Social networking has grown up alongside Facebook. In its early years, it was a quirky online activity mainly enjoyed by horny college students, and so profiles mainly featured pictures of people holding red party cups. Then, somewhat unexpectedly, Facebook opened itself to the world, and, somewhat more unexpectedly, the world joined. Friend requests started coming in from parents, bosses and colleagues. This caused problems for people who’d created their profiles in the party-cup days. Then the requests started coming in from people you hardly knew. How many of your pictures do you really want them to see? At this point, most of us have Facebook friends dating back to three or four distinct