Yasutada.sudo

Engineering is complicated, so here's a flowchart to help you out.

(H/t Andrew Rader)

As Google Scholar approaches its 10th anniversary, Nature spoke to its co-creator Anurag Acharya

-- Read more on ScientificAmerican.com

This evening, children everywhere will throw sheets over their heads and emit the same exact noise. How did everyone come to agree on the noise a ghost makes? Forrest Wickman attempted to answer that question in 2011. The story is reprinted below.

Heidi is a reader of this blog and personal finance enthusiast. I’m currently writing a book on personal finance (very slowly) and asked her to share some more excellent tips. You can get more finance tips from Heidi at the excellent blog www.thriftytricks.com. Today I’ll talk about 10 best tips for saving money. There are a ton [...]

The post 7 Unexpected Ways to Save Money as a Grad Student appeared first on SellOutYourSoul.

Software developers know about bugs—but ship products anyway

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Visa's new Paywave chip-and-PIN credit-cards have a $1M limit on foreign-currency transactions that can be verified "in-card," meaning that someone who gets close enough to your UK wallet can simply wave a phone at it and charge a megabuck to it without raising any realtime security alerts. Read the rest

When most people are tailgated, they slam on the brakes or slow down. This fellow stopped his car on the highway and stared at his tailgater.

Mexican free-tailed bats emit a special "sweep jamming" sound to interfere with prey localization in  other bats competing for food.

Simon writes, "I recently got a chance to interview and profile the people behind a collaboration between Smithsonian and the Harvard College Observatory who are crowdsourcing the transcription of logbooks for thousands of photographic plates. It's a massive undertaking that will give scientists access to a hundred years of astronomical data." Read the rest

Winning a Nobel Prize has its perks. When you talk, people listen. And you end up doing a lot of talking. And travelling.

Reflecting on how the Nobel Prize changed his life, Walter Gilbert (1980 winner in Chemistry) commented, “You can find yourself spending years travelling and talking right after winning.”

And what if you want to take your Nobel Prize on the road with you? According to astrophysicist Brian Schmidt (winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Physics), that can present its own challenges. He recently told an audience in New York:

‘There are a couple of bizarre things that happen. One of the things you get when you win a Nobel Prize is, well, a Nobel Prize. It’s about that big, that thick [about the size of an Olympic medal], weighs a half a pound, and it’s made of gold.”

“When I won this, my grandma, who lives in Fargo, North Dakota, wanted to see it. I was coming around so I decided I’d bring my Nobel Prize. You would think that carrying around a Nobel Prize would be uneventful, and it was uneventful, until I tried to leave Fargo with it, and went through the X-ray machine. I could see they were puzzled. It was in my laptop bag. It’s made of gold, so it absorbs all the X-rays—it’s completely black. And they had never seen anything completely black.”

“They’re like, ‘Sir, there’s something in your bag.’
I said, ‘Yes, I think it’s this box.’
They said, ‘What’s in the box?’
I said, ‘a large gold medal,’ as one does.
So they opened it up and they said, ‘What’s it made out of?’
I said, ‘gold.’
And they’re like, ‘Uhhhh. Who gave this to you?’
‘The King of Sweden.’
‘Why did he give this to you?’
‘Because I helped discover the expansion rate of the universe was accelerating.’
At which point, they were beginning to lose their sense of humor. I explained to them it was a Nobel Prize, and their main question was, ‘Why were you in Fargo?’”

So just a word of caution to Jean Tirole, who won the Nobel Prize in Economics today, if you’re ever visiting grand-mère…

via Scientific American

Related Content:

Read 18 Short Stories From Nobel Prize-Winning Writer Alice Munro Free Online

Jean-Paul Sartre Rejects the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1964: “It Was Monstrous!”

Hear Albert Camus Deliver His Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech (1957)

Take a Free Course on the Financial Markets with Robert Shiller, Winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Economics

What Happens When You Take a Nobel Prize Through Airport Security is a post from: Open Culture. Follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus, or get our Daily Email. And don't miss our big collections of Free Online Courses, Free Online Movies, Free eBooks, Free Audio Books, Free Foreign Language Lessons, and MOOCs.

The post What Happens When You Take a Nobel Prize Through Airport Security appeared first on Open Culture.

"A New Jersey businessman ordered a bottle of wine [Screaming Eagle Oakville] he was told cost "thirty-seven fifty" for the table, and wound up learning a valuable lesson in sales when he found out that the actual cost was $3,750."

Image: @DistrictWino

"Too Many Cooks" is an 11-minute opening credit reel for an imaginary 1980s sitcom that tells a very funny, very dark, story that becomes more improbable, and more inspired as the minutes tick by.

"By imagining nerds as a race of their own," writes Christopher Tan in The New Inquiry, "Silicon Valley tries to disguise its white supremacy."

"It takes a lot to make a stew".

Jason Steffen, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, came up with a boarding method that greatly speeds up the traditional back-to-front boarding method used by most airlines. But the airlines aren't interested. Read the rest

Piled Higher & Deeper by Jorge Cham		www.phdcomics.com
title: "The Oxford Comma and Other Academic Punctuation Marks" - originally published 10/31/2014 For the latest news in PHD Comics, CLICK HERE!

On October 25th, a man-valanche of epic proportions descended upon Portland, Oregon for the 2014 World Beard and Moustache Championships. Gentlemen both fancy and wild from around the world gathered to compete for recognition of their glorious facial hair.

The competition features 18 categories across three divisions; Moustaches, Partial Beards and Full Beards. Each category features three prizes for the best facial hair.

More info: worldbeardchampionships.com | oregonlive.com (h/t: imgur, today)

"I’m not really attracted to any sort of, may I say, penetration. It is hugging and holding the shape of the car close to me and actually talking to it a little bit. And then of course, the rest is just physical satisfaction – masturbation is, I guess, the word.”

For anyone learning how to speak Japanese, this is a fun illustrated “picture dictionary” with over 1500 words that will help build up your Japanese vocabulary.

Read the rest

When some genius set up a 1960s non-directive chatbot psychotherapist to reply to #notyourshield tweets, hilarity ensued! Read the rest

A great, full-body-squick-inducing article in National Geographic provides an overview of the current research on parasites that use a combination of techniques to control their hosts' behavior, making them sacrifice themselves for the sake of the parasites and their offspring. Read the rest

Jabbing a steel needle into your flesh is not ever going to be fun, per se, but scientists have found a way to make it at least hurt a lot less. The trick is actually fooling your nerve cells with a small device that applies pressure and vibration. Here's how it works.

Read more...

Doghouse Diaries.

Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler was addicted to meth-amphetamine, according to documentation recently released by U.S. intelligence services. Read the rest

When you are in a meeting or in class, writing by hand leads to more effective learning . It's just so darn slow. If you skip the letter "e" when writing, you'll write faster.

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The alpha-anteater pose was overkill as the baby roo was already running away and didn't see it.

If you like posts about delightful creatures like this, take a look at Boing Boing's Delightful Creatures tag!

When Google wants to create its Street View maps — the ones that show the buildings and sidewalks that line the world's streets — it sends a funny-looking car with a camera on top off to capture the footage.

Those StreetView cars work great in places where there are roads. But in the world's more remote locations — a desert in Abu Dhabi, lets say — vehicles don't cut it. Enter Raffia, the camel carrying a camera across the Liwa oasis to produce more Google Maps.

(Google/YouTube)

Of course, the camel carrying a camera is not an everyday sight. But whats more striking about the video is the sheer size of the Liwa Oasis, an expansive stretch of desert that runs along the Persian Gulf.

(Google/YouTube)

This is a somewhat surreal video of Raffia, with her guide, in action.

(Google / YouTube)

You can see the results of Raffia's work on the Google Treks site, replete with many more camels who were not carrying cameras.