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Listen to Lexicon Valley Episode No. 36: The Dude Abides

Noam Chomsky is a pretty unlikely celebrity. As a preeminent anarchist theorist, his political writing is full of passionate intensity, but in his numerous public appearances, he conforms much more to images associated with his day job as a preeminent academic and linguist. He’s very soft-spoken—I’ve never heard him raise his voice above the register of polite coffee-shop conversation—and frumpy in that elder scholar kind of way: uncombed gray hair, an endless supply of sweaters and corduroy jackets…

So, yes, it’s amusing when, in the short clip above, a young Chomsky fan asks the 85-year-old “father of modern linguistics” for advice on how to talk to women. Chomsky’s nonplussed response is honest and heartfelt. He has nothing to offer in this regard, he says: “I got out of that business 70 years ago.” If it seems like Chomsky’s math is a little off—he was married in 1949—consider that he and his wife Carol met when they were both just five years old.

Theirs was a quietly charming romance. Chomsky, who has always possessed an extraordinary ability to keep his personal, political, and professional lives separate, did not speak much of their marriage until after Carol’s death in 2008. In the excerpt above from a Big Think interview shortly after, Chomsky tells a story of group of peasants in Southern Columbia who planted a forest in his wife’s memory. He’s also asked to define love. This time, he has a much more interesting response than his reply to the would-be pick up artist above: “I just know it’s—has an unbreakable grip, but I can’t tell you what it is.  It’s just life’s empty without it.”

via Critical Theory

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Student Asks Noam Chomsky for Dating Advice is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

There was a moment three or four years ago when the media could not stop talking about how miserable parents were—especially mothers. We prefer doing pretty much anything to taking care of our offspring (even housework!), we get less sleep, and we’re more depressed than adults without kids. But, as most parents will tell you, the experience of parenting also provides moments of transcendent, uncomplicated glee: the giggle you share with your toddler, watching your 7-year-old master a math problem, a gossipy lunch with your young adult.

In mid-December, Apple named Duolingo—a piece of language-learning software—its 2013 iPhone app of the year. Since then, I swear every native English speaker of my acquaintance has suddenly begun guten tag-ing, buongiorno-ing, and comment ça va-ing. I myself have been habla-ing Español for the past three weeks, with Duolingo as my guide. Verdict so far? ¡Excelente, mis amigos! Until we genetically engineer the Babel fish that Douglas Adams envisioned in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Duolingo may be our best bet for a global uptick in inter-lingual understanding. The app currently teaches Spanish, French, Italian, German, and Portuguese to English speakers, and teaches English to speakers of those languages plus Dutch, Russian, Hungarian, and Turkish, with more on the way.

Also check out these stunning galleries:
Life in Russia
Best Pictures from Russian Dating Sites
Russian Facebook

Delta has released a new, 1980s-style in-flight safety video complete with appropriate clothing, crazy dance moves, and bad hair.

via Delta

[click to enlarge]

If you’ve ever thought London is a pretty big deal, here’s the proof. In the above map, Redditor LB4 has carved up the UK into eight areas, each of which has a population less than Greater London.

That’s right: there are more people living in our dark-grey splodge than the entire of Wales and  south-west England, for example. And London’s population is bigger than Scotland’s, Northern Ireland’s, north-east England’s and north-west England’s put together.

No wonder it feels a bit crowded from time to time…

✚ A map of second languages spoken in London
✚ The perfect postcodes for a quick commute
✚ How clean is your kebab? Every UK restaurant’s hygeine rating mapped

When you hear the word “cute,” “spider” is probably not the first word that pops into your head. But photographer Thomas Shahan is out to change all that with his incredible macro photographs of doe-eyed jumping spiders.

Jumping spiders are unusual in that the majority of them do not hunt with webs. They have powerful hind legs and the best eyesight among spiders, allowing them to hunt actively with powerful jumps. They can still produce silk, however, often using it to tether themselves before jumping or to create shelters.

With the exception of Australia, where just about every living thing out there can kill or maim you, I don’t get why people hate spiders. A world without spiders would be a world with far more mosquitoes and flies, which carry countless diseases. And when you know that some of them can look this cute – are they really all that scary?

And that statistic you might have heard about the average person swallowing eight spiders a year? In 1993, a writer circulated this and other fake facts to prove how easy it was to circulate false information. His demonstration was extraordinarily successful.

So the next time you see a spider, keep in mind that it’s probably more interested in hunting bugs that are trying to bite to bite you rather than biting you.

Source: Flickr

Jumping spiders have the best eyesight among spiders

They are also very curious and often interact with organisms many times their size

If a spider turns to look at you, it is almost certainly a jumping spider – they have insatiable curiosity about humans

Many arachnids, like black widows try to avoid people, but jumping spiders are quite fearless

They probably just want to hug you!

Macro Photos Of Cute And Cuddly Jumping Spiders by Thomas Shahan originally appeared on Bored Panda on January 27, 2014.

In a recent episode of SciShow, Hank Green explains what causes “eyeball floaters,” those mysterious drifting objects we sometimes see in our vision.

This 16th century German book opens in 6 different ways to reveal 6 books in one binding. It is a variation of a dos-à-dos (“back-to-back”) bookbinding, a rare method for attaching books back to back that was practiced primarily in the 16th and 17th centuries. The 6-way book is in the collection of the National Library of Sweden–there are more photos of it on the library’s Flickr page.

photos by István Borbás/National Library of Sweden, GIF via Erik Kwakkel

via Erik Kwakkel, Neatorama

Television in Denmark is rubbish, Finnish men like a drink – and Sweden is not exactly a model of democracy. Why, asks one expert, does everybody think the Nordic region is a utopia?

For the past few years the world has been in thrall to all things Nordic (for which purpose we must of course add Iceland and Finland to the Viking nations of Denmark, Norway and Sweden). "The Sweet Danish Life: Copenhagen: Cool, Creative, Carefree," simpered National Geographic; "The Nordic Countries: The Next Supermodel", boomed the Economist; "Copenhagen really is wonderful for so many reasons," gushed the Guardian.

Whether it is Denmark's happiness, its restaurants, or TV dramas; Sweden's gender equality, crime novels and retail giants; Finland's schools; Norway's oil wealth and weird songs about foxes; or Iceland's bounce-back from the financial abyss, we have an insatiable appetite for positive Nordic news stories. After decades dreaming of life among olive trees and vineyards, these days for some reason, we Brits are now projecting our need for the existence of an earthly paradise northwards.

I have contributed to the relentless Tetris shower of print columns on the wonders of Scandinavia myself over the years but now I say: enough! Nu er det nok! Enough with foraging for dinner. Enough with the impractical minimalist interiors. Enough with the envious reports on the abolition of gender-specific pronouns. Enough of the unblinking idolatry of all things knitted, bearded, rye bread-based and licorice-laced. It is time to redress the imbalance, shed a little light Beyond the Wall.

Take the Danes, for instance. True, they claim to be the happiest people in the world, but why no mention of the fact they are second only to Iceland when it comes to consuming anti- depressants? And Sweden? If, as a headline in this paper once claimed, it is "the most successful society the world has ever seen", why aren't more of you dreaming of "a little place" in Umeå?

Actually, I have lived in Denmark – on and off – for about a decade, because my wife's work is here (and she's Danish). Life here is pretty comfortable, more so for indigenous families than for immigrants or ambitious go-getters (Google "Jantelov" for more on this), but as with all the Nordic nations, it remains largely free of armed conflict, extreme poverty, natural disasters and Jeremy Kyle.

So let's remove those rose-tinted ski goggles and take a closer look at the objects of our infatuation …

DENMARK

Why do the Danes score so highly on international happiness surveys? Well, they do have high levels of trust and social cohesion, and do very nicely from industrial pork products, but according to the OECD they also work fewer hours per year than most of the rest of the world. As a result, productivity is worryingly sluggish. How can they afford all those expensively foraged meals and hand-knitted woollens? Simple, the Danes also have the highest level of private debt in the world (four times as much as the Italians, to put it into context; enough to warrant a warning from the IMF), while more than half of them admit to using the black market to obtain goods and services.

Perhaps the Danes' dirtiest secret is that, according to a 2012 report from the Worldwide Fund for Nature, they have the fourth largest per capita ecological footprint in the world. Even ahead of the US. Those offshore windmills may look impressive as you land at Kastrup, but Denmark is the EU's largest exporter of oil, and it still burns an awful lot of coal. Worth bearing that in mind the next time a Dane wags her finger at your patio heater.

I'm afraid I have to set you straight on Danish television too. Their big new drama series, Arvingerne (The Legacy, when it comes to BBC4 later this year) is stunning, but the reality of prime-time Danish TV is day-to-day, wall-to-wall reruns of 15-year-old episodes of Midsomer Murders and documentaries on pig welfare. The Danes of course also have highest taxes in the world (though only the sixth-highest wages – hence the debt, I guess). As a spokesperson I interviewed at the Danish centre-right thinktank Cepos put it, they effectively work until Thursday lunchtime for the state's coffers, and the other day and half for themselves.

Presumably the correlative of this is that Denmark has the best public services? According to the OECD's Programme for International Student Assessment rankings (Pisa), Denmark's schools lag behind even the UK's. Its health service is buckling too. (The other day, I turned up at my local A&E to be told that I had to make an appointment, which I can't help feeling rather misunderstands the nature of the service.) According to the World Cancer Research Fund, the Danes have the highest cancer rates on the planet. "But at least the trains run on time!" I hear you say. No, that was Italy under Mussolini. The Danish national rail company has skirted bankruptcy in recent years, and the trains most assuredly do not run on time. Somehow, though, the government still managed to find £2m to fund a two-year tax-scandal investigation largely concerned, as far as I can make out, with the sexual orientation of the prime minister's husband, Stephen Kinnock.

Most seriously of all, economic equality – which many believe is the foundation of societal success – is decreasing. According to a report in Politiken this month, the proportion of people below the poverty line has doubled over the last decade. Denmark is becoming a nation divided, essentially, between the places which have a branch of Sticks'n'Sushi (Copenhagen) and the rest. Denmark's provinces have become a social dumping ground for non-western immigrants, the elderly, the unemployed and the unemployable who live alongside Denmark's 22m intensively farmed pigs, raised 10 to a pen and pumped full of antibiotics (the pigs, that is).

Other awkward truths? There is more than a whiff of the police state about the fact that Danish policeman refuse to display ID numbers and can refuse to give their names. The Danes are aggressively jingoistic, waving their red-and-white dannebrog at the slightest provocation. Like the Swedes, they embraced privatisation with great enthusiasm (even the ambulance service is privatised); and can seem spectacularly unsophisticated in their race relations (cartoon depictions of black people with big lips and bones through their noses are not uncommon in the national press). And if you think a move across the North Sea would help you escape the paedophiles, racists, crooks and tax-dodging corporations one reads about in the British media on a daily basis, I'm afraid I must disavow you of that too. Got plenty of them.

Plus side? No one talks about cricket.

NORWAY

The dignity and resolve of the Norwegian people in the wake of the attacks by Anders Behring Breivik in July 2011 was deeply impressive, but in September the rightwing, anti-Islamist Progress party – of which Breivik had been an active member for many years – won 16.3% of the vote in the general election, enough to elevate it into coalition government for the first time in its history. There remains a disturbing Islamophobic sub-subculture in Norway. Ask the Danes, and they will tell you that the Norwegians are the most insular and xenophobic of all the Scandinavians, and it is true that since they came into a bit of money in the 1970s the Norwegians have become increasingly Scrooge-like, hoarding their gold, fearful of outsiders.

Though 2013 saw a record number of asylum applications to Norway, it granted asylum to fewer than half of them (around 5,000 people), a third of the number that less wealthy Sweden admits (Sweden accepted over 9,000 from Syria alone). In his book Petromania, journalist Simon Sætre warns that the powerful oil lobby is "isolating us and making the country asocial". According to him, his countrymen have been corrupted by their oil money, are working less, retiring earlier, and calling in sick more frequently. And while previous governments have controlled the spending of oil revenues, the new bunch are threatening a splurge which many warn could lead to full-blown Dutch disease.

Like the dealer who never touches his own supply, those dirty frackers the Norwegians boast of using only renewable energy sources, all the while amassing the world's largest sovereign wealth fund selling fossil fuels to the rest of us. As Norwegian anthropologist Thomas Hylland Eriksen put it to me when I visited his office in Oslo University: "We've always been used to thinking of ourselves as part of the solution, and with the oil we suddenly became part of the problem. Most people are really in denial."

ICELAND

We need not detain ourselves here too long. Only 320,000 – it would appear rather greedy and irresponsible – people cling to this breathtaking, yet borderline uninhabitable rock in the North Atlantic. Further attention will only encourage them.

FINLAND

I am very fond of the Finns, a most pragmatic, redoubtable people with a Sahara-dry sense of humour. But would I want to live in Finland? In summer, you'll be plagued by mosquitos, in winter, you'll freeze – that's assuming no one shoots you, or you don't shoot yourself. Finland ranks third in global gun ownership behind only America and Yemen; has the highest murder rate in western Europe, double that of the UK; and by far the highest suicide rate in the Nordic countries.

The Finns are epic Friday-night bingers and alcohol is now the leading cause of death for Finnish men. "At some point in the evening around 11.30pm, people start behaving aggressively, throwing punches, wrestling," Heikki Aittokoski, foreign editor of Helsingin Sanomat, told me. "The next day, people laugh about it. In the US, they'd have an intervention."

With its tarnished crown jewel, Nokia, devoured by Microsoft, Finland's hitherto robust economy is more dependent than ever on selling paper – mostly I was told, to Russian porn barons. Luckily, judging by a recent journey I took with my eldest son the length of the country by train, the place appears to be 99% trees. The view was a bit samey.

The nation once dubbed "the west's reigning educational superpower" (the Atlantic) has slipped in the latest Pisa rankings. This follows some unfortunate incidents involving Finnish students – the burning of Porvoo cathedral by an 18-year-old in 2006; the Jokela shootings (another disgruntled 18-year-old) in 2007, and the shooting of 10 more students by a peer in 2008 – which led some to speculate whether Finnish schools were quite as wonderful as their reputation would have us believe.

If you do decide to move there, don't expect scintillating conversation. Finland's is a reactive, listening culture, burdened by taboos too many to mention (civil war, second world war and cold war-related, mostly). They're not big on chat. Look up the word "reticent" in the dictionary and you won't find a picture of an awkward Finn standing in a corner looking at his shoelaces, but you should.

"We would always prefer to be alone," a Finnish woman once admitted to me. She worked for the tourist board.

Sweden

Anything I say about the Swedes will pale in comparison to their own excoriating self-image. A few years ago, the Swedish Institute of Public Opinion Research asked young Swedes to describe their compatriots. The top eight adjectives they chose were: envious, stiff, industrious, nature loving, quiet, honest, dishonest, xenophobic.

I met with Åke Daun, Sweden's most venerable ethnologist. "Swedes seem not to 'feel as strongly' as certain other people", Daun writes in his excellent book, Swedish Mentality. "Swedish women try to moan as little as possible during childbirth and they often ask, when it is all over, whether they screamed very much. They are very pleased to be told they did not." Apparently, crying at funerals is frowned upon and "remembered long afterwards". The Swedes are, he says, "highly adept at insulating themselves from each other". They will do anything to avoid sharing a lift with a stranger, as I found out during a day-long experiment behaving as un-Swedishly as possible in Stockholm.

Effectively a one-party state – albeit supported by a couple of shadowy industrialist families – for much of the 20th century, "neutral" Sweden (one of the world largest arms exporters) continues to thrive economically thanks to its distinctive brand of totalitarian modernism, which curbs freedoms, suppresses dissent in the name of consensus, and seems hell-bent on severing the bonds between wife and husband, children and parents, and elderly on their children. Think of it as the China of the north.

Youth unemployment is higher than the UK's and higher than the EU average; integration is an ongoing challenge; and as with Norway and Denmark, the Swedish right is on the rise. A spokesman for the Sweden Democrats (currently at an all-time high of close to 10% in the polls) insisted to me that immigrants were "more prone to violence". I pointed out that Sweden was one of the most bloodthirsty nations on earth for much of the last millennium. I was told we'd run out of time.

Ask the Finns and they will tell you that Swedish ultra-feminism has emasculated their men, but they will struggle to drown their sorrows. Their state-run alcohol monopoly stores, the dreaded Systembolaget, were described by Susan Sontag as "part funeral parlour, part back-room abortionist".

The myriad successes of the Nordic countries are no miracle, they were born of a combination of Lutheran modesty, peasant parsimony, geographical determinism and ruthless pragmatism ("The Russians are attacking? Join the Nazis! The Nazis are losing? Join the Allies!"). These societies function well for those who conform to the collective median, but they aren't much fun for tall poppies. Schools reign in higher achievers for the sake of the less gifted; "elite" is a dirty word; displays of success, ambition or wealth are frowned upon. If you can cope with this, and the cost, and the cold (both metaphorical and inter-personal), then by all means join me in my adopted hyggelige (home). I've rustled up a sorrel salad and there's some expensive, weak beer in the fridge. Pull up an Egg. I hear Taggart's on again!

The Almost Nearly Perfect People – The Truth About the Nordic Miracle (Jonathan Cape), by Michael Booth, is published on 6 February. It will be BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week from 10 February.

Who’s got two thumbs, speaks German, and has the answers to both the faculty labor crisis and the metastasizing sports scandals in the fraught world of American higher education? Dieses ich, that’s who. In light of the latest athletics crap show out of the much-in-the-news University of North Carolina, I’ve realized that, just like Hermann Hesse says, I had the answer to everything within me all along. You’re welcome.

Vous êtes devant votre ordinateur, vous consultez vos mails et là... scénario d'horreur: des centaines et des centaines de messages arrivent et submergent votre boîte de réception, sans que vous ne compreniez bien pourquoi.  C'est la mésaventure qu'a vécue bien malgré lui un Californien. Tout ça à cause d'un drôle de bug de Gmail, le service de messagerie de Google. Identifiée par Techcrunch, cette erreur est due à un lien, qui apparaît tout en haut des résultats de recherche lorsqu'on tape «gmail» dans Google. En cliquant dessus, le lien fait apparaître «une fenêtre pour écrire un mail», décrit le site spécialisé, qui ajoute: «Oui, c'est bizarre. Très, très bizarre.» Dans la boîte de rédaction du mail en question, à la case du destinataire, se retrouve  une seule et même adresse, ajoutée automatiquement par Gmail. Techcrunch, qui a fait l'expérience de ce bug, raconte pourtant qu'aucun de ses journalistes n'avaient cette adresse mail dans ses contacts. Ironie du sort, il ne s'agit même pas d'une adresse gmail, mais d'une adresse hotmail, autrement dit qui dépend non pas de Google, mais de Microsoft! Après une courte investigation, Techcrunch a réussi à identifier le malheureux destinataire-mystère: un certain David S. Peck, qui réside en Californie. Contacté par le site, il se désole: «Je reçois des milliers d'emails vides et sans objet. [...] 500 par heure, je ne peux pas les arrêter. [...] Ils ... Lire la suite

Each Friday, Roads & Kingdoms and Slate publish a new dispatch from around the globe. For more foreign correspondence mixed with food, war, travel, and photography, visit their online magazine or follow @roadskingdoms on Twitter.

(via)

While bringing a funnel to his stranded car, a man has quite possibly the most boring phone conversation ever in the hilarious short film “Funnel.” The film was created by and stars Andre Hyland and is presented by Bob Odenkirk. It is an official selection of the 2014 Sundance Film Festival.

via The Awesomer

It’s a new year, which means it’s time for the Edge.org to pose its annual question to some of the world’s finest minds. The 2014 edition asks the question, “What Scientific Idea is Ready for Retirement?” The question came prefaced by this thought:

Science advances by discovering new things and developing new ideas. Few truly new ideas are developed without abandoning old ones first. As theoretical physicist Max Planck (1858-1947) noted, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” In other words, science advances by a series of funerals. Why wait that long?

So what established scientific idea is ready to be moved aside so that science can advance? The replies — 176 in total — feature thoughts by Steven Pinker, Kevin Kelly, Sherry Turkle, Robert Sapolsky, and Daniel Dennett, among others. If you’re willing to venture down the rabbit hole, you can access the complete collection of responses here.

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176 Big Thinkers Answer the Question: What Scientific Idea is Ready to Be Dead and Buried? is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture by signing up for our Daily Email. That is the most reliable and convenient option. You can also find us on Facebook, Twitter, and Google Plus.

Grilling meats is an American tradition, but it’s not the healthiest thing to do. A growing body of research suggests that cooking meats over a flame is linked to cancer. Combusting wood, gas, or charcoal emits chemicals known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Exposure to these so-called PAHs is known to cause skin, liver, stomach, and several other types of cancer in lab animals. Epidemiological studies link occupational exposure to PAHs to cancer in humans. When PAHs from a flame mingle with nitrogen, say from a slab of meat, they can form nitrated PAHs, or NPAHs. NPAHs are even more carcinogenic than PAHs in laboratory experiments. The reasonable conclusion is that grilling meat may be hazardous to your health.

Why are some websites easy to read and focus on, while other strain your brain and eyes? Turns out, there's a science to fonts and the way they make you feel is controlled by both biology and culture.

Downworthy is a Chrome plugin that converts hyperbolic headlines from viral mills into sarcastic -- and much more realistic -- semantic equivalents. For example, the word "literally" is replaced with "figuratively"; while "go viral" is translated to "be overused so much that you'll silently pray for the sweet release of death to make it stop."

* "Literally" becomes "Figuratively"
* "Will Blow Your Mind" becomes "Might Perhaps Mildly Entertain You For a Moment"
* "One Weird Trick" becomes "One Piece of Completely Anecdotal Horseshit"
* "Go Viral" becomes "Be Overused So Much That You'll Silently Pray for the Sweet Release of Death to Make it Stop"
* "Can't Even Handle" becomes "Can Totally Handle Without Any Significant Issue"
* "Incredible" becomes "Painfully Ordinary"
* "You Won't Believe" becomes "In All Likelihood, You'll Believe"
* ... and so on.

Downworthy (via Waxy)

Noel Gallagher recorded the  commentary for Oasis’s music video DVD. The only problem: he despises the very notion of music videos, making his commentary fantastically misanthropic. Choice rants from the above video:

‘I’d kind of grown out of the video experience quite quickly. By the third one I was just like “this is a load of bollocks.” It seemed like [the director] was just making it up as he was fucking going along. In this bit, he was saying “we should bury the drum kit!” And I was saying “why don’t we bury the drummer?” and he was like “Yeah yeah we’ll fucking bury the drummer!” And I was like “Wow, is that how easy this is? You just randomly suggest nonsense and people just go and film it?”’

‘I fucking hate videos. I hate the fact they cost a fortune, I hate the fact you’ve got to be there at eight in the morning, I hate the fact that you don’t leave until eight the fucking next morning. I don’t like the fact that the people who are making them think they’re making fucking “Apocalypse Now”, and everything is the most important – “this is the really important shot” – it’s fucking nonsense. A right fucking con if you ask me.’

“I mean I hate videos at the best of times, which we’ve already spoken about, but actually being in a video where you’re actually supposed to be the frontman is just the biggest pain in the fucking arse. A guy actually said to me on this shoot, “Can you do that bit again, but can you do it with a bit more energy in your eyes?” I still have no idea what he meant by that to this day. Do you want me to fucking stare at you like a fucking serial killer? Nonsense. Fucking bag of shite that. Waste of an afternoon.”

Brilliant.

For more music news, follow @TimeOutMusic.

Buzzfeed has it about right. Meanwhile, the control room of the Victoria Line was inexplicably submerged in quickset today. Previously.

Dominic Wilcox says: "Here’s my second object for my Selfridges window at the Festival of Imagination. I thought to myself ‘what would it sound like if I could hear the things that happened on my left side through my right ear?’ So I decided to make this Reverse Listening Device, and it actually works. It sounds very strange and I now will wear it at all times."

Reverse Listening Device

(Above photo: Dominic Wilcox wearing the Reverse Listening Device. Photograph by Piotr Gaska)

More Dominic Wilcox on Boing Boing

There is a popular belief that a person's name can influence their destiny. What names do Russian parents choose for their children, and how can a name be used to express one's attitude to a person?

The new nadir in network news.

Cyclists can adorn themselves from head to toe in flashing lights, but it's still possible that pedestrians and drivers won't see them until it's too late. It's a problem the Blaze Laserlight hopes to solve by projecting an early warning signal 16 to 20 feet ahead of a cyclist, so that others on the road will know they're coming in advance—and have time to react.

Read more...

An anonymous reader writes "The WSJ is reporting that Amazon has obtained a patent for 'anticipatory shipping,'' and claims it knows its customers so well it can start shipping even before orders are placed. The technique could cut delivery time and discourage consumers from visiting physical stores. In the patent document, Amazon says delays between ordering and receiving purchases 'may dissuade customers from buying items from online merchants.' Of course, Amazon's algorithms might sometimes err, prompting costly returns. To minimize those costs, Amazon said it might consider giving customers discounts, or convert the unwanted delivery into a gift. 'Delivering the package to the given customer as a promotional gift may be used to build goodwill,' the patent said. Considering the problems that can arise when shipping something a customer did not order anticipatory shipping has the potential to backfire faster than an Amazon drone can deliver."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.