- Saving Mel Brooks
I’ve always liked Mel Brooks, and I have a tremendous amount of respect for him. But this article really got me thinking about my own family. What’s going to happen when one of my parents dies? I feel like I’m going to be in the same situation as Max, with my career and life just getting started and having to figure out how to take care of a grieving parent. Hopefully I won’t have to deal with that for at least another 20 years.
- Beyond Stones & Bones: The New Science of Human Evolution
If you’re into paleoanthropology like me, then you’ll find this article to be a good read. If you’re not into it, though, then I’m afraid there’s not much I can do to help you. While the whole thing was interesting, my favourite part was this:
[T]he human version of [neurological gene] FOXP2 appeared less than 200,000 years ago—about when anatomically modern humans stepped onto the world stage—and maybe as recently as 50,000. If so, then it is only humans as modern as those in the last diaspora out of Africa who developed advanced, spoken language. Another gene with interesting timing is microcephalin, which affects brain size. It carries a time stamp of 37,000 years ago, again when symbolic thinking was taking hold in our most recent ancestors. The third, called ASPM and also involved in brain size, clocks in at 5,800 years. That was just before people established the first cities in the Near East and is well after Homo sapiens attained their modern form. It therefore suggests that we are still evolving.
I’ve heard a lot of people argue that homo sapiens has stopped evolving, but that line of thought is based on the old “bones and stones” model of paleoanthropology. I absolutely love how advances in science can just obliterate ideas like that without even breaking a sweat.
- “Our stores were conceived and built for this moment in time - to roll out iPhone.”
A really great article for Fortune in which Steve Jobs talks about what went into creating the most successful retail store chain out there.
(Hat tip: Gruber)
- Not-so-precise Swiss army unit mistakenly invades Liechtenstein
What began as a routine training exercise for some Swiss soldiers almost ended in an embarrassing diplomatic incident, when the troops got lost at night and mistakenly marched into neighbouring Liechtenstein.
- Sun May Be Warming Both Earth and Mars
Simultaneous warming on Earth and Mars suggests that our planet’s recent climate changes might have a natural — and not a human-induced — cause. Mars, it appears, has also been experiencing milder temperatures in recent years. In 2005 data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions revealed that the carbon dioxide ‘ice caps’ near Mars’s south pole had been diminishing for three summers in a row. Habibullo Abdussamatov, head of the St. Petersburg’s Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory in Russia, says the Mars data is evidence that the current global warming on Earth is being caused by changes in the sun.
- Top Secret: We’re Wiretapping You
It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked “top secret.” And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.
You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.
- Microsoft Insider: “15% of Windows Vista written in INTERCAL”
At the time Bill Gates was ‘chief software architect’ and of course was still pulling the strings despite Steve Ballmer being CEO. Gates employed an ‘industry research’ firm, a company specializing in corporate espionage, to steal the source code of Apple’s work-in-progress, OS X version 10.2. He planned to beat Apple to market with Apple’s own new features. It was a very strange plan considering that Microsoft already owned over 90% of the desktop market.
So that’s why it took six years to make!