Remember when Google released Chrome, a few people felt that the logo resembled Microsoft’s icon for Windows? Now, many people are saying that Microsoft’s use of the four colors looks like Google’s Chrome.
So…
Microsoft’s new logo looks like Google Chrome’s new logo which used to look like Chrome’s old logo which used to look like Microsoft’s old logo.
People seem to be losing track of who’s copying who.
The Any Search extension easily adds support for other search engines to Safari 6’s unified search/address bar. Before I was using Glims to hack it. This seems easier and probably not as big a drain on resources as a plugin.
via David Sparks
I know this is from the NY Times but I had to link to it. Alex Stone starts off his article on why waiting is torture to people:
”Some years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.
Translation: we’re dumb and allow our minds to be tricked. Read the rest because Stone touches on a few other psychological tricks and oddities that appear when people wait on line for something.
via DF
My wife and I try our best to buy locally sourced organic foods as often as we can. We do this for a lot of reasons including health and impact to the environment. We also tend to buy things as we need them; we don’t stock up unless it’s a dry good that we expect will last like beans, pasta, rice, and so on. Unfortunately we aren’t always the best at using everything we buy and sometimes it goes to waste. It’s not something we like to admit and try hard to avoid by planning out our meals but we haven’t been perfect at it. And it’s just as hard to hear we contribute to the 40% of food produced in the US that gets wasted anually.
”About 40 percent of food in the United States today goes uneaten. The average American consumer wastes 10 times as much food as someone in Southeast Asia — up 50 percent from Americans in the 1970s. Yet, 1 in 6 Americans doesn’t have enough to eat, says the U.S. Department of Agriculture. And food waste costs us about $165 billion a year and sucks up 25 percent of our freshwater supply.”
Don’t think the US is the only country to waste food. The UK does as well but they seem poised to help change that:
”The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says five million tonnes of edible food is discarded by UK households annually – the equivalent of £680 for a household with children.
Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said confusion over food labelling was responsible for an estimated £750m of the £12bn edible-food wastage each year.”
I’m all in favor of removing the ‘sell by’ dates on many foods – partially because we shouldn’t be buying food that’s processed and has a ‘shelf life’. We should be eating foods that naturally tell us when they aren’t safe to eat because, well, they went bad and we’re smart enough to know when a piece of fruit isn’t editable.
via Unlikely Words and NPR. h/t to The Kitchn
Brett Kelly on what he's calls a Kickstarter Potential Backer's Mental Checklist:
"…novelty and excitement have been key elements in my decision to support Kickstarter projects. Neither of these hold up well over time."
He talks about what he calls ‘interest attrition' that takes place between learning of a new project and the day a shipped product is received. In his checklist, he highlights some of the challenges with crowd funded projects from Kickstarter. None of them are insurmountable but it's something to keep in mind when backing something.
But, to me, these are important points for the project organizers themselves. Communication is key. And limiting your production rates is just as important as achieving your minimums.