Great interactive timeline of the Internet. It’s amazing how some of the concepts were first thought of in the 30’s and 40’s. It’s also amazing how development picked up in the 60’s and 70’s but just exploded in the 90’s. It’s also amazing that such old technology still powers much of the web today.
via The Loop
I was told there really isn't a 'cure' or way to prevent jet lag but, it turns out, someone has come up with a solution:
The Argonne Anti-Jet-Lag Diet is helping travelers quickly adjust
their bodies' internal clocks to new time zones. It is also being
used to speed the adjustment of shiftworkers, such as power
plant operators, to periodically rotating work hours. The diet was
developed by Dr. Charles F. Ehret of Argonne's Division of
Biological and Medical Research as an application of his fundamental
studies of the daily biological rhythms of animals. Argonne National
Laboratory is one of the US Department of Energy's major centers of
research in energy and the fundamental sciences.
I'm going to play skeptic on this until I have to travel again but I'll definitely try it.
via Kottke
Russia, say the surveys, have nearly 20 million alcoholics which is about one in five men. It's a problem the government has spent decades trying to solve:
The Russian government has repeatedly tried to combat the problem, but to little avail: this includes four reforms prior to 1917, and larger scale measures taken during the Soviet period in 1958, 1972, and 1985. “After each drastically stepped-up anti-alcohol campaign, [Russian] society found itself faced with an even greater spread of drunkenness and alcoholism,” explains G.G. Zaigraev, professor of Sociological Sciences and Head Science Associate of the Institute of Sociology at the Russian Academy of Sciences. The Kremlin’s own addiction to liquor revenues has overturned many efforts to wean Russians from the snifter: Ivan the Terrible encouraged his subjects to drink their last kopecks away in state-owned taverns to help pad the emperor’s purse. Before Mikhail Gorbachev rose to power in the 1980s, Soviet leaders welcomed alcohol sales as a source of state revenue and did not view heavy drinking as a significant social problem. In 2010, Russia’s finance minister, Aleksei L. Kudrin, explained that the best thing Russians can do to help, “the country’s flaccid national economy was to smoke and drink more, thereby paying more in taxes.”
Sad. The article reads as if Russia's government is actively promoting promoting behavior that only serves to cause longer-term problems for short term gains. And it also points out that Russia's AA doesn't have one of the major components of any AA programs around the world: religion. Say what you want about them, but AA relies on the concept of God to help addicts through the process. It's missing in Russia because, among other reasons, the government doesn't recognize AA as a treatment.
John Gruber, to no one's surprise, reviews the new iPhones. Of course he loves them… If I had one, I'd love too it since I love my iPhone 5. Among the details of fit and finish, he talks things only geeks care about: speed benchmarks. Now we all expected the new iPhone 5s to be fast, but this was eye opening:
To put that in context, the iPhone 5S beats my 2008 15-inch MacBook Pro by a small measure in the Sunspider benchmark (with the MacBook Pro running the latest Safari 6.1 beta). The iPhone 5S is, in some measures, computationally superior to the top-of-the-line MacBook Pro from just five years ago. In your fucking pocket.
Emphasis mine.
Rands wrote a long, excessively so, post on the ex-Instagram filter, Gotham, which was depreciated with the 2.0 release. Many people get upset when filters are changed or removed completely. But it’s guys like him that mercilessly work to recreate what was taken for us in another form.
Many dear friends wish I would shut the fuck up regarding the Gotham filter. It’s not happening because obsessing about the details not only continues to educate me, it also provides me the opportunity to form a well-constructed opinion. In a world where we mindlessly repeat the loudest and most compelling tweets as fact, a well-constructed opinion is rare. It’s rare because a well-constructed opinion can defend itself. Through a combination of experience, facts, and, occasionally, passion, a well-constructed opinion is a refreshing signal among a sea of unstructured, unattributed noise.
But it’s this point on knowing your facts and being educated in something is very rare and a critical success factor when delivering a message with confidence and conviction.