April 2009
9 posts
Slow Loris
If monkeys could legally have pets, this would be mine:
Markdown and MarsEdit
One new thing I’ve been trying with this site is to compose new entries using Markdown. This is a simple language optimized for composing web entries (co-created by John Gruber, author of daringfireball.net). It strikes me as being a lot like LaTeX. It handles line breaks similarly (one line break is ignored, while two or more indicates a new paragraph), makes it straightforward to have...
far-fetched imagination
For all the naysayers who believe that all this monkey changing into human stuff is nonsense, I bring to your attention the following study. Essentially, they (the authors of the paper this article is summarizing) show that simply imagining a situation increases the probability that the event will occur.
I’m glad I bought nine cans of Alpha-ghetti.
horizontal gene transfer
thinking implies fairness
Moral hypocrisy:
This is an insightful, and simple, experiment done to measure perceived fairness, and hypocrisy in humans (those silly hypocritical creatures).
The paper measures the difference in decision outcomes between initial “knee-jerk” reactions, and more thoughtful decisions. Giving the participants the task of memorizing a number seemed to make a large difference in the...
running pigeons up a ramp
evolution of flight: This summary of a paper talks about the attempt to determine how birds started to fly long ago. This isn’t so much entertaining to me as this:
“Earlier studies carried out in the US looked at how flapping flight could have evolved, by making Chukar partidges run up an incline. Noting how wingbeats assisted the birds, the researchers claimed that such a process...
bookmarklets
I’ve got a number of bookmarklets I use quite frequently that I find very useful. I thought I’d mention them here. Each page I point to has a link you can drag to your bookmark bar so that you can use them on the current webpage easily. They should work in all browsers.
Readability:
This takes a crowded webpage and prunes it down to the most important content (strips out ads,...
loneliness
the bottom right corner
As a monkey, it is hard for me to feel any more significant than an atom. Look at me over at the bottom right corner.