Interesting Links for 04-01-2012

[andrewducker]

• This is What Happens When You Give Thousands of Stickers to Thousands of Kids
  (tags: art children )
• The US ends its pro-democracy pretense
  (tags: politics usa iran egypt democracy middle east israel )
• Some science on why dieting doesn't work (and what you need to do to make it work).
  (tags: diet weight health )
• 'Big banks make their money from optimism' - an interview with an investment strategist
  (tags: banking finance investment )
• Killer instinct - the financial company that deliberately hired psychopaths.
  (tags: economics psychopath psychology finance banking )
• Paypal forces buyer to destroy disputed violin worth thousands of dollars
  (tags: paypal violin )
• Top Ten Cutest Photos of 2011
  (tags: photos cute 2011 )
• The Dumbest Idea In The World: Maximizing Shareholder Value
  (tags: business economics management capitalism finance value )
• Mineways - 3D printing of Minecraft landscapes/objects.
  (tags: minecraft printing 3d )
• Steam reaches 5 million concurrent user mark
  So, PC gaming still not dead? I wonder what the comparative figures for the 360 and PS3 would be.
  (tags: steam games computergames )
• I Have Seen the Future of Retail…And It Doesn't Have Cashiers
  Of course, this is about the low end of the market. Where people are prepared to pay higher prices there will be assistants there to make it easy for them.
  (tags: business shopping technology )

Comments

[buddleia]

That NYT article isn't remotely scientific. It's a long wail about how mean human bodies are to people who want to fit a societally approved model of beauty. Nowhere is it mentioned that a lot of recent studies refute the thin=always healthy and fat=always unhealthy model. Since it has now been fairly conclusively proved that the only way for a fat person to be a thin person is to adopt the psychological and eating habits typical of someone with a serious eating disorder, perhaps it might have been more helpful of the writer to look at the Health At Every Size movement (HAES).

[bohemiancoast.livejournal.com]

Cashiers are still much more efficient than self-scanning for large shopping trolleys, though my local Asda, which is much, much bigger than this shop, is self-scan only now. Waitrose experimented with scanning as you go round the shop, but we found it tedious.

But seriously; the future of lower-end retail doesn't just have no cashiers, it has no shops.

I like PC games

[zornhau.livejournal.com]

Mouse control seems more natural, and my study is set up for looking at the screen.

[tysolna]

I have been playing the violin since I was seven. I own a violin, and if someone asked me what item I would save out of a burning house if I could take only one, it would be the violin every time.

The forced destruction of a musical instrument saddens me beyond words. What makes me even madder though is that the purchaser went along with this and destroyed it.

[anton-p-nym.livejournal.com]

re: Steam concurrent users

I don't know if Xbox has released its record, but I do know that a couple of individual games have breached the million concurrent-players mark on Xbox Live. (Mainly the big shooters like the Halo and Call of Duty franchises, usually during their respective launch weeks.) XBL also claims 35 million subscribers as of last December, though I don't know if they've ever publicly distinguished how many of these are the lower-service free accounts and how many are Gold accounts that can play online.

-- Steve doesn't follow the Playstation 3 figures nearly as closely, so he won't comment to avoid inadvertantly saying something ridiculous.

21st century shopping

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

One of the keys to the big box store model is externalizing the cost of the last ten miles' transportation. Instead of buying from a small, local store, the small local stores are driven out of business by big boxes with less service and raw warehouse shelving.

Peak oil is ending the viability of that model. I don't know what will replace it, but I've been watching. Online ordering with semi-local delivery may be an early contender. The big fabric store a couple blocks from me now receives packages from J. C. Penny -- just like my mother going to Wards or Sears to pick up her catalog order when I was little . . .

[octopoid-horror.livejournal.com]

The US has not been pro-democracy for quite some time. During WW2 it was anti-Imperial (in the sense of the Nazis, Japan and also Britain) rather than pro-democracy, then by the 60s the US was already propping up dictators in the carribean and latin america who happily murdered & tortured their way to power and overthrowing democratic governments to install said dictators.

Here's a funny thing - here's the demands that the US made to the Taliban

Deliver to the U.S. all of the leaders of Al-Qaeda
Release all foreign nationals that have been "unjustly imprisoned"
Protect foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers
Close immediately every terrorist training camp
Hand over every terrorist and their supporters to appropriate authorities
Give the United States full access to terrorist training camps for inspection

Aside from the first one, and substituting UN for US in the last one, these are all things that people are/should have been demanding of the US since the end of 2001 if not before.

It's nice that they've stopped pretending. I'm (relatively speaking) more comfortable with a country openly saying "hell yeah we torture people and protect our own interests with force" than pretending they're something else.