Last week’s
edition here.
Previously on MoreLiver’s:
OFF-TOPIC
DRINKING
It's not
the end of soda -- yet. But soft drinks have peaked, while bottled water,
energy drinks, and a considerable amount of premium alcohol are taking their
place in our liquid diet.
Last Call – Washington
Monthly
Industry
giants are threatening to swallow up America's carefully regulated alcohol
industry, and remake America in the image of booze-soaked Britain.
TECHNOLOGY
High-definition TV: Ne plus ultra – Babbage
/ The Economist
Having seen
interest in 3D television fizzle, consumer-electronics firms are desperate to
find some other blockbuster product that will get customers back into big-box
stores.
How roads could beat rail – Felix
Salmon / Reuters
Researchers
who have used the biomolecule to encoded MP3s, text files, and JPEGs say it
will be a competitive storage medium in just a few decades.
A Free Database of the Entire Web May Spawn the
Next Google – MIT
Technology Review
Common
Crawl supplies a database of over five billion Web pages in the hope that it
will inspire new research or online services.
What Makes a Mind? Kurzweil and Google May be
Surprised – MIT
Technology Review
One AI
researcher suggests that an ambitious plan to build a more intelligent machine
may be flawed.
Opportunity may no longer be able to move
forward. Fortunately, boffins have worked around this niggle by getting this
Mars Exploration Rover (MER-B, to give its technical moniker) to drive in
reverse. It is thanks to clever tinkering like this that it is "nine years
into its 90-day mission",
WORK / LIFE
How to create great slides for presentations – Mike
Jeffs / slideshare
Checklist: Are you
doing these five things to be the best? – Barking
Smokers who quit
before age 40 have lifespan almost as long as people who never smoked – Scienceblog
Here’s how you’ll
waste 43 days of your life – MarketWatch
Hours spent on hold listening to Muzak add up over
time. Having to wait 40 days and 40 nights sounds like a torture of biblical
proportions, but the average American suffers just that long over the course of
a lifetime — on hold.
Why You Truly Never Leave High School – The New York Magazine
New science
on its corrosive, traumatizing effects.
Everybody’s An Expert – Farnam
Street
One of
Tetlock’s counter-intuitive findings is that specialists are not significantly
more reliable than non-specialists in predicting what is going to happen, even
in the field they study.
Pot Smokers Might Not Turn into Dopes after All – SciAm
Revisiting
data casts doubt on the link between heavy cannabis use and declining IQ
Finance lost. Tech won. Here’s why. – pandodaily
I failed at
investment banking. And it wasn’t this soft, cheery type of failure that we
celebrate in Silicon
Valley. It
was a real failure.
Building Blocks and Innovation – Farnam
Street
Most
innovation comes from combining well-known, well-established, building blocks
in new ways.
SMART
PHONE
I’m Going Back to my “Dumb” Phone. Should You? – MIT
Technology Review
For the
next month, I’m trying out a smartphone-less existence. Am I crazy?
My Dumb Phone Experiment: Week One – MIT
Technology Review
It’s not
going great, guys.
My Dumb Phone Experiment: Week Two – MIT
Technology Review
In modern
society, there’s no such thing as giving up your smartphone.
Why I’m Not Going Back to My iPhone – MIT
Technology Review
For now, at
least, my dumb phone experiment has reached a strange equilibrium.
OTHER
Lucasfilm Confirms: J.J. Abrams Will Direct the
Next Star Wars Movie
– Wired
Back in business – Babbage /
The Economist
An
unprecedented move by America's government, in the shape of the
country's National Scientific Advisory Board for Biosecurity, to request that
the world's two leading scientific journals censor the papers
James Bond,
Moviegoers Face New Nemesis: Chinese Censors –WSJ
James Bond and the Killer Bag Lady – Salon
New clues
and a powerful Wall St. skeptic challenge the official
story of CIA financier Nick Deak's brutal murder…In November 1985, a woman who
appeared to be a homeless drifter staked out the offices of 80-year-old banker
Nicholas Deak, waited until he returned from lunch, then executed Deak and his
secretary. As police wrestled her to the floor, she said “Don’t hurt me. He
told me I could carry the gun.”
What would George Orwell have made of the
world in 2013? – The
Guardian
If he were
alive today, would he be writing about call centres and Occupy? Or would he
have become a rightwing food writer? It's not as crazy as it sounds
Mind and
Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost
Certainly False
IN FINNISH
Euroalueen loppupelit
– Henri
Myllyniemi / US Puheenvuoro
Japani elvyttää
umpikujaan – Nordea
Tappaako vahvempi
euro euroalueen toipumisen? – Nordea
Oligopoli – takkirauta