Simon

"And so was born Chinese restaurant syndrome (CRS) and a medico-academic industry dedicated to the researching and publicising of the dangers of MSG - the foreign migrant contaminating American kitchens. [...] Science has still not found a convincing explanation for CRS: indeed, some researchers suggest it may well be to do with the other things diners have imbibed there - peanuts, shellfish, large amounts of lager. Others say that fear of MSG is a form of mass psychosis - you suffer the symptoms you've been told to worry about." - Simon

"My friend Nic came round. He told me about a Japanese restaurant he'd been to that gave him headaches and a 'weird tingling in the cheeks' - until he told them to stop with the MSG. Then he was fine, he said. I nodded and I served him two tomato and chive salads; both were made using the very same ingredients but I told him one plate of tomatoes was 'organic', the other 'factory-farmed'. The organic tomatoes were far better, we agreed. These, of course, were the tomatoes doused with mono sodium glutamate." - Private Sanjeev

List price: $625. - Simon

Hint: It's not a niche area. Linklaters has an annual revenue of $2.5 billion and is the second largest firm in the world in this industry. The names do seem to be quite apropos. - Simon

"Among all our casual topics, whether someone likes the taste of beer is the single best predictor of if he or she has sex on the first date." "If you want to know... Is my date religious? Ask... Do spelling and grammar mistakes annoy you? If your date answers 'no'—i.e. is okay with bad grammar and spelling—the odds of him or her being at least moderately religious is slightly better than 2:1." - Simon

Perhaps this indicates that Aprils tend to be born in April. Similarly for Mays and Junes. But Julies do not. - Simon

Audio is apparently recorded binaurally -- use headphones for the full effect! - Simon

"Google engaged in a “honeypot” attack to trick Bing. In simple terms, Google’s “experiment” was rigged to manipulate Bing search results through a type of attack also known as “click fraud.”" - Simon

"“How much does a kilogram weigh these days?” may sound an odd question. In fact, a kilogram is the mass of a cylindrical lump of platinum-iridium alloy that was cast in 1879 in London.[...] The kilogram is the last bit of the International System of Units (SI) to be tied explicitly to an artefact." - Simon

"With a reverse 0-to-60-mph time of 9.2 seconds, the Lincoln is only 1.1 seconds slower going backward than forward" - Simon

"In the settlement, the agency pledged to inform its officers of the public’s general right to photograph the exteriors of federal courthouses. Now, the civil liberties group has received a redacted version of the directive that was sent out last year. Significantly, it embraces federal buildings — not just courthouses — nationwide. The three-page bulletin reminds officers, agents and employees that, “absent reasonable suspicion or probable cause,” they “must allow individuals to photograph the exterior of federally owned or leased facilities from publicly accessible spaces” like streets, sidewalks, parks and plazas. Even when there seems to be reason to intercede and conduct a “field interview,” the directive says: Officers should not seize the camera or its contents, and must be cautious not to give such ‘orders’ to a photographer to erase the contents of a camera, as this constitutes a seizure or detention."" - Simon

"A few days ago, China Central Television showed footage of what they claimed was an air force training exercise conducted on January 23. From the looks of things, they were actually just playing clips from Top Gun." - Simon

Whoa. A billion people are going to think the US Air Force endorses Kenny Loggins. - Micah

Drool. Compact sized. APS-C sensor. 12.3 MP. Optical + 1.4MP electronic viewfinder. 9 blade aperture. Metal dials. - Simon

"So in the years ahead, China will have lots of patents—far more than the U.S. You can’t fault China; it is simply taking a page from Silicon Valley’s playbook. Chinese patents will serve as land mines for foreign businesses. They will allow China to demand license fees from companies that do business there or to shut them out entirely. It’s best to disarm before it is too late.  That means reforming the patent system. We really don’t need software patents, and we really don’t need patents in other technologies that evolve rapidly." - Simon

I use OS X and Windows regularly, but I still find the OS X font rendering rather blurry. I can certainly appreciate the same-as-the-printed-page fidelity of OS X (I was the production manger at a student newspaper long ago). However, these days I view most content on-screen and so I would rather the displayed fonts be optimized for on-screen than on-page viewing. - Simon

Hopefully it'll become moot as ppi densities get ever higher. - Simon

For the standard Windows fonts (well hinted), the Windows rendering is nice, and the OS X rendering is blurry. However for most fonts (*), the Windows rendering is horrendous, and the OS X rendering is blurry but good. (*) I've been looking at lots of fonts from Google Font Directory, TypeKit, Font Squirrel, etc. for possible use on my web pages, but they all look so awful in Windows that I'm only using the default fonts for now. :( - Amit Patel

One can force OS X to use LCD font smoothing on all displays with this Terminal command: defaults -currentHost write -globalDomain AppleFontSmoothing -int 2 http://hints.macworld.com/article... - Ashish

"our calculations suggest that Gmail is 32 times more reliable than the average email system, and 46 times more available than Microsoft Exchange" - Simon

That huge drop in 1966 (and slight bumps in neighboring years) was due to superstition -- it was the year of the Fire Horse. - Simon

I wonder if the response rate would have been any different if it were an engineering or science class. - Simon

Cool visualization of returns from the S&P over time. Not sure why they would chose light red for 0-3% net positive returns above inflation though. With this color scheme cash would be deep red, and bonds would probably be mostly various shades of red. - Simon

""there is no definition of a mental disorder. It’s bullshit. I mean, you just can’t define it.” Allen Frances, lead editor of the fourth edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders [DSM] [...] one psychiatrist wrote after the APA voted homosexuality out of the DSM, “there is a terrible sense of shame among psychiatrists, always wanting to show that our diagnoses are as good as the scientific ones used in real medicine.” - Simon

Lots of interesting ones, and this one is my favorite: "The bias blind spot is the cognitive bias of failing to compensate for one's own cognitive biases." - Simon

"Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu's dollhouse to the car and told her I'd donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn't have "The Little White Donkey" perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, "I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?" I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she still kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn't do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic. Jed took me aside. He told me to stop insulting Lulu—which I wasn't even doing, I was just motivating her" - Simon

... and here's the SFGate story on how she was taken out of context: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin... - Mr. Gunn

leg gully, silly mid-off, square leg, deep extra cover, backward short leg... - Simon

long leg - Ashish

Long stop and straight hit positions are rarely(never) used now a days. - Ashish

"After being stunned by the quality of the street photographs, Maloof began digging and discovered that they were created by a nanny and street photographer named Vivian Maier. Now some are saying he might have discovered one of the greatest (and previously unknown) street photographers of the 20th century." - Simon

She died in 2009 and her work only reached critical acclaim after her death. Some examples of her work here: http://vivianmaierphotography.com/ Her street photography is pretty breathtaking. - Simon

:) At least, they weren't afraid to explore each item! - Anne Bouey

A pretty amazing story about ex-Apple employees continuing to develop a canceled project even after they had been made unemployed: " We found two [empty Apple offices] and started sneaking into the building every day, waiting out in front for real employees to arrive and casually tailgating them through the door. Lots of people knew us and no one asked questions, since we wore our old badges as decoys. [...] Once we had a plausible way to ship, Apple became the ideal work environment. Every engineer we knew was willing to help us. We got resources that would never have been available to us had we been on the payroll." - Simon

The video: http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Simon

A beautiful story :) - Private Sanjeev