5 Intriguing Things
"An eye doctor says he’s recently seen a few 35-year-old patients whose lenses, which are typically clear all the way up until around age 40, are so cloudy they resemble 75-year-olds’. A sleep doctor says kids as young as toddlers are suffering from chronic insomnia, which in turn affects their behavior and performance at school and daycare. A scientist finds that women who work night shifts are twice as likely to develop breast cancer than those who sleep at night. What do all these anecdotes have in common? Nighttime exposure to the blue light emanating from our screens." (gigaom.com)
2. A personal ethics of clicking.
"Immanuel Kant's perspective on ethics might suggest to us a Categorical Internet Imperative: Click only on those links that you can at the same time will all your fellow citizens to click on. I don't know about you, but many times I feel that if everybody were just clicking on what I'm clicking on, our culture would be racing toward - well, to pretty much where we are these days, I guess: a few reliable sources of insight and information doing their best to compete with freak shows, bear-baitings, and adorable kittens attacking paper bags." (3quarksdaily.com)
3. A massive indoor pool for testing Navy ships in suburban Maryland.
"The recent installation of 216 state-of-the-art electronically-controlled wave boards has made this the most sophisticated scientific wave-testing basin of its size in the world. Scaled-down fiberglass models, cruisers the size of canoes, ride waves that max out at a few feet high. But it’s the motion of the ocean that matters. The hinged wave boards, each with its own motor synced up to software, can precisely recreate eight ocean conditions (from flat calm to typhoonlike) across all seven seas, pushing the water and moving up and down like giant piano keys whose scales and chords are waves." (smithsonianmag.org)
4. One person has made it possible to find millions of historical images in the public domain.
"As a Yahoo! fellow at Georgetown, Leetaru wrote his own software to customize how books would be digitized during his project. The Internet Archive has used a program that discarded images, but Leetaru reengineered the software to go back and salvage what the original scans had discarded, leaving him with the images that would then be converted into a Jpeg format. Leetaru plans to make his code available to others and that any library could replicate what he has accomplished. 'That's actually my hope, that libraries around the world run this same process of their digitized books to constantly expand this universe of images,' he said." (thewire.com)
"Overwhelming evidence documents a tendency toward cost and effort overruns in software projects. On average, this overrun seems to be around 30 percent1. Furthermore, comparing the estimation accuracy of the 1980s with that reported in more recent surveys suggests that the estimation accuracy hasn’t changed much since then." (infoq.com)
Book 5. Junkyard Planet by Adam Minter. "An excellent overview of the global scrap business written by someone who grew up in the scrap business." Recommended by Zach Stednick.
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
clew, clue. The words are the same, but the more recent clue is now established in the usual sense of idea or fact that may lead to a discovery, while clew is retained in the nautical sense, & in the old-fashioned sense skein or ball of wool, from which the usual sense of clue has been developed.
Blue Light Emanating