SEALs Push U.S. Olympians to Limit in Their Training →

The SEALs warn their audience, comprised mostly of U.S. sailing team members: "We're going to re-set your baseline today."

Within hours, some athletes are on the edge of hypothermia, some are crying, others are cursing like, well, sailors, and all are fully immersed in misery.

I'm not sure I could come up with a more fitting sentence. This is an awesome story.

How I Scored A Million Points In SpellTower →

If you are playing the regular puzzle mode, there is no need to die. The only thing that would be guaranteed to do you in is that eventually you will use up so many words that there won't be enough left. But even that is not a problem, because I have discovered that the memory cache for the words already used is too small, so that if you play long enough, you can start using the same words a second or third time. This starts kicking in after you have amassed about 600,000 points.

Surely someone thought of that scenario when developing and tested it... Right? No?

Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012 →

To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet.

Forest Service May Blow Up Frozen Cows in Cabin →

Headline of the day. Bonus points for the photo caption:

Conundrum Creek Cabin, in the White River National Forest, near Aspen, Colo., where as many as six cows froze to death.

'Cocktail Party Effect' Identified in the Brain →

How your brain identifies and focuses on individual voices in crowds has been identified in the brain by some very clever researchers.

There's no Hope in Test →

While PM/Dev/Business Team may hope it works right, or ships on time, or sells enough, Hope is not a valid Testing Technique. Hope is another way of saying "Assume". Neither has a place in Test.

Testers do not Hope. They prove or disprove. We are paid to find invalid assumptions, not make them ourselves.

Going With the Flow: Google's Secret Switch to the Next Wave of Networking →

Though Google says it's too soon to get a measurement of the benefits, Hölzle does confirm that they are considerable. "Soon we will able to get very close to 100 percent utilization of our network," he says.

That's absolutely astoundingly considerable. As the article points out, it's 3-4 times better than the average utilization of a network.

I'm Being Followed: How Google - and 104 Other Companies - Are Tracking Me on the Web →

Companies' ability to track people online has significantly outpaced the cultural norms and expectations of privacy. This is not because online companies are worse than their offline counterparts, but rather because what they can do is so, so different.

Not only are these (numerous) companies getting better at tracking us, a lot of times we're unsure of what the privacy expectations should be around that tracking. But Madrigal anticipates where the uncertainty leads if we don't set cultural expectations on online privacy:

The current levels of machine intelligence insulate us from privacy catastrophe, so we let data be collected about us. But we know that this data is not going away and yet machine intelligence is growing rapidly. The results of this process are ineluctable. Left to their own devices, ad tracking firms will eventually be able to connect your various data selves. And then they will break down the name wall, if they are allowed to.

Another fantastic article from The Atlantic.