How Your Cat Is Making You Crazy →
"But frankly, this mostly falls into the 'Get a load of this, can you believe what nature has come up with?' category."
Research from several different studies in several different fields has flagged a parasite called Toxoplasma gondii, which is excreted by cats in their feces, as a contributor to car crashes, suicides, and mental disorders such as schizophrenia, due to the way researchers hypothesize it influences the fear and anxiety centers of our brains.
Any interesting case all sorts of people are researching, including parasitologists, psychiatrists, evolutionary biologists, and neuroscientists.
How to Approach a Responsive Design →
Upstatement blogs about their work on the Boston Globe's responsive redesign and the tools and process behind it.
"Content" Creep →
"Content" and the metrics it enables are not unlike a drug. They offer a quick fix for publishers, but overuse leads to a brutal hangover.
Frictionless sharing isn't frictionless after all. All it does is trade the small friction of having to choose what to share with the large friction of having to think about whether what you're about to do will be shared.
— Nick Bradbury, "The Friction in Frictionless Sharing"
New Error-Correcting Codes Guarantee Optimal Data Transmission Rates →
In the next issue of the journal IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, Gregory Wornell, a professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at MIT, Uri Erez at Tel Aviv University in Israel, and Mitchell Trott at Google describe a new coding scheme that guarantees the fastest possible delivery of data over fluctuating wireless connections without requiring prior knowledge of noise levels.
This is brilliant, and immediately implementable in the real-world to produce higher-quality and more efficient transmissions despite noise levels over the channel, such as WiFi or cell frequencies.
Small Teams Beat Large Teams in Software Development →
The two biggest reasons they found? Communication and defect rates.
This is an interesting debate for me because some of the feature teams we have at Hotmail would consume all the developers of some of the small companies mentioned, but we also have PMs and testers who are on point to help handle some of the inefficiencies in communication and catch defects as they are coded. I imagine some of these smaller companies do not.
All in all, I've seen benefits firsthand to both approaches.
Adam Ladd, 5-Year-Old Analyzes Logos
Mac OS X Mountain Lion vs. a Real Mountain Lion →
Best comparison chart I've read in a long time...
Technology, Hollywood Edition →
Let's amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special "Hollywood Edition" of our products. Here are some of the special new "features" we'll be giving them…
(via Steve Hanov)