Seth at DrBunsen.org:
My longest running experiment centers on coffee grinders. A common belief among coffee pundits is that good coffee depends on good grinding. Specifically, coffee ground with a burr grinder purportedly tastes better because it grinds the beans more uniformly and doesn’t over-heat the grounds like traditional blade grinders. The experiment I setup tested this claim by brewing coffee using a burr grinder or a blade grinder and scored which of the two cups subjects preferred.
OmniGraffle is one of my favorite annotation and mockup tools. It just got better with the release of version 6
Here are the full release notes
Thanks to Igloo for sponsoring the RSS feed again this week.
Stop waiting for your IT department to move off SharePoint and start using an intranet you’ll actually like. Igloo is free to use with your team, it’s built around easy to use apps like blogging and file sharing, and it has social tools built right in to help you get work done.
It works on your desktop, your tablet and your phone.
From the always excellent xkcd What If Series:
To make things worse, given the huge number of drives they manage, Google has a hard drive die every few minutes.[11] This isn’t actually all that expensive a problem, in the grand scheme of things—they just get good at replacing drives—but it’s weird to think that when a Googler runs a piece of code, they know that by the time it finishes executing, one of the machines it was running on will probably have suffered a drive failure.
From Discover Magazine:
The researchers combed through thousands of minuscule amber nuggets from nearly 80 million years ago. Among them they found 11 M&M-sized globules with traces of ancient feathers and fuzz. A number resembled modern feathers—some fit for flying and others designed to dive. And unlike fossils, the amber preserved colors too: white, gray, red and brown.
How can you not love stuff like this. Dinosaur feathers!!! Seriously.
Such a nice little animation about evolution. Good stuff.
From Mind Hacks:
The signs were clear to everyone but they were ignored because other people haven’t listened to the same point-of-view I expressed on the previous occasion the opportunity arose.
Dave Addey has a nice article about iBeacons. I’m both excited and terrified of this new prospect. It could enable some pretty amazing conveniences. I am concerned about where the data gets used and stored.
I’ve always wondered why so many companies were interested in big data. I think most are misinterpreting the concept.
Most companies don’t have the data that Google has, and can never hope to cash in on stuff at the scale of the ad traffic that Google sees. Even so, there are lots of smaller but real gains that lots of companies – but not all – could potentially realize if they collected the right kind of data and had good data people helping them.
As usual, the iFixit team does a great job figuring out what makes this stuff tick.
