Why does everything have to be some complicated? One thing seemed so sure: If you plant trees, you take CO2 out of the atmosphere and reduce global warming. Trees are currently planted everywhere on a massive scale by governments and private donors. That is good. But apparently, the effect on climate change is not so easy to assess. Trees don’t only reduce global warming, they also contribute to it through several mechanisms:
Link of the day: Online Advertising is the New Dotcom Bubble
Very often, advertising makes surprisingly little sense. If you are trying to target the audience that is most likely persuaded by your ad, you are also targeting the people that are most likely going to use your service anyway, without seeing your ad. It is a bit like handing out coupons to people who are already standing in line to get something. The problem: This selection effect often cannot … more
Link of the day: The Effect of Nuclear Explosions on Commercially Packaged Beverages (scientific paper)
Yep. It is exactly what you think it is. In the 50s the United States conducted an experiment to test how a nuclear bomb would affect packed drinks like soda and beer and published a paper on it. Turns out: if your can isn’t broken after the nuclear explosion, you are probably safe to drink it.
Link of the day: List of Things That Can Be Built Closer to a Home Than A Wind Turbine (German)
Germany recently prohibited to build new wind turbines that are closer than 1000m to a home. This is a huge problem for renewable energies in Germany, as space for new wind turbines is very scarce. Here is a surprising list of things that are deemed less problematic than wind turbines. It is more than just a bit absurd.
Sometimes history makes me very angry. This is one of these times. In 1954 the CIA launched a coup d’état in Guatemala and deposed the democratically elected president, Jacobo Árbenz. Árbenz had introduced, among others, a land reform to help rural farmers. The coup was most strongly lobbied for by the United Fruits Company (now Chiquita Brands International) who was one of the main targets of that land reform. At the time, the United Fruits Company made an annual … more
Bananas are radioactive. This is because they naturally contain high amounts of Potassium and a certain percentage of that is the radioactive Potassium-40. This apparently also causes trucks with bananas to be triple checked at borders in order to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons that could be smuggled under a pile of bananas (I couldn’t find a link for that unfortunately, take that info with a grain of salt). Bananas are therefore often used in popular science articles … more
Link of the day: How the predominant idea that Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is caused by plaques in the brain may have slowed down scientific progress by years.
Ideally, scientific progress is an open process where ideas compete and all good hypotheses are tested. Sometimes, progress may be slowed down if a predominant dogma hinders this open exchange of ideas. The article presents an interesting overview of the story of Alzheimer’s from that perspective.
Everything was better in the good old days. You can ask your grandpa. But anecdotes aside, it really seems like things have been possible in the past that are not possible anymore, and nobody really knows why. On his website, Patrick Collison lists numerous examples for things that were either much cheaper or much more quickly achieved in the past than seems possible today:
Link of the day: The Tomato Timer
Happy New Year!
If you want to boost you’re productivity for the oncoming year and haven’t heard of the Pomodoro Technique, check it out. It is a simple and effective tool to boost productivity.
Link of the day: List of Things that are Accidentally Turing-Complete
A machine that is Turing-complete can in principle execute every conceivable computer program (I leave the detailed explanation to Wikipedia). Some things are designed to be Turing-complete (programming languages), others are not (Pokemon Yellow Edition, Super Mario, MS PowerPoint). And the latter are decisively more funny. Check it out, if you’re interested. Also look at this hilarious 5min video of someone programming software with PowerPoint!
