S Anand

Some interesting material on complexity that I found when hunting through the web. What if… Wired: 12 principles of the networked world Trojan Mice: What are complex adaptive systems?

Excellent article by a Microsoft cognitive psychologist on how we recognise words. We recognize a word’s component letters simultaneously, then use that visual information to recognize a word.

Southwest Airline’s effort to be humourous. Southwest … have [my business] because of low fares, and force-marching their employees through comic routines will do little to affect my choice of carrier. They are, however, wasting their “research” dollars and undoubtedly humiliating their employees. I suggest they stop. While the phrases themselves were well-crafted specimens of humor, delivered with carefully practiced inflection of the voice, the eyes of the pressganged comedians were cold and dead. ...

Outsource your own job. A programmer outsourced his job to an Indian programmer. Salary arbitrage: $67,000 - $12,000 = $55,000. He’s planning to get another job and do this again. (It’s probably not true, though)

Watson and Crick’s original paper on DNA in Nature magazine. It has not escaped our notice that the specific pairing we have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the genetic material. Comments Dae-Hyun Hahm 12 Sep 2006 6:22 am: I am a teaching professor and I need that paper in PDF for teaching in University.

Alternate exchanges: Hollywood Stock Exchange, Innovation futures, Blogshares. These exchanges are supposed to be remarkably accurate in predictions.

Google games

MIT’s Social Media Group

Excellent intro to social network analysis

About the mad life we have with children. Aniruddha will appreciate this.

Bald actresses. They look nice without the hair too. Comments kesh 27 Feb 2009 8:53 pm: where s d photos ? S Anand 28 Feb 2009 7:55 am: Looks like the original link went bad. Have replaced it with a Google search.

Dan Briklin on software that lasts 200 years.

Interesting idea to use gmail for backup.

Nilesh on the Uncanny valley. The point at which a simulation becomes close enough to reality that it stops matching up. I have seen a lot of this happen in software design too.

Street dogs in Athens are being poisoned. Maybe this happens everywhere. Maybe it is for the good. I just wish there were another way. (Don’t watch the clip.)

The Best Google Answers.

Excellent article by Paul Graham on great hackers.

Conversational cheap shots.

A good way to get things done at a call center.

Kevin Rose tests gmail performance at 1 GB.