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Why spaghetti does not break in half. It usually breaks into three or more pieces. Audoly and Neukirch show several videos of this phenomenon. The also show that dry spaghetti breaks even if you just bend it, and release it suddenly. This is because the waves of curvature propogate through the spaghetti, and sometimes the curvature becomes too high. When you break spaghetti, it first breaks into two, and then the remaining halves behave as if they were released suddenly, splitting into further pieces.

Are the free Mac Minis for real? Hardy tries to get one – and succeeds. But… is it worth it? Pretty good economic analysis.

Most blogged books of 2005.

Paris by night. A panorama of Paris.

Site Helper: simple instructions on how to get a web site up and running.

Powers of Ten, a video for IBM zooming 10 times every 10 seconds through the universe.

So I have a blog is Sir Tim Berners-Lee’s blog. The comments on the first post pay homage to the father of the WWW. via LazyGeek

10 most puzzling artefacts.

Google Music Search and the Home Page API. With the home page API, Google Base, and Blogger, looks like Google has bypassed conventional web hosting and become a Web 2.0 host.

Tech support tricks of the trade. This one is very true. And I used to think computers just started working better when I was around…

All Apple advertisements

Da Vinci Code trailers. Comments Sai 15 Dec 2005 9:56 pm: Anand, tell us a bit about Infosys consulting. They seem to be on a big expansion drive. Hows it out there? S Anand 16 Dec 2005 7:32 am: I can mail you, Sai. What’s your e-mail ID? S Anand 16 Dec 2005 9:39 am: BTW, the del.icio.us tag on “The Da Vinci Code” is an anagram: c i con thee david. Sai 16 Dec 2005 7:42 pm: Anand it is [email protected] Sai 16 Dec 2005 7:46 pm: Thanks!

Quote by Herbert Simon on Information: What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention, and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it. It sounds quite like the Scientific American article The Tyranny of Choice which says that after a point, more choice causes unhappiness. The satisfaction of picking the best choice is less, because the second best is almost as good. And you’re more likely to not pick the best – because there are so many choices – and will regret it more often. ...

Research suggests that chimps learn differently from humans. When they showed the chimpanzees how to retrieve the food, the researchers added some unnecessary steps. Those chimps could see that the scientists were wasting their time sliding the bolt and tapping the top. None followed suit. They all went straight for the door. The children could see just as easily as the chimps that it was pointless to slide open the bolt or tap on top of the box. Yet 80 percent did so anyway. ...

Super cooled water.

An article on NYT about Ray Ozzie: can this man reprogram Microsoft?

Real-life Calvin snow art.

Yahoo buys del.icio.us.

Windows Live Local tries to match Google Maps. But Google Maps is just too fast. As I mentioned earlier (Why Google Reader): the reason I like Google is largely speed.>

500 mile e-mail: the story of a server that would not send e-mail beyond 500 miles.