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How to feed a family of 4 for $45. These recipes are nutritious and healthy. They are low in fat and cholesterol, high in protein and rich in fibre.

Gap Minder – an excellent dynamic interface to world economic indicators.

Why your boss is overpaid. The ugly truth is that your boss is probably overpaid–and it’s for your benefit, not his. We work our socks off in underpaying jobs in the hope that one day we’ll win the rat race and become overpaid fat cats ourselves. Economists call this “tournament theory.” The second, and more counterintuitive, prediction of tournament theory is that the more luck is involved in work, the larger the pay gaps should be between the winners and the losers. If Jack’s promotion is 90% luck and 10% effort, Jack may be inclined to goof off–unless, of course, the rewards for promotion are absolutely astronomical. And they sometimes are. ...

Timeline of trends and events from 1750 to 2100 (yes, that’s next century).

Where does dust come from? Inside the house, it’s mostly from our skin. Short of vacuuming the carpet regularly, there’s little you can do about it.

Why we all sell code with bugs. All the reasons are tied up in one truth: every time you fix a bug, you risk introducing another. Don’t we all start out with the belief that software only gets better as we work on it? Nobody on our team intentionally creates new bugs. Yet we have done accidentally.

The Mathematical Structure of Terrorism. The frequency distribution of terrorist attacks – be it in Iraq, Columbia, Afghanistan or anywhere in the world – is the same. The frequency distribution of the size of terrorist groups is the same as well.

Dan cracked the final challenge of the Google Da Vinci Code Quest in 5 minutes. The top 10,000 get a cryptex to solve. (Photos)

Search engines rank their own sites better. Yahoo Answers ranks higher on Yahoo, but not on MSN or Google. Google Answers ranks high on Google, but not on Yahoo or MSN. This is bias, but not necessarily evil. They may just be fooling themselves. Even scientists, the genuinely objective ones, do this. As Feynman points out in Cargo Cult Science: Millikan measured the charge on an electron by an experiment with falling oil drops, and got an answer which we now know not to be quite right. It’s a little bit off because he had the incorrect value for the viscosity of air. It’s interesting to look at the history of measurements of the charge of an electron, after Millikan. If you plot them as a function of time, you find that one is a little bit bigger than Millikan’s, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, and the next one’s a little bit bigger than that, until finally they settle down to a number which is higher. ...

Though Google Reader learns to share, I haven’t found it easy to see what others are reading. Even a Google search for shared lists reveals very few.

Shared books at esnips.com. You can download the entire book. Authors include Jeffrey Archer, Fredrick Forsyth, Arthur Hailey, Erich Segal, Michael Crichton, J K Rowling, Terry Pratchett, etc. Comments blogreader 18 May 2006 4:39 pm: Anand, are these downloads copyright comliant? any idea? Sai 18 May 2006 7:01 pm: Real nice, thanks for sharing. Dhar 19 May 2006 5:53 am: Blogreader, you can bet your last dime that these books are NOT copyright compliant. Cheers, D. Anonymous 19 May 2006 1:38 pm: Then do u still think we shud support these? S Anand 19 May 2006 5:35 pm: Doesn’t look like anyone’s earning any money out of it – so it may not be a matter of support. I guess at best we can choose not to download these. Sai 19 May 2006 11:09 pm: Oops :). did not realize that angle. Had felt happy for having found a cool medium. Anonymous 20 May 2006 6:25 am: Yes Anand. Makes sense. It wud be so unfair on our part to enjoy some nice works without having to pay for it.

Google Notebook released. Would be more useful when they Add offline functionality Reduce the accesses to the server Comments India News 17 May 2006 5:10 am: I am building a large INDIA news website. I found your blog today and loved the things that you write about! Would you be willing to write 1-3 small articles about India related topics that I can include on our site? We will gladly link back to your blog from the page that your article is on. - We have high ambitions for this site and will be generating quite a bit of traffic. Would you like to trade links? (Our site is: http://www.India-News.in ) I would love for your contribution,

People act on the spur of the moment, most of the time. So, as you can see from this example below, psychology can be more important than economics. Senthil Mullainathan worked with a bank in South Africa that wanted to make more loans. A neoclassical economist would have offered simple counsel: lower the interest rate, and people will borrow more. Instead, the bank chose to investigate some contextual factors in the process of making its offer. It mailed letters to 70,000 previous borrowers saying, “Congratulations! You’re eligible for a special interest rate on a new loan.” But the interest rate was randomized on the letters: some got a low rate, others a high one. “It was done like a randomized clinical trial of a drug,” Mullainathan explains. ...

Google launches Google Co-op, which lets you search deep content (and share deep content), and Google Trends, which is like Google Zeitgeist for your searches.

10 ways to add variety to your digital photographs. Exposure bracketing sounds especially interesting. Comments Dhar 10 May 2006 7:29 pm: Err, this seems a sure shot way of never learning to photograph properly. The problem with this approach is that people just take shots and pray that things will turn out correct (spray and pray). It would be better to make LOTS of mistakes early on and get a correct idea of things like exposure and composition and then use Exposure bracketing. “when it comes to shooting lots of images - take note of what you%u2019re doing.” From personal experience, this is crazy. With film SLRs (at least the model I had), note taking was often required because info about shutter speed, aperture, focal length was not available otherwise. But come on, with digital cameras this is easily available in the EXIF data. And how many times would you interrupt your photography session to note down these details. I personally feel, the better idea is to MAKE mistakes. Dont bother with exposure bracketing, multiple shots with different focal lengths and the like. If your snaps dont come out right, analysis and comments from people who know photographic techniques will tell you what is to be done the next time and then your snaps will be correct. Sorry for the long comment, but felt it worthwhile to point out a different opinion. Cheers, D.

Share your OPML. Seems to be down, though. Comments rajkumarc 11 May 2006 7:54 am: 24/25 - Great work and kept me awake until I got it right. Couldn’t figure out what was song #23. S Anand 11 May 2006 11:59 am: #23: Kamal, Sridevi song. rajkumarc 12 May 2006 5:00 am: Thanks S Anand. I guessed it right the first time but typed in Sivappu instead of Sigappu and it was not accepted. S Anand 14 May 2006 8:25 am: Yeah, it’s a little difficult making tradeoffs on what variations to allow and what not to. ‘v’ maps to w, b, g… too many things.

Now your tongue can see. Clive Thomson suggests that this could be a good interface for video games too. Comments rajkumarc 6 May 2006 12:00 pm: 10/10

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Watch TV shows online.

How to Exercise an Open Mind.