The Economist’s Tom Standage spoke to Joseph Lichterman at Nieman Lab recently about the newspaper’s digital strategy and “the limit of a model based on advertising”. I was struck by the clarity of purpose expressed in these paragraphs: We sell the antidote to information overload — we sell a finite, finishable, very tightly curated bundle …
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Just for the wow factor: NASA tested its new space launch system rocket booster in Utah. Watch to the end to see the ‘quench tool’ in action. Published on 11 Mar 2015 The largest, most powerful rocket booster ever built successfully fired up Wednesday for a major-milestone ground test in preparation for future missions to …
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A lovely bite-sized tour of Plato’s greatest hits from The School of Life. Plato’s four big ideas for a more fulfilled life: Think more (and know yourself) Let your lover change you (love is based on admiration, we need to help each other) Decode the message of beauty (we sense in beauty qualities we need …
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Dr Steven Kotler, Director of Research for the Flow Genome Project, talks in this 4:20 video about the neurochemistry of your brain when you’re in a flow state. Transcript from YouTube: Besides neuroanatomical changes in flow there are neurochemical changes, right. The brain produces a giant cascade of neurochemistry. You get norepinephrine, dopamine, anandamide, serotonin …
By Duncan Forgan, University of St Andrews We all know and love the moon. We’re so assured that we only have one that we don’t even give it a specific name. It is the brightest object in the night sky, and amateur astronomers take great delight in mapping its craters and seas. To date, it …
British Pathé uploaded this sweet little demo of a 1927 car with front wheels that swivel flat.
Automated cycle parking in Japan: roll bike in, machine whips it underground and parks it. Come back later, tap your membership card, bike is retrieved and away you go. Genius. Danny Choo did a TV piece about these clever EcoCycle bike parking facilities a while back. He also did a great photo post of …
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Take 8 minutes out of your day to watch how a printing company makes and tests great big, blobby, beautiful barrels of ink. Or just listen: it’s accompanied by “Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-Flat Major, Op. 73, “The Emperor”: II. Adagio un poco mosso” by Apollo Symphony Orchestra (Google Play • iTunes). See also …
Loving the educational GIFs popping up around the place. This one, which I saw on an IFLS post that pulls together 21 maths GIFs, demonstrates ‘how to make an ellipse’. It’s from giphy.com. This one I find so simple but so illuminating. A GIF from NikolayS that shows how a sewing machine makes a stitch. …
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I read a great post by Jared Spool this morning on ‘The curse of a mobile strategy’. The killer pull-out quote for me is this one: The problem with a mobile strategy is it’s about the medium of delivery, not what is being delivered. It focuses on the technology questions. Do we build a native app or a web-based …
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