"""
With a simple 20-line change to how A/B testing works, that you can implement today, you can always do better than A/B testing -- sometimes, two or three times better. This method has several good points:

* It can reasonably handle more than two options at once.. Eg, A, B, C, D, E, F, G, …
* New options can be added or removed at any time.

But the most enticing part is that you can set it and forget it. If your time is really worth $1000/hour, you really don't have time to go back and check how every change you made is doing and pick options. You don't have time to write rambling blog entries about how you got your site redesigned and changed this and that and it worked or it didn't work. Let the algorithm do its job. This 20 lines of code automatically finds the best choice quickly, and then uses it until it stops being the best choice.
"""

"""
To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we've been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server. This has allowed us to drop our initial page load times to 1/5th of what they were previously and reduce differences in performance across browsers.

On top of the rendered pages, we asynchronously bootstrap a new modular JavaScript application to provide the fully-featured interactive experience our users expect. This new framework will help us rapidly develop new Twitter features, take advantage of new browser technology, and ultimately provide the best experience to as many people as possible.
"""

"""After his death, Jim’s family did an amazing and unusual thing: They left his body where it lay, in Jim and Nancy’s bed, for three full days. And Nancy invited anyone and everyone to come say goodbye. Or hello. Or whatever they wanted. I remember sitting on the bed with my friend, crying my friggin’ eyes out."""

"""WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets), each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. The resulting network of meaningfully related words and concepts can be navigated with the browser. WordNet is also freely and publicly available for download. WordNet's structure makes it a useful tool for computational linguistics and natural language processing."""

"""
So the titanic showdown between Facebook and Google might not be the News Feed vs. Google+ after all. It might be Facebook Camera vs. Project Glass.

It might, in fact, be pictures vs. vision.
"""

Discovering a new mutation.

"Science is the systematic transformation of the unknown into the known. It is necessarily then a transformation of the impossible into the possible."

I don't always drink port but when I do it's infused with cheese and nuts and can last for days unrefrigerated.

Why do people post about their silly problems on Twitter? Because sometimes, Twitter gives them an answer.

Hete comes the rain...

image

"To use libsaas, you first create a service object and then use the method it provides to send and fetch data from a software as a service API."

Libsaas, "It's like an ORM for SaaS!"

free program to backup and restore your gmail account at will.

An excellent series of diagrams explaining how we use evidence to find truths (i.e. science)

Since I don't have an address or tel. number any more, I had to get creative with my luggage tag.

Overview of not-so-well known nvalt tricks.

I have a fear of chickens. I felt I should diagram why.

a handy-dandy tool for exploring and linking to logical fallacy explanations

Greece is way ahead in green technology. They have these vehicles that use no fossil fuels--they run on dried grass.

Chrome says has insecure content. Duh. If we weren't insecure would we document our lives, searching for validation?

Don't get discouraged, you'll figure it out.

Friends are allowed to make mistakes.The enemy is not allowed to make mistakes because his whole existence is a mistake

Just posted a photo

Just posted a photo

How speaking firmly, politely, and with conviction can make all the difference.

"""One objective reality is that our government doesn’t work, not because we have dysfunctional politicians, but because we have dysfunctional voters. As a scientist and educator, my goal, then, is not to become President and lead a dysfunctional electorate, but to enlighten the electorate so they might choose the right leaders in the first place."""

A very a clear explanation of the difference between capitalism as it is understood by most and the free market.

answered with different tips for getting a git graph

"""
Yes, “people in a group do, individually, become less likely to help. It’s the volunteer dilemma: ‘If there are 7 billion people who could save the world, why should it be me?’ ” Krueger says. But drill down, and the picture grows more complex. In situations where there’s a clear threat—when someone is trying to extinguish a raging car fire, rather than merely struggling to change a flat tire—the bystander effect actually diminishes. “It’s counterintuitive,” says Krueger. “As the costs of a behavior become higher, you should be less likely to help.” Why that’s not so lies deep in our lizard brains. We know danger when we see it, and when we do, it induces higher levels of arousal and, therefore, more propensity to help. Even more heartening, when the costs of intervention are physical—a punch in the face or being run over by an oncoming train, instead of merely being late for work—“the bystander effect goes away,” Krueger says. And if the perpetrators are still on scene, the bystander effect can turn positive
"""

just like the $30 software i want to buy, but online and free!

Not a single terrorist in TSA's own "Top 10 Good Catches of 2011"

In addition to talking about how placebos may be getting more effective (commercials), this article is an excellent overview of the placebo effect -- how it works, how people deal with it, the problems it causes for testing drugs, and how to use it for good.

Improving the UI of tipping with gameification:

python script to decode google maps polylines into lat/lon

"How 'job creators' are fighting back [against big government]" by John Stossel ~ /via @yoshismith

Pet insurance, for when a dog tries to eat your cat.

At least you can fucking die and leave North Korea: #riphitch

This is the best thing ever for HTTP codes:

I loved these HTTP Status Cats from @girlie_mac.

(Faves: 408, 413, 418)

"""It's called media priming -- the idea that the things we watch or listen to or read influence our emotions and our behavior, perhaps more than we realize. This particular study may be the first to use fictional characters in a narrative to show an effect on people's cognitive performance..."""

A picture of Einstein at a chalkboard. You can submit what text you want on the chalkboard.

"""Although the scientists assumed that the inhibitory presence of glucose would more than compensate for the excitatory influence of protein, that hypothesis turned out be incorrect. Instead, consuming even a little protein canceled out the curse of sugar, especially when the foods were consumed simultaneously. (When the animals ate protein first, and then swallowed a chaser of glucose, orexin neurons still showed a decrease in activity. So make sure your dessert has some protein in it.)""""

"""After bringing the liquid to a boil, reduce heat to a bare simmer so that only an occasional bubble breaks the surface. At this point, partly cover the pot, cook for about 10 minutes, then turn off the heat, leaving the chicken to finish cooking in the hot water for 10-15 more minutes."""

Hey, so the movie where these guys play brothers, when's that coming out? What?There's no such movie? Really? #epicfail

"""No matter how rational and high-minded you try to be, you can’t make decision after decision without paying a biological price. It’s different from ordinary physical fatigue — you’re not consciously aware of being tired — but you’re low on mental energy. The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts, usually in either of two very different ways."""

animated gif happy sunshine dancing

"""Aspartame is a highly studied food additive with decades of research showing that it is safe for human consumption. As expected, the research is complex making it possible to cherry pick and misinterpret individual studies in order to fear monger. But the totality of research, reviewed by many independent agencies and expert panels, supports the safety of aspartame."""

"""The guiding idea of this literature seems to be, first, that plants do in fact act, and they act in ways which, when animals act that way, we are disposed to think of as signs of intelligence. Some examples: plants orient and react appropriately not only in response to light, but also wind, water, predators, quality of soil and the volume of available soil, among many other factors."""

"""
Sucrase, and other sugar digestion proteins are extremely efficient and break the bond almost instantaneously. That is, if the bond is still intact. The bond is often broken by acid hydrolysis when sucrose is placed in acidic solution, such as, soda pop.
Regardless of where it is broken though, it makes no difference, because both are taken up by the intestine in exactly the same way. The fact is that humans can't absorb sucrose (or any other disaccaride for that matter). To get sugar, from food, past the brush border and into the blood, you need to break the aforementioned bond. Glucose and fructose are then taken up independently.
"""

"It would be hard to imagine a difference between sucrose and HFCS since both would end up in the intestine as glucose and fructose and stimulate the same effect."

Why doctors don't spend a lot of money on end-of-life care.

They are optional, and I don't use them because as someone who codes primarily in python I will inevitably forget them in some places, and nothing bad will happen so I won't know I forgot them, and then I will break the #1 code formatting rule -- consistency within the file.

Why women don't negotiate.

patent for teleportation device -- claims to have actually been invented

A bottle of fancy French wine. Look closely at the label. Yes, it's lorem ipsum filler text. Oops.

Someone on google plus said this is the greatest cat picture *ever*, and I can't seem to disagree:

Programming reality --> #LOL