Igor Delovski Board

[delovski]

YouTube: The Shock Doctrine by Alfonso Cuarón and Naomi Klein

"The Shock Doctrine: "No Logo" Author Releases Controversial Short Film"

[delovski]

reddit - Mind-boggling right versus left brain test-- Try it.

"The Right Brain vs Left Brain test ... do you see the dancer turning
clockwise or anti-clockwise?"

[delovski]

Slashdot: The Story of Baikonur, Russia's Space City

"There's an article up on Physorg about Russian space launch city Baikonur,
rented by Russia from Kazakhstan. Although it is essentially the same as it
was in the 60's and 70's, it is amazingly efficient and still operational. 'Even
the technology hasn't changed much. The Soyuz spacecraft designed in the
mid-1960s is still in service, somewhat modified. It can only be used once,
but costs just $25 million. The newest Endeavor space shuttle cost $2 billion,
but is reusable.

Life and work in Baikonur and its cosmodrome are also pretty much what
they were in the Soviet era. The town of 70,000 - unbearably hot in summer,
freezing cold in winter and dusty year round - is isolated by hundreds of miles
of scrubland.'"

[Ike]

life reboot - The Working Dead

“I get paid to stay in an air conditioned office all day.” — “I get paid to
play solitaire all day.” — “I get paid to browse the Internet all day.” — “I
get paid to babysit a phone all day.” — “I get paid to attend meetings all
day.” — “I get paid to watch the clock all day.”

In other words, they like thinking “I get paid to do nothing all day.”

[XNote]

Određuju nas godišnja doba, a ne zvijezde (CRO)

"Premda se na astrologiju vrlo često gleda kao na bezopasno praznovjerje,
znanstvenici su nedavno otkrili da datum ro?enja doista utječe na naš život"

[Ike]

bbc - FBI campaign against Einstein revealed

"The files reveal that for five years J Edgar Hoover tried, and failed, to link
Einstein to a Soviet espionage ring."

[Ike]

RC: The impact of hardworking employees on their less diligent
colleagues

"Tim Harford cites the study Peers at Work by Alexandre Mas and Enrico
Moretti which used a grocery store check-out line as its laboratory, and
the results are illuminating."

[XNote]

FP: In the Windy City, prostitutes sleep with police more often than
get arrested by them

"They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes
who aren't working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest. In
fact, prostitutes get officially arrested only once per 450 tricks or so, leading
the authors to conclude that "a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a
police officer than to get officially arrested by one."

[XNote]

reddit - A PBS Documentary

"It's four and half hours. Watch it anyway... an evocative, brilliant, and
thorough analysis of how the US ended up in a war ... (pbs.org)"

[Ike]

neatorama.com - The Evolution of National Flags



"Did you know that the current US flag was designed by a high school student
for a class project? (He got a B, though his teacher changed it to an A after
Congress accepted it as the national flag!). Did you know that the Libyan flag
is green (and nothing but green) or that the precursor to the Philippines flag
had a Jolly Roger? Read on ..."

[Ike]

reddit - Long article but well worth it...explains backroom dealings on Buffett, bailout,bank industry,GS,etc

"In the brief meeting in lower Manhattan that warm Sunday, according to a
person familiar with the events, Blankfein told his lieutenants the firm would
become a bank holding company, ending its run as the jewel of global invest-
ment banks."

[Ike]

ivan krstic - How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing

"To put it mildly, the numbers scared the living hell out of the hedge funds: if
they didn’t immediately buy back the Volkswagen stock they were shorting,
there might not be any left to buy later, and it isn’t their stock — they have
to return it to someone."

[XNote]

Liz Elliott - Magenta Ain't A Colour

"Magenta is the evidence that the brain ... has apparently constructed a color
to bridge the gap between red and violet, because such a colour does not ex-
ist in the light spectrum. Magenta has no wavelength attributed to it, unlike
all the other spectrum colours."

[Ike]

ars - Yes, Virginia, there is a magenta

"Elliot's article might be better titled, 'Magenta is not a single wavelength of
electromagnetic radiation in the 'visible' spectrum, but our brain perceives it
anyway.'"

[delovski]

NYT - A Privileged World Begins to Give Up Its Secrets

"While Switzerland is arguably the largest off-shore center, it is not the only
one. Supporters of its banking secrecy code point out that the code is wrap-
ped up in the country’s claims to neutrality and being above the global poli-
tical fray. But secrecy has also turned out to be immensely lucrative; accor-
ding to some estimates one-quarter of the world’s offshore money now resi-
des in Switzerland."

[Ike]

From NYT - Following Benford's Law, or Looking Out for No. 1

"Dr. Theodore P. Hill asks his mathematics students at the Georgia Institute
of Technology to go home and either flip a coin 200 times and record the
results, or merely pretend to flip a coin and fake 200 results. The following
day he runs his eye over the homework data, and to the students' amaze-
ment, he easily fingers nearly all those who faked their tosses."

[delovski]

blog.okcupid.com - The 4 Big Myths of Profile Pictures

"Hello, old friends. I am back from dark months of data mining, here now to
present my ores. To write this piece, we cataloged over 7,000 photographs
on OkCupid.com, analyzing three primary things:

Facial Attitude, Photo Context & Skin."

[delovski]

reddit - What I learned in Jail. What did you learn?

"I learned that City jail guards are the most despicable people on earth with
a few notable exceptions."

[delovski]

Jeff LaMarche - The Illusion of Open

"Unless Google resumes direct sales or puts licensing limitations on the
carriers to prevent them from locking down Android phones, "open" will
be just another empty marketing slogan. And I suspect that's what it will
be.

Google doesn't really care about the user experience, they just want to
keep making money on their proprietary, non-open advertising in the
mobile space the way they have on the web, and the more Android pho-
nes that are out there, the more phones that will be getting Google Ads.
Hell, Google even discussed the possibility of unblockable ads at Google
IO!"

[delovski]

reddit - How real-world corruption works.

"But in the public sector, the "consumer" often has little choice... so-cal-
led 'market discipline' is a lot more diffuse when you have a former-scho-
olteacher-or-real-estate-broker-turned city councilman whose job it is to
disburse a multi-million-dollar street-paving contract or whatever. And
neither the schoolteacher nor the real-estate broker has any clue how
to write or evaluate a road-paving contract..."

[delovski]

liveleak.com - Dead Porn Stars

"Porn stars that died..."

[delovski]

Yahoo - Are you dating a player?

"Over 18 months of study and interviews, Dr. Kalish found that philanderers
share a startling number of characteristics. Know what those red flags are,
and your play-dar will be right on target. So, here are five warning signs to
watch for — as well as five signs the guy you’re seeing is an upstanding,
sincere sort that you should consider keeping around."

[delovski]

nytimes.com - How Microbes Defend and Define Us

Scientists are regularly blown away by the complexity, power, and sheer
number of microbes that live in our bodies. “We have over 10 times more
microbes than human cells in our bodies,” said George Weinstock of Wa-
shington University in St. Louis. But the microbiome, as it’s known, remains
mostly a mystery. “It’s as if we have these other organs, and yet these are
parts of our bodies we know nothing about.”

[delovski]

reddit - The war logs. Massive leak of secret files exposes truth of
occupation. Includes interview with Wikileaks' Julian Assange

"The unit that was most likely responsible for doing this was CIA's S O G
(they're part of SAD), almost all of whom are former Delta and Navy SE-
AL Dev Gru (formerly known as SEAL Team 6), the second most likely
candidate is Delta Force itself, they have been tasked with this sort of stuff
before, but I picked SOG as the most likely because they have far more
plausible deniability PLUS (if you'll read the article on them that I linked
to) you'll see that they are the one and only such unit that can be directly
deployed by the President without using the chain of command or going
through any other persons or organizations (e.g. military, Congress,
National Security Council, etc.)--that means SOG is the President's go-to
guys when he needs to deploy the best of the best of the best of the bad-
dest-ass motherfuckers we've got, he can do it without advising anyone,
getting permission from anyone (e.g. Congress) or going through anyone
else, he can directly order SOG to conduct any mission they're capable of
anywhere in the world on a moment's notice."