Category: Life

Watermelon Hacks: Just in Time for Summer

July 6, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

Watermelon Hacks: Just in Time for Summer Watermelon is the perfect snack for hot temperatures. It’s hydrating, crisp, and refreshing, especially when it’s chilled. Yet some people aren’t content with leaving a good thing alone, which has given us many watermelon-based innovations, some great (vodka-filled watermelons) and some delightfully strange (square watermelons). Oddly, not everyone goes crazy for this tasty fruit. If you need to reignite your love for Citrullus lanatus (that’s watermelon in Latin), then be sure to check out all of these hacks. #1. Turn a Watermelon into a Keg Was that sound I just heard your head exploding? Yes, it’s true: someone figured out a way to turn a watermelon itself into a dispenser of fruit-laced alcoholic beverages. This counts as…

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Watermelon Hacks: Just in Time for Summer

Your high IQ Will Kill Your Startup

July 6, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

This article was originally published on March 4, 2010 at Max Klein’s blog.

It has since fallen off the Internet and into the great 404 void. I am republishing it here because it is one of the very few blog posts that I’ve read in my lifetime that have stuck with me. If the original comes back online, please kindly comment below and I’ll remove this copy from my blog. In 2004 I was in Brazil, walking down the hill in Lapa to get some lunch. I was with a friend who I had met in the hostel I was staying – his name was Ofer. We were having a discussion about intelligence, and what role it plays in success. Then out of the side of the road…

Original Article Can Be Found Here:

Your high IQ will kill your startup

The Science of Happy Design

July 3, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

So much of the news about technology tells us that websites, mobile apps, and social media are bad for us. Supposedly, technology makes us anxious, our smartphones take us out of the present moment, and social media ensnares us in a dopamine loop. A Google search of “happiness and technology” pulls up hundreds of articles about how technology is making us miserable. Can that be true? What if instead, the design of a favorite website or a trusted mobile app might make us happy – and influence our long-term actions? Happy, But Not an Accident As someone who attempts to make experiences with technology better, it makes me sad to think that my work might be making people unhappy. There has been some research to show …

Original Article Can Be Found Here:

The Science of Happy Design

You May Have Been A Lab Rat In A Huge Facebook Experiment

June 29, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

A newly published paper reveals that scientists at Facebook conducted a massive psychological experiment on hundreds of thousands of users by tweaking their feeds and measuring how they felt afterward.In other words, Facebook decided to try to manipulate some people’s emotional states — for science.The research involved Facebook’s News Feed — the stream of status updates, photos and news articles that appears when you first fire up the site. For a week in January 2012, a group of researchers, variously affiliated with Facebook, Cornell University and the University of California, San Francisco, altered the algorithm that determines what shows up in News Feed for 689,003 people. One group was shown fewer posts containing words thought to evoke positive emotions, such as “love,” “nice” and “sweet,” while another…

Original Article Can Be Found Here:

You May Have Been A Lab Rat In A Huge Facebook Experiment

Google’s Amazing New Flight Search Is About To Save You Thousands Of Dollars On Airfare

June 28, 2014 / Paul / 0 Comments

A view from a plane landing in Rio de Janiero. Back in the early 2000s, travel search engines caused panic among venerable career travel agents. Sites like Orbitz, Travelocity, and Priceline wowed tourists and businesses alike with low prices and flashy features. While online travel booking became the norm, the do-it-yourself novelty quickly faded into a hellscape of kitschy commercials, obscure policies, and redundant searches. The Internet-booked honeymoon was over. But it doesn’t have to be that way! One of Google’s less-celebrated features might just make that affordable coveted summer getaway a possibility. In September 2011, Google unveiled Flight Search. It was still in its nascent stages, but it brought Google’s user-friendly design to the online travel bookings far away…

Original Article Can Be Found Here:

Google’s Amazing New Flight Search Is About To Save You Thousands Of Dollars On Airfare