Expensive != Quality.

I learned this recently. Price is a signal of how much one party values something. Spending money can be a signal of how committed someone is, a way of showing that he knows he'll make the money back. Or it could be that the cost he's paying right now is peanuts to him. A high cost doesn't automatically mean you're getting what you pay for.

Free personality tests are more reliable and efficient than the paid variety

A “Chef” Fools Diners Into Preferring Inferior Food

DIY at an AWS presentation

Last Saturday I attended an event for Amazon Web Services. It was really informative and interesting, but the one that left a lasting impression was the DIY seismograph one of the presenters debuted. It was a dinky little thing, an accelerometer connected to a toothpick needle and handwritten dial. The whole thing relied on an Arduino to send data into AWS, and can send push notifications to a cellphone or turn on an alarm over the Internet.

The kit for portable seismographs will cost into the thousands of dollars. The DIY device showcased at that talk will cost much less, and can be tuned for different functions and greater/lesser sensitivity. It can be distributed to different areas, and AWS provides the analytics tools. The push notification capability alone exponentially increases the speed of info dissemination. 

This device is revolutionary because it transfers potential into the hands of the regular people. It has the ability to outperform bloated institutions that are more concerned with perpetuating themselves than actually performing the purpose they were created for. Where I am for example the weather services are a joke. But what if instead of a motion sensor we attach to the Arduino thermometers and hygrometers and anemometers and rain gauges and tide gauges? What if we didn't have to wake up at 5:30 in the morning to wait for advisories, and we could depend instead on a message on our phones?

IoT is here, and it is amazing.

Dom Giuca: Thief vs. AAA Gaming

There's a lot of keen insights here, some that mirror my own views and also a lot that escaped me the first time I played the old Thief games.

 

Actor-observer bias in the wild

Overheard how one bro lost respect for his brother because the latter pronounced sauce as sows (as in, He sows corn in his field everyday.). This same bro later characterizes someone as "matured," and another as a "dooshbug."

Need to remember this.

Was This Louisiana Cop Accused of Being in the KKK Actually Fired for Objecting to Police Corruption?

It's a pretty cut-and-dried story. Except it turns out the bigot detective was actually an informant for the FBI.

We all lose battles. It's fine if he loses this one - he's already done more than anyone in his lifetime. People are going to live more peaceful lives in Louisiana because of what he did.

Biology

Exciting stuff like this sometimes makes me regret not working harder for my Biology degree.

Humble Plants that Hide Surprising Secrets
How Quantum Biology Might Explain Life's Biggest Questions

A friendly reminder

This made me remember that for all the integrity media trumpets it has, the bottom line is they get paid to have people tune in. Their incentives are not my incentives.

.NET Excel File Download

This was a cool trick I learned from a co-worker, which he in turn found from StackOverflow. I'm putting it here as a reference, because it's so simple and useful. So, let's say you want to have the browser download an Excel file instantly without using plugins or Interop. You put the following lines in your controller method:

Response.AddHeader("content-disposition", "attachment; filename=" + [filename]);
Response.ContentType = "application/ms-excel";

Then you have the method return a PartialView. The PartialView will have an IEnumerable of your view model:

@model IEnumerable<[view_model_here]>

Then you can just add the markup and styling for the data. When you run the application and use the controller method, it will cause a download attachment to occur.

Like I said, cool.