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I have lost more than 100 pounds since last September, and I have many mixed emotions about it. You would think that I’d be proud of the hard work that went into this change, but there’s more to it than that.
Read more…
via Lifehacker How I Experimented My Way to Losing 100 Pounds
Did you know the polycarbonate plastic material that Dyson uses for the dirt collecting bins on its vacuums is the same material used to make police riot shields? We all know that Dyson makes some of the best vacuums on the market, but the company is now giving us an inside look at its R&D labs and exactly how it ensures its hardware sucks so incredibly well.
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via Gizmodo A Rare Behind the Scenes Look at How Dyson Torture Tests Its Vacuums
First time accepted submitter briglass writes “Imagine being a total non-gamer and then suddenly playing an hour of StarCraft a day for almost two months. A new study of mine demonstrates that a group of female gaming novices (seriously novice, as in 0 to 1 hour of gaming per week novice) demonstrated increased cognitive flexibility after playing StarCraft, a sort of fast-paced chess on steroids. The control group played The Sims. It’s been well known that video gaming can lead to psychological benefits, such as faster perceptual information processing after playing first-person shooter games. But this new study, published in PLOS ONE, shows that video gaming can also affect higher-level cognitive functions. The StarCraft game was customized to be adaptive and remain challenging as the newly minted gamers honed their skills, and in-game behavior was recorded to determine what aspects of StarCraft leads to the boost in flexibility.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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via Slashdot Playing StarCraft Could Boost Your Cognitive Flexibility
Dilbert readers – Please visit Dilbert.com to read this feature. Due to changes with our feeds, we are now making this RSS feed a link to Dilbert.com.
via Dilbert Daily Strip Comic for August 11, 2013
A study published last week in the New England Journal suggests that blood sugar levels may be a more important indicator than previously realized for non-diabetics: high blood sugar levels were linked by the study’s authors with increased risk of dementia (summary free; full article paywalled). The study followed more than 2,000 elderly participants, and found a positive correlation between blood glucose levels and development of dementia, both for patients with and without diabetes.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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via How to Carve Roast Unicorn WOLVERINE, PREDATOR, THOR & MORE! YAY, IT’S FRIDAY!
Johnny Cash gives James Bond a new sort of soul with “Thunderball,” the theme song for the eponymous spy flick. This is the harpoon-laced opening sequence to the 1965 adaptation, with the lyrics of the song describing the film’s story.
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If you work with command line and know your SQL, q a great tool to use:
q allows you to query your text files or standard input with SQL. You can:
SELECT c1, COUNT(*) FROM /home/shlomi/tmp/my_file.csv GROUP BY c1
And you can:
SELECT all.c2 FROM /tmp/all_engines.txt AS all LEFT JOIN /tmp/innodb_engines.txt AS inno USING (c1, c2) WHERE inno.c3 IS NULL
And you can also combine with your favourite shell commands and tools:
grep “my_term” /tmp/my_file.txt | q “SELECT c4 FROM – JOIN /home/shlomi/static.txt USING (c1)” | xargs touch
Some of q’s functionality (and indeed, SQL functionality) can be found in command line tools. You can use grep for pseudo WHERE filtering, or cut for projecting, but you can only get so far with cat my_file.csv | sort | uniq -c | sort -n. SQL is way more powerful for working with tabulated data, and so q makes for a great addition into one’s toolbox.
The tool is authored by my colleague Harel Ben-Attia, and is in daily use over at our company (it is in fact installed on all production servers).
It is of course free and open source (get it on GitHub, where you can also find documentation), and very easy to setup. Enjoy!
via Planet MySQL Tool of the day: q
It seems as though every day we read (and write) about another amazing new breakthrough, be it medical, technological, epicurean, or other. And then we wait… and wait… and wait… and… hey, just a minute. Where’d that quantum computer go?
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via Gizmodo Where Do All Those Amazing Discoveries Go, Anyway?
