Recent reading (7 links for Feb 5)

San Telmo street art

Irregularly, I post noteworthy articles I recently read. Enjoy!

 

Kickstarting: A Wi-Fi-Enabled Lamp That Lets You Say Goodnight Across The Globe: FastCo’s take on the Good Night Lamp, a series of connected lamps that helps you send social signals in more ambient way. I’m a big fan of both the product and the team, so I recommend you have a closer look. (Just noticed I first blogged about this in 2007. Time flies!) (link);

 

Top 10 Lessons Learned at Dave Asprey’s Bulletproof Biohacking Conference: A report from the front line of the biohacking and quantified self community. (link)

 

Shooters: How Video Games Fund Arms Manufacturers: How video games, through licensing fees, help funding arms producers. A very scary thought. – by Simon Parkin (link)

 

The World is Getting Better. Quickly.: On a more uplifting note, turns out that overall we’re making quite good progress on a global scale towards bettering life conditions for everyone. Some highlights from Bill Gates’ report on the progress of his foundation and their goals. (link)

 

Dell goes private in $24.4 billion deal, including $2 billion loan from Microsoft: Dell buys back the company shares, ridding itself of the pressure of quarterly earnings reports to shareholders. Impressive, and also something that can serve us as a reminder to always keep thinking about incentives we create for ourselves and our companies. – by Nathan Ingraham (link)

 

Q: “How much does an app cost?” A: “About as much as a car.”: Neat metaphor-slash-guideline: How much does an app cost? It costs about as much as a car does, it just depends on what you want. “I just want an app and I want it to work” = 1994 Honda Civic = $1-5K. You just want a simple app. Nothing fancy, and you don’t really care who works on it. (link)

 

EU-Flaggschiff-Initiative: Forscher erhalten Milliardenförderung: Quick overview of the projects that got the EU’s 1b Euro funding for scientific research. How awesome are the two projects that won? Very. How awesome are the ones that didn’t get the funding? Also: very. I’m all for institutional funding of science. (link)

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