- A bus company that threatened to sue a witness of racial abuse by one of its drivers for speaking up online, but backed off once the going got tough and possibly managed to avoid the Streisand Effect.
- Nordstorm’s famous tyre returning story, a perfect opposite of the bus company, albeit an urban legend.
Author: Aditya
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Two customer service tales
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What does a parcel see travelling through mail?
Now you know:
Ever wondered what it was like to be a parcel? No? Silly you. Ruben van der Vleuten thinks you should know. So he’s made a video from a parcel’s point of view.
via A Box With A Hidden Video Camera Documents Journey Through The Mail | Singularity Hub.
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Being Reddit
Maybe I should start visiting Reddit more often and posting on my blog to drive page views. Then again it’s likely that I’ll pick up the chickpea farming stories:
And then an hour or two — or 12 or 24 — later, there’s a really good chance you’re going to see that popular Reddit post repurposed on Gawker or BuzzFeed. Well, the silly or controversial stuff, at least. (The random nerdy/newsy topical stuff that Redditors upvote — like last Wednesday’s front-pager about chickpea farming — tends to stay in the Redditverse.)
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Masks to give you superhuman powers of seeing and hearing
Iron Man like mask gives you superhuman powers of seeing and hearing | TechTripper.
I’d say they make you look more like Bane and The Fly though:
There are two masks developed by the researchers: Eidos Vision and Eidos Audio. Eidos Vision is the one that can capture the scene through a head-mounted camera and then send it to a computer for processing. The scene is captured as it is done in long exposure photography, all patterns and traces which are usually not recognizable to the naked eye are displayed inside the mask for humans to see.
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XKCD Time – Browse at your own pace
In case you were wondering where XKCD 1190 – Time was coming from or leading to, use this tool to view the story so far – XKCD Time – at your own pace.
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The Empire gets ready to strike back
Intel is finally revealing details for its impending Atom successor launch, named Silvermont. Wonder whether Motorola+Google have some interesting things lined up using these parts. And then of course there’s Microsoft that needs high performing, but low cost Win 8\Blue devices.
Either way, things look really promising both on the power and performance front, which can only mean good things for the mobile industry as a whole:
The mobile market is far more competitive than the PC industry was back when Conroe hit. There isn’t just one AMD but many competitors in the SoC space that are already very lean and fast moving. There’s also the fact that Intel doesn’t have tremendous marketshare in ultra mobile. Silvermont may feel a lot like Conroe, but the market it’s competing in is very different. That’s not to say that Intel can’t be successful here; it’s just not going to be easy.
Architecturally Silvermont is very conservative, and that’s not a bad thing. A side effect of not wanting to make Haswell irrelevant by a far lower cost part is the benefit of maintaining power efficiency. Intel joins the ranks of Apple and Qualcomm in intelligently scaling performance while respecting power consumption. Intel’s 22nm process should give Silvermont a lot of runway to use. If it can quickly follow up with 14nm, Silvermont’s power advantage could end up being akin to Conroe’s performance advantage in the mid-2000s.
via AnandTech | Intel’s Silvermont Architecture Revealed: Getting Serious About Mobile.
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IBM predicts Google Glass in a 2000 commercial
Too much of research?
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[Quora] The Dark Knight Rises through the plot holes
Time for a revisit to the concluding part
Q: What was the biggest problem with The Dark Knight Rises?
Lack of attention to detail!
When bane leaves Gotham stock exchange it is broad daylight…
I mean BROAD daylight..
It is consistent until the bikes are about to enter the tunnel…
…and when the bikes come out on the other side of the tunnel it is pitch dark, like midnight.
There’s no way in hell that is possible unless the tunnel was 100 miles in length and it took them at least a couple of hours to traverse it, even if we assume that broad daylight could be maybe (5:30 pm) to give Nolan some creative solace.
TL;DR : It is day when you drive in the tunnel, and night when you drive out a few moments later, really? what is that, an eclipse or something?
Now consider this one :
When they receive information about miscreants living in the sewer they send the entire police force down the sewers (Excuse the pun) Which sane police administrator sends down the entire force to tackle one issue? aren’t there other issues to tackle in the city?
Now consider this one :
The police are trapped underground for 3 months. It would be fair to assume that they might have barely managed to survive by sharing whatever meager resources they had (specifically referring to food). When they finally come out of the trap, NONE of them looks frail physically or psychologically. They all bounce out like happy jumpy telly tubbies who have been well fed and given a spa treatment. Try working a 9-to-5 job and you will be walking like a zombie at the end of just one day. These policemen sat there, with no exercise for 3 months straight, and their limbs seem very supple and motor responses are crisp. The best part? None of them has grown a beard!
Yo, ssup bro? glad we made it out. Pleasant weather too. Wonder if my Netflix subscription has expired? Scars of captivity? Pffff..what’s that? We’re always defcon delta bro, come what may..
None of them seem to be fazed, concerned, affected by the fact that they had been captive for three months without sunlight, food or exercise.
That’s not all. The very next day they are fully rejuvenated to charge towards bane’s army as if they’re just out of the gym and have been rejuvenated by a nice protein shake. (also note that they run like hooligans, no formations no strategy nothing)
Yeaaa..run bro run, fuck all logic and run, we are getting paid to run…
Now consider this one :
When Gordon was awarded death by exile and the blokes were shivering and taking calculated steps so as to be careful not to step on thin ice and fall into the water, while our dude Batman just walks by *on it*, *towards them*, *from the other (unsafer) side of the ice* like it’s a cozy marathon walk. Then he proceeds to have a nice chat with Gordon while standing on the same ice.
Now consider this one :
Although he had found a successor in Robin, it seems counterproductive for Bruce to advertise to the people that ‘Batman’ had died with the explosion, because the core concept on which the inception of batman is based, and as repeatedly mentioned by Bruce in all the movies himself “Batman can be anyone, it is a symbol”, so why ‘kill’ the symbol and make a memorial to officially remind the people that Batman, who had been a symbol of hope until then, is officially gone?
Had the people not been made to believe that the persona ‘Batman’ had died in the explosion, they would have had a Robin AND a (new) Batman guarding Gotham in the future.
Now consider this one :
Bruce is officially declared dead with a memorial at a very public place (his mansion which was going to serve as an orphanage) and yet he sits in Italy with no attempt to conceal his identity. Plus, both Bruce and Batman are declared dead at the same time with public memorials, which is counterproductive to their mission to hide the identity of Batman. Although this does not directly link Batman to Bruce, but it makes the disguise less discreet.
I call BS on that one!
Now why do these seemingly minor details matter despite the fact that they don’t taint the core plot the way a plot inconsistency does? because these discrepancies get registered in the sub-conscious mind while watching the movie and make the plot seem less authentic. This hurts the overall movie experience more than an actual plot inconsistency which is subject to creative freedom.
This is a very big flaw in narration, movie or otherwise. The more of them you have the more the narration (plot) becomes difficult to believe on a sub-conscious level especially if you intend to narrate a fictional story where the audience already has a burdened obligation to assume a lot of conventions the way the director wants them to believe, which makes it all the more important to avoid the avoidable inconsistencies so as to not overburden the viewer’s mind with variables that don’t synchronize with each other. Otherwise the viewer comes out of the movie theater harboring a debate between his conscious and sub-conscious mind which looks like this :
Dafuq did we just see bro? Not sure bro…
As Bane would have put it : Once you have upvoted my answer, THEN you have my permission to mock Nolan!
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Money can buy happiness (if you do the charts right)
If you make the charts the right way, you can definitely make money buy happiness. Read How to Lie with Statistics, and you’ll see the above chart as a poster child for most of the tricks explained in the book:
- The Satisfaction axis is truncated to magnify the increases – most countries have a difference of just 1 point between the lowest and highest scores
- The income reported axis is on a log scale to compress the differences. In most cases the reported income needs to go up 2-4x for a single point increase in satisfaction.
- The figures are self reported through an online poll (Gallup or not, after doing assignments during my management education I have increased my dose of salt when reading online poll results).
Check out the original paper for more data along with detailed graphs, and to draw your own conclusion:
While the idea that there is some critical level of income beyond which income no longer impacts well-being is intuitively appealing, it is at odds with the data. As we have shown, there is no major well-being dataset that supports this commonly made claim. To be clear, our analysis in this paper has been confined to the sorts of evaluative measures of life satisfaction and happiness that have been the focus of proponents of the (modified) Easterlin hypothesis. In an interesting recent contribution, Kahneman and Deaton (2010) have shown that in the United States, people earning above $75,000 do not appear to enjoy either more positive affect nor less negative affect than those earning just below that. We are intrigued by these findings, although we conclude by noting that they are based on very different measures of well-being, and so they are not necessarily in tension with our results. Indeed, those authors also find no satiation point for evaluative measures of well-being.
As for my thoughts on the graph? Brazilians and Mexicans seem to do better with what they have than the rest of the world. Then, there’s Nigeria where money doesn’t seem to buy happiness – must be the conscience kicking in after scamming all those thousands of dollars from gullible people in the other countries.
