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The Reason We Reason | Wired Science | Wired.com
The idea here is that the confirmation bias is not a flaw of reasoning, it’s actually a feature. It is something that is built into reasoning; not because reasoning is flawed or because people are stupid, but because actually people are very good at reasoning — but they’re very good at reasoning for arguing. Not only does the argumentative theory explain the bias, it can also give us ideas about how to escape the bad consequences of the confirmation bias.
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[Tool] Android Injector – xda-developers
A tool for Android to install non-market apps when restricted by your service provider. Thankfully this is not yet a problem in India.
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General Motors: Weight Loss Diet Program
Includes the steps in the program along with explanations for why the diet is suggested.
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References in Samit Basu’s ‘The Simoquin Prophecies’ // needlessly|messianic
Some seem to be off the mark as pointed out by the author himself in a twitter post.
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Notable Quotables : The New Yorker
Quite a lot of information on how quotes get mangled over time & get popular thus immortalizing the person who made the quote. Then again, sometimes quotes are misattributed. It also mentions a couple of books that help verify the authenticity of quotes & traces their origins.
“Public circulation is what renders something a quotation. It’s quotable because it’s been quoted, and its having been quoted gives it authority. Quotations are prostheses. “As Emerson/Churchill/Donald Trump once observed” borrows another person’s brain waves and puts them to your own use. (If you fail to credit Emerson et al., it’s called plagiarism. But isn’t plagiarism just the purest form of quotation?) Then, there is a subset of quotations that are personal. We pick them up off the public street, but we put them to private uses. We hoard quotations like amulets. They are charms against chaos, secret mantras for dark times, strings that vibrate forever in defiance of the laws of time and space. That they may be opaque or banal to everyone else is what makes them precious: they aren’t supposed to work for everybody. They’re there to work for us. Some are little generational badges of identity. Some just seem to pop up on a million occasions. Some are razors.”
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Anatomy of a Fake Quotation – Megan McArdle – National – The Atlantic
An analysis of how the fake quote “I mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. – Martin Luther King, Jr” originated & went viral through the social networks in a couple of days
Category: bookmarks
Bookmarks from delicious
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Shelf Life Advice | Avoid waste…Save money…Stay green
Interesting site that helps you decide how long a food item is safe for consumption, irrespective of what its expiration date says. Wonder how well this relates to the Indian products.
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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SheldonShirts.com – The Big Bang Theory TV T-Shirts, Shirts Worn by Sheldon & Leonard
Quite a list of t-shirts worn by Sheldon Cooper in the Big Bang Theory TV show. Also includes t-shirts worn by other characters & quotes from the show.
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Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Situational overload and ambient overload
Wonder what’s the way out.
“The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.”-
The cause of situational overload is too much noise. The cause of ambient overload is too much signal.
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Technology Archives – Osborne 1 vs. iPad 2 | StormDriver
We’ve come a long long way in 30 years for sure. Orders of magnitude, in fact, and we still complain about poor hardware specs.
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BigAl’s Books and Pals: The Greek Seaman / Jacqueline Howett
The comments section pretty much exemplifies what not to do if you are an author who has received a negative review.
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Slow Performing Add-ons :: Add-ons for Firefox
Finally a quantitative way to find out the culprits behind the Firefox slowdowns.
“Add-ons provide many useful features and functions, but they can also cause Firefox to become slower. Some add-ons can even slow Firefox to a crawl and make it difficult to use for regular web browsing. If you think add-ons might be the reason Firefox is lethargic, check the list below for some of the biggest bottlenecks. And remember, for best performance you should disable add-ons that you no longer use regularly.”
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Interesting links for the week (weekly)
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Canon USA Consumer Products – EF Lenses 101 – Focal Length Comparison
A visualization tool for focal lengths for Canon lenses. Covers a wide range from 15-1200mm, but in a stepped rather than continuous manner.
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Tamron Europe: Focal length comparison
A useful tool to visualize focal lengths for Tamron lenses
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Nikon | Imaging Products | NIKKOR Lenses Simulator
A very useful tool to visualize different focal lengths for Nikon lenses\cameras
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How to lie with statistics, or how surveys can be flawed in a major way…
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Welcome | ICorrect – The Universal Website for Corrections
Interesting website that lets celebrities issue corrections for matters relating to them. The corrections can be browsed for free. There’s of course a steep fee – $1000 pa – if you want to join & issue corrections.
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Links for the week (weekly)
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Top 10 Dinosaurs That Aren’t What They Were
Time to reset our imaginations. Wonder what Calvin would’ve done.
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Radiation dose chart with quite a lot of real life reference points
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Links for the week ending 21-03-2011
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Short Stories: Mrs Packletide’s Tiger by Saki
Used to be part of the English CBSE textbook. Quite a humorous story
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Photo editing 101 star rating shoots aperture lightroom | Chase Jarvis Blog
A handy guide to trimming the number of photos to edit
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Canon lenses vs Nikon lenses 2009 – 2010
Nice roundup of the Canon & Nikon lens equivalents. Includes image quality ratings & price.
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Links for the week ending 14-03-2011
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How To Sync Your iPhone To Multiple Computers – iSmashPhone iPhone Blog
A handy little workaround
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Rock-Paper-Scissors: You vs. the Computer – Interactive Feature – NYTimes.com
A neat little version with a learning computer or a learned one.
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You may use your class notes & Feynman
Since Caltech has an honor system most exams tend to be take home and open book. The instructor for the class will write any special directions at the top of the exam. For a freshman physics exam one year the instructions read:
You have 3 hours. You may use your class notes and Feynman.
“Feynman” of course referred the Feynman physics lecture notes which are published in three volumes.
On reading these instructions one particularly alert student grabbed his exam and raced across campus to Richard Feynman’s office. He handed the exam to Feynman explaining that the directions clearly indicated he was a valid resource. Feynman glanced over the instructions and agreed. He wrote out the exam in less than half an hour, and got a perfect score! -
Custom firmware that lets you enhance your camera (Canon 5D MkII & 550D supported as of early 2011), kinda like CHDK for the P&S cameras.
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A lot of lens reviews from users, including ratings.
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Article from the last millennium – all about the cuteness factor in Japan that impacts everyone starting from business to the government.
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Links for the week ending 07-03-2011
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Man upgrades Windows 1.0 to Windows 7 | WinRumors
An interesting concept plus a test of patience
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Sloppy Google – The Search Operators
A sloppy & sluggish version of Google
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Quite a lot of things to learn about exposure with a bunch of handy tips & references.
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DIY – Release Cable for Canon DSLRs | DIYPhotography.net
Quite a handy DIY. It also supports the shutter half press.
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Links for the week ending 21-02-2011
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Understanding Camera Autofocus
Quite a primer on camera auto-focus mechanisms
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11 Surefire Landscape Photography Tips
Food for thought
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Strategy Letter V – Joel on Software
Interesting article on commoditization. Microsoft did it pretty well in the PC era, while Sun shot itself in the foot by trying to commoditize both hardware & software. Wonder what happens in the mobile computing (smartphone\tablet\netbook) era. Will the app marketplaces do the trick?
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Links for the week ending 14-02-2011
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4 Walmart employees fired after disarming gunman caught shoplifting – ksl.com
Bureaucracy at its best. Hopefully the armed forces & police don’t have such clauses.
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Camels and Rubber Duckies – Joel on Software
How do you price software? Lots of theories ranging from basic macroeconomics to capitalism & the likes, but no definitive answer.
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City of Shadows – ALEXEY TITARENKO | PHOTOGRAPHY
Time-lapse + Black & White + Busy city = Haunting photographs
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ExposurePlot (former Focalplot)
A very handy tool to analyse the different parameters of your photograph.
“ExposurePlot (former FocalPlot) is a new free utility that analyzes your usage of the focal length of your lenses (jpeg only), show charts for ISO, aperture and shutterspeed.Great to determine which lens you ‘really’ need, or which lens did you actually use on the trip to the mountains.” -
Free minix-like kernel sources for 386-AT – comp.os.minix | Google Groups
Linus Torvalds’ post evangelizing Linux way back in 1991
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