Interior Design Websites

I'm removing these from my Google Reader, but wanted to keep the links for when we move to our next place:

Design Sponge
Apartment Therapy LA

Most Dangerous People in Your World

Post by John Goekler on Counterpunch
All statistics are in deaths per year in the US, based on statistics available in 2009

1. Yourself - between half a million and a million deaths due to "lifestyle disease" (smoking, lousy diets, lack of exercise, etc.)
2. A doctor - ~200,000 deaths due to medical errors
3. A coworker with an infection - ~75,000 deaths from diseases like flu or pneumonia
4. "Toxic agents" - ~55,000 deaths due to asbestos, lead, pesticides, household chemicals
5. Other drivers - ~42,000 deaths

The list continues, but notice that terrorists, lightning strikes, sharks, spiders, and other common fears are not on this list.

Found via Bruce Schneir's Crypto-Gram

The Power of a Sketch

Dan Roam describes the napkin sketch that inspired supply-side economics



Wikipedia article on the Laffer curve. One key sentence: Many economists have questioned the utility of the Laffer Curve in public discourse.

Sprint Commercial - The Now Network

As much as I normally dislike commercials and feel that their impact should be minimized (by not watching cable or broadcast TV, using some level of ad-blocking, using a RSS reader instead of browing the Web), I'll stay go out of my while to highlight interesting and well-made ads such as this one.

Doing the "Impossible"

Post at danieltenner.com

People react to being told “it’s not possible” in a variety of ways, and not all those ways are productive. To get around the brick walls which large corporations, bureaucracies and other social organisms put in our way, it is important to:

1. Calm down, smile and remain polite to maintain any chance of success
2. Become a human being rather than a faceless number
3. Be persistent to grind away the brick wall
4. Be prepared to lose, to expand your freedom of thought and action
5. Be clear about your objective so you can be flexible about how to achieve it
6. Find who can, since often the first person you speak to cannot help
7. Take an active part in making things happen more efficiently
8. Make the other person feel good about helping you so that they are more likely to help you
9. Don’t relax this stance until it’s over, it’s easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

I am particularly struck by the first suggestion:

You cannot win this kind of battle through anger. The very first thing to do is to observe that you are angry, and calm yourself down. Acknowledge your anger, and put it aside for later. There’ll be plenty of time for cursing the system that put these problems in your way later, after you’ve removed these obstacles. The surest way to guarantee that you won’t get your way is to get angry. Angry people are always wrong, and they’re rarely worth helping or cooperating with.

And the eighth:

It is much more effective to present the situation in such a way that the person who can help you will feel that they are doing something Good by helping you.

Prevent Selection for Resistance By Targeting Post-Reproductive Individuals

The article at ScienceDaily describes an "evolution-proof" insecticide, targeting malaria. The idea works in this case because it is the older mosquitos that transmit malaria, AND they have already reproduced. Therefore, any insecticide that kills them does not apply selective pressure and the spread of resistance is significantly slowed, or even stopped.

Link to the actual paper at PLoS Biology

I particularly like this quote:

Consequently, there is now a concerted effort to identify new insecticidal compounds for use in malaria control [36,39]. On the face of it, this is desirable, but novel chemistry does not, in itself, provide a sustainable answer. All existing insecticides were “new” at some point, and there is the very real danger that, as with the antimalarial drug treadmill [40], the search for products can become open ended as the efficacy of successful new compounds is, in turn, eroded by the evolution of resistance.

If you're stuck in an evolutionary arms race, the best way to win is to get out of the race with a revolutionary strategy.

The article mentions several other diseases that might benefit from this approach:

... it may be applicable to others with extrinsic incubation periods that approach the life spans of their vectors. Such diseases may include dengue, filariasis, West Nile virus, Japanese encephalitis, onchocercaisis, and Chagas disease.

Anti-carpal tunnel exercises

Video is by a professional percussionist, but applies to desk jockeys as well.