Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Road Map for Financial Recovery: Radical Transparency Now!
Good article from Wired about how to prevent future problems.

Internal Bacterial Imbalance Leads to Asthma | Wired Science from Wired.com

Without Tears, Is There Still Sadness? | Wired Science from Wired.com
Scientists removed tears from photos of sad people. Without the tears, people couldn't tell they were sad.

Wired 14.10: START - Boost Your Life the Urawaza Way
Little tips and tricks for making life easier for less money. I actually read a better article about it, but couldn't find it again.

Depiction, Inc.
It's like Google maps, if Google maps had an option that said, "destroy the city and see what happens."

Get a Personal Loan or Invest Money - Peer-to-Peer Lending - Lending Club
You can borrow or lend money directly, and either pay less interest, or get more interest paid to you, than you would be going through a middleman (like the banks). Might be a good idea, seeing how responsible those guys are.


Cooperation Beats Selfishness, at Least in Theory | Wired Science from Wired.com
It's a no-brainer, but this is the part I thought was interesting:

The key, suggests Helbing's simulation, is mobility and imitation. When individuals are free to choose their associates and smart enough to imitate their success, cooperation emerges, then flourishes — and it doesn't take much to start the process.


Scientists Identify Bacteria That Increase Plant Growth
Put special bacteria on the plants, and they grow faster.

Why is the United States backing Mexican drug gangs? | The Argument
The author makes a good point that most of the drug war problems in Mexico are our fault - Mexico's government is doing all it can to fight, and we're not doing our part. I agree, and have for some time.
But - she says this:
Yet the arms that cartels can and do buy from the open U.S. market -- completely illegally -- leave Mexico's police force and even its military outgunned. There are nearly 7,000 gun shops along the southern U.S. border, about three for every mile. They sell thousands of hand grenades, rocket-propelled grenade launchers, AK-47s, and "cop killer" guns and bullets that cut through Kevlar body armor.

She was rightly torn apart for this statement, as no legal gun shop in America can sell any of those things (except "cop-killer bullets", to which one poster replied, "(Is it) some sort of modern variant of the vampire killing silver/garlic alloy bullet made famous in Hollywood vampire flicks? You mean that cops are somehow protected by black magic powers and they are impervious to regular bullets that can kill ordinary people? Gee, if that's true, I wanna be a cop too!"). Alright, so she's irresponsible and sloppy, or a liar. Then she posted this reply:

I do incorrectly imply in the article that gun shops on the border sell hand grenades and rocket-propelled grenade launchers. The border gun shops do not legally sell these. However, these type of weapons used by Mexican drug cartels have been seized by customs officlas making their way south through the border. How they are purchased is somewhat unknown, but many of these are making their way to Mexico through the United States.


She was rightly torn apart for this, too - making a statement that gun shops sell illegal weapons is not at all the same as implying they do.
It's disappointing that the author is supposedly a credible researcher, and that the article is published in Foreign Policy, which is supposedly a credible magazine.