There is a wonderful story over at Runner's World about Bret Dunlap, a guy who was badly injured when he was a kid. His brain and body are damaged. It's about how he moves on and adapts. How his mother helps him recover and build a life. How he discovers running and it helps change his life. The story is poignant and well written. It's definitely worth reading.
There is an interesting clip over on YouTube, that shows what having Google Glass (or something similar) might someday be like.
A couple of years ago, when I was thinking a bit about frugality (as in; "Hey, that's a characteristic I should have more of), I came up with the idea of a "Zero-Six Week". This is a week where I am only allowed to spend money on one of the days (typically a Sunday). The aim is to buy enough necessities on the Sunday to see me through the week, and not spend any money at all the rest of the week. That means walking everywhere, making all the meals for the week, etc.
Lifehacker has a infographic giving research-based workout exercises that will work your whole body. The best bit is that you apparently can do the whole thing is 7 minutes (30 seconds per exercise, with 10 seconds rest between them).
There is a poignant account of a person falling into depression over at Hyperbole and a Half. It is beautifully illustrated too. The author explains how you can't externally induce happiness in someone who is depressed. This really struck home for me, as someone who is obnoxiously upbeat. There is actually a light at the end of the rather long blog post.
Yesterday I found something super-cool - a desktop spectrometry kit (for $40, which is even cooler). A spectrometer is a device for determining the composition of chemicals using light. There is a public database over at SpectralWorkbench.org, where you can upload your spectrographs.
There is a method of inducing lucid dreams that is getting a lot of love on Reddit at the moment. The FILD method is described in this post, but the technique can be summed up as follows:
Go to sleep.
Wake up when you're very tired, perhaps using an alarm.
Start tapping two fingers very gently, using a minimal amount of energy. Keep tapping and let yourself drift off to sleep.
Do a reality check after a few minutes.
One of the main problems that Bitcoin solves is how to stop double spending. This is a hard problem to solve in a distributed currency, and is the reason why a lot of early digital currencies relied on a central server for storing the transaction history.
The creator of Bitcoin Satoshi Nakamoto describes how Bitcoin solves the double-spend problem in this email. It's an extremely elegant solution, and Satoshi presents it in an easy-to-understand way.
There is a very scary article on the Atlantic about how you essentially become shunned by employers after 6 months of unemployment. It is about an experiment by Rand Ghayad of Northeastern University. He applied for 600 job openings using fake resumes, within which he varied 3 factors - how long the applicant had been out of work, how often they had switched jobs, and how much experience they have. What he found is that how long you've been out of work is the most important thing that employers look at. People prefer to hire someone with no experience, than someone that has been out of a job for more than 6 months. Scary stuff.
Here is a list of the top 100 TV series on IMDB as of today. I have ordered them based on year produced, and then sorted them within each year based on 60% IMDB score and 40% the number of people who voted for each title. I am personally more interested in the newer stuff that is being produced that people are liking, so this was my query to data-mine the results.