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.
A Whole Body Workout in 7 Minutes
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).
A Poignant Account of Depression
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.
Slaves, Robots and Labour
There is an interesting post over at pieria.co.uk called "The Financialisation of Labour". Frances Coppola compares the changing economic incentives between a company making a capital investment in a slave and an employee. She then suggests replacing the word "slave" with the word "robot".
The "Barefoot" Craze
I just bought some Merrell "Barefoot" style shoes. They have practically no heel so are supposed to be better for you as you walk more naturally. I thought they were interesting because they are very lightweight and good for travel. We'll see how they go.
Desktop Spectrometry Kit
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.
Finger Induction of Lucid Dreams
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:
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Go to sleep.
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Wake up when you're very tired, perhaps using an alarm.
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Start tapping two fingers very gently, using a minimal amount of energy. Keep tapping and let yourself drift off to sleep.
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Do a reality check after a few minutes.
The Technological Unemployment Problem
Jon Perry has written an interesting post listing some strategies for dealing with the Technological Unemployment Problem.
The Technological Unemployment Problem is the issue of technology replacing humans to the point that there is massive unemployment.
Bitcoin and the Byzantine Generals' Problem
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.
Mnemonic Tagging
OK, here is an idea I had this morning: It's called "Mnemonic Tagging". The idea is that you create a list of keywords (or tags) that you use to mentally file mnemonic visualizations. For each of these tags you imagine something that represents the tag, followed by a chain of mnemonics that relate to that tag.