One of our readers sent in an email which mentioned the idea that nobody can explain how the Egyptian pyramids were built, so we thought it would be fun to link to this animation which proposes a new theory.
Source: YouTube – How the Khufu Eqyptian Pyramid Was Built Part II
The New Yorker has a great read about what exactly went down the night U.S. operatives went into Abbottabad and killed bin Laden.
Source: The New Yorker – Getting Bin Laden
According to Forbes, the 400 richest Americans pay a mere 18% tax rate. What a sad state of affairs. When the gap between the rich and poor continues to increase, the inevitable outcome is social unrest. For a nice summary of the economic disparity in the U.S., please (re)-read this article by Stiglitz titled ‘Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%’.
Source: Forbes – The 400 Richest Americans Pay An 18% Tax Rate
Given all of the debt ceiling chatter, it is worth reviewing just how much money was spent this year alone to ‘fight’ the war on drugs in the U.S.:
…Facebook is fundamentally (=unalterably) indiscreet.
And it is fundamentally indiscreet because it is architecturally indiscrete. (Forgive me that word play.) Meaning: you cannot distinguish easily between different degrees of intimacy among the people in your social graph. The various relationships are not discrete, not separate.
Mark’s vision (as he told it to me back then, and as I described it in my early profile) was to be a “mapmaker” (like the heroic explorers of the Renaissance) of human connections. To him that was an algorithmic challenge. I always knew that his premise was unsound sociologically.
Source: andreaskluth.org – The sociological breakthrough of Google+
Interesting article by Bloomberg. Here’s a snippet:
Cyber attacks used to be kept quiet. They often went undiscovered until long after the fact, and countries or companies that were hit usually declined to talk about attacks. That’s changed as a steady flow of brazen incursions has been exposed. Last year, for example, Google (GOOG) accused China of spying on the company’s workers and customers. It said at the time that at least 20 other companies were victims of the same attack, nicknamed Operation Aurora by the security firm McAfee (INTC). The hacked included Adobe Systems (ADBE), Juniper Networks (JNPR), and Morgan Stanley (MS). Joel F. Brenner, the head of U.S. counterintelligence until 2009, says the same operation that pulled off Aurora has claimed many more victims over several years. “It’d be fair to say that at least 2,000 companies have been hit,” Brenner says. “And that number is on the conservative side.”
Here’s a fun read by Chuck Klosterman. A snippet pour toi:
Allow me to spare you the hyperbole: Usain Bolt is fast.
He is, as far as we can tell, the fastest human who’s ever lived — in 2009, at a race in Berlin, he ran the 100-meter dash is 9.58 seconds. This translates to an average speed of just over 23 mph (with a top speed closer to 30 mph). His ’09 performance in Germany was .11 quicker than the 9.69 he ran at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the fattest chunk ever taken off a world record at that distance. Considering the unadulterated simplicity of his vocation and the historic magnitude of his dominance, it’s easy to argue that Bolt has been the world’s greatest athlete of the past five years. And yet there’s an even easier argument to make than that one: Within the next 10 years, Bolt’s achievements as a sprinter will be completely annihilated.
Source: Grantland – Is the Fastest Human Ever Already Alive?
