“You know, that’s the first thing I do when I hit a browser bug I can’t pin down - start cutting the styles in half. Doesn’t matter which half, just start narrowing down the potential culprits by halves until I’ve got it down to one or two lines. Glad I’m a web designer and not a surgeon. ‘Does it hurt now? How about now?’” Wilson Miner, on finding CSS bugs by elimination
“Some people call me the human calendar while others run out of the room in complete fear. Most have called it a gift, but I call it a burden. I run my entire life through my head every day and it drives me crazy!!!” “AJ”, on her unique ability to perfectly and instantly recall details of her past, a condition researchers have dubbed “hyperthymestic syndrome”
“Today the world grows twice as much food as it did a generation ago, but it uses three times as much water to grow it. Two-thirds of all the water abstracted from the environment goes to irrigate crops. This use of water is massively unsustainable…” New Scientist
“Researchers recorded muscle activity in octopus limbs, and found that an arm generates two waves of muscle contractions that propagate toward each other. When the waves collide, they form a part-time joint.” LiveScience, MSNBC.com
“I’m sure the technology is even better now, but I was a -8 in both eyes and came out 20/10. Meaning I can see BETTER than 20/20. It’s awesome… The hardest part was to have my eyes “propped” open for the surgery. It as a little scary after the flap was cut and I couldn’t see anything. It was just black… The three days of healing weren’t painful and they weren’t very difficult. The hardest part for me was to not read newspapers and so on, as instructed. When you aren’t used to being able to see, you want to read EVERYTHING.” Dave Simon, on LASIK
“Adam Gopnik just emailed me to tell me that, for some strange reason, a debate that he and I did for the Washington Monthly on the Canadian health care system… has now been resurrected on various blogs… In our debate, Adam vigorously defended the Canadian system, and I attacked it. But wait! That was six years ago! I’ve now changed my mind. I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said. In fact, I shudder when I read what I said back then.” Malcolm Gladwell
“The Canadian health-care system is a health-care system for women. The American health-care system is a health-care system that is perfectly situated for men. It’s the male health-care system. This whole debate about what is better, the American system or the Canadian system, is essentially a variant on the gender war.” Blink author Malcolm Gladwell, on healthcare
“The mean duration of urinal use by men was 41 seconds, whereas women spend 75 seconds in their little stalls.” Reporter Francine Kopun, citing a 1975 study by the National Research Council
“Louise Boudin was an old lady when the San Franciso earthquake shook her world in 1906. Still, she dashed into her burning bakery. As it collapsed into rubble behind her, she emerged with just one item: a wooden bucket of mother dough. The widow Boudin retired four years later, but the mother dough lives on. The ‘mother’ is a sourdough starter that has been raising bread dough for 157 years. It is put to work every day at the Boudin Bakery & Museum on Fisherman’s Wharf in San Franciso.” Food Editor Susan Sampson, on the live culture of yeast and lactobacilli that is fed with flour and water
“Given all the contributions Canada has made to the world, who would guess one of the biggest would be to help build a better banana… the fourth most important food staple in the world—after rice, wheat and corn.” Leslie Scrivener, Toronto Star