Fortune recounts the story of Terralliance, an oil exploration firm with high profile investors like Kleiner-Perkins and Goldman Sachs, that claimed to have found an algorithm that enabled it to accurately forecast where oil could be found. A taste:
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There’s been a (huge) backlog in my feedreader. And Firefox is currently loaded down with dozens of open tabs. A level of disorganization I probably shouldn’t ever admit to. But there it is. Presented with interesting stories, my eyes are always bigger than my stomach.
If you’ve every wondered how someone invents informercial products, how much money there is in the business, really, and whether those people are even real, a now six week old interview in the Wall Street Journal provides some clues.
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First commercially available jet pack. And just $90,000. 12 month wait, no license needed to fly. 10 gallons an hour.
Another reason I’d rather be a hedgehog:
“Heavy multitaskers are often extremely confident in their abilities,” says Clifford I. Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University. “But there’s evidence that those people are actually worse at multitasking than most people.”
Indeed, last summer Nass and two colleagues published a study that found that self-described multitaskers performed much worse on cognitive and memory tasks that involved distraction than did people who said they preferred to focus on single tasks. Nass says he was surprised at the result: He had expected the multitaskers to perform better on at least some elements of the test. But no. The study was yet another piece of evidence for the unwisdom of multitasking.
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You know how in the movies and on television crime shows you’ll see a detective or intelligence officer in a lab looking at a blurry digital picture? And they’ll issue a command to “enhance it” or just “zoom in” or “resolve the image?”
That’s been science fiction. You can’t resolve detail that wasn’t captured in the first place. Zoom in closer and closer and you get … bigger pixels, not clearer pictures.
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You may remember reading about or watching the documentary “The Cove” in which former dolphin trainer Richard O’Barry tells a story of watching the former star of Flipper kill herself by drowning. For some, the story is unremarkable: of course animals can commit suicide. To others, the story is impossible, with the only relevant question being: “Why is Richard O’Barry lying?”
Time Magazine this week recaps a paper in Endeavors that explores the history of animal suicide.
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Read Write Web reports that the mobile app marketplace across 13 current app stores is likely to exceed $17.5 billion. While I’m not inclined to trust a study promoted by GetJar and performed by an “independent consulting firm” I’ve never heard of, RWW reassures us that the estimate lines up with previous estimates by other, more big name firms.
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The Stolen Supper Club appropriates recipes from some of the world’s best restaurants. The
Londonist explains:
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Last night the United States Congress virtually guaranteed national bankruptcy for the United States. Social Security and Medicare, which are today jointly unsustainable—with liabilities that if capitalized today at record low interest rates would top $107 trillion. So what’s the solution? Add another, broken-at-birth entitlement—”(Sorta) Free Health Insurance for All!”—on top of it!
Free, very good health care for all is a nice idea. It’s beautiful in theory. The vision makes you feel all warm inside. And it seems an ethical imperative. But the gap between theory and reality on this one is unbridgeable.
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