"if they placed tomato plants near a germinating dodder, the parasite headed for the tomato 80 percent of the time. And when they put scent chemicals from a tomato on rubber, 73 percent of the dodder seedlings headed that way. Turns out, it sniffs out it's prey."

"Never before has something so human and primitive as dating been reducible to such discrete values."

"I like to tell people I did private tutoring every day for the cost of a fast-food meal or a Starbucks coffee"

"There are no taboos in the field of research, but to do this directly in the course of teaching is obviously not appropriate"

The Allen Institute has completed the mapping of the brain of a mouse.

Block Interest Discovery Service the brain child of
Alberta Market Solutions is a new consortium set to open in the first quarter of 2007.
The companies involved are Citigroup, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sach, Lehman Brothers, UBS AG and Morgan Stanley.

Java might slim down a bit in the next release (J2SE 6.0 codenamed Mustang). Packages scheduled for the chopping block include MIDI and CORBA following the guidelines of JSR 270

An experiment to achieve a billion page views and a million clicks

An experiment in open-source reporting

Do you really need a 160 mega pixels camera ?

"It's intolerable...The problem is that many people think that a garbage truck and a street cleaner will pass the next day..."

"Unsanitary nail salons pose a serious health threat to consumers"

"We conclude that there is sufficient injury caused by this prank to warrant a public health message"

"We see what we know.... They saw, were convinced and left"

"XML is perhaps the worst programming language ever conceived. I’m not talking about XML as a data-description language, which was its original design. I’m talking about perverting XML for programming applications. It’s inappropriate to use XML as a scripting language (e.g., ANT), a test-description language (e.g., TestNG), an object-relational mapping language (e.g., Hibernate, JDO), a control-flow language (e.g., JSF), and so forth. These sorts of XML programs are unreadable, unmaintainable, an order of magnitude larger than necessary, and audaciously inefficient at runtime."


from the same guy who gave us...


"The getter/setter idiom is a commonplace feature in many Java programs. Most of these accessor methods, however, are unnecessary and can severely impact your systems' maintainability. Using accessors violates the basic object-oriented (OO) principle of encapsulation, so you should avoid them."


Reader feedback here

"Corporal Payne plainly enjoyed conducting what he called 'the choir'...
systematically assaulting each of the Iraqi civilian detainees in turn ...
causing each one to shriek or groan in pain, their various noises
constituting the music."

Did you know...

...that the first successful penis transplant in China had to be reversed because of severe psychological problems caused to the recipient and his wife.

... that mosquitos love sugar.

... the five leading causes of card-related data breaches.

...that you can control how often Google crawls your website

...about the Dutch obsession for Drop.

...why Dutch Toilets are designed "differently" while the Japanese like to use theirs for pranks.

Does your taste in music dictate your social life ?
As per a London psychologist hip hop music fans are likely to have had more sex while those who stick to the classics have tried cannabis .Meanwhile another researcher in Scotland found that IQ scores not only determine your intelligence but your capacity to tolerate a hangover. British fertility clinic are also overcoming a shortage of home-grown sperm by importing it from Denmark.Me think they should import some brain cells as well.

Pinocchio might be the most popular puppet to spring out of Western literature but its origin and
legacy seems to span beyond the norm set out for it within children fairy tale and Hollywood films. This article offers a broader perspective. It is interesting to note the Christological allegory comparing Pinocchio, the creation of the carpenter whose name in the story derives from Giuseppe or Joseph and the fact that the puppet must die in order to be reborn as a transfigured being. The blue fairy thus becomes the Virgin Mary considering that she has traditionally been depicted with a blue mantle.

As an organ donor, I was impressed when I glanced at the news that the Pope will
be "dedicating organ to seek harmony in Church". Here at last is a Pope who is going to shun a
traditional christian burial and opt for the advancement of scientific research.
Then I took a closer look at the news and it turned out to be a church organ. A church organ to seek "harmony in Church". Nice play of words there your Popiness.

Index funds have come a long way. I fell for them 5 years ago, adopting it as my preferred method of investing. Considering their philosophy of long term investing, the returns
have been satisfactory. Vanguard is keeping me happy :)

Anybody and everybody in front of a computer has used the mouse one time or the other.
Did you know that a mouse speed is measured in dots per inch or DPI ?
...and do you know what is the unit to measure the number of "dots" covered by the mouse in a particular direction ?
...You guessed it right! - A "Mickey"

If you had registered for a new email account in the last couple of years or signed up for a service online,
you might have encountered a form where you had to accurately reproduce the content embedded in a
distorted image onto a field before submission. The purpose of this step is to prevent bots from taking part in online polls, registering for free email accounts etc.

Though I have interacted with this process for years, I stumbled on the definition only recently. CAPTCHA is an acronym for "Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart". More on this term here.

Singapore is on the hunt for a serial cat killer who has slaughtered at least 20 felines in the past two weeks. The cats were found dumped in bushes and drains, with their throats slit...