🔗 Articles: Sun 18.Feb.2024

New Scientist: The hidden rules that determine which friendships matter to us

Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has found that our friendships are governed by secret rules, based on everything from your sex to your sleep schedule. Our unique social fingerprints help determine who we are drawn to, which friendships last and why some friends are ultimately replaceable.

via AppleNews+

New Scientist: A container ship just tested a system to capture its own CO2 emissions

Shipping companies are experimenting with onboard carbon capture systems, but they face difficult trade-offs on energy and space for regular cargo.

Manton Reece: Letitia James on Trump

Letitia James, after New York’s $350 million fine on Trump:

The scale and the scope of Donald Trump’s fraud is staggering. And so too is his ego, and his belief that the rules do not apply to him. Today we are holding Donald Trump accountable. We are holding him accountable for lying, cheating, and a lack of contrition, and for flouting the rules that all of us must play by.

Wikipedia: Levittown

Levittown is the name of several large suburban housing developments created in the United States (including one in Puerto Rico) by William J. Levitt and his company Levitt & Sons. Built after World War II for returning white veterans and their new families, the communities offered attractive alternatives to cramped central city locations and apartments. The Veterans Administration and the Federal Housing Administration (FHA) guaranteed builders that qualified veterans could buy housing for a fraction of rental costs.

The first Levittown home sold for $7,900 and in a short period of time, 17,000 units were sold, providing homes for 84,000 people. In addition to normal family dwellings, Levittowns provided private meeting areas, swimming pools, public parks, and recreational facilities.

Production was modeled on assembly lines in 27 steps with construction workers trained to perform one step. A house could be built in one day, with 36 men, when effectively scheduled. This enabled quick and economical production of similar or identical homes with rapid recovery of costs. Standard Levittown houses included a white picket fence, green lawns, and modern appliances. Sales in the original Levittown began in March 1947. 1,400 homes were purchased during the first three hours.

The homes were, by today’s standards, bare bones: 750 square feet, with no basement or porch.

Realities.io (YouTube): Talk: Re-Designing Puzzling Places for Apple Vision Pro

Daniel Sproll gives an overview about how we aproached re-designing Puzzling Places for spatial computing. After a quick overview of Puzzling Places on Quest he lays out 3 key design dimensions for VisionOS development before diving into how the choices made in each of these dimensions shaped the Puzzling Places version that is now available on Vision Pro.

A well-organized and -delivered talk about the design decisions going into this interesting game.

Dan Miller (YouTube): Getting Started Developing for Apple Vision Pro with Unity

24.Oct.2023

This talk was part of the JetBrains GameDev Day 2023

Description: Learn about Unity’s support for Apple Vision Pro. How to leverage existing tools, packages, and features to start building today. The session will cover PolySpatial, the new Unity technology used for building shared and mixed-reality applications for Apple Vision Pro.

Speaker: Dan is a Senior Software Engineer at Unity working on the XR team. Before that, he was a developer advocate at Unity, focusing on AR and VR, building content, sharing knowledge, and helping the community.

Full event stream: JetBrains GameDev Day

This was put on four months before the Apple Vision Pro was actually released, so parts of it will certainly have changed since.

Dr. Gabe Mirkin: Fruit Juice Raises Blood Sugar As Much As Coca-Cola

A serving of 100 percent fruit juice contains the same amount of sugar as a sugared soft drink. Eight ounces of fruit juice contains the same 30 grams of sugar (eight teaspoons) that is found in eight ounces of soda, because that is the concentration at which sugar tastes best in drinks.

A review of 17 studies of children and 25 studies of adults found that drinking 100 percent fruit juice regularly is associated with gaining extra weight (JAMA Pediatr, January 16, 2024:e236124). A review of 73 meta-analyses that included 8,601 studies showed that adding sugared drinks to your diet was associated with significantly higher risks of 45 negative health outcomes (BMJ 2023;381:e071609). The Nurses’ Health Study and The Health Professional’s Follow-Up Study have shown that sugar-sweetened beverages are associated with increased risk for heart attacks, diabetes, obesity and high blood pressure, and the more sugar-sweetened beverages you take in, the more likely you are to suffer from these conditions (Circulation, April 30, 2019;139:2113–2125).

This is such a shame: I love orange juice!

TED Talks: Tim Urban: Inside the mind of a master procrastinator

February 2016

Tim Urban knows that procrastination doesn’t make sense, but he’s never been able to shake his habit of waiting until the last minute to get things done. In this hilarious and insightful talk, Urban takes us on a journey through YouTube binges, Wikipedia rabbit holes and bouts of staring out the window — and encourages us to think harder about what we’re really procrastinating on, before we run out of time.

I don’t mean to brag, but I have a bigger IGM (but a smaller PM).

NYT: BAFTA Awards 2024 Winners: Oppenheimer Sweeps

The Holdovers and Poor Things were also honored at the British equivalent of the Oscars, while Saltburn and Barbie left empty-handed.

Oppenheimer is apparently available on Amazon Prime Video at the moment.

The Guardian: Meet the cool-headed controllers who really run the country

From the road network to our airspace and the electricity grid, teams of workers are busy behind the scenes responding to every eventuality. But what does it take to keep Britain moving?

control centre duty manager, TfL, London
National Highways South East Operations Centre team manager, Surrey
call assessor, West Midlands Ambulance Service, Brierley Hill, Dudley
maritime operations officer, Humber Coastguard, Bridlington
control room distribution engineer, National Grid, Derbyshire
air traffic controller, NATS Swanwick, Hampshire

Updated: 18.Feb.2024 18:34 EST