Link Banana

Sadly refraining from linking to the source, Gems Sty highlights a pretty clever idea: a tent that looks like a car covered by it’s obsessive owner, allowing you privacy on even the world’s busiest streets. (Well, assuming you can find a parking spot.)

An interesting concept: Emily Jo Cureton draws pictures inspired by a few words in that day’s New York Times crossword.

(via Gems Sty)

On a related note, Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle is interesting.

If you’re willing to accept the fact that The Times of India’s website commits no small number of sins, Gems Sty found an interesting story about the impact cellphones have had there.

For the cellphones are now in the hands of people who would not have presumed, a generation ago, to put themselves on those eight-year-long waiting-lists. If you are chauffeur-driven these days, you can be sure that your driver carries a cellphone. If you visit a friend in a Delhi suburb, the istri wallah on the side-streets — with his wooden cart, using a coal-fired steam iron to iron clothes from the neighbourhood — carries a cellphone, to know which apartment needs his services. Farmers carry cellphones; just being able to call the nearest town to find out whether the market is open and what prices are being charged saves a farming family hours of fruitless walking. In Kerala, fisherfolk carry cellphones, so they can call in to the coastal towns after their catch, to know where they should sail to in order to obtain the best prices for their fish.

The cellphone is not a panacea; it will not single-handedly usher in the development that our country has been striving for since Independence. But it is making a huge difference. Above all, it has empowered the Indian underclass in ways in which 45 years of talk about socialism singularly failed to do.

The Independent has a rather long grouping of excerpts from Robert Frank’s The Economic Naturalist. They’re essentially questions answered with straight-forward but verbose (and sometimes questionable) economics. An example:

Why are DVDs sold in much larger packages than CDs, even though the two types of disc are exactly the same size?

Making the CD cases a little less than half as wide as the album sleeves they were replacing thus enabled retailers to avoid the substantial costs of replacing their storage and display racks.

Similar considerations seem to have driven the decision regarding DVD packaging. Before DVDs became popular, most film rental stores carried videotapes in the VHS format, which were packaged in form-fitting boxes that measured 135mm wide and 191mm high. These videos were typically displayed side by side with their spines out. Making DVD cases the same height enabled stores to display their new DVD stocks on existing shelves while consumers were in the process of switching over to the new format. Making the DVD package the same height as the VHS package also made switching to DVDs more attractive for consumers, since they could store their new DVDs on the same shelves they used for their VHS tapes.

(via Gems Sty)

This is very neat little video about how the internet began, and how it’s changed the nature of information. Well worth a look.

(via Gems Sty)