Interesting Links for 23-05-2013

[andrewducker]

• We're getting closer to understanding how salamanders regenerate limbs
  (tags: regeneration biology )
• Average Home Sizes Around the World
  (tags: housing homes )
• The seven craziest findings in the US investigation of Apple’s tax avoidance practices
  (tags: tax apple )
• Amazon gets into the fanfic business
  (tags: fanfic amazon )
• How to post-master an

Comments

[bart_calendar]

"As a writer you slant all evidence in favor of the conclusions you want to produce and you rarely tilt in favor of the truth..... This is what a writer does: his life is a maelstrom of lying. Embellishment is his focal point. This is what we do to please others. This is what we do in order to flee ourselves. A writer's physical life is basically one of stasis, and to combat this constraint, an opposite world and another self have to be constructed daily... the half world of a writer's life encourages pain and drama, and defeat is good for art: if it was day we made it night, if it was love we made it hate, serenity becomes chaos, kindness became viciousness. God became the devil, a daughter became a whore... lying often leaked from my writing life."

-- Brett Easton Ellis

[artkouros]

lol@walmart "security". That's SO 2000.

Once when my oldest (black) granddaughter was about 4 or 5 we went to a Dallas mall to shop. While we were in one of the big stores she decided she wanted to play hide and seek and have me chase her around the store. Finally in exasperation I cornered her, threw her over my shoulder and carried her out of the store, with her wailing with horror and dis-entitlement all the way. I got a lot of stares, but no one called the police. But it had already occurred to me that they might, so I always carried a photo of me with all my grandkids in my wallet. I still carry it.

[momentsmusicaux]

I'm astonished that average UK home size is 76 sq m. My flat is about 100 and it seems on the small side to me. Maybe that's because I grew up in a city where most people lived in standard 3-bed houses?

[philmophlegm]

I'm not entirely surprised, and with increasing population, I doubt that the average UK home size is going to do anything but decrease. I wonder what the figure would be for the UK outside of the big cities.

One important piece of information missing from that statistic though is the number of people living in the average home. There may be more single people and fewer large families in the UK. Our six bedroomed house is lovely and big for the two of us but probably wouldn't be if we had eight children.

[philmophlegm]

There are some good points in that 'My mum and SEO' post about testing your assumptions on 'normal' people. We do this. We had a client who was getting good performance from their AdWords campaign and their organic SEO right up to the booking stage - they were just not getting conversions. Giving my parents a list of ten holiday accommodation providers in southwest England on a piece of paper and telling them to go to their websites and tell us which one they would book while silently watching what they were doing was very revealing

[andrewducker]

Thank you, that was fascinating.

[simont]

You'll also hear general internet users sometimes say that they don't click on ads because they assume that the organic results are somehow more relevant to their search.

By contrast, Google's AdWords are pretty much the only kind of ad I ever do click on, and not only that, sometimes buy things from afterwards

[philmophlegm]

That's a very good distinction - between adverts that distract you from what you are doing (most of them) and adverts that help you to achieve what you're trying to do. I might use that with clients!

[avva]

>The world that only formerly-blind people can see

This article links to an absolutely fascinating case study Recovery from Early Blindness, which I thought was more interesting than the article itself. There're drawings by the formerly blind patient there, tests of visual illusions, and much more.