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How Ferrofluid Works

Ferrofluid is an assemblage of magnetic particles engineered at the nanoscale, 100 times smaller than the wavelength visible light. Although too small to be imaged with microscopes, nano-products harness surprising properties from nanoscale physics for use in the macroscale world.

via YouTube – Ferrofluid: How it works.

How To Hack Your Brain, Part 1: Sleep

the waste

One of the ways to force your brain into REM sleep and skip the other phases is to make it feel exhausted. If you’ve gone 24 hours without sleep, you might notice that you drift away into dreams straight from being awake. This because your body goes instantly into REM sleep as a protection mechanism. The way to hack yourself into entering REM sleep without being exhausted is to trick your body into thinking you’re going to get a tiny amount of sleep. You can train it to enter REM for short periods of time throughout the day in 20-minute naps rather than in one lump at night. This is how polyphasic sleep works.

There are actually six good methods to choose from; the first one, monophasic sleep, is the way you’ve probably slept your whole life. The five others are quite a bit more interesting.

the uberman

via How To Hack Your Brain, Part 1: Sleep | Dustin Curtis.

With regards to actually getting some sleep, I’ve always wanted to try a polyphasic sleep technique, where you have lots of little naps during the day to maximise your REM sleep, and minimise your “wasted” sleep.

You apparently feel more refreshed, and can stay “normal” for a longer period of time with less and less sleep – how’s 2 hours of sleep (broken up into 6x 20-minute naps) a day sound?

Only problems I see is that my current lifestyle doesn’t permit me to have such a sleep schedule – when you’re doing 6x 20 min naps a day and you miss even one by 30 mins, your whole schedule gets out of whack and you feel like crap for the next couple of weeks, even if you stick to your schedule over that time…

That being said, it does require a lot of time to get into (several weeks) – but I think it’d be awesome to survive on 2 hours sleep a day! Imagine how much more work you could get done!

Personally, I’d love to try it one day. If I’m ever in the position where I can do what I like for an extended period of time (6 months or more), I’d give it a crack

Blogger ethics: proper attribution > accountability

Overall, these results suggest that bloggers do expect a degree of ethical behavior from the community at large, and they practice (or at least they believe they practice) ethical behavior at an even higher rate. There are a number of ways to reconcile this with the poor reception that the proposed formal code of behavior received. It’s possible that the loudest voices on the issue came from a minority within the blogging community, or their were objections to the specific aspects of this code. But the results of the survey suggest that people won’t necessarily demand that the rest of the community adheres to the standards they set for themselves.

via Blogger ethics: proper attribution > accountability – Ars Technica.

Accountability? What’s that? Screw accountability, I say.

Now attribution – THAT’S important. In Uni you learn that plagiarism is bad – to this end, linking back to where you found the original story is seen as proper ethics.

As I’ve always said – credit where credit is due, gentlemen.

Wrong Number Generator

wrong number generator

Feel like driving someone insane in a malicious way? Come on, everybody knows at least one person they’d like to drive bonkers. This Wrong Number Generator is a brilliantly simple way to do just that.

How’s it work? Well, you plug your victim’s phone into one end and run the other end into the wall jack and leave it to do its business. It’ll then intercept any numbers that they dial and replace them with wrong numbers. This will be annoying. But the real coup? It’ll let the right numbers through 25% of the time, making them think that the problem is with their fat, inaccurate fingers, not with the phone itself. All the while you can sit back knowing that you’re causing lots of stress for your poor victim. Sweet.

via VISGORIA.

You can find the original post here.