Six Links Worthy Of Your Attention #133

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Is there one link, story, picture or thought that you saw online this week that you think somebody you know must see?

My friends: Alistair Croll (BitCurrent, Year One Labs, GigaOM, Human 2.0, the author of Complete Web Monitoring and Managing Bandwidth: Deploying QOS in Enterprise Networks), Hugh McGuire (PressBooks, LibriVox, iambik) and I decided that every week or so the three of us are going to share one link for one another (for a total of six links) that each individual feels the other person "must see".

Check out these six links that we’re recommending to one another:

  • Aviary Ice – YouTube. "A couple of food-related links this week. My sister bought me Heston Blumenthal’s outstanding cookbook, and my wife got me Nathan Myrvhold’s epic five-volume compendium on molecular gastronomy, for the holidays. So you’ll forgive me if I’m a big food-obsessed this week. First up, a beautiful, almost poetic, video about a Chicago foodie destination called Aviary, and the cool things they do with frozen liquids. It’s also a nearly spiritual homage to True Hipster Love." (Alistair for Hugh).
  • Homaro Cantu + Ben Roche: Cooking as alchemy – TED Talk. "Across town from Aviary is another notorious destination, Homaro Cantu’s Moto. This place is all about trickery: Monte Cristo sandwiches that look like, well, Monte Cristo cigars. Along with Ben Roche, Homaro likes to push the envelopes. Why, for example, can’t we take what cows eat (beets, corn, and so on) and make a burger, without the cow? Here’s a ten-minute TED talk they gave in 2011 that reminds me of a crazy dinner I had there a couple of years ago — think gourmet food served by the Mythbusters cast. Oh, and now they’re working on 3D printed food with NASA." (Alistair for Mitch).
  • Debunking Nine Myths of the Gun-Control Debate – Bloomberg. "It’s funny once you completely embrace the Lean Start-Up/analytics-driven way of thinking about the world, you stop having such faith in your intuitions. Intuitions are so often wrong; or they are as often right as they are wrong, and the trick of the Lean Start Up method is to define a testable hypothesis, set up measurable assumptions with analytics, and test. Then make your decision based on the results. (Hey, this sounds a lot like the scientific method!). Great start-ups are really good at this, and it goes for design decisions, feature decisions, pricing decisions, and much more. Because: everyone has an opinion, and you don’t know what the answer is until you see how real people react. I’ve found myself increasingly uncertain about political issues. I tend to the left of spectrum, but my reaction now is to mistrust my tendencies and ask: where is the data? How do we test this? And so, after Sandy Hook, I found myself with the typical left response: the US needs better gun control; but also reacting to that reaction with: is there data to show that will stop things like Sandy Hook? How do we test this issue? Because, I just don’t know if gun control is that answer. (Not to mention, it’s hard to imagine how, say, banning assault rifles will have any impact on the 10,000 gun deaths a year in the US – there are already 300 million guns in that country!). Anyway. This was a refreshingly honest article… and I am not sure about all these myths, but we should all ask about getting more data about these myths in order to craft effective policy responses." (Hugh for Alistair).
  • The Internet – A Decade Later. "A great infographic about where we’ve come from, and where we are." (Hugh for Mitch).
  • NASA working on faster-than-light space travel, says warp drives are ‘plausible’ – ExtremeTech. "If you ever wake up, roll over and feel a little depressed, I want you to bookmark this news item. I want you to bookmark this news item, because if we are on the verge of getting warp speed travel in our lives, we’re a few steps closer to having Star Trek become a reality. Now, you don’t even have to be a nerd to have that make you shake your head, smile and say: ‘it’s good to be alive!’ Warp speed. How awesome is that?" (Mitch for Alistair).
  • What to watch for in 2013 – The Shatzkin Files. "So, do people buy more books in their digital format or physical form? The debate rages on, and the true tipping point has yet to be firmly established. Are physical books done for? This is one of those fascinating reads about the publishing industry that will get you thinking and re-thinking everything (with the stats to back it up). Special thanks to Jeffrey Gitomer for turning me on to this post." (Mitch for Hugh).

Now it’s your turn: in the comment section below pick one thing that you saw this week that inspired you and share it.