Link roundup

1. "A Chinese shipping magnate last weekend spent 250,400 euros ($328,000) for a Dutch pigeon."

2. Vanderbilt University apparently employs 67 nonteaching/nonresearch professional staff for every 100 students.

3. A look at the Weyland-Yutani soldiers from Alien 3.

Link roundup

1. How China bought its first aircraft carrier. (Hint, they lied about it.)

2. MIT students receive their acceptance letters in cardboard tubes and are encouraged to modify them. One student sent hers into space. (Have you noticed that all of the interesting stories about space have nothing to do with NASA?)

3. Mysterious new Google device being tested. Via.

Link roundup

1. Didn't work for me, but apparently you can play right in your browser the Alice: Madness Returns demo.

2. Speaking of video games, The Old Republic is $45 right now at Amazon. (Again, it's fascinating watching the algorithm work. When I started writing this post, a third party seller was offering the $45 (with shipping) rate. And just after I published, Amazon, which had been selling it for $53 matched the $45 price.)

3. Oreos had to stop being Oreos to succeed in China. Via.

4. Cool video of remote control planes modified to look like flying people. A marketing stunt, of course.

Link roundup

1. If you're in San Francisco tonight, go see Charmaine Olivia's new show at Shooting Gallery. First 50 people get a cool poster.

2. Computers are totally disrupting the job market:

Because they take out the middle, it is a lot harder to pursue the American dream by working your way up the ladder. Climbing up rung by rung, you will find a machine staring down. And it won’t retire or move up the ladder to make room for you. Once in place, a retirement or promotion is not going to happen, it isn’t going to be opening up a spot.

Via.

3. Air pollution in China is horrendous. The US Embassy in Beijing Tweets air quality reports. Via.

4. Parts list and photo instructions for building a great looking Lego X-Wing. Via.

5. I just installed send to Kindle on my computer. You just install it and sign in to your Kindle account, and then you can right click on pdfs and send them to your Kindle devices. Quick and easy.

Giant overhead LED screen in China

"The Place" mall in China features a giant overhead LED screen that shows a wide variety of animation:

Link roundup

1. Ice Worms:

In 1887, a glacial geologist named George Frederick Wright was hiking across the Muir Glacier in southeast Alaska when something strange caught his eye. Just as the daylight began to fade, the previously uninterrupted expanse of white snow around him began to develop what appeared to be a five o’clock shadow. These wriggling “whiskers” grew rapidly end emerged from the solid ice, leaving the snow crawling with an astonishing number of small black worms. Within approximately an hour there were tens of thousands of them criss-crossing the snow as far as he could see, leaving nary a square inch unwormed. A few hours later they began to slip effortlessly back into the ice, ultimately leaving nothing but pure white snow behind for the morning sun. The ice scientist brought news of these strange ice worms back to polite civilization, yet even over a century later little is known about the intriguing organisms.

(Been a long time since I saw the movie, but didn't they have something to do with Smilla's Sense of Snow?) Via.

2. Last week's mysterious lines in China are "are almost definitely used to calibrate China's spy satellites."

3. "By my calculations, at least 10 times as many girls are now trafficked into brothels annually as African slaves were transported to the New World in the peak years of the trans-Atlantic slave trade." Via.

Link roundup

1. Abandoned Chinese Disneyworld.

2. If you want to feel nauseous about the economy...

3. Great article about the search for rare earth elements in Alaska (add some super-smart bears and you have a Michael Crichton novel). A taste:

Dotson explained how he’d joined the first landing party as a surveyor to stake the mineral claims on Bokan in 1955. One of the geologists, Don Ross, of the Ross-Adams mine, had found the deposit by dangling a radiation detector outside the window of a tiny Piper Cub propeller plane while he skimmed the peaks of Prince of Wales Island.

4. And from the same issue of Businessweek, read about Amy Jo Martin, the woman behind Shaq's (and other athletes) success on Twitter:

At one point, in October of last year, 9 of the 10 trending topics on Twitter were related to her clients. The two-year-old company does in the “mid-seven figures” in annual billings, which are up 525 percent in 2011. Martin has done so well with teams and athletes that Digital Royalty picked up companies such as DoubleTree and Discount Tire Centers; non-sport clients now make up 70 percent of the business. She employs 15 people (mostly young, mostly women, mostly pretty) and is looking to hire at least five more.

Link roundup

1. Envelope with mysterious styrofoam cube.

2. "A German Ghost Town in the Heart of China." Via.

3. "How to Fix Internet Embarrassments and Improve Your Online Reputation."

Link roundup

1. Futuristic mouthguards:

The football team at Stanford University has gotten a high-tech upgrade to its uniform.

This season, players have begun wearing mouthpieces lined with sensors that measure the force and angle of collisions, to help researchers understand what kinds of hits and body positions are associated with concussions.

2. CBLDF fundraiser includes lunches with Neil Gaiman, Frank Quitely, and more.

3. China:

For example, when Shang-Jin Wei, an economist at Columbia University, and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute examined the size distribution of Chinese homes, they found that families with sons built houses that were significantly larger than those built by families with daughters, even after controlling for family income and other factors. They also generally found that the higher a city’s male-to-female ratio, the bigger the average house size of families that have sons.

Mr. Wei reports that many families with sons have begun to add a phantom third story to their homes, one that looks normal from the outside but whose interior space remains completely unfinished.

“Marriage brokers are familiar with the tactic,” he reports, “yet many refuse to schedule meetings with a family’s son unless the family house has three stories.”

Via these sites.

4. The Portal-themed iPad decals I posted a few days ago are now on sale.

Link roundup

1. Interesting article on the history of China's Bayi Rockets, the military-sponsored basketball team that got into the big fight with Georgetown. Once dominant, the team couldn't adapt to changing rules:

From its outset, the CBA had allowed teams to import two foreign players, including retreads from the NBA, as a way to expose Chinese players to better competition. The exception was Bayi, which remained all-Chinese. It would have been embarrassing for the army team to import foreign mercenaries. Yet as better foreigners began arriving, Bayi began to struggle, which was more embarrassing. The league tried to give it special protection: Any team playing Bayi had to limit the playing time for foreign stars.

2. I enjoyed Brian Lam's ridiculous article about Steve Jobs. Its subtitle is "Regrets of An Asshole", but he: (1) timed the publishing of the article to benefit from Jobs's death; (2) goes to great pains to brag that Steve Jobs thought he was really talented; and (3) blames much of the iPhone 4 fiasco on coworkers, especially the people still at Gawker media ("I probably should have quit right after the first story was published for several different reasons. I didn't know how to say that without throwing my team under the bus, so I didn't.").

3. And speaking of articles on Steve Jobs, here's Robin Hanson discussing Jobs and signaling.