• A Question of Privilege
  Depending how you write a story, it can be viewed as a privileged or unprivileged life. Here’s one example.
• The hidden price Steph Curry pays for making the impossible seem effortless
  The first article I read about Steph Curry (so far). I’m sure there will be many more written about him throughout his career.

  Curry has dramatically scaled back his commitments. The offers still come in “on an almost daily basis,” Austin says, but mostly, the answer is no. His deals with State Farm and Express recently concluded, and he won’t renew. Instead, going forward Curry has prioritized a few lucrative contracts that feel true to him and bespeak a clean message. There are no candy or fast food commercials; instead he endorses Brita water filters. And of course Under Armour, which renegotiated to give him equity in the company and a royalty-cut of his sneaker sales. If he takes on anything new it will be something that offers him a stake, and doesn’t require a lot of appearances, or photo and video shoots.

• The Minecraft Generation
  An article in the NY Times that talks about how Minecraft might be this generation’s garage tinkering for budding engineers.

  Redstone transports energy between blocks, like an electrical connection. Attach a block that contains power — a redstone “torch,” for example, which looks like a forearm-size matchstick — to one end of a trail of redstone, and anything connected to the other end will receive power. Hit a button here, and another block shifts position over there. Persson ingeniously designed redstone in a way that mimics real-world electronics. Switches and buttons and levers turn the redstone on and off, enabling players to build what computer scientists call “logic gates.” Place two Minecraft switches next to each other, connect them to redstone and suddenly you have what’s known as an “AND” gate: If Switch 1 and Switch 2 are both thrown, energy flows through the redstone wire. You can also rig an “OR” gate, whereby flipping either lever energizes the wire.

  These AND and OR gates are, in virtual form, the same as the circuitry you’d find inside a computer chip. They’re also like the Boolean logic that programmers employ every day in their code. Together, these simple gates let Minecraft players construct machines of astonishing complexity.

• The Ikea Way
  Another IKEA article but this one is focused more on how IKEA does globalization

  Ikea used to be pretty lousy at expansion. When the company first went into the U.S. market in 1985, it forgot it was a retailer. Instead it behaved like an exporter, taking beds and cabinets measured in centimeters and plopping them down in its first U.S. store near Philadelphia. Even sales successes happened for the wrong reasons: Americans bought an inordinate amount of Ikea vases … using them as water glasses. The European-size ones were too small to satiate Americans’ preference for ice.

• A controversial theory may explain the real reason humans have allergies
  Not really controversial, but the theory is new to me and possibly you.

  We know that allergens often cause physical damage. They rip open cells, irritate membranes, slice proteins into tatters. Maybe, Medzhitov thought, allergens do so much damage that we need a defense against them. “If you think of all the major symptoms of allergic reactions–runny noses, tears, sneezing, coughing, itching, vomiting and diarrhoea–all of these things have one thing in common,” said Medzhitov. “They all have to do with expulsion.” Suddenly the misery of allergies took on a new look. Allergies weren’t the body going haywire; they were the body’s strategy for getting rid of the allergens.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: ikea, pocket, science