Living

Aug 7, 2012 11:20 PM   It's long been considered in poor taste to check your texts and emails and assorted other smartphone features while out on a date or socializing in close company. But is it possible that this social taboo is no longer worthy of being considered such a social crime? At this point, the odds are in your favor that whomever you're out with will have a smartphone, too. And you're probably going to receive a few texts in your time together. Maybe they'll be important, maybe they'll just be your mom saying she loves you (which: important, but not urgent ). But perhaps it's okay, finally, to acknowledge the need to check our phones for a second, just to make sure we're not needed. Should we ease up on the stigma at this point? Or is it still just plain rude? Image via Tawkify View the original article here This post was made using the Auto Blogging Software from WebMagnates.org This line will not appear when posts are made after activating...

Math! It's hard enough to wrap your head around even when it's not systematically unraveling your understanding of reality. For instance: there's a pretty decent chance you're dreaming right now. No, seriously; math says so. The mid-morning mind-frak springs from the highly advanced brain of Jan Westerhoff, a philosophy professor and metaphysics researcher at the University of Durham. In the ambitiously titled book Reality: A Very Short Introduction, Westerhoff breaks down why your present reality might not be so real: We optimistically assume that you get eight hours of sleep a night, which leaves sixteen hours during which you are awake. Sleep researchers have found out that there is a strong correlation between dreaming and being in so-called REM (rapid eye movement) sleep. REM sleep is characterized by rapid movement of the eyeballs; the brain is highly active, its electric activity resembles that of a waking brain, but the sleeper is more difficult to wake than du...

Jul 26, 2012 6:05 PM   One thing that stood out in Facebook's relatively by-the-books earnings call is how few ideas Facebook seems to have outside of "make it like mobile." That's probably not the best news for you. Facebook's primary focus today was its effort to convince advertisers that Facebook ads aren't a waste of money. That's been a big problem for the company (naturally, given that 90% of its revenue comes from advertising), and mobile has been a particularly sticky wicket. Its main source of revenue came from ads—poorly performing ads, but ads—that were on the right hand side of the page. But you can't do that on a 4-inch screen. The saving grace is Sponsored Stories. People click them, because they're in the news feed, and they look like something one of their friends might have posted. And on a mobile screen, they're basically a full-page ad. They're by far the most successful type of ad that Facebook has. Thankfully, Faceboo...

Jul 26, 2012 6:05 PM   One thing that stood out in Facebook's relatively by-the-books earnings call is how few ideas Facebook seems to have outside of "make it like mobile." That's probably not the best news for you. Facebook's primary focus today was its effort to convince advertisers that Facebook ads aren't a waste of money. That's been a big problem for the company (naturally, given that 90% of its revenue comes from advertising), and mobile has been a particularly sticky wicket. Its main source of revenue came from ads—poorly performing ads, but ads—that were on the right hand side of the page. But you can't do that on a 4-inch screen. The saving grace is Sponsored Stories. People click them, because they're in the news feed, and they look like something one of their friends might have posted. And on a mobile screen, they're basically a full-page ad. They're by far the most successful type of ad that Facebook has. Thankfully, Faceboo...