via Engadget.com.

Our system involves just three main lists:

• People I trust: These are your main dudes and ladies, your closest friends. You’re only going to put 10-15 people on this one, max. My friend Will’s version of this list is named Inner Circle; mine is named True Blue. It’s the VIP list, so treat it accordingly — people have to earn their spots.
• People I don’t know well: Virtually everyone else you know goes on this list. It’s the one for friends from class, or the people you only see at parties, or friends of friends. Remember, you really don’t know that many people well — anyone you wouldn’t trust to keep those pictures of you on spring break in Mexico under wraps while you run for Congress goes on this list.
• Limited Profile: This is everyone you probably have to be friends with but that you don’t really want seeing your profile. Your boss, your little cousin, your mother. You’re going to lock this list down tight.

M as in Monkey.

Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents are training monkeys to use weapons to attack American troops, according to a recent report by a British-based media agency.

Reporters from the media agency spotted and took photos of a few “monkey soldiers” holding AK-47 rifles and Bren light machine guns in the Waziristan tribal region near the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan. The report and photos have been widely spread by media agencies and Web sites across the world.

HT: Slashdot.org.

1,500

Number of students scholarship that will be eventually scrapped – due to lack of funds.

RM750 million

Money saved from reducing subsidy and will be allocated education and health.

RM800 million

Total construction cost of the new Istana Negara. Double of RM400 million as initially projected.

43,544

Number of civil servants working in PM’s Department.

RM3.956 billion

Money allocated for PM’s Department in 2010.

This will probably have no impact to your day job but, it is interesting though.

NYTimes reports a string theorist and professor of physics at the University of Amsterdam, offers a new light on gravity.

But what if it’s (gravity) all an illusion, a sort of cosmic frill, or a side effect of something else going on at deeper levels of reality?

It goes something like this: your hair frizzles in the heat and humidity, because there are more ways for your hair to be curled than to be straight, and nature likes options. So it takes a force to pull hair straight and eliminate nature’s options. Forget curved space or the spooky attraction at a distance described by Isaac Newton’s equations well enough to let us navigate the rings of Saturn, the force we call gravity is simply a byproduct of nature’s propensity to maximize disorder.

“Some of the best physicists in the world say” the article continues, “they don’t understand Dr. Verlinde’s paper…”

Neither do I; but then again, it has no impact to my day job.

Brainstorming in a group became popular in 1953 with the publication of a business book, Applied Imagination. But it’s been proven not to work since 1958, when Yale researchers found that the technique actually reduced a team’s creative output: the same number of people generate more and better ideas separately than together.

Other techniques that works are listed in the article. Of all the suggestions, I prefer this the most

Explore other cultures. Five experiments by Northwestern’s Adam Galinsky showed that those who have lived abroad outperform others on creativity tasks. Creativity is also higher on average for first- or second-generation immigrants and bilinguals. The theory is that cross-cultural experiences force people to adapt and be more flexible. Just studying another culture can help. In Galinsky’s lab, people were more creative after watching a slide show about China: a 45-minute session increased creativity scores for a week.