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Euh…

What Monkeys Can Teach You About Money

Un long article (en anglais) démontrant que la bêtise humaine est animale. Ou plutôt les risques économiques. Prenez des singes, donnez leur la valeur de l’argent puis vendez leur des fruits… avec des risques sur les résultats de la vente…

What Monkeys Can Teach You About Money
August 25, 2011 – 12:00 AMThis is a special sneak peek at the September-October issue of mental_floss magazine. Click here to get a risk-free issue!

by Allen St. John

How a Yale research team made history by teaching capuchins to spend money … and discovered that they’re just as smart—and stupid—as your financial advisor.

It’s a little bigger than a quarter and about twice as thick, but because it’s made of aluminum, it weighs roughly the same. It’s flat and smooth, except for what seem to be a few tiny bite marks around the perimeter. To you, it might look like a washer without a hole. To Felix, an alpha male capuchin monkey, and his friends at Yale University, it’s money.

“When one of the monkeys grabs a token, he’s going to hold onto it as though he really values it,” explains Laurie Santos, a psychology professor at Yale. “And the other monkeys might try to take it away from him. Just like they would with a piece of food. Just as you might want to do when you see a person flaunting cash.”

During the past seven years, Santos and Yale economist Keith Chen have conducted a series of cutting-edge experiments in which Felix and seven other monkeys trade these discs for food much like we toss a $20 bill to a cashier at Taco Bell. And in doing so, these monkeys became the first nonhumans to use, well, money.

What Monkeys Can Teach You About Money

Legotron, Mark I, lego = photo

Legotron, Mark I — 4×5 Camera made of LEGO bricks

{ed note: Wow! Hello people from all over the place! Below is my initial post about the Lego 4×5. I added more images and a bit more detail to a new post just now. Check it out here.}

Back in August of 2009, I blogged about having an idea of making a 4×5 out of LEGO bricks. Ten days later I’d made some serious progress on it. I started with trying to use the LEGO builder App on the computer to spec it out before I built it, but my mind wouldn’t work like that, so I threw that out and borrowed a metric tonne of LEGOs from my friend Gregory. I made a couple of rounds of prototypes that proved to work well enough for my mind to think Hello World / proof of concept. Fast forward a bit and I got really busy and left the project sitting on a desk for just ages. A big hitch in the progress, other than being busy, was that I’d built just enough of the camera to realize I had to rebuild the main body to accomodate the film holder—a part I’d forgotten to plan for.

Fast forward something like a year, and I finally carved out time to restructure everything to fit the back and actually finish the super-low-budget “ground glass”. This weekend marked the first time all the pieces came together! I took 4 frames on Sunday, two Monday, and processed them later that day. I got to scan them this morning and I am COMPLETELY FREAKING STOKED.

Here are the 4 frames I shot. I only took the time so far to edit the one of Ashley.

Ashley Johnson, of A Bryan Photo.

Legotron, Mark I — 4×5 Camera made of LEGO bricks | cary norton photographs

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Vidéo

Encore un peu de Mc Askill?

Toujours plus impressionant, toujours sur une bonne musique

Voir aussi la première et la seconde vidéo de Mc Askill sur Sylaz.

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Métal Vidéo

Snowboard+metal

Je sais, c’est mal…
Une vidéo avec un crédit carbone équivalent à celui de la Belgique, qui vont bruyamment à grand renfort de kérosène faire chier les ours en haute des montagnes…
Mais c’est du snowboard avec du métal!!!!!

Catégories
Documentaire

Myanmar

Un court reportage édifiant sur la Birmanie, parond le Myanmar et ses contradictions… Un très bon complément à cette excellente BD de Guy Delisle : Chroniques birmanes

Catégories
Apple

What Ze F…

Décidément les coques d’iphone les plus barées du monde :

[SoftbankiPhone4??]???????????(????)
iPhone???

??????[??][Softbank iPhone 4??]???????????(????)[9??????????] ??????/????????????/?????/????????????????????????