Nature’s Very Own Suicide Bombers - "Some insects in the animal kingdom have been known to self-destruct, as a form of altruism to save their colonies or brethren, when harassed or pursued by a predator"
Why we're leaving the cloud - "Basecamp has had one foot in the cloud for well over a decade, and HEY has been running there exclusively since it was launched two years ago. We've run extensively in both Amazon's cloud and Google's cloud. We've run on bare virtual machines, we've run on Kubernetes. We've seen all the cloud has to offer, and tried most of it. It's finally time to conclude: Renting computers is (mostly) a bad deal for medium-sized companies like ours with stable growth. The savings promised in reduced complexity never materialized. So we're making our plans to leave. The cloud excels at two ends of the spectrum, where only one end was ever relevant for us. The first end is when your application is so simple and low traffic that you really do save on complexity by starting with fully managed services. This is the shining path that Heroku forged, and the one that has since been paved by Render and others. It remains a fabulous way to get started when you have no customers, and it'll carry you quite far even once you start having some. (Then you'll later be faced with a Good Problem once the bills grow into the stratosphere as usage picks up, but that's a reasonable trade-off.) The second is when your load is highly irregular... It's like paying a quarter of your house's value for earthquake insurance when you don't live anywhere near a fault line... Now the argument always goes: Sure, but you have to manage these machines! The cloud is so much simpler! The savings will all be there in labor costs! Except no. Anyone who thinks running a major service like HEY or Basecamp in the cloud is "simple" has clearly never tried. Some things are simpler, others more complex, but on the whole, I've yet to hear of organizations at our scale being able to materially shrink their operations team, just because they moved to the cloud... The cloud is sold as computing on demand, which sounds futuristic and cool, and very much not like something as mundane as "renting computers", even though that's mostly what it is. But this isn't just about cost. It's also about what kind of internet we want to operate in the future. It strikes me as downright tragic that this decentralized wonder of the world is now largely operating on computers owned by a handful of mega corporations. If one of the primary AWS regions go down, seemingly half the internet is offline along with it. This is not what DARPA designed!"
Russian Gas Station Offered Free Fuel To Anyone In A Bikini & Men Ended Up Taking Full Advantage Of It - "The Olvi gas station in Samara, Russia promised free fuel to anyone who turned up in a bikini. They probably thought that a lot of women will turn up, but they clearly didn't think things through."
Internet is a weird place where a picture of Elizabeth Olsen fixing sink pipe exists
Everything you thought you knew about inbox zero is wrong | WIRED UK - "Merlin Mann, the lifestyle "guru" that invented the concept of inbox zero in the early noughties, claims people took his idea far too literally. They advocated treating work emails like a never-ending task to be completed: once an email has been acknowledged it should be immediately archived, never to clutter the inbox again. Advocates of this philosophy even released handy tips on how to achieve this through infinite tags and categories. But people soon realised this is not just tedious but a massive waste of time. Mann, who admits his own work inbox is embarrassingly cluttered, agrees."
How non-English speakers are taught this crazy English grammar rule you know but you've never heard of - "But some of the most binding rules in English are things that native speakers know but don’t know they know, even though they use them every day. When someone points one out, it’s like a magical little shock. This week, for example, the BBC’s Matthew Anderson pointed out a ”rule” about the order in which adjectives have to be put in front of a noun... Forsyth also takes issue with the rules we think we know, but which don’t actually hold true. In a lecture about grammar, he dismantles the commonly held English spelling mantra ”I before E except after C.” It’s used to help people remember how to spell words like “piece,” but, Forsyth says, there are only 44 words that follow the rule, and 923 that don’t. His prime examples? “Their,” “being,” and “eight.”"
4 types of white guys - *Preppy, hunter, emo/goth, skinhead*
"BUT WAIT. THEY FORGOT THE 5TH TYPE. THE MOST RAREST TYPE *Fedora*"
Bishops agree sex abuse rules - "Girls Think Tank Has Emerged as Key Voice for Human Rights — The San Diego Union-Tribune 1/3/11
Padres pitcher Latos writes ‘I hate SF’ on balls — The Associated Press 2/19/11
Youth hunts start season — The Bellingham (WA) Herald 9/24/10
Bishops agree sex abuse rules — The Sunday Business Post (Dublin, Ireland) 4/3/11
Police: Suicide followed natural death — Las Vegas Review-Journal 3/4/11
Bullying session to be rescheduled — The Post-Crescent (Appleton, WI) 1/18/11
1 in 5 U.S. moms have babies with multiple dads, study says — MSNBC.com 4/1/11
Judge raises bail for sex offender — The Boston Globe 7/30/10
Texas man accused of shooting deputies in custody — USA Today 9/20/10
Woman accused of mugging a man using a walker — San Antonia Express-News 4/1/11"
‘A crazy story’: how a Chinese vase valued at €2,000 sold for €8m - "In the 41 years of wielding the gavel at his auction house a stone’s throw from the royal chateau at Fontainebleau, Jean-Pierre Osenat had never seen anything like it... The story has cost one of the auctioneer’s experts his job, after a Chinese vase he declared an ordinary decorative piece worth €2,000 (£1,760) at most sold for almost €8m, nearly 4,000 times the estimate. “The expert made a mistake. One person alone against 300 interested Chinese buyers cannot be right,” Osenat said. “He was working for us. He no longer works for us. It was, after all, a serious mistake.” The extraordinary story began earlier this year when a French woman living abroad decided to sell furniture and various objects from her late mother’s home in Brittany. Having entrusted Osenat with the sale, the vase – which had belonged to her grandmother – was packed up, dispatched to Paris and put in a “furniture and works of art” auction of 200 lots, none of which was valued over €8,000... The estimated price, between €1,500 and €2,000, reflected the expert’s view that it was a 20th-century decorative piece and not a rare artefact... The expert, who was sacked and has not been named, is reported to be standing by his original valuation. Cédric Laborde, the director of the auction house’s Asian arts department, is still not entirely convinced the expert was wrong. “We don’t know whether it [the vase] is old or not or why it sold for such a price. Perhaps we will never know”... “The valuation corresponded to what the expert thought. In China, copying something, like an 18th-century vase, is also an art. In this case I don’t have an answer. Over the last few years there have been some surprises in auctions of Asian objects.”"
'Foodbank' nurse who put Nicola Sturgeon on spot in TV debate pictured enjoying lavish trip to New York - "The nurse who claimed she is forced to use foodbanks during the BBC Scotland election debate has been ridiculed after pictures emerged of her enjoying champagne in a five-star New York hotel. Claire Austin, 50, posed with glasses of champagne and shared pictures of her lavish meals while on a luxury trip to the Big Apple over the New Year – despite telling Nicola Sturgeon she "can't manage" on her wages because the government are failing to fund the NHS. Her Twitter profile also states hints that she is 'moderately rich' while it is believed her daughter attended a private school where the fees are more than £11,000 a year... in a sarcastic post she hit back at critics"
Jeffrey Dahmer Halloween costume sales banned on eBay
Maybe it's just me, but serial killers are scary. But Halloween has strayed from its earlier traditions
Quebec order of nurses disapproves of sexy, erotic Halloween nurse costumes - "To those considering dressing up this Halloween as a fetishized nurse, Quebec's order of nurses says you should think twice. "The eroticization of the profession is socially and professionally unacceptable," the president of the OIIQ said in a press release... While the OIIQ is not about to start producing Halloween costumes it said, it has come up with a version which portrays nurses in a realistic way."
Might as well cancel Halloween. Deciding on an appropriate costume is a full-time job
The vast majority of female costumes are sexualised anyway
Nixing Halloween parade in Lower Merion causes big stir among parents who ask, ‘What’s next?’ - "“Security was a big concern,” said Amy Buckman, director of Lower Merion’s school and community relations. Although adults are screened when entering schools, that can’t happen outside. “Just the thought of having an entire school population of young children in a field surrounded by adults that we couldn’t possibly screen was worrisome,” Buckman said. Lack of inclusivity was another factor, she said. “Our district prides itself on providing a sense of belonging to every student. And we have numerous students who for religious or cultural reasons do not celebrate Halloween.” Some families choose to keep their children home that day, she said. “Other kids would just be sitting in the library ... and that does not help create a sense of belonging for children,” Buckman said. Furthermore, work obligations prevented some parents from attending the morning parade, disappointing their children... It’s not that students will have to bag Halloween pageantry. “Students who wish to come to school in costumes are invited to do so,” according to a letter emailed to parents last Friday. “Students are also invited to dress in a way that reflects something unique about them, their interests, culture or personality.”... “We seem to be taking the view of inclusivity as going down to the least common denominator, rather than trying to celebrate all cultures, all religions, all views for our kids,” she said. “We’ve done other celebrations in the past, like Chinese New Year or Diwali. And certainly not every kid aligns with those”"
Sheriff's ‘ghost’ horse costume blasted for 'KKK' similarity - "An attempt by some Ohio sheriff’s officers to dress their horses up like “ghosts” for Halloween became more trick than treat for the department, when some residents complained they looked like the “Ku Klux Klan.”"
The risks of trying to be fun in a culture of offence
Meme - "I made a collage with a picture of me in the middle and some women on Facebook who decided to tell me they wouldn't have sex with me because im a conservative. To be clear I never initiated any conversation about having sex with these... Um people. They just felt the need to tell me completely unprompted that they would not have sex with me. Sincerely thank you it's a great relief to know that none of you will ever attempt to have sex with me."
Firefox points the way to eradicating PDFs - "It's not sexy but it is good. Mozilla deserves our love for implementing a better PDF reader in the new Firefox browser, 106. It takes away the pain, just a bit, by doing in-browser renderings that can be annotated, decreasing the chance you'll have to find a third-party reader that does what you need... The list of PDF's sins puts Las Vegas to shame, and they all stem from one of the 1990s' most grievous misconceptions, that the digital would be a more exploitable clone of the physical. That assumption is far from dead – it's why corporate VR is so awful – even though PDF has been a glaring demonstration of that folly for decades. PDF is skeuomorphic, intended to carry the character of an old entity into a new one. It is designed to produce an exact replica of a printed document. Great if you want printed documents, terrible if you don't. But PDF works from the assumption that because human readable data has been distributed in formats that can't change from cuneiform to Caxton to Agatha Christie, that's how it's going to be in computer land... The results are lost productivity, lost opportunity, even lost users."
The Secret Tricks Hidden Inside Restaurant Menus - "Far from being glorified pricelists, restaurant menus are sophisticated marketing tools that can nudge customers towards certain choices. Restaurant menus can even tell us what to think. “Even the binding around the menu is passing us important messages about the kind of experience we are about to have,” explains Charles Spence, a professor in experimental psychology and multisensory perception at the University of Oxford. “There are a lot of elements on a menu that can be changed to nudge the customer in one way or another.”... “For a large chain that might have a million people a day coming into their restaurants around the world, it can take up to 18 months to put out a menu as we test everything on it three times,” says Gregg Rapp, a menu engineer based in Palm Springs, California, who has worked on menus for small neighbourhood cafes and multinational giants during his 34-year-long career... Heavier menus have been shown to suggest to the customer that they are in a more upscale establishment where they might expect high levels of service. The font the menu is written in can convey similar messages; for instance an italic typeface conveys a perception of quality. But using elaborate fonts that are hard to read could also have another effect – it could alter how the food itself tastes... consumers often associate rounder typefaces with sweeter tastes, while angular fonts tend to convey a salty, sour or bitter experience. “Restaurants can play with this to nudge people towards ordering more expensive dishes,” explains Spence, whose recent book Gastrophysics: the New Science of Eating, looked at the issue in detail. But the language on the menu can be just as important, he adds. After all, a “grass-fed Aberdeen Angus fillet with thick-cut rosemary fries” sounds much more appetising than a simple “steak and chips”, does it not? This sort of descriptive language is widely used by the food industry. The British retailer Marks & Spencer famously uses long-winded, and often sensual, descriptions of the food it sells in its adverts, to convey the impression of the quality of its products. “This is not just a pudding,” one advert declared. “This is a melt in the middle, Belgian chocolate pudding served with extra thick Channel Island cream.” It saw sales rocket by 3,500 percent. Words have tremendous power over our food choice. Giving dishes descriptive names can increase sales by up to 27 percent in some cases. This becomes particularly effective if the description attaches some provenance to the ingredients – “Grandma’s home-baked zucchini cookies” sound much more appealing than “courgette biscuits”. “Naming the farmer who grew the vegetables or the breed of a pig can help to add authenticity to a product,” says Spence. “Consumers take that as a sign of quality, even it has been made up. Sensory words can also make a dish seem more appealing.”... by cleverly naming dishes with words that mimic the mouth movements when eating, restaurants could increase the palatability of the food. They found words that move from the front to the back of the mouth were more effective – such as the made up word “bodok”... Putting brand names into dish titles is also an effective strategy for many chain restaurants, as are nostalgic labels like “handmade” or “ye olde” according to Brian Wansink from the Food and Brand Lab at Cornell University. A dose of patriotism and family can also boost sales... if longer words were used to describe a dish, it tended to cost more. For every letter longer the average word length was, the price of the dish it was describing went up by 18 cents (14p)... Certain colours like green are often used to imply the food is healthy and fresh, while orange is thought to stimulate the appetite... Red suggests a sense of urgency and perhaps draws attention to dishes the chef most wants you to buy – probably because they have the biggest profit margin... “The dollar sign is a pain point that reminds the diner that they are spending money,” says Allen. “By just using the figure, or even better, writing it out in words, it can reduce that pain.”... By placing the most expensive item at the top of the menu, it makes those that come after it seem far more reasonably priced... “When we do eye tracking on a customer with a menu in their hand, we typically see hotspots in the upper right hand side,” he says. “The first item on the menu is also the best real estate.”... filling a menu with too many items can actually hamper choice, according to menu design experts. They say offering any more than seven items can overwhelm diners... in fast food restaurants, customers wanted to pick from six items per category. In fine dining establishments, they preferred a little more choice – between seven and 10 items... Boxes around certain dishes – often high-priced options like steaks – can be particularly effective. Some restaurants also use logos that might signify a new time or a seasonal dish to draw a customer towards those choices. Images can also help, but it depends on where you are eating. In many parts of the world, pictures of food tend to be associated with cheaper fast food, and can put off the more snobby eater... “Our minds find protein in motion – oozing cheese and dribbling yolk, very attractive,” says Spence. “As menus go digital, there will be more opportunity to show this off with videos and animations.” Menus of the future could become so sophisticated that they may even know what you want to order before you even realise it yourself"
21 Strange and Ingenious Uses for WD40 - "A 1983 survey revealed that 4 in every 5 American homes had a can of WD40 in them... The WD40 website promotes dozens of uses for their product, as well as a list of 2,000 uses submitted by actual users...
Use No. 1: Spray it on dead fish bait as “a great pike attractor.”
Use No. 2: Coat wire tomato cages with it to keep insects away.
Use No. 5: It works like magic on tangled horse manes and tails.
Use No. 6: Remove gunk from the base of the toilet bowl.
Use No. 7: It’s a great lubricant for prosthetic limbs.
Use No. 8: It shines the leaves of artificial plants...
There have been all sorts of guesses about what exactly is in WD40, but the company isn’t saying. In 2009, Wired Magazine sent some to a laboratory to have it analyzed. The verdict? Fish oil, Vaseline, and “the goop inside homemade lava lamps.” Fact is, nobody knows. The formula has never been patented, apparently from fear somebody would find out. Instead, it’s a closely guarded trade secret locked up in a bank vault in San Diego...
Use No. 9: There are arthritis sufferers who swear by spraying it on stiff limbs. (The company, on the other hand, advises against it.)
Use No. 11: Great for getting chewing gum out of your kids’ hair.
Use No. 12: It’s rumored to keep the Statue of Liberty rust-free.
Use No. 13: Takes the sting out of fire ant bites.
Use No. 14: It keeps mirrors and windows from fogging up, whether in the car or the bathroom.
Use No. 15: It repels pigeons from balcony railings.
Use No. 16: Paired with a long-handled lighter, it makes a great mini flame-thrower. (Proceed at your own risk.)
For years, the number one complaint about the product was that people lost the little red straw that came with each can. In 2005, the company introduced the foldable Smart Straw to solve this problem. (Incidentally, the Smart Straw is smarter than you think. I just today read the can and realized that you can still spray it the old fashioned way if you just leave the Smart Straw folded. Am I the only person who didn’t know this? My guess is, yes.)... Police once used WD40 to extricate a naked burglar who had become wedged into ductwork. It was used to help pull a boa constrictor from pipes on the underside of a bus. A pet owner used it to free his parakeet—and himself—from sticky mouse paper...
Use No. 17: It keeps snow from sticking to shovels.
Use No. 18: It eliminates static on volume-control and tuning knobs.
Use No. 19: It cleans dog poop off tennis shoes.
Use No. 20: It camouflages scratches in cultured marble.
Use No. 21: It removes duct tape"
Benefits of Walking: Is Walking Every Day Really Enough Exercise? - "Kerry believes that walking is seriously underrated. While it isn’t as high intensity as other forms of cardio such as running, “it is effective in its own right, and no matter how fit you are, it is extremely beneficial”. Walking is particularly good for people who suffer from “knee, ankle or back problems”, says Kerry, as it can “reduce pain and improve your circulation and posture”. There are a whole load of benefits you can get from walking. According to Dr Davies, it can help you “improve your breathing, lower your heart rate, feel happier, become more connected to your environment, and experience less pain if you struggle with pain-related health issues.” And it’s not just about fitness: new research published in the Journal of Alzheimer’s Disease found that brisk walking five times a week helps combat brain aging and memory loss by encouraging blood flow... Kerry recommends “a daily walk of at least 30 minutes”. This is the best way to “increase cardiovascular fitness, help to strengthen your bones, and boost muscle endurance and power”. However, Tashi Skervin, a runner, trainer, and founder of fitness bootcamp TSC Method, says that everyone is different. “Someone with quite a sedentary lifestyle will require more movement, whereas someone whose job involves them moving all day won’t need as much to ensure they reach the minimum amount required”... “practising good posture is important” while walking to ensure the exercise is comfortable and efficient. That means you should “keep your head up, lengthen your back, drop your neck and shoulders, and try to engage your core”. You also need to make sure you “swing your arms with each step to create momentum”. Dr Davies recommends “finding your baseline duration each session”. Your baseline is basically “whatever you can manage without causing problems”, such as losing your form or injuring yourself. She suggests aiming to build from your baseline by at most 8-10% each week, to ensure you keep your “heart, lungs, muscles and other body systems” challenged. It can also help to vary the intensity of the exercise. Tashi says that “some of your walks could be long and slow, and others can be short and brisk, and this will help to work different energy systems and improve your cardiovascular health”."
The Economics Behind Grandma’s Tuna Casseroles - "All too often, cooking is explained in terms of social norms about femininity, or immigrants, or, in one New York Times column, the Cold War. This is all very well for sophomore sociology classes, but why does no one ever offer simple theories such as “they liked it”; “they thought it looked pretty like that”; or “that was what they could afford”? Having read quite a lot of the era's cookbooks and food writing, I find these the most likely reasons for the endless parade of things molded, jellied, bemayonnaised and enbechameled...
1. Most people are not that adventurous; they like what's familiar. American adults ate what they did in the 1950s because of what their parents had served them in the 1920s: bland, and heavy on preserved foods like canned pineapple and mayonnaise.
2. A lot of the ingredients we take for granted were expensive and hard to get. Off-season, fresh produce was elusive: The much-maligned iceberg lettuce was easy to ship, and kept for a long time, making it one of the few things you could reliably get year round. Spices were more expensive, especially relative to household incomes...
3. People were poorer... The same people who chuckle at the things done with cocktail franks and canned tuna will happily eat something like the tripe dishes common in many ethnic cuisines...
4. The foods of today’s lower middle class are the foods of yesterday’s tycoons. Before the 1890s, gelatin was a food that only rich people could regularly have... Over time, the ubiquity of these foods made them déclassé...
5. There were a lot of bad cooks around. These days, people who don’t like to cook, or aren’t good at it, mostly don’t. They can serve a rich variety of prepared foods, and enjoy takeout and restaurants. Why would you labor over something you hate, when someone else will sell you something better for only slightly more than it would cost you to make something bad?... Modern food writing has an enormous selection bias. The median cookbook reader is a much better cook, and much more interested in food, than the median audience of recipes from decades past...
6. Look at the sources of our immigrants... With the notable exception of the Italians, in the 19th century, most immigrants were from places with short growing seasons and bland cuisines, heavy on the cream and carbohydrates. After we restricted immigration in the 1920s, that’s what we were left with until immigrants started coming again in the 1960s. Of course, Louisiana had good French food, California and Texas had a Mexican influence, but by and large what we ate in 1960 was about what you’d expect from a German/English/Irish/Eastern European culinary heritage, adapted for modern convenience foods...
7. Entertaining was mandatory. Because people didn’t go to restaurants so much, they spent time having people over, or eating at someone else’s house. If someone had you over, you had to have them over."
There’s Already a Blueprint for a More Accessible Internet. If Only Designers Would Learn It - " The internet was a welcoming place when Cerf conceived of it. Email, for instance, originated as an assistive device that allowed the deaf to receive messages accurately. He developed its protocols, in part, to communicate with his wife Sigrid, who is deaf... But as websites got flashier, the experience has quickly become a source of frustration for disabled users... In 2017, the FBI arrested Maryland resident John Rayne Rivello for tweeting a strobing gif to embattled journalist Kurt Eichenwald with the words: “You deserve a seizure for your posts.” The New York Times reports that Eichenwald, who has epilepsy, immediately suffered a seizure upon seeing the animated message on his Twitter feed... Getting web developers to implement WCAG’s best practices is difficult because accessibility is often an afterthought... A 2016 Microsoft-funded investigation about the economic value of accessible technologies to companies suggests several advantages for employees from increased talent diversity, boost in productivity, and increased retention. For customers, showing a company cares about accessibility engenders loyalty and generates repeat business. There’s a particularly dramatic return for online businesses. For instance, UK insurance company Legal & General Group doubled its online traffic in three months when it redesigned its website to make it accessible to disabled people. It recovered the cost of the redesign within 12 months. Similarly, CNET improved its SEO and saw a 30 percent spike in Google traffic after adding transcripts of videos in 2016... “There’s a long history of innovations designed with and by excluded communities that have become a part of everyday life for many more people,” she explains to Quartz. Closed captioning, touchscreen mobile devices, audiobooks, and even the keyboard all originated as assistive technology... “Many of us are temporarily able bodied and will face exclusion as we age. When we design for inclusion, we’re designing for our future selves.”"
In Finland, Kids Learn Computer Science Without Computers - "unlike in some parts of the United States where learning to code is an isolated skill, Finnish children are taught to think of coding and programming more as tools to be explored and utilized across multiple subjects... If kids are in a physical-education class, students can act out the concept of a loop (essentially a sequence) by putting on a favorite tune and repeating a series of dance steps. Clap, clap, stomp, stomp, jump! The class can learn about different types of loops by adding other specifications—say, having students close their eyes—to the sequence or modifying it. In art class, kids can learn about loops by knitting, which is, after all, a sequence of stitches that sometimes vary and sometimes stay the same... Liukas pushes back at the idea that children are already tech-savvy simply because they seem to be able to navigate an iPhone intuitively... knowing how to use something isn’t the same as understanding how it works. And because programming can be taught in so many ways, Liukas said, it can be an opportunity for kids to learn lots of related skills, such as how to collaborate, how to tell a story, and how to think creatively... This is where the argument that it’s supposedly not fair to compare Finland to the United States because the former is much smaller, more homogenous, and more egalitarian often comes in. But Samuel Abrams, a professor at Columbia University and the author of a book about the push to privatize education in the United States, challenges that narrative. Abrams, who outlined his research at the embassy, compared Finland’s high marks on international education tests to those produced by other, similarly sized Nordic countries that are also relatively more homogenous and egalitarian than the United States. Those countries—Sweden, Denmark, and Norway—score lower than Finland and more in line with America. Finland, Abrams argued, sees education as a mode of nation building and economic development because it has to. While Norway has oil and Sweden has minerals and Denmark has banking, Finland has the brains of its citizens. And while Finland is today considered a frontrunner on education, that wasn’t always the case"
The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist - "the dominant thinking until fairly recently was that universal linguistic properties reflect genetic predispositions. Under this view, duality of patterning is much like an opposable thumb: It evolved within our species because it was advantageous, and now exists as part of our genetic heritage. We are born expecting language to have duality of patterning. What to make, then, of the discovery of a language whose words are not made from smaller, meaningless units? Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL) is a new sign language emerging in a village with high rates of inherited deafness in Israel’s Negev Desert... words in this language correspond to holistic gestures... ABSL provides fodder for researchers who reject the idea that there’s a genetic basis for the similarities found across languages. Instead, they argue, languages share certain properties because they all have to solve similar problems of communication under similar pressures, pressures that reflect the limits of human abilities to learn, remember, produce, and perceive information"