Wealth and attractiveness; sustainable online book reviewing; lignin reaction for biofuels; geoengineering with lime …

• 1 – People in wealthy areas perceived to be most attractive
  “Finding healthy people more beautiful could be an evolutionary explanation for attractiveness, while a link between wealth and beauty points to a more cultural explanation, the researchers said.”
  (tags: affluence health wealth society culture perception beauty psychology)
• 2 – Michael Crichton: Evil, Or Just A Crazy Luddite?
  My vote goes on “twat”, frankly.
  (tags: science author writer FUD denialism technophobia Crichton)
• 3 – Is Online Book Reviewing Sustainable?
  “By putting some money back into the institutions [...] publishers would be helping to maintain discussion levels as well as [...] investing in the next generation of writers by supporting a paying short fiction market… ” Hmm.
  (tags: publishing dialogue discussion markets paying criticism reviews book fiction genre)
• 4 – Chemical breakthrough turns sawdust into biofuel
  “A large percentage of the starting material is converted into useful products,” he adds. “But this work is still in its infancy so other aspects related to economic issue will be evaluated in the near future.” Uh-huh.
  (tags: research fuels energy sawdust reaction lignin biofuel)
• 5 – A dash of lime — a new twist that may cut CO2 levels back to pre-industrial levels
  “… potentially huge environmental benefits from addressing climate change – and adding calcium hydroxide to seawater will also mitigate the effects of ocean acidification… ” Er, hang on a second…
  (tags: limestone environment ocean sequestration carbon geoengineering)
• 6 – OpenDNS Brings in $20K Each Day
  “OpenDNS gets requests for over 2 million searches a day, and for them that translates into $20,000 per day in revenue. That’s about $7.3 million per year. Not too shabby.”Good business model; monetise the free service.
  (tags: economics monetise search business OpenDNS)
• 7 – Events Manager
  “Events Manager is a plugin to manage events such as music gigs, art expositions, or just job meetings. Events Manager inserts an Events page in the Manage menu of Wordpress Administration… “
  (tags: management event plugin calendar webdev wordpress)