Source: medium.com - @tomwhitwell
- $8 pizza tastes 11% better than $4 pizza, even when the pizza is the same. [Bourree Lam]
- In 1990, more than 12 million children died before the age of 5. In 2015, that number will fall to 5.9 million. [Nicholas Kristof]
- 18th Century books looked almost exactly like smartphone screens. [Clive Thompson]
- Every day, WhatsApp handles twice as many messages as the entire global SMS system — around 40bn messages [Benedict Evans]
- Apple uses lasers to tidy up the insides of aluminium iWatches after they’ve been precision machined. Nobody else does that. [Greg Koenig]
- More than half of the world’s feed crops will soon be eaten by Chinese pigs [The Economist]
- If you’re selling a product based on emotion, leave out the cents (i.e £16). If you expect purchases to be driven by logic, add some cents (ie £15.97). [Nick Kolenda]
- When product designers decide that they want a perfectly smooth ‘puller’ on their zips, thousands of Chinese people have to spend 8 hours a day manually aligning pullers with sliders. [Bunnie Huang]
- The Mock Prison Riot is held every spring, and features hands-on training and technology exposure to corrections, law enforcement, military, and public safety practitioners from around the world [Mock Prison Riot]
- A temple in South India was found to have more than $22 billion in gold hidden away in locked rooms rumoured to be filled with snakes. [Rama Lakshmi]
- In China, cigarette companies are allowed to sponsor schools, with slogans like “Genius comes from hard work. Tobacco helps you become talented.” [Andrew Martin]
- The Daily Mail now employs 720 journalists, 200 of them in the US. [Mark Sweney] The Guardian employs 964. [Tom Standage]
- In Ghana, lots of people are talking about (and buying) a huge, ugly feature phone with a big battery that can power other electronics. Nobody is quite sure what the hook on the top is for. [Emmanuel Quartey]
- To encourage use of WeChat payments, TenCent persuaded their advertisers to give away $80m to customers in one day. [Connie Chan]
