Friday Four

1. I wouldn't call them the smartest things Amazon's founder and CEO has ever said, but I found this list of twenty things Jeff Bezos has said entertaining and thought-provoking. My favorite? "Your margin is my opportunity."

2. Auto-Brewery Syndrome is not a nice problem to have:

The patient had an infection with Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Cordell says. So when he ate or drank a bunch of starch -- a bagel, pasta or even a soda -- the yeast fermented the sugars into ethanol, and he would get drunk. Essentially, he was brewing beer in his own gut. Cordell and McCarthy reported the case of "auto-brewery syndrome" a few months ago in the International Journal of Clinical Medicine. [link dropped]

Fortunately, the condition seems to be extremely rare.

3. Own a 3-D printer? The point your browser here to print out a Norwegian fjord for fun and profit. You laugh, but this childhood model railroader sees some pretty spectaular possibilities coming from technology like this. (Sadly, the site is having issues as of writing time. I have no idea whether one can, say, set a desired scale or print out parts for assembly.)

4. And speaking of esoteric uses of the web, be sure to bookmark this site just in case you think you might need to know how many people are in outer space at any given moment.

-- CAV