Toronto sister cities

The other day I learned that São Paulo, Mexico City and Tehran are sister cities to Toronto.

Via Wikipedia

7 billion

The Story of Cosmetics

Changing prices of food

Change in price of items since 1978, relative to overall inflation, as measured by the Consumer Price Index. The price of carbonated drinks, for example, has fallen 34 percent relative to all other prices.

Via NY Times

Next generation of barcode technology

A replacement for the black and white stripes of the traditional barcode has been outlined by US researchers.

Bokodes, as they are known, can hold thousands of times more information than their striped cousins and can be read by a standard mobile phone camera.

The 3mm-diameter (0.1 inches), powered tags could be used to encode nutrition information on food packaging or create new devices for playing video games.

The work will be shown off at Siggraph, a conference in New Orleans next week.

“We think that our technology will create a new way of tagging,” Dr Ankit Mohan, one of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers behind the work, told BBC News.

Read the rest on BBC