This is a great interview. The Planet Money guys are brilliant and Marco gets right in sync with their style.

Marco made and sells one of my all time favorite utilities: Instapaper. In a nutshell, if I start reading an article on my computer and want to finish it or read it on my iPad, I hit a button on my browser “read later” and the article is sent up to Instapaper, a cloud-based service that acts as my breadcrumbs in the clouds. Later, when I’m using my iPad (still connected to wifi) I click the Instapaper app and update its cache of saved stuff. The article appears and I can read it there.

What many don’t realize is that Instapaper caches the articles on the iPad and/or iPhone and so, I can read them there when I’m not connected, like when I’m on a plane. So, before my regular trips to LA I routinely load up my Instapaper account with things I want to read on the plane, then update the iPad’s Instapaper cache memory and I’m set.

Instapaper has many iBook-like reading tools including typographic control and more.

I’m hoping to use Instapaper to help my mother read The New Yorker as its app is totally worthless for anyone who can’t read small type.

fresh Air had a fascinating show today about the plastic Austrian pistol, it’s history and evolution. I’m not into guns but this was a fascinating listen for me nonetheless.

A polio-free India means that there are just three nations where polio is considered endemic: Pakistan, Afghanistan and Nigeria.

Incredible. As a polio survivor this is particularly meaningful to me. It’s an enormous job to do this in a huge, developing country like India and the Gates Foundation and the World Health Organization deserve praise for their hard work over many years.

What struck me in this interview is that the world’s tallest building (at the moment), The Burj Khalifa, built in Dubai is a very modern building built in a city with no city wide sewage system (yet). Because of this waste from this huge building has to be trucked away constantly and the trucks wait in lines to dump their waste into a sewage treatment plant for as much as 24 hours. Kate mentions in this piece that in many ways a city sewage system is a bigger challenge to build than a skyscraper. As an American, this strikes me as amazing because even though I live in a rural place where we have our own well and septic system I take for granted that cities and towns have services like these built in from the start. But, what we as Americans might call a natural evolution of a city or an infrastructure gets turned on its head with things like the internet and cellular phone systems which allow everyone in a developing country to have a cell phone or even a smart phone long before there is a land line infrastructure.

This piece is part of StoryCorps. After discovering it a week ago I’ve listened to it numerous times and it makes me smile and laugh every time.

[via wimp.com]

This is really interesting. Not sure I’m willing to toss out the concept just yet but this piece is worth taking seriously.

More on Learning Styles and Howard Gardner and multiple intelligences.

Listen to this on good speakers, it’s killer good. This tips me to buying Bennett’s new album when it comes out: Duets II.

Bennett is 85. They’re both musical geniuses.

Jacob Goldstein and David Kestenbaum at NPR’s Planet Money have a new piece on Bitcoin a digital virtual currency that’s fascinating.

I posted about another piece All Things Considered ran on this and related topics earlier in the summer: Silk Road: Not Your Father’s Amazon.com.

Meredith Perry turned 22 this month. She just graduated from college and started a new company built around a technology she recently invented.

There’s plenty of bad economic news these days, but Perry and her company, called UBeam, are trying to defy it — she’s hiring and entertaining funding offers from investors.

Perry’s invention: A transmitter that can recharge wireless devices using ultrasonic waves. It’s like Wifi, she says, except instead of a wireless Internet connection, her’s transmits power over the air.

Fantastic. UBeam for an iPhone. I hope she makes it, we really need this.