The New Yorker on truth, beauty, and string theory. Along similar lines, last month’s Wired featured a brief little interview with Lee Smolin, who just published The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next. While we’re on the topic, take a look at the introduction […]
Radar surveys the 8 worst hair trends on Capitol Hill. The Rep. Tom Lantos/ Emperor Palpatine bit is quite perceptive.
Allsimps.com links to streaming video of all the Simpsons episodes. Has it really been 18 seasons already??
Word on the street is that Lipton has decided to make tea bags that contain full-leaf tea, which jives with Orwell’s instructions. Here is Lipton’s site for the new “pyramid” tea bags. I’m not sure how I feel about the fruity flavors… taste will tell. [thanks, rebekah]
Cato Institute has a new paper about Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism. Here’s the full report [PDF].
A fundamental way newspaper sites need to change: “stop the story-centric worldview”. [via dashes]
A couple articles about speechballoons in comics and their evolution. There is some great stuff in the archives as well.
The Mises Institute has gathered up some of the latest economic indicators for the United States. It ain’t looking good, folks.
From Psychology Today, research on given names and child development: “Parents may be further empowered to christen their children idiosyncratically given that names aren’t the rich source for taunts they once were. ‘Kids today are used to a variety of names, so it is almost too simple for them to make fun of each other […]
Sculptures made from incredibly intricate cuts on sheets of plain white paper. The snowballs were a personal fave. [via svn]
William Chace, current professor and former president of Emory University, has an odd little opinion piece in the New York Times. “When I was a college president, I was never able to give incoming freshmen the honest talk I wanted to. But had I done so, here’s what I would have said…” Bill, as I […]
Looks like some folks need to brush up on the whole “managing sensitive information” thing: a Google search for [confidential “do not distribute”].
Some good tips on breaking the omnipresent writer’s block, along with links to tips elsewhere: “Writer’s block is a sham. Anyone who wrote yesterday can write today, it’s just a question of if they can do it to their own satisfaction. It’s not the fear of writing that blocks people, it’s fear of not writing […]
A couple years back, I got interested in the ideas of voluntary simplicity and the downshifted lifestyle. My readings eventually sent me on a side-trail to the book Your Money or Your Life. Since then, about 14 months ago, I’ve been tracking every cent I spend on everything. Usually if I have any receipts when […]
So here’s another guy, Noah Kalina, that has photographed himself every day for more than 6 years and made a video out of it. See my earlier post for a similar film and an annual family photo timeline.
And here’s a selection of similar photography projects.
The BBC has a photojournal of life inside a Bolivian jail. “There are no guards, no uniforms or metal bars on the cell windows. This relative freedom comes at a price: inmates have to pay for their cells, so most of them have to work inside the jail, selling groceries or working in the food […]
My latest distraction has been the Google Image Labeler. It’s sort of a dynamic folksonomy game. Operating under time pressure, you and a random internet partner try to match labels for photos, earning points along the way. I worked my way up in rank to the low 400s. It’s a good use of my time… […]
A particularly clever bit of telemarketing revenge: transfer the salesman to a recording. Should be cool to see how it turns out.
String theory isn’t the golden child it used to be, but you can still learn about existing in ten dimensions.
Two more additions to the first three links in my Scalar Series:
A clock depicting the last 4.6 billion years of history in one hour and a project in visualizing enormous numbers with pennies, from one to one quintillion. [via svn]
One-minute vacations are short sound recordings of various places on the planet. Some 240+ recordings in the back catalog.
Rembrandt painted almost ninety self-portraits in his lifetime. Jeanne Ivy discusses what artists find when they search in the mirror.
If you miss the original Zelda, you can get help. Zelda Classic reconstructs the old NES version. “Beyond that, Zelda Classic allows the development of new quests that can use either the traditional graphics or enhanced graphics, as well as new enemies, items, and challenges…If you can imagine it, you can create it (provided it’s […]
A brief article on Librivox, which provides free, user-recorded audiobooks for works in the public domain. “If you think a recording is done badly, then please do one, and we’ll post it as well.”
Free (as in speech) beer: “Anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a derivative of the recipe. Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the recipe under the same license and credit our work.” They even have garish branding materials to share.
Slate is hosting an online edition of The 9-11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation, excerpting a chapter each day. [via badlanguage]
Hugh MacLeod has 10 questions for Seth Godin. Seth on wealth: “Look, there are 8 million millionaires in the USA. Why do these people go to work every day? Why not downsize appropriately and just sit on the beach? Because they’re too smart. They realize that the purpose of living isn’t to bake in the […]
Here’s an oldie, but a goodie. An article from Outside magazine about America’s most dangerous wilderness, Angeles National Forest:
The man in charge at headquarters, Michael J. Rogers, insists that the Angeles is the ultimate proving ground for the theory that nature can be saved from humanity’s onslaught. Rogers, who has been forest supervisor since 1990, […]
The Mises blog points to another “victory” in patent warfare. Creative has successfully gotten a $100 million settlement from Apple to end a suite of lawsuits, including one patent dispute about “automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata”.
The Nonist introduces us to Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. “Full-frontal objectification of the library itself,” featuring some pretty incredible photos. Books, shelving, tables all laid bare. Wish I were there…
Lately, I’ve stumbled across a couple articles on Freeganism, which is a new word for me. Freegan.info describes freegans–”people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources,”–and their common tenets:
Waste Reclamation
Waste Minimization
Eco-Friendly Transportation
Rent-Free Housing
Going Green
Working Less/ Voluntary Joblessness
Here’s a piece in the BBC from […]
DejaVu.org offers a brief history of the internet, as well as a tool to emulate old-school web browsers like Lynx, Mosaic, and former versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. You can see what the internet looked like before it was in color. We really have come a long way.
Orwell’s 11 essentials for A Nice Cup of Tea. I love this bit:
“Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has […]
Nick Hornby writes about How to Read.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong.
As a consequence, the first thing to be cut from my reading diet was contemporary literary fiction. This seems […]
No longer allowed to romp around in refreshing Edenic bliss, the Kool-Aid Man wears pants now. [via ptdr]
Some great news in my inbox this morning: “Farecast is happy to announce that airfare predictions for flights out of Atlanta (ATL) are now available at Farecast.com.” Farecast predicts ticket prices and indicates fare history for the routes you’re interested in. They claim 75% accuracy in their predictions, and they also have some cool visual […]
I feel like the Wikipedia thing has been beaten to death (almost as badly as the blogging v. journalism discussion), but I persist… Jaron Lanier writes about the rise of wiki, meta, and the Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:”it’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective […]
In 2004 Scott Williamson became the first person to “yo-yo” the Pacific Crest Trail in one year. That is, 2650 miles hiking from the the southern tip of California through Oregon and Washington to Canada, and 2650 miles back. Last spring, Steve Friedman wrote “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Scott Williamson”. It’s not so much […]
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