January 2012
44 posts
Our coffee shop was too trendy. →
distorte:
The third segmentation, this time squashed between the existing rooms, was something in between conservative and free-spirited. The furniture was second-hand, but carefully chosen. The chairs matched. There was local art on the walls, but it contained less open vaginas than the left-hand side.
Fireland: “Would you say I’m beautiful? A... →
fireland:
“Do you think my beauty distracts people from noticing my other good points?”
“No way.”
“My sense of humor, my fierce loyalty.”
“You walk in a room people say now there’s someone who’s fiercely loyal. Finally.”
Only the Good Old Days
The Shins | Simple Song
Surfer Blood | I’m Not Ready
Little Dragon | Ritual Union
Gotye featuring Kimbra | Somebody That I Used to Know
Andrew Bird | Effigy [live]
Kelly Rowland featuring Lil Wayne | Motivation
Purity Ring | Lofticries
Zammuto | YAY
Jonathan Coulton | Nobody Loves You Like Me
Bon Iver | Michicant
Death Cab for Cutie | Stay Young, Go Dancing
The Records | Starry...
whatbryanismissingonfacebook:
Whatever you give a woman, she will make greater. If you give her sperm, she’ll give you a baby. If you give her a house, she’ll give you a home. If you give her groceries, she’ll give you a meal. If you give her a smile, she’ll give you her heart. She multiplies and enlarges what is given to her. So, if you give her any crap, be ready to receive a ton of shit!...
gifparty:
Apple will not release iPad 3 at Macworld or CES →
parislemon:
Other things Apple will not be releasing at events they don’t put on this year include:
iGun
The iPad 4, 5, 6, or 7
Apple Ham Radio
The Kraken
Apple+
The iPhone 5, 6, 7, 8, or — get this — 9
Apple Petting Zoo
BioDome 4
An Android phone
Their blow out Q1 earnings
Puppies
The old-fashioned: a complete history and guide to... →
Troy Patterson:
A four-page discussion begins by connecting the old-fashioned with the first recorded definition of the cocktail in general—”a stimulating liquor, composed of spirits of any kind, sugar, water and bitters”—which dates to 1806. “As the cocktail evolved, this earliest of cocktails became known simply as the Old-Fashioned,” the text explains. Before...
Out-of-body experience: Master of illusion →
Ed Yong:
Ownership illusions could help people to take control of entire alien bodies, both virtual and robotic, in a way that would afford a finer degree of control than the joysticks and other controllers used to steer robots and avatars today. People who control robots, for example, would see from their machine’s perspective using goggles, steer using motion-capture suits and receive...
Institutions, Confidence, and the News Crisis →
Clay Shirky:
Institutions are designed to reduce they choices for their members, but they only happen to reduce the choices in society. A publisher may want reporters at their desks at 10 am, and to be the main source of breaking news for the paper’s readers. The former desire is under the publisher’s control; the latter not.
Now this seems easy enough to describe, but people inside...
Barney Frank gets some real power →
Jeffrey Toobin:
Frank rarely smiles, even when he’s being funny. “There are three lies politicians tell,” he told the real-estate group. “The first is ‘We ran against each other but are still good friends.’ That’s never true. The second is ‘I like campaigning.’ Anyone who tells you they like campaigning is either a liar or a sociopath. Then, there’s ‘I hate to say I told you so.’ ” He went on,...
Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer, And Other Career... →
Patrick McKenzie:
The prof in charge of my research project offered me a spot in his lab, a tuition waiver, and a whole $12,000 dollars as a stipend if I would commit 4~6 years to him. That’s a great deal if, and only if, you have recently immigrated from a low-wage country and need someone to intervene with the government to get you a visa.
If you really like the atmosphere at universities,...
Podcast Podfacts: Installment No. 7 →
podcastpodfacts:
4. Kevin Clash has been the voice of ”Elmo” on Sesame Street for more than 26 years. Mr. Clash’s normal speaking voice is quite deep. He got his inspiration for Elmo’s character while visiting his mother’s home daycare in Baltimore. At that visit, Mr. Clash decided that the character of Elmo is 3 1/2 years old and based on love.
The Curse of Cow Clicker: How a Cheeky Satire... →
Jason Tanz:
He had the ring made as a dark reminder of his experiment. “I like to think that having it on my body, especially on one of my typing fingers, will make me think twice about all these activities,” Bogost says. “I’ve made all these people click on cows. I’ve wasted my own time and my family’s time.”
Gilad Shalit and the Rising Price of an Israeli... →
Ronen Bergman:
I have covered Israeli hostage and M.I.A. cases for more than 15 years, including the covert ways in which Israel’s powerful espionage agencies operate to bring soldiers home alive or dead. Over that time, the issue has come to dominate public discourse to a degree that no one could have predicted. Israeli society’s inability to tolerate even a single soldier held in captivity...
Your Brain Knows a Lot More Than You Realize →
David Eagleman:
When we examine skills that are not amenable to introspection, the first surprise is that implicit memory is completely separable from explicit memory: You can damage one without hurting the other.
Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach them the video game Tetris, they...
A Conspiracy of Hogs: The McRib as Arbitrage →
Willy Staley:
Fast food involves both hideously violent economies of scale and sad, sad end users who volunteer to be taken advantage of. What makes the McRib different from this everyday horror is that a) McDonald’s is huge to the point that it’s more useful to think of it as a company trading in commodities than it is to think of it as a chain of restaurants b) it is made of pork, which makes...
“You can have a non-wily head of a department and the collective knowledge and...”
– Edward Luttwak Talks Israel and Bin Laden
Dave Sanders: Fiber-Optics Exec by Day, Defender... →
Joshua Davis:
To round out the team, Putnam and his wife invited Cassandra Moore, a family friend, to come to Sacramento to help retrieve the missing investments. Moore, a curvaceous model and actress from Los Angeles, was supposedly adept at online research. The Putnams thought her computer skills might come in handy, but as soon as Sanders and Anderson got a look at her, they decided to cast...
Moral Hazard and The Chubby Blue Line →
Susan Schorn:
People aren’t born with that kind of reality filter. They have to build it for themselves. Those structures Alexis Madrigal is talking about, the ones that constrain us? Yeah, we build them around ourselves. We strengthen them every time we see or take part in an exercise of power that isn’t equitable—unless we make some attempt to balance the scales.
When you don’t regularly...
Take what you need →
Baseball player Don Carman had grown so tired of mundane post-game interviews by 1990 that he decided to forego them altogether, and instead attached a handwritten list of stock responses to his locker along with a message to reporters: “You saw the game. Take what you need.”
December 2011
30 posts
