February 2012
2 posts
Facebook’s IPO: How Mark Zuckerberg plans to... →
Matthew Yglesias. The estate planning details were new to me — the class B shares with magnified voting rights lose their mojo if sold to anyone else, with an exception for a designated transfer in the event of Mark Zuckerberg’s death.
The Fireplace Delusion (Sam Harris) →
I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when their beliefs are criticized. It’s not a perfect analogy, as you will see, but the rigorous research I’ve conducted at dinner parties suggests that it is worth thinking about. We can call the phenomenon “the fireplace delusion.”
Via Steven Moffat, via Julian Simpson
December 2011
1 post
Tyson Discrimination Verdict Restored by Appeals... →
On Dec. 16, more than a year after the initial decision, the appeals court reversed course. The new ruling was opaque and grudging, but Mr. Clemon said he welcomed it, particularly since it is very unusual for a federal appeals court panel simply to change its mind. “I don’t recall it ever happening,” said Mr. Clemon, who graduated from law school in 1968.
November 2011
1 post
When I Got the Call (The Nation) →
Katha Politt talks to God.
October 2011
2 posts
Cost of false positives (Laughing Meme) →
I’ve had this browser window open for weeks, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about it. It connects the difficulty of eradicating spam (where falsely labeling something as spam is much worse than accidentally letting one through) to the challenge of screening for very rare things in general, whether you’re screening for diseases or trying to identify terrorists.
I went to...
The Benjamin Franklin Effect (You Are Not So... →
Marvelous essay, filling in some psychological gaps in my understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’m going to have to buy that book.
September 2011
1 post
Relative sales of girl-scout cookies (Wired) →
Via @rands
August 2011
3 posts
Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on... →
Kee Nethery stacks up straw men, and burn them down.
A meditation on GlaDOS →
Herein find, from before Portal 2 came out, an art-historical analysis of GlaDOS’ motivations and emotional state. It opens up into a spectacular rabbit hole. Via @lostinfont.
Is this thing still on?
How do I flip it over and shake the spiders out of it?
May 2011
1 post
Linda Greenhouse: Justice in Dreamland →
Linda Greenhouse, the world’s best Supreme Court reporter, on the worst Supreme Court decision in years.
January 2011
2 posts
Philip IV, Restored →
Great use of a Flash interface, depicting the before and after restoration of a Velazquez portrait of Philip IV.
The 2010 Seattle Seahawks: Worst. Playoff. Team.... →
The Seahawks are not any garden-variety 7-9 team: they are an incredibly bad 7-9 team.
Wakemate's charger
This morning I received an email from Perfect Third, the company making the Wakemate sleep-monitoring gizmo, recommending I desist in using the USB power brick which shipped last week with their hardware. TechCrunch applied their usual levelheaded gloss.
I finally thought to put the Wakemate brick next to an Apple iPhone brick, which it resembles in every physical detail. The resemblance...
December 2010
3 posts
On Moscow's Escalators →
There are 643 [escalators] in the Moscow Metro. This is a system, like Washington’s, with deep, deep stations, but, unlike in Washington, passengers here are rarely left to hoof it on their own up or down immobilized stairways. It wouldn’t work, because people don’t walk fast enough. At rush hours fully loaded trains run on 90-second intervals; it’s up to the escalators...
Harbinger or Hoax: The First Painting of Kim Jung... →
It’s Culture Wednesday! Please enjoy this circuitous analysis through art history and the North Korean edition of Kremlinology to figure out whether a painting depicts the DPRK’s heir apparent or his more popular grandfather, and the meaning of both scenarios. Via Brad Steinbacher.
November 2010
8 posts
Why Transformers 2 Made No Sense →
And somehow I still liked it more than the first one.
Estrella Family Creamery Defies FDA Over Recall... →
This version of events is a little more nuanced than the one on Madison Market’s registers.
Governors
Three governors’ races I failed to note until well after the election: Medicare fraudster Rick Scott won in Florida, anti-evolution reprobate Sam Brownback won in Kansas, and ex-Republican Lincoln Chafee won in Rhode Island.
Noted lunatic Jan Brewer won in Arizona, which wasn’t a surprise, but as in Kansas, I can’t think of a single advantage Obama gained in plucking Kathleen...
Don't Forget Me
I hadn’t noticed, but Neko Case’s lovely “Don’t Forget Me” from Middle Cyclone turns out to be a Harry Nilsson cover. Neil Diamond’s currently picking up the same song, covered in much the same style. He ducks the “when we’re older, and full of cancer” line, though. Oh, the things one can learn from other people’s twitter followers.
The...
Elephants' teeth are not well designed
Unless Stephen Colbert’s been rummaging around wikipedia again:
Adult [elephant] teeth do not replace milk teeth by emerging from the jaws vertically as human teeth do. Instead, new teeth grow in at the back of the mouth, pushing older teeth toward the front, where the latter break off in pieces until they are gone.
It gets worse:
The first chewing tooth on each side in each jaw...
Facebook Messages: The Worst Thing That Ever... →
“Facebook announced Monday that its new messaging system is blurring the line between e-mail and social networking, but that decision is the worst thing that ever happened.”
Hey Mr. Nugget. You the bomb.
Every so often the phrase pops into my head for no reason. From season 1 of The Wire:
Bruce Schneier's "Reconceptualizing Security" talk →
A great 20-minute introduction to the Schneier worldview. The premise is that “security” can refer to the feeling of being secure, or the state of being secure, but doesn’t necessarily (or often) mean both simultaneously. It’s littered with well-chosen anecdotes, like the once-widespread fear of doorbells, and useful concepts including the availability heuristic, which...
October 2010
6 posts
Shirley Corriher Tells You What You Did Wrong... →
Too much baking powder can have the same effect as too little. Neat!
NPR explains 'Free Public WiFi' →
I knew it was bogus and suspected it was somehow self-propagating, but I thought it might have had malicious origins, and definitely didn’t know it was Windows XP’s fault.
James Bagian on being wrong →
Bagian is the head of the VA, with a background in the space program. This gives him desperately-needed perspective on the appropriate response to medical errors, and gives Atul Gawande a tag-team partner. Bagian’s reaction to the Challenger explosion, toward the end of the interview, is wonkishly swoonworthy.
Lawrence Lessig reviews 'The Social Network' →
It’s one-third movie review, three-fifths contextual grounding in/political reframing of Sorkin’s mishandling of copyright and legal policy, and one-fifteenth Randian elevation of Mark Zuckerberg. I guess I’m going to have to see this movie at some point.
Why Wesabe Failed
Marc Hedlund, Wesabe’s CEO, has an essay up about why Wesabe lost to Mint, which is quite bumming me out.
Yes, both products helped some people — ours mostly through a supportive community and theirs mostly through giving people a rough picture of where their money has gone. But when we analyzed the benefits we saw for our users, and when Mint boasted about the benefits they saw...
Gaming Cursebird
Cursebird is a moderately amusing real-time view of tweets containing English profanity. This analysis of the process of climbing Cursebird’s leaderboard is incrementally more amusing, especially the bits about bot competition, which extend into the comments.
I hadn’t known that Twitter will put the brakes on entities which tweet too much, which at the time of this writeup about a...
September 2010
11 posts
How to live with Google Notifier
I’ve been relying more on Gmail of late. At first I used Fluid to keep Gmail in its own dock icon and process, but that was suboptimal because Fluid shares cookies with Safari, so whenever I logged out of my Google account, it’d whack the Gmail client.
I switched to Chrome as a Gmail client, but Chrome can’t reflect unread messages in the dock icon, so I started using Google...
Annals of great App Store reviews
Fingerprint Remover for iPad:
Two More Things Involving The Word "American"
A fine grilled cheese, available in a nice little corner of San Francisco:
I had the Moscone, plus tomato soup with crème fraiche, and garlic croutons. It was gratifying.
This was in San Leandro. Whoops, I guess I only had one more thing involving the word “American”.
'The American': Clooney goes full-bore European... →
Reviews of “The American”, which I really admired, are weirdly polarized, leading me to believe certain critics missed their naps. Jeff Simon’s take is right on.
“The idea is not that people are or are not [morally] utilitarian; it’s that they...”
– Research psychologist David Pizarro
Roger Ebert cookbook interview →
Email interviews, where the interviewee uses nonverbal punctuation, always bugged me a little bit, but obviously there’s no getting around it (and no reason to want to) when interviewing post-Singularity bon vivant Roger Ebert. In this breezy exchange with the Toronto Star, Roger reaches back to the corporeal world to persuade me to buy a rice cooker.
Wikipedia fact of the day
The brand name “Samsonite” has Biblical origins, referring to the masculine half of the Samson and Delilah double act. That’s why, if you cut off the luggage tag, your Samsonite bag loses all its structural integrity.
August 2010
5 posts
Free Parking Comes at a Price (Tyler Cowen, NYT) →
The economic distortions of legally mandated parking minimums are really interesting. This is a good layman’s introduction to the effects, which are huge, but largely escape notice until you start fnording for them.
Hans Zimmer Borrows a Note (NYT) →
Dave Itzkoff gets Hans Zimmer to comment at length on the derivation of Inception’s signature musical cue, which turns out to be a clever re-use of the Edith Piaf song used repeatedly throughout the movie as a signal that things are about to get complicated and/or blow up. This is the first time I can recall seen a big-time news story prompted by a YouTube video, at least one which...
James Fallows' "How to Save the News" →
Long Atlantic story from last month about Google’s journalistic enterprises. Worth reading if you didn’t see it the first time around.
Triceratops Retconned →
Beloved childood dinosaur revealed as mere juvenile torosauruses. Or is that torosaurs? I don’t know, I’ve never heard of them before today.
To Enhance Flavor, Just Add Water (NYT) →
Harold McGee on the odd circumstances in which adding water causes flavors or aromas to increase instead of dilute. Now I need a refractometer.
July 2010
3 posts
"This project is doomed." (Three Panel Soul) →
How to Lose Time and Money (Paul Graham) →
Poems by Google Voice
First in a series.
I'll I'll it's mean
wondering
if you are going to camp
where i fall and wait
for brides
and he wearing reputational job
together.
Anyway bye.
By Google Voice, with an assist from my mom.