January 2011
1 post
December 2010
1 post
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"Missing the point of WikiLeaks" →
The Economist’s astute observations on WikiLeaks.
August 2010
3 posts
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“To rescue the trapped miners, workers will try to dig a wider 27-inch shaft...”
– A Good Plan, from “Trapped Chilean Miners’ First Request: Toothbrushes”
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“For me, repression used to be a one man show. Now I am part of a broader...”
– Dave Pell, Tweetage Wasteland: Confession #77
July 2010
6 posts
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“You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people...”
– Paul Graham, “The Acceleration of Addictiveness”
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"The Egg" by Andy Weir →
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"Pictures" by Jack Shedd →
I don’t want to stare at some photo of me at 21 when I’m 50 and contemplate everything I was, or could have been. I don’t want to have to drown in partial truths, grasping at a falling memory to paint in details. I’d rather either remember, or not. Rather know, or forget.
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““I PERSONALLY GUARANTEE THAT THE CLEVELAND CAVALIERS WILL WIN AN NBA...”
– Cavs owner Dan Gilbert, in a crazy, crazy, open letter to LeBron James (emphasis his)
(via kottke)
June 2010
3 posts
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"The Burger Lab: How to Make Perfect Thin and... →
J. Kenji Lopez-Alt creates the perfect fry—that is, the McDonald’s fry—at home:
I know it’s bad form to toot your own horn, but I’m simply amazed that these fries have been coming out of my own kitchen. I’ve been eating fries in various shades of good or bad constantly for the past few days, and I’m absolutely sick of them, yet I am still eating them...
May 2010
1 post
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"National Parks Closed For Annual... →
If you find your local national park briefly unavailable, here’s why:
Each year, all 84.4 million acres of land overseen by the National Park Service are thoroughly scrubbed, tidied, and restored to a maximally picturesque summertime state. According to officials, the weeklong process includes extensive brook re-babbling, the application of new bark to some 37,000 giant redwood trees,...
April 2010
8 posts
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"Not Even in South Park?" by Ross Douthat →
Across 14 on-air years, there’s no icon “South Park” hasn’t trampled, no vein of shock-comedy (sexual, scatalogical, blasphemous) it hasn’t mined. In a less jaded era, its creators would have been the rightful heirs of Oscar Wilde or Lenny Bruce — taking frequent risks to fillet the culture’s sacred cows. […] Our culture has few taboos that can’t be violated, and our establishment has...
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“The Alot is an imaginary creature that I made up to help me deal with my...”
– Hyperbole and a Half on dealing with grammatical mistakes
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"Lambdas? In my C++?" →
Lambda notation for C++, through abuse of templates and operator overloading. Genius, but in the scary way.
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“Imagine you fall off a boat out in the open ocean, and you turn around, and the...”
– Dr. Clark Martin, discussing his experience with the hallucinogen psilocybin
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"Offline" →
James Sturm is giving up the internet for four months. He’ll be blogging about it (via fax and mail, of course).
(props to Slate for giving an RSS feed of just this series)
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"Beyond Facebook" →
Jesse Schell on the future of gaming: the world around us is more a game than we realize, and it’s only getting worse.
March 2010
3 posts
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"Raiding Eternity" by Joel Johnson →
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Whither programming?
Point, from the Reinvigorated Programmer:
A huge part of my job these days seems to be impedence-matching between big opaque chunks of library software that sort of do most of what my program is meant to achieve, but don’t quite work right together so I have to, I don’t know, translate USMARC records into Dublin Core or something. Is that programming? Really? Yes, it takes taste and...
February 2010
6 posts
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"Is Indie Dead?" - Paste Magazine →
Rachael Maddux explores the past and future of “indie”, in the face of major labels, bigger audiences, and “selling out”:
Maybe we’re too charmed by the serendipitous pleasure of hearing a song we love out in the wild, or we’re too busy trying to push any and all unwanted associations from our minds—or maybe we just don’t care. Still, the fact remains: It’s a band...
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that's *so* 1999. →
Waxy uncovers a beautiful artifact of the ancient web: “The 4th Annual P.O.V. 100 Best Web Sites”
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"Stop Selling Scarcity" →
Some fascinating thoughts from Jeff Jarvis:
The merchant doesn’t give a rat’s ass about your limited supply of space and eyeballs; the merchant cares about sales and return on investment. As Max Kalehoff advised in a comment on that post, “Sell the outcome.”
as I’ve been obnoxiously stating it, advertising is failure — it’s what you do when you don’t have a valued relationship.
The...
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PPK has a good point and a bad point in his second tirade against iPhone developers:
The iPhone has become an obsession. If we don’t pay attention, we’ll have a mobile web that only works on the iPhone. And then we’ll have the real mobile web that wasn’t made by us and doesn’t give a shit about web standards and best practices. […]
Despite the platform having only 15% sales market...
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“You don’t solve anything ever, really. You simply state a problem which,...”
– photographer Gary Winogrand
January 2010
3 posts
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"On Rotating The Dishes" →
Greg Allen:
I imagine a guy living alone, eating alone, washing and putting away his dish alone, for years. One dish accumulating the scars and scratches and chips of use, while the three, or five, or seven, or even eleven dishes below it sit untouched.
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December 2009
14 posts
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“The romantic image of an über-programmer is someone who fires up Emacs, types...”
– John Cook, “Why programmers are not paid in proportion to their productivity”
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"Public Fried Chicken" by Scott Banister →
In fact, if you’ve gone a long time without chicken, and then you sign up for an all-you-can-eat Fried Chicken Provider, you tend to consume a lot more chicken than the average person. FCPs eventually got wise to this. People who joined after going a long time without a chicken plan tended to drive up costs, so FCPs raised prices on those with what they termed “pre-existing chicken...
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“The truth is, any endeavor, no matter how seemingly trivial, can benefit from an...”
– David Wurtz, “Smart People should do Stupid Stuff”
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"Lost in the Filth Simulacrum" →
Jason Louv on the importance of 4chan:
The Chans aren’t the freak sideshow of the Internet. They are the heart and soul of the Internet. And they are the ones furthest ahead of the pack, leading us. At this point there should be little doubt that the Internet is mutating the human species into something completely different. Therefore it’s instructive to look at the most extreme,...
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“The nice thing about the internet is that it is Christmas all the time.”
– Vint Cerf, in “The Web is Large”
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“Remember that our sons and grandsons are going to do things that would stagger...”
– Daniel Burnham
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“ “Party In The USA” deals with Miley [Cyrus]’s personal...”
– From a Facebook event to “honor Miss Cyrus” by listening to her new single
(“a struggle we all can relate to”? Really? Really?)
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"Rise of the Tablog" - Put Things Off →
In an attempt to combat this death by archive effect, the blog format offers its own curious blend of useless navigational clutter: fluffy tag clouds, monstrous category lists, ‘possibly related’ entries, and ‘most commented’ posts. Sadly, the result is the emergence of the blog aesthetic: a distinctive look that is neither beautiful nor usable.
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"I thirst!" - Clusterflock →
Hooray intersecting sets
November 2009
9 posts
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“The creation of a desire on the part of millions of car buyers each year to...”
– GM chief designer Harley Earl on planned obsolescence, in Sharon Bloyd-Peshkin’s “Built to Trash”