MIchael Pollan: Since 1967, we’ve added 167 hours — the equivalent of a month’s full-time labor — to the total amount of time we spend at work each year, and in households where both parents work, the figure is more like 400 hours. Americans today spend more time working than people in any other industrialized [...]
A wonderful, bitter tasting story about Venezuelan chocolate: With its reliance on cheap labor, the industry seems hard-wired for conflict, though chaos afflicts some cacao areas are more than others. Barlovento, near here, is plagued by thievery of cacao pods, score-settling murders and the torching of storage facilities. Built with slave labor, the industry here [...]
When the history of this new place called the world wide web is written, it will be interesting to read how its “capitals” developed in relationship to one another. Nigeria and San Francisco, now beside one another.
Facebook is free (ad-supported) software for communicating with friends and family. Google will compete indirectly with Facebook when it introduces Wave. Both are a continuation of the web portal which in its day replaced the BBS. The apices of the BBS were probably AOL and CompuServe, likewise of the portals it was Yahoo and MSN. Surely [...]
From the NYT, In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable The study complements a growing body of work suggesting that the speed with which the brain reads and interprets sensations like the feelings in one’s own body and emotions in the body language of others is central to avoiding imminent threats. “Not long ago people [...]
The Talented Mr. Ripley is many things (beautifully shot, tautly edited, thrilling) including an illustrated social pyramid with rich white men at the top, followed by poor white men, rich white women, poor white women and, then, everyone else. It is also, apparently, nothing like the novel.
At the end of Social Climbers, David Attenborough presents us with the skulls of several different primates and arranges them on a boulder by size. The primates with the smallest brains, he explains, live in very small groups. The ones with the largest brains live in very large groups. Now picture New York City, Mumbai [...]
Gourmet magazine is that rare combination of eye candy and usefulness. In the six months that we’ve had a free trial subscription, we’ve cooked out of it a half-dozen times, mostly for dishes that require less than 20 minutes to prepare. Each has been a welcome surprise.
Reassuring: The researchers… generally discounted the possibility of highly centralized superintelligences and the idea that intelligence might spring spontaneously from the Internet. But they agreed that robots that can kill autonomously are either already here or will be soon.
Anthony Bourdain No Reservations in Mexico may be the best episodes of that show and probably the best of its genre. A gem.
Via Ron, Gates and Crowley both related to the O’Neill’s: Ironically, James Crowley, whose name in Gaelic means “hardy warrior,” is also descended from the same line as Gates, having very close links to Niall of the Nine Hostages. So the two men who took part in what is now an infamous confrontation outside the [...]
Many of the very serious problems associated with street transportation are related to information – or a lack thereof. For example: “visualize using your turn signals.” The Speed Vest by Brady Clark and Mykle Hansen is an ingenious step towards improving the exchange of information between bicyclists and car drivers.
A reader of Talking Points Memo on the opportunity to discuss the need for checks and balances on law enforcement: So, along with the rightful adoration we reserve for our police officers, our society needs to acknowledge that their power is awesome and must be wielded in a cautious and prudent manner. Not only can [...]
Discover Magazine: To the Brain, Tools Are Temporary Body Parts. Suggested by a MetaFilter user in a discussion of the Tetris Effect. In other words, fantasies like the bionic man are too literal. We’ve been cyborgs since we picked up a rock.
I should know better than to respond to a post on BoingBoing. When it veers into politics, it’s too often fluffernutter. But this post, by a guest blogger, was hard to swallow: [This 1968 Rolling Stones story denouncing the Yippies' tactics], in the middle of the Vietnam War, one year before Woodstock would prove just [...]
remembering some recent jokes i’ve heard, i thought: aren’t the best comedians some of the smartest people? to laugh is to physically surrender to the truthfulness of an idea. that’s powerful stuff. it stands to reason that some of the smartest people through the ages, the ones still being quoted today, were funny. like, really [...]
our friend N met with a potential employer. she asked him a few questions to see if he was a reasonable boss. he assured her that he ran a very progressive organization. he said: “oh no, we’re human.” N noted this phrasing and was pleased. later, upon hearing this story, I too was pleased. but [...]
Via TPMDC: “Finally, we’re making progress here.” Witness an effective display of what a reality-based community looks like: professional gadfly Chris Matthews chides a demagogue into admitting there is only one reality. We are entitled to different opinions, but not different facts. In the case of Obama’s birthplace (Hawaii), those who have chosen to “resist” [...]
Has America gotten happier over the last generation? According to one academic survey, no. By far the most extensive and detailed time series comes from the U.S., and the full series covering the 60 years from 1946 to 2006 shows a flat trend. So, who is getting happier? Well, most everyone. Eighty percent of the [...]
watching the incredible, wonderful: Mammals: Plant Predators, I see so much intelligence, from the way plants reproduce to the way herds of wildebeests protect themselves. sometimes, the stratagem at work is not readily apparent. for example, the males in a topi herd will tire themselves out competing for females. exhausted, the losing, peripheral males then [...]
The Undercover Economist explains how pricing is also a form of signaling – it’s a back-and-forth dialogue between the consumer and the vendor. The scheduling of television shows may be a form of pricing. When a network puts a program in prime-time, it’s telling the audience that this program is of the highest quality. The [...]
two weeks ago, the moral leader of the straw hut party, former Alaska governor Sarah Palin, walked away from her elected post, apparently to focus on fighting the myths of global warming. one week later, a giant mass of black algae drifted towards Alaska: “Whitledge said he doesn’t know why an unprecedented bloom of algae [...]
watching movies about nature, i’m reminded that opposable thumbs are very cool. once upon a time they helped us grasp fruit. then tools. today, they help us to TXT. TXTing was the cheapest fruit on the Telco tree – voice and data much more expensive. (for the Telco, it’s very cheap to send sms’es.) this [...]
Politesse and politics are two sides of the same coin: how we all get along. So it’s not surprising that the last two weeks have been dominated by a story of politesse. We’ve been talking about whether or not a Latina can enrich the juridical system. But this is politesse – a way of getting around [...]
my parents came back from cuba recently. for my father it was his first time back since 1979. many of the following are his observations. right now, when you buy something in cuba (any product or service) there are no receipts. this is not a good thing. receipts (comprobantes) are an essential part of running [...]
Not 12 hours after having this positive experience, I get an email from same mass blogging service telling me that a user is now “following me” along with the user’s profile image. Only the user is a spammer and their image is the equivalent of a goatse. So I’ve just been goatse-d at 8:45 am [...]
I just had a come to Jesus moment on a well-indexed site for mass real-time blogging. We heard some rumbling far off. Sounded like fireworks. But I couldn’t see them. Lots of rumbling. Walked around the house. Still couldn’t see them. More rumbling. Not a trace on the horizon. So I went to the LAT [...]
apple has introduced a feature called the genius sidebar for your music listening pleasure. it may be very smart at finding related music but it has a funny bug: an occasional sign of social immaturity. the genius is intended to be a personal assistant. as such, it should know when to be quiet. for example, [...]
it’s very hard to turn a dance into a pratfall; to make a well-timed step appear clunky – or funky. on a new error, moderat turn a clean four/four into something quite different with a series of beguiling transitions. what appear to be mistakes at first listen, merge together to become a very fresh accent. well [...]
Learning to play means learning another person’s set of rules. Or writing the rules together with them. Playing sports is a terrific way to experience the benefits of compromise (peace, profits) on a small scale and that’s where real change happens. Video games offer a similar opportunity for co-operation. Yes, there are “death squad” games [...]
let’s say you needed to create intermediaries between us and the other mammals. if a machine can learn sign language by watching TV, couldn’t one learn horse, dolphin or crow? to do so, it would have to be more than a computer but rather an autonomous robot, capable of following its pack, mimicking gestures, touch. [...]
the life of mammals with David Attenborough is not just a documentary – it’s an excellent movie. surprising, delightful, funny. confident. it excels at what movies were made for: surreal pleasures. case in point, a montage where Attenborough appears a few feet away from wild animals doing their wild things. all the while, he delivers [...]
there’s a good documentary somewhere inside Dolphins: IMAX, you just have to peel off the music layer. and the voice over. the facts and footage are remarkable. science fiction spin-off: humans discover dolphins are more evolved… than humans.
The Hour Glass, a comment by Salon user jafi12: Part of the problem is the hourglass marketing strategy. Low end cheap stuff, high end expensive stuff, very little good value decent quality stuff in the middle. Companies prefer high profit margins on their products. The hourglass strategy is designed to maximize margin. There a few [...]
last night i bought a pair of flip flops online. at around 8 pm PST. they arrived this morning. that’s very fast. that’s, like, as long as it used to take the local grocer to do a food delivery when webvan was up and running. only those were local deliveries. where is zappos again? oh, [...]
Ana says responsible breeders are essentially lending dogs to owners. Like life banks, if you will. Where you pay full price up front. They’ll totally, with a smile, take back that life form they sold you if something in your life has changed. And some provide refunds past year two. That’s a very interesting agreement. [...]
Jon Van Oast on a society transformed by new communication tools: “The future will be an experiment in fluid dynamics.”
beware adults who treat other adults as children. “they don’t need to know” or “they can’t handle the truth” is never an appropriate stance for leadership. the motto of a democracy is “politicians report, voters decide.”
The BBC: “Israeli transport chiefs spark Arab anger with a plan to replace traditional Arabic names on signposts with Hebrew versions.” Imagine if during the time of Prop 187 the California State Legislature had decided to rename Los Angeles to The Angels, San Francisco to Saint Francis, etc.
From today’s NYT, currently the most-emailed: The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since [...]