Following up on the carrot vs. the stick, Matthew Yglesias writes: “Manufacturers of white paint need to hire some better lobbysist or something” since “trying to get people to paint roofs white seems like a total no-brainer and given how solid the science behind this is I don’t really understand why there isn’t more momentum [...]
On Before New York in National Geographic. To date, computer graphics have been used most memorably in live-action movies to realize futuristic objects like spaceships. It’s the continuation of a push that began in the 1800s with railroads and crystal palaces. (e.g., From Metropolis through 2001 to Minority Report, etc.) To make visible an industrial [...]
I had heard of the movie Soylent Green so many times over the years that I may have been dulled to the experience of seeing it for first time – which I did just a few hours ago. The most impressive moments aren’t fantastical, rather they’re an intimate and very modest dinner between two old friends [...]
We’re built pretty well: put your hand over an open flame and you’ll jerk it away in a few milliseconds. For this to happen, the nerves in your hand have to feel the heat and send a warning signal to your brain which then sends a series of commands to all the muscles that control [...]
There’s a presentation making the rounds lately that pokes fun at companies hoping to “capture the magic” of the Apple iPhone by making devices that are superficially similar but substantively different – or inferior. Namely, with similar hardware but different software. There’s a very simple, fundamental principle at work here: literalism. To take something at face [...]
First: I love The Wire. I think it’s really one of the best “things” I’ve ever seen. That very ambiguity about what it is (a very long movie? a movie-like television show?) probably adds to its uniqueness. Sometimes, the special and rare becomes the normal and commonplace. Mostly, it doesn’t. So when David Simon talks [...]
Listening to an interview with Mike Judge, I was reminded of one of the reasons why I’ve stopped listening to most of NPR: their obsessive focus on Scots-Irish roots music and its iterations. I would feel the same way if every other review or profile featured a ragtime pianist or a klezmer compilation. I’m all [...]
Now would be a good time for businesses that “sell” to frugality: Sales of vegetable plants swelled fivefold in March over past years. The company added a public address system and bleachers to accommodate hordes showing up for vegetable-growing classes. Yes, many people are experiencing very significant losses. The GDP shrank. But, consumer spending is [...]
Slept with the windows open, woke up feeling like I’d smoked two cigarettes.
My summary of a recent interview with historian Nelson Lichtenstein on Wal-Mart: 1) Wal-Mart’s first innovation was data mining, which it did using bar codes. 2) Wal-Mart’s most profitable innovation has been in social engineering – exploiting labor laws and incentives for managers, etc. Elsewhere, Paul Krugman, in a terrific conversation with Charlie Stross, suggests how [...]
I’ve been watching Google Trends Hot Trends for fun recently. Most of it is self-explanatory. A story breaks or a show hits the air and people respond with understandable questions. But there’s also some noise in the signal. Possibly, users trying to game Google for sport or research or financial gain. I’m wondering if that’s [...]
Ricky Jay in Wikipedia: Jay created a consulting firm, Deceptive Practices, which provides “arcane knowledge on a need-to-know basis.” His firm’s clients are often within the stage, television, and film industries.
The movie The Class may be the smartest, most gripping story I’ve encountered in a very long time. The day after, I was still thinking about the characters – as if they were real. That seldom happens. But it’s watching the “making of” that accompanies the movie that puts it over the top. We generally think [...]
anatijuana.com.
Matthew Yglesias: My worry would be that it strikes me as very plausible that a political strategist could overlearn the lessons of his own success. The fact of the matter is that Obama’s margin of victory was more-or-less exactly what you would expect based on fundamentals-driven models of presidential elections. We know that the strategy [...]
NYT: Sunday mornings at church, Jan Thomas and Joan Becker can be seen sitting side by side. The story telling is indulgent but the story is amazing.
The Latin music industry according to iTunes:
The tell is more important than the telling: Voters don’t have a great deal of knowledge about the issues, or a great deal of interest in acquiring knowledge about the issues. But they are human beings, equipped with our species’ excellent ability to read the emotional states of other human beings. If they see a [...]
A performative statement if ever there was one: “Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s whole seven-nation Africa tour, which has had quite serious intentions, may end up being reduced to one sound bite about her husband.” And that was the lede.
Two opens that remind me of one another: How My Heart Behaves, Feist* Everything In Its Right Place, Radiohead *fantastic audio quality thanks to Apple, Universal Music and DRM
Two riffs that remind me of one another: Hustler, Simian Mobile Disco Heavy Water, Foals
The NYT: The low-budget alien movie “District 9” was No. 1 at the weekend box office with an estimated $37 million in ticket sales, a stronger than expected result fueled by a quirky marketing campaign. “District 9,” an R-rated social satire about a spacecraft that stalls over Johannesburg, cost only $30 million to make. Peter [...]
They wouldn’t be called opportunists if they weren’t exploiting a real opportunity. Rick Perlstein via TPM: So the birthers, the anti-tax tea-partiers, the town hall hecklers — these are “either” the genuine grass roots or evil conspirators staging scenes for YouTube? The quiver on the lips of the man pushing the wheelchair, the crazed risk [...]
If you were stuck in an elevator, you’d push all the buttons, too: “The folks who are coming aren’t poor,” said Jonathan L. Walton, a professor of religion at the University of California, Riverside, who has written about the movement and was there doing research. “They reside in that nebulous category between the working and [...]
In this complicated world we live in where consumer choices are felt to be political choices and vice versa, John Mackay’s op-ed on health care in the Wall Street Journal may have done more to “activate” credit card-carrying liberals than President Obama’s own PAC. Here’s Mackay on his constituents back in 2005: “Let’s go down [...]
Ars Technica: “Domain tasters” take advantage of a five-day domain name grace period to perform risk-free cybersquatting. Since ICANN upped the penalty for excessive cancellations, however, the practice has essentially disappeared. As our economy becomes increasingly symbolic, the exploitation of technical loopholes becomes an ever more lucrative business. Consider the recent coverage of flash orders [...]
I hear the sound of fingernails on a blackboard, muffled and distant when I hear someone say “utilize” when they could so much more easily say “use.” For example: “Let’s utilize the time” instead of “let’s use the time.” There’s no need for it: The best use for “utilize” is to mean “make use of”: [...]
Results for “whole foods facebook” as of 8am PST this morning: Whoopsies. Update: In 24 hours, the backlash has moved up to second place in Google’s search results, making the now third item, a puff piece on how Whole Foods “gets” Facebook, all the more delicious.
It’s been years since I watched Sunday morning talk shows. Maybe as many 20 years. So I’d not had the fortune of hearing wickedly smart demagogues like Newt Gingrich peddling his wares. But I did this morning, thanks to the global DVR that is YouTube. Gingrich and his allies are selling a pretty interesting lie. [...]
Elizabeth Kolbert paraphrasing Brian Wansink: [People] have no idea how much they want to eat, or, once they have eaten, how much they’ve consumed. Instead, they rely on external cues, like portion size, to tell them when to stop. The result is that as French-fry bags get bigger, so, too, do the French-fry eaters. The [...]
Echoes of secret dealings on energy policy: But I also care about democracy, and the deal between Big Pharma and the White House frankly worries me. It’s bad enough when industry lobbyists extract concessions from members of Congress, which happens all the time. But when an industry gets secret concessions out of the White House [...]
Perhaps, a question for a labor lawyer: if a company claims its human resources department is so good that employees don’t need a union, can that claim be tested? Are there standardized polls? Surveys? And if such surveys are required of employers with more than, say, 150 employees, are those results a matter of public [...]
Movies are uniquely able to transport the viewer into another person’s life – to see the world from an alien point of view. The excellent movie Blame it on Fidel (2006) is set in 1970s France and shows a world cleft by the brutal monoliths of fascism and communism; a time when the third way, liberal [...]
The eight paragraph abstract of Polarized America: The Dance of Ideology and Unequal Riches (MIT 2006) is astounding. Their argument: an increase in immigration (!) and income inequality leads to political polarization and a paralyzed state. The graphs are eye-popping. Via Paul Krugman.
Nancy Franklin: Even more than the reality shows on other networks, the ones on VH1 appear to be saying, “My, aren’t blond bimbos and undereducated minority people amusing?” No one has ever been able to tell me what he or she liked about these shows, beyond laughing at the people in them, In an interview [...]
Orangutans use leaves to deepen the sound of their voices in order to scare off predators. Previously: whales.
In California, minorities have hijacked the government and are hell-bent on driving the economy into the ground. Here’s The Economist: California has been suffering serial budget crises, the latest of which was resolved last month in a rather desperate deal between the governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the legislature. It contained huge cuts, including $2 billion [...]
Ana was just raising the volume on our boombox. She could have held down the button (it’s the chiclet variety) but instead she clicked the button repeatedly, rocking a little back and forth with each click, until she reached the desired volume. She was using her body as a metric. She was also compensating for [...]
A few years ago I remember gushing that the Best of Craigslist was genius – the kind of genius promised by one thousand monkeys hammering away at their typewriters, finally realized. It should be no surprise that this genius is now being edited for mass consumption. There’s You Suck at Craigslist and Avoid This Job as [...]
In a now famous exchange, the Daily Show stumped a New York Times editor by pointing out that all the news fit to print is old news: Daily Show: Why is aged news better than real news? New York Times: I’ve never heard that term before…[and] not necessarily. DS: Tell me one thing in there [...]