January 2009
89 posts
The robots invade Zappos →
There’s a nice piece in Wired about autonomous warehouse robots that go about and collect stuff by themselves. The best part is this video showing the robots in action at Zappos, the online shoe store.
Dangerous Internet addicts in China! →
“Things have absolutely gone out of control,” said Wang, 45, almost in tears. “My son just beat and bit me again this morning after I wouldn’t let him touch the computer.”
The world's best passenger complaint letter →
Excerpt from a hilarious complaint letter to Richard Branson from an unhappy Mumbai to Heathrow passenger:
By now I was actually starting to feel a little hypoglycaemic. I needed a sugar hit. Luckily there was a small cookie provided. It had caught my eye earlier due to it’s baffling presentation.
It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY...
Endow the news →
David Swensen, the magician who manages Yale’s endowment, writes that the way to save newspapers is to give them the same business model as universities:
Turn them into nonprofit, endowed institutions — like colleges and universities. Endowments would enhance newspapers’ autonomy while shielding them from the economic forces that are now tearing them down….
How large an...
John Updike RIP counter-programming: DFW's... →
John Updike has died of lung cancer. He was 76, and I was a fan. But I was also a fan of DFW, and this seems as good a time as any to point to Wallace’s blistering review of Updike’s 1997 novel Toward the End of Time.
The review was published in the New York Observer (and later in Consider the Lobster.) Here’s a taste:
Toward the End of Time concerns an incredibly erudite,...
Teen goalie designs pads to trick shots →
Nice idea:
While daydreaming in his high school chemistry class, hockey goaltender Trevor Leahy began to think about the opposing forwards who buzz around him when Pingree School hits the ice.
What are they looking for, he asked himself.
Open net.
But why does he wear dark blue pads that let shooters zero in on a target?
Using computer skills he learned in a graphic...
WatchObama wants to “visit” with reporters, not answer questions. Wait — didn’t we just have that president?
E-mail tip: Change your signature to "Sent from... →
Kevin Rose’s genius Twitter:
“my secret time saving email tip: change your desktop email signature to “Sent from iPhone” - then write 1 sentence replies! sshhh”
Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman's finger-synched... →
Faking performances for big events is not just for the Chinese. Yo-Yo Ma and Itzhak Perlman played live at the inauguration, but the speakers and media didn’t broadcast their live music — instead they played a recording made two days earlier. The inaugural committee did this in case the players slipped up as a result of the cold weather.
A spokeswoman gets all defensive with the...
Jenna and Barbara Give Tips to Sasha and Malia →
Among the bits of advice in a very charming letter, the Bush girls tell the Obama girls:
Slide down the banister of the solarium, go to T-ball games, have swimming parties, and play Sardines on the White House lawn. Have fun and enjoy your childhood in such a magical place to live and play.
A Google bomb for Obama: "Cheerful Achievement" →
Remember how Googling “miserable failure” would return a page for George W. Bush? Now there’s a Google bomb for Obama. Google “cheerful achievement” and you get the new president’s White House page (well, it’s the second Google link — it was first, but then this post at Google Blogoscoped reporting the bomb replaced it).
Op-Ed Contributor - Oaf of Office - NYTimes.com →
Steven Pinker argues that John Roberts mangled the quote because he’s a grammar fundamentalist:
In his legal opinions, Chief Justice Roberts has altered quotations to conform to his notions of grammaticality, as when he excised the “ain’t” from Bob Dylan’s line “When you ain’t got nothing, you got nothing to lose.” On Tuesday his inner copy editor overrode any instincts toward strict...
How Not to be a Key Online Influencer →
P.R. exec goes to Memphis to coach FedEx people on using social media. When he lands, he Twitters,
“True confession but I’m in one of those towns where I scratch my head and say, ‘I would die if I had to live here.’”
Good thinking there. FedEx chews him out quite well.
Do-over — Obama re-takes the oath. Just to make sure. http://is.gd/gMfO
Intimate secrets of Sarkozy's fitness regime →
There’s a new French weight-loss fad — flex your taint.
Because according to Nicolas Sarkozy’s personal trainer, Julie Imperiali, the French president has shed 4kg and shrunk two trouser sizes since she got him working the muscles of his pelvic floor 10 months ago. What’s more, if he is anything like her other clients (who include France’s first lady, Carla...
Experts say Obama should retake the oath →
Just to be safe!
A do-over “would take him 30 seconds, he can do it in private, it’s not a big deal, and he ought to do it just to be safe,” said Boston University constitutional scholar and Supreme Court watcher Jack Beermann. “It’s an open question whether he’s president until he takes the proper oath.”
Turns out both Calvin Coolidge and Chester...
Obama likes his burgers medium-well, with lettuce, tomato, dijon, fries and salad on the side. Medium *well*?! http://is.gd/gJkA
Satellite image of the inauguration crowd. Swarms of people look sort of like the capitol has a beard. Click to zoom: http://snurl.com/afxhh
Bush Dies Peacefully In His Sleep | The Onion -... →
The Onion:
WASHINGTON—George W. Bush, 43rd president of the United States of America, passed away painlessly in his sleep Monday night, White House sources confirmed. The 62-year-old Bush was reportedly discovered lying unresponsive in his bed by first lady Laura Bush, a gentle smile still on his lips. “It was as though he knew it was his time to go,” said longtime family physician...
Oh, good — he’s out of the car!
It’s seems somewhat pointless to have a parade in which the main attraction is locked inside an impenetrable, opaque bulletproof Caddy.
Fighting a cold? Every bit of sleep counts →
The L.A. Times, via Boing Boing:
People who sleep less than seven hours a night appear to be almost three times as likely to catch a cold as those who sleep eight hours or more, a new study has found.
Quality of sleep may count even more than quantity. Those who spend as little as 25 minutes a night tossing and turning face more than five times the risk of sniffing and sneezing.
...
The oil market's in "contango," which means a lot... →
Morgan Stanley has just hired a supertanker to store 2 million barrels of oil in the Gulf of Mexico in the expectation that it can sell the cheap oil it buys today for higher prices tomorrow. Citigroup and Shell have done the same thing.
That’s because the oil market is in “contango” — a term that describes a market in which the price set by the futures market for future...
Why so many minds think alike →
Why do you resist voicing your opinion if everyone else in a meeting believes something different? Because your brain considers your nonconformity an error:
A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the “oops area” becomes extra active, while the...
Is That an Emoticon in 1862? →
Jennifer 8. Lee writes:
A historical newspaper specialist at the digital archival company Proquest believes he has found an example of a sideways winking smiley face embedded in The New York Times transcript of an 1862 speech given by President Lincoln. Other historians are not so sure, saying the semicolon alongside a closed parenthesis is either a mistake or a misinterpretation of...
Want to Get More Work Done? Try a Bigger Screen →
From my NYT article on working with two monitors:
…over the last few weeks I began a personal quest for multiple-monitor Zen. I got my hands on several displays and paired them up in every way possible way.
First I tried using two 22-inch Dell widescreen monitors side by side, creating one very wide screen, roughly 38 inches measured diagonally. Next, I rotated each display so that...
iTunes replaces software DRM with "social DRM." →
Although iTunes is removing copy protections from music in its store, every file you download will contain your e-mail address embedded within it — so if that song you just bought ends up on a trading network, it can be traced back to you.
Some folks have taken to calling this kind of copy-protection — or, rather, copy deterrence — “social DRM.”
How to read 462 books in one year →
Book critic Sarah Weinman explains what it’s like to be a super speed reader:
I sat in the La-Z-Boy at my parents’ house with a pencil, went through page by page making notes but also enjoying the book, and had the whole task done in about 3-4 hours. This was a 350-page manuscript too, so roughly 80,000 words. Take away the pencil and the editor’s hat and the reading speed...
Do you have friends who’ve deliberately stayed off Facebook? Are they aloof about it? Does it annoy you? Can I talk to them?
How To Give Anyone A Speeding Ticket →
BuzzFeed:
Take a photo of your adversary’s license plate, print it out on glossy paper, cover your own license plate with it, and drive 100mph through a SpeedCam equipped intersection that gives automatic tickets. In a couple days, a speeding ticket arrives in your victim’s mailbox. Brilliant and evil - like most new ideas thought up by High School students.
Facebook's valuation (in Whoppers) →
Kottke does the numbers on Burger King’s recent Whopper Sacrifice campaign (unfriend 10 friends, get a free Whipper) and arrives at a valuation for Facebook: $1.8 billion.
Cory Doctorow: Writing in the Age of Distraction →
Among many nice bits of advice, Cory offers:
Researching isn’t writing and vice-versa. When you come to a factual matter that you could google in a matter of seconds, don’t. Don’t give in and look up the length of the Brooklyn Bridge, the population of Rhode Island, or the distance to the Sun. That way lies distraction — an endless click-trance that will turn your 20 minutes...
For the second time in a year, Google changes its... →
The favicon is the little icon that shows up in the tab of your browser. Google used to have a big, thin uppercase G; last May, it switched to a lowercase blue G; now it’s got a white lowercase G cut out of a multicolored circle. This new one’s better. (Via Search Engine Land.)
Texas death row inmate pulls out eye, eats it →
The AP:
HOUSTON – A Texas death row inmate with a history of mental problems pulled out his only good eye and told authorities he ate it. Andre Thomas, 25, was arrested for the fatal stabbings of his estranged wife, their young son and her 13-month-old daughter in March 2004. Their hearts also had been ripped out. He was convicted and condemned for the infant’s death.
While in the...
Baltimore Mayor Sheila Dixon indicted →
News for fans of The Wire — Mayor Sheila Dixon, the inspiration for Nerese Campbell, the woman who took over as mayor after Carcetti left to run the state, is in trouble:
Dixon was charged with perjury, theft, fraudulent misappropriation and misconduct, stemming in part from gifts she received from former boyfriend and developer Ronald H. Lipscomb, who was also charged earlier this...
Irregardless of what you think, "conversate" is a... →
Ta-Nehisi Coates talks to Jesse Sheidlower, editor at large of the OED, about what words are really words. Turns out they all are — it’s just that some aren’t appropriate in certain instances:
“Table” is generally acceptable, but “ass” or “fuck” might not be, In some cases they would. It’s the same for “hopefully” or...
Flu Found Resistant to Tamiflu Antiviral Drug →
The Times reports:
Virtually all the flu in the United States this season is resistant to the leading antiviral drug Tamiflu, and scientists and health officials are trying to figure out why.
The problem is not yet a public health crisis because this is a below-average flu season so far and the chief strain circulating is still susceptible to other drugs — but infectious disease...
How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a... →
You know that German financier who killed himself after losing a bundle on a bad position on Volkswagen? What did him in was betting against Porsche, which engineered “one of the most masterful hacks of the financial system in history,” explains Ivan Krstić.
Porsche bluffed hedge funds into betting against VW’s stock; when the company later revealed that it owned nearly all...
So … I started a link blog: http://farhad.tumblr.com/
Obama will probably inherit the Bush “Miserable... →
Danny Sullivan writes:
Yes, the miserable failure “Googlebomb” was fixed at Google. However, should any future administration ever use either the words “miserable” or “failure” on the US president’s home page, there’s a good chance that page will start ranking tops again for searches like “failure” or “miserable” or even “miserable failure.” Using those words effectively overwrites Google’s...
If Facebook were a country.... →
Mark Zuckerberg says:
Today, we reached another milestone: 150 million people around the world are now actively using Facebook and almost half of them are using Facebook every day. This includes people in every continent—even Antarctica. If Facebook were a country, it would be the eighth most populated in the world, just ahead of Japan, Russia and Nigeria.
If Facebook were a country,...
