January 2012
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Resolutions:
I will learn where people buy toilet paper and stop stealing packs from my parents’ house.
I will stop actively rooting for the funniest candidates to win the Republican nomination.
I will not make fun of people who pronounce foreign words correctly.
I will not get frustrated when my parents put their iPhones in unnecessary protective cases.
I will make things that...
December 2011
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“If there were a museum of terrible self-help ideas, the new years resolution...”
– Merlin Mann
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“Enough to merely be! Enough to breathe! Joy! Joy! All over joy!”
– Walt Whitman (via bluelogic)
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Eater:
Billy Corgan is working on opening a cool little tea house in suburban Highland Park. The Smashing Pumpkins founder and frontman lives in the tony North Shore burgh and frankly is tired of not having cool cultural things to do.
“We want to open it because there’s nothing really to do up here,” Corgan said, adding that it’s a beautiful place to live. “But...
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Congress ends corn ethanol subsidy
Detroit News:
The United States has ended a 30-year tax subsidy for corn-based ethanol that cost taxpayers $6 billion annually, and ended a tariff on imported Brazilian ethanol.
Congress adjourned for the year on Friday, failing to extend the tax break that’s drawn a wide variety of critics on Capitol Hill, including Sens. Tom Coburn, R-Okla., and Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. Critics also...
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Maximizing shareholder value is the dumbest idea...
Forbes:
“Imagine an NFL coach,” writes Roger Martin, Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, in his important new book, Fixing the Game, “holding a press conference on Wednesday to announce that he predicts a win by 9 points on Sunday, and that bettors should recognize that the current spread of 6 points is too low. Or picture the team’s quarterback standing up in...
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Santa Claus
1. No known species of reindeer can fly. But there are 300,000 species of living organisms yet to be classified, and while most of these are insects and germs, this does not completely rule out flying reindeer which only Santa has ever seen.
2. There are 2 billion children in the world (persons under 18). But since Santa doesn’t (appear) to handle Muslim, Hindu, Jewish, or Buddhist children, that...
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BBC:
Volkswagen turns off Blackberry email after work hours
The carmaker confirmed it made the move earlier this year following complaints that staff’s work and home lives were becoming blurred.
Econ 101: If employers want email to be a valuable commodity to employees, it needs to have some scarcity.
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Smoke Screening
Charles Mann for Vanity Fair:
Not until I walked with Bruce Schneier toward the mass of people unloading their laptops did it occur to me that it might not be possible for us to hang around unnoticed near Reagan National Airport’s security line. Much as upscale restaurants hang mug shots of local food writers in their kitchens, I realized, the Transportation Security Administration might post...
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Strange white string-like material found in...
Augusta Chronicle:
Savannah River Site scientists are working to identify a strange growth found on racks of spent nuclear fuel collected from foreign governments.
The “white, stringlike” material was found among thousands of spent fuel assemblies submerged in deep pools within the site’s L Area, according to a report filed by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal oversight...
thevisionbeautiful asked: Just wanted you to know, I took Cards Against Humanity to a party over the weekend, and everyone's faces hurt from laughing so hard and we all woke up with abs the next day. Every single one of them asked me where they could buy it. That game seriously sells itself.
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“Before I was diagnosed with esophageal cancer a year and a half ago, I rather...”
– Christopher Hitchens
“‘It looks like a human was involved in choosing what went where,’...”
– Marissa Mayer addressing Google designers, as quoted in “In The Plex” by Steven Levy (via buzz)
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Rob Siltanen, on pitching the “Think Different” campaign to Steve Jobs:
Jobs was quiet during the pitch, but he seemed intrigued throughout, and now it was time for him to talk. He looked around the room filled with the “Think Different” billboards and said, “This is great, this is really great … but I can’t do this. People already think I’m an egotist, and putting the Apple logo up...
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MG Siegler on the Galaxy Nexus:
Unfortunately, the system still lacks much of the fine polish that iOS users enjoy. The majority of Android users will probably think such criticism is bullshit, but that has always been the case. I imagine it’s probably hard for a Mercedes owner to describe to a Honda owner how attention to detail makes their driving experience better when both machines get them...
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Japan to release packs of wild monkeys to test...
The Telegraph:
Wild monkeys in nuclear-hit Fukushima are to be fitted with special radiation-reading monitors in order to measure contamination levels in forests.
•___•
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Facebook is making us miserable
Daniel Gulati:
Since our Facebook profiles are self-curated, users have a strong bias toward sharing positive milestones and avoid mentioning the more humdrum, negative parts of their lives. Accomplishments like, “Hey, I just got promoted!” or “Take a look at my new sports car,” trump sharing the intricacies of our daily commute or a life-shattering divorce. This creates...
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“If you’d like to make a DVD of this video, use this download and print...”
– Louis CK
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“In support of the gender-stratified hypothesis, we show here that greater male...”
– A new AMS study, Debunking Myths about Gender and Mathematics Performance, shows that gender differences in math are cultural, not biological, and socioeconomic status is the primary determinant for math performance of both boys and girls
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Teachers don’t like creative students
Marginal Revolution:
Research has indicated that teachers prefer traits that seem to run counter to creativity, such as conformity and unquestioning acceptance of authority.
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In addition, although teachers say that they like creative students, teachers also say creative students are “sincere, responsible, good-natured and reliable.” In other words, the teachers don’t know what...
