February 2012
48 posts
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“A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent...”
– Ayn Rand via Letters of Note, where you can read the full letter with this quote in context.
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There's a place to go if you're paranoid
I’m not paranoid on the web (yet), but if I were I’m happy to know there’s a place to go. DuckDuckGo, the anonymous web browser, has an illustrated guide called Google tracks you. We don’t that explains their philosophy of the web.
DuckDuckGo has also published a guide to Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! which is helpful to understanding how your search history...
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Breaking an addiction to Equasy or banning it...
Jeff Stier of Reason Magazine, in his essay Modern-Day Prohibition, shared the story of psychopharmacologist David Nutt, who didn’t think Ecstasy and LSD should be categorized among the most dangerous drugs. Instead of backing down to critics and detractors, he wrote a satirical article, analyzing another addiction.
He analyzed “an addiction called ‘Equasy’ that kills ten people a year,...
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THE COMPOSITES →
The Composites is a very strange website where Brian Joseph Davis inputs descriptions of literary characters into law enforcement composite sketch software.
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“Truth is stranger than fiction, but it is because Fiction is obliged to stick to...”
– Mark Twain in Following the Equator
via Brain Pickings
“The value of goals is not in the future they describe, but the change in...”
– David Allen, Productive Living
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“If you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go far, go with a group.”
– - African proverb
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Pick one goal for all your priorities
Scott Adams shares the one goal he focuses on that serves the multiple priorities in his life.
The way I approach the problem of multiple priorities is by focusing on just one main goal: energy. I make choices that maximize my personal energy because that makes it easier to manage all of the other priorities. Maximizing my personal energy means eating right, exercising, avoiding unnecessary...
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The Scale of the Universe 2 →
The universe is big. Scroll in to the smallest particle and out to the observable universe.
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Age-Maps
Bobby Neel Adams spliced together photos of six individuals from when they were children and adults to make these interesting Age-Maps.
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Why text?
Marco Arment, creator of Instapaper, spoke to Stephen Hackett of 512pixles about why he chooses text as his medium of choice.
Text is an amazingly versatile medium. Relative to other media, text has very low production costs, both in authorship and distribution. One person can produce a great essay or even a complete book. It’s much harder to be a one-person filmmaker. And since text as a medium...
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Reality TV's many intersections
This Venn Diagram from New York Magazine shows an incredible amount of overlap in the titles and themes of various reality show.
Here’s the big version.
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Hacker News for marketers
Rand Fishkin from Moz and Dharmesh Shah from HubSpot launched a Hacker News like site for marketers, Inbound.org.
I hope the community and content quality of this site is up to the standards of it muse.
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The constitutions of classic cocktails
Pop Chart Lab has this detailed diagram of many classic cocktails.
This definitive guide to classic cocktails breaks down 68 drinks into their constituent parts. Follow the lines to see where spirits, mixers, and garnishes intersect to form delightful concoctions. This massive movie poster-sized print contains over 40 types of alcohol (from distilled spirits to bitters), mixers from...
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Superbowl Twitter mentions visualized on... →
Hotspot.io gathered twitter mentions of Superbowl ads and presented them in a beautiful graph.
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To Know, but Not Understand: David Weinberger on... →
Science is producing more data than it knows what to do with.
[T]he creation of data galaxies has led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we’ve adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all.
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Everything old is new again
According to Eric Felten, in his WSJ.com review of the book New by Winifred Gallagher,
Creativity flourishes best when part of a tradition. The new ideas that succeed are those that stick around long enough to become old.
He sees what’s new as part of a long line of creative works, one springing forth from another. For all the interest our society shows for the new and improved...
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Death by brainstorming
Gathering opinions from everyone in the room is still in vogue, but creative work is still best done in solitude. Susan Cain of The New York times explores the role of Groupthink in the workplace and how best to combat its negative effects.
Solitude is out of fashion. Our companies, our schools and our culture are in thrall to an idea I call the New Groupthink, which holds that creativity and...
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Processes instead of goals
Dilbert Creator Scott Adams talks about what works for his success in an essay on his blog called The Yoke of Credibility.
I see life as a process, not a goal. If my goal had been to create world-changing ideas that worked right away, I would be a complete failure. But I don’t have that goal. Instead, I have a process that involves seeding the universe with ideas and waiting for the...
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The bottle of wits
This Princess Bride themed wine from the Alamo Draft House will be available for Valentine’s Day.
Nothing says “I Love You” like a possibly poisoned wine.
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“If you don’t like growing older, don’t worry about it. You may not...”
– Thomas Sowell
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“Consummate politeness is not the right tonic for an emotional collapse.”
– Joseph Conrad, Victory
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“It takes considerable energy to plan your own future, but if you don’t figure...”
– Jason Theodor, M.A.P.S.: The Four Pillars of Creative Job Fulfillment
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January 2012
40 posts
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Changing the past
I love e-books, especially on my Kindle, but Nicholas Carr or the Wall Street Journal has some interesting ideas on the danger of e-books.
[A]s is often the case with digitization, the boon carries a bane. The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks...