What the Web will be. Maybe.

¶ 121 Posted at 03.20 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | interesting | internet | future )

Quote of the moment:

Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers.
Mignon McLaughlin

¶ 136 Posted at 11.20 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting | quotes )

Zadie Smith - On the Road: American Writers And Their Hair

¶ 245 Posted at 01.02 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | interesting )

The Kool-Aid FAQ sets the record straight on Jonestown (FAQ XX):

It is a popular misconception that 900 followers of cult leader Jim Jones committed suicide by drinking Grape Kool-Aid laced with cyanide at their commune in Jonestown Guyana in the late 1970's. This is not true. The followers of Jones actually drank cyanide laced Flavor-aid, a cheap imitation of Kool-Aid. The Flavor-aid flavor they consumed was grape. Therefore, Kool-Aid played no part in this tragedy.

So now you know.

¶ 247 Posted at 03.27 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting | fyi )

Judge Rules Fingerprints Cannot Be Called a Match (NY Times).

¶ 253 Posted at 10.35 PM ⇒ No Comments ( news | interesting )

Why I'm Skipping the Olympics. Old, but still relevant.

¶ 278 Posted at 03.47 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

Not entirely credible, not entirely incredible: The Secret Connections between "Fight Club" and "Calvin and Hobbes".

¶ 317 Posted at 11.37 AM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | interesting )

An interesting article on the paperless office from our friends at the New Yorker.

¶ 320 Posted at 02.12 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting | future )

I know nothing of building electronics, but it looks like even I could do this: build your own noise-canceling headphones.

¶ 328 Posted at 11.29 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting | geek )

A look at earlier Disney work (Windows Media).

¶ 394 Posted at 09.29 PM ⇒ No Comments ( media | interesting )

An entertaining movie (Quicktime MOV) Indigen.

¶ 395 Posted at 11.41 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | interesting )

Test yourself for hidden bias. From the Southern Poverty Law Center and Yale University. So far, I have "... a slight automatic association between White American faces and American" and "... a strong automatic preference for Gay people." Hi, Amir. The test is in a java applet which probably won't work on Mac IE, but did work in my Windows IE6.

¶ 468 Posted at 10.59 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

This is a really awesome journal by a guy working as a sound engineer in Hollywood. It's not well-edited or anything, but it's really interesting and the guy's got good flow. It's long, but if you've got the time, read it.

My poor, poor neglected web site.

¶ 496 Posted at 02.52 PM ⇒ No Comments ( music | interesting )

Second part of Mixerman's diaries. They're a little tough to find.

¶ 498 Posted at 01.32 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | music | interesting )

From Andrew, who also does not have a website: Results of a long-term marriage study. It's pretty interesting stuff.

¶ 515 Posted at 02.48 PM ⇒ No Comments ( linkage | interesting )

One of the cool things about the flight yesterday was the sun. Really. We were flying south in the early afternoon, and I was on the right side of the plane. So, if you can picture it in your mind, the sun was mostly overhead, but a little bit to the right and forward (since we're above the Tropic of Cancer and it's spring, the sun is southward). It worked out so the sunlight reflected off the ground and back up at me. If it had been an ocean flight, that would have sucked, but since it was over land, it reflected off pools, ponds, and lakes. The best part was when we flew over a stream or a small river. These were basically invisible most of the time because they were so small; you could only tell they were there if the surrounding area was barren or grassy and the stream was lined with trees. If the stream was mostly perpendicular to our flight path, it flashed briefly along its length. If the stream was roughly parallel, the reflection moved along with us, with random brightening and dimming as it went along. It doesn't sound like much, but it was really beautiful. I don't remember having ever seen it before, which makes sense given how you have to be flying in the right direction at the right time and be on the right side of the plane.

¶ 525 Posted at 12.08 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

Planning a honeymoon? Consider beautiful North Korea.

¶ 636 Posted at 04.40 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

The NY Times has reposted a classic article from a few years back that I'd been trying to track down. It's really quite funny. Among the Inept, Researchers Discover, Ignorance Is Bliss.

¶ 653 Posted at 02.54 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

The New York Times Magazine has an article about a bagel delivery man and his experience with minor "white-collar" theft. His business runs on the honor system for payment, which is used as a lens by which to view the bigger problem. It's pretty interesting. Least honest are telecommunications companies and law firms. The rank-and-file tend to be more honest than the executives.

¶ 773 Posted at 11.38 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

The NY Times has an article about bullying bosses. Among other interesting data, the study covered found that the boss's behavior was infectious; bully bosses caused their subordinates to be more likely to be bullies themselves, while nice bosses elicited similarly nice behavior in their subordinates.

¶ 793 Posted at 05.40 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

Mute found this article entitled "How Not to Buy Happiness." I'd summarize it for you, but that might keep you from reading it, which you should.

¶ 827 Posted at 02.23 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

Attack Trees are neat. And that thinking can be generalized to other types of planning.

¶ 878 Posted at 03.16 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting | geek )

The Museum of Modern Art likes tall buildings (Flash), both real and imagined. So do I, especially the Jin Mao Tower in Shanghai (#6) and the Swiss Mary Reinsurance Headquarters in London (#17).

¶ 886 Posted at 04.00 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

Wired has a cool article about what they call the Long Tail, the media items that aren't hits. It makes the point that hit-driven media production is a response to problems of scarcity that apply less and less with digital ordering and delivery. The mass market is dying.

¶ 900 Posted at 05.04 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

The FBI has a guide to concealable weapons (PDF) that's pretty neat.

¶ 911 Posted at 05.32 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

The NY Times "public editor" has a piece on innumeracy (here's another article referred to by the first). Lots of good points. People just don't understand numbers. When people aren't given a context, they need to know how to find the appropriate one. That people don't know how to do this makes it it easy to manipulate them. It's like thermometers that measure to the tenth of a degree. People think, surely if they have that level of precision, it must be accurate, and it must reflect a qualitative difference between different measurements. On the scales we're talking about, they're not usually that accurate. Even if they are, they aren't necessarily meaningful. Numbers can be invented just as easily as any other assertion and, with the patina of credibility they give, are probably even more invented than other assertions. Of course, people aren't so good at questioning those other kinds of assertions either, but that's for another day.

¶ 1015 Posted at 10.49 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

If you print many digital photos, you'll find this examination of labs and printers over time to be useful.

¶ 1100 Posted at 12.15 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

Scientists have discovered that switching a single gene in a female fruit fly will induce it to behave like a male, according to the International Herald Tribune. That seems to be a solid step down the path of establishing homosexuality as being a result of genetics. And that is not a good thing. I'm not saying it's a choice, either, nor that establishing it as a choice would be any better. Frankly, I don't care, and neither should anyone else. This is one of those damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't situations. If homosexuality is proven to have a genetic cause, then social conservatives will argue it is a genetic defect. If it is proven to be a choice, then they will argue it is a depraved and degenerate practice. They can find arguments condemning it if it's caused by non-genetic biological factors, by environmental factors, or by cosmic rays and Cher. Now, I'm not saying that we should pay attention to what social conservatives think. In fact, I say quite the opposite. Arguing about whether the cause makes it acceptable is still wrong and still lets them dictate the agenda. It implicitly acknowledges that one's sexuality needs to be justified to unaffected, uninvolved parties. I say that it doesn't matter one bit where homosexuality comes from except for academic reasons. What matters is that homosexuality hurts nobody 1 and is nobody's business. Root causes are irrelevant. It just is, and that should be good enough for everybody.

¶ 1109 Posted at 10.26 AM ⇒ No Comments ( science! | interesting | politics )

A recent study described in the NY Times suggests that people are bad at remembering which claims were true and which were false after being presented with health information. They'll remember that a particular statement was made, like "aspirin destroys tooth enamel," but they won't remember whether that was the fact or the fiction. We seem to regard familiar claims as being true, even if our familiarity stems from being told they are not true. The study was limited to health information, but it seems to me that would explain the continuing belief of many Americans that Iraq had something to do with September 11th (if you wanted to grossly misapply scientific research).

¶ 1170 Posted at 02.26 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )

If you're interested in animal domestication (and let's face it, who isn't?), you should read this article (PDF) describing a Soviet/Russian experiment over 40 years to domesticate the silver fox. It turns out that domestication can happen in just a few decades when artificially selecting solely for temperament, contradicting previous ideas that held that domestication of animals in human (pre-)history spanned millennia. They also found some interesting results in how characteristics of the animals that were seemingly unrelated to temperament changed in the sample population to mirror those same characteristics in other domesticate mammals, such as floppy ears, broader faces, and changes in mating cycles. It's neat stuff.

¶ 1199 Posted at 04.11 PM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting | science! )

I had a longer post trying to summarize some articles I've read recently on nurturing ability in children. I wasn't satisfied with it, though, and rather than bang my head on it, I'll just point you. New York Magazine reports on the right ways to praise. The authors have a few followup posts on their weblog: 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

This seems related to research showing the impressive effects of practice as described in this NY Times Magazine article. Then there are some articles by your friend and mine, Malcolm Gladwell: the Physical Genius and Do Parents Matter? Also relevant is the example of Làszlò Polgàr, who raised three daughters to be world chess champions, including one who is ranked 13th in the world. And maybe What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage to finish.

¶ 1400 Posted at 11.45 AM ⇒ No Comments ( interesting )