May 2008
85 posts
Procrastination →
At least my daughter has broken my family legacy. When she comes home, she does her homework and practices her piano. I never nag her. How does she do it? She said it was something she learned in the Sunshine class, when she was 4 years old. “The teachers would hand out snacks: five pieces of popcorn, five gummy bears, and five pretzels. Everyone ate what they liked first, then they...
Favicons for Google Reader →
Believe it or not, this makes reading feeds even more fun.
FbCal →
This is pretty cool if you use iCal. You can subscribe to calendars for your Facebook events and friends’ birthdays, to have those show up in your iCal.
Saving Seconds →
Let’s try a test. From this article, I want you to count the number of discrete steps it takes you to compose a new mail message. Each key or key combination you click is 1 point. A mouse drag is one point. A mouse click is another point.I use gmail, so my score is 3: move mouse to bookmark toolbar, click on gmail, press c. The thing is, I don’t really use this because I’m almost...
How to Live Longer Without Really Trying →
You don’t really expect the New York Times to have funny articles, so this one caught me off guard. The author talks about her efforts to follow a personalized advice on how to improve her healthy life expentancy: I was ready to move on to the next suggestion: avoid salt. To accomplish this, I sat at my desk awhile, eating nothing, until I figured enough time had passed to allow me to check...
Happiness (the book) →
Click on “The Book” at the top for photos from the book. Looking at those pictures of incredibly happy looking people makes me smile.
Philip Glass (Trailer) →
I can’t say that I like all of Philip Glass’ pieces, but there are a few that I absolutely love. I first heard of him from this scene in Battlestar Galactica (that’s Metamorphosis Five, by the way). You can browse through his music here, by mood, tempo, or date composed. As the joke at the end of the trailer implies, some of his music gets a bit repetitive, but there’s...
Grief in the Rubble →
Mr. Ma saved several children the day of the disaster but cannot shake the memory of one girl. Her leg had been pinned beneath a heavy concrete slab. Two small cranes had failed to free her. Her body temperature was quickly dropping. So Mr. Ma told her father, “She can keep her leg or her life.” The father was led away. Mr. Ma used a serrated knife he kept in his jeans. He said the job took...
Remembering Ricky →
No words. Just watch it.
Olallieberries →
How did the Olallieberry get its name? “Olallie” is a word for berry that was used by Native Americans of the Pacific Northwest. So you’re actually saying “berry berry”!Awesome.
Kindle Review →
I know it looks ugly, but the reviews still make me want one. One of the nicest things about the Kindle, and something that is inherent in such a device, is that, unlike a regular book, its orientation and weight aren’t constantly shifting. With a paper book, you are made to move [it] around as you shift from the left to the right page, flip pages, etc. With the Kindle however, all of that...
Why Everything Except AT&T Sucks At Stanford →
As the article explains, the reason that all the other carriers have terrible coverage on Stanford campus is that Stanford has an exclusive contract with AT&T. Gee, thanks, because no student would possibly want to choose their own carrier, or have a contract with another carrier from before they came on campus, right? >_
Instapaper →
Instapaper is a website that lets you save links to articles and webpages that you want to read, but don’t currently have time for. They just added this page: it gives you a list of the top saved articles for today, plus the past few days. Bonus: that page also tells you the number of unread articles you have saved in your Instapaper, at the top (next to “Articles”). Just what...
Stop eating junk food! →
“Female humans report that they eat high-calorie foods to make themselves feel better when stressed,” Dr. Zellner says, “but they actually don’t feel better after eating them. Instead, because they are restrained eaters, they feel guilt and actually feel worse. Female monkeys don’t have that cognitive baggage.” Only the monkeys, it seems, find comfort in comfort foods. Doh.
Earthquake Lights →
Read the comments though.
Watch Shlino lake sunset timelapse (via Ample Sanity)
Show Us Your Food →
An excellent interview with the authors of “Hungry Planet,” certainly one of the most thought-provoking books I’ve read in a while. Two of the more interesting passages from the interview: It seems that people in the developed world, especially those in the United States, are losing respect for food. We eat too much and waste too much, and many of us eat stuff that hardly...
Calendar Effects →
Great post on the various calendar effects that have been observed in the market. Here’s an interesting one: Consider the January Effect, which refers to the tendency of the equity markets annual returns to follow the results of the first five trading days in January. In other words, if the market finishes the first week of the year on a positive note, so will the entire year and vice...
The US wastes lots of food →
As it turns out, Americans waste an astounding amount of food — an estimated 27 percent of the food available for consumption, according to a government study — and it happens at the supermarket, in restaurants and cafeterias and in your very own kitchen. It works out to about a pound of food every day for every American. This is pretty depressing.
Nostalgia →
I just changed the design to use the excellent Nostalgia theme from Bill Israel. Feels cleaner than my old theme. What do you think?
MentatWiki →
A promising post on Metafilter about mental exercises, predominantly at MentatWiki. An interesting site, even if it hurts my eyes.
New Facebook design coming →
Yay!
A 30,000-Volume Window on the World →
This is probably my favorite article so far this year, although I don’t really expect many others to share that sentiment. It’s beautifully written, and really makes me long for the summer vacations years and years ago (has it been that long?) when I had enough time to go through 10 books a week… The scribbles on the margins, the occasional date on the flyleaf, the faded bus...
Batman & The Dark Knight Trailers →
Wow, that’s pretty cool. If you play the trailers for Batman and The Dark Knight together, they line up. Neat!
WatchWhat a great story, especially the end part with the court. I really need to start listening to the This American Life podcast…
Double-yolked egg
I generally try to eat the white part of a hard-boiled egg first and then eat the yolk. So when I ate an egg for lunch today, I bit off one end, and found egg yolk underneath. I then switched to the other end, thinking that it would be the white part. Imagine my surprise when there was egg yolk underneath there too! It wasn’t a small egg, so I was quite confused: was the yolk unusually...
BillG Review →
This one is pretty old, but it is an excellent story.
WatchThe Day There Was No News (via Metafilter)
Microsoft TouchWall →
*drools*
The Future of Reading →
The Kindle uses a technology known as E Ink, which deploys negatively charged black particles and positively charged white particles to create something that looks, and acts, startlingly like paper. There’s no reflection in the sun and no discernible flicker on the screen. Compared to traditional LCD screens, whose light and flicker force your eyes to constantly strain and refocus, this is a...
Hu Jintao's trip to Japan →
I’m not normally interested in politics, but this was interesting: More clearly than any Chinese leader before him, Mr Hu said, in effect, that the harm Japan did in the first half of the 20th century was outweighed by its contribution to Asian peace and prosperity in the second half. I don’t agree with that, but it’s a good step for the two countries.
Tag Galaxy →
A bit slow, but still interesting.
“Apologies are like monsters: they’re only real if you believe in them.”
– Blank is like Blank
