September 2008
134 posts
WatchZoom into steel. (via Neatorama)
August 2008
83 posts
Barack Obama
Me: I watched a video of Michelle Obama's speech yesterday, and it was... is something wrong?
Friend: ...
Me: Uh, are you ok?
Friend: Is Obama his first name or his last name?
Obama: We are better than these last eight years →
But the record’s clear: John McCain has voted with George Bush 90 percent of the time. Sen. McCain likes to talk about judgment, but really, what does it say about your judgment when you think George Bush has been right more than 90 percent of the time? I don’t know about you, but I’m not ready to take a 10 percent chance on change.
What an amazing speech.
Young Bamboo Shoots →
In this video, Ito welcomes us into his back yard in Japan, where he and his partner Mizuka teach us how to hunt for and prepare this traditional seasonal delicacy from a lush bamboo forest.
I eat bamboo shoots at home all the time, but I had no idea they were this much of a pain to prepare. It’s a pretty neat video (make sure you watch the last few seconds of it).
Visualizing Time →
Life is short, so it’s vitally important to set both personal and professional goals that enable you to achieve your dreams and ambitions. I knew a guy who went to a toy store and bought about 4,500 marbles, putting them all in a big 5 gallon pickle jar. Each marble represented one week of his life and, since he was 30, he immediately took 1,560 of them out. Those were the weeks he had already...
Internet Explorer →
Microsoft’s new Web browser, Internet Explorer 8, is now available in a beta version meant for ordinary users, and it’s a pretty good piece of software.
Wait, what? I never expected that to happen.
Pixifoods →
As a child it tastes like: You know, cotton candy. As an adult it tastes like: Cotton root canals.
I keep buying cotton candy (or wanting to) because it was mostly forbidden when I was a kid, but I’m always disappointed when I eat it. It practically hurts my teeth with sweetness.
Yellow River →
A cascade of 20 major dams already interrupt the Yellow River, and another 18 are scheduled to be built by 2030. Grassroots resistance to dams has emerged, most famously over the forced resettlement of more than a million people by the Yangtze River’s Three Gorges Dam, but to little effect. Ma Jun, a prominent environmentalist, says dams on the Yellow River are especially harmful, since...
The Eternal Value of Privacy →
How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of...
Solving the Anthrax Mystery →
Favorite Feeds
A few friends have asked about this now, so here’s a list of my favorite RSS feeds. These will tend toward feeds that post about a wide variety of interesting stuff rather than a focused topic (although I read those too). I like the ones that are slightly obscure so that my feeds are not too repetitive. You’ll probably notice that these are the links that show up most often in my via...
WatchThis video really draws me in. I think I’m living in the wrong city. (via joe lazarus)
Santa's Bad 2008 →
For one thing, all deliveries in a region will be made to a single, nonsectarian community drop site. This is something we’ve been meaning to do for years. It’s easier on the reindeer, it’ll eliminate the ever-spiraling cost of stuck-in-chimney insurance, and it’s a great way to reduce our footprint.
The Diver's View →
That’s scary.
The Creative Personality →
Nina Holton, whose playfully wild germs of ideas are the genesis of her sculpture, is very firm about the importance of hard work: “Tell anybody you’re a sculptor and they’ll say, ‘Oh, how exciting, how wonderful.’ And I tend to say, ‘What’s so wonderful?’ It’s like being a mason, or a carpenter, half the time. But they...
Gymnastics and Humility
I think what impresses me most about watching the gymnasts is not the amazing skill and strength that they show, or the breathtaking flips. It’s how the gymnasts help their teammates set up for their next event. They’re absolute stars, and yet they are not above doing the menial tasks like chalking up bars (Yang Wei) and setting up pads (Jiang Yuyuan).
Maybe they know the cameras are...
How can I make time slow down? →
I turn 25 today. And time is passing so quickly, I’m terrified.
I often feel like this, and I’m not 25 yet… Some great answers from Ask Metafilter though.
China's Journey →
My students wrote essays on paper so cheap and thin that it felt like the skin of an onion. The brittle pages tore easily; if held to the light, they glowed. The English was flawed, but sometimes that only gave the words more power. “My parents were born in poor farmer’s family,” wrote a young man who had chosen the English name Hunt. “They told us that they had eaten...
TED talk: Brain magic →
“I think planning a project is ultimately a little like throwing a donut at the...”
– 43folders
Sidezoomer or Lineupper? →
When your lane needs to merge to the right, do you merge into the slower lane as soon as you can (lineupper), or do you wait till the last minute to merge (sidezoomer? Personally, those sidezoomers are incredibly annoying. Also annoying are those drivers that use extremely long exit-only lanes to get ahead.
Anyway, the Freakonomics blog has a solution:
Why not neither move over nor pass, but...
Guilloches →
I never knew that the swirly patterns from paper money was called guilloches, or that generating them were so interesting.
Olympics Swim Records →
Perfect 10s →
Interesting post on Metafilter about previous gymnastic routines that scored a perfect 10 under the old scoring system. Watching these after watching the recent gymnastics competitions really underscores how much more difficult these routines have gotten since then. There are far fewer dance-y moves on floor, they seem to go higher and have more turns before they hit the ground on vault. To me,...
Coign of Vantage →
I don’t usually like to post flash games, but this one is cool - try to rotate the pixels into images as quickly as possible. There’s a special trick to it though, that does make it a lot easier once you get it.
(My highest score is 288010… What’s yours?)
Diving Cameras →
How do they get those diving shots? They drop a camera down a pipe. It drops at the same speed as the diver. If that isn’t clever enough:
The falling camera rides a rail on the inside of the pipe. A glass strip runs along the pipe’s full length; the camera takes its picture through the glass. From the diving platform to the water line, the glass is smoky. Below the line, it’s...
WatchTo explain it would be to spoil it. Just watch it, even if the beginning is a bit slow. (via swissmiss)
WatchWow. That is too cute. Three more where that came from! (via NotCot)
(Note: To pause/play the video, click on it and then press space. Sorry, I couldn’t figure out how to embed it without autoplay.)
Game Rant →
I mean, how important is it really that you shoot 20 pretend Nazis and get the blue card key? It’s not, but if the game gives you a wacky gun that lets you stake guys to a wall, you tend not to notice that the rest is uninteresting. Because hey, cool gun.
He gets so many things right in this that it’s almost scary. (via Daily Meh)
