Deliciously impractical. I would love to read a sci-fi story where this was actually some kind of shared public transit:
Read more at Commutapult.org, where they are trying to get the idea, ahem, off the ground.
Ants in your scanner
Five years of an ant colony, which was installed in a desktop scanner. A time-lapse: one scan every week for the five year period.
It looks like a music video. I like it.
Motivation for exercise: Beer, and lots of it
Ever since I hurt my foot (a year ago) I’ve been having trouble running. Like many things, this is a vicious cycle: the less I exercise, the less I feel like exercising.
What could bust me out of that cycle? Perhaps some kind of reward that I give myself for successful completion of exercise?
Thank goodness, then, for Colin, who pointed out the way to me. “The Way” is actually a blog devoted to running a half-marathon (which I have done) while drinking a beer every mile (which I have not).
There’s 13 miles in a half-marathon, and there’s 13 beers in a dozen, if you also buy one extra. Coincidence? I think not.
Exercising While Intoxicated is funny, and informative:
Several of you told me that I was “going to die” if I drank 13 beers while running the San Francisco Half Marathon. I did not die. I puked three times, blacked out for miles 11 and 12, and needed five hours to finish.
Then, his mouth filled up with vomit as “two cute Asian girls” took his finish line picture. They skedaddled. The full story’s worth a read.
So, who’s up for a run?
You are not so smart
Sorry I haven’t blogged much today, I’ve been too busy reading about how I’m not so smart, after all.
I am in love with this site: You Are Not So Smart. Basically, they take common misconceptions, and then shatter them. It’s awesome. Or, perhaps I just think that it’s awesome, because I just spent a bunch of time reading it, and I want to convince myself that my time was well spent.
Part of a post on how you are not so smart when it comes to fanboyism and brand loyalty:
The Misconception: You prefer the things you own over the things you don’t because you made rational choices when we bought them.
The Truth: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self.
…
In experiments at Baylor University where people were given Coke and Pepsi in unmarked cups and then hooked up to a brain scanner, the device clearly showed a certain number of them preferred Pepsi while tasting it.
When those people were told they were drinking Pepsi, a fraction of them, the ones who had enjoyed Coke all their lives, did something unexpected. The scanner showed their brains scrambling the pleasure signals, dampening them. They then told the experimenter afterward they had preferred Coke in the taste tests.
They lied, but in their subjective experiences of the situation, they didn’t. They really did feel like they preferred Coke after it was all over, and they altered their memories to match their emotions.
They had been branded somewhere in the past and were loyal to Coke. Even if they actually enjoyed Pepsi more, huge mental constructs prevented them from admitting it, even to themselves.
The thing is, I really do like Coke better!
Going for gold
So this is how crappy gold companies like Goldline screw you out of your money:
Click for full-size.
(From The Big Picture, via Gawker)
Movies that should not get a sequel, but do
If I was to really write about what my headline implies, this could be a very long and detailed list. The history of film-making, the past several years in particular, is littered with ill-advised sequels. Movies that were mediocre (at best) have somehow managed to wrangle sequels.
Take Piranha II: The Spawning, for example. Was Piranha such a blockbusting success that a sequel was called for? Probably not.
No, Piranha II was not James Cameron’s most shining moment. Yes, THAT James Cameron. He was the director. You might remember him from a slightly more commercially successful film: Titanic — a movie that is not likely to ever get a sequel, right?
I am afraid you are wrong.
The A.V. Club reports that “Titanic II is real and there’s a trailer.”
Strangely, I have an urge to see this film.
The mind-blowing Easter Egg in the ‘Inception’ soundtrack
I could blog about Inception all day — I think it’s a great movie, really I do, although it has a couple of fundamental flaws*.
This, though, blew my mind:
As the Onion Av Club points out:
The further the heroes dive into a person’s subconscious-into a dream within a dream within a dream, and so on-the more slowed-down time becomes. So if composer Hans Zimmer is playing us a super-slowed-down version of “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” then the implication is that we’re still submerged deep within the dream, far from the kick that will wake us up.
Whoa.
________
* The biggest problem is the flagrant breaking of Chekhov’s rule about guns in the first act having to go off by the third act. We get a huge, amazing set piece with Ariadne showing how architects can bend the dream cityscape to their will, but they never ever really use that ability — which could have come in handy during the whole third act.
How political is your clothing
It’s old news, I guess, that companies contribute to political campaigns, but I guess I never really thought about how I, as a consumer, could be helping out political causes that I don’t agree with.
I sort of thought that most large companies would hedge their bets by contributing equally (or equitably) to both sides of the political spectrum, but that’s not always the case. And, I’ve just come across a site that breaks down the contributions by clothing manufacturer. Check out this page on OpenSecrets.org:
In the 2008 election cycle, employees of Michael Kors donated 93 percent of campaign contributions to Democrats while employees of Liz Claiborne donated 98 percent to Democrats. Meanwhile, employees of Columbia Sportswear donated almost 90 percent of campaign contributions to Republicans.
Although the clothing industry is pretty evenly divided overall, individual companies in the clothing manufacturing business tend to be notably partisan in their federal political donations, more so than almost any other industry.
Some other highlights were that Guess?, Calvin Klein and American Apparel were 100% supportive of the Democrats, while Levi, Perry Ellis and Fruit of the Loom were heavily Republican.
Use your Nikon lenses on your Canon camera
For some technical reason, it cannot work the other way around, but if you’re a Nikon user from way back who would love to try out a Canon body but are stuck with a gajillion dollars in pricey Nikon-only lenses, you can now buy a $300 adapter that will fit F-mount lenses on EOS-bodies.
The adapter, by Novoflex, even preserves your ability to set the aperture, which is cool.
Read more about it at Wired or at Photography Bay.
Shocking update: Employees don’t trust their bosses
It’s no real surprise that the cradle-to-grave lifetime employment thing is long gone. Even when I was in high school, I was told to expect an average of seven employers during my career. And I’ll bet kids today are being schooled in how to become an independent consultant, sigh.
But I didn’t realize it was this bad. According to Deloitte’s fourth annual “Ethics & Workplace Survey,” a jaw-dropping one in three employees plan to quit their current jobs and find another.
Just as soon as this recession is over, that is.
And why do they want to quit so bad? Because, according to the survey, they don’t trust their bosses. Companies have completely demoralized their workforces by their poor handling of the economic downturn. As Gawker puts it:
Everyone … wants to quit because they don’t trust their employers anymore, presumably having witnessed how they handled a major crisis like the great recession. Lack of communication and transparency seem to be the biggest gripes, maybe demonstrated through a series of harrowing, scary layoffs and budget cuts.
(via the New York Post)
As slow as lightning
If you watch the timestamp on this video, it appears that the whole minute-and-a-half is actually only about half a second of real life. It’s apparently slowed down approximately 300x, so you can see exactly what’s going on in this lightning strike.
Talk about awesome:
(from ScienceBlogs)
Intriguing margarita recipe
Over at Gawker, they’ve posted a tip about a different kind of margarita recipe. The secret ingredient is diet Mountain Dew. Apparently the sweetener used in diet Mountain Dew helps knock down the tequila flavour:
In a blender combine in the order given here: 1/3-1/2 can (depending on tart preference) of LIMEADE frozen concentrate; 1/4-1/3 fifth of TEQUILA of choice; 1/4 -1/2 cup of TRIPLE SEC (a slightly lesser amount of Cointreau can be used in place of Triple Sec); 1-1 1/2 cups of DIET (must be diet as this is the key ingredient) MOUNTAIN DEW; finally add enough crushed ice to bring the level in the blender to about 2 inches from the top. Mix till ice is smoothly integrated and then get the party started.
From what I know about Slurpees, it’s important to have enough sugar in your frozen drink to keep it slushy — and the reason there’s no diet Slurpee is because aspartame doesn’t work for that. But I suspect there’s enough sugar in the Limeade for this concoction.
I am looking forward to giving this a shot!
Meaningless T-shirts
Among the explosion of single-serving blogs (usually trying for a book deal) the winners are few and far between.
But I like this recent addition to the corpus: Meaningless T-Shirts. Although many of the shirts they call out have just a jumble of number-and-letter codes, or a fake retro screen print, or a suspiciously particular year, they also feature shirts like this:
Does the fact that “Casdia Reef” is an entirely fictional place make this Meaningless T-Shirt less pointless, or even more pointless?
It’s hard to say, although it does at least indicate a rare flash of imagination on the part of the designer. Alternatively, it could indicate that they couldn’t be titted to fire up the low-level synapses required to remember a location – any location on Earth – where a fishing trip could take place. They simply tilted their exhausted, demoralised gaze over to the catering-size bottle of anti-depressants sat atop their monitor, squinted at the label, and copied down the name of the active ingredient.
Casdia 35mg. May cause itchiness, wincing, palpitations and foaming.
Jane Austen’s ‘Fight Club’
If this is truly made by a bunch of Mormon girls in Los Angeles, as they say on Boing Boing, that only makes it funny on a third or a fourth level. I wish this trailer had included a little bit about the identity-swapping or the anti-capitalism of the book and (original) movie, but it’s pretty downright great as it is.