christmasgorilla - { chris muscarella }

Paul: so a new atomic element was just discovered, ununseptium.

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:31:04 -0400

Paul: so a new atomic element was just discovered, ununseptium.
cm: really? sounds like the condition of a serious cocaine user.

"I like that at a real bookstore, I can instantly tell the difference between works by actual..."

Wed, 01 Sep 2010 12:30:45 -0400

“I like that at a real bookstore, I can instantly tell the difference between works by actual historians and works by conspiracy theorists, since the real books are printed on good paper with pretty covers and the others are smudgy pamphlets. We need to bring those barriers of entry to the Internet, and speed is a way to to do it.”

- Joel Stein, Time Magazine (on net neutrality)

MarineTraffic.com - this is super cool.

Sun, 22 Aug 2010 12:30:00 -0400

MarineTraffic.com - this is super cool.

Tallest Man on Earth - Love is All

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 20:02:40 -0400

Tallest Man on Earth - Love is All

"Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching..."

Tue, 17 Aug 2010 08:46:00 -0400

“Every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites…”

- Eric Schmidt, CEO of Google

This has been quoted in RWW and Gawker—in a derisive way. One of the follow ups: “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time… I mean we really have to think about these things as a society.”

This is not ridiculous.

The National - The Runaway via texturism

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 19:27:00 -0400

The National - The Runaway

via texturism

Antony & the Johnsons - Here Comes the Sun

Sun, 15 Aug 2010 11:32:54 -0400

Antony & the Johnsons - Here Comes the Sun

A book art sampler as I was looking for some design inspiration...

Sat, 14 Aug 2010 12:12:00 -0400

Guy Laramee

Claire Brewster

Robert The

Thomas Allen

Jacqueline Rush Lee

Su Blackwell

A book art sampler as I was looking for some design inspiration this morning. Included: Claire Brewster, Guy Laramee, Jacqueline Rush Lee, Robert The, Su Blackwell, Thomas Allen. Not included: Brian Dettmer—there’s enough of his work that I’ve posted before.

"The web is ruled by maniacs like Perez Hilton, Ron Paul zealots, Apple fan boys, blog commenters,..."

Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:03:00 -0400

“The web is ruled by maniacs like Perez Hilton, Ron Paul zealots, Apple fan boys, blog commenters, animal lovers, and other crazy people.

Content is more viral if it helps people fully express their personality disorders

Couch potatoes don’t matter on the web, crazy people do”

- Jonah Peretti, A Viral Meetup Talk

“File this under “icebreakers, MacWorld...

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 13:55:30 -0400

“File this under “icebreakers, MacWorld ‘11”. Finally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren’t just getting fucked by Apple… The chart pretty much speaks for itself; I’ll just say that the numbers for all three brands are for 30 year-olds, so it’s not a matter of older, more experienced people preferring one phone to another. We found this data as part of our general camera-efficacy analysis: we crossed all kinds of user behaviors with the camera models and found we had data on the number of sexual partners for 9,785 people with smart phones.”

OkCupid, Don’t Be Ugly by Accident!

As always, OkCupid dishes up another amazing read. One of the things I’m particularly interested in is the model of cameras relative to attractiveness of picture. Understandly SLRs produce better pictures, but it’s interesting to note the brand / model stacking. Is that just a self-selection bias from the type of people that would gravitate to those cameras?

Jay-Z feat. Mr. Hudson - Young Forever via alexbeaudet

Tue, 10 Aug 2010 12:15:59 -0400

Jay-Z feat. Mr. Hudson - Young Forever

via alexbeaudet

"Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both..."

Mon, 09 Aug 2010 21:37:22 -0400

“Dallas and Los Angeles represent two distinct models for successful American cities, which both reflect and reinforce different cultural and political attitudes. One model fosters a family-oriented, middle-class lifestyle—the proverbial home-centered “balanced life.” The other rewards highly productive, work-driven people with a yen for stimulating public activities, for arts venues, world-class universities, luxury shopping, restaurants that aren’t kid-friendly. One makes room for a wide range of incomes, offering most working people a comfortable life. The other, over time, becomes an enclave for the rich. Since day-to-day experience shapes people’s sense of what is typical and normal, these differences in turn lead to contrasting perceptions of economic and social reality. It’s easy to believe the middle class is vanishing when you live in Los Angeles, much harder in Dallas. These differences also reinforce different norms and values—different ideas of what it means to live a good life. Real estate may be as important as religion in explaining the infamous gap between red and blue states.”

- Virginia Postrel, A Tale of Two Townhouses

Redefining windblown.

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 20:20:10 -0400

Redefining windblown.

"Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We..."

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:30:15 -0400

“Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. When asked to do this, English speakers arrange time from left to right. Hebrew speakers do it from right to left (because Hebrew is written from right to left).

Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”

- Lera Boroditsky, Does Language Influence Culture

Jay-Z & Marvin Gaye - Partylife (Brooklyn Soul Remix) via...

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 10:33:49 -0400

Jay-Z & Marvin Gaye - Partylife (Brooklyn Soul Remix)

via alexbeaudet

"Good documentation is condescendingly terse, and Git’s documentation is like an art critic who..."

Thu, 05 Aug 2010 07:10:58 -0400

“Good documentation is condescendingly terse, and Git’s documentation is like an art critic who giggles at you. (The description of git-rebase is “Forward-port local commits to the updated upstream head”. Oh, fuck off.)”

- Ted Dziuba

via probenjamin

“The problem is that the social networks we’re...

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 19:43:00 -0400

“The problem is that the social networks we’re creating online don’t match the social networks we already have offline. This creates many problems, and a few opportunities.”
- Paul Adams, User Research for Social at Google

This slide from Paul’s presentation seems obvious and it’s mainly a critique of Facebook (they even make a reference to scaring young, ten year old swimmers with pictures of a gay nightclub). To me, it shows something interesting—which is a kind of taxonomical approach to thinking about relationships, which seems pretty wrong-headed and inorganic. It seems much more congruent with the idea of social software to have platforms that implicitly teach people that they’re making things for public consumption (yay tumblr!) rather than try to have extensive class models for how you want to relate to people. Tumblr should ship Paul and Google some t-shirts that say, “Tumblr is Facebook for Grown-ups.”

The Hemingway Look-Alike Society My friend, Henry, expects me...

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 16:15:48 -0400

The Hemingway Look-Alike Society

My friend, Henry, expects me to win before 2050.

"The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal..."

Mon, 02 Aug 2010 11:10:33 -0400

“The error could hardly have been more awkward. Governed by India but claimed by China, Arunachal Pradesh has been a source of rankling dispute between the two nations for decades. Google’s sudden relabeling of the province gave the appearance of a special tip of the hat toward Beijing. Its timing, moreover, was freakishly bad: the press noticed that Google’s servers had started splaying Mandarin place-names all over the state only a few hours before Indian and Chinese negotiating teams sat down for talks in New Delhi to work toward resolving the delicate border issue.”

- John Gravois, The Agnostic Cartographer

“It is said that every map is a political statement. But Google, by trying to subvert that truth, may just be intensifying the politics even more.”

Clayton is about to hit some really cold water. The past few...

Sun, 01 Aug 2010 07:47:00 -0400

Clayton is about to hit some really cold water. The past few days have been excellent.