January 2011
21 posts
The Death of Stephen Stucker, Johnny from... →
Bummer. I was listening to Bill Simmons’ podcast with Patton Oswalt, and they started talking about the hilarious minor character, Johnny, from the 1980 movie Airplane.
They mentioned that it was funny that someone could stand out so well in such an epic film, but they wouldn’t even know his name.
I looked him up, and sadly, he died of AIDS a few years after the movie came out, at...
The Lollapalooza Effect →
Charlie Munger coined this great term for why people make idiotic decisions in crowds.
This Wikipedia succinctly explains his reasoning.
“Hockey, by the way, has a higher incidence of concussions than football,” Dr....”
– From The New Yorker’s Football and the Concussion Crisis
I think I’m officially as fascinated by our new understanding of head injuries as I am by animal psychology, Boston history, or origami, and that’s impressive company to keep in my noggin.
This article is crammed full of...
“To whomever was working on their pipes last night, I’d like you to know...”
– The tenant below us in our building decided treat a backed up sink as “emergency flooding,” had a plumber come to his place at 1:30 AM, and proceeded to bang loudly on pipes until after 4 AM.
Lisa was not amused, and you do NOT screw with Lisa.
Our building has a very active Google...
“Winters are a nice visual cue of the passage of time. Its a bit easier to...”
– From Rob Go’s “Why I Like Crummy New England Winters.”
New England winters are like the iPad: just because everyone doesn’t need one, doesn’t mean they can’t make some people really happy.
One other point I’d like to add in defense of New England’s...
Beluga: Free, Private Group Mobile Messaging →
I wish I could bet big on this catching on in a major way.
A little bit of up-front cost getting a handful of friends to all connect to the same pod, but so fun when it comes together.
I’d also like to bet on “pod” (as Beluga uses it) brewing slowly, then catching on as a hot phrase in ~18 months.
Finally, I should probably bet on the eventual, requisite Facebook knock-off...
The Mathematics Of Beauty →
I might as well be the 2 millionth person to link to this.
These guys are so good.
Love this, especially:
I see so many photos that are clearly designed to minimize some supposedly unattractive trait—the close-cropped picture of a person who’s probably overweight is the classic example. We now have mathematical evidence that minimizing your “flaws” is the opposite of what you...
Kids and iPhones →
Brief, charming story, but the author seems overly concerned, despite her own anecdotal evidence, that kids who enjoy technology will necessarily have poor social skills. I disagree.
“Society is made up of competing goods that can’t be resolved in any perfect way...”
– Considering that Clay Shirky was the only writer with anything interesting to say about the collapse of newspapers, it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s also got the only original opinion about Wikileaks, expressed here in his: Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action
Where other...