July 2009
25 posts
Charlie Brooker on our rotten intstitutions and... →
It’s all gone wrong. Our belief in everything has been shattered by a series of shock revelations that have shaken our core to its core. You can’t move for toppling institutions. Television, the economy, the police, the House of Commons, and, most recently, the press … all revealed to be jam-packed with liars and bastards and graspers and bullies and turds.
Mortal Skin →
Black people, on average, are more likely to die of cancer than white people. Is part of that difference genetic?
The Man Who Crashed The World →
Almost a year after A.I.G.’s collapse, despite a tidal wave of outrage, there still has been no clear explanation of what toppled the insurance giant. The author decides to ask the people involved—the silent, shell-shocked traders of the A.I.G. Financial Products unit—and finds that the story may have a villain, whose reign of terror over 400 employees brought the company, the U.S. economy, and...
High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to... →
Ship captains spend their careers trying to avoid a collision or grounding like this. But for Habib, nearly every month brings a welcome disaster. While people are shouting “Abandon ship!” Habib is scrambling aboard. … [H]e’s the senior salvage master — the guy who runs the show at sea — for Titan Salvage, a highly specialized outfit of men who race around the world...
Tales of an accidental grease monkey →
How the recession gave me an appreciation for hot rods, power tools and manual labor
Why America is flunking science →
There can be little serious doubt that entertainment depictions have consequences. Entertainment industry expert Marty Kaplan, director of the Norman Lear Center at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication, perhaps puts it best when he describes Hollywood films as the “unofficial curriculum of society.”
How to Cure Health Care →
The United States spends a mind-boggling percentage of its GDP on a health care system that virtually everyone agrees is a disaster. Is there any way out of this mess?
Re-Engineering the Earth →
As the threat of global warming grows more urgent, a few scientists are considering radical—and possibly extremely dangerous—schemes for reengineering the climate by brute force. Their ideas are technologically plausible and quite cheap. So cheap, in fact, that a rich and committed environmentalist could act on them tomorrow. And that’s the scariest part.
Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial... →
Researchers say a wandering mind may be important to setting goals, making discoveries, and living a balanced life.
Confessions of a Non–Serial Killer →
Conspiracy theories are all fun and games until you become the subject of one.
Diary →
In a small, frightening room in the psychiatric hospital where my wife had recently incarcerated me, I explained to the staff psychiatrist about Olivier Ameisen and the drug baclofen.
(thanks, nostrich)
Up and Then Down →
It was an express elevator, with no stops below the thirty-ninth floor, and the building was deserted. But after a moment White felt a jolt. The lights went out and immediately flashed on again. And then the elevator stopped.
(thanks, Peter Vidani)
Not Every Child Is Secretly a Genius →
The idea of intelligence — that human beings possess, to varying degrees, an innate and universal ability to learn — has taken a beating in recent decades.
(thanks, Tom Corell)
The Nike Experiment: How the Shoe Giant Unleashed... →
Using a flood of new tools and technologies, each of us now has the ability to easily collect granular information about our lives—what we eat, how much we sleep, when our mood changes.
Great Wall of Facebook: The Social Network's Plan... →
Instead of working together to reach the promised land of online brand advertising, Facebook and Google are racing to see who can get there first.
US cities may have to be bulldozed in order to... →
Dozens of US cities may have entire neighbourhoods bulldozed as part of drastic “shrink to survive” proposals being considered by the Obama administration to tackle economic decline.
Praying to the Wrong God →
The history of technology is littered with good intentions, false starts and great successes that take those false starts and simply wrap them in good design.
Content owners are praying to the wrong God. In this new world, their content is valuable only in the right contextual experiences. While they worship, someone else will build that experience and invite them to sit at the table...
Getting Up to Speed →
How do you build a train that takes you from Los Angeles to San Francisco in 2 hours 40 minutes?
(thanks, Dan W.)
Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off →
In women’s-magazine parlance, I did not have the strength to “work on” falling in love again in my marriage. And as Laura Kipnis railed in Against Love, and as everyone knows, Good relationships take work.
The Virginity Movement, Rebranded →
There was the Virginia Beach teacher who told her ninth graders they could be arrested for having premarital sex. And the abstinence teacher who explained to the young women in his class that women are like wrapped lollipops, and that after having sex they’re nothing more than “poorly wrapped, saliva-fouled suckers.”
This would be comical if not for the fact that these people have been...
The Secret History →
Can Leon Panetta move the C.I.A. forward without confronting its past?
Internet (C)rapshoot: How Internet Gatekeepers... →
That danger is that a couple of corporate giants will end up with a buyer’s market for creative works, control over the dominant distribution channel, and the ability to dictate the terms on which creative works are made, distributed, appreciated, bought, and sold.
And the danger of that is that these corporate giants might, through malice or negligence, end up screwing up the means...
Enough Already →
What I’d really like to tell the bores in my life.
How does our language shape the way we think? →
What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.
The Graphing Calculator Story →
Pacific Tech’s Graphing Calculator has a long history. I began the work in 1985 while in school. That became Milo, and later became part of FrameMaker. Over the last twenty years, many people have contributed to it. Graphing Calculator 1.0, which Apple bundled with the original PowerPC computers, originated under unique...