Classic long read on The Hairpin. Excerpt:
My brother Danny lost his virginity at age 25. To a call girl named Monique. Hired by our mother.
My mother didn’t bother asking Danny for his permission before engaging Monique’s services. She didn’t ask my father to condone the transaction. Nor was she troubled by social mores or laws against solicitation. She deserves a Mother of the Year Award.
The full list is over at Mental Floss. Here’s an excerpt from the one I found most interesting, written by Richard Nixon’s Chief of Staff, in case anything went wrong with Apollo 11:
Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace.
These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice. These two men are laying down their lives in mankind’s most noble goal: the search for truth and understanding.
If I had a chance to gather all the people from my generation (Generation Y) in one gigantic room and deliver them with a message, I’d open up YouTube, and play this video, a slam poem by Taylor Mali.
Here are the lyrics.
The folks at Hedonometer.org have a nifty interactive chart they describe as the “Dow Jones Index of Happiness”. It analyzes tweets in English from around the world to present “happiness trends” from as early as 2008 and until today.
To quantify the happiness of the atoms of language, we merged the 5,000 most frequent words from a collection of four corpora: Google Books, New York Times articles, Music Lyrics, and Twitter messages, resulting in a composite set of roughly 10,000 unique words. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service, we had each of these words scored on a nine point scale of happiness: (1) sad to (9) happy.
Unsurprisingly, happiness spikes up in weekends and holidays and hits notable lows in times of natural disasters and terror attacks. In a quick glance I noticed one interesting trend: In the five years since data collection has begun, the chart suggests that people are enjoying holidays — especially Christmas — less and less.
One might argue that people who spend time on Twitter during holidays are inherently more lonely or introvert, thus enjoying family and relative gatherings less than others; but, this is irrelevant because in our case the total population are those who do use Twitter, something that in turn raises a set of different questions regarding technology and its effects on our social life.
The concept of “hedonometers” — happiness gauging devices — was first conceived in 1880 (Wikipedia).
(via hacker news)
Popular Science quotes a new research on how our brains fool us to eat calorie-rich foods even when we don’t like their taste.
There appear to be two unrelated brain circuits that kick into gear when people consume things, Dana Small, a Yale University psychologist who studies people’s responses to food and one of the scientists who performed this study, tells Popular Science. There’s one that’s related to consciously liking flavors. And then there’s another that responds to glucose in the blood, which is an indicator of that person’s metabolism of food. “The thing the brain really cares about are the calories,” Small says.
I’m very wary of superlatives, but there aren’t that many other words that can describe this time-lapse video by Dustin Farrell:
Every frame of this video is a raw still from a Canon 5D2 DSLR and processed with Adobe software. In Volume 2 I again show off my beautiful home state of Arizona and I also made several trips to Utah. This video has some iconic landmarks that we have seen before. I felt that showing them again with motion controlled HDR and/or night timelapse would be a new way to see old landmarks.
Be sure to have HD toggled on.
(via single dad laughing)
Published last February by David Cain:
It turns out procrastination is not typically a function of laziness, apathy or work ethic as it is often regarded to be. It’s a neurotic self-defense behavior that develops to protect a person’s sense of self-worth.
This makes failure or criticism disproportionately painful, which leads naturally to hesitancy when it comes to the prospect of doing anything that reflects their ability — which is pretty much everything.
Renowned British pianist James Rhodes on The Guardian‘s music blog:
After the inevitable “How many hours a day do you practice?” and “Show me your hands”, the most common thing people say to me when they hear I’m a pianist is “I used to play the piano as a kid. I really regret giving it up”. I imagine authors have lost count of the number of people who have told them they “always had a book inside them”. We seem to have evolved into a society of mourned and misplaced creativity. A world where people have simply surrendered to (or been beaten into submission by) the sleepwalk of work, domesticity, mortgage repayments, junk food, junk TV, junk everything, angry ex-wives, ADHD kids and the lure of eating chicken from a bucket while emailing clients at 8pm on a weekend.
First off, well put.
Rhodes shares what finally made him go with his lifelong passion of becoming a concert pianist, and the price he had to pay: poverty, divorce, mental hospitalization.
I’m yet to decide whether I find Rhodes’ story inspiring or extremely depressing. I’m just not sure what’s the real message it conveys for me. Right now — and I want to read it again sometime soon — it only sharpens how much of a zero-sum game life has become in our age, and how expensive this game is for the creatives. And creators.
Only in America – a story on ABC News:
Jordan, a 49-year-old college graduate, took the exam in 1996 and scored 33 points, the equivalent of an IQ of 125. But New London police interviewed only candidates who scored 20 to 27, on the theory that those who scored too high could get bored with police work and leave soon after undergoing costly training.
The average score nationally for police officers is 21 to 22, the equivalent of an IQ of 104, or just a little above average.
The U.S. District Court found that New London had “shown a rational basis for the policy.” In a ruling dated Aug. 23, the 2nd Circuit agreed. The court said the policy might be unwise but was a rational way to reduce job turnover.
(Thanks for the submission, Daniel!)
A must-read. This one isn’t so much about the internet as it is about people. People like Paul Miller. And people like me and you, to some extent. The writing had me hooked throughout, but the video managed to move something inside. And trust me, I don’t risk sounding kitschy too often.
At 11:59PM on April 30th, 2012, I unplugged my Ethernet cable, shut off my Wi-Fi, and swapped my smartphone for a dumb one. It felt really good. I felt free.
One year ago I left the internet. I thought it was making me unproductive. I thought it lacked meaning. I thought it was “corrupting my soul.”
It’s a been a year now since I “surfed the web” or “checked my email” or “liked” anything with a figurative rather than literal thumbs up. I’ve managed to stay disconnected, just like I planned. I’m internet free.
And now I’m supposed to tell you how it solved all my problems. I’m supposed to be enlightened. I’m supposed to be more “real,” now. More perfect.