February 2012
30 posts
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“The central attribute of human conscious experience, so fundamental, in fact,...”
– Legendary neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran, author of the excellent The Tell-Tale Brain: A Neuroscientist’s Quest for What Makes Us Human, shares his adventures in behavioral neurology.
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“We have a government that says it’s okay to eat Twinkies and Cocoa Puffs and...”
– From sustainable farmer Joel Salatin. Quote captured by Amy Eddings on WNYC Culture blog.
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“Consider, too, that in 1960 we spoke of the First World and the Third World;...”
– A Conversation with Peter Thiel - The American Interest Magazine
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“Celebrity chef Jamie Oliver has apparently found rare Joy Division and New Order...”
– NME
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The Disadvantages of an Elite Education →
austinkleon:
One of the great errors of an elite education, then, is that it teaches you to think that measures of intelligence and academic achievement are measures of value in some moral or metaphysical sense. But they’re not. Graduates of elite schools are not more valuable than stupid people, or talentless people, or even lazy people. Their pain does not hurt more. Their souls do not weigh...
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WatchWatch this. The comparison between environments we build on screens and the environments we’ve built in the physical wold is brilliant. The whole thing is great.
He also does a nice profile of Robert Irwin in there, who is a favorite of mine.
“This is the axe my grandfather made.
My father replaced the handle,
and I...”
– Proverb (via bestmadeco)
“You can fondle the cube, but it will not respond.”
– Warren Buffett: Why stocks beat gold and bonds
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“Baja is the new Tuscany.”
– Anthony Bourdain
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James Fallows and me on the U.S. Constitution, NBD
James Fallows, responding to my question on his Reddit AMA yesterday:
[…]our political system is uniquely resistant to change. Our Constitution is harder to change than most other countries’ – and is getting quite old now. If “the Founders” were around today, they would never come up with something like today’s Senate. They were practical-minded people, and they would have...
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Me, to James Fallows on Reddit:
You’ve said in this discussion: “the foundations of American democracy and self-government are a cause for serious worry.”
I tend to agree with this statement, but I have a hard time pinpointing the biggest fissures in the foundation. I often blame first past the post voting for creating a homogenous legislature. I also worry that national...
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“Fine, it may not be legal to flip the bird on television, but that’s simply a...”
– Sasha Frere-Jones to Tim Winter of the Parents Television Council, from M.I.A. Shouldn’t Have Apologized.
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“Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous ‘I don’t know’.”
– Wislawa Szymborska, from her Nobel Prize acceptance speech
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“As for accountability of teachers and administrators, Sahlberg shrugs. “There’s...”
– What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland’s School Success - The Atlantic
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“We hope to change how people relate to their governments and social...”
– Facebook’s S-1 Filing Facebook officially asserts itself as a non-state actor.
January 2012
60 posts
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“The last thing we need to do is encourage our customers to stare at their...”
– Mark Cuban on apps that augment sports events. Same can be easily said about concerts. Sorry, startups. (via Ian)
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“Piracy’s preserving effect, while little known, is actually nothing new. Through...”
– Provocative read on why history needs software piracy. Reminiscent of the story of how the widely pirated first edition of Arabian Nights made it one of the most influential pieces of storytelling in history. (via curiositycounts)
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kateoplis:
“Still, there’s a reason for optimism about America’s workforce, and a good lesson to be learned from Apple’s surge. What really makes the iPhone work isn’t the hardware. Sure, the glass—designed by Corning in upstate New York and manufactured in China—is beautiful. But the transformative part of the phone is the software. The code behind the touch-screen was written here; the iOS...
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“In theory, you can use crowdsourcing to get the metadata, but so far I’ve not...”
– Carl Malamud Answers: Goading the Government To Make Public Data Public - Slashdot
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Crowdsourcing LOL.
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“Unfortunately financial calculators show with the current inflation figures and...”
– Am I saving enough for my kids’ college? | BrightScope
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Of course the answer is “no, you are not saving enough,” because it’s impossible to save a billion dollars (projected cost of our daughter’s tuition) over 18 years.
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“If you know how to use Excel on top of having all of the above cited analytical...”
– thanks, NYTimes comments. (via darushimo)
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Apply for the Alan Lomax Fellowship in Folklife... →
usagov:
From the Library of Congress:
The Alan Lomax Fellows Program, established for a period of five years, supports scholarly research that contributes significantly to a greater understanding of the work of Lomax and the cultural traditions he documented over the course of a vigorous and highly productive seventy-year career. It provides an opportunity, for a period of up to 8 months, for...
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The Atlantic: The Zynga Abyss →
dbreunig:
90wpm:
The Atlantic published an excerpt from my essay for Distance today. It’s a little over 1500 words, and covers some of the main points in the essay.
It also includes a fantastic photoshopped stock photo of a lab rat playing FarmVille in a Skinner box.
Here’s a small snip:
In the 1890s, while studying natural sciences at the University of Saint Petersburg, a Russian...
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