March 2011
14 posts
“Young men: If you attend this crap with friends who admire it, tactfully inform...”
– Roger Ebert - Battle: Los Angeles (half star)
Microsoft Kinect Blowing Away Competition So Far →
theatlantic:
Here’s two things that Microsoft’s promotional department would like you to know about its motion-sensing Kinect controller. 1) It’s sold 10 million devices in just over four months, an average of 133,333 units per day. 2) It just officially made the Guinness Book of World Records for fastest selling electronics device, beating out Apple’s iPhone and iPad.
Read on at The...
Powerpoint is the devil
If you’ve never read this 2001 New Yorker story on Powerpoint, you really should. This is the lede:
Before there were presentations, there were conversations, which were a little like presentations but used fewer bullet points, and no one had to dim the lights. A woman we can call Sarah Wyndham, a defense-industry consultant living in Alexandria, Virginia, recently began to feel that...
niemanlab:
Lab Flashback: In 1995 Arthur Sulzberger wasn’t a fan of reporters wasting time on email http://nie.mn/f6ORG9
Shower-curtain effect →
bestofwikipedia:
In physics, the shower-curtain effect is the phenomenon in which a shower curtain gets blown inward with a running shower. The problem of the cause of this effect has been featured in Scientific American magazine, with several theories given to explain the phenomenon but no definite conclusion. (via casanovaandtheradio)
I find it very disturbing people haven’t solved...
““When you see a bunch of guys in red, what do you know?” Kharoba asked.
“They...”
– How We Train Our Cops to Fear Islam, Washington Monthly, by Meg Stalcup and Joshua Craze
Stories like this one should be far more damaging... →
Remember those essays you wrote for standardized tests back in HS? Did you ever wonder how they were graded? Like legislation and sausage, the process is pretty ugly. Except the results are kinda like the sausage produced by the factories in The Jungle or the legislation produced by … some legislative body that’s generally less effective than congress. (I realize that’s a really...
“In fact viewership of al Jazeera is going up in the United States because it’s...”
– Sec. of State Hillary Clinton (via davewiner)
Related: Al Jazeera actually covers foreign news, whereas Fox News/CNN/MSNBC cover news that impacts Americans that happens in foreign countries. There’s a difference. I wrote about this at my other blog for class a few years ago, after Robert...
“How many more American citizens are going to have to die? … Juarez is reported...”
– Texas Governor Rick Perry, criticizing the Obama administration’s record on border enforcement. After an aide informed him of his mistake, Perry clarified that Juarez is actually in Mexico, and not in his state. (via officialssay)