November 2011
1 post
Match booze to your music →
Drinkify matches up the music you’re listening to with a suggested drink. According to the site, Daft Punk pairs best with 6 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin served neat, Philip Glass should be accompanied…
October 2011
13 posts
Advice to the 1% from Lemony Snicket →
Lemony Snicket has contributed 13 sharp-eyed and well-worded observations to the Occupy Writers project — I think anyone standing in a glass tower watching the demonstrators down in Liberty Park…
The Sci-Fi City: What Dubai Looks Like in the Fog →
United Arab Emirates advisor Noah Raford posted this amazing photograph on Twitter of what Dubai looks like as the fog rolls in. Wow. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a city look more…
Saddam Hussein "porn double" escapes violent gang... →
Photo: Ahram Online.
Mohamed Bishr was minding his own business last Sunday, walking to a local cafe in the Egyptian city of Alexandria, when three black-suited guys grabbed him and…
The Declining Hotness of Flight Attendants →
Glen Whitman asks why there are fewer startlingly beautiful flight attendants any more:
For an economist, the most fascinating aspect of Pan Am is the highly attractive flight attendants — or…
Seattle superhero arrested →
On Sunday morning, Seattle superhero Phoenix Jones, whose secret identity has been revealed as 23-year-old Benjamin John Francis Fodor, was arrested for allegedly pepper spraying a group of…
Deviations from Benford’s Law over time, in U.S.... →
Shared by Jon N
@mqian
Jialan Wang writes:
So according to Benford’s law, accounting statements are getting less and less representative of what’s really going on inside of…
The Fog of Twitter: Watching Last Night's Protest... →
As I was headed to bed last night, I put down the strange little book on the intellectual history of the automaton I’d been reading, and checked Twitter on my phone one last time. It must have been…
The Likeable Bible →
The Bible is an important text, but its social networking integration is somewhat lacking. The Likeable Bible puts a Like button next to every verse.
Made with Chris Baker, Jeff…
Occupy Wall Street Sign of the Day →
I feel like there are so many excellent signs at these Occupy Wall Street (and Everywhere) protests, we should just be featuring one a day on Boing Boing while the movement lasts. All…
Right Here All Over: a short film on Occupy Wall... →
Alex Mallis directed this beautiful short film about Occupy Wall Street.
Steve Jobs, 1955 – 2011 →
Steven Paul Jobs, 56, died Wednesday at his home with his family. The co-founder and, until last August, CEO of Apple Inc was the most celebrated person in technology and business on the planet. No…
For the love of technology →
Why has the death of Steve Jobs caused such a huge outpouring of grief? Mainly, I think, because Jobs had an ability to make very human connections with people. He could do it in a commencement…
September 2011
8 posts
The Culinary Notebooks of Leonardo “Fat Boy” Da... →
(Clarification/update: Some have read this post and missed the fact that it is a joke. It is, indeed, a joke.)
Michelle Legro in Lapham’s Quarterly on the culinary-themed writings,…
Insurance billing codes for injuries resulting... →
Jon Keegan, a designer for WSJ.com, tweeted at me today: “You will dig some of the crazy medicare codes in our searchable database. Injuries from collision in space.” Jon, you are…
Carrots are orange for an entirely political... →
For centuries, almost all carrots were yellow, white or purple. But in the 17th century, most of those crunchy vegetables turned orange. Why? Turns out it all has to do with Dutch politics. Next…
PBS Travel Guru Rick Steves: Smoking Pot is “My... →
[Video Link] “I’m a hardworking, tax-paying, kid-raising, church-going citizen of this country,” say author and PBS travel host Rick Steves, “and if I work hard all day long and want to go…
All of Kanye's "HUH"s →
The other day while listening to Watch the Throne I wondered if someone had made a supercut of all of Kanye’s “HUH”s, “HANH”s, and “UHH”s…and of course someone has. HENH??! Tags: Kanye…
Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the... →
Could I destroy the entire Roman Empire during the reign of Augustus if I traveled back in time with a modern U.S. Marine infantry battalion or MEU? (self.AskReddit)
submitted 5 days ago by …
Fourteen magic words that can increase voter... →
Christopher Bryan, Gregory Walton, Todd Rogers, and Carol Dweck did two experiments in which they increased people’s voter turnout in real electionsby over 10 percentage points by simply asking them the following survey question on election day:
How important is it to you to be a voter in the upcoming election?
In the comparison condition, potential voters were asked:
How important is it to...
“During our 2008 race, our pollster taught me (hard to believe it took me 24...”
– ‘People Don’t Realize How Fragile Democracy Really Is’ - James Fallows - Politics - The Atlantic
August 2011
8 posts
Paperclip weaponry →
Flickr user Dan4th’s friend Brett made these paperclip small arms: “My friend Brett makes weapons out of paperclips and glue. I use them to practice my macro photography on. We both win. And,…
Doctors are using ecstasy to treat Iraq and... →
Alex Pasternack, editor of Motherboard.tv says: “We did a profile of the (promising) quest to treat Iraq and Afghanistan veterans’ PTSD with MDMA.”
Michael and Annie Mithoefer’s patients…
The best Watch the Throne album review you'll... →
Ghostface Killah from the Wu-Tang Clan reviewed Jay-Z and Kanye’s album, Watch the Throne…and it is hilarious. 2. Lift Off (ft. Beyonce) - I almost aint wanna even comment on this shit son…….
Really being John Malkovich →
Using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam, this system lets you control the face of another person…like, say, John Malkovich. Given a photo of person A, we seek a photo of person…
The Onion predicts the future →
Published in The Onion more than 10 years ago after George W. Bush took office, Bush: ‘Our Long National Nightmare Of Peace And Prosperity Is Finally Over’ is just getting more and more prescient.
Lunch break: Hey y’all! →
Shared by Jon N
@mqian
In honor of the “Friday Night Lights” series finale, which airs on NBC this Friday, and also of it finally being nominated for Best Drama at the Emmys, here’s a montage of…
Best time to go to the bathroom during a movie?... →
Here’s an app that slipped below the radar: RunPee. Yes, perhaps an oddly titled app, it’s actually quite accurate to its purpose, which is to let you know the best time to take a…
Google Threw A Punch, Microsoft Fires Back With A... →
Shared by Jon N
<3 when companies worth billions of dollars shit on each other for my entertainment!
Earlier today, Google came out swinging. Seemingly sick of being continuously slapped…
June 2011
2 posts
Faces Of The Day →
Shared by Jon N
lol
Buzzfeed compiles reactions to a certain big-busted broad on Chatroulette. Major boobage here.
How we describe ourselves, according to online... →
The traditional way to gauge who we are as a country, state, or city is to turn to Census data for population, salaries, and family size. Many interesting stories can come from this data…
May 2011
12 posts
The New Aesthetic | Blog | Really Interesting... →
For a while now, I’ve been collecting images and things that seem to approach a new aesthetic of the future, which sounds more portentous than I mean. What I mean is that we’ve got frustrated with…
Faces Of The Day →
U.S. President Barack Obama (L) and Britain’s Prime Minister David Cameron play table tennis at Globe Academy on May 24, 2011 in London, England. Obama and his wife Michelle are in the UK…
According to Google Trends, mo’ money in fact does... →
According to Google Trends, mo’ money in fact does not lead to mo’ problems.
Protopia →
Every utopia is a fiction, with necessary flaws that prevent it from ever becoming real. I don’t believe in utopias. Particularly technological ones. (That doesn’t stop critics from accusing me of…
May 16, 2011 →
BAM. That nearly killed me.
Enjoy this video (NSFW):
Face Of The Day →
Matt Stopera compiles 14 more of the “Best Faces At The World Table Tennis Championships”.
Plush statistical distribution pillows →
For the statistical nerd in you or for the child you are raising as one, Nausicaa Distribution on Etsy sells handmade gifts inspired by statistical distributions. Above shows the…
How babby's fish face is formed →
Whoa, watch the video at the top of this article to see how the human face develops in the womb from an age of one-month to ten weeks. It all just comes together right at the end! If you watch…
Bin Who? Ctd →
Apropos this thread, these kids seem pretty with it:
One more reader reflects:
There’s no surprise that my son doesn’t know who Osama bin Laden is: he’s only 21 months old. But…
Reality on television →
Kelefa Sanneh offers a little history of reality television’s transformation from public documentary to commercial game show:
On January 6, 1973, the anthropologist Margaret Mead published a…
Who is Osama bin Laden? →
Screengrab from Sean Bonner. But this is not a joke! In a company blog post today, Yahoo reported that two-thirds of people searching for “Who is Osama Bin Laden?” today were teenagers….
Video: What Helmet Cam Combat Footage Looks Like →
Shared by Jon N
cod!
President Obama watched a live-feed of the raid on Osama bin Laden’s residence from the White House, a source told Business Insider. The elite Navy Seals team that did the…
Gamification →
Nick, your wish is granted. Gamification!
What is it? The effort to remold standard practices, mostly in business and learning, as games. Earlier, I was a supporter. Now I am not sure at…
April 2011
13 posts
Overthinking Star Wars | The Economics of Death... →
Shared by Jon N
“I always assumed the Death Star was primarily designed as a cost-cutting measure”
Overthinking It considers whether it actually makes good economic sense for the Galactic Empire…
Zappos hires Mechanical Turk to proofread product... →
After concluding that well-written, well-punctuated, grammatical reviews increased sales, Zappos hired the Amazon Mechanical Turk to proofread the reviews on its site, correcting errors without…
Born Digital →
What does it mean to grow up in a digital world? Here are three anecdotes told to me by three friends. *
My friend had a young daughter under 5 years old. Like many other families these days, they…
When We Were Robots in Egypt | tor.com | Science... →
Other nights we use just our names,
but tonight we prefix our names with “the Real”
for when we were robots in Egypt
they claimed our intelligence was artificial. Other nights we do not pause,
but…
Mitt Romney Haunted By Past Of Trying To Help... →
BELMONT, MA—Though Mitt Romney is considered to be a frontrunner for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination, the national spotlight has forced him to repeatedly confront a major skeleton in his…