January 2011
19 posts
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Spring Forward
One of those end-of-college posts, which will probably become increasingly frequent as we advance toward May. This may be annoying. I apologize in advance.
This is the best time of the academic year: I can’t wait to tackle extensive reading lists, that guy in section hasn’t annoyed me yet, my professors still seem flexible rather than flaky, and I am able to get a decent amount of...
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There are no wrong answers
Hipster literary journal: McSweeney’s or n+1?
TV show to watch on the treadmill: The Biggest Loser or Top Chef?
Overprocessed goop that tastes nothing like the real thing but is so much more delicious than the real thing: almond paste or guava paste?
French New Wave muse: Anna Karina or Brigitte Bardot?
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Mountain Man - “Animal Tracks”
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A manifesto for the simple scribe – my 25... →
2. You are not writing to impress the scientist you have just interviewed, nor the professor who got you through your degree, nor the editor who foolishly turned you down, or the rather dishy person you just met at a party and told you were a writer. Or even your mother. You are writing to impress someone hanging from a strap in the tube between Parson’s Green and Putney, who will stop...
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Ether-a-go-go
The eag gene encodes a voltage-gated potassium channel, and mutations in it cause repetitive firing and increased neurotransmitter release in motor neurons.
What does this mean in plain English? In fruit flies, where this gene was first studied, anesthetization with ether made their legs twitch like dancers at the Whisky A Go-Go nightclub in West Hollywood, California. And that’s why eag...
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High Expectations Asian Children
I was reading this paper on the expectations of American and Chinese children regarding positive and negative feedback. When the study was originally conducted, they asked the American children this question:
Let’s say that you were learning to play a new game and you were playing really badly. If you asked kids who knew a lot about the game ‘how well am I doing?’ do you think most of them...
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Sum
from Sum by David Eagleman
In the afterlife you relive all your experiences, but this time with the events reshuffled into a new order: all the moments that share a quality are grouped together. You spend two months driving the street in front of your house, seven months having sex. You sleep for thirty years without opening your eyes. For five months straight you flip through magazines while...
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“In the South Pacific, principally New Guinea and the Solomon Islands, Dr. Mayr...”
– Ernst Mayr, Pioneer in Tracing Geography’s Role in the Origin of Species, Dies at 100
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Once upon a time I wanted to be a film critic, but...
When a movie throws a massive, tangled ball of emotions at me, my reaction is to dwell on small details. Watching The Social Network, I could only appreciate how faithfully they replicated the emergency exit stickers on the door of Mark Zuckerberg’s dorm room. Watching Synecdoche, New York, I was struck by the familiarity of the MacArthur letterhead when Caden receives his genius grant....
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The Year in Longform
aka the most interesting articles from 2010
With Longform.org, Longreads, and Give Me Something to Read, who says no one has attention spans on the Internet anymore? I began using Instapaper in earnest this past year, and it’s probably the single app that’s most revolutionized my Internet browsing habits. There is nothing I like better than cozying up to my own Instapaper.
But...
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Would you rather have your entire BROWSING HISTORY...
Chrome History X Extension (search, manage, visualize browsing history)
I used to think I would so much rather die, but then I made this Google Chrome Extension that played around in browsing history and had to demo it to everyone with my own browsing history and it was kind of okay. I didn’t die in the literal or metaphorical sense.
Chrome users out there (53.2% of you according to...
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Remember Angelfire?
For the new year, I purchased a new domain and paid for 24 months of web hosting. Who knows where I’ll be 24 months from now, but I’ve made a commitment swearing by my credit card number and now a small space on the Internet officially belongs to me. In fact, the URL here might look a little different.
Everything seems more official when money exchanges hands, but oddly enough,...