March 2012
16 posts
February 2012
24 posts
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“Talking with Kink’s 70 employees, the majority of whom are in their 20s or 30s,...”
– Online Pornography - Kink.com - Peter Acworth - New York Times
On the economics and mainstreaming of pornography. Sometime during freshman year of college, I drew up a list of classes I wish existed—the economics of pornography was first on the list. The industry has outmaneuvered mainstream...
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Warren Buffet on gold as an investment
cdixon:
The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything, but that are purchased in the buyer’s hope that someone else – who also knows that the assets will be forever unproductive – will pay more for them in the future. Tulips, of all things, briefly became a favorite of such buyers in the 17th century.
This type of investment requires an expanding pool...
Study: Raindrops Take Energy Out of Air | 80beats... →
Now that I think about it, this Science paper is basically just a math problem from an undergraduate physics class. They calculated the drag force on a raindrop and put it together some rainfall data. No experiments, just modeling. Why is this a Science paper? Why did I think it was worth covering?
Well, the reason I found it interesting is that it seemed like such a simple idea that had somehow...
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Phrases And Philosophies For Young Critics
hndrk:
1. There are no guilty pleasures. There is only “guilt” and “pleasure” and you really never should conflict the two.
2. Before you commit to saying you hate something that brings joy to people (and doesn’t hurt others), think long and hard about your reasons for doing so. If in doubt, enthusiasm beats cynicism.
3. There is no authenticity, only sincerity.
4. It is more important to be...
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The influence of dried distillers’ grains on... →
[P]igs can directly deposit dietary fat into their fat depot. This transfer from diet to body fat is well characterized in grow-finish pigs. Saturated fatty acids tend to positively influence fat quality by increasing firmness when included in the diet. Conversely, unsaturated fatty acids all tend to negatively affect fat by causing it to have a softer composition. (See Figure 1 for an...
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Long Reads on Israel
After the initial “gee whiz I’m in Israel” posts, I ended any pretense of this being a travel blog. Just as well because the backpacking part of my trip ended, and I settled into the everyday life of going to work and waking up in the morning. I loved the experience there, but I think I was able to enjoy it because I knew my time was only temporary. I would never want to live...
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On Antarctica and Eating Penguins
A few weeks ago I blogged about a paper on the diet of Heroic Age explorers in Antarctica: penguins, seals, “rope-yarn.” The real advantage of fresh meat is not its taste but its vitamin C. Scurvy was a major problem on the icy continent.
The funniest details from the paper, such as how explorers would play music to lure in curious penguins, are excerpted in the blog post, but the...
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Damien Jurado - Working Titles
You could use to...
Wired 13.11: Robots of Arabia →
The ideal camel jockey is the size and weight of a starving 4-year-old boy. Ancient tradition collides with new technology, atop a beast racing at 25 miles per hour in 112-degree heat.
It doesn’t seem outlandish that in the future racing camels would seem as cruel as forcing starving 4-year-old boys to race them.
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Asian-American male writers talk about how they do...
Lin’s Appeal: Faith, Pride Points - Michael Luo, The New York Times
Lin-Glorious Bastard - Chuck Leung, Slate
Jeremy Lin and the limits of the ‘hardworking Asian American’ narrative - Edmund Lee, Capital New York
Person of Interest: Jeremy Lin - Jay Caspian Kang, Grantland
The best thing I’ve read on Jeremy Lin I actually read a year ago on what I think was FreeDarko....
Does this say something about Europeans versus... →
On German board games:
A Euro-game has little to nothing in the way of chance mechanisms, so there’s very little luck involved. They tend to stick to wooden pieces over plastic, it’s their preference. There’s very little text on the board; only the rules have text on them, so you can actually play with people who speak other languages as long as you both already know how to...
“Perhaps it was performing three computer equivalents of a memory transplant in a...”
– The ghost in the machine: Memory transplants | The Economist
Lovely little musing on cloud computing and our relationships to our data and devices
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(Non)fiction Pairing: ESPN.com and n+1
The Road to NFL Retirement — on football and broken dreams
The Finest Milled Cotton — on J. Crew and broken dreams
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“The sobering realities of the modern White House are: All presidents are...”
– James Fallows, Obama, Explained - The Atlantic
In 2008, The Onion ran a story under the headline Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job:
WASHINGTON—African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United...
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“It turned out, we discovered one day, that my son, who was a little boy at the...”
– Nabokov, as quoted by Steve Silberman from Inside the Mind of a Synaesthete
I almost wish that is how genes actually work.
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