Category: Uncategorized
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A Thanksgiving/Christmas Prayer (for Atheists)
A prayer for atheists before Thanksgiving/Christmas dinner: Dear Global Economy, we thank thee for thy economies of scale, thy professional specialization, and thy international networks of trade under Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage, without which we would all starve to death while trying to assemble the ingredients for such a dinner as this. Amen.
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Barack Obama’s Speechwriters
A profile of Barack Obama’s speechwriter, Jon Favreau, 26, from a January ’08 edition of The New York Times: “The trick of speechwriting, if you will, is making the client say your brilliant words while somehow managing to make it sound as though they issued straight from their own soul,” said the writer Christopher Buckley, who was a…
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The Best of Esquire’s 75 Years
75 years since its initial publication, Esquire shares the 7 greatest stories and the 70 greatest sentences to have been published in the magazine. Now he would never write the things that he had saved to write until he knew enough to write them well. –Ernest Hemingway, “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” 1936 via Kottke
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Visual Guide to the Financial Crisis
An excellent infographic on understanding the current financial crisis from one of my favourite data visualisation sites, FlowingData.
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Scouting New York
Even though I’ve never been to New York, I love the Scouting NY blog; a collection of often over–looked and unique locations discovered by a NYC film location scout. The ‘About’ section says all you need to know: I work as a film location scout in New York City. My day is basically spent combing…
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Food Production: Where ‘TV Dinners’ Come From
The video of the production line at a Goodfella’s frozen pizza factory (originally via Richard Holden) has been widely shared and I’m sure you’ve already seen it (and been fascinated by the machine that puts the tomato base on). Some may also have seen a few of the slightly less appetising videos such as this one on hot…
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Love–It or Hate–It Films, and the Miss Congeniality Problem
An addendum to my previous post on the Netflix Prize: When someone noticed that the top five most frequently rated movies on Netflix were neither particularly popular nor critically acclaimed (Miss Congeniality, Independence Day, The Patriot, The Day After Tomorrow and Pirates of the Caribbean), another competitor mused: Seeing Miss Congeniality on the list of…
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Miscellaneous Transport Maps
After seeing this map of the US Interstate system (via Link Banana), I wanted to find an equivalent for the motorway system here in the UK. The closest I came wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but very impressive nonetheless: Harry Beck’s London Underground-inspired UK motorway map. After a bit more searching I came…
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MIND08 Talks
Videos of talks from MIND08; the Design and the Elastic Mind Symposium. Collaboration between science and design is yielding a radical new way of visualizing, understanding, and manipulating the natural world. MIND08 is a conference […] which aims to catalyze this convergence. Bringing together an eclectic group of speakers and participants, including leading scientists, designers, and…
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Advice for Potential Graduate Students (and Employees)
Poignant advice for potential graduate students (originally by the Johnsen Lab, Duke University). Finally, have your fun now. Five years is a long time when you are 23 years old. By the end of graduate school, you will be older, slower, and possibly married and/or a parent. So if you always wanted to walk across…