January 2012
9 posts
Alan Moore's alternative Thought for the Day →
If you’ve got a spare two minutes, give this a spin: Alan Moore succinctly explains his made-up religion on BBC Radio 4. Or, check out this transcript from the Forbidden Planet blog:
“Hello everybody, my name’s Alan Moore, and I earn a living by making up stories about things that have never actually happened.
When it comes to my spiritual beliefs that’s perhaps why I worship a second...
December 2011
19 posts
Focused dabbling
Dan Benjamin on Back to Work:
“I don’t believe it’s possible to have a side business. I don’t think you can have a business on the side. I don’t think you can go to work and have a job and then come home and run a business. I believe that both the job and the side business… you will never reach your potential in either of them, *and* it will affect your personal life as well. Now, it might be...
Murder stats
Crime is fascinating, and murder is the most fascinating crime. Every night, millions of Americans watch fictionalized accounts of the most violent act of all, followed by fictionalized attempts to discover, solve, and punish it. Here are some raw numbers to go with our intuitions and popular depictions. (Figures not specified as percentages are per 100,000 people.)
In 2005, the homicide rate in...
Masters
Two masters at the top of their craft, doing audience-control humor:
1. Bobby McFerrin plays the audience like a piano.
2. Horse_ebooks
WatchI had a great time attending and speaking at re:build 2011 in Indianapolis earlier this year. My talk is up now. It’s titled Bit Depth, and it’s about working on projects of varying depth and complexity. Enjoy it!
Constant spoonerizing
I spoonerize words all the time. All. The. Time. Good spoonerisms and bad. In my head. (I worderize spoons all the time. Tall. The Lime. Spoon Gooderisms band ad. Hin my ed.)
The earliest memory I have of doing this is in my teens, spoonerizing movie titles on posters at the nearby theatre. Lindler’s Schist. Gorrest Fump. Lue Tries. Hi Dard. Parkassic Jure. For a while I thought it was...
Quick inflation calculation using Siri
Update: People are reporting all sorts of weird interpretations by Siri; read the note below.
This morning I needed to look up what the most expensive-to-produce album of all time was. (It’s For A Tweet™.) Then, I had to convert that to today’s dollars - a good idea whenever you’re looking at prices of anything older than a few years. My usual method is to google...
“How many times have you been to a product website and seen big bold letters...”
– Brent Simmons on Twitter’s new nomenclature. Spot-on.
“My grandfather used to say: “Life is astonishingly short. Now, in my memory, it...”
– Franz Kafka, ‘The Next Village’. This is the entire text of the story. It’s really a fragment rescued by his friend Max Brod, but like many of these it’s usually published on its own. As a paragraph in a larger work it could be funny; as a standalone piece it is haunting.
“An often-overlooked feature the Lisa system used is its early harnessing of...”
– Wikipedia entry on the Apple Lisa
I’m not sure if iOS’s reversal of this principle is, on balance, good or bad. I’m happy that I know where to find my Pages documents on my iPad, but I can’t do any of my “real work” in any single app. Even if I could,...
iOS grippers
iOS 5 added two large-ish new features with prominent “gripper” controls: the Notification Center, and the split keyboard (iPad only). To clarify what a gripper is: a UI element you can drag to resize or reposition a larger element. Some examples include window corners before OS X Lion, iChat’s sidebar resizer in the tabbed chat view, and the resizing stripe between the two...