October 22, 2013
Why People Mistake Good Deals for Rip-Offs
Why People Mistake Good Deals for Rip-Offs. In another experiment, the ventral putamen, a region of the brain that processes reward, was more active when people drank Pepsi than when they drank Coke—except when they were told that they were drinking Pepsi. Coke’s brand appeal is so powerful, and our ability to determine the value of cola so fickle, that our brains respond differently as soon as we learn that what we’re drinking isn’t Coke. The physical experience doesn’t change at all, but we’re unable to peg the value of a brown, caffeinated soda until we know where its life began.
Final Fontasy
Type:Rider is an exploration of the history of typography, from cave paintings to the modern day, in which you play a colon (which navigates something like a motorcycle) traversing a landscape composed of various fonts. [more inside]
Bart to the Future
Siracusa pens longform review of OS X 10.9 Mavericks
Along with today's release of OS X 10.9 Mavericks (a free download from the Mac App Store) comes John Siracusa's remarkably detailed 24,008 word review of the new OS for Ars Technica.
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On being short.
Was Shakespeare a Woman?
Did Amelia Bassano Lanier write William Shakespeare? Her single volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum was published in 1611, but Amelia Bassano Lanier (1569–1645) may have left us even more. John Hudson, a British Shakespeare scholar and director of the New York theatre ensemble the Dark Lady Players has written that if Bassano did not write all of the plays, she was certainly a major collaborator. He is not alone.
Shake, shake, shake señora
You were always my favorite to boop.
Presenting Reddit's most adorable, most tentative, cutest hyper-specific subreddit: Boop. Best of Boop.
High School Student Discovers Skeleton of Baby Dinosaur
Luckily I was able to quickly sample my screams of pain
Banjo Gyro, one of the weirder videos on YouTube, is a short film about three restaurant employees—Sammy, Bill, and Finger—who hunt demons. Sort of like Invader Zim meets David Lynch's "sitcom" Rabbits.
How Pixar screwed up cartoon cars for a generation of kids
"The eyes of anthropomorphized cars are the headlights, not the windshield. When we look at a car, we see the front end as a sort of face. They're almost always bilaterally symmetrical, like a face, they have roughly the same number of general features, so it's easy to ascribe eyes, mouth, and even sometimes a nose to the various components. Like I said, we're really good at doing this. Consider the simple emoticon — :-) — and you'll see what I mean. We see faces in everything." [more inside]
high spirits
The ghostbots were created by man. They hovered. They grooved to smooth jazz. They look and feel like ghosts. And they have a plan.
There is no cost to getting things wrong
Trouble at the lab: Scientists like to think of science as self-correcting. To an alarming degree, it is not
"Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think."
"Academic scientists readily acknowledge that they often get things wrong. But they also hold fast to the idea that these errors get corrected over time as other scientists try to take the work further. Evidence that many more dodgy results are published than are subsequently corrected or withdrawn calls that much-vaunted capacity for self-correction into question. There are errors in a lot more of the scientific papers being published, written about and acted on than anyone would normally suppose, or like to think."
Dealing with the KNOW-IT-ALL
So letters that have an untrue basis... do not get printed
On October 8, the LA Times' Letter Editor, Paul Thornton published a piece entitled, "On letters from climate-change deniers" following up on a claim in an earlier article that said, " Simply put, this objection to the president's healthcare law is based on a falsehood, and letters that have an untrue basis (for example, ones that say there's no sign humans have caused climate change) do not get printed." [more inside]
Seventeenth-century crowd funding
Taylor was a waterman who first entered the book trade in 1612 with a collection of verses. From that point on he kept up a prolific stream of publications, including in 1618 an account of a journey on foot to Scotland published as The Pennyles Pilgrimage. In the previous year Taylor has published a similar account of his journey to Hamburg, but this book had two twists. The first was that Taylor had set himself the challenge of completing his journey without begging and relying on spontaneous offers of hospitality. The second was that Taylor tried to fund it through subscriptions.
Foundation
"The maths that saw the US shutdown coming". Peter Turchin (Previously) has a mathematical model that shows why the US is in crisis, and what will happen next. [more inside]
20-years on the bench pays off
As the 2013-14 NBA season approaches, the last year of the reign of Commissioner David Stern, Sports Business Journal takes an in-depth look at his successor, New Media enthusiast, marathon runner, and fan of competitive balance, Adam Silver. [more inside]
We Must Consider the Sounds of Knives and Forks
Noise: A Human History is a cool 30-part radio series by David Hendy in collaboration with the British Library Sound Archive and the BBC that explores the past 100,000 years of sound and listening.
Heritage Minutes: History by the Minute (plus parodies)
Got a minute for Canadian history and some CanCon (prev: 1, 2, 3)? Great! Because Heritage Minutes are just that - 60 seconds of history from Canada's past. To date, there have been over 70 short segments produced, and you can watch them online at Historica Canada, and read about people and events below the videos. If you don't know where to start, here are the top 5 minutes according to a poll from 2012, and the top 10 from Macleans. But if that's all too serious for you, there are also parodies, plus more in this YouTube playlist.
But watch out for the venomous spurs
What's in your invisible fanny pack?
Retro F1 Liveries
Politics as usual
Did Race Play a Role in the Shutdown? Republicans from the House districts that have the highest levels of racial resentment were about 60 percentage points less likely to vote for the deal to end the shutdown than Republicans from districts with low levels of racial resentment.
They say they thought there were fewer homeless people than before.
If you declare, in a famous poem affixed to the Statue of Liberty, in New York Harbor, “Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed, to me,” you might consider that a certain commitment has been made. (SLNYer)
The Old Ways
"Really Rosie"
In 1975, CBS aired the half hour animated special "Really Rosie" with story and lyrics by Maurice Sendak (based on five of his children's books) and with music composed and performed by Carole King.
Many have fond memories of the broadcast ("Chicken Soup with Rice" is a particular childhood earworm), and though it has yet to make it to DVD, you can watch it in full on YouTube. The special was later turned into an Off-Broadway production in 1980 and continues to be performed by kids across the country.
I Was Short and Ugly and I Had a Speech Impediment
My Life as a Young Thug (Mike Tyson, for New York magazine)
"You can't 3-D-print a highway"
Stanford lecturer and genetics startup co-founder Balaji Srinivasan delivered a talk entitled "Silicon Valley's Ultimate Exit", at the Y Combinator startup school on Saturday. The provocative talk, described as "a fantasy of seceding from the U.S." with "undertones of class hostility as well as simple naïveté", is just the latest escalation of the techno-utopian and often anti-government rhetoric from Silicon Valley's elite class (previously: 1, 2, 3).
This ain't your daddy's Monster Mash.
Looking to freshen up that old October playlist? Allow me to recommend Halloween Booootie, three free, full-length compilations (2009, 2010 and 2012) of bootlegs and mashups all perfectly themed for your next graveyard smash.
But do you want some more? Are you looking for, dare I say, the real wicked shit? Then please, step this way... [more inside]
But do you want some more? Are you looking for, dare I say, the real wicked shit? Then please, step this way... [more inside]
Appletopia
An excerpt from the new book Appletopia: Media Technology and the Religious Imagination of Steve Jobs by Brett T. Robinson. [more inside]
Looking out the window while landing on the moon
Simultaneous video and selectively played audio of every Apollo lunar landing on one screen. (via Collect Space) [more inside]
A way for the monkey mind to cope with the modern world
The Melancholy of Subculture Society, an essay on the rise of multiple subcultures, the idea of “opting out” of the mainstream culture and the social and psychological benefits of the existence of alternative status hierarchies. [more inside]
Sugar-shamed
"There are times when we should feel shame, like when we’re tempted to hunt for Communists. But nowadays one suspects that Joe McCarthy would have just accused his critics of “red-shaming.” On shaming.
Criticism v. Reviews
Bioshock Infinite is the worst game of the year. An essay on the sad state of videogame criticism.
It Could Be Worse
I signed up for an account on Healthcare.gov last week. It wasn’t the smoothest process, but I was able to create an account. Some parts are slow; sometimes you have to reload a page to make progress. But it’s starting to work. It will be fixed, because it has to be. And now that the launch and inevitable crash has finally happened, in a way the worst is over. Real-world traffic is providing programmers all the debugging data that they could ever want, and “all bugs are shallow with the president watching,” as Paul Ford writes in Bloomberg Businessweek, paraphrasing the open-source-software advocate Eric Raymond’s assertion that “with enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.” -- Rusty Foster in The New Yorker
Yo! Oy! Motown meets Anatevka
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