February 17, 2015
Not startup, smart-up.
At some start-ups, Friday is so casual it’s not even a workday. "Treehouse is closed every Friday. The 80-and-counting employees work a 32-hour work week Monday through Thursday. On Fridays, employees are expected to be home, with their families, having fun, doing something, anything, other than work." How's it doing? "The company has raised $13 million, saw 100 percent revenue growth last year and has close to 100 percent employee retention."
HEAVY METAL
The Science of Cast Iron Cooking. The Truth About Cast Iron. How To Season A Cast Iron Skillet:
The skillet you want is at least fifty years old, and right now it is probably sitting on a thrift store shelf or a yard sale table. Your first task is to locate it. Until the 1960s, the final stage in manufacturing cast iron was to machine-polish each pan until the cooking surface was as smooth as glass. New cast iron is sold unpolished, that is, fresh out of the mold, with a texture like pitted Formica. The cast iron companies claim that the new, unpolished skillets are as easy to season and as non-stick as the old, polished ones—but then they would say that. You can polish new cast iron yourself with an orbital sander and some 80 grit, followed by hand sanding with 220 grit wet-dry, then 320, then 400, then 600 for good measure, but let’s face it, you’d rather have those five hours of your life and the ridges on your fingernails intact. The skillet you want is polished already.How To Season A Cast Iron Pan. 5 Myths Of Cast Iron Cookware. [more inside]
Not miniature, just small.
Want to make something just for you and your sweetie? Maybe two tiny cheesecakes? One dozen cookies? Four cupcakes? Small-batch baking blog Dessert for Two has you covered.
Kanye West vs. white mediocrity
Kanye takes more heat than anyone. Post-Grammys and "SNL" 40, we're finally seeing his critics for what they are. Social media has changed the game a lot in the past six years. There’s a lot of voices–lumped under names like “Black Twitter”–who have begun to consistently speak out to fill in the missing pieces from stories like the Kanye West Saga, to poke holes in pat narratives like “Kanye West is an egotist” or “Kanye West is a maniac.” [more inside]
This is not macro mayonnaise
(SLYT) Miniature foods and cooking. Does what it says on the tin. A very small tin.
Shills for Big Paleo
British-based webforum Mumsnet (For Parents, By Parents) had a fun time this weekend, when a new member decided she was sick and tired of dinosaurs being forced on our children. [more inside]
Welcome, to the WORLD of the FUUUUUUTURE!
Via the Verge, a trailer for Don Herzfeldt's forthcoming new film.
Mladjov's Historical Maps
Bronze Age maps. Maps of Ancient Greece and Rome, India and China. Maps of the Viking era, the Crusades, and the High Middle Ages. Maps of Asia after the Mongol conquest, of Mexico before the Spanish conquest—dozens upon dozens of intricate historical maps.
A form of fraud on the readers
Why I have resigned from the Telegraph; an open letter by Peter Oborne, until now the chief political commentator of the Daily Telegraph, alleging that the conservative-leaning British broadsheet has allowed advertisers to veto its editorial policy, a process which culminated in the suppression of stories about the recent tax avoidance scandal involving the HSBC bank, itself a major Telegraph advertiser.
“When the Cows Come Home,”
In 1900, the average dairy cow in America produced 424 gallons of milk each year. By 2000, that figure had more than quadrupled, to 2,116 gallons. We explore the incredible science that transformed the American cow into a milk machine—but we also uncover the disturbing history of prejudice and animal cruelty that accompanied it. Along the way, we’ll introduce you to the insane logic of the Lifetime Cheese Merit algorithm and the surreal bull trials of the 1920s. This is the untold story behind that most wholesome and quotidian of beverages: milk. Prepare to be horrified and amazed in equal measure.
What me worry?
The Measure of a Person is What They Do With What They Have
Beginning in 1920, Robert J. Flaherty spent a year in the Canadian Arctic (Port Harrison in Northern Quebec) documenting the daily struggles of an Inuk man named Nanook. The resulting feature-length film, an American silent documentary with elements of docudrama, was the first of its kind, in a style that would eventually become known as "salvage ethnography." Nanook of the North: A Story Of Life and Love In the Actual Arctic (1922) [more inside]
Cocaine. David Bowie. Thin White. Thick White.
such is the cost of the Experiment
Why Chance The Rapper Is Forgoing Solo Fame To Make Jazzy Songs With Friends (Chance previously) [more inside]
X-Cats
Pouring paint on top of paint on a wooden box timelapse
YouTube Videos from the 90's about Computers
"How People Described the Internet in the 1990s Is Hilarious" A surprisingly rich listicle of some surprisingly deep (so much zeitgeist) revealing 90's videos and cliches pertaining to computers and the internet. Previously [more inside]
Self Signed
99% Invisible covers Guerilla Public Service - DIY intervention in public infrastructure. [more inside]
TARDIS-Eye-View
A VFX artist calling himself 'John Smith' has created an incredible take on the Tardis' dematerialisation effect, ..."what travelling through time and space might look like from the point of view of the Tardis, from take-off to landing, all in one shot." [via] [more inside]
"Lights out!"
Comics artist Brett Ewins, co-creator of Deadline, artist for Skreemer and Johnny Nemo, and frequent 2000AD contributor (cover gallery), has passed away passed away age 59.
The Landmark Forum: 42 Hours, $500, 65 Breakdowns
My lost weekend with the trademark happy, bathroom-break hating, slightly spooky inheritors of est. (Previously, previously, previously).
Averages don't tell the whole story.
No city mixes affordability, opportunity, and wealth as well as Minneapolis, Minnesota - at least, according to The Atlantic.
However, the Minnesota Department of Health points out that "averages don't tell the whole story." Minnesota's demographics may obscure some socio-economic problems, including severe disparities in health outcomes and educational attainment.
“We clamor for our own stories, to see ourselves in narratives..."
The Struggle To Be A Good Critic [Electric Literature] How should or shouldn't white writers write POC characters?
The Mars 100
From the initial 202,586 applicants, 100 hopefuls have been selected to proceed to the next round of the Mars One Astronaut Selection Process. The final 100 chosen come from around the world, with 39 from the Americas, 31 from Europe, 16 from Asia, 7 from Africa, and 7 from Oceania. A total of 40 candidates will eventually be chosen to take part in a training programme and live in a copy of the Mars outpost on Earth. [more inside]
Richard Dawson and his music
Black Dog in the Sky; Final Moments of the Universe; The Vile Stuff; Wooden Bag; Poor Old Horse: some songs by the English (specifically Geordie) singer & guitarist Richard Dawson. ‘[A] distinctly English folk equivalent of Captain Beefheart’s deconstruction of the blues,’ opines The Guardian, of his recent album Nothing Important. ‘Syd Barrett’s freewheeling poetry teamed with the guitar strangle of Eugene Chadbourne or Derek Bailey’ hazards Rolling Stone. Of his own work, Dawson has said ‘I have come to think of it as ritual community music. Perhaps you could call that folk music, but it is certainly not in the folk tradition. I hope it belongs to part of a wider tradition of north east artists, people like Jospeh Crawhall, Jack Common, Basil Bunting, John Martin and Peter Beardsley.’
"If you can move at a slow shamble, we can use you."
There’s No Morality in Exercise: I’m a Fat Person and Made a Successful Fitness App "There is a thing I feared when I started making a fitness app, and it was this: that someone would notice that I am fat."
Pot Kids
When sex won't work
When my first boyfriend literally couldn’t penetrate me, I assumed we were just doing it wrong. But I was actually living with a rare and confounding condition that made sex impossible.Swati Khurana describes living with vaginismus.
And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away
What the collapse of ancient capitals can teach us about the cities of today — Warnings from history: Angkor was a thriving metropolis of 750,000 before a series of mega-monsoons made it unliveable. Can modern flood-threatened cities learn from its downfall?
Equation Group: The Crown Creator of Cyber-Espionage
Only now Kaspersky Lab’s experts can confirm they have discovered a threat actor that surpasses anything known in terms of complexity and sophistication of techniques, and that has been active for almost two decades – The Equation Group.
Kaspersky provides details [pdf]. Securelist.
17 Astonishing Places You Wouldn’t Believe Are In Pakistan
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