Blog – page 46 of 75

The Telegraph has this amazing picture of coffee splashing out of its cup.

Jack Long uses high-speed photography to capture the moment a splash is made in a cup of coffee. The Milwaukee-based photographer has taken a year to perfect his secret technique, but claims the effect is not created by dropping liquid as seen in other splash photography…

via Art of the Title

Jeremiah Warren made this quick history of the modern calendar.

via Laughing Squid

Facebook’s Memology takes a look at the top 10 global topics of 2011.

Memology takes the pulse of this global community by comparing this year’s status updates to last year’s, unearthing the most popular topics and cultural trends - or memes - emerging on Facebook. Whether it’s hmu, lms or tbh, each year brings a new set of three letter acronyms that go viral.

Once a year, my dislike of pop music comes into conflict with my love for well done mashup/remixes thanks to the amazing work of DJ Earworm.

This year’s mix, as always, features the 25 biggest hits of 2011.

This year’s was okay, but doesn’t compare to his best work in 2009:

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms. Call it Generation Sell.

— William Dersiewicz: The Entrepreneurial Generation - NYTimes.com

Below are some highlights from my recent reading of Benjamin Franklin’s “The Way to Wealth”, a collection of some of the better known of Poor Richard’s sayings.

[D]ost thou love life, then do not squander time, for that’s the stuff life is made of[.]

…

We degrade God when we attribute our own ideas to Him, out of annoyance that we cannot fathom His ways.

— Fyodor Dostoyevsky – The Idiot

Old people dancing is awesome. And the Internet is awesome for setting their classic steps to contemporary music.

via Kottke

Bret Victor questions the effectiveness of educators that do not actively participate in the subjects they teach in his essay Some Thoughts on Teaching.

Can you trust a teacher who doesn’t use what he teaches? Who has never used what he teaches?

Can you trust a teacher whose only connection to a subject is teaching it?

Song sung by Zooey Deschanel and Joseph Gordon-Levitt

via Hans Pieper

I’m not a big sports enthusiast, but I’ve always been more interested in professional sports. I was never sure why I had that preference, but Taylor Branch’s article, The Shame of College Sports expresses why I prefer pro.

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

What man actually needs is not a tensionless state but rather the striving and struggling for a worthwhile goal, a freely chosen task.

— –Viktor E. Frankl, Holocaust survivor, author of Man’s Search for Meaning via

Author Jonah Lehrer reports on Geoffrey West’s attempt to understand how cities work.

[C]ities are valuale because they facilitate human interactions, as people crammed into a few square miles exchange ideas and start collaborations. “If you ask people why they move to the city, they always give the same reasons,” West says. “They’ve come to get a job or follow their friends or to be at the center of a scene. That’s why we pay the high rent. Cities are all about the people, not the infrastructure.”

What do you call a political movement that’s half peaceful and half violent? A violent political movement.

— JAMES TARANTO, Better Late Than Never - WSJ.com

via holykaw

Do This

This is old but still useful. The New York Times has a personal finance check list with tons of useful links, calculators, videos, and other tools and media.

Taking time out to put your personal finances in gear can reap both immediate and long-term benefits, from cashing gift cards to reallocating investments. This checklist can help you formulate a strategy, providing tips, the time needed to achieve them, and links to additional resources. For each category, Ron Lieber, the Your Money columnist, offers his insights on video. You can customize your list by removing items to suit your strategy, and then print a personalized list of the items you plan on tackling today.

We hurry and push and hustle, for the good of humanity! ‘The world is becoming too noisy, too commercial!’ groans some solitary thinker. ‘Undoubtedly it is, but the noise of waggons bearing bread to starving humanity is of more value than tranquillity of soul,’ replies another triumphantly, and passes on with an air of pride.

— from The Idiot by Fyodor Dostoyevsky