Archive for September, 2007
One of the news media’s approaches to spicing up the particularly boring upcoming election is to report breathlessly on how new technology is changing democracy. News.com.au has an article today about the supposed usefulness of Google Trends to track what Australian voters are thinking. Excerpt:
Metering the internet search terms used by Australians, Google’s [...]
Gary Taubes’s article in New York Magazine gives a nice rundown of the evidence that exercise does not cause weight loss: link. Many of you will already be familiar with this stuff, but I still found Taubes’s article an interesting and fun read. Three excerpts:
Ultimately, the relationship between physical activity and fatness comes [...]
Frank Capra’s 1946 romantic comedy It Happened One Night is on Google Video for free: link. I really like and recommend this movie. Unlike most romantic comedies, it’s actually romantic and funny – and it never gets sappy. Great fun.
I read an interesting article about Bjorn Lomborg in the New York Times [link]. Lomborg will get a lot of media attention in the coming weeks, and I recommend approaching the skeptic with skepticism.
I was originally going to post this article with positive comments about Lomborg, but upon looking just a bit closer, I found deep [...]
The music site Pitchfork has started a series where they ask great DJ’s to make mixes for free downloads from the Pitchfork site. The first one in the series is by Scottish JD Twitch, and it’s fantastic, eclectic fun. The free mp3, plus a tracklisting and interview, are here: Link.
The highlight for me is a [...]
Check out Shorpy Vintage Photos – The 100-Year-Old Photo Blog. Here are a few that struck me, with Shorpy’s captions. Click to see bigger.
August 1912. Another picture of little Annie Fedele, 22 Horace Street, Somerville, Massachusetts, doing piecework, which usually entailed putting the finishing touches (buttons, or collar and waistband trim) on [...]
In this fake op-ed in The Onion, Bill O’Reilly is finally won over by the absurd opinions he accuses his opponents of having. Classic satire. Link.
Jason Kottke had a good post months ago about a street donut-and-coffee vendor in his neighbourhood. Instead of running a cash register, he lets the customers give him the money and then take the correct change out of a tray of money that’s just sitting there. Link. Excerpt:
If you were the CEO [...]
The 50’s song you are most likely to hear in a bar or a gym is Jackie Wilson’s ‘Reet Petite’, not because it’s a wonderful song (which it is), but because Aardman Animations made a cool claymation filmclip for it in the 80’s. Take away the claymation filmclip and it would be just another [...]
Jonathon Haidt researches the psychology that drives our moral instincts, and how our moral instincts drive cognition. He has a brilliant article in The Edge where he outlines some of his theories, and then looks at Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion and a few of the other popular anti-religion books that have come out in [...]
John Lennon had a portable jukebox in the 60’s which carried 40 records. This is a BBC documentary about those songs: it features a whole lot of wonderful, wonderful music, and a glimpse into how Lennon put songs together. Highly recommended: Link.
Via smashingtelly.
An album I’m loving at the moment is the Martin Buscaglia’s El Evangelio Segun Mi Jardinero.
It’s hard to find information about Martin in English (he’s Uruguayan), but I can say for sure that he’s a colossal talent. El Evangelio is amazingly eclectic – a mix of funk, tropicalia, hip hop, psychedelic pop, samba, [...]
