Archive for May, 2008
The New Republic has an article about the growing backlash against al-Qaeda (and al-Qaeda-style indiscriminate killing) in the Muslim world. Link. Excerpt 1:
According to Pew polls, support for Al Qaeda has been dropping around the Muslim world in recent years. The numbers supporting suicide bombings in Indonesia, Lebanon, and Bangladesh, for instance, have dropped by [...]
For his installation, Displacements, artist Michael Naimark 1) put a video camera on a turntable in the middle of a room, 2) set it recording as it span, 3) painted everything in the room white, and 4) put a projector on the same turntable, and set it spinning. Clever. Link.
Pinker has a great article in The New Republic about some of the problems with using the preservation of dignity as an argument against medical research. Link. Excerpt:
First, dignity is relative. One doesn’t have to be a scientific or moral relativist to notice that ascriptions of dignity vary radically with the time, place, [...]
From an article in the Boston Globe:
The pirates who roamed the seas in the late 17th and early 18th centuries developed a floating civilization that, in terms of political philosophy, was well ahead of its time. The notion of checks and balances, in which each branch of government limits the other’s power, emerged in England [...]
From this gallery. Via Kottke.
Cursor*10 is an ingenious brief puzzle game. Very original, pretty hard. Part of the charm is the way you have to discover the rules of the game as you are going along. Cooperate by yourself!
One of my heroes, Michael Pollan – author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and In Defense Of Food – recently gave an hour-long lecture at Google about food. Highly recommended: Link.
See also: Compulsory reading about food and nutrition
Richard H Thaler is a revered economist, and Cass R. Sunstein is a revered legal scholar. The two of them have published a book called Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. The book advocates what they call ‘libertarian paternalism’: using our knowledge about the irrational biases of people in order to make them [...]
Take it from me: mp3fiesta.com is incredibly good.
It’s the most popular of the Russian mp3 shops out there. Russian mp3 sites pay royalties at the rate set in Russia by the Russian Organization for Multimedia and Digital Systems. That rate is lower than the rate in America. As a [...]
The video for The Replacements’ 1985 single ‘Bastards of Young’ : Link.
