Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death
For every four days you live, you get three days closer to death.
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Working for the Michelin Guide
Have you ever wondered what the life of a Michelin Guide critic is like?
You have to know a lot about food and you have to eat a lot.
Monday, October 12, 2009
Good Advice
This could be generalized to pretty much everything:
“That woman was sexy…Out of your league? Son. Let women figure out why they won’t screw you, don’t do it for them.”
Einstein and God
What was God doing before he created everything 10,000 years ago? Beholding the void and marvelling at the perfect nothing he had made. Hah.
Einstein expressed the same idea a little more clearly: “For me the Jewish religion like all other religions is an incarnation of the most childish superstition.”
The whole letter is worth a read.
Friday, September 25, 2009
get into a good restaurant
Bruce Feiler explains how to get a table in any restaurant in the world (via Jason Kottke).
Monday, September 21, 2009
Technique
The justification for technique is being able to do what you want to do when you want to do it.
Ansel Adams, via Jack Shedd.
Some of our assumptions may be wrong
Ants looking for aliens: we’ve searched dozens of these floor tiles for several common types of pheromone trails. If there were intelligent life up there, we would have seen its messages by now.
Monday, September 14, 2009
Things that you don’t understand
The Royal Society (a national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth) issued a study concluding that it is now feasible to start geo-engineering the climate.
The same week, researchers at UCLA reported the discovery of previously unknown basic mode of energy transfer from the solar wind to the Earth’s magnetosphere in the earth’s upper atmosphere.
“It’s like something else is heating the atmosphere besides the sun.” said Larry Lyons, a co-author of the research.
To paraphrase Stevie Wonder: when you mess with things that you don’t understand, you suffer.
Monday, September 07, 2009
What happens when something bigger than a testicle attacks you?
Monday, August 24, 2009
Hard Work
“I worked hard, and if you work hard you get the goodies.”
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
How Google sees you
If you go to google.com/ads/preferences in your regular browser, you can see what Google knows about your interests (and opt out of interest-based advertising).
Monday, August 17, 2009
If not white wine then what?
Re this:
If I’m not going to drink white wine or beer when I go out partying, then what?
Orange juice has 14 calories/oz. (worse than beer or Coke), and apple juice is just as bad.
Definitely not milk, which has 18.75 calories/oz.
Maybe I’m looking in the wrong direction… how about Bacardi 151? 122 calories/oz.
It looks like any alcoholic drink or fruit juice you can get in a bar is as at least as caloric as Coke, if not far worse.
I’m going to start drinking Perrier with a lemon slice.
Colors we never dreamed
This is old news by now, but it still makes me smile when I imagine…
The spectrum we learned in high school is red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet.
This covers all the wavelengths of visible light. The wavelengths longer than red light and shorter than violet light are infrared and ultraviolet, invisible without special equipment.
So where’s magenta, which should be halfway between red and violet? Magenta is a chord.
In music, a chord is two or more notes played at once. For example, the simplest form of a C-Major chord is just two notes: C and E. The C-Major chord cannot be represented by a single note.
Magenta is a chord in the same way but instead of being C and E played together, it’s composed of red and violet played together, and cannot be represented by a single wavelength.
What if there are other colors that we’ve never seen—other colorful chords that can’t be found in nature, but only by mixing natural colors?
Saturday, August 15, 2009
The obvious next question
re this:
White wine has 19.5 calories/oz. (62% more than Coke).
Shit.