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.
Friday, August 14, 2009
Buy me a book
Some people think things like “but I gave him a book for Christmas last year”.
A book is a doorway to a different world. The physical, paper book is just a medium, and it’s what’s beyond that’s interesting.
Saying “I already got her a book” is like saying “I already got her something with screws”—it just doesn’t matter.
Each book is its own world, and worlds make great presents.
Corona > Coke
I would never drink six cans of Coke in an evening—It’s too fattening.
A 20oz. bottle of Coca-Cola has 240 calories, whereas a 12oz. bottle of La Cerveza Mas Fina has 148 calories.
Coke: 12.0 calories/oz.
Corona: 12.3 calories/oz.
Shit.
Monday, August 10, 2009
Smart Crows
Crows (well, actually rooks) are smart.
“...they are ‘clearly combining some sort of understanding of the task with an understanding of the tool and are able to solve the task so quickly.’”
If By Whiskey
Here is a list of logical fallacies. It’s fascinating reading, and gives you the tools to know if someone (especially a politician) is trying to put one over on you.
I especially enjoyed the “If By Whiskey” argument.
Throw yourself in
Here’s a useful insight (and lots more good stuff if you feel like improving yourself):
There are some things that can’t be approached gradually.
I surf, badly. One of the main reasons why I have a hard time is because surfing is about waiting for the right moment and then throwing yourself in, absolutely.
I resist throwing myself under several tons of falling water. I try to drag out the transition between not surfing and surfing, but it doesn’t work that way.
This binary-type-experience paradigm is useful because it explains a point of failure that can be, otherwise, hard to diagnose.
People have spent a lot of time and energy giving me advice about how to surf (and a lot of it was helpful). But it’s more useful just to accept that I’m going to have to act, not think, when that wave arrives.
Fly lice and trash cans
These stories are awesome and short—only a few paragraphs each.
Five months later, I chuckle out loud about once a week when I remember them.
For two of my favorites, load the page then search for:
- chinese restaurant (fly lice story)
- when my (trash can story)
Thanks, Steve.
Sunday, August 02, 2009
Harder to Push In than to Pull Out
I don’t remember where I learned it, but this is a great trick:
How to extract a cork from the inside of a wine bottle:
Needed: 1 empty wine bottle, 1 cork, 1 plastic bag (like vegetables come in)
1. push the cork into the empty wine bottle (this is by far the hardest part).
2. twist up the plastic bag and thread it into the wine bottle.
3. tip the wine bottle so that the cork is next to the plastic bag, ready to enter the neck of the bottle.
4. blow into the plastic bag just enough to inflate it a little.
5. pull the plastic bag out of the bottle, dragging the cork with it.
It’s one of those things that seems completely impossible until you do it.
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