April 2011
Sweden Solar System →
bestofwikipedia:
The Sweden Solar System is the world’s largest permanent scale model of the solar system. The sun is represented by the Ericsson Globe in Stockholm, the largest hemispherical building in the world. The inner planets can also be found in Stockholm but the outer planets are situated northward in other cities along the Baltic Sea. It was started by Nils Brenning and Gösta Gahm. It...
More Than 1 Billion People Are Hungry in the World... →
But what if the experts are wrong?
Dambisa Moyo, an economist who worked at Goldman Sachs and the World Bank, has joined her voice to WIlliam Easterly […]
Both argue that aid does more bad than good. It prevents people from searching for their own solutions, while corrupting and undermining local institutions and creating a self-perpetuating lobby of aid agencies.
The best bet...
How to beat Apple —Jason Kottke →
Apple has supply chain advantages, a massive number of their customers’ credit card numbers […], key patents, one-in-lifetime personnel like Steve Jobs and Jony Ive, solid relationships with key media companies, and an integrated ecosystem of stores, apps, applications, and hardware. They are an imposing competitor.
but :
Apple doesn’t do social well on a large...
The Sad, Beautiful Fact That We're All Going To... →
Linda Holmes:
Consider books alone. Let’s say you read two a week, and sometimes you take on a long one that takes you a whole week. That’s quite a brisk pace for the average person. That lets you finish, let’s say, 100 books a year. If we assume you start now, and you’re 15, and you are willing to continue at this pace until you’re 80. That’s 6,500 books,...
“Death and the sun are not to be looked at steadily.”
– La Rochefoucauld via.
“One thing that people are all disturbed about is sex… I said...”
– Dan O’Bannon
on Alien
“The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new...”
– Isaac Asimov via
What Is Totalitarian Art? | Foreign Affairs →
Kanan Makiya :
The crucial element in the creation of totalitarian culture was the involvement of the state, not indirectly, through the financing of culture, but directly, by imposing a “dictatorship of taste,” as the Russian futurist poet Vladimir Mayakovsky enthusiastically called it.
To find, as in post-Baathist Iraq, boxes of files containing hundreds of pages of...
“What did come under discussion… was why, when people go to the beach, they...”
– Amy Hempel
Stephen King on the Creative Process, the State of... →
Oh them fighting words :
When I see books by some of the suspense writers that are popular now, I think to myself: “These are basically books for people who don’t want to read at all.” It just kind of passes through the system. It’s like some kind of fast-food treat that takes the express right from your mouth to your bowels, without ever stopping to nourish any...
information triage →
n. The process of gathering, sorting, and prioritizing information to identify what is relevant or important and to discard everything else.
via wordspy
Secrets Behind 'Game of Thrones' Opening Credits -... →
Angus Wall :
HBO wanted something like the map that begins books like The Lord of the Rings. “We wanted to do something different from the standard tropes for fantasy maps,” Wall tells THR. “So we came up with the idea of a world inside a sphere.”
Is Sugar Toxic? - New York Times →
If Lustig is right, then our excessive consumption of sugar is the primary reason that the numbers of obese and diabetic Americans have skyrocketed in the past 30 years. But his argument implies more than that. If Lustig is right, it would mean that sugar is also the likely dietary cause of several other chronic ailments widely considered to be diseases of Western lifestyles — heart disease,...
WatchColourBleed trailer by Peter Szewczyk. Shot on the 5D Mark II.