Watch: A Symphony Of Lullabies, Played By 40 Jogging Mice

Fabio Di Salvo and Bernardo Vercelli have a way with coaxing interesting harmonies out of unexpected sources. Known together as Quiet Ensemble, they’ve elicited audible frequencies from pears and pineapples. (Spolier alert: The fruits sound a lot like techno), and their latest endeavor allowed mice to remix works by famous composers.)

Curious? Find out more here.

Moleskine Cat Journal - Collect and organize the life of your cat

davemorin:

Any Two Pages on the Web Are Connected By 19 Clicks or Less - Smithsonian

Stay Curious

Aaron Swartz, in a 2009 interview with Ronaldo Lemos:

When I was a kid, I thought a lot about what made me different from the other kids. I don’t think I was smarter than them and I certainly wasn’t more talented. And I definitely can’t claim I was a harder worker — I’ve never worked particularly hard, I’ve always just tried doing things I find fun. Instead, what I concluded was that I was more curious — but not because I had been born that way. If you watch little kids, they are intensely curious, always exploring and trying to figure out how things work. The problem is that school drives all that curiosity out. Instead of letting you explore things for yourself, it tells you that you have to read these particular books and answer these particular questions. And if you try to do something else instead, you’ll get in trouble. Very few people’s curiosity can survive that. But, due to some accident, mine did. I kept being curious and just followed my curiosity.

thenextweb:

Google on Monday launched a global resolutions page where anyone can add their own New Year’s resolution for the year 2013. The new small service features a world map where anyone can browse other people’s resolutions, whether they’re making their own this year or not. In typical Google fashion, the page isn’t just powered by Google Maps though. Thanks to Google Translate, you can explore what people are hoping to do next year regardless of what language they are doing it in. Furthermore, the site lets you filter through resolutions by category (Love, Health, Career, Finance, Family, Education, Do Good, and Other). You don’t need an account to add your own resolution (the good thing is Google isn’t required, the bad is that there is likely to be spam). You do have to share your postal code and country name, as well as pick one of the aforementioned categories. So far, all the resolutions are pretty straightforward. Google users want to make more money, exercise more, smile often, run a full marathon, quite smoking, and so on. The page updates automatically so you can see new resolutions as they are being made. The new Zeitgeist page is an excellent want to encourage people to make resolutions for the New Year. It’s also a great way for Google to remind everyone about its services and that it is a “people company.” The launch comes just a few weeks after Google released its Zeitgest 2012 report. The company has embedded the same Zeitgeist 2012 video from earlier so that users can watch it first, and then add their “resolution and explore our collective hopes and aims for the coming year.” See also – Google adds Lao to Translate as an alpha, for a grand total of 65 languages and Google Maps brings over 10,000 indoor floor plans to the desktop Image credit: Piotr Matlak (via Google Launches Global Resolutions Map for 2013)

Portland, Oregon

I guess this means it’s fall….

Little Big Burger

These pictures from The Atlantic are unreal.

America the Anxious - NYTimes.com

Thought provoking article on the pursuit of happiness. I’m trying my best to be more present and mindful in recent months, to spend more time appreciating right now and less time yearning for later. This is food for thought in that regard.

Barack Obama on optimizing decision-making, excerpted from Michael Lewis’s fantastic Vanity Fair profile of the President.

More on the psychology of how we make decisions.

Strongly agree.

(via superamit)

Piers Morgan: The Luxury Life of Dubai

The Oregon Coast

Silicon Valley visionary Peter Thiel was one of the first investors in Facebook. He has backed many of today’s hottest tech companies. And now he’s searching for the next generation of entrepreneurs – in an electrifying competition unlike anything seen before.

20 Under 20: Transforming Tomorrow captures every step of this amazing journey, telling the stories of the extraordinary young men and women each vying for a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship. Brilliant innovators who are barely out of high school, these budding entrepreneurs have very big ideas — and if they win, Thiel will give them the money and the mentors they need to make their dreams a reality. But there’s a catch: to walk away with a Fellowship, they need to walk away from college.

It’s a decision that will change their lives … and maybe even the world.

Half of a typical family’s spending today goes to transportation and housing, according to the latest Consumer Expenditure Survey, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. At the height of the housing bubble, residential construction and related activities accounted for more than a quarter of the economy in metro areas like Las Vegas and Orlando. Nation­wide, new-car and new-truck purchases hovered near historic highs. But Millennials have turned against both cars and houses in dramatic and historic fashion. Just as car sales have plummeted among their age cohort, the share of young people getting their first mortgage between 2009 and 2011 is half what it was just 10 years ago, according to a Federal Reserve study.

Needless to say, the Great Recession is responsible for some of the decline. But it’s highly possible that a perfect storm of economic and demographic factors—from high gas prices, to re-­urbanization, to stagnating wages, to new technologies enabling a different kind of consumption—has fundamentally changed the game for Millennials. The largest generation in American history might never spend as lavishly as its parents did—nor on the same things. Since the end of World War II, new cars and suburban houses have powered the world’s largest economy and propelled our most impressive recoveries. Millennials may have lost interest in both.

Sunday Morning