Here’s my URL spelled out in tags I’ve used on this blog (and the posts they come from). They’re all ridiculous.
Creepy creepy mailbox
He says ‘canyon’ so perfectly
Eavesdropping is easier than actually WRITING
Lala how the life goes on
Steps to a happy brain
Yesterday my esteemed colleague Tyler Coates ranked the oeuvre of Wes Anderson in descending order of quality. You can read the post here, but the sequence is as follows: Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Fantastic Mr. Fox, Bottle Rocket, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and The Darjeeling Limited. Although he didn’t explicitly state it, he told me IRL that he “would rank Moonrise Kingdom between The Royal Tenenbaums and Fantastic Mr. Fox.” Although I like Mr. Coates as a person and think he does a stellar job as the Senior Editor of BlackBook, I believe his appraisal fails in several important ways. The first is that it is wrong.
Both of these lists make me ask the question: am I the only person who enjoyed The Darjeeling Limited? I don’t know anyone in real life who actually liked it either, but it’s my second favorite Wes Anderson film after The Royal Tenenbaums, and it’s one of those films I can watch when I’m sick over and over again. (The people who didn’t like Darjeeling didn’t like Tenenbaums either, so I figure they’re the ones that are nuts).
This is an absolutely fantastic explanation of the measurements we can make in our universe. Though it’s simple enough to grasp, trying to hold this kind of information in my head always sort of makes me dizzy.
The only part of this that surprised me is that in order to test how people perceived men vs. women, they showed them images both right side up and upside down, because:
“…pictures of people present a recognition problem when they’re turned upside down, but images of objects don’t have that problem…”
Is this really the case? Can our complex and evolved brains really not distinguish a human as soon as the image is flipped? That seems like a strange glitch for our brains to have kept all this time.
There’s something so satisfying about running your fingers over fabric swatches. (Taken with instagram)
Where Do Fingerprints Come From?
From cradle to grave, no matter how much fingers grow, everyone’s fingerprints are unique and unchanging.
Video: Smithsonian Channel
Whoa! I never knew how fingerprints formed, how early into life they’re created (24 weeks after conception!!), and how crucial they are to holding things.
This video has me staring at my hands in wonder.
Love these Da Vinci style drawings of the Large Hadron Collider by Sergio Cittolin, a research physicist who’s worked at CERN for 30 years.
(via kottke)
The Great Stories are the ones you have heard and want to hear again… You know how they end, yet you listen as though you don’t. In the way that although you know that one day you will die, you live as though you won’t.
That time in *CHICAGO* when I stood at the edge.
I’m having some fun playing with Wander Weeks photos. This week’s assignment is to share a memory from a place you’ve been.
This past weekend was one of the best ever, not in a grandiose big events kind of way, but in an awesome hanging out with great people kind of way. My cousin Laura (one of my favorite people ever) and her two hilarious girls came down for a visit. And we had our friend Aaron over as well, so it was like one big slumber party all weekend. Our weekend was filled with:
The best story of the weekend came from Laura, who told us about a conversation she had with the girls where they were asking why the parents of a friend of theirs were divorced. Nyla didn’t understand because she said she’s seen them get along okay and why couldn’t they be married anymore? Laura explained that getting along and being married can be two different things sometimes. And Gia pipes up and says:
“I get it. It’s like if your husband always wants to eat fish. And it’s okay the first night, but then you have to eat it every night of the week. It’s like, ‘Fish. Fish. Fish. Fish. Divorce.”
I wish you could hear her inflection on this because it’s priceless, but you’ll have to settle for reading it. If that doesn’t make you laugh, I don’t know if you have a funny bone in your body.
Bill Murray talking about madras pants, rum, and tents makes me want to see Moonrise Kingdom even more than I already did.
“I had to work with a bunch of scouts and kids. No money can make that right, can it?”
Leap Motion, a San Francisco startup has created a device (“the Leap”) that lets you control your computer just my moving your fingers over it, as if you were using a touchscreen in the air.
Leap Motion is now taking pre-orders for the $69.99 device but won’t begin shipping it until the end of this year or early 2013. The company is also opening up its developer ecosystem to give software makers a head start on developing new applications.
Wait, really!?
How is this only $70? However much it costs, I need it. I’ve definitely done that thing where I reach up to Google Maps on my laptop and try to zoom in with the flick-open hand gesture that works on my phone.
Check this out: Sweet Home Alabama played by ELECTRICITY. Not only is this maybe the awesomest use of Tesla coils to date, but the reason it works is really interesting too. From the creator’s website (but edited for grammar and punctuation…I can’t help it, I’m sorry):
[Tesla coils] create an extremely high frequency voltage at their output. This voltage has enough energy to convert a small part of the air around the coil to a plasma (the purple stuff you can actually see). Now this plasma, when it’s created, forces air out of it’s way as it forms. This creates a pressure wave that propagates away from the spark at the speed of sound.
It’s the same thing that happens with a speaker. The cone moves forward and back, creating a pressure wave we perceive as sound. Cool, eh?
I absolutely love that scientists out there are trying to discover the cure for cancer and other noble things, but damn if I’m not super happy that they’re also playing around with stuff like this.
Crazy, amazing facts that can double as conversation starters this weekend.
I feel like this might actually be a problem that spacewalking astronauts encounter on the regular. Imagine floating in space above the incredible ball we call Earth and being overwhelmed at the unrealness of it all. I know if I were an astronaut, that’d be my daily state of emotion.