November 2011
2 posts
April 2011
1 post
Incredible GIF Images
Not quite a video. Not quite an image. See the full gallery on Posterous Credit: Jamie Beck and Kevin Burg Cite: http://www.fastcodesign.com/1663683/far-better-than-3-d-animated-gifs-that-savor-a-passing-moment
November 2010
4 posts
7 tags
My New Favorite Art Exhibit
Today, I went to the Hamburger Bahnhof, an old Berlin train station that was converted to a modern art museum. It was incredible.
There were some awesome Warhol pieces in the Marx Collection, which I will happily fun fact vomit about if you so desire.
But, the best part was, by far, Carsten Höller’s SOMA.
The closest approximation of my initial reaction would probably be walking...
2 tags
The Most Boring Day In The Last Century
April 11, 1954 was the most boring day in recent history.
Nobody significant died that day.
No major events (apparently) occurred.
Only one slightly notable person, Abdullah Atalar, a Turkish academic, was born.
For some reason, I feel very sorry for April 11, 1954. If there was a way to calculate the most boring person that ever lived, I think most people would not want to know.
2 tags
Thanksgiving List
Thank you for making that one night so incredibly memorable.
Thank you for making this summer the best summer of my life.
Thank you for teaching me about myself.
Thank you for putting things into perspective.
Thank you for genuine, warm conversations.
Thank you for cheering me up when I was down.
Thank you for sending me those emails when I needed them the most.
Thank you for offering me a...
9 tags
Three Examples of Courage
A few days ago, I read an article in NYTimes that broke my heart. Three Iowa Supreme Court Justices, who had upheld same-sex marriage in Iowa, lost their jobs after losing their retention elections, in light of a particularly aggressive removal campaign funded by out-of-state conservative organizations.
In an election that was meant to be as apolitical as possible, the opposition spent more money...
October 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Three Quotes About Chicago
“Hollywood is hype, New York is talk, Chicago is work.” - Michael Douglas
“The greatest and most nearly beautiful city of our young nation is probably Chicago. Eventually I think that Chicago will be the most beautiful great city left in the modern world.” - Frank Lloyd Wright
“You know what they say about Chicago. If you don’t like the weather, wait fifteen...
5 tags
The Széchenyi Chain Bridge
Went to Budapest, Hungary for the past three days, and there I heard a very sad, interesting story about the Széchenyi Chain Bridge.
As the story goes, the bridge was built in 1839 by an engineer named William Tierney Clark. Upon completion, Clark declared the bridge perfect and wagered that if anyone could find a single thing wrong with the bridge, he would kill himself. Of course, the bridge...
September 2010
1 post
4 tags
Charles Darwin, the Romantic.
Notes from Charles Darwin’s notebook regarding whether he should marry or not.
Favorite lines:
“better than a dog anyhow.” (under pros for marriage)
“Marry-Mary-Marry Q.E.D.”
July 2010
6 posts
Dinner Conversations - 7/16/10
When they sit down across from me, I feel like I’m being interrogated by the FBI on Casual Friday. Broad shoulders, well-toned arms, but the bronze tan is new. I’m impressed.
I ask about their past weekend, and the conversation turns into locker room talk fast. He scored, he got blocked, and he didn’t bring his game. I think because guys are the initiators, they talk like...
1 tag
Dinner Conversations - 7/15/10
The following is a guest post from someone who had dinner with me. Interesting and humbling perspective.
She kept me waiting. It wasn’t a big deal or anything, but I do value punctuality. I finally got my bike balanced in the weird Facebook bikerack at 6:01pm, and got to stand idly watching workers exit the building, carrying food, laundry, or Facebook apparel. Good work, employees - use...
2 tags
Dinner Conversations - 7/9/10
She wears four hair ties on her left wrist, because she cannot wear anything on her right. She’s carrying one more than usual today, and this throws off her system of designated hair ties corresponding to the intensity of the activity.
I ask about Oxford and her friends. She says that Oxford was good when she got settled. She got to play a Bond girl at a James Bond-themed Oxford Ball. When...
1 tag
Dinner Conversations - Introduction
I’ve been eating dinner with a lot of interesting people this summer. I would really like to remember the conversations and people, so I will write up a post and/or picture for my dinner companions for the summer.
Also, I would love to have dinner with you.
May 2010
1 post
8 tags
I am 100% Guesser
This article in the Guardian is a revelation.
Excerpt:
“We are raised, the theory runs, in one of two cultures. In Ask culture, people grow up believing they can ask for anything – a favour, a pay rise– fully realising the answer may be no. In Guess culture, by contrast, you avoid “putting a request into words unless you’re pretty sure the answer will be yes… A key skill is...
April 2010
2 posts
3 tags
Thoughts On Our Generation
“But I don’t understand how this is a ‘C’ paper. I worked really, really hard on it.” (Kent State PR major, 1998-2010)
I’ve said some variation of that statement in the last five years, and I’ve heard it being said even more often. That’s because our generation is the ADD, entitled generation that’s graded on effort. At least, that’s what the older generations think,...
“A friend of mine goes to Brown and she has a chemistry class with Emma Watson....”
– set phasers to fabulous
February 2010
7 posts
7 tags
Music Trends Over Time
Currently, I’m writing a paper on how the the technology behind our personal music mediums (i.e. iPods, Walkmans, etc…) affect how we listen to music and what mainstream/popular music sounds like.
Case In Point:
iPods are incredibly small, portable, and inconspicuous. Hence, this allows us to integrate them with our daily lives so seamlessly that sometimes we don’t even realize...
4 tags
Disclosed Relationships > Undisclosed...
Turns out that going “official” by posting on Facebook means you’re more likely to be happy. Or, have happy status messages at least.
Excerpt:
People who are in relationships do seem happier than those who are not in relationships. However, there are some important areas of distinction. For instance, the people that seem the most unhappy are those that either don’t disclose...
PopJam turns Chatroulette idea into random IM with... →
Not exactly what I had in mind, but TechCrunch did an article about something similar called PopJam. It sets up Facebook chats between random strangers.
6 tags
Chatroulette in Facebook
Every time I got to Chatroulette, I can never get up the nerve to actually press play and talk to a complete stranger. (For those of you unfamiliar with Chatroulette, it’s basically an online service that connects two random strangers and starts a webcam/chat between the two.)
I was thinking it would be cool to have a Chatroulette as a Facebook application. Instead of connecting with a...
Flying Anxiety
On Friday night, I will be on an airplane. Usually, the week leading up to a flight is filled with uneasiness, so to quell my irrational fears, I read up on ways to survive water landings and free-falling.
Popular Mechanics Article: How to Fall 35,000 Feet—And Survive
Statistically speaking, it’s best to be a flight crew member, a child, or traveling in a military aircraft. Over the past four...
Nifty Findings Today
Today, I learned the following:
“The practice of swearing an oath while touching one’s or someone else’s testicles was common in the ancient Near East (Abraham also orders a servant to do just that in Genesis 24:2). Its linguistic memory survives in our word “testify”—testis being the Latin both for “witness” and the male generative gland.”
Continuing off my typography-focused post...
January 2010
1 post
6 tags
The Most Eco-friendly Font Ever
The interesting problem of conservation gets solved in a very unique way: font.
FontFont made a font called Mt, which conserves paper and ink by condensing upper-case and lower-case letters to the same small height and forcefully removing all vowels, which you can add back by typing in all caps. Because our generation has become pretty skilled at reading with the vowels, (rly?!), the resulting...
December 2009
4 posts
3 tags
Getting Older
I never really felt old until recently when I saw my brother playing “Unblock Me” on his iPod, which is this puzzle game where you try to slide a block out.
And I said, “when I was young, we had a physical version of that game.” Because I remember this puzzle game called Rush Hour, which looked like this…
Moral: If you still remember playing games made out of...
Religious time travelers.
I like the story of Jesus, because I think that it means time travel is possible in the future. Let me explain.
Let’s say you’re a relatively smart guy (because you just invented time travel) in the not-so-distant future. You decide to time travel back to biblical times to meet the Messiah.
You proceed to wander around looking for this mythical man, expecting to hear people talk...
Experiment: Perceiving the Passage of Time
Hypothesis: The main difference between this decade and the last is the graininess of the film medium used to record it. When the medium is standardized, one will see that there’s humans have made a surprisingly small, (outwardly) visible progress in a decade.
Methodology:
1. Film an area of high-traffic (but no cars) with a 90s camcorder.
2. Put it on a VHS.
3. Wait 10 years.
4. FIlm...
Burning a million quid, living in North Korea.
In 1980, thirty-eight days after meeting, Charles Robert Jenkins, a North Korean defector, falls in love and marries Hitomi Soga, a Japanese women abducted by North Koreans and given to Jenkins. Jenkins proceeds to live the rest of his life in North Korea then Japan.
In 1994, K Foundation (an artistic duo) burn 1 million pounds in cash. that’s $1.658 M using todays’ conversion rate....