- With Coffee, the Price of Individualism Can Be High. We have these K-cups at work, with a Keurig machine. And beyond most of the coffee blends not being especially good, I think the convenience for a largeish workplace is definitely worth it. I drink so little coffee I’d feel a little annoyed if I had to help remake a fresh pot regularly. (The Keurig also makes tea and cocoa, so there’s that.) [via]
- One word: Megafishes. [via]
- Breakthrough: The first sound recordings based on reading people’s minds [via]
- ‘Huffington Post’ Employee Sucked Into Aggregation Turbine. I think I would like HuffPo more if it wasn’t a huge content farm fronted by unexceptional celebrity essays and stories from other websites, where millions of dollars go to line the pockets of Arianna Huffington but not a cent goes to the writers. Or at least if people on Twitter would stop linking to it as much.
- And finally, the real question: does anyone have sixty-thousand dollars I could borrow? [via]
humor
Thursday various
- SETI and the problems with searching for alien life [via]
- Grant Morrison Comic Bingo [via]
- Scooby-Doo and Secular Humanism:
To paraphrase G.K. Chesterton, Scooby Doo has value not because it shows us that there are monsters, but because it shows us that those monsters are just the products of evil people who want to make us too afraid to see through their lies, and goes a step further by giving us a blueprint that shows exactly how to defeat them. [via]
- The darker side of Groupon. Apparently it kind of sucks for small businesses. [via]
- The Myths at the Bar, Debunked
- The harrowing story of What Really Happened Aboard Air France 447. Warning: you almost certainly will not want to fly after reading this. (Also: FAA approves iPads in the cockpit.) [via]
- The AV Club compiles a list of 26 destructive fictional therapists. I keep thinking there’s maybe a book in this, but that’s maybe just my day job talking.
- When William Gibson wrote, “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel,” did he really mean Fox News? Does Newt Gingrich want to make Neuromancer come true? [via]
- Star Trek People Drinking Coffee. Does exactly what it says on the tin.
- And finally, the lovely video for “In Your Arms” by Kina Grannis. After, I recommend the making-of video. [via]
Wednesday various
- Tintin’s Lovecraftian Adventures
- Along the same lines: What If…Herge Created the X-Men?
- And also, what if Charles Schulz illustrated H.P. Lovecraft? [via]
- Today in infographics: The Rules of Magic, Doctor Who Timeline, and Good Versus Evil in the Superhero Comic Color Palette [via and via]
- The truly odd story of New York’s Hartwick College and their “Methuselah” trust from a one-time benefactor:
Because thanks to an eccentric New York lawyer in the 1930s, this college in a corner of the Catskills inherited a thousand-year trust that would not mature until the year 2936: a gift whose accumulated compound interest, the New York Times reported in 1961, “could ultimately shatter the nation’s financial structure.†The mossy stone walls and ivy-covered brickwork of Hartwick College were a ticking time-bomb of compounding interest—a very, very slowly ticking time bomb.
One suspects they’d have rather gotten a new squash court. [via]
- Sorry, folks on my Christmas list: Mailing Chicken Pox Lollipops Is Illegal, Reckless. Maybe just a card? [via]
- A Tree Grows in Queens (Right Through An Auto Body Shop!) [via]
- “Sure. Alternate realities. You could have, like, a world without shrimp. Or with, you know, nothing but shrimp…” – Anya
First top predator was giant shrimp with amazing eyes. (“You have amazing eyes! Please don’t eat me, giant killer shrimp!”)
- The Higgs boson: Why scientists hate that you call it the ‘God particle’ [via]
- And finally, Bobby McFerin demonstrates the power of the pentatonic scale [via]:
Monday various
- PTSD’s Trauma Symptoms Ring Out Through Ages. (Bookslut remains slightly skeptical.)
- Quite late to post this, but Whole Foods instructs stores not to promote Ramadan. As always, it’s couched in non-racist soundbites, but can you imagine Whole Foods deciding not to market kosher foods or Passover because a neo-Nazi group wrote them an angry letter?
- A boy with a compromised immune system sends a robot to school in his place. [via]
- Noel Murray on nostalgia, the pop culture of our youth:
On one level, they call to me, in the way so much popular culture of the past does, as a doorway to the half-remembered. But there’s a melancholy there, too—deep, powerful and true.
- And finally, Monsters of Grok. Cute T-shirt ideas. [via]
Wednesday various
- “When It’s Not Your Turnâ€: The Quintessentially Victorian Vision of Ogden’s “The Wire†[via]
- The Content Farm: “Informative articles about every topic, written by people with a passing knowledge.” [via]
- War Dog:
Dogs have been fighting alongside U.S. soldiers for more than 100 years, seeing combat in the Civil War and World War I. But their service was informal; only in 1942 were canines officially inducted into the U.S. Army. Today, they’re a central part of U.S. efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan — as of early 2010 the U.S. Army had 2,800 active-duty dogs deployed (the largest canine contingent in the world). And these numbers will continue to grow as these dogs become an ever-more-vital military asset. [via]
- If Housepets Were Libertarians
- And finally…
X-Men: First Class Title Sequence from Joe D! on Vimeo. [via