Saved (Public Feed)

“Documentation for the Ableton Live MIDI Remote Script _Framework classes, based on decompiled Python sources and docstrings.” Someday.

All orange juice tastes the same because the juice from the oranges has its oxygen (and taste) removed for spoil-free storage and then ‘flavor packs’ are added to the flavorless juice. The flavor packs are loaded with supplementary chemicals but still technically qualify as ‘orange juice’, so there is no ingredient listing requirement for them. And: ‘Juice removed from the fruit is just concentrated fructose without any of the naturally-occurring fiber, pectin, and other goodies that make eating a whole fruit good for you.’ So don’t drink juice.

Infographic on the scientific evidence for effectiveness of popular dietary supplements. ‘Showing tangible health benefits when taken orally by an adult with a healthy diet.’

The story of Jason Rohrer’s ‘Chain World’, a customized fork of Minecraft of which there is only a single copy available on a USB stick and which is meant to be played only once, following a strict set of commandments, and then passed on to someone else. It’s meant to be a game about religion.

Heartwarming. Sixty photos of the world becoming just a little bit happier.

With a chart that shows what actually happened. “In future decades, when rising health costs with an aging population hit the budget in full force, deficits are projected to be far deeper than they are now. Effective health care reform, and a willingness to pay more taxes, will be the biggest factors in controlling those deficits.”

Basically, he advocates shutting yourself off from the world as much as possible for an initial boot camp-style stretch for as long as you can manage in order to really commit yourself to wrapping your head around the concepts of programming (Rails, in this case). I want to do this, but finding time away from other commitments isn’t something I’m especially suited to do at the moment.

This is 100% true. “Because if your website is full of assholes, it's your fault. And if you have the power to fix it and don't do something about it, you're one of them.”

“Nerds will still be nerds, and trust me, their adolescences will still be awful enough to provide fodder for a lifetime of creativity and humor, if they’re lucky. The thing that everyone seems to forget is that nerddom, in its purest form, is a teenage affliction, something that many, if not most, people grow out of. They figure out how to be passionate about their interests without being smug and humorless about them. They learn to laugh at their past humiliations, and to celebrate this newfound comfort in their own skins, they proudly take on the epithet so long slung in their direction: they call themselves nerds. And that’s it. If done in the true spirit of awareness and goodnatured self-deprecation, the day you call yourself a nerd is the day you become an ex-nerd.”

Old media (The Epiphinator) is all about stories and endings. New media (Facebook etc.) knows nothing, crafts no careful stories. But we still need those things, so don't expect it to die yet.

“The thing I really want to impress on my students is that the commercial case for news only matters if the profits are used to subsidize reporting the public can see, and that civic virtue may be heart-warming, but it won’t keep the lights on, if the lights cost more than cash on hand. Both sides of the equation have to be solved.”

“Still, for the Cool Kids, it comes down to one thing: Mountain Dew provides them with a fair opportunity to usher their music into the world. ‘Any other label, any other situation … you do all the work and they take all the money. I can’t sleep comfortably with that,’ explains Rocks. ‘I would take Mountain Dew any day of the week over that. Money comes and goes, you spend it stupid and it’s gone. But what we are doing, what we’ve made — no one can take that away from us.’”

“And if you want to talk about pop music between 1980 and now, that issue—the question of who’s singing and who’s being sung to—is an important one. The study assumes that hit singles in the eighties and hit singles in the new millennium play the same role in our culture. But over the past 30 years, the weekly charts have seen changes a lot more significant than any surge of ego. It’s not just that pop’s audience has changed; it’s that its whole purpose has.”

“One challenge of adapting Quidditch to real life lies in transforming a literary invention into a balanced contest where skill and strategy matter. The greater challenge involves getting around the lack of, you know, magic. You can't fly. Neither can the bludgers, or the snitch. You can pretend to fly, though. And you can throw the bludgers. But the snitch is a problem.”

“Treating monogamy, rather than honesty or joy or humor, as the main indicator of a successful marriage gives people unrealistic expectations of themselves and their partners. And that, Savage says, destroys more families than it saves.”

“Young bands including Animal Collective, Blues Control and others are incorporating sounds from the much disparaged genre.”

“The tracks on Clones’ Gate EP are composed of dark, spacious, myriad textures, but if songs were colors, they would be lavender instead of black.”

“Matthew McVickar designs these Cameramail packages with disposable film-cameras taped to their front and a note exhorting posties to take pictures of themselves and environs as the package passes through their custody.”

“I love the idea of this project by web designer Matthew McVickar. He sent this camera in the mail with a message asking the postal workers to take pictures on the camera’s trip to its destination. The result is fun and educational, and it would be a great school project for any teachers out there.”

Looks at your CSS and tells you what's wrong with it.

The political process that made this happen. Fascinating, inspiring, and moving.

I was interviewed by Debra Black at the Toronto Star this morning. “For Matthew McVickar the idea of sending a disposable camera attached to a piece of cardboard was intriguing. What kind of pictures would one get, he wondered? Would the camera make it to its destination?”

“no nasty pics, im surprised”

“that's a great idea but the pictures aren't as fun as one would've imagined”

Nitsuh Abebe dares to say Justin Vernon is a little boring. Reading this, I think I understand why people aren't as impressed or as moved by stuff like Bon Iver and The National as I am — it has a certain New England, autumn/winter feeling and I think a lot of its appeal is in its power to evoke that snowed-in cabin, that 2am rainy city street, that drunken goodbye that we experienced or imagined. That’s how it is for me, anyway.

“Eventually, the country will have to confront the deficit we have, rather than the deficit we imagine. The one we imagine is a deficit caused by waste, fraud, abuse, foreign aid, oil industry subsidies and vague out-of-control spending. The one we have is caused by the world’s highest health costs (by far), the world’s largest military (by far), a Social Security program built when most people died by 70 — and to pay for it all, the lowest tax rates in decades. “To put it in budgetary terms, the deficit we imagine comes largely from discretionary spending. The one we have comes partly from discretionary spending but mostly from everything else: tax rates, Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security.”

“When a computer running an older version of XP can’t find any of its ‘favorite’ wireless networks, it will automatically create an ad hoc network with the same name as the last one it connected to—in this case, ‘Free Public WiFi.’ Other computers within range of that new ad hoc network can see it, luring other users to connect. And who can resist the word ‘free?’”

“Matthew McVickar decided to send a camera through the mail, these are the images it captured.”

Another link.

Another one.