You've got to jump off cliffs all the time...

More writing tips, this time from ad-man David Ogilvy. (I'm certain there's some alignment of the stars here with Mad Men's season premier this weekend.) I'm a fan of #2 (pun intended), "Write the way you talk. Naturally."

I suppose this is like jumping the shark: Hitler is mad about all the Hitler Downfall parodies.

Every NBA shot in the last 5 years.

At first, this brief post on why being smart hurts your productivity seemed a bit self-serving. It seems to be making an excuse: I'm not very productive but it's because I'm very smart. Of course, the internet is used as an example of how we can be easily distracted. The internet is crack for information junkies. The gist of the article's sentiment is buried in a quote by mathematician Richard Hamming that I'll repeat here in its entirety.

I notice that if you have the door to your office closed, you get more work done today and tomorrow, and you are more productive than most. But 10 years later somehow you don't know quite know what problems are worth working on … He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. … [T]here is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.

Close on the heels of last week's pot of chicken feet (Get it? Heels, feet.) comes this tray full of cow eyeballs.

Don't be the ugly American. Know these etiquette rules for international travel. For example, don't eat french fries with your hands in Chile - use a fork. Conversely, don't eat chile with a fork in the U.S.of.A.

Shit just got real. The Poop Stool for "better, quicker, and more complete elimination." (Remove pants first.)

In the rather long essay What's a museum? we read that museums have gone from "being about something" to "being about somebody" or I would interject the dreaded "being about everybody." Do we need museums to be another form of upscale shopping mall?

The latest trailer for Ridley Scott's Alien prequel Prometheus is kick-ass. (In Greek mythology, Prometheus stole fire from Zeus and gave it to man, a crime for which he was severely punished.)

Van Gogh to Rothko in a 30-second video.

I don't own a grill yet these Banana Boats stuffed with chocolate chips, marshmallows and other stuff look great.

What kind of delicious music would you play on a bacon guitar?

Seeing e = mc² in Einstein's own handwritten is very cool.

Hic Sunt Dracones

Tweereal - a real-time map of tweets

Video map of earthquakes worldwide in 2011

Old maps online - for example, this map of the inhabited world from 1824.

Breathing Earth - CO2 emissions

Urban World map showing growth of urban populations over time.

...and build your wings on the way down. ~Ray Bradbury