Saturday, October 19, 2013

Those who realize their folly...

See the London Symphony Orchestra like you've never seen them before with LSO Play.

Another nail in the coffin of generationalism and its stereotypes. A study by researchers at Northwerstern's Kellogg School of Management showed that older workers more fully embraced social networking tools in the workplace than their younger colleagues.

Yes, I like modern and abstract painting. No, I do not think this is art: snort paint and spray tears of color.

Taking into account the source (BuzzFeed), here are 40 things every man over the age of 30 should own. (Where is the imagination? Shouldn't it be 30 things for the man over 30? Besides just that little bit of parallel wordplay it would keep this list from seeming to be interminable. For example, they could drop #40 about owning a decent bottle of booze. In fact, there's just too much booze-related stuff on this list. And a lot of this list is duh, common sense, anyway.)
  • #4 Stocks - I'll disagree. Unless you really know what you're doing (and most people don't) mutual funds are probably better.
  • #8 A Wristwatch - I'll salute them for including this.
  • #19 A flask - Really, I thought this was for men over 30, not boys turning 16.
NASCAR is known for branding everywhere, all over the cars and track. But now a beer is branded by NASCAR: Dale's Pale Ale. (I can hear my beer friends scoffing now.)

Begin Mapapalooza

This world map combines a country's number of internet users with the most popular website. Google is red. Baidu is green. Facebook is blue. The Japanese love them some Yahoo! (purple).
Bitly's real-time media map. See who's consuming what media across the U.S.

Imagine if each state could only have one sport: United Sports of America. Of course, Texas has high school football. But cornhole in Ohio? Honestly, I didn't even hear of cornhole until a few years ago.
The distribution of several pizza chains across the U.S. Red is Pizza Hut.

End Mapapalooza

Can social media save science? No. (But liking Facebook posts can.)

"Underwear is only minimally practical. It might be another layer of warmth, or a device to catch and contain the body’s seepings or inconvenient activity..." (That sounds incredibly practical to me.) From the London Review of books, On Knickers.

Pooping destinations? Next there will be pooping vacations.

As engineers we've all done our share of debugging. But it wasn't directly beneath a fully fueled Saturn V.

Don't know your Meyers-Briggs personality type? Here's another free online implementation of it. (I'm ESTJ but as I age the E is slowly sliding toward an I.)

How to get rich on the internet: solve basic human problems better, faster, and simpler (oops - can't have all three) than anyone else. But what does this guy know? Who's ever heard of Blogger and Twitter?

Why might I be interested in this princess alphabet from Mike BaBoon Design?
They've already righted the wreck but this passenger-shot video from inside the Concordia is still troubling.

Learn yourself some parallel programming with the freely available online textbook Programming on Parallel Machines by U.C. Davis' Norm Matloff. Why stop there? You can learn some OpenGL over at LearnCAx.

Interested in aerospace and defense blogs? Here's a long list of 'em.

Ever wonder about the optimal distance to stand from a painting to fully enjoy it? Seems like it's all a matter of geometry. Of course, Rothko wanted you to get up close to be fully enveloped by the work.

Motivated by mobile devices, promoted by Google, WebP is a new image file format for the web that could replace PNG and JPG. Although it's lossy like JPG it allows transparency like PNG.

I misplace more stuff the older I get. Neptune lost a moon but Naiad has been found again.

I'll leave you with a choice.
  1. Play Full Screen Mario for hours and hours.
  2. Burgers, burgers everywhere.
...are not true fools. ~Zhuangzi

2 comments:

Francis Shivone said...

Always good quotes, btw.

Nothing too surprising about the web-use map...except Japan.

INFP. I am going to do an at home experiment and fill in what I think my wife is and have her do the same for me.

Also, I always like these tests but about 25% of my answers would actually start with "it depends."

On the 40 for over 30. I agree about the numbers. The list was good and I agree for the most part although their box of tools picture could have been more manly. That one looked like something a dad gives his daughter when she goes off to college and which is never used.

John said...

It appears you and I are as opposite as you can get: ESTJ to INFP. However, keep in mind that Meyers-Briggs isn't a value judgement. My wife is scared by the fact that she's the same type as me: ESTJ. And the thing about the questions is that you have to answer quickly with the first thing that comes to you and not over-analyze them.

You're right about the tools. They would've done better by starting with a nice Craftsman set.