Oh man, this sounds familiar:
Do you suffer Computer Back? I do. Mine is caused by the terrible habit of hunching over the laptop while also curling my legs under the chair in a sort of corkscrewed position that is osteomuscularly nightmarish but somehow conducive to concentration. When I stand up I look like a stooped, slightly concerned turtle.
My chiropractor calls it “laptop neck”. I’ll definitely be trying some of these exercises.
The balls on this guy must be huge. The biography for Kim Kardashian on IMDB begins:
Kim Kardashian is emblematic of the shallowness of American culture in the first two decades of the new millennium. While some cultural critics call her the prime avatar of the “famous for being famous” faux celebrity crowd, she along with Paris Hilton is a new breed of cat whose celebrity comes from the release of a sex tape and the canny exploitation of the resulting publicity.
It’s been taken down by IMDB, but the linked post has a screen capture. (As “Ben Thoma” in the comments points out, bonus points for the algorithm that chose an ad for a Kia with “class-leading trunk space”.)
(Via @thecajunboy)
At the intersection of pop music, grammar nits, and rapping white nerds you’ll find this excellent way to spend two minutes.
(Via @GourmetSpud)
Jeff Atwood has put together a convenient list of ways to spend money in ways that will make you happier (all backed up by science!). The advice is all golden, and summarized well:
3. Buy many small pleasures instead of few big ones
Because we adapt so readily to change, the most effective use of your money is to bring frequent change, not just "big bang" changes that you will quickly grow acclimated to. Break up large purchases, when possible, into smaller ones over time so that you can savor the entire experience. When it comes to happiness, frequency is more important than intensity. Embrace the idea that lots of small, pleasurable purchases are actually more effective than a single giant one.
Atwood references a paper co-authored by Dan Gilbert, whose excellent Stumbling on Happiness is a real eye-opener on human perception, emotion, and happiness. Highly recommended.
Yes, taxes. No right-minded American likes them, right? Well…
First up, this history of the income tax from Planet Money explains that Americans are relatively all right with paying their taxes. At least, we’re not a place like Greece where almost everyone dodges their taxes.
But (linked from that post) you must watch this Disney propoganda film commissioned by the Treasury Department from 1943 when almost everyone had to start paying income taxes. It has Donald Duck learning that it’s his patriotic duty (“Taxes to beat the Axis!”) to fill out the new simplified tax form (“Dependents: Huey, Dewie, and Louie”). It’s amazing.
Next up, an essay from Mike Dang at The Billfold about how he likes paying his taxes:
This is the social contract, isn’t it? We’ve all agreed to not kill each other, and to protect one another from harm. I love this country that we live, and I want all of us to prosper. I think that these are goals that we all share, and I am happy to pay my fair share help us get to a place where everyone in my community is safe and cared for.
And, more forcefully, Stephen King would like you to raise his fucking taxes:
Mitt Romney has said, in effect, “I’m rich and I don’t apologize for it.” Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want—those who aren’t blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money—is for you to acknowledge that you couldn’t have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it’s not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It’s un-fucking-American is what it is. I don’t want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that—sorry, kiddies—you’re on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay—not to give, not to “cut a check and shut up,” in Governor Christie’s words, but to pay—in the same proportion. That’s called stepping up and not whining about it. That’s called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn’t cost their beloved rich folks any money.
Preach!
/raises lighter
/no one else raises their lighter
I guess we don’t do that for tax policy?
Back in the day, Thursday nights were the best nights because they were the nights where we all drank a bottle of wine and watched The O.C.. So this video made me happy.
(Via Warming Glow)
Trevor Butterworth at The Awl looks into the firing of Elizabeth Flock, a writer at the Washington Post’s blogPOST news aggregator. He’s sympathetic to her, and quietly vicious to pageview-seeking aggregation machines run by companies that actually do real journalism.
The whole operation functions smoothly as long as the blogger-journalist doesn’t make a mistake, because a mistake draws attention to the inherent cheapness of the product and the ethical dubiety of the entire process. You see, the Post—or any legacy news organization turned aggregator—wants to have its cake and other people’s cake too, and to do so without damaging its brand as a purveyor of original cake.
You can see the problem: the more pageviews you seek, the more the work turns to drudgery; but the more it becomes drudgery, the more exacting it becomes to protect the integrity of the aggregation process, and, with it, the Post's brand. […]
Call me a sentimental old English major, but if you read through Ms. Flock’s work you can practically feel this young journalist's desperation to write something—anything—that wasn’t first written, hours or minutes earlier, by someone else.
I don’t have to do this sort of thing full-time – thank the heavens – but the few times when I do have to regurgitate some PR babble for a little blog post at work, it is drudgery. It’s a challenge to rephrase things in a way that isn’t outright plagiarism that also masks your contempt for the task. You start to understand why many people just copy-paste the press releases and call it “news”: it's more honest, in its own way.
Michael Johnston at The Online Photographer reminds skittish Canon owners that they can step back from the ledge because the relatively poor DxOMark image quality score of the new 5D Mark III really doesn’t matter:
This has resulted in a whole generation of photographers who have been constantly reinforced in the notion that "image quality" is an essential building-block of a successful photograph. Actually, it isn't. Actually, it isn't at all. One can find examples of anything, and I'm sure you can find examples of photographs that "work" primarily because of resolution or color accuracy, but most simply don't. You could also find examples of just as many photographs, if not more, that work primarily because of poor image quality or lower resolution or color inaccuracy.
The ReadyNAS NV+ is vastly more complicated than it appears. It takes a lot of effort to get it working. Even if you get it working, it's often so slow that it seems like it isn't working. And if you let it work, it will do things that you probably didn't expect. Troubleshooting it is like whacking a piñata only to find that it's filled with onions and having to unpeel them only to find more goddamn onions. It will make you feel stupid for buying it.
Otherwise, highly recommended. Read on.
I just mentioned how much I admire Wirecutter, but I’ve also been enjoying another site on The Awl’s network: The Billfold. From their About page:
The Billfold aims to do away with the misbelief that talking about difficult money issues is uncomfortable, and create a space to have an honest conversation about how we save, spend and repay our debts. We are going to break one of the last taboos in our culture — talking about what you earn, what you spend, what you owe.
Here are some of the articles I enjoyed just this week:
My experience with a lot of personal finance sites is that they often come off kind of smug and know-it-all-y, and Billfold doesn’t come off that way at all – that’s a good thing. Definitely recommended.
I’ve cackled before at Best Buy’s woes, so of course I was going to enjoy Farhad Manjoo’s suggestions for how they could (maybe) turn themselves around by stocking much fewer items:
Why would going small work for Best Buy? Because big has become the domain of the Web. There once was a time when massive selection was a key differentiator in physical stores—the more stuff you stocked, the more likely you were to appeal a wider range of customers. But now, no matter how many TVs Best Buy keeps in stock, its selection will never match that of Web retailers. If you’re the type of customer who studies every 32-inch set before choosing one, you’re not likely to bother with a store.
I wonder if there’s an opening in the market for an electronics store that’s like a physical version of The Wirecutter: we’ve only got one TV, but they’ve done all the research and are reasonably sure it’s the best for most people. <Troll>You know, like an Apple Store for things not made by Apple</troll>.
Riveting piece by Jessica Grose on Slate about the investigation of two related deaths in Yellowstone that also asks important questions about our relationship with nature.
Also worth reading is a follow-up interview on The Awl.
This is a great look at the designer of Braid, with a peek at his next project. Blow doesn’t have nice things to say about most video games.
Once, during an online discussion about the virtues of short game-playing experiences, Blow wrote, “Gamers seem to praise games for being addicting, but doesn’t that feel a bit like Stockholm syndrome?” His entire public demeanor forms a challenge to the genre’s intellectual laziness. Blow is the only developer on the planet who gives lectures with titles like “Video Games and the Human Condition,” the only one who speaks of Italo Calvino’s influence on his work, and the only one to so rile up the gamer community with his perceived pretentiousness that the popular gamer blog Kotaku used him as the centerpiece of a post titled “When You Love the Game But Not Its Creator.”
The profile also appears to crack the meaning of Braid, if that’s been bothering you.
Logan Sachon has some bad advice but he presents a compelling list:
Things That Seem More Likely To Me Than Growing Old And Having No Money or Means To Get Money
A planet colliding with our planet
An asteroid colliding with our planet
Gamma rays
Winning the lottery
Rising sea levels wipe out eastern seaboard
Tsunami wipes out eastern seaboard
Worldwide economic collapse
Plane crash
Writing a thing and getting it optioned for a zillion dollars
War with China
War with Iran
War with North Korea
War with anyone, really
No, you're crying at work!
Roger Cicala at Lensrentals.com, err, nails it (sorry):
Hammerguru: Justgotmine – looking at your images those are pretty long nails. Were you using good technique with a nail stabilizer? It also seems the hammer wasn’t lined up square to the target. It’s impossible for us to help you if you don’t eliminate all the other variables. It could be the hammer, could be the nails, could be technique.
(This has been everywhere, but I first saw it from Tim Bray, retweeted by Jeff Atwood)
Probability. Mitt Romney’s political viewpoints can be expressed only in terms of likelihood, not certainty. While some views are obviously far less likely than others, no view can be thought of as absolutely impossible. Thus, for instance, there is at any given moment a nonzero chance that Mitt Romney supports child slavery.
(Via Will Saletan)
I love eye-banging the Feltron report as much as anybody, but I totally agree with this essay by Robert Krulwich that asserts that all this data doesn’t really tell us a lot:
Of course numbers and patterns tell us truths, real truths about the world and about ourselves. No doubt. But what you see, over and over, is activity. Here's what I did, did next, did after that. It's outside stuff, not inside stuff.
Worth reading in its entirety.
Thoughtful piece by Mat Honan at Gizmodo about how Google is slowly eroding our trust in them:
Google is far bigger now, and far less susceptible to the whims of the public. But I hope that, to some extent, it is still listening. Because the case against Google is for the first time starting to outweigh the case for it.
The post office is more than a bunch of buildings — it's a community center and, for many towns, an essential part of the local identity, as well as a tangible link to the rest of the nation. As former Sen. Jennings Randolph poignantly observed, "When the local post office is closed, the flag comes down." The corporatizer crowd doesn't grasp that going after this particular government program is messing with the human connection and genuine affection that it engenders.
I don’t like waiting in line either, but people that really hate the USPS drive me bonkers. As if that 45¢ first-class stamp isn’t a screaming deal.
Still, time marches on. And while mail is definitely not cool, it is gnarly! Ooh, another Daily Show video!
I enjoyed the hell out of this video covering the USA Memory Championships. The event is interesting by itself, but then Jerry O’Connell shows up! And David Pogue!
Competitors call themselves “mental athletes” or “mentaletes”. I guess “methletes” sent the wrong message.
INTERNET, I THOUGHT WE HAD AGREED THAT APRIL FOOLS IS STUPID AND FOR STUPID PEOPLE AND EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE TO CONFINE THE STUPIDITY TO ONE DAY, APRIL FIRST, AND NOT DO ANYTHING BEFOREHAND. God, I hate April Fools Day. Fuck you.
Seriously, trust nothing you read tomorrow.
