Cooked food is more digestible than raw food. And not just by a little, but by a lot. Learn how to control fire, use it to cook your food, and you free up extra energy — plus time that would otherwise be spent masticating. Spend that time hunting, and your metabolic equation gets even better.
It’s still unknown exactly why this area — and this area alone — should produce such regular lightning. One theory holds that ionized methane gas rising from the Catatumbo bogs is meeting with storm clouds coming down from the Andes, helping to create the perfect conditions for a lightning storm.
With a total of roughly 1.2 million lightning discharges per year, the Relampago del Catatumbo is thought to be the world’s greatest producer of ozone. As the lightning rips through the air, it produces nitrogen oxide, which is later converted by sunlight into ozone, which ends up in a protective layer high above the planet.
I learned about this storm from the description of a course that Geoff Manaugh is teaching at Columbia about…what would you call it…geoarchitecture?
The studio will be divided into three groups — one designing glaciers, one designing islands, one designing storms. Each group will mix vernacular, non-fossil fuel-based building technologies with what sounds like science fiction in order to explore the fine line between architectural design and the amplified cultivation of natural processes.
Tom Junod says that the key to understanding how Obama governs is to look at how you’d imagine he might raise Sasha and Malia. Specifically, Junod compares the President’s community organization roots with the parenting technique of positive discipline.
You don’t have to win, we were told at the positive-discipline workshop. Your child is not damaged, morally, if your child wins, if the battle is withdrawn, or, better yet, never joined. Our culture has viewed parenthood in terms of decisive moments, but it’s better to view it in terms of development, as a continual process, and to be in it for the long haul. Nothing lies like the moment of truth, and if there’s no powerlessness, then there are fewer power struggles. If your child has a problem with authority, it’s likely that you have a problem with authority, or your lack of it. The answer is to return it to your child in the form of choices, while you set an example. Your example is your authority. Positive discipline does not mean no discipline; it means that discipline is a matter of teaching mutual respect, rather than making your child suffer. “Children do better when they feel better, not worse,” is what it says on my kitchen cabinet, and so when faced with intransigence, parents have to respond by stating their expectations, repeating the rules, and then giving their children the love and support they need to follow them. Always try to include, rather than isolate; avoid labels; don’t negotiate, but don’t escalate, either. If your children are not doing well, either take them out of the situation or remove yourself. You — and they — can always try again.
It is a philosophy that could have been minted by Cass Sunstein, the White House advisor who is developing ways to “nudge” citizens to make the right choices without them being aware of the manipulation. It could serve as a precis for how Obama has dealt with Joe Wilson, not to mention Skip Gates and Sergeant Jim Crowley, not to mention Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who was never threatened but rather told to “think carefully” while answering the protests of the Iranian presidential election with the truncheon and the gallows. One could almost hear Obama saying, “Use your words, Mahmoud. Use your words.”
The piece is interesting throughout, but I particularly liked this observation:
Barack Obama, then, is not the agent of change; he’s the fulfillment of a change that is already occurring culture-wide, in every place but politics. That’s why the Republicans fear him so much; why, while waiting for him to fail, they just come off as the political party for people who want to hit their kids.
Between 1977 and 2002, the percent of the American population eating three or more snacks a day increased to 42 percent from 11 percent.
Also, this is a great use of quotation marks:
Kara Nielsen, a “trendologist” at the Center for Culinary Development, a brand development company in San Francisco, cites the proliferation of activities, from soccer to chess club to tutoring sessions, that now fill children’s afternoons.
That’s actually not a “real” “job”, is it? (via @megnut)
In 1961, surgeon Leonid Rogozov was the only physician stationed on an isolated 12-man Soviet base in Antarctica when he developed appendicitis. He had to remove his appendix himself.
“I didn’t permit myself to think about anything other than the task at hand. It was necessary to steel myself, steel myself firmly and grit my teeth. In the event that I lost consciousness, I’d given Sasha Artemev a syringe and shown him how to give me an injection. I chose a position half sitting. I explained to Zinovy Teplinsky how to hold the mirror. My poor assistants! At the last minute I looked over at them: they stood there in their surgical whites, whiter than white themselves. I was scared too. But when I picked up the needle with the novocaine and gave myself the first injection, somehow I automatically switched into operating mode, and from that point on I didn’t notice anything else.
The most interesting of several infographics related to The Beatles is the first one depicting the declining rate of collaboration within the band gleaned from songwriting credit data.
The whole thing is a perfect snapshot of everything to love and hate about the 1980s: the art bull market, Manhattan, fashion’s hardworking LGBT backbone, and the nature of celebrity in the dawn of the fractured and streaming media world we live in now.
The link above has pointers to downloads of footage from three shows. (via fimoculous)
Well, not so much The Beatles as The Quarrymen, a band formed by John Lennon and some schoolmates that was the precursor to The Beatles. (via @brainpicker)
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist. Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years?) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
Nail on the head. Although I think you can also consider something like “trust” to be stock as well, in which case you can use quality flow to build up stock.
I didn’t think much of this one at first (yet another tower defense game, right?) but the megatower wrinkle helps make Bubble Tanks Tower Defense almost unputdownable.
Oh, and there’s a level with unlimited money to spend on towers and upgrades to defend against unlimited enemies (it’s the last board in the top row). I built up the board as much as I could and let it run overnight. After 10 hours or so, the game got to level 2758 before all 20 lives were gone.
And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.
I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”
I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.
I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.
I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.
If you travelled back in time to 1963 and told everyone that in 2009 the President of the United States is a black man, perhaps only Martin Luther King Jr. would have believed you.
Joan Didion in The Year of Magical Thinking couldn’t throw away her dead husband’s shoes, for fear that he’d need them when he returned. After my grandfather died I used to fantasize that I could call him and he would answer. “Hey buddy,” he’d say. “I was just thinking of you.” But they changed the area code for that part of Pennsylvania, from 215 to 610, sold the house, and got rid of his clothes.
The cops also thought it was wrong to drop the case just because a piece-of-shit famous person might be guilty of shooting a piece-of-shit unfamous person in a piece-of-shit part of the city. If prosecutors required every witness to have a pristine record, one detective says, “most of the cases in the city wouldn’t be solved.” None of the cops doubted for a second that if Harrison was a plumber or a UPS driver instead of a famous athlete, he’d have long since been arrested.
Call it overrated if you’d like, but Ssam Bar is still the only place in NYC (or perhaps the world) where you can eat, using chopsticks, German-inspired cuisine served to you by a native Spanish speaker while drinking a glass of sparkling red wine and listening to 90s hip-hop in a restaurant conceived by an American junior golf champion from Virginia whose parents were from Korea.
And this is what I sometimes worry about: do I put them back on top of the stack? Do I put the bowls back in the empty front spot on the shelf? Because if I do that, then guess which dishes are going to get reached for the next time? That’s right, the same ones.
I think about this every time I put our dishes back in the cupboard. I assumed it was just me and that I was crazy.
I was drawn into Longo’s life through the most improbable of circumstances — after the murders, while on the lam in Mexico, he took on my identity, even though we’d never met. Starting from this bizarre connection, using charm and guile and a steady stoking of my journalist’s natural curiosity (he was innocent, he was framed, he had proof, he would show me), he soon became deeply enmeshed in my own life. In the first year, we exchanged more than a thousand pages of handwritten letters. I wrote a book about him.
After I started a family of my own, I didn’t communicate with Longo anymore. But I was not disentangled from him. I remained haunted by Longo, by what he’d done; nearly every day, as I held my own kids, images of his crime — a child locked in a suitcase, or falling from a bridge, or fighting for air — would flit through my mind and I’d flinch, as if I’d brushed against a hot burner on the stove.
This a brutal read, fascinating in places (especially the economics of death row part) but I have a hard time wrapping my head around what this guy did and how he feels about it.
To ensure it had enough eggs to meet pandemic-level demand, the government invested more than $44 million in the program over five years; more than 35 farms are now involved in this feathered Manhattan Project. No signs advertise the farms’ involvement in the program, and visits from the outside world are discouraged. The government won’t disclose where the farms are located, and the farmers are told to keep quiet about their work — not even the neighbors are to know.
These don’t exactly sound like free-range operations:
After nine months of service, [the chickens] are typically euthanized because they can no longer lay “optimal eggs,” Mr. Robinson said. “They’ve served their government,” he said.
American Pixels is a project by Joerg Colberg that uses jpeg compression algorithms to create compelling images. From the technical notes:
ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting. As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real - so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible - ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.
All sorts of goodies come up during the interview, including master passwords, keeping data after it has been deleted, and the the ubersmart Facebook engineers that you can’t talk to “on a normal level”.
She picked the eight blogs that covered her client’s subject, TV, that she liked the most on a personal level, read them religiously, and only sent them only the content she thought each blog would be into. While the rest of the publicists in her company were sending out mass emails to everyone, hoping to get bites from Perez Hilton, Gawker, HuffPo, or wherever, this publicist focused on a lower traffic tier with the (correct) understanding that these days, content filters up as much as it filters down, and often the smaller sites, with their ability to dig deeper into the internet and be more nimble, act as farm teams for the larger ones. A site can be enormously influential without having crazy eyeballs, because all eyeballs are not equal.
David Grann, the author of The Lost City of Z (which my wife scooped up off the bookshelf the other day and has barely put down since), reports on some new findings that indicate that there was a large civilization that lived in the jungles of the upper Amazon basin.
The latest discovery proves that we are only at the outset of this archeological revolution — one that is exploding our perceptions about what the Amazon and the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus. Parssinen and the other authors of the study in Antiquity write, “This hitherto unknown people constructed earthworks of precise geometric plan connected by straight orthogonal roads… The earthworks are shaped as perfect circles, rectangles and composite figures sculpted in the clay rich soils of Amazonia.”
From the Wikipedia page about the .me domain, the top-level domain for Montenegro:
The dot-ME top level domain replaced the dot-YU (Yugoslavia) domain previously used by Serbia and Montenegro. In addition to declaring .me independent of .yu, a new .rs domain was deployed for Serbian use.
Lemme get this straight…when me was subtracted from you, what’s left over is ours?
5. You are not the best at programming. Live with it. — I always thought that I knew so much about programming, but there is always someone out there better than you. Always. Learn from them.
I doubt I’ll live to 104 and my obituary won’t begin like this:
Joe Rollino once lifted 475 pounds. He used neither his arms nor his legs but, reportedly, his teeth.
Rollino wasn’t even felled by old age. He was killed by a minivan — a fucking Windstar! — while crossing the street in Brooklyn. Here’s the deceased circa 1915 at age 10, already displaying a winning form:
The Morning News just announced the judges and books for their 2010 Tournament of Books — “the one and only March Madness battle royale of literary excellence” — and I am terrified to report that I will be one of the judges and therefore responsible for evaluating the writing (in public!) of some truly excellent authors like Nicholson Baker, Barbara Kingsolver, and the awesomely named Apostolos Doxiadis.
Rachel Loshak is posting two photos a day on her A Year in the Day - 2010 blog; one taken in 2000 and one taken in 2010. The juxtaposition, as they say in the art world, is interesting. (via @ironicsans)
Yes, acceptance is a theme of this photo, as well as all my photos; even the photos I take that capture isolationism have a theme of acceptance, a lack of acceptance. It is the ultimate compliment that this photo not only captured my soul, but yours as well.
The apartment that American writer William S. Burroughs inhabited while he lived in New York has been preserved since his death in 1997. Photographer Peter Ross took some photos of some of the contents, including a worn pair of shoes, some nunchucks, and a book called Medical Implications of Karate Blows.
Well, I bet I’ll go through half a dozen iPhones in the time it would have taken Burroughs to resole those shoes. That makes me feel greedy, wasteful, and self-indulgent. Maybe I’d be better off keeping the modern world out. Maybe we all would. Let’s all just grab our nunchucks, put on our shoes and hat and walk the streets of Manhattan.
Fascinating map of Netflix rental patterns for NYC, Atlanta, Miami, and nine other US cities. I wonder if you could predict voting patterns according to where people rent Paul Blart: Mall Cop or Frost/Nixon. I wonder what the map for Napoleon Dynamite looks like?
Most of the interesting trends occurred on a local scale — stark differences between the South Bronx and Lower Manhattan, for example, or the east and west sides of D.C. — and weren’t particularly telling at a national scale. (We actually generated U.S. maps in PDF form that showed all 35,000 or so ZIPs, but when we flipped through them, with a few exceptions, we found the nationwide patterns weren’t nearly as interesting as the close-in views.)
If you didn’t get a chance to check this out earlier in the week, a friendly reminder: my 100 favorite links of 2009, culled from the archives of kottke.org. Good for killing several hours.
The largest sealed environment ever created, constructed at a cost of $200 million, and now falling somewhere between David Gissen’s idea of subnature — wherein the slow power of vegetative life is unleashed “as a transgressive animated force against buildings” — and a bioclimatically inspired Dubai, Biosphere 2 even included its own one million-gallon artificial sea.
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