An interesting new study suggests people who are extremely active are happier than people who sit idle.
The finding may explain why people confess to being so incredibly busy in today’s society.
(via emilyposts » psychotherapy)
“I need you to take on a contract for me,” Watanabe says. “But in this case, instead of coordinating a facilitative approach in the light of the client’s tactical aims, you will take a prescriptive approach in implanting strategic objectives as part of a processual intervention in executive leadership.”
“I’ve done that before, as a junior associate, but it’s dangerous,” DiCaprio says with raspy wistfulness. He has a vision of privatized British hospitals crumbling into a foamy sea. “But the only way to do it is to infiltrate the client’s internal management consulting group to convince the board that it’s their own strategic objectives they’re implementing.”
Brilliant.
(via kottke)
“This sauce is really good,” she said. “It’s so Jean-Georges. He does this French-and-Asian thing.” She warned me that she would need a few seconds to figure out its precise ingredients. (She refused to divulge them, on the ground that Vongerichten would consider the recipe “a trade secret.” I later learned from one of the waiters that the ingredients include powdered English mustard and soy sauce.) “It’s so complex,” she said. “It makes me smile.”
The New Yorker goes undercover with a Michelin food critic, whose mere existence is so secretive that the author is forced to refer to her as M, which is the initial of a name that isn’t even hers.
I couldn’t help but think constantly of Anton Ego, the food critic nemesis in Pixar’s Ratatouille, while reading this article.
(via givemesomethingtoread)
So I just started watching this little show called Lost… It’s really good! I wonder why I hear so little about this show—as always I’m two steps ahead of the mainstream…
Okay, fine. I have been meaning to watch Lost for the longest time but I just never got around to it. This changed when I got my iPad several weeks ago and downloaded the ABC Player app which let me stream all six seasons for free. I’m only a handful of episodes into the second season but already I’m hopelessly addicted.
To be honest, I’m quite surprised by how good Lost is. I’ve been conditioned by moronic network producers that the popularity of shows has a direct inverse relationship with how great they are. Out of my favorite shows—Pushing Daisies, Arrested Development, Mad Men, Flight of the Conchords, My So-Called Life, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, to name a few—none had much luck attracting mainstream viewership, and all but a few were unceremoniously yanked off the air because of it. So for Lost to be as awesome as it is and stay on ABC for six seasons is just mind-blowing to me. They are, after all, the network that canceled Pushing Daisies.
But I digress. This whole Dharma Initiative storyline is just incredible. I especially love the stark black and white iconography that makes up the highly distinctive Dharma brand. Check out these fantastic food labels.
Interesting article in the NYT:
Professor Vedder likes to ask why 15 percent of mail carriers have bachelor’s degrees, according to a 1999 federal study. “Some of them could have bought a house for what they spent on their education,” he said.
I’m not going to lie—I mainly blogged this just to see how well I can do it on my iPad. In case you’re wondering, it’s wonderful.
Instead of praising the iPad, critics express their disappointment, because they expected more. They expected a genre buster. They expected something they’d never seen before, something beyond their imagination. Something revolutionary.
They’re disappointed that the iPad is so… well… unsurprising.
Therein, of course, lies the genius.
One of the best essays on why the iPad will be legendary when Apple’s previous attempt—the adorable yet ahead-of-its-time Newton—was not.
List posts are bad*, but this is a good article—the points are all very well elucidated, so don’t lynch me.
- Men like blond bombshells (and women want to look like them)
- Humans are naturally polygamous
- Most women benefit from polygyny, while most men benefit from monogamy
- Most suicide bombers are Muslim
- Having sons reduces the likelihood of divorce
- Beautiful people have more daughters
- What Bill Gates and Paul McCartney have in common with criminals
- The midlife crisis is a myth—sort of
- It’s natural for politicians to risk everything for an affair (but only if they’re male)
- Men sexually harass women because they are not sexist
So the next time your girlfriend catches you gaping at an attractive, blond bombshell on the street, just remind her that you can’t help it—it’s just human nature. That will dull the pain from the slaps across the face you’ll likely be receiving. Science is awesome.
NPR’s Laura Lorson:
Love may be patient and love may be kind, but really, love’s not at its best in the middle of February. February is kind of the dark night of the soul of cohabitational relationships. February is when even Tristan and Isolde are getting on each other’s nerves. Isolde finds herself saying things like, “I really wish you wouldn’t leave your snowy, salty boots to drip melt water all over our living room carpet,” and Tristan fires back with, “Wow, you really sound like your mother when you get angry.” And then someone ends up sleeping on the couch with the dogs—hypothetically speaking, of course.
In my world, romance and love are very different things. If love is a diamond, romance is rhinestones. Love abides; romance is a squatter on the run from a collection agency. Romance likes that it has a holiday where it’s the center of attention. Love isn’t all that interested; love’s got bigger fish to fry. Romance will ply you with whispers and compliments; love is busy fixing your leaky roof and taking out the trash.
I don’t understand all the fuss behind Valentine’s Day either. It’s my birthday—shoutout to all my other 1988 Valentine’s Day babies!—but otherwise it’s a fairly gloomy day, a day in which the winter hasn’t released its grip, trees are still bare, and scarves still wrapped around necks. I can’t think of a worst time to celebrate ‘love’, or even the fake, forced ‘romance’ the article talks about.
Fantastic article.
An hour and a half after waking, early birds and night owls were equally alert and showed no difference in attention-related brain activity. But after being awake for 10 and a half hours, night owls had grown more alert, performing better on a reaction-time task requiring sustained attention and showing increased activity in brain areas linked to attention. More important, these regions included the suprachiasmatic area, which is home to the body’s circadian clock. This area sends signals to boost alertness as the pressure to sleep mounts. Unlike night owls, early risers didn’t get this late-day lift. Peigneux says faster activation of sleep pressure appears to prevent early birds from fully benefiting from the circadian signal, as evening types do.
Personally, I can stay awake 16 to 20 hours a day whether I wake up at 7 AM or 12 PM. But I do notice I’m considerably more tired at the end of the day when I wake up early than the times I wake up later.
Too bad most of the article is hidden behind a pay wall. And if the Financial Times’ editor Lionel Barber is to be believed, this will not be the only instance—in fact, he predicts that “almost all” news organizations will be charging for online content within a year. While I understand and accept news corporations’ reasons for doing so, I have to side with John Gruber on this issue, who claims it is “a fundamentally flawed strategy” to charge for online content:
A dollar for a newspaper or a few bucks for a glossy magazine feels like a fair price for a copy. Trees have been cut, presses have been rolled, trucks have been driven to get that copy into your hands.
What feels like a fair price for a copy of a web page, on the other hand, is nothing. They’re just ones and zeroes.
Let’s hope Lionel Barber is wrong and Gruber is right, and that we should never see too many ridiculous pay walls blocking online content.
Edit: Uh oh. The Wall Street Journal today announced that it will begin charging for mobile access to its news content starting October 24th. As Gruber-Yoda would say, “Not victory, Obi-Wan. The shroud of the Dark Side has fallen. Begun, this News-corporations-paywalling-online-content War has.”
Welcome to Your Quarterlife Crisis
Imagine a day in the life of a couple you probably know. He’s 27 years old, and she’s 26. They wake up beside each other in his downtown bachelor apartment and have sex that neither of them particularly enjoys. They’ve been sort-of dating for a while now, but they’re not willing to commit to each other: he likes her, but doesn’t know if he always will. She can’t decide if she likes him more or less than the other two guys she’s sleeping with.
He bikes to work at an advertising agency, where he uses his master’s in English to proofread ad copy, and spends several hours reading music blogs and watching movie trailers, periodically Twittering updates about his workday to his 74 followers. He doesn’t really hate his job, but feels as if his skin is crawling with vermin most of the time that he’s there, so he has a plan to move to Thailand, or to maybe write a book. Or go to law school.
Interesting feature on the “Quarterlife Crisis”, the feeling of ennui and listlessness among urban, middle-class, well-educated twentysomethings.
I haven’t quite made it to my mid-twenties yet, but I can already relate to several issues mentioned in the article. Well worth your time to read.
Darth Vader Jesus – “I find your lack of faith disturbing”
[via friendlyatheist»heavingdeadcats]
Started following Friendly Atheist for the laffs. I have no problems with others following their own religious beliefs and keeping it to themselves, but what I can’t stand are those that preach and spread their religious beliefs as if non-believers are just waiting for people like them to ‘save them’.
I was raised in a secular household in New York City where religion and intelligent design are rightfully kept out of classrooms—unlike in other parts of the country—and attended a high school that specializes in mathematics and science, a place where I’d estimate 75% of students are agnostic or atheistic. I truly believe proper education and modern scientific discoveries completely nullify religion and any ‘higher being’ beliefs, a theory which sadly seems to indicate much of the United States is poorly educated.
by Shine from Yahoo! [via dearmary]
“Nick” in TV Guide’s Ask Matt rant/rave/questions roundup on Pushing Daisies’ untimely cancellation on ABC.
I highly recommend reading the whole roundup because it contains possibly the most fair, levelheaded, and reasonable discussion of show-canceling politics I read anywhere.
“Nick”—no last name given—doesn’t blame the low-brow nature of today’s TV series and reality shows, but rather the stupid people who choose to watch, and thus support, these inane, juvenile ‘other’ shows. It isn’t the fault of the networks if they’re just producing and greenlighting reality shows and other forms of cheap entertainment when that’s exactly what are attracting viewers and their valuable eyeballs. You can’t blame the networks for canceling our great but hardly watched shows to make room for dimwitted but eyeball-friendly shows when we the viewers—as a whole at least—actually seem to prefer the latter? And as Nick so succinctly writes, that’s what’s saddest and scariest of all.