Category Archives: tumblr

tumblr

shared content

“

Why do many people think that Facebook, Google, Microsoft and Apple are rivals? They hardly compete directly. Sure, Facebook and Google both sell targeted Web-based advertisements. But they offer such different services that they don’t share a core mission. Apple makes its money selling devices and mobile apps. Microsoft sells computer software and video game consoles. Google makes a free suite of applications that could challenge Microsoft Office. But it has not. Google also runs a social network that no one uses. And it gives away a mobile smartphone operating system. All four seem to be safely in control of distinct missions and markets. They intersect only slightly.

But these companies are not just focused on dominating a particular device or service like your phone or Web search. Short-term revenue and market capitalization only serve to finance their long-term vision. Each is scheming to win the marathon ahead: to become the operating system of your life.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/books/review/fred-vogelsteins-dogfight.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

AS the N.B.A. season gets under way, there is no doubt that the league’s best player is 6-foot-8 LeBron James, of the Miami Heat. Mr. James was born poor to a 16-year-old single mother in Akron, Ohio. The conventional wisdom is that his background is typical for an N.B.A. player. A majority of Americans, Google consumer survey data show, think that the N.B.A. is composed mostly of men like Mr. James. But it isn’t.

I recently calculated the probability of reaching the N.B.A., by race, in every county in the United States. I got data on births from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; data on basketball players from basketball-reference.com; and per capita income from the census. The results? Growing up in a wealthier neighborhood is a major, positive predictor of reaching the N.B.A. for both black and white men.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/in-the-nba-zip-code-matters.html?pagewanted=1&ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

You probably know the scene in Stanley Kubrick’s “Dr. Strangelove”: Slim Pickens, playing the pilot of the B-52 that has been ordered to attack Russia by his bonkers commander, General Ripper, is reviewing the contents of the crew’s survival kit. It contains among other essential items $100 in gold, nylon stockings and “one issue of prophylactics.” At the end of the list he remarks, “Shoot, a fella could have a pretty good weekend in Vegas with all that stuff.”

If you look closely at Pickens’s lips, they seem to be framing something other than the word “Vegas.” Indeed they are: “Dallas.” The first critics’ screening of the new film had been scheduled for Nov. 22, 1963. Unfortunate timing, as it turned out. Kubrick re-dubbed the line, substituting the name of another city where gold, nylon stockings and prophylactics always come in handy. It is said that the original city remains intact in the French-subtitled version. Figurez-vous.

”

– http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/opinion/sunday/a-bad-day-to-die.html?ref=todayspaper

Standard
tumblr

shared content

Psychopathy is a personality disorder that has been variously described as characterized by shallow emotions (in particular reduced fear), stress tolerance, lacking empathy, coldheartedness, lacking guilt, egocentricity, superficial character, manipulativeness, irresponsibility, impulsivity, and antisocial behaviors such as parasitic lifestyle and criminality.

So which professions (other than ax murderer) have the most psychopaths? What about the least?

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Their key finding was that the total number of mutual friends two people share — embeddedness, in social networking terms — is actually a fairly weak indicator of romantic relationships. Far better, they found, was a network measure that they call dispersion.

This yardstick measures mutual friends, but also friends from the further-flung reaches of a person’s network neighborhood. High dispersion occurs when a couple’s mutual friends are not well connected to one another.

…

Their dispersion algorithm was able to correctly identify a user’s spouse 60 percent of the time, or better than a 1-in-2 chance. Since everyone in the sample had at least 50 friends, merely guessing would have at best produced a 1 in 50 chance. The algorithm also did pretty well with people who declare themselves to be “in a relationship,” correctly identifying them a third of the time — a 1 in 3 chance compared with the 1 in 50 for guesswork.

Particularly intriguing is that when the algorithm fails, it looks as if the relationship is in trouble. A couple in a declared relationship and without a high dispersion on the site are 50 percent more likely to break up over the next two months than a couple with a high dispersion, the researchers found. (Their research tracked the users every two months for two years.)

”

– http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/28/spotting-romantic-relationships-on-facebook/?_r=0

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“It wasn’t until after World War II, however, that Halloween costume manufacturing became big business. With the rise of television in the 1950s and the popularity of TV shows such as The Adventures of Superman, Zorro, and Davy Crockett, Ben Cooper obtained the licenses to many of these live-action shows and began mass producing inexpensive representations of them in costume form for less than $3 each, which amounts to about 12 bucks these days. The company distinguished itself with speed: It would rapidly buy rights, produce costumes and get them onto store shelves, which opened a whole new world of costuming to children. By the 1960s, Ben Cooper owned between 70 and 80 percent of the Halloween costume market, offering pretty much any pop culture reference in costume form.”

– http://www.slate.com/articles/life/culturebox/2013/10/ben_cooper_costumes_how_the_popular_plastic_outfits_reinvented_halloween.html

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

The irony of the business of baseball is that the business has a seriousness that the game lacks: the fortune of a billion-dollar company rests on the shoulders of the twenty-five players competing to hold their spots on the roster, and an enormous pride comes with being one of those players. Now that I’ve quit, I will never again find myself in a position where the stakes are so high and I’m held accountable. I miss that the most. But quitting, for me, was still the right move.

A few days into the start of this season, my friend Anthony Rizzo, who plays first base for the Cubs, called me to say that he had told A. J. Burnett that the rookie who broke up his no-hitter had retired. Burnett replied, half joking, “I wish the kid had retired one year earlier.”

Sometimes I wish the same thing. For whatever reason, I was never the sort of player who could enjoy a game, a play, or a hit before moving on to prepare for the next one. It was only after I quit that I wished I hadn’t always kept my head down, relentlessly climbing to reach the top of the game, to fulfill an American dream. I wish I had looked up more often, even at the cost of some of my success. The American dream didn’t tell me that an experience only matters if I acknowledge it, that losing yourself in the game is a good way to lose what makes life meaningful. When you’re standing at the plate and you hit a sharp foul ball to the backstop, the spot on the bat that made contact gets hot; the American dream forgot to tell me to step back and enjoy the smell of burnt wood.

”

– http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2013/10/why-i-quit-major-league-baseball.html

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

In science, the days are long gone when Michael Faraday, who started out as a bookseller’s apprentice, could teach himself enough to revolutionise a field. But “the questions that philosophy asks are questions that my 11-year-old nephew could understand, and I think that’s significant,” says Crane. If there is a God, who made God? But he adds: “Philosophy is a discipline. You’ve got to discipline your thought. It’s not just making stuff up. And disciplining your thought is very hard to achieve.”

Even so, amateurs have managed it. Ludwig Wittgenstein was an engineering student when he began reflecting on philosophy, and if we no longer categorise him as an outsider, that’s only because his work proved so persuasive. Copernicus and Galileo were spurned by the mainstream, but we never hear about the countless outsiders whose ideas rightly sank into obscurity. Anyway, the problem with theories such as Birnbaum’s is not that they’re ridiculous, Crane argues; it’s that they don’t go deep enough. “Lots of philosophers have thought of potential as being something that really exists,” he says. “But if it’s going to explain anything, it has to be something real. And if it’s something real, then it can’t explain how reality itself came into existence.” Philosophy’s darkest question persists.

”

– http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/oct/19/david-birnbaum-jeweller-philosopher

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“Graffiti art, let’s remember, is purposefully one of the less controlled and more transient of art forms. It is inherently communal, whether in the enjoyment or in its genesis and longevity. Performance art, of course, is more fleeting by definition, but both graffiti and performance art take away much of the control from the artist, whether limiting themselves in time or creating a painting that will necessarily be under the community’s control. Both though, tend to raise a strange frustration in people, perhaps because these forms so diverge from our traditional notions of art as eternal, as belonging in a museum. Graffiti takes the city as its canvas, the walls, alleyways, and windows of lived life, an intrusion of art into the stuffiness of the city, but always as part of the city. To then treat it as an objet d’art, to quarantine it off, transforms it and takes it out of its natural and proper context.”

– http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/joe-winkler-objectified/

Standard
tumblr

shared content

“

Why coffee? For starters, it’s the second-largest traded commodity in the world, after oil. Despite heavy marketing efforts, hardly anyone picks a gas station for the brand. But they’ll administer a pistol-whipping over coffee.

Pierre Bourdieu, whose 1979 book Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste is rather impenetrable, had a theory I like:

>

Pour-over coffee—waiting ten minutes for coffee to trickle through a specially-made Japanese funnel—comes to mind. Taste, including the mouth stuff, is completely inseparable from culture. We own no part of our aesthetics. Instead we use preferences to create and understand the social structures we are part of. Hard workers “Run on Dunkin’.” Most Bay Area snob-shops offer a personal coffee experience, each cup made just for you.

But as soon as the middle class latches onto the favorites of the rich and famous, the wealthy move on.

Starbucks worked for awhile, with its grande/venti code and delightfully artsy interior. But lattes haven’t been enough for years; even McDonald’s serves them now. Where to go but snobbier precincts?

”

– http://www.theawl.com/2013/10/what-does-your-coffee-say-about-you-and-is-it-something-terrible

Standard