Link Banana

A nihilistic counterpoint to the previous post:

What’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception. Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which are larger than you anyhow. No doubt you’ll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don’t think you’ve goofed somewhere along the line, don’t try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as W. H. Auden said, “Believe your pain.” This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you ever is.

(via kottke)

Jessica Hagy knows the secret.

This Economist story’s a bit stale, but I feel a need to document such errata about obscure places.

I had no idea.

(via ToMu)

I think there’s something to Michael Schaffer’s thesis that the burgeoning pet industry owes something to American alienation, but really it’s this statistic — whose statistical rigor I doubt — that got my attention:

A 2001 survey for the American Animal Hospital Association revealed that 83 percent of pet owners call themselves their animal’s “mommy” or “daddy.”

The most interesting part is the list of magnet and sticky states. I’m shocked to see New York at the bottom of their magnetic list. I’d expect NYC would at least make it most magnetic state in the Rust Belt, but I guess not.

(via kottke)

This chart is impeccably executed.

Shirky should be required and regular reading for anyone involved in the transmission of ideas. His latest has a number of good lines. A severely pruned list of the quotes I pulled from it:

“When a 14 year old kid can blow up your business in his spare time, not because he hates you but because he loves you, then you got a problem.”

…the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

The newspaper people often note that newspapers benefit society as a whole. This is true, but irrelevant to the problem at hand; “You’re gonna miss us when we’re gone!” has never been much of a business model.

(via Waxy)

While explaining that “motherfucker” is a popular insult worldwide, Nina Shen Rastogi says that:

Anthropologists note that, across cultures, the most severe insults tend to involve a few basic themes: your opponent’s family, your opponent’s religion, sex, and scatology.

No part of that really surprises me, but I’d just like to congratulate anyone who gets paid to discover stuff like this.

It’s wonky and probably — to most — pretty boring, but I think Nate Silver makes a good point:

The question, of course, is why there isn’t a millionaires tax bracket now … or even a multi-millionaires tax bracket. I haven’t run the numbers, but I’m guessing that if you established a new tax bracket at, say, 40.5 percent, that started at incomes of $1,000,000 or more, this would bring in as much revenue to the government as restoring the $250K tax bracket (which is really $360K now given indexing to inflation) to 39.6 percent, as it was under Clinton.

I enjoyed this trip to the end of a life.

(via DF)

Perhaps it’s just because my opinions on embryos are so close to his, but William Saletan seems to me the most serious liberal writing about these difficult issues. His piece on the way to treat the President’s recent decision to overturn the embryonic stem cell ban is good. This part especially:

The danger of seeing the stem-cell war as a contest between science and ideology is that you bury these dilemmas. You forget the moral problem. You start lying to yourself and others about what you’re doing. You invent euphemisms like pre-embryo, pre-conception, and clonote. Your ethical lines begin to slide.

There is also a follow-up here.

It’s been a while since I’ve paid attention to Tales of Mere Existence. This one, via Andrew Simone, makes me wonder why I stopped.

I’ve noticed that Google now adds to the search results of some searches a timeline of when that term is mentioned in sources — apparently a combination of newspapers, books, and websites. A few observations made using the tool:

• Many events have peaks in ten-year anniversaries of their first happening. See for example: Hiroshima, Apollo 11.
• Recession seems reasonably well correlated with market feelings.
• The historical usage of some terms in interesting. Try for example, piracy and Black Friday.
• “Apollo 13” got a definite boost when the movie came out.
• Some terms show the tool still has bugs. Mesozoic for example. (The peak at 2000BC, for example appears to be caused by a misinterpretation of a citation.)

Obviously the validity of all of these observations is limited by my limited understanding of how the thing works and its bugs.

Jacob Gershman does some investigating into the rash of nonnatural fibers cropping up in processed American foods. As you probably suspected, their health benefits are mostly unproven:

For example, Campbell’s V8 High Fiber, which Liebman calls “high fibber,” claims on its label to offer “20 percent of the recommended daily value” of fiber per 8-ounce glass. As Liebman pointed out in a recent report, the fiber that Campbell’s is talking about is maltodextrin, which she says has not been shown to have “any impact on regularity, or any aspect of digestive health.”

While they obviously have their nontrivial problems, unplanned urban development has some characteristic that unlikely people are praising:

Prince Charles of [Wales], who founded an organization called the Foundation for the Built Environment, praised Dharavi (which he visited in 2003) for its “underlying, intuitive ‘grammar of design’ ” and “the timeless quality and resilience of vernacular settlements.” He predicted that “in a few years’ time such communities will be perceived as best equipped to face the challenges that confront us because they have built-in resilience and genuinely durable ways of living.”

Angus McLeod has made the strangest study-aid I think I’ve ever seen.

(via Strange Maps)

I must restore my balance, view the world in a fair way, hope to inspire more appreciation than ridicule.

A sound goal for us all.

(via Fimoculous)

Though it’s not exceptionally deep (not to mention aged in my Instapaper account for a few months), Sara Dickerman’s story of the cows historical journey from farmer’s field to feedlot and hamburger patty is pretty good.

It reminds me of my argument — which I’ve thus far failed to live up to — that no one should be able to eat meat that hasn’t (at least) watched an animal killed for that purpose in front of them.

Want to send visitors straight to the incessant song in Charlie the Unicorn 2? Now you can:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFCSXr6qnv4#t=3m33s

(via BF)