Hypothetical question: You’re heartsick about global warming, so you’ve just paid $25,000 to put a solar system on the roof of your home. How do you respond to news that it was manufactured with a chemical that is 17,000 times stronger than carbon dioxide as a cause of global warming?

I’d probably say, “Really!? Wow. That sucks. Is there any replacement.” To which the article says nothing.

(via Ideas)

Another reason to like Louis CK.

(via Jack Shedd)

These bits always interesting me. For example, I had no idea that the iPod name came from 2001. (Assuming I’m willing to trust CIO magazine.)

As Deron summarizes: Seeing attractive women in magazines makes men more self-conscious and less inclined to ask a woman out.

From the department of absurd comparisons comes this:

The odds of landing a part-time job at department store operator Bealls Outlet Stores Inc. this holiday season are slimmer than getting into Harvard: It’s one out of every 45.

Don’t think the chances are any better at 7-Eleven. One California store received more than 100 applicants in a week and a half for jobs that pay $8.50 per hour - and the retailer doesn’t even usually hire holiday workers.

(via Tomorrow Museum)

That’s my response to this thoroughly boring etymology of the word.

The origins of “meh” are murky, but the term grew in popularity after being used in a 2001 episode of “The Simpsons” in which Homer suggests a day trip to his children Bart and Lisa.
“They both just reply ‘meh’ and keep watching TV,” said Cormac McKeown, head of content at Collins Dictionaries.

(via Mr. Coates)

Truly living up to it’s name, Strange Maps offers the stunning overlay of those areas that were the greatest cotton producers in 1860 — and thus had the largest slave populations — and those areas most strongly for the election of Barack Obama. Proof that if nothing else, history lives on.

Also, I’d love to hear some theories about that high-producer on Tennessee’s southern border that’s now solidly red. Is that a city? — my geography of the South is pretty bad.

To address this problem, I looked for a pun to make this post worth writing. I didn’t find it, but I still find Simon Pegg’s argument against running zombies to be fairly compelling.

More significantly, the fast zombie is bereft of poetic subtlety. As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.

Like Mr. Kottke, I’d never considered the meaning of “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”

The final line, “Life is but a dream,” is perhaps the most meaningful. With a religious point of view, life and the physical plane may be regarded as having equivalent value as that of a dream, such that troubles are seen in the context of a lesser reality once one has awakened. Conversely, the line can just as equally convey nihilist sentiments on the meaninglessness of man’s actions

Perhaps the most interesting thing about this little project — taking pictures of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. in different cities across the United States — is that not two years ago someone would have had to visit all of these places to be able to compile it.