The Humble Weekly Sale, featuring Jim Guthrie & friends (pay what you want and help charity)
Pay what you want for 11 breathtaking albums, a game, & a movie, all while supporting vital charities!
Oh cool! Purchased.
Continue readingLawrence Lessig on Government Spying
Lawrence Lessig and Bill Moyers explore how we can protect our privacy when Big Government and Big Business morph into Big Brother.
Larry and Bill discuss the real issue at hand, which is how to arrive at a surveillance operation that protects civil liberties. The discussion should not be centered around Snowden, whether he’s a traitor, where he’s holed up, or what kind of person he is. That should be the least of our concerns, and is a total distraction.
Continue readingUsing eval for blazing JavaScript performance
Great video. Blows my mind that string concatenation + eval is faster than object/hash creation + repeated modification.
Now I see why. I’ve run an experiment here.
Continue readingGrasshopper lands
A ten story tall rocket hovers in the air and then returns safely to the launch pad. The future is now, and I’m amazed.
Continue readingRoderick on existential terror
What I realized in that moment was that the lights of the city, the electric light, has formed a kind of dome over the cities where we live. And it is a protective dome, a protective shield, that shields us from full awareness of how deep and infinite space is. So we sit in our cities, and our electric lights have blanked out the sky, for us, and we no longer have first-hand experience of the existential terror that is available to you at any point in time if you just try and spend one night outside on the beach or in the forest.
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Roderick on self-hatred
The route to thinking about, caring for, and contributing to, the happiness of other people, is found by first loving oneself. Continuous, inward-facing self-hatred helps no one.
That’s my paraphrase of John’s sentiment from Roderick on the Line episode 60, at about 1:08:00. He points specifically to the northwest during the grunge era. But that form of self-reflection continues to this day inside of chronic self-deprecants, of which I have too often been one. Recovering.
Continue readingJohn Hartford - Austin Minor Sympathy
Japan's incredible shrinking building
Guessing you’d have to construct the skyscraper with this capability initially, with a “cap” at the top that can be lowered as each level below it is dismantled. Very cool.
Continue readingThank You, Liz Lemon, for Being You
“She’s the type who can yell at her male boss and put him in his place, she’s the type who goes to bat for her friends, she’s the type who goofs around by pretending that a toy train is her robot penis and will wolf down entire sandwich in front of a TSA agent so she doesn’t have to throw it away before going through security.”
Blerg.
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