Eclecticism

Sometime between June 9th and June 18th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Lunch Shop for Ironworkers Rises With Skyscraper: "The restaurant, a Subway franchise, opened its door on Wednesday at the top of the steel honeycomb that forms 1 World Trade Center, the skyscraper rising at ground zero. The building will be the city's tallest when finished in 2013, and the sandwich shop, currently sitting on the 27th floor, will rise along with it."
• Who Is the Best Soccer Player at the World Cup? Science Has the Answer.: "The key was identifying the real objective in a soccer game isn't so much scoring goals as it is moving the ball away from your own goal and towards the opposing team's, thereby maximizing your team's scoring opportunities. As such, players that are successful in maintaining possession of the ball for their team maximize their team's chances of success."
• Modify the Look of the Safari 5 Reader Function: "Safari 5 introduces the Safari Reader feature, for selecting article bodies to make reading and printing easier. I started looking around for where this new Reader functionality lives to see if it was customizable and I found that it is."
• Leviticans: "I would like to make the suggestion that there is an entire class of self-identified 'Christians' who are not Christian at all, in the sense that they don't follow the actual teachings of Christ in any meaningful way. Rather these people nod toward Christ in a cursory fashion on their way to spend time in the bloodier books of the Bible (which tend to be found in the Old Testament), using the text selectively as a support for their own hates and prejudices, using the Bible as a cudgel rather than a door. That being the case, I suggest we stop calling these people Christians and start calling them something that befits their faith, inclinations and enthusiasms. I say we call them Leviticans, after Leviticus, the third book of the Old Testament, famous for its rules, and also the home of the passages most likely to be thrown out by Leviticans to justify their intolerance."
• Gallery: Digitizing the Past and Present at the Library of Congress: "The Library of Congress has nearly 150 million items in its collection, including at least 21 million books, 5 million maps, 12.5 million photos and 100,000 posters. The largest library in the world, it pioneers both preservation of the oldest artifacts and digitization of the most recent–so that all of it remains available to future generations. I recently took a tour of two LoC departments that exemplify this mission: the Preservation Research and Testing Division in Washington, D.C., and the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Va. The library's preservation specialists use the latest technology to study and scan ancient books, maps and other historical artifacts."

Sometime between June 7th and June 9th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• The Story Behind the Recycled Newspaper Prop: "Brow Beat has learned that the prop comes from a small newspaper prop company called the Earl Hays Press in Sun Valley, Calif. Started in 1915, Earl Hays is one of the oldest newspaper prop companies, and the paper in question was first printed in the 1960s (note the top-hat ad on the lower left), then offered as a 'period paper,' better suited for Mad Men (where it has not appeared) than Scrubs (where it has)."
• Copyright: The Elephant in the Middle of the Glee Club: "The fictional high school chorus at the center of Fox's Glee has a huge problem — nearly a million dollars in potential legal liability. For a show that regularly tackles thorny issues like teen pregnancy and alcohol abuse, it's surprising that a million dollars worth of lawbreaking would go unmentioned. But it does, and week after week, those zany Glee kids rack up the potential to pay higher and higher fines."
• Study: Secondhand Smoke May Affect Mental Health: "researchers at University College of London have quantified another health risk for those exposed to secondhand smoke: mental-health ills. In a study of 8,155 men and women in the Scottish Health survey, published in the Archives of General Psychiatry, researchers led by Mark Hamer at University College of London documented a 50% greater risk of psychological distress in nonsmokers with the highest levels of nicotine residue in their blood, compared with those with the lowest levels."
• How to Send Your Face to Space: "NASA wants to put your face in space. No, really: Just in time for the last two space shuttle flights, NASA is offering to fly pictures of anyone who uploads a head shot on their Face in Space website to the International Space Station."
• Kids of Lesbians Have Fewer Behavioral Problems, Study Suggests: "A nearly 25-year study concluded that children raised in lesbian households were psychologically well-adjusted and had fewer behavioral problems than their peers. The study, published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, followed 78 lesbian couples who conceived through sperm donations and assessed their children's well-being through a series of questionnaires and interviews. Children from lesbian families rated higher in social, academic and total competence. They also showed lower rates in social, rule-breaking, aggressive problem behavior."

Sometime between May 29th and June 6th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• After 10 Years, Experience Music Project Is Still Perplexing: "After 10 years on the Seattle cityscape, billionaire Paul Allen's Experience Music Project still generates controversy. Everyone agrees that the rock museum's design is unique and its construction was a technical marvel, but there's little agreement about whether it's beautiful or ugly. World-famous architect Frank Gehry said the building was meant to celebrate the sometimes chaotic process of creating the kind of music it's devoted to, but critics still say it's just too odd."
• How You Can Live Like a Vulcan Without Bleeding Green: "…let's face it – Vulcans are way cooler than Jedi or Na'vi anyway. (At least if you ignore Star Trek: Enterprise, which you really, really should.) Vulcans are quite possibly the most fully realized alien race television or movies have ever created, and not just because they have a complex culture and history. Vulcans have something most made-up races can only dream of: a central contradiction that's ultra-compelling. They're overflowing cauldrons of passion, who have mastered their emotions to such a high degree they appear almost robotic. No matter how pissed off or freaked out you might ever get, you can't be as hot-blooded as a Vulcan. And you'll have to work pretty hard to be half as cool."
• Google Ditches Windows on Security Concerns: "'We're not doing any more Windows. It is a security effort,' said one Google employee. 'Many people have been moved away from [Windows] PCs, mostly towards Mac OS, following the China hacking attacks,' said another. New hires are now given the option of using Apple's Mac computers or PCs running the Linux operating system."
• Facebook: Privacy Problems and PR Nightmare: "One gets the impression that Facebook doesn't take any of this stuff very seriously. It just views the complaints as little fires that need to be put out. The statements Facebook issues aren't meant to convey any real information – they're just blasts from a verbal fire extinguisher, a cloud of words intended not to inform, but to smother. Just keep talking, the idea seems to be, and it doesn't matter what you say. In fact the more vapid and insincere you can be, the better. Eventually the world will get sick of the sound of your voice, and the whiners will give up and go away."
• Presidential Proclamation–Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month: "NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim June 2010 as Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Pride Month. I call upon all Americans to observe this month by fighting prejudice and discrimination in their own lives and everywhere it exists."

Sometime between May 25th and May 28th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• Today’s College Students Lack Empathy: "College students today are less likely to 'get' the emotions of others than their counterparts 20 and 30 years ago, a new review study suggests. Specifically, today's students scored 40 percent lower on a measure of empathy than their elders did. The findings are based on a review of 72 studies of 14,000 American college students overall conducted between 1979 and 2009. 'We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,' said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research."
• Is Queen’s "Invisible Man" the Best Scifi Music Video of All Time? Yes.: "How awesome is the music video for 'The Invisible Man'? Let's just say that if there was a machine that could quantify awesomeness, this machine would be built of dinosaur bones and powered by the inchoate yalps of happy babies. Here's the music video – we'll dissect its scenes and themes below."
• Republicans’ New Web Site Not Exactly What They Hoped It Would Be: "The Web site filters out obscenity and the like, but it hasn't kept out hundreds of ideas: some serious, some offensive and some so wacky they surely must be Democratic sabotage. 'Let kids vote!' recommended one. 'Let's make a 'Social Security Lotto,' ' proposed another. 'What dope came up with the idea of criminalizing a parent's right to administer corporal punishment?' a third demanded. Some contributors demanded action to uncover conspiracies involving the 9/11 attacks and the 'NEW WORLD ORDER.' One forward thinker recommended that we 'build the city of the future somewhere in a non-inhabit part of the United States, preferably the desert.'"
• Ten of the Greatest Maps That Changed the World: "From the USSR's Be On Guard! map in 1921 to Google Earth, a new exhibition at the British Library charts the extraordinary documents that transformed the way we view the globe forever"
• Is Texting [or using a cellphone] Legal if I’m at a Stoplight?: No, and after June 10th, you can get cited: "'Even though you are stopped, you're still in physical control of the automobile, which would require you at a moment's notice to take off,' State Patrol Sgt. Freddy Williams said. 'Are you going to stop texting immediately when the light turns green?'"

Sometime between May 21st and May 23rd, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• After Keeping Us Waiting for a Century, Mark Twain Will Finally Reveal All: "The creator of Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn and some of the most frequently misquoted catchphrases in the English language left behind 5,000 unedited pages of memoirs when he died in 1910, together with handwritten notes saying that he did not want them to hit bookshops for at least a century. That milestone has now been reached, and in November the University of California, Berkeley, where the manuscript is in a vault, will release the first volume of Mark Twain's autobiography. The eventual trilogy will run to half a million words, and shed new light on the quintessentially American novelist."
• Cripple Crab Crutch: "A two-disc album of spoken word mash-ups. Source materials ranging from the paranormal, the historical, the literary, the scholarly, the philosophical and religious, film excerpts, strange old recordings, radio shows, comedy, and an old Disneyland attraction."
• The Swinger: "The Swinger is a bit of python code that takes any song and makes it swing. It does this be taking each beat and time-stretching the first half of each beat while time-shrinking the second half. It has quite a magical effect."
• 10 Days in a Carry-on: "Heather Poole, a flight attendant from Los Angeles, demonstrated how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on."
• The Pirate Bay | Cracked.com: "The Pirate Bay is the largest torrent website in the world. According to the RIAA, it rates somewhere between Nazi Dinosaurs and The League of Extraordinary Evil on the Global Threat Scale." I'm not a huge fan of Cracked — their humor tends to rely a bit much on foul language for my tastes — but this infographic is great.

Sometime between May 18th and May 20th, I thought this stuff was interesting. You might think so too!

• New Social Networking Site Changing the Way Oh, Christ, Forget It: "According to sources we feel really, really sorry for, Foursquare works by allowing users to 'check in' from their present location, whether it be a bar, restaurant, nearby magazine stand, or man, this piece would be perfect to hand over to that schmuck Dan Fletcher at Time magazine right about now. By 'checking in,' users can earn tangible, real-world rewards. For instance, the Foursquare user with the most points at any given venue earns the designation of 'mayor' and can receive discounts, free food, or other prizes that, quite honestly, we're thoroughly disgusted with ourselves for having actually researched. In addition, please, kill us already."
• The Ragbag – F(x) = ½X + 7: "it was only yesterday that i realised that the rule of thumb for dating people of different ages (the 'half your age plus 7' rule) determines not only the lower bounds for dating but the upper bounds as well–that for each ½x + 7, there is a corresponding 2(x-7)."
• Who You Gonna Call?: "For our latest mission, we brought the movie Ghostbusters to life in the reading room of The New York Public Library at 42 Street. The 1984 movie begins with a scene in the very same room, so we figured it was time for the Ghostbusters to make an encore appearance. Enjoy the video first and then go behind-the-scenes with the photos and report below."
• Article Asking for More Comprehensive Sex Education Cut From Catholic-School Newspaper: "Ryan Dunn, a senior at Bishop Blanchet High School, just spent four months researching and writing an editorial for his school newspaper arguing that more comprehensive sex education should be available on campus. In a move that seems a little psychologically sadistic, Dunn was pressured to cut the article himself after his principal said it might cost some of his favorite teachers their jobs. Dunn was encouraged not to run the story by his principal (Tom Lord) and his journalism teacher (Chris Grasseschi) because Blanchet is already under scrutiny from the archdiocese for being too liberal."
• The Big Caption: "For your viewing pleasure: THE BIG CAPTION. A compliment to THE BIG PICTURE wherein JOKES and STATEMENTS are made using TYPOGRAPHY."