[onion] Everyone In Restaurant Jealous Of Toddler Who Gets To Wear Pajamas And Watch iPad … ‘“I can’t believe this! He doesn’t even have to talk to anybody or pay attention to what’s going on around him—he gets to just sit and watch Bluey,” said Ray’s Italian Bistro patron Finn Delamore, echoing the sentiment of dozens around him who reportedly couldn’t help but cast longing looks at the 2-year-old whose eyes were glued to the screen in front of him, his hands clasping a bright red toy fire truck.’
[life] The Scale of Life … Fascinating real-time statistics about what is happening right now all over the world. ‘Year to date, Number of Hours Worked: 5,224,497,264,667’ [via Andrew Ducker]
[life] The surprising data behind supercentenarians … Tim Harford sugggests a surprising reason why some people live so long. ‘In the US, Newman finds that the outstanding predictor of longevity is patchy birth records. Introducing proper records in the late 19th century reduced by more than two-thirds the number of babies who would eventually seem to reach the age of 110. That suggests that, until recently, seven out of 10 apparent supercentenarians were, in fact, younger than claimed. This all points to error or outright fraud.’
[travel] Obvious Travel Advice … Useful list of thoughts on travel. ‘Time seems to speed up as you get older. And you wonder—is it biological, or is it because life had more novelty when you were a child? Travel partly answers this question—with more novelty, time slows way down again.’
[vending] A day in the life of (almost) every vending machine in the world … A wonderfully written profile on the world of vending machines. ‘At 12.45am, a white-chocolate Twix dropped into the well of a machine in Blackfriars in London. At a taxi depot in Belfast, drivers on overnight standby thumbed in coins to buy keep-awake Cokes. Cans of sugar-free Tango slammed down in the surgeons’ staffroom at an Edinburgh hospital. Bottles of Mountain Dew, already long past expiry, turned another hour older inside a Covid-shuttered office in North Carolina. A Japanese accountant, several hours ahead of Europe and the US in a southern prefecture called Ehime, eyed the familiar choices in a cup-noodle machine by his desk…’
[dads] Trolley Problem Variations for Dads … Another list from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. ‘Dad is given both options of the Trolley Problem. But as he begins to think it over, he keeps saying, “This is exactly like the Kobayashi Maru!” He then spends so much time explaining how Captain Kirk cheated to win the scenario that he never pulls the lever.’
[life] 101 Additional Advices … More Advice From Kevin Kelly. ‘When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.’
[life] My Comments Are in the Google Doc Linked in the Dropbox I Sent in the Slack … ‘The document won’t open? I’m not sure how I could make this any easier. Okay, I reset the document permissions, but you’ll need to sign into the email document_view@busycompany.org via the password I texted you via iMessage. Once you sign into the email, it’ll ask you to create a Microsoft Teams account. You’ll find the link to the document in the Teams channel called “NO DOCUMENTS LINKS!!!” From there, you’ll find a link to a couple of WeTransfers of the current .docs. Every WeTransfer link is expired. To find the non-expired link, you’ll have to look through the email thread I forwarded you saying, “FYI.” It should be 110-120 emails deep in the thread.’
[mac] Fixing Macs Door to Door … Confessions of an AppleCare Contractor in the 2000s, navigating around Chicago to repair Macs at customers’ homes. ‘Often I’d show up only to tell them their hard drive was dead and everything was gone. This was just how things worked before iCloud Photos, nobody kept backups and everything was constantly lost forever. Here they would often threaten or plead with me, sometimes insinuating they “knew people” at Apple or could get me fired. Jokes on you people, I don’t even know people at Apple was often what ran through my head. Threats quickly lost their power when you realized nobody at any point had asked your name or any information about yourself. It’s hard to threaten an anonymous person.’
[lists] Things that don’t work … An interesting list of things that never ever work. ‘Arguing with people — Say Alice strongly believes X. You give devastating evidence that X is in false. How often will Alice turn around and say, “You’re right, I’m wrong, X is wrong.”? Words do not exist that will make people do that. (Aside from a few weirdos who’ve intentionally cultivated the habit.) But if you make a good case and leave her some room for retreat, you may find that Alice’s position is a bit softer the next time X comes up in conversation.’
[relationships] Satanic Couple No Longer Has Shared Dark Vision For Future … ‘She and Dane hadn’t felt that first blush of unspeakable perversity and evil in quite some time. “As I became more interested in animal and human sacrifice, he started immersing himself more in his esoteric texts and dark arts that he says will unleash death and madness upon the world. So we really don’t have much to talk about anymore. We had planned on giving birth to the Antichrist someday, but he keeps trying to put it off by saying we have to wait until a blood moon rises on the winter solstice.”’
[books] Today, I learned… Apparently the Brontë’s all died so early because they spent their lives drinking graveyard water.‘…There was the graveyard-which sat on a hill, right in front of the parsonage where the Brontë’s lived-which Babbage found to be overstuffed, badly laid out, and poorly oxygenated, so much so that the decomposing material from the graves had filtered into the town’s water supply. The long-term exposure to harmful bacteria would have made the Brontë’s weaker, shorter, and more susceptible to other diseases.’
[cartoons] Tom Lets Out Weary Sigh After Walking Into Kitchen and Noticing Cheese Grater Isn’t Part of the Matte Painting … ‘Viewers of Tom & Jerry, while still eager to see Tom get hurt, were sympathetic to how resigned he was to his fate. “Don’t get me wrong, that cheese grater looked gnarly and he absolutely had it coming,” cartoon enthusiast Katie McLaughlin said of Tom, whose only crime was trying to catch a pest that lives in the walls and eats his owners’ food.’
[ideas] 100 Little Ideas … A collection of ideas explaining how the world works. ‘Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.’
[life] 52 things Tom Whitwell Learned in 2023 A list of TiLs. ‘Scientists in Singapore have developed a tiny flexible battery, powered by the salt in human tears, designed for smart contact lenses.’
[philosophy] Philosophy Bro … The complicated ideas of philosophy explained simply. Camus’ “The Myth of Sisyphus”: A Summary: A Summary:‘Look, so, nothing matters, right? Shit’s fucking weird. We all want to know how the universe ultimately works or who’s running the show or whatever, and it turns out – TRICK. FUCKING. QUESTION. No one’s running the show, and the world is unreasonable. Ever had some shit happen to you that made you go, “Why the fuck did that happen? There’s no reason for that.” Turns out, you were right. So our attempts to impose reason on the world will fail. Death and taxes, my friend. Death and motherfucking taxes.’
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on Philosophy Bro]
10 October 2023
[dna] The Gift … I really recommend this BBC Radio podcast about what happens when home DNA tests gives their users big surprises.
[tags: BBC, DNA, Life][permalink][Comments Off on The Gift: When Genealogy, Technology, and Medicine Collide]
13 September 2023
[death] Horror stories of cryonics: The gruesome fates of frozen bodies … A look at the results of cryogenic freezing failure on human bodies during the early days of cryogenics. ‘The worst fates of all occurred at a similar underground vault that stored bodies at a cemetery in Butler, New Jersey. The storage Dewar was poorly designed, with uninsulated pipes. This led to a series of incidents, at least one of which was failure of the vacuum jacket insulating the inside. The bodies in the container partially thawed, moved, and then froze again – stuck to the capsule like a child’s tongue to a cold lamp post. Eventually the bodies had to be entirely thawed to unstick, then re-frozen and put back in. A year later, the Dewar failed again, and the bodies decomposed into “a plug of fluids” in the bottom of the capsule. The decision was finally made to thaw the entire contraption, scrape out the remains, and bury them. The men who performed this unfortunate task had to wear a breathing apparatus.’
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on Cryogenic Freezing Horror Stories]
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on Study: ‘Truly Being Seen’ Still Ranks Among Worst Possible Experiences In Human Existence]
30 August 2023
[worms] ‘Oh my god’: live worm found in Australian woman’s brain in world-first discovery … Oh, Dear God, Tapeworms! ‘It was a fairly regular day on the ward for Canberra hospital infectious diseases physician Dr Sanjaya Senanayake, until a neurosurgeon colleague called him and said: “Oh my god, you wouldn’t believe what I just found in this lady’s brain – and it’s alive and wriggling.” The neurosurgeon, Dr Hari Priya Bandi, had pulled an 8cm-long parasitic roundworm from her patient…’
[doctors] Fad diets, midday sun and … coffee on the sofa: 12 doctors on the everyday dangers they avoid … ‘I don’t take paracetamol for a headache unless it is really bad. I see a lot of people with headaches in my clinic and they can usually be avoided by a healthier lifestyle. Quite often patients get headaches from popping too many paracetamols, or other over-the-counter medications. It is a vicious cycle: we call it an analgesic overuse headache. I try not to skip sleep. If you want to get a headache, go to bed late and get up early. Sleep and downtime are important.’
[tags: Health, Life][permalink][Comments Off on The Everyday Dangers Doctors Avoid]
[life] Dead Ringers … The compelling story, from 1975, about identical twin gynecologists who died together under mysterious circumstances in New York. The story was an influence on David Cronenberg’s movie Dead Ringers. ‘On Tuesday, July 14, Cyril lurches one last time out of the twins’ final nesting place. He stumbles as he is about to cross the threshold to the outside world. The doorman who offers to assist Cyril thinks he “looks like death.” Out on the sidewalk Cyril looks at life without Stewart. The first thing he will have to do, he knows, is explain things. It’s not hard to explain why he returned so soon to that crypt in 10H. Only in those two minutes he languished in the womb after his brother’s departure could Cyril have been more alone. He double-locked the door behind him. He pushed an armchair up against it as a further barricade…’
[tags: Life, Movies, People][permalink][Comments Off on The Mysterious Deaths of Identical Twin Gynecologists]
23 May 2023
[lost] Into Thin AirPods … Amusing tale of an attempt to find some lost Airpods using Apple’s Find My” app. ‘I texted a group chat that I had lost my AirPods, but was hot on the trail of the thief in a natural history museum, as if my life were a damn Hitchcock movie. I told them I thought I had eyes on the perp, but couldn’t be sure. “Confront!!” They urged. “Apprehend the teen!!! You of all people can take him!!” But what if I was wrong? I couldn’t ruin some nice adorable family’s Friday afternoon, even if it was just to ask a few innocent questions, like, “Hey–You guys look like you ski. Do you ski? What about stealing? Do you steal?”’
[life] Treat your to-read pile like a river … Oliver Burkeman On Dealing With Your To-Read Pile. ‘The reading recommendations I encounter via Twitter are much more tailored to my concerns than those I might encounter via a newspaper, because I choose who I follow on Twitter; it’s like having a thousand assistants scouring the infoverse for whatever might pique my interest. My challenge, information-wise, isn’t about finding a needle in a haystack. It’s that I’m confronted on a daily basis, in Carr’s words, by “haystack-sized piles of needles.”‘
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on Oliver Burkeman On Dealing With Your To-Read Pile]
15 February 2023
[life] Taliban Bureaucrats Hate Working Online All Day, ‘Miss the Days of Jihad’ … Please note that this is not an Onion headline. ‘The real test and challenge was not during the jihad. Rather, it’s now. At that time, it was simple, but now things are much more complicated. We are tested by cars, positions, wealth and women. Many of our mujahedin, God forbid, have fallen into these seemingly sweet, but actually bitter traps.’
[tags: Funny, Life][permalink][Comments Off on Not the Onion… Taliban Bureaucrats in Afghanistan Miss The Jihad]
12 January 2023
[til] 52 things I learned in 2022 … Fifty-two TIL from Tom Whitwell. ‘There’s a warehouse in Israel full of claw machines you can play remotely. They send the prize if you win.’
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on 52 things Tom Whitwell learned in 2022.]
27 December 2022
[nostalgia] ‘Who remembers proper binmen?’ The nostalgia memes that help explain Britain today … A look at nostalgia memes popular within UK social media. ‘Worzel Gummidge. Sweets by the ounce. Icicles hanging from the window frame (“Before central heating!”). Miss World (“All natural. Not a bit of botox in sight”). The power cuts of 1972-4 (“we coped, we were strong”). Scrubbing and polishing your front steps (“That’s when people had pride in where they lived”). Outdoor toilets. Cigarette machines. Flares. Playing in bombsites. Jumping in puddles. Roland Rat. There are no births, marriages or deaths here, no wars, no world-historic events, no great men and women of history. There is no post asking “who remembers the Cuban missile crisis?” or “who remembers the sinking of the Belgrano?” Those questions are too remote from ordinary life. Over here, we have abacuses and Listen With Mother to talk about. The banality is the point. This is a world where a picture of three butter knives can attract 1,300 comments of fond recollections and reflections.’
‘Thirteen minutes after the note came the tweet. “Following further evaluation this morning, the Queen’s doctors are concerned for Her Majesty’s health and have recommended she remain under medical supervision,” wrote Buckingham Palace. “The Queen remains comfortable and at Balmoral.”
“When the statement dropped about her health it was obvious, and suddenly no MPs would talk,” the Whitehall correspondent says. Labour and Liberal Democrat MPs stopped responding to messages.
Across at what was once known as Fleet Street, time stopped.’
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16 August 2022
[games] Jason Brassard Spent His Lifetime Collecting the Rarest Video Games. Until the Heist … A true-crime story about the robbery of a pristine collection of video games and the emotional cost of losing it. ‘Generations of games had been lost to attics, yard sales, and garbage bins, and enthusiasts like Brassard had become sentimental about finding and possessing them. A culture, and then a market, had bloomed around such wistful longings. It’s fair to assume most humans have played a video game-the emotional capital of playing and loving a game 30 years ago is one of the reasons games that old have become desirable. In the summer of 2021, a sealed copy of the first print of Super Mario Bros. for the NES sold for $2 million at auction. A copy of The Legend of Zelda went for nearly $900,000. A pristine, never-opened copy of Super Mario 64 sold for $1.56 million.’
[cancelled] I’m a low-income pensioner and I’m terrified of university cancel culture this winter… ‘Yes, those with conservative views have got the Daily Telegraph, the Mail, Spectator and the Sun if people want to advocate sending Windrush migrants to Rwanda in leaky boats, but if they’re denied the platform of the University of East Anglia you’re literally cutting their tongues out. I don’t know what I’m going to do…’
[tags: Life, Politics][permalink][Comments Off on Low-Income Pensioner Terrified of University Cancel Culture This Winter]
20 June 2022
[life] Why City Life Has Gotten Way More Expensive … A look at why things like Uber are starting to cost more. ‘It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.’
[tags: Life, Web][permalink][Comments Off on Why Living in a City is Getting More Expensive]
1 June 2022
[life] Your Personality, Explained by Your Annoying Household Habits … ‘Soaking Dishes in the Sink – Your ability to make life more difficult is unmatchable. If an easy solution is available-and I mean a mind-numbingly obvious one-you decide that maybe the fix can’t be so simple and that you’d better let things marinate for a few days, at which point, yes, they’ve now become the nasty thing that you imagined, seeped in a rancid cesspool of indecision and procrastination (and, literally, rotting food).’
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on Your Personality, Explained by Your Annoying Household Habits]
[tags: Life, Wisdom][permalink][Comments Off on 103 Bits of Advice Kevin Kelly Wished He Had Known]
15 April 2022
[comics] We Apologize For Publishing Darkseid’s Anti-Life Equation … All is one in Darkseid! ‘Naturally, the staff and ownership of Hard Drive don’t encourage anyone to die for Darkseid; we encourage conversation. As the current and eternal ruler of the dread planet-fortress Apokalips, Darkseid is a public figure of note. While we pointedly disagree with cosmic genocide, we considered his perspective on the fabrege egg we call life newsworthy. Now it’s clear that no conversation can take place after cutting out your own tongue. We’ve removed Darkseid’s editorial, at great human cost. Our Opinion editor caught a glimpse of the equation as he deleted the page, snuffing the flame of his mortal soul and replacing it with loyalty to Darkseid.’
[tags: Comics, Funny, Life][permalink][Comments Off on We Apologize For Publishing Darkseid’s Anti-Life Equation]
[tags: Life][permalink][Comments Off on 100 ways to slightly improve your life without really trying]
24 March 2022
[lol] Why We Use “lol” So Much … A deep-dive into LOL. ‘We use lol as a way of downplaying a statement; adding irony, levity, humility, empathy, or commiseration; expressing amusement; or just neutral acknowledgment. No longer simply an internet acronym that’s entered the mainstream, lol is an example of how language evolves over time, adheres to new grammatical rules, and creates community around the people that use it.’
[tech] His software sang the words of God. Then it went silent. … A really sad, powerful story about how software can die with it’s creator, teaching Torah, loss and about a million other things. ‘I first heard it played to me over the phone from a copy that hadn’t yet ceased to function. It was a voice unlike any I’d ever heard: not human but made by humans, generated by a piece of computer code dating to the 1980s, singing words of a text from the Bronze Age in a cadence handed down, from one singer to another, over thousands of years. TropeTrainer was software that had been taught to sing the words of God. Then it went silent…’
