Some links: 1. Japanese Elderly Offer to Take Over Fukushima Nuclear Cleanup. 2. The Man Who Can Taste Sounds. Every sound seems to taste like Bacon. I actually have a case of the much more common grapheme-color synesthesia. 3. Pimp My Wort Chiller. 4. Arab Spring Timeline Graphic.
I’m in Michigan at the moment, on the first leg of my road trip out to the Bay area for the summer. It turns out you can get a car wash in Detroit for $2. Here are some highlights from my stop by Niagara Falls earlier today: Blogging may be less frequent than usual over the next week and a half, depending on how often I can find (or want to find) a decent internet connection.
My brother was recently admitted to the Vancouver Film School, so he’s moving to Canada. I never realized how highly the city is regarded. It’s been ranked the #1 most liveable city by The Economist for five years in a row: For the fifth straight year, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, bested 139 other cities worldwide in the ratings of “relative comfort,” based on five broad categories: infrastructure, education, safety, culture and environment and health care. Sadly, not a single U.S. city made the top 10. Anyways, I’m excited to have a good excuse to go visit.
I’ve long been a fan of Tyler Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution. It’s interesting, off-beat, and is a great source of lesser publicized news stories and research findings, with plenty of thoughtful commentary thrown in. I had been meaning to read Tyler’s recent book, ‘The Great Stagnation’, for a while now. Then the other day, while sitting in an airport, I caught this Business Week article about Tyler, titled ‘Tyler Cowen, America’s Hottest Economist.’ It’s a fascinating article about what makes him one of the more quirky and unique economists, and made me much more eager to read some of his published work. ‘The Great Stagnation’ is about why our economic growth trend has all but come to a standstill, and why
I’m leaving in a few days on a cross-country road trip, and am looking to stock up on some new music for the ride. Anyone have any recommendations? Preferably new albums. I’m also thinking about buying a few audiobooks. I’ve never actually listened to one the whole way through. Any audiobook recommendations, with a decent narrator?
Via Marginal Revolution, it appears that a bunch of people were aggressively arrested yesterday for dancing at the Jefferson memorial. The rest of the story obviously has yet to unfold, but from the initial reports and videos, this does not look good:
National Geographic: Inishowen, Ireland National Geographic: Namaqua Chameleon, Namibia EarthShots: Cheetah And I found this timelapse video of the European Southern Observatory’s “Very Large Telescope” VLT to be pretty amazing. Just watch the sky spin in circles.
I like James Fallows because he teaches me interesting things about China, beer, flying, and politics. Things I probably wouldn’t learn otherwise. Today Jim* wrote a fascinating post about what we’ve learned about the Air France crash from the recent black box recovery, what new questions it raises, and why most people have no clue what “stalling” means in the context of flying. Here’s an excerpt about what it means when a plane “stalls”: 3) The plane “stalled,” but not in the way you think. The great impediment to accurate coverage of many airplane crashes involves the world “stall.” Its normal meaning, to 99 percent of the reading public, is that an engine has stopped or failed. Engines do sometimes fail on airplanes, and
Apparently round.
Obviously via xkcd: