I’ll be away for the next few days as I pack my earthly belongings and make the trek to Chicago. I’m taking pictures and keeping track of the journey on Flickr, but it will likely be this time next week before I resume a regular posting schedule.
Stick around, though - I’ve been tweaking the design of the blog, and I think you’ll like the changes I plan to reveal next week!
Adobe has hired one of the researchers responsible for an incredible image resizing technique.
Global Rich List, a sobering site that puts our unprecedented wealth in context.
Those cheesy maps at the back of your Bible? Lame. Upgrade to BibleMap.org, a cool Google Maps mashup that pinpoints biblical locations by chapter and verse.
The NYT posits that the upturned palm is a universal gesture.
A WiFi connection that spans almost 200 miles. Hope they’ve turned on encryption.
Thanks to pollution, China’s economy is almost out of breath.
Wise Bread looks at the benefits of having money.
The Ten Habits of Highly Effective Brains. Common sense, but a good reminder.
A Handbook of Rhetorical Devices. For those interested in improving their writing or rhetorical skills, an hour spent with this list would be profitable.
Forget the log cabin. Most American presidents were raised in the wealthiest of families.
Harvard’s endowment stands at a cool 41 billion. That’s with a "b."
Vladimir Putin sounds like he’s resurrecting the Hitler Youth.
5 eco-friendly homes that I’d be happy to have. Especially if the last one included a few acres in the Shire.
A kind soul pointed me to the free student New York Times subscription a few months ago. Though I’ve read the Times regularly for the past few years, I was nonplussed; most NYT content was available for free anyway, as opposed to the Wall Street Journal, which insists on subscriptions.
Having used the Select subscription for several months now, I’ve been pleasantly surprised. I receive a Wednesday email that previews articles from the weekend magazine, and the access to the archives and Select op-ed pieces has . Not everything "free" is worth your time, but this deal certainly is.
All you need is a university-issued email address to get started. Students and professors (and presumably anyone with a valid .edu address) are eligible. Visit this NYT student page for more info. If you subscribe, let me know what you think!
Macworld takes HandBrake 0.9.0 for a test drive. [via DF]
I’ll have the "Chop the Strange Fish," please. China tries to stamp out "Chinglish" before the Olympics.
Here’s a coupon for a free Chic-fil-A chicken sandwich and a Coke. I love Chic-fil-A.
Read/Write Web yesterday examined YouTube’s most popular videos. The results were somewhat surprising.
Number one - my only favorite that turned up on the list - is "The Evolution of Dance."
The promise of the Internet is the free sharing of information, and like all new media, it was immediately co-opted by the predictable interests: news, comedy, romance, opinion, porn. YouTube began as a human experiment: what do we, as a race, want to watch? The people have spoken: we want dancing comedians and girls with hips that don’t lie.
The corporate influence is also notable here. Apparently, we enjoy watching professionals more than the Numa video or the Charlie short. Give me a magical liopleurodon over My Chemical Romance (#3 and #7 on the list) any day.
Japan wants to make a new Internet. Yes, a new one. Just when I was getting settled in, too…
Democrats have some good ideas (tighter regulation) and some bad ideas (throwing $1 billion to those in arrears) for fixing the mortgage implosion.
The Simple Dollar whips up some quick and healthy breakfasts. Handy for the grad student who enjoys breakfast just a little less than he enjoys sleeping in.
It turns out that Skype was brought down by Windows users.
Zen Habits compiles 20 tools for organizing your life. I use only one (Google Calendar).
Handbrake - the free app that rips DVDs quicker than a Hulk Hogan shirt - has been updated to 0.9.0, sporting new features and a redesigned interface.
Listeners are dropping hip-hop music like it’s hot. I say good riddance - can we bring back the Four Tops already?
Please accept the humble thanks of a humble grad student.
10 Practical Uses For Psychological Research in Everyday Life. Pretty cool lifehacks.
A Reader’s Manifesto. Absolutely essential criticism for modern readers. His comments perfectly explain my (until now, vague) boredom with DeLillo’s Underworld.
The Not-To-Do List: 9 Habits to Stop Now. The reason my cell phone will now be off on Saturdays.
Sometimes you find an application just after you needed it. For my Amazon reflections post, I looked for an easy way to spruce up the small images of the children; a small, photo-like frame perhaps. My searches found nothing.
I soon began my quest anew and discovered Thumbscrew, a small app that’s been in beta for close to three years. The 1.0 version was released last week and, after testing it, I’ve decided it’s worth the wait.
Thumbscrew is a simple application - pull a photo into the drop box and it quickly creates a thumbnail. Were it only a thumbnail generator, it would be worth keeping. Its true attraction is the ease with which it adds polish to an image. For example, using an image from my Amazon post, it transforms this…
…into this…
Neat, huh? It’s instant too. The settings provide a range of options, including degree of skew, background transparency, thumbnail size, etc. It also processes images in batches.
Thumbscrew resizes everything to a specified thumbnail size, which can be adjusted in the preferences. Since I’ll use it primarily to add border & shadow effects to images, an option to retain the image size would be handy. But that’s a minor quibble - I’ll happily use this free, effective app as it is.
Paul Graham wrote an excellent essay on "stuff" that’s been making the rounds.
So maybe they didn’t break the speed of light.
J.C Watts brings some perspective to the dog fighting debacle.
Garr Reynolds from Presentation Zen pointed me to TED, a collection of varied talks by leading thinkers. The title of one presentation - How could God have allowed the tsunami? - intrigued me. Rev. Tom Honey, a vicar in the Church of England, took a thoughtful look in February 2005 at God’s place in the course of human events. He rightly points out that while we often credit God for the good in our lives, we are loath to do the same for the bad. His discussion is worth watching (and his wonderful accent worth hearing)… but his theology is problematic.
First, it is unclear how a world spirit fixes the problem of tragedy; or, as C.S. Lewis called it, the problem of pain. If God is set apart from his creation and is the first cause of all things, we can rightly "blame" him for a tsunami. But if a singular spirit is at work in both humanity and the tsunami, then we are the tragedy itself.
Further, if this world spirit caused the tsunami (and it surely did, since the spirit is in everything, including the shifting plates), then you and I were part of the cause as well. We are culpable; a culpability shared by those who perished. Rev. Honey does not show how this is preferable to divine responsibility.
Rev. Honey clearly believes that if God causes death, he is unjust. Here he applies to some higher moral code - a higher standard of justice - to which God must comply; if God does not comply (and here he cannot), then he is not worthy of worship. Yet where does Honey find this superior moral law? Was it given by a lawgiver? Can an all-pervasive spirit be the source of objective morality, as the Reverend treats it?
I applaud Rev. Honey for exploring the hard questions of faith and pain. I have no solutions. His inclination toward pantheism, however, introduces troubling questions with even more troubling consequences.
Skype is down.
Unclutterer looks at how to manage college paperwork.
The IHT appraises India and Pakistan, 60 years after independence.
Fodors explores the undiscovered country of Europe.
Hyundai brings a USB port to the 2009 Elantra. It’s a great idea… but haven’t we needed this for about, oh, say, 11 years now?
Hugu Chávez moves to retain the title of "Socialist Dictator Punk" for life.
BookFinder.com consolodates bookstore searches (including Amazon and AbeBooks). I can see this saving me some cash. [via NextStudent]
I StumbledUpon this nifty tea starter set yesterday and thought I’d share it. I’m a tea lover, so naturally I was interested.
The tea itself is probably standard fare, but the teapot is ingenious (click for a demo video). The boiling water and loose tea are poured in the top, while the brewed tea comes out the filter at the base. The system eliminates the need for tea balls, bagged tea, or any of the other little tea gadgets I’ve tried and eventually dismissed.
The set also comes with a tea book that looks nice. For $19, you can’t go wrong.
I’ll share my impressions of the ingenuiTEA teapot, along with the starter set, when I get it. In the meantime, if anyone wants a $5 gift certificate, just leave a comment to this post and I’ll email you one (the site allows you to send certificates to friends; you get discounts in return)!
