Thirty Three Things (v. 1)
A weekly roundup of irresistibly interesting ephemera.
By Joe Carter, September 16, 2008
1. JP Morgan's Guaranteed Formula for Success
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2. Paste Magazine editor Josh Jackson on violence in the media:
I really am repulsed by the idea of torture-porn flicks like Saw and Hostel, and don't understand how anyone could enjoy watching them. And I'm bothered by games like Grand Theft Auto that put you in the shoes of a gangster. Yet I gleefully watch Samuel L. Jackson burst into a scene like the vengeful hand of God and lay waste to pathetic junkies in Pulp Fiction, and I marvel at Javier Bardem flipping a coin to decide a man's fate in No Country for Old Men. So where's the line? What makes me want to write off 50 Cent as a thug, but enshrine Johnny Cash as the 20th century's coolest customer?
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3. Siris: Experience and the Presidency
(1) If experience were such a key issue for the Presidency, we would expect second-term Presidents always to be better Presidents than first-term ones. After all, they have the maximum amount of experience possible not just with "national office" or "executive office" but with the Presidency itself. But in fact we do not see any such increase in quality. Second terms notoriously tend to fizzle and stutter. Second-term Presidents are regularly accused of not knowing their limits and of excessive confidence in their own ability to handle the problems faced by the country. Second-term Presidents stop making some kinds of mistakes, but always end up making new kinds of mistakes.
(2) Politics is extraordinarily scalable. The basic skills used by a successful small-town mayor and a state Governor are not fundamentally different: the politics of the two positions consists of exactly the same thing. There are really only four things you do in politics: sell, bully, bargain, and organize. The policies may change, as may the rules and the stakes; but the political skills, which are the greater part of what experience in politics actually brings, are pretty much the same everywhere. What is important is not experience but adaptability: i.e., the ability to adjust one's skills to new conditions and rules. This is one of the things of which we can sometimes get a rough idea by looking at the details of a candidate's experience; but looking at a candidate's experience in this way and trying to sum up their record simplistically as "Experienced Enough" or "Not Experienced Enough" are radically different things.
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4. Roger Ebert on How to read a movie
I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them. A couple of years later, when I started doing shot-by-shots at the Conference on World Affairs at the University of Colorado at Boulder, the conference founder, Howard Higman, described this process as "democracy in the dark." Later he gave it a name: Cinema Interruptus.
(Via: Kottke)
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5. Benjamin Franklin: America's first great urbanist.
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6. Wanderlust, courtesy of Good magazine, maps out histories greatest journeys, from Magellan circumnavigation of the globe to Ken Kesey's electric kool-aid acid trip. (Via: VSL)
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7. Glenn C. Arbery on how great literary works sustain their meaning. (Via: Mars Hill Audio)
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8. Quote of the Week: "I’ve learned that you can tell a lot about a person by the way he or she handles these three things: a rainy day, lost luggage, and tangled Christmas tree lights." -- Poet Maya Angelou (Via: boing boing)
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10. How Pixar Fosters Collective Creativity
Of great importance—and something that sets us apart from other studios—is the way people at all levels support one another. Everyone is fully invested in helping everyone else turn out the best work. They really do feel that it’s all for one and one for all. Nothing exemplifies this more than our creative brain trust and our daily review process.
The Brain Trust.
This group consists of John and our eight directors (Andrew Stanton, Brad Bird, Pete Docter, Bob Peterson, Brenda Chapman, Lee Unkrich, Gary Rydstrom, and Brad Lewis). When a director and producer feel in need of assistance, they convene the group (and anyone else they think would be valuable) and show the current version of the work in progress. This is followed by a lively two-hour give-and-take discussion, which is all about making the movie better. There’s no ego. Nobody pulls any punches to be polite. This works because all the participants have come to trust and respect one another. They know it’s far better to learn about problems from colleagues when there’s still time to fix them than from the audience after it’s too late. The problem-solving powers of this group are immense and inspirational to watch.
(Via: Scott Hodge)
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11. 50 Places to Find Your Favorite Downloadable TV Shows
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12. Graph of the Week
music charts
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13. 6 Things Inspired by Einstein
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14. Rich GenXers Give More Than Boomers
According to a fresh survey from Northern Trust, which polled 1,000 households with investible assets of at least $1 million, Generation X millionaire households (those ages 28 to 42) gave away more money than Baby Boomers (43 to 61) or Silent Generationers (62 to 77). GenXers gave an average of $20,000 in 2006, compared with $10,000 for the older millionaire households.
The GenXers also are more charitable in their plans for the afterlife. They expect to leave 22% of their estates to charity, compared with 16% for Boomers and 14% for Silent Generation millionaires.
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15. Top 10 Amazing Prison Escapes (Via: The Presurfer )
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16. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List
Top MBA programs don't have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work. The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List features only the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research. So skip b-school and the $100,000 loan: you can get a world-class business education simply by reading these books.
(Via: Lifehacker)
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17. Doug Ross on energy policy:
The accompanying map depicts "The No Zone." This is the region surrounding the United States in which Democrats have forbidden oil exploration. Take, for example, ANWR. The Alaskan wildlife refuge is an immense property. To put it into its proper scale, if ANWR was the size of a football field, the requested oil exploration area is the size of a postage stamp.
18.Timewaster of the Week: Chronotron
Paradoxical insomnia
Paradoxical insomnia is a complaint of severe insomnia. It occurs without objective evidence of any sleep disturbance. Daytime effects vary in severity, but they tend to be far less severe than one would expect given the expressed sleep complaints.
People with this disorder often report little or no sleep for one or more nights. They also describe having an intense awareness of the external environment or internal processes consistent with being awake. This awareness suggests a state of hyperarousal. A key feature is an overestimation of the time it takes them to fall asleep. They also underestimate their total sleep time.
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20. The British government is funding a social-network site for parents of teenagers:
The website is designed to cover problems from the very serious to the comical. As well as a Mumsnet-style forum, where parents can chat anonymously about what is happening at home, the new site will have e-learning modules to help with problems such as drug or alcohol abuse.
They can click on to acted-out storylines covering common scenarios such as teenagers staying out too late or refusing to tidy their bedroom to get ideas on better ways to communicating with their children rather than arguing.
The website will also carry a "jargon buster" so that parents can understand what their teenagers are talking about.
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21. Dan Glickman, C.E.O. of the Motion Picture Association of America, on piracy, ratings, and other aspects of the movie industry:
Q: How has profitability of the film production industry evolved over time?
A: Movie making is inherently a risky business. Last year, the average cost to make and market a studio film was over $100 million. Contrary to the perception you might get if you just read the headlines about the big summer blockbusters, 6 out of 10 movies never recoup their original investments in their domestic runs.
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22. Thirty-Eight Ways to Win an Argument by Arthur Schopenhauer
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23. Six steps for learning difficult subjects quickly
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Elephants have thick skin
Actually its skin, except over the back and sides where it can be 2-3 cm thick, is very sensitive. Elephants can feel a simple touch, are sensitive to the sun, reason for which the mother constantly provides shade for the babies. They even bathe in mud to protect themselves from the sun.
(Via: The Presurfer)
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25. LOLCat of the Week
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26. Word of the Week: Exformation is "explicitly discarded information."
Effective communication depends on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating. In using words, sounds and gestures the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied. This shared context is called exformation. Exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all -- whereas information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with.
(Via: Kottke)
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28. The Faith 2008 Database tracks religious rhetoric in the campaign by candidate and theme, and features historical and international comparisons.
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29. Ten cool TV commercials done by movie directors (Via: Kottke)
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30. Musical ability - is it all just practice?
When marvelling at the world's great talents, whether in music, sport or literature, it's easy to conclude that these characters are simply born gifted. But that's unfair. Take a closer look and you'll see these people practice. A lot. In fact, the Swedish expertise expert Anders Ericsson has argued that the difference between an average and an elite musician is entirely down to practice, nothing else. Put the time in and you could be Mozart too, so the logic goes.
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31. Abstract of the Week: Expressions of Positive Emotion in Women's College Yearbook Pictures and Their Relationship to Personality and Life Outcomes Across Adulthood by LeeAnne Harker and Dacher Keltner (University of California, Berkeley)
To test hypotheses about positive emotion, the authors examined the relationship of positive emotional expression in women's college pictures to personality, observer ratings, and life outcomes. Consistent with the notion that positive emotions help build personal resources, positive emotional expression correlated with the self-reported personality traits of affiliation, competence, and low negative emotionality across adulthood and predicted changes in competence and negative emotionality. Observers rated women displaying more positive emotion more favorably on several personality dimensions and expected interactions with them to be more rewarding; thus, demonstrating the beneficial social consequences of positive emotions. Finally, positive emotional expression predicted favorable outcomes in marriage and personal well-being up to 30 years later. Controlling for physical attractiveness and social desirability had little impact on these findings.
(Via: Facts, Ideas and Logic)
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32. Hurt feelings 'worse than pain'
The old adage "sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt", simply is not true, according to researchers.
Psychologists found memories of painful emotional experiences linger far longer than those involving physical pain.
(Via: Neatorama)
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33. First Crush
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Should we bail out the Big Three?
