Swans on Tea

Literary Lesson: Authors, Poets Write the News
It was on an average Wednesday that a very serious Israeli newspaper conducted a very wild experiment. For one day, Haaretz editor-in-chief Dov Alfon sent most of his staff reporters home and sent 31 of Israel’s finest authors and poets to cover the day’s news.
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Among those articles were gems [...]

Fast Food Apple Pies and Why Netbooks Suck
I have no horse in this race, or a smartphone for that matter, but any explanation of “the zone of suck” using fast-food apple pies is worthwhile reading, IMO.
Monarch Burger went to the trouble of making their apple pie look like a slice of homemade apple pie. While [...]

Lots of great stuff on kottke recently
Dan Baum: The Following Account of My Short Career at The New Yorker Ran as a Series of Tweets on May 8, 11, and 12, 2009
Three tweets: (Thufferin’ Thuccotath!)
of arms. Tom Wolfe is right, I think, when admonishes young writers to ignore the old advice about “writing [...]

Piracy isn’t quite as haphazard an operation as it might appear.
npr: Behind The Business Plan Of Pirates Inc.
“We could see that there was a time sheet on a particular person who had been onboard and dates they had been onboard and so many dollars per day, and then a total sum on the time sheet,” [...]

Wrong Tomorrow
When someone makes a prediction, people post it to the site along with a brief description and a URL. We monitor it and change its status to true or false when appropriate.
They want significant, empirically testable predictions made by public figures, that have no more than a five-year horizon. Topics (thus far) are [...]

The Makers of Things at Rands in Repose.
Building the Brooklyn Bridge.
With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, [...]

One of our HP printers is broken, and I’ve wasted several hours the past few weeks trying to arrange to get it fixed. Waiting on hold and wading through phone trees, and at the end of it all, the promised support technician never calls to arrange a visit, and the contact number I have [...]

How Porsche hacked the financial system and made a killing
Making your own short squeeze.
I don’t think this would work in the US, because I think any ownership above 10% requires public disclosure. I wouldn’t be surprised if the EU were contemplating a similar law.

Animated map: Watching the Growth of Walmart Across America
It’s like watching green bacterial goo grow in a US-shaped petri dish.

Doing the Math to Find the Good Jobs
The study, to be released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress.
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According to the study, mathematicians fared best in part because they typically [...]

Who has the worst jargon?
I was recently asked to fill out a questionnaire to evaluate how my place of work was doing in terms of some business metrics. It was hell. Two groups that love their jargon and acronyms, the government and business. I thought that it could have been worse, because [...]

How to copyright a song
Because nobody can possibly steal it if it’s protected by copyright …