Swans on Tea

Abstruse Goose: Reasonable Expectation
I’ve heard there are groups that get together to swap shopper cards on occasion, just to stick it to the corporate man.

Chad went an mentioned a buzzword that sets my teeth on edge: deferred maintenance.
It’s not just the economics of academia that suck in this regard. I’ve seen my fair share of it, too. As Chad notes, maintenance is not sexy, and it’s hard to get people not directly involved fired up about [...]

The Economics of Pinball
The economics of pinball at its peak, when it took advantage of programmable electronics that would shortly be its downfall.
In 1980, pinball went digital, multi-ball, and multi-media starting with the game Black Knight. Black Knight brought pinball to a new level, literally speaking because it was among the first games with [...]

Green Consumers and the Recession: Is It Really Different This Time?
“What we see in more developed countries is that, yes, there is the idea of having a personal benefit, but there is a greater sense of altruism when you’re behaving green. In the U.S., it has more to do with the personal benefit as opposed [...]

Paul Graham: What Startups are Really Like
The cofounder is your thesis advisor. There are many points with a pretty decent correlation to life in grad school, at least for physics, and my datum.
I’ve been surprised again and again by just how much more important persistence is than raw intelligence.
Not that physics grad school [...]

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.
[…]
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 [...]