Chilly out again 
You may prefer to chill out instead with more stuff from the modern successor to the electric telegraph:
Happy invoicing!
You may prefer to chill out instead with more stuff from the modern successor to the electric telegraph:- The Physics of Angry Birds - Rhett Allain uses Video Tracking Analysis to assess the realism of the hit game: "Do the birds have a constant vertical acceleration? Do they have constant horizontal velocity? Let’s find out, shall we? Oh, why would I do this? Why can’t I just play the dumb game and move on. That is not how I roll. I will analyze this, and you can’t stop me.
- A Paper Internet - "If you wanted to preserve important bits of our civilization for future centuries, you could do worse than a bundle of paper sealed in plastic. It's remarkably cheap and effective; you can make one over a weekend. In this article we'll build a 1/2 scale model of a time capsule that contains the complete Linux 0.1 source code, plus sundry articles and internet ephemera." Carlos Bueno offers detailed instructions on building a time capsule.
- John Sculley On Steve Jobs - Fascinating interview transcript in which John Sculley, the man who supposedly almost ruined Apple in the late Eighties, explains Steve Jobs: "Steve had this perspective that always started with the user’s experience; and that industrial design was an incredibly important part of that user impression... What makes Steve’s methodology different from everyone else’s is that he always believed the most important decisions you make are not the things you do – but the things that you decide not to do. He’s a minimalist."
- If you do this in an email, I hate you - Another spot-on comic from The Oatmeal.
- Blockbuster, Netflix and the future of rentals - James Surowiecki considers the reasons for the demise of Blockbuster: "The problem—in Blockbuster’s case, at least—was that the very features that people thought were strengths turned out to be weaknesses. Blockbuster’s huge investment, both literally and psychologically, in traditional stores made it slow to recognize the Web’s importance: in 2002, it was still calling the Net a “niche” market. And it wasn’t just the Net. Blockbuster was late on everything...
Bonus pic: Blockbuster's new logo
- in almost every picture #7 - "...tells the story of a Dutch woman whose life is seen from the point of view of a fairground shooting gallery. The chronological series begins in 1936, when a 16-year-old girl from Tilburg in Holland picks up a gun and shoots at the target in a shooting gallery. Every time she hits the target, it triggers the shutter of a camera and a portrait of the girl in firing pose is taken and given as a prize. And so a lifelong love affair with the shooting gallery begins. This series documents almost every year of the woman's life (there is a conspicuous pause from 1939 to 1945) up until present times."
- 2 Years in Prison - A Man's Story - "So I just got out of prison... and **** it if I've forgotten how to work a mouse and hit the submit button too soon. I don't even recognise half the dickgirls on /di/ anymore. Has the whole world grown tits while I was gone? And who the **** if Justin Bieber?" If you're travelling to the US, this first-hand account of prison life should give you plenty of good reasons to behave yourself.
- Pat Metheny on Kenny G - Glorious rant; it starts out dismissive, shifts up into acerbic, and resolves into the key of pure venom. "He did show a knack for connecting to the basest impulses of the large crowd by deploying his two or three most effective licks... as jazz or even as music in a general sense, with these standards in mind, it is simply not up to the level of playing that we historically associate with professional improvising musicians... in one move, through his unbelievably pretentious and calloused musical decision to embark on this most cynical of musical paths, [he] tulip all over the graves of all the musicians past and present who have risked their lives by going out there on the road for years and years developing their own music..."
- A radical pessimist's guide to the next 10 years - "It's going to get worse - No silver linings and no lemonade. The elevator only goes down. The bright note is that the elevator will, at some point, stop." Cheery stuff from Douglas Coupland, of Generation X and Microserfs fame.
- Indexed - "This site is a little project that lets me make fun of some things and sense of others. I use it to think a little more relationally without resorting to doing actual math." Jessica Hagy draws little charts on 5" X 3" index cards to illustrate her thoughts on the world:
Happy invoicing!
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