This song is a break from our normal format, but I’ve always liked it. I heard it in the background of something the other day so I tracked it down and now here it is for your enjoyment: Love Like Me You Used To.
(I didn’t know this, but according to Tucker’s wikipedia page she had a romance with Glen Campbel, another one of my favorite singers… Even if Wichita Lineman is the creepiest song ever.)
IEEE Spectrum: The Million Dollar Programming Prize.
I pointed to this a few months ago, The NetFlix million dollar prize to any programmer, or team, that can get a 10% improvement on Netflix’s recommendation engine. This article profiles the leading team, and how they are getting closer and closer.
A blah blah designer blog post about the famous-ish designer that quit Google, but what it’s really about is how men have crazy brains that lets them hyper-focus on a problem to the exclusion of anything else.
In other words this post is for my wife who is tired of repeating herself when I’m working on something.
Rushkoff is probably my favorite wild-eyed prophet of our modern times. Certainly worth reading even if he is basically calling for the total and utter collapse of western civilization.
How cost-effective is it to make pantry staples from scratch? - By Jennifer Reese - Slate Magazine.
I’ve always been curious about a cost benefit analysis of preparing staples at home. Reese explores it and gives a good breakdown.
The Peekaboo Paradox - washingtonpost.com.
I bookmarked this link for you a long time ago and then never posted it, but its great story about a children’s party entertainer in D.C. The upshot is that he’s a fantastic and caring individual who is the best at what he does, but like many people who are best in a particular area the rest of his life is a total and complete wreck.
Food Companies Try, but Can’t Guarantee Safety - NYTimes.com.
ConAgra — which sold more than 100 million pot pies last year under its popular Banquet label — decided to make the consumer responsible for the kill step. The “food safety” instructions and four-step diagram on the 69-cent pies offer this guidance: “Internal temperature needs to reach 165° F as measured by a food thermometer in several spots.”
Increasingly, the corporations that supply Americans with processed foods are unable to guarantee the safety of their ingredients. In this case, ConAgra could not pinpoint which of the more than 25 ingredients in its pies was carrying salmonella. Other companies do not even know who is supplying their ingredients, let alone if those suppliers are screening the items for microbes and other potential dangers, interviews and documents show.
This article is hilariously full of all the foibles of our modern food chain, but I think it can best be summed up like this:
If you’re buying a pot pie for .69 cents be prepared for literally anything, up to and including a bug-eyed monster crawling out of your ass and choking you to death.
As a personal rule I never buy anything priced the same as a sexual position. I’m just saying.
I haven’t posted any Pixies for a while so here’s a nice barn burner for you: River Euphrates
My Personal Credit Crisis - NYTimes.com.
I had a hand in covering the Asian financial crisis of 1997, the Russia meltdown in 1998 and the dot-com collapse in 2000. I know a lot about the curveballs that the economy can throw at us.
But in 2004, I joined millions of otherwise-sane Americans in what we now know was a catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate and reckless mortgages. Nobody duped or hypnotized me. Like so many others — borrowers, lenders and the Wall Street dealmakers behind them — I just thought I could beat the odds.
Everyone and their brother has linked to this already but in case you missed it Times reporter Edmund Andrews tells how he wound up with his own tail caught in the crack of the financial collapse. His story helps humanize the entire mess. As I read how he quickly spiraled into overwhelming and out of control debt I could feel my stomach churning like it was happening to me. All it takes is a couple of dumb decisions by an otherwise smart guy and suddenly you’re 8 months behind on your mortgage and just waiting for the day they come to take your house away.
Millions of your neighbors are going through this right now. Scary.
“Mega Shark Vs. Giant Octopus” | Video | MTV.
I wish I was the type of person who could enjoy a campy fun movie like this, but I know myself well enough to know that I would hate this. But the previews sure are fun.