February 2012
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January 2012
43 posts
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Gymnopédie No. 1 by Erik Satie
In the final 20...
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Murk Avenue: I Found Ice Cube’s “Good Day” →
As in, “Today was a…” Some of the best pop-culture investagatory journalism ever via Murk Avenue.
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Holy shit, “The Last Outpost” is the worst/best episode of TNG I’ve ever seen.
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“Extremely close examination of the impulse drive system schematic panel in Main...”
– Mike Okuda, Star Trek: The Next Generation Technical Manual.
Apparently when the blu-ray disks come out, we’ll be able to see these panels, some with in-jokes never designed to be visible on television, in high definition.
Read more from Mike in this interview from Star Trek.com.
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Swizz Beatz Owns MegaUpload →
I did not know this.
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The Unprecedented Audacity of the iBooks Author... →
Important dissection of the iBooks Author EULA by Dan Wineman:
PLEASE READ THIS SOFTWARE LICENSE AGREEMENT (“LICENSE”) CAREFULLY BEFORE USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE. BY USING THE APPLE SOFTWARE, YOU ARE AGREEING TO BE BOUND BY THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE. IF YOU DO NOT AGREE TO THE TERMS OF THIS LICENSE, DO NOT INSTALL AND/OR USE THE SOFTWARE.
But that language is in the EULA itself, a...
“Question everything generally thought to be obvious.”
– Dieter Rams
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Books I Read in 2011
One of my New Years Resolutions in 2011 was to read two books a month. I didn’t quite hit my goal as I was often out enjoying the countryside during summer. However, I did succeed in making reading a daily habit.
I enjoy balancing fiction with non-fiction. Non-fiction appeals to my left-brain and I feel I’m becoming learned. When I read fiction, I choose the classics.
The book that...
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“I wanted a piece of the pie for me and my family so I made it.”
– Big Boi, from my playlist of favorite Big Boi verses entitled, “Big Boi’s Diamonds & Pearls”.
(The playlist title references a Big Boi lyric from “Ova Da Wudz”; itself a reference to a Prince song.) (Because people that listen to Outkast are smarter.)
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Music That Makes You Dumb by Virgil Griffith →
Caltech student Virgil Griffith correlated musical interests with SAT scores.
The method is highly unscientific, but the grouped by genre graphic makes the most sense. People who list Outkast in their favorite music on Facebook tend to score higher than those who list Lil Wayne.
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Back to the Woods
Nearly four years ago when I began this tumblelog I posted this quote by Columbia Professor of Music Aaron Brown, “Country music is born when the country becomes a nostalgic idea,” and it stuck with me. Partly because I have a deep appreciation for the simple songwriting of country music. Partly because when I post things it’s for my own reflection.
I’ve been recalling...
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Monthly Playlists for 2012
Last year I made monthly playlists of songs in heavy rotation. Really enjoyable to revisit at year’s end. Instant time warp. — Frank Chimero (@fchimero) January 5, 2012
Really excited to do this in 2012.
(Also, embedded tweets look pretty legit on Tumblr.)
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Resizing windows in Mac OS X Lion
Today I discovered that you can resize windows in Mac OS X Lion with the aid of the Option and Shift key, a technique usually reserved for image editing software.
Hold down the Option key while resizing the edge of a window to move the opposite edge the same distance.
Hold down the Shift key while resizing a window to maintain the current aspect ratio.
This functionality was added in Lion,...
Best of Ben Schwartz Video Playlist →
Ben Schwartz:
In celebration of the premiere of House of Lies this Sunday at 10pm on Showtime, CollegeHumor has released a “Best of Ben Schwartz” Playlist. CH took their favorite twenty one sketches I’ve done for the site over the past five years and served them up on an all you can eat buffet. Get ready for…
Ben Schwartz is hilarious. My favorites are Stay Awake Contest, and Drinking...
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“Commonplacing facilitates reflexive thought.”
– Regarding a “commonplace book”, mentioned in chapter 4 of Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson.
In the early 19th century, “gentlemen of letters” often kept a commonplace book, which meant they recorded the interesting ideas and passages of text they encountered in their...
December 2011
6 posts
The school of Jay-Z studies →
Jay-Z doesn’t need to be Homer. Or Shakespeare. Or Mark Twain, Beethoven or Wagner. He’s Jay-Z: arguably, the most important figure to come out of the biggest cultural movement of the past 30 years. The merits of the case – for serious intellectual course work focused on the man and his lyrics – stand on their own, without feeble comparisons to more “respectable” members of the academic canon.
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