Part IV of the Armageddon Series. Post title is fairly self-explanatory.
Michael Erard on the troubling effects of entertainment that rewards short attention spans.
We need a Ronald Reagan of attention, someone to inspire us away from the fight over smaller and smaller pieces of the attention pie. Someone who will inspire us to make the attention pie bigger.
via Ideas.
Continuing my ongoing Armageddon Series, here’s some brand new information on what’s killing the honey bees. A teaser: it isn’t just one specific thing (i.e. cell phones).
For those of you who are just joining us, here’s why you should care: the extinction of honey bees will directly lead to ecological collapse and, thus, the end of the human race.
Newsweek’s Johannah Cornblatt confirms what we already suspected: that, for all our obsessive communicating and networking, loneliness is at an all-time high.
By one measure, Cornblatt writes, the rate of loneliness (defined as the inability to identify a single person in which to confide) in Americans has tripled since 1985.
This one’s for all the theoretical physics fans in the house.
Read along as Seed editor and confessed aficionado of pop-physics Elizabeth Cline tries to make some sense of Why Does E=mc²?, a new book by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw.
Guest blogger (and theoretical astrophysicist) Ethan Siegel responds.
Your daily dose of required reading. By Oscar Wilde.
Obama sips it. Paris Hilton loves it. Mary J. Blige won’t sing without it. How did a plastic water bottle, imported from a military dictatorship thousands of miles away, become the epitome of cool?
Mother Jones‘s excellent exposé on Fiji Water.
After watching Zombie Girl the other night (which I mentioned yesterday), I put my Macbook Pro to sleep and went to read for a while. I can hardly believe it, but I should have Infinite Jest finished within two weeks.
When I opened the laptop back up later that night, the display was dead. Turns out my laptop is one of the models affected by some manufacturing defect on Nvidia’s part. The video card, which is soldered to the logic board (read: the brains), simply got too hot and melted. Or whatever.
Nothing against Zombie Girl. It was a pretty interesting documentary and makes me sincerely wish that I had had an ounce of Emily’s resolve when I was her age.1 If you’ve got an hour and a half, you should watch it.
Anyway, I had the laptop repaired at the Apple Store.
Just in case that’s not all that legible, that’s $1622. Dollars.2 Luckily, I bought into the $200 Applecare warrantee program when I bought the thing in 2007. Since then, subtracting the initial cost of the plan, It’s saved me more than $2500 in parts and labor.
So anyway, get Applecare.
These Are My Twisted Words, available for free here.