rebecca's pocket

» Russell Davies on barely-games and the value (and ubiquity) of pretending. His piece make a nice counterpart, somehow, to the Aimee Mullins piece I linked Tuesday. (via waxy) [ 11.19.09 ]

» Jacques Pepin cooks a 5-course dinner for 6 - spending $24. No plan, he just buys what looks good and then improvises when he gets home to the kitchen. [ 11.18.09 ]

» Athlete Aimee Mullins on, among other things, reality, self-image, and imagination. Don't let the title put you off. This piece is mind-blowing, thought-provoking, and very, very interesting. (thanks, vinylrake!) [ 11.17.09 ]

» Can you imagine New York City and Tokyo after the ice caps have melted? Studio Lindfors has, and the images are among the most beautiful you will ever see. [ 11.16.09 ]

» Harriet Evans on the critics' reception and perception of male vs female writers. In short:

[B]ooks about young women are seen as frivolous and silly, while books about young men's lives that cover the same topics, are reviewed and debated, seen as valid and interesting contributions to the current social and media scene.

(via mamr) [ 11.13.09 ]

» Wisdom: the "work-to-glory ratio" and "product-plus-process" aspect of knitting. This applies equally to any of the hand crafts, including cooking. [ 11.12.09 ]

» Wow! Research Librarian Camille Cloutier has created a custom Google search for recipes, using her favorite recipe sources and aggregators. I've done a few searches, and the results are very promising. (via her recipe aggregators recommendations for Cool Tools) [ 11.11.09 ]

» The Empire State Building green initiative includes no solar panels and no green roof. Instead, building managers plan to reduce annual energy use by nearly 40 percent using low-tech methods such as improved insulation, and adding a coated film between the glass in window panes. [ 11.10.09 ]

» How does jello work? (via se) [ 11.06.09 ]

» If you haven't already seen them, don't miss this amazing series of pictures of the flooding in Venice last December. (via @ebertchigago) [ 11.05.09 ]

» From the American Bookseller's Association, 10 years of indie recommendations for November reading. (via ra) [ 11.04.09 ]

» So when is Twitter going to remove the 140 character limit from posts? At this point it's just vestigial, isn't it? [ 11.04.09 ]

» Jaw dropping.

As [Kaiser Permanente CEO George ] Halvorson explained, and academics and consultancies have repeatedly confirmed, if you leave everything else the same -- the volume of procedures, the days we spend in the hospital, the number of surgeries we need -- but plug in the prices Canadians pay, our health-care spending falls by about 50 percent.

Click through if only to see all the charts. (via rc3) [ 11.03.09 ]

» Rats fed unlimited amounts of junk food exhibit the same behaviors as herion addicts, a new study shows. After just five days on the junk food diet, rats ate twice as many calories as rats in the control group, showed a reduction in their pleasure centers, and were willing to undergo electric shocks while they ate. Returned to a healthy diet, the rats refused to eat for two weeks. [ 11.02.09 ]

» Jish is correct. [ 10.30.09 ]

» The Colbert Report, nominally a review of Jacob Soll's The Information Master, is a fascinating study on post-Gutenberg information overload, ancient information management, and Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV's chief minister, whose goal was to collect and hoard "all knowledge, formal and practical, [to] be used together in one archival system to understand and master the material world." (via mamr) [ 10.16.09 ]

» Reflections on FDR's public option: government-sponsored electrical service for rural America.

Investor-owned utilities, who rejected the farmers for years, wanted them dearly once the competition showed up. They fought in legislatures and courts and newspapers to keep the Rural Electric Coops from lighting the back roads.

And omigawd were [the coops] evil. Socialistic, un-American, undermining the very fabric of democracy. Legislators, businessmen, members of Congress, editorial page editors all over the country railed at the specter of Big Government shouldering into private enterprise, when everyone knew Government couldn't do it right.

Most infuriating of all, government did it right. The cooperatives became the pricing yardstick for electrical power. Investor-owned utilities had to lower their rates to compete.

[ 10.15.09 ]

» Oooh! The National Book Awards finalists. (via tra) [ 10.14.09 ]

» Your English teachers probably taught you about metaphor as an advanced technique used by writers to build depth into their work. But it turns out our very thinking is based on our physicality--and our physical enviroment colors our perceptions.

Our instinctive, literal-minded metaphorizing can make us vulnerable to what seem like simple tweaks to our physical environment, with ramifications for everything from how we build polling booths to how we sell cereal. And at a broader level it reveals just how much the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning is in fact a sometimes awkward piggybacking onto the mental tools we have developed to govern our body's interactions with its physical environment. Put another way, metaphors reveal the extent to which we think with our bodies.

[ 10.14.09 ]

» Why did the Large Hadron Collider fail? To save us from a terrible fate. It's not a crackpot theory unless you consider the man who founded string theory to be a lightweight. Seriously, this is my favorite science story of all time. [ 10.13.09 ]

» The Naked Chef's new crusade. I'm impressed with his lack of ideological absolutism. Krispy Kreme doughnuts? "They're a treat, there to be loved." A 15-pound burger? "It tasted good." And of course, I'm impressed with his decision to use his power for good. He's quite a guy, really. [ 10.13.09 ]

» NPR: Boy steals book; librarian changes life. [ 10.12.09 ]

» Kristof: If Congress fails to reform healthcare, let them go without insurance. The last time I was the Netherlands, a native told me the Dutch had enacted universal healthcare out of enlightened self-interest. They realized that the uninsured poor were more likely to be struck by virulent diseases, which they then might pass onto the well-to-do. [ 10.09.09 ]

» "I'm beginning to believe that the best way to achieve true and lasting healthcare reform is to just get out of the way and let Baby Boomer women revolutionize healthcare." - Intel's Eric Dishman on the profound disconnect between the issues that confront caregivers and the people who design technologies and policies intended to support them. [ 10.09.09 ]

» NASA is about to crash a rocket into the moon. No, really. If you live west of the Mississippi, you can watch from your backyard. (Twitter feed here.) [ 10.08.09 ]

» Alex Payne nails San Francisco, though I think he over-rates the food and the quirkiness. (To be fair, in both respects I'm sure I've been spoiled by having lived where - and how - I have.) But mostly he's right. It took me a little while to realized that while San Francisco is politically liberal, and while it prides itself on embracing a proscribed set of "fringe elements" (though heaven forfend if your eccentricity isn't included in the canon), it's actually socially conservative. But to echo Alex - if you've never lived in a major city before, you'll probably like it here. (thanks, jjg!) [ 10.07.09 ]

» A graphic novel about higher mathematics? Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth. [ 10.05.09 ]

» Well, speaking as a Californian, we sure could use the money. Remember to pick either a state, or a city. (via bittman) [ 10.02.09 ]