Turns out those pruney fingers you get when you’ve showered for too long aren’t just some by-product of water-absorption. From Forbes:
[W]hy would water absorption lead to wrinkles with that signature shape? And why would water absorption lead to wrinkles on the finger tips but not all the other spots on the body? And why would water absorption lead to wrinkles at all, given that water absorption should generally lead to swelling and consequently taut skin? No, water absorption can’t explain it. […]
[I]n fact, it has been known since the 1930s that nerve damage to a finger abolishes the pruney response. Pruney fingers are neuronally modulated. That’s even further reason to suspect that our prunes are adaptive.
The other day, Alyssa Bereznak wrote a piece for Gizmodo (the piece has been altered to soften its language. You can find the original here), describing her date with a nerd she met on OKCupid. Bereznak was fairly dismissive of her date, Jon Finkel, who is the world champion at the card game Magic: The Gathering. What’s worse, she appeared to dismiss him simply because he was good at such a game. Bereznak refers to the date as a “horror story” but if that’s her version of a horror story, she really needs to meet a few of my friends who have had much worse luck in the online dating world. Also, a Gizmodo writer calling out a Magic player for being a nerd? Pot, meet the kettle with no sense of privacy or boundaries.
Bereznak’s piece is fascinating for a number of reasons. On the one hand, the piece itself is as bizarre as its venue of publication, so much so that I can’t imagine the people over at Gawker Media/Gizmodo did not know what they were doing by running it. They understood that they’d be pissing people off, and racking up a ton of links and attention in the process. As of this writing, it’s accumulated over 800,000 views, making Bereznak a rich intern and probably making Gawker owner Nick Denton pretty pleased with himself.
Over at Forbes, Paul Tassi asks the question that I also had when reading the piece:
So as a freelancer, and as a publisher, you have to ask yourself how much you want to sell your soul in order to bring in page views. I’m sure that was Gizmodo’s highest trafficked day in a long while, but at the cost of most people visiting saying “Wow, how could they have actually published this?” Alyssa might be getting a fat bonus check at the end of the month, but at the cost of having her name permanently etched into the internet as a shallow, mean human being. Was it worth it?
I do wonder if Bereznak knew that she’d be forever associating her (previously relatively little known) name with a self-affirmation of her shallowness and a categorical denunciation of geeks. It’s a fact that when you Google Bereznak’s name, the firestorm surrounding this piece will probably be on the first page of results for a long time to come. I can’t imagine that will be good for her future dating life, but who knows? Maybe that kind of thing appeals to some guys.
I spoke with friend and writer Natasha Vargas-Cooper regarding the piece. You can find audio of our conversation here. Apologies for the terrible sound quality:
Sorry for the sparse updates recently. I’ve spent the last few days moving. It’s not a process I recommend; moving is incredibly disruptive, not just because it requires exceptional amounts of exertion, but because it upsets one’s routine. In a literal way, the world I woke up in yesterday is no longer the one I’ll wake up in today. It’ll take some getting used to. To commemorate the occasion, I tried my hand at some street photography last night in Harvard Square. (Again, I used my Canon 5D Mark 2 on ISO 3200.)
It’s a place that’s full of character. These photos are my brief love letter to it:
Al Lewis runs down all the bone-headed moves that HP has taken in the past year alone:
It has been a year since H-P fired Mr. Hurd. Jack Kevorkian couldn’t have devised a better plan for euthanizing a company. But like the good doctor used to say: “Dying is not a crime.”
Richard Dawkins recently penned a scathing piece for the Washington Post, in which he responded to Rick Perry’s pronouncements that the theory of evolution had “gaps.” It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here’s a slice:
There is nothing unusual about Governor Rick Perry. Uneducated fools can be found in every country and every period of history, and they are not unknown in high office. What is unusual about today’s Republican party (I disavow the ridiculous ‘GOP’ nickname, because the party of Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt has lately forfeited all claim to be considered ‘grand’) is this: In any other party and in any other country, an individual may occasionally rise to the top in spite of being an uneducated ignoramus. In today’s Republican Party ‘in spite of’ is not the phrase we need. Ignorance and lack of education are positive qualifications, bordering on obligatory. Intellect, knowledge and linguistic mastery are mistrusted by Republican voters, who, when choosing a president, would apparently prefer someone like themselves over someone actually qualified for the job.
Time to think about the unthinkable. What if a major hurricane were to pass close to New York City, as several forecasting models now suggest that Hurricane Irene might?
Apart from the inevitable loss of life in the most densely populated part of the country, history suggests that the economic damage could run into the tens of billions of dollars, depending on the severity of the storm and how close it came to the city. Unlikely but theoretically plausible scenarios could have the damage entering the realm of the costliest natural disasters of all time, and perhaps being large enough to have a materially negative effect on the United States’ gross domestic product.
If you’re around New York/New England (as I am), do stay safe this weekend. Hopefully this forecast is making a mountain out of a molehill…
Eric Kim (via Vanessa) has some pretty good tips, drawn from the work of master street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. Perhaps my favorite one is “stick to one lens”:
Although Henri Cartier-Bresson shot with several different lenses while on-assignment working for Magnum, he would only shoot with a 50mm if he was shooting for himself. By being faithful to that lens for decades, the camera truly became “an extension of his eye”.
Apply the same mentality to when you go out and shoot. I encourage people to use different focal lengths to see the world differently and experiment—but ultimately sticking with one focal length will help you solidify your artistic vision. You will be able to see natural framelines in your everyday life, and know exactly how your photos will appear when shooting from certain angles and distances.
In the wake of Steve Jobs’ resignation as CEO of Apple, the best reflection that I’ve read on this topic comes not from a tech pundit, but from Linda Holmes at NPR:
The relationship between Apple and its aficionados has always borne little resemblance to the relationships consumers have with most other giant companies, tech companies, or even brilliantly marketed companies. To see congruence, for instance, between Apple fans and Microsoft users based on the constant back-and-forth that makes fights between them so pointless and eternal is to misunderstand how those discussions work. People love Apple; at best, they appreciate Microsoft (and, more to the point, grow weary of those people who love Apple). What you see is not “Apple is brilliant,” “No, Microsoft is brilliant.” What you see is, “Apple is brilliant.” “Oh, would you shut up already.” These discussions, for those who choose to spend time on them, are often about a binary sense of Apple: Apple Yes, and Apple No. That’s the definition of the argument, and that’s the definition of dominating the part of the culture in which you exist.