GracefulFlavor

I first laughed out loud at this.  Then I felt sorta creeped out.  Then I posted this here in the hopes that I’m not the only one with this reaction.

[Via Clusterflock]

So scientists at Stanford have found a way to reverse the aging mouse skin to make it appear and act young again. If any of you think that we, as a species, aren’t embarked upon our biggest decoding exercise in our history, think again.

The researchers first discovered a protein that plays a role in skin aging. Then they used a lotion that inhibited the protein in a genetically engineered mouse. After two weeks of treatment with their genetic cosmetic, the skin of older mice displayed the look and genetic profile of younger skin.

[…]While the Stanford research isn’t yet ready for humans, it provides surprising insight into how the body ages. The work suggests that aging is not merely a passive wearing down of the body and its components, but that an active genetic process causes aging.

All I can say to this is: hurry up. I’m 38. And I’m not a mouse. So, like, put a nickel in it, okay?

Great list by the NYTimes. Ones I’ve been eyeing:

Fiction

• Cheating at Canasta, by William Trevor
• Exit Ghost, by Philip Roth
• Falling Man, by Don DeLillo (although I understand this is more tedious than his earlier works)
• Later, at the Bar: A Novel in Stories, by Rebecca Barry
• Like You’d Understand, Anyway: Stories, by Jim Shepard
• On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan
• Then We Came to the End, by Joshua Ferris (only because I’m fairly certain I worked in a place not unlike Ferris’ setting)
• Twenty Grand: And Other Tales of Love and Money, by Rebecca Curtis

Nonfiction

• The Argument: Billionaires, Bloggers, and the Battle to Remake Democratic Politics, by Matt Bai
• Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism, by John Updike
• How Doctors Think, by Jerome Groopman
• The Nine: Inside the Secret World of the Supreme Court, by Jeffrey Toobin

One hour I guarantee you won’t want to get back. Mann is a coolhunter in the sense that he understands the trends of the information age and the unique problems they present to you, the technology-rich first-worlder. Mann’s blog, 43folders, is one of my daily must-reads. If you’re not familiar with it, you should be. You’ll never look at your inbox the same way again.

Link to IDEO video

Very interesting take on where American politics stand in today’s blurred-deliniation society. Interestingly enough, the following snippet comes from Herb Gintis reviewing Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal on Amazon:

I am sorry that we can’t do better than Krugman. There are very serious social problems to be addressed, but the poor, pathetic, liberals simply haven’t a clue. Conservatives, on the other, are political sophisticated and hold clear visions of what they want. It is too bad that what they want does not include caring about the poor and the otherwise afflicted, or dealing with our natural environment. Politics in the USA is no longer Elephants and Donkeys; it is now conservative Pigs and liberal Bonobos. The pigs are smart but only care about what’s in their trough. The Bonobos are polymorphous perverse and great lovers, but will be extinct in short order.

[Via kottke]

Very well done QuickLook module to allow viewing of ZIP contents via Leopard’s QuickLook function. Perfect example of how to extend QuickLook functionality via its extensible API.

(click to embiggen)

Equally well done is the Folder plugin, which allows the viewing of a folder’s contents via QuickLook. Get it here.

[Via Matt]

Anytime anyone faces change and makes tough personal decisions head-on to pursue what’s most important to them, I can’t help but applaud.  And here we see Hugh MacLeod doing just that, getting back to building his GapingVoid microbrand as his #1 priority, even when other opportunities press.

So this last week I’ve been telling people I work with, I’m changing the game plan. I’m going back to basics. From now on building “the gapingvoid brand” will become my first priority. Yes, I will still be working with the same people and projects I’m working with now, in much the same way, but in a much less involved capacity.

Time to regroup. Indeed.

Bravo, Hugh.  I look forward to whatever’s next.

Just saw this on a colleague’s PC. This pretty much cements the anti-Vista meme that’s been growing since its launch, and had to cost Apple a fortune to get this placed (in two places!) behind the WSJ pay-wall.

[Thx Chris]

I’m not sure this is shrewd marketing so much as it is reaping the fruits of massive commercial success, but whatever it is, it’s funny.

Link

I was half asleep when I clicked on this via DF’s suggestion, and within minutes I was laughing out loud like an idiot. It was the “I got a murder boner!” that did me in.

Green Team with Will Ferrell

I’m about to do something an Apple guy shouldn’t do, and I know it will net me all sorts of angry comments and emails. For some, this is akin to some sort of crime, especially seeing how the iPhone just bagged an ungodly high satisfaction score with PC Mag. Nonetheless, I’m going to explain why I want to buy an iPhone but simply can’t, and I’m going to give you an idea of what sort of mobile phone user I am.

Let’s take those in reverse order.

I’m on Verizon. I’m a BlackBerry user and have just purchased a BlackBerry 8130 Pearl, which won out over the iPhone. Prior to the Pearl, I had a BlackBerry 8703e and, before that, a BlackBerry 7130. I’ve been nothing but utterly thrilled with BlackBerry and can say that they’re the best smartphones I’ve ever used, bar none. They’re light years above Palm and Windows Mobile devices. If you think they’re just huge email devices for corporate blowhards, you’re wrong. Go check them out again.

I’m a phone power user. I have multiple email accounts integrated into my BlackBerry. I use the browser constantly, as well as Gmail and Google Maps. I use nearly every dimension of a modern mobile phone, and I won’t consider anything but a smartphone. Whatever I choose has to do everything reasonably well; there can’t be any glaring weaknesses.

(more…)

Going to try this one out for a bit. It’s called The Journalist and WordPress.com just released it. I’ve been long begging the guys at WP.com for a professional minimalist theme that’s black-on-white, and this might be it. I need to test drive it for a bit.

I like the use of whitespace, but I don’t know if I like the Trebuchet font in the sidebar. Also, I think the title typography is a bit weak relative to post titles, and it sucks that this theme, like my previous one, doesn’t show the blog tagline without having to edit the CSS.

Like it? Hate it so much you’re going to unsubscribe from my feed? Tell me in the comments.

UPDATE: Back to Cutline, as you can see. 

Lil’Bit is a cat with two faces.  From the Telegraph:

Vets believe the cat, which has two mouths, two noses and four eyes, may have two brains, as one face can go to sleep while the other remains awake and it can blink independently on each one.

“When he purrs it is like he is purring in stereo,” the cat’s owner said.

I wonder which face you look at when you’re reprimanding it for whizzing on your bed.

Just saying.

[Via BB]

Christopher Hitchens, appearing on FOX News, says Mitt Romney’s Mormonism should be fair game for the 2008 decision.

Is this fair game as voting/debate criteria for the 2008 race? If not, why?

Your comments welcome.

And this, kids, is why 80%+ of the food I buy is organic.

Effective Jan. 1, dairies selling milk in Pennsylvania, the nation’s fifth-largest dairy state, will be banned from advertising on milk containers that their product comes from cows that have never been treated with rBST, or recombinant bovine somatotropin.

Translated: Monsanto uses rBST, and they’ve lobbied the PA state government to prohibit dairies that don’t use the hormone from advertising the fact on their packaging.

Without getting too deep into the epic amount of bullshit this represents and the continued deception foisted upon consumers as it relates to the industrialized, processed “food” most of us eat every day, the bigger point is Monsanto’s arrogance.

Instead of adapting and changing their business practices to be congruent with consumer demands, they instead choose to use  their agribusiness political power to lobby governments to change the market to their business practices.  This is the exact inverse of a capitalistic free market system where goods live and die on their own merits, but it’s time we stopped pretending that this doesn’t happen everywhere around us.

It does, and Monsanto is one of the biggest bullies around.

(If you’ve seen the movie Michael Clayton, it’s not difficult to deduce that uNorth is a symbol for today’s agribusiness reality, namely Monsanto.)

This ruling is likely to spread, with Ohio and New Jersey falling in line with Monsanto next.  From there, where it goes next is anyone’s guess.  But know one thing: this will spread.  Monsanto’s political muscle and lobbying power is well known.

I’m so passionate about this topic that I can’t reiterate this strongly enough, and I’m naturally biased towards hyperbole: if you knew what you were eating every day under the guise of health and nutrition, you’d be appalled.  The food we eat, coupled with the prevailing “wisdom”  of the health system as it relates to diet, exercise and wellness, is the primary reason the United States is so sick as a population.

Solid analysis by Godin, and he reiterates my thought about Amazon doing something to stimulate Kindle hardware sales.

The beauty of real books is that they don’t require a reader, which means that millions of people are eligible members of the market. Even if you only have .0001% market share, you can still get your book read.

The challenge that my hero Jeff Bezos has is that if he’s really really lucky, he’ll sell a million of these things in a year. And that means that at $10 a book, you need to have significant market share to make an impact. The Sony reader has been out for months and it has sold, perhaps, a few thousand units.

My thought was to use it, at least for a few years, as a promotion device. Give the books for free to anyone who buys the $400 machine. (Maybe you can have 1,000 books of your choice, so there’s not a lot of ‘waste’.) You’ll sell more machines that way, that’s for sure. And the people willing to buy the device are exactly the sort of people that an author like me wants to reach. No harm, no foul, all three of us win. If there were a million of these machines out there and an author had a chance to have her next book show up automatically on all of them, few among us would say, “no thanks to that exposure.”

This is a disruptive approach, the sort of thing only a market leader could pull off. It changes the world in a serious way. I wanted to be part of that.

I was unpersuasive. Sorry.

Link

So the talk of the day was certainly the Amazon Kindle, the eBook reader released by the retail giant. This thing costs $400, which is hardly a low barrier to entry. It also looks like the illegitimate son of a Commodore 64 and a Wii, but I don’t want to get slagged down in the design aspect, as much as I’d love to. I’ll leave that to FSJ.

I’m still mulling over the Kindle on various levels, but here is a series of unrelated thoughts on the device:

• The name rather blows. Far too close to kindling, which is clearly what annoyed users and naysayers will dub the device. That was the first thing that jumped at me, and I’m not even annoyed with it yet.
• $400? For real? Please.
• Nice features: always on EVDO (via Sprint), blog reading, newspaper subscription, web browsing, the ability to buy books over the air. I particularly like the decision to go with EVDO over wi-fi, because as fun as it is to pretend we live in a world where we have always-on wifi access, we’re really nowhere close. For umbrella access to the Net, riding atop a cellular data network is the only option.
• Once you swallow the $400, you’re not done paying: blogs cost $2/month (and Amazon decides what blogs you can subscribe do, and let me tell you I’m incensed that GF didn’t make the list) and newspapers cost $15/month. What’s strange about this model is the relative arrogance Amazon is has about the Kindle universe: all of the content I can pay for on the Kindle I can get for free on the web via RSS or directly via websites.
• No PDF or DOC support unless users want to the have files translated into Kindle-friendly format (.TXT or the Amazon-native .AZW) for either $.10 (if they want the file pushed to their Kindle via EVDO) or free (if they want to get the file converted and mailed back to them so they can push it to the Kindle via USB).
• As you might imagine, eBooks purchased from the Amazon store are loaded with DRM, which locks things down considerably. No printing, no sharing. And there’s no guarantee these books will even be readable 10 years from now — what happens if the Kindle goes tits-up? What happens to your purchased eBooks then?
• If Amazon really wanted to kick ass, it would offer customers free eBook versions of the standard books customers bought from them. That would go a long way towards helping the initial proliferation of Kindles and Kindle eBook downloads.
• The massive Newsweek love-fest was indeed a bit slurpy, to borrow a phrase from FSJ. Nonetheless, what a huge victory on the road to building hype. Impressive PR win.

More thoughts when I decide I want to think about this again. In the meantime, what are your impressions?

I can appreciate some down-home design dissection as much as the next guy, and while these illustrations are nice, it seems that Ward Sutton is trying just a little too hard when he analyzes the current set of 2008 campaign logos.

(Also: what’s Tiger Woods doing in the foreground on slide 2?)

Link

I use Firefox as my default browser on my Mac. I like it well enough, but the vast improvements in Safari under Leopard (specifically the improvements made to WebKit) have made me try to make the switch to Safari full-time.

One issue remains however, and for me it’s a real problem: Safari doesn’t work well with WordPress.com’s web interface.

Example: if I compose a post using WordPress’ web interface under Safari, it starts out well enough.

After publishing, though, things start to go to hell.

This, obviously, renders Safari 3 relatively worthless for an all-purpose browser, seeing how using WordPress’ web controls is something I do regularly. (Even though I compose most of my posts with ecto, I often do edits/updates to posts using WordPress itself.)

This is the one bug that I’d really like to see fixed. I’m somewhat surprised that this happens under Safari, because in every other dimension of my web life, Safari doesn’t miss a beat. With WordPress, however, it does, and quite badly at that.

If anyone knows a way around this, I’m all ears.

Until then, I’m all about Firefox.

Well, that didn’t take long.

Update details

Will be installing on MacBook Pro as soon as I post this.

John Scalzi on his recent visit to the Creation Museum in Petersburg, KY:

The guy who built the temple, satisfied that it truly represents his beloved load of horseshit in the best possible light, then opens the temple to the public, to attract not only the already-established horseshit enthusiasts, but possibly to entice new people to come and gaze on the horseshit, and to, well, who knows, admire its moundyness, or the way it piles just so, to nod in appreciation of the rationalizations for its excellence or to clap in delight and take pictures when an escaping swell of methane causes the load of horseshit to sigh a moist and pungent sigh.

When all of this is done, the fellow turns to you and asks you what you think of it all now, now that this gorgeous edifice has been raised in glory and the masses cluster in celebration.

And you say, “Well, that’s all very nice. But it’s still just an enormous load of horseshit.”

And this is, in sum, the Creation Museum. $27 million has purchased the very best monument to an enormous load of horseshit that you could possibly ever hope to see. I enjoyed my visit, admired the craft with which the whole thing was put together, and was never once convinced that what I was seeing celebrated was anything more or less than horseshit. Popular horseshit? Undoubtedly. Horseshit hallowed by tradition and consecrated by time? Just so. Horseshit of the finest possible quality? I would not argue the point. And yet, even so: Horseshit. Complete horseshit. Utter horseshit. Total horseshit. Horseshit, horseshit, horseshit, horseshit. I pity the people who swallow it whole.

That’s just part of the beginning. The entire thing is fantastic.

I spent all last night literally laughing to the point of tears looking at John Scalzi’s 101-picture long Flickr photoset of the Creation Museum.  If you remember, earlier on GF I wrote about the museum’s grand opening, and finally some brave soul has paid the $19.95 entrance fee and, armed with a camera, taken plenty of pictures to illustrate the moist, humid mound of horseshit that’s being dumped on visitors.

Aside from the obviously high production value of the museum’s placards and exhibits, the messages being taught here are downright alarming.

Quick — any guesses as to what percentage of the US population believes this line of “reason” dogmatically?

Link to Flickr photoset

(Be sure to read not only Scalzi’s comments for each picture, but also the user comments.  There is much comedy to be had, provided your head doesn’t explode from the insanity.  Then it’s not so fun and you’ll need a mop.)

Enjoy.  Take your time and slog through each picture — it’s more than worth it.

Funny — you mean Microsoft can’t build its $10,000 George Jetson coffee table and sell it to the mainstream market just yet? Maybe the functionality isn’t quite ironed out above and beyond the scripted demos we saw several months ago? Applications are pushed back because people are really deep down trying to figure out what to make the sexy interface do?

Who knew?

I thought the Surface was impressive when I first saw it, but even then I remember talking to friends and arguing that it was more a concept technology than anything real. I argued that after the aesthetics and interface, it could die in the execution stage. Or perhaps it limps along until the market comes to it, but that’s hardly something MS can hope for at this stage of its maturity.

MS either makes this market or loses it. I don’t see much of a middle ground.

Previously on GF:
MS Surface: Apple’s multi-touch gets big
One day, your computer will be a big-ass table

If people knew — really knew — how bad fast food is for them, would they stop eating it?  All trending evidence points to no, but nonetheless it’s interesting and more than a little disappointing to see exactly how bad fast food is for you.

Here’s a chart of popular items from major fast food chains compared.  If, after seeing this, you don’t think that these companies have absolutely zero regard for your health, you’re kidding yourself.

For instance, did you know:

• A large Arby’s curly fries has 566 calories, 37 grams of fat (7 saturated) and 1476 mg of sodium?
• A Big Hamburger from Carl’s Jr. has 470 calories, 17 grams of fat (6 saturated), 1060 mg of sodium and 54 grams of carbs?
• How about the Double Six Dollar Burger at Carl’s Jr.?  One of these gets you 1520 calories, 111 grams of fat (47 saturated), 2760 mg of sodium and 60 grams of carbs?  For reference, that’s almost the calorie that smaller female needs per day, and it’s far more fat than what’s recommended for a medium-sized male.
• The McDonald’s Chicken Selects Premium Strips (5 pcs) weighs in at 630 calories, 33 grams of fat (6 saturated), 1550 mg of sodium and 46 grams of carbs.  Keep in mind that this is McD’s premium offering, no less.

And there’s more — lots more.  This is the best comparison analysis I’ve ever seen for commonly-found fast food items.

[Via kottke]

Rands in Repose:

Your nerd has built an annoyingly efficient relevancy engine in his head. It’s the end of the day and you and your nerd are hanging out on the couch. The TV is off. There isn’t a computer anywhere nearby and you’re giving your nerd the daily debrief. “Spent an hour at the post office trying to ship that package to your mom, and then I went down to that bistro — you know — the one next the flower shop, and it’s closed. Can you believe that?”

And your nerd says, “Cool”.

Cool? What’s cool? The business closing? The package? How is any of it cool? None of it’s cool. Actually, all of it might be cool, but your nerd doesn’t believe any of what you’re saying is relevant. This is what he heard, “Spent an hour at the post office blah blah blah…”

You can be rightfully pissed off by this behavior — it’s simply rude — but seriously, I’m trying to help here. Your nerd’s insatiable quest for information and The High has tweaked his brain in an interesting way. For any given piece of incoming information, your nerd is making a lightning fast assessment: relevant or not relevant? Relevance means that the incoming information fits into the system of things your nerd currently cares about. Expect active involvement from your nerd when you trip the relevance flag. If you trip the irrelevance flag, look for verbal punctuation announcing his judgment of irrelevance. It’s the word your nerd says when he’s not listening and it’s always the same. My word is “Cool”, and when you hear “Cool”, I’m not listening.

Cool? Cool.

I drive a 2006 Dodge Charger R/T HEMI. I got it on a 27 month lease. It’s an absolute piece of shit and a mechanical embarrassment on nearly every level, but I’ll come back to that later. First things first.

It’s worth noting that my prior two cars were nearly flawless: a 2001 Acura CL Type-S, and then a 2004 Infiniti G35. The G35, in particular, was an excellent machine: I took it into the dealer one time because an oxygen sensor died, which led to the relatively benign problem of a warning light being lit all the time. The dealer gave me a loaner car, sent me on my way, and called me back a few hours later to tell me the job was done. And they washed my car too. Nice.

About the same story for the Acura: nearly no problems except for a headlight that killed itself prematurely, plus the time I decided to take a turn too fast after a winter storm and plowed headlong into a pile of snow. That resulted in a cracked front clip, which was all fiberglass, that had to be replaced. My error, not Acura’s, and I did learn the lesson that a 4′ pile of wet snow is denser than you might think. I got a free loaner car in that scenario too, even though the repair wasn’t warranty work.

So. Let’s get back to the Charger and that whole piece of shit thing.

When it came time to turn in my G35 at the end of its lease term, I decided I wanted something cheaper. Around here in Detroit, you hear a steady cacophony of rally cries to support the local American automakers which, allegedly, will help our ailing local economy. Like some flipper-armed idiot, I decided to listen to it. To pay my dues, you know. To show my support for local industry. To be a patriot.

(more…)

“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could; some blunders and absurdities have crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; you shall begin it serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense.”

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I never really noticed this.

[Via CF]

I’m a fan of Acorn and Pixelmator, but I’ll be all over Naked Light — a Leopard-only image editor that’s hitting beta tomorrow.

Naked light throws away antiquated concepts like pixels; layers; 8-bit color; and destructive, non-re-editable filters and operations. Instead, compositions in Naked light represent a sort of Platonic ideal—with infinite resolution, an astounding 590 quintillion colors, and perpetually re-editable nodes.

[Via DF]

Salon has an article about Bill Keller, a televangelist, and his efforts to dissuade his 2.4M mailing list readers from voting for Mitt Romney, who’s a Mormon.

A choice clipping is below, but let me just (again) say that this is why anyone who bases their worldview and overall intellectual framework on something as warped as religious dogma is just as deranged as those he denigrates.

To wit:

“A vote for Romney is a vote for Satan,” Keller declared in his daily e-mail devotional last May. His reasoning went like this: Romney’s election would serve as a giant advertisement for a competing religion, Mormonism, which Keller and others believe has falsely portrayed itself as another form of Christianity in an effort to find converts. “He would influence people to seek out the Mormon faith,” Keller predicted of a Romney presidency. “They would get sucked into those lies and they would eventually die and go to hell.”

I see this “reasoning” as pure idiocy, ramblings of an intellectually-stunted child. What bothers me the most is that more people than I am ready to believe will swallow this message and relay it to their friends and families. It’s terrifying.

(For the record, my views on Mormonism aren’t much more uncontroversial than my views on other religions: I think it’s a cult, and a harmful, baseless, incredibly delusional one at that.)

But tell me: aside from the delineation line between Christianity and Mormonism as detailed by Keller, how on earth is Keller’s line of reasoning any more sane than what Romney would say about his religion?

Both lines of thinking are items bought from the Delusion Warehouse. They’re just different brands.