June 2012
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The art of espresso →
A jet of hot water at 88°-93°C (190°-200°F) passes under a pressure of nine or more atmospheres through a seven-gram (.25 oz) cake-like layer of ground and tamped coffee. Done right, the result is a concentrate of not more than 30 ml (one oz) of pure sensorial pleasure.
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Qi Lu on Working 20 Hours a Day Every Day →
Growing up in a village outside of Shanghai with no running water or electricity, Qi Lu (pronounced: chee loo) had no idea that one day he would have a corner office at one of the world’s biggest technology companies. As the President of Online Services at Microsoft, Lu has made a drastic journey to the top thanks to what his colleagues call “Qi Time.”
“During college, the amount of time I spent...
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“It is very difficult to know people and I don’t think one can ever really...”
– The Razor’s Edge by W. Somerset Maugham
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The Future is Better Than You Think →
By: Peter Diamandis/Singularity University June 27, 2012
During the last two decades, we have witnessed a technological acceleration unlike anything the world has ever seen. Exponential progress in artificial intelligence, robotics, infinite computing, ubiquitous broadband networks, digital manufacturing, nanomaterials, and synthetic biology, among many others, put us on track to make greater...
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The Power of the Particular →
By: David Brooks NY Times, June 25, 2012
They say you’ve never really seen a Bruce Springsteen concert until you’ve seen one in Europe, so some friends and I threw financial sanity to the winds and went to follow him around Spain and France. In Madrid, for example, we were rewarded with a show that lasted 3 hours and 48 minutes, possibly the longest Springsteen concert on record and one of the...
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Nora Ephron: What I Won't and Will Miss →
The great Nora Ephron passed away yesterday, aged 71, following a battle with leukemia that began in 2006. She had many strings to her bow, but most notably wrote the screenplays to some of the best loved films ever to grace the big screen, many of which she also directed and produced. She wrote the following lists — of things she won’t and will miss — in 2010 and used them to close her...
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FOOTBALL IS THE BEST SPORT →
From INTELLIGENT LIFE magazine July/August 2012
Football—aka soccer—began to benefit from organisation in 1863, when a man named Ebenezer Morley collated rules in his home overlooking the stretch of the Thames on which the Boat Race between Oxford and Cambridge was already an annual fixture. The game took the best part of a century to conquer the world, and then along came satellite television,...
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computer "brain" teaches itself how to spot cats... →
By: John Markoff NY Times, June 25, 2012
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — Inside Google’s secretive X laboratory, known for inventing self-driving cars and augmented reality glasses, a small group of researchers began working several years ago on a simulation of the human brain.
There Google scientists created one of the largest neural networks for machine learning by connecting 16,000 computer...
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A Book Lover's Guide to Reading and Walking at the... →
I stand up. I start walking. I’m still reading. My secondary senses go into overdrive to keep me on track (you know, like Daredevil). My mind divides: I’m both here and not-here, in the reality and in the fiction at the same time. The world scrolls by around the edges of the page, the margins outside the margins—furniture, stairs, pets, children. I keep a weather eye on all that, but I’m still...
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I analyzed the chords of 1300 popular songs for... →
If you write a song in C with an E minor in it, you should probably think very hard if you want to put a chord that is anything other than an A minor chord or an F major chord. 93% of the time one of these two chords came next.
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Waiting game →
By: Frank Partnoy, Financial Times, June 22, 2012
During superfast reactions, the best-performing experts in sport, and in life, instinctively know when to pause, if only for a split-second. The same is true over longer periods: some of us are better at understanding when to take a few extra seconds to deliver the punchline of a joke, or when we should wait a full hour before making a judgment...
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Our underground future →
By Leon Neyfakh | BOSTON GLOBE, JUNE 24, 2012
A finished basement can be a beautiful thing. With the right accoutrements and enough effort, what might otherwise be a damp, empty space lined with concrete can be turned into a cozy playroom, or a den, or an office and gym. Properly planned, the basement can become an integral part of a household, even a kind of engine that powers it from below.
...
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Tomorrow's Kickstarter is live! →
tomorrowmag:
It took three weeks, a small forest’s worth of paperwork, hours on the phone with customer service agents, a crash course in starting a small business, and a road trip to the Los Angeles County clerk’s office (which is not, in fact, in Los Angeles). But we made it: Our Kickstarter page went live just moments ago. If you have the inclination and resources, we’d love your support,...
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Will Your Children Inherit Your E-Books? →
By: Amanda Katz, NPR June 21, 2012
What happens to our books when we die? Many books disappear before we do, of course; they fall apart, or we put them out on the stoop for scavengers. A book like this one, however — a text that is still read and reprinted, that has played a notable role in the 20th-century imagination, and then a copy of the text that played an especially interesting role — is...
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Doc Johnson, a sex toy empire →
Ron moved from London to Los Angeles to open Doc Johnson. Packaging he had seen in Europe he reproduced in America. “We were still light-years behind the Europeans,” he says, but now Doc Johnson named and packed its vibrators like any other piece of merchandise. The business grew. In two years’ time it expanded from 1,500 square feet to a new property of 33,000 square feet. He tapped into...
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Watchlarssss: The Prototype.
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“Blade Runner” Nearly Three Decades Later: How a... →
For those of us who first saw “Blade Runner” in theaters, the first nighttime street scene –Harrison Ford, as the blade runner Deckard, wandering through acid rain in a wrecked, neon-lit downtown Los Angeles–is forever etched in our brains. The street life of the future is chaotic, a babel of advertising slogans–”a new life awaits you in the off-world colonies!”–music and images such as...
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“I realized why I need to start a new company. Not for the money. Not because I’m...”
– Derek Sivers on Why You Need Your Own Company
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THE VICE GUIDE TO DATING RICH GIRLS →
Rich girls are hot because their moms are hot. But they’re also insane because their dads are inbred sociopaths with Nazi fetishes. All of this makes dating one for a short period of time an excitingly weird mixture of prescription pills, naps, crazy arguments, depressing music, room service, therapists, tattoos that cost more than cars, jet lag, and guestlists. It’s gonna be fun! They...
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How to Write an Aaron Sorkin Script, by Aaron... →
A song in a musical works best when a character has to sing— when words won’t do the trick anymore. The same idea applies to a long speech in a play or a movie or on television. You want to force the character out of a conversational pattern. In the pilot of The Newsroom, a new series for HBO, TV news anchor Will McAvoy (Jeff Daniels) emotionally checked out years ago, and now he’s...
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