Amazing bird shots
Today I bring you some amazing bird-shots, courtesy of my friend Diede. The first set includes the photo above, and comes from Andrew Zuckerman’s Bird book. The second set is all about kingfishers from National Geographic:
Today I bring you some amazing bird-shots, courtesy of my friend Diede. The first set includes the photo above, and comes from Andrew Zuckerman’s Bird book. The second set is all about kingfishers from National Geographic:
For a great lesson in entrepreneurship, I warmly recommend visiting the brand new Walt Disney Family Museum in San Francisco’s Presidio Park. Apart from being a beautiful museum with lots of wonderful artwork, it also illustrates the phenomenal entrepreneurial spirit that made Walt Disney the success that he was:
I found it incredibly inspiring to learn about the life of this great man, and the passion with which he brought so much joy to all of us. And with that, I’m going to put the Jungle Book at the top of my Netflix queue:
Eli Burakian has some beautiful nature shots on his site, many of them from around Dartmouth (where we both went to college). I particularly recommend his abstract gallery. Thanks Will for the recommendation!
Given how much I post about Apple products, I really want to give kudos to Dell for the genuine innovations in their latest laptop. This Ars Technica article describes the cool new features of the Z600 laptop:
All in all, a very impressive feature set that demonstrates real creativity. I hope Apple follows suit on some of these, especially the wireless dock.
These dust storm pictures from The Big Picture blog are stunning. This Flickr gallery also has a bunch of great shots. San Francisco looks like this most days, but unfortunately our fog is a dull grey.
What is a moment? Here’s one answer from the excellent science podcast Radiolab:
So simple, so plain, so beautiful. Via Jonah Lehrer’s equally excellent blog The Frontal Cortex.
PS: Is the soundtrack by Sigur Ros? It reminds me of Heima. Shazam won’t recognize it…
I’m certainly not the first to post these picture, but this balloon launch is AWESOME:
The largest mass ascent of hot air balloons took place recently at the biennial Lorraine Mondial Air Ballons rally in Chambley, France. Pilots from around the world lifted off in 329 balloons on 26 July.
A little something to get excited for ski season (via Ariel):
The Social History of the MP3 is a Pitchfork article that puts MP3s in the context of previous technological revolutions. It’s full of interesting nuggets:
When radio came along, its broadcasts created communities of music-listening strangers, physically distant from each other but connected through the knowledge that they were listening to the same song at the same time. Where radio brought listeners together as a listening public, the LP started splitting them apart. The LP and 45 rpm formats took the phonograph, which had been in existence for over half a century, to the masses, right as the American middle-class was going suburban and privatizing their lives. We could then use musical objects like we’d been using literature and art for centuries prior: as collectibles, and signifiers of personal taste. The emergence of the cassette–the first sturdy, re-writeable music technology– allowed us to “manufacture” our own music in the privacy of our own homes and recirculate it at our will, through mixtape trading and full-album dubbing.
How the telegraph created commodity futures:
Weirdly enough, this particular effect of mp3s and peer-to-peer networks– that information travels much faster than physical goods– most closely resembles that of the telegraph on the 19th century commodity markets. Before that innovation– the Internet’s great-grandfather– individual markets based in major cities were separated by hundreds of miles, and goods could only travel as fast as railroads could take them. Yet because information about crop conditions could travel via telegraph exponentially faster than the actual crops, the exchange of money for physical commodities was largely replaced by a futures market, based on what would happen.
On the pace of online music
The ideal would have been that a new network of independent music lovers would have elevated different types of music, or even found new ones, the way nascent rock’n'roll, honky tonk, bluegrass, and R&B benefited thanks to the 45. But online, new genres risk being strangled in the crib before anyone knows they exist, and people are “done” with new albums before the cover art has been approved.
Thanks to Noah for the link. Also, for those of you who have Spotify, I can warmly recommend Pitchfork’s 500 Best Songs of the 2000s playlist.
I love this quote shared by my friend Amit:
“Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful” -William Morris