dear clusterflock
What is your favorite city?
London, 5
The postcard.
Love, Lucy x
This one
is for Lucy, but she may not want it.
Postmodern Book List
I have read five of the 61 essential postmodern books (via), The Scarlet Letter, Metamorphosis, Maus I & II, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and Hamlet. I also got bored with Everything Is Illuminated, so I put it down, and read an entirely different City of God.
Watch My Face
My thinking here was, if you’re going to get glasses, then for pete’s sake get glasses.
the man fox news interviewed in a segment about whether surgeon general nominee Regina Benjamin was too fat
quote out of context
Right when I sat down and shook his hand he asked me if I’d helped any poor people that day, and I said, “Of course!” Then he took out his Purell, squirted it into his hands and told me that it was nothing personal, but “poor” seemed to be going around these days and he had a family to think about.
we glow
The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day.
How did they find out?
Five healthy male volunteers in their 20s were placed bare-chested in front of the cameras in complete darkness in light-tight rooms for 20 minutes every three hours from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. for three days.
Hmm.
Shanidar 3
A 50- to 75,000-year-old Neanderthal skeleton shows evidence it was killed by a human with access to a stone spear.
Churchill and his colleagues examined Shanidar 3, one of nine Neanderthals discovered between 1953 and 1960 in a cave in northeastern Iraq’s Zagros Mountains. The team also ran experiments with a specially calibrated crossbow, which they used to deliver stone-pointed spears with different forces to simulate a thrusting spear and a long-range projectile weapon like a dart.
The weapons were thrust into pig and other animal carcasses. “Pigs make a pretty good model for Neandertal thoraces,” Churchill told LiveScience. “The ribs are about the same stoutness and overall same size. And the musculature and skin thickness and things like that are pretty similar from what we can tell.”
Harvard
“Apparently nobody in our financial office has read the story in Genesis about Joseph interpreting Pharaoh’s dream—you know, during the seven good years you save for the seven lean years,” remarked Alan Dershowitz, a professor at Harvard Law School since 1967. “And now they’re coming hat in hand, pleading to the faculty and students to bear the burden of cutbacks. It’s a scandal! It’s an absolute scandal, the way Harvard has handled this financial crisis.”
Once upon a time—that is, the fiscal year ending June 30, 2008—Harvard’s endowment stood at $36.9 billion, way, way up from $4.8 billion in 1990. No other university endowment in the world comes close to matching Harvard’s. Yale’s endowment, the second-largest in the nation—$22.9 billion for fiscal 2008—is nearly 40 percent smaller than Harvard’s. Stanford’s is less than half the size: $17.2 billion, as of last year.
Then came the Great Recession. In the second half of 2008, even more quickly than it had taken off, Harvard’s overheated endowment collapsed. Last December, in a letter written to the university’s deans, Harvard’s president, the historian Drew Gilpin Faust, and its executive vice president, Ed Forst, revealed that Harvard’s endowment had lost $8 billion, or 22 percent, in the first four months of the fiscal year, from July through October 2008. To put that number in context: $8 billion is greater than Columbia University’s entire endowment ($7.1 billion as of fiscal 2008). Not since 1974, when Harvard’s endowment shrank by 12.2 percent, had the university seen losses of such magnitude. Anticipating more dire financial news, Faust warned her deans to expect a 30 percent loss in the endowment for the year. Other universities were showing big losses in 2008, but at Harvard, given the scale and size of its endowment, the numbers seemed inconceivably large.
London, 4
Every evening at 8. From the V and A theatre collection.
Love, Lucy x
London, 3
One of the plays what I saw.
Love, Lucy x
Gimme Shelter
Cam-phone photo. LG VX11000. July 21, 2009.
I set off today for a walk in the rain. The trees offered some protection, but for a few minutes I crouched within a man-made shelter.
Orange immaturity
These oranges, on the tree in my front yard, won’t be ripe for at least 3 more months.
Dear clusterflock
Has your involvement with clusterflock changed you? If so, how?
India, your kittens need to get a roomba.
Odd DC Lobbying Ad
It was a full page Ad in Politico.
Life Imitates Art
Turtle Porn
Palin’s Resignation: The Edited Version
Edited by one of the authors of Vanity Fair. (via Austin Kleon)
Broomba: the self propelled broom
Catburglar Claude
More of the pixelated goodness. I desperately want to play this game. (hat tip to Offworld)
Tyler Cowen asks
If Medicare had not been passed, might this country have instituted universal health care coverage sometime in the 1970s?
Tyler also points to: Reincarnation Bank:
If you leave nothing purposely behind when you die, then what is there here for you when you return?
Objectified
Objectified is a feature-length documentary about our complex relationship with manufactured objects and, by extension, the people who design them. It’s a look at the creativity at work behind everything from toothbrushes to tech gadgets. It’s about the designers who re-examine, re-evaluate and re-invent our manufactured environment on a daily basis. It’s about personal expression, identity, consumerism, and sustainability.
Why Japan’s cellphones haven’t gone global
Japan’s cellphones are like the endemic species that Darwin encountered on the Galápagos Islands — fantastically evolved and divergent from their mainland cousins — explains Takeshi Natsuno, who teaches at Tokyo’s Keio University.
