Dear Clusterflock
Something to think about over the week-end:
What are your thoughts on a re-design around here?
Let a Professional Do It
When I posted this, the phrase “insert in post” caught my eye.
photo out of context
Almost Perfect
Her arms are almost in a perfect line, and I keep looking at it wishing they were.
Let’s Talk Ned Hepburn.
Ned Hepburn is the best. He’s like this experiment in writing-yourself-to-life, as I can never tell what is a real memory and what is an invention that plays true. He’s also keenly, achingingly, hyper-aware of everything that goes on around him in this disturbing GoodFellas-level-of-detail way.
it’s rather sad, because i’ve hung out with “normie” women before and they’re really nice people. they like shitty bands like The Fray and think that “Chuck Klosterman” is something you get from sleeping with guys with leather jackets. they’re nice people, though. i just know that we can never be together. we are too fundamentally different. she says tomatoes, and i say that i liked tomatoes better before “everybody else started liking them”.
the only thing that overlaps normies and scene kids is Trader Joes, bad television, and the underlying reality that “i hate her because she owns a camera and calls herself a photographer” and “she hates me because i own a MacBook and call myself an artist”.
Perhaps it’s too-too to like it when someone points out obvious things. I don’t give a crap. Hepburn loves Los Angeles, Natalie Portman, getting high and is writing some of the funniest stuff around. Yet another person I wanna hang out with for an afternoon and interview cause it’d be a great story no matter what happened.
moot speaking at TED
I think nonprofits should be the new start-ups:
In a brief question and answer exchange between moot and TED’s Chris Anderson, moot said that money wasn’t the goal of creating 4chan. “The commercial picture is that there really isn’t one,” he said. More laughs, mostly uneasy, and I was left with a sense that many people in the room did not understand. I did, because like 4chan, Ars was started not to make money, but to service a community. Whether or not 4chan has a real commercial future isn’t clear, moot said, but he was going back to school and hoped to apply all he has learned from 4chan to some future venture.
Most of moots discussion (hat tip to waxy), however, centered around 4chan and the power of privacy, particularly in an age when transparency and publicity through social networking is lauded. The whole talk reminds me of why I love the flock’s Christopher Walken.
Orthorexia
The obsessive compulsion to only eat healthy foods:
On Wednesday, the first draft of DSM-V was published online, kicking off a three-year process of public comment and further revisions that will culminate in a new and improved version come 2013. Orthorexia is not listed in this new draft and, despite the ongoing efforts of various eating-disorder groups, is unlikely to make its way into the final edition.
“We’re not in a position to say it doesn’t exist or it’s not important,” says Tim Walsh, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University who led the American Psychiatric Association’s work group that reviewed eating disorders for inclusion in DSM-V. “The real issue is significant data.” Getting listed as a separate entry in the DSM requires extensive scientific knowledge of a syndrome and broad clinical acceptance, neither of which orthorexia has.
Jason remembers his father flying
Like when he made a crosswind landing in a Cessna 172 ahead of an oncoming storm which we later learned had spawned some tornadoes while running a bit lower on gas than was generally acceptable by the place’s captain. He’d already attempted one landing, aborting after the wind dropped us like 10 feet in half a second while about 30 feet from the ground. The sensation of that crosswind landing — of gliding over the runway twenty feet off the ground at ~60-80 mph while pointed about 30 degrees off axis and then, just before touching down and presumably tumbling down the runway wing over wing, straightening out for a surprisingly gentle landing — was one of the freakiest things I’ve ever experienced, partly because I wasn’t scared at all…I knew he’d get us down safely.
Remembering Alexander McQueen
climber’s body
Last night I moved fluidly, unencumbered, able to maneuver against the smallest holds, moving smoothly over rocks and walls, climbing stronger than I had ever been.
dear clusterflock
I’m Roger Teeter.
suspended animation, metabolic flexibility in mammals
Mark Roth is a cellular biologist who has studied using hydrogen sulfide to induce suspended animation as a way to increase the likelihood of survival in both traumatic injury and surgery.
But then you have these freaks of nature. . . . There’s a retrospective study that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine ten years ago that shows that 50 percent of people who have been without a heartbeat for three hours [in cold conditions], and are re-warmed appropriately, survive without neurological problems. The people in that study spent at least three hours below 28 degrees. The record is a 29-year-old skier in Norway who went for nine hours. Her core temperature fell to below 14 degrees C. Remember, people are large bags of water; they take a long time to cool off and a long time to re-warm. It took her nine hours to get to a point where they could re-start her heart, and she went on to be the head radiologist in the hospital that treated her.
three dicks
Dick Pound. Dick Trickle. Dick Swett.
“This is very strange to me.”
Bill Gates’ email to Microsoft employees after Apple launched iTunes.
However I think we need some plan to prove that even though Jobs has us a bit flat footed again we move quick and both match and do stuff better.
Somewhere Over the West.
Imagery
I once watched a well-dressed gentleman physically tear the pages from a novel with his own teeth, then dispose of the remains into the rushing air through an open window.
– Nick Cernis, convincing us to read a book a week.
(via)
How’s That?
I’ve got to wonder where they find these respondents.
(via)
Photo Out of Context
(via)
Which of these things does not belong?
GOOD has a nice little photo essay on the The Central Valley Tea Party.
At the Front Door
reg’lar day
Lookin’ out my back door.
It’s kind of wimpy for this time of year, as we had a big thaw a few days back.
snow day
We never get this here.
from the comments
I was always certain that it was a fact, but then I started talking to people like the girl I mentioned above and when I explained this they looked at me as if I had a donkey tail.
K2
No, not the mountain, but what the midwestern kids are smoking these days:
Erickson said the police purchased K2 in Lawrence and brought it back to Johnson County to test the chemical breakup of the product. He said the tests suggested that K2 contained a synthetic version of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana.
“It’s definitely not a form of marijuana,” Erickson said, “but it mimics the effects on the body,”
A senior named John, who asked that his last name be withheld, said he was a regular marijuana smoker who decided to try K2 recently after hearing about it in the news.
John said he thought K2 produced a bodily effect similar to marijuana but only tasted “OK.” He said there were a number of other reasons why he wouldn’t make K2 his drug of choice.
“It’s a relaxing feeling, but it doesn’t have the head high of weed,” John said. “It’s nothing straight to the dome like weed.”
John said he thought those who did not smoke marijuana regularly would find K2 to be more potent than he did. However, because of the price and availability of marijuana in the area, John said he would stick with the illegal product.
“Great weed in this town is so readily available that I’d much rather just go to a dealer than some store,” John said.
Clever name, though, I’ll give them that.
legislating the apocalypse
The Virginia House of Delegates has voted against implantation of microchips against a person’s will, both as a measure of protecting personal privacy and to forestall the coming of the Anti-Christ.
“My understanding — I’m not a theologian — but there’s a prophecy in the Bible that says you’ll have to receive a mark, or you can neither buy nor sell things in end times,” Cole said. “Some people think these computer chips might be that mark.”
