Small Sample-Size Theater

I spent an entire short flight last week reading the middle third of the Jony Ive profile in the New Yorker , and here’s the passage that’s breaking my considerable writing-in-public hiatus: ...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/113145914589

While in Williams-Sonoma a couple of months ago, I spent a moment gazing at a neon-fuschia Kitchenaid mixer. The key to understanding why such a visually assaultive object existed was that Susan ...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/18370738890

Facebook’s IPO: How Mark Zuckerberg plans to retain dictatorial control his company. (Slate) : Matthew Yglesias. The estate planning details were new to me — the class B shares with magnifi...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/17145469384

The Fireplace Delusion (Sam Harris) : > I recently stumbled upon an example of secular intransigence that > may give readers a sense of how religious people feel when thei...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/17014629425

Tyson Discrimination Verdict Restored by Appeals Court (nytimes.com) : > On Dec. 16, more than a year after the initial decision, the appeals > court reversed course. The new�...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/14851022050

When I Got the Call (The Nation) : Katha Politt talks to God.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/12757056402

Cost of false positives (Laughing Meme) : I’ve had this browser window open for weeks, trying to figure out what I wanted to say about it. It connects the difficulty of eradicating spam (wher...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/11167426588

The Benjamin Franklin Effect (You Are Not So Smart) : Marvelous essay, filling in some psychological gaps in my understanding of the Stanford Prison Experiment. I’m going to have to buy that ...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/11166414405

Relative sales of girl-scout cookies (Wired) : Via @rands

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/9708512961

Pseudonymity, Privacy and Responsibility on Google+ : Kee Nethery stacks up straw men, and burn them down.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/9560305495

A meditation on GlaDOS : Herein find, from before Portal 2 came out, an art-historical analysis of GlaDOS’ motivations and emotional state. It opens up into a spectacular rabbit hole. Via @lo...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/8919891163

How do I flip it over and shake the spiders out of it?

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/8540317874

Linda Greenhouse: Justice in Dreamland : Linda Greenhouse, the world’s best Supreme Court reporter, on the worst Supreme Court decision in years.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/5676313783

Philip IV, Restored : Great use of a Flash interface, depicting the before and after restoration of a Velazquez portrait of Philip IV.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/2583771106

The 2010 Seattle Seahawks: Worst. Playoff. Team. Ever? (Nate Silver) : > The Seahawks are not any garden-variety 7-9 team: they are an > incredibly bad 7-9 team.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/2582913922

This morning I received an email from Perfect Third, the company making the Wakemate sleep-monitoring gizmo, recommending I desist in using the USB power brick which shipped last week with their ...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/2546502747

On Moscow's Escalators : > There are 643  in the Moscow Metro. This is a system, > like Washington’s, with deep, deep stations, but, unlike in > Washington, passengers�...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/2328850320

Harbinger or Hoax: The First Painting of Kim Jung Un? (Foreign Policy) : It’s Culture Wednesday! Please enjoy this circuitous analysis through art history and the North Korean edition of Krem...

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/2328750378

Why Transformers 2 Made No Sense : And somehow I still liked it more than the first one.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/1695061549

Estrella Family Creamery Defies FDA Over Recall (NYT) : This version of events is a little more nuanced than the one on Madison Market’s registers.

https://blog.bumppo.net/post/1672501953