woody

Mr. Connare, 48 years old, now works at Dalton Maag, a typography studio in London, and finds his favorite creation — a sophisticated typeface called Magpie — eclipsed by Comic Sans. He cringes at the most improbable manifestations of his Frankenstein’s monster font and rarely uses it himself, but he says he tries to be polite when he meets people excited to be in the presence of the creator. Googling himself, he once found a Black Sabbath band fan site that used Comic Sans. The site’s creators even credited him. “You can’t regulate bad taste,” he says.

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Typeface Inspired by Comic Books Has Become a Font of Ill Will - WSJ.com

1 week ago |

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the sand grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

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Richard Dawkins (via livejamie) (via whatson) (via christopherabel)

Reblogged from christopherabel | 2 weeks ago |

Plus, the Burmese junta has substantial internal instability to contend with. There are reports of a recent “clearance sale” of heroin by ethnic militias, who are rushing to sell off the drugs to finance enormous weapons purchases. The drugs are being sold at bargain-basement prices in preparation for a possible resumption of civil war. These ethnic groups have been fighting the government on and off for more than 60 years. The fighting has largely occurred in Burma’s border areas, but a resumption of wide-scale violence also carries the threat of discouraging foreign investments in Burma’s energy sector, further weakening and isolating an already dangerous regime.

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The Future Nuclear Powers You Should Be Worried About | Foreign Policy

I wonder if, because of that, there might be some sort of a shift in how nations vote or something. maybe if it was e instead of heroin.

2 weeks ago |

Dusty sunbeams streak through the window while you lay on the couch in a blissful half-asleep cocoon. Sometimes during this hazy daze a little voice in your brain politely asks that the TV be turned down or shut right off. In moments like this there’s something satisfying about keeping as much of your body completely relaxed and perfectly still as possible while awkwardly grabbing the remote with your foot, a rolled up newspaper, or another remote that just happens to be closer. After you stab at it and coax it across the carpet, you do the deed and let a little smile curl on your face as you fade deeper and deeper into your comfy afternoon nap. AWESOME!

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#652 Using any item within reach to help grab the remote control so you don’t have to move « 1000 Awesome Things

2 weeks ago |

A similar feeling swept the nation in September 2001, just as the first Millennials were settling into college campuses. The day after the terrorist attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Mr. Howe appeared on CNN to discuss historical cycles, a subject he and Mr. Strauss had described in a 1997 book called The Fourth Turning, which described four repeating “saecula,” or seasons, of history—awakenings, unravelings, crises, and highs. Did the smoldering twin towers portend a crisis era? The day after the interview, The Fourth Turning appeared in Amazon’s top 20.

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The Millennial Muddle: How Stereotyping Students Became an Industry - Student Affairs - The Chronicle of Higher Education

2 weeks ago |

The system needs at least five seconds of music to make a match, and sometimes people turn it on just as the song is ending. There are also frequently errors when people look up live performances—if you hold up your phone to your TV during the musical segment on Saturday Night Live, Shazam will most probably fail to ID the song. (If you do get a match from SNL, you’re probably watching that episode with Ashlee Simpson—Shazam is a great way to catch lip-syncers in the act.)

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How does the music-identifying app Shazam work its magic? - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine

Wow, this totally changes things! you can spot-check to see if it is really the CD version of a song live! i wonder how well it truely works…

2 weeks ago |