I read this at least once every few weeks.

As a result of their activism, Ai Weiwei, Jacob Appelbaum, and Laura Poitras have become three of the most justifiably paranoid people in the world.

“If you don’t have an opinion, everyone else will give you theirs.”

A little something I put together.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Jello Biafra and The Guantanamo School Of Medicine’s new album, White People and the Damage Done, is an artifact from an alternate reality in which the Dead Kennedys never dissolved in acrimony, and instead kept on gigging and recording, getting tighter and tighter, angrier and angrier,…

Now listening.

I sure do love Björk.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Along the way, you’ll be reminded that today’s debates have historical roots in controversies over computer hacking, phone phreaking, home taping, and ultimately the 1920s patent-law rebellions against AT&T. This is history every interested copy-fighter, patent reformer, and netizen needs to…

Discover how some of the world’s greatest minds organized their daily routines. We delved into their diaries and other documents to see how they worked, slept and exercised their way to success.

msg:

Inspired by Nick Crocker I thought I would share the products and services, both physical and digital, that I used in 2014.

Early in the year I moved to SF which means I bought a Patagonia jacket it was great for 6 months until I misplaced it, if you know where it is lmk :)

While in…

I don’t know why I derive so much pleasure reading lists like this, but I do.

mostlysignssomeportents:

The FCC’s war on dirty words is having a chilling effect — even WBAI Pacifica, the radical radio station in NYC, is scared of airing Allen Ginsberg’s magnificent poem, Howl.

“Why, 50 years later after a judge ruled that children could read this poem, people are afraid the courts will say…

What a bunch of cowards.

mostlysignssomeportents:

Ron English’s Stickable Art Offenses is an inspired collection of stickers from one of the world’s most iconic sticker artists. Ron English designed the iconic Ronald McDonald parody for Super-Size Me, and has built his reputation on…

This was a fun (and funny) interview. Mostly funny because of the balls that Klosterman had in asking some of the questions he did. And then there was the way Page answered.

So, why did the magazine decide to set the meter at six articles per month?

“Well, it’s based on a number of factors. One is our sort of intense data analysis of our readers. Another is the economics, and the third is gut. It feels like a good number,” NewYorker.com editor Nicholas Thomson told Capital in an interview. “You’ll be able to get a lot of stories, you’ll be able to get a lot of the magazine every month, but it also feels like a number where people will feel like they should subscribe.”

Data + gut. I like that. And I’m happy to pay.

brycedotvc:

My 4yo has been dealing with a bit of a cold the last few days.

This morning, shortly after we shuffled her older siblings out the door for school, she found me in the kitchen and asked me if I could give her some medicine.

This resonates in a big way.

Great interview with our CEO, John MacFarlane.

If you say that in a meeting, you’ve failed. You’ve abdicated responsibility and just multiplied the time wasted by the number of people in the room.

TIME SPENT PROMOTES BOTH EMERGING AND ESTABLISHED RAP ARTISTS BY RECORDING LIVE PERFORMANCES THROUGH THE SPECIFIC MEDIUM OF VHS. THE VHS FORMAT WILL NOT ONLY SET OUR VIDEOS APART FROM THE CURRENT DEMAND FOR HD BUT ALSO REFERENCE THE EARLY DAYS OF NO BUDGET AND DIY STREET RAP VIDEOS. BY CHALLENGING THE RAP AND VIDEO ARTIST WITH A STRICT SET OF RULES, TIME SPENT CREATES AN OBJECTIVE VIEW OF RAP PERFORMANCE AS AN ART FORM IN A UNIQUE AND RAW EXPERIENCE.

Matt Mason, BitTorrent’s Chief Content Officer, speaks frankly on today’s surprise release.

Artfully written.

Today, we take another step forward in bringing you closer to the music you love with the introduction of Deezer Elite, which offers high definition audio streaming, only available on Sonos. - See more at: http://blog.sonos.com/news/introducing-deezer-elite-on-sonos/#sthash.dOo3YvlA.dpuf

bijan:

On Saturday, one of the founders in our portfolio called to let me know that one of the executives at the company was leaving. He wants to move to cross country for personal/family reasons.

Typically when a great person is thinking about leaving a portfolio company my instinct is to help the…

bijan:

Love this.

algorithmiablog:

As developers one of our biggest “problems” is our voracious appetite for news. From Twitter to HackerNews to the latest funding on TechCrunch, it seems, at times, we cannot avoid the gravitational pull of our favorite news feeds. 

minimalmac:

I put the word books in quotation marks because the two I’m going to mention are closer to multimedia products than they are books. This is not a bad thing. In fact, I could recommend you check each out just on that fact alone. 

mostlysignssomeportents:

Please reblog!

Being a compendium of some of my most popular graphic novel reviews from the past year, from The Encyclopedia of Early Earth to RASL

@rockandbacon

thisisadynasty:

The laws that are governing online music share sites were written at a time when our online and real-life landscapes were totally different. Our marching orders are coming from a place that’s completely out of touch and irrelevant. They have these legal legs to stand on that empower them to make life kind of a pain-in-the-ass for people like me. And for many of you. Countless artists have launched their careers though mash ups, bootlegs, remixes and music sharing. These laws and page take-downs are cutting us down at the knees.

And yo, musicians definitely need knees. 

America’s National Security Agency gathers unfathomable mountains of Internet communications from fiber optic taps and other means, but it says it only retains and searches the communications of “targeted” individuals who’ve done something suspicious. Guess what? If you read Boing Boing, you’ve been targeted. Cory Doctorow digs into Xkeyscore and the NSA’s deep packet inspection rules.

Between reading Boing Boing and using Tor, I guess I’m suspicious. 

There goes my evening.

seanbonner:

I gave a new Ignite talk the other day at an icebreaker opening to a several day conference. The organizers asked for talks about the most exciting thing people had learned this year. Since I’ve been getting into vinyl jazz records recently I wrote back and asked if that might be a worthwhile…

I can totally relate to everything here. 

xoxofest:

XOXO is an ongoing experiment. Every year, we try new things, see what works, and iterate. It’s worked pretty well for us so far — last year’s XOXO exceeded all our expectations, and we’re excited to try it again.

I went to the first two and had a really awesome time and met a lot of great people. I can’t recommend this enough.

As a human being and especially as a parent, I couldn’t make it through any of this without sobbing. If you have a heartbeat, you will cry. It is absolutely worth reading though.

pudjam666:

I run a service called DistroKid that costs $19.99/yr. Musicians use it to get their music into iTunes, Spotify, and other stores.

I noticed that 75% of users were dropping out at the credit card form. A 25% conversion rate seemed okay to me, so I didn’t give it much thought for a year.

theoldreader:

Google Reader was a monopolist product built on an anti-monopolist technology. Now that they’re gone, RSS is once again anyone’s game. You’re going to see a lot more innovation and new stuff for RSS. I never know if its supposed to be a blessing or a curse to live in interesting times. But I have to believe this RSS is entering maybe the most interesting time in its long history.

Thank you Warren Ellis

Really practical advice, not just for CEOs, but for managers and anyone else who wants to get shit done.

continuations:

As promised (threatened?) I am going to use Continuations to think out loud about what I believe is the beginning of a transition away from an industrial age to an information age. I know those terms aren’t perfect but that will be part of the discussion itself. 

Terrific read.

A recent study has shown that if American parents read one more long-form think piece about parenting they will go fucking ape shit.

aeiowu:

A lot of indies don’t want to market their games and I tend to agree with them. Marketing is a bad word and a shitty thing. It has been selling us stuff our whole lives. When I see a billboard yelling at me to try the new CrunchMeatwich 5000 for just $2.99, I clench up. Most of us do when we’re…

Just as applicable to music artists. Terrific read. /via

Been a happy customer of Private Internet Access for years. Use it on my Mac, iPhone and iPad.

Holy hell there’s some great stuff in this list that I had never heard of. I’m a massive fan of his SPEKTRMODULE podcast, which if you like ambient music, you will also love. 

The best thing you will read online this week.

parislemon:

Megan McArdle on the tendency of companies, especially large ones, to choose not to hear dissenting opinions — or worse, to silence them:

Why did they try to shoot the messenger instead of listening to the message? One answer is that’s what organizations do—especially dysfunctional organizations. As a young IT consultant, I sat through more than one meeting where we, or someone, tried to stop a client from doing something obviously crazy. Usually, the result was that the client did something crazy, and that someone went looking for another job.

Doctor No, that grating in-house critic, can be your most valuable employee—if you can make yourself listen. That’s surprisingly hard to do. Organizations exist for the purpose of doing stuff. That’s what their staff is hired to do. The guy who says maybe we shouldn’t do that stuff—or the stuff we’re doing isn’t working—is not very popular. There’s a large body of literature on dissenters, and it mostly tells you what you already know if you’ve ever been to a project meeting: Nobody likes a Negative Nancy.

Which is too bad. I’ve argued before that every company should be forced to have such an employee — and ideally one who is very high-ranking.

McArdle goes on:

You don’t want to let the perennial Voice of Doom kill every project. But if you listen carefully to the Voice of Doom, you’ll find he’s giving you something extremely useful: a list of almost everything that can possibly go wrong with your plan. Think of the VOD as your defensive coordinator, identifying all the holes you need to plug, and backup plans you need to have in place, before you launch. Instead of ostracizing your Doctor Nos and asking them to kindly shut up, why not give them a designated role on the team, telling you what’s likely to go wrong, and then pointing out when it is?

Exactly. There is no downside to hearing the negative view. But there is potential upside. And there is plenty of downside in not hearing it.

tiffanyb:

If you’re a Dropbox user, you probably got an email in the last few days about an update to their TOS that basically puts all disputes into arbitration rather than litigation. 

If you’re like me, you probably glossed over this update because gah, legalese. 

Allow me to summarize what it means when a company wants to handle all disputes in arbitration:

No matter what they do (delete your data, privacy breach, overcharging, whatever), you don’t get to sue. Instead, THEY get to choose the arbitrator according to whatever criteria they want, and thus any dispute is decided by someone they’re paying.

Also, you can’t join a class-action suit against them. Which sounds like no big deal, but when a company takes advantage of a bunch of people all in the same small way (incorrectly assessing a service charge, for example), class action is how companies are made to clean up their act en masse, instead of waiting for thousands of people to call them up and demand their $20 back or whatever.

I love Dropbox and use/recommend it enthusiastically. But this is a company that we entrust with some of our most important data- the kind of data we need to have access to wherever we are. Family photos, portfolios, projects representing years of work, etc. And as we’ve seen with Google buying Nest, even if we trust the management team in charge of our data right now, that’s not guaranteed in the future. Founders move on to other things. Companies with great products get acquired. Business decisions get made that change the direction of the company.

The agreement we make with Dropbox is too important to be enforced only by an arbitrator of their choosing. You have 30 days from the date of notification to opt out of the arbitration clause. Do it now.

I did it. You should too.

[I]f you’re one server crash away from losing your data (backups), it hardly matters if you make deployments faster (team efficacy). Fixing your backups is the priority.

>Many a destination resort will admit privately that snowboarding now accounts for less than 15 percent of total revenue. Others have seen snowboard visits cut in half. Sales of snowboarding gear are down dramatically, too, a whopping 29 percent over the past six years. Where did all the snowboarders go? Many are skiing. Others simply quit.

Who knew?

Kazemi is part of a small but vibrant group of programmers who, in addition to making clever Web toys, have dedicated themselves to shining a spotlight on the algorithms and data streams that are nowadays humming all around us, and using them to mount a sharp social critique of how people use the Internet—and how the Internet uses them back.

Can’t. Stop. Staring.

seanbonner:

This post is part of a series in which LinkedIn Influencers share their secrets to being more productive. See all their #productivityhacks here.I’ve lost count of the number of misunderstandings,

Never email when you can call
Never call when you can video chat
Never video chat when you can face-to-face

Over the weekend I discovered that every device in my home was expired so I had to learn as much as I could about what I was going to replace them with.

This is my first story on Medium. I’ve committed myself to some longer form writing and this is the beginning. If you like it, please recommend it, share it and reblog it.

More than anything this made me think about my workflow and I’ll probably borrow from it, but this is still WAY too complicated for most people. 

I feel like I’ve been on the photo management quest for so long that I’ve damn near given up hope. I have to assume many are working on the problem, but I’m shocked that no one has been able to do it. I still miss Everpix. 

mostlysignssomeportents:

Everyone in the browser world is convinced that not supporting Netflix will lead to total marginalization, and Netflix demands that computers be designed to keep secrets from, and disobey, their owners (so that you can’t save streams to disk in the clear).

For me, having more options rarely works out to my mental benefit, which is in part why I spend so much time thinking about what the perfect single solution is and then limiting myself to only that.

Me too. Ugh. Me too.

Unlike Mr. Snowden, who downloaded hundreds of thousands of digital N.S.A. files onto computer hard drives, the Media burglars did their work the 20th-century way: they cased the F.B.I. office for months, wore gloves as they packed the papers into suitcases, and loaded the suitcases into getaway cars. When the operation was over, they dispersed

Can’t wait to read the book.

Over the eons, cells have developed complex mechanisms that identify and correct many of the glitches. But the process is not perfect, nor can it ever be. Mutations are the engine of evolution. Without them we never would have evolved. The trade-off is that every so often a certain combination will give an individual cell too much power. It begins to evolve independently of the rest of the body. Like a new species thriving in an ecosystem, it grows into a cancerous tumor. For that there can be no easy fix.

Gross revenue - Returns = Net revenue - COGS = Product margin - Free shipping one or both ways = Gross margin - Customer service - Merchant processing fees - Photography - Non-shipping cost of fulfillment - E-commerce operations = Sort of contribution margin - Marketing & promotions = True contribution margin.

Really terrific read.

carlsed:

I’m a HUGE fan of todo lists. They help me stay organized, prioritize my day and add structure to an otherwise chaotic day.

I recently discovered what appears to be the best yet simplest way to keep a todo list: a GitHub Gist.

“For me, in terms of personal satisfaction, the mission’s already accomplished,” he said. “I already won. As soon as the journalists were able to work, everything that I had been trying to do was validated. Because, remember, I didn’t want to change society. I wanted to give society a chance to determine if it should change itself.”

“All I wanted was for the public to be able to have a say in how they are governed,” he said. “That is a milestone we left a long time ago. Right now, all we are looking at are stretch goals.”

A video from Vice Japan about Safecast, which uses specially-designed Geiger counters and a growing volunteer network to produce the most accessible radiation map currently available.

Really cool stuff that Sean and a bunch of people around Japan are doing. 

ifttt:

Introducing the iOS Location Channel.

Create Recipes that work with the location of your iPhone! Automate lights, social announcements, your home appliances, and notifications to family as you move about the day.

New Location Triggers

Use…

This is just awesome. I love you IFTTT.

del-fi:

Well, that didn’t take long. Less than seven hours after I posted a request and reward for a 23andme app, I had two submissions. Beau Gunderson and Eric Jain (who turn out to be friends) both submitted short programs that fulfilled my request. The winning version is at Beau’s site.

First, a little context. The point of this wasn’t to create a consumer experience, so don’t go to the link and expect one. It’s a download tool, no more and no less. But it didn’t exist before and now it does. What you will get if you click the link is the ability to store local copies of your genotype and health results.

This is awesome. 

topspinmedia:

Today for the very first time, you can go to Spotify and stream Led Zeppelin…

We’ll let that sink in for a moment… LED. ZEPPELIN.

In case you missed the news, this morning Spotify announced an exclusive deal to become as the only place fans can stream the band’s catalog. And if that wasn’t…

The fact that we (Topspin) has even a small part of this is like a dream come true. I mean this is LED ZEPPELIN! Holy. Shit. Someone threatened to include my Led Zeppelin tattoo in the post. Really glad that didn’t happen. 

Fifteen years ago, the music industry was still a high-functioning behemoth pulling in $38 billion a year at its peak, able to ignore the digital revolution that was about to denude it entirely. Starting in 1999, sales of recorded music fell an average of 8% a year; 2012 was the first time since then that sales went up — 0.3%. Last year, it reported $16.5 billion in global revenue. America accounted for $4.43 billion of that — approximately the same amount spent by AT&T, Chevy, McDonald’s, and Geico on ad buys in the U.S. alone.

topspinmedia:

Our friends at Spotify just announced that artists will be able to promote their merch directly on their Spotify artist profile pages using Topspin’s ArtistLink.

It’s all happening!

There are so many incredible things said in this interview. Just read the whole thing. I’m not going to do it justice by quoting it.

moot:

I hope Snapchat’s dramatic rise represents a shift not only in consumer preferences, but also sends a message to service providers that it’s possible to build great, valuable products that embrace both pseudonymity and ephemerality. 

bijan:

There seems to be a lot of folks paying attention to Snapchat rejecting Facebook’s $3B offer.

Loosely speaking I’ve seen negative sentiments like

“This means Facebook is in trouble”

“I knew it, we are in a bubble”

“The Snapchat founders are nuts”

I don’t think it’s any of those things….

This is so good.

staff:

In a matter of hours on Friday, Typhoon Haiyan completely devastated parts of the central Philippines. It was one of the strongest storms ever recorded. The death toll is estimated up to 10,000 with hundreds of thousands more displaced. The country has declared a “state of calamity.”

Fellow humans in the Philippines need our help. Let’s give it to them.

confessionsofamichaelstipe:

I first saw Lou Reed perform in 1977, first covered his songs in 1980, and first recorded and released his songs in 1983. By the time we met in 1985, he had already helped define the trajectory of my life. Musically, Lou Reed was profoundly important, but there was another component to his public…

…is that you’re going to need far more talent than you were born with.

duncandavidson:

I’ve long been a fan of 1Password, but have often said that it’s functionality is important enough to be built into the OS as an expansion of the Keychain that’s been part of OS X since, well, forever. iCloud Keychain finally makes a move towards that and I’ve been using it on Mavericks and iOS 7. But it still doesn’t replace 1Password for me. Instead, 1Password has become the master place where I access and manage my information while letting iCloud Keychain enable that information to be used across my devices.

This is pretty much how I feel as well and how I use 1Password with iCloud Keychain. 1Password has a lot more functionality (that I use) than iCloud Keychain, but iCloud Keychain is integrated with Mac OS and iOS, which makes for a better experience for web site logins.

msg:

It comes down to trusting my friends and their network that the outcome will be net positive. Also it cuts down on time spent on email.

So to any of my friends who are reading this, feel free to introduce me to anyone you want.

Agreed. I have the same policy. It also cuts down on the LinkedIn noise.

People often think I’m paranoid. Now I have something to tell them to read.

gleitzman:

The Southwest Airlines boarding process has a rich and colorful history. Bucking the industry standard of providing assigned seats in different cabins, Southwest has historically offered an “open seating” policy that favors an assigned boarding order to determine who is first to enter the plane…

brycedotvc:

From aninterviewwith designer/artist/soul searcher Elle Luna:

So I was using Uber all the time in San Francisco, even though I hated the design. And then I went to the Crunchies awards ceremony and at a post-ceremony event, where I was in a ball gown, I saw the CEO of Uber, Travis Kalanick, sitting at the bar. I was three whiskeys deep at this point and I walked up to him and said, “I use Uber all the time and I absolutely hate the app. I think you should bring me in to fix it.” He replied, “Oh, yeah? What are the three things you’d fix about it?” I said, “I’d redo the logo, redo the entire app, and change the rating system.” I think there was something about being in a dress that empowered me to say such things (laughing). And do you know what he said? He said, “Be at the Uber office at 9am on Monday.” I told him I couldn’t do it alone and he said he’d have a team for me.

I thought the offer was bogus, but I went to Uber’s office on Monday at 9am, laughing to myself, and Travis led me back to a project room with two other designers—they were from outside of Uber and he had flown them in from New York! We took on the Uber app and redesigned it in three weeks. In fact, one of the guys he flew in from New York, Shalin Amin, ended up staying on full-time. The app is gorgeous and last night it won the Fast Company 2013 Innovation By Design Awards for the transportation category, beating out Mars Rover and Tesla.

Most people want to be fit, most people aren’t.

Most people want to build a successful business, most people won’t.

Most people want to be the best version of themselves, most people aren’t.

Most people have dreams they want to fulfill, most people won’t.

Everyone wants to quit something, build something, be something, do something. Most people won’t.

How many things have we wanted? How many opportunities have we craved? How many broken things have we wanted to fix? 

And how many of those have we shrunk from. Hid from. Or, excused away.

We’re not alone.

Most people won’t.

But every once in a while someone puts themselves out there. Makes the leap. Faces rejection or failure or worse. And comes out the other side. Better. Changed. Bolder.

Most people won’t. Which means those that do change everything.

I love everything about this. 

To put it bluntly, goals are for losers. That’s literally true most of the time. For example, if your goal is to lose 10 pounds, you will spend every moment until you reach the goal—if you reach it at all—feeling as if you were short of your goal. In other words, goal-oriented people exist in a state of nearly continuous failure that they hope will be temporary.

The current level of general surveillance in society is incompatible with human rights. To recover our freedom and restore democracy, we must reduce surveillance to the point where it is possible for whistleblowers of all kinds to talk with journalists without being spotted. To do this reliably, we must reduce the surveillance capacity of the systems we use.

If anyone has a chance in hell to make this happen, I think Anil and Gina have a better chance than most. I’m backing them and you should too.

I’m a big fan of Editorially.

A solid and thoughtful rebuttal of the Spoitify-is-evil stance that David Byrne and Thom Yorke take. Dave is a legendary musician himself. The important thing here is that someone is providing a counter to this ongoing discussion, which has felt pretty one-sided thus far.

Absolutely fascinating account of Twitter’s beginnings.

I hate you. At least I’m using Tor all the time.

Makes me feel pretty good about using them, though that might be the point of this post. I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt here and, hey, no advertising or selling my info. That’s nice too. I’ve had an account for a while and recently have been migrating from Gmail.

The very feature that makes Tor a powerful anonymity service, and the fact that all Tor users look alike on the internet, makes it easy to differentiate Tor users from other web users. On the other hand, the anonymity provided by Tor makes it impossible for the NSA to know who the user is, or whether or not the user is in the US.

Tor is still a worthwhile tool that everyone should be using every day.

The point is that this is a programme of culture change, not just technical change. Some may criticise this as “giving out candy” in school but people are not rational and children doubly so. You can enforce obedience through technical means or you can use all the carrots, sticks, honey, sweets, jokes, cajoling and nudging that real, sustainable cultural shifts require to move your organisation to a better place.

[I]f you’re someone over the age of 23 who professes to care about music and you buy this album, you should be ashamed of yourself. Grow the fuck up. Remaining a child all your life is nothing to be proud of.

Scathing, absolutely hilarious and spot-on. (via @bobmoz)

lessig:

On Thursday, Senator Elizabeth Warren and I will participate in an event hosted by the Constitutional Accountability Center (livestream here) to discuss a brief I submitted in a corruption (aka “campaign finance”) case that the Supreme Court will hear on October 8: McCutcheon v. F.E.C.

At the center of the brief is a Tumblr — the first time a Tumblr has been used in an argument in a Supreme Court brief.

topspinmedia:

For the last five months, Topspin and several other companies have been working with BitTorrent’s new Bundle platform, and today, we’re proud to share the news that it is now available to more artists as part of a closed alpha announced yesterday by BitTorrent.

I love my job.

ninakix:

“wireframes” or “sketches” (the semantics aren’t important here) are really like writing out long division. If you’re trying to think seriously about a software product, if you aren’t sketching things out, then you aren’t really thinking about it. Yes, some details are inane (“Where should I put the login button?”) but many more are the details that make up the service: Tumblr linking to its six basic post types wasn’t a detail, it markedly effected the way the service felt and was used. And these are the little details that we start to see once we can start externalizing bits of our short-term memory to paper. 

As an even more general point, I’d say that confidence and fluency in sketching and diagraming is one of those things that can make us exponentially better thinkers. 

I love this and agree 100%. Sometimes I use paper and other times I use software, but if you’re not writing it out in some way, you’re not thinking about it. 

This looks really incredible. If I wasn’t so satisfied with my Patagonia MLC bag, which is indestructible and has served me so well, I might pick this up. 

cashmusic:

Our Portland summit dates are past us now, and it was so much fun we thought we’d do a few more events this year.

On October 12th we’ll be putting on a hack/build/make day in LA. 

Sweet! Sign up LA people. 

“Self-regulation,” “self- discipline,” and “emotional regulation” are big buzz words in schools right now. All are aimed at producing “appropriate” behavior, at bringing children’s personal styles in line with an implicit emotional orthodoxy. That orthodoxy is embodied by a composed, conforming kid who doesn’t externalize problems or talk too much or challenge the rules too frequently or move around excessively or complain about the curriculum or have passionate outbursts. He’s a master at decoding expectations. He has a keen inner minder to bring rogue impulses into line with them.

Plant-based diets are beneficial for children, as confirmed by the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics (formerly the American Dietetic Association), the largest nutrition organization in the world, and arguably one of the more conservative with dietary advice. Not only does this organization say that a vegan diet is appropriate for all stages of life, including infancy and childhood, it also says that a plant-based diet helps prevent dying from heart disease, reduces cholesterol levels, lowers blood pressure, and well, you know the rest.

My soon-to-be neighbor Souris put together this rad coloring book called Outside the Lines: An Artists’ Coloring Book for Giant Imaginations. Looking forward to mine arriving soon. Pick a copy up for yourself or your kid!

New Pixies EP. So happy that I don’t have to hold this secret in anymore. 

Interesting argument for sending you kid to public schools, even if you can afford private. I think I would rather help make public education better by getting involved, so I think I’m agreeing with this guy.

Introduce yourself to as many people as possible. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy just a simple “Hi, I’m . What is it that you do?” Bam! That’s it.

Today is the fiftieth anniversary of the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. The full title is important because the right words are important.

Yet another fantastic MeFi thread. 

Terrific thread. 

spytap:

HOLY FUCK IS THIS SCARY AND AWESOME ALL AT ONCE!

Truly awesome and utterly fucking amazing.

This is how we lose our rights. Not overnight in one fell swoop, but gradually, after getting worn down again and again, and after hundreds of mini-panic-attacks, and with ever-ratcheting procedural changes that effectively invalidate the assurances and safeguards that we’re given.

The feds thought William Vollmann might be the Unibomber. 

One of the most disturbing, fucked up things I’ve read in a long time.

The annual health exam is a venerable tradition, stretching back to the late 19th century—those heady days of medicine when doctors overestimated their own ability to cure disease, and badly underestimated their tendency to cause it. We’re now in the evidence-based era of medicine, and there’s little evidence that annual exams provide any benefit. So here’s a free bit of advice: If you’re not sick, don’t go to the doctor.

“I will be far more aggressive in my reporting from now. I am going to publish many more documents. I am going to publish things on England too. I have many documents on England’s spy system. I think they will be sorry for what they did,” Greenwald, speaking in Portuguese, told reporters at Rio’s airport where he met Miranda upon his return to Brazil.

The surveillance landscape is far worse than it has ever been and I feel like everything we do is now observable. All of our transactions and communications are all fused together into total information awareness apparatus. I don’t think any of this can be fixed merely by the application of cryptography. It is going to require some push back in the policy space. We are going to have to have Congress react to this and we need to get the population to react, perhaps through the economic consequences we face of losing a lot of business for American internet companies. Maybe American internet companies can push back because of economic harm that comes with the rest of world turning its back on us.

“If you really want to protect your e-mails from prying eyes, use OpenPGP or S/MIME on your own desktop and don’t let a third-party provider have your data,” he told Ars. “No one of the ‘E-Mail made in Germany’ initiative would say if they encrypt the data on their servers so they don’t have access to it, which they probably don’t and thus the government could force them to let them access it.”

If Silicon Valley can coördinate its dissent, they stand a chance of moving the policy needle. For the government, meta-secrecy has the added benefit of deflecting the legitimacy that big business would bring to critics of the surveillance state; the few known public dissenters are painted as a rogue’s gallery of hackers, leakers, spies, and traitors

benguild:

In order to drum up some reviews for this quick App I built called “Twitter Cleaner“ (called "Followed User Cleaner (for Twitter)” for trademark reasons), I’ve made it free until August 31st, 2013!

Giving this a whirl. So far I have unfollowed over 30 people. Lots of inactive accounts.

Loving the new Instapaper web app and can’t wait to use the new iOS apps.

I don’t really even know where to begin with this. It’s fantastic. It’s truth. Read it.

While I voted for the labeling act that was on the California ballot last year, a simple “contains GMOs” label would be of little use to me. I want to know what specifically about the organism was modified so I can reach my own conclusions.

Involuntarily, my fists rose towards the sky and I knew there was only one thing to scream: “That is so fucking Metal.”

One of the assurances I keep hearing about the U.S. government’s spying on American citizens is that it’s only used in cases of terrorism. Terrorism is, of course, an extraordinary crime, and its horrific nature is supposed to justify permitting all sorts of excesses to prevent it. But there’s a problem with this line of reasoning: mission creep. The definitions of “terrorism” and “weapon of mass destruction” are broadening, and these extraordinary powers are being used, and will continue to be used, for crimes other than terrorism.

Great list. 

cashmusic:

The New York Times just ran a piece on the BOLO (be on the lookout) practices of the IRS. They’re at the heart of a story where some groups are saying they were unfairly targeted by the IRS. CASH Music and the role of open source software were both mentioned in the NYT piece, and as we’ve long suspected (known) the IRS has indeed been flagging all tax exempt applications from groups mentioning open source software.

Oh, America… 

My favorite one so far is:

On a Southwest flight to San Diego, Iran into one of the Chemical Brothers.

topspinmedia:

MTV, VH1, & CMT have announced together with Monster DNA headphones that on July 4th, 2013, in honor of Music Independence Day, they will be matching tips paid to unsigned and indie artists via Tip Jars on MTV & CMT artist pages. On that day, fans from around the world will be asked to visit MTV & CMT artist pages to support the musicians they love. We encourage all unsigned and independent artists to take advantage of this unprecedented opportunity. 

This is pretty awesome. If you’re an independent artist spread the word and sign up. 

This is AWESOME.

topspinmedia:

Topspin has released update 4.1 to the Wordpress plugin. Please thoroughly test the update in a development environment before updating your live store. 

New for 4.1:

• Updated WP_MediaHandler class with new image copying method 
• Secondary images (if available) are pulled into the WordPress Media Library 
• New WP-cron is spawned to handle secondary image caching 
• Added a progress notification message when offers are syncing in the CMS 
• Misc. PHP warning fixes 
• Now Supports Selling from Backorder Cap.

If you use our Wordpress plugin, we just released 4.1. 

The prevailing anxiety is at once a recognition of real problems and a symptom of the aging of the West, a reflection of its psychic fatigue. Our pathos is that of the end of time. And because no one ever thinks alone, because the spirit of an age is always a collective worker, it is tempting to give oneself up to this gloomy tide. Or, on the contrary, we could wake up from this nightmare and rid ourselves of it.

If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

Out of the approximately 10,000 news stories you have read in the last 12 months, name one that – because you consumed it – allowed you to make a better decision about a serious matter affecting your life, your career or your business. The point is: the consumption of news is irrelevant to you.

Plenty of companies provide useless, throwaway goods. Others corporate identities are so tainted that you can’t feel good tying your name and dollars to them. But an increasing group of companies is striving—intentionally or not—to focus on improving lives. It’s these companies that rose to the top of Havas Media’s second annual Meaningful Brands Index, which was released today and features Google in first place, followed by Samsung, Microsoft, Nestle, and Sony. And it’s working: And index of Havas’s Meaningful Brands would have outperformed the stock market by 120% last year.

.

It takes a minute before this gets old.

maxistentialist:

Julian Assange:

The advance of information technology epitomized by Google heralds the death of privacy for most people and shifts the world toward authoritarianism. While Mr. Schmidt and Mr. Cohen tell us that the death of privacy will aid governments in “repressive autocracies” in “targeting their citizens,” they also say governments in “open” democracies will see it as “a gift” enabling them to “better respond to citizen and customer concerns.” In reality, the erosion of individual privacy in the West and the attendant centralization of power make abuses inevitable, moving the “good” societies closer to the “bad” ones.

Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

ambivert—more introverted than extroverted but with some extraordinarily well-developed faking skills

Not having an iPhone can be social suicide, notes Casey. One of her friends found herself effectively exiled from their circle for six months because her parents dawdled in upgrading her to an iPhone. Without it, she had no access to the iMessage group chat, where it seemed all their shared plans were being made.

tetw:

by Derek Thompson

A short philosophical history of personal music.

tetw:

A Tetw reading list

Great articles about music and the people who make it.

glessner:

There are a lot of places to find out where to make great coffee, but those tend to involve precise measurements, scales, expensive machinery, math, and dark magic.

I love great coffee, but I also love pretty good coffee. And to my taste buds, the difference between a lot fuss and a little bit of fuss isn’t very big. 

Amen.

Absolutely terrifying whether your kid is in daycare or with a nanny at home. I could barely finish reading this. Parents owe it to themselves to read this.

tonxcoffee:

We had a really nice write up for the cover story of the Spring issue of the always beautiful Edible Westside. The brilliant Becky Reams shot us and writer Matthew Kang was very kind with his words.

… This development makes coffee more of a culinary product than ever. The main…

My morning brew. Every morning.

One of the things for which I am eternally grateful is that my dad compiled a small notebook of advice for his kids. I have read it many times and plan to do the same for mine. 

topspinmedia:

Going direct-to-fan takes more than a website and an e-commerce store. It takes strategy, planning, and information. Below are a few stories we think are helpful for all three, as the latest installment of the semi-regular Required Reading column. Enjoy.

Another edition of Required Reading is up on the Topspin Tumblr.

I’d be curious to know about the other mobile carriers.

notabli:

You and your family deserve the best, so we’re working hard to improve Notabli.

I’m fickle when it comes to apps, but this one is different. Having a kid changes your life and the app that I’ve been using to document everything is Notabli. My family loves it and it’s a hell of a lot easier than sending text messages to the family, though I’m forced to do that as well since some people don’t have iPhones or don’t know how to install apps on their iPhones. I’m gonna fix one of those family members next week. 

muledesign.com

Rel­a­tive­ly speak­ing, rela­tion­ships used to be sim­ple. Or at least sim­pler. Maybe just not as com­pli­cat­ed.

Once upon a time your pro­fes­sion­al rela­tion­ships stayed in one place, your per­ …

This should be required reading for everyone. I read it twice.

A little interview I did.

“I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear. I hope to be spared as much pain as possible on the approach path. I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state. What I am grateful for is the gift of intelligence, and for life, love, wonder, and laughter. You can’t say it wasn’t interesting. My lifetime’s memories are what I have brought home from the trip. I will require them for eternity no more than that little souvenir of the Eiffel Tower I brought home from Paris.

I believe that if, at the end of it all, according to our abilities, we have done something to make others a little happier, and something to make ourselves a little happier, that is about the best we can do. To make others less happy is a crime. To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn’t always know this, and am happy I lived long enough to find it out.”

topspinmedia:

At Topspin, we’re obsessed with all things direct-to-fan. And that extends to our reading choices as well. Required Reading is a semi-regular series showcasing stories you may have missed, focusing on the obscure, the counter-intuitive, and the inspiring. Our goal is to connect the dots, educate, inspire and even challenge. Enjoy. 

Enjoy this little reading list I put together for the Topspin blog. It’s going to be a semi-regular thing. 

topspinmedia:

We have extensive data that suggests that if fans purchase or download music from one artist, they are very likely to be interested in offers from other related artists. So we’re testing a feature that monitors the purchase history of select Topspin artists to recommend other artists that their fans might also like.

We’re doing some cool new things at Topspin to further help artists. 

jesuschristsiliconvalley:

It’s hard to imagine how you can turn a personal puff piece about your mobile phone into such a stunning cocktasm.

nostrich:

Need a cool pic to go with your article on cyberterrorism? I got you.

Massive Attack… Oh, I get it. 

buzz:

This is an absolute classic. One of the best McSweeney’s lists ever. I reference it constantly.

Genius.

/via Pramit

Data changes habits. If you present people with information about how much physical activity they will need to do to work something off, they will make different choices. I love this so much. 

I can’t wait for the technology to be invisible. 

priceonomics:

Moleskine differentiates its market position from stationery companies by offering the caché of using the same style of notebook that the Hemingway and Picasso crowd took out in Parisian cafés in order to sketch and write.

matthewbarnhart:

Wake up one hour earlier than usual.  Don’t fuck around with this hour.   Have a glass of water and go to the toilet and sit down at a desk and write.  One hour and not on a computer.  Set a kitchen timer. Better to hear it ring from another room than to keep watching your watch   You aint writing a song or a poem or a msterpiece.   Just write.

Universal to writers and creators of all kinds. 

topspinmedia:

The music business has learned some hard lessons over the last decade. So much so that other industries are now looking to how it has responded as inspiration for their own forward-thinking digital strategies.

seanbonner:

LA really needs investors who are supportive of both the growing scene and LA itself. There’s a unique atmosphere here that, if nurtured, could produce some incredibly awesome companies. I have no doubt about that at all. Some of the most creative and driven people I’ve met in my entire life have been in LA.

Yes!

brycedotvc:

When I came up with the idea for OATV’s Field Trip Series I had our early experience with the NYC startup community as a backdrop. Stepping off the plane at LAX last week, I had no idea how relevant that context was for the week I was about to experience.

Glad we got to meet up while you were in town.

topspinmedia:

Headed to Austin for SXSW? We want to buy you brunch. Take a break from playing music and learn how to get paid for it! Sip the best bloody mary’s in Austin and shake hands with the music heads from MTV, CMT, VH1 and Topspin.

OPEN TO ALL ARTISTS! First come, first served!

mediaor:

Reposted from http://bit.ly/12M1ZXk on February 15, 2013 at 10:33AM

[SNIP]

Topspin GoDirect

At first, Topspin GoDirect may seem like just another hassle of a band profile to be maintained and created on the web (because we all know there are hundreds of sites to make profiles on), but it has a unique set of features that make it a powerhouse for marketing. It creates a profile for you on Artists.MTV, has direct-to-fan sales capabilities, and can also assist you in securing licensing deals with its publisher information section.

If you don’t have any one of these three tools working for you and promoting your music yet, you should certainly take a look! Each has a unique set of capabilities and benefits that make them all worth having.

If you want to follow along with Riley and I as we experiment with tools like these, put books full of music marketing advice to the test, and generally make a mad scientist lab out of the music industry, join us at RileyAndRyan.com, or onFacebookandTwitter!

lyftapp:

We’re excited to announce that Lyft has landed in Los Angeles! Starting tomorrow (Thursday) at 7am, Lyft community drivers will take to the streets of LA sporting the pink mustache, offering friendly rides on demand just in time for Super Bowl weekend.

Happy to see Lyft in LA! 

topspinmedia:

We have big and exciting news at Topspin today: News of a substantial new strategic investment, news of a product partnership that will bring fans and artists closer together in a new consumer service, and news of a new CEO and a whole bunch of new open positions on our team.

Definitely some big and exciting news. 

I’m definitely not an expert in film. Hell, I see maybe see half a dozen in the theatre every year. I am, however, a massive comic book and superhero fan. Christopher Nolan’s Batman films are, if not THE best, are certainly up there. I don’t read much about films, but this article was particularly interesting to me. Christopher Nolan is a tremendous filmmaker and I like what he has to say.

seanbonner:

Rather than just sitting around feeling helpless I started putting this together. To try and find a solution. Maybe it’ll work, maybe it won’t - but I had to try. Very much a work in progress, but it’s a start. The “10 things…” proposal is probably the most important part.

Would love feedback…

Props, Sean. Gonna dig into this more over the coming days. Thank you for doing this.

Bummed the holidays are over? Maybe this will cheer you up.

grackle:

When you see an automated music recommendation do you assume that some stupid computer program was trying to trick you into something? It’s often what it feels like – with what little context you get with a suggestion on top of the postmodern insanity of a computer understanding how should you feel about music – and of course sometimes you actually are being tricked.

I’m not a big fan of TV, but I’m a big fan of Laura’s cousin Jon Alpert. He has been recognized a lot for what he does, but it was still pretty cool to hear him and Keiko on NPR. They are incredible people doing good things for the world through education and documentary.

alesserphotographer:

Own your creations. Social networks want them for a reason.

You may decide someday to give away the rights to your photos to help an idea spread faster. You may decide someday to sell your rights to the highest bidder. But it should always remain your decision.

Today, photographers were in an…

Agreed and am outta there!

If you’re looking for something good to read, I have 10 recommendations for this week.

This week’s Required Reading is ready to be devoured. What are you reading? What did I miss?

This week’s Required Reading has been assembled. There are some really great ones this week. I hope you’re enjoying these lists. Did I miss anything good?

topspinmedia:

Wow.  Thanks sincerely for supporting artists by buying direct on Cyber Monday.  Thanks to you, Monday, November 26th, 2012 was among the biggest sales day in Topspin’s history, and 93% larger than Cyber Monday 2011.  Considering Cyber Monday sales were up about 30%, it’s incredibly encouraging to see direct-to-consumer sales out-pacing by 3x!  We’re long-time believers in direct-to-consumer as a growing retail channel and it was exciting to see this played out on the biggest online shopping day of the year.

To celebrate, we wanted to share some staff picks for our favorite holiday gifts of the year from Topspin artists.

Everyone at the company contributed to our gift guide. Can you guess what I picked?

topspinmedia:

We have an immediate opening on our Customer Service team. We’re in search of someone based in London who lives and breathes customer service, feels passionately about keeping customers happy, is interested in adding value and is comfortable working with a team remotely. You should be happy,…

Wanna join my team in London?

This week’s Required Reading has been compiled. Let me know what you’ve been reading and if I missed something good. Keep the feedback coming!

What required reading did you miss last week? Don’t worry about it. I’ll catch you up. This is my third installment of Required Reading. Hope you enjoy it.

What did you read last week that didn’t make the list? Leave it in the comments.

topspinmedia:

Hello. My name is Ian Rogers and I’m the CEO of Santa Monica-based Topspin. We build software that helps artists grow their fan base and make money. Thanks to Bill, Antony, and all of Billboard for bringing us all together and for the opportunity to speak today.

Make sure you check out Ian’s presentation from today’s Billboard Future Sound conference.

After a brief hiatus to move me and my wife, I’m back on track. What did you read last week that was good?

topspinmedia:

In early September, Topspin released a new product called GoDirect. Since then, thousands of you have signed up and taken control of your page on MTV. And a bunch of you have written in or hit me on Twitter to give us feedback, suggest features and generally ask, what else can I do?

maura:

Great post on how and why Facebook is rendering itself more and more useless by the day. (Also note the fact that photos are ranked as “more important” than text-only posts, one big reason why the whole place looks like a goddamn bumper-sticker factory these days. SORRY FOR LIKING WORDS, MARK ZUCKERJERK.)

I’m trying something new. 10 articles you should read every week or so. It’ll be a mixed bag of music, media, tech, health, privacy and other topics. I started feeling like I rad such great stuff that I need to find a better way to share it. What do you think?

Gonna have to see this one.

I fucking love Aaron. 

Kinda makes you wonder what this guy is doing on a committee concerned with science.

parislemon:

Sarah Perez for TechCrunch:

Similarly, actually remembering and recounting tales of your first computer will soon be this odd, old person thing to do, too. Kids’ first computers will be their parents’ hand-me down iPads. There are children being born into the world now who have always had an iPad. Like, from babyhood. I know that you know this already, but really think about that for a minute.

Note to self…

perzadook:

bbbrad:

david:

Rian Johnson:

I recorded a commentary track to be downloaded, put on an iPod and listened to in the theater as you’re watching Looper. This is an odd thing I tried with Bloom, and have gotten a few requests for it again, so here it is.  It is totally different from the commentary track that will be on the Blu/DVD, a bit more technical and detailed. Needless to say, this is NOT to be listened to on a first viewing, or before you’ve seen the film. Also, please work it so that a glowing screen is never out of your pocket during the movie.

Listen to the introduction before heading to the theater, it has instructions. And lemme know how it works.

Marke Johnson:

I listened to the In-Theater Commentary track Rian made for Bloom, and I’ve got to say, it’s just about the most fun you can have in public. Especially when you realize there are a couple other people in the theater listening along, which you can tell is the case when Rian says something funny and a few smothered and scattered laughs can be heard.

So clever! Will be trying this over the weekend.

Love the “glowing screen” PSA. :)

This is just amazing.

yeah what wow

Tho actually makes me want to see the movie even more now.

Really great thread, especially if you are new to LA. I even learned a few things and I’ve lived here for 16 years.

topspinmedia:

Norman Cook aka Fatboy Slim, is an English DJ, musician and producer. His new preorder (go here to see it) started with the Big Beach Bootique 5 event in June (at a football stadium). Topspin was part of the ticketing for the event, which was filmed and released in cinemas for ONE night only in 600 cinemas around the world at the end of August. They are now offering the DVD for sale in both physical and digital, as well as a boxset with all the bells and whistles (shipping early November). Plus, every preorder gets you an Instant download of the Infamous 2002 Brighton Beach Party “Big Beach Boutique 2” full length film.

@boomcat and I were in London, having lunch with some people from Norman’s label and they showed us the trailer for the film and I literally got chills. If you’ve ever been to a FatBoy Slim show, you probably know why. Insanity. Oh, the late 90s/early aughts…

topspinmedia:

Join Topspin and our Americana Music Association Conference partners for a cold beer and conversation, Friday, 9/14 from 5:30p-7:30p on the Mezzanine of the Sheraton Hotel Downtown Nashville. Meet some folks, talk some shop, drink some beer. Repeat. Conference registration is NOT…

gregcohn:

A friend recently posted on facebook that he was undecided between the two major Presidential candidates, and invited friends to suggest frameworks with which to think about this.

My initial reaction, frankly, was to be slightly horrified that someone as thoughtful and news-aware as he is could…

I’m sort of bookmarking/reblogging so I can come back to this later. I love having smart friends that I can learn from and have intelligent conversation.

circumswoop:

I had wanted to move to Los Angeles ever since Spin leaked Jenny Lewis’ rent. This was before I discovered that Silver Lake, the Wicker Park/Capitol Hill/Mission of LA where Jenny used to out-Zooey Zooey Deschanel (before the bailout of Rilo Kiley), is actually kind of bougie,…

Really liked this a lot. Great imagery and words.

Catching up on the past, reading about and listening to Autosalvage on a lazy Saturday. Dig it.

A powerful follow-up to the epic hack. This could have easily been me (or you). How prepared are you?

nevver:

No one remembers all your fuck ups except you

Fantastic!

Anyone who knows me knows that I’m generally not a huge sports fan. As I have been running and paying much more attention to fitness, nutrition and overall health, I’ve become more competitive. I’m finding ways to appreciate competition in sports, though I might not actually enjoy the activity. Athletes are really interesting to read about though. Getting inside the heads of these super-humans is really fascinating to me. The psychology of it is appealing because it’s so universal and applicable to daily life. 

Such a Neil Halstead fan. Great song.

This is absolutely amazing.

spiegelman:

Long emails are, more frequently than not, the worst. When you send someone an email, you make a demand on their time. If you use more words than necessary, you waste their time. Sure we’re talking maybe a fraction of a minute, but given the number of emails the average person sends in a day those fractions add up pretty quick.

This conflicts with an older style of correspondence that associated pleasantries with tact. Tactful emails now are efficient, and pleasantries are a waste. People accustomed to pleasantries see their absence as rude, or a sign of being cross. They infer a tone that isn’t there, while people accustomed to brevity know how difficult it can be to ascertain tone from an email.

virb:

Welp, it’s finally happened: Apple’s iWeb has been discontinued. While users can still use iWeb, they’ve lost a lot of features and are having to turn to confusing third-party services to keep things up and running. For iWeb users, who chose the service because they wanted a simple way to create a…

I love these guys. If you need a solution, here it is. 

Be kind to everyone and don’t be so quick to dismiss people. You never know who they are or what you can learn from them.

viafrank:

I think the web is heading towards an age of anthologies, where users gain new ways to select, sequence, and publish the content they come in contact with online. Some of these will be automated like Flipboard or Facebook’s timeline, but I’m more interested in the design opportunities of the manual tools that require our attention to pass over what we’ve reaped from the web. These anthologies are more than a flat stream or cursory pass over an exhaust of data. They are experiences and content chosen by the user to be shared in a certain sequence for a certain effect. The arrangements have edges, and fly against the nature of the web, simply in that one may “finish.”

newschallenge:

1. What do you propose to do? [20 words]

We are planning to build a global sensor network monitoring radiation and air quality, publishing all data freely and openly.

2. How will your project make data more useful? [50 words]

Radiation and air quality are environmental…

If there’s one thing I have learned in reading a lot of research and articles reporting on research related to diet and nutrition, it’s that you should never take the data or conclusion at face value. It’s really disconcerting too because most people don’t have their bullshit alarm on. So the question is, where should people go to find out what’s actually good for them? What should they believe?

matthewb:

I was recently looking for a solution for an upcoming project which required me to load content by post type from Tumblr’s API. The one or two options I found produced hard-coded markup for each post, and didn’t make it easy to customise their output. As a result, I put together this little framework that combines jQuery ajax loading with Boris Moore’s JsRender templating syntax (the successor to the jQuery Template plugin).

I’ve documented the key parts over at Github and put together a quick demo page that loads various post types into a single page. Please let me know if you find it useful!

This is super fucking cool. Thanks for sharing!

topspinmedia:

Friends and colleagues at Essential Music and Marketing have detailed their Paul Buchanan campaign which received exceptional results, including the album charting No. 3 in the first mid-week in the UK, finishing the week at No. 14. We love this campaign’s laser focus of providing value to…

My productivity app of choice, OmniFocus, is 50% off. Steal it. Could not live without it.

From 2004 and still relevant. 

Adding item 3 to my list of things to do this year:

Learn to speed read with high retention. Emerson Spartz taught me this while I was at a Summit Series event. If he reads 2-3 books a week, you can read one.

Well, I was going to be mummified, but now I need ot change my will. 

I really like this:

Vibram offered vouchers to customers who had unwittingly bought fake Five Fingers, so that they could buy the real product at cost price. 

The company also put up a page on its website alerting customers, enlisted the help of bloggers and asked fans of its Facebook page to get the word out. 

Within a year, the deluge of complaints from customers who had bought fake products slowed to a trickle.

A story ran in the Washington Post this week about a regrettable incident from my past. As we tend to do with mistakes made during our teenage years, I had mostly erased all memory of this episode from my mind. The Post’s account brought it all back, and with that recollection came an intense…

Wow. Yes.

And we are all artists. That is the message of spirituality. We are all here to create. But to do that, we have to start getting good at humility and flexibility.

This is one of the most incredible things I’ve seen online. That’s no hyperbole. Whether you’re a casual or die-hard music fan, you are sure to be blown away. I love the Internet so much right now. And of course I love John Peel. Now listening to Aardvark. You gotta start somewhere, right?

Is this really the end of privacy as we know it?

spiegelman:

A good friend of mine has one of those Twitter lists devoted to people whose tweets he actually wants to read. He checks that, exclusively, instead of his main feed. He does this to avoid the drama of someone getting upset with him IRL because of the perceived slight of an unfollow. Another friend…

In summary: Grow a pair. Don’t be a wuss.

I unfollow people on Twitter and unfriend people on Facebook pretty often. I also have a “short list” list on Twitter that is private. It’s the people I really care about, but I also follow a lot of other people that I care about, just not as much. 

dbreunig:

This is my favorite use of iOS’s background geofencing yet:

newsme:

I’ll think we’ve all been there: you get into a subway car, and just as the doors are closing, you realize that you’ve forgotten to take your phone out, pull to refresh, and wait 10 seconds to download the latest news articles to read offline. You curse under your breath and switch back to Angry Birds.

Today we’re pleased to introduce a new feature called Paper Boy. Simply set your home location so that whenever you leave home, News.me downloads your latest news in the background.

The best part about this? It’s such a clever, simple solution I imagine all serious news apps (cough-Instapaper-cough) will implement this feature shortly. Suddenly background downloading is no longer the domain of Newsstand bound apps. Hats off to Rob Haining for this sharp hack.

Really fantastic feature. Really with Instapaper would add this sort of thing. I can’t count how many times I’ve whipped out my iPad just as the doors were closing on a plane to make sure my Instapaper had the latest and greatest.