Brilliant – violinist responds to concert interrupted by cell phone ring with improv on Nokia ringtone (via)
Flight Assembled Architecture (by mwaibel)
Now that we have a boy maybe one of my kids will be into model trains!
Miniatur Wunderland *** official video 2012 *** largest model railway / railroad of the world (by MiWuLaTV)
Hamburg’s number 1 tourist attraction. For damn good reason.
The main thing is not to hurry. Nothing good gets away.
HEART2HEART - FACEBOOK OFFICIAL [HD] (by Heart2HeartWorld)
This can’t be real.
What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?
Commitment It is a fundamental principle of economics that a person is always better off if they have more alternatives to choose from. But this principle is wrong. There are cases when I can make myself better off by restricting my future choices and commit myself to a specific course of action.
The idea of commitment as a strategy is an ancient one. Odysseus famously had his crew tie him to the mast so he could listen to the Sirens’ songs without falling into the temptation to steer the ship into the rocks. And he committed his crew to not listening by filling their ears with wax. Another classic is Cortex’s decision to burn his ships upon arriving in South America, thus removing retreat as one of the options his crew could consider. But although the idea is an old one, we did not begin to understand its nuances until Nobel Laureate Thomas Schelling’s wrote his 1956 masterpiece: “An Essay on Bargaining”.
It is well known that thorny games such as the prisoner’s dilemma can be solved if both players can credibly commit themselves to cooperating, but how can I convince you that I will cooperate when it is a dominant strategy for me to defect? (And, if you and I are game theorists, you know that I know that you know that I know that defecting is a dominant strategy.)
Schelling gives many examples of how this can be done, but here is my favorite. A Denver rehabilitation clinic whose clientele consisted of wealthy cocaine addicts, offered a “self-blackmail” strategy. Patient were offered an opportunity to write a self- incriminating letter that would be delivered if and only if the patient, who is tested on a random schedule, is found to have used cocaine. Most cocaine addicts will probably have no trouble thinking of something to write about, and will now have a very strong incentive to stay off drugs. They are committed.
Many of society’s thorniest problems, from climate change to Middle East peace could be solved if the relevant parties could only find a way to commit themselves to some future course of action. They would be well advised to study Tom Schelling in order to figure out how to make that commitment.
RELATIVE PITCH: Sunday Viewing
Walk Off The Earth covering Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know.
Jess sent this over to me earlier this week. It’s great. 21 million people agree. It’s perfect for Sunday viewing. Enjoy!
This was the song of the week last week in the BillGuard office. Cool take.
Some folks will make good money with [online video]. But it still won’t be the competitor to TV that everyone predicts. Why ? Because just like no one took the time to change the blinking 12:00 on their VCRs back in the day, having to hit the internet button on the remote, or even worse, the input button on the remote will not be the path of least resistance for watching tv. Believe it or not, it will be far too much hassle for most people when compared to just turning on and watching TV the old fashioned way.
The TV Business Keeps Getting Stronger ! « blog maverick
I agree with pretty much all of this post. I want TV to be disrupted as much as anyone, but I’ve yet to see anyone present a credible case for how to do it. To remake TV, you have to fundamentally remake entire infrastructures—legal, regulatory, business, and transmission. I can think of only two companies with the cash and wherewithal to even attempt that.
Cuppow turns a canning jar into a mug for sipping on the go.
I’d go for at least a cuppow of these.
Available here.
(via themattsmith.)
If hipsters were into awards, this would win a few.
Prisencolinensinainciusol (by levriero201)
A song meant to sound like what English sounds like to non-English speakers.
1321 plays
Auld Lang Syne (Live at the Fillmore - 1-1-70) by Jimi Hendrix
from 41 years ago at the fillmore happy cover day everyone. the last one of 2011
shared from exfm
Perfect
‘Your own reality—for yourself, not for others.’ Thinking for yourself means finding yourself, finding your own reality. Here’s the other problem with Facebook and Twitter and even The New York Times. When you expose yourself to those things, especially in the constant way that people do now—older people as well as younger people—you are continuously bombarding yourself with a stream of other people’s thoughts. You are marinating yourself in the conventional wisdom. In other people’s reality: for others, not for yourself. You are creating a cacophony in which it is impossible to hear your own voice, whether it’s yourself you’re thinking about or anything else. That’s what Emerson meant when he said that ‘he who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling with the souls of other men, from living, breathing, reading, and writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions.’ Notice that he uses the word lead. Leadership means finding a new direction, not simply putting yourself at the front of the herd that’s heading toward the cliff.
So it’s perfectly natural to have doubts, or questions, or even just difficulties. The question is, what do you do with them? Do you suppress them, do you distract yourself from them, do you pretend they don’t exist? Or do you confront them directly, honestly, courageously? If you decide to do so, you will find that the answers to these dilemmas are not to be found on Twitter or Comedy Central or even in The New York Times. They can only be found within—without distractions, without peer pressure, in solitude.
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