Not Wonkavision

tyleroakley: buzzfeed: George Takei responds to “traditional”...

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:15:40 -0400

buzzfeed:

George Takei responds to “traditional” marriage fans.

George Takei is flawfree.

Hoppy beer is awful—or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. - Slate Magazine

Fri, 17 May 2013 16:27:57 -0400

Hoppy beer is awful—or at least, its bitterness is ruining craft beer’s reputation. - Slate Magazine:

section9:

sotheresthat:

YES.

PREACH!

No. I’m sorry, but this is wrong.

Seven paragraphs into this poorly-researched article, the author says:

Let’s be clear: Not all craft beer is hoppy. There are many craft breweries that seek to create balanced, drinkable beers that aren’t very bitter at all, like Patrick Rue’s the Bruery in Placentia, Calif., and the Commons Brewery in Portland, Ore. Among the non-hoppy yet complex and delicious American craft beers available are Widmer’s hefeweizen, New Glarus’ cherry and raspberry beers, and Full Sail Brewing’s Session Lager (a beer specifically developed to serve as a refreshing counterpoint to overhopped beers). America’s independent breweries make beers to suit every palate, not just the ones that revel in bitterness.

Yeah, so the entire premise of the headline is disproven by the author, but somehow Slate thought this was still worth publishing. That’s lazy and should be an embarrassment for both writer and editor.

There are plenty of craft beers that aren’t hop-forward, like Mama’s Little Yella Pils from Oskar Blues, Lagunitas PILS, and Coney Island Lager. There are literally dozens of browns, stouts, and wheat beers that feature malt and yeast instead of hops. The first craft beer I ever had, when I was in college and convinced that all beer was Budweiser was St. Rogue’s Red Ale, from Rogue brewing.

A more accurate and actually useful article might be headlined Think All Craft Beer Is Too Hoppy? Think Again.

Come to Eugene, OR and learn something is all I can say.

nevver: The Street

Fri, 10 May 2013 13:52:33 -0400

nevver:

The Street

wow

Fri, 10 May 2013 11:46:59 -0400

wow

wired: gemmacorrell: Sky Cats (my monthly cartoon for Emirates...

Wed, 01 May 2013 16:17:13 -0400

wired:

gemmacorrell:

Sky Cats
(my monthly cartoon for Emirates Airlines Open Skies In-Flight magazine)

OMG so good.

springwise: Picnic blanket features integrated speaker...

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 11:43:38 -0400

springwise:

Picnic blanket features integrated speaker system

Travelers heading outdoors usually have to decide which home comforts they’ll have to leave behind. However, we have seen a few innovations that conveniently combine products, such as the Springtime picnic basket that can transform into a set of tables and chairs. Our latest spotting is the Speaker Blanket, a mat that keeps picnickers off the mud while providing music to complement their outing. READ MORE…

You certainly wouldn’t want to hear the ambient sounds of nature!

Evgeny Morozov: The Naked and the TED | New Republic

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 14:21:18 -0400

Evgeny Morozov: The Naked and the TED | New Republic:

Today TED is an insatiable kingpin of international meme laundering—a place where ideas, regardless of their quality, go to seek celebrity, to live in the form of videos, tweets, and now e-books. In the world of TED—or, to use their argot, in the TED “ecosystem”—books become talks, talks become memes, memes become projects, projects become talks, talks become books—and so it goes ad infinitum in the sizzling Stakhanovite cycle of memetics, until any shade of depth or nuance disappears into the virtual void. Richard Dawkins, the father of memetics, should be very proud. Perhaps he can explain how “ideas worth spreading” become “ideas no footnotes can support.”

old but good

jaymallinphotos: Wow - almost 20 miles of ribbons bridge heaven...

Sun, 14 Apr 2013 14:51:48 -0400

jaymallinphotos:

Wow - almost 20 miles of ribbons bridge heaven and earth in Grace Cathedral’s installation called “Graced With Light.” By their 2013 artist in residence, Anne Patterson.

Photo

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 18:21:20 -0400

gnomar: 04/12/2003 - Ruling the game of Triominoes with an iron...

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 20:34:41 -0400

gnomar:

04/12/2003 - Ruling the game of Triominoes with an iron fist!

Gnomar the gnome in San Jose, CA

Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 22:10:13 -0400

Sponsors Now Pay for Online Articles, Not Just Ads:

parislemon:

Puke.

Double Puke

"While many email users have historically added emotion-markers (so-called ‘emoticons’ or ‘smileys’)..."

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 11:53:50 -0400

“While many email users have historically added emotion-markers (so-called ‘emoticons’ or ‘smileys’) as paralinguistic footnotes to their literal messages […], it is not clear that these less-than-intuitive symbols will achieve widespread usage among email’s currently burgeoning clientele.”

- Baron, N. S. 1998. “Letters by phone or speech by other means: the
linguistics of email”. Language & Communication 18. pp. 133-170 (via gwenniel)
That thought was behind in 1998! Looks absolutely myopic now.

"West: There is a whole class of gesture-based functionality, basically, that mobile apps are trying..."

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 11:15:56 -0400

“

West: There is a whole class of gesture-based functionality, basically, that mobile apps are trying to take advantage of, which is fantastic. Now on Foursquare, when you pull down on a venue, it checks you in without you having to tap the screen. It’s a power user feature we tell people about—it’s very rare you accidentally do it. Plus, a little bit of a learning curve isn’t that bad. A lot of web gurus say it’s bad if there’s any kind of learning curve or tutorial needed, but I disagree. We’re making the standards. This is the time when we’re figuring out what the best practice is.

Disabato: It’s funny, I’ll see people much younger than myself having no problem learning totally new interaction models on these interfaces when they aren’t given any help. I’ll see people my age or older, I’m 31, they’ll struggle and won’t be able to do anything on it, and they’ll need help.

West: We already have a mental model, or muscle memory, tripping us up. I have an Xbox, and I always had Nintendo before, so I keep wanting to hit A and B all the time. If I was a five year old, I would have no issues.

Disabato: I think you might start seeing apps that are experimental for their own sake. They do very weird things with gestures, they’re not really serious labored endeavors, but they’re something you can play with and understand the limitations of the medium. You see that a lot with game design and sound apps, music generation apps, that sort of stuff, where it’s just this weird set of graphics you play around with, like [sound toy app] Pluto Pluto. The more people actually use them, the more you’ll start to understand there’s way more to design than what Apple proscribes in their interface guidelines.

”

- Patrick Sisson interviewed Nick Disabato and I for Interview: New Trends in Mobile Design / Features / Nothing Major. (via timoni)

"We badly need more poetry in our social debates."

Fri, 22 Mar 2013 18:29:19 -0400

“We badly need more poetry in our social debates.”

- James Poulos (via stoweboyd)

We badly need more poetry in our lives, not just in our social debates

Accessibility for Visually Impaired and Blind but I Like It

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 18:04:00 -0400

Accessibility for Visually Impaired and Blind but I Like It:

Kind of cool having my newspaper read to me on my iPhone.

"My main impression over the past five years is that the conference circuit capitalists who give..."

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 11:04:27 -0400

“My main impression over the past five years is that the conference circuit capitalists who give fantastic presentations have turned out to be marginal to history while the people who are too boring and unfashionable to get invited to the conferences in the first place have actually changed the world under our noses.”

- http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/12/opinion/brooks-the-axis-of-ennui.html?smid=tw-nytdavidbrooks&seid=auto&_r=0

skysignal: feed-well: December 5, 2012 screening of Life of...

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:46:21 -0500

skysignal:

feed-well:

December 5, 2012 screening of Life of Pi at the Piscine Pailleron in Paris, France

pour capu, anne et mimi

This is so cool, but what do they do when they have to go to the bathroom?

What a great example of passive immersive entertainment

Stowe Boyd: Topolsky In TEDland: Deep Ambivalence

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:40:00 -0500

Stowe Boyd: Topolsky In TEDland: Deep Ambivalence:

stoweboyd:

Topolsky went to TED, and was bemused at times by the incredibly white, ideas-besotted, closed-while-lauding-openmindedness love-in. But he also found it hollow at the core, because while TED is about ‘ideas worth spreading’, it is philosophically dishonest.

Joshua Topolsky, Inside TED: the…

The thinking that any problem can be solved by engineering is a mistake, because any societal or civilization based problem comes down to people. Techno-fascism is where we are (not a new or novel statement), we might be served better by an idea street fair then an elite idea culture.

Stowe Boyd: Techno-utopianism is a dead end, and so is TED

Thu, 07 Mar 2013 11:23:48 -0500

Stowe Boyd: Techno-utopianism is a dead end, and so is TED:

stoweboyd:

Umair Haque suggests that ‘TED thinking’ — the sort that underlies the techno-utopianism behind the TED conference and much of the triumphalist ‘we can do anything’ discourse on the web — does an injustice to the power of ideas, and trivializes the issuse we are confronted with.

Umair Haque,

Nice criticism by Umair Hague.

Viral Video Shows the Extent of U.S. Wealth Inequality

Sat, 02 Mar 2013 18:37:19 -0500

Viral Video Shows the Extent of U.S. Wealth Inequality