Food, marriage, and Star Wars

Ahh, three of the most important topics in anyone's life. First, a fascinating jaunt through the lives of plants disguised as a mild chiding of self-righteous vegetarianism.

The next article is a bit older, but I hadn't had time to read it until now. It's an exploration of an attempt to make a marriage better. The article fascinates, as much in what doesn't get answered as in what does. There were a lot of things that also made me examine my own past relationships (well, relationship, really...). Life ain't easy, is it?

Finally, on a lighter but also much more important note, I give you a slightly disturbing yet deeply insightful 70-minute review of Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. Yeah, you read that right. The full review is an hour and 10 minutes long. But you know what, it's the best damn movie review I've ever seen or heard. He does a bang-up job of picking through all the things wrong with Phantom Menace, not just from a fan perspective, but from a real movie-making and storytelling perspective. It really made me think and taught me something. If you're only willing to watch one, watch #6.

Death and Happiness

NYTimes has a very interesting article about death and organ donation. It asks some really interesting questions about when death starts. I've always believed that life and death are rooted in the nervous system, but man there's a lot more gray area than I've ever thought about.

On a happier note, I want to revisit an Atlantic article about what makes us happy. Had it up in the profile a while back but this was before the blog. This article made me happy, mostly because I read these articles and think "yup, got that, yup, got that too, hey I got all the happiness checkmarks". It's like I'm in a competition or something, gotta be happier than thou. Never fails.

Weirdness

Today's updates are brought to you courtesy of Slate magazine. First, a very NSFW trip through the English countryside exploring some, ah, interesting clubs of the past, shall we say. Very droll, I'm sure.

Also, if you've only ever heard of Mr. Ed through that theme song, like me, this will come as a bit of a surprise. Somehow the fact that the talking horse was a bit of a pimp just doesn't compute...

Bagels and Breast Cancer

Mathematics + food = AWESOME. Enough said.

Also, NY Times Magazine (of course) has a nice little article up about the numbers associated with screening for breast cancer which really applies to all testing in general. And also happens to be a nice primer on priors in probability! Probability is AWESOME. Yes, yes, I'm a huge nerd.

Letters and fruit flies!

This is a common complaint, but nonetheless true. When all our correspondences are via email, where are we going to get all those long books full of people's letters that the biographers love? This Slate article on letters doesn't really address the question, but does bring up some fascinating quotes from letters past. I'm going to write all my emails as if they're being preserved for posterity from now on!

Speaking of posterity, apparently fruit fly boys dig the big girls. Although apparently that can be quite bad for the ladies....

Superman & Loneliness

Two topics today: one serious, one not so much. Time has an article up on how loneliness can be contagious, from results on a studying done on the Framingham Heart dataset (seems like everybody's going to this data these days). This follows the earlier a bunch of earlier results on how behaviors ineverything from smoking to obesity also spreads through social networks. The question nobody seems to have addressed yet is why are these links asymmetric? If you have a network with a lonely person and some people who aren't lonely, when does the lonely person drag down the happy people, and when do the happy people lift up the lonely/sad one? Inquiring minds want to know!

Speaking of uplifting, I recently found a reasoned, scientific treatise on Superman's mating prospects. Suffice to say that the reproduction of a Kryptonian alien is not a simple matter. That is all.

Feedback

Slate.com (one of my favorite online news sites) has this interesting article on having a monitoring device to give you feedback on driving habits. It's been pretty well known that giving people feedback on their performance can really change their behavior. If you've ever driven a hybrid you know that the "mpg game" can be a hugely amusing distraction. It's interesting to think about how we can use feedback in daily life to improve all manner of things... Speaking of improvements, this also really reminds me of Atul Gawande's book "Better", about improvements in health practices and surgery. It really highlights the effect of quantitative feedback on performance. Lots of food for thought.

Camel Case

The New York Times Magazine's "On Language" column is one of my favorites. This week's article is a fascinating exploration of written language disguised as a polemic against camelCase. Now, I happen to love camelCase (running words together and capitalizing the middle words), but the article is still a great read.

And for those who are curious about how it works in other languages than English, in Chinese and Japanese (and I imagine most other Asian languages?) there is no "word" spacing. You figure out what characters belong together by recognizing words that are formed. I wonder if word spacing would have any effect on the way we read those languages...?

Car of the year

Top Gear did a hilarious build of an electric car, and you can see the Autocar Magazine video review here. The full review can be found here [warning: PDF link!]. It is, in a word, Hi-Larious.

World Toilet Day

Yup. You heard me. World Toilet Day. I don't think I need to say any more.

Also, those of you who have heard me talking about wushu (Chinese martial arts), this video will help explain what it is. And by explain I mean blow your mind.

First Post! (ironicly not)

Today's link come courtesy of The Atlantic Online, the undead electronic lich that has risen from the grave of the Atlantic Monthly.
a fascinating article about the genetic benefits of traits like depression. Group discussion topic: if you could find out your genetic predisposition to depression, would you?

Also,a bit of art to lighten the day.

Finally, if you can fight through the choppy prose and slightly painful self-analysis this article by Sandra Tsing-Loh (my commencement speaker!) actually puts up some thought-provoking points. That is all!

Welcome!

A surprising number of people have come to me and told me that I've brought joy to their internet time wasting with my gchat profile links, and I realized that I also like those articles. Therefore I've decided to start a blog, primarily to have a way of easily archiving the links and also to feed my growing narcissism. Plus this way I get to throw in some half-digested thoughts with each piece. So enjoy!