Brian's posterous

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Wed, 08 Jul 2009 16:43:17 -0700

Several studies have shown that living with a roommate of a different race changes students’ attitudes. One, from the University of California at Los Angeles, generally found decreased prejudice among students with different-race roommates — but those who roomed with Asian-Americans, the group that scored the highest on measures of prejudice, became more prejudiced themselves.

What am I supposed to do with this information? [via]

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My new favorite Aardvark question

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 13:27:11 -0700

aardvark@vark.com:
You there? I have a question about *drugs* that I think you might be
able to answer.

(Type 'sure', 'pass', or 'busy'.)

Brian Shih:
sure

aardvark@vark.com:
(From Kiefer K./22/M/Cambridge,MA)
what is the absolute craziest combination of substances to get crunk,
without seriously risking death?

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Okay, this is just absurd.

Wed, 10 Jun 2009 18:29:14 -0700

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Fri, 15 May 2009 18:32:14 -0700

The fame vs fortune choice matters because of substitutability, the willingness to accept one thing as a substitute for another. Substitutability is neutralized in perfect markets. For example, if someone has even a slight preference for Pepsi over Coke, and if both are always equally available in all situations, that person will never drink a Coke, despite being only mildly biased.

The soft-drink market is not perfect, but the Web comes awfully close: If InstaPundit and Samizdata are both equally easy to get to, the relative traffic to the sites will always match audience preference. But were InstaPundit to become less easy to get to, Samizdata would become a more palatable substitute. Any barrier erodes the user’s preferences, and raises their willingness to substitute one thing for another.

Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content by Clay Shirky

Old, but seemingly relevant these days. Just replace micropayments with [whatever strategy newspapers are trying now].

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Tue, 21 Apr 2009 12:09:59 -0700

By some estimates, 100 surnames cover 85 percent of China’s citizens. Laobaixing, or “old hundred names,” is a colloquial term for the masses. By contrast, 70,000 surnames cover 90 percent of Americans.

Yep, I was right. From the NYTimes [via]

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Sat, 18 Apr 2009 17:39:57 -0700

Wow, I had no ideas synths had gotten so terrifyingly good. Seeing stuff like this makes me wonder if any of the instruments I’ve heard on the radio in the last several years were real… Bert Smorenburg is also incredibly entertaining - favorite line: “Quantize. Why? Because it’s house, of course.”

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If you are one in a million in China, there are 1300 people just like you

Mon, 13 Apr 2009 19:53:03 -0700

A rare piece of spam made it past the ol’ Gmail filter the other day, so I ended up reading it. Here’s the thing: I’ve gotten spam where they claim some obscure relative has died and I get to inherit their fortune, but contacting me on the basis of my last name alone? Come on guys… do you have any idea how many Shihs there probably are in the world? Bonus points for including a wikipedia link to bolster your legitimacy though!

I am Barrister Yang Lim , an attorney at law. I discovered your email and information through internet search so I decided to contact you. A deceased client of mine, that shares the same last name as yours died as the result of a heart-related condition on March 12th 2005. His heart condition was due to the death of all the members of his family in the tsunami disaster on the 26th December 2004 in Sumatra Indonesia. And in the record there is no known successor to this deposit of the deceased who died without a will.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_Indian_Ocean_earthquake.

I have contacted you to assist in distributing the money left behind by my client before it is confiscated or declared unserviceable by the bank where this deposit valued at Eighteen million dollars is (US$18million dollars) lodged. This bank has issued me a notice to contact the next of kin, I can be reached on (yanglim8@gmail.com) for more information.

Best regards,
Yang Lim
Attorney at Law.

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M.I.A. "Paper Planes" and The Clash "Straight to Hell"

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 19:42:06 -0700

http://www.whosampled.com/sample/view/80/M.I.A.-Paper%20Planes_The%20Clash-Straight%20to%20Hell/

Raise your hand if you knew “Paper Planes” sampled The Clash.

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Sat, 11 Apr 2009 07:40:01 -0700

The Alesis Micron is so delightfully retro looking. Love the look.

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Wed, 08 Apr 2009 18:40:00 -0700

Keri Hilson ft. Kanye and Ne-Yo - “Knock You Down”

I loved her on Nas’ “Hero”, and this song (once the 16th note hi-hats and the rest of the beat kicks in) is just as good. Plus it has the line “commander-in-chief of my pimp ship”? SOLD. Also, no Kanye auto-tune? DOUBLE SOLD.

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Wed, 01 Apr 2009 21:49:50 -0700

If I ever buy a motorcycle… this will be it.

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Twitter switch for Guardian, after 188 years of ink

Wed, 01 Apr 2009 11:41:00 -0700

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2009/apr/01/guardian-twitter-media-technology

This is an amusing and yet incredibly awkward April Fool’s joke. Especially with this line: “Printing presses will fall silent in brave new Twitter-based future.”

It’s never just a joke, right?

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Mon, 02 Mar 2009 19:31:30 -0800

Oh. My. God. How have I not heard this until now? And they’re going to be at SXSW???

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Wed, 25 Feb 2009 17:00:16 -0800

Beautiful.

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The No-Stats All-Star

Mon, 16 Feb 2009 00:10:27 -0800

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/15/magazine/15Battier-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1

A fantastic article by Michael Lewis on basketball. I particularly like the dissection of why basketball is the one professional sport where there’s real conflict between what’s best for the player (stats-wise) and what’s best for the team.

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Since when did Instructables start offering things like this "Vampiric Cyberpunk Double Barrel Shotgun"?

Tue, 27 Jan 2009 19:41:29 -0800

http://www.instructables.com/id/Vampiric_Cyberpunk_Double_Barrel_Shotgun/

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Best description of Jeezy's "Put On" I've ever read

Wed, 24 Dec 2008 02:57:02 -0800

If “Put On” was just a Young Jeezy track, it’d already be the best Jeezy track since at least “Hypnotize”. Jeezy snarls hard but brings a newfound sense of style and wit to a monolithic synthetic boom from producer Drumma Boy: “Inside fishsticks, outside tartar sauce/ Pocketful of celery, imagine what she telling me.” But then, at the 2:52 mark, Kanye shows up in full AutoTune robo-mode, moaning damaged, paranoid self-pity out of nowhere: “You can ask Big Homey, man the top so lonely/ I’m so lonely.” It’s a neck-snapping about-face, Jeezy’s chest-thumping self-aggrandizement into Kanye’s seething depression. But when “Put On” sinks in, they sound like opposite sides of the same coin: The conjoined feelings of exhilaration and doubt that come when you finally, against odds, make something of yourself. And in a car with decent speakers, this little meditation on duality sounds like the fucking apocalypse. —Tom Breihan

via Pitchfork’s top 100 tracks of 2008

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Wed, 03 Dec 2008 23:02:32 -0800

Prop 8: The Musical - How on EARTH did I not hear about this? This is totally amazing. Thanks Lindsay :)

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Sun, 30 Nov 2008 18:04:10 -0800

Long overdue: The totally awesome “sushi” birthday cake Lindsay made me. Click through to see the annotated version.

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SWATTING ATTACKS ON FRUIT FLIES AND SCIENCE

Sat, 08 Nov 2008 22:51:30 -0800

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/coyne08/coyne08_index.html

“In her usual faux-folksy style, Palin lit out after a congressional earmark involving these insects: “You’ve heard about some of these pet projects — they really don’t make a whole lot of sense — and sometimes these dollars go to projects that have little or nothing to do with the public good. Things like fruit-fly research in Paris, France. I kid you not.” (Reading this diatribe is not sufficient; only video reveals the scorn and condescension dripping from her words.)”

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