Jonathan Frei's Blog

Better than buying links

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 08:00:05 -0500

Commercial sites should just buy the blogs that help them. There are brands selling things that bloggers love talking about and bloggers who would love to make a living without Adsense. So why don’t they just get together?

The phases of life are depressing. (via EscaWorks - Phases Of...

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:30:05 -0500

The phases of life are depressing.

(via EscaWorks - Phases Of Life)

BoraBora Sunshine Tablets: A sunny day in pill form. (via...

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:00:06 -0500

BoraBora Sunshine Tablets: A sunny day in pill form.

(via Vaulot&Dyèvre)

Templates for modern movie posters via Dr. Monster

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 06:30:06 -0500

Templates for modern movie posters via Dr. Monster

What makes a diamond real?

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:30:05 -0500

This is from an old but interesting story from Wired.com about the New Diamond Age.

Put pure carbon under enough heat and pressure - say, 2,200 degrees Fahrenheit and 50,000 atmospheres - and it will crystallize into the hardest material known. Those were the conditions that first forged diamonds deep in Earth’s mantle 3.3 billion years ago. Replicating that environment in a lab isn’t easy, but that hasn’t kept dreamers from trying.

Making diamonds in a lab is sure to upset the deeply entrenched diamond industry.

The mystique of natural diamonds is anything but rational. Part of the allure is their high cost and supposed rarity. Yet diamonds are plentiful - De Beers maintains vast stockpiles and tightly controls supply. Clever marketing may bring buyers around to manufactured diamonds.

The hardest marketing will be up to husbands to convince their wives that the synthetic ones are just as good.

Kevin Castro, a jeweler in Cedar City, Utah, comes to a surprised halt. “These are awfully pretty,” he says. I tell him that they are man-made and ask if that bothers him. “If you go into a florist and buy a beautiful orchid, it’s not grown in some steamy hot jungle in Central America,” he says. “It’s grown in a hothouse somewhere in California. But that doesn’t change the fact that it’s a beautiful orchid.”

So, is a diamond real if it’s made in a lab or only if it’s mined from the earth?

World Press Photo of the Year - 2011. Check out all the 2011...

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 07:00:05 -0500

World Press Photo of the Year - 2011.

Check out all the 2011 winners from Worldpressphoto.org or view them at The Big Picture.

The smartest people are pointing us to games

Fri, 24 Feb 2012 06:30:05 -0500

Reginald Braithwaite shares my sentiment about a tragedy in technology.

What makes me sad is that the pinnacle of our computing power, the massive behavioural engine that is Google Adwords/Adsense, has decided that when someone is reading about dinosaurs, the most profitable thing to do is show them ads for games. Not books about dinosaurs, or even dinosaur games, but games.

We take a generation of incredibly smart people who have been rigorously trained to deliver amazing code, running on a massive computing engine, and when confronted with a human being trying to learn something, they try to distract him with games. Can you imagine Google in charge of textbooks? In my children’s time, textbooks will be immersive experiences, complete with Google’s avatars whispering “Psst! Math is hard, let’s play games instead of studying.” Can you imagine Google making eyeglasses? They would obscure anything educational with virtual billboards for dating sites.

Thank goodness for apps like AdBlock that make the web a more beautiful place. I’m not robbing any website publishers any revenue because I wouldn’t be clicking on the ads anyway. I’d just be leaving the site in disgust and finding somewhere else to go.

That would be messy. Check out more Brilliantly Sarcastic...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:30:05 -0500

That would be messy. Check out more Brilliantly Sarcastic Responses To Completely Well-Meaning Signs on Happy Place

Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done (by...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 07:00:06 -0500

Solve for X: Neal Stephenson on getting big stuff done (by wesolveforx).

I’m not a sy-fi geek, but this video has something for everyone. It has a few things to agree with and a few things to disagree with.

There’s more of these incredible sculptures on Takanori...

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 06:30:05 -0500

There’s more of these incredible sculptures on Takanori Aiba’s Flickr Photostream.

"A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual..."

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:30:06 -0500

“A person who exists only for the sake of his loved one is not an independent entity, but a spiritual parasite. The love of a parasite is worth nothing.”

- Ayn Rand via Letters of Note, where you can read the full letter with this quote in context.

Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Snowboarder (by...

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 07:00:06 -0500

Jacob Sutton’s L.E.D. Snowboarder (by tb303meets606).

Fashion photographer and filmmaker Jacob Sutton swaps the studio for the slopes of Tignes in the Rhône-Alpes region of south-eastern France, with a luminous after hours short starring Artec pro snowboarder William Hughes. The electrifying film sees Hughes light up the snow-covered French hills in a bespoke L.E.D.-enveloped suit courtesy of designer and electronics whizz John Spatcher.

There's a place to go if you're paranoid

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 06:30:06 -0500

I’m not paranoid on the web (yet), but if I were I’m happy to know there’s a place to go. DuckDuckGo, the anonymous web browser, has an illustrated guide called Google tracks you. We don’t that explains their philosophy of the web.

DuckDuckGo has also published a guide to Escape your search engine Filter Bubble! which is helpful to understanding how your search history eventually filters web results to fit your world view.

If you’re curious to know what Google knows about you, you can view your Google web history.

Awesome. Flavorwire’s compilations of The 20 Most...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:30:06 -0500

Awesome. Flavorwire’s compilations of The 20 Most Beautiful Bookstores in the World makes me wonder at what I’m missing having switched most of my reading to a kindle and computer screen.

Breaking an addiction to Equasy or banning it entirely

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 07:00:05 -0500

Jeff Stier of Reason Magazine, in his essay Modern-Day Prohibition, shared the story of psychopharmacologist David Nutt, who didn’t think Ecstasy and LSD should be categorized among the most dangerous drugs. Instead of backing down to critics and detractors, he wrote a satirical article, analyzing another addiction.

He analyzed “an addiction called ‘Equasy’ that kills ten people a year, causes brain damage and has been linked to the early onset of Parkinson’s disease.” Nut added that Equasy “releases endorphins, can create dependence and is responsible for over 100 road traffic accidents every year.” Had Nutt not revealed that Equasy was simply the time-honored sport of horseback riding, activists certainly would have rushed to introduce a ban. Nutt pointed out that since Equasy causes acute harm to one out of 350 riders, it is far riskier than Ecstasy, for which the fraction is one out of 10,000.

The point in all of this is that prohibitions and bans are more based on the perception of risk, rather than statistics. Stier continues:

It is hard to miss the similarities between current prohibition campaigns and their historical predecessors. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union’s “stated desire was to ‘reform, so far as possible, by religious, ethical, and scientific means the drinking classes.’ ” Likewise today, says Snowdon, self-righteous activists and their allies in government do not seek to improve public health by following the dictates of science but rather use pseudoscientific arguments and “subtle deceit” to advance laws that dictate how we live.

School Kills Creativity - Ken Robinson (by...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 06:30:06 -0500

School Kills Creativity - Ken Robinson (by koekskesberg).

There’s also his TED Talk version.

via xkcd: Kerning

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:30:06 -0500

via xkcd: Kerning

THE COMPOSITES

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 07:00:05 -0500

THE COMPOSITES:

The Composites is a very strange website where Brian Joseph Davis inputs descriptions of literary characters into law enforcement composite sketch software.

Obviously, I’m not condoning piracy, but it’s clear...

Mon, 20 Feb 2012 06:30:05 -0500

Obviously, I’m not condoning piracy, but it’s clear from this image that it’s not just about saving money. People are willing to pay if you offer them what they want, but if there is a large burden or inconvenience in going through legitimate avenues, they will look elsewhere.

“Cigarettes are like squirrels. They’re not...

Sun, 19 Feb 2012 07:30:05 -0500

“Cigarettes are like squirrels. They’re not dangerous until you put one in your mouth and light it on fire.” [via celluloidblonde]