"…the first 90 percent of the work is easy, the second 90 percent wears you down, and the last 90 percent - the attention to detail - makes a good product. Making software that is simultaneously easy to learn, easy to use, friendly, useful, and powerful takes people with an incredible combination of skills, talent, and artistry working together with intensity and patience."

"The U.S. government is known to have used drones to carry out lethal attacks in at least six countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen."

bq. This is really the heart of what this case is about.  The rule of law is dependent upon a government that is willing to abide by the law.  Disrespect for the rule of law begins when the government believes itself and its corporate sponsors to be above the law.

"In effect we made the physical space behave as their virtual spaces did – easy to get into and out of, allowing of experimentation and failure and most importantly full of tools and structures and plugin ins designed to make it simple and cheap for them to do what they are passionate about."

"What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it."

I should start wearing a helmet and using Runkeeper for my biking around. But I should also keep up my avoidance of car-bike crashes.

Please let this be contributed to WebKit tomorrow.

GOULD. BACH.

Another nice step-by-step of a mandolin build.

bq. ‘Three years ago, I got angry at the mountain. I climbed it 38 times in two months.’

A perfect blog post, until the goddamn xkcd comic.

This is pretty incredible. I suppose with all these movies about glamourous thieving people are bound to get inspired to do the real thing.

A pinecone opening and closing.

Laptops: do they lead to isolation?

I'm a bit sad to admit my drooling fandom, but the two times Sam gave the shoot-my-face-off terrible one liners in this episode made me cringe. I've never watched CSI, so how could I have known he's making fun of them. Redeemed.

“Opening up yet another fragment of the frontier of beauty.”

I really want to do up a house like this guy. Problem is I know nothing about building. The ultimate hacking: of your own home.

The Internet as non-partial, constant, and global interlocutor. (Note: I am posting this from the a40 buzzing northwest out of the alps towards Paris.)

A bit of bullshit, but I'm sold nonetheless.

Computers aren't just getting under our skin, but also keeping it nice and toasty.

bq. We’re a nation of thugs and louts with flames tattooed on our necks, who call each other “motherfucker” and are skilled only in playing video games based on mass murder.

Ah, Kunstler.

"Calvin and Hobbes, Eighth Wonder of the World." Seconded.

Buying local keeps 30% more of the money you spend close to home.

bq. Any way this evolves, this device opens up a world of possibilities for new interfaces. Even if we don't get rich off of it, we'll still be able to build the coolest shit on it.
—Eliss creator Steph Thirion

I completely missed the wave of iPhone, and don't feel much the worse for it. But as uninspiring as the announcement may have been yesterday, I think this paddish thing has at least as much potential in it as the phone has shown, and over the long term it will take the lead as far as incredible-touchable-futureman interface to all things digital.

Sign me up.

Oh, but the fucking name!

.

wate consumption in the shower vs the meat production consumption cycle:

bq. …a vegetarian could shower for an extra THREE HOURS every day and still use significantly less water per year than a meat eater. Eat one fewer pound of beef per month, and even by the meat industry’s clearly biased numbers, you’ve earned fifteen minutes extra in the shower every day.

Yesterday the whole ‘Pants on the Ground’ thing almost made me proud of america. But then today Massachusetts happened and I saw this.

bq. That’s right. The devastating Lisbon earthquake of 1755 prompted a widespread spiritual crisis among the philosophes of Europe, causing them to question how such random devastation could be squared with the existence of a compassionate personal God; our own makers of respectable opinion are shaken to their existential core, evidently, by the reflection that there are some calamities that can even extend to mansions and monied families.

I like the sports & leisure centers, the pipe shipping, and the in-floor beds and tables. Most of it actually.

…by machines of loving grace. What technologies would I say fit such a poetic bill? 'Earthships' are first to mind. I'd almost put the iPod(/Phone) up there. What else? "Surely not cars":http://forest/2007/02/10/ilya-ehrenburg.html.

bq. The United States, searching for water, bombed the moon.

From the inventor of probably the first PC: the "wibble-wobble method" of learning to ride a bike. Just have the kids wiggle their handlebars back and forth, and they apparently won't need training wheels.

bq. In the 2000s, we learned that most of us love nothing better than to watch videos of other people's embarrassing moments all day long, and to pass them around to our friends, and by extension, the world.

Can you say badass? "three pink elephants."

Oof. I've hardly touched my LX1 since I've been in france, instead opting for the lens on my iPhone. Also it feels like it doesn't autofocus right, but I have no evidence of that. Here's the logical replacement/improvement. It looks great.

Sadly.

Boingggggg… (the sound of my eyes popping out and dangling on springs).

bq. It's staggering really that modern American Christianism supports wealth while Jesus demanded total poverty, fetishizes family while Jesus left his and urged his followers to abandon wives, husbands and children, champions politics while Jesus said his kingdom was emphatically not of this world, defends religious war where Jesus sought always peace, and backs torture, which is what the Romans did to Jesus.

To the future. This makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. In 1st-3rd grade my class went on a 3 day camping trip each year, and they're probably my favorite memory of school ever. How cool would it be to do this everyday? I'm seriously jealous.

bq. A baboon called Fred, back ground, sits inside a car with a baboon called Michael Jackson, left, as he eats at Cape Point on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa.

Holy shit I wish I could draw.

How I cook: Look into the fridge, see whats there, combine any two ingredients, google for a recipe including them, make the first thing that looks good. This isn't too bad.

Oh wow.

Made this a few times last week. It wasn't bad.

I decided I'd make a bucket of things I'd cooked on delicious. I got to thinking earlier today what kind of glory a ham and avocado sandwich would bestow upon me, and then checked google to make sure I wasn't insane, and here was the recipe. Mixing the butter and mustard together with pepper is pretty badass.

Photos of people's workspaces, leaning heavily towards the industrial. Oh wow. None of this lifehacker/ikea desk/shiny cable-free computer desk bullshit.

bq. But the REAL question is: Why the hell are these chunks of cinematic shite so popular? The answer is simple: American guilt. We’re all thrashing around in a culture built on Me-ism—I want mine, I’ll do whatever it takes to get it, and fuck everybody else. And deep down in places we don’t talk about at parties, we KNOW we’re steeped in a moral wasteland, and that we’re little better than most criminals for spending our time worrying about how many panda-skin Jimmy Choos we can buy while a single mother of four works three jobs and still can’t afford to have a fucking cavity filled.

bq. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.

I totally agree with this. Also: on a two-way trail divided with a dashed line, swerve from one side of the path to another—between the dashes and without touching them with either your front or back tire—fast as you can.

Jan Chipchase on switchable (between opaque and transparent) glass.

‘Traditional Melodies in Four Movements.’ Head-explodingly good new stuff from the Punch Brothers. Give it until the 4th, or you'll regret it.

Rainforest architecture.

James Condino (luthier) channels BLDGBLOG a bit. I'm never going anywhere without an instrument again.

They make some good fucking sandwiches. Available at the little bakery 2 blocks from my house.

bq. It’s hard to be too pessimistic or angry in the presence of something that despite its fragile beauty has existed for millions of years. As I looked up and sighed, the trees seemed to benignly acknowledge this idea, as if to say that whatever we have endured, they have lived through much worse.

This french mandolin festival coincides with the first vacation I get from teaching the french! Ho shit! Mike Marshall & Big Trio w/ Caterina Lichtenberg anybody?

bq. Get this: when Scotty was a kid (growing up in the notorious performing Stoneman Family), he used to get up in the middle of the night, take his fiddle into the chicken coop and play until all the chickens were awake and squawking around and going nuts, and then he'd put his fiddle away and go back to bed.

Oh shit.

"Finally Americans will get the opportunity to see what it looks like when a filibuster-proof majority is squandered."

Who knew.

Holy shit.

This is hugely awesome. It gave me my first tinge of iPhone doubt. Off-the-cuff programs I can run from my pocket! (Wonder when I'll bother to get a phone that isn't a 5 year old motorola…)

Attack of the Blackbird.

bq. Fucking Nikola Tesla once lit 200 lightbulbs from a power source 26 miles away, and he did it in 1899 with a machine he built from spare parts in the middle of the fucking desert. To this day, nobody can really figure out how the fuck he pulled that shit off, because two-thirds of the schematics only existed in the darkest recesses of Tesla's all-powerful brain.

Animal cruelty at its best.

I saw this one time when I was flying. The plane's shadow on the ground surrounded by a burst of color.

This appears to be an autonomous, garbage collecting Segway. Summoned by cellphone.

Real text editors figured this out forever ago. Browsers are on their way. How long until everything in our computers can be easily and dynamically programmed?

oh shit…

Fuck the iPhone, I want one of these.

Howard Zinn on how the citizenry needs to step up and rectify the erring ways of an Obama administration going sour.

This apartment is intense.

Software D smackdown.