Fellow southpaws know what a pain in the butt it is to use a conventional spiral notebook, having to contort your writing hand so as to minimize the pain of the spiral pressing into the underside of your wrist.
Here's an assortment of six (6) double spiral notebooks in six (6) colors, each with 50 8"x 5" sheets.
Smaller than a bread box — wait a sec, joe, your wires are crossed.
Again.
The Egyptian tortoise is smaller than a raspberry at birth; fully grown, it will measure between 3 and 5 inches long.
Critically endangered in the wild, its only hope for survival from extinction is continued successful breeding of the species in zoos.
Its native habitat is the Mediterranean coastal deserts of Egypt, Eastern Libya, and the western Negev Desert in Israel.
Its numbers have rapidly declined since the 1960s because of the exotic pet trade and destruction of its habitat through development.
From Open Culture:
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Albert Einstein became one of the world’s great science communicators by choice, not necessity, and found ways to explain his complex theories to children and the elderly alike. But perhaps, if he'd had his way, he would rather have avoided words altogether, and preferred acrobatic feats of silent daring to get his message across. We might at least conclude so from his reverence for the work of Charlie Chaplin. Chaplin was the only person Einstein wanted to meet in California during his second (1930–31) visit to the U.S., when he was at the height of his fame, with newspapers tracking his every move and academics clamoring for explanations of his theories.
The admiration was mutual. Their first meetings happened outside press scrutiny at Universal Studios, where the pair took a tour and had lunch together. They hit it off straight away, sharing quick wits and curious minds. In his autobiography, Chaplin writes that Einstein's wife Elsa finagled an invitation to dinner at Chaplin's house. He was only too happy to oblige, arranging an intimate dinner at which Elsa regaled him with the story of when Einstein came up with his world-changing theory around 1915.
The two continued to correspond, and the big public unveiling of their friendship came when Chaplin invited Einstein to the premiere of City Lights in 1931 (see photo up top) where the mega-celebrities from very different worlds were greeted by reporters, photographers, and adoring crowds.
It's clear Einstein saw something in Charlie Chaplin worth emulating. Chaplin left his mark on Existentialist philosophy, lending the name of his film Modern Times to Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir's influential journal, Les Temps Modernes. He also left a legacy on Beat poetry, lending the name City Lights to Lawrence Ferlinghetti's infamous San Francisco bookstore and publisher.
This 2004 piece by the Belgian designer employs an ordinary chair covered with a "new skin" of paper strips from a shredder.
"Every dot on this globe is a real person's voice — a short story about a place, a memory, a feeling. Tap one and hear someone from the other side of the planet."
If you like, you can record your own voice for others to hear.
Back story here.
It's a new feature making its debut today.
Aren't you excited?
Oh.
That's OK, never mind.
This inaugural installment is entitled:
Have you ever noticed how most people, when given a compliment, say things like, "It's about time you noticed," or "It's nothing," or "No, not really?"
That's rude.
Because what they're doing is telling the person giving the compliment, in effect, that they're wrong.
How much nicer, more appropriate and gracious to simply say "Thank you."
And yet not one person in a hundred does.
Try it — I promise it will improve the quality of your — and others' — lives.
And isn't that the only reason to use up oxygen, really?
To make life a little better and sweeter for others?
If you don't agree, please don't ask for a jump seat when the mother ship comes to take me back to my home planet.
When the first time you knew you had an AdSense for YouTube account is when you're notified (above and below) this morning that it's defunct.
No worries — as long as they don't suspend my YouTube channel, where over 10,000 happy subscribers tune in daily to see what my beloved calico cat Vanta has gotten up to.
The Economist offers up its annual assessment of paradise and hellholes.
There must be peeps reading this who live in some of these places: what say you?
This bookshelf appears to suspend a stack of books in mid-air against a wall, without any support.
Mounts to almost any wall with included hardware in minutes.
Metal powder-coated with silver finish.
Set of 3 —Small: $25.49; Large: $45.
Both here.
The New York-based designer and creative director's online weather report not only gives you the temperature, humidity, "feels like," and visibility for major cities around the world 24/7/365, but it also lets you use your location for a more precise look.
"It's good news week."
"
"What's the weather like today?"
This excellent four-part 2024 BBC series now on Starz features the nonpareil Rebecca Hall as a young teacher in England who begins hearing a low-pitched hum inaudible to those around her.
It gradually takes over her life and leads her down a rabbit hole of uncertainty and confusion and ultimately to personal catastrophe.
Each of the four episodes is under 45 minutes long so if you're a binge watcher like me, you can take in the entire series in one go.
Hall is among a handful of actors whose presence makes a show or movie worth watching.
Others: Kristin Stewart, Charlize Theron, Zendaya, Daniel Day-Lewis, Michael Caine.
In 1936 Noguchi, inspired like Fuller by Einstein's theory of relativity, worked on his first major public sculpture in Mexico.
It was a seventy-two-foot-long wall, part of which would be a figure of an Indian boy observing Einstein's equation for energy.
Noguchi forgot the exact equation and wired to Fuller for help.
Fuller sent back a telegram (above) explaining E=mc².
Yeah, I figured you'd want to me do that — here's the plain text.
bucky
I've been looking at these in catalogs for years but only yesterday did I realize that many people have brick interior walls and so might find them of use.
My outside walls are almost entirely brick but hanging things from them doesn't appeal to me.
From websites:
Spring-steel brick hangers snap easily onto a brick wall to support up to 25 lbs.
No anchors to hang, no holes to drill, no damage to brick or mortar.
When you redecorate, just unclip it and use it elsewhere!
Use outdoors (rust-resistant) to hang climbing vines, or for stringing lights.
Use indoors over a brick fireplace to hang picture frames, wreaths, or clocks.
Teeth grip standard brick 2-1/4" to 2-3/8" tall.
1/8" minimum mortar recess needed.
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Brown alloy steel.
Set of 12: $12.99.
A New York Times science Q&A by the nonpareil C. Claiborne Ray gave a clear, succinct explanation of something many non-radiologist doctors don't know.
Here's the piece.
Q. I have a titanium screw in my skull for a bone-anchored hearing aid. Does this mean I cannot have an M.R.I.? What elements make something attractive to a magnet?
A. You can still have magnetic resonance imaging with a titanium implant.
In fact, titanium is used for many medical implants because it does not interfere with CT scans and M.R.I.s the way steel implants can, implant manufacturers say.
Titanium may obscure specific areas of an image, but it is not affected by even strong magnetic fields.
Not all metallic elements are attracted to magnets, and most orthopedic implants are made of nonmagnetic alloys.
The four strongly magnetic elements are iron, nickel, cobalt, and gadolinium.
The strength of magnetic attraction depends on the way moving electrons are aligned in the atoms of a substance, sometimes forming minuscule internal magnets.
In some substances, the tiny magnetic fields cancel one another out or are always randomly oriented.
In materials attracted to magnets, the internal magnets within the material line up with the magnetic field of the magnet.
That gives the material a magnetic field, and it is then pulled toward the magnet.
The fields vary with temperature, becoming stronger as it grows colder and disappearing at high enough temperatures.
In the four ferromagnetic elements, the internal magnetic fields can stay aligned even at room temperature.
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Some disasters in the MRI suite involve anesthesiology equipment such as ferromagnetic steel cylinders containing compressed gas (the dark object in the photo below)
which become bomb-like projectiles once the MRI machine is turned on.
Not The Onion — this is for realz.
Issued by Turkmenistan in 1999, there are nine different stamps, each labeled with a value of 50.00 M and featuring the actress in one of her movie roles.
The sheet of nine in mint condition cost $6.58 when issued.
You can get a set for $2 (+ $5.67 shipping from the UK) here.
Reading Amy X. Wang's recent New York Times story about the latest sleep enhancing technology, this sentence caught my attention: "Some 42 per cent of Americans use a wearable fitness tracker — like an Apple Watch or Oura Ring — that alerts them to how they've been sleeping."
Once you decide to measure your sleep quality and quantity, you automatically alter it from what it would have been: the very act of paying attention to numbers in the sleep space changes them.
I know this firsthand because even though I was convinced from the get-go that such "quantified self" measures are useless at best, I gave them a go for a few nights by wearing my Apple Watch and then checking the results in the morning on my phone.
What a crock.
Screen after screen of graphs and charts and tables and numbers comparing this to that, all of it not worth the pixels bringing me the data.
Quantum theory tells us it is impossible to measure both the momentum and position of a particle simultaneously: once you quantify one, the other variable is unknowable.
So with sleep: once you measure markers of aspects of sleep (time/stage/depth/movement etc.), the results incorporate the fact you decided to measure them, altering your prospective slumber.
As for wearing a watch in bed so as to know what time it is if you should happen to wake up earlier than you wanted to: bad idea.
Once you see what time it is, you're dismayed because you know it's not enough sleep.
On the other wrist/hand, if you have no watch to tell you the time, it could be any time — that means there are a zillion different paths back into slumber, each starting at a different time.
Should you choose not to know, that allows for any one of those myriad world-lines to carry you off to dreamland.
Thus, you're much more likely to get back to sleep if you've adopted this no-watch strategy.
Up top: a terrific 2002 film.
[1917 map of Berlin]
Wrote Kevin Kelly:
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Imagine having access to all the ancient maps of the world, and being able to explore them with AI, including searching the words etched in the maps, or concepts about the maps — for instance "give me all the maps showing the routes of Roman aqueducts."
All this and more are available online for free [the way we like it] at the David Rumsey Map Collection.
For 25 years Rumsey has been scanning over 140,000 maps of all kinds from his insane collection from around the world.
He then innovates ways to share them.
When you find a map you particularly like, you can tap a button and have it printed out on a large scale and mailed to you for a reasonable fee.
This is an international treasure.
Years before boj's August 2004 inception there was EVERLASTING BLÖRT.
Remarkably, it persists!
You could look it up.
I have a special warm place in my psyche and heart for EB because since forever it's featured boj on its homepage blogroll aka "smorgasblort" (above) and from time to time reposts choice items from boj.
I know this because when I look at where my readership comes from EB is always among the top referrers (below).
It's run by one madamjujujive.
You could look it up.
It's taken me decades of watching him play the same disheveled, goofy, stoner-ish, mildly out-of-it character in countless films to appreciate just how natural he is on screen.
The penny dropped last night while I watched his latest, "Crime 101," in which he plays a burned-out Los Angeles police detective trying to solve a series of seemingly related high-value burglaries all of which have occurred near the 101 freeway.
I'm sure he won't win any awards for his performance, just as he's never won an Academy Award though he's been nominated four times; he's been nominated seven times for a Golden Globe and did win once, in 2021, for "Best Actor" in "I Know This Much is True."
I must say I was astonished at his great performance opposite Emma Stone in 2023's "Poor Things," in which he played a debauched lawyer as far as is conceivable from his typical roles.
Last month when I received SHOKZ Bluetooth headphones for my birthday from someone who knows me very well, my first thought was "Why did you bother?"
He knows I'm a card-carrying Apple fanboi since forever: why waste money on something I won't use?
After two weeks looking at them all charged up and ready to go, I decided to take them out for a run before consigning them to my cabinet of non-Apple stuff, which is packed to the top with things that simply didn't make the cut.
Surprise!
Not only did the SHOKZ perform beautifully and without a glitch, they surpassed AirPods Pro 3, my longtime running companion, in several areas:
1. They stay put — unlike AirPods which, once they get wet with sweat, fall out my ears, silencing the music and forcing me to stop running when I'm hot and exhausted and miserable and semi-delirious from sweat pouring into my eyes to reinsert them and restart the music.
2. The stereo separation is better than the AirPods: I can clearly hear the two distinct channels. And the overall sound quality is fine.
3. They continue to play music no matter how much noise I make singing along or grunting or whatever, with no pauses from loud ambient traffic sound, fire engines, sirens, etc., not the case with AirPods which go silent when loud noises occur and then take 10-20 seconds to gradually return to the max volume I keep them at.
4. No more need to have that annoying dangling connecting cable behind my neck that prevents one of my AirPods from falling to the ground: I've lost two (2) AirPods Pro devices that way over the years, after spending hours looking for them and employing Apple's Find My function to no avail.
SHOKZ come in Orange, Silver, Rose Gold, Blue, or Black.
1. "Mission Earth" — L. Ron Hubbard: 1,200,000 words
2. "Sironia, Texas" — Madison Cooper: 1,100,000 words
3. "Clarissa" — Samuel Richardson: 969,000 words
4. "Poor Fellow My Country" — Xavier Herbert: 850,000 words
5. "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling" — Marguerite Young: 700,000 words
6. "A Suitable Boy" — Vikram Seth: 593,674 words
7. "Atlas Shrugged" — Ayn Rand: 565,223 words
8. "Remembrance Rock" — Carl Sandburg: 532,030 words
9. "Gai-Jin" — James Clavell: 487,700 words
10. "Infinite Jest" — David Foster Wallace: 484,000 words
[via Gregory Cowles writing in the New York Times]
Long story short: it doesn't.
Those who believe an unhappy person doesn't do as good a job as one delighted with things as they are — I believe they are simply out of touch with the real world.
Many of the excellent performers I know personally in various fields — as disparate as law, gardening, sales, waitressing, medicine, airline pilot, coffee roaster, upscale real estate broker, and business school admissions committee member — are not very thrilled with what they do.
Some have to fight every morning to make it in, so unhappy and angry are they with their lot.
Don't give me that "Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow" pap — it's a sound bite to keep you anesthetized.
I got through medical school only by riding a combination of fear, uncertainty and well–concealed rage at the whole process.
I left general practice after two years because I was bored to tears and devastated each night when I got home, a combination of emotional fatigue and (short–term, I hope) brain damage resulting from listening to 30 depressed people a day tell me the somatic manifestations of their misery.
But guess what?
Every single practice I worked at during that two–year run–up to beginning my anesthesiology residency (which I absolutely loved every minute of, by the way) begged me to stay and become full–time.
They loved me.
I'm talking five or so different groups around the greater L.A. area including Kaiser, one in East Los Angeles in the heart of the barrio, one in Beverly Hills and a couple others.
Why?
You can believe what you like but what they all told me is that I was a doctor who really cared about the patients and the patients — most of whom I'd seen only once or twice during my short stint as a fill–in — told them so.
So drop the "why don't you quit if you're so unhappy?" stuff — it's silly and tedious and simply marks you as just another Kool–Aid drinker.
Me, I'd much rather tell it like it is than live in some fantasyland.
I'm with Jerzy Grotowski who memorably remarked, "Daily life involves endless pretexts."
