Brian › Comments

a survey of London's remaining professional darkrooms - Brian

As luck would have it, though, I was instructed to visit the Tuesday market on Calle Pachuca in la Condesa, my first trip to a neighborhood market here. And what a treat. Like much of the city, despite its 20 million or so residents, it was calm, quiet, not hurried, and far from crowded, like a fine Paris market on the luckiest of days. (The weather, of course, was perfect, as it so often is here.) - Brian

people who walk dogs are more consistent about regular exercise and show more improvement in fitness than people who walk with a human companion - Brian

an extension for the Gnome Desktop Environment designed to enable a full screen preview of any kind of file - Brian

We’re living in a stylistic tropics. There’s a whole generation of people able to access almost anything from almost anywhere, and they don’t have the same localised stylistic sense that my generation grew up with. It’s all alive, all “now,” in an ever-expanding present, be it Hildegard of Bingen or a Bollywood soundtrack. The idea that something is uncool because it’s old or foreign has left the collective consciousness. - Brian

Barthelme’s only instruction was apparently “in no particular order, just read them.” - Brian

Culture isn't knowing when Napoleon died. Culture means knowing how I can find out in two minutes. - Brian

Go has fast builds, clean syntax, garbage collection, methods for any type, and run-time reflection. It feels like a dynamic language but has the speed and safety of a static language. It's a joy to use. - Brian

Computerbank recycles donated computers and distributes them to disadvantaged individuals and community groups. - Brian

In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard. Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings. - Brian

People get stuck on the word stout. It confuses, the way it connotes size and fleshiness. And the color, too — inky, impenetrable black — suggests mass and power. As a result, many people think stout is a formidable blockbuster of an ale, heavy and alcoholic, just the way they assume darker roasts of coffee have more caffeine than lighter roasts. Nothing could be further from the truth. - Brian

The game is easy. You find an ugly clone of someone and send them a MMS with the subject line "looks like you". - Brian

This google-interface behaves similar to a unix-shell. - Brian

The Fitbit Tracker contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of your physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took you to fall asleep, the number of times you woke up throughout the night and how long you were actually asleep vs just lying in bed. You can wear the Tracker loosely in your pocket or clipped to your clothing. - Brian

The fold refers to the border at the bottom of the browser window at the user's default screen resolution. - Brian

Sometimes, instead of the full phrase, just "Potemkin" is used, as an adjective. For example, the use of a row of trees to screen a clearcut area from highway drivers has been called a "Potemkin Forest". - Brian

More on barefoot/long distance running from the NYTimes. Photo of a huarache-clad Tarahumaran; approaching a barefoot running tipping point? - Brian

Every system has two sets of rules: The rules as they are intended or commonly perceived, and the actual rules ("reality"). In most complex systems, the gap between these two sets of rules is huge. - Brian

The Streisand effect is an Internet phenomenon where an attempt to censor or remove a piece of information backfires, causing the information to be publicized widely and to a greater extent than would have occurred if no censorship had been attempted. Examples of such attempts include censoring a photograph, a number, a file, or a website (for example via a cease-and-desist letter). Instead of being suppressed, the information receives extensive publicity, often being widely mirrored across the Internet, or distributed on file-sharing networks - Brian

Haunted by the fashionable cant of the Frankfurt school, we are uncomfortable that Levi's should make use of Whitman. But this is wrong. I think it is thrilling to see these meanings circulating in our culture, passing from the poem through the advertising to the jeans, both resonating with and for the American experiment. It is especially thrilling to hear Whitman's voice return to us from the 19th century, the muse himself made legion. - Brian

The plain fact is users will not read anything you put on the screen. - Brian

The Dreyfus Model of Skill Acquisition postulates that when individuals acquire a skill through external instruction, they normally pass through five stages. This model, first proposed by Stuart Dreyfus and Hubert Dreyfus in 1980[1] proposes that the five stages of skill acquisition are: Novice, Advanced beginner, Competent, Proficient and Expert - Brian

A familiar stranger is an individual who is recognized from regular activities, but with whom one does not interact. First identified by Stanley Milgram in the 1972 paper The Familiar Stranger: An Aspect of Urban Anonymity, it has become an increasingly popular concept in research about social networks. - Brian

I enjoy all forms of art. My most recent love is modern dance. - Brian

what the person before you searched for - Brian

Miroslaw Balka installed a enormous steel container filled with – darkness. The sculpture, called How It Is is 30 meters long, 10 meters wide and 13 meters high and completely dark inside. The interior walls of the steel chamber are lined with a soft flock that is light absorbing and 10 times blacker than normal black paint. - Brian

9862 images of animals on white background (isolated on white) for around 482 different animal species. - Brian

Augmented Reality (AR) has been all over the web recently, but is everybody talking about the same thing? - Brian

We've all seen those amazing videos where unspeakably large schools of fish travel huge distances without anyone or anything to guide them. Somehow, it's all very organized and the fish don't seem to have any problems with traffic jams – which is more than we can say for us bipedal earth-goers. Apparently, Nissan has noticed the same thing. - Brian

Joe Girardi tells how chess helps inform his decisions on the baseball diamond. - Brian