Keith Pelczarski › Comments

Much like calculators can degrade our ability to do math in our heads, GPS can hamper our ability to create mental maps. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

Just in time for Valentine's Day, an interesting short excerpt on the neurochemistry of love. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

We all know that zombies love brains, but this book takes a look at how to win a zombie's unbeating heart. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

David Brin must be so proud. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

Indeed: https://plus.google.com/1166654... - Stephen Mack from iPhone

Excellent visualization of music. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"Brooklyn singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton is excited to announce that he’s been working on a new album. Artificial Heart will be his eighth studio album and is set to debut this fall. The first track off the record, “Nemeses,” features The Long Winters’ John Roderick on vocals. Listen to the track in the player below." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

A helpful instructional diagram from howtobeadad.com. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

Wait. So how do I tell the difference then? - Brian Johns

Zombies will eat your brains. But they aren't going to eat your eyes. - Keith Pelczarski

Really nice information visualization from Flowing Data on how much space it would take to fill a city with the entire population of the Earth at different densities. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"Teaching girls that their appearance is the first thing you notice tells them that looks are more important than anything. It sets them up for dieting at age 5 and foundation at age 11 and boob jobs at 17 and Botox at 23. As our cultural imperative for girls to be hot 24/7 has become the new normal, American women have become increasingly unhappy. What's missing? A life of meaning, a life of ideas and reading books and being valued for our thoughts and accomplishments." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

I kept waiting for a mighty eagle to pluck the orange guy from the park, leaving the grey, camouflaged guy to reproduce. - Kevin Fox

Like a roc. ;-) - Keith Pelczarski

"In today's excerpt - certain grammatical "rules" that are widely viewed as correct come from the invalid application of grammatical rules from Classical Latin and Greek to the English language by British authors writing hundreds of years ago. Though they have been routinely violated by writers from Shakespeare to Hemingway, two such "rules" are the prohibitions against split infinitives and ending a sentence with a preposition:" - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"Some will call this among the most improbable national championship runs in history. Others will call the Huskies' 53-41 victory over Butler the most aesthetically challenged championship game in history. Those ancillary details, those sour opinions, might matter in 49 states." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"Japan is exceptionally well-prepared to deal with natural disasters: it has spent more on the problem than any other nation, largely as a result of frequently experiencing them.  (Have you ever wondered why you use Japanese for “tsunamis” and “typhoons”?)  All levels of the government, from the Self Defense Forces to technical translators working at prefectural technology incubators in places you’ve never heard of, spend quite a bit of time writing and drilling on what to do in the event of a disaster." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

Really well written local account. - Stephen Mack

"As shown in the Hertzsprung-Russell Diagram, Main Sequence stars span a wide range of luminosities and colors, and can be classified according to those characteristics. The smallest stars, known as red dwarfs, may contain as little as 10% the mass of the Sun and emit only 0.01% as much energy, glowing feebly at temperatures between 3000-4000K. Despite their diminutive nature, red dwarfs are by far the most numerous stars in the Universe and have lifespans of tens of billions of years." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

""[A significant number of individuals who achieve at a a high level nevertheless] see themselves as frauds. Psychologists call this the impostor phenomenon. Those who are afflicted believe that their successes cannot be attributed to their own abilities. Instead they are convinced that other people's praise and recognition of their accomplishments are the result of charm, deception or simple good luck. Interestingly, such thoughts tend to surface in people whose lives have been an apparently uninterrupted string of successes." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"But honestly: since when did every little girl become a princess? It wasn't like this when I was a kid, and I was born back when feminism was still a mere twinkle in our mothers' eyes. We did not dress head to toe in pink. We did not have our own miniature high heels. What's more, I live in Berkeley, California: if princesses had infiltrated our little retro-hippie hamlet, imagine what was going on in places where women actually shaved their legs? As my little girl made her daily beeline for the dress-up corner of her preschool classroom, I fretted over what playing Little Mermaid, a character who actually gives up her voice to get a man, was teaching her." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

It might be the starter motor at fault. A little trick is to tap it (not *too* hard) with a hammer while someone tries to turn the car over. - Keith Pelczarski from iPhone

More detail about why hitting your car with a hammer might get it to start: http://www.misterfixit.com/startts... - Keith Pelczarski

@Keith Good point - actually the first thing the AAA guy did was try and hit the starter with a hammer! - David Weekly

Hey! I was there too! - Brian Johns

Sports photography is not lucrative, in general. (Unless you're very good, and usually only for people who specialize in sports photography) Certainly not lucrative enough to call "profitable" when you take the specialized equipment into account. While bits of compensation may flow here and there the football thing is mostly for fun, and to keep me on my toes. - Brian Johns

My forehead. - topernic

I'd use: http://qrcode.kaywa.com/img... - Mark Trapp

So awesome. - Paul Buchheit from Bookmarklet

Cool fan-made trailer http://www.youtube.com/watch... - Jérôme

But it comes with a free frogurt, which is good... - Scoble, Alex Scoble

Can I have my monkey paw now? - Keith Pelczarski

""When they finally crunched the numbers, West and his team were delighted to discover that Kleiber's negative quarter-power scaling governed the energy and transportation growth of city living. The number of gasoline stations, gasoline sales, road surface area, the length of electrical cables: all these factors follow the exact same power law that governs the speed with which energy is expended in biological organisms. If an elephant was just a scaled-up mouse, then, from an energy perspective, a city was just a scaled-up elephant. "But the most fascinating discovery in West's research came from the data that didn't turn out to obey Kleiber's law. West and his team discovered another power law lurking in their immense database of urban statistics. Every datapoint that involved creativity and innovation - patents, R&D budgets, 'supercreative' professions, inventors - also followed a quarter-power law, in a way that was every bit as predictable as Kleiber's law. But there was one... more... - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"Hide the chocolate milk behind the plain milk. Get those apples and oranges out of stainless steel bins and into pretty baskets. Cash only for desserts. These subtle moves can entice kids to make healthier choices in school lunch lines, studies show. Food and restaurant marketers have long used similar tricks. Now the government wants in on the act. The U.S. Department of Agriculture announced what it called a major new initiative Tuesday, giving $2 million to food behavior scientists to find ways to use psychology to improve kids' use of the federal school lunch program and fight childhood obesity. A fresh approach is clearly needed, those behind the effort say." - Anne Bouey from Bookmarklet

...I like that "choice architecture"; Ruchira, fair enough. :) - .LAG liked that

frolic. play. laugh. lurk. - chrisofspades

I already told you: I deal with the god damn customers so the engineers don't have to. I have people skills; I am good at dealing with people. Can't you understand that? What the hell is wrong with you people? - Keith Pelczarski

Well done YouTube videos offering instruction on math, science, and more. - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"Attentive, helpful service that is as fast as advertised. No aggressive upselling, just honest assessment of the car's needs. This isn't the place to take your car when there's a big problem, but it's…" - Keith Pelczarski

"t's a shelf! No, it's a table! No, it's all the same piece of furniture! Ron Barth, president of Resource Furniture, shows off design savvy furniture that redefines the typical notion of space efficiency. Desks become beds, closets flip around, and coffee tables become dining tables." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

“Youth has no age.”~Pablo Picasso "Remember when life was simple? When your friends were the most important thing in the world. When a snow day was a perfect excuse to have fun, not a block of time when you felt guilty about being unproductive." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

I know that many of you don't need help being childlike, but I thought there were some fun suggestions in this list. - Keith Pelczarski

"By now, we're used to letting Facebook and Twitter capture our social lives on the web -- building a "social layer" on top of the real world. At TEDxBoston, Seth Priebatsch looks at the next layer in progress: the "game layer," a pervasive net of behavior-steering game dynamics that will reshape education and commerce." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet

"1. People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered. Love them anyway. 2. If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives. Do good anyway. 3. If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies. Succeed anyway. 4. The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow. Do good anyway. 5. Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable. Be honest and frank anyway. 6. The biggest men with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men with the smallest minds. Think big anyway. 7. People favor underdogs, but follow only top dogs. Fight for a few underdogs anyway. 8. What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight. Build anyway. 9. People really need help but may attack you if you do help them. Help people anyway. 10. Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth. Give the world the best you have anyway." - Keith Pelczarski from Bookmarklet