A personal account of getting a Sak Yant (a form of Thai Tattoo.) The video is lovely to watch; I wonder what camera was used.

A successful logo redesign for the New York Public Library, done in-house.

Some really interesting materials and fabrication experiments, here.

Allow investors to buy future income, instead.

Just saw this and enjoyed it immensely. As I noted to friends, the fact that some critics saw its merits makes me feel less guilty for liking it so much. And, another note, regarding this reviewer’s contention that "Only an audience that feels invulnerable can enjoy watching on screen the wholesale destruction of its civilization and not take it as a threat. A cloud has lifted. It’s safe to be happy and brainless again. ‘2012′ may be Hollywood’s first post-post-9/11 movie." For me, the past eight years have been more of an experience of getting comfortable with annihilation (global warming, peak oil, financial collapse, etc.) rather than a recovery from the feeling of vulnerability of 9/11. The future seems even more unpredictable and chaotic than it ever has, to me; I guess I’ll just be less surprised when the Next Big Thing happens.

Uh oh.

This netbook is adorable, and everything about it (from its design to how it is packaged) seems like a refreshing rethinking of the whole netbook segment.

This is one of the few things that still puts the iPhone behind WebOS and Android.

This is a great set of notes from danah about how modern information flows do not, in fact, "democratize" information. She reviews the problems that have arisen now that broadcast media distribution is dying, and makes some predictions about models that will work in the future. A nice finishing quote, comparing the difficulty of monetizing social spaces: "[W]e have yet to find the digital equivalent of alcohol."

Typical methods for detecting network effects yield a lot of false positives. The conclusion: "Researchers should be cautious in attributing correlations in health outcomes of close friends to social network effects, especially when environmental confounders are not adequately controlled for in the analysis."

Why China won’t be importing a larger share of American goods.

Corollary: There is no truth serum.

Interesting. A new approach to language learning other than repetition (a la high school) and visual games like Rosetta Stone. Here, you use muscle memory as well.

This is an information visualization of the US, with unemployment rates animated over time by county. Gruber calls it "jarring," which it is. I’d love to see it scaled geometrically by population; the visualization would be even scarier (and more accurate) in that case.

Neatsauce.

Nice factory porn, though I’m shocked by how much of this process involves humans moving stuff around with their hands. It’s nice to see how the insides of IKEA furniture are made, though. I had to do a bit of research on it to make this server rack out of CORRAS side tables: http://www.instructables.com/id/EVZB8VCHHVEZR7B6NW/.

This doesn’t apply to my motivations for moving to the non-profit sector, but it’s a good reminder to embody a good amount of humility. Phat skillz in the startup world do not a good not-for-profit leader make. That last sentence is way too hard to parse; read the article instead

Here’s a good collection of finance papers, explaining why hedge funds fed the last tech bubble instead of serving as a market-correcting force. The post is optimistic, at least, that a such a bubble is unlikely to recur for the foreseeable future.