YouTube – Chat Roulette Funny Piano Improv. chatroulette seems like the ultimate improv starter.

What If Everybody in Canada Flushed At Once?. a graph of water consumption in Edmonton during the gold medal hockey game. people were really holding it until intermission.

He’s a Terrorist. Just say it. Terrorist. For F*%k sake!. it turns out that pretty much every news publication took it pretty easy on that guy who flew a plane into an IRS building. via ram.

DAVID SIMON – Vice Magazine. long interview with the creator of The Wire.

Augmented (hyper)Reality: Domestic Robocop on Vimeo. a thought provoking little video about augmented reality and advertising.


YouTube – Leadership Lessons from Dancing Guy. a great analysis from Derek Sivers.

Sinatra Song Often Strikes Deadly Chord – NYTimes.com. if you find yourself doing karaoke in manila, make sure you don’t sing “My Way”.

A Peek Into Netflix Queues – NYTimes.com. Choose Seattle, and then check out movies like “Milk” and “Paul Blart : Mall Cop”.

Evolution of the Hipster. well done.

The House Next Door: Focus on the Family: Pixars Small-c Conservatism. interesting discussion on the themes in pixar’s films. also, i can’t believe i haven’t seen wall-e yet. via ram.

Why I gave away my company to charity | Derek Sivers. When he sold CDBaby the money went in a trust that will pay him an annual dividend so he can live comfortably and then when he dies they’ll give the money to charity. that’s pretty awesome.

Your Looks and Your Inbox « OkTrends. this blog is just awesome. choice quote : “the two curves together suggest some strange possibilities for the female thought process, the most salient of which is that the average-looking woman has convinced herself that the vast majority of males aren’t good enough for her, but she then goes right out and messages them anyway.”


TED : Stefan Sagmeister : The power of time off. a wonderful video.

France at night – Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals). Ram, whether right or wrong, is definitely epic in the comments of this post. There’s 205 comments and a stunning amount of them are either directed at or about Ram.

Bill Maher: New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country. “Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they’re not stupid. They’re interplanetary mavericks”

Alain de Botton: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success | Video on TED.com. i love the quote at the end about the changing perception of “success” with age and how you really can’t have it all.

How Different Groups Spend Their Day – Interactive Graphic – NYTimes.com. that’s a pretty cool interactive graph.

what makes us happy

There’s a very large article from this month’s copy of The Atlantic entitled What Makes Us Happy? which is really quite interesting. It talks about a Harvard study that has followed the lives of 268 Harvard men for the last 72 years to find out what makes for a happy and healthy life. The article is well worth reading and points out some of the interesting individuals of the study (which, oddly enough, included JFK). The main lessons: deal with problems maturely, get educated, have a stable marriage, don’t smoke, don’t abuse alcohol, do “some excercise”, and keep a healthy weight. But in summary, “The the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people.”

I also really enjoyed this video which is found in the article. It touches on some of the topics and gives a great overview…

‘Youth Magnet’ Cities Hit Midlife Crisis – WSJ.com. lots of 20somethings are still moving to cities like portland even as unemployment reaches 11%. the photos in the slideshow for the article are also really nice and typical portland. also, turns out that 8% of people in portland commute by bike, 10 times the national average.

how hospitals treat same-sex couples – well blog. it’s odd to think that same-sex couples are advised to carry their marriage license in case of a medical emergency.