Cheetahs get workout at horse track – Houston Chronicle.
I can’t imagine why they don’t want the cheetahs and the horses on the track at the same time *grin*
Tag Archives: fark
Elections, Muppets, Hospices, Accents, and More – a link dump.
Kurt Vonnegut motivational posters. One of these days I’ll get around to reading something of his.
Pencil art – but not the way you think.
This article on hospice care is a hard article to read, but worth it.
A practical plan for when you feel overwhelmed is exactly what it says it is. Turns out I’ve been using most of these for years without having read them in a blog, but the bit about doing 15 minutes of fast things, followed by 35 minutes of something hard, is worth giving a try I suspect.
An awesome photo of a really bad shot by Tiger Woods.
Grover does Old Spice Guy.
Awesome use of negative space in IBM “Outcomes” campaign
Best Drunk Driving Public Service Annoucement for today’s geek ever:
An interesting look at the evils of shoes and not just heels, but pretty much all of them. I’m a big fan of MBTs, which they diss just a bit, but which increased my balance quickly enough that my martial arts instructor noticed. That’s progress. On the other hand, I’m hearing wonderful things about Vibram Five Fingers, and they’re likely to be my next adventure in shoes.
32 photographs of the solar system by The Big Picture.
Inspiration
The Velluvial Matrix is the commencement speech Atul Gawande gave Stanford’s School of Medicine.
Half a century ago, medicine was neither costly nor effective. Since then, however, science has combatted our ignorance. It has enumerated and identified, according to the international disease-classification system, more than 13,600 diagnoses—13,600 different ways our bodies can fail. And for each one we’ve discovered beneficial remedies—remedies that can reduce suffering, extend lives, and sometimes stop a disease altogether. But those remedies now include more than six thousand drugs and four thousand medical and surgical procedures. Our job in medicine is to make sure that all of this capability is deployed, town by town, in the right way at the right time, without harm or waste of resources, for every person alive. And we’re struggling. There is no industry in the world with 13,600 different service lines to deliver.
It’s worth a read.
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Also worth the read, but in a totally different way: some folks write one of the most interesting Facebook updates I’ve ever seen.
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This article from Donna Spencer got me out of a major funk last week.
The more design work I do the more I realise that there is no such thing – there is no right answer to a design problem. […] There are only bad, good and better answers for the current situation. Each of the potential solutions sits within a particular context.
Gender Studies
I don’t know if I’m just attuned to gender-related articles right now or if there are just lots of them. But I found these interesting:
My Brief Life as a Woman is an article by a man who, thanks to treatment for prostate cancer, got to go on the emotional rollercoaster that women experience as menopause.
I liked the article above better than this one: The Penis Pant, an article in which a man suddenly realizes that PMS and cramps hurt like hell. Thank you for joining the rest of us.
OK, this one is just odd, but I had to share. This is a picture of Batman pregnant with Superman’s baby. Remember before you click: you can’t un-see things.
Speaking of things you can’t un-see, here’s an iPad cover I won’t be buying.
Lots o links to amaze and amuse
- What happens when children build their own three-story playgrounds? Nothing of note, which explains why we all survived this long.
- An update to this post, here are more crazy poodles, courtesy of Fark, of course. (Slideshow.)
- Just in time for me to go to England, here’s an slideshow on packing 10 days worth of clothing in a carry-on. Not that I’ll just take a carry-on, but tight packing comes in handy.
- Privates is a PC video game that takes place, um, in a person’s privates. Bonus: it’s a shoot ’em up.
- Eight websites you need to stop building
- How to put Facebook on a privacy lockdown because if you don’t, you’ll eventually wish you had.
That’s enough to keep you busy for now.
One more, this time on the volcano
Via Fark (again), here’s how to pronounce the volcano:
Link roundup and vacation
So, where’ve I been at?
I’ve been working. And working. And working. And designing and architecting and wireframing and learning about design and thinking about user problems and dreaming about user problems and wireframing and designing and learning – oh God the learning – my brain has melted out my ears a dozen times already.
This results in a few things:
1. I am exhausted.
2. I want to learn even more.
3. I want to get the hell away from everyone and everything that says I have to learn faster so I can produce faster so they can have the results faster, because it’s leading straight back to 1.
4. I am a grouchy grouchy bitch when 1, 2, and 3 interact.
5. I finish the project.
Because #5 happened at approximately 3:24 this afternoon, when the handoff meeting wrapped, I can actually think and breathe for the first time in weeks.
What happens now?
Well, tomorrow we play board games.
Saturday, we go to a baseball game.
Sunday I fly to Seattle.
Sometime between Sunday and Thursday I have a thousand new things poured into my ears, resulting in more brain melt. If my expectations are met, I’m also killed in a combination earthquake/tsunami, since it’ll be my first time on the left coast, and I’ll be feet away from the Pacific.
Assuming, as my family keeps doing, that last bit is inaccurate, I’ll then fly home Thursday.
That’s when I get to party with family from Thursday to the following Wednesday. There will likely be even more learning and thinking, but of a wholly different kind than I have experienced in months.
Two weeks from today, I’ll go back to work, a different person than I am right now.
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My twitter favorites feed is in the thousands again. Time to clean out some links.
Speaking of wrong…
A short but good essay on the recent student loan reform bill that passed.
A great commercial for Axe.
Researchers discover a possible new human group with DNA from a bone — making us more than just Neanderthal and Modern Human.
A school in England is making education easier for teenagers by moving the school day’s start back to 10am. Maaaaan, if I’d had this I’d be brilliant by now.
Fear and Loathing in Farmville is an article written by a game designer who attended the GDC and summarized how “social gaming” is changing game design, in many cases for the worse.
These are very important instructions. They are also a good reason to study math.
Speaking of studying, game design, and long talks, here’s one about using video games to save the world:
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More as I continue to clean out my Twitter favorites.