The ‘i Before e, Except After c’ Rule Is a Giant Lie

Wonkblog explains The ‘i before e, except after c’ rule is a giant lie "'This addendum to the rule completely useless,’ Cunningham writes. ‘You still have roughly three to one odds that the ‘i’ goes first.’"

#c0ffee is the color

On the web colors are identified as 3 numbers usually written as 3 or 6 hexadecimal digits. Turns out, some words are 3 or 6 letters long and can be spelled with hex digits, particularly in 'leet' script. And someone made a page of them: #c0ffee is the color

history of the entire world, i guess

Entertaining 20 min video of the history of the world. It starts a little slow (with the beginning of space and time) but once it gets to society it's really fun tracking all the civilizations of the world. Saying I learned a lot is going a bit far, but I watched as he described a fair number of things I didn't know. I think this would be fun for kids except for the swearing.

Rodney King Who?

Professor Ed wrote at Gin and Tacos All Right, All Right, All Right about how kids today don't know who Rodney King was.

"So he was OK?"

"He was beaten up pretty badly, but, ultimately he was. He died a few years ago from unrelated causes (note: in 2012)."

"It's kind of weird that everybody rioted over that. I mean, there's way worse videos." General murmurs of agreement.

This is a generation of kids so numb to seeing videos of police beating, tasering, shooting, and otherwise applying the power of the state to unarmed and almost inevitably black or Hispanic men that they legitimately could not understand why a video of cops beating up a black guy (who didn't even die for pete's sake!) was shocking enough to cause a widespread breakdown of public order. Now we get a new video every week – sometimes every few days – to the point that the name of the person on the receiving end is forgotten almost immediately.

Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive

I missed this whole uproar about a $700 Internet juicer. Ben Einstein explains, Here’s Why Juicero’s Press is So Expensive

Last week Bloomberg published an article exposing how easy it is to ‘hack’ Juicero’s produce packs by squeezing them with your hands, deeming the $699 (now $399) WiFi-connected juice press completely unnecessary. Nearly overnight, Juicero has become the posterchild for Silicon Valley excess.

Juicero raised nearly $120M from well-known investors before shipping a single unit. The team spent over two years building an incredibly complex product and the ecosystem to support it. Aside from the flagship juice press, Juicero built relationships with farmers, co-packing/food-processing facilities, complex custom packaging, beautifully designed mobile/web applications, and a subscription delivery service. But they did all this work without the basic proof that this business made sense to consumers."

It's a fun and pretty breakdown of the product. For any company there's a balance of speed, price and quality. This is what happens when you ignore the second one.

Why Hollywood’s writers are on the verge of a strike — and what it could mean for the industry

Vox explains Why Hollywood’s writers are on the verge of a strike — and what it could mean for the industry. Things are always more complex than they seem but I'm on the writers' side.

Fairytale Prisoner by Choice: The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump

Kate Imbach posted an analysis of Melania Trumps twitter photos. Fairytale Prisoner by Choice: The Photographic Eye of Melania Trump "Melania posted five photographs of Trump with their son. She took each photo from behind the two, sometimes literally from the backseat. Boys in front, girls in the back, the same arrangement we were all so appalled to see on inauguration day, is her norm. She lives in the background."

It's all random speculation and a dark read.

A Guide To What Teens Think Is Cool

Kottke reports A guide to what teens think is cool "Google recently released a report about what US teenagers think is cool. The chart above is getting a bunch of attention on social media; teens aged 13-17 were asked to rank a bunch of brands according to how cool they think they are."

Training Your Brain So That You Don’t Need Reading Glasses

The NY Times reports on something very intriguing to me, Training Your Brain So That You Don’t Need Reading Glasses.

By middle age, the lenses in your eyes harden, becoming less flexible. Your eye muscles increasingly struggle to bend them to focus on this print. But a new form of training — brain retraining, really — may delay the inevitable age-related loss of close-range visual focus so that you won’t need reading glasses. Various studies say it works, though no treatment of any kind works for everybody.

They mention an app called GlassesOff which is free to download but $10/month or $35 for 3 months.

The training with GlassesOff is long and challenging. I found it fun initially, perhaps because it was new. But weeks into it, I began to dread the monotonous labor. Yet, after a couple of months, the app reports I can read fonts nearly one third the size I could when I started and much more rapidly. According to feedback from GlassesOff, my vision after training is equivalent to a man about 10 years younger than my age. If I reach 50 — the age at which almost everyone needs corrective lenses to read — and still don’t need reading glasses, I may conclude that the training has paid off.

Anyone hear of or try this?

Operation London Bridge: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death

The Guardian has a long read on Operation London Bridge: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death. "She is venerated around the world. She has outlasted 12 US presidents. She stands for stability and order. But her kingdom is in turmoil, and her subjects are in denial that her reign will ever end. That’s why the palace has a plan."

It's more than I, and probably you, ever wanted to know about the Queen's funeral plans, I made it about 2/3 of the way through it. You're milage may vary.

I learned how to do math with the ancient abacus

So the title of this Vox article is a bit hyperbolic, I learned how to do math with the ancient abacus — and it changed my life, but I found some interesting things in it.

Shortly after enrolling my daughters and myself in an abacus class, we discovered that the practice relies on a math strategy known as decomposition, which makes computation easier by breaking numbers down into their component parts. So students are encouraged to think about how certain numbers have 'complements' or 'partners.' For instance, 10 is made by partnering 7 plus 3 or by partnering 6 plus 4.

For an actual math problem, consider 5 plus 8. On the abacus, you would not add those actual figures. Instead, you would 'decompose' the numbers and add 10 to the 5 and take away 2 — or the partner of 8 — in order to get to the answer: 13.

It can take a little longer to learn math in this way. Certainly it took me a little while to fully grasp this approach. But decomposition gives people a better underlying sense of how the math actually works. (Interestingly, my kids didn’t find the approach all that novel, since a decomposition approach is embedded in the new Common Core math standards.)

Van Gogh on Dark Water

Never seen anything like this before:

(via kottke)

Snow Prediction

I’m no meteorologist but I’ll hazard a snow prediction (it’s more like a hope). I noticed that this century we’re in a 5 year pattern of low snowfall. So I’m going to guess Boston will get less than 20" of snow this winter. Of course I’m saying that having gotten 5.9 inches in Dec, an inch today and about 3 more expected tomorrow. Still, fingers crossed.

MacArthur Foundation Class of 2016

The MacArthur Foundation has announced this year's Genius Award winners (though they hate that term). Here's the Class of 2016. The only one I've heard of is graphic novelist Gene Luen Yang.

NH Foliage Tracker

It must be fall, the New Hampshire Foliage Tracker

Music, Spies And Exact Change: The Strange History Of Electronic Tolls

NPR's All Things Considered has a pretty fun story, Music, Spies And Exact Change: The Strange History Of Electronic Tolls. Here's a clip of Leon Theremin playing his own instrument.

How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol

I'll save you trouble of searching. This came up because a Trump son tweeted a meme with this frog cartoon in it and journalists went nuts and I had no idea what it was. How Pepe the Frog Became a Nazi Trump Supporter and Alt-Right Symbol.

Also, I knew 88 meant "Heil Hitler", I didn't know 14 meant “we must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children”. Sigh.

Step by Step: How Elon Musk Built His Empire

This Visual Capitalist piece from April is pretty fun, Step by Step: How Elon Musk Built His Empire (by Anna Vital).

The adjective word order we all follow without realizing it

Kottke points out, The adjective word order we all follow without realizing it

From Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence, a reminder of the rules of adjective order that fluent English speakers follow without quite knowing why.

...adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac. It's an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

Did anyone learn this in school? I sure didn't. How do we all know then?

These charts clearly show how some Olympic swimmers may have gotten an unfair advantage

The Washington Post says These charts clearly show how some Olympic swimmers may have gotten an unfair advantage. Really interesting and lots of really pretty charts.