Category: rePosts

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rePost :: :: Rough Type: Nicholas Carr's Blog: Not addiction; dependency

I have to admit a certain affinity towards how Ternovskiy feels. It is an impulse I try to fight against constantly.

By “the world,” of course, Ternovskiy means the Internet, which is also where most of his friends are. His closest confidant is a Russian immigrant named Kirill Gura, who lives in Charleston, West Virginia. Every night for the past five years, Ternovskiy has turned on his computer, found Kirill on MSN Messenger, and talked to him until one of them fell asleep. “He’s a real friend,” Ternovskiy says … Ternovskiy says that he sees the computer as “one hundred percent my window into the world.” He doesn’t seek much else. “I always believed that computer might be that thing that I only need, that I only need that thing to survive,” he says. “It might replace everything.”
via Rough Type: Nicholas Carr’s Blog: Not addiction; dependency.

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rePost :: ::The Productivity Myth – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review

Must forward the linked study to the boss. harharhar

# A comprehensive study by Ernst & Young showed that the longer the vacation their employees took, the better they performed. Yet more than half of all Americans now fail to take all of their vacation days and 30 per cent of Americans use less than half their allotted vacation time.
via The Productivity Myth – The Conversation – Harvard Business Review.

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rePost :: Great Words For Steve Nash :: Bill Simmons: Phoenix Suns trying to erase 40 years of stomach punches – ESPN

3. Last summer, Kerr had to sign Nash — only the face of his franchise, the most popular Phoenix athlete ever and the heart of his locker room — to a contract extension. Kerr knew Nash couldn’t stop rehashing the past four years, thinking of all the couldas and wouldas and whatmightabeens. He knew Nash wondered if Kerr and Sarver knew what they were doing. He knew that, if this were anyone else, Disgruntled Superstar X would have demanded a trade or made it clear, “I’m playing this last year out, and if we fall short again, I’m out of here.”
But he also knew Steve Nash isn’t wired that way. He’s loyal. He’s Canadian. He’s old-school. He believes in things like, “I am the leader of this team, so as soon as I say that I might want to leave, I can’t lead anymore.” Nobody else would have stayed. Steve Nash stayed. Kerr promised him things would be better, that the window hadn’t closed, that he would, for lack of a better word, fix this. He even believed it.
via Bill Simmons: Phoenix Suns trying to erase 40 years of stomach punches – ESPN.

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rePost :: Marginal Revolution: What has happened to surprise marriage proposals?

The most likely ones to accept such proposals are women who are unsure of their “quality,” either on the mating market or in unmarried life.  Accepting the proposal takes on one kind of risk but relieves the woman of another.
Overall it seems that women are today more certain about the utility value of their alternatives to a surprise marriage proposal and that means they turn them down.  The proposals may seem like harmless “cheap talk” (propose to lots of women above your station in life and thus the custom persists, even if it rarely succeeds), but Google-savvy, credential-savvy women can evaluate men better than ever before and the lower status guys don’t get close enough to them to try a shock proposal, much less make it stick.
Is it a prediction that rapid, surprise proposals are more common in societies where male high achievers are hard to identify in advance?  How important is inequality of income and volatility/uncertainty of income?
Perhaps for aesthetic reasons, I find the decline of the surprise proposal slightly sad (though in part reflective of some positive societal developments), and I am pleased to reaffirm that I do not believe in the consultative approach.
via Marginal Revolution: What has happened to surprise marriage proposals?.

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repost :: Starcraft II launches July 27 – News at GameSpot

I need a new laptop.

Blizzard reveals street date for long-awaited Wings of Liberty, the first installment in three-part sequel to the popular sci-fi RTS.Many-a-PC gamers' summer plans were ruined this afternoon, when Blizzard Entertainment announced the long-awaited launch date for its real-time strategy game, Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty. The first installment in the three-part sequel will launch worldwide–China excepted–on July 27 for the PC and Mac and will retail for $60 in the US. The game will also be available in a deluxe $100 Collector's Edition that will include a 176-page art book and a flash drive preloaded with the original Starcraft and its Brood War expansion.The Terrans will lead the Starcraft II charge July 27.Starcraft II: Wings of Liberty will focus on the human Terran campaign with a 29-mission single-player campaign. However, the multiplayer component will also let gamers wage interstellar real-time strategy warfare as the hivelike Zerg and technologically advanced Protoss factions. Eager gamers who preorder the RTS via GameStop will be able to join the ongoing Starcraft II beta. Orders cannot be canceled once GameStop sends out the beta key.
via Starcraft II launches July 27 – News at GameSpot.

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rePost :: Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Know Yourself: Principal or Lieutenant?

Excellent advice. Read the whole thing!

“Know yourself” includes knowing when you excel as a principal and when you excel as a lieutenant. Many entrepreneurs I know think of themselves as CEO material. Generic ambition points to the top. But not everyone is best suited for the top job all the time, even if they are sufficiently capable.
You are not either a principal or lieutenant. Teams and circumstances vary. Part of being a good team player is knowing your role within the team. Most of the time I find myself a principal / CEO, but there is at least one area where I excel and enjoy more a lieutenant role: basketball.
via Ben Casnocha: The Blog: Know Yourself: Principal or Lieutenant?.

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rePost :: Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers’ joys of print » Nieman Journalism Lab

4. Physicality and variety
“I don’t want to read online,” Eggers said. “I don’t want to wake up and look at a screen. I feel like as a society, we try to put everything on that same goddamn screen, and pretty soon we’re going to be eating on the screen or, like, making love through the screen. It’s just sort of like: ‘Why does everything have to be on the screen?’
So: “I do think that it’s a time to make the paper form more robust and more surprising and beautiful and expansive,” Eggers concluded.
via Calmness, curation, cat porn: Dave Eggers’ joys of print » Nieman Journalism Lab.

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ROTD :: Amazing rats « Naturally Selected

The PLoS One study, conducted by Duarte Viana and colleagues at the Instituto Gulbenkian de Ciência, Oeiras, Portugal, showed that rats were able to cooperate and adjust tactics depending on the strategy of their opponent, when put in a Prisoner’s Dilemma scenario. The results shattered the idea that only humans can solve the Prisoner’s Dilemma – and may bode a whole new approach to how we think about intelligence in other species.
via Amazing rats « Naturally Selected.

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Latauro Reviews IRON MAN 2 — Ain't It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news.

I get the feeling that the initial reaction to IRON MAN 2 will be that it isn’t quite as good as the first film, but I think that will largely be because the first film came out of nowhere. Robert Downey Jnr’s Tony Stark was such an unlikely hero, such an unusually charismatic figure, that everybody seemed jolted out of their seats. Everything that was good about the first film is here in the second, only now we’re expecting it. In time, when the dust has settled and both films are equally canonised, I suspect the general consensus will be that they are of equal quality. And though the phrasing may be limp, the conclusion is not: IRON MAN 2 is up there with the best.
via Latauro Reviews IRON MAN 2 — Ain’t It Cool News: The best in movie, TV, DVD, and comic book news..

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Interesting :: :: The Cohesion Crisis – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com

Funny Sentence.

Enough with the PIIGS, a totally unhelpful acronym. What we’re really seeing now is a crisis of the “cohesion countries” — the countries that entered the EU relatively poor, and for a time received substantial aid in the form of “cohesion funds”. In Eurospeak, it’s important to know the difference between cohesion and convergence: cohesion means convergence in per capita GDP, while convergence means getting inflation rates in line so that monetary cohesion is possible. Get it?
via The Cohesion Crisis – Paul Krugman Blog – NYTimes.com.