Archive for October 2009

Look, I think the bril­liant and beau­ti­ful thing in life is that any­one can do any­thing,” he said. “When I used to go to spe­cial needs, we got laughed at, but we’re not sup­posed to all be aca­d­e­mic. What is edu­ca­tion? A bunch of stuff that peo­ple think we should know. Ulti­mately if you can put a wall up, if you can paint, if you can work with other peo­ple and, most impor­tant, if you find out what you are good at, that’s the key. Kids can do detailed, tech­ni­cal things, and they can do them well. Have you seen them on skate­boards and surf­ing? It doesn’t have to be a BMX, it can be a pot and a pan and a knife, but we wrap them up in cot­ton wool and treat them like babies and they’re not.

~ Jamie Oliver Puts America’s Diet on a Diet a bril­liant arti­cle and insight on Jamie on NYTimes​.com

Explain­ing Google Street View to the Japan­ese. Cute as a button!

At times the two cen­tral pro­tag­o­nists behaved like peo­ple whose day job was work­ing up skits for Monty Python.…they had dis­tinctly lack­adaisi­cal work habits. Wat­son played sev­eral sets of ten­nis every after­noon and spent his evenings alter­nately chas­ing ‘pop­sies’ at Cam­bridge par­ties and going to the movies. Crick, who rarely showed up at the lab before 10 AM and took a cof­fee break and hour later repeat­edly appeared to lose inter­est in the prob­lem of DNA. On more than one occa­sion, vital piece of infor­ma­tion were obtained not through hard work but as a result of chance con­ver­sa­tions in the tea line at the Cavendish laboratory.

A quote from Richard Ogle’s “Smart World”, on Wat­son and Crick’s dis­cov­ery of DNA’s struc­ture. Chas­ing pop­sies, heh.

Gor­geous “The Weak­erthans” t-​​shirt at Cin­der Block