Tag: Technology

AotM #15: Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day

Yes, everyone, that’s right, Bittersweet Chocolate with Almonds Day is a thing. Enjoy some chocolate and almonds for breakfast, lunch, & dinner today, since they are an incredibly healthy and delicious snack.

  1. ‘O’ [Yawn!]
    …Did that work? Did you yawn through sheer peer pressure? Well hopefully so, since yawning is AWESOME! It oxygenates the brain, increases alertness, and moves you closer to a meditative state. So never be ashamed of yawning. I love articles like this that explore that fuzzy nexus of science and spirituality.
  2. Everyone should keep as many houseplants as you can handle. We spend more time indoors than ever before in human history, surrounded by more toxic chemicals than ever before, in more tightly sealed and insulated domiciles than ever before—those old drafty houses on the prairie were actually good for you. So do yourself a favor and invest in some all-natural, sunlight-powered, green air-filters. (Or spend more time outdoors…Either way).
  3. Books are great, and reading improves your language ability, but you can’t trust most books out there when it comes to grammar…Even that supposed “classic” Elements of Style by Strunk & White is full of horrendous and ill-informed advice. Grammar isn’t nearly as boring or stuffy as lots of codgy old books, misinformed teachers, and snobby editors would have you think. And incidentally, I absolutely love the Language Log blog, as it brings language and grammar to life.
  4. Your new car runs more lines of code than the Joint Strike Fighter (no wonder car costs haven’t gone down much over the decades). Might this cause some problems, maybe with brakes…? It’s unfortunate that it’s becoming more difficult to find and learn the pleasures of a no-frills manual transmission these days.

AotM #10: National Dessert Day

I’ve decided that from now on I’m going to dedicate each Articles of the Moment post to whatever random and strange holiday happens to fall on that day. Because why not?

So…Today happens to be National Dessert Day. Treat yourself to some delicious pastries.

  1. There’s a lot of fearmongering going on lately about all the chemicals and “toxins” we’re potentially exposed to all the time, and how many of them are untested and have unknown biological effects. Well, those are actually some good points. I don’t have much hope that companies will start voluntarily testing all of their products and additives extensively before release, but I do have hope that blood and DNA testing will become cheap and easy enough for individuals to self-examine. Eventually, this will lead to greater awareness in the public, which will put economic pressure on companies, which will ultimately lead to better ground-up testing and a safer environment for us all. But then, I’m an optimist.
    Of course, another way of looking at it is that cancer rates haven’t really risen that much despite all of these new chemicals around us, so maybe we should embrace our exposure and breed future generations of super-immune cockroach kids!
  2. You should always be healthily skeptical of any images you see, as they’ve always been doctorable, but with further changes in technology like this algorithmic image builder, you have even more reason to be wary.
  3. Here’s a long and in-depth, but very well-written & researched article about just how short-sightedly fearful and greedy Big Content as been over the last hundred years. It’s nothing terribly surprising, other than the fact that Big Content has been so dense and slow to adjust to the Internet Age.
  4. Continuing the environmental and technological thread of the other articles today, I present a very long but highly engrossing exploration of Earth’s fiber networks, which happens to be by my favorite author, Neal Stephenson. If you’re interested in networking, communications, technology, or geography, you won’t regret spending the time to read it. Enjoy!