Yes Machine

The machine that makes you go yes

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(via Instapaper)

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Capuchin monkey rejects unequal pay.

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Looking for an iconic photo of Neil Armstrong? Don't take the one above, because that's not him, that's Buzz Aldrin. Read more: Charles Apple on the difficulty of finding a good picture of Neil Armstrong.

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Have a look at those photos of batshit insane Chinese swimming pools.

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There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelieavable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs.

— John Rogers

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Don't read an inspirational quote every day

Sure, feeling good about yourself is something that can make you work harder and longer. Make you work towards a better self. And if only that, it makes you feel better about yourself. That's great. But don't make the mistake of thinking that the self you see in some inspirational quote on the internet is already you – you always have to fulfill that self with purpose and reasoning to actually make it reality. Instead of that one more inspirational quote on a blog, read something critical of your own stance from time to time. Make yourself wonder if you are indeed on the right path. Challenge yourself. That's the fastest way to self improvement. If an inspirational poster brought you to that place, all the better. Don't get me wrong: I love for example my friends at Holstee and their Manifesto. Be sure to check it out. And always strive to be a Yes Machine. Don't be a No Man. Be positive about new things. Just don't fall into the trap of believing that thinking & being is making & doing. Just like the Holstee guys and girls, you have to make something out of your ideas.

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But that’s not the real reason why geeks are skeptical. It’s because we are smart asses. We are the people that put salt and pepper on the pizza before trying it, because we just know best.

While talking about Apple's new operating system Mountain Lion, Oliver Reichenstein from Information Architects also drops a nice quote that reminds of a lot of people I know.

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Charles Allen Thomas was one of hundreds of scientists present for the detonation of the first atomic bomb in July 1945. This letter to his mother describes his experience of that detonation in a quite personal way in a short 11 pages.

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Federer as Religious Experience

Federer as Religious Experience, a 2006 NYT article by David Foster Wallace about the final game of that year's Wimbledon tournament against Nadal, is a beautiful read that I stumble over every year or two. It talks a lot about minute details of tennis, but it also tries to explain an interesting sort of beauty, and how a single angled explanation of any phenomenon is too little to grasp the full reality of it.

Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.

The human beauty we’re talking about here is beauty of a particular type; it might be called kinetic beauty. Its power and appeal are universal. It has nothing to do with sex or cultural norms. What it seems to have to do with, really, is human beings’ reconciliation with the fact of having a body.

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Does climate change feel too complicated for you to bother? Watch this TEDx talk by David Roberts and learn a bit about it.

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Craig Mod: Hack The Cover

Quoting Seth Godin who's talking about type on digital book covers,

“Who needs them? When you see the book online, it's always accompanied by lots of text. You read the text on the screen, the cover is the icon.”

Designer Craig Mod's intelligent essay, while posing to be about how to effectively transform book covers to work in the digital space, talks about much more. It's about content and context, and how to evolve content when the context changes.

In a borderless digital space, where the next book is just a search result away, book covers aren't meant to inform in the classic sense of teaching the reader about the author and the book's name – it's there to capture the reader's attention and focus it on the accompanying textual information that contains all that information anyway.

http://www.craigmod.com/journal/hack_the_cover/

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100 Riffs (A Brief History of Rock N' Roll) by Alex Chadwick

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If the sound tank isn't the best weapon ever invented, I'm not sure we can still be friends.

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The Art of Moreing by Leo Addison.

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Hiromi's Sonicbloom: I don't think I've ever seen a musician having so much fun on stage. Via @garretvoorhees.

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— You’ll obviously be remembered as the person who put the @ symbol in email. Anything else you’d like to be remembered for? — Oh, I don’t know. I thought the three-way handshake for TCP was pretty cool. [laughs]

Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email: 'I see email being used, by and large, exactly the way I envisioned' (on The Verge)

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Play Lego Bitch! – Hyriet music video, a good way to start your week. Via Tobias Rechsteiner.