Linkology: The Best of the Internet for Friday, 10/9/2009
Some astonishingly good links for you today. But first I want you to understand that I recently bought a new table and chair set, and everything came packed in a 523 lb. box (yes, 523 lb.) that I had to wrestle to the ground
and dissect with a box cutter, after which I settled in to assemble the 3,227 parts over a course of four hours. The assembly instructions were vague with illustrations drawn by what appeared to be a fourth-grader (like I should talk). And I had to do all of this with a fairly deep laceration on my thumb, because I decided the other night to clean a pair of scissors by wrapping the blade with a wet paper towel and carelessly running my thumb down the blade while I did flash cards with my son.
So yeah. The next time someone says it’s only $79 for delivery and assembly, take it.
Anyway. Moving on:
- Dump the Ump: an argument that MLB should use pitch tracking technology to call strikes in pro baseball games. If this happens, do sports like pro tennis use boundary detection technology to remove in/out calls from the ref’s duties?
- Earlier this year Michael Pollan (author of The Botany of Desire, The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto) asked for reader’s rules about eating well. He got more than 2,500 responses. Here are his 20 favorite.
- Windows 7: a great, easy upgrade for helping you forget the misery of Vista. Unless you run XP, in which case I hope you have your files backed up elsewhere, because your hard disk will need to be nuked. Oh, and you’ll also need to reinstall all of your apps from their original CD media or downloaded installers. Oh, and then you’ll have to download all of the patches/point releases/updates that you got for each app over the years. At that point, if you still want Windows 7, you may as well buy a new PC.
- One man’s obsessive project to turn himself into his late spouse.
- The best opening sentence to a news article I’ve seen in a long time ever.
- Are mandatory calorie counts on restaurant menus effective? Not at all.
- Awesome, awesome casual reading: the one nagging thing you still don’t understand about yourself.
- If you’re an iPhone user and love McSweeney’s, I can’t urge you strongly enough to get the McSweeney’s iPhone app. Finally, you always have some quality reading right in your pocket.
Have a great weekend, everyone.
