Well…since both the writer and the boss are out of town (Greeley Colorado) I offer up a picture from my brief honeymoon at Priest Lake to our faithful readers. This was taken on one of our many dirt bike treks in the hills just east of Cavanaugh Bay.
Ian Leslie says we really can be too clever for our own good:
“If a rat is faced with a puzzle in which food is placed on its left 60% of the time and on the right 40% of the time, it will quickly deduce that the left side is more rewarding, and head there every time, thus achieving a 60% success rate. Young children adopt the same strategy. When Yale undergraduates play the game, they try to figure out some underlying pattern, and end up doing worse than the rat or the child.”
The higher the stakes, the more over-thinking becomes a problem. So—good news!—all we have to do is get better at ignoring information.
Finally, something I can excel at.
Radio Time Machine is a nifty little tool that plays Billboard chart-toppers from every year back to 1940. Well…30-second samples, anyway. You apparently need an account to hear the entire song. But it’s certainly enough to prove that the art of songcraft isn’t just in decline; it’s assumed room temperature.
Are we really on the verge of of one of the biggest imaging revolutions since 1826? Lytro’s new light-field camera takes photographs that can be focused long after they’re captured. How? Beats me. I lost interest when I saw the phrase “computationally intensive Fourier-transform” followed by talk of ray-tracing algorithms and plenoptic functions. But it sure sounds cool.
This past Sunday, our senior designer Shirlee Roberts was married to her sweetheart, Brett Downey.
photo courtesy of Matt Vielle / Hamilton Studio
Shirlee has been with AMD for a dozen years now. For those who know her, the wedding event was pretty much what you would expect from someone who keeps a tarantula near her desk. It was unique: the nuptials took place at a local Starbucks where she and Brett first met – five years ago to the day. It was efficient: the ceremony was well under 10 minutes. It was personal: the only time I’ve heard the words “guns” and “cars” exchanged while professing vows.
And I loved the souvenir coffee mugs inscribed with a simple message – bsw 04.29.12 (brett, shirlee, wedding).
Congrats to Shirlee and Brett!
I’ve been hearing “which begs the question” an awful lot these days. And it usually sounds something like this:
“Whoa—she’s a Betty. Which begs the question, ‘Why doesn’t she have a boyfriend?'”
Just so we’re clear, that’s not begging the question. It’s raising the question. Two very, very different things.
It has been decided that tomorrow is Passive Voice Day. Great fun will no doubt be had by all.
Florence Colgate has a perfect face. (What? We’re simply reporting on the results of a rigorous scientific study.)
Good news: you won’t cause a devastating explosion if you drive off with the gas pump nozzle still in your car.
Finally, Simon Doonan has a theory that explains the prevalence of tattoos.
If nothing else, this book promises to be an interesting read. The scandalous Baroness Pannonica de Koenigswarter—”Nica”—was arguably as much a part of New York’s emerging bebop scene as the now-legendary musicians themselves.
Of the dozen or so songs written for her, Thelonious Monk’s somewhat surreal offering is by far my favorite:
[audio:https://helveticka.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2012/04/03-Pannonica.mp3|titles=03 Pannonica]“Pannonica,” from Brilliant Corners (1956). Thelonious Monk, piano; Ernie Henry, alto sax; Sonny Rollins, tenor sax; Oscar Pettiford, bass; Max Roach, drums.
Speaking as a parent, this is pretty much how it feels.
Three days, three figures from my childhood…gone. RIP Dick Clark, Levon Helm, and Jonathan Frid. Time’s wingèd chariot, indeed.
A fun article over at the Washington Post on the victory of “hopefully.” A small quibble, though: the AP Stylebook is venerated? Really? By whom, precisely? (No, journalists don’t count.)
Igor Vovkovinskiy would prefer that you not compare him to a sturgeon. You’ve been warned.
Finally, another notable birthday this week: Fenway Park turns 100 today.
The first World Palindrome Champion was crowned last month. (For those of you less inclined toward word geekery, a palindrome is a word or phrase that reads the same backward as it does forward.)
The winner? A standup comedian from Portland, Oregon, who came up with the nonsensical “Devil Kay fixes trapeze part; sex if yak lived.”
Full results from the competition can be found here.
For my money, the finest biographer alive is Robert Caro. Esquire‘s Chris Jones takes a look at the guy who’s spent nearly 40 years chronicling the life of one man.
As an aside to those of you who think my sentences are too long, check this out:
“Caro’s sentences are long, fluid, intricate. (A single sentence in The Passage of Power contains a parenthetical, an em dash, a colon, a comma, another two commas, a semicolon, two more commas, and a period.)”
My kind of writer.
Bet you still know exactly who this is.
Designer Daily has seven more examples of how well-known companies adapted when forced to use non-Latin characters in their logos. Turns out it’s a pretty good test of your brand’s strength.
http://vimeo.com/37796909
Can’t…stop…watching…