This is so fricking awesome, I don't even know where to begin.
(kinda sad actually)
Uh, after watching this, I realized that I don't think I've seen all the Star Wars movies. How is this possible?!
Color me impressed! Apparently he is going to be on Ellen...
Watch out for those machines, though. Humans know a special trick of self-observation: when to avert our gaze. Machines don’t understand the value of forgiving a lapse, or of treating an unpleasant detail with tactful silence. A graph or a spreadsheet talks only in numbers, but there is a policeman inside all of our heads who is well equipped with punishing words. “Each day my self-worth was tied to the data,” Alexandra Carmichael, one of the founders of the self-tracking site CureTogether, wrote in a heartfelt blog post about why she recently stopped tracking. “One pound heavier this morning? You’re fat. Skipped a day of running? You’re lazy. It felt like being back in school. Less than 100 percent on an exam? You’re dumb.” Carmichael had been tracking 40 different things about herself. The data she was seeing every day didn’t respect her wishes or her self-esteem. It was awful, and she had to stop.
Electronic trackers have no feelings. They are emotionally neutral, but this very fact makes them powerful mirrors of our own values and judgments. The objectivity of a machine can seem generous or merciless, tolerant or cruel. Designers of tracking systems are trying to finesse this ambivalence. A smoking-cessation program invented by Pal Kraft, a Norwegian researcher at the University of Oslo, automatically calls people who are trying to quit, asking them every day whether they’ve smoked in the last 24 hours. When the answer is yes, a recorded voice delivers an encouraging message: All is well, take it easy, try again. This mechanical empathy, barely more human than a recorded voice on the customer-service line, can hardly be expected to fool anybody. But a long line of research in human-computer interaction demonstrates that when machines are given humanlike characteristics and offer emotional reassurance, we actually do feel reassured. This is humbling. Do we really feel better when a computer pats us on the back? Yes, we do.
I've been thinking a lot about validation lately... maybe even a post-it or a pop-up on the computer really can be helpful, as hokey as it seems.
Calling...
Village Whiskey
500 Degrees
Nodding Head
Good Dog
Five Guys
"New Jersey Asian Americans live, on average, an astonishing 26 years longer, are 11 times more likely to have a graduate degree, and earn $35,610 more per year than South Dakota Native Americans"
"There's just one problem—by relying so heavily on Lynch, and Lea Michele's Rachel and Corey Monteith's Finn, and underdeveloping large swaths of its big and talented cast, the show is at risk of making its leads boring and overexposed."
"To our knowledge this is the first time in the world that a postal authority is issuing a special stamp on a gay/lesbian occasion. At least, we are not aware that this has happened before anywhere in the world." via Towleroad
"It may have taken an ecological disaster, but the gulf-state conservatives' newfound respect for the powers and purse of the federal government is a timely reminder for them. As conservatives in Washington complain about excessive federal spending, the ones who would suffer the most from spending cuts are their own constituents." (via Misha)