- Cool art series of the week: Artist Uses Paint To Disguise Foods As Other Products. These are trippy.
- Surprisingly cool thing of the week: What Tree Rings Sound Like Played on a Record Player.
- This iPhone accessory alarm wakes you up with the sound & smell of sizzling bacon. Intriguing, but I’d be cranky that there wasn’t actual bacon to eat.
- This new speed reading app will let you read a novel in under 90 minutes. I don’t know how I feel about this.
- Help a good cause and possibly have dinner with Nathan Fillion? All over it.
- A self-contained/self-cleaning aquarium/aquaponics garden combo. Kinda cool, and developed by fellow Austinites.
- The Questions That Will Save Your Relationships. Actually really good advice.
- Honesty’s Daily Decline. Some research shows that people are more prone to dishonesty in the afternoon, as they’ve used up their self-control/moral reservoir earlier in the day.
- A Physicist Solves the City. “The only way to really understand the city, West says, is to understand its deep structure, its defining patterns, which will show us whether a metropolis will flourish or fall apart. We can’t make our cities work better until we know how they work. And, West says, he knows how they work.”
- What A City Would Look Like If You Replaced Ads With Fine Art.
- “Productivity” Tricks for the Neurotic, Manic-Depressive, and Crazy (Like Me).
- The Case for Artist Dates.
- The Student Passion Problem. “From an objective perspective, what does it mean for a second semester freshman to “love” electrical engineer or mathematics? At best, it means he enjoyed a handful of courses on the topic and/or thinks it sounds interesting. To feel real passion for an academic subject, by contrast, requires years of honing your craft. Until then, you’re pursuing an idealized simulacrum.”
- Related: The 3 Do-What-You-Love Conundrums.
- Getty’s New Embed Tool Makes Millions of Photos Free to Use Non-Commercially. Good news for bloggers!
Things of Note:
Whew, the internet really delivered this week! I hope you all found something interesting in the above mega-list. In other news, SXSW is still taking over my city (and my Twitter feeds), and I’m still avoiding downtown. And I’ve officially told clients that I’ll be out of office the week my sister visits (less than a month away now!) so that I can have that whole time to hang out with her. So excited! I haven’t seen her in 2 years (she’s in the Air Force and stationed in Charleston) so some hang out time is long overdue.
Also, I’m starting to think that maybe I shouldn’t tell people about exciting projects I’m lined up to be on board with until I’m actually officially on board, because it jinxes it. I’ve had 3 major things that I was super excited about the possibility of so far this year, and gushed about them to friends/family in my excitement, and then none ended up actually happening, despite my best efforts and being sought out by the other parties. It’s really frustrating and disappointing. So I think mum’s the word from now on. I’ll save my bursts of excitement for after I officially land the project.
How are you doing this week?
