Sunday, April 22, 2012

Internet Browsing Club - April 2012

The author of the online comic Toothpaste For Dinner has a new website, Worst Things For Sale. After reading this post, I noticed an Amazon review for the product that said “...it does come in handy while driving”. If I see someone using this thing on the highway I am gonna road rage them into a ditch.


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Rock N Roller Jack White was profiled in New York Times Magazine. “This generation is so dead,” he said at one point. “You ask a kid, ‘What are you doing this Saturday?’ and they’ll be playing video games or watching cable, instead of building model cars or airplanes or doing something creative. Kids today never say, ‘Man, I’m really into remote-controlled steamboats.’ They never say that.” Do toymakers manufacture remote-controlled steamboats? Do they run on steam?




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Ever wonder how they manufacture the basketball courts used during the NCAA championship tournament? USA Today had a feature about it. It definitely makes sense to build new courts with ugly NCAA logos and insert them in huge stadiums too big for ticket demand, where players find it harder to shoot. That’s definitely better than simply playing in arenas built for basketball, where courts already exist.


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Nick and I both read this New Yorker article that shows how unhelpful brainstorming can be. The evidence has been around for half a century, and I’m just now learning this?




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I think Bobbo passed on this article on prisons, which addresses the same general topic of that one I shared a month or two ago. A few similar thoughts, but some new ideas, as well.

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Before reading this Atlantic piece about a professional gambler’s huge blackjack run in Atlantic City, I didn’t consider this probability wrinkle: “Many casinos sell laminated charts in their guest shops that reveal the optimal strategy for any situation the game presents. But these odds are calculated by simulating millions of hands, and as Johnson says, “I will never see 400 million hands.”


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Lindsey and I read all 5 of these AV Club articles where creator Paul Feig details every episode of Freaks and Geeks. That was a good show.

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Bob Powers continues to write genius stories on an almost-daily basis. The Ice Couple Day is my recent favorite.