xkcd: Cold.

[Love Monsanto or hate them, this is pretty interesting. Note: the use of the word “organic” in the headline is completely misleading; they mean “non-GMO.” -egg]

But here’s the twist: The lettuce, peppers, and broccoli—plus a melon and an onion, with a watermelon soon to follow—aren’t genetically modified at all. Monsanto created all these veggies using good old-fashioned crossbreeding, the same tech­nology that farmers have been using to optimize crops for millennia. That doesn’t mean they are low tech, exactly. Stark’s division is drawing on Monsanto’s accumulated scientific know-how to create vegetables that have all the advantages of genetically modified organisms without any of the Frankenfoods ick factor.

via Monsanto Is Going Organic in a Quest for the Perfect Veggie – Wired Science.

I just finished Cat Valente’s _Deathless_. One of the best books I’ve ever read. If you’re a Neil Gaiman fan, you owe it to yourself to read this as soon as possible. Valente isn’t Gaiman — she’s something rare and beautiful and unique — but his work is the closest point of reference I can offer. They’re both working in the realm of fairy tale as literature, fairy tale as high art. In this case it’s a Russian folk tale (warning! Spoilers on the Wikipedia article about the folk tale), woven together with the gritty history of the Siege of Leningrad. _Deathless_ is powerful and mythic and moving, and I give it my very highest recommendation. -Egg

[Really fantastic piece of journalism from George Saunders. -egg]

A legend is growing in Nepal, where people say a meditating boy hasn’t eaten or drunk in seven months. He barely moves, just sits under a tree, still as a stone. It’s impossible, some say. Is it a miracle? A hoax? Let’s find out.

via Longform Reprints: The Incredible Buddha Boy by George Saunders.

[I don’t give a damn about artisanal toast, but the story ends up really being about a pretty amazing person. -egg]

At first, Carrelli explained Trouble as a kind of sociological experiment in engineering spontaneous communication between strangers. She even conducted field research, she says, before opening the shop. “I did a study in New York and San Francisco, standing on the street holding a sandwich, saying hello to people. No one would talk to me. But if I stayed at that same street corner and I was holding a coconut? People would engage,” she said. “I wrote down exactly how many people talked to me.”

The smallness of her cafés is another device to stoke interaction, on the theory that it’s simply hard to avoid talking to people standing nine inches away from you. And cinnamon toast is a kind of all-purpose mollifier: something Carrelli offers her customers whenever Trouble is abrasive, or loud, or crowded, or refuses to give them what they want. “No one can be mad at toast,” she said.

Carrelli’s explanations made a delightfully weird, fleeting kind of sense as I heard them. But then she told me something that made Trouble snap into focus. More than a café, the shop is a carpentered-together, ingenious mechanism—a specialized tool—designed to keep Carrelli tethered to herself.

via How Did Toast Become the Latest Artisanal Food Craze? – Pacific Standard: The Science of Society.

[Want. -egg]

The ‘Skull Chair’ is part of my ‘Vanitas’ collection which is a collection of products inspired by the Dutch vanitas still-life paintings from the 16th and 17th century. The characteristic type of paintings where symbols of emptiness, time and death were placed on the canvas as a reminder of the vanity of earthly life. My goal was to combine the idea of thinking about death with a modern design vision and to allow the user of the product to enjoy every moment of his life by surrounding himself with the Vanitas symbols. This creates an environment that makes you understand the mortality and the absurdity of the present, but does so by letting you enjoy the very moment by giving an authentic and interesting product experience.

via Skull chair with brain ottoman – Boing Boing.

Created by artist Kohei Nawa (previously here and here) for the 2013 Aichi Triennale, Foam is an immersive cloud-like installation made from huge plumes of amorphous bubbles, meant to mimic a bleak primordial landscape. Nawa is known for his explorations of cellular forms as seen in his extensive series of PixCell sculptures where animal forms are covered in glass beads, and Foam seems to be a natural extension of this.

via Immersive Foam Clouds Tower Over Visitors to the 2013 Aichi Triennale | Colossal.

[Oooh, induced neuroplasticity? Hell yeah! -egg]

Research had previously shown that adult mice given histone-deacetylase inhibiting drugs (HDAC inhibitors) could “establish perceptual preferences that are otherwise impossible to acquire after youth.” To test whether this connection also existed in humans, Valproate, another HDAC inhibitor, was given to a group of healthy young men with no musical training. The men were then asked to perform a set of exercises for two weeks with the aim of improving their pitch while another control group was asked to perform the same exercises, but given a placebo.

According to the study, those subjects given valproate learned to identify pitch “significantly better than those taking the placebo.” Hensch calls the results remarkable, telling NPR that until now there had been “no known reports of adults acquiring absolute pitch.” The implications of the study aren’t limited to learning how to sing beautifully: by altering brain plasticity, users of valproate could conceivably learn other skills normally picked up during the early critical period. Hensch picks out language learning as an obvious area of application for the drug.

via The pill that might give you perfect pitch by altering your brain | The Verge.

[This looks like a great typography resource. -egg]

Butterick has web-published a new book on typography for a general audience, Butterick’s Practical Typography. It covers the same subject, but without directives specific to the legal profession.

This time it’s not a print book. It’s not an e-book, either. It was created and coded by Butterick himself specifically for the Web. You can read it through like a book, but it’s set up as an easy reference guide, with links to font basics, font recommendations, text formatting, sample documents, etc. For those in a hurry, there’s a “Typography in Ten Minutes” section.

The book is freeware, but you can kick the author some compensation for his work through the website.

I love type. I’ve read many bookis on the subject. Butterick’s are by far the clearest and most useful of them all.

via Cool Tools – Butterick’s Practical Typography.

I’ve been completely lusting after something like a Sonos system that lets me play whatever music I want in any room in the house, so I can send audio from my computer to (for example) the living room speakers. Sonos (which seems like the only really decent system out there) costs hundreds of dollars, maybe thousands depending on your needs, so there wasn’t much chance I’d actually buy one.

Turns out I can do everything I need with a $25 application: http://rogueamoeba.com/airfoil/

This is totally cool as hell. I took a half-broken old iphone and made it the receiver for the living room speakers. I can also send from my computer to every other computer on the network, no problem. So for a party, it’s easy to make any computer be controlling music that plays in every room in the house (using some cheap thrift store speakers etc as needed). It’s also equally easy for Celene and I to dynamically split the house into a couple of zones, one where she’s hearing the music she’s playing, and one where I hear what I want.

Note that that $25 covers installation on all your computers. One-time fee 🙂