I saw these all over town this weekend, on bus stops and the like—and while I intellectually appreciate they spent $100 million on this ad campaign, and what do I know from ad men, I do have a question:
Are you selling us special active-teen tampons? Because that’s the only conceivable product Y!ou can possibly be, especially given this lovely stock photo you chose. Yay. I’ll pick some up with my Teen Spirit Sparkling Salsa deodorant next time I’m out.
Ancient lore has suggested that the Vikings used special crystals to find their way under less-than-sunny skies. Though none of these so-called “sunstones” have ever been found at Viking archaeological sites, a crystal uncovered in a British shipwreck could help prove they did indeed exist.
The crystal was found amongst the wreckage of the Alderney, an Elizabethan warship that sank near the Channel Islands in 1592. The stone was discovered less than 3 feet (1 meter) from a pair of navigation dividers, suggesting it may have been kept with the ship’s other navigational tools, according to the research team headed by scientists at the University of Rennes in France.
A chemical analysis confirmed that the stone was Icelandic Spar, or calcite crystal, believed to be the Vikings’ mineral of choice for their fabled sunstones, mentioned in the 13th-century Viking saga of Saint Olaf.
Today, the Alderney crystal would be useless for navigation, because it has been abraded by sand and clouded by magnesium salts. But in better days, such a stone would have bent light in a helpful way for seafarers.
Because of the rhombohedral shape of calcite crystals, “they refract or polarize light in such a way to create a double image,” Mike Harrison, coordinator of the Alderney Maritime Trust, told LiveScience. This means that if you were to look at someone’s face through a clear chunk of Icelandic spar, you would see two faces. But if the crystal is held in just the right position, the double image becomes a single image and you know the crystal is pointing east-west, Harrison said.
These refractive powers remain even in low light when it’s foggy or cloudy or when twilight has come. In a previous study, the researchers proved they could use Icelandic spar to orient themselves within a few degrees of the sun, even after the sun had dipped below the horizon.
Tumblr meetup at Fat Cat.
I remember meeting a lot of the people I came to know on Tumblr, in person, this night, I think March 13 in 2008. This was long before Tumblr was much of a thing outside of New York. I spent a lot more time on Tumblr back in those days.
It seems pretty likely that Tumblr, this weekend, is at a turning point.
Tumblr as a product simply stop attempting to evolve over the last couple of years, perhaps by design. Despite that, growth has continued, it’s a massive success in terms of size and scale. It even managed to generate a few million dollars, but not likely enough to sustain itself as a business and I suspect there’s not much runway left to try.Whatever happens, this place was something special for me, and continues to be for many others. I really enjoyed the time I spent here.
Who is your favorite Giant to watch?
“Buster Posey, obviously. It feels like we’re in the fever dream of a six-year-old playing pretend baseball with his Transformers, and Posey is the Optimus Prime figure that gets every big hit.”
-Grant Brisbee
Any living creature that can move through the air at 242 miles per hour is terrifying.
(Source: imgs.xkcd.com)
The millennials are the people who’ve inherited the hangover from the baby boomers’ party: a warming planet, a dysfunctional global financial system that rewards the rich and screws the poor, a polarized political class that’s moved so far to the right that a centrist like Barack Obama can be described with a straight face as “a socialist.” Millennials may be “narcissistic, materialistic and addicted to technology,” as Stein alleges early in his article; they’re also drowning in college debt, slaves to an internship “system” that demands ever-increasing work for no pay, and entrants into a job market that’s replaced employment rights with the “flexibility” of never being able to afford health insurance.
Why Time’s Millennials Cover Story Says More About Joel Stein Than It Does About Millennials
Republicans think by a 74/19 margin than Benghazi is a worse political scandal than Watergate, by a 74/12 margin that it’s worse than Teapot Dome, and by a 70/20 margin that it’s worse than Iran Contra.
One interesting thing about the voters who think Benghazi is the biggest political scandal in American history is that 39% of them don’t actually know where it is.
So… yeah.
I’ll give you the most logical conclusion kids are ditching Facebook—one that none of the articles I read on the Great Teenage Facebook Exodus mentioned. And the evidence that supports the theory is right there in the Piper Jaffray survey. But first let’s define Facebook.
What is Facebook to most people over the age of 25? It’s a never-ending class reunion mixed with an eternal late-night dorm room gossip session mixed with a nightly check-in on what coworkers are doing after leaving the office. In other words, it’s a place where you go to keep tabs on your friends and acquaintances.
You know what kids call that? School.
Cliff Watson (via soupsoup)
The kids are alright.
This is the secret to life.
David Foster Wallace walked out to his patio, bound his own hands with duct tape, and hung himself with his belt. The secret to life was literally the very last thing in the world he had. These are just coping strategies.
These my girls. These two right here.
Date yourself. Take yourself out to eat. Don’t share your popcorn at the movies with anyone. Stroll around an art museum alone. Fall in love with canvases. Fall in love with yourself.
(Source: artisticbitches)
(Source: astrodidact)
