Make a DIY No-Kill Mousetrap with a Toilet Paper Roll - Lifehacker
First, I love how simply this illustration demonstrates the idea. I thought about copying the text description of how this works, but it’s self-explanatory.
Second, I love how simple, clever ideas still have the power to surprise me. I looked at this for a few seconds, then had the ‘aha’ moment and realized the genius of this idea.
I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn’t last, and now it’s running out. I don’t particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you’d be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history’s moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it.
…Concepts don’t reflect the world in a straightforward way; instead, they contain hidden traps that distort reality, causing confusion and angst. And the verb “to be”, he argued, contains the most traps of all. Take the phrase, “My brother is lazy”… it implies certainty and objectivity, when in reality it expresses an opinion… “Our judgments can only be probabilistic,” wrote Allen Walker Read, a Korzybski follower. “Therefore we would do well to avoid finalistic, absolutistic terms.
First-Person Tetris
Wow, I just played this for 45 minutes without realizing. I guess it’s first-person from the perspective of someone playing Tetris on a Nintendo… who’s rotating the room in parallel with the blocks? Okay, so maybe “first-person” isn’t really accurate but it’s pretty addicting anyway.
Writing to ‘get it right the first time’ is like driving a car with the emergency brake on. In order to write more good stuff faster, and suffer less, you need to focus on removing the stalling, obsessing, and nitpicking from your composing process, and to think about a different kind of process.
— Joan Bolker (via merlin)
Universe Sandbox
Smash moons into planets, create new stars, and build new worlds from spinning discs of debris. Explore our solar system in 3D or destroy everything you’ve created with a super massive black hole.
You can simulate and interact with:
- Our solar system: the 8 planets,160+ moons, and hundreds of asteroids
- Nearest 1000 stars to our Sun
- Our local group of galaxies
- An unlimited number of fictional scenarios
Tinker with your creation or sit back and watch the effects of gravity unfold. It’s fun, accessible, and easy to use.
The screencap above is from a simulation of two galaxies colliding. If that isn’t awesome, I don’t know what is.
It’s difficult to convey in a two-dimensional image, but you can spin around and fly through all these simulations as they happen. You can even use 3D-glasses if you have them. It’s like this episode of Radiolab put into practice. So good.
