Made Thing

Negative health effects of sedentary work not undone by exercise

Worth reading only for this comment:

Thank you for this exotic pile of research ordure. You — that is the pea-brained hippogriffs who designed these studies — have managed to finagle reality into some existential nightmare that might make even a dour, gymless rat like Jean Paul-Sartre collapse in despair — even though he was already in despair. Despair squared! Cubed! Mega-Cubed. We’re talkin’ despair. Any decent supermax Prison Guard (surely comparable in moral dignity to the average researcher sited here) could tell you that if you cage a guy for 23 hours a day and then let him out to exercise only to pace on a doily for an hour then Mr. Man (sexist pigs!! where are the comparable women’s studies!!) won’t be superfit. Uh, duh? Of course it ALL depends on length of time “sitting” vs. “working out.” Do they really expect us to parse from these findings that a 23-hour workout following an hour of couch potatoing will not offset the physical effects? We have a technical term to refer to such stacked research: lame. Maybe participants in the studies were forced to watch endless re-runs of “Petticoat Junction” followed by a “workout’ that consisted of bench pressing a case of Almond Joys into their mouth a then a drive in high-speed bumper-to-bumper in Los Angeles traffic for two hours before arriving home only to be flogged with a garden hose by their miserable spouse and given a bowl of steam for dinner followed by a short, brutish sleep on a bed of nails?

Question by May Swenson

Incredible poem.

I Write Like

Paste a sample of your writing, and machine analysis matches it to a famous writer’s prose style.

My zombie essay returned Margaret Atwood.

The pot and how to use it

Wonderful food writing from Roger Ebert, via Bobulate.

First, get the Pot. You need the simplest rice cooker made. It comes with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Not expensive. Now you’re all set to cook meals for the rest of your life on two square feet of counter space, plus a chopping block. No, I am not putting you on the Rice Diet. Eat what you like. I am thinking of you, student in your dorm room. You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman. You, obsessed computer programmer or weary web-worker. You, lovers who like to cook together but don’t want to put anything in the oven. You, in the witness protection program. You, nutritional wingnut. You, in a wheelchair.

Self-Employed

Wonderful use of the title as a metaphor. Some days I’d like to fire myself, too.

Frank Chimero on the designer's crisis of faith

I will say this as squarely as I know how for the students and young professionals reading this. Within the first year or two of working as a professional designer, you will question if you want to do this any more. You will get beat up and overworked, you will produce a giant pile of work that you are not proud of.

More, on the Buttafuoco Point

Andy Ihnatko, on the importance of reclaiming your attention:

If you’re spending every waking moment distracting yourself…what are you distracting yourself from? What is your brain clamoring to tell you, if it were ever to get your full and complete attention? An experiment: The next time you have a little time to kill and you instinctively go to your phone to launch your email client or your Twitter app or the web browser, launch the Clock app instead. Set a countdown timer for the amount of time you were going to spend in any of those activities (or ten minutes, whichever is shorter).

The mindfulness meditation that I’ve been trying (and mostly failing) to practice argues essentially the same thing, only in different terms.

jQuery for Designers

Beautifully done.