other

If you live in Seattle and haven’t hunted down Skillet, you’re missing out.

Amazing access to a place not unlike Willy Wonka’s - the Lego factory. The scale will impress you.

WARNING: Not for the faint of heart.

If you want to understand what waterboarding is and how mentally excruciating it is, watch Christopher Hitchens go through the experience for a recent Vanity Fair article. I was watching the video and I thought they were just warming him up. I had no idea that what they were doing was the actual torture until Hitchens caved. Yikes.

You may have read by now the official lie about this treatment, which is that it “simulates” the feeling of drowning. This is not the case. You feel that you are drowning because you are drowning—or, rather, being drowned, albeit slowly and under controlled conditions and at the mercy (or otherwise) of those who are applying the pressure. The “board” is the instrument, not the method. You are not being boarded. You are being watered.

It’s amazing how much marvelousness we humans miss while focused on our daily routines. This is why it’s always so heartening when somebody does pay attention and discovers something noteworthy like how you can study sunspots from inside New York’s Grand Central terminal.

The southern wall of the Grand Concourse, facing 42nd Street, has semicircular grills high up, with small curlicued spaces like those in a leafy tree. Many of those spaces act like the aperture of a pinhole camera, reflecting an image of the sun that, when it reaches the floor, will be 8 to 12 inches wide. The smaller grill spaces will produce dimmer but sharper solar images on your paper.

It’s a huge shock, I know, but Cheney’s Chief of Staff is a royal d%@&!

Addington went on to explain how the enemy’s actions — “smoke was still rising. . . . 3,000 Americans were just killed” — justified his legal reasoning. And he showed abundant disdain for dissenters, such as Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala.), who asked whether Addington consulted lawmakers about anti-torture statutes. “There is no reason their opinion on that would be relevant,” he answered.

[via The Morning News]

Japan has a new health-care initiative that involves measuring the waistlines of all company and government employees. Men with waistlines over 33.5 inches and women with waistlines over 35.5 inches are considered overweight and subject their employers to penalties and fines.

These new guidelines affect 44% of the Japanese population. The goal of this initiative is to reduce the overweight population of Japan by 10% over the next 4 years and 25% over the next 7 years.

I can see how reaction to these measures is split amongst people who feel that this is trampling their personal freedoms and those who applaud a course correction that will force employers to think about the physical activity and diets of their employees - a decision which impacts usage of the medical system, insurance, etc. From a pure economics standpoint, I’d prefer a system which rewards employers for advocating healthy-minded decisions as opposed to penalizing them for poor ones. For instance, offering well-balanced meals in the cafeteria should be applauded and promoted rather than penalizing the offering of burgers and fries, etc. Perhaps I’m too optimistic about behavior though. My concern with the Japan approach is that it could keep overweight people from getting jobs in the first place as employers may not want to hire somebody that they’ll be fined for.

[via Money Morning]

The skinnyCorp Guide to Doing What You Love for a Living
(and whatever else we end up talking about)

The business

The second presentation of the day at Seed was from Jake Nickell and Jeffrey Kalmikoff, who discussed the “perfect storm of awesomeness” known as Threadless. Threadless is basically an online call for t-shirt design submissions where the winning shirts get printed and sold for 1-week on the site. Designers are paid for their winning designs and gain reputation points within the community for influence over future design choices. Actually, the kind of cool thing is that anybody in the community who votes, comments, and purchases from the site, gains influence via reputation scores which feedback into a more loyal customer-base and better product selection. This sort of radically open feedback loop is known as “crowdsourcing.”

How it works

“Crowdsourcing is not a business plug-in, IT IS THE BUSINESS. Crowdsourcing means the CEO no longer has control.” - paraphrased from Nickell and Kalmikoff

The 4 laws of crowdsourcing, as proposed by Nickell and Kalmikoff are as follows:

1. Allow your content to be created by its community
2. Put your project in the hands of its community
3. Let your community grow itself (but nurture the growth)
4. Reward the community that makes your project possible

Picking your passion and what I’ll take away from this presentation

“Find your own perfect storm. Ride the excitening” - Nickell and Kalmikoff

Veering into a a hilarious vignette, Nickel and Kalmikoff spent a little time talking about tote bags. Many people have suggested that Threadless is the perfect solution for the custom-printing of tote. Why not just reproduce the community tools, fire up the crowdsourcing, and start making money hand over fist on tote bags? Because Nickell and Kalmikoff can’t get excited about tote bags. Please don’t suggest that they make tote bags. There’s obviously a huge opportunity in tote bags. You should go make tote bags.

Here is why they say you should pick something where you have passion, and not just where you see a business opportunity:

1. Passion inspires trust
2. Work harder (in a good way)
3. Be more inspired
4. Failure is less sucky

After talking about crowdsourcing and following your passions, the guys switched over into question and answer mode. What I found particularly interesting was where crowdsourcing didn’t tend to work and how there was still some amount of moderation and control that was required on behalf of the head guys at Threadless. Basically, the voters don’t determine 100% of the designs that get chosen. This is because the when voters determine the entire content, it tends to echo. The head guys are always using the crowd as their first filter but they ultimately select t-shirts that they’d buy and they weigh the votes of other members who have also bought more heavily.

Something else I thought was really cool was how reactive Threadless is in their business. They don’t do practically anything - in fact, they’re inherantly lazy - unless the demand for it is fairly obvious, where the method of doing things is just causing too much pain. For example, Threadless was getting to a point where they were buying out a color t-shirt from Fruit of the Loom for the year, for the entire world. Rather than be beholden to a single supplier, they decided to get into the t-shirt production business on their own.

“You’ll know that you’re at a growing point when shit just goes crazy.”

The last thing that they went over was the need to be patient. In the beginning, Threadless was really just a hobby. Success did not come over night but through a long series of tweaks with a product that they loved.

[Disclaimer: What you have read in this post is my recollection and my notes from the event. I make no claims to 100% transcription accuracy and if I botched something, I'm happy to fix it - just drop me a comment.]

Just what it says it is.

[via rantings of an arab chick]

We’re in the process of closing on some beautiful property outside of Walla Walla in the foothills of the Blue Mountains. As a result, we’ve been very interested in pre-fab and/or very inexpensive structures that will allow us to enjoy the property on long weekends. “The Shack at Hinkle Farm” by Broadhurst Architects is exactly what I have in mind, a small structure for basic living which benefits from an outstanding location and a rustic DIY ethic. Hand-powered plumbing, rain water shower, and oil lamps on this one although I’d be interested in looking into solar systems for some power needs.

The great thing about small structures like this is that they often fall under the size required for permitting.

Photos by Anice Hoachlander/HD Photo

On Architectural Record and the Spec Sheet.

On Materialicious

On Treehugger