Lifehacker headline:
Study Confirms All Suspicions: Fitness Trackers Aren’t Magic Bullets
They quote The Journal of the American Medical Association:

Although wearable devices have the potential to facilitate health behavior change, this change might not be driven by these devices alone. Instead, the successful use and potential health benefits related to these devices depend more on the design of the engagement strategies than on the features of their technology. Ultimately, it is the engagement strategies–the combinations of individual encouragement, social competition and collaboration, and effective feedback loops–that connect with human behavior.
No fucking shit?
Let me get this straight: little electronic wristbands can’t magically get you in shape?
Next thing you’re going to tell me is Siri isn’t a real person.
Or that I have to make a concerted effort to achieve important things in my life.

via Re/code

Seth Godin on the difference between your logo and your brand:

Spend 10,000 times as much time and money on your brand as you spend on your logo.

Your logo is a referent, a symbol, a reminder of your brand.

But your brand is a story, a set of emotions and expectations and a stand-in for how we think and feel about what you do.
Too many people don’t understand this.

From a 2008 post at The New Yorker:

Some words for hangover, like ours, refer prosaically to the cause: the Egyptians say they are “still drunk,” the Japanese “two days drunk,” the Chinese “drunk overnight.” The Swedes get “smacked from behind.” But it is in languages that describe the effects rather than the cause that we begin to see real poetic power. Salvadorans wake up “made of rubber,” the French with a “wooden mouth” or a “hair ache.” The Germans and the Dutch say they have a “tomcat,” presumably wailing. The Poles, reportedly, experience a “howling of kittens.” My favorites are the Danes, who get “carpenters in the forehead.” In keeping with the saying about the Eskimos’ nine words for snow, the Ukrainians have several words for hangover. And, in keeping with the Jews-don’t-drink rule, Hebrew didn’t even have one word until recently. Then the experts at the Academy of the Hebrew Language, in Tel Aviv, decided that such a term was needed, so they made one up: hamarmoret, derived from the word for fermentation. (Hamarmoret echoes a usage of Jeremiah’s, in Lamentations 1:20, which the King James Bible translates as “My bowels are troubled.”) There is a biochemical basis for Jewish abstinence. Many Jews–fifty per cent, in one estimate–carry a variant gene for alcohol dehydrogenase. Therefore, they, like the East Asians, have a low tolerance for alcohol.
A “howling of kittens.”
I love me some collective nouns involving animals.
via ParisLemon

Evan Williams, founder of Medium, on Medium:

I was recently quoted as saying, “I don’t give a shit” if Instagram has more users than Twitter. If you read the article you’ll note there’s a big “if” before my not giving of said shit. As quoted:

If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant. It’s at least apples to oranges. Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this realtime information network where everything in the world that happens on Twitter – important stuff breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter. If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a shit if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.

Of course, I am trivializing what Instagram is to many people. It’s a beautifully executed app that enables the creation and enjoyment of art, as well as human connection, which is often a good thing. But my rant had very little to do with it (or with Twitter). My rant was the result of increasing frustration with the one-dimensionality that those who report on, invest in, and build consumer Internet services talk about success.
via Daring Fireball

This week Michael and Bryan discuss how iPhone cases sucks, the useful things missing from womens’s purses, Charlie Hebdo, bugs in iOS, and Michael’s car finds on eBay. The episode opens with a clip from Ghostbusters.
Listen Now (and subscribe on iTunes)

—T.S. Elliot

Intel’s $150 HDMI Stick Turns Any TV Into a Windows Desktop

Got an HDMI port handy? Sure, you could plug in a Chromecast, Fire TV Stick or Roku Streaming Stick to get your Netflix fix. Or you could pay $150 to get a full Windows 8.1 PC in the same form factor.
Why would anyone want to do this to their TV?
It’s like saying, “I’d like to turn my TV into a piece of shit.”

Re/code: This Is the Unofficial Brothel of CES:

When new women arrive to work at Sheri’s Ranch, a legal brothel about 65 miles west of Las Vegas, they have to be taught a lot of new techniques. Social media is one of the most important of them.

During this week’s sprawling International CES gadget show, which ends tomorrow and draws more than 150,000 people each year to the Las Vegas Convention Center, the sharing-savvy brothel sees some of its busiest nights. Sheri’s Ranch calls itself “the unofficial brothel of CES” — and says that business is up about 70 percent this week.

Brothel matron Dena, who uses humorously bawdy social media to attract CES attendees, also trains the ranch’s rotating roster of 75 to 100 on-site sex workers to create online personas and unique voices, which Dena says makes the women feel more empowered, and helps skirt the legal ban against advertising their services.

Andrew Watts, a 19-year-old at the University of Texas, posted an interesting piece on Medium titled, A Teenager’s View on Social Media.
He breaks down the popularity of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, SnapChat, Tumblr and YikYak in the “highly coveted” demographic of which he is a part.
Most interesting to me are his views on Facebook:

In short, many have nailed this on the head. It’s dead to us. Facebook is something we all got in middle school because it was cool but now is seen as an awkward family dinner party we can’t really leave.
This makes total sense. Mom, Dad and all your and all your aunts and uncles are on Facebook. LAME-O. But, wait:
Facebook is often used by us mainly for its group functionality. I know plenty of classmates who only go on Facebook to check the groups they are part of and then quickly log off.
And:
Messaging on Facebook is also extremely popular among our age group, mainly because they provide the means to talk to those people who you weren’t really comfortable with asking for their number but comfortable enough to send them a friend request.
So, despite being “dead” to the kids, they continue to use Facebook a lot. I’m willing to bet they use it potentially as much as other, more cool social networks like Instagram. What’s interesting is Andrew seems to define “using” a website/app as posting content to it. Simply “checking in” on it—like teens do on Facebook—doesn’t count. Server logs and analytics tools would beg to differ.
It also seems Facebook’s move to decouple messaging from the core Facebook product was a smart move. Facebook is perceived as a crazy, loud, public zoo (because it is), but Facebook Messenger is a discreet way to talk to someone.

From the Editorial Board of The New York Times:

Mayor Bill de Blasio has been in office barely a year, and already forces of entropy are roaming the streets, turning their backs on the law, defying civil authority and trying to unravel the social fabric.

No, not squeegee-men or turnstile-jumpers. We’re talking about the cops.

For the second straight week, police officers across the city have all but stopped writing tickets and severely cut down the number of arrests. The Times reported that in the week ending Sunday, only 347 criminal summonses were issued citywide, down from 4,077 over the same period last year. Parking and traffic tickets were down by more than 90 percent. In Coney Island, ticketing and summonses fell to zero.
Perhaps doctors should stop attending to injured police officers and their families when they have problems with something their bosses say. That’s fair, right?

Headline on Flavorwire:
Moviegoing Hit a 20-Year Low in 2014. Is the Death of the Movie Theater Inevitable?
Will theatres die? No.
Seriously reduce in number? Very possible. I say we start closing the disgusting ones, where you’re afraid you might catch bed bugs.
One a related note: Vinyl record sales in 2014 were the highest they’ve been since 1993