Tom Ford tells AnOther Magazine how to be a gentleman (via Om Malik):

1. You should put on the best version of yourself when you go out in the world because that is a show of respect to the other people around you.

2. A gentleman today has to work. People who do not work are so boring and are usually bored. You have to be passionate, you have to be engaged and you have to be contributing to the world.

3. Manners are very important and actually knowing when things are appropriate. I always open doors for women, I carry their coat, I make sure that they’re walking on the inside of the street. Stand up when people arrive at and leave the dinner table.

4. Don’t be pretentious or racist or sexist or judge people by their background.

5. A man should never wear shorts in the city. Flip-flops and shorts in the city are never appropriate. Shorts should only be worn on the tennis court or on the beach.

Great list.
Especially #5 – guys with the flip flops, you have to cut that shit out. Ladies too, but I’ll save that for another post.

The Awl: Wikipedia And The Death Of The Expert

Experts, geniuses, authorities, “authors”–we were taught to believe that these should be questioned, but until now have not often been given a way to do so, to seek out and test for ourselves the exact means by which they reached their conclusions. So long as we believe that there is such a thing as an expert rather than a fellow-investigator, then that person’s views just by magic will be worth more than our own, no matter how much or how often actual events have shown this not to be the case. For us to have this magic thinking about “individualism” then is pernicious politically, intellectually, in every way. That is not to say that we don’t value those who can lead the conversation. We’ll need them more and more, those “who are able to marshal the wisdom of the network,” to use Bob Stein’s words. But they might be more like DJs, assembling new ways of looking at things from a huge variety of elements, than like than judges whose processes are secret, and whose opinions are sacred.

I think about this idea of experts, DJs and curation in relation to current events in technology like Drudge Report’s continued success (on page of curated links) and GroupOn (curated products and events with quality writeups).

I learned a new word this morning:

All these years of living and I’m still surprised to see Q come before R, S, and T. Q should be hangin with V, W and X. I’m sure of it.

via my brother on Twitter

Without play, there is no experimentation.

—Paul Rand

via this isn’t happiness

NYTimes: The High Cost of Low Teacher Salaries

WHEN we don’t get the results we want in our military endeavors, we don’t blame the soldiers. We don’t say, “It’s these lazy soldiers and their bloated benefits plans! That’s why we haven’t done better in Afghanistan!” No, if the results aren’t there, we blame the planners. We blame the generals, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs of Staff. No one contemplates blaming the men and women fighting every day in the trenches for little pay and scant recognition.

And yet in education we do just that. When we don’t like the way our students score on international standardized tests, we blame the teachers. When we don’t like the way particular schools perform, we blame the teachers and restrict their resources.

And what about the money:

For those who say, “How do we pay for this?” — well, how are we paying for three concurrent wars? How did we pay for the interstate highway system? Or the bailout of the savings and loans in 1989 and that of the investment banks in 2008? How did we pay for the equally ambitious project of sending Americans to the moon? We had the vision and we had the will and we found a way.

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle:

In quantum mechanics, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot simultaneously be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known. In other words, the more you know the position of a particle, the less you know about its velocity, and the more you know about the velocity of a particle, the less you know about its instantaneous position.

From Off The Wall TV – Pass The Bucket with Tony Alva:

Considered to be one of the the most influential skateboarders of all time, Tony Alva, an original Z-Boy, hit a bottom 4 years ago battling drug addiction and alcoholism. There, at his lowest point, his reliance on successes and ego came into perspective for the first time. Tony’s fight for sobriety and truth has recently lead him to a new perspective on life and direction moving forward. Dedicated to giving back Tony now see’s passing the bucket as the only way out.

Still skateboarding at 53 years old. Impressive.

NYTimes: Designers Make Data Much Easier to Digest

In an uncharted world of boundless data, information designers are our new navigators.

In a Stamen graphic of Twitter traffic during an MTV awards show, the number of tweets about celebrities was reflected in the size of their photos. They are computer scientists, statisticians, graphic designers, producers and cartographers who map entire oceans of data and turn them into innovative visual displays, like rich graphs and charts, that help both companies and consumers cut through the clutter. These gurus of visual analytics are making interactive data synonymous with attractive data.

And:

Visual analytics play off the idea that the brain is more attracted to and able to process dynamic images than long lists of numbers. But the goal of information visualization is not simply to represent millions of bits of data as illustrations. It is to prompt visceral comprehension, moments of insight that make viewers want to learn more.

Bingo. It’s great to see what we designers do get recognized by the mainstream press.

NYTimes: Paterson Teacher Suspended Over a Post on Facebook

A first-grade teacher in Paterson, N.J., was suspended on Thursday after she posted on her Facebook page that she felt like a warden overseeing future criminals, district officials said.

From some of the stories I’ve heard from people who teach, it’s very likely this woman wasn’t exaggerating. Just saying.
She just needs to work not broadcasting that inside voice of hers on the biggest social network in the world.

From SlashDot:

A 12-year-old boy by the name of Jacob Barnett is a math genius. Mastering many college level astrophysics courses by the age of 8, he now works on his most ambitious project to date: his own ‘expanded version of Einstein’s theory of relativity.

………Mkay.

From the NYTimes:

WASHINGTON — In a lively decision that relied as much on dictionaries, grammar and usage as it did on legal analysis, the Supreme Court on Tuesday ruled unanimously that corporations have no personal privacy rights for purposes of the Freedom of Information Act.

Chief Justice Roberts dropped some serious vocab on AT&T’s ass:

In addition to considering dictionary definitions for and the common usage of the word “personal” standing alone, Chief Justice Roberts said the word should also be considered in the context of the phrase “personal privacy.” Here, too, he said, “AT&T’s effort to attribute a special legal meaning to the word ‘personal’ in this particular context is wholly unpersuasive.”

“Two words together may assume a more particular meaning than those words in isolation,” he wrote, adding that “personal privacy” suggests “a kind of privacy evocative of human concerns.”

The chief justice had examples here, too. “We understand a golden cup to be a cup made of or resembling gold,” he wrote. “A golden boy, on the other hand, is one who is charming, lucky and talented. A golden opportunity is one not to be missed.”

Thanks, Bryan.

This was the first thing that popped in my head when I saw my coworker Victor‘s mouse:

I’m just waiting for a little Batman to bust out of the mouse on a little mouse wheel Bat Bike and drive across my keyboard.