New Math

New Math is a well-designed, simple website about concepts as math equations run by the mysterious CRAIG DAMRAUER. Craig claims to bake his ideas fresh every monday. Simple, delightful. Some of the ideas are rather half-baked, but I appreciate the fresh visual appeal.

As a tangential aside, I always have trouble spelling "equation." It makes sense that there is a T there, because the two sides equaTe but it's weird that everyone pronounces it equaSION. Like an invasion of equal signs. Sigh. I digress. Enjoy!

(From sorry, I forgot)

The Classic Tie Knots

The Classic Tie Knots is an article on the Ben Silver site that teaches you how to properly tie a tie. They show you how to do the Ascot, the Bow Tie, the Cross knot, the Four-in-hand, the Half-Windsor, the Windsor, the Prince Albert, and the Small Knot. They even have videos for the imagination-impaired.

Makes me want to go get a tie and practice.

(From Metafilter)

Academic Earth

Academic Earth is a website that gathers thousands of video lectures from the world's top scholars.

From their FAQ:
"What is Academic Earth?
Academic Earth is working to bring together the best available content across many subjects and distribute it in an engaging and useful way to learners worldwide.

How many videos are available on Academic Earth?
As of this writing, there are over fifteen hundred videos from MIT, Stanford, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. We are adding more every day. Some of these are grouped into courses, which each contain anywhere from 4 to 50 lectures.

Can I get credit for these courses?
No - but feel free to learn as much as you'd like.

Can I download copies of lectures?
Yes, when the "Download to iPod" option appears you can download a QuickTime version of the lecture. Just right click on the "Download to iPod" link and select "Save Target As..." or the equivalent for your browser.

Can you skip ahead during lectures?
You can skip ahead in lectures using the progress bar at the bottom of the video. However, right now, you need to wait for the video to load before you can do this. (Watch the dark grey bar). We're working on improving this for future releases.

How do grades work?
Lectures start out with a grade of B. From there the grade is an average of the grades that our users have given it. Course grades are based on the grades given to the lectures in that course. Highly rated content will show up first in browse results and in the Top Rated sections in our homepage. The more people provide feedback, the better the ratings will get."

Sample lecture by Guy Kawasaki:

The blurb for it:

"Kawasaki thinks that companies like Nordstrom, Audi, and Nike make the world a better place. His advice: don't start a business because you think that's what's hot. You should study and do what you love, he says. He can't promise you that the money will come, he does promise that if you start a company simply for the money, you will probably end up miserable."

Enjoy!
(From Metafilter)

Lunch Bag Art

Lunch Bag Art is a Tumblr blog by a talented dad who draws on his kid's lunchbags every day. Things like Daria, and Toad, and such. He draws those during his lunch break. And apparently he takes artsy photos of them as well.

Do those kids know how lucky they are?!?!? Hands down, coolest lunch recepticles EVAR.
(From Metafilter)

Your Family May Once Have Been A Different Color

Your Family May Once Have Been A Different Color is a story by Robert Krulwich from Morning Edition. It's about how, according to Nina Jablonski (head of the Penn State Department of Anthropology), skin color can change over relatively few generations, without intermarriage.

She estimates 100 generations or less. I have no idea whether this is credible or not, but it certainly is interesting.

(From NPR)

Wiki Trivia

Wiki Trivia is an online trivia game by Alex Ksikes and Philipp Lenssen made from Wikipedia entries. Basically, it pulls up quotes from a wikipedia page, and replaces defined nouns with questions marks. You have to guess what is being talked about.

It's fun, for like, 5 seconds. Enjoy.

(From Metafilter)

Racialicious

Racialicious is a blog by Carmen Van Kerckhove on race, pop culture media, and diversity education. Latoya Peterson is Editor of Racialicious and Carmen Van Kerckhove is founder and Publisher.

They usually have well-thought out posts on race and race-relations. For example, here is a long long LONG exerpt dissecting the movie Gran Torino:

"In Gran Torino, Clint Eastwood plays a bitter old man who’s basically the only white person left in a run-down neighborhood somewhere in the Midwest. He (reluctantly, at first) gets to know his Hmong neighbors, and ends up getting intricately involved in their lives, as they deal with issues caused by a local Hmong gang that some of their relatives are a part of.

There are plenty of things about the movie that might make for great posts on Racialicious:

1. Like most Hollywood movies that are about a community of people of color, Gran Torino features a white protagonist who not only saves the day, but also has the most layers of complexity to his personality.

2. As the first major Hollywood film about Hmong Americans, how did it do at depicting this community? Does the exposure of Hmong culture and the opportunity for Hmong actors outweigh the possible inaccuracies and negative representations? (See some of the commentary about this on AsianWeek.)

3. Clint Eastwood’s character’s constant racist remarks serve as a running joke in the movie. Just because he uses outdated and blatantly un-P.C. language with an “equal-opportunity discrimination” approach, is it OK to use this deeply offensive language as comic relief?

But I don’t really want to write about those things. I want to write about another reaction I had.

Of course I’ve seen other movies involving gangs, shootings, and/or rape. But this one hit me harder. After seeing it, I couldn’t stop worrying about the Hmong family depicted in the movie. I think there were a few reasons that the gang violence and the rest of the plot made such a big impact on me:

One reason is that the gang members and family affected were all Asian. I suppose I had heard of the existence of Asian American (or even Hmong American) gangs, but it’s easy to forget. Because of the media I’ve been exposed to my whole life, I usually make the assumption that street gangs are mostly made up of African Americans and Latinos, and then I also hear about “organized” crime—the Italian mafia, Chinese mafia, etc. (I’m pretty sure there’s a fine line between gangs and organized crime anyway, and I wonder how much racist assumptions factor in to that distinction.)

The gang activity in the movie was disturbing because it was relatively unexpected. My girlfriend pointed out that in the beginning of the movie, the neighborhood where it takes place doesn’t seem like a dangerous neighborhood. I think that’s because the neighborhood isn’t the stereotypical dangerous neighborhood usually depicted in films—which would be a black or Latino neighborhood in a densely populated urban area. In Gran Torino, the first impressions the viewers get of the neighborhood are of a white (Polish American) family gathering at one house, and then of a Hmong family gathering at the house next door. White and Asian families coming together around home-cooked food on the weekends, in their two-story houses with lawns, doesn’t seem to have much to do with criminal activity. But of course, that’s because the movie scenes we’re accustomed to tell us otherwise.

Another thing that made the setting less stereotypical was that it took place in the Midwest (I’m not sure where exactly). And rather than showing us the culturally homogeneous setting that we’re used to seeing and that’s become synonymous with the Midwest (except for Chicago), we see an extremely diverse neighborhood, in which the main character is quickly becoming, or already is, a racial minority as a white person. Indeed, a little casual research showed me that Minnesota and Wisconsin have the largest populations of Hmong Americans along with California."

Oh the things I didn't know! They also published a counterpoint.

A shorter exerpt of the critique of He's Just Not That Into You:

"Minorities are literally background color - people who move through the white circles of the leads, but rarely stick. (The exceptions are Mary’s coworkers at the fictional Blade, played by Wilson Cruz and Leonardo Nam. I’ll refer everyone to Queerty’s take on those two.) When you see blacks, it’s Frangela (more on that in a bit), the black waiter serving Gigi and Connor’s table, or the black waiter who works at Alex’s bar. When you see Latin@s in the movie, they are in the Army, or working on the homes of wealthy whites who are renovating. At one point, Ben tries to blame all the 'undocumented workers' currently re-doing their home for some cigarettes Janine found. Janine also speaks dismissively to Javier, the head contractor on their home, before she has a breakdown about her husband’s deception. (Javier, to his character’s credit, shows his mastery of the English language by pointing out that the question/statement Janine posed didn’t have the proper inflection to be a question, and noted her excessive use of prepositions.)"

Enjoy.
(From TJ, from a backlink from TOTI)

Crisis of Credit

Crisis of Credit is a video from Jonathan Jarvis, a graduate tudent at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California. The project was completed as part of his thesis work in the Media Design Program. In his words, "The goal of giving form to a complex situation like the credit crisis is to quickly supply the essence of the situation to those unfamiliar and uninitiated. "  The topic is still complex, but the figures are appealing. He does good work with great visual impact.  The old-school sound and narration are awesome, and the heart-beat crescendo unnerving. Love it.  

(From buzzfeed)

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide?

Amy Tan: Where does creativity hide? is a spectacularly good TED talk about the nature of creativity by Amy Tan. Amy, of course, wrote the Joy Luck Club, The Kitchen God's Wife and The Hundred Secret Senses.

Her talk is laced with interesting pictures and metaphors. Totally worth your 18 minutes. Also, I did not know she had temporal lobe seizures.

(From your Mom)

Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook.

Oh Crap. My Parents Joined Facebook. is a blog for people whose parents joined Facebook and the teeming millions who like to make fun of them. For some reason, all of the quotes from the kids are in crowded black letters with white outlines and a drop shadow. And encoded as pictures. Whatever floats your boat, I guess.

Has it happened to you? Sure happened to meeeeeeee. Fun.

(From Laughing Squid )