I can’t find a decent explanation anywhere of why the #1 soccer player in France would headbutt another player in the final moments of the big game. This is as good as any: “the lofty hermeneut within me saw it as the supreme existentialist gesture—le grand refus—at the very moment of being inducted

Kyle MacDonald started with a single red paperclip, and, through a series of trades, managed to exchange it for a whole house: one red paperclip

Leaving aside the tiresome journalists vs bloggers debate for a moment, here’s a chewy piece by Tom Stites about the failings of newspapers over the past 10-20 years to address the needs of all citizens. In fact, newspapers have been deliberately turning away readers from the bottom tiers of the eco

Excellent guiding principle: “Concrete is much easier to work with before it is poured.” Todd Lappin – 15 Minutes of Madness

To decode da Vinci, you need a firm grasp of art. To learn from Archimedes, you need to get your hands on something a bit more sophisticated. Like a synchrotron that accelerates electrons to nearly the speed of light to produce x-rays. At least, that’s what scientists at the Stanford Linear Accelera

A new generation of backcountry gear offers the perfect balance of high performance and low, low weight. Your back will be ecstatic. Big Agnes Seedhouse Superlight 2It might not be blizzard-worthy, but this sub-3.5-pound, two-person tent is as easy to pitch as it is to haul. And for three-season cam

Summer is all about the right mix of sun and surf. It’s the perfect time – and light – for fun pics but can be brutal on a typical camera’s innards. That’s why you need a waterproof shooter. Unlike standard models that are often accessorized with a cumbersome dive case, these cams come ready to […]

GoLite’s Wisp windjacket ($50-60) is made out of faerie wings. OK, it’s really made out of alien space fabric. Whatever the material, it’s mysteriously lightweight, so the whole jacket only weighs 2.5 ounces and you can squish it down to the size of a large orange and jam it into a corner of your pa

Blog comments are like drive-by shootings: Someone fires off a comment, then disappears, never to be seen again. There’s no follow-through, and it’s hard to engage in a sustained back-and-forth shootout, I mean, conversation. Subscribe to Comments changes that. It’s a free WordPress plugin that acco

The old grade school puzzler goes like this: Which is heavier: A pound of bricks or a pound of feathers? If you’re eight years old and you’re not paying attention, you say “bricks.” JP Rangaswami, who writes the IT blog Confused of Calcutta, used a similar analogy in a discussion I had with him last

The videonet is here. Data point: People upload 50,000 videos to YouTube every day. In turn, the site delivers 50 million video views each day. That’s huge. One of the most useful panels at Supernova covered “the rise of the videonet.” One of the panelists, Mary Hodder of Napsterization, quoted some

How real is the Net advertising boom? “Only about 6 percent of all advertising spending in the United States went to the Internet in the first quarter of the year … but it was clearly the fastest-growing category — up 38 percent year over year.” Waiting for the Dough on the Web