The Burger Lab: The Fake Shack | A Hamburger Today

Yes, I’m talking about the Shack Burger from Shake Shack, of which more than enough has been written about already. I’m not here to wax poetic about what Josh Ozersky has dubbed “the platonic ideal of a hamburger”—rather, I’m here to talk about a way to skip the line that doesn’t involve standing outside at 9 p.m. on a rainy Tuesday night: Just make the Shack Burger at home. Easier said than done.

The fun theory

This site is dedicated to the thought that something as simple as fun is the easiest way to change people’s behaviour for the better. Be it for yourself, for the environment, or something entirely different, the only thing that matters is that it’s change for the better.

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Avlon: Extremism in danger of acceptance – CNN.com

The civility is dying in part because the permanent campaign pursued by incumbent presidents to sell the American people on their agenda is being met with a new innovation: the permanent opposition campaign.

There is no presidential honeymoon and no national unity in this new view. There is no assumption of goodwill or responsible governance from the president of a different party.

Opposition is now “resistance” and politics is an ideological blood sport between not just right and left, but good and evil. And so any president with an opposing view is an enemy — and the ugliness emerges.

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Stuff

I’m not claiming this is because I’ve achieved some kind of zenlike detachment from material things. I’m talking about something more mundane. A historical change has taken place, and I’ve now realized it. Stuff used to be valuable, and now it’s not.

In industrialized countries the same thing happened with food in the middle of the twentieth century. As food got cheaper (or we got richer; they’re indistinguishable), eating too much started to be a bigger danger than eating too little. We’ve now reached that point with stuff. For most people, rich or poor, stuff has become a burden.

We are Colorblind » Patterns for the Color Blind

About 8% of the male population has some sort of color blindness. The color blind have the inability to clearly distinguish different colors of the spectrum, they tend to see colors in a limited range of hues. Because of this, the color blind have trouble with a lot of websites.

Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

In one study, Benedetti found that Alzheimer’s patients with impaired cognitive function get less pain relief from analgesic drugs than normal volunteers do. Using advanced methods of EEG analysis, he discovered that the connections between the patients’ prefrontal lobes and their opioid systems had been damaged. Healthy volunteers feel the benefit of medication plus a placebo boost. Patients who are unable to formulate ideas about the future because of cortical deficits, however, feel only the effect of the drug itself. The experiment suggests that because Alzheimer’s patients don’t get the benefits of anticipating the treatment, they require higher doses of painkillers to experience normal levels of relief.

Which Financial Records to Keep (and How Long to Keep Them) * Get Rich Slowly

Keep any tax-related records for seven years. Keep records of IRA contributions permanently. Keep quarterly retirement/savings plan statements until you receive an annual statement. If the numbers match, shred the quarterlies and keep the annual summaries permanently. Shred unimportant bank records after one year; keep the rest permanently. Keep brokerage statements until you sell the securities. Most of the time you can shred bills once you get a cancelled check. Keep bills for big items permanently. Keep credit card receipts to reconcile with your statements, then keep the statements for seven years. Paycheck stubs should be kept until you receive your end-of-year tax statements. Keep house records permanently. (Some can be held for less time, but I think it’s wise to keep them all.)

Want to Remember Everything You’ll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm

Once we drop the excuse that memorization is pointless, we’re left with an interesting mystery. Much of the information does remain in our memory, though we cannot recall it. “To this day,” Bjork says, “most people think about forgetting as decay, that memories are like footprints in the sand that gradually fade away. But that has been disproved by a lot of research. The memory appears to be gone because you can’t recall it, but we can prove that it’s still there. For instance, you can still recognize a ‘forgotten’ item in a group. Yes, without continued use, things become inaccessible. But they are not gone.”

Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? – TIME

The inevitable question is, How much of this industry is sincere? Last year, shortly after the election, Beck spoke with TIME’s Kate Pickert, and he didn’t sound very scared back then. Of Obama’s early personnel decisions, he said, “I think so far he’s chosen wisely.” Of his feelings about the President: “I am not an Obama fan, but I am a fan of our country … He is my President, and we must have him succeed. If he fails, we all fail.” Of the Democratic Party: “I don’t know personally a single Democrat who is a dope-smoking hippie that wants to turn us into Soviet Russia.” Of the civic duty to trust: “We’ve got to pull together, because we are facing dark, dark times. I don’t trust a single weasel in Washington. I don’t care what party they’re from. But unless we trust each other, we’re not going to make it.”

“How can we trust each other, though, when the integrated economy of ranters and their delighted-to-be-outraged critics are such a model of profitability? A microphone, a camera and a polarizing host are all it takes to get the money moving.”

So the article is kind of interesting, but doesn’t answer the question. The answer is YES. Yes he is, and so is Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Keith Olbermann, and Rachel Maddow.

“We tell ourselves a tale in America, and you can read it in Latin on the back of a buck: E pluribus unum. Many people from many lands, made one in a patriotic forge. And there’s truth in that story — it conjures powerful pictures in the theater of our national mind. But it can also be misleading. Lots of Americans can’t stand one another, don’t trust each other and are willing — even eager — to believe the worst about one another. This story is as old as the gun used by Vice President Aaron Burr to kill his political rival Alexander Hamilton.”

Anyone who tells you, as Glenn has, the only reason everything isn’t perfect is because “…we’re being held back. And who is holding us back? Politicians. Special-interest groups. Political correctness. You name it — everybody but you” is making a buck off you. Anyone who inspires you to hate half the people in your country and start thinking of them as an enemy is bad bad bad for America.

I never talk about politics online because it is too easy for people to act like jerks in ways they never would face to face (including me), and I will probably let this be the end of my brief foray into moderate political ranting. But seriously people, can’t we stop encouraging these jerks?

via Mad Man: Is Glenn Beck Bad for America? – TIME.

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The Kindle Problem – The Atlantic (September 14, 2009)

For people who love books, there are quite a few intangibles that an electronic device will never quite be able to replicate. For example, the Kindle lets readers down with respect to one subtle but powerful element of the traditional book’s appeal: its role as an identity marker. Pulling out a particular book on an airline flight or in a doctor’s office can mean staking a claim to being a particular kind of person. Likewise, the books lining your living room or office can tell others about your interests and background. But on the Kindle, no matter what you’re reading, all anyone else will see is an unchanging plastic device.

via The Kindle Problem – The Atlantic (September 14, 2009) .

Remembering September 11th

Remembering September 11th – The Big Picture – Boston.com.

I was in California visiting my parents. My Mom, who has amnesia and is not a reliable news source, called out to me to come watch the TV, someone had just bombed the World Trade Center. I told her it happened a long time ago and they were just talking about it on the news again or something. She said, “No, this is live. An airplane flew into it.” It took me watching TV for a few minutes before I could process what happened.

I drove back to Utah that day. I remember how the freeway was deserted. I listened to the news on the radio for a while but had to turn it off. All the details were just too disturbing and I didn’t want to hear anymore. I drove in silence for hours.

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More Chinese Farmer Innovations: Baby Buddha Pears! | InventorSpot

Buddha Pears

Buddha Pears

Farmer Gao XianZhang has created a plastic mold that he uses to enclose each pear, and eventually the fruit will assume the shape of that mold. It’s a simple enough idea, and of course it’s hardly the first time that anyone has done this with some fruit. But you’ve got to credit Farmer Gao with coming up with a design that consumers will be attracted to.  And Chinese consumers tend to bite when it comes to this ‘good luck’ jazz.

via More Chinese Farmer Innovations: Baby Buddha Pears! | InventorSpot.

I don’t want to buy them, I just want a tree with little Buddhas hanging off of it like that.