Aviv Naveh, Paratroopers, Palamhim, 2005
Blake Masters: Peter Thiel’s CS183: Startup - Class 4 Notes Essay -
Here is an essay version of my class notes from Class 4 of CS183: Startup. Errors and omissions are my own. Credit for good stuff is Peter’s entirely.
CS183: Startup—Notes Essay—April 11—The Last Mover Advantage
I. Escaping Competition
The usual narrative is that capitalism and…
VisaMapper
A site that helps you find Visa-free travel destinations.
I just got around to reading Benjamin Schmidt’s piece in The Atlantic on the historical accuracy of the language in Mad Men and found this on Schmidt’s blog. Very cool, and some of the anachronisms in Mad Men are quite surprising. (He’s made charts for Downton Abbey, too.)
This is wonderful. Just wonderful.
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(via 1948 Norman Timbs Special Images)
cdixon tumblr: Warren Buffet on gold as an investment -
The second major category of investments involves assets that will never produce anything, but that are purchased in the buyer’s hope that someone else – who also knows that the assets will be forever unproductive – will pay more for them in the future. Tulips, of all things, briefly became a…
Lately, I’ve been making an app called Taxonomy (that desperately needs your votes …sorry). It’s designed to make your taxi experience better- a traveling companion, if you will. Going by the logic that a lot of people (in New York, at least) only really travel in taxis when out at night,…
Drew Wilson has introduced a new service ($19–$99/year) which allows designers to create custom icon fonts from his Pictos collection. It’s crazy simple: Pick your icons, assign to letters, and embed the font live, ala Typekit, or download the file for a small fee. Brilliant.
Also: if you need a little convincing as to why you would want to use a webfont for icons, check out this excellent article on CSSTricks.
(via Meanwhile, in Switzerland - Imgur)
The Iglu-Dorf Gstaad (gallery).
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Today, Facebook is publishing a study that disproves some hoary conventional wisdom about the Web. According to this new research, the online echo chamber doesn’t exist.
Facebook did a non-peer-reviewed study on its own network, that hinged heavily on its secret EdgeRank algorithm and — surprise — got results that are very good PR for Facebook. This is awfully familiar! Slate’s eating that shit up, without having seen the study, of course, with only a token mention of the obvious bias. I wish we were better at skepticism, people that read and report on technology.
“The only useful airport security measures since 9/11,” he says, “were locking and reinforcing the cockpit doors, so terrorists can’t break in, positive baggage matching”—ensuring that people can’t put luggage on planes, and then not board them —“and teaching the passengers to fight back. The rest is security theater.” — Bruce Schneier, Does Airport Security Really Make Us Safer? | Culture | Vanity Fair