“…I think universities should conduct a 3 minute silence in memory of him. Just think about how many students would fail to finish their assignments or research papers, if instant noodle wasn’t invented?” Scott Yang, on the passing of 96-year-old Momofuku Ando, the inventor of instant noodle
“If you’ve ever wondered how it works, this is how it works: I don’t call Steve, Steve calls me. Or more accurately, someone in Steve Jobs’s office calls someone in my office—someone at a much higher pay grade —to say that he has something cool. I then fly to the metastasized strip mall called Cupertino, Calif., where Apple lives, sign some legal confidentiality stuff and am escorted to a conference room that contains Jobs, some associates, and some lumps concealed under some black towels. I stare at what was under the towels. Everybody else stares at me. This is how Apple, and nobody else, introduces new products to the press. It can be awkward, because Jobs is high-strung and he expects you to be impressed. I was, fortunately, and with good reason. Apple’s new iPhone could do to the cell phone market what the iPod did to the portable music player market: crush it pitilessly beneath the weight of its own superiority. This is unfortunate for anybody else who makes cell phones, but it’s good news for those of us who use them.” Lev Grossman, Time
“Forget toothpaste. Now it’s time to put some flavor in your life with Breath Palette. At $161 for a kit of all 31 flavors, who could resist? Looks like an all-natural idea for packaging toothpaste and then selling it for hundreds of times more than was spent to manufacture it… When you face brushing your teeth with flavors such as a Monkey Banana, Sweet Salt, and Darjeeling Tea, you may want to just skip the brushing and have a snack instead.” Gizmodo
“There are many different modes of creating wonder—psychology, misdirection, suggestion. A magician must find out what people are drawn to—what colors, what numbers, what shapes—so that you can kind of get a general idea of what people want to see. We’re kind of in the same business as advertisers, because we give people what they want to see, but on our terms. It’s hard to give an example without revealing secrets.” David Copperfield
“A 17-year-old boy in northeastern China was so disappointed with the looks of a woman he met over the Internet that he hanged himself after seeing her face-to-face, state media reported Friday.” Agence France-Presse
“In fact, what little clinical evidence there is suggests that dirty soap isn’t so bad. A study from 1965 and another from 1988 used similar methodologies: Researchers coated bars of soap in the lab with E. coli and other nasty bacteria, and then gave them to test subjects for a vigorous hand-wash. Both teams found no transfer of contamination from the dirty soap. However, both studies were tainted by potential conflicts of interest: The first was conducted by Procter & Gamble, and the second came from the Dial Corp. Still, there’s no good evidence to contradict these studies, and it’s likely that the bacteria on a dirty bar would just wash off when you rinsed your hands. In other words, you’d be cleaning the soap as you cleaned your hands.” Daniel Engber, Slate Magazine
“Police have warned fish farmers to increase their security after 15,000 halibut were released from their cages in an attack believed to have been carried out by animal rights activists… Thousands of dead fish are being washed up along the west coast of Scotland… The halibut died from starvation or getting caught in seaweed. They were also being eaten by herring gulls and otters.” Valerie Elliott, Times Online
“The grain structure of film allows a softness that HD video tends not to have, posing more challenges, especially when it comes to capturing female faces. We seem not to care about seeing men in a rougher, more edgier way, whereas females, were used to seeing them in a softer, more appealing way. So there’s a little more filtration needed, and you have to approach it from a different standpoint.” Stephen McNutt, director of photography for Battlestar Galactica
“You have to understand how we do things at Apple. We think different. So, por ejemplo, as they say in the Netherlands, we don’t start with the phone, or the software. We start with the ads. We’ll spend months doing storyboards, writing slogans, making fake billboards that we put up in one of our windowless warehouses. I realize this is the reverse of how most companies do it. Just about everybody else starts with the product, and only when it’s done do they go, Oh, wait, we gotta come up with some sort of ad, don’t we? Which is why most advertising sucks, because it’s an afterthought.” Fake Steve, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs
“Deciding between the spicy peanut stew and the pesto chicken, or the squash soup and the avocado, chicken, lime soup, are not the only decisions tempting patrons at the One World Café in Salt Lake City and the SAME So All Might Eat Café in Denver. They must also decide what the meal is worth. These pay-as-you-can cafes have missions that are unapologetically altruistic—call it serving up fare Robin Hood style… Customers who have no money are encouraged to exchange an hour of service — sweep, wash the dishes, weed the organic garden — for a meal. Likewise, guests who have money are encouraged to leave a little extra to offset the meals of those who have less to give.” Peta Owens-Liston, Time.com