Everything Is Fascinating

• 2012-05-17 479 notes

  

  motherjones:

  The Charts TED Doesn’t Want to Publicize:

  Why wouldn’t TED Talks post these income inequality charts and the video of a TED presentation about how the American middle class has been left behind?

  Source: motherjones

• 2012-05-16 2 notes

  

  When Is Sexy Time?

  December is sexy time! Otherwise, it sure looks like April is the cruelest month for love. What happens right after Valentine’s Day? Everyone is either exhausted or seething with anger.

  Inspired by Matt Stiles’s visualization of birth date frequency, I took the data compiled by Harvard economist Amitabh Chandrato its logical conclusion: birthday rankings minus forty weeks suggests the most common dates on or about which couples conceive children.

• 2012-05-01 12 notes

  

  See How Easy You Can Learn Hypnotism

• 2012-04-30 0 notes

  

  Do Your Friends Feel Sorry for Your Wife?

  Like it or not, your friends and neighbors size you up by what you EARN—judged by your home and family. Why not surprise them by making good in a big way? Tell them nothing, but on the quiet fit yourself for a bigger place!

  The American tradition of success literature has always depended on questioning the indvidual’s sense of self-worth. The con of success seeks out a person who is susceptible to suggestion (which is almost all of us), holding up an imaginary mirror that says “hey, buddy: you are not what you think you are. Look at how other people—your friends and neighbors—actually see you.” It is essential that this picture show the individual as a powerless being.

  Because we can not actually see into the minds of others, we are rarely certain what others think of us, and yet are deeply, if secretly, curious about that. The con enters through this gap in our mind. When someone shares the gossip about us, we become so fixated on the gossip that we don’t question the source.

  The second step to the con is to impose a measurement of the individual that compares him, unfavorably, to lots of others who are finding success, to make the mark of the con feel he is falling behind those others, that they are moving while he is not. Now the con has the mark exactly where he wants: feeling powerless and immobilized, a drooling Homer Simpson on the couch.

  The individual mark now sees himself as powerless and unmoving and is ready for the con’s offer. The mark will feel that any action is better than the present state of no action, so the con is free to propose almost anything to the mark and find a welcome landing.

  In the final step, the con sets up a very simple challenge, a small, easy action to take, often something the individual can do right at that moment, and through which the mark can demonstrate he is not powerless, no no, no at all. And then the individual is hooked: he has a sense of power again, the endorphins and adrenaline are unleashed in his body, and his body knows, even if his mind doesn’t, that the source of this feeling of power is the con man, and he’s ready for more.

  This sequence is the model for most marketing and propaganda: to first make you feel powerless and immobilized, then make you feel powerful while embedding within you the unconscious feeling that the source of your power is the brand of product or service the the marketer is trying to sell. It doesn’t matter if they are selling floor mops, pick-up trucks, or a political candidate, the model is largely the same.

• 2012-04-26 2 notes

  

  BE AN ARTIST!

  —and be your own boss!

  1928 advertisement for the Federal School of Illustrating, Minneapolis, MN

  Source: books.google.com

• 2012-04-25 0 notes

  

  My Apologies for Marketing.

  Really? Since when is freeze dried coffee fresh?

• 0 notes

  One of the profound objectives of all art is not to tell you something new, but, really, to give you a profound insight into something you already know.

  …

  I want to make beautiful things, even if nobody cares.

  —Saul Bass (May 8, 1920 – April 25, 1996)

• 2012-04-23 1 note

  

  Lie Still, Little Bottle

• 0 notes

  

  BIG NEED FOR SYSTEMS MEN

  …LEARN AT HOME IN SPARE TIME

  Every company, large & small, needs a Systems Man. As a Systems Man, you’ll work with management… help them make vital decisions… make a prestige salary… and enjoy your work, too! You’ll supervise CHARTING, PROCEDURE PLANNING, FORMS DESIGN, OFFICE LAYOUT, COMPUTER PROGRAMMING, DATA PROCESSING, etc. Big Demand — see high salary positions in “help wanted” sections of your newspaper. You need no previous experience or special training… easy home-study plan guides you toward success, prestige, good salary in exciting, respected field. High school education required. Send for free Booklet, “OPPORTUNITIES IN SYSTEMS.”

  North American Institute of Systems & Procedures
  4401 BIRCH ST., DEPT. 4171, NEWPORT, CALIF. 92660

• 2012-04-22 69 notes

  

  Who actually believes communicating is “Mission Critical”? The Archives of the United States. That’s who.

  aotus:

  Until fairly recently, social media has been seen as experimental and outside the realm of the essential work of our agency. Today that is simply no longer the case.  Smart use of social media is now mission-critical to our agency.

  Today, it is no longer about a single voice disseminating information from the Archives. Our customers want deeper access to our staff and to hear the entire chorus of our voices.  Our citizen archivists and engaged customers eagerly await more ways to participate and add their voices to the chorus.  Together we can provide greater access to the records, and a deeper understanding of those records. Together we’ll amplify each other’s messages.

  Let’s do it!

  Read the full post on the AOTUS blog.

  (via todaysdocument)

  Source: blogs.archives.gov

• 2012-04-20 3 notes

  Why do humans tend to imagine that there are gods at all? Because, according to the latest from the field of cognitive science, there was a survival advantage in imagining that every stirring in the tall grass meant that a leopard — or some such potential hazardous life form — might be closing in for an attack. Our brains are what the cognitive scientists call “hyperactive agency detection devices”: we see faces in clouds, hear denunciations in thunder, and sense transcendent beings all around us because we evolved on a planet densely occupied by other “agents” — animals that could destroy us with the slash of a claw or the splash of a fin, arbitrarily and in seconds.

  — Barbara Ehrenreich, “The Animal Cure.” In The Baffler, #19.

• 2012-04-17 3 notes

  

  Separated at birth?

• 2012-04-16 0 notes

  If most of the value is now in the initial creative act, there’s little benefit to traditional hierarchical organization that’s designed to deliver the same thing over and over, making only incremental changes over time. What matters is being first and bootstrapping your product into a positive feedback spiral with a constant stream of creative innovation. Hierarchical management doesn’t help with that, because it bottlenecks innovation through the people at the top of the hierarchy, and there’s no reason to expect that those people would be particularly creative about coming up with new products that are dramatically different from existing ones - quite the opposite, in fact.

  — Michael Abrash via Jason Kottke

  Source: blogs.valvesoftware.com

• 2012-04-13 0 notes

  

  Your Cart Is Empty.

  Cathedral Holy Water Bottle. Bottles come with Holy Water from the Cathedral

  Source: j.mp

• 2012-04-10 0 notes

  

  Married Women to Lose Jobs

  SALEM, Ore., April 14 (AP).—Married women whose husbands earn enough to support their families soon will be excluded from the State payroll, Carl Cover, assistant State budget director stated today. Women whose husbands are not earning enough to provide for their support will be retained, however, he added.

  (April 15, 1935)