This Tumblr serves as a repository of the Internet ephemera that I find particularly interesting. This is primarily for my own future reference, but you, random viewer, may find it intriguing as well.
The Most Beautiful McDonald’s In America
McDonald’s purchased a crumbling 100+ year old Georgian mansion in Long Island, NY with the intention of tearing it down and replacing it with a standard McDonald’s restaurant. However, the locals secured landmark status for the building and McDonald’s was forced to restore the property under the guidelines of the landmarks commission, resulting in the most beautiful McDonald’s in America.
8-Bit Synthesized version of Marvin Gaye’s “Sexual Healing”
(Source: Boing Boing)
What America Buys - 1949 vs. 2011.
The poor aren’t less able, they’re distracted.
When you’re poor you’re surrounded by bad decisions of people around you. You’re so concerned about the present that you can’t begin thinking about the future, and that’s the big irony: People with the greatest need to think about the future don’t have the leisure or emotional capacity to do so. The very essence of poverty complicates decisions and makes immediate needs so urgent that you start making wrong choices. These mistakes aren’t any different from anyone else’s, but they occur more frequently due to the element of stress, and their implications are much greater.
A fifteen year history of the music site Pitchfork detailing its prescient take on the relationship between culture and consumption. An insightful critique of contemporary music criticism.
Wanted: Schrödinger’s Cat
An extremely disconcerting article about a meta-researcher who uncovered the current failings of even the most highly-regarded medical research. There appear to be many flaws with the “gold-standard” of peer-reviewed studies from randomized trials.
[Dr. Ioannidis] discovered that the range of errors being committed was astonishing: from what questions researchers posed, to how they set up the studies, to which patients they recruited for the studies, to which measurements they took, to how they analyzed the data, to how they presented their results, to how particular studies came to be published in medical journals.
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His model predicted, in different fields of medical research, rates of wrongness roughly corresponding to the observed rates at which findings were later convincingly refuted: 80 percent of non-randomized studies (by far the most common type) turn out to be wrong, as do 25 percent of supposedly gold-standard randomized trials, and as much as 10 percent of the platinum-standard large randomized trials. The article spelled out his belief that researchers were frequently manipulating data analyses, chasing career-advancing findings rather than good science, and even using the peer-review process—in which journals ask researchers to help decide which studies to publish—to suppress opposing views.
Letting Go
What should medicine do when it can’t save your life?
The soaring cost of health care is the greatest threat to the country’s long-term solvency, and the terminally ill account for a lot of it. Twenty-five per cent of all Medicare spending is for the five per cent of patients who are in their final year of life, and most of that money goes for care in their last couple of months which is of little apparent benefit.
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The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end.
Iconic Images Without Their Subjects
In the project “Fatescapes,” the visual artist Pavel Maria Smejkal forces us to reconsider the veracity of historical images and the photographer’s role by digitally removing the people that made these images resonant. What is left is the scene as it might have looked just minutes before or after the photographer passed by. Mr. Smejkal has reshaped these images and challenged us to confront the relationship of photographer, image and history in a manner that is profoundly unsettling.
The 25 Most Beautiful College Libraries in the World
The college library, whether ornate or modern, digital or dusty, is in many ways the epicenter of the college experience — at least for some students. It is at once a shining emblem of vast, acquirable knowledge, a place for deep discussions and meetings of the mind, and of course, a big building full of books, which, as far as we’re concerned, is exciting enough. Colleges and universities are understandably quite proud of their libraries, which can be a selling point for prospective students and donating alumni alike, and they often become the most well-designed and beautifully adorned buildings on campus. To that end, and perhaps to inspire your studies a bit, we’ve collected a few of the most beautiful college and university libraries in the world, from Portugal to France to Boston.
