I’m sure by now you’ve heard the story of the guy whose ringtone stopped a performance of the New York Philharmonic

The unmistakably jarring sound of an iPhone marimba ring interrupted the soft and spiritual final measures of Mahler’s Symphony No. 9 at the New York Philharmonic on Tuesday night. The conductor, Alan Gilbert, did something almost unheard-of in a concert hall: He stopped the performance. But the ringing kept on going, prompting increasingly angry shouts in the audience directed at the malefactor.

In addition to the public humiliation of the moment, the Internet proceeded to fall our hapless music lover’s head. It sounds like he was actually the victim of poor user interface design from Apple (unusual. From the same article:

bq. He said he made sure to turn it off before the concert, not realizing that the alarm clock had accidentally been set and would sound even if the phone was in silent mode.

Ouch) I certainly understand the design tradeoff: would you rather put people at risk of public humiliation when their silent phones makes noise, or would you rather have somebody sleep through an important meeting because they silenced their phone, forgetting about their alarm clock?

I’d vote for silencing everything when you mute the phone, but pop a warning if you mute the phone with alarms pending. Or maybe a warning that lets you choose whether you want to also silence alarms or not?

I dunno, I’d happily leave the details to the generally-awesome UI designers at Apple.

(As long as we are talking about Apple UI, there is a little tweak I want: I want AutoCorrect to make a little noise whenever it offers me a correction. I can’t really touch type on the iPhone or the iPad (can’t imagine I’m alone here), so I never see the little popups in time to either cancel them or to hit SPACE to accept them. Some subtle sound that cues me to look up from my typing would be lovely.)

Update: John Gruber points out that it’s not worth over-complicating things for edge cases, and yeah, he’s probably right.

Update 2: See also Marco Arment and Andy Ihnatko.

Jonah Weiner Interviews Louis C.K.. On his first two-minute act, which bombed: "Stand-up, I didn’t know what that was going to feel like. I guess I thought it would feel like it does in TV shows or movies: they’re going to laugh. That’s part of it, right? You tell a joke and then they laugh. It has this feel to it that I knew, and boy, when you realize how wrong you are, that’s a fucking cold slap in the face. I think that’s true of anybody’s first time. The thing I tell people if they want to do this, and I don’t give people advice much about it, but it’s to not bring your friends the first time. I’ve seen that a million times: People come in and have 50 people there for them, and their friends laugh and cheer them on, and you see their face get red and excited, and the next time they don’t come in with their friends, and they’re fucking doomed. You need to enter stand-up with that cold slap in the face, or you’ll never really understand what you’re doing."

I think all the big tech companies are evil in their own ways, so unless you’re ready to eschew their products entirely it’s pretty much a pick-your-poison situation. MG Siegler’s Why I Hate Android piece dispels for me the notion that choosing an Android device is somehow nobler.

Vi Hart’s awesome series on Spirals, Fibonacci, and Being a Plant: part 1 and part 2. Can’t wait for part 3! I don’t think it’s hyperbole to say this changes the way I look at the world.

Radiolab is generally awesome—no news there—but I still have to link this one up because their latest episode, The Bad Show, is a contender for my favorite:

We begin with a chilling statistic: 91 of men, and 84 of women, have fantasized about killing someone. We take a look at one particular fantasy lurking behind these numbers, and wonder what this shadow world might tell us about ourselves and our neighbors. Then, we reconsider what Stanley Milgrim’s famous experiment really revealed about human nature (it’s both better and worse than we thought). Next, we meet a man who scrambles our notions of good and evil: chemist Fritz Haber, who won a Nobel Prize in 1918…around the same time officials in the US were calling him a war criminal. And we end with the story of a man who chased one of the most prolific serial killers in US history, then got a chance to ask him the question that had haunted him for years: why?

The stuff you never hear about the Milgram experiment! The Fritz Haber story! I haven’t gotten to the serial killer part yet, but it’s already so good I don’t need to wait on posting.

The Man Who Loves to Hate Himself: Good profile of Louis C.K. by Jonah Weiner. The interview is even better.

What Is College For?. "Students, in turn, need to recognize that their college education is above all a matter of opening themselves up to new dimensions of knowledge and understanding. Teaching is not a matter of (as we too often say) “making a subject (poetry, physics, philosophy) interesting” to students but of students coming to see how such subjects are intrinsically interesting. It is more a matter of students moving beyond their interests than of teachers fitting their subjects to interests that students already have. Good teaching does not make a course’s subject more interesting; it gives the students more interests — and so makes them more interesting."

Great Planet Money podcast on why lard fell out of favor.

Pretty crazy, goalie Tim Howard’s goal. From the wide angle you wonder how the other goalie let that happen, but then there’s a side view replay and that thing is moving.

Harrison Krix’s Gravity Gun prop is stunningly good, and his detailed build post really shows you what goes in to something like this. As if that weren’t great enough, it sold for $21,000 at a Child’s Play charity dinner in Seattle.

My favorite tower defense game ever, Kingdom Rush, is now out in an iPad version. There’s also Windosill. I actually played the iPad version first, and it totally captivated me and my girls.

Been awhile since I gave you a fun way to blow stuff up: Zomblast. It gets better as you go, I like it best for levels 20 and up.