The Illusions of Psychiatry. Rampant conflict of interest and pill-pushing in psychiatry. Grim.

Structured Procrastination. "Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important."

I won’t be posting here for awhile. Hopefully only a few weeks. I have a pet programming project I have been failing to wrap up because I am always distracted by the nearest shiny thing. So I am banned from the iPad and all things Netflix, I’m turning off my access to Facebook and my newsreader, and I’m blocking Flash (curse you, YouTube!). Will not return to any of these things until it’s done. Gulp.

Ira Glass’s Ode to Radiolab. "It’s a crazy tour de force of radio production, all the more impressive when you think of the difficulty of organizing a dozen people all over the globe and making them get the right kind of audio, and then sifting down what must’ve been 12 or 15 hours of sound to a compelling, funny, utterly original bit of radio that only lasted four minutes. I don’t know any other radio show that would’ve been able to execute the whole thing that fast. I don’t think I could’ve. For one thing, after all that work, you usually make a much bigger deal out of the whole “We reached out to you! All over the globe!” thing. All that effort and trouble, you drag it out for way more than four minutes on the air. But that’s not how they roll on Radiolab. They invented this insanely concise, entertaining way to tell that story, and they have no problem hurtling through it quickly."

Staking a Life. Hitchens on capital punishment.

Pumped Up Kicks|Dubstep: A dance routine so good it looks fake. Watch the whole thing. Doesn’t really get going until around a minute in:

My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling. "… the fantasy of creating bilingual prodigies immediately collided with reality. My children — Danya (fifth grade), Arden (third grade) and Emmett (kindergarten) — were among the first foreigners to attend Novaya Gumanitarnaya Shkola, the New Humanitarian School. All instruction was in Russian. No translators, no hand-holding. And so on that morning, as on so many days that autumn of 2007, I feared that I was subjecting them to a cross-cultural experiment that would scar them forever."

Nerve-wracking, queasy-making: Russian Man Climbs Moscow Skyscraper Without Safety Equipment. Good god.

(And let us not forget the late Dan Osman’s insane 400 foot climb)

(via df)

“Everyone knows that the greatest and most iconic contribution to Cinema is"Tom Selleck’s Moustache:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BxhqVrbixZc&feature=player_embedded. So great is it that there isn’t a single film that would not be improved by the inclusion of Tom Selleck’s Moustache.

Two comics on the Netflix/Qwikster split: one from The Oatmeal and one from The Joy of Tech.

Netflix is spinning off DVD-by-mail into a totally separate business called Qwikster. “Netflix” will carry on as a streaming-only company. The two companies will not be integrated (separate queues, reviews, etc.). Hard to imagine people will ever use Qwikster as a verb. “I Qwikstered it…” Yeah, doesn’t work.

While it’s a gamble, I can see why this might be good for Netflix, but it’s certainly bad for me. Alas.

Who Are You and What Are You Doing Here?. > You may not be the person that your parents take you to be. And—this thought is both more exciting and more dangerous—you may not be the person that you take yourself to be, either. You may not have read yourself aright, and college is the place where you can find out whether you have or not. The reason to read Blake and Dickinson and Freud and Dickens is not to become more cultivated, or more articulate, or to be someone who, at a cocktail party, is never embarrassed (or who can embarrass others). The best reason to read them is to see if they may know you better than you know yourself. You may find your own suppressed and rejected thoughts flowing back to you with an “alienated majesty.” Reading the great writers, you may have the experience that Longinus associated with the sublime: You feel that you have actually created the text yourself. For somehow your predecessors are more yourself than you are.