"If you can demonstrate that McDonald’s only introduces the sandwich when pork prices are lower than usual, then you’re but a couple logical steps from concluding that McDonald’s is essentially exploiting a market imbalance between what normal food producers are willing to pay for hog meat at certain times of the year, and what Americans are willing to pay for it once it is processed, molded into illogically anatomical shapes, and slathered in HFCS-rich BBQ sauce." The McRib as arbitrage of pork prices.

"jqPlot is a plotting and charting plugin for the jQuery Javascript framework." Ooh, nice; another one for the collection.

"It's 1981. Roy Richardson is a manager at a Los Angeles computer company. A devout Mormon, he has a two-year-old son, with two daughters yet to be born. He has a little over ten years to live.

I was that two-year-old and Roy was my father. I grew up without him, knowing the outlines of his life but not the details. In 2006, at my mother's house, I found three boxes of details." Leonard never fails to surprise and amaze. This is wonderful.

"This is a formula, a master plot, for any 6000 word pulp story. It has worked on adventure, detective, western and war-air. It tells exactly where to put everything. It shows definitely just what must happen in each successive thousand words.

No yarn of mine written to the formula has yet failed to sell." Lester Dent was the creator of Doc Savage, and wrote a LOT of pulp fiction.

Interesting list; worth spending some time staring at, for sure.

"This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color." Lovely. I really like Kusama.

"I could argue back and forth forever, but what I really want to do as a developer, is to work on games in tiny, tiny teams. It means less compromise when it comes to design. It means more freedom when it comes to implementation."

"Shim is a node.js-based browser-compatibility tool that lets you synchronize several devices/browsers and surf the same pages simultaneously on all of them." Wow.

An Impressive list of notable examples of programmatic journalism from Dan Sinker; something I must return to.

"You can control time when you can see it." Things I like here: half-day resolution; tracking time as a group, rather than solo activity; the value of projects that may be numerically "over budget". Meetings as "0" is interesting; I'm not sure about that yet.

Nice tutorial for exploring AR with Processing. (Yes, I know it's AR, but I also am interested in how this works, so stop your booing in the peanut gallery).

"The film was shot back through the earth's atmosphere in buckets that parachuted over the Pacific Ocean, where C-130 Air Force planes snagged them with grappling hooks." You cannot make this stuff up. Hexagon sounds phenomenal.

"FnordMetric is a highly configurable (and pretty fast) realtime app/event tracking thing based on ruby eventmachine and redis. You define your own plotting and counting functions as ruby blocks!" Interesting.

Remarkable satirical maps from the First World War; the Raemaekers is especially brilliant.

"Alien is a great example of the importance of seeing movies on big screen.  For any director reliant on frequent long-takes, compositions naturally become less didactic: greater scope in field-of-vision grants greater freedom to the explorative viewer’s eye.  For a filmmaker like Scott, compositions are so enlarged that it is as if the audience is looking at the film through a microscope." Cracking article on Alien over at MUBI.

“What Bella doesn’t know is that this is no ordinary home, and the Cullens are no ordinary family. By rescuing an innocent girl from where she fell, they have set her upon a path that could change all their lives for ever. And when Bella emerges from the other end of that path, she may find that things are not what she expected in… the Twilight Zone.” This is priceless.

"Yes, we could have started with the placeholder structures and made them more elaborate and better-looking, in a general video-game-level-design way, but that’s different from having well-thought-out ideas subtly embodied in the structures of the areas, which is what we are going for." The Witness used real architecture and landscape architecture firms to help design its world.

"The point isn't nostalgia, that things were better in simpler times, but that the conditions we create (deliberately or accidentally) for and around the practices we pursue have a tremendous influence on the ways we carry out those practices. In the case of computer programming in particular, the apparent benefits of speed, efficiency, accessibility, and other seemingly "obvious" positive virtues of technical innovation also hide lost virtues, which of course we then fail to see." Culture as a byproduct of conditions.

"Type words to interact with Fireplace or just sit back and enjoy. The logs burn down to ashes in about 30 minutes each." Charming, delightful.