Tech Support T-Shirt [Pic]

Hilarious Tech Support T-Shirt [Pic]:

I wouldn’t wear this to work, but darn, truer words have never been spoken.

Anyone who thinks “the customer is always right” never worked in tech support.

[Work Tech Support T-shirt @ Amazon.com]

The Secret To Delicious No-Sugar-Added Baking: Tasty, Tasty Sugar

The Secret To Delicious No-Sugar-Added Baking: Tasty, Tasty Sugar:

(Facebook)

What’s the secret to totally delicious healthy, no-sugar-added baking? Fat and sugar, of course! This re-enactment of a classic “Seinfeld” episode is brought to you by Butterfly Bakery of New Jersey, where three out of the company’s 45 varieties of baked goods were shown to contain a lot more saturated fat and sugar than the label stated. By “a lot,” we mean twice the saturated fat listed on the label, and three times the sugar.
The bakery first received a warning letter in May 2011, and the company said in a statement that they’ve been working with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration since then to comply with regulations. Unfortunately, lab tests showed that “sugar free” items weren’t. The bakery has agreed to shut down until they can straighten this out with the FDA.
“We are confident that our product claims are true,” Butterfly Bakery said in a statement on their Facebook page.
Federal judge approves consent decree with New Jersey bakery [FDA]

Butterfly Bakery USA Statement [Facebook]

Sorted Books Revisited: Artist Nina Katchadourian’s Playfully Arranged Book Spine Sentences

Sorted Books Revisited: Artist Nina Katchadourian’s Playfully Arranged Book Spine Sentences:
“Friendship: The silent places where speech ends.”
As a longtime fan of artist Nina Katchadourian’s long-running Sorted Books project, which even inspired some playful book spine poetry experiments of my own, I’m thrilled for the release of Sorted Books (public library) — a collection spanning nearly two decades of her witty and wise minimalist mediations on life by way of ingeniously arranged book spines, including some pieces never seen online.
A heart-warming bonus: Most of the books Katchadourian uses are library copies, presenting a subtle conceptual addition to other love letters to libraries.
Brian Dillon writes in the introduction:

‘Sorted Books’ is many things at the same time: a series of sculptures or photographs, or site-specific installations; a collection of short stories, or poems, or jokes; a work in which the ‘found object’ is subject alike to chance and the most painstaking choices; a delicate conceptual game with the horizontal and the vertical. But it is first of all an act of reading. We have to picture the artist at large between the bookshelves, scanning the spines for likely, or unlikely, meetings among their titles.

Katchadourian’s project began in 1993, somewhat serendipitously — as most great side-projects-turned-lifelong-passions tend to — while she was pursuing an MFA at University of California, San Diego. She recounts the origin story:

We studied — and were trying to put into practice — an engagement with the everyday, a stance toward art that located it in unlikely places, and ways of working collaboratively. In that spirit, an art major undergraduate, who was friendly with some of the graduate students, invited a group of us to move into her parents’ house for a week and make art with what we found. Her parents — who were not art collectors but simply welcoming and curious people — generously agreed to be invaded by the six of us.
The house where we stayed was in a small town called Half Moon Bay, about an hour south of San Francisco on the foggy California coast, so we decided to call the project ‘The Half Moon Bay Experiment.’ We spent about a week there, poking around and thinking about what to make. Eventually each of us found different zones in the house that interested us, and in the end we had a small show, which essentially meant running an announcement in the local paper, opening the font door for the afternoon, and having some friends, family, and locals come by.
Quite early in the week, I latched onto the library. Our hosts had married late in life — a second marriage for both — and they had merged their separate book collections when they moved in together. It seemed like they had decided to keep everything, and so they had a lot of books, organized in casually thematic manner on wooden shelves. I spent a long time looking at the books and getting acquainted with the wide variety of subjects in the library: Shakespeare, self-help, gambling, addiction, health care, history, and investment strategy guides. I suddenly recalled a moment in the university library when, looking for a book, I had turned my head sideways as I walked down the stacks and thought how spectacular it would be if all the titles formed an accidental sentence when read one after the other in a long chain. Standing amidst the bookshelves in Half Moon Bay, my next move was simply to make this imaginary accident real. I spent days shifting and arranging books, composing them so that their titles formed short sentences. The exercise was intimate, like a form of portraiture, and it felt important that the books I selected should function as a cross section of the larger collection.

The rest, as they say, is history — but Katchadourian remained true to the same methodology and ethos of curiosity over the years. In an era drowned in periodic death tolls for the future of the physical book, her project stands as a celebration of the spirit embedded in the magnificent materiality of the printed page. Katchadourian writes:

I am always paying attention to the physical qualities of the books, and I try to work with their particular attributes as much as possible. The size of a book carries temperament and tonality, as does the way the text sits on the spine. A heavy volume with large text on the spine, for example, might be exuberant, urgent, pushy; a small typeface might communicate a voice that’s exacting, shy, insecure, or furtive.

My favorite arrangement is this laconic addition to history’s finest definitions of art:

Above all, however, Sorted Books is a visceral reminder of that powerful interplay between context and subtext, which embodies — and emboldens — the wellspring of meaning.
Images courtesy Nina Katchadourian

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#458 Three One Four One

#458 Three One Four One:

Google Reader to shut down July 1st

Google Reader to shut down July 1st:





Google has announced yet another spring cleaning of its various services, and this time around, the company is giving the axe to its Google Reader RSS aggregator. The service, which originally launched back in 2005, will be officially put out to pasture on July 1st, 2013. Reader has gone through a number of iterations, but it had not been significantly updated in a long time. The last time that Google updated the product, it built in integration for the Google+ social network and removed Reader's own native sharing service, causing a bit of a backlash with die hard users. Google is offering users a way to export their Reader content, including lists of users that they follow and starred and liked articles.
In addition to killing off...
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Smart shoes

Smart shoes:

Can shoes communicate and connect the user's activity to web? Yes! The Adidas smart shoes, co-develo..(Read...)

One Complaint To CFPB Fixes Mortgage Snafu That 9 Months Of Dealing With The Bank Couldn’t

One Complaint To CFPB Fixes Mortgage Snafu That 9 Months Of Dealing With The Bank Couldn’t:

(chadlafarge)

As Consumer Financial Protection Bureau director Richard Cordray pointed out in his testimony before the Senate Banking Committee this morning, more than 130,000 American consumers have used the agency’s numerous complaint portals to help resolve their problems with financial institutions. Consumerist reader Charles is just one of those people who still has a house because the CFPB was able to accomplish in a few days what no one else could in almost a year.
Last May, Charles and his wife purchased a co-op. What should have been a happy time of enjoying their new home together instead became a nightmare of unaccountability and ineptitude.
“The previous owner had a mortgage with Citibank. However, when she took out her loan Citi’s third-party counsel filed a lien for the wrong bank, listing Wells Fargo as the lender instead of Citi,” explains Charles. “Needless to say, this was a huge headache. Citi (correctly) didn’t feel they could release a lien belonging to another bank. The idiotic law firm who made the error had destroyed their records and refused the rectify the mistake.”
He says that even though the seller had provided an affidavit swearing she’d never had a Wells Fargo mortgage, and Wells Fargo had furnished a letter declaring it had never serviced a mortgage for the seller, Citi refused to release the lien.
“After nine months of ignored letters and legal threats, I filed an online complaint with the CFPB,” writes Charles, referring to the agency’s mortgage complaint portal, which requires lenders and servicers to respond to each complaint within a given time frame. “I heard from Wells Fargo’s executive customer service office within 48 hours. Within three weeks, the lien was released. This saved us the trouble of filing a lawsuit, which would have been enormously costly and exhausting.”
Charles is sharing his story with Consumerist readers specifically because some members of the Senate have promised to block Cordray’s re-appointment as CFPB director unless there are significant changes made to the agency, changes that would hamstring its ability to make decisions and regulate financial institutions.
“People should know what a great resource they already are,” he says of the CFPB. “They’ve handled 130,000 complaints to date. If even a fraction of them have had resolutions like mine, that’s a lot of consumers in a better place.”

Walgreens is building America's first 'zero energy' superstore

Walgreens is building America's first 'zero energy' superstore:





Pharmaceutical chain Walgreens has started work on what it calls America's first "zero energy" superstore. Its Evanston store, located some 20 miles away from its headquarters, will utilize more than 800 solar panels, two wind turbines, and geothermal energy to — it hopes — provide enough energy to keep the store running without additional power from the grid. Walgreens is fairly confident it can easily reach that goal; it says that its renewable energy sources can generate 256,000 kilowatt hours (kWh) of electricity every year, and estimates its store will use just 200,000 kWh. It does emphasize that both those figures are only estimates — weather will play a large part in both energy demands and output.
Of course, building a...
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Richard Feynman: Rubber Bands are Fascinating [Science!]

Richard Feynman: Rubber Bands are Fascinating [Science!]:

Richard Feynman on rubber bands. I could keep on listening to this man for hours. Have you heard his explanation on fire? Truly a joy to listen to.
[Via]

After years of lab research, hundreds of chimpanzees could be given sanctuary

After years of lab research, hundreds of chimpanzees could be given sanctuary:





Research involving chimpanzees in the US is finally winding down, which means hundreds of chimps will soon be freed from their laboratory confinements and relocated to more natural surroundings. Of the 450 or so chimps currently under government control, a vast majority are set to be retired to federal sanctuaries, unlikely to face any further research experiments — at least the type they've become accustomed to.
Up to 50 of the animals may be need to stay behind for future lab work, however, with scientists admitting that chimpanzee research has become an increasingly controversial topic that must be handled delicately. "There are cases in which chimpanzees are and will continue to be useful," Alice Ra’anan of the American...
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Wealth Inequality in America

Wealth Inequality in America:

Infographics on the distribution of wealth in America, highlighting both the inequality and the diff..(Read...)

130 years later, modern software helps complete Gaudi's architectural masterpiece

130 years later, modern software helps complete Gaudi's architectural masterpiece:





Construction on the Sagrada Familia began in 1883, when famed architect Antoni Gaudi first laid the blueprint for his now-iconic Barcelona church. Gaudi devoted his last years to the project, and 130 years later, it's widely regarded as one of the most stunningly unique buildings on Earth. It also has yet to be completed.
CBS News took a closer look at the Sagrada Familia on Sunday's 60 Minutes, delving into the history and mythology behind Gaudi's unfinished masterpiece. It's this history, together with an almost religious devotion to Gaudi's legacy, that drives much of today's efforts to complete the building. Gaudi had meticulously laid out the Sagrada Familia with a set of models he constructed before his death in 1926, but these...
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