Thought-Provoking Friday

1) Dad Turns Toddler Videos Into Action Movies. Here’s an e.g.:

Way to make those iPhone vids interesting; that’s gotta be a class on this… Or at least an App… Anyone? The Rockstar was so impressed.

**Update: There IS an App. Thank you to the awesome reader (yeah SingTel service provider :D) who sent me the pic… 

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2) April’s Fool Pranks. Y’know, just in case people don’t hate you enough at work.

I have ex-colleagues who actually did this one but with foil

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3) The Problem With Food Porn. Betcha didn’t know, whether you took a good enough picture of the food on your plate is now a thing in some restaurants. With the rise of social media, some chefs are getting upset at the possibly “inaccurate portrayal” of their culinary achievements in badly-taken pictures that might even feature smudged plates <signs to ward off evil>, posted to Instagram or Twitter or FB etc.

But well Food Libel doesn’t sound as sexy… And you’re welcome.

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4) “Legalizing Medical Marijuana May Actually Reduce Crime.” Am I the only one who found this headline funny? If you make something legal, there’ll be less crime because people doing this now-legal thing are no longer committing a crime when they do it, right?

Y-eah that’s not what the article is about. I just picked that up because it reminded me of something semi-related to my old work life. Derivatives are affected by how their underlying assets are doing (a stock option is affected by how the stock is trading, for e.g.) and economic data and political and news announcements affect how the asset or stock is trading. So those little fraction-of-a-percentage-point movements in Consumer Price Index, or Non-Farm Payrolls or Unemployment numbers in the US cause “ripple effect” as your all-too-human traders react or anticipate how their counterparts will react.

Now think this: WHAT IF the number didn’t actually change, just the way you calculated it did? As in, if your definition of minimum wage was USD 2 an hour instead of USD 1 an hour – suddenly you have a lot more people below the minimum wage than you did before. Without actually doing anything to the number of people…….

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5) 30 Pilots And Flight Attendants Confess Some Of The Best Kept Secrets When Flying. Not sure how true. Very sure how gross. And pretty disturbing. (Betcha didn’t really think something you bought off Apple Store could seriously flummox a plane’s probably multi-million dollar navigational technology? It can’t. You switch it off so it doesn’t flummox the pilot using the multi-million dollar navigational technology. Not one phone. Every passenger’s phone, all starting to pick up signals when he’s trying to listen for clearance to take off/ land.)

But in case you are lazy to click and scroll all 30, read this one:

“Do not EVER drink water on an aircraft that did not come from a bottle. Don’t even TOUCH it. The reason being the ports to purge lavatory shit and refill the aircraft with potable water are within feet from each other and sometimes serviced all at once by the same guy…..” 

There’s another one about how they don’t clean the drinking water tank (or the blankets and pillows between flights) and don’t pour the nuts directly onto the tray table because of the number of poopy baby diapers that usually sit on it for a time…

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6) 63 Magical Facts About Disney Movies.

I liked this #9: In 1989, Ariel became Disney’s first new princess in 30 years, the last princess film had been Sleeping Beauty, which was released in 1959. I mention to say I should be less surprised the original Disney Princesses I grew up with were all about a prince rescuing them…

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7) Woman battling brain cancer wears tutu for marathon run amid chemotherapy.

Well-known magazine asks permission to use picture. When the issue hits the stands, it was with a caption about the “tutu epidemic” and how wearing them doesn’t make you run faster but it does make people run from you faster.

Backlash causes sales of “running tutus” to sky rocket, magazine has to issue apology, but really I’m still on She’s Running A Marathon While On Chemo For Brain Cancer?!

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8) Maybe For The ER… Maybe It’s Time To Reconsider The Poorly Received Google Glass.

This would be kind of why I hope for a lesson most places… Because if we could predict all uses and all lessons from things we came across in the course of our lives…. we would have discovered a lot less.

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9) The Girls have got the 5-second skit this week, in the spirit of New Uses For Things… Or at least the Miss does. This one is simply titled “Eat.”

As in I step away, only to return very shortly later, prompted to ask the Miss What In The Wide World Are You Doing?

(She had pulled off one of her hair clips to use like a cocktail stick to eat her animal shapes pasta…)

A-and by request, more dog toys:

OK they’re funny and cool, but there was another reason – we traditional give JD an octopus, something that is satisfyingly flail-y when she starts killing it. Unfortunately the Miss has started speaking, and so another round of “Kill Sotong” (Kill Octopus) has to be censored away until the second child is a little older and doesn’t go round telling JD to kill things. Hence the pursey.

Have a good weekend, dears…