Peter Buffett, son of Warren Buffett, with a thought-provoking Op-Ed for The New York Times about the motivations and consequences of today’s charity culture:

Philanthropy has become the “it” vehicle to level the playing field and has generated a growing number of gatherings, workshops and affinity groups.

As more lives and communities are destroyed by the system that creates vast amounts of wealth for the few, the more heroic it sounds to “give back.” It’s what I would call “conscience laundering” — feeling better about accumulating more than any one person could possibly need to live on by sprinkling a little around as an act of charity.

[…]

But as long as most folks are patting themselves on the back for charitable acts, we’ve got a perpetual poverty machine.

In essence, Peter argues that the very people who offer aid to fight poverty are the ones helping create and maintain it.

Todd Woody, Quartz:

As we’ve written before, the mysterious mass die-off of honey bees that pollinate $30 billion worth of crops in the US has so decimated America’s apis mellifera population that one bad winter could leave fields fallow. Now, a new study has pinpointed some of the probable causes of bee deaths and the rather scary results show that averting beemageddon will be much more difficult than previously thought.

Sounds like honey prices will continue to rise.

A very fun Tumblr site:

Animated GIFs that I’ve created of some of my favorite craft beers.

Just like it sounds, animated beer labels. My favorites: Yeti Imperial Stout by Great Divide Brewing Co. and Heady Topper by The Alchemist.

(via: Daring Fireball)

George Dvorsky, io9, on the recent news that German scientists successfully “froze” light for one minute:

It sounds weird and it is. The reason for wanting to hold light in its place (aside from the sheer awesomeness of it) is to ensure that it retains its quantum coherence properties (i.e. its information state), thus making it possible to build light-based quantum memory. And the longer that light can be held, the better as far as computation is concerned.

This has implications for things like quantum internet. Very cool.

David Auerbach, writing for Slate, with an interesting analogy for the plight of Microsoft:

What does Microsoft in the Ballmer era have in common with drug kingpin Avon Barksdale’s organization in The Wire? For years, both of them had the strongest package. They owned their territory, owned their market, owned their users. They were untouchable. Then times changed, bringing new competitors with new, intense products. Their own product went weak. But they couldn’t let go. “We got a weak product, and we holding on to prime real estate with no muscle,” Avon’s cerebral second-in-command, Stringer Bell, complains to him. For the Barksdale organization, the product was heroin and the real estate was the drug-ravaged Franklin Towers housing project. For Microsoft, the product is Windows and the real estate is the PC.

Peter Cohen, writing for iMore, on the awful state of iTunes:

I think it’s time for Apple to look at iTunes and start over with a fresh sheet of paper. Just admit that this horrible thing isn’t working any more and try something entirely new. Ideally, I’d like to see music, apps, and videos broken up into separate utilities.

“Complexity” is a word that describes the iTunes experience to a tee. Hopefully once iOS 7 is out the door, Ive can put his eyes and his best minds to work on the problem of iTunes, because right now it’s embarrassing for Apple to be promoting and distributing this software. It’s the antithesis of what we expect the Apple user experience to be.

Amen. I wrote a similar post last year in which I shared my frustrations with iTunes. Unfortunately, as my buddy Ross Kimes was quoted as saying, the biggest problem with fixing iTunes is having to offer Windows support. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed yet - leaving iTunes to balloon into a nightmare.

Radhika Nagpal, writing for Scientific American, offers great insight for those thinking of pursuing a tenure-track faculty position:

I’ve enjoyed my seven years as junior faculty tremendously, quietly playing the game the only way I knew how to. But recently I’ve seen several of my very talented friends become miserable in this job, and many more talented friends opt out. I feel that one of the culprits is our reluctance to openly acknowledge how we find balance. Or openly confront how we create a system that admires and rewards extreme imbalance. I’ve decided that I do not want to participate in encouraging such a world. In fact, I have to openly oppose it.

So with some humor to balance my fear, here’s goes my confession:

Seven things I did during my first seven years at Harvard. Or, how I loved being a tenure-track faculty member, by deliberately trying not to be one.

It’s long, but worth the read.

I think the one I most relate with is to stop taking advice. That’s not to say advice from colleagues is bad. Rather, letting the implications from that advice negatively affect your emotional happiness is bad. The truth is there is no secret sauce that leads to success. People simply do what works for them. In the end, we are better off trusting our own instincts.

(via: Dr. Heather Grams)

Olga Khazan, The Atlantic, writes about workers in Antartica and the relationship between isolation, frigid cold, darkness, and drinking:

A bored, trapped, and cold population naturally gave rise to a bar. Club 90 South was a simple, wood-paneled joint with a hole in the wall opening up to the outside, where the bartenders would put the Jagermeister to keep it chilled. Massive pallets of beer, wine, and liquor were flown in with the winter crew, and they prayed it would last until them all nine months.

Anil Dash offers 10 things he sees inherent with today’s Internet. This list could be extended by orders of magnitude, but these are pretty spot-on.

My favorite:

People will move mountains to earn a gold star by their name on the Internet.

The one I most struggle with:

Never argue against logic with emotion, or against emotion using logic.

Jason Kottke has posted CBS News coverage of the 1969 moon landing. Pretty nifty. I can only imagine what people were feeling like when they watched this live. It’s a shame our government no longer values science like they did in 1969.