Typhoon suspends SKorean flights, subway, kills 3 -
My story filed today.
Yesterday morning at the Shilla Hotel for the Club of Madrid conference on “G-20’s Role in the Post-Crisis World.”
South Korean Foreign Minister did not say anything that validated my early morning trek there.
Typhoon Kompasu swept across the Korean peninsula early Thursday morning. This is what I saw on my way to work.
“Things that are made from organic material age and decay, especially when they stop being alive. A piece of home-baked bread, say, left on your kitchen counter, will get moldy relatively fast. Lord knows what some ground beef would smell like after a week. But the artist Sally Davies has been photographing one McDonald’s hamburger and fries every day for 137 days. They look basically exactly the same.” via GOOD
“Such is beauty ever — neither here nor there, now nor then, neither in Rome nor in Athens, but wherever there is a soul to admire. If I seek her elsewhere because I do not find her at home, my search will prove a fruitless one.” — Henry David Thoreau (saturnrising, miadat via fuckyeahthoreau) (via crashinglybeautiful)
The Bloom Box : A Power Plant the Size of a Coffee Mug
Those two blocks can power the average high-consumption American home — one block can power the average European home. At least that’s the claim being made by K.R. Sridhar, founder of Bloom Energy, on 60 Minutes last night. The original technology comes from an oxygen generator meant for a scrapped NASA Mars program that’s been converted, with the help of an estimated $400 million in private funding, into a fuel cell.
The device is already being used by Google, Fed Ex, Staples, eBay and several others.
To me, the interesting thing about the line is how both similar and different it is to regular graffiti. Essentially, most graffiti writers enjoy seeing their name on things. The bigger they can paint it and the more visible their tag is, the more people will notice their conquering of the city. MOMO created the largest tag in New York, yet the scale of his work here, so massive that it can’t all be viewed at once, means that thousands of people will walk on it each day and never even notice it. It’s simultaneously the biggest and smallest artistic statement I have seen in my time here.
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Adverbs, like the passive voice, seem to have been created with the timid writer in mind. With the passive voice, the writer usually expresses fear of not being taken seriously; it is the voice of little boys wearing shoepolish mustaches and little girls clumping around in Mommy’s high heels. With adverbs, the writer usually tells us he or she is afraid he/she isn’t expressing himself/herself clearly, that he or she is not getting the point or the picture across.
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Someone out there is now accusing me of being tiresome and anal-retentive. I deny it. I believe the road to hell is paved with adverbs, and I will shout it from the rooftops. To put it another way, they’re like dandelions. If you have one on your lawn, it looks pretty and unique. If you fail to root it out, however, you find five the next day … fifty the day after that … and then, my brothers and sisters, your lawn is totally, completely, and profligately covered with dandelions. By then you see them for the weeds they really are, but by then it’s—GASP!!—too late.
” — Stephen King, On Writing (via iwl)[video]
