I didn’t know this until today but buttered coffee is a thing, now. Marco Arment tried it and said it sucked.
Now you know.
Sierra Nevada and Dogfish Head breweries worked with famed glass maker Spiegelau to make the worlds best,scientifically engineered, IPA glass.
After testing out dozens of iterations, the craft breweries’ respective materminds, Ken Grossman and Sam Calagione, landed on the design above. The composition helps with three things: The thinness keeps the beer cold. The ridges on the bottom aerate the liquid and reinforce the robust head (which traps the carbonation). And as opposed to scent-catapulting normal pint glasses, the aromas are captured by the concave, snifter-like top, which Calagione calls in the video below an "olfactory cannon" aimed at your nose.
The right beer glass makes all the difference. If I didn’t already have a great set of Spiegelau glasses already, I’d be tempted to get a few when they come out in the spring.
via The Loop
I love politcal theory. This piece from Charlie Stross is a rather fun read – if not for the snark then for the ideas themselves. You should read the whole thing but he talks about how, regardless of what political party you are a part of, you are no different than the other person.
Overall, the nature of the problem seems to be that our representative democratic institutions have been captured by meta-institutions that implement the iron law of oligarchy by systematically reducing the risk of change. They have done so by converging on a common set of policies that do not serve the public interest, but minimize the risk of the parties losing the corporate funding they require in order to achieve re-election. And in so doing, they have broken the “peaceful succession when enough people get pissed off” mechanism that prevents revolutions. If we’re lucky, emergent radical parties will break the gridlock (here in the UK that would be the SNP in Scotland, possibly UKIP in England: in the USA it might be the new party that emerges if the rupture between the Republican realists like Karl Rove and the Tea Party radicals finally goes nuclear), but within a political generation (two election terms) it’ll be back to oligarchy as usual.
He has great theories on the nature of our political systems and how we got to a near global state of forced status quo. Unfortunately, there isn’t much he believes we can do to fix it because you become what you formed to rally against.
And that… is our happy thought of the day.
Oh, and this.
via Boing Boing
The question, "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" has been answered.
via Brain Pickings
Gear Patrol has been compiling some great lists of late and this one about their top 100 books for men is no exception. They break it down by fiction, non-fiction, short story, biography, philosophy, and poetry.
There are a lot of missing books that I would have substituted but I don’t disagree with each book listed being an important piece of work that everyone should experience.