Links, Week 16: One McIntosh apple, puffing hard

Apologies on not posting during the weekend – blogging in the Philippines, I’ve come to realize, will probably involve 3 posts on Monday that encompass Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, given my extreme lack of internet access (unless I walk to the office or pay) on the weekends. Enough! Let’s talk about what I read online this week.

25 hours, 38 minutes writing and reading (really 35 hours, given the time I spent reading Italo Calvino's book, If on a winter's night). 23 hours and 6 minutes wasted: 3 hours and 40 minutes on Facebook, narrowly edging out 3 hours and 39 minutes on Quora. Nothing else comes close. 21 hours and 3 minutes of neutral time. 11 hours and 16 minutes on Gmail. 3 hours and 21 minutes reading Grantland and New Yorker.

Ok! Here are the links.

Who’s cuter, you or me? Let me into Pottermore!

I’ve renewed my attempts to read more, and better, for the next few months. I just bought the Kindle edition of the John McPhee Reader, and for online articles, I use Readability, which strips the sidebars on a webpage away so only the main text draws attention. The New Yorker has the literary background behind when man discovered Kindle Fire. Bissell writes brilliantly on being hooked on cocaine and video games. A YDN in-depth report analyzes why we suck so much at sciences. It’s long, but in the end, worth it: why Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours hypothesis is bullshit. And I’ve probably linked to this before, but you can’t go wrong with career advice from Dilbert.

As for the more commercial side of the web, well: apparently a ton of people in the U.S. swear by Slick Deals to buy their material possessions. I really like this Jason Chen guy’s voice. I spent half an hour watching people break world records. If you’re a techie, here’s how to earn money from your runoff. Google Analytics is finally live in real-time! For those starting (or re-starting) a blog, here are some tips for new bloggers. And thanks, James, for pointing me out to the smallest high-quality guitar made.

A quasi-blog I want to draw attention to: a Yale professor posts interesting articles from the web. Here are some of my favorites: apparently made in Italy really means made by Chinese people in Italy; Larry Summers thinks the Winklevoss twins are assholes; the power of Twitter to put words in Martin Luther King Jr.’s mouth; the economics of topless models; and a book on Amazon that costs more than 2 million dollars.

I spent 6 hours this week reading about the baseball playoffs. The New York Times discusses just how improbable it was for the Rays to make the playoffs. Even though the Giants didn’t make it, here’s 10 positive things about them. Tampa Bay sports radio is online at 620 WDAE (hard-core fans only).