Maybe “Public Timeline” was not the best name for that

Slate discovers “consumer surplus”

Annie Lowrey writing in Slate:

It sounds ridiculous, but many economists would love to run this experiment. That is because they suspect that our computers are worth, in some strange way, more than what we pay for them.

Strange? You mean like every other good that people purchase voluntarily?

Decepticons: 16% is not 0%

There’s a local TV ad for a window company. They advertise “5 year no-interest financing, or a 30% factory-direct discount.”

Targ manure! If the cash price is lower than the financed price, you’re effectively paying interest on the financing. But how much?

Kinchley’s Tavern

Tim Kang at Serious Eats’ “Slice” blog reviewed the pizza at Kinchley’s Tavern, Ramsey, NJ. A must-stop whenever we return to the Spousal Unit’s ancestral homeland, Kinchley’s has the best pizza I’ve had in my life. So far.

Our mandatory pie is the garlic pie. The garlic is infused with the sauce.

---

Addendum: Serious Eats also covered the strawberry donuts from Donut Man in Glendora, CA—my all-time favorite donuts. Two coast-to-coast favorites in a single week! Donut Man was also the first place I went in the first car I ever owned. I picked up my 1994 Civic del Sol from the dealer in El Monte in April 1999, and picked up some celebratory dozens for my fellow grad students on the way home. I guess the donuts were lucky; I drove that car to over 200,000 miles before selling it in good running condition.

Profit margin of the day

7 inches of silicone rubber for only $16.98.

0 0 1 1 * /usr/bin/issue_award

Via Kottke, Josh Nimoy describes special effects work on Tron: Legacy:

In Tron, the hacker was not supposed to be snooping around on a network; he was supposed to kill a process. So we went with posix kill and also had him pipe ps into grep. I also ended up using emacs eshell to make the terminal more l33t. The team was delighted to see my emacs performance -- splitting the editor into nested panes and running different modes. I was tickled that I got emacs into a block buster movie.

This comes on the heels of wget's flawless performance in The Social Network.

Clearly we have enough momentum for an annual* award for the best performance by a UNIX command in a major motion picture.

I propose calling it the Lexy, after the Jurassic Park character Lex, who exclaimed “It’s a UNIX system! I know this!” upon seeing SGI’s File System Navigator fsn**.

---

* Yeah, both The Social Network and Tron: Legacy were released in 2010. We’ll construct the Award Year to split them, in the interest of making the project viable.
** The best supporting command can get the Yaccy.

C'est un piège !

As a fan of both Magritte and Star Wars I’m surely biased, but this is the best thing I’ve seen in a while: