Collisions with Reality

Believe it or not, this week I actually read things that weren’t about the Michigan coaching search!

• This article about the dearth of taxis at 4 p.m. in New York is fascinating. It’s not easy to balance 12-hour shifts, equity of rush hours for the drivers, and skyrocketing rents for the cab companies.
• If you’re feeling a bit bummed about the past decade, Charlie Stross has a post on how the world has gotten better. Lots of medical advances!
• I was poking around the Onion AV Club site, and found their television reviews. And in their classics section, they’re reviewing episodes of Batman: The Animated Series. I absolutely adore that incarnation of Batman, and am so excited to see a serious analysis of it. (I’m not sure it shows up anywhere in syndication nowadays, but the series is available on DVD.)

Three-day-weekend! Yay!

I wasn’t blogging over the holidays, so here are some of the interesting things I’ve seen in the last few weeks:

• I adore this picture of New York City from 1907 (via Shorpy, go there to see larger version).
  It’s such a familiar perspective, looking at Manhattan from the Brooklyn Bridge. There’s something about the faintness of the buildings — it’s almost as if you could see today’s skyline if you could peer through the haze.

• The A.V. Club has a list of some of the crazy swag they received in 2010, with their recommendations for improvement. I can’t decide what my favorite is — the Russian nesting dolls depicting Kirstie Alley? Or the visor that looks like a brain?
• I was really excited to see this study that shows that treatments can have a placebo effect even if you know it’s a placebo (via @mskyle). I have a cold that is just not going away, and I’ve reached the point of scrubbing the house and doing all the laundry in hopes of thwarting it. Next up today: buying out the entire cold remedy section at CVS in hopes that something kills it.

Happy Friday!