Well, if you manage to crawl to the finish line at 5 PM today, you've made it through another week. Look on the bright side. Unless you're melanin-challenged and work at a college, you'll still have a job on Monday, and you have two whole days to show your liver who's boss. On to today's links!
Did You Just Get a $500 Freelance Assignment? The City Might Bill You $30,000
Although little-known to people who work at home sewing, writing, designing, illustrating, party planning or tutoring, their perfectly legal pursuits are deemed "unlicensed" by L.A. officials, and they must register with City Hall. Then, these tens of thousands of residents are notified to pay an obscure annual city "business tax."
Just drive an Uber cab. Your magic iPhone transubstantiates all regulations into ponies and cupcakes.
60-Year-Old French Apartments Look Like a Utopian Dream
Between 1954 and 1973, the country erected public housing in the suburbs surrounding the City of Light. These towering structures, which included some six million units, embodied the prevailing idea that modernist architecture could help foster a utopian state by improving people’s lives. “They were praised as places where men could blossom away from the agitation of big cities,” Kronental says.
My Utopian dream is living in France after all these buildings are demolished.
The Making of the Most Expensive Mansion in History
When the house's asking price was announced last May, some people figured it was an absurd marketing ploy, since if the property fetches anything close to $500 million, it will obliterate the current world-record price of $221 million, for a London penthouse. But absurdity is all relative in today's gigamansion market—particularly in L.A., where previous milestones such as the $85 million sale of the 123-room Spelling manor in 2011 are beginning to look quaint.
The author of this article sure doesn't know much history. Try putting in an offer on the Biltmore Estate. You'll have to buy 1/6th of the Pisgah National Forest to go along with it. It used to be the back yard.
Sweden Reintroduces Border Controls
"The overall assessment when we collect information from the police, the Civil Contingencies Agency and the Migration Agency is that it is warranted to impose temporary border controls," interior minister Anders Ygeman told a press conference. More than 120,000 people have arrived since January in Sweden, which is, with Germany, one the favoured destinations for migrants coming to Europe and wich has, until recently, upheld what Ygeman called a "generous" policy.
At this point, wouldn't Swedish border controls only keep Muslims in?
Udacity Raises $105 Million Series D, Bringing Valuation To $1 Billion
The announcement came as the company celebrated the one-year anniversary of its nanodegree program. The nanodegrees are now recognized by some of Silicon Valley’s biggest companies, including Google and Salesforce.
I guess homeschooling is only bad when conservatives do it.
The Latest Evidence That Helmet Laws Don't Help Bike Safety
What the researchers failed to find was any connection between helmet laws and bike-related hospitalization rates. That held true whether they looked at all cycling injuries or just traffic-specific injuries. Surprisingly, it also held true when they narrowed in on body parts protected by a helmet: the brain, head, scalp, skull, face, even neck. Since helmet laws don’t necessarily mean compliance, they looked at helmet usage, too, and once again found nothing.
Humans take chances. Increase their feeling of security, and they'll take bigger chances.
7 Long-Term Productivity Habits Of The Most Successful People
One thing uniting the most high-power leaders with the lowest-level workers is time: Day in and day out, we all have the same amount of it. Where the variation comes in is how we use it. Some of the most successful people tend to attribute their achievements at least partly to time management.
The most successful people don't spend all day reading lists on the Internet.
Van Gogh's Turbulent Mind Captured Turbulence
The painter's magnificent brushwork made (intuitive?) use of a property known as luminance, a measure of the relative brightness between different points. The eye is more sensitive to luminance change than to color change, meaning we respond more promptly to changes in brightness than in colors. This is what gives many Impressionist paintings that familiar and emotionally moving twinkle, as we can see, for example, in Claude Monet's Impression, Sunrise.
Hey, NPR: His brain didn't work. His eyes were fine.
The New Yorker Editor Who Became a Comic Book Hero
Comic books? Educational? The very idea is comical to anyone familiar with the 1954 Senate subcommittee investigation that linked juvenile delinquency to horror and crime comics. The politicians dealt the industry a staggering blow that it overcame only after superheroes, plus corny teens like Archie and a rascal named Dennis, came to the rescue. Still, comics are seldom associated with literacy. But Françoise Mouly started Toon Books precisely to get more young people reading, and thinking, and enjoying the printed word, lushly illustrated and handsomely bound as well.
So, my collection of Classics Illustrated never happened, right Francoise?
How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
A group of Italian microbiologists had compared the intestinal microbes of young villagers in Burkina Faso with those of children in Florence, Italy. The villagers, who subsisted on a diet of mostly millet and sorghum, harbored far more microbial diversity than the Florentines, who ate a variant of the refined, Western diet. Where the Florentine microbial community was adapted to protein, fats, and simple sugars, the Burkina Faso microbiome was oriented toward degrading the complex plant carbohydrates we call fiber.
Florence, Italy, gave us the Renaissance. I'm pretty sure you can buy manganese mined by hand in Burkina Faso, which is pretty swell, too.
Everybody have a great day, and make sure to buy a drink for your whole microbial community tonight after work. It's the friendly thing to do.
Tracked: Nov 15, 09:40