a blog by Ian Kennedy
Perhaps Hyundai was over-confident that the Pats would make the Super Bowl again and had already finished this commercial and didn’t want to see it go to waste. If so, I’m glad they didn’t because this is gem.
Appearance by Chris Evans, John Krasinski, Rachel Dratch, and local hero David “Big Papi” Ortiz.
By popular demand, here’s SNL on the New England institution that is Dunkin’
I hate to pitch politics as just one side vs. the other because it ignores the fact that we’re all Americans (shout out to the guy in the MAGA hat that waved and cheered me on my morning run) and are lucky that we even have the luxury to debate issues and participate in a political process, however flawed it may be.
Here are the closing arguments of the impeachment trial. It’s instructive to place them side-by-side and compare style and substance.
Let’s see how things go over the next two days in the Q&A portion of the trial. Please focus on the facts, try and remain objective while the political winds swirl around us. Everyone is speaking to a camera.
While watching, I’ll be keeping these words from New Yorker columnist, Jia Tolentino in mind.
The early internet had been constructed around lines of affinity and openness. But when the internet moved to an organizing principle of opposition, much of what had formerly been surprising and rewarding and curious became tedious, noxious, and grim.
This shift partly reflects basic social physics. Having a mutual enemy is a quick way to make a friend—we learn this as early as elementary school—and politically, it’s much easier to organize people against something than it is to unite them in an affirmative vision. And, within the economy of attention, conflict always gets more people to look.
Excerpted by Ezra Klein in Why the media is so polarized – and how it polarizes us
In case you missed it, SmartNews had a big round of funding last year which we are using to staff up positions here in the United States. While we’ve always had openings for machine learning engineers (doesn’t everyone?) we now are also staffing up in Product, Marketing, and Biz Dev.
If you’re interested in learning more about any of these roles, let me know!
Product – Business Intelligence Analyst
Product – Design Manager
Product – Data Scientist
Marketing – Senior Partnerships Manager
Engineering – Staff Software Engineer, System Generalist
Media BD – Partner Relations, Business Development Associate
More positions including openings in Engineering and in our Tokyo office posted here.
The Center for Systems Science and Engineering (CSSE) at Johns Hopkins is pulling together data from the WHO and CDC and two Chinese health site, the NHC and Dingxiangyuan into a Google Sheet the drives the visualization above.
You can read more about the map and how they put it together on their blog.
After driving around waiting for a calling from God, Nadejda Reilly decided to take it up a notch and drive into the path of an oncoming car. Local police charged her with aggravated assault for causing a wreck an injuring two people.
In India, a man suffered lacerations to his neck while taking his rooster to a cockfight when his prized bird turned on him instead.
Temps dropped to below 40 in Florida so it rained iguanas again.
Canadian Neil Young was finally granted US citizenship after his application was held up because of his long history of smoking weed.
In Italy medical marijuana is now apparently free of charge and apparently grown by the Italian Army.
If one Arizona lawmaker gets his way, it will become a felony to lick ice cream and put it back in the store cooler.
Nearly 100,000 gallons of cabernet sauvignon spilled into a river in Northern California at the Rodney Strong winery.
A man with ‘murder’ tattooed across his face sentenced for murder.
Several furries attending a nearby convention stopped a domestic assault, pulling the offender from his car and sitting on him until police arrived.
A Detroit man, trying to deposit a settlement check from a racial discrimination lawsuit against his employer, was refused by a bank that later called the four police officers on him and initiated a fraud investigation. So he sued the bank for racial discrimination.
Oh, and just in case you didn’t think the world is about to end – ‘Unprecedented’ Swarms of Locusts have descended on East Africa
Have a great weekend everyone!
Spanish ultra marathoner Kilian Jornet is crazy. He apparently climbed Mt. Everest twice in one week (although there is some controversy about that claim) and holds the Fastest Known Time for ascents of the Matterhorn and Mont Blanc.
His latest stunt was to race a someone up and down a 1500 foot mountain in Norway with the catch that his competition had a wingsuit so he could literally fly down. Stating the obvious, Kilian says, “he would be quick to climb and of course very fast on the way down.” (via Runner’s W0rld)
Nike has done it again, this time capturing the sometimes comic ritual of gift-giving (in this case, the tradition of hongbao red envelopes given out during the Chinese New Year) in Asian culture.
These envelopes are often filled with money and given to children by elder relatives for good luck. The 90-second spot from Wieden+Kennedy Shanghai depicts a cat-and-mouse game between an aunt attempting to give an envelope and her niece who repeatedly declines out of politeness.
The Drum
Hat tip to my son Tyler who has always had his finger on the pulse of pop culture.
New analysis determined that the past 10 years are the top 10 years on record for the world’s oceans or, to put it into terms we could understand, “the amount of heat being added to the oceans is equivalent to every person on the planet running 100 microwave ovens all day and all night.”
A medical marijuana farm in Arizona literally turned the sky above into a purple haze. (queue Jimi Hendrix)
Utah Gov. Gary Herbert put the kabash on an HIV-prevention campaign that involved handing out 100,000 free condoms after negative reaction to the packaging that “did not go through necessary approval”
The San Francisco Giants hired the first full time female coach in Major League Baseball history.
Louis Vuitton announced a partnership with the NBA.
Ben & Jerry’s have a partnership with Netflix – I’ll let you guess the name of the new flavor they launched.
A company called Mojo has been thinking about shrinking a video display and embedding on to your eye as a contact lens. They’ve reportedly have released their first prototype.
First it was pigeons in cowboy hats in Vegas. The mystery deepens this week as pigeons in sombreros have been spotted in Reno. Viral casino ad campaign or new ICE initiative?
Apparently there’s a killer squirrel on the loose trapping Houston residents indoors.
Danni Morritt asked her Amazon Echo to teach her about the cardiac cycle of the heart. To her horror, someone had edited the wikipedia page that the Echo uses for source material so the Echo told Danni not only that heartbeats are “bad for the planet” but that she should, “stab herself for the common good.
Police in Colorado Springs arrested a bank robber who robbed a downtown bank, then stepped out and tossed the cash in the air while saying “Merry Christmas”
The US Patent Office awarded Nike a patent for blockchain-verified sneaker line they are calling CryptoKicks.
Scientists have figured out how to edit tomato genes to make them grow into bouquets, like flowers.
A New York state assemblyman wrote an editorial to the local paper on Christmas Eve about the dangers of drunk driving. On New Year’s Eve he drove his GMC Acadia into a ditch and police determined he was drunk driving.
Headlines with the words Iran and attack triggered high frequency trading algorithms to rapidly sell off dollar/yen before traders grabbed the wheel and brought it back.
A Florida beachcomber brought home what she though was an old rusty plate but later discovered it was a landmine.
A Spanish television reporter won the lottery and quit her job, live on air. “Natalia doesn’t work tomorrow. Woo!” she declared while wagging her finger. Natalia later found out her payout was only $5,500 after discovering she was sharing her earnings with hundreds of others, “It’s unclear if [she] is still an employee at RTVE”