Social Media Explained

[Photo by douglaswray, via Three Ships Media]

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Audrey Hepburn With Her Pet Deer

Photo credit: N/A

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Quote: Frank Zappa

If you end up with a boring miserable life because you listened to your mom, your dad, your teacher, your priest, or some guy on television telling you how to do your shit, then you deserve it.

Advice like this really never gets old.

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RIAA Issues Statement On MegaUpload Shutdown

RIAA issued a public statement regarding to last week’s shutdown of MegaUpload on their blog yesterday:

Fortunately, shutdowns of these types of hubs for illegal activity are not unprecedented. In October of 2010, Limewire (the most popular P2P service at the time) was shut down, and just like this week, millions of users were forced to find new sources for their content. Although some contingent of users remain fixated on stealing music rather than using any of the myriad legal – and often free – services available, we have seen strong evidence that many users quickly switch to legal sources. According to the NPD Group, Limewire users left by the millions in the months after the shutdown (see here). And just like this week with Megaupload and its ilk, the shutdown of one major source led to decreases across other similar services as well.

[...]

Collectively, this evidence strongly suggests that the shutdown of illegal sites helps create a thriving and diverse digital marketplace. It encourages users to go to legitimate sites, and enables great new services to be launched – like Spotify, which launched in the US last year and quickly signed up millions of new users. It’s always reassuring when the data we see in the market reflects what we thought was just common sense.

Why Closing Megaupload Matters [RIAA]

Well, if they say so. Anyway, Julian Sanchez offers some common sense counter-arguments here.

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Do We Become More Conservative As We Age?

Contrary to popular belief, people generally do not become more conservative as they age:

Amidst the bipartisan banter of election season, there persists an enduring belief that people get more conservative as they age — making older people more likely to vote for Republican candidates.

Ongoing research, however, fails to back up the stereotype. While there is some evidence that today’s seniors may be more conservative than today’s youth, that’s not because older folks are more conservative than they use to be. Instead, our modern elders likely came of age at a time when the political situation favored more conservative views.

In fact, studies show that people may actually get more liberal over time when it comes to certain kinds of beliefs. That suggests that we are not pre-determined to get stodgy, set in our ways or otherwise more inflexible in our retirement years.

Do people become more conservative as they age? [DiscoveryNews]

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What You Think – What You Say

[via]

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Everything Is Everything By Koki Tanaka

Here’s a footage of people doing random stuff and random things happening for some reason.

kktnk.com

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Shit New Yorkers Say

So true. “You have to go to Brooklyn. It’s the law!” and “I wanna dog” are my favorites.

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Wernher Von Braun

Wernher von Braun (1912 – 1977) standing next to F-1 engines of the Saturn V first stage at the US Space and Rocket Center.

Photo credit: Wikipedia.

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Exercise Hormone May Fight Obesity, Diabetes

Looks like you may be able to drop the regular workout sessions soon. Or not:

A newly discovered hormone produced in response to exercise may be turning people’s white fat brown, a groundbreaking new study suggests, and in the process lessening their susceptibility to obesity, diabetes and other health problems. The study, published on Wednesday in Nature and led by researchers at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, provides remarkable new insights into how exercise affects the body at a cellular level.

Exercise Hormone May Fight Obesity and Diabetes [NYTimes]

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