- Online tool for creating graphs
- “NCES constantly uses graphs and charts in our publications and on the web. Sometimes, complicated information is difficult to understand and needs an illustration. Graphs or charts can help impress people by getting your point across quickly and visually.”
- Why Chipotle does less than other chains
- “Chipotle also avoids the frills that pad other chains’ bottom lines. ‘Desserts and other sides are all profit for these chains,’ says industry analyst Clark Wolf. ‘The whole infrastructure’s already there, so they can make a 90% margin on extras.’ But founder and CEO Steve Ells staunchly refuses to expand his menu beyond four options (burrito, burrito bowl, taco, salad). ‘We want to do just a few things better than everyone else,’ Ells says. ‘We just do things we think are right.’” [via BL]
- The quietest place on earth
- “Silence is a truly rare thing. All reverberation is removed… all sounds that aren’t coming from your own body disappear. After a few moments in the anechoic chamber, you’ll begin to feel a touch jumpy. Hearing your heart beat, your blood pulse, the sound of your own ear buzzing and your body functioning like you’ve never heard before has a tendency to be a bit unnerving. And in complete silence, you lose all sense of space and surroundings. The absence of reflected sound and reverberation makes ‘feeling out’ the room impossible.”
- How to meditate
- “The purpose of meditation is to make our mind calm and peaceful. If our mind is peaceful, we will be free from worries and mental discomfort, and so we will experience true happiness; but if our mind is not peaceful, we will find it very difficult to be happy, even if we are living in the very best conditions. If we train in meditation, our mind will gradually become more and more peaceful, and we will experience a purer and purer form of happiness. Eventually, we will be able to stay happy all the time, even in the most difficult circumstances.”
- “In Japan, That Donut Could Cost You Your Job”
- “To curtail Japan’s overweight population, the Japanese health ministry recently mandated that all waistlines among its 56 million workers over age 40 be below ‘regulation size’ of 33.5 inches (for men). Any company failing to bring its employees’ weight under control — as well as the weights of their family members — will be fined up to 10% of its earnings by the government.”
- Online Vietnam Veterans Memorial
- “it’s a 5 gigapixel image (about 460 feet wide when viewed at 100%) of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall (stitched from 1,494 images) where you can click on any name to learn more about that person or add photos and comments.”
- OpenID for Google accounts
- You can now use your Google Account to log into any site that supports OpenID.
- Canoe made from disposable chopsticks
- “A former city employee in the Fukushima prefecture town of Koriyama has built a 4-meter (13-ft) long canoe from thousands of used disposable chopsticks recovered from the city hall cafeteria. Bothered that perfectly good wood was going to waste after a single use, Shuhei Ogawara — whose job at city hall involved working with the local forestry industry — spent the last two years of his career collecting used chopsticks from the cafeteria.”
--Josh
on 11 Apr 08Chipotle’s simplicity is great – but I always wish they’d add a Nachos option.
goga
on 11 Apr 08xttp://openid-provider.appspot.com/username
I have to type all_that every time I want to use Google’s openid service? Why can’t it be xttp://gmail.com/username,
carlivar
on 11 Apr 08So if you’re fat and unemployed in Japan, that’s okay?
Pat Gannon
on 11 Apr 08Chipotle makes burritos better than everybody else? Ha! Chipotle is not bad, when traveling outside of CA, but you’ll notice they don’t even attempt to operate inside California. If you think Chipotle makes the best burritos anywhere, I’ll send you a burrito from Santa Rosa Taqueria (or numerous other local joints) via same-day airmail and you’ll eat your words for desert.
Ryan Heneise
on 11 Apr 08@Pat – Yet, for those of us who have been forced to move out of California by high taxes, high cost of living, and overactive legislation, Chipotle is a great substitute for cali-mex.
Regarding the post though – I love Chipotle for its simplicity. A great contrast is Chipotle vs Baskin Robins 31 Flavors. Ordering from Chipotle is so easy; last time I went to BR31F I ended up getting something cheap and lame because I couldn’t decide what to get. I told my wife we should open up one of those frozen yogurt stores where they just have one flavor of yogurt.
Mmm. this makes me think of Pinkberry.
carlivar
on 11 Apr 08@Pat – Chipotle is in California. There’s one near me here in Burbank. Yeah, local joints can be good but I’ve had some terrible hole-in-the-wall Mexican, too.
But I usually prefer Tex-Mex style over the stuff here in California.
John
on 11 Apr 08Yes, Chipotle is in California. No one mentions the calories in a burrito bowl are more than most average people need in an entire day.
As for the meditation thing … that site is total BS. As a long time budhist, I have to call them on that. Life is suffering, there is no such thing as “stay happy all the time”. If you really want to know what meditation is read Brad Warner, you can google him for his website. He was a punk bassist for Zero Defucts, and now a zen priest. Plain and simple its you sitting staring at a wall.
mike-2
on 11 Apr 08@john – Agreed. Meditation is purposeless.
surya
on 12 Apr 08@37signals – what prompted the interest in meditation? How are you all enjoying it so far?
@mike-2, @john – meditation is about becoming thoughtless and being centered. I don’t know why you believe life is suffering but it is certainly more pleasant when you are experiencing thoughtless awareness.
Maybe you just haven’t found a style of meditation that works for you? I looked around a bit before finding the style I like. Try out this guided online meditation workshop (freemeditation.ca). It may work for you. Let me know how you like it. Good luck.
mike-2
on 12 Apr 08@surya – I can’t speak for yoga meditation, but the goal Buddhist meditation is not to have a clear mind, be peaceful or to become something other than what you are, which is why I say it is purposeless—there’s no payoff at the end. The Heart Sutra says “no attainment with nothing to attain.”
One of the four noble truths of Buddhism is that life is suffering, meaning that we will never be able to achieve a life of perfect bliss with no discomfort, dissatisfaction or pain.
Grant
on 12 Apr 08He’s so intent on simplicity that earlier this year, when Chipotle tested brown rice at some stores here in Boulder, they completely removed white rice from the menu. Personally I liked the brown, but not everyone does and they’ve since switched back.
-gb
Seth
on 12 Apr 08Chipotle SUCKS. Fake ass Mexican food…
I feel sorry for those of you living in the US that don’t have the options we do here in CA :)
Seb
on 12 Apr 08@mike-2 you look pretty bitter. It’s sad. If all buddhism can give you is that, you’re missing the point!
mike-2
on 12 Apr 08@Seb – Its unfortunate that people think they have to choose cynicism or sentimentality, and that if you shine a light on the falseness of one, you must be an advocate for the other.
That we will never achieve complete freedom from discomfort is simply one of the basic (and obvious) teachings of Buddhism. Everyone encounters this truth, and some people respond to this by becoming cynical, but cynicism and sentimentality are really just two sides of the same coin. Sentimentality defensively escapes into blissful fantasy, but cynicism is equally a defense mechanism—life doesn’t live up to our expectations, so we become cynical to avoid disappointment.
What both of these viewpoints share is the belief that things are intolerable just as they are and a kind of defensive crouch against our experience, which is why meditating to “become centered” is often really just “running away from being off-center”. But one slogan from Tibetan practices is “Abandon all hope of fruition”. How do you respond to that? It can sound quite terrifying. But remember, everyone knows exactly how you feel, because everyone feels it too, everyone knows what it is like to want to run away. Much of our intolerance to suffering comes from a lack of compassion towards ourselves for feeling suffering in the first place. We feel guilty, or we think we’ve screwed up, but we haven’t. Its part of life, and by avoiding that fact, we actually make things much worse for ourselves.
Where does this guilt come from? There’s a tremendous cultural pressure, similar to a religious dogmatism, that insists that we can and it is our duty to escape from this basic condition through various means, and to say otherwise is blasphemy. Really, we have an impossible standard that we can never live up to, and the old religious demands seem almost tame in comparison.
This is not to say that it is wrong to try to improve your situation, but there are limits to what can be done, and even then, you are still in the same place that you are now, in some important ways.
Lemme
on 13 Apr 08That Vietnam Memorial site is excellent and will only get richer over time. For another example of this kind of thing - though you’ll have to install the Silverlight plug-in (alas) - check out Hard Rock’s new memorabilia site. Accessible from their homepage—hardrock [dot] com. 250+ high-res images of some great rock memorabilia. Over a billion pixels worth of information. Pretty impressive. Find the Sid Vicious handwritten note for a good laugh.
Jason
on 14 Apr 08I want to love Chipotle, but I can’t. Looking at their nutritional information boggles the mind – a black bean bowl with rice and fajita veggies is a sodium and fat BOMB, and accounts for all of your daily recommended value of each.
Simplicity my ass.
Pat Gannon
on 14 Apr 08@carlivar Drive down to El Cholo in downtown LA and tell me if you still prefer Chipotle. ;-)
Best Regards, Pat
Seth
on 15 Apr 08http://www.lavicsj.com/images/HOME_PG_FULL.gif
This discussion is closed.