• The Cold Hard Facts Of Freezing To Death
  

  You’ve now crossed the boundary into profound hypothermia. By the time your core temperature has fallen to 88 degrees, your body has abandoned the urge to warm itself by shivering. Your blood is thickening like crankcase oil in a cold engine. Your oxygen consumption, a measure of your metabolic rate, has fallen by more than a quarter. Your kidneys, however, work overtime to process the fluid overload that occurred when the blood vessels in your extremities constricted and squeezed fluids toward your center. You feel a powerful urge to urinate, the only thing you feel at all.

• For Amusement Only: the life and death of the American arcade
  

  In March of 1991, Capcom released Street Fighter II into arcades, setting off a renaissance in the business. A massive success, Street Fighter II sold more than 60,000 cabinets worldwide, which was unheard of by the early ‘90s. Japanese fighting games weren’t new, but its combination of novel characters, hand-to-hand combat, and secret moves formed the foundation of fighting games as we still know them. It also brought a new wave of enthusiastic players out of their houses and into arcades. It was important that, while home versions were typically available the next year, they were simplified: arcade technology was simply better than what the SNES or home computer versions could offer.

• What is Actually Going On In Iceland
  Some ramblings on why the Iceland economy is still messed up. I learned that loans in Iceland are really weird – you could pay for years on your mortgage and then suddenly your amount owning is greater than your original principal!

  In normal economies, 4% inflation underlying 2.6% growth doesn’t result in everybody’s loan principal increasing 4% over the year. But that’s exactly what happens in Iceland. So you have to bring inflation into every discussion on growth in Iceland.

• Meet Amancio Ortega: The third-richest man in the world
  If you haven’t heard his name before (not surprisingly), he is the founder of….Zara
• The Rules of the Game
  A look at the history and evolution of Hollywood’s publicity game, from when there was none to today’s social, organic approach.

  In today’s terms, media outlets report that George Clooney, whose picture personality is that of a handsome, charismatic, yet hesitant to commit man-about-town, replicates those characteristics in his “real” life, gallivanting about Lake Como, switching beautiful girlfriends every few years. The extra-textual information ratifies and authenticates his overarching image; the “real” Clooney is in fact all of the things he is in, say, Ocean’s Eleven. Whether we’re conscious of it or not, that coherency is at once pleasurable and reassuring.

Posted by Kevin in Blogs Tags: celebrities, iceland, instapaper