Sunday Reading

A nuclear power plant near the epicenter of the 2011 Japanese earthquake and tsunami survived because an engineer insisted the seawall be built five times as high as was recommended. (Oregon Live)

The average American family makes less, in real terms, than it did in 1989. (Washington Post)

Kurt Vonnegut, life advice to some students who wrote him. (Letters of Note)

Hunter S. Thompson gives life advice to a friend at 20 years old. Just read the actual letter and skip the commentary. (Brain Pickings)

The real reason Van Halen had the no brown M&M's clause in their rider; it was a tip-off for quality. (Tim Ferriss)

I'm more convinced than ever that the internet has fundamentally altered our perception of what does and does not qualify for compensation. Anyways, a New York Times write explains the changes in his industry. (NYT)

Autonomous cars - safer, smoother, more fuel efficient. (MIT Tech Review)

40% of adults 24-35 years old will spend at least a year making 1.5 times the poverty line or less. By age 35 25% of them will have lived for at least a year below the poverty line. (The Atlantic)

It's official. Internet service in America is terrible and overpriced. (Dailydot)

Gaming in general has been on the rise, but I was unaware the PC gaming is huge and growing.

Sunday Reading

How the iPad made tablets mainstream. (Wired)

How Chris McCandless (of Into the Wild fame) actually died. (The New Yorker)

The total diet replacement Soylent continues its interesting climb to prominence. (Wired)

A National Geographic photographer's experience with leopard seals. (Imgur)

A large percentage of young people in Japan aren't interested in sex. (The Guardian) An interesting take on why this is happening. (reddit/r/bestof)

Sleep flushes away proteins that cause Alzheimer's. (Washington Post)

Target stops asking potential hires if they're ever been convicted of a felony. (New York Times)

New home sizes in square feet from around the world. There are certainly confounding variables such as percentage of the population that lives in apartments, number of people inhabiting home, etc., but it's none the less interesting to see the great variance in something that we typically see as a norm. (Source)

Werner Herzog on the Colbert Report:

I want the audience with me in wild fantasies. In something that illuminates them. You see, if I were only fact based, you see the book of books in literature then would be the Manhattan phone directory. 4 million entries, everything correct, but it dusts out of my ears and I do not know; do they dream at night? Does Mr. Jonathan Smith cry in his pillow at night? We do not know anything when we check all the correct entries in the phone directory. I am not this kind of a film maker.

To which Colbert says "Sir, if I may? I want to party with you, cowboy."