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Every single one of these is a gem. Read the rest

From Kevin Kelly, a collection of photos he took of Katmandu, Nepal in 1976.

Nepal was recently affected by a 7.8 earthquake, which resulted in the deaths of more than 6000 people and much property damage.

Katmandu was an intensely ornate city that is easily damaged. The carvings, details, public spaces were glorious. My heart goes out to its citizens who suffer with their city. As you can see from these images I took in 1976, the medieval town has been delicate for decades. Loosely stacked bricks are everywhere. One can also see what splendid art has been lost. Not all has been destroyed, and I am sure the Nepalis will rebuild as they have in the past. Still, the earthquake shook more than just buildings.

If you look carefully you may notice something unusual about these photos. They show no cars, pedicabs, or even bicycles. At the time I took these images, Katmandu was an entirely pedestrian city. Everyone walked everywhere. Part of why I loved it. That has not been true for decades, so this is something else that was lost long ago. Also missing back then was signage. There are few signs for stores, or the typical wordage you would see in any urban landscape today. Katmandu today is much more modern, much more livable, or at least it was.

Quiksilver designed a wetsuit that looks like an actual suit.

If you’re a surfer, and you love the feel of salty sea mist on your skin, and the threatening billow of a forming wave, and the rush of gliding on water, but your preferred look is business formal, this is great news for you. 

"You see this goblet?" asks Achaan Chaa, the Thai meditation master. "For me this glass is already broken. I enjoy it; I drink out of it. It holds my water admirably, sometimes even reflecting the sun in beautiful patterns. If I should tap it, it has a lovely ring to it. But when I put this glass on the shelf and the wind knocks it over or my elbow brushes it off the table and it falls to the ground and shatters, I say, 'Of course.' When I understand that the glass is already broken, every moment with it is precious."

From Thoughts Without a Thinker: Psychotherapy from a Buddhist Perspective by Mark Epstein.

For months Jeff Wysaski has been covertly placing fake installations into everyday society. He is the creator of the subversive product remixing project, tumblr site, and sometimes fake company, ‘Obvious Plant’ (just think about that name…). At first glance his work seems like everyday book covers, warning signs or wine recommendations – but take a closer look and the jokes on you.

Need a bottle of wine and don’t know what to pair it with? Jeff left wine recommendations at his local liquor store. They pretty much tell it like it is…

Has that wine buzz brought up some personal issues you need to deal with? Don’t worry, grab one of Obvious Plant’s fine self-help books at Jeff’s local bookstore. Seriously, who understands kids these days?

Ok, you are an adult, how about reading like one. Here are Jeff’s new (and honest sections) at the same store.

You aren’t even safe from Jeff’s trickery in the parking lot (even when he’s doing his “best to prevent crime“). Here he gives some sage advice on how to keep your car safe while you’re shopping at the mall:

Clearly Jeff is on a roll here. Check out more of his consumerist subversions on his site (and once you’re inspired, go make your own).

Using this thumbnail trackpad is like playing the world’s smallest violin.

As Boing Boing's "king of typos," I can appreciate this howler from The Vocabulary of East Anglia, Vol. 1 of 2.

Many thanks to Rob for antiquing this scan of the public domain book. We are releasing the image to the public domain. Have fun with it!

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When Google pulled the plug on Google Reader, I looked around for a replacement. I found Feedly and thought it was almost as good as Google Reader.

You’re reading Significant Digits, a daily digest of the telling numbers tucked inside the news. To receive this as an email newsletter, please subscribe.

0.00055 percent

11.9 percent

From New York Magazine, a big feature on NYC after midnight. Several people shared their stories, including Bebe Buell:

In 1974, I was on Hudson and Horatio -- it was still pretty shady over there at the time - and I could not get a cab. This big giant Cadillac pulls up, and a guy and a girl were in it. It was obviously a pimp and his girl. And the guy goes, "My name is Magic. Do you need a ride?" Who in their right mind would get in that car? But I did. His name was Magic, her name was Angel, and it was like a scene out of a Scorsese movie. I just remember the tranny girls yelling, "You go, girl!" They thought I had gotten a trick or something. I don't know what made me think it was going to be okay. Angel let me know, "Don't worry, honey, we're not serial killers." And for some godforsaken reason, I believed them.

And Alec Baldwin, who has always been interested in Saturday Night Live:

I was told that there was a place called Louis's Toy Bar on the Upper East Side. And it was this narrow sliver of a shop that obviously had sold antique clothes or something. And this guy Louis who owned it would put out plates of, like, Velveeta cheese and crackers and very modest kinds of canapes. I was told, back then, that all the cast of the original Saturday Night Live went there after the show; this was their haunt, this was their after-party-after-party Copacabana. And I went there countless times, eating Velveeta cheese, waiting for them, and they never came. They never showed up.

And Lydia Lunch:

I made money by standing on the corner of Sixth Avenue and 8th Street, shaking down women with children, saying I worked for the Cancer Foundation, until I got $10. I could live on that. The rent at my apartment on 12th Street between A and B was $75 a month.

And Dr. Jason D'Amore, formerly a resident at Bellvue:

One night, we got this guy in who was riding his Harley down the FDR at high speed, and he got run over by a semi, and he comes in and is very close to death. [...] So this guy, he was covered head-to-toe in iron crosses and swastikas and white-power tattoos. I'm looking around, and I'm D'Amore, and the ortho guy was Schwarzbaum, and we had to call neurosurgery, and that was Goldberg, and we intubated him and we got him stabilized and into the operating room, and he's totally sedated, and I leaned down and said, "Dude, I just wanted you to know a bunch of Jews just saved your ass."

And Colin Quinn:

It's easier to be nostalgic now. It's easier to look at it now and say, "Oh, I miss Taxi Driver." Suddenly, we're all like French film students who romanticize New York, even though when you lived it, it was bad. There were so many heroin dealers. If you were on, like, Avenue B and C, and somebody goes, "You want heroin?" and you said no, they'd get mad at you, like you were going browsing in a store and not buying anything. "You're wasting our time! Trying to make money here."

And Alexis Swerdloff:

The hand-delivered invite was a velvet-wrapped VHS tape. Five minutes and 42 seconds long, the video had Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres, Ananda Lewis, Todd Oldham, Veronica Webb, Ben Stiller, Pauly Shore, Derek Jeter, and dozens of other '90s luminaries hyping Puff Daddy's 29th-birthday party on November 4, 1998. Chris Rock said to leave your posse at home, Magic Johnson instructed guests to arrive at 10 p.m. on the dot, and Will Smith directed people to a 212 number in order to RSVP for the secret location. "It's gonna be all that," cooed Tyra Banks.

And there's so much more...go read the whole thing. The photos are great too. Look for the one with Edith Piaf singing at a club; it's just her in 1950 on a tiny stage with no microphone singing to people while they eat dinner. Man, if I had a time machine...

Devin Graham shot this high-energy race down a New Zealand mountain with a boulder-sized Zorb ready to roll over anyone in its path. The key is to dive before it catches you, or plan on a pretty heavy faceplant as it rolls over. Read the rest

Google Search thinks the most important female CEO is Barbie.

The University of Washington just released a preview of a study that claims search engine results can influence people’s perceptions about how many men or women hold certain jobs. One figure quoted in the preview is that in a Google image search for CEO, only 11 percent of the people returned were women (by comparison, the university says 27 percent of CEOs in the US are women). That’s pretty crazy, so I decided to fire up incognito mode in Chrome and search Google Images as an Anonymous Internet Person to see the authentic, natural results. And, uh, the results are insane. 

Meet the enormous machine that refreshes railroad tracks (rails, ties, gravel) with minimal human involvement. Fun to see the infrastructure behind the infrastructure.

Not even John Henry would stand a chance against this behemoth.

Street artists Ella & Pitr painted this amazing massive piece in a Lyon, France rail yard. (Street Art News via Laughing Squid)

Chicago: please watch this important video, and don’t forget to vote on April 7th.

(via Chicagoist)

Today a renegade sculptor mounted a bust of Edward Snowden in a Brooklyn park — only to have it removed by the Parks department.

(GIF from a Vine shared by Jeremy Cabalona)

Someone has been keeping an incredible fictional Instagram account of Drake twins.

(images via draketwins)

Artist Julien Knez designed VHS covers for current movies and shows that make us nostalgic for the present.

A San Francisco jury found Friday that a prestigious venture capital firm did not discriminate against a former junior partner because of her gender, concluding a month-long trial that, despite its outcome, launched a wide-ranging discussion about how women are treated in Silicon Valley.

Ellen Pao had accused Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers of treating her “despicably, maliciously, fraudulently, and oppressively” and later retaliating by denying her a promotion and firing her when she complained. Kleiner Perkins, famous for early investments in Amazon and Google and which had a good track record of hiring female executives, countered that Pao was a difficult employee who simply didn’t make the cut.

The jury of six men and six women deliberated for three days before deciding in favor of Kleiner Perkins on three counts related to gender discrimination as well as a fourth count on whether Pao was fired in retaliation for her lawsuit. Pao had asked for $16 million in compensation, plus punitive damages.

“I have told my story and thousands of people have heard it,” Pao said after the decision. “If I helped to level the playing field for women and minorities in venture capital, then the battle was worth it.”

Regardless of the jury’s decision in favor of Kleiner Perkins, many said the trial remains a rebuke of Silicon Valley’s male-dominated culture and a warning sign to other technology firms and start-ups — a message that seemed to find a wide audience despite the particulars of a difficult case. These supporters point to the gender disparity in technology jobs, such as at Google, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo, where women hold 15 percent to 20 percent of those positions. And recent gender-discrimination lawsuits filed against Twitter and Facebook are likely to further fuel the debate.

The courtroom testimony in Pao's case was at times salacious, with dissections of an office affair and the gift of an erotically-charged poetry book. But the jury’s decision appeared to hinge on more subtle signs of sexism and harassment, the kind of “boy’s club” culture that women in technology have complained about for years. That’s what kept the courtroom packed -- former Yahoo president Susan Decker was among the curious driven to drop by for closing arguments earlier this week -- and made the case fodder for obsessive Twitter updates.

"It's a clear win for Kleiner Perkins," said Jason Knott, a Washington, D.C., attorney specializing in employment law and who closely followed the case. "But it still raises the issue that employers have to be sensitive to how they treat workers."

Some tech companies already have moved to make their workplaces more welcoming to women, said Freada Kapor Klein, a diversity consultant in the San Francisco area.

She said she’s been contacted for help by more than a dozen companies in recent weeks as the Pao trial unfolded. The focus is no longer about preventing just what she calls “smoking gun” acts of discrimination. Companies want advice on rooting out smaller problems.

“They are moving to dismantle unwelcoming work environments and hidden or subtle biases,” Klein said.

Joelle Emerson, chief executive of Paradigm, which helps tech companies with diversity, said she believes Pao’s case will continue to reverberate in Silicon Valley.

“My hope is that it will help other companies be more thoughtful,” Emerson said.

Pao, now 45, arrived at Kleiner Perkins in 2005 as chief of staff to the firm’s best-known partner John Doerr. She was bright. She had an electrical engineering degree from Princeton and graduated from both Harvard’s law and business schools. She was promoted to junior partner at the firm. But she was fired in October 2012, not long after filing her lawsuit.

At Kleiner Perkins, women make up more than 20 percent of the partners, making it a stand-out among competitors. Firm partner Mary Meeker testified at trial that it was “the best place to be a woman in business.”

But Pao’s attorneys claimed she was the victim of a male-dominated workplace where women were denied the same opportunities as men.

The headline moments came when Pao testified a male coworker with whom she had an affair retaliated against her by cutting her out of emails and meetings – and the firm did nothing to stop it.

"Going back I would not have done it again," she testified about the affair. "I didn't think it was inappropriate at the time."

She said she was subjected to a discussion about pornography on a plane ride with her male colleagues. She said a partner gave her a copy of Leonard Cohen’s “Book of Longing” as a Valentine’s Day gift. Pao also said she and other female employees were not invited to firm dinners at the home of former Vice President Al Gore and left out of an all-male firm ski trip to Colorado.

Kleiner Perkins lined up explanations – the poetry book was not intended to create discomfort and other women had been invited to the Gore dinners and on the ski trip. Meeker, the high-profile female partner, testified she’d dined at Gore’s house before and was invited to ski in Colorado, but declined.

But the case seemed to balance on smaller slights. Pao said she was denied a seat by Kleiner Perkins on another company’s board of directors in part because she was going on maternity leave. Her lawsuit claimed male junior partners were allowed to sit on the boards of multiple companies that the firm invested in, while female colleagues were limited to one.

Pao’s attorney said Pao excelled at the firm, leading to an investment in a company that later enjoyed great success and helping two companies merge. Two male colleagues of Pao had been promoted, even though one was called confrontational and another was accused of having "sharp elbows," an apparent reference to his treatment of other workers.

Similar criticisms of Pao were used to justify her being fired, Pao’s lawyer Alan Exelrod said.

"The evidence in this case compels the conclusion that men were judged by one standard and women by another," Exelrod told the jury this week. "The leaders of Kleiner Perkins are the ones responsible for this double standard."

Kleiner Perkins has countered that Pao was a chronic complainer who twisted facts and circumstances in her lawsuit and had a history of conflicts with colleagues.

“The complaints of Ellen Pao were made for only one purpose: a huge payout for team Ellen," Kleiner Perkins attorney Lynne Hermle told the jury.

In recent weeks, at least two more gender discrimination lawsuits have hit major Silicon Valley firms. Facebook was sued in February by a former employee who claims gender and racial discrimination, among other allegations. Chia Hong, who is a woman and Taiwanese, claims that she was fired in 2013 and replaced by a less qualified man.

Earlier this month, Twitter was hit with a class action lawsuit by a former software worker. Tina Huang, who worked at Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters for six years, claims she was passed over for promotion because of her gender and then fired when she complained. Huang’s lawsuit alleges that Twitter did not openly post job opportunities, but relied instead on a secretive “shoulder tap” process that favored the “boy’s club.”

For Emerson, the Twitter lawsuit carries even more potential for changing the tech culture than Pao’s closely followed case. That’s because it’s not about the plight of one women, Emerson said, it’s about the structural discrimination that many believe exists in the tech world.

Twitter actually was a sticking point in Pao’s trial. In 2008, Pao pushed for Kleiner Perkins to invest in the popular messaging site. But the firm turned her down, only to put funding into the company later.

Pao’s attorney, in his closing argument to the jury, noted the irony that word of the verdict would be spread by Twitter now.

It just wasn't the verdict he wanted.

Associated Press contributed.

Oh my, I had forgotten about the Name of the Year site and how amazing it is. Each year, they collect the most unusual names in the world and pit them against each other in a March Madness-style bracket. Here are some of the names in the running for the 2015 Name of the Year:

Swindly Lint
Dr. Electron Kebebew
Flavious Coffee
Lancelot Supersad Jr.
Jazznique St. Junious

(A reminder...these are actual names of actual people. Somehow.)

Littice Bacon-Blood
Dr. Wallop Promthong
Infinite Grover
Genghis Muskox
Malvina Complainville
Beethoven Bong
Amanda Miranda Panda

Some Hall of Name inductees include Tokyo Sexwale, Nimrod Weiselfish, Doby Chrotchtangle, Tanqueray Beavers, and Vanilla Dong.