John Cox

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3 Misconceptions That Need to Die (WMT, X)

Morgan Housel takes on three popular economic beliefs with government data: that most American spending goes to Chinese-made goods (only about 2.7% does, with 88.5% going to American-made goods and services), that China is our main creditor (it holds 7.8% of U.S. government debt, less than Japan and the U.K. combined, with much of the rest held by U.S. trust funds and the Fed), and that most of our oil comes from the Middle East (just 9.2%, versus roughly half produced domestically and more than twice as much imported from Canada and Mexico). He also explains why the myths persist, noting for instance that U.S. manufacturing output is near a record high even though manufacturing jobs have collapsed, and he opens with a Wharton professor's warning about misinformation undermining rational debate.

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The Inspiration Stream | Veerle's blog 3.0 - Webdesign - XHTML CSS | Graphic Design

A monthly color-inspiration roundup, in which the curator gathers visuals from print design, photography, illustration, and typography, with downloadable color palettes as Adobe Swatch Exchange (.ase) files. This edition collects about a dozen credited pieces, including Kri Kri frozen yogurt illustrations, a set of 20 Tripadvisor achievement badges, a Concours of Elegance 2025 catalogue cover, a limited-edition Ename Blond bottle, and Tycho's Art Basel show. It also includes an architectural look at the 1961 Garduño-Heiser Home in Silver Lake. It's worth keeping as a palette and visual reference source rather than for any argument.

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25 jQuery Plugins to help with Responsive Layouts

A roundup of about 25 jQuery plugins for making individual page elements responsive, on the premise that media queries resize the overall layout but navigation, images, sliders, carousels, video embeds and grids each need their own handling. The picks include Response.js for swapping content by screen size, menu-to-dropdown converters, Doubletake for swapping image sources at breakpoints, FitText for fluid headlines, FitVids for fluid video, and several sliders and galleries (Elastislide, FlexSlider, PhotoSwipe, rlightbox). It also covers grid and layout tools (Masonry, Isotope, The Heads-Up Grid), and ends with Adaptive Images, which isn't a plugin but serves device-appropriate images without changing your markup.

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Freakonomics » Cause of Death: Drinking More Acceptable Than Smoking in UK

A Journal of Clinical Pathology study of 2,128 death certificates and 236 postmortems from a London teaching hospital (2003–2009) found alcohol listed as a major contributor in 57.4 percent of cases, while smoking appeared as a cause of death in only 0.5 percent, usually as a secondary one, even though 279 of the deaths involved lung cancer or COPD. The authors suggest doctors avoid stigmatizing the deceased by naming smoking, though they don't extend that reluctance to alcohol, which means valuable epidemiological data is being lost. The piece ties this to Britain's increasingly punitive anti-smoking campaign, including graphic pack warnings and a BMJ letter proposing publication of the names of those killed daily by smoking, and speculates that British pub culture explains the softer attitude toward drink.

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Six Famous Thought Experiments, Animated in 60 Seconds Each | Brain Pickings

A short roundup from Maria Popova pointing to the Open University's animated series 60-Second Adventures in Thought, which packs six famous thought experiments into one-minute videos: Zeno's Achilles and the Tortoise (motion as illusion), the Grandfather Paradox (time travel), Searle's Chinese Room (artificial intelligence), Hilbert's Grand Hotel (infinity), the Twin Paradox (special relativity), and Schrödinger's Cat (quantum mechanics). The post is mostly embedded videos with one-line framings and a nod to Peg Tittle's anthology *What If… Collected Thought Experiments in Philosophy* for further reading.

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How to Know When to Quit

Drawing on Seth Godin's *The Dip*, April Dykman argues that "winners never quit" is wrong: winners quit constantly, but they quit the right things at the right time. She separates a cul-de-sac, a true dead end where proactive fixes have failed (her own burned-out jobs, a micro-managing boss, a too-narrow ferret-sitting niche), from a dip, the hard stretch between beginner's luck and real accomplishment, which successful people lean into rather than merely endure. To tell the difference, she passes along Godin's checks: don't decide while panicking, consider whether you're trying to influence one person or a market, and ask whether you're making measurable progress. She adds that quitting can mean dropping a tactic or project, not just a job or business.

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Homeland original series only on Showtime: Watch videos, Downlaod Mobile Apps, Games, More

There's no article here, just the leftover text of a streaming site's promotional carousel. It advertises three titles: a film about a newly crowned Super Middleweight Champion who breaks his neck in a head-on car crash, a movie in which a family flees a nuclear bomb in Los Angeles to an eccentric prepper's mountain fortress called The Homestead, and a Dexter series in which Dexter Morgan moves to New York City. If you meant to save a specific piece, the capture failed, so it's worth re-saving from the original page.

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Gay teen bullying victim who recorded an “It Gets Better” video commits suicide – Boing Boing

A short post from 2011 on the suicide of Jamey Rodemeyer, a 14-year-old from Buffalo, NY, who died four months after posting an "It Gets Better" video about surviving homophobic bullying. It sets his hopeful message in the video, where he credits Lady Gaga with helping him love himself, against his final Tumblr post, which asked what he had to do to get anyone to listen to him. The post is mainly a brief tribute and a pointer to Dangerous Minds, and the rest of the saved page is unrelated sidebar teasers for gadgets and deals.

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Taxes and the Wealthy - NYTimes.com

Paul Krugman rebuts the claim that the rich are overburdened by taxes just because their share of total tax payments has grown, noting that this ignores how much their share of income has grown. Using CBO data through 2005 and the Tax Policy Center's method of measuring how tax changes affect after-tax income, he shows that changes in tax rates from 1979 to 2005 benefited the very richest the most. Tax policy contributed only modestly to the surge in after-tax inequality, he concedes, but it reinforced that trend rather than countering it, and he says anyone claiming otherwise shouldn't be trusted.

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jQuery Timelinr ↩ CSSLab

Documentation page (in English and Spanish) for Timelinr, a jQuery plugin from CSSLab.cl that turns a plain list of dates and entries into an animated timeline, in horizontal or vertical layout. It covers setup, the required HTML markup, and the configurable options (orientation, animation speeds, transparency, prev/next buttons, keyboard arrows, starting position, autoplay), then lists the changelog from 0.9.1 through 0.9.6, which adds autoplay, startAt, IE8 fixes and centering of long timelines. Demos and a download are linked, and the plugin is MIT-licensed.

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How Tech Is Changing the Museum Experience

A survey of how museums are using mobile technology, led by the Smithsonian's wide-ranging portfolio: exhibit companion apps, the LeafSnap crowdsourcing tool, and early augmented reality work. Nancy Proctor argues that camera-based recognition is the most promising direction, but that indoor Wi-Fi, GPS limits, and building materials hold it back, and that mobile's real value is two-way social exchange rather than the one-way audio tour. It also covers the Museum of Jewish Heritage's GPS walking tour of Emma Lazarus's New York and Sydney's Powerhouse Museum, where Sebastian Chan suggests that once visitors can look up facts on their phones, galleries can focus on immersive experience and leave the "fact layer" to mobile and online delivery.

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