[MyAppleMenu] Mar 31, 2013

[applesurf at myapplemenu.com]

MyAppleMenu
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**** How Apple's Return Policy In China Differs From The U.S. ****
<http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2013/03/30/apple-china-return-policies/>
Philip Elmer-DeWitt, Fortune


> It doesn't, as near as I can tell. So what's all the fuss about?






MyAppleMenu Reader
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**** Reviewed: Noise - A Human History Of Sound And Listening By David Hendy ****
<http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2013/03/reviewed-noise-human-history-sound-and-listening-david-hendy>
Steven Poole, New Statesman


> During a classical music concert, a cough is rarely just a cough. According to a recent paper by the economist Andreas Wagener, people are twice as likely to cough during a concert as at other times. Furthermore, they are more likely to cough during modern, atonal music than during better-known repertoire and they cough more during slow or quiet passages than during fast and loud ones.

> The classical cough, then, is no accident but rather a form of communication disguised as involuntary physiological tic.



**** Maps ****
<http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2013/03/26/maps/>
Ben Lytal, The Paris Review


> People pretend the idea of fact-checking fiction is hilarious and a paradox and maybe even scandalously bureaucratic and wrongheaded. But when fiction gets facts wrong, people care. If a novel claims to be about a real place, people say, It should at least get the street names right. If somebody writes a story about Manhattan, and he mixes up the streets, he’s expected to fix it. 

> When I first realized this, it worried me. If I ever wrote a story, I thought, it would be murder to go back and change the street names. Not because of their precious sonic qualities, the effect removing them would have on the rhythm of the sentences. But because likely I’d have done more than transpose street names. I’d have bent Broadway to intersect with Bowery so that my hero could stumble out of a Bowery bar and look up and be able to see Grace Church, for example. Moving the streets, shuffling them back or prying them apart, would ruin the effect.



**** When Did You Get Hooked? ****
<http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n07/john-lanchester/when-did-you-get-hooked>
John Lanchester, London Review Of Books


> For reasons I’ve never seen explained or even thoroughly engaged with, there seems to be an unbridgeable crevasse between the SF/fantasy audience and the wider literate public.