Edward L. Glaeser says: “Historically, human capital — the education and skills of a work force — predicts which cities are able to reinvent themselves and which ones are not. Those people who are continuing to pay high prices for Manhattan real estate are implicitly betting that New York’s human capital will continue to come up with new ways of reinventing the city.”

Disarmingly witty, plush toy versions of popular meats — ya gots yer t-bone steak, yer pork chop and yer hambone. You may not necessarily need these in your life, but you’re probably happy they’re out there.

Simple search tool allows you to check dozens of sites to see if your preferred screen handle is available or in use.

Sadly, digital technology will put the final nail in the coffin for Polaroid’s iconic instant film product at the end of the year; after earlier ceasing the manufacture of its cameras, the company will stop making the actual film after 31 Dec. For the remaining users and fans orphaned by this turn of events, Photojojo offers this typically excellent round-up of coping tips, including a look at some substitutes of varying levels of satisfaction.

A friend of mine just showed this site to me today, which I apparently missed when it first debuted several months ago. It’s a nearly perfect re-creation of the Apple Keynote presentation-making application — or as nearly perfect as can be expected within a Web browser — built with the Cappuccino Web framework, which enables “desktop class applications” through JavaScript.

280 Slides is an impressive piece of work, but I wonder if it isn’t somewhat quixotic too. Though browser applications will inevitably become more desktop-like as they become more powerful, that doesn’t mean they should be designed to look and function like the software that lives on your hard drive. It’s still important to be true to the medium and the platform. That’s why Gmail is such a huge success; it doesn’t try to ape the desktop. Rather it makes the most of the strengths and weaknesses of the browser. Trying to re-create the desktop experience note-for-note seems like an ill-advised way to create a great browser application.

Designer Tom Genoni offers up a quick tool for creating layout grids, with fine-tuned control over gutters and margins, and drag-and-drop placeholders for advertising units. Not the first of its kind, but slightly more robust than others. A great start.

An unmitigated calamity of a public service announcement from the early 1990s: an anti-gang lecture delivered in miserably watered-down hip-hop style, accompanied by a jaw-droppingly banal video narrative. Given the distance of years, it comes across as both hilarious and horrible.

“Dozens of Apple patent applications were published today revealing research that Apple had done in 2007 on many topics encompassing future versions of Mac OS X. The most intriguing is a series of patent applications which describe a ‘multidimensional’ user interface. Apple has essentially been working on true 3D desktop environments.”

A visual exercise in breaking down various Disney cartoon characters into their constituent shapes, using three-dimensional rendering software.

Everyone’s favorite tee-shirt aggregator published their picks for the best tees to give as gifts this holiday season. I wrote about Rumplo in June and still find that browsing its catalog is one of the more entertaining ways to waste one’s workday. Not that I do that.