For the first episode of podcast called Working, David Plotz talks to Stephen Colbert about how he and his staff construct The Colbert Report. This is fascinating.
My show is a shadow of the news, so I have to know what shadow it's casting right now, so I can distort it in my own way.
At the 13 minute mark, he talks about how the team communicates with each other about how the show is shaping up, changes, concerns, etc. They do it all by what sounds like text messaging. Paging Stewart Butterfield, you should get those folks on Slack. (via digg)
From Michael Benson comes Cosmigraphics, a survey of many ways in which humans have represented the Universe, from antiquity on up to the present day.
Selecting artful and profound illustrations and maps, many hidden away in the world's great science libraries and virtually unknown today, he chronicles more than 1,000 years of humanity's ever-expanding understanding of the size and shape of space itself. He shows how the invention of the telescope inspired visions of unimaginably distant places and explains why today we turn to supercomputer simulations to reveal deeper truths about space-time.
The NY Times has an adaptation of the introduction to the book.
Among the narrative threads woven into the book are the 18th-century visual meditations on the possible design of the Milky Way - including the astonishing work of the undeservedly obscure English astronomer Thomas Wright, who in 1750 reasoned his way to (and illustrated) the flattened-disk form of our galaxy. In a book stuffed with exquisite mezzotint plates, Wright also conceived of another revolutionary concept: a multigalaxy cosmos. All of this a quarter-century before the American Revolution, at a time when the Milky Way was thought to constitute the entirety of the universe.
Last week, Emily Dreyfuss wrote a piece at about Why I'm Giving Wikipedia 6 Bucks a Month.
"Give me money, Emily," Wales begged, "then go back to researching Beyonce lyrics."
"Excuse me, Jimmy," I wanted to say, "I don't appreciate being watched as I read about how her song "Baby Boy" includes a lyrical interpolation of "No Fear" by O.G.C."
Later, Wikipedia replaced Wales with other employees of the Wikimedia Foundation, which maintains Wikipedia with grants and donations. They moved me about as much as Wales did, which is to say not at all.
Today, while scanning my third Wikipedia article in as many hours, I saw the beggi.... er, note was back. It's at the bottom now, without the pleading visage of a Wikipedian, and now includes an option to pay monthly.
I was annoyed, again. That's the first instinct of anyone who spends time on the Internet and is constantly bombarded by pleas for money. But then I realized something: My annoyance was a symptom of my dependence on Wikipedia. I rely on it utterly. I take it completely for granted.
I found her argument persuasive, so much so that I just signed up to give Wikipedia a monthly amount as well. I consider it a subscription fee to an indispensable and irreplaceable resource I use dozens of times weekly while producing kottke.org. It's a business expense, just like paying for server hosting, internet access, etc. -- the decision to pay became a no-brainer for me when I thought of it that way.
Do other media companies subscribe to Wikipedia in the same fashion? How about it Gawker, NY Times, Vox, Wired, ESPN, WSJ, New York Magazine, Vice, Washington Post, The Atlantic, Buzzfeed, Huffington Post? Even $500/month is a drop in the bucket compared to your monthly animated GIF hosting bill and I know your writers use Wikipedia as much as I do. Come on, grab that company credit card and subscribe.
If you were to design the simplest possible radio, what features would you need to keep to still call your device a radio? In making The Public Radio, Brooklynites Zach Dunham and Spencer Wright kept only four features: an FM tuner, an antenna, a speaker, and a volume knob. No alarm function, no AM band, and no changing stations; The Public Radio ships tuned to your favorite radio station, the one you listen to 95% of the time anyway.
For an enclosure for this minimum viable radio, they went with something cheap, off-the-shelf, and très Brooklyn: a 250 mL mason jar. The pair used the jar when testing speakers on prototypes and decided to keep it as part of the radio's simple aesthetic. If you don't like the jar it ships with, you can replace it with something a little more your style -- a vintage blue wide-mouth quart Ball mason jar perhaps?
The Public Radio comes fully assembled, but it's also available in two additional DIY configurations: as a high-res download of the design files for those who want to fabricate their own from scratch and a fun Maker Kit option with all the necessary components you get to solder together. Order your Public Radio today on Kickstarter!
Like it says on the tin: a collection of Beautiful Maps. I wish there was some attribution attached to each map though. The map above is by Claude Bernou circa 1681. (via @khoi)
Rex Sorgatz wonders what sort of robots we'll build, R2-D2s or C-3POs.
R2-D2 excels in areas where humans are deficient: deep computation, endurance in extreme conditions, and selfless consciousness. R2-D2 is a computer that compensates for human deficiencies -- it shines where humans fail.
C3-PO is the personification of the selfish human -- cloying, rules-bound, and despotic. (Don't forget, C3-PO let Ewoks worship him!) C3-PO is a factotum for human vanity -- it engenders the worst human characteristics.
I love the chart he did for the piece, characterizing 3PO's D&D alignment as lawful evil and his politics as Randian.
Tony Zhou's excellent series on filmmaking, Every Frame a Painting, has become a much-watch for me. Here's the latest one, a short look at a single scene from Silence of the Lambs in which Zhou asks: Who Wins the Scene?
Lockheed Martin is in the process of developing a compact fusion reactor they say could revolutionize the world's energy industry.
Dubbed the compact fusion reactor (CFR), the device is conceptually safer, cleaner and more powerful than much larger, current nuclear systems that rely on fission, the process of splitting atoms to release energy. Crucially, by being "compact," Lockheed believes its scalable concept will also be small and practical enough for applications ranging from interplanetary spacecraft and commercial ships to city power stations. It may even revive the concept of large, nuclear-powered aircraft that virtually never require refueling-ideas of which were largely abandoned more than 50 years ago because of the dangers and complexities involved with nuclear fission reactors.
The key difference in Lockheed's approach seems to be the configuration of the magnetic field containing the reaction:
The CFR will avoid these issues by tackling plasma confinement in a radically different way. Instead of constraining the plasma within tubular rings, a series of superconducting coils will generate a new magnetic-field geometry in which the plasma is held within the broader confines of the entire reaction chamber. Superconducting magnets within the coils will generate a magnetic field around the outer border of the chamber. "So for us, instead of a bike tire expanding into air, we have something more like a tube that expands into an ever-stronger wall," McGuire says. The system is therefore regulated by a self-tuning feedback mechanism, whereby the farther out the plasma goes, the stronger the magnetic field pushes back to contain it. The CFR is expected to have a beta limit ratio of one. "We should be able to go to 100% or beyond," he adds.
Charles Seife, who wrote a book about the history of fusion, is skeptical of Lockheed's claims.
This week, Lockheed Martin supposedly managed to achieve a "breakthrough" in nuclear fusion that has gotten a lot of media attention. As Charles Seife points out, it did so "without having built a prototype device that, you know, fuses things on an appreciable scale. It's a stunning assertion, even by fusion-research standards. But a quick look at the defense contractor's ambitious plan-a working reactor in five years-already shows the dream fraying around the edges. A year and a half ago, the company promised that fusion was four years away, meaning that the schedule is already slipping. Negative one years of progress in 20 months is, sadly, business as usual for fusion. At this rate, it'll take Lockheed Martin at least a decade before the natural endpoint: desperately spinning victory out of an underwhelming result generated by a machine whose performance comes nowhere near predictions-and which brings us no closer to actually generating energy from a fusion reaction."
After playing four straight days of Beyonce tunes, a Houston news radio station settled on its new format: classic hip hop. It's the first major market radio station to do so.
In many ways, this is an idea whose time has come, which is another way of saying that hip-hop, and its first-wave fans, are, well, old. Dre will be 50 in February; Ice-T is just 10 years away from his first Social Security check. Licensed to Ill topped the Billboard charts in 1987; three years later, hip-hop made up one-third of the Hot 100. By 1999, it was the country's best-selling genre, with more than 81 million albums sold. The fans who propelled the early boom probably don't know Young Thug from Rich Homie Quan, and don't want to.
The obvious parallel is to classic rock radio -- a format that emerged in the early-1980s as baby boomers rejected punk and disco, and radio execs realized it was easier to serve up old songs than convince their aging audiences to try new music. It eventually morphed into a touchstone of middle-age: Every so often, a cultural observer wakes up, checks his bald spot and wonders how Green Day or Smashing Pumpkins or some other band of his own youth got lumped in with Led Zeppelin and Aerosmith on the radio dial.
Not this cultural observer! I've never done anything of that sort ever.
Annnnyway, here's a Spotify playlist (Rdio) of the sort of thing Boom 92 will be playing. (via @tcarmody)
John Overholt, a curator of early modern books and manuscripts at Harvard's Houghton Library, has started a new blog called First Drafts of History that features the first versions of Wikipedia articles. Here's the first draft of the iPhone entry, dated more than a year and a half before it was introduced.
I'm sure there were many giggles about this kind of thing in the Britannica offices back then. Wikipedia has come a long way.
From Tobias Frere-Jones, a short history of how typefaces get their names.
Years ago, I asked one of my mentors what he thought was the hardest part of designing a typeface. I was expecting "the cap S" or "the italic lowercase" or something like that. But he answered without hesitation: the name. Finding the name is the hardest part.
Speaking of PBS shows, Steven Johnson's How We Got to Now starts on PBS tonight with two back-to-back episodes. The NY Times has a positive review.
The opening episode, for instance, is called "Clean," and it sets the pattern for the five that follow. We tend not to acknowledge just how recent some of the trends and comforts of modern life are, including the luxury of not walking through horse manure and human waste on the way to the post office.
The episode turns back the clock just a century and a half, to a time before our liquid waste stream was largely contained in underground pipes. Mr. Johnson then traces the emergence of the idea that with a little effort, cities and towns could have a cleaner existence, and the concurrent idea that cleanliness would have public health benefits.
But his examination of "the ultraclean revolution," as he calls it, doesn't stop at the construction of sewage and water-purification systems. He extends the thread all the way to the computer revolution, visiting a laboratory where microchips are made.
The show is based on Johnson's book of the same name, which enters the NY Times bestseller list at #4 this week. Also, I keep wanting to call the book/show How We Got to Know, which strikes me as a perfectly appropriate title as well.
Atul Gawande's best selling Being Mortal is getting the Frontline treatment on PBS this January. Here's the trailer:
I am not a runner so I didn't think I would find this exploration into the conditions under which a 2-hour marathon could occur that interesting. I was incorrect.
Between 1990 (the first year in which data was available) and 2011, the average male marathoner ranked in the top 100 that year shrank by 1.3 inches and 7.5 pounds. Smaller runners have less weight to haul around, yes. But they're also better at heat dissipation; thanks to greater skin surface area relative to their weight, they can sustain higher speeds (and thus, greater internal heat production) without overheating and having to slow down. Despite our sub-two runner's short frame, he'll also have disproportionately long legs that help him cover ground and unusually slender calves that require less energy to swing than heavier limbs.
Runners shed heat through their skin, so bigger runners should have an advantage, right? Indeed, a 6' 3" marathoner can dissipate 32 percent more heat than a 5' 3" athlete with the same BMI. But heat generation rises faster in bigger runners because mass increases quicker than skin area. So at the same effort, the 6' 3" guy ends up producing 42 percent more heat than his shorter peer-and overheating sooner.
The piece includes a favorite old chestnut of mine, man vs. horse:
Horses are still much quicker at distance, but humans are still improving.
In the November issue of Elle, Laurie Abraham talks about the fear, pressure, regret, and misconceptions related to how we think about abortion in America, written through the lens of her own experiences.
In several meetings at work in which this essay was discussed, I noticed that none of the other editors in the room, all of them pro-choice, could bring themselves to utter the word abortion; it was "Laurie's pro piece," or her "memoir." I know that my colleagues, many of whom are my friends, were just trying to be kind when they referred to my "reproductive rights" story. The truth is, I felt uncomfortable saying it out loud too. Abortion is a conversational third rail, women's dirtiest dirty laundry, to mix metaphors. Because the other thing about living in a political culture where a single-cell zygote is constantly being called a "person" is that there is a penumbra of shame surrounding abortion. For myself, however, I wonder: Am I really ashamed -- and, if so, what is it exactly that I'm ashamed of?
The book Abraham references throughout, Katha Pollitt's Pro: Reclaiming Abortion Rights sounds really interesting. (via @atotalmonet)
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