Joel Robuchon to open Atelier restaurant in the Four Seasons Hotel in New York next spring.
Las Vegas is in for some water troubles. Surprisingly, it's residential use that's the problem, not the showy water displays by the casinos.
A text message love affair gone wrong. "How had we managed to speed through all the stages of an actual relationship almost solely via text message? I'd gone from butterflies to doubt to anger at his name on the screen, before we even knew each other."
@ the movies
Garden State
Garden State is probably one of those movies that gets better with a second viewing. I liked it alright the first time, enough that I'm willing to give it that second shot.
And on a totally different note, when Zach Braff's character meets Natalie Portman, she's wearing a pair of the silver Aiwa headphones that I love and still swear by, even though they are 5 years old and all falling apart. Best pair of cheapo headphones ever.
Comparison of the power law in war. Statistics show that fatalities in modern warfare trend toward non-G7 terrorism patterns rather than those of conventional warfare, independent of context.
American Airlines posts first profit in 5 years by listening to cost-cutting measures suggested by employees. Does this mean we can have our pillows back now?
News flash! 17-yo kid obliterates opponents at video games. Ok, here's the kicker: he's blind.
1880s Brooklyn brownstone has swastika patterns as part of the wood flooring. "We turned to the landlord guy and said, 'You haven't fixed this?!?!' He suggested that we could just put furniture over them. All four, in every room. And then he told us that there had been a number of Jews who'd looked at the place and 'seemed really bothered by it.'"
Mock-up photos of the "East Village" retail complex planned for Las Vegas. There's even a displaced meatpacking district and Washington Square arch.
Flickr reaches the 1,000,000 member threshhold. I wish Flickr publicized everyone's number so that I could lord my early-adopter status over everyone in a more quantitative manner.
Google attempting to patent RSS advertising?
John Battelle points to news of Google (the author is Nelson Minar) attempting to patent the idea of automating the incorporation of targetted ads into RSS files. Here's the application on the USPTO site. I've got a few questions and concerns:
Is this a joke?
Ok, bad first question since it seems unlikely that Nelson and Google would write up this application just to have a few laughs. So here's a better question: where's the prior art on this? The patent was filed on 12/31/2003. I floated the idea of embedding advertising into RSS ads in October 2002 and there was prior art then. But Google's patent application covers "targeted ads" in a "syndicated, e.g., RSS, presentation format in an automated manner". Curiously, I believe this is already covered by an older Google patent, filed in 12/2002:
The relevance of advertisements to a user's interests is improved. In one implementation, the content of a web page is analyzed to determine a list of one or more topics associated with that web page. An advertisement is considered to be relevant to that web page if it is associated with keywords belonging to the list of one or more topics. One or more of these relevant advertisements may be provided for rendering in conjunction with the web page or related web pages.
That's Google AdSense in a nutshell: inserting targeted ads into web documents in an automated manner. So what is it about RSS/Atom files that make them different than plain old web pages and hence not covered under the 2002 AdSense patent? Nothing. This vocabulary of "feeds" and "syndication" is still misleading. RSS/Atom files, especially as they are described in the 12/2003 patent application, are XML files that sit on a web server waiting for someone with a web browser to come along to read them, just like XHTML files:
So, people access documents written in a markup language that have been published on a Web server with a software application. If this seems familiar to you, it should. It's called Web browsing and has nothing to do with syndication. RSS readers and newsreaders are just specialized Web browsers...
The 12/2003 application tries to explain the difference between HTML pages and "syndicated content formats" thusly:
Syndicated content, unlike web pages which are normally stored in an HTML format, are often stored and presented in what may be described as a syndicated content format. Syndicated content formats are often XML (eXtended Markup Language) based and include structured representations of content such as news articles, search results, and web log entries. Syndicated content formats are primarily intended for providing syndicated information, e.g., news headlines, weblogs, etc. in a structured format such as a list of items, with another device, e.g., a user device, usually controlling the ultimate presentation format of the items in the list. This is in contrast to HTML which usually includes a fair amount of presentation and formatting information within an HTML document such as a web page.
That's a pretty weak explanation and sounds a lot like what a web browser (the "user device" that controls the presentation) does with XHTML files (XML-based files without a "fair amount of presentation and formatting information"). It sounds to me like Google already has this covered with their previous patent.
[Long aside: Does the prior art of embedding AdSense ads in XHTML files invalidate this patent? Patents are tricky because they don't cover ideas, they cover specific implementations of ideas. While the 12/2003 application states that "said syndicated format is an XML compliant format" it also specifies that "said syndicated format is a format for listing items corresponding to a channel, said received information including a listing of at least two items and including for each item, a title and a link". That is, the XML files they're talking about have to be RSS/Atom-ish in nature. This doesn't rule out XHTML files in theory, but it does rule out many of them in practice.
But the really tricky part with these software patents is that the implementations of ideas are written so broadly that they might as well be patents of the ideas themselves. If you look at it that way (the patent-holding companies certainly seem willing to litigate on that basis), Google has already embedded automated, targeted advertising into XML-based files. According to news.com, Google launched their AdSense service in June 2003. When the first AdSense advertisement was embedded in an XHTML file soon after that, well, there's your prior art on the very thing that Google attempted to patent 6 months later.]
J. Seward Johnson, Jr. recreated a bunch of impressionist paintings as sculptures you can walk around in. Looks very cool...the photos are from a show going on through Aug 7th at the Nassau County Museum of Art.
The science of Lance Armstrong. Between 1992 and 1999, he increased his muscle efficiency by 8 percent, a gain previously thought to be impossible.
Steven Shapin reviews Tom Standage's A History of the World in 6 Glasses, a "social life of beverages". Standage is one of my favorite technology/culture writers; he wrote about the telegraph in The Victorian Internet.
Why do you get stuck at O'Hare for hours?. The major airlines' hubs are too "hubby"; that is, to make all the connecting flights work, they overload the airports with takeoffs at peak times, making several flights a day chronically (and purposely) late.
Latest David Sedaris in the New Yorker. What do you care what it's about? It's David Sedaris. Just go read.
@ the movies
9 Songs
Sex is often a significant part of human relationships, so why shouldn't films reflect that and depict it more accurately? That's the question director Michael Winterbottom tries to answer with 9 Songs, and he does so fairly successfully. The film is rated NC-17 and features fairly graphic sex (penetration, oral sex, bodily fluids), which was disappointing at first because I thought Winterbottom was using sex for the same purpose as most directors do (cheap titillation) but the choice made more sense as the movie progressed and, thanks in large part to the two lead actors, contributed greatly to the feeling of relationship in the film.
Wired's got a "10 years of the web" thing going on in their August 2005 issue. Web nostalgia is sooooo yesterday...
Is Owen Wilson the secret factor to Wes Anderson's success?. I'm of the opinion that The Life Aquatic didn't suck, but I can see the point here.
Winners of the 2005 Faux Faulker Contest. Winner: "The Administration and the Fury: If William Faulkner were writing on the Bush White House".
NY Times on professional miniature golf. I won a mini golf tournament once and even have a trophy to prove it.
Steven Johnson's open letter to Hillary Clinton regarding her call for a Congressional investigation about the effects of video games on children. "I know a congressional investigation into [the violence and hostility in high school] football won't play so well with those crucial swing voters, but it makes about as much sense as an investigation into the pressing issue that is Xbox and PlayStation 2."
The NY Times picks some good bottles of wine for under $10. For those of you who want to move up from the Two Buck Chuck a little.
A citizen's guide to refusing NYC subway searches. "As innocent citizens become increasingly accustomed to being searched by the police, politicians and police agencies are empowered to further expand the number of places where all are considered guilty until proven innocent."
NYC taxi agency approves the use of hybrid cars as taxis. Downside: the hybrids have less leg room than the vast Crown Vic.
Scott Berkun on how to learn from your mistakes. "We're taught in school, in our families, or at work to feel guilty about failure and to do whatever we can to avoid mistakes."
The olden days
Yesterday was web nostalgia day on kottke.org, with nearly the entire day's worth of remaindered links dedicated to blogging old school web memes and information as if I had just seen them for the first time. No reason really, just a bit of fun.
Oh, and something[1] tells me that the Neiman-Marcus cookie recipe email is a fake.
[1] "Something" being the gigantic amount of email I received yesterday after posting this link. For a good 2 hours or so, an email arrived every two minutes telling me that the cookie thing was a hoax. It was kind of incredible, by far the most feedback I've gotten in several months. Boy, you folks don't think much of me, do you? ;)
Another in Edward Jay Epstein's series on the business of Hollywood. This one's about the secret industry reports done by the MPAA that reveal hard-to-come-by statistics about how much Hollywood is making from which businesses.
Venture capitalist Howard Anderson on why he's leaving the VC game. Rational markets and an over-supply of technology are two of his reasons.
Cello is a graphical WWW browser like Mosaic. "Cello runs under Microsoft Windows on any IBM PC with a 386SX chip or better. While we have run Cello with only 2MB of RAM on a 386SX-16 machine, we think you'll like it better on a machine with more memory and a faster chip."
Walter Miller's Home page is the best personal home page on the WWW. "Yes Im in an abbusive relatonship. Hes in a whelchair but Im still scared of him. I know it sounds dumb. Some of his threats are to rip my lungs out throuhg my anes, then tie them around my head like Micky Mouse ears."
This animation of a dancing baby is fun to watch. Email this one to your friends!
This one guy tried to get the word "sweatshop" printed on his custom Nike shoes and Nike wouldn't let him. "The Personal iD on my custom ZOOM XC USA running shoes was the word 'sweatshop.' Sweatshop is not: 1) another's party's trademark, 2) the name of an athlete, 3) blank, or 4) profanity. I choose the iD because I wanted to remember the toil and labor of the children that made my shoes. Could you please ship them to me immediately."
The Hot or Not site lets you rate people's pictures on a scale of 1 to 10. You can even upload your own picture to be rated.
WiReD magazine on the Mosaic WWW browser and how it is "well on its way to becoming the world's standard interface". "Mosaic is the celebrated graphical 'browser' that allows users to travel through the world of electronic information using a point-and-click interface. Mosaic's charming appearance encourages users to load their own documents onto the Net, including color photos, sound bites, video clips, and hypertext 'links' to other documents. By following the links -- click, and the linked document appears -- you can travel through the online world along paths of whim and intuition."
Hahaha! Look at all those hampsters dancing. Be sure to turn up the sound on this one!
Hilarious home page of a lonely Turkish guy named Mahir who is seeking female companionship. "I kiss you!!!!"
A woman who was charged $250 for a cookie recipe from Neiman-Marcus gets her revenge by emailing the recipe to everyone she knows. "So here it is, please pass it on to someone or else or run a few copies...I paid for it, so now you can have it for free!!!"
The makers of the WWW browser Mosaic are keeping track of what's new on the WWW. "Carnegie Mellon has announced their Web server; here's the 'Front Door'; here's the home page. ('Front door'... interesting metaphor, that.)"
It's the Really Big Button That Doesn't Do Anything. When you push it, it really doesn't do much.
David Filo and Jerry Yang are organizing the entire WWW into a hierarchical category system. They've named their site "Yahoo".
The evolution of book cover design. Using Robert W Chambers' The King in Yellow as an example.
Announcing the world's smallest mp3 player: the iPod Flea. Love the Flea collar.
20 hamburgers you must eat before you die. That In-N-Out isn't on here almost got this link disqualified from posting, but since they don't seem to have any other chains on here, I'll let it slide.
Tattoo copyrights and lawsuits. David Beckham is being threatened with a lawsuit by his tattooist should he and his wife "go ahead with a promotional campaign highlighting their body art".
Butterfly team colors may discourage inter-species mating and pave the way for the development of separate species. "This process, called 'reinforcement', prevents closely related species from interbreeding thus driving them further apart genetically and promoting speciation."
The economics of movie popcorn pricing
In the past 5 years, I've probably been to a theater an average of once every two weeks to see a movie. Even though it costs a small fortune, I almost always get a soda and popcorn (topped with "butter"[1]) to go with the show. Many of the larger chains offer a deal if you purchase a large popcorn and a large drink together. This "Super Combo" costs a lot less than ordering a L popcorn and a L soda separately from the menu but often it will actually cost you less than a L popcorn/M soda, M popcorn/L soda, or even a M popcorn/M soda (?!??). Why such a steep discount when the theaters make so much of their money on concessions? I've developed a few theories over the years but would like to hear your thoughts before sharing them.
[1] The proper way to butter movie popcorn is to fill the bag half full, apply butter, fill the rest of the bag and apply more butter. This results in fairly even application of butter to kernel throughout the bag. Due to a lack of focus on service and an increasing number of theaters moving to DIY butter application, it's getting more and more difficult to buy a good bag of buttered popcorn at the movies.
Yahoo! buys Konfabulator. This could be huge. Aside from the Flickr purchase, this is the first move by Yahoo! that gives them something that Google needs but doesn't have. (More on this soon.)
Larry Brown wanted Stephon Marbury off the Olympic team in Athens. Marbury is the most overrated player in the NBA...there ain't no "Marbury" in "team". I wouldn't have him on my team even if he played for free.
"So You Want to Write a Book?". O'Reilly Media's guide for new authors.
Now that our favorite movies and old TV shows are so easy to find, will we still enjoy them?. I've been watching some old favorites from the 80s...I should have kept them there.
The last surviving WWII Comanche code talker dies. "The group of Comanche Indians from the Lawton area were selected for special duty in the U.S. Army to provide the Allies with a language that the Germans could not decipher."
Eater is a new NYC food/restaurant blog. Looks a bit too gossipy for my taste, but that's me.
Ugh, riders on the NYC subway are going to have their bags randomly searched by the NYPD. "People who do not submit to a search will be allowed to leave, but will not be permitted into the subway station." What the fuck?!?
Heading to the South Pole and back...on skis
Ben Saunders is a little bit crazy. He does stuff like ski solo from Russia to Canada via the North Pole just for the heck of it. When I was last in London, I called him up to make dinner plans and he apologized if he seemed a "little" tired because he'd been out for a "bit" of a run this morning. That short run turned out to be 20 miles. (At dinner that evening, Ben and his training partner, Tony, ate everything on the table short of the cutlery.)
Ben's latest endeavor is his upcoming expedition across Antarctica to the South Pole, dubbed SOUTH:
Here's the plan. The first return journey to the South Pole on foot and the longest unsupported polar journey in history. In October next year, Tony Haile and I will set out from Scott's hut, on the shores of McMurdo Sound on a 1,800-mile, four-month round trip, from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back. No dogs, no vehicles, no kites, no resupplies. We're calling it SOUTH.
The great Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen made the only return journey, using dogs, 93 years ago. His rival Captain Scott died on his return from the Pole just 11 miles from the relative safety of his largest depot. Since then every expedition has either been flown out from the Pole or used dogs, kites or vehicles. Many people have blamed Scott's failure on his reliance on human power, and many experts still believe an entirely human-powered journey of this magnitude to be impossible. We think otherwise.
Expeditions of this sort are generally funded by large corporations who give money in exchange for advertising and sponsorship opportunities. On his last expedition to the North Pole, Ben blogged (and photoblogged) daily using a PDA & satellite phone and was cheered along by the thousands who read and commented on the journey. So for SOUTH, Ben and Tony are doing something a little different...they are seeking financial support from private individuals (and companies/groups/etc.). For a donation of $100, you can "own a mile" of the expedition, which means you get a listing on the site, a listing on the front page when your mile of the expedition is completed, your name enscribed on one of the expedition sleds, and your name on a flag planted at the South Pole. Ben and Tony are great guys and I would love to see them succeed, so give them a hand if you can.
More explosions in London on the tube and buses. Only detonators were used; minor injuries and damages.
Why children love Roald Dahl's stories -- and many adults don't. Danny, The Champion of the World is my favorite Dahl book and I've read most of the others as well.
As a designer, who owns your portfolio?. I've never had any problems with this, but I've heard some pretty bad stories about other people's troubles.
A Japanese bank is putting a slot machine in their ATMs; get three 7s and the fee is waived. All they need is the sound effects from Super Mario 2 and I'm so there!
Robotics research suggests that Lucy walked upright like humans. Lucy, discovered in 1974 in Ethiopia, is a 3.2 million year old Australopithecus afarensis skeleton.
Slideshow of historic photography from the archives of ICP and the George Eastman Collection. Lots of photos from both collections are set to be available online in 2006 at photomuse.org.
The sexing up of the female on-camera meteorologists at the Weather Channel. From a SVP at TWC: "When you compare The Weather Channel women on camera to the weather women on camera around the country, we got the best. I mean, that’s what we set out to do. And damn it, we've done a good job."
The shitty Shitty Tipper database
Does the Shitty Tipper Database seem wrong to anyone else? I'm all for underpaid service staff venting and attempting to raise public awareness about bad tipping (which, in the absence of poor service, amounts to an unjust pay-cut determined completely by some random idiot customer). But since when is anything under 17% considered shitty? $0 on a $125 bill, that's shitty. 15% (on the pre-tax amount, I might add) is still the industry standard, no matter how much it sucks to get exactly the minimum for adequate service.
More importantly, what gives these people the right to take someone's full name off of a credit card (procured on the job, BTW) and put it up on the web because of some completely subjective gauge of service provided? If I'm eating somewhere, my expectation is that my credit card is being used only for payment and not for any personal use by the employees of the restaurant. If I don't leave someone what they think was deserved, they should catch me on the way out and ask me about it. Perhaps I forgot or miscalculated. Or maybe the service was a bit off in my mind. If I left no tip, I probably talked to the manager about why I did so and they'll be hearing about it from them. But to be all passive aggressive and get my name from my CC and post it on some internet message board...that suggests to me that maybe they didn't deserve a good tip in the first place.
Jerry Rice and Sean Landeta are the only NFL players featured in Tecmo Bowl that are still active. And there are only 14 active players left in Tecmo Super Bowl.
As We May Think by Vannevar Bush. This influential essay that introduces Bush's Memex concept was published 60 years ago this month.
The BBC is running a series this week on "digital citizens": "people whose creativity has been transformed in the digital age". The blogging feature is on Dooce; there's also one about podcasting and digital filmmaking.
Another take on why movie theater revenues are declining. The ads suck, the movies suck, ringing cell phones suck, and you can watch your Netflix at home on your widescreen TV. Again, no mention of piracy.
The folks at Danny Meyer's Shake Shack go above and beyond the call of duty. When a birthday party shows up after an erroneously posted closing time, the manager has food sent over for them from the kitchen at Eleven Madison Park. Amazing service.
The importance of narrative in science. "Science and stories are not only compatible, they're inseparable, as shown by Einstein's classic 1905 paper on the photoelectric effect".
Chess960, a more random form of chess invented by Bobby Fischer, is growing in popularity. Sounds really interesting.
I generally don't feed the trolls, but this John Dvorak column on Creative Commons is laughably bad. It is summer...maybe the interns whipped this one up for him.
Don Watson and Clive Thompson on the assembly-lining of thought and discourse via modern jargon. "That's the true malaise of modern jargon: It forces people to treat any subject as if it were always a managerial problem of inputs and outputs."
NewsRank but not particularly new
I missed this April article in New Scientist about Google's plans to rank news stories according to quality and credibility of the sources:
Now Google, whose name has become synonymous with internet searching, plans to build a database that will compare the track record and credibility of all news sources around the world, and adjust the ranking of any search results accordingly.
The database will be built by continually monitoring the number of stories from all news sources, along with average story length, number with bylines, and number of the bureaux cited, along with how long they have been in business. Google's database will also keep track of the number of staff a news source employs, the volume of internet traffic to its website and the number of countries accessing the site.
Google will take all these parameters, weight them according to formulae it is constructing, and distil them down to create a single value. This number will then be used to rank the results of any news search.
The second paragraph of the story mentions that this system has been patented by Google, but I don't see how it's much different than what PageRank does or what Metacritic has been doing with film, game, and book reviews:
This overall score, or METASCORE, is a weighted average of the individual critic scores. Why a weighted average? When selecting our source publications, we noticed that some critics consistently write better (more detailed, more insightful, more articulate) reviews than others. In addition, some critics and/or publications typically have more prestige and weight in the industry than others. To reflect these factors, we have assigned weights to each publication (and, in the case of film, to individual critics as well), thus making some publications count more in the METASCORE calculations than others.
I wonder if these systems will eventually let their users tweak the credibility algorithms to their liking. For instance, it won't take long for conservatives to start complaining about the liberal bias of Google News. In the case of Metacritic, I'd like them to ignore Anthony Lane's rating when he writes about summer blockbusters and put greater emphasis on whatever Ebert has to say. In the meantime, I'm readying my patent applications for RecipeRank, PhotoRank, ModernFurnitureRank, SoftDrinkRank, and, oooh, PatentRank. I'm sure they're brilliantly unique enough to be recognized by the US Patent Office as new inventions.
Another use for Google Maps: getting out of traffic tickets in the courtroom. Many traffic cases are decided in favor of the state because of a lack of information on the part of the defendant...you'd be surprised at how good a chance you have of fighting a ticket if you show up armed with good information.
Philip Stewart has constructed an alternate version of the periodic table of elements in the form of a "chemical galaxy". "The intention is not to replace the familiar table, but to complement it and at the same time to stimulate the imagination and to evoke wonder at the order underlying the universe."
Ever wonder what the world's best palindrome is?. "My girlfriend has a freaking weird name: Eman Driewgnikaerfasahdneirflrigym."
Antarctic base will be built on skis. The movable station "will prevent the possibility of the base drifting out into the ocean on the back of an iceberg that has 'calved' off the shelf".
I will soon have no memory of this
From an article on mnemonics in the NY Times Magazine:
This might well be called the year of memory. Already, I'm able to click on the icon that marks the Find function on my little pocket Treo. Can't think of a friend's last name? I enter "Myrna," and in a second the screen invites me to choose Davis, Greenberg or Lewis. Can't remember the name of a book by Jonathan Spence? This time, it's Google to the rescue: three clicks gives the answer: "The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci." And that's just the start.
Apple has just released Tiger, its latest operating system, which includes Spotlight. Just as Google searches the World Wide Web, this new feature uses a word or phrase to find a document inside your computer. Microsoft is at work on a new operating system, Longhorn, with similar capability. Such powerful assists to memory raise a question never before conceivable: Why struggle to remember anything?
I've been increasingly aware of this phenomenon with my own memory. Emails are forgotten seconds after they're read; Mail.app will keep track of those. If I'm having lunch with a friend and they bring up something I've posted to kottke.org recently, it often takes me several seconds to remember posting it...my weblog (my outboard brain) is where I put things that I want to "remember". I've never been able to remember people's names worth a damn, but until recently, I knew hundreds of URLs. Now my newsreader keeps track of those for me. I know 3 phone numbers by heart: mine, Meg's, and that of my childhood home (where my dad still resides); the rest are in my cell phone. Birthdays and special occasions are in iCal...I know a few friends' birthdays and when the 4th of July is, but that's about it. And Google remembers everything else.
I'm sure with all that storage space in my brain freed up for other things, I'm able to do so much more with my limited mental faculties. If only I could remember...
Apple unleashed a rash of Slashdottings when they turned on podcast support in iTunes. "It's very bizarre. The only reason why I found this funny was because I have unlimited bandwidth in my server package. If I were some of the others who got caught unaware, I would probably be apoplectic."
Racial disparities in tipping taxi drivers. African-American drivers were tipped 1/3 less than white drivers and African-American passengers tipped 50% less than white passengers.
More philosopher ratings, this time from Crispin Sartwell. "jacques derrida: there's something to be said for the deconstructuive method, a tool which i've been known to throw around myself. otherwise, this is so, so, so full of shit. obviously, it's intentionally obscurantist, which is i guess supposed to be part of the profound game of defamiliarizing language etc. fuck you.'
FontHunt is a typographic scavenger hunt taking place in NYC the week of July 21. Doesn't get much geekier (or cooler) than this, folks.