This is a surprisingly effective idea: using a Google Maps zoomable, scrollable interface to read magazines. (via information aesthetics)
This short blog post by Sasha Frere-Jones about rock show patron drink tipping practices is impossible to excerpt...lots of lovely little bits. Ok, twist my arm:
When Chromeo played, their crowd drank house vodka and Budweiser. Didn't tip. Some of them did what I'll call the slide-backs. They put a dollar down on the bar, wait until you turn your back, then palm their buck and walk away. Classy. When your night starts out with "What's your cheapest drink?" that's also not good."
In The Year of Living Biblically, AJ Jacobs followed all the rules in the Bible as literally as he could.
The book that came out of the year has several layers.
- An exploration of some of the Bible's startlingly relevant rules. I tried not to covet, gossip, or lie for a year. I'm a journalist in New York. This was not easy.
- An investigation of the rules that baffle the 21st century brain. How to justify the laws about stoning homosexuals? Or smashing idols? Or sacrificing oxen? And how do you follow those in modern-day Manhattan?
Jacobs was recently interviewed by Jewish culture magazine Jewcy about the book and will be talking about his experience tomorrow at the 92nd St. Y.
Despite a common heritage, the social, economic, and political differences between the United States and Britain are, in some cases, great.
Like most west Europeans, Britons tend to have more left-wing views than Americans, but the first chart shows that this is often by a surprising margin. ("Left" and "right" are harder to locate than they were: here "left" implies a big-state, secular, socially liberal, internationalist and green outlook; right, the reverse.) The data are derived by subtracting left-wing answers from right-wing ones, for each country and for each main political grouping within each country. A net minus rating suggests predominantly left-wing views and a positive rating suggests a preponderance of right-wing views.
Compared to Britain, the US is a remarkably conservative nation. The companion chart is a good look at some of the data. (via gongblog)
Jamie Zawinski, one of the developers responsible for the early versions Netscape Navigator, has declared that today is Run Some Old Web Browsers Day. In celebration, he's hosting an archive of old Mosaic/Netscape broswers and rolled back the clock on the original mcom.com domain.
home.mcom.com and all URLs under it just redirected to netscape.com, then redirected a dozen more times before taking you to some AOL portal page. The old URLs that were baked into the toolbar buttons of the original web browsers didn't work any more. But now, if you fire up a copy of Mosaic Netscape 0.9, and click on the various toolbar buttons, they will work again! For example, in the old browsers, when you clicked on the "What's New" toolbar button, it went here.
home.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from 21-Oct-1994.
mosaic.mcom.com is now a snapshot of that web site from July 1994. That's from just after the company was announced, but before the first browser beta was released. I think that by Oct 1994, both mosaic.mcom.com and www.mcom.com were redirects to home.mcom.com, but I can't remember any more.
Evolt also maintains an extensive archive of browsers old and new. I have a smaller archive that I put together for an episode of 0sil8 more than 10 years ago.
Interview with chefs Grant Achatz of Alinea and Heston Blumenthal of The Fat Duck, mostly about the cookbooks that they're working on. Achatz is self-publishing the Alinea Book and using the exact recipes from the restaurant:
For us, we felt the most important thing was to express the restaurant in its most accurate fashion, and try to convey to the reader what Alinea and the food are all about. We felt that if we eliminated some of the techniques because they were too difficult, or some of the ingredients because they were too hard to find, then you would be left with something that's not representative of the restaurant or of the cuisine itself. So our effort was to convey the emotion, the expression, the essence of the restaurant, and also hopefully-if the recipes are written well enough-to dispel the myth that cooking in this style is impossible for somebody who isn't a professional cook.
He also mentions that the ingredient amounts in the recipes are metric, meaning that a digital scale is required. Maybe they should make the cookbook itself a digital scale...just make the cover a little thicker, throw some sensors in there with a digital display in the lower right hand corner, and there you go!
I've received several emails in the past few weeks containing a variation of the following message:
Please consider the environment before printing this e-mail.
One message even formatted this line in green text. Treehugger recommended this course of action back in March 2007, but this post predates Treehugger's. Wonder where it came from?
The business of parenting
Salon had an interview with Pamela Paul the other day, author of Parenting, Inc., a book about the business of parenting. Paul starts out by disparging the $800 stroller phenomenon. Ollie's stroller was somewhat expensive (not $800 but not $100 either) but it's well built, flexible in use, nicely designed (functionally speaking), and was far and away the best one for our needs. We didn't feel good about spending so much money, but the eventual cost-per-use will be in the range of cents, so we're really happy with our choice so far. Some parents buy expensive strollers more as a fashion statement, so I can see where Paul is coming from on this one.
I thought the rest of the interview was quite good. We're still new to this parenting thing, but Paul seems to be on the right track. Here's her take on the best toys for kids:
When you think back to the '60s and '70s, all the right-thinking progressive parents thought toys should be natural and open-ended. Crayola and Kinder Blocks and Lego were considered raise-your-kid-smart toys. Then, all this data that came out which said that kids need to be stimulated. They need sound! They need multi-sensory experiences! Now, the more bells and whistles a toy has, the supposedly better it is.
Our parents' generation actually had it right. The less the toy does, the better. Everyone thinks: "Toys need to be interactive." No, toys don't need to be interactive. Children need to interact with toys. The best toys are 90 percent kid, 10 percent toy, the kind of thing that you can use 20 different ways, not because it has 20 different buttons to press, but because the kid, when they're 6 months old is going to chew on it, and toss it, but when they're a year they're going to start stacking it.
And then later:
At the most basic level reuse, recycle, repurpose. The average American child gets 70 new toys a year. That is just so far beyond what is necessary. Most child gear, toys, books are a lot cheaper, relatively speaking, than they were decades ago. In the aggregate it ends up being a lot more expensive, because we're buying a lot more of it, but kids just don't need that many toys. Kids lose out when things become less special.
We've been avoiding toys that make noise and light up. Half of his toys are garbage -- old toilet paper rolls, bags that our coffee pods come in, 20oz soda bottles filled with colored water or split peas, scraps of fabric, etc. -- or not even toys at all -- pots and pans, measuring spoons, etc. It seems like the right approach for us; Paul's "90 percent kid, 10 percent toy" really resonates.
Paul also talks about not overstimulating kids. When I get up in the morning or come home from the office, it's hard not to scoop Ollie up and give him constant attention until he goes to bed or down for a nap. Instead, I've been trying to leave him alone to play and explore by himself. He's getting old enough that when he wants me involved, he'll come to me. In this way, parenting is like employee management; give people the resources they need and then let them do their jobs.
This last bit reminded me of our trip to Buy Buy Baby (subtle!!) to procure baby proofing supplies. They totally had a Wall of Death designed to entice parents to coat their entire house in cheap white plastic.
The baby-proofing industry completely preys on parents' worst anxieties and fears. It really doesn't take a brain surgeon to baby-proof a house, and every store has the "Wall of Death" with like 10,000 products in it that you can affix to any potentially sharp surface in your house, if you choose to go that route.
It's difficult not to feel incredibly manipulated by the Wall of Death. You know deep down that it's ridiculous; your parents didn't have any of this crap and you turned out fine. But then the what-ifs start gnawing away at your still-shaky confidence as a new parent. Our encounter with the Wall paralyzed us, and with the exception of those plastic wall outlet plugs, we've punted on baby proofing for now. We're letting Ollie show us where all the problem areas are before committing to any white plastic solutions.
Dolphins and tuna can swim so fast that the water around their tails cavitates.
When the bubbles [formed by cavitation] collapse, they produce a shockwave, which eats away the metal in propellers. To dolphins, it is painful. According to the researchers' calculations, within the top few metres of the water column, this happens when the dolphins reach 10 to 15 metres per second (36 to 54 kilometres per hour).
Tuna don't have this pain problem; their tails don't have nerve endings.
How uncanny is her valley? Very. Never has one of those Flash move-your-mouse-around applets been this creepy.
This a bit old but the dude that runs the stylish cameron i/o site (who is coincidentially named Cameron) built a trumpet-like bell for the iPhone out of a used toilet paper tube.
I wanted to listen to my music in the shower but the iPhone's speaker would get lost in the noise from the shower. So I directed the iPhone's audio straight towards me. Worked pretty well. Just ask my neighbors.
The top five reasons why "the customer is always right" is wrong. I like the idea that a company should be as ready to fire bad customers as they are to fire bad employees.
Video of Charlie Rose's conversation with chef Thomas Keller the other night. Good stuff as always, although I'm disappointed about how completely he's embraced the idea of the chef as empire-tender rather than as a person who cooks.
I realized the other day that I prefer eating at places where the person that owns the place is in the kitchen because no one else is going to care as much about your meal and experience as that person. Which doesn't mean that you can't find excellent food and experiences at Per Se or the diner around the corner, but the increasingly prevalent fine dining empires feel like, in the words of Bilbo Baggins, "too little butter spread over too much toast". (via eater)
Philippe Starck says that design is dead and that he's retiring. Says Starck:
I was a producer of materiality and I am ashamed of this fact. Everything I designed was unnecessary. I will definitely give up in two years' time. I want to do something else, but I don't know what yet. I want to find a new way of expressing myself ...design is a dreadful form of expression.
Solar furnaces
A solar furnace is a structure used to harness the rays of the sun in order to produce high temperatures. This is achieved by using a curved mirror (or an array of mirrors) acting as a parabolic reflector to concentrate light (Insolation) on to a focal point. The temperature at the focal point may reach up to 3,000 degrees Celsius, and this heat can be used to generate electricity, melt steel or make hydrogen fuel.
Whoa! Here's a great photo of a solar furnace in Uzbekistan and an even better photo of said furnace melting aluminum (close-up).
If you've got an old TV, you can use the Fresnel lens to make a solar furnace of your own. Caveats apply:
DANGER! This device is extremely dangerous. It should not be constructed or operated by anyone who does not observe proper safety precautions. It will instantly destroy flesh. It will melt metals, ceramics, and most any other material. Always wear welding goggles when operating this device! DO NOT leave this device unattended.
This DIY solar furnace is capable of melting brick (!!) and will "boil" a quarter in ~25 seconds.
Solar furnaces and the like have been around for centuries. In the 3rd century BC, Archimedes allegedly used a mirror to burn up the entire Roman fleet during the seige of Syracuse:
When Marcellus withdrew them [his ships] a bow-shot, the old man [Archimedes] constructed a kind of hexagonal mirror, and at an interval proportionate to the size of the mirror he set similar small mirrors with four edges, moved by links and by a form of hinge, and made it the centre of the sun's beams--its noon-tide beam, whether in summer or in mid-winter. Afterwards, when the beams were reflected in the mirror, a fearful kindling of fire was raised in the ships, and at the distance of a bow-shot he turned them into ashes. In this way did the old man prevail over Marcellus with his weapons.
This assertion was tested at MIT and on Mythbusters with mixed results. (via delicious ghost)
Related to yesterday's post about online media archives, Footnote is compiling an gigantic archive of historical documents and photos and invites you to do the same...your shoebox + the world's archives = let's make history together. For example, their collection from the US National Archives is exclusive to the web.
Footnote also recently launched an interactive version of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial that allows anyone to annotate names on the wall.
Julio Diaz got mugged on his way home from work. But not really...that's not where the story ends.
As the teen began to walk away, Diaz told him, "Hey, wait a minute. You forgot something. If you're going to be robbing people for the rest of the night, you might as well take my coat to keep you warm."
The Navy Federal Credit Union has embraced green architecture, but not for any of the usual reasons.
"You've been asking for data," Ebbesen says to me. "Well, we definitely have energy savings: we've had one study that said 25 percent and another that said 40 percent. We pay a lot of attention to the energy model because we want to be efficient, because that leads to less pollution. But that's not where the savings are. The savings are all related to productivity." Navy Federal's wealth (they don't exactly have trouble getting long-term financing) means that Ebbesen could swallow higher up-front costs if it means a longer life span-and indeed this building is designed for a 40-year cycle (generous for its type). But to be conservative he sticks to 30 years for the following calculation: over that time 92 percent of the organ-ization's costs goes to employees, 6 percent go to maintenance and operation, and a mere 2 percent are represented by the initial construction investment. "When I show that on a slide," Ebbesen says, "it's kind of like, 'Duh, now are you paying attention?'"
With their new environmentally friendly buildings, Navy Federal has reduced their annual employee turnover rate from 60% to 17%.
Top ten artists suffering the Lindsey Buckingham Paradox.
The Lindsey Buckingham Paradox is what happens when otherwise brilliant musicians decide they're better than their bandmates (creative differences, natch), strike out on their own with solo "careers", and somewhat curiously never again manage to grasp his or her own genius in the way we all know is possible.
Sting clocks in at #2:
Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers brought their own special flavors to the Police party, and without them, Sting is just a big bowl of goddamned puffy cheetos. Like Bono, maybe, without the passion or, you know, cred.
GQ interview with Keith Richards. Do I even need to say it's rambling?
Q: You should sell your body on eBay.
Yeah, I think so. Apparently, I do have an incredible immune system. I had hepatitis C and cured it by myself.Q: How?
Just by being me.Q: Do you regret not moisturizing your face?
No. I leave that up to other people.Q: Ever think about getting Botox?
No one's ever talked me into doing that. You're lucky if you walk out of there alive. God bless you.Q: Are you still cutting your own hair? You've done that all your life, right?
Yes. I did this bit here yesterday. [holds up a few strands on the side of his head] Also, I'm letting the dye grow out, since I'm not on the road. If the wife likes it, I'll keep it.
(via goldenfiddle)
Eiffel Tower to get flowery-looking viewing stand glomed onto the top of it.
The design is already causing controversy, with critics questioning the wisdom of tinkering with the famous silhouette and spending money on upgrading a tourist attraction which attracts 6.9 million visitors a year.
(via spurgeonblog)
Update: The architect who submitted the above design says that it was an unsolicited "spontaneous design". (thx, tim)
David Serero, principal of Serero Architects, said in a telephone interview that his firm's proposal was merely a spontaneous design it had submitted to the Eiffel Tower management group in view of the tower's approaching 120th anniversary and, he said, was neither a response to a design competition nor solicited by the tower's management.
Ridley Scott is set to direct a film about Gorbachev and Reagan's 1986 summit in Iceland. Looks like I may get my wish. (thx, gunnar & brian)
The recent discovery of a phonautogram by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville may be the earliest recording of sound in the world, predating that of Thomas Edison by almost 20 years.
Scott is in many ways an unlikely hero of recorded sound. Born in Paris in 1817, he was a man of letters, not a scientist, who worked in the printing trade and as a librarian. He published a book on the history of shorthand, and evidently viewed sound recording as an extension of stenography. In a self-published memoir in 1878, he railed against Edison for "appropriating" his methods and misconstruing the purpose of recording technology. The goal, Scott argued, was not sound reproduction, but "writing speech, which is what the word phonograph means."
Flickr photoset of an abandoned amusement park in Ohio called Chippewa Lake.
Hidden on a lakeshore in Medina County is one of the state's most unique forgotten treasures: the abandoned amusement park called Chippewa Lake. What you'll find there today is the tragic shell of a once-glorious family fun park, one with a history going back to the 1840s. The crying shame is that it's been reduced to an inadequately-fenced-off stretch of acres, overgrown with every imaginable form of vegetation native to this state and festooned with faded NO TRESPASSING signs.
(via maggie)
Our collective recent history, online
In past few years, several prominent US magazines and newspapers have begun to offer their extensive archives online and on DVD. In some cases, this includes material dating back to the 1850s. Collectively it is an incredible record of recent human history, the ideas, people, and events that have shaped our country and world as recorded by writers, photographers, editors, illustrators, advertisers, and designers who lived through those times. Here are some of most notable of those archives:
Harper's Magazine offers their entire archive online, from 1850 to 2008. Most of it is only available to the magazine's subscribers. Associate editor Paul Ford talks about how Harper's archive came to be.
The NY Times provides their entire archive online, most of it for free. Most of the stories from 1923 to 1986 are available for a small fee. The Times briefly launched an interface for browsing their archive called TimesMachine but withdrew it soon after launch.
Time Magazine has their entire archive online for free, from 1923 to the present.
Sports Illustrated has all their issues online for free, dating back to 1954.
The Atlantic Monthly offers all their articles since Nov 1995 and a growing number from their archive dating back to 1857 for free. For a small fee, most of the rest of their articles are available as well, although those from Jan 1964 - Sept 1992 are not.
The Washington Post has archives going back to 1877. Looks like most of it is for pay.
The New Yorker has free archives on their site going back to 2001, although only some of the articles are included. All of their articles, dating back to 1925, are available on The Complete New Yorker DVD set for $40.
Rolling Stone offers some of their archive online but the entire archive (from 1967 to 2007) is available as a 4-DVD set for $79.
Mad Magazine released a 2-DVD set of every issue of the magazine from 1952-2006.
And more to come...old media is slowly figuring out that more content equals more traffic, sometimes much more traffic.
Update: Nature has their entire archive online, dating back to 1869. (thx, gavin)
Mario Kart Wii will be out in the US on April 27!!!!!!!!!!!!! Why so many exclamation points? Feast thine eyes on this:
This game has been announced as supporting the Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection service. This will feature online racing and battle modes, both of which are capable of up to 12 simultaneous players. It has also been confirmed that there will be online leagues, with international and local rankings. This will take place from within an entirely separate Wii Channel. This channel will also feature the option of sending saved time-trial ghost data.
IGN has several videos for your online viewing pleasure.
Is the Mighty Mouse Apple's worst product ever? Google says yes. (I dislike mine as well.)
Delicately knit human organs (brain, heart, intestines) by Sarah Illenberger. See also the Brain Bag. (via this is that)
I don't really want to imagine a 9-year-old heroin junkie.
Cheese heroin is Mexican black-tar heroin that has been diluted with crushed tablets of over-the-counter sleep medication such as Tylenol PM.
Sniffing heroin is not particularly new, but addiction experts say this outbreak in Dallas is unprecedented. Typically, people who inhale heroin are older and they're white. In Dallas, however, users are mostly Latino, and they're young.
"Reports that we were seeing were pretty striking. Kids as young as 9 or 10 years of age coming to the hospital emergency rooms or detox facilities in acute heroin withdrawal," says Dr. Carlos Tirado, a psychiatry professor at UT Southwestern Medical Center and medical director of a drug treatment center in Dallas.
(via cameron)
Anders Weberg makes true P2P art. Weberg shares his videos on Bittorrent until a single other user downloads them. Then he stops sharing it and...
After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist. [...] Feel free to don't or download the film, watch it and share it for as long as you like. Or delete it immediately.
A list of 98 nicknames for New York City, including The City of Friendly People, The University of Telephony, and Father Knickerbocker. (via gothamist)
Cold War giants in tiny rooms
In Arsenals of Folly, Richard Rhodes details the making of the nuclear arms race between the United States and the Soviet Union, with a particular focus on the roles of Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev. The book is fantastic and a full review is forthcoming, but I wanted to share a couple of passages that would be worthy of cinematic adaptation.
A pivotal event in the book is the 1986 summit meeting between the two leaders in Reykjavik, Iceland. For two full days, Gorbachev and Reagan discussed drastically reducing the number of nuclear weapons in the two countries' arsenals with the eventual goal of eliminating nuclear weapons altogether. Gorbachev proposed meeting in Iceland because it was halfway between the US and the Soviet Union, but the tiny country was unprepared in some ways for the number of people participating in the negotiations.
Back at the American Embassy, Shultz assembled Donald Regan, John Poindexter, Paul Nitze, Richard Perle, Max Kampelman, Kenneth Adelman, and Poindexter's military assistant, Robert Linhard, inside what Adelman calls "the smallest bubble ever built" -- the Plexiglas security chamber, specially coated to repel electromagnetic radiation and mounted on blocks to limit acoustic transmissions, that is a feature of every U.S. Embassy in the world. Since the State Department had seen no need for extensive security arrangements for negotiating U.S. relations with little Iceland, the Reykjavik Embassy bubble was designed to hold only eight people. When Reagan arrived, the air-lock-like door swooshed and everyone stood up, bumping into each other and knocking over chairs in the confusion. Reagan put people at ease with a joke. "We could fill this thing up with water," he said, gesturing, "and use it as a fish tank." Adelman gave up his chair to the president and sat on the floor leaning against the tailored presidential legs, a compass rose of shoes touching his at the center of the circle.
And later, the US team deliberated in an even tinier space:
Gorbachev and Reagan returned. The leaders retreated upstairs with their teams. Reagan's advisors briefed him in the only place where they could meet in private, Rowny recalled, "a little ten by twelve bathroom where about ten of us crowded in. Several stood in the bathtub, Reagan was on the throne. I was agitated, I was worried about the idea of giving up all nuclear weapons."
The metaphorical possibilities of these two scenes are endless. I hope someone working with a good cinematographer makes a movie out of the book.
THEBLOG WEEMADE is about "sharing the artwork and creativity of kids", and they're inviting you to contribute. My favorite post is by the guy who runs the site...it's a poem he wrote about terrorism when he was 8 years old in 1984.
What's the matter Ghadafi?
Why are you so blue?
Has someone put glue
Upon your shoes?
Well, the glue may not be on your shoe,
But the glue is certainly all over you.
You're stuck, stuck, stuck,
You're a terrorist,
You're the most murderous
Terrorist on our list!
Frontline's two-part report on Bush's War is getting good reviews.
A two-part special series that tells the epic story of how the Iraq war began and how it has been fought, both on the ground and deep inside the government.
Davenetics sums up the program's findings:
It really was a perfect storm of bad judgment, malicious intent, a power structure out of balance, a weak Natl Sec Adviser, a marginalized secretary of state, an all-powerful veep, a lazy Congress, and outplayed British PM, a foolishly managed French foreign policy, an ignored military leadership, an Oedipal complex hall of fame President, and a media that focused on Rumsfeld's funny press conference delivery instead of highlighting the fact that he was wrong, horribly wrong, on just about any point that mattered.
Both parts of the series are available for viewing in their entirety on the Frontline site.
MovieStamper lets you permalink and tag your favorite movie scenes. For instance, check out the timestamps for The Departed or Office Space. (Oh, and I know you're eventually going to click on the boobs tag, so here you go. NSFW.)
It's all a bit proof of concept right now, but if people start using it in earnest, it could be a fantastic resource.
David Attenborough narrates a sexual encounter between two leopard slugs. I know slug sex probably isn't your thing, but this is worth a look. Beautiful. (thx, alex)
99-cent fine dining
The NY Times dining section has a fun pair of articles today about cooking on the cheap. First, Henry Alford prepared all his meals for a week using ingredients purchased from 99-cent stores.
Because the main Jack's store can have an unpredictable inventory -- yesterday's huge display of Progresso soup is today's much-smaller hillock of marinated mushrooms is tomorrow's sad heap of slightly battered boxes of Royal gelatin -- shopping there is a return to the improvisatory cooking of yore, when people made dinner with whatever was in the market.
Trader Joe's shoppers are already accustomed to those constraints. The Times also enlisted Eric Ripert, chef/owner of NYC's 4-star Le Bernadin, to construct an entire menu using primarily 99-cent items; 5 dishes and 3 desserts for $40.
A butter sauce was whisked into shape to dress frozen crab cakes and Seabrook Farms vegetables. Canned coconut milk went into the jasmine rice and the jarred marinara sauce for baked salmon filets. "Wild salmon for 99 cents!" Mr. Ripert said, in disbelief.
Here's a slideshow of Ripert and his team creating their dishes and his recipe for tuna rillettes. Take that, Sandra Lee.
Update: NPR recently aired a show on Cooking Gourmet with 99¢ Food, featuring Christiane Jory's The 99¢ Only Stores Cookbook, which is due to be released on April 1. Neither Times article makes mention of Jory's book, which seems like an obvious influence (or an incredible coincidence). If the book was an influence, this is bad form on the part of the Times. (thx, janelle)
Budget cuts at NASA means that one of the two Mars rovers will be shut down, even though it's still doing useful science.
Besides resting Spirit, scientists also likely will have to reduce exploration by Opportunity, which is probing a large crater near the equator. Instead of sending up commands to Opportunity every day to drive or explore a rock, its activities may be limited to every other day, said John Callas, the Mars Exploration Rover project manager at JPL.
The rovers were originally deployed for three-month missions but have operated for more than four years.
Update: NASA decided not to go through with Mars rover budget cuts. (thx, jeff)
In a review (of sorts) of the Paris Hilton vehicle The Hottie and the Nottie on the eve of its UK release, critic Joe Queenan picks his worst movie of all time, along with the criteria he used to choose it.
To qualify as one of the worst movies ever made, a motion picture must induce a sense of dread in those who have seen it, a fear that they may one day be forced to watch the film again -- and again -- and again.
Gigli wasn't that bad. Neither was Jersey Girl.
Awesome trippy video made in 1971 that demonstrates through dance the process of amino acids linking to form protein. Skip ahead to ~3:30 for the dance itself. This film is still being shown in class at MIT. (thx, jeff)
A NY Times reporter was assaulted while taking photos of some men putting up illegal posters near Madison Square Park. The rationale for his inclination not to press charges is an interesting one:
While my assailant's actions were frightening, they resulted in part from what he interpreted as provocation: that is, my taking pictures after he had explicitly warned me not to. He did not take my wallet, cash or briefcase; something he could easily have done while I was on the ground. Nor do I recall him using much more force than was needed to wrest the camera from me. He didn't kick me gratuitously when I was down. He did what he threatened to do, but no more.
In the greater scheme of things, my quarrel isn't with him, anyway. It's with the suits who made the decision in the first place to undertake an illegal marketing campaign.
Update: Maybe Rocko got his logo from the Rocky comic strip? (thx, joakim)
Chekhov's gun is the literary technique whereby an element is introduced early in the story, but whose significance does not become clear until later on. For example, a character may find a mysterious object that eventually becomes crucial to the plot, but at the time of finding the object, does not seem to be important.
That's Anton, not Pavel (who in turn should not confused with tennis player Pavel Chekhov (who has a brother named Anton!)).
Ok, this is the last one of these, I promise. This is the most elaborate Line Rider track ever created. Dear god, how much time did that take to make?
Say this three times fast: sea shrinks foam cups. (It helps if you sing the words to the tune of Frère Jacques.)
The [styrofoam] cups were then gingerly sent into the deep. During the historic dive, led by Russian scientists, the pressure of the surrounding water crushed the cups to the size of thimbles, also squeezing their whimsies of writing and drawing. Afterward, the tiny cups became instant mementoes of the polar dive, offering striking proof of the descent into an unfamiliar zone and silent testimony to the crushing power of plain old water.
The "open-skies" agreement goes into effect at the end of this month, which means that airlines based in the US and Europe can fly into and out of any two airports in each area.
The new pact is expected to be game-changing for Europe-bound travel. More routes are expected to open, and prices could fall thanks to the new competition. The agreement is also likely to encourage European carriers to compete more aggressively with one another across the Continent. Lufthansa, the German airline, for example, could set up a hub in Paris; or Air France could set up a hub in Frankfurt.
The article also states that Ireland-based Ryanair wants to offer fares to/from secondary markets in the US and Europe as low as $16. !!!
Comparison of old versions (5,10,12 years ago) of popular web sites (Yahoo, CNN, Starbucks) with the current versions. Here's a comparison from a less popular site of your acquaintance. (via vitamin briefcase)
Interview with Errol Morris in the Columbia Journalism Review about Standard Operating Procedure.
Somebody comes up to you and says, "I'm a postmodernist; I don't care about truth; it's subjective." My answer is, "So it doesn't matter who pulled the trigger? It doesn't matter whether someone committed murder, or whether someone in jail is innocent or not?" I believe that it does matter. What happens in the world matters a great deal.
Morris also says that there will be a web site that accompanies the film where you can view all the Abu Ghraib photos in the order that they were taken.
You can click on a photograph and an iris opens up -- you go into the photograph, and inside of the photograph is context. Take, just for example, the Gilligan photograph, the one on the box, with the wires. I rubber-band that photograph with the other ones taken at the same time, so that it becomes a group of related photographs. There's software that allows you to reconstruct the room from the different angles of the photographs. Then I have biographies that you can click on for all the people who were in the room, and their own accounts. Plus you can see stuff that I recorded for this movie. In other words, you can really enter the world of the photograph.
Canada is seeing a small influx of American deserters who would rather not serve in Iraq.
Most of them, like Colby, say they joined the military in part out of patriotism. "I thought Iraq had something to do with 9/11," Colby says, "that they were the bad guys that attacked our country." But unlike Hinzman, most did not apply for conscientious-objector status. They tend to say they aren't opposed to all wars in principle -- just to the one they were ordered to fight. It wasn't until Colby arrived in Iraq that he started to see the conflict as "a war of aggression, totally unprovoked," he says. "I was, like, 'This is what my buddies are dying for?'
The Canadian government will soon decide whether or not to let those soldiers apply for citizenship on the basis that the conflict in Iraq is "a war not sanctioned by the United Nations".
Talented people are leaving Pixar because very few people get a shot at directing a film of their own.
For all the success, however, there's very little room atop Pixar's food chain. While live-action movie studios might crank out more than a dozen movies annually, the digital animation company built by Apple's Steve Jobs barely makes a film a year -- and had no features at all in 2005 or 2002. What's more, all Pixar movies so far have been directed by an inner circle of animation all-stars: John Lasseter ("Toy Story," "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2" and "Cars"), Brad Bird ("The Incredibles" and "Ratatouille"), Andrew Stanton ("Finding Nemo" and summer's forthcoming "Wall-E") and Pete Docter ("Monsters, Inc." and 2009's "Up").
Brad Bird is set to direct a live-action movie about the earthquake that hit San Francisco in 1906.
Point. Being nasty can improve your life.
Next month sees the arrival of Asshole: How I got Rich and Happy by Not Giving a S*** About You, by New York author Martin Kihn. "I was the nicest guy in the world - and it was killing me," he says in the book. "My life was a dictionary without the word 'no'. If you asked me for a favour -- even the kind of favour that required me to go so far out of my way that I needed a map, a translator and an oxygen tank -- even if I didn't know you that well, I might hesitate a second, but I'd always say yes."
Kihn walked other people's dogs, traipsed out of his way to bring back the most complicated lunch orders for colleagues and handed over his money to whichever charity or sales scam asked for it. The result of such "kindness" was a dead-end job and a second-rate apartment.
While Gryzb recommends subtle personality changes, Kihn takes it a step further. He picked up tips from the masters - Donald Trump, Scarface and "the guy in my building with a tattoo on his face" -- and decided to "blowtorch away my old personality and uncover the rock-hard warrior within". In his book, Kihn devises a "10-step programme to assholism" for anyone wanting to acquaint themselves with their darker side. He himself signed up to the National Rifle Association, started kickboxing, screamed at colleagues and ate garlic bagels on public transport.
Counterpoint. The secret to happiness is giving.
Think you'd be happier if you won the lottery or just had a few extra bucks in your pocket? Think again. Overturning classic economic wisdom, new research shows that it's not how much you have that matters, it's how you spend it. People who donate their dollars to charities or splurge on gifts for others are more content than those who squander all the dough on themselves.
(via 3qd)
A fantastic pair of maps, courtesy of Strange Maps:
- A map of the area covered by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on their Apollo 11 moon walks, superimposed on a soccer pitch for comparison purposes.
- The same map, superimposed on a baseball diamond.
Update: Here's a look at the traverse map overlaid on the moon's surface.
Update: For all you conspiracy theorists out there, LVHRD superimposed the traverse map onto a Universal Studios soundstage.
Ben Saunders, North
My pal Ben Saunders is headed North, in an attempt to set a new world record for the fastest trip to the North Pole.
The current record was set in 2005 by a guided team using dog sleds and numerous re-supplies in a time of 36 days 22 hours. Ben's expedition will be solo and unsupported and on foot. This route has only ever been completed once solo and unsupported, by Pen Hadow in 2003. Ben aims to halve his time and complete it in 30 days. More than geographic exploration, Ben is exploring the limits of his own human potential.
Unsupported means that Ben will carry everything he needs to make the trip with him from the beginning. Check out the gear he's bringing with him, including the tech he'll use to update his journal along the way. Good luck, Ben!
Last week, PZ Myers, an outspoken critic of creationism, was booted from a screening of Expelled, a film defending intelligent design co-written by Ben Stein.
They singled me out and evicted me, but they didn't notice my guest. They let him go in escorted by my wife and daughter. I guess they didn't recognize him. My guest was...
Richard Dawkins.
Here's an account of the affair in the NY Times and a review of the film by Dawkins called Lying for Jesus.
Is that upcoming Judd Apatow produced/written/directed/presented by/executive produced movie going to be any good? Use this handy scoring system to find out.
Drillbit Taylor is written by Apatow acolyte Seth Rogen (3), but directed by Steven Brill, the auteur behind Little Nicky (-2). It stars Owen Wilson (-1) and is sadly free of Apatow's repertory company of comedians, though Leslie Mann does play a supporting role (1). As far as we know, it contains no wangs, no seasoned dramatic actress, and no McLovin. It should score about a 1, which is to say it will be slightly better than Anchorman.
The Anchorman Is Not As Funny As You Remember sidebar is spot on as well. Will Ferrell needs to rethink his shit.
@ the movies
300
During the conference Xerxes sent a man of horseback to ascertain the strength of the Greek force and to observe what the troops were doing. He had heard before he left Thessaly that a small force was concentrated here, led by Lacedaemonians under Leonidas of the house of Heracles. The Persian rider approached the camp and took a thorough survey of all he could see -- which was not, however, the whole Greek army; for the men on the further side of the wall which, after its reconstruction, was now guarded, were out of sight. He did, none the less, carefully observe the troops who were stationed on the outside of the wall. At that moment there happened to be the Spartans, and some of them were stripped for exercise, while others were combing their hair. The Persian spy watched them in astonishment; nevertheless he made sure of their numbers, and of everything else he needed to know, as accurately as he could, and then rode quietly off. No one attempted to catch him, or took the least notice of him.
Back in his own camp he told Xerxes what he had seen. Xerxes was bewildered; the truth; namely that the Spartans were preparing themselves to die and deal death with all their strength, was beyond his comprehension, and what they were doing seemed to him merely absurd. Accordingly he sent for Demaratus, the son of Ariston, who had come with the army, and questioned him about the spy's report, in the hope of finding out what the behavior of the Spartans might mean. 'Once before,' Demartus said, 'when we began our march against Greece, you heard me speak of these men. I told you then how I saw this enterprise would turn out, and you laughed at me. I strive for nothing, my lord, more earnestly than to observe the truth in your presence; so hear me once more. These men have some to fight us for possession of the pass, and for that struggle they are preparing. It is the custom of the Spartans to pay careful attention to their hair when they are about to risk their lives. But I assure you that if you can defeat these men and the rest of the Spartans who are still at home, there is no other people in the world who will dare to stand firm of lift a hand against you. You will now have to deal with the finest kingdom in Greece, and with the bravest men.
That's from Book VII of Herodotus' The Histories, translation by Aubrey de Selincourt. Why was none of this hair-combing business in the movie? That would have been great in slow motion.
Which reminds me. My other question about 300 is why the filmmakers, having wonderfully distilled and reduced the Hollywood action movie down to its fantastically violent essence, padded the remainder of the film with 45 minutes of the most boring slow-motion-filmed plot since Plutarch's Watching Paint Dry? 300 would have benefitted greatly from a little worship at the altar of Jason Bourne: don't stop the fucking action, ever.
Buzzfeed gets a little love in this week's New Yorker article about the "death and life of the American newspaper".
The Huffington Post's editorial processes are based on what Peretti has named the "mullet strategy." ("Business up front, party in the back" is how his trend-spotting site BuzzFeed glosses it.) "User-generated content is all the rage, but most of it totally sucks," Peretti says. The mullet strategy invites users to "argue and vent on the secondary pages, but professional editors keep the front page looking sharp. The mullet strategy is here to stay, because the best way for Web companies to increase traffic is to let users have control, but the best way to sell advertising is a slick, pretty front page where corporate sponsors can admire their brands."
Here's the mullet strategy page on Buzzfeed. (Disclosure: I'm an advisor to Buzzfeed.)
From the outgoing NY Times Paris bureau chief, eight lessons in the ways of the French.
A doctor I know told me he once bought a coat at a small men's boutique only to discover that it had a rip in the fabric. When he tried to return it, the shopkeeper gave him the address of a tailor who could repair it - for a large fee. They argued, and the doctor reminded the shopkeeper of the French saying, "The customer is king."
"Sir," the shopkeeper replied, "We no longer have a king in France."
Michael Chabon on why real-life superhero costumes don't work.
This sad outcome even in the wake of thousands of dollars spent and months of hard work given to sewing and to packing foam rubber into helmets has an obvious, an unavoidable, explanation: a superhero's costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist's sleight of hand. The superhero costume as drawn disdains the customary relationship in the fashion world between sketch and garment. It makes no suggestions. It has no agenda. Above all, it is not waiting to find fulfillment as cloth draped on a body. A constructed superhero costume is a replica with no original, a model built on a scale of x:1. However accurate and detailed, such a work has the tidy airlessness of a model-train layout but none of the gravitas that such little railyards and townscapes derive from making faithful reference to homely things. The graphic purity of the superhero costume means that the more effort and money you lavish on fine textiles, metal grommets, and leather trim the deeper your costume will be sucked into the silliness singularity that swallowed, for example, Joel Schumacher's Batman and Robin and their four nipples.
Steve Nash directed his own Nike commercial. Nash's original concept for the commercial is clever:
At first, the idea was to shoot on different mediums -- camera phone, 8-millimeter, 16-millimeter (the eventual choice), security footage. My idea was the city was watching me. The genesis was a lot of people film me or take a picture of me in the city on cellphones. If it's such an appetite to see me do normal things, it was an idea to do something people like.
(via truehoop)
How do you describe a smell or a taste? John Lanchester discusses that and a recent book of perfume reviews in this recent New Yorker article.
The language of taste has, therefore, reached something of an impasse. On the one hand, we have the Romantic route, in which you are free to compare a taste to the last unicorn or the sensation you had when you were told that you failed your driving test-and others are free to have no idea what you are talking about. On the other, we have the scientific route, which comes down to numbers, and risks missing the fundamental truth of all smells and tastes, which is that they are, by definition, experiences.
Photos of people in their beds by Thierry Bouet. Dumb Flash interface alert: click on "au lit" to see the beds. (thx, juliette)
The opera Tristan and Isolde has had more than its fair share of mishaps over the years. The current engagement of the opera at the Met has been through 4 Tristans already.
Ed Boyden on How to Think "in a world where problems are extremely complex, targets are continuously moving, and our brains often seem like nodes of enormous networks that constantly reconfigure".
Make your mistakes quickly. You may mess things up on the first try, but do it fast, and then move on. Document what led to the error so that you learn what to recognize, and then move on. Get the mistakes out of the way. As Shakespeare put it, "Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win, by fearing to attempt."
(via spurgeonblog)
Mike Johnston on the camera he would like to own, a decisive moment digital (DMD) camera.
So there you have it: a small, light, unobtrusive carry-around camera with great handling and world-class responsiveness, capable of being used in all manner of lighting conditions and yielding DSLR-quality results on the gallery wall. The 21st-century equivalent of Henri Cartier-Bresson's stealthy street-shootin' Leica.
There Will Be Vader, a mashup of There Will Be Blood and Star Wars, with Daniel Plainview playing the part of Vader.
(via house next door)
Lost Prada glasses, Brooklyn, NY, an experiment in internet chivalry.
The reading glasses pictured below were found on Friday, March 21, 2008 on Prospect Park West, on the side of the park, somewhere between 9th and 12th streets around 8:00 a.m.. Instead of just leaving them there waiting to be crushed by a Bugaboo or bike, or chewed up by a dog or pigeon, they were picked up in hopes of finding their rightful owner. All through the magic of the internet and the generous linkage of those interested in solving a good cause.
Paul Ford has plans to make a better TV show than The Wire, "set in even worse parts of Baltimore".
I'll use cave paintings as the model for my series. Omar will chase mammoths through the streets and Carcetti will wear a robe made from a wolf and Beadie will chew bear meat for her children before passing it from her mouth. And everyone will speak proto-Indoeuropean without subtitles and the hidden cultural theme that no one sees will be land-bridge migration and phenotype variation.
I have already pre-ordered seasons 1 through 261,492.
Posts from the International Association of Time Travelers forum.
At 14:52:28, FreedomFighter69 wrote:
Reporting my first temporal excursion since joining IATT: have just returned from 1936 Berlin, having taken the place of one of Leni Riefenstahl's cameramen and assassinated Adolf Hitler during the opening of the Olympic Games. Let a free world rejoice!At 14:57:44, SilverFox316 wrote:
Back from 1936 Berlin; incapacitated FreedomFighter69 before he could pull his little stunt. Freedomfighter69, as you are a new member, please read IATT Bulletin 1147 regarding the killing of Hitler before your next excursion. Failure to do so may result in your expulsion per Bylaw 223.At 18:06:59, BigChill wrote:
Take it easy on the kid, SilverFox316; everybody kills Hitler on their first trip. I did. It always gets fixed within a few minutes, what's the harm?
A list of foods that were unknown in Europe in the Middle Ages. A good resource for Renaissance Faire planners.
You can see it coming...just like in 1999/2000, the failure of all these shitty businesses built on sand will be blamed on an economic downturn and not that companies who make widgets for Facebook are not worth anything close to $500,000,000.
If you tell photographer Izaz Rony where you'll be at a particular time, he'll come and take your picture without you knowing it.
Using information provided earlier about their weekly routine, the photographer will arrive on the scene, and unseen, take shots of the subject. The subject will be photographed walking through the streets, going about their daily business. Without posing and artifice, the camera captures only the natural beauty of the person.
Andrew Hearst calls it "surveilling yourself".
Permanent Vacation, a piece by Cory Arcangel consisting of "two unattended computers send endlessly bouncing out-of-office auto-responses to each other". (via vitamin briefcase)
Dan's 20th Century Abandonware page showcases one man's collection of "legacy software, computer systems and memorabilia". I've got a CD of FutureSplash (an early version of Flash) somewhere. And a NeXT pencil! (via mark)
A list of amusing restaurant names presented somewhat oddly in scholarly paper format. Pony Espresso is a coffeehouse in Wyoming, Wiener Takes All in a hot dog place in Illinois, and Wholly Mackerel is a Gulf Coast seafood place.
Paris, I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down is the latest is a series of dispatches from Rosecrans Baldwin during his Parisian residence.
"So who would win in a fight," the Welshman asked me, "New York or Los Angeles?"
It took me a second. "Los Angeles. New Yorkers would be too busy to fight," Then I asked him: "OK, imagine it's you and a hundred five-year-olds in a locked room. The children are overcome with a desire to kill you. How many could you put down?"
He thought for a second. "Can I use one of them as a weapon against the others?"
"Sure. But you have to remember they're a mob."
"Yeah, I can't let them get me on the ground."
A minute later we gave the game over to the French: "Who wins, Coca-Cola or Uma Thurman?"
The French didn't answer and remained staring out the windows-it might have been Battersea, or Shepherd's Bush. Then the French director said, "That is not a game." He started coughing. "It is so Anglo, this game. It is not a game. How do you judge this? It is a soda and a woman. Then how do you decide?"
"One wins, one loses. Just pick," I said. But he refused: "It is nothing a French person would think is a game. It is so stupid."
The traffic wasn't moving. I asked him then to suggest a French game instead that we could play. "OK, OK, here is a French game," he said. "We will talk about something for a little while. It will be about nothing. We will talk and talk and talk about it. Sometimes I will take the other side of the conversation, just to say you are wrong. And then we will stop."
He resumed his brooding silence. The composer turned to say he agreed, this was a classic French game.
The Desire Paths Flickr pool. Desire paths are improvised paths built collectively by pedestrians trying to find the shortest way across the grass, like ants laying down pheromone trails to food. I've heard of some clever institutions who wait for desire paths to be laid down by pedestrians and then put permanent sidewalks in those places.
It's been awhile since the last conversation about gender diversity at web conferences. Here's a particularly high profile example of more of the same: Google's just-announced Web Forward conference appears to have a single woman speaker out of 38 total speakers.
Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market.
Myth #1: Renting is Like Throwing Your Money Away
Buyers throw their money away for the first five years they own a home, because they simply give money to the bank for the privilege of borrowing money. Renters, on the other hand, pay for one thing every month: shelter. They don't pay interest to the bank, property taxes or maintenance fees. They pay rent.
Short is In. Kevin Kelly collects a bunch of short media, including 4-word film reviews, 6-word music reviews, and 7-word wine reviews. To which I would add Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity In Words of Four Letters or Less.
The Abu Ghraib article by Errol Morris and Philip Gourevitch which I wrote about here and was subsequently taken down is back online. For now. Get it while you can. (thx, tom)
Craig Oldham's Nudist typeface is flesh-colored with some bits pixelated out. Other "weights" include a fig leaf version and a black censor bar version. Entirely SFW.
Short post about the favorite letters drawn by H&FJ type designers, including the awesomely named Sulzbacher Eszett character.
The designers at H&FJ are often asked if there are particular letters that we especially enjoy drawing. Office doodles testify to the popularity of the letter R, perhaps because it synopsizes the rest of the alphabet in one convenient package (it's got a stem, a bowl, serifs both internal and external, and of course that marvelous signature gesture, the tail.)
I would love to see a collection of those office doodles.
A collection of film stills on LiveJournal. Click through to see more from each film.
A German fighter ace has just learned that one of his 28 wartime 'kills' was his favourite author. Messerschmidt pilot Horst Rippert, 88, said he would have held his fire if he had known the man flying the Lightning fighter was renowned French novelist Antoine de Saint-Exupery.
Sometimes truth is stranger than fiction. (via clusterflock)
In the middle of this interview with rapper DMX, it becomes clear that he's never heard of Barack Obama before.
Q: Barack Obama, yeah.
A: Barack?!Q: Barack.
A: What the fuck is a Barack?! Barack Obama. Where he from, Africa?Q: Yeah, his dad is from Kenya.
A: Barack Obama?Q: Yeah.
A: What the fuck?! That ain't no fuckin' name, yo. That ain't that nigga's name. You can't be serious. Barack Obama. Get the fuck outta here.Q: You're telling me you haven't heard about him before.
A: I ain't really paying much attention.Q: I mean, it's pretty big if a Black...
A: Wow, Barack! The nigga's name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain't his fuckin' name. Ima tell this nigga when I see him, "Stop that bullshit. Stop that bullshit" [laughs] "That ain't your fuckin' name." Your momma ain't name you no damn Barack.
(via ah)
Long long but good good roundbrowser** discussion about which is the best TV drama ever: The Wire, Deadwood, or The Sopranos.
MZS: And I would be, frankly, stunned if, as great an actor as Ian McShane is, he ever did anything that was as demanding and as complex as what he did on Deadwood. Same thing for Gandolfini. And there are even smalle