I wish this map of current US gas prices factored out the taxes included in the pump price. It seems like what the map mostly shows is the differences in taxes between states (PDF map) and not, for instance, how the distance from shipping ports or local demand affects prices. (via what i learned today)
One could imagine a Powers of Ten video with drawer pulling instead of zooming.
recently on twitter.com/jkottke
- The sun never sets on Google's datacenters. Feel free to use that in your next Web 2.0 whitepaper.
- There's a turd on the stairs in the office. We discovered it right before lunch. The very definition of bad timing.
- Becoming a parent means that you tear up when Forrest Gump meets his son for the first time.
- Aggregating the "When Obama wins" meme: http://kottke.org/when-obama-wins/
Nine things I learned this week, 04
[Part four of a recurring series...part one, part two, part three.]
According to the Indian National Crime Bureau, there were 6,787 dowry deaths in India in 2005. A dowry death occurs when a woman is killed or commits suicide due to coercion by her husband or her husband's family in order to secure a larger dowry. [Indian National Crime Bureau]
As of August 2005, the poverty rate in Mississippi was 21.1%, the highest in the nation. The state also ranks first in senior poverty and second in child poverty. Despite being surrounded by states with relatively low poverty rates, Washington DC ranks first in child poverty and is second in overall and senior poverty. [USCCB]
Buddhist teachers Michael Roach and Christie McNally haven't been more than 15 feet from each other in the ten years since they took an oath to that effect. They also read the same books at the same time. [NY Times]
NYC's alternate-side parking rules will be suspended in Park Slope for a few months so that workers can replace parking signs. Residents are overjoyed because they don't have to move their cars every few days. [NY Times]
There are at least 3 escalators in Wyoming. [Metafilter]
Velcro is 50 years old. (At least the trademark is.) [mental_floss]
The Golden Gate Bridge is younger than John McCain. [Things Younger Than John McCain]
In Oklahoma City, the interstate will be moved five blocks from downtown to an old railroad line. The new 10-lane highway, expected to carry 120,000 vehicles daily, will be placed in a trench so deep that city streets can run atop it, as if the highway weren't there. The old highway will be converted into a tree-lined boulevard city officials hope will become Oklahoma City's marquee street.
Several other cities have done (or are planning to do) similar highway tear downs.
"Highways don't belong in cities. Period," says John Norquist, who was mayor of Milwaukee when it closed a highway. "Europe didn't do it. America did. And our cities have paid the price."
No mention of Boston's Big Dig, perhaps the most high-profile example of this trend.
The Wii Fit, the new exercise peripheral for the Nintendo Wii, was reviewed favorably by a number of people for the New York Times. A fitness professional at the Sports Center at Chelsea Piers gave it pretty high marks:
"Actually I think it's pretty good," she said. "You can definitely get a workout. When I started doing it, I realized all the activities were pretty much on point. There were some things I didn't like, like the alignment in a couple of places. But over all, I thought they did a good job and this will be a good tool for people who can't make it to the gym."
The Wii Fit will be released in the US and Canada early next week.
Update: Joel Johnson has a nice round-up of exercise-themed video game accessories, from the unreleased Atari Puffer to the Wii Fit.
A list of ways to get yourself excused from the jury pool in the R. Kelly child pornography case.
I (heart) R. Kelly. Nothing gets prospective jurors booted faster than telling the prosecution they are a fan of Kelly's. Just ask the woman who called him a "musical genius." When prodded to say something negative about Kelly, the best she could come up with was: "He and [rapper] Jay-Z don't get along?" Prosecutors bounced her soon after.
Another potential juror was excused for suggesting that Kelly "led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11".
A collection of photos of a cleaning crew washing Seattle's Space Needle with high pressure washers (scroll down a bit).
Even though the sprayers use half the flow of a garden hose, the water shoots out at 3,000 pounds per square inch -- more than enough power to send the guy behind the hose flying. "One thing we say is, it doesn't necessarily have to be fun to be fun. There are definitely times when I'm spinning in free space and I'm like, holy cow this is terrifying and I can't believe this is my job," said Matt Henry, rope technician.
The company doing the work, Karcher GmbH & Co., has done similar high-profile jobs around the world, all at no cost...their web site says that these projects are good publicity for their cleaning products. Here's a sampling of some other projects they've done, including the Statue of Liberty and Berlin's Brandenburg Gate. (via girlhacker)
Here's an update on the effort to solve the Pioneer anomaly, the unexplained deviation in motion of deep space probes from what Newton and Einstein's theories predict.
As it sped through space, a specialist in radio-wave physics named John Anderson at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory noticed an odd thing. The spacecraft was drifting off course. The discrepancy was less than a few hundred-millionths of an inch per second for every second of spaceflight, accumulating year after year across billions of miles. Then Pioneer 11, an identical probe escaping the solar system in the opposite direction, also started to veer off course at the same rate.
Ordinarily, such small deviations might be overlooked, but not by Dr. Anderson. He monitored the trajectories six years before calling attention to the matter. "I'm a little like an accountant," Dr. Anderson said. "We have Newton's theory and Einstein's theory, and when you apply them to something like this -- and it doesn't add up -- it bothers me."
The researchers, using data recovered from recently discovered Pioneer records and funded by sources outside of NASA, have figured out part of the problem but the rest remains a mystery.
Greg Allen still has his bottle of Suck Cola from when the now-defunct web site Suck was handing them out at a trade show in 1996. He's building a registry of Suck Cola bottles...if you've got one, send in the details.
After your Cola information is reviewed and validated, you will be issued a Suck Cola Registry Number. I have designated my bottle SC0005, having reserved the first four Registry Numbers, SC0001-SC0004, for Suck.com co-founders Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman.
Suck the web site has now been dead for as long as it was active, but the Cola lives on.
Video of designer John Gall, who shares his five rules for book cover design.
The other great source of inspiration is the deadline.
A look at how portion sizes have changed in the US over the years.
We don't have to eat those extra 360 calories in the tub of popcorn, but that's easier said than (not) done. Studies indicate that when given food in larger containers, people will consume more. In a 1996 Cornell University study, people in a movie theater ate from either medium (120g) or large (240g) buckets of popcorn, then divided into two groups based on whether they liked the taste of the popcorn. The results: people with the large size ate more than those with the medium size, regardless of how participants rated the taste of the popcorn.
@ the movies
Fight Club
This one's not holding up as well as one would think. The first time I saw it, in the theater in 1999, my reaction was "eh". The second time, on DVD a few years ago, I thought it was great. Now I'm back closer to "eh" again.
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we've run out of money, and can no longer afford to pursue our vision of adapting great long-form content for a short-form world, at least not as a stand-alone company. As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don't.
Like Cameron, I found the site useful and am sad to see it go.
Michael Bierut celebrates the elegantly simple design of the Brannock Foot-Measuring Device.
Charles F. Brannock only invented one thing in his life, and this was it. The son of a Syracuse, New York, shoe magnate, Brannock became interested in improving the primitive wooden measuring sticks that he saw around his father's store. He patented his first prototype in 1926, based on models he had made from Erector Set parts. As the Park-Brannock Shoe Store became legendary for fitting feet with absolute accuracy, the demand for the device grew, and in 1927 Brannock opened a factory to mass produce it. The Brannock Device Co., Inc., is still in business today. Refreshingly, it still only makes this one thing. They have sold over a million, a remarkable number when one considers that each of them lasts up to 15 years, when the numbers wear off.
Bierut also notes that Tibor Kalman was a big fan of the Brannock Device, once saying:
It showed incredible ingenuity and no one has ever been able to beat it. I doubt if anyone ever will, even if we ever get to the stars, or find out everything there is to find out about black holes.
The humble shoe horn is another well designed shoe-related device that may never be bettered.
An interview with the makers of a film about secondhand clothing in Haiti.
Shell says Haitians sometimes dress better than Americans because they are used to tailoring their secondhand clothes to fit. While the pepe market makes it difficult for Haitian tailors to sell their own designs or traditional fashions; the cheap cost means, as one woman in the documentary explains, they can "adopt the look that is on television without much effort."
Most of the clothes come from the United States.
Update: Secondhand clothing imports to Zambia killed the clothing industry there:
Mark O'Donnell, spokesperson for Zambian Manufacturers, explains that in 1991, when the country's markets were opened to free trade, container load after container load of used clothing began to arrive in Zambia, undercutting the cost of the domestic manufacturers and putting them out of business. The skills, the infrastructure and the capital of an entire industry are now virtually extinct, with not a single clothing manufacturer left in the country today.
(thx, tj)
Joan Acocella on the paradox of New Yorkers' seeming rudeness and helpfulness in public spaces.
[New Yorkers] make less separation between private and public life. That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It's hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.
And here's how New Yorkers deal with celebrities:
Another curious form of cooperation one sees in New York is the unspoken ban on staring at celebrities. When you get into an elevator in an office building and find that you are riding with Paul McCartney -- this happened to me -- you are not supposed to look at him. You can peek for a second, but then you must avert your eyes. The idea is that Paul McCartney has to be given his space like anyone else.
A tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells that was a part of the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MoMA was killed because it was growing too fast.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. "It was growing too much," she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat's creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
The b3ta folk explore what happens just outside the border of some well-known album covers. The Simon and Garfunkel and Pink Floyd/Kool-Aid ones are pretty good.
The Chicago City Council overturned the city's embarrassing ban on foie gras. The vote was 37-6.
I just recently picked up on the visual pun on the cover of Cal Henderson's Building Scalable Web Sites.
A list of infrequent HTTP/1.1 status codes.
HTTP 220 (The Clooney): Same as 200 with a little something in there for your trouble.
(thx, djacobs)
A list of unconventional but useful tips for visitors to NYC.
Do a bunch of local New York things: Hang out in Central Park, Explore Brooklyn, wear black, enjoy the free WiFi in Bryant Park (use the bathroom there -- nice). Attend a lecture at the 92nd ST Y, go to Chinatown in Queens. Buy junk at a street fair, and eat street meat (don't ask). Have a cigar at the Grand Havana Room (members only). Catch an author speak at a Barnes & Noble (use the bathroom while you are there).
Eventually I hope to write up my How To Be A Pedestrian In NYC guide, a companion to my rules for the NYC subway, only a bit more helpful and less ranty.
A developer just fixed a bug in the BSD flavor of Unix that had gone undiscovered for 25 years. I guess it finally accrued enough eyeballs to make it shallow.
Related to yesterday's post about photo retouching is this article about how challenging high definition is to makeup artists and actors alike (via house next door) .
John Toll is an Academy Award-winning cinematographer who has had limited exposure to HD photography, but who understands the impact of it on the business. "Film tends to be more kind," he said. "Now with HD, they're doing things like more filtration, or softening of the light, or degrading the image so it's not so highly defined. It's sort of what they used to do in movie star close-ups, an over-diffused style to try to make them look glamorous. Now they do it so you don't see every pore in a close-up on skin."
Also related, James Danziger weighs in on the Dove/Dangin/Leibovitz controversy the latter of whom is represented by Danziger's gallery.
Any photograph used in a magazine, a billboard, an album cover, whatever -- can only be presumed to be a photo-based illustration. The issue, which Dove's well-intentioned campaign addressed, is the effect these illustrations have on the psyche, self-esteem, and well-being of women (in particular) not to mention the unrealistic view men might have of women. It brings to mind the shock the eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin experienced upon discovering his wife's pubic hair, after which he was unable to consummate the marriage. Divorce followed shortly.
Bluegrass Vader. I was just about to click away when, bam, instant laughter.
Mobile phone companies are evil, irritating, and stupid defacto monopolies
[I'm sure this is nothing new and has been amply documented elsewhere but I'm in rant mode, not research mode, so here we go.] We're going to London soon so my wife calls up AT&T to make sure our iPhones will work in the UK. We already knew all about the ridiculous prices they charge for international data roaming (viewing a 3-minute video on YouTube would cost about $40!), so turning that feature off for the duration is not going to be a problem. After unlocking the phones for international access, the woman informed Meg of two other tidbits of mobile phone company idiocy:
1. If my iPhone is on in the UK and the phone rings but I don't answer, the call goes to voicemail. As it should. But somehow, I get charged for that call at $1.29/minute *and* perhaps an additional call from my phone to the US, also billed at $1.29/minute. Individual voicemails are limited to 2 minutes, but if I get 10 2-minute voicemails over the course of a couple days, I'm charged $25 for not answering my phone. And then I have to listen to all the voicemails...that's another $25. Insane and inane.
2. But it gets even more unbelievable! Then the woman tells Meg that when the iPhone is hooked up to a computer via USB, you shouldn't download the photos from the phone to the computer because you'll incur international data roaming charges and further that the only way to deal with this is to wait to sync your photos when you get back to the US. W! T! F! How is that even possible? This sounds like complete bullshit to me. The iPhone somehow calls AT&T to ask permission to d/l photos? Verifies the EXIF data? Informs the US government what you've been taking pictures of...some kind of distributed self-surveillance system? Is this really the case or was this woman just really confused about what she was reading off of her script?
Video: The Day There Was No News. This is what CNN should do instead of filling the 24 hours of the day with recycled hysteria.
A list of all the US presidential election logos from 1960-2008. That's a whole lot of red and blue. I particularly liked 1988's Dick "Chrysler" Gephardt and Paul Simon's Top Gun homage. (via quips)
From Coolspotters, a new site that tracks celebrity use of brands and fashion, here's a list of celebs that use an iPhone, including Heidi Klum, Karl Rove, Paris Hilton, and, er, Steve Jobs. (via mike davidson)
Bonnie Richardson, a junior from Rochelle High School in Texas, was the only woman from her school to qualify for the Texas 1A state track meet and ended up winning the team title for Rochelle...all by herself.
Richardson's title march began with field events on Friday when she won the high jump (5 feet, 5 inches), placed second in the long jump (18-7) and was third in the discus (121-0). On Saturday, she won the 200 meters in 25.03 seconds and nearly pulled off a huge upset in the 100 before finishing second (12.19) to defending champion Kendra Coleman of Santa Anna. Richardson, a junior, earned a total of 42 team points to edge team runner-up Chilton (36).
Cue Bjork's Army of Me. (via clusterflock)
1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
Ok, we've done books so let's move on to movies. From the book by Steven Jay Schneider comes a list of 1001 movies you must see before you die. Since it's less time consuming to watch movies rather than read books, I did a lot better on this list...I've seen 214/1001 movies on the list. My favorites are marked with an asterisk.
Nosferatu, A Symphony of Terror(1922)
The General (1927)
King Kong (1933)
Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937)
The Wizard of Oz (1939)
Gone With the Wind (1939)
Pinocchio (1940)
Citizen Kane (1941)
Casablanca (1942)
It's a Wonderful Life (1946)
On the Waterfront (1954)
Rear Window (1954)
The Seven Samurai (1954)
Touch of Evil (1958)
The 400 Blows (1959)
North by Northwest (1959)
La Jetee (1961)
West Side Story (1961)
Lolita (1962)
Goldfinger (1964)
Dr. Strangelove (1964)*
A Hard Day's Night (1964)
The Sound of Music (1965)
Faster, Pussy Cat! Kill! Kill! (1965)
The Graduate (1967)
Cool Hand Luke (1967)
Rosemary's Baby (1968)
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
A Clockwork Orange (1971)*
Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971)
Harold and Maude (1971)
Dirty Harry (1971)
Deliverance (1972)
The Godfather (1972)*
The Sting (1973)
American Graffiti (1973)
The Conversation (1974)
Young Frankenstein (1974)
Chinatown (1974)
Blazing Saddles (1974)
The Godfather Part II (1974)*
Dog Day Afternoon (1975)
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (1975)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)
Barry Lyndon (1975)
The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976)
All the President's Men (1976)
Rocky (1976)
Taxi Driver (1976)
Network (1976)*
Star Wars (1977)*
Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)
Annie Hall (1977)
Saturday Night Fever (1977)
The Deer Hunter (1978)
Grease (1978)
Alien (1979)
Life of Brian (1979)
Apocalypse Now (1979)
The Jerk (1979)
The Muppet Movie (1979)
The Shining (1980)*
Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)*
Airplane! (1980)
Raging Bull (1980)
Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)*
Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1981)
E.T.: The Extra-Terestrial (1982)
Blade Runner (1982)
Tootsie (1982)
Gandhi (1982)
A Christmas Story (1983)
Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
The Right Stuff (1983)
Scarface (1983)
Amadeus (1984)
The Terminator (1984)
This Is Spinal Tap (1984)
Beverly Hills Cop (1984)
Ghostbusters (1984)
The Killing Fields (1984)
The Natural (1984)
The Breakfast Club (1985)
Back to the Future (1985)
Brazil (1985)
Stand By Me (1986)
Blue Velvet (1986)
Aliens (1986)
Ferris Bueller's Day Off (1986)
A Room with a View (1986)
Platoon (1986)
Top Gun (1986)
Raising Arizona (1987)
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Withnail and I (1987)
Good Morning, Vietnam (1987)
The Princess Bride (1987)
The Untouchables (1987)
Fatal Attraction (1987)
Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988)
The Thin Blue Line (1988)
Akira (1988)
A Fish Called Wanda (1988)
The Naked Gun (1988)
Big (1988)
Dangerous Liaisons (1988)
Die Hard (1988)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)
Rain Man (1988)
The Accidental Tourist (1988)
Batman (1989)
When Harry Met Sally (1989)
The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989)
Do the Right Thing (1989)
Roger & Me (1989)
Glory (1989)
Say Anything (1989)
Goodfellas (1990)
Jacob's Ladder (1990)
Dances with Wolves (1990)
Pretty Woman (1990)
Edward Scissorhands (1990)
Total Recall (1990)
Boyz 'n the Hood (1991)
Raise the Red Lantern (1991)
Thelma & Louise (1991)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)*
JFK (1991)
Slacker (1991)
The Player (1992)
Reservoir Dogs (1992)*
Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)
Unforgiven (1992)
The Crying Game (1992)
Groundhog Day (1993)
Philadelphia (1993)
Jurassic Park (1993)
Schindler's List (1993)
The Piano (1993)
Hoop Dreams (1994)
Forrest Gump (1994)
Clerks (1994)
Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)
The Lion King (1994)
Natural Born Killers (1994)
Pulp Fiction (1994)*
Muriel's Wedding (1994)
The Shawshank Redemption (1994)*
Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Casino (1995)
Babe (1995)
Toy Story (1995)
Braveheart (1995)
Clueless (1995)
Heat (1995)
Seven (1995)*
Smoke (1995)
The Usual Suspects (1995)
Fargo (1996)
Independence Day (1996)
The English Patient (1996)
Shine (1996)
Trainspotting (1996)
L.A. Confidential (1997)
Princess Mononoke (1997)*
The Butcher Boy (1997)
The Ice Storm (1997)
Boogie Nights (1997)*
Titanic (1997)*
Saving Private Ryan (1998)
Buffalo 66 (1998)
The Big Lebowski (1998)
Run Lola Run (1998)
Rushmore (1998)*
Pi (1998)
Happiness (1998)
The Thin Red Line (1998)
There's Something About Mary (1998)
Magnolia (1999)*
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
Three Kings (1999)
Fight Club (1999)
Being John Malkovich (1999)
American Beauty (1999)
The Sixth Sense (1999)
The Matrix (1999)*
Gladiator (2000)
Requiem for a Dream (2000)
Amores Perros (2000)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)
Traffic (2000)
Memento (2000)
Dancer in the Dark (2000)
Amelie (2001)
Spirited Away (2001)
No Man's Land (2001)
Moulin Rouge (2001)
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
The Royal Tenenbaums (2001)*
The Pianist (2002)
Lost in Translation (2003)
Oldboy (2003)
Good Bye Lenin! (2003)
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)*
Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004)
A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Sideways (2004)
Caché (2005)
Brokeback Mountain (2005)
The Constant Gardener (2005)
If you'd like to post your movie list, I used this list along with a list of additions and subtractions.
Update: The very latest edition of the book adds and subtracts some more movies to/from the list; here are the added movies that I've seen:
Crash (2004)
Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
The Prestige (2006)
United 93 (2006)
Children of Men (2006)
El Laberinto del Fauno (2006)
The Queen (2006)
Apocalypto (2006)
The Departed (2006)
Volver (2006)
And deleted from the list:
Monsoon Wedding (2001)
Mulholland Dr. (2001)
A Very Long Engagement (2004)
Caché (2005)
It's interesting to watch the churn on a list like this. With the newest movies, they're making guesses as to how they'll age and in many cases, the guesses aren't that good. Also, removing Caché for Apocalypto? No fucking way. (thx, jack)
Doug Dyment reveals his secrets to packing light for trips.
Dyment has two big tricks for packing a bag correctly: Don't let any space go unused, and wrap your clothes in bundles.
"If you're packing a pair of running shoes, say, don't forget there's a lot of space inside those shoes that you can use to pack stuff," he says.
When it comes to clothing, Dyment says travelers who fold items individually, put them in a stack and force them in the suitcase are making a huge mistake.
More info here, including a diagram of how to bundle wrap your clothes to save space.
A short list of items lost in taxi cabs and how they were returned.
Thierry Belisha and Haimy Mann, jewelers from Montreal, left a suitcase full of diamonds and other gems in the back of a cab they took to La Guardia Airport after a show at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center. Mr. Belisha, an Orthodox Jew, called several rabbi friends in Israel and asked them to pray for him, prayers that were answered when Hossam Abdalla, a Muslim cabdriver, found Mr. Belisha's business card in the trunk and returned the suitcase (with all the gems).
The list is a sidebar to the story about a cabbie's return of a $4 million Stradivarius to its owner and subsequent concert performed in the Newark airport taxi holding area, a delightful piece of reporting.
But despite the setting -- or maybe because of it -- Mr. Quint's audience seemed particularly moved by his gesture. "I like that he came here," Ebenezer Sarpeh, 46, said, in the accent of his native Ghana. "And, yeah, the music, I like it." It was Mr. Sarpeh who burst into spontaneous applause on several occasions and started yelling "magic fingers" during one particularly deft moment. Later, he took a turn in front of the stage and his fellow cabdrivers laughed and cheered while he shimmied and moonwalked, the Newark Taxi Cab Association's answer to Justin Timberlake.
A bunch of examples of contemporary typography...lots of ideas to riff off here.
Approaching the uncanny valley from the other direction
Fashion photo retouching (i.e. high-brow Photoshopping) gets the New Yorker treatment with this story on retoucher Pascal Dangin, one of the best in the business.
In the March issue of Vogue Dangin tweaked a hundred and forty-four images: a hundred and seven advertisements (Estée Lauder, Gucci, Dior, etc.), thirty-six fashion pictures, and the cover, featuring Drew Barrymore. To keep track of his clients, he assigns three-letter rubrics, like airport codes. Click on the current-jobs menu on his computer: AFR (Air France), AMX (American Express), BAL (Balenciaga), DSN (Disney), LUV (Louis Vuitton), TFY (Tiffany & Co.), VIC (Victoria's Secret).
The article touches too briefly on the tension between reality and what ends up in the magazines and advertisements. As Errol Morris points out on his photography blog, it is often difficult to find truth in even the most vérité of photographs. Even so, the truth seems to be completely absent from Madonna's recent photo spread in Vanity Fair that was retouched by Dangin, especially this one in which a 50-year-old Madonna looks like a recent college graduate who's never lifted a weight in her life.
The uncanny valley comes into play here, which we usually think of in terms of robots, cartoon characters, and other pseudo anthropomorphic characters attempting and failing to look sufficiently human and therefore appearing creepy and scary. With an increasing amount of photo retouching, postproduction in film, plastic surgery, and increasingly effective makeup & skin care products, we're being bombarded with a growing amount of imagery featuring people who don't appear naturally human. People who appear often in media (film & tv stars, models, cable news anchors & reporters, miscellaneous celebrities, etc.) are creeping down into the uncanny valley to meet up with characters from The Polar Express. I don't know about you but a middle-aged Madonna made to look 24 gives me the heebie-jeebies. Perhaps the familar uncanny valley graph needs revision:
As rumored yesterday, the iTunes Store has added some HBO shows to their lineup. The initial offerings are the first seasons of The Wire, Flight of the Conchords, Rome, and Deadwood, as well as seasons 1 and 6 of the Sopranos and all of Sex in the City. Prices are between $2-3 per episode. (thx, dhrumil)
David Remnick lists the top 100 essential jazz albums. Caveat:
I thought it might be useful to compile a list of a hundred essential jazz albums, more as a guide for the uninitiated than as a source of quarrelling for the collector.
The list is a companion piece to Remnick's article on jazz DJ Phil Schapp.
A list of 1001 (fiction) Books That You Must Read Before You Die, from a book of the same name. I read too much nonfiction to be well-read fiction-wise, but I have read these thirty from the list:
The Corrections, Jonathan Franzen
House of Leaves, Mark Z. Danielewski
Infinite Jest, David Foster Wallace*
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Haruki Murakami*
Contact, Carl Sagan*
The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien*
Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov*
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway
The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger
Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell*
Cry, the Beloved Country, Alan Paton
Animal Farm, George Orwell
The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
The Hobbit, J.R.R. Tolkien*
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Time Machine, H.G. Wells
The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Arthur Conan Doyle
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain
Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen*
Candide, Voltaire
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe
Some of my very favorites are on there.
Update: Following Marco's lead, I've marked some favorites with an asterisk. Under duress, I'd admit to the following as my top three favorite fiction books, in order: Infinite Jest, 1984, and Lolita.
A slideshow featuring well-designed tables of contents. There's an associated Flickr group if you fancy sharing your own. (via designnotes)
How to find images on the internet, an extensive list of links and resources.
FontStruct is an awesomely simple online font creation tool. Just draw on a grid with simple Photoshop-like tools, save, and download a TrueType version of the fonts you've just created. If this had been around when I made Silkscreen, it would have taken so much less time.
Brand Tags asks people what they think of in association with particular brands and then the results are displayed as tag clouds. For instance, Playboy, Nike, Apple, and MTV. See also Celeb Tags.
In last week's New Yorker, Malcolm Gladwell talked about inventions, scientific discovery, and how it's possible to "manufacture" ideas.
In 1999, when Nathan Myhrvold left Microsoft and struck out on his own, he set himself an unusual goal. He wanted to see whether the kind of insight that leads to invention could be engineered. He formed a company called Intellectual Ventures. He raised hundreds of millions of dollars. He hired the smartest people he knew. It was not a venture-capital firm. Venture capitalists fund insights -- that is, they let the magical process that generates new ideas take its course, and then they jump in. Myhrvold wanted to make insights -- to come up with ideas, patent them, and then license them to interested companies.
Myhrvold believes that scientific discovery is largely "in the air" and inevitable, not the product of individual genius. Given the thesis of the piece, as Kevin Kelly notes, it's odd that Gladwell tells the story of this new idea as not one that was "in the air" but as stories like these are traditionally told, through the insight of one man, Nathan Myhrvold.
The Sartorialist on headbands:
Headbands...what a tough accessory. When they are right, they are really right and when they are wrong you're Loverboy.
Advice for 1985: how to survive a nuclear blast. (via delicious ghost)
How this whole When Obama wins thing got started: some Adaptive Path folk musing about state name changes if Obama won:
Dan was twittering something about Alabama, but wrote "Alambama". He joked that when Barack Obama wins the election, certain states will probably be renamed - Alobama, Califobama, Nevama, Massabama, New Yobama. Of course, I thought that was hilarious and started thinking about other things that would change once Obama wins. So, a few of us started twittering silly little things, thinking of it as an inside joke.
Overnight, a few people caught on giving it a life of its own.
And if you're so inclined, you could Digg When Obama wins and help melt my web server.
Update: It's on Reddit as well.
A sad Kermit the Frog sings Elliot Smith's Needle in the Hay (complete with The Royal Tenenbaums parody), NIN's Hurt, and Radiohead's Creep (in which Kermit says "fucking"). (via buzzfeed)
Jezebel's 2008 Harper's/Harper's Bazaar mashup, I'd like you to meet Andrew Hearst's 2005 Harper's/US Weekly mashup.
Chip Kidd's copy of the New New Times reveals the truth behind Russia's new President: Trickery. (via book design review)
Eight things I learned this week, 03
[Part three of a recurring series...part one, part two.]
Starting in June 2009, the US government will require a passport or "similar federally approved document" for entering the US by land. Both US and Canadian citizens living near the borders are unhappy. [Salon]
Fifty percent of the Australia's houses sit less than 8 miles from a beach. Eighty percent of Australians live within 80 miles of the sea. [Architectural Record]
The capacity of Niagara Falls is controlled artificially; the flow is doubled during normal tourist visiting hours. [Newsweek]
As a reward for returning the Stradivarius left in the backseat of Mohamed Khalil's taxi, violinist Philippe Quint gave the cabbie a reward of $100, a private 30-minute performance in the taxi waiting area at Newark, and tickets for him and his family to Quint's next performance at Carnegie Hall. Khalil also received a medal from the city of Newark. The Stradivarius is valued at $4 million. [BBC]
Toilet bowls are cleaner than the average computer keyboard. Studies differ on how much cleaner...1/5? 1/67? 1/400? [Gelf Magazine]
When actively used, women's ballet shoes can last anywhere from 2 weeks to 2 days. [Arizona Daily Star]
For $6,000, you can buy a Worldchanging Carbon Clean Slate gift for your graduating high schooler, which will offset all the climate emissions that your kid has accumulated from birth. For $25,000, you can offset their entire life. [Worldchanging]
By 2015, Moscow will have the 10 tallest office buildings in Europe. The rent for Moscow office space is currently higher than in midtown Manhattan. [Newsweek]
And finally, a holdover from the last week (which itself was a holdover from the week before). Bob Herbert got his "a third of all American high school students drop out" stat from a report prepared by the Editorial Projects in Education Research Center. As I erroneously surmised last week, the ~10% rate from here is not an annual dropout rate. I don't know how you get from 10% of 16-24 year-olds not having a high school diploma in 2005 to 1/3 of all students dropping out of high school. Final update.
A lightbulb in a firehouse in California has been burning more or less continuously since 1901. You can check on the light's status on its WWW home page. (thx, john)
When Obama wins microsite
Last night, folks on Twitter began to contemplate what will happen if Barack Obama wins the nomination. The meme seems to have begun with Andrew Crow's vision for the future:
When Obama wins... unicorns will crap ice cream and pastries.
I collected a bunch of the best ones and made a page that cycles through them: When Obama wins.
Do we really need science to tell us that the DNA of an egg-laying, no nippled, duck-billed mammal is unusual?
Just in time for my newly formed headlines tag: Great tits cope well with warming. (thx, ryan & alex)
This is pretty incredible...John Resig has ported the Processing visualization language to JavaScript. Wow. (via waxy)
The stodgy old New Yorker has a Twitter account and its friends are NPR, Harper's, Gothamist, Huffington Post, the NY Times, and the WSJ, among others. Magazines should have friends, no? (Sniff, the WSJ has no friends.)
NYer Conference, other day one notables
British architect David Adjaye observed that not only are public buildings built for "the public" but they also create "the public" by establishing a space for it to exist. I guess by the same token, buildings built for private citizens also create private citizens...hence, eventually, gated communities and the like.
Adjaye also described his native Africa as layered combination of its different eras: colonialism + nation building + European + Islam + urban/capitalist.
The chefs panel, with Bill Buford interviewing Daniel Humm, Marc Taxiera, and David Chang, was the most entertaining of the day. Right at the end, David Chang told a short anecdote about a customer who complained to him about the amount of fat in the Momofuku pork bun...pork as in pork belly and pork belly as in mostly fat. Chang told him that's the way it came and that he wasn't getting a replacement. Shrugging, he told the audience he had a different idea about hospitality than most restaurateurs..."the customer is not always right".
Michael Novogratz, the 317th richest American, explained the current financial crisis. Goes something like this. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the opening up of China and India for both trade and labor laid the groundwork for globalization. Lots and lots of cheap labor available made for cheap goods and low inflation. Between early 2003 and late 2007, globalization kicked into high gear and people thought, this is it, this is the end of inflation forever. But the workers in Eastern Europe, India, and China gradually became consumers. They bought TVs and cars and better food and whaddya know, inflation is back. The bubble burst.
Amy Smith challenges her students to try living on $2 a day for a week...that includes food, transportation, and entertainment. This video of a talk that Smith did at TED in 2006 covers much of what she talked about today at the New Yorker Conference. The NY Times covered her clever inventions back in 2003.
Eric Haseltine
Haseltine came from an unusual place to the NSA: Walt Disney Imagineering. Between his overuse of the phrases "bad guys" and "war on terror", there were a couple of interesting moments.
In Haseltine's estimation, something called Intellipedia is the biggest advance in the intelligence community since 9/11. Intellipedia is basically an internal Wikipedia for people who work for one of the 16 US intelligence agencies. Its goal is to break down some of the barriers between these agencies in terms of information sharing and colloboration.
Right at the end of the session, interviewer Jane Mayer asked Haseltine if perhaps the Bush administration is overreacting to terrorism...if the mindset that danger lurks everywhere is appropriate and realistic. He replied that since he got involved in the intelligence community, he doesn't sleep well at night. "I know too much."
Whatever Gavin Newsom is selling, I'll take ten
I'll admit I don't watch politicians speak that often, particularly in public. So maybe I'm being a little naive here, but San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom is nothing short of a magician up on the stage. He talked for 20 straight minutes (his would-be interviewer could only get in 2-3 questions during that time and Newsom pretty much ignored them and talked about whatever he pleased) and it felt both like 5 minutes and exhausting at the same time. By the time he'd finished what I would term a sermon, I wanted to sign up for whatever he was selling at a price no lower than my heart and soul. I haven't non-sexually crushed this hard on a speaker since Robert Wright.
Ok, two particularly interesting things that broke my gaze long enough for me to scribble them down in my notebook.
1. Newsom talked about building filling stations for electric cars that relied on exchanging batteries instead of plugging in and waiting for your car to charge. You don't need to own your particular battery.
2. In SF, he's hoping to exchange the payroll tax for a carbon tax. In his words, tax a bad thing (carbon use) instead of taxing a good thing (jobs). That way, the incentives are in the right place...people aren't penalized for working but are penalized for using excessive amounts of carbon.
Update: Oh, don't get me wrong, I have no idea if Newsom was telling the truth or what...it's just that it all sounded so good coming out of his mouth. Even when it sounded like bullshit I wanted to believe him. I felt so dirty and manipulated afterwards, but still wanted to believe. Like I said, love...what's truth got to do with it?
The purpose of the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act of 2008:
To prohibit discrimination on the basis of genetic information with respect to health insurance and employment.
It passed the Senate earlier this year is expected to be signed into law by the President soon. No Gattaca! (via nyer conference)
Gladwell on the mismatch problem
Picking a subject from his upcoming book, Malcolm Gladwell talked about the difficulty in hiring people in the increasingly complex thought-based contemporary workplace. Specifically that we're using a collection of antiquated tools to evaluate potential employees, creating what he calls "mismatch problems" in the workplace, when the critera for evaluating job candidates is out of step with the demands of the job.
To illustrate his point, Gladwell talked about sports combines, events that professional sports leagues hold for scouts to evaluate potential draftees based on a battery of physical, psychological, and intelligence tests. What he found, a result that echoes what Michael Lewis talks about in Moneyball, is that sports combines are a poor way to determine how well an athlete will eventually perform as a member of their eventual team. One striking example he gave is the intelligence test they give to NFL quarterbacks. Two of the test's all-time worst performers were Dan Marino and Terry Bradshaw, Hall of Famers both.
A more material example is teachers. Gladwell says that while we evaluate teachers on the basis of high standardized test scores and whether they have degrees and credentialed training, that makes little difference in how well people actually teach.
New Yorker Conference
I'll be at the New Yorker conference today and some attempt to provide an alive weblogging of the goings-on will be made. On the slate are kottke.org tagholders David Remnick, Rebecca Mead, David Chang, Malcolm Gladwell, and James Surowiecki.
Stewart Butterfield wins Silicon Valley best beard contest. Sloooow news day at Fortune...did the bosses tell 'em to Valleywag it up a little? (Or should I say, Valleywag it down?)
Despite having no basketball playing ability or experience, college junior Zach Feinstein has declared himself for the 2008 NBA Draft. You can find him listed on the NBA's official early entry list under "unknown individuals". (thx, jared)
W magazine has some advice for billionaires on Getting Things Done.
Delegate. Name any task -- somewhere, a billionaire is outsourcing it. One well-known mogul favors shabby chic cashmere sweaters but doesn't have the patience to let them get slightly worn at the elbows, so he employs a man to wear them around for him first.
I can't tell if this list is a joke or not...
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