A dream of journalism without advertising
A dream of journalism without advertising. From E.W. Scripps' experiment in Chicago to A.J. Liebling's vision of newspapers funded by endowments.
What's your law?
John Brockman has asked his Edgy band of scientists, futurists, writers, and philosophers about "some bit of wisdom, some rule of nature, some law-like pattern, either grand or small, that you've noticed in the universe that might as well be named after you", like those of Newton, Moore, or Murphy. Here are the results.
The more general of such laws are the most interesting because they can enrich our understanding of diverse subject areas and can be very instructive in how they fail. I think maybe this is what Alan Alda was getting at with his First and Second Laws of Laws:
1. All laws are local.
2. A law does not know how local it is.
Here's a few of my other favorite laws from the list, general and not:
Pimm's First Law: No language spoken by fewer than 100,000 people survives contact with the outside world, while no language spoken by more than one million people can be eliminated by such contact.
Gopnik's Gender Curves: The male curve is an abrupt rise followed by an equally abrupt fall. The female curve is a slow rise to an extended asymptote. The areas under the curves are roughly equal. These curves apply to all activities at all time scales (e.g. attention to TV programs, romantic love, career scientific productivity). (see the graphs)
Morgan's Second Law: To a first approximation all appointments are canceled.
Pöppel's Universal: We take life 3 seconds at a time. Human experience and behaviour is characterized by temporal segmentation. Successive segments or "time windows" have a duration of approx. 3 seconds.
Brand's Pace Law: In haste, mistakes cascade. With deliberation, mistakes instruct.
Kai's Example Dilemma: A good analogy is like a diagonal frog.
Rushkoff's Law: A religion will increase in social value until a majority of its members actually believe in it--at which point the social damage it causes will increase exponentially as long as it is in existence.
Humphrey's Law of the Efficacy of Prayer: In a dangerous world there will always be more people around whose prayers for their own safety have been answered than those whose prayers have not.
Minksy's Second Law: Don't just do something. Stand there.
Sterling's Corollary to Clarke's Law: Any sufficiently advanced garbage is indistinguishable from magic.
So good it'll make you wanna croque
A croque monsieur is a sandwich consisting of two slices of white bread, ham, cheese, a bit of cream (or cheese) sauce, and yet more cheese melted over the top of it after the whole thing has been grilled. I somehow missed this miracle of French cuisine the last time around, but am taking full advantage of it now. I've even written a little song about it, quite unintentionally. It just popped into my head and every time I see le croque monsieur on the menu, I can't help singing it:
Croque Monsieur, Croque Monsieur
uh huh huh**, Croque Monsieur
(repeat)
A chart topper for sure.
** The "uh huh huh" here is what I think of as typical French grunting (gathered mostly from misrepresentions of snooty French characters in movies and cartoons), a sound that when followed by a "monsieur" could be thought of as playfully condescending in tone.
I want to like Chicken
I want to like Chicken Run. I really do. But I fear that all the little stuff that makes Nick Park's stuff really great will be squeezed out of the film by watering it down for a mass audience. I hope I'm wrong.
Fans of Park's work (Wallace & Gromit, &c.) will want to check out Creature Comforts, his Academy Award-winning short film. The entire film is available online, streamed piping hot to your very own computer.
Unbreakable, despite some minor issues
Unbreakable, despite some minor issues here and there, was a surprisingly good movie. M. Night Shyamalan, the director and writer of both Unbreakable and The Sixth Sense, is fumbling around with this film (and, to a lesser extent, The Sixth Sense), trying to find his talent sweet spot. I get the sense that if given enough room, he's going to make a really spectacular movie in the next few years.
Breaking up in the digital age
Breaking up in the digital age. "we both stared at the one Xbox that jealously guarded both our saved games"
In response to my post
In response to my post on onomatopoetic words, Neel sent in this wonderful word: abecedarian. It refers to either an alphabet enthusiast or to a list of words in strict alphabetical order (like Apple, Be, Compaq, Dell, &c...), and when you say it, it sounds like you're reciting the beginning of the alphabet. Abecedarian is my new favorite onomatopoetic word.
2008 election maps
Last night as the election results were coming in online, I took screenshots of a bunch of the now-familiar red/blue electoral maps being used by the larger media sites to show election results and posted them all on this page. (There are currently 25 maps...I'm adding more in a few minutes.)
Hit me on my burner if you run across any others. A couple of quick notes:
1. No one strayed from the red and blue. The red/blue combo is overwhelmingly symbolic but there are plenty of other colors in the crayon box; I would like to have seen someone try something different.
2. In the 2000 and 2004 elections, the red/blue map was the focal point of the media coverage. People were fixated by it. This time around, it didn't matter so much. The maps were interesting for 3-4 hours until the overwhelming nature of Obama's victory became apparent and then, not so much. By this morning, the maps are already shrinking or disappearing from the home pages of the Times, CNN, and the like.
3. Nate Silver and the rest of the 538 guys nailed it. They got Indiana wrong and there are a couple more states that are still too close to call, but they got the rest of the map right. Their final projection had Obama getting 348.6 electoral votes and they currently have him at 349.
It looks like I have
It looks like I have a fan in Georgia. The eApps site looks familiar somehow, although maybe it's just the Silkscreen all over the place. (thx chris)
The unobserved tree makes noise
Two independent groups of scientists have recently confirmed that the universe does exist when we are not observing it.
The reality in question -- admittedly rather a small part of the universe -- was the polarisation of pairs of photons, the particles of which light is made. The state of one of these photons was inextricably linked with that of the other through a process known as quantum entanglement. The polarised photons were able to take the place of the particle and the antiparticle in Dr Hardy's thought experiment because they obey the same quantum-mechanical rules. Dr Yokota (and also Drs Lundeen and Steinberg) managed to observe them without looking, as it were, by not gathering enough information from any one interaction to draw a conclusion, and then pooling these partial results so that the total became meaningful.
That's a relief, although the head of one of the group called their results "preposterous", so perhaps we're still not really here.
About two months ago, I
About two months ago, I had the rare pleasure of (unknowingly) starting a small meme and then watching it grow into something wholly unexpected. Here's what happened:
- After reading a post on Tom Coates' Web site noting the similar subject matter on our sites, Meg and I both posted the same fictional story to megnut and kottke.org about seeing a little girl riding her bike. We even misspelled the word "pedal" to add to the uniformity of the copy. We thought it would be good for a joke.
- Then something strange happened. Tom posted the story to his site, word for word (spelling error and all), without further comment. Then Heather, Steve, and a few other folks posted the story word for word to their Web sites.
- To most folks, who hadn't had time to witness the genesis of the meme before it spread, these multiple posts (seemingly made at the same time) looked like a conspiracy among a clique, trying to demonstrate their elite status or some other such nonsense. Other people thought it was a bug in the software that many of the posters used to update their sites. In the course of a day or so, the meme had spread to a relatively wide audience and, to a significant degree, had already obscured its origin.
- People then started to notice the pattern and began to comment on it, both in a group setting on Metafilter (here & here) and on their Web sites (here & here, for example). Others took the original story, put a personal spin on it, and posted it to their sites (here, here, and here, for example).
From there, it became a joke in email, was mentioned in passing in online forums, and came up in conversations. People continued to post it to their sites, probably not even realizing the full context of the situation, doing it simply because everyone else was.
There was even a smaller "aftershock" meme involving people posting "I am Jason Kottke" to their sites (like here & here). I have no idea what that was all about...except maybe that the pump had been primed and people were in the mood to repeat just about anything.
And then people pretty much forgot about the whole thing, which, I think we can all agree, is a good thing.
More men are taking their wives' last
More men are taking their wives' last names in marriage and are getting more shit for it too. "Van Hallgren received a scathing note from a longtime listener with a subject line that read, 'Sam, turn in your man card.' The listener asked what 'sissy juice' the host was drinking."
Why children love Roald Dahl's stories --
Why children love Roald Dahl's stories -- and many adults don't. Danny, The Champion of the World is my favorite Dahl book and I've read most of the others as well.
Lunchtime in Saigon
We had a couple of notable lunches in Saigon. The first was at Quan An Ngon. The owner of this establishment found the best street food vendors in Saigon, offered them a steady wage, and brought them all under one roof to form a restaurant[1]. When you arrive (and after waiting for 10 minutes or more at this busy place) and are shown to your table, you pass the various cooks preparing their street specialties. The waiter was super-quick in taking our order so we didn't get too good of a look at the menu, but we managed to have an excellent lunch.
A couple of days later, we checked out La Fenetre Soleil (the link is in Japanese, but the photos are good). As you probably know, France ruled Vietnam for about 100 years and the influence can be seen in several aspects of life there. La Fenetre Soleil feels quite French (circa 1940), mostly due to the architecture of the building and the deliberate styling of the proprietors. There are a few tables, but we sat in two ridiculously comfortable stuffed chairs and lunched on banh mi with cold drinks. A very cool place to chill out and have a small meal or a drink...comfortable enough to lounge for hours.
[1] A great idea, BTW. I wonder if such a thing could work in NYC?[2]
[2] Or some other city somewhere else. I live in NYC so I spend a lot of time (publicly and privately) wondering if things I notice elsewhere could work where I live.
Not sure when this happened, but the
Not sure when this happened, but the New Yorker has posted the huge profile of Bill Clinton that David Remnick wrote for the magazine back in September 2006. Yes it's long, but well worth the effort. Related: a NY Times crossword puzzle with clues provided by Clinton.
Anil to bloggers: "you're just like the media you hate"
Anil to bloggers: "you're just like the media you hate". Blogs have become known for attacking and tearing down, not for understanding and building up. Sad.
After 10 years, kottke.org favorite New Green
After 10 years, kottke.org favorite New Green Bo (still the best soup dumplings in town, IMO) has changed its name to Nice Green Bo.
We're 10 years old, and we have so many nice customers, so we made it Nice Green Bo.
(via eater)
Update: My officemate Scott snapped a photo of the new signage during lunch.
Signs you've played too much Tetris
When I got home last night, I picked up my mail and opened the shirt I ordered from Threadless:
It took me all of two seconds to look at Scandinavia and determine that it was impossible to construct using conventional Tetris pieces. Unless some of the little blocks had been disappeared by clearing a row. And the dialogue in my head when I was thinking about all this was spoken in Professor Frink's voice from The Simpsons. Maybe I need to start reading on the subway rather than playing my GameBoy Advance so much.
The Cupertino effect: a term for incorrect
The Cupertino effect: a term for incorrect spellcheck suggestions that make it into finalized documents. The term comes from the appearance of the word "Cupertino" in several European Union documents in the place of "cooperation". "The fact that Secretary General Robertson is going to join this session this afternoon in the European Union headquarters gives you already an idea of how close and co-ordinated this Cupertino is and this action will be."
Vacation Observation #427: You know
Vacation Observation #427: You know you have too much time on your hands when you start recognizing known contemporary actors in bit parts on bad TV programs. In the space of 24 hours, I recognized the actor who plays Meldrick on Homicide as the leader of the Lords of Hell in Adventures in Babysitting and caught Michael Dorn, Worf on Star Trek: TNG, as a cop on CHiPs.
Vacation Observation #285: You know you have too much time on your hands when you beat Super Marios 1, 2, and 3, all in the space of 24 hours.
The whitewater rafting was awesome. I'll have some pictures of the trip up sometime in the near future. It's good to be home, though. I have no idea what 9 days of laziness and goofing around is going to do to my work ethic. I guess I'll find out tomorrow.
Erik Spiekermann's favorite fonts
Erik Spiekermann's favorite fonts. He created the Meta and Officina typefaces and now has a weblog.
Jason D. O'Grady, who "broke" a product
Jason D. O'Grady, who "broke" a product announcement that turned out to be a false rumor, on his legal problems with Apple: "What if a company with US$14 billion in revenue and 14,000 employees wanted a piece of your ass?" -dj
Design of airplane food
Web design and airplane food design have some things in common. On the Web, one often designs for 640x480 and on the plane, one has to make the food tray, beverage, and utensils all fit on the little fold-down tray.
Second generation traffic calming
Salon recently ran an article on the relatively new school of thought about traffic management called second generation traffic calming. It involves improving traffic flow by incorporating, under certain circumstances, automobile traffic back into the flow of other human activities:
Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it's a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it's about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.
The idea, borrowed in part from behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology disciplines, is that traffic will become safer and move more smoothly if drivers are forced to pay more attention to their driving and be on autopilot less:
Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.
At the beginning of the article, the author observes traffic working like this in China:
It's rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.
In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. "There are no rules," as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.
But here's the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn't see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets.
When I was in Bejing a few years ago, I observed the same thing. Traffic was an amazing thing to watch there. One day as we toured a temple a few stories off the ground, my dad and I broke away from the rest of the group to watch traffic on the 5 or 6-way intersection below us for several minutes. It was a marvel of self-organizing behavior, with buses, pedicabs, pedestrians, cyclists, taxis, cars, and motorcycles forming temporary lanes of traffic that would weaken and yield to newly formed lanes of flow.
I've observed this phenomenon in NYC as well, especially in dense areas of Manhattan like Midtown. People are always in the street, crossing against the light or jaywalking across even busy avenues or through stopped traffic. Cyclists run red lights, charge through busy crosswalks, and barrel down one-way streets the wrong way. Everyone pays a lot of attention to what they're doing, regardless of what the signs say or where the crosswalk is marked. And for the most part, it seems to work. New York City has a relatively low pedestrian fatality rate, about half that of the city with the highest rate, a remarkable fact considering the pedestrian density involved and how fast traffic moves in Manhattan sometimes (I saw a cab zipping down 5th Avenue this afternoon doing at least 50 mph, slaloming through jaywalkers as he went).
25 and life to go
When you reach 25, it's finally time to fully grow up and be an adult.
You must, however, stop viewing carelessness, tardiness, helplessness, or any other quality better suited to a child as either charming or somehow beyond your control. A certain grace period for the development of basic consideration and self-sufficiency is assumed, but once you have turned 25, the grace period is over, and starring in a film in your head in which you walk the earth alone is no longer considered a valid lifestyle choice, but rather grounds for exclusion from social occasions.
The best advice: "Be interested so that you can be interesting."
This year's AIGA Holiday Party features an
This year's AIGA Holiday Party features an auction conducted by Mr. John Hodgman to benefit a design mentoring program for NYC high school kids. Also, free wrapping paper.
Many thanks for all the
Many thanks for all the kind birthday greetings yesterday (and today). :)
Birthday wrap-up: I got virtual cards from both of my parents, a $25 Amazon.com gift certificate from my co-workers, got to bust open a pinata whilst wearing a sombrero after lunch at work (don't ask), my dad took me out to lunch (today), and Nichol surprised me with flowers, dinner, and a movie (Run Lola Run). Great day.
IT Conversations will be streaming presentations from
IT Conversations will be streaming presentations from PopTech 2005 live...Windows Media Player required. :( From Etech to the AIGA Design Conference to Web Essentials 05, more and more conferences letting those of us who can't attend listen in anyway.
Creative writing time
My pal Kdunk, who gave me a lucky dollar to hang on my wall on the occasion of my going full-time on kotte.org, recently posted an intriguing photo to Flickr. As the first commenter notes, "there goes a story". As a creative writing exercise, what's your take on what's going on here? Doesn't have to be true, just make something up. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I think this one may have a few more in it than that.
PopTech 2006
Postings around here may get a little sporadic because I'm heading up to attend the PopTech conference in Maine. PopTech is near the top of the heap of all the conferences I've attended and I'm really looking forward to this year's event, especially since I didn't get to go last year. Speakers include Thomas Barnett, Richard Dawkins, Homaro Cantu, Juan Enriquez, Stewart Brand, Thomas Friedman, Will Wright, and Ze Frank, as well as the sleepers that I've never heard of that inevitably knock everyone's socks off.
If you didn't get yourself in gear to make it to PopTech this year, no need for despair. For the first time, they're broadcasting the whole thing, live and for free. I will also be doing some blogging from the audience (as will others, I imagine), so stay tuned for that as well.
Roommate Wanted: Share My West Village Pad. "
Roommate Wanted: Share My West Village Pad. "Ideally, you do not have 'a lot' of friends (i.e., any). But if you do, they cannot visit the apartment at any time."
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?
Liar's Poker
Michael Lewis is one of my favorite authors. He's not the smartest or the most clever writer but he weaves deceptively simple stories into larger statements on society and humanity with a skill possessed by very few people doing creative work in any field. I haven't gotten around to reading Moneyball yet, but Liar's Poker is probably his strongest work. It's as hard to put down as any fiction. Great book.
Pro baseball player Don Carman wrote up
Pro baseball player Don Carman wrote up a list of stock responses to reporter's questions...it reads like a script for almost every locker room interview I've ever seen. "We're going to take the season one game at a time."
A just-concluded eGullet conversation with Ruth Reichl,
A just-concluded eGullet conversation with Ruth Reichl, currently editor-in-chief of Gourmet magazine and former food critic for The New York Times.
Child molesters say Lance should never be
Child molesters say Lance should never be allowed to legally wed anyone he loves..
Merry...er....Saturday!
Merry...er....Saturday!
Federer's (nearly) flawless footwork
A New York TImes video explains Roger Federer's footwork and how it helps him be so effective and efficient on the court. Bonus: the creepy CG version of Federer makes him seem like even more of a robot. (via clusterflock)
How to become Jason Bourne
Timothy Ferris has some excerpts from a new book by Neil Strauss called Emergency: This Book Will Save Your Life. The book is an "encyclopedia for those who want to disappear or become lawsuit-proof global citizens".
I couldn't believe classes like this even existed. In the last forty-eight hours, I'd learned to hotwire a car, pick locks, conceal my identity, and escape from handcuffs, flexi-cuffs, ducttape, rope, and nearly every other type of restraint.
The course was Urban Escape and Evasion, which offered the type of instruction I'd been looking for to balance my wilderness knowledge. The objective of the class was to learn to survive in a city as a fugitive. Most of the students were soldiers and contractors who'd either been in Iraq or were about to go, and wanted to know how to safely get back to the Green Zone if trapped behind enemy lines.
Like Ferris' Four Hour Work Week, Emergency sounds both exhilarating and preposterous. I wonder if these folks might have been helped by such a book.
Just looking at the Grand Canyon Skywalk (
Just looking at the Grand Canyon Skywalk (more info here) makes me go all queasy. 70 feet out from the edge of the cliff and 4000 feet down? No thanks! Genius idea though.
Best show poll results
Almost 4000 people have taken the best show on TV poll so now is a good time to take a look at the results. Here are the top five:
The Wire: 16%
The Simpsons: 8%
Seinfeld: 7%
Arrested Development: 7%
The West Wing: 6%
No other show got more than 4% of the total vote. As expected, The Wire topped the list1. Some notes:
- Arrested Development ranked 4th overall, way higher than I would have thought. People love this show more than the ratings and its duration (it was cancelled after 3 seasons) would indicate.
- The Sopranos was not in the top five. My feeling is that if this poll were conducted five years from now, it would rate higher...the influence this show has had on TV is only starting to be felt.
- Beavis and Butt-head beat out The Honeymooners for second-to-last place. Ralph and Alice deserve better.
- Shows I would have liked to see higher in the list: Deadwood, Sesame Street, The Sopranos.
- I love Seinfeld, but it was ranked too high. At 2%, Buffy got 2% more of the vote than I would have given it.
- Shows that some thought should be on the list: Law & Order (love the show but it defines formulaic TV), The Twilight Zone (perhaps), Doctor Who (again, love it, but nothing this cheesy can be the best show on TV), Sex and the City, Rome, Carnivale, Heroes, and The Mary Tyler Moore Show.
Thanks to everyone who voted.
[1] I got some emails saying that The Wire ranked first only because I talk about the show so much on the site. That was probably a factor, but it's not like this is a Wire fan site or something. The poll wasn't that scientific anyway. Run a similar poll on Perez Hilton and American Idol might have won. Or on a site that appeals to 50-somethings and some of the older shows on the list might have done better. All this poll really shows is what people who like the kinds of things I post about on kottke.org also like to watch on television. (This was also not, as someone suggested, an attempt to gather information about viewing habits for advertisers. Duh.) ↩
Photos of the 28-course tasting menu at
Photos of the 28-course tasting menu at chef Grant Achatz's Alinea.
Anyone in a coining mood? If one
Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn't already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking "Post". As in: "Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead." Any ideas?
Elves and Hobbits in Russian Woods
Elves and Hobbits in Russian Woods. "Carrying a realistic-looking wooden elven saber might get you in trouble with the law if you can’t explain yourself."
This Word suicide note looks
This Word suicide note looks like a cheap ripoff of Paul Ford's Word suicide note (from his essay on Word).
The hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers will
The hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers will soon relaunch as a 4-star boutique hotel.
The real identity of Belle de Jour
The real identity of Belle de Jour is out, and it looks like she's really an author, not a call girl.
Jason's 4th of July wrap-up:
Jason's 4th of July wrap-up: made blueberry pie and potato salad, consumed world's largest hot dog at a party, took lots of pictures (none of them digital), got a bit of sunburn, made a *really* bad joke involving patriotic pinwheels (one of the pinwheels fell down and I said there had been a death in the family), and heard, but did not see, some fireworks.
NY Times on professional miniature golf
NY Times on professional miniature golf. I won a mini golf tournament once and even have a trophy to prove it.
Fractal bacteria
Pruned has collected some lovely petri dish scenes full of fractal patterns.
Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning -- no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics -- other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode.
More here. See also ferrofluid.
Advice for the party thrower
Chi Chi Valenti is a NYC Nightlife Empress, but in this interview for Gothamist, she throws down some great general advice:
Since someone's always hooking up, getting wasted or starting a fight these days, my standard for a great party is somewhat higher. Most importantly, there must be a MIX - Vampires and diamond dealers, legends and New Kids, fetishists and objects of worship, romantics and cynics, geeks and pop stars, boys, girls and everything in between. Historically, New York's best parties (and club nights) have combined all ages, gender prefs, income levels and style schools. A roomful of one kind of person is boring and predictable - it is the mark of the provinces.
What's true for parties is also true for ideas, friends, and experiences; diversity is a good thing.
Bilbao, Rio, Taichung. Guggenheim announced for Taiwan?
Bilbao, Rio, Taichung. Guggenheim announced for Taiwan?. Zaha Hadid did the moving (literally) design. via Archinect
Michael Sippey offers some suggestions on how
Michael Sippey offers some suggestions on how web startups could benefit from how grade schools function. Snack time, gym class, field trips, and using periods instead of a calendar.
New version of Google Groups adds mailing
New version of Google Groups adds mailing lists to the Usenet archives. Maybe each group should have a RSS/Atom feed?
Aquarium design
Photos from the 2008 International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest...AKA fancily decorated aquariums. (thx, dustin)
Here's a list of reasons that Hollywood
Here's a list of reasons that Hollywood is in trouble, with nary a mention of the piracy bogeyman. "These trends do not appear reversible in the short run. It is not just that this year's movies mostly stink."