...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
Popular searches on kottke.org in the past two months: dog, dogfood, test, sex, kottke, design, food, flash, fuck, silkscreen, magnolia, meg, and tivo.
Weird searches on kottke.org in the past two months: asstastic, i like cake, bratwurst, chutzpah, will to love, motley crue videos, booty shaking, me pants, butt cheese, cow booger, and sexier than a pork sausage.
Here's the first sentence of an article that must have been fun to write.
A gay man tried to poison his lesbian neighbours by putting slug pellets into their curry after he was accused of kidnapping their three-legged cat.
Oh humanity, what will you think of next? (via @ettagirl)
Mukesh Ambani, the fifth richest man in the world, is building the most expensive single family residence ever, a $2 billion -- yes, BILLION -- 27-story skyscraper in downtown Mumbai.
Atop six stories of parking lots, Antilla's living quarters begin at a lobby with nine elevators, as well as several storage rooms and lounges. Down dual stairways with silver-covered railings is a large ballroom with 80% of its ceiling covered in crystal chandeliers. It features a retractable showcase for pieces of art, a mount of LCD monitors and embedded speakers, as well as stages for entertainment. The hall opens to an indoor/outdoor bar, green rooms, powder rooms and allows access to a nearby "entourage room" for security guards and assistants to relax.
Photos here. In fairness, the place sounds like a combination corporate HQ with an incorporated family living space, but still. Not noted in the article is the expensive laboratory-grade scanning electron microscope that Ambani uses to locate his teensy penis, for which the 27-story house is compensation.
Depressing article on how much hassle it was for the makers of Mad Hot Ballroom to clear all copyrighted music in the film. "If I had known all that I had to go through, I'm not sure I would have done it."
In a short post yesterday about where writers do their business, I mentioned that Witold Rybczynski had written about the writing room of a famous author that was purposely set away from the rest of his house. I grabbed my copy of The Most Beautiful House in the World off the shelf just now and found that I'd turned down the page containing the relevant passage back when I read the book a few years ago. The author I was thinking of was George Bernard Shaw; here is Rybczynski's description of his writing room:
But Shaw too was a builder, and the writing room that he erected in his garden was a Shavian combination of simplicity, convenience, and novelty. He called it "the Shelter," but it was really a shed, only eight feet square. It contained the essentials of the writer's trade -- a plank desk, an electric lamp, a wicker chair, a bookcase, and a wastepaper basket. Beside the desk was a shelf for his Remington portable -- like [Samuel] Clemens, Shaw was an early amateur of the typewriter. There was also a telephone (modified to refuse incoming calls), a thermometer, and an alarm clock (to remind him when it was time for lunch).
Shaw's writing hut had one other curious feature: the entire building was mounted on a pipe so that it could be rotated to take advantage of the sun's warmth at different times of the day. But the tiny building was so loaded down with books and furniture that the feature was probably never used. Pictures and more on Shaw's writing hut at BBC News, the National Trust, and Cool Tools.
Rybczynski also mentions that Samuel Clemens wrote most often in a hilltop gazebo he'd constructed for that purpose away from his luxurious house..
I'm looking for a writer/blogger** to work on a short-duration kottke.org project. You must be available from 10/30 to 11/6, not counting the weekend. There's a small budget available if you wish to be financially compensated. The resulting project will be featured on the front page of kottke.org with full credit to the author...this isn't some behind-the-scenes thing. Apologies if all that's intentionally vague, but I'll share the full details with the applicants.
If you're interested in applying, send an email to jason@kottke.org containing: 1) a subject line of "kottke.org feedback - Oct project", 2) a one-paragraph cover "letter" of no more than 6-7 sentences, and 3) links to your resume (if you have one), your blog (ditto), and any applicable writing/editing/blogging samples. Use your own discretion as to what to reveal about yourself. Any email with attachments or excessive paragraphs will be deleted unread or will be read and then mocked. Publicly. Those who enjoy reading kottke.org but are unlike me, demographically speaking, are particularly encouraged to apply. Thanks!
** Update: To clarify slightly, I don't necessarily need someone who is a writer or blogger professionally, just someone who can write or blog, no matter their training or profession.
Update: Hi, I think I've got all the applicants I need for now. Thanks to all for your interest.
Psychology Today talks with psychologist Robert Epstein about his book, The Case Against Adolescence:
In every mammalian species, immediately upon reaching puberty, animals function as adults, often having offspring. We call our offspring "children" well past puberty. The trend started a hundred years ago and now extends childhood well into the 20s. The age at which Americans reach adulthood is increasing -- 30 is the new 20 -- and most Americans now believe a person isn't an adult until age 26.
The whole culture collaborates in artificially extending childhood, primarily through the school system and restrictions on labor. The two systems evolved together in the late 19th-century; the advocates of compulsory-education laws also pushed for child-labor laws, restricting the ways young people could work, in part to protect them from the abuses of the new factories. The juvenile justice system came into being at the same time. All of these systems isolate teens from adults, often in problematic ways.
Epstein says the infantilization of adolescents creates a lot of conflict and isolation on both sides of the divide. Over at Marginal Revolution, economist Tyler Cowen adds:
The problem, of course, is that a contemporary wise and moderate 33 year old is looking to climb the career ladder, find a mate, or raise his babies. He doesn't have a great desire to educate unruly fifteen year olds and indeed he can insulate himself from them almost completely. He doesn't need a teenager to carry his net on the elephant hunt. Efficient capitalist production and rising wage rates lead to an increased sorting by age and the moral education of teens takes a hit.
You can read the first chapter of the book at The Radical Academy.
Update: Bryan writes to recommend Neil Postman's The Disappearance of Childhood, saying that "Postman argues that the idea of childhood is a cultural phenomena that comes and goes through the ages". (thx, bryan)
PDF (2.3 Mb) of nifty infoviz graphs that show different improvisation styles for jazz greats Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. More here. Reminds me a little of Tufte's sparklines.
Nina Planck on the recent death by starvation of a baby fed a vegan diet by his parents: "I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants."
Sasha Frere-Jones on Auto-Tune, the studio gizmo responsible for the cool/cheesy voice effects in Cher's Believe and, more recently, most of T-Pain's work.
T-Pain, who is currently working on his third album, "Thr33 Ringz," spoke to me on the phone from his studio in Miami. He first heard the Auto-Tune effect on a song by Jennifer Lopez -- he doesn't remember which one -- and borrowed it for a mixtape appearance in 2003. He says it's no trade secret that he uses Auto-Tune with the retune speed set to zero, and likes to recall a time he spent selling fish out of a truck with his father in Tallahassee: "My dad said, 'They can know what you're using, but they'll never know how to use it. They can see that we're using salt and pepper.'"
Frere-Jones demonstrates how Auto-Tune works in a short audio segment. Anil Dash wrote about Auto-Tune in the context of Snoop Dogg's recent Sensual Seduction video. A free Auto-Tune clone called GSnap is available for free.
I uploaded a few of Auto-Tune's greatest hits to my Muxtape: have a listen.
Entire NHL hockey season cancelled. Can the sport recover from this?
This mirror shot by Alison reminded me of a shot I took in Berlin at the Camper store. (Hmm...the Web site has been redesigned recently...)
The Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me DVD is being released on November 16th. New Line Home Video really has their act together when it comes to producing DVDs, at least Austin Powers DVDs. The first Austin Powers DVD had deleted scenes, a game, music, trailers, and commentary by Mike Myers and the director. The Spy Who Shagged Me is even better, with 20 minutes of deleted scenes, behind-the-scenes information, a Dr. Evil featurette, DVD-ROM games, music videos, and some neat tactile goodies in the case. No one else is doing anything like this with their DVDs.
Is Saving Private Ryan ever going to come out on DVD? Spielberg is dragging his feet in supporting the format.
Friends and finances in 21st century America: "More friends and acquaintances are now finding themselves at different points on the financial spectrum, scholars and sociologists say, thanks to broad social changes like meritocracy-based higher education, diversity in the workplace and a disparity of incomes among professions."
A Canadian pig farmer came up with an interesting solution for herding pigs. Instead of using heavy wooden "chase boards" to guide the pigs, she used a length of fabric of the same color, allowing a single person to do a job once done by many.
Top 50 photo series from the 2006 Critical Mass competition. Some good stuff in there if you poke around a bit...2005 and 2004 too. (via ffffound!)
To start off each year, a question is asked of the Edge membership. This year's question is: "What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?" Here are some favorite responses of mine followed by a couple of my own beliefs.
Rupert Sheldrake is Darwin's man and believes that all natural processes, even physical laws, have evolved through natural selection:
I believe, but cannot prove, that memory is inherent in nature. Most of the so-called laws of nature are more like habits.
The idea that something like the value of Avogadro's number is just a habit that the universe adopted after much practice is quite appealing.
Kevin Kelly thinks the DNA within in our body is slightly different in each cell:
I believe, but cannot prove, that the DNA in your body (and all bodies) varies from part to part. I make this prediction based on what we know about biology, which is that natures abhors uniformity. No where else in nature do we see identity maintained to such exactness. No where else is there such fixity.
Ray Kurzweil is trying to live forever and probably hopes to see the whole of the universe at greater than light speed:
We will find ways to circumvent the speed of light as a limit on the communication of information.
Kurzweil would probably disagree with Todd Feinberg's belief:
I believe the human race will never decide that an advanced computer possesses consciousness. Only in science fiction will a person be charged with murder if they unplug a PC. I believe this because I hold, but cannot yet prove, that in order for an entity to be consciousness and possess a mind, it has to be a living being.
Jonathan Haidt on religion:
I believe, but cannot prove, that religious experience and practice is generated and structured largely by a few emotions that evolved for other reasons, particularly awe, moral elevation, disgust, and attachment-related emotions.
Seth Lloyd on science:
I believe in science. Unlike mathematical theorems, scientific results can't be proved. They can only be tested again and again, until only a fool would not believe them.
I cannot prove that electrons exist, but I believe fervently in their existence. And if you don't believe in them, I have a high voltage cattle prod I'm willing to apply as an argument on their behalf. Electrons speak for themselves.
And George Dyson thinks their may be a connection between the language a raven speaks and the language spoken by the indigenous human population:
Interspecies coevolution of languages on the Northwest Coast.
During the years I spent kayaking along the coast of British Columbia and Southeast Alaska, I observed that the local raven populations spoke in distinct dialects, corresponding surprisingly closely to the geographic divisions between the indigenous human language groups. Ravens from Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Haida, or Tlingit territory sounded different, especially in their characteristic "tok" and "tlik."
Here's what I believe:
What do you believe?
Interesting article on the genesis, sound design, and cinematography of Wall-E.
"We wanted it to have the feeling that it had actually been filmed," says Morris. Using subtle details such as barrel distortion and lens flare, gave Wall.E the feel of the 70mm sci-fi films of the Seventies. For the first time Pixar also brought Academy Award-winning cinematographer Roger Deakins and special-effects don Dennis Muren onboard. "We wanted to get the nuance of a live action film, and actually put mistakes in with zooms and framing to give it a more immediate feel."
Deakins is well-known for working with the Coen Brothers on many of their films. (thx, brian)
Giles Turnbull wrote a fun piece for O'Reilly showcasing the Docks of some OS X users. This is my Dock (well, as of last week...the one on my new Powerbook looks a bit different now). What does yours look like? Post a screenshot to your site and paste a link (and description if you'd like) to it in the comments.
Finally. Did you notice the little icon next to today's date? It links to the permanent URL for this entry. Use that URL to bookmark or link to this particular entry. I've also done the same for the previous entries for this month. At some point, I'll go back and do this for all the previous months' entries as well.
I didn't have high hopes as I headed into the theatre to see The Gladiator, expecting the typical Hollywood tough guy action movie, complete with a hasta la vista, baby or yippee ki-yay, motherfucker. I was glad to be wrong. The acting was solid, the music was good, the cinematography was very good - frequently outstanding - and to my surprise, the storyline was one of the better aspects of the movie. Go for the action, stay for the...umm...rest of it.
Silhouettes of Aeroplanes is an aircraft recognition guide from 1917.
Attributor, a copyright monitoring service, launched today. It's currently available only to enterprise subscribers, but they'll be launching a service for small publishers and bloggers next year. Of special note is the (purported) use to which publishers want to put the service—link credits:
Attributor splits up the world between sites that exhibit extensive copying (more than half of an article, for instance, and just some copying. It shows which sites have linked back to the original source and which have not. "Often, that's all they want—a link," says Brock. Below is a typical dashboard view of what a customer would see. In this case, the content from People.com is being analyzed (based on its feed). Of the 265,000 matches, 103,000 don't link back to People.com.)
(via techcrunch)
According to Wired News, nudity in Mississippi might have a new definition. If Republican state Senator Tom King has his way, nudity would henceforth include "the showing of covered male genitals in a discernibly turgid state." And you thought nudity meant "being without clothing." Apparently, this type of thing is not without precedence. All I can say is that there are going to be a lot of teenaged boys in the slammer.
WindMaker adds motion to a web site based on the current wind conditions at a place of your choosing. Here's kottke.org with NYC wind and with Chicago wind. (thx, jim)
Regarding the debate over copyrights and food, people in fashion are having the same discussion. "In an industry where many designers come out with similar looks each season -- and where inspiration is said to be 'in the air' -- designers and the thriving knockoff industry are hotly debating the issue." (thx, richard)
The Internet Revolution has Little to do with Technology. A kid watching TV is "unlikely to ever be involved in the production of any television" but that's not so with the internet.
A list of the top one articles by Neal Pollack about how sportswriters should stop writing about the NBA MVP race and, oh yeah, lists of stuff are dumb:
Sportswriters and pundits, on the other hand, are treating the MVP race with the gravitas of a presidential election. That's because they make up the Electoral College. When they're debating who's going to win the award, they're not really talking about who they think the best player is; they're talking about whom they should pick as the best player. It's the ultimate circle-jerk of sports-guy self-regard.
Mars, Inc. is offering a reward of 2 million dark chocolate M&M's for the safe return of The Scream, the Edvard Munch painting stolen from a museum in Norway in 2004. Mmmm....Munch. (via girlhacker)
It will take you literally hours to get through this list of the 50 Greatest Comedy Sketches of All Time (video often included). (thx, miguel)
Nobody knows how tall Burj Dubai is going to be when completed later this year, only that it will be the world's tallest building by a comfortable margin. Of the mystery height, the builder has only this to say:
If you put the Empire State Building on top of the Sears Tower then it's reasonable to say you'll be in the neighbourhood.
SkyscraperPage.com says it'll top out around 2650 feet...that's 550 feet shorter than the ESB + Sears but still more than half a mile. (via things magazine)
Netflix, the online DVD rental company, recently released a bunch of their ratings data with the offer of a $1 million prize to anyone who could use that data to make a better movie recommendation system. On the forum for the prize, someone noted that the top 5 most frequently rated movies on Netflix were not particularly popular or critically acclaimed (via fakeisthenewreal):
1. Miss Congeniality
2. Independence Day
3. The Patriot
4. The Day After Tomorrow
5. Pirates of the Caribbean
That led another forum participant to analyze the data and he found some interesting things. The most intriguing result is a list of the movies that Netflix users either really love or really hate:
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Lost in Translation
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Miss Congeniality
5. Napoleon Dynamite
6. Fahrenheit 9/11
7. The Patriot
8. The Day After Tomorrow
9. Sister Act
10. Armageddon
11. Kill Bill: Vol. 1
12. Independence Day
13. Sweet Home Alabama
14. Titanic
15. Gone in 60 Seconds
16. Twister
17. Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy
18. Con Air
19. The Fast and the Furious
20. Dirty Dancing
21. Troy
22. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
23. The Passion of the Christ
24. How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days
25. Pretty Woman
So what makes these movies so contentious? Generalizing slightly (*cough*), the list is populated with three basic kinds of movies:
Misunderstood masterpieces / cult favorites (Royal Tenenbaums, Kill Bill, Eternal Sunshine)
Action movies (Pearl Harbor, Armageddon, Fast and the Furious)
Chick flicks (Sister Act, Sweet Home Alabama, Miss Congeniality)
The thing that all those kinds of movies have in common is that if you're outside of the intended audience for a particular movie, you probably won't get it. That means that if you hear about a movie that's highly recommended within a certain group and you're not in that group, you're likely to hate it. In some ways, these are movies intended for a narrow audience, were highly regarded within that audience, tried to cross over into wider appeal, and really didn't make it.
Titanic is really the only outlier on the list...massively popular among several different groups of people and critically well-regarded as well. But I know quite a few people who absolutely hate this movie -- the usual complaints are a) chick flick, b) James Cameron's heavy-handedness, and c) reaction to the huge success of what is perceived to be a marginally entertaining, middling quality film.
BTW, here are the movies on that list that fit into my "love it" category:
The Royal Tenenbaums
Lost in Translation
Napoleon Dynamite
The Day After Tomorrow
Kill Bill: Vol. 1
Titanic
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
When the topic of weblogs gets covered in the mainstream press, the question of trust often comes up. Inevitably, the comparison is to print and television media. Is the information you get from weblogs as trustworthy as, say, what you read in the NY Times or watch on CNN? Old media's quick answer is often "no".
But people gauge the trustworthiness of weblogs just like they do with newspapers, magazines, and television. Based on what's being said, how it's said, the accuracy of the information compared to other sources, the blogger's track record with similar information, and who else trusts that blogger, we can make pretty good decisions as to the general trustworthiness of a blogger and the specific trustworthiness of a particular post. And much of the time -- say, when Instapundit or Boing Boing are just linking to and excerpting stories from other online sources -- trusting a certain weblog isn't that much of an issue.
Trust becomes more important when eyewitness reporting is involved. Where is Raed? is the personal weblog of Baghdad resident Salam Pax**...or so he tells us. Other than what he tells us, we have no way of knowing if he's actually posting live from Baghdad or is running some elaborate hoax from the middle of Kansas (don't laugh, it's happened before). The site is hosted on blog*spot and is therefore practically anonymous.
Is Salam posting from Baghdad for real? I don't know, but if I had to guess, I'd say yes. There's a good way to find out for certain. Kevin (whom I'm pretty sure is real and blogging from Iraq), if you make it to Baghdad during the course of or after the war, look up Salam and tell us all about it, would you?
** Salam Pax is almost certainly a pen name. "Salam" (or more properly, "Salaam") and "Pax" mean "peace" in Arabic and Latin respectively.
The Fine Brothers spoil 100 movies in less than 4 minutes. See also the spoilers t-shirt and an extensive text list of spoilers.
My roommate got his new Surround Sound system installed yesterday, so we had to try it out by watching Iron Giant. The new setup definitely kicks ass and Iron Giant was just as wonderful the second time around. Do yourself a big favor and rent this movie when you get a chance.
Even with the encroachment of blogs, craigslist, and online stock listings, James Surowiecki says the newspaper business is actually not a bad business to be in these days. "Newspapers are classic cash cows: solidly profitable businesses in a stagnant industry."
Obesity infographics for several countries, the percentage of population older than 15 with a body-mass index greater than 30. That USA man is really fat.
Soviet Army dance ensemble + Run DMC = the invention of breakdancing in the mid-1900s.
Here's the same thing mixed with Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice. Reminds me of the previously featured but still awesome video of Al Minns and Leon James doing the Charleston to Daft Punk. Here are two more videos that track the origins and breakdancing and hip-hop dancing in a slightly more formal manner: one, two.
Clay Shirky rants about the absurd US copyright laws that are preventing him from copying his own media. "Copyright laws do not exist to defend the moral rights of copyright holders -- they exist to help enforce artificial scarcity."
Heather abandons ship at Harrumph and launches a photolog at hchamp.com.
I caught William Shatner singing with Ben Folds Five on Conan last night. Well, singing really isn't the right word. It was more like he was talking over music...on the bridge of the Enterprise.
Sadly, Conan did not ask him if he's serious about his singing. Darn darn.
Video of a Charlie Rose interview with Pixar's John Lasseter and Steve Jobs. This was about a year after Toy Story had been released and a few months before Apple bought Jobs' NeXT.
Bhutan's measurement of Gross National Happiness and how that idea has spread to other countries.
I've had this damn thing up in a browser tab for literally months1 and finally got around to reading it, "this damn thing" being editor David Foster Wallace's introduction to The Best American Essays 2007. In it, Wallace describes his role in compiling the essays collection as that of The Decider. As in, he Deciders what goes into the book according to his subjective view and not necessarily because the essays are "Best", "American", or even "Essays".
Which, yes, all right, entitles you to ask what 'value' means here and whether it's any kind of improvement, in specificity and traction, over the cover's 'Best.' I'm not sure that it's finally better or less slippery than 'Best,' but I do know it's different. 'Value' sidesteps some of the metaphysics that makes pure aesthetics such a headache, for one thing. It's also more openly, candidly subjective: since things have value only to people, the idea of some limited, subjective human doing the valuing is sort of built right into the term. That all seems tidy and uncontroversial so far -- although there's still the question of just what this limited human actually means by 'value' as a criterion.
One thing I'm sure it means is that this year's BAE does not necessarily comprise the twenty-two very best-written or most beautiful essays published in 2006. Some of the book's essays are quite beautiful indeed, and most are extremely well written and/or show a masterly awareness of craft (whatever exactly that is). But others aren't, don't, especially - but they have other virtues that make them valuable. And I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and perspective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of information and context that is by definition part of 2007's overall roar of info and context. But it is possible for something to be both a quantum of information and a vector of meaning. Think, for instance, of the two distinct but related senses of 'informative.' Several of this year's most valuable essays are informative in both senses; they are at once informational and instructive. That is, they serve as models and guides for how large or complex sets of facts can be sifted, culled, and arranged in meaningful ways - ways that yield and illuminate truth instead of just adding more noise to the overall roar.
Although there are some differences between what Wallace and I consider valuable, the Decidering process detailed in his essay is a dead-on description of what I do on kottke.org every day. I guess you could say that it resonated with me as valuable, so much so that were I editing an end-of-the-year book comprised of the most interesting links from 2007, I would likely include it, right up front.
Oh, and I got a kick out of the third footnote, combined here with the associated main text sentences:
I am acting as an evaluative filter, winnowing a very large field of possibilities down to a manageable, absorbable Best for your delectation. Thinking about this kind of Decidering is interesting in all kinds of different ways. For example, from the perspective of Information Theory, the bulk of the Decider's labor actually consists of excluding nominees from the final prize collection, which puts the Decider in exactly the position of Maxwell's Demon or any other kind of entropy-reducing info processor, since the really expensive, energy-intensive part of such processing is always deleting/discarding/resetting.
My talk at Ars Electronica 2006 on the topic of simplicity touched on similar themes and the main point was that the more stuff I can sift through (and throw away), the better the end result can be.
From this it follows that the more effective the aggregator is at effectively determining what the group thinks, the better the end result will be. But somewhat paradoxically, the quality of the end result can also improve as the complexity of the group increases. In constructing kottke.org, something that I hope is a simple, coherent aggregation of the world rushing past me, this complexity is my closest ally. Keeping up with so many diverse, independent, decentralized sources makes my job as an aggregator difficult -- reading 300 sites a day (plus all the other stuff) is no picnic -- but it makes kottke.org much better than it would be if I only read Newsweek and watched Hitchcock movies. As artists, designers, and corporations race to embrace simplicity, they might do well to widen their purview and, in doing so, embrace the related complexity as well.
Welcome the chaos because there's lots of good stuff to be found therein. I also attempted to tie the abundance of information (what Wallace refers to as "Total Noise") and the simplification process of editing/aggregating/blogging into Claude Shannon's definition of information and information theory but failed due to time contraints and a lack of imagination. It sounded good in my head though.
Anyway, if you're wondering what I do all day, the answer is: throwing stuff out. kottke.org is not so much what's on the site as what is not chosen for inclusion.
[1] In actual fact, I closed that browser tab weeks ago and pasted the URL into a "must-read items" text file I maintain. But it's been open in a browser tab in my mind for months, literally. That and I couldn't resist putting a footnote in this entry, because, you know, DFW. ↩
As stated previously, I love this kind of thing:
If you were to travel 2000 years into the past, how useful would you be in jumpstarting technological advancements? This 10 question quiz will help you figure out your technological usefulness.
I got a 6/10, which is probably more than I deserved...the invention of "new" technologies is not multiple choice. I wouldn't have the faintest clue where to begin in actually making concrete or steel from scratch. (via ettagirl)
Update: Phew, I'll just wear this shirt when I go back. (thx, runyon)
Demographic charts for New York City using data from 1790 to the present.
Saw Princess Mononoke last night. What a great, great film. Man! I enjoyed myself so thoroughly that I might have to go see it again. Read my Epinion of the film for more gushingly uninformed commentary.
Projected climate map of Europe in 2071. The map is a bit confusing...the cities are placed on the map according to their projected new climate, not their geographical location. So, in 2071, Berlin will find itself in the same climate as circa-2007 North Africa.
1. I miss my iBook.
2. But I also missed Homesite. For my purposes, BBEdit is usable, but HomeSite kicks its ass all over the place.
3. Where to start with Outlook. I got so used to the many fantastic features of Entourage that Outlook (at least the version I'm using here) is almost unusable.
4. Why is the CTRL key all the way over there?
5. But damn, this Pentium 4 is fast. The iBook is downright pokey in comparison. Apple, your low-end notebooks should be 1GHz+...what's the hold-up?
5a. Ok, enough about the computer stuff.
5. My daily commute goes through Grand Central Station. I love Grand Central. Expect pictures at some point.
6. I am bad with names. I've forgotten all but three of the names of my new co-workers...I have only so many slots in my short term memory. Many weeks of "hey...you there..." to follow.
7. First day excitement and nervous energy dissipates by the afternoon, resulting in an afternoon crash into near-sleep. (Hearty lunch of soup may also have contributed to this.)
So, yeah, I got a new job. And this is probably the last you'll hear of it because work is one of the few things I don't talk about here. Postings may be light (and email replies will be really light) as I get adjusted to the new routine.
So far, the response to the "redesign" has been about 50/50: some want the old design back while some like the new version. Pretty much what I expected.
And about the Humans for Sale site I mentioned a few days ago...the site is most likely a "marketing" mechanism for gathering email addresses and very specific demographic information. Proceed with caution.
Interview with the fellows from skinnyCorp. Half of my current wardrobe is from Threadless and I haven't had occasion to wear my nifty Naked & Angry tie yet.
The best way to get a sense of what kottke.org is all about is to head to the front page or check out some random entries from the archives. Follow kottke.org via RSS or Twitter.
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