Best music of the 2000s
From Largehearted Boy, a roundup of lists of best music of the 2000s.
Restaurant server don'ts
On the NY Times small business blog, Bruce Buschel shares 50 things restaurant servers and staff should never do. The next 50 will follow next week.
Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
At a recent conference, a group of physicists talked about the biggest answered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions in physics. Three of the questions are:
What is everything made of?
Will string theory ever be proved correct?
How far can physics take us?
Music videos of the decade
Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)
This decade's lost species
From the Guardian, a list of species that became extinct or critically endangered during the 2000s. (via @ettagirl)
A case of the Mondays
A pair of McSweeney's lists to brighten this sleepy Monday morning. 1. YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?
1. loog a his lirow nose
2. there is some shit I will not eat
3. LISN bud LISN
2. What to Expect: The Third Decade
Your thirty-year-old adult may be able to...
Make a martini (vodka)
Refrain from discussing college
Get married
File his taxes (EZ form)
Remember 5-10 friends' birthdays
Acknowledge other viewpoints (political)
Thirty dumb inventions
Life has a list of 30 dumb inventions, including the Hubbard Electrometer (invented by L Ron Hubbard to measure pain in tomatoes), the fast-draw robot, TV glasses, and the rainy day cigarette holder.
Michael Pollan's food rules
Michael Pollan asked his readers for suggestions for food rules, and condensed all the answers down to 20. Here are my three favorites:
Never eat something that is pretending to be something else.
Don't yuck someone else's yum.
If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.
The best of Worldchanging
If you haven't had occasion to dip into the Worldchanging site, they've compiled a list of their favorite/best/most popular articles from the past on the occasion of their sixth anniversary.
Best NBA players of the 2000s
I'm not exactly sure what I expected from such a list, but this wasn't quite it. Kobe at #3 and Shaq is #6? Hrm.
The best movies of 2009
Too soon for that title? Anyway, Hitfix takes an early look at the Oscar contenders for 2010. Among them, Clint Eastwood's Invictus, Star Trek, Where the Wild Things Are, Malick's The Tree of Life, The Road, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones.
Where's the world's best food?
The Guardian lists the best 50 foods to eat and where to get them. I've had a few of these (ravioli at Babbo, pork at Gramercy, pho at Pho 24, pastrami at Katz's, etc.) but, sucker that I am for such things, I particularly enjoyed reading about the Turkish olive oil available at an electrical supply shop in London:
At his electrical supply shop in London's Clerkenwell, Mehmet Murat sells wonderful, intensely fruity oil from his family's olive groves in Cyprus and south-west Turkey. Now he imports more than a 1,000 litres per year. His lemon-flavoured oil is good enough to drink on its own.
Who won the recession?
Vanity Fair has released their 2009 list of the "top 100 Information Age powers"...Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and the Google triumvirate make up the top five. Only 12 women made the list, most of them coupled with a man. A similar list from Business Insider has a better name: The 25 Who Won the Recession. I thought this recession business was supposed to kill the influence of the financial sector...funny how that never happens.
1984, a fine year for movies
Related to yesterday's post about the evolution of the modern blockbuster movie, a list of the most popular movies from 1984 (according to IMDB). Among them:
Beverly Hills Cop
Ghostbusters
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Gremlins
The Karate Kid
Police Academy
Footloose
Purple Rain
Amadeus
Revenge of the Nerds
Red Dawn
The Terminator
The Killing Fields
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Sixteen Candles
Once Upon a Time in America
This Is Spinal Tap
Top Secret!
That's a pretty good year. My God, the pop culture references.
Things that are better than a New York City hot dog
In response to a hyperbolic statement from a friend about the goodness of New York City hot dogs, Matthew Diffee compiles an extensive list of stuff that's better. A sampling:
Nice fluffy towels
Believing in yourself
Finding a lost twenty in your coat pocket
Prince Edward Island
Coming home after being away for a while
Submarines
Supermodels
A kiss in the rain
20 cool ancient maps
Among this list of 20 fascinating ancient maps, you'll find the island of California, a would-be beautification of Paris circa-1789, and the Modern and Completely Correct Map of the Entire World, which turned out to be nothing of the sort. (thx, john)
Pitchfork's songs of the decade
As part of their review of the music of the 2000s, Pitchfork listed the top 500 tracks of the past decade. Here are the top 10:
10. Arcade Fire, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)"
9. Animal Collective, "My Girls"
8. Radiohead, "Idioteque"
7. Missy Elliott, "Get Ur Freak On"
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, "Maps"
5. Daft Punk, "One More Time"
4. Beyonce [ft. Jay-Z], "Crazy in Love"
3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy], "Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)"
2. LCD Soundsystem, "All My Friends"
1. OutKast, "B.O.B."
Be sure to click through for the extensive explanations. It would easy to nitpick specific selections, but that's a pretty good top 10.
Gorilla vs. Bear also shared their top songs and albums of the decade.
Uncomfortable plot summaries
Some plot summaries of movies and TV shows that might make you feel uncomfortable. Among my favorites:
THE GOONIES: Physically abused, retarded man finds love with overweight preteen.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Mel Gibson fulfills fantasy of showing a Jew beaten to a bloody pulp and killed on-screen.
TITANIC: Crazy old widow disregards lifelong memories of husband, children, and grandchildren in favor of that one time she fucked a bum.
STAR WARS: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
DOCTOR WHO: Elderly man serially abducts young women.
BOOGIE NIGHTS: Deformed boy goaded into life of crime.
(via the browser)
The world's worst healthcare reforms
Foreign Policy has a list of the worst healthcare reforms in the world...the list includes China, Russia, the United States, and Turkmenistan.
So, in a frankly insane healthcare reform effort, [Turkmenistan's "President for Life" Saparmurat Niyazov] restricted the public's access to care by replacing up to 15,000 doctors and nurses with unqualified military conscripts. The next year, he ordered hospitals and clinics outside of the capital, Ashgabat, to close -- even though the vast proportion of Turkmenistan's population lives in rural areas. The BBC quoted him as saying, "Why do we need such hospitals? If people are ill, they can come to Ashgabat." He also implemented fees and created an "unofficial" ban on the diagnosis of certain communicable diseases, like hepatitis.
(via mr)
Quentin Tarantino's top 20 movies
Quentin Tarantino talks about his 20 favorite movies that have been made since he became a director.
Here's the full list in handy text form:
Battle Royale
Anything Else
Audition
Blade
Boogie Nights
Dazed & Confused
Dogville
Fight Club
Fridays
The Host
The Insider
Joint Security Area
Lost In Translation
The Matrix
Memories of Murder
Police Story 3
Shaun of the Dead
Speed
Team America
Unbreakable
Titles from The Baby-Sitters Club: The College Years series
Claudia Goes to Class Wearing Sweatpants With Words On the Backside
Kristy's Softball Friends Don't Buy it That She's Dating a Dude
Mary Anne Narcs On Her Roommate
When I was a kid, there were never enough books around the house that I hadn't read (and I was apparently too lazy to go to the library) so when my younger sister started reading the Baby-Sitters Club series, I did too; she would finish a book and I'd pick it up right after her. At one point, I even got ahead of her and read the first six or seven in the series. This also explains why I've read all of the Anne of Green Gables series (yes, even Rilla of Ingleside), many of the Little House books, and quite a few Nancy Drew books. Anyway, great to see that Claudia, Kristy, Mary Anne, and Stacey made it to college!
Ten things we don't understand about humans
New Scientist has a series of articles about aspects of humanity that scientists don't quite have a handle on...like pubic hair, art, dreams, and teenagers.
Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases -- so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?
The seven vices of highly creative people
Habits are fine, but do you have the imperfections necessary for true creativity?
VICE THREE: PUT GAMBLING FIRST
Gambling is at the heart of every worthwhile accomplishment in life. Consequently, vice three is essential for the success of your creativity. Instinctively, the highly creative person knows that nothing matters except the throw of the dice. As the French say, "There are two great pleasures in gambling: that of winning and that of losing." Or, in the words of Mark Twain, "There are two times in a man's life when he should [gamble]: when he can't afford it and when he can." These are vital lessons.
Some of my favorite books
The Week asked me to choose a selection of my favorite books for this week's issue. I'll take any opportunity to recommend Tom Standage's The Victorian Internet.
Even though it's a history of the telegraph, this book is always relevant. The rise of the 1830s communication device continues to be a fantastic metaphor for each new Internet technology that comes along, from e-mail to IM to Facebook to Twitter.
50 essential films
Roger Ebert annotates the top 10 from The Spectator's list of 50 Essential Films.
1. The Night of the Hunter, Laughton
2. Apocalypse Now, Coppola
3. Sunrise, Murnau
4. Black Narcissus, Powell & Pressburger
5. L'avventura, Antonioni
6. The Searchers, Ford
7. The Magnificent Ambersons, Welles
8. The Seventh Seal , Bergman
9. L'atalante, Vigo
10. Rio Bravo, Hawks
Lots of notable titles missing...and only a couple post-1980s films make the list.
Core human skills
Riffing on Robert Heinlein's ode to generalization:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Josh Kaufman offers a list of twelve skills that you should focus on developing to improve "the quality of your life and work".
Information-Assimilation - how to find, consume, and comprehend information and identify what's most important in the face of a problem or challenge. A person who is highly skilled in Information-Assimilation is able to process information quickly and apply it to the situation at hand, with consistently high levels of comprehension and retention.
(via lone gunman)
100 years of design manifestos
John Emerson has collected a number of design manifestos dating back to 1909.
Since the days of radical printer-pamphleteers, design and designers have a long history of fighting for what's right and working to transform society. The rise of the literary form of the manifesto also parallels the rise of modernity and the spread of letterpress printing.
The best film titles ever made
Perhaps someday I'll get tired of posting links to lists of good movie title sequences, but today is not that day. (via quipsologies)
50 reasons to be optimistic about 2010
Sounds like an interesting list, right? I like lists and since 95% of the news coverage out there is about bad things happening to good people and good things happening to bad people, I enjoy reading stuff that swims against that tide, so when this came up in my newsreader just now, I got a bit excited to see if this particular effort was worth a damn. But if you actually click through, it's just 50 women in bikinis. Don't get me wrong, I like women in bikinis, but as G.O.B. would say, "Come on!"
Old cities, still kicking
The 10 oldest cities which are still inhabited. Includes a few you've probably heard of (Damascus, Jericho, Jerusalem) and a couple of surprises. (via that's how it happened)
Essential postmodern books
An annotated list of 61 essential postmodern reads. I've read only five -- Heartbreaking Work..., House of Leaves, Infinite Jest, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, Hamlet (??) -- and started (but didn't finish) another -- 2666.
Not-so-good great books
Fired from the Canon is a collection of well-regarded books that perhaps shouldn't be so revered. Includes White Noise, One Hundred Years of Solitude, On the Road, and A Tale of Two Cities.
World changing ideas
Here are 20 bold/crazy ideas that could save the world...most of them related to energy and climate change.
A relatively small piece of the Sahara could theoretically provide electricity for the entire planet if it were covered in solar thermal mirrors. Plus think of all those jobs to build a solar plant the size of Britain. The new transmission grid would be quite a project as well...
Update: Hmm, the site appears to be down and redirected to same squatter spam thing. I'll put the link back up when the site (hopefully) returns.
Update: The Infrastructurist site is still down but I found the original link on the Guardian.
Most anticipated books of (the rest of) 2009
The Millions recently posted a round-up of the most anticipated books for the second half of 2009. Among the boldface names are Dave Eggers (The Rumpus has an excerpt from his forthcoming Zeitoun), Thomas Pynchon, William T. Vollman, and Dan Brown.
Nice custom lettering
Lettercult has a round-up of some notable "custom letters" from the first half of 2009...hand lettered type, calligraphy, sign painting, graffiti....stuff like that. This is one of my favorites:
(via do)
Chip Kidd's favorite covers
Chip Kidd shares his seven favorite book cover designs (that aren't his). (via do)
Top 50 movie trailers
IFC lists the 50 greatest trailers of all time. Trailers are like episodes for Law & Order for me -- ten minutes after viewing and I can't remember a thing about them -- so I don't really have any favorites, but this list seems like a solid collection.
Update: They also polled a number of experts to weigh in on their favorites. The article led me to the Golden Trailer Awards, an annual awards show for the best movie trailers and posters. This year's winner was the trailer for Star Trek (I'm guessing it's trailer 1).
Great places to work
CNNMoney tells us about seven great companies to work for. For instance, a Colorado brewing company gives their employees free beer and company ownership.
After one year of work, each employee receives an ownership stake in the company and a free custom bicycle. After five years every employee enjoys an all-expenses-paid trip to Belgium -- the country whose centuries-old beer tradition serves as a model for the Fort Collins, Colo., brewery. Oh yeah, and employees get two free six-packs of beer a week.
The architecture of Star Wars
The Architects' Journal selected their top 10 structures from the Star Wars films.
Not quite a building, but the monumental quality of its form and its polygonal facades lend this Jawa Sandcrawler a building-like presence. These large treaded vehicles have inspired buildings from a Tunisian hotel to Rem Koolhaas' Casa de Musica in Porto.
(thx, janelle)
Beautiful words
Are these the 100 most beautiful words in the English language?
Words from invented languages
Arika Okrent wrote a book on invented languages so University of Chicago Magazine asked her to share her ten favorite made-up words.
lxmsgevjltshevjlpshev: "179 degrees 59 minutes and 59 seconds of west longitude within one second of reaching 180 degrees west" Now that's a word!
50 Films You Can Wait to See After You're Dead
Death to Smoochy
The Boondock Saints
The Karate Kid, Part III
Cool as Ice
Dice Rules
Basic Instinct 2
Gigli
SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
From Justin to Kelly
The Hottie & the Nottie
Glitter
Car 54, Where Are You?
Son of the Mask
Leonard Part 6
Lady in the Water
Norbit
Swept Away
White Chicks
Anacondas: The Hunt for the Blood Orchid
Spice World
Jaws 3-D
Bratz: The Movie
Troll 2
Howard the Duck
Battlefield Earth
The Postman
I Know Who Killed Me
Kazaam
Rambo III
Freddy Got Fingered
Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot
Striptease
Caddyshack II
The Adventures of Pluto Nash
Barb Wire
Ishtar
Bio-Dome
Jingle All the Way
Catwoman
Disaster Movie
Rocky V
BloodRayne
Deuce Bigalow: European Gigolo
The Love Guru
Crossroads
Book of Shadows: Blair Witch 2
The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas
It's Pat!
Batman & Robin
Speed 2: Cruise Control
Nine reasons why the High Line sucks
Oobject interrupts the High Line hug fest with a list of nine reasons why the High Line sucks. He missed James Kunstler's assertion that the whole thing should have remained a railroad.
Dream discoveries
Five discoveries made while dreaming. A Hindu goddess delivered formulas to mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan while Jack Nicklaus practiced some dreamful attraction.
Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn't holding the club the way I've actually been holding it lately. [...] So when I came to the course yesterday morning I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a 68 yesterday and a 65 today.
Absurd Time cover stories
Reason recalls the ten most ridiculous Time cover stories, including the infamous 1995 CYBERPORN story, which was the first time I remember the web collectively and vigorously fact-checking the ass of a mainstream media outlet.
The "principal researcher" for the study that inspired Time's cover was actually an undergraduate, and experts began picking the study apart the moment the issue hit newsstands. Three weeks after the wee, wide-eyed web surfer cover, Time backpedalled -- on page 57 -- explaining that real experts say "a more telling statistic is that pornographic files represent less than one-half of 1 percent of all messages posted on the Internet" and that, "it is impossible to count the number of times those files are downloaded; the network measures only how many people are presented with the opportunity to download, not how many actually do."
(via fimoculous)
Two thumbs up from Ebert
Roger Ebert shares a few of his "two thumbs up" reviews from the past few months. Among them are Up, Away We Go, The Hangover, and somewhat surprisingly, Knowing starring Nicholas Cage. Ebert was the only major critic that really liked the film.
The science of persuasion
This list of 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is pretty awesome. Two of my favorites:
2. Introduce herd effect in highly personalized form. The hotel sign in the bathroom informed the guests that many prior guests chose to be environmentally friendly by recycling their towels. However, when the message mentioned that majority of the guests who stayed in this specific room chose to be more environmentally conscious and reused their towels, towel recycling jumped 33%, even though the message was largely the same.
40. Incentive programs need a good start. A car-wash place gave one group of customers a free car wash after 8 washes, and everybody got their first stamp after their visit. Group B got a free car wash after 10 car washes, with 3 stamps on the card. Both groups needed to make 7 more trips to get a free wash. 19% of the Group A returned, while 34% of the Group B did.
These are all taken from a book of the same name. (via lone gunman)
The seven types of book store patron
Independents: They don't want help. They want a computer terminal they can use themselves. They want up-to-date inventory numbers aligned with an up-to-date store map, so they can go find the book themselves. If the book isn't in the store, they want up-to-date warehouse information, so they can order it themselves. In other words, they want a bookseller, but they don't want any of that messy human contact. And they want an online sales site, but they prefer to drive out to a retail location, as opposed to the convenience of using a website at home.
What's interesting about the list is that none of the types sound like the ideal book store customer.
Best TV of the decade
Variety polled members of the Television Critics Association for their picks for the best TV of the past decade. Here are their choices for drama series and comedy series:
Drama: Friday Night Lights, Lost, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The West Wing, The Wire.
Comedy: 30 Rock, Arrested Development, Curb Your Enthusiasm, The Daily Show, Everybody Loves Raymond, The Office.
A list of summer reading lists
Rebecca Blood kicks off her annual list of summer reading lists for 2009.
Update: Here is Blood's second installment. The entire list (with future updates) is available here.
On rebooting Star Trek
This post by Greg Hatcher contains two equally interesting parts:
1. A detailed examination of the Star Trek franchise which shows that the film by JJ Abrams is merely the latest in a long series of successful reboots.
2. A list of rules to follow to successfully reboot a franchise, whether it's Star Trek or Bond or Batman.
Don't abuse the audience goodwill. Remember, you sell the audience on your story based on certain expectations. Break that unspoken contract and you're in trouble. No one bought a ticket for Spider-Man 3 thinking they were going to get a romance with musical comedy interludes, yet that's what it felt like we got.
If you're doing a new version of a beloved old property, that means you need to figure out what it was people liked and make damn sure it's in there. That doesn't mean you have to do it the same way every time, you just have to do it. James Bond movies have been retooled a number of times, but we never lose the license to kill, the exquisite stunt work, the Bond theme music, or the cool cars and hot girls. There's about a million miles of difference between Moonraker and Casino Royale, but they're both recognizably Bond movies and they were both successful, because they met the baseline audience expectation of what a James Bond movie would give them.
(via rebecca blood)
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."
Rules for time travelers
Sean Carroll lays out the rules for time travel for movies (but also more generally) based on our current understanding of physics.
1. Traveling into the future is easy. We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you'll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world -- either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we're talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It's coming back that's hard.
Rules of style
I don't agree with everything on Scott Sternberg's rules of style list, but a couple of his points are pretty interesting. I'll spot you this one:
Whenever you start a new project or a new job, don't tell anyone what you're working on, because it can change direction a million times and once you start telling the world about it, you get constrained by your own mouth.
but you'll have to find the others on your own. (via andrea inspired)
Update: A recent study has indicated that people who don't share their goals are more successful in achieving them.
Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals -- that is, the aspirations that define who we are -- sharing our intentions doesn't necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain "a premature sense of completeness" about the goal.
(thx, sam)
Hellish housing
Oobject has collected 15 housing projects from hell.
Despite the title of this list, several of these housing projects were designed by some of the world's most famous architects and lauded at the time. The undeniable squalor of 19th Century slums combined with modernism to produce and attempt to clean things up and create a crystalline utopia. The end result was often an anti-septic vision of hell, a place devoid of organic spaces and evolved social interaction.
Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight
There's very little information about this online, but here's what I've scraped together. Milton Glaser: To Inform and Delight is a documentary on the legendary designer and it will be released in theaters sometime near the end of May. You know, one of those huge summer blockbusters.
I posted about Glaser's Ten Things I Have Learned several years ago, mostly for point #5's rejoinder to "less is more": "Just enough is more". Rereading it now, I'm much more interested in some of the other points, particularly 1-3.
And the important thing that I can tell you is that there is a test to determine whether someone is toxic or nourishing in your relationship with them. Here is the test: You have spent some time with this person, either you have a drink or go for dinner or you go to a ball game. It doesn't matter very much but at the end of that time you observe whether you are more energised or less energised. Whether you are tired or whether you are exhilarated. If you are more tired then you have been poisoned. If you have more energy you have been nourished. The test is almost infallible and I suggest that you use it for the rest of your life.
How To Be A Successful Evil Overlord
How to be a successful evil overlord and avoid all the mistakes that bad guys usually make in books, movies, and TV.
5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragon of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.
25. No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible spot.
(via memeticians)
The Ten Most Influential Films of The Last Ten Years
/film has an interesting list of the most influential films of the last ten years. You'd expect to see The Matrix and The Bourne Ultimatum on there but Sky Captain? The Polar Express? The comments contain some better choices.
Untitled Gravity
The Virginia Quarterly Review has a list of the ten most popular titles for the submissions they receive, including Untitled, Night, and Drowning. Interestingly, there's no overlap in titles from a previous list.
A new golden age of type
After a thorough review, Typographica has chosen their favorite typefaces of 2008.
Sensationalism aside, it's significant that the ever-increasing quality in type design these days -- dubbed by some as the new "golden age" of type -- has caused this year's list to supersede previous lists in many ways.
Death becomes him
Which actor dies the most in his movies? Two problems with this list: 1) lots of spoilers, and 2) where are the women? There's not a single one in the list.
Update: Cinemorgue is an extensive listing of actors and actresses and how many times they've died in movies. (thx, andy)
The scientifically unexplained
Science magazines seem to write this list about once a year but they are always fun to read: thirteen things that science cannot explain. This version of the list includes the Kuiper cliff, tetraneutrons, cold fusion, and our old friend the Pioneer anomaly.
A world without Black Swans
Nassim Nicholas Taleb lists ten principles for a Black Swan-proof world. Most points relate directly to the current economic situation in the US.
No socialisation of losses and privatisation of gains. Whatever may need to be bailed out should be nationalised; whatever does not need a bail-out should be free, small and risk-bearing. We have managed to combine the worst of capitalism and socialism. In France in the 1980s, the socialists took over the banks. In the US in the 2000s, the banks took over the government. This is surreal.
It was difficult to choose just one of Taleb's points to excerpt; they're all worth considering. BTW, a Black Swan is an event that is rare, has a large impact, and is deemed predictable after the fact. I might have to push Taleb's book of the same name to the top of my reading list.
Design paradoxes
Adrian Shaughnessy shares ten paradoxes about graphic design; by paradox he means "an opinion or statement contrary to commonly accepted wisdom". I particularly liked these two bits of wisdom:
As part of their training, all designers should be obliged to spend a sum of their own money on graphic design.
And:
If we want to make money as a graphic designer, we must concentrate on the work -- not the money.
Top ten reasons managers become great
Scott Berkun shares how great managers get that way.
8. Self aware, including weaknesses. This is the kicker. Great leaders know what they suck at, and either work on those skills or hire people they know make up for their own weaknesses, and empower them to do so. This tiny little bit of self-awareness makes them open to feedback and criticism to new areas they need to work on, and creates an example for movement in how people should be growing and learning about new things.
(via world airmail links)
Banned album covers
Thirty controversial album covers. I had forgotten about Nirvana's "Waif Me"! A bit NSFW. (via design observer)
More than one in a row
The A.V. Club picks 25 albums that work best when listened to from start to finish. +1 for In The Aeroplane Over The Sea. I tend to listen to albums more than individual songs...Sigur Ros or Boards of Canada doesn't make any sense on shuffle.
Best movie ensembles
The House Next Door has a post up about their favorite movie ensembles.
My selections are movies featuring fairly large herds of individuals who clash or collude directly, whose lives intersect or intertwine, who sustain the illusion of continuing to lead their lives beyond the frame, long after the credits roll.
The initial selections include Gosford Park and LA Confidential with the commenters adding many more excellent suggestions like Ocean's Eleven, Glengarry Glen Ross, Big Night, and Do the Right Thing.
April Fool's that actually aren't
From across the pond, here's a list of 10 stories that could be April Fool's but aren't. On the list:
Pubs are telling expectant mothers when they've had enough to drink.
Entirely unfunny. For a more joke-filled first of the month, you can always get that yodeling game for XBox360.
Nothing but pet
A list of the Top 10 Mascots of the NCAA Men's Basketball Tournament.
Though not completely relevant to March Madness, here's a list of the worst mascots in college sports.
Number eighty
80. Wear a sportcoat when traveling by plane. It has easily accessible pockets.
1001 Rules For My Unborn Son is a poignant idea that's well-executed.
Your better half
A gallery of not-famous twins and their celebrity siblings.
It must suck so much to have to explain that, no, really, you're not that guy from Napoleon Dynamite.
Crayon compendium
From a post that includes all 120 crayon names, codes, and trivia:
The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, wife of company founder Edwin, and a former school teacher. She combined the words craie, which is French for chalk, and ola, for oleaginous, because crayons are made from petroleum based paraffin.
I don't remember ever having scribbled with sticks of Manatee or Jazzberry Jam, but I do distinctly recall meticulously practicing my hearts and starts with the dulled point of Carnation Pink.
via Colour Lovers
Up in a down market
Mother Jones magazine has a list of ten people who have profited from the current financial crisis.
[John] Paulson is a hedge fund manager who has been ridiculously successful betting against banks and other entities that had exposure to the subprime crisis: In 2007, his funds were up $15 billion. In 2008, he didn't do as well: His main fund rose 38 percent in a year when the S&P 500 fell almost 40 percent. His 2007 earnings were in the neighborhood of $3.7 billion. According to Forbes, while 656 billionaires lost money last year, Paulson was one of the 44 who added to their fortunes.
This is the peculiar thing about financial markets: if you know something bad is going to happen (you know, like the global collapse of the financial markets), you can either sound the alarm and save a lot of people a lot of grief or you can make a billion dollars.
Things needing a redesign
A couple of months ago, Jessica Helfand posted a list of 10 things that needed to be redesigned. Her list included the hearse, plastic packaging, and IRS forms. Fast Company recently asked a few other designers what they thought was in need of fixing.
How about it? What would you like to see redesigned? (More than one-line answers appreciated.)
World of GOOP
Gwyneth Paltrow runs an online lifestyle site/newsletter called GOOP. It has both been widely panned by snarky news outlets and proved successful at attracting subscribers who would otherwise shy away from such things. (Hello, A & M!)
Anyway, the most recent GOOP newsletter shares DVD rental picks from some of Gwyneth's friends...you know, Sofia Coppola, Steven Spielberg, Wes Anderson. The inexplicable crush I have on Gwyneth was only strengthened by this bit of her introduction:
I'm not one of those film people who can tell you who the cinematographer was on On The Waterfront or who most influenced Truffaut. When it comes to knowledge of film history, I'm semi-rubbish (a friend of mine once left the dinner table when I admitted I had never seen one of the most famous and most well-regarded films of all time). I can do the whole rap at the end of The Revenge of the Nerds and all of Jeff Spicoli's dialogue, but sadly, my expertise ends there.
Like I said, inexplicable. If you could only see the fun time she and I are having in my head as we quote memorable Fast Times at Ridgemont High moments to each other. She loves my Spicoli impression!
Ten world-changing ideas
Time has a list of ten ideas that are changing the world right now. This is not a typical mindless list (e.g. green energy! um...more green energy)...there's some good stuff here. Jobs Are The New Assets asserts now that making money with money (i.e. stocks and property) while you sit on your ass all days doesn't fly, your job is your main source of income and financial stability.
All the while, we blissfully ignored a little concept economists like to call human capital. The cognition you've got up there in your head -- your education and training -- it's worth something. We can extract value not just from our homes and our portfolios but from ourselves as well. The mechanism for extracting that value? A job. "The income you earn from working is like the stream of interest income you might get from owning a bond," says Johns Hopkins University economist Christopher Carroll. "Think of it as a dividend on your human wealth."
Michael Lewis recently said something similar in an interview for Big Think.
When you think of making money, think of what you do for a living, not the financial markets.
Amortality is my favorite entry on the list. It's a more general version of the Grups theory put forth in New York magazine three years ago. An amortal person is someone who lives a similar lifestyle all throughout their life, from their teens to their 80s.
For all the optimism about how science may prolong life, mice and humans keep turning up their toes. No matter how much the government bullies and cajoles, amortals rarely make adequate provision for their final years. Yet even as faltering amortals strain the public purse, so their determination to wring every drop out of life brings benefits to the private sector. They prop up the tottering music industry, are lifelong consumers of gadgets and gizmos, keep gyms busy and colorists in demand. From their youth, when they behave as badly as adults, to their dotage, when they behave as badly as youngsters, amortals hate to be pigeonholed by age.
Lying about books
From the Guilty Secrets survey by Spread the Word, the top ten books that people say that they've read but haven't.
1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)
I've read 1, 6, bits of 4, and started on 10 but didn't get more than 20 pages in. (Sorry, Dawkins!) This is a UK-centric list...I wonder what the US list would look like.
Jedi sucks
Fifty reasons why Return of the Jedi sucks. Number one with a bullet is "Ewoks, Ewoks, Ewoks".
But aside from what we see onscreen, the Ewoks are miserable little creatures for a completely different reason: they are the single clearest example of Lucas' willingness to compromise the integrity of his Trilogy in favor of merchandising dollars. How intensely were the Ewoks marketed? Consider this: "Ewok" is a household word, despite the fact that it's never once spoken in the film.
When I was a kid, I had a friend who knew all the names of even the most minor characters from the Star Wars movies and had no idea where he got that information. Was there a fourth movie I didn't know about? It wasn't until much later that I realized his extensive collection of SW action figures had filled in all the blanks for him.
BTW, the current definition of an Ewok on Wikipedia reads:
Ewoks are a fictional species of teddy bear-like hunter-gatherers that inhabit the forest moon of Endor and Settlement operations at Goldman Sachs.
Goldman, you've been burned!
The 15 Strangest College Courses In America
The Online Colleges blog has collected a list of the oddest college courses in the US, including Arguing with Judge Judy: : Popular 'Logic' on TV Judge Shows, The Science of Superheroes, and The Strategy of StarCraft.
I'm sure that in South Korea one could major in StarCraft, but it's a bit strange seeing a college course about the game here in the US. The class uses StarCraft to teach the art of war, discussing strategy and tactics in the famous game.
2009's emerging photographers
PDN recently posted their list of 30 emerging photographers to watch in 2009. Go here to access the photos without popups. Some nice stuff in there, including a couple photographers featured previously on kottke.org. (thx, youngna)
The Tao of War Photography
Bruce Haley shares his Tao of War Photography.
11. Do you believe in a personal, loving God who really cares about us mortals down here...? Go to a few war zones and famine areas and watch all those innocent children die, then answer this question...........
61. Yes, those really are gruesome hacked-up snake parts in that big glass of homebrew you're expected to chug down, and YES, your hosts will be extremely dishonored and upset if you try to weasel out of it (or if they catch you dumping it under the table when they look away)... quit being such a pussy and just drink the damn thing.....
Odd software bugs
Wikipedia has a listing of unusual software bugs -- "mostly named after scientists who discovered counterintuitive things" -- that are difficult to identify or fix.
A mandelbug (named after fractal innovator Benoit Mandelbrot) is a computer bug whose causes are so complex that its behavior appears chaotic. This word also implies that the speaker thinks it is a bohrbug rather than a heisenbug. Some use mandelbug to describe a bug whose behavior does not appear chaotic, but whose causes are so complex that there is no practical solution. An example of this is a bug caused by a flaw in the fundamental design of the entire system.
My all-time favorite bug is still the 500-mile email. (thx, jake)
Mono-histories
Similar to the list of books That Changed The World is this list of mono-histories, biographies of singular items.
Salt: a world history, by Mark Kurlansky - Published in 2002, Kurlansky's history of the world's most important commodity is probably the best known mono-history and the only one to appear on the best-seller lists. I found it fascinating and inspiring. Kurlansky must have enjoyed his foray into mono-history because he's followed up on Salt with Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.
Other topics covered by these books are pizza, pencils, and the alphabet. (via rebecca's pocket (welcome back!))
Update: Several people have noted that Cod was published five years before Salt. (thx, all)
Rules for all sorts of things
Tom took these rules for a gunfight and adapted some of them to other contexts.
Eating Contest:
8. If you are not chewing, you should be swallowing, communicating, and running. Yell "Fire!" Why "Fire"? Cops will come with the Fire Department, sirens often scare off the sea gulls, or at least cause then to lose concentration and will.... and who is going to summon help if you yell "Hot Dog," "Ketchup" or "Worchestire?"Bodyguard Carrying Contest:
16. Don't drop your guard.
Really secure
Along the lines of "what's your mother's maiden name?", here are some even more secure user authentication questions.
What time was it when, in a drunken rage, you threw your novel into the fire?
If you could do it all over again, what would you do differently?
Rules For A Gunfight
1. Forget about knives, bats and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need.
10. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
21. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet if necessary, because they may want to kill you.
27. Regardless of whether justified of not, you will feel sad about killing another human being. It is better to be sad than to be room temperature.
These aren't the pants you're looking for
The best lines from Star Wars that are improved by replacing a word with "pants".
I find your lack of pants disturbing.
Chewie and me got into a lot of pants more heavily guarded than this.
I cannot teach him. The boy has no pants.
In his pants you will find a new definition of pain and suffering.
Han'll have those pants down - we've gotta give him more time!
I have altered the pants, pray that I don't alter them further.
Mindfuck movies
Matthew Baldwin lists sixteen of his favorite mindfuck films, including La Jetée, Dark City, and Memento.
As I stood in line to buy my tickets, I noticed a small hand-lettered sign in the box-office window that read, "People arriving five or more minutes late to Memento will not be allowed entrance." This was at a small art-house cinema -- not one to place arbitrary restrictions on its patrons -- and it struck me as odd that the limitation applied solely to this one film, so I asked the cashier about it when I reached the front of the line.
"You can't understand anything about the film if you miss the first five minutes," she told me with a roll of her eyes. "We've had late-comers charge out here after the end and demand that we explain the whole thing to them."
Baldwin gives Primer some much-deserved love, which is always appreciated around here.
Interaction design reading
The School of Visual Arts has published a list of recommended reading for their MFA in Interaction Design program.
Ten lessons from the Bush years
Bob Woodward offers ten lessons that the Obama administration can learn from the eight long years that George W. Bush held office. The advice basically boils down to "keep your head out of the sand and your ass".
[Bush] made probably the most important decision of his presidency -- whether to invade Iraq -- without directly asking either Powell, Rumsfeld or Director of Central Intelligence George J. Tenet for their bottom-line recommendations. (Instead of consulting his own father, former president George H.W. Bush, who had gone to war in 1991 to kick the Iraqi army out of Kuwait, the younger Bush told me that he had appealed to a "higher father" for strength.)
(via lined & unlined)
The 20 worst foods of 2009
Men's Health has a listing of the 20 worst foods of 2009, all of which fit the description of "calorie bombs". For instance, the worst "healthy" sandwich is the Blimpie Veggie Supreme, which contains 1100 calories, and 33 grams of saturated fat. And Jesus, the worst food is a shake from Baskin Robbins that has 2600 calories.
We didn't think anything could be worse than Baskin Robbins' 2008 bombshell, the Heath Bar Shake. After all, it had more sugar (266 grams) than 20 bowls of Froot Loops, more calories (2,310) than 11 actual Heath Bars, and more ingredients (73) than you'll find in most chemist labs. Rather than coming to their senses and removing it from the menu, they did themselves one worse and introduced this caloric catastrophe. It's soiled with more than a day's worth of calories and three days worth of saturated fat, and, worst of all, usually takes less than 10 minutes to sip through a straw.
Who is on Twitter?
Sasha Frere-Jones lists a bunch of people who are on Twitter.
people who are just back from a really awesome run
people who are involved in "social networking" and optimizing the power of re-Tweeting and "computers"
people who can't figure out what their kids want to eat
Shaquille O'Neal
people who have never seen snow
people who like Battlestar Galactica
Best movie shots, 2008
A review of 2008's best cinematographic moments: part one, part two.
This year the challenge was of a different sort. The field was curiously thin. It wasn't that the talent wasn't on display. God knows, a number of the greats were lining up behind the camera this year. But the images weren't as instantly iconic or as viscerally gripping as they were in 2007, which might have left me a bit disappointed on one hand. Then again, it just made searching for my favorites all the more involved and interesting, and I'm happy to offer my findings to you in this space, even if it meant doubling up.
This was one of my favorite "best of" lists from 2007 and I'm glad to see it return this year.
Update: Hmm, all the permalinks on that site appear to be broken. Maybe check back later?
Confidence tricks
Wikipedia's list of confidence tricks page is very entertaining. Consider the pig-in-a-poke:
Pig-in-a-poke originated in the late Middle Ages, when meat was scarce, but apparently rats and cats were not. The con entails a sale of a (suckling) "pig" in a "poke" (bag). The bag ostensibly contains a live healthy little pig, but actually contains a cat (not particularly prized as a source of meat, and at any rate, quite unlikely to grow to be a large hog). If one buys a "pig in a poke" without looking in the bag (a colloquial expression in the English language, meaning "to be a sucker"), the person has bought something of less value than was assumed, and has learned firsthand the lesson caveat emptor.
A trick called the glim-dropper requires a one-eyed accomplice.
One grifter goes into a store and pretends he has lost his glass eye. Everyone looks around, but the eye cannot be found. He declares that he will pay a thousand-dollar reward for the return of his eye, leaving contact information. The next day, an accomplice enters the store and pretends to find the eye. The storekeeper (the intended griftee), thinking of the reward, offers to take it and return it to its owner. The finder insists he will return it himself, and demands the owner's address. Thinking he will lose all chance of the reward, the storekeeper offers a hundred dollars for the eye. The finder bargains him up to $250, and departs. The one-eyed man, of course, can not be found and does not return.
A con called The Ogged contains a very specific example of its use.
A new con trick born in the age of blogs. For this scam, the con artist creates a pseudonymous internet persona and befriends a group of people online who will become his marks. Then the scammer feigns some terrible disease, such as stomach cancer. Finally, the scammer subtly pushes the idea that his online "friends" could pitch in for something to make him feel better, such as a $700 gift certificate to the French Laundry. After the boon is received, the scam artist claims a miraculous recovery or doctor error. Finally, once the gift certificate has been cashed, the con artist claims that he must "go on hiatus" or even quit blogging altogether.
I can't find any evidence that the FL gift certificate incident ever happened or documentation of a trick called "The Ogged" anywhere aside from Wikipedia. Anyone? (via bb)
Update: Several people wrote in about "The Ogged". The inclusion of the term appears to be a joke. A couple of years ago, a blogger named Ogged posted that he had cancer (but not really), he gets a gift certificate to The French Laundry, the cancer comes back, and then it was added to Wikipedia as a joke. (thx, everyone...especially andy)
Loathsome people
The 50 most loathsome people in America for 2008. George W. Bush and Barack Obama both make the list but She Who Shall Not Be Named Ever Again is #1. "You" makes the list at #43 and is my favorite.
You're hopping mad about an auto industry bailout that cost a squirt of piss compared to a Wall Street heist of galactic dimensions, due to a housing crash you somehow have blamed on minorities. It took you six years to figure out what a tool Bush is, but you think Obama will make it all better. You deem it hunky dory that we conduct national policy debates via 8-second clips from "The View." You think God zapped humans into existence a few thousand years ago, although your appendix and wisdom teeth disagree. You like watching vicious assholes insult each other on TV. You support gun rights, because firing one gives you a chubby. You cuddle falsehoods and resent enlightenment. You think the fact that 43% of whites could stomach voting for an incredibly charismatic and eloquent light-skinned black guy who was raised by white people means racism is over. You think progressive taxation is socialism. 1 in 100 of you are in jail, and you think it should be more. You are shallow, inconsiderate, afraid, brand-conscious, sedentary, and totally self-obsessed. You are American
Exhibit A: You're more upset by Miley Cyrus's glamour shots than the fact that you are a grown adult who is upset about Miley Cyrus.
Beatles songs ranked
A list like this could spark endless debate: a ranking of all the songs by The Beatles, from #185 (Revolution 9) to #1 (A Day In The Life).
To novice Beatles fans, I warn you not to believe the hype about "Revolution 9." I've listened to it many times over the years, waiting for the light in my head to switch on so I could unlock its mysteries. All I've ever gotten out of it is the vague feeling that immediately after listening to it, something is going to rise out from under my bed and butcher me in my sleep.
Each choice is extensively annotated and defended; start here if you want to work your way through them all.
Bad critics, Blu-ray, and unseen movies
A trio of movie-related links: Criticwatch runs down the movie critic whores of the year, DVD Beaver picks the Blu-rays of the year, and the best movies that you perhaps didn't see in 2008.
Top 100 science stories of 2008
Discover has a list of the top 100 science stories of 2008 (scroll a bit for the whole list). Post-oil, LHC, ice on Mars, cheap genomes, quantum spookiness, etc.
Best special effects shots
A wide-ranging and carefully considered list of the top 50 special effects shots in movies. The Matrix bullet-time effect doesn't make this list because:
An effect extraordinarily limited in what can usefully be done with it, it has nonetheless been flogged to death in the 10 years since The Matrix.
The Burly Brawl from the second Matrix movie thankfully didn't make the list either, likely because the whole thing looks like a cartoonish video game (and not in a good way). The only quibble I can think of: maybe Titanic should have been on there somewhere? (via fimoculous)
Update: Titanic actually made the worst effects list. (thx, rob)
The Best Links 2008
This is the fifth annual selection of my favorite things I've linked to on kottke.org. This year's list includes games, photography, top-notch journalism, time-related material, architecture, design, and even politics, about 100 links in all. The format of the list is a bit different this year. Sprinkled amongst the usual high quality links are collections of links which fit into accidental categories that sprang up while going over the material, including my picks for the sites/blogs of the year. Enjoy.
Passage is a game that takes 5-minutes to play which possesses a poignancy that you wouldn't expect from such a simple game.
Beautiful slow-motion skateboarding with explosions. Directed by Spike Jonze. See also this video of slow-mo skateboarding tricks filmed with an ultra high resolution camera.
An extensive history of visual communication, from cave paintings on up to the present-day computer.
The NY Times published a stacked graph of movie box office receipts from 1986 to Feb 2008. More about stacked graphs.
Sites/blogs of the year: The growing cache of vintage photos from museums and other public institutions on The Commons project on Flickr barely edges out excellently edited superb photography of The Big Picture for the site of the year.
On the final episode of St. Elsewhere, it was revealed that an autistic child named Tommy Westphall had dreamt the whole show. Since St. Elsewhere had a number of connections to other shows, it turns out that a surprising number of other popular TV programs all took place in Tommy's mind too.
From The Onion: Pornography-Desensitized Populace Demands New Orifice To Look At and Researchers Discover Massive Asshole In Blogosphere.
Big Dog is a large robotic dog that can walk in snow and cannot be knocked down, even when kicked.
A 2104 messageboard about time travel reveals that you can't just go and kill Hitler whenever you'd like.
Maps of the Apollo 11 moon walks superimposed on a soccer pitch and a baseball diamond. They sure didn't walk very far.
This peeping shrubbery photo taken at a wedding by Mindy Meyers still makes me laugh.
David Attenborough narrates while two leopard slugs mate while hanging off of a tree branch.
An obituary recounting the almost unbelievable life of Charles Fawcett, actor, filmmaker, and adventurer.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: Backed by two huge and clueless media conglomerates, Hulu was never supposed to succeed but NBC and Fox managed to create a simple and compelling site for watching TV and movies online.
Matthew Dent's awesome designs for the new UK coinage.
Sentence Drawings and other literary visualizations from Stefanie Posavec.
2008 video for Something Good by The Utah Saints. Don't know why, but this makes me smile.
Elevators and stories about elevators, including an account of Nicholas White, who was trapped in an elevator for 41 hours. Includes security camera footage of White's ordeal.
A map of all the streets in the lower 48 United States by Ben Fry.
An account of when Dateline NBC's To Catch a Predator segment goes wrong and someone dies.
The financial mess of 2008: Early in the year before the full extent of the chaos was known, n+1 had a lengthy interview with a hedge fund manager and followed up with him a couple months later. This American Life aired two radio programs that did an excellent job of explaining what caused the crisis: The Giant Pool of Money and Another Frightening Show about the Economy. After much of the smoke had cleared, former bond salesman and current bestselling author Michael Lewis sums up what happened in The End of Wall Street's Boom.
City of Shadows, timelapse photos of people in St. Petersburg taken by Alexey Titarenko. Particularly this one.
Stunning photos of the electrified plume of the Chaitén volcano in Chile. Some bigger photos at The Big Picture.
John Resig ported the Processing visual programming language to JavaScript.
Photos of a wedding and then an earthquake in Sichuan, China.
A retrospective of the NYC restaurant Florent by Frank Bruni for the NY Times doubles as a history of Manhattan's ebbs and flows over the past 20 years.
US political election logos from 1960 to 2008.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: It technically launched in 2007, but this was the year that many people realized that Amazon's MP3 store finally made it easier and more convenient to search for and buy DRM-free music than getting it for free and illegally elsewhere (Bittorrent, etc.). And I haven't bought a single mp3 on iTunes since Amazon's MP3 store opened.
Unbeknownst to the family who hired him to renovate their house, architect Eric Clough hid a puzzle in their apartment that remained unsolved for more than a year.
Atul Gawande writes about itching in the New Yorker. Really, really interesting.
Urban prankster Remi Gaillard kicks soccer balls into all sorts of unlikely goals, such as garbage cans, drive-thru windows, and police station entrances. The AC/DC soundtrack makes it perfect.
The covers for the books in Volume III of Penguin's Great Ideas series, most notably the brilliant cover for The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
A classic text on the economics of POW camps in Europe during WWII.
A 1985 BBC documentary about the painter Francis Bacon. Entertaining and enlightening even if you don't care about painting.
Sports: Three 2008 sports happenings stick out for me. 1. The epic Federer/Nadal final at Wimbledon. It was almost 5 hours long (not including the rain delay) and I was on the edge of my seat the whole time. 2. Usain Bolt winning both the 100m and 200m in world record time at the Beijing Olympics. Bolt celebrating so early before crossing the finish in the 100m was impressive but the margin of victory in the 200m was an astounding athletic feat. 3. The Michael Phelps / Milorad Cavic photo finish in the men's 100m butterfly final provoked much discussion and some of the only excitement on the way to Phelps winning a record eight golds at the Beijing games.
Christopher Hitchens writes about being waterboarded. Here's the video of his experience.
This Lego version of Stephen Hawking is uncanny.
A selection of thirty stunning satellite photos of the Earth that appear abstract.
David Carr recounts his time as a single parent and crackhead in Minneapolis.
Dorothy Gambrell documents a trip around the world, part of which happened aboard a cargo ship. Read from the bottom and keep clicking "Next Entries".
Things which aren't so much links as products:The Apple keyboard is the best keyboard ever made. RjDj is an iPhone app that samples sounds from your immediate environment and plays them back to you with music.
On June 19th, the Mars Phoenix Lander twittered that it had discovered evidence of ice on Mars.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats showcases vintage photography in categories such as The Cool Hall of Fame, The Heretofore Unmentioned, and When Legends Gather.
Frédéric Bourdin is a French con man who made his way to the United States posing as an abducted teenager even though he was in his mid-20s at the time.
Brain researcher Jill Boyte Taylor tells the audience at TED about the time she had a massive stroke and how the experience informed her later research.
Bill Sizemore, a long-time observer of Pat Robertson's activities, pens a lengthy profile of the fundamentalist Christian for VQR.
Lenny "Nails" Dykstra, former Met and Philly, is faring well in the business world and remains highly entertaining.
Fantastic Contraption, an incredibly addictive Flash game where you build machines out of seemingly simple parts to solve increasingly difficult puzzles.
Switched at Birth tells the tale of two girls who were swapped for one another at the hospital and didn't find out more than 40 years later even though one of the mothers knew the whole time. See also The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: Roger Ebert's blog demonstrates that he might be a better cultural commentator than film critic. Either way, he's never been better.
Some well-meaning kids show off their unintentionally hilarious science project posters.
Dyna Moe's excellent illustrated moments from Mad Men.
Merlin Mann wants to do Better.
Improv Everywhere used a Jumbotron, dozens of crazy fans, color programs, mascots, NBC sportscaster Jim Gray, and the Goodyear blimp to make a typical Little League game between the Lugnuts and Mudcats into The Best Game Ever.
Dan Hill explains extensively about the process for designing the web site for Monocle magazine.
The literal version of A Ha's Take On Me video.
R.I.P. David Foster Wallace: Wallace gave what I think is his final interview to the WSJ's Christopher Farley about Wallace's book about John McCain's 2000 presidential campaign. After Wallace died, I collected a number of online remembrances. David Lipsky's The Lost Years & Last Days of David Foster Wallace for Rolling Stone and McSweeney's reprint of a 1987 profile of Wallace both capture who Wallace was and how much he gave of himself to his family, friends, and the world.
Test your visual geometric accuracy with the eyeballing game.
Michael Pollan's letter to the next President of the United States: "we need to wean the American food system off its heavy 20th-century diet of fossil fuel and put it back on a diet of contemporary sunshine".
Filip Dujardin stitches together parts of different photographs of buildings to make pictures of new and sometimes crazy & impossible buildings. This one of those "I wish I'd thought of that" projects.
A segment from the This American Life TV show about a Chicago restaurant called The Wieners Circle which turns into a sexually and racially charged free-for-all on weekend nights, much to the delight of the patrons, the heavily tipped workers, and the owners.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: The Art of the Title blog obsesses over the increasingly elaborate and celebrated craft of movie title sequences.
Steward Brand posted the entirety of How Buildings Learn online. The 1997 BBC documentary was based on Brand's excellent book of the same name.
Charles Mann on the Earth's soil for National Geographic Magazine.
Google's archive of millions of photographs from Life magazine.
Barack Obama (and the other guy): Since meeting him more than four years ago, photojournalist Callie Shell has taken a number of great photos of Obama. Just after the election, Newsweek posted an epic seven-part series about the Obama, McCain, and Clinton campaigns resulting from a year of behind-the-scenes reporting. David Remnick weighed in on Obama and race in America. And a March 2008 interview with rapper DMX reveals that he has no idea who Barack Obama is. "The nigga's name is Barack. Barack? Nigga named Barack Obama. What the fuck, man?! Is he serious? That ain't his fuckin' name."
The (Mostly) True Story of Helvetica and the New York City Subway.
Video showing how to build an igloo, a must-see for those interested in architecture.
Sites/blogs of the year, cont.: I couldn't leave this one off. Christoph Niemann doesn't post to his NY Times blog very often, but each entry is a gem. I love his kids' obsession with the NYC subway.
Vanity Fair constructs several menus for George W. Bush's final days in the White House. Includes such dishes as Gored hearts of Palm Beach, with hanging chad; Deep-fried Halliburton, in Saddam Hoisin Sauce; and New Orleans flounder.
If you're still information deprived after all that, you can check out the lists from 2007, 2006, 2005, and 2004.
Favorite posts of 2008
As an appetizer before my annual best links of the year post (coming Monday, I hope), I put together a list of kottke.org posts from 2008 that I liked the most and that may be worth a look if you missed them the first time around.
In January, I liveblogged the Mythbusters episode about the airplane on the conveyor belt. I still get email telling me that the plane won't take off.
Time merge media is a collection of video and photographic works which display multiple time periods at once.
A collection of single serving sites, single-page sites like Barack Obama Is My New Bicycle, Khaaan!, and Is Lost A Repeat?
A liveblog of the Oscars written without actually watching them.
A post about the end of The Wire.
In March, kottke.org turned 10 years old and I collected a bunch of the previous designs together.
One of my all-time favorite threads on kottke.org: saying words wrong on purpose.
My favorite graph which doubles as a picture of my son.
Stanley Kubrick, Pablo Ferro, and Arthur Lipsett.
A photo of Ollie attempting to walk in Turbine Hall in the Tate Modern.
A collection of early movie reviews, including one by Maxim Gorky from 1896.
Survival tips for the Middle Ages, another great thread about how a contemporary person might fend for themselves in 1000 AD.
Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is a book printed in 1499 but which looks quite contemporary.
The most beautiful suicide, a photo of Evelyn Hale taken by Robert Wiles a few minutes after she jumped from the Empire State Building
A pair of posts about the Metropolitan Life Tower: the tower's past and future and an unusual death that occurred in the building shortly after it opened.
A collection of election maps from the 2008 US Presidential election.
And finally, the opening space scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey with chickens from The Muppet Show clucking the Blue Danube waltz.
My year in cities, 2008
For the fourth year in a row, a list of all the places I visited in 2008.
Waitsfield, VT*
New York City, NY*
Boston, MA*
Orange, MA*
Springfield, MA
London, UK
Paris, France
Buffalo, NY
Binghamton, NY
Cedar Rapids, IA
Nantucket, MA
Las Vegas, NV
Washington DC
One or more nights were spent in each place. Those cities marked with an * were visited multiple times on non-consecutive days. Note: We didn't actually spend the night in Paris, but we were there all day so I threw it in there. Here are the lists for 2005, 2006, and 2007.
Best architecture of 2008
Paul Goldberger, the New Yorker's architecture critic, lists his ten favorite buildings of 2008.
In time for the 2008 Olympics, the world saw the fruits of China's decision to put aside nationalism, hire the greatest architects from around the world, and let them do the kind of things they could never afford to do at home. That brought us two of the greatest buildings of the year, Herzog and de Meuron's extraordinary Olympic Stadium, the stunning steel latticework structure widely known as the Bird's Nest; and Norman Foster's Beijing Airport, a project that was not only bigger than any other airport in the world, but more beautiful, more logically laid out, and more quickly built. And the headquarters of CCTV, the Chinese television network, by Rem Koolhaas and Ole Scheeren, of the Office for Metropolitan Architecture -- a building which I had thought was going to be a pretentious piece of structural exhibitionism -- turned out to be a compelling and exciting piece of structural exhibitionism.
Big disagree on Eliasson's NYC waterfalls...they were underwhelming.
Designs of the year, 2008
Some design heavies -- Paula Scher and Gary Hustwit among them -- choose their design highlights of 2008.
The best conceived, designed, and expressed total idea, ever: Barack Obama's entire campaign, each and every part of it, including Barack Obama.
Two designs I found interesting were the Surface Table (made of carbon fiber, it's only 2mm thick for a 13-foot-long table!) and Boudicca Wode Perfume, which sprays on blue and fades to transparent over time. (via quips)
The Year in Media Errors and Corrections
Regret the Error has released their annual roundup of media errors and corrections for 2008. The absurd corrections are always the best:
We have been asked to point out that Stuart Kennedy, of Flat E, 38 Don Street, Aberdeen, who appeared at Peterhead Sheriff Court on Monday, had 316 pink, frilly garters confiscated not 316 pink, frilly knickers.
And this:
A film review on Sept. 5 about "Save Me" confused some characters and actors. It is Mark, not Chad, who is sent to the Genesis House retreat for converting gay men to heterosexuality. (Mark is played by Chad Allen; there is no character named Chad). The hunky fellow resident is Scott (played by Robert Gant), not Ted (Stephen Lang). And it is Mark and Scott -- not "Chad and Ted" -- who partake of cigarettes and "furtive man-on-man action."
They also highlighted a Guardian typo: "Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel is One Hundred Years of Solitude, not One Hundred Years of Solicitude". I don't know though...2006 and 2005 were pretty great.
Project management lingo
Michael Sippey collected a bunch of project management lingo from a PM mailing list. Hit with the scope bat, analysis paralysis, eating the elephant one bite at a time, come to Beavis meeting, nine women can't have a baby in one month, schedule chicken...collect them all.
Update: You may now play project management lingo bingo.
The Year in Ideas
The NY Times has posted their annual Year in Ideas collection for 2008, packaged this year in an "interactive feature", which is Esperanto for "no permalinks". A favorite so far in paging through is Tokujin Yoshioka's Venus Natural Crystal Chair, a piece of furniture grown in mineral water.
Update: Permalinks are a go. I repeat, permalinks are a go. Here's the one for the crystal chair. (thx, everyone)
The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2008
Foreign Policy has their annual list of The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2008. For instance, more coca than ever is being grown in Colombia despite the billions the US has spent to "win" the "war" on drugs.
The Year in Reading 2008
It's time again for The Year in Reading, the annual feature from The Millions that asks a few trusted readers to share what they were into this year, bookwise.
Best book cover design of 2008
The Book Design Review lists their favorite book covers for 2008. Go forth and drool.
Best Esquire stories
In celebration of its semisesquicentennial1, Esquire magazine shares the seven greatest stories ever told in the pages of their magazine and has published them online in their entirety. (See also Esquire's 70 greatest sentences.) Get a load of these initial paragraphs.
The School by C.J. Chivers:
Kazbek Misikov stared at the bomb hanging above his family. It was a simple device, a plastic bucket packed with explosive paste, nails, and small metal balls. It weighed perhaps eight pounds. The existence of this bomb had become a central focus of his life. If it exploded, Kazbek knew, it would blast shrapnel into the heads of his wife and two sons, and into him as well, killing them all.
The Falling Man by Tom Junod:
In the picture, he departs from this earth like an arrow. Although he has not chosen his fate, he appears to have, in his last instants of life, embraced it. If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity's divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually. His white shirt, or jacket, or frock, is billowing free of his black pants. His black high-tops are still on his feet. In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did -- who jumped -- appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale. They are made puny by the backdrop of the towers, which loom like colossi, and then by the event itself. Some of them are shirtless; their shoes fly off as they flail and fall; they look confused, as though trying to swim down the side of a mountain. The man in the picture, by contrast, is perfectly vertical, and so is in accord with the lines of the buildings behind him. He splits them, bisects them: Everything to the left of him in the picture is the North Tower; everything to the right, the South. Though oblivious to the geometric balance he has achieved, he is the essential element in the creation of a new flag, a banner composed entirely of steel bars shining in the sun. Some people who look at the picture see stoicism, willpower, a portrait of resignation; others see something else -- something discordant and therefore terrible: freedom. There is something almost rebellious in the man's posture, as though once faced with the inevitability of death, he decided to get on with it; as though he were a missile, a spear, bent on attaining his own end. He is, fifteen seconds past 9:41 a.m. EST, the moment the picture is taken, in the clutches of pure physics, accelerating at a rate of thirty-two feet per second squared. He will soon be traveling at upwards of 150 miles per hour, and he is upside down. In the picture, he is frozen; in his life outside the frame, he drops and keeps dropping until he disappears.
What Do You Think of Ted Williams Now? by Richard Ben Cramer:
Few men try for best ever, and Ted Williams is one of those. There's a story about him I think of now. This is not about baseball but fishing. He meant to be the best there, too. One day he says to a Boston writer: "Ain't no one in heaven or earth ever knew more about fishing."
"Sure there is," says the scribe.
"Oh, yeah? Who?"
"Well, God made the fish."
"Yeah, awright," Ted says. "But you have to go pretty far back."
Frank Sinatra Has a Cold by Gay Talese:
Frank Sinatra, holding a glass of bourbon in one hand and a cigarette in the other, stood in a dark corner of the bar between two attractive but fading blondes who sat waiting for him to say something. But he said nothing; he had been silent during much of the evening, except now in this private club in Beverly Hills he seemed even more distant, staring out through the smoke and semidarkness into a large room beyond the bar where dozens of young couples sat huddled around small tables or twisted in the center of the floor to the clamorous clang of folk-rock music blaring from the stereo. The two blondes knew, as did Sinatra's four male friends who stood nearby, that it was a bad idea to force conversation upon him when he was in this mood of sullen silence, a mood that had hardly been uncommon during this first week of November, a month before his fiftieth birthday.
M by John Sack:
One, two, three at the most weeks and they would give M company its orders -- they being those dim Olympian entities who reputedly threw cards into an IBM machine or into a hat to determine where each soldier in M would go next, which ones to stay there in the United States, which to live softly in Europe, and which to fight and to die in Vietnam.
The Last American Hero Is Junior Johnson. Yes! by Tom Wolfe:
Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua aqua, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-cheek raspberry. Nude Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock-car races, and that old mothering north Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields. Mother dog!
Superman Comes to the Supermarket by Norman Mailer:
For once let us try to think about a political convention without losing ourselves in housing projects of fact and issue. Politics has its virtues, all too many of them -- it would not rank with baseball as a topic of conversation if it did not satisfy a great many things -- but one can suspect that its secret appeal is close to nicotine. Smoking cigarettes insulates one from one's life, one does not feel as much, often happily so, and politics quarantines one from history; most of the people who nourish themselves in the political life are in the game not to make history but to be diverted from the history which is being made.
[1] That's seventy five years, yo. Quattuordecennial is the anniversarial name for fourteen years. Others. ↩
Five physics lessons for Obama
Five quick physics lessons for President-Elect Obama from the author of Physics for Future Presidents (@ Amazon). One of the lessons: nuclear power is the way to go.
It's true that after 300 years, nuclear waste is still about 100 times more radioactive than the original uranium that was removed from the earth. But even this isn't as scary as it sounds. If the waste is stored underground in such a way that there's only a 10 percent chance that 10 percent of it will leak -- which should be more than doable -- the risk will be no worse than if we had never mined the uranium in the first place.
Muller asserts that safe nuclear power is a solved technical problem and that the use of it is a political issue.
Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck
Schlocky painter Thomas Kinkade recently made a film and during the production distributed a list of what Vanity Fair calls Thomas Kinkade's 16 Guidelines for Making Stuff Suck.
12) Surprise details. Suggest a few "inside references" that are unique to this production. Small details that I can mention in interviews that stimulate second or third viewings -- for example, a "teddy bear mascot" for the movie that appears occasionally in shots. This is a fun process to pursue, and most movies I'm aware of normally have hidden "inside references". In the realm of fine art we refer to this as "second reading, third reading, etc." A still image attracts the viewer with an overall impact, then reveals smaller details upon further study.
Final photos
A list of final photographs taken of people before they died. Included Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, and Adolf Hitler. (via cyn-c)
How the universe might kill us
The universe is trying to kill us, let us count the (ten) ways.
Start worrying in a few million years about a cosmic dust collision, when the sun hits the closest spiral arm of our galaxy. Take your chances with an exploding star. Or manage to escape these threats, and you just get an extra 10^35 years before all matter decays anyway.
Best of list season starts earlier and earlier
And so it begins. The Ralph Lauren Rugby store near Union Square took delivery of its Christmas decorations on Monday and the end of the year lists have already started appearing online. So far there's Time's best inventions of 2008 and Amazon's best books of 2008.
Foods of the 80s
Top 10 foods associated with the 80s. Go back in time with jawbreakers, Cool Ranch Doritos, Tab, and Capri Sun. (No Fruit Roll-ups?)
Nerdy political needs
Matt Haughey lists a bunch of ways that political candidates can get his nerdy vote.
I've been thinking lately about a dream candidate for my nerd habits, my nerdy business, and the way I live my nerdy life. Regardless of party affiliation, if you're running for an office from as small as city council all the way up to president, if you hit on any/all of these things, you just might get my vote.
Universal healthcare, universal broadband, and a renewed commitment to science are on his list...anything missing?
Skills every woman should know
While not as good as Popular Mechanics' list of 100 Skills Every Man Should Know, here's a list of 30 Skills Every Woman Should Have Before Turning 30. Now someone do one for "Every Person".
10 reasons why newspapers won't reinvent news
A list of reasons that newspapers won't (can't?) reinvent news.
The culture of newspaper management is a dysfunctional relic of a low-bandwidth, monopoly era. It still hasn't adapted to the lessons of Web 2.0, it's generally beholden to a short-term stock price instead of a long-term re-investment strategy and it simply refuses to accept that you can't expect 20 profit margins in a competitive market. Instead of leading, it is a legacy anchor.
An overly harsh list, but good food for thought.
Best news photos
Vanity Fair has a list of the 25 best news photographs. Many are familar but I had never seen the photo of Roman Polanski sitting outside his house after his wife's murder. (Quite a few of these photos are disturbing. Viewer beware.)
Useful black holes
A list of 15 uses of tiny black holes, including hazardous waste disposal, cheap transport, and hanging posters without tacks.
Best sports journalism
In a recent column, ESPN sports writer Bill Simmons shared his list of best sports pieces ever written. Max from The Millions took Simmons' list and found many of the articles were available online for your complementary reading pleasure. Authors include Gay Talese, Roger Angell, George Plimton, and David Foster Wallace.
100 skills you should know
A list of 100 skills every man should know. The annotated version of the list starts here. My dad taught me almost all of the skills you should teach your kids.
Clever ads by students
Ten creative advertising ideas from students. The Smart Car and Match.com concepts are particularly clever.
23 of the toughest math questions
DARPA is soliciting research proposals for people wishing to solve one of twenty-three mathematical challenges, many of which deal with attempting to find a mathematical basis underlying biology.
What are the Fundamental Laws of Biology?: This question will remain front and center for the next 100 years. DARPA places this challenge last as finding these laws will undoubtedly require the mathematics developed in answering several of the questions listed above.
(via rw)
Twelve Virtues of Rationality
The Twelve Virtues of Rationality by Eliezer Yudkowsky. From the top:
The first virtue is curiosity. A burning itch to know is higher than a solemn vow to pursue truth. To feel the burning itch of curiosity requires both that you be ignorant, and that you desire to relinquish your ignorance. If in your heart you believe you already know, or if in your heart you do not wish to know, then your questioning will be purposeless and your skills without direction. Curiosity seeks to annihilate itself; there is no curiosity that does not want an answer. The glory of glorious mystery is to be solved, after which it ceases to be mystery. Be wary of those who speak of being open-minded and modestly confess their ignorance. There is a time to confess your ignorance and a time to relinquish your ignorance.
Essential comics
Fifty things every great comics collection needs.
Because comic books are read in a way that we invest a lot of ourselves in the telling, because they're visual in nature, and because for generations they were among the only art forms available for a child to easily own, they can be powerful nostalgic items. It's always great to have a few comics around that you either remember reading or simply recall wanting more than anything in the world. You may be surprised by how much of your comics reading since has been shaped by those feelings.
Scariest movies?
In preparation for a panel at the New Yorker Festival, Ben Greenman put together a list of the five scariest movies of all time. I've never seen a horror movie (unless Blair Witch Project counts) so Silence of the Lambs would be my top pick.
26 actors who deserve better careers
A list of actors who deserve better careers. Quentin Tarantino should do a film starring all of these actors and raise their boats like he did with John Travolta.
40 years of food in NYC
As part of their monster 40th anniversary celebration, New York magazine has some notes from the past four decades of food and dining in NYC. Gael Greene remembers her favorite meal as a restaurant critic and also lists the 14 most important NYC restaurants over the past 40 years. No Union Square Cafe? Meyer deserves some credit for taking the stuffiness out of NYC dining.
Legendary chef André Soltner and David Chang share a conversation about the state of food in the city. When Soltner was asked if he did interviews, he replied:
If they came to Lutèce, if they came to my kitchen, yes. I would not go out. If they asked me to go to Chicago to do a fund-raising dinner, it was, "No." If they asked me to come to give me a prize or whatever, I said, "Only on Sundays, when I'm not in the kitchen." I was sort of a slave to my restaurant. And my wife too. I don't say it was right. Today, I maybe say it was wrong. Years ago, in Paris, we had no money. But when we were more comfortable, maybe twenty years later, I said, "Simone, you know, you've paid your dues and everything, I buy you whatever you wish." I was thinking to buy her a ring or a necklace or something like that. "Whatever you wish, tell me." She looked at me and said, "Take me to a movie." For twenty years, I hadn't taken her to a movie. I woke up. I said, "Oh my God, what did I do to my wife?"
And finally but wonderfully, a timeline of food in NYC. The first McDonald's opened here in 1972 and Starbucks in 1994. Hanger steak was big in 1990.
What is new media art?
How to identify interactive or new media art.
7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, "Yeah..yeah, I could've done that too..c'mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It's so easy..."
(via russell davies)
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.) ↩
Ten things you don't know about the earth
A list of ten things that you didn't know about the earth. My favorite one, by far:
But what if you did dig a hole through the Earth and jump in? What would happen?
Well, you'd die (see below). But if you had some magic material coating the walls of your 13,000 km deep well, you'd have quite a trip. You'd accelerate all the way down to the center, taking about 20 minutes to get there. Then, when you passed the center, you'd start falling up for another 20 minutes, slowing the whole way. You'd just reach the surface, then you'd fall again. Assuming you evacuated the air and compensated for Coriolis forces, you'd repeat the trip over and over again, much to your enjoyment and/or terror. Actually, this would go on forever, with you bouncing up and down. I hope you remember to pack a lunch.
Note that as you fell, you accelerate all the way down, but the acceleration itself would decrease as you fell: there is less mass between you and the center of the Earth as you head down, so the acceleration due to gravity decreases as you approach the center. However, the speed with which you pass the center is considerable: about 7.7 km/sec (5 miles/second).
Fast forward to the year 2483 and we'll probably all be using such holes to quickly travel through the earth. Spain to New Zealand in 42 minutes! New York to the middle of the Indian Ocean? 42 minutes! I also recall reading somewhere that the tunnels don't need to run through the middle of the earth. You don't get the free fall effect, but with the proper contraption (mag-lev tunnel train?) you'll be pulled through the tunnel at a great speed. Does this ring anyone's bell?
Update: A bell has rung. The tunnels described above are called chord tunnels and the travel time through the earth in a frictionless chord tunnel is always 42 minutes, even if the tunnel is only a few hundred miles long or so (say from New York to Detroit). (thx, mike)
Update: In this short Nova clip, Neil deGrasse Tyson "demonstrates" a trip through the center of the earth. (thx, michael)
Best show on TV ever?
Just for fun, I whipped up a little poll based on the best show(s) on TV post the other day:
What's the best show that's ever been on television?
There are around 30 shows on the list; please consider all the options before choosing.
Production notes: My methodology can be described as "half-assed". I consulted a number of "best of" lists in choosing the shows -- not just the ones listed in yesterday's post -- and excluded some currently airing shows on which the jury is still out (e.g. 30 Rock, Mad Men) for lack of sufficient evidence. No miniseries allowed, episodic only. My feeling is that there are still too many show on the list (there are four or maybe five real choices) but I wanted to give people options. Also, unless the list is missing something *very* obvious, I'm not looking for additions so don't even think about Cmd-N'ing that mail message.
The best show on television, all of them
According to several TV writers, bloggers, and cultural critics, each of these is the best show on television.
The Wire
Lost
Friday Night Lights
Deadwood
30 Rock
The Daily Show
Battlestar Galactica
The Sopranos
Arrested Development
Studio 60
South Park
Veronica Mars
Six Feet Under
Hard Knocks: Training Camp with the Dallas Cowboys
The Colbert Report
Mad Men
The West Wing
Mad Men is getting the most buzz lately but The Wire is still the high-water mark (in my opinion as well as the web's collective opinion according to Google). The Sopranos gets surprisingly little love as the top show, although its relatively weak competition back in the early 2000s perhaps means it didn't need to be said. The quality of television for the past 3-5 years is impressive...most of the shows listed above were all on at the same time.
Road runner rules
The simple but strict rules for Road Runner cartoons.
1. Road Runner cannot harm the Coyote except by going "beep, beep".
2. No outside force can harm the Coyote -- only his own ineptitude or the failure of Acme products.
3. The Coyote could stop anytime -- IF he was not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim." -- George Santayana).
4. No dialogue ever, except "beep, beep".
5. Road Runner must stay on the road -- for no other reason than that he's a roadrunner.
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters -- the southwest American desert.
7. All tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, make gravity the Coyote's greatest enemy.
9. The Coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
10. The audience's sympathy must remain with the Coyote.
Charles Miller argues that John Hodgman's PC character in the Mac vs. PC commercials is like Wile E. Coyote...likable but inept. (via df)
Great arts videos
A list of fifty great arts video available on YouTube, including Joy Division playing on Granada Television in 1978, Jack Kerouac reads On the Road in 1959, and Jackson Pollock making one of his drip paintings in 1951.
What not to write in your thesis
Footnotes, Endnotes, and Parentheticals That Cost Me Marks on My Thesis.
3 Who, although a gifted academic, is still a douche.
10. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean-Paul_Sartre
Walter Benjamin's tips for writing
A list of writing tips from Walter Benjamin.
Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
I find that when I develop an idea for too long in my head, I forget most of it when I go to write it down. Once again proving that Walter Benjamin is a better man than I am.
Movie-going rules
I triple endorse every single one of these 17 simple rules for going to the cinema with me.
9. You will not involuntarily exclaim any of the following, or any derivatives of the following, ten minutes before and ten minutes after the end of the screening: "Oh SHIT! OUCH!", "Woah!", "Oooooooh!", "PAIN CITY!", "Holy [anything]!". Such exclamations are not involuntary. If you are a Tourette's sufferer, you will provide a confirmatory note from a registered and reputable practitioner of medicine before purchasing your tickets, whereupon you will be politely refused entry.
My insistence on the strict adherence to rule #1 is why I often find myself at the movies alone (sobbing quietly, friendless).
Best TV commercials by movie directors
Ten cool TV commercials done by movie directors. Ridley Scott's 1984 Apple ad makes the list along with spots by Messrs. Jonze and (Wes) Anderson. BTW, Jonze's Ikea commercial is superior to his Gap ad. (via self-employedsandwich)
List of problems solved by MacGyver
More from the bounty of Wikipedia: a list of all of the problems solved by MacGyver.
MacGyver creates a bomb to open a door using a gelatin cold capsule containing sodium metal, which he then places in a glass container filled with water. When the gelatin dissolves in the water, the sodium reacts violently with the water and causes an explosion which blows a hole in the wall. ("MythBusters" questioned the size of the explosion but verified that pure sodium does cause an exothermic reaction when mixed with water, just not enough to destroy a concrete wall.) The amount of sodium required to destroy a concrete wall would greatly exceed the size of a cold pill.
Despite the length of the page, the text warns that "this list is not yet comprehensive". (via gongblog)
What makes for a good blog?
Merlin Mann lists some attributes of good blogs.
Good blogs try. I've come to believe that creative life in the first-world comes down to those who try just a little bit harder. Then, there's the other 98%. They're still eating the free continental breakfast over at FriendFeed. A good blog is written by a blogger who thinks longer, works harder, and obsesses more. Ultimately, a good blogger tries. That's why "good" is getting rare.
Like Merlin, I'm discovering fewer and fewer good blogs these days. Part of it is that blogging as I would define it is passe. These days people are writing for online magazines like Gawker or Tumblring or Twittering or Facebooking or doing a million other things on the web. But people are also listening to a bunch of bad advice -- CALL NOW TO FIND OUT HOW TO MAKE MONEY WITH BLOGS AND WE'LL THROW IN THIS JUICER ABSOLUTELY FREE -- instead of Merlin's level-headedness.
Unusual medical conditions
Ten people who have unusual medical conditions, including the woman who can't stop orgasming, the woman who is allergic to cell phones and microwaves, and the boy who can't sleep.
Top ten psychology videos
The top ten psychology videos includes footage of the Stanford Prison Experiment and Jill Boyte Taylor's TED talk about having a stroke. Surely this 45-min video about The Milgram Experiment should have been on the list.
What will the LHC find?
A list of possible discoveries by the Large Hadron Collider and the probability of each discovery being made within the next five years.
The Higgs Boson: 95%. The Higgs is the only particle in the Standard Model of Particle Physics which hasn't yet been detected, so it's certainly a prime target for the LHC (if the Tevatron doesn't sneak in and find it first). And it's a boson, which improves CERN's chances. There is almost a guarantee that the Higgs exists, or at least some sort of Higgs-like particle that plays that role; there is an electroweak symmetry, and it is broken by something, and that something should be associated with particle-like excitations. But there's not really a guarantee that the LHC will find it. It should find it, at least in the simplest models; but the simplest models aren't always right. If the LHC doesn't find the Higgs in five years, it will place very strong constraints on model building, but I doubt that it will be too hard to come up with models that are still consistent.
The list also functions as a nice overview of what's happening at the edges of our physics understanding. (via 3qd)
How Starbucks is trying to get its groove back
Fourteen ways in which Starbucks has tried to revitalize its brand.
8. Ditch the underperformers: In July, Starbucks announced its closure of 600 stores. Check this map for a closure near you, or peep the full list. It's also dropping 61 of its 84 stores in Australia, and eliminating 1,000 support jobs (not including all layoffs due to stores closures).
Stupid ideas captured
Maggie collects the top ten stupidest ideas depicted on Flickr. These are pretty amazing.
A year of... books
A collection of books, compiled by Rex, by people who spent a year doing something and then wrote a book about it. Topics include competitive eating, not shopping, and reading the OED.
Top 25 documentaries
In October 2007, the International Documentary Association made a list of the 25 best documentaries.
1. Hoop Dreams (1994), Steve James
2. The Thin Blue Line (1988), Errol Morris
3. Bowling for Columbine (2002), Michael Moore
4. Spellbound (2002), Jeffrey Blitz
5. Harlan County U.S.A. (1976), Barbara Kopple
6. An Inconvenient Truth (2006), Davis Guggenheim
7. Crumb (1994), Terry Zwigoff
8. Gimme Shelter (1970), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
9. The Fog of War (2003), Errol Morris
10. Roger & Me (1989), Michael Moore
11. Super Size Me (2004), Morgan Spurlock
12. Don't Look Back (1967) D.A. Pennebaker
13. Salesman (1968), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, and Charlotte Zwerin
14. Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance (1982), Godfrey Reggio
15. Sherman's March (1986), Ross McElwee
16. Grey Gardens (1976), Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Ellen Hovde, and Muffie Meyer
17. Capturing the Friedmans (2003), Andrew Jarecki
18. Born into Brothels, (2004), Ross Kauffman and Zana Briski
19. Titicut Follies (1967), Frederick Wiseman
20. Buena Vista Social Club (1999), Wim Wenders
21. Fahrenheit 9/11 (2004), Michael Moore
22. Winged Migration (2002), Jacques Perrin
23. Grizzly Man (2005), Werner Herzog
24. Night and Fog (1955), Alain Resnais
25. Woodstock (1970), Michael Wadleigh
Masturbation songs
The top nine songs about masturbation. Includes the obvious I Touch Myself by The Divinyls and some less-obvious songs. (via buzzfeed)
Five ways to trigger a natural disaster
Human activities can trigger natural disasters such as earthquakes and flooding.
"Dams are the most dangerous man-made structure likely to cause quake," says David Booth of the British Geological Survey. By artificially holding a large volume of water in one place, dams increase pressure on fractures beneath the surface of the earth. What's more, water has a lubricating effect, making it easier for the fractures -- or faults -- to slip.
Physical theories as women
If physical theories were women.
Quantum mechanics is the girl you meet at the poetry reading. Everyone thinks she's really interesting and people you don't know are obsessed about her. You go out. It turns out that she's pretty complicated and has some issues. Later, after you've broken up, you wonder if her aura of mystery is actually just confusion.
Would like to see the list for men as well. (via snarkmarket)
Unsolved problems
Another Wikipedia gem: a list of unsolved problems from a number of different fields, including linguistics, physics, and computer science. (via lone gunman)
Recent classic book covers
Entertainment Weekly recently compiled a list of well-designed book covers from the past 25 years. Not fantastic but a solid list worth browsing.
Oobject
Oobject is on a roll lately. In particular, check out the railroad snowplows, worst General Lee, medical manikins, pocket sundials, and food rations.
Dumb Pixar ranking list
Vulture's wrong, wrong, wrong list of the best Pixar films. Finding Nemo belongs in #1 with The Incredibles and Ratatouille close behind. Then Toy Story 2 followed by the rest. Putting The Incredibles in the #7 spot, that's just plain irresponsible.
Unthinkable futures
A list of predictions about the unthinkable future by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno, made in 1993. This one by Eno isn't half bad:
A new type of artist arises: someone whose task is to gather together existing but overlooked pieces of amateur art, and, by directing attention onto them, to make them important. (This is part of a much larger theory of mine about the new role of curatorship, the big job of the next century.)
Great movie cameos
A list of movie cameos that end up stealing the whole movie. The deserving #1 is Alec Baldwin's Glengarry Glen Ross speech. (God, what a great scene.)
100 best movie posters
A list of the 100 best movie posters of all time. There's a lot to disagree with on this list. American Beauty at #2?
How to improve your home cooking
The top ten home cooking mistakes. The name of the post is something of a misnomer...it's really a list of suggestions to improve your home cooking.
2. A real knife. You can do a lot with a good chef's knife, and you can't do shit without one. It doesn't have to be an expensive model; America's Test Kitchen has recommended this Victorinox 8" chef's knife (or its 10" version, about a buck cheaper!) for years, although I have grown accustomed to the handles on my Henckels Four-Star knives. Buy a good chef's knife that feels comfortable in your hand, with a blade 8 to 9 inches long, and buy a honing steel to keep it sharp. Avoid home sharpeners, though, which "sharpen" your blade by destroying it.
(thx, andrew)
Spotting fake photos
Five ways to spot a faked photo. Comparing the light reflection in the various eyes in a photograph is an especially clever technique.
Warren Buffett book recommendations
Pay attention: ten books on investing recommended by Warren Buffett.
Basic kitchen elements
Kitchen chemist Herve This' 10 basic elements of kitchen knowledge.
Elusive movie objects
Sixteen elusive movie object of desire, including White Castle burgers in Harold & Kumar, the Ark of the Convenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the One Ring from the LOTR trilogy.
R Kelly jury foolishness
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".
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)
100 essential jazz albums
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.
1001 Books That You Must Read Before You Die
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.
Commercial parodies
A list of the 50 greatest commercial parodies of all time, with video evidence.
How to take better photos
A list of 21 ways to shoot better photographs. I can hear my photographer friends snickering about the cliches on the list, but if you don't know much about photography but are interested in learning, you could do worse than to explore some of these techniques.
What's under your kilt?
A list of responses to "The Question" asked of all kilt-wearing gentlement: What's under your kilt?
Fifty greatest TV shows of all time
There's much to argue with on this list of the 50 greatest TV shows of all time. Too many 1 or 2 season shows and recent shows. And Buffy at #2? Christ, whatever.
A list of reasons why people write
A list of reasons why people write and explore history with examples of each.
14. The past is heritage: we study it to form or enforce national, ethnic, religious or personal identity, or to combat attempts to destroy heritage. Gertrude Himmelfarb, The De-Moralization of Society.
(via short shrift)
The 10 most appropriate weatherperson names...like Ray
The 10 most appropriate weatherperson names...like Ray Ban and Storm Field. When I was a kid watching the news out of Minneapolis, their morning weather guy's name was Sunny Haus. (Not his real name though...the station wouldn't let Steve Wolhenhaus go by his real name.)
A list of the top one articles
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.
A somewhat uneven list of the best
A somewhat uneven list of the best films that never won a Best Picture Oscar. As the commenters point out, lots of good films (like Raging Bull & Dr. Strangelove) were missed. (via house next door)
20 respectable rock and rap acts that peaked with debut albums.
20 respectable rock and rap acts that peaked with debut albums.
A visual look at the top 10 trends
A visual look at the top 10 trends in spring/summer 2008 fashion, including parachute silk, higher waistlines, and skinny belts.
It will take you literally hours to
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)
A list of "evil" human experiments, including
A list of "evil" human experiments, including the Stanford prison experiment (one of the milder examples) and the Nazi experiments on concentration camp prisoners. Heed the warning at the top of the page...this was a difficult list to read.
Update: I had to remove the link because there was a bunch of crappy, virus stuff. If you're on a Mac, have popup blocking turned on, or have a strong constitution, you can click here to see the list.
A list of quintessentially New York books.
A list of quintessentially New York books.
New York is a hypertextualized city. By 6 a.m., our commuters have smudged more words off their papers than most cities read all day. How to even begin identifying a canon? While reading, I plotted candidates along two mystical axes: one of all-around literary merit, and the other of "New Yorkitude" -- the degree to which a book allows itself to obsess over the city. Robert Caro's The Power Broker just about maxes out both axes; others perseverate so memorably on smaller aspects of city life that they had to be included.
The list includes Rem Koolhaas' Delirious New York, Don DeLillo's Great Jones Street, and Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities.
A chronological list of fears, from childhood
A chronological list of fears, from childhood through parenthood. (via lone gunman)
A large list of interesting print catalogs
A large list of interesting print catalogs for niche industries and hobbies.
Cabela's. 1400 pages of hunting, fishing & outdoor gear. Comes with foldout index tabs and if you spend appalling amounts there (like my SO), they send you a hardbound version.
(via mathowie)
A short list of What Every American
A short list of What Every American Should Know About the Middle East.
Arabs are part of an ethnic group, not a religion. Arabs were around long before Islam, and there have been (and still are) Arab Christians and Arab Jews. In general, you're an Arab if you 1) are of Arab descent (blood), or 2) speak the main Arab language (Arabic).
A companion list of what every resident of the Middle East should know about the US might also be helpful. (via chris glass)
The top five reasons why "the customer
The top five reasons why "the customer is always right" is wrong. I like the idea that a company should be as ready to fire bad customers as they are to fire bad employees.
Top ten artists suffering the Lindsey Buckingham
Top ten artists suffering the Lindsey Buckingham Paradox.
The Lindsey Buckingham Paradox is what happens when otherwise brilliant musicians decide they're better than their bandmates (creative differences, natch), strike out on their own with solo "careers", and somewhat curiously never again manage to grasp his or her own genius in the way we all know is possible.
Sting clocks in at #2:
Stewart Copeland and Andy Summers brought their own special flavors to the Police party, and without them, Sting is just a big bowl of goddamned puffy cheetos. Like Bono, maybe, without the passion or, you know, cred.
A list of 98 nicknames for New York
A list of 98 nicknames for New York City, including The City of Friendly People, The University of Telephony, and Father Knickerbocker. (via gothamist)