Man wins half a million bucks on Jeopardy.

Euro 2004 players in pixels by Flip Flop Flyin’.

Deceptively simple Flash game: keep the stumbling drunk on his feet. After 5 or 6 games, I could manage 73 meters.

Fahrenheit 9/11

The film, while entertaining — very funny in parts and at times powerfully moving — was ultimately disappointing for me. Whether Moore intended it to or not (not quite sure what Moore wants these days…he’s plays his cards close to his chest in that regard), this film is not meant to change your mind or sway opinion. It’s meant to rally the troops, and it does so well. Fahrenheit 9/11 is ultimately about Michael Moore’s view of the world, which is what makes it so entertaining, pleasing to Moore fans, but also what limits its potential.

During the last half of the movie, I thought more than once about The Fog of War, Errol Morris’ excellent documentary on Robert McNamara, and how Morris would have done the film. Or how Andrew Jarecki (Capturing the Friedmans) would have. You certainly can’t remove opinion from a documentary, but with Fog and Friedmans, you get a sense of what the filmmakers’ opinions are and how they affect the way the story is told. And as with anything in life, you find your own truth in the films based on what you think that bias might be. But Fahrenheit 9/11 is so much about Michael Moore’s opinion that it’s difficult to go through that process of finding the truth. The frustrating thing is that Moore has a point, but he’s unable to get himself out of the way enough to tell us the story so we can make up our own minds about it. One of the charges leveled against Bush — and probably every other politician in the US — is that he’s constantly putting spin on everything to obscure or manipulate the truth. I can’t help but think that Moore is doing exactly the same thing in the opposite direction.

• movies

All sorts of Gmail tips, tricks, and resources.

The 1,000 Best Movies Ever Made, compiled by the NY Times. I’ve seen 201 of these, which is impressive considering I generally don’t like films made before 1970.

Wired magazine on SCO’s efforts to refashion itself as an intellectual property licensing company.

Clinton couched

I know the Lewinsky thing is the most horrible thing a sitting US President has ever done (*cough*), but I love the fact that the leader of the free world, the most powerful person in the world, slept on the couch for months after he told Hillary about the affair. From Slate’s Condensed Bill Clinton:

Meanwhile, I was still sleeping on a couch, this one in the small living room that adjoined our bedroom. I slept on that old couch for two months or more. I got a lot of reading, thinking, and work done, and the couch was pretty comfortable, but I hoped I wouldn’t be on it forever.

Doesn’t matter if you’re a prince or a pauper, if you’re unfaithful to your partner, you’re sleeping on the couch.

Delightful interview with Michael Lewis about the Moneyball aftermath, magazine journalism, and other things.

• books
• interviews
• journalism
• Michael Lewis
• Moneyball

Jean-Paul Gaultier exhibits some of his signature creations, but made out of bread. David Gallagher calls it “the most French thing I have seen in France”.

NY Times duped by Google bomb

When I read this recap of Google’s amended S-1 in the NY Times yesterday, the last two paragraphs struck me as a bit strange:

Separately, there was an indication yesterday that Google’s vaunted corporate culture may be under stress as a result of competition and the stock offering. As of yesterday afternoon, typing the words “out of touch management” into Google caused the search engine to list as its first result a page describing the company’s top management.

A person close to the company said that Google employees had engaged in the practice of “Google bombing.” A Google bomb is an attempt by a group of people to cause a particular Web page to become the first result for a search phrase. The Google spokeswoman declined to comment.

The “out of touch management” search indeed works as stated, but how they got from that to “Google’s vaunted corporate culture may be under stress as a result of competition and the stock offering” left me baffled. I knew that I’d seen this particular Google bomb before, but couldn’t recall where. Chris Sherman, in a thread about the article on John Battelle’s site notes that the Google bomb was initiated by Daniel Brandt back in March. It would seem that the “person close to the company” was not as close as the Times thought they were. If this were a sensationalistic news site, I might wonder why the New York Times is “press bombing” Google. But that would be silly, like tacking some ill-conceived speculation onto the end of a story about boring financial statements to juice it up a little. It’s a forgivable error, but one that needs correcting. Paging Daniel Okrent.

Some not-so-super Supermen.

The Top 25 Weirdest Items You Can Purchase Through Amazon.

Soccer and Zidane

Overcome by a hankering for soccer**, I tuned into the France v. Switzerland match last night. I don’t often watch soccer — usually only around World Cup time — but I enjoy it when I do. It’s just so hard to find it here on TV…although with TiVo, that’s not much of an excuse.

Anyway, there’s something about that Zidane, isn’t there? Great players on Zidane’s level usually make other players look slow, weak, or dimwitted in comparison. Michael Jordan certainly did so, as did Barry Sanders in the NFL, Steffi Graf in tennis, and Wayne Gretzky in hockey. In this case, it’s Zidane that appears a step slow. Of course, he’s not slow at all…he’s just smooth. Very very smooth. He lopes along with the ball, hardly showing any effort, defenders swiftly converging on him from all sides, seemingly screwed, and somehow he pops into the clear and effortlessly flips a pass to a streaking teammate. He looks almost lazy out there. I replayed several of his plays last night, trying to see exactly how he does it, an ultimately futile exercise. Great fun to watch though.

** I’d call it football, but then you’d think I was being pretentious (or anglophilic). But that’s what much of the rest of the world calls it. I just wanna do the right thing here. Non-North Americans, just pretend I called it football, ok?

Rules for the NYC subway.

piPod, an iPod-based field guide to NYC pizzerias.

The computational origami of Dr. David Huffman.

Christopher Hitchens slams Fahrenheit 9/11. Do you get the sense that we’re all just yelling right past each other?

Photos of the New York City commute.

More names I’ve called Meg’s cat

Snoop Catty Catt
Puff Catty
B Kitty
Chairman Meow
Sir Meows Alot
50 Meow

Somewhat more pop music-related than the last go ‘round.

Ben Affleck wins California State Poker Championship. While J. Lo. is busy pursuing leader Liz Taylor in the failed marriage derby.

Tracking the ranking of the most popular photos from Yahoo News over time.

Interview with Carol Kolb, editor in chief of the Onion.

“[Formica] was intended to serve as an electrical insulator and was created as a replacement for Mica, which was used for that purpose at the time. Hence the name ‘for mica’.”.

Religion and economics. “Religious participation is negatively correlated with economic growth” but religious belief is not.

Follow SpaceShipOne’s progress as it attempts to make the first commercial manned space flight.

The patent governing the compression algorithm used for GIF files has expired. Just waiting for them to make it back into the GD library.

Transfer your email from your current mail app into Gmail.

Beastie Boys new album installs software on your computer without permission. The record companies are learning the wrong lessons from scumware installers like Kazaa.

The NY Times on Michael Moore and Fahrenheit 9/11. And on the difficulties of presenting truth as the basis for opinion. Or is it vice versa?

The man who brought you the homemade Segway returns with a self-balancing one-wheeler. Trevor, you’re looking tres Dukakis-in-a-tank there.

“You can roughly determine the emotional health of a company by how often their internal weblog is updated.”.

Older versions of MT choke on links to large files with TrackBack auto-discovery turned on. Guess how many *hours* I spent today trying to figure that out?

Audio version of Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk

Cory Doctorow recently gave a talk about DRM (Digital Rights Management) to Microsoft Research. He dedicated the text of his talk to the public domain using a Creative Commons public domain dedication, which means:

Dedicator recognizes that, once placed in the public domain, the Work may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, used, modified, built upon, or otherwise exploited by anyone for any purpose, commercial or non-commercial, and in any way, including by methods that have not yet been invented or conceived.

Using GarageBand and the built-in microphone on my Powerbook, I recorded an audio version of Cory’s talk. Andy is hosting an mp3 version of the talk (mirror) and a Bittorrent of the file is available here. (Thx Patrick and Sverrir for mirrors).

It’s 36.4 MB and 40 min long. If you want to mirror the mp3, let me know and I’ll put a link up. The audio is covered under the same dedication as the original text. If you’d like to do something with it, go nuts. Also, listen for a little easter egg about 8:20 into the audio.

Sort of disclaimer: I make no claim as to the quality of this recording. It may be too quiet or contain too much background noise. You may hear fast-talking, mumbling, my cracking voice, or flubbed pronounciations of difficult names. I do not do justice to Cory’s animated passion about the subject…at times, I sound like I’m reading James Joyce on NPR rather than enthusiastically arguing for the hopeful future of media and technology.

But it’s out there. You can put it on your iPod, you can listen to it while you have breakfast tomorrow morning, listen to it on your shower mp3 player while scrubbing your bits and pieces, or you can burn it to a CD and listen to it in your car on the way to work. Or whatever. It’s not a high-quality professional recording, but as Cory says in his talk, it doesn’t have to be because it’s got other things going for it.

ps. I’d love to see someone other than Cory give this talk at a conference. Now that would be “exploitation by anyone for any purpose”.

The dungeonmaster of Ftrain on geek shame and hypocrisy.

Firefox 0.9 is out.

The Lakers go supernova: Phil Jackson quits as coach, Kobe opts out of his contract, and Shaq wants to be traded. Shaq back to Orlando for McGrady? To Denver for Carmelo? To Philly for Iverson? To Chicago for the whole team?

A Google search for “blog” returns 46 million items. From 0 to 46 million in 5 years…that’s not bad.

Roger Ebert addresses accuracy and bias in discussing Fahrenheit 9/11.

Issac Mizrahi mixes $30 sweaters with coture clothes on the same runway.

You actually can fold a piece of paper in half more than 8 times

After lunch today, I ate a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup, which came individually wrapped in a surprisingly thin tin foil wrapper. Using the back of my fingernail, I smoothed the foil out into a perfect square with only the tiniest wrinkles remaining. Then I started folding the foil repeatedly in half, flattening it out between each fold. After 7 foldings, a tiny rectangle remained, unwilling to be further folded. I started to think that if I had a larger piece of foil, I could have folded it again, but then I remembered that old chestnut from adolescence (that was repeated in college as fact): it’s impossible to fold a piece of paper in half more than 8 times. Thwarted.

Then I started thinking, why is the limit 8 times? Given an extremely thin, large piece of paper, you should be able to fold it more than that. I figured someone must have debunked this conventional wisdom and sure enough, a quick google revealed that the number of folds depends on the length and thickness of the piece of paper. In practice, the high school student who derived the formula for paper folding limits folded a piece of paper a whopping 12 times. So much for conventional wisdom.

Side note: Given Richard Feynman’s interest in flexagons, this paper folding bunkum seems like something he might have solved in his spare time, the solution perhaps lost amongst the many things he never published or even wrote down anywhere.

Amazon is now listing purchase statistics on some of their product pages. “Customers who viewed this page ultimately bought…”

Screenshots please

A bit of advice for companies and individuals who make software with a UI:

1. Provide many screenshots of your application in action.
2. Place a clearly named link to those screenshots in a prominent place on your Web site.

If a picture is worth a 1000 words, a screenshot is worth at least 10,000 words.

A talk about DRM and copyright given by Cory Doctorow to Microsoft’s Research Group.

Web browser features that would enhance Web application development.

Second generation traffic calming

Salon recently ran an article on the relatively new school of thought about traffic management called second generation traffic calming. It involves improving traffic flow by incorporating, under certain circumstances, automobile traffic back into the flow of other human activities:

Rejecting the idea of separating people from vehicular traffic, it’s a concept that privileges multiplicity over homogeneity, disorder over order, and intrigue over certainty. In practice, it’s about dismantling barriers: between the road and the sidewalk, between cars, pedestrians and cyclists and, most controversially, between moving vehicles and children at play.

The idea, borrowed in part from behavioral psychology and evolutionary biology disciplines, is that traffic will become safer and move more smoothly if drivers are forced to pay more attention to their driving and be on autopilot less:

Reversing decades of conventional wisdom on traffic engineering, Hamilton-Baillie argues that the key to improving both safety and vehicular capacity is to remove traffic lights and other controls, such as stop signs and the white and yellow lines dividing streets into lanes. Without any clear right-of-way, he says, motorists are forced to slow down to safer speeds, make eye contact with pedestrians, cyclists and other drivers, and decide among themselves when it is safe to proceed.

At the beginning of the article, the author observes traffic working like this in China:

It’s rush hour, and I am standing at the corner of Zhuhui and Renmin Road, a four-lane intersection in Suzhou, China. Ignoring the red light, a couple of taxis and a dozen bicycles are headed straight for a huge mass of cyclists, cars, pedicabs and mopeds that are turning left in front of me. Cringing, I anticipate a collision. Like a flock of migrating birds, however, the mass changes formation. A space opens up, the taxis and bicycles move in, and hundreds of commuters continue down the street, unperturbed and fatality free.

In Suzhou, the traffic rules are simple. “There are no rules,” as one local told me. A city of 2.2 million people, Suzhou has 500,000 cars and 900,000 bicycles, not to mention hundreds of pedicabs, mopeds and assorted, quainter forms of transportation. Drivers of all modes pay little attention to the few traffic signals and weave wildly from one side of the street to another. Defying survival instincts, pedestrians have to barge between oncoming cars to cross the roads.

But here’s the catch: During the 10 days I spent in Suzhou last fall, I didn’t see a single accident. Really, not a single one. Nor was there any of the road rage one might expect given the anarchy that passes for traffic policy. And despite the obvious advantages that accrue to cars because of their size, no single transportation mode dominates the streets.

When I was in Bejing a few years ago, I observed the same thing. Traffic was an amazing thing to watch there. One day as we toured a temple a few stories off the ground, my dad and I broke away from the rest of the group to watch traffic on the 5 or 6-way intersection below us for several minutes. It was a marvel of self-organizing behavior, with buses, pedicabs, pedestrians, cyclists, taxis, cars, and motorcycles forming temporary lanes of traffic that would weaken and yield to newly formed lanes of flow.

I’ve observed this phenomenon in NYC as well, especially in dense areas of Manhattan like Midtown. People are always in the street, crossing against the light or jaywalking across even busy avenues or through stopped traffic. Cyclists run red lights, charge through busy crosswalks, and barrel down one-way streets the wrong way. Everyone pays a lot of attention to what they’re doing, regardless of what the signs say or where the crosswalk is marked. And for the most part, it seems to work. New York City has a relatively low pedestrian fatality rate, about half that of the city with the highest rate, a remarkable fact considering the pedestrian density involved and how fast traffic moves in Manhattan sometimes (I saw a cab zipping down 5th Avenue this afternoon doing at least 50 mph, slaloming through jaywalkers as he went).

The reality of running away from stuff in movies.

Financial Times: “The Bush administration has misled the American people”.

NY Times: “President Bush should apologize to the American people”.

Eyebeam launches Street Memes, “a project designed to track the spread of street art”.