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A young Harvard economist named Roland Fryer Jr. wants to use economic tools to “figure out where blacks went wrong”. One of his papers addresses the six-year gap in life expectancy for blacks versus whites; he aruges that saltier black slaves were selected for the ocean voyage from Africa and that salt sensitivity has lead to “higher rates of cardiovascular disease, stroke and kidney disease”.
Time to market for DVDs keeps getting shorter and shorter. Studios make more money on DVD releases, so they’re eager to piggyback the DVD release on the big screen marketing campaign.
Menu collection from 1856-1930 comprised of over 5000 menus. Part of the extensive, near-exhaustive New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery.
AMS2HID is an application that utilizes the motion sensor in the new Powerbook as a input device. Of course, one of the coolest uses is to control gameplay…one could imagine using AMS to play games like Katamari Damacy.
Some friends and I checked out the Ashes and Snow a couple of weeks ago here in NYC. The exhibition features the photography and films of Gregory Colbert, who documents “the wonderous interactions between human beings and animals”. Colbert spent ten years traveling the world collecting the moments for this show, which will be displayed around the world in a “nomadic museum”. The museum, constructed out of shipping containers, is currently placed on Pier 54 on the west side of Manhattan, just below 14th Street, but will continue to travel around the world after it leaves NYC on June 6.
As much as I liked the photography, the building designed by Shigeru Ban was the star of the exhibit for me. The simple wooden path surrounded by rocks, over which the photographs were displayed and beautifully lit, the industrial feel of the shipping container walls, and the way the sunlight reflected off the Hudson River and danced through the cracks in the walls and across the ceiling…all the elements came together to create a wonderful environment for viewing Colbert’s work.
Paul Boutin on newsmashing, or the remixing of the news.
A “fireball” (!!) created in a particle accelerator “may be [a] black hole” (!!!).
Peter Jackson says his film adaptation of The Hobbit is at least 3-4 years away..
Celebrities that look good or not so good on HDTV. “[Britney] is still in her early 20s, but she looks about 10 years older in high-def. Her face is puffy and she’s starting to show wrinkle marks around her lips, reportedly from a two pack-a-day cigarette habit.”
Interview with actor Gene Wilder about his new memoir.
The complete Feynman Lectures on Physics, both in PDF and MP3 formats.
Barry Diller to buy Ask Jeeves soon?. Diller is responsible for the horrible Ticketmaster.
Looks like PBS has enabled Trackback on most of the pages on their site.
Genes in a woman’s “dormant” X chromosome may not be as inactive as once thought. “Because the genes expressed from the inactive X are also expressed from a woman’s active X, women get a higher dose of these genes than men. So these genes may underlie traits that differ between the sexes.”
On Darren Aronofsky’s next movie, The Fountain. It’s “a love story that spans 1,000 years as a man searches for a cure for his terminally ill wife”.
The history of yelling “Freebird” at concerts. I wonder if this ever happens at 50 Cent concerts?
Notes on George Dyson’s Etech talk about Von Neumann. This is the one talk I’m very sad to have missed at Etech.
The 30 least-hot things you can say to a naked woman.
Lens Culture is a thoughtfully constructed photography site.
Online casinos offer bonuses to entice new players but you need to bet a certain amount to get it. But by playing blackjack by the numbers and betting the minimum, you barely lose any money and get to keep the whole bonus. Online casino hacks!
I started kottke.org seven years ago this week. I forget the anniversary until after the fact every year even though I know it’s sometime in March (for whatever reason almost everything important in my life has happened in March, at least for the last few years). Seven years is way longer than I would have guessed keeping the site going on a near-daily basis…it’s the longest I’ve ever done anything, even longer than all but a handful of friendships. So happy birthday, old friend, it’s been fun. (0sil8 started in March as well…nine years ago.)
Notes about Surowiecki’s talk at ETech about the Wisdom of Crowds.
March’s evil award goes to the idea “of being too quick to judge others without knowing the burdens they bow to”. “And [to] the poor providers of content, who given the choice between allowing others to improve on their work - even when enacted by companies like Google - and keeping it all to themselves, would rather ‘opt out’, hoard up their treasures, and forbid anyone else from touching it.”
Interview with Danny O’Brien about life hacks. “I suppose what I learnt here is that going public improves the benefits of your work generally, though not always to yourself. Things that you put on the Web have a better chance of getting done, though necessarily by you.”
When looking at the distribution of wealth, rich people follow a power law curve, but the rest don’t. “While economists’ models traditionally regard humans as rational beings who always make intelligent decisions, econophysicists argue that in large systems the behaviour of each individual is influenced by so many factors that the net result is random, so it makes sense to treat [the non-rich] like atoms in a gas.”
Here’s a look at the new screen fonts that Microsoft will start shipping in 2006. “The Microsoft collection includes two serif, three sans serif, and a monospaced face for use in programming environments. They are intended to be text typefaces as opposed to display faces that are used in larger sizes for headlines.”
Google search for “micropatron”. From 0 to ~73,300 in three weeks. Not bad.
Daniel’s got the best collection of photos I’ve seen from SXSW Interactive.
Jessica Helfand wonders how scrapbooking fits into graphic design. My mom does scrapbooking…it’s fun to share my interest in design with her when we look at the scrapbooks she’s done.
Well, it’s been about three weeks and it’s time to wind down the kottke.org fund drive. This is your last chance to contribute to the fiscal health of kottke.org before the fund drive ends at noon ET on Friday (3/18). If you haven’t contributed, here’s the place to go to do that. If you still need some convincing, perhaps another look at my introductory post, the list of my business influences, or the list of gifts available to some lucky micropatron who has contributed $30 or more will get that wallet flexing.
So yeah, after Friday I’ll post a wrap-up (because I’ve gotten lots of queries as to how it’s going), contact the winners of the gifts, and then it’s full-speed ahead, which will be nice because the overhead created by the fund drive, while necessary, has really slowed my progress on other stuff for the site.
Final call for kottke.org micropatrons. Fund drive ends Friday at noon ET…contribute now if you haven’t already.
Trailer for Old Boy. This won the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes and will be out in the US soon.
The house where Pedro lived in Napoleon Dynamite is for sale. Only $105,000.
Electronically file your federal income tax for free. “The Fed was going to develop a free efile site because its so much cheaper when you efile than paper file. TurboTax threw a fit because it would destroy their business. They came to an agreement that TurboTax would develop a free version instead of the government, then they just don’t advertise it.”
Eliot Shepard of slower.net is showing photos at Jen Bekman gallery. Opening is 3/22, exhibition is 3/23-4/30.
Family Guy Live!, four performances in NYC the last week of April. “The sensational voices behind the Griffin family will perform live readings of a classic episode” plus a bunch of other stuff.
A9 search engine can now return results in XML format.
The NYC photobloggers are set to talk about their work at the Apple Store in Soho. March 23, 6pm.
I’m on the plane back to NYC from what was my fifth SXSW. I hadn’t been for a couple of years and it was good (and a little weird) to be back. Some thoughts, in rough chronological order:
Best panels I attended: tie between Jason Fried’s How to Make Big Things Happen with Small Teams and Malcolm Gladwell’s keynote. Having read Blink and seen him speak on it twice before, there was nothing much new in Malcolm’s talk, but he’s a fantastic speaker…knows his shit cold, didn’t utter a single “um” or “like”, could make the phone book seem interesting, but doesn’t have to caper about the stage to be compelling.
Everyone was nice. Well, there was that one guy who was an asshole, but I think everyone pretty much ignored him. But everyone else, so nice to get to meet you or see you again.
Overheard in the hallway: “no woman who knows that much about CSS should be that good looking”, “here’s how I met Marc Canter for the first time: I’m standing outside at a conference, he comes up beside me and farts”, “I have no idea who you are”, “surf the glue”, “no one will get naked in the hot tub with me”, and “Imagine Malcolm Gladwell…with breasts. That’s how busy it will be.”
My two panels sandwiched the keynote conversation between Bruce Sterling and Alex Steffen, so I was only able to catch about 20 minutes of it. But that was long enough to hear Bruce talking about smoking his shoes. LOL for reals.
BBQ! BBQ! In what could be a record for a bunch of folks who can’t pay attention to any particular thing for more than 10 minutes at a time, fifteen of us waited an hour and a half for a table at Stubb’s (cool menu pictured at right). I can’t speak for the rest, but my beef brisket was worth the wait. As a bonus, Kathryn accidentally walked away with the primary object of our obsession during our 90 minute wait, the buzzing/blinking table-readiness notification coaster. I’m sure said coaster will be a treasured guest at many SXSWs to come.
Bruce Sterling’s not-house party didn’t really get crackin’ until the geeks descended on the Zoob toys. The photo evidence pretty much speaks for itself here.
Ben Brown, because he asked me to. Many, many times. Ben, I expect you to comply with the terms of the restraining order from this point forward.
And finally, I’m at the airport ready to leave just after getting through security and I hear, “your attention please, Jason Kottke to security check 3 for a lost item pickup”. Bag, check; rollie, check; coat, check; phone and wallet, safely stowed in the zipper pocket of my bag. What the heck could they have found and how on earth do they know it’s mine? I zipped over the security check point and was waved over by a friendly/stern police officer. “You Jason?” “Yep.” He holds up my wallet, which I swear on a stack of The Origin of Species was in my bag. “Holy crap,” I said. “And that’s not the worst part,” he says with the most serious look I’ve ever seen on anyone’s face.
Uh oh, I feel a full body cavity search coming on.
He pulls out my social security card and lectures me for two minutes on how I shouldn’t be carrying it because it’s all someone needs to steal my identity. Relieved that I’m not about to be hauled into a tiny windowless room for interrogation, I’m sort of chuckling at this point, which he takes to mean I don’t believe him about the SS card. “Do you see me looking you right in the eye, son? That’s how serious I am about this.” Mr. Sir, as soon as I’m home, I’m taking my SS card out of my wallet and putting it in the safest place I can…right after I change into some clean underwear.
Yahoo! 360. Looks like Yahoo! has created its own version of Livejournal (blogs + social networking)…Flickr will fit into this nicely. ;)
Timeline: A History of Communications 35,000 BC - 1998 AD.
Doogie Howser, M.D. Season One, quite possibly the most worthless DVD release ever. Sometimes the Long Tail should be a little shorter.
Amazon is searching inside its library for “statistically improbable phrases”. A good way to discover proto-memes.
Short interview with Harold McGee about the updated version of his classic On Food and Cooking.
Panoramic view of the protests in Beirut, Lebanon.
Some new research is showing that the number of things humans can hold in our heads while solving problems is fairly small, three or four things at the most. Chunking makes it possible to remember more complex tasks:
It’s difficult to measure the limits of processing capacity because most people automatically use problem solving skills to break down large complex problems into small, manageable “chunks.” A baker, for example, will treat “cream butter, sugar and egg together” as a single chunk — a single step in the process — rather than thinking of each ingredient separately. Likewise she won’t think, “break egg one into bowl, break egg two into bowl.” She’ll just think, “add all of the eggs.”
I wonder how much the process of learning is just chunking task variables into larger and larger bits, building layers of abstraction the way a programmer might build an OO program.
NY Times mentions bugmenot.com in a story about dealing with annoyances.
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