An ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct
An ivory-billed woodpecker, thought to be extinct since 1920, found alive in Arkansas. Ok, now rustle us up some passenger pigeons.
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Entries for April 2005
Yuri Lane demonstrates his beatbox harmonica technique
Yuri Lane demonstrates his beatbox harmonica technique. Saw this guy today at GEL…fricking great.
The High Line problem
As much as I love the High Line (some photos from my excursion last year), I share David’s concerns that the development of it will not turn out so well:
The problem is that linear parks don’t really ever function as parks, a place to hang around and enjoy nature, they are often built (like the highline) in a place that does not lend itself to mature planet growth and the spaces themselves are not ‘static’ - in short they become expensive, fancy, shrub lined, bike lanes.
The double whammy for the Highline project is that it is a raised linear park, with all of the problems that separating pedestrian flow from the ground produced in large urbanism projects in the 50’s and 60’s.
The really unfortunate thing about it is that the High Line is really cool and I would love to see it developed into something great. Walking along it, you get a unique view of Manhattan, both literally and figuratively. And from below, it just looks cool, especially when you catch people up there looking down on you. I think of the High Line as a bit like TiVo was a few years ago…difficult to explain to people who had never seen it, hard to understand why you’d ever need such a thing if you’d never used it, but once you’d used it for more than 10 minutes, it’s hard to imagine how you ever did without it. And so it is with the High Line; it’s hard to understand the appeal unless you’ve been up there. But as David notes, the linearity and elevation may make it difficult for many to find their way up there and discover that for themselves.
Video of New Order performing Love Will
Video of New Order performing Love Will Tear Us Apart on Jimmy Kimmel’s show.
The Sony Librie
I spent the afternoon at the half-day session that GEL has added this year (it was formerly just a one-day conference). There were twelve different sessions described as “hands-on experiences” to choose from and I attended the gadgets session with Dan Dubno, who is a self-described lunatic when it comes to gadgets and technology products. I’m not much for gadgets, especially new ones…I’m a fairly late adopter among my tech-savvy friends. But some of the stuff I saw today…wow. Aside from the thinnest touch-screen tablet PC I’ve ever seen, the thing that blew me away was the Sony Librie, the first commerically available electronic ink e-book reader. Here’s a photo I took:
What you can’t see from the photo is how insanely crisp and clear the text on the “screen” is. It was book-text quality…it looked like a decal until you pushed the next button and the whole screen changed. It was *really* mind-boggling and you could instantly see how most books are going to be distributed in the very near future. Despite looking like a computer, when you were reading, it felt like a book because of the resolution (a very odd sensation). And it’s not only for books…I was told that there’s e-paper that’s capable of full-color 24 fps video. Can’t say enough about how blown away I was by the Librie. (Now for the bad: 10MB storage capacity, uses Sony’s Memory Sticks for more storage, and the content self-destructs after 60 days. If Sony opened this up and used normal flash memory like everyone else, this thing would be huge. Enormous. It’s a TV, video player, book, magazine, gaming platform, and hybrids of all of the above. Instead, they’ll probably keep it closed and someone else will capitalize on it.)
Anyway, if you can handle navigating the Japanese menus, you can get one from Dynamism for $600 (which I would totally do if I still had my old job).
“Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In
“Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber Greatest Invention In The History Of Mankind Ever”. “Popular Science quickly placed the chamber on the fold-out cover of its next issue, which reads, ‘FUCKING AWESOME!!! THE BALLS-OUT H.C. IS 40 TIMES BETTER THAN SEX… AND COUNTING!!!’”
How a couple of mathematicians helped the
How a couple of mathematicians helped the Met accurately photograph some priceless tapestries. The difficulty in piecing together the different photographs was because when the tapestries were taken off the wall, they “began to breathe, expanding, contracting, shifting”…that is, they were changing between photos.
Man bitten by a deadly Brazilian Wandering
Man bitten by a deadly Brazilian Wandering Spider is saved by his cameraphone pic he took of the spider. “Experts at Bristol Zoo were able to identify [the spider from the photo] and suggest an antidote.”
Super Size Me
Finally got around to seeing this documentary and loved it…but wanted to love it even more. There’s so much going these days in relation to America’s relationship with food: the growing obesity problem (especially among children), corporate exploitation of food for profit, governmental agencies like the FDA and USDA supporting corporations rather than educating consumers, corporate sponsored school meals, the never-ending diet mania, etc. and SSM only touched on these things tantalizingly briefly. I’m not sure how much of this stuff could have been explored more without disrupting the main narrative of Morgan Spurlock slowly killing himself with McDonald’s food, but a bit more substance would have been nice. Maybe co-writing the film with Eric Schlosser would have done the trick.
But still, for all the attention that Fahrenheit 9/11 received, the better documentary to open in the summer of 2004 was Super Size Me.
How big is Jesus?
How big is Jesus?. Based upon the amount of communion wafers and wine consumed by Christians, Jesus “weighs twenty million times more than you, and contains ninety-two billion times as much blood”.
On the occasion of its 25th birthday,
On the occasion of its 25th birthday, a history of the Post-It note.
Does advertising still work?
Does advertising still work?. “In 1965, advertisers could reach eighty per cent of their most coveted viewers — those between the ages of eighteen and forty-nine — just by buying time on CBS, NBC, or ABC.” Now it’s a lot more difficult and expensive to do so.
The NY Times’ Randy Cohen is making
The NY Times’ Randy Cohen is making a literary map of Manhattan. Not a map of where authors hung out, but where their characters did.
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials
NYPD: web sites are not eligible for working press credentials. Wait, doesn’t the NY Times have a web site?
Americans are getting more excited about cheese these days
Americans are getting more excited about cheese these days.
Why geeks and nerds are worth dating
Why geeks and nerds are worth dating. “They actually give a damn about you. Not how you look (though that’s a plus), not how skinny you are, not how much make-up you primp yourself up with, but they like you for you. That kind of thing lasts longer than ‘DaMN baby you got a fine ass!!!’”
A whole new internet?
After reading Janice’s piece, It’s a Whole New Internet, I didn’t really know how to feel about it. It is an exciting time on the web right now, but it doesn’t seem any more exciting than 2-3 years ago. At that time, blogs were really taking off, people were paying more attention to structured data in the form of RSS & XHTML/CSS, and using web services to paste together various apps and bits of data from around the web into new and useful services. But after thinking about it for a couple of days, what bothered me about it was echoed by Andre Torrez, who puts it a tad stronger (and funnier) than I would have:
Anyway, yes, there’s more money that seems to be available for people who have been building these apps, but the suggestion that people who make these sites are only now springing to life when money is available is kind of disappointing. I hate the equation that $1 million in funding == EXCITING OPPORTUNITIES. It’s how you fools lathered yourselves into the last bubble.
If your focus is on the neat technology shoehorned into some idea to make money then you’re going to be up to your ass in sock puppets again.
When the dot com economy was crumbling in 2000 and 2001, I remember thinking at the time that although everyone I knew was out of work (myself included), that is was a good thing for the long term. One of the more pleasant side effects of the dot com boom was that billions of dollars were spent training indivduals how to design web sites, program, write, etc. In the years following the bust, when all those people were suddenly unemployed or stuck in high-paying jobs that they didn’t care for very much but needed to pay the bills, they responded by starting to tinker around with all sorts of neat things, just for the hell of it. Because they could, because they wanted to, not because they had an artificial deadline to reach or some arbitrary client requests to satisfy.
They made apps and services that they wanted to use or thought that others would like to use, not only apps for which there was money available to build. There was no pressure…these people had nothing to lose and everything to gain. Out of this period came All Consuming, Movable Type, Amazon Light, millions of blogs, thousands of very active blog communities, the first consumer-grade newsreaders, Wikipedia (and thousands of other wikis), Firefox, FilePile, lots of social software (admittedly much of it of dubious value), Muxway (which became del.icio.us), a huge push toward XHTML/CSS-only sites, and a billion other things I’m forgetting, all when no one was putting any money into anything.
If you’re buying low and selling high, the time to buy optimism was two to four years ago, not now. That was when a small group of friends looked at a horrible economy and saw an opportunity to educate their clients and the rest of us about the value of user-centered design. When a husband and wife decided to build their own blog tool in their spare time because they wanted to use it. When an entreprenuer gambled that you could make money publishing weblogs. When a few folks decided that people needed a place to share their photos with friends. When a loose collective of designers showed us the possibilities of semantically correct standards-based web design. There’s still lots of opportunity these days, but it’s more expensive with less return.
Now that the money is back, the focus will necessarily shift even though, as Janice notes, we’ll be a little wiser about it this time around. There will be less innovation and activity from individuals because they’ll be snapped up by companies to work on their projects for their customers. The information flowing out of companies, even those that are pretty open, will be limited because of competitive and legal concerns. A person who — when she was unemployed 3 years ago — could spend a couple weeks in releasing a neat web app for anyone to use because she wanted to or could say what she wanted on her blog will now be putting all her coding energies into an application that serves a few customers & needs to be cash-flow positive and won’t have the time to post anything to her blog (and can’t say much about what she’s working on anyway unless all her readers want to sign NDAs). (Not saying this is bad…this is just what companies are for. But what’s good for companies, their shareholders, and their customers isn’t necessarily what’s good for environment those companies inhabit. On the other hand, everyone I know has more work than they know what to do with and that’s a good thing too.)
Consider Six Apart as an example of what I’m talking about. 6A is like a black hole for creative people. Folks who, a year or two ago, were among the leading voices in the discussion of how weblogs were changing our culture, were coding all sorts of useful plug-ins for Movable Type, or were pushing the edges of web design are now focused on making software that generates revenue and aren’t saying a whole lot about it. (Sort of ironic that working for 6A kills the weblogs of their employees, isn’t it?) That’s great for them, for Six Apart, their customers, and their partners, but it kinda sucks for the community as a whole.
(And just to head off some of the obvious criticism here, of course companies contribute to the common good (some more than others), competition creates opportunity, investment isn’t evil, Ajax is cool, innovation is still happening, etc., etc.)
Steven Johnson: “Imagine an alternate world identical
Steven Johnson: “Imagine an alternate world identical to ours save one techno-historical change: videogames were invented and popularized before books”. “Reading books chronically under-stimulates the senses. Unlike the longstanding tradition of gameplaying — which engages the child in a vivid, three-dimensional world filled with moving images and musical soundscapes, navigated and controlled with complex muscular movements — books are simply a barren string of words on the page.”
Some guy named Lee Walton versus Shaq
Some guy named Lee Walton versus Shaq in a free throw shooting competition. After each Heat game, Lee would attempt the same number of free throws as Shaq and tally the results. He lost to Shaq by 8 points.
“More big chefs are getting paid to
“More big chefs are getting paid to pitch everything from shrimp to raisins — and not telling their customers”. “The Seafood institute pays [chef Ty Fredrickson’s restaurant group] $10,000 a year to have the word Alaska in front of its king-crab and halibut dishes.”
The stupid West Side stadium
Amen to Kurt Anderson’s comments about the ridiculous proposal to plop a huge stadium for the Jets on the West Side of Manhattan:
When I asked the Planning Department’s spokesperson why the city needs a stadium for the Jets on that spot, she said it was “essential to jump-start development” in the neighborhood. Really? Essential? Right on the Hudson, immediately north of the successfully renovated Starrett-Lehigh office building and a thriving art neighborhood and Chelsea Piers? “There’s a hole there,” she said, referring to the MTA yards over which the stadium would be built. Holes can be filled in lots of other ways when they’re adjacent to living urban tissue, albeit not as quickly. Well, she said, the stadium—that is, the New York Sports and Convention Center—is the best option on the table.
With the stadium, what they’re doing is replacing one hole with another higher priced hole (with football!). But what’s the alternative?
But why not, as the transmogrified High Line helps propagate the Tribecafication of the adjacent blocks, imagine a tightly woven extension of the southern and eastern neighborhoods into the rail-yards site? Why not build apartments and hotels and theaters, a better, funkier Battery Park City? Or a big park? Or the second Guggenheim Museum? Or a campus for New School University? Why can’t this city assemble a brilliant team of designers and entrepreneurs to dream up a thrilling new piece of New York—people with as much visionary gusto as, say, the man who started a new kind of digital data and news company a quarter-century ago? It wouldn’t be finished in five years, because creating great new places that people are eager to visit and live in is not easy or fast. But wouldn’t it be better to be driven by the ambition to create a 21st-century Rockefeller Center than by a deadline to hold the 2010 Super Bowl and a 2012 torch-lighting ceremony?
Putting that stadium where they want to put it seems to me like sticking one of those huge outdoor gas grills in the middle of your bathroom. However yummy the food that’s made with it, that grill isn’t going to turn my bathroom into a kitchen and is only going to interfere with the proper operation of the bathroom (my dream of cooking a meal while showering as a time-saving technique notwithstanding). Like Anderson, I’ll be pulling for some other city to win the 2012 Olympic Games this summer. Anything to get another chunk of New York City breathing comfortably again.
A salt taste test: “From fleur de
A salt taste test: “From fleur de sel to kosher, which salt is best?”.
Cassini spacecraft finds complex hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Titan
Cassini spacecraft finds complex hydrocarbons in the atmosphere of Titan.
Chris Ware to self-publish own books and
Chris Ware to self-publish own books and graphic novels from now on.
The Gunning Fog Index of the last
The Gunning Fog Index of the last month of kottke.org posts is 10.70. That’s a little less than the Wall Street Journal and more than Time or Newsweek. (Three years ago it was 9.61…I’m getting less readable.)
David Byrne on how the tightening of
David Byrne on how the tightening of US borders keeps creativity out of our country. I imagine this has had an effect on the scientific community as well.
There are some signs that Americans are
There are some signs that Americans are actually paying off their credit card debt.
“There’s a game I like where you
“There’s a game I like where you have to think of people whose name makes a complete sentence”. “Tom Waits. Jeremy Irons. Jeff Bridges. Wesley Snipes.”
Audio from the Who Owns Culture? talk
Audio from the Who Owns Culture? talk by Lessig, Tweedy, and Johnson now online. Streaming audio or mp3.
PHP5, DOM, scraping web pages, and McSweeney’s Lists RSS
In preparation for a larger project, I recently spent some time playing around with PHP5’s DOM support to scrape web pages. Basically you point your script at a page and use the DOM methods to root around in it. This little chunk of code gets you a tree of the contents of all the
tags in document.html:
$dom = new DomDocument();
$file = ‘document.html’;
$dom->loadHTMLFile($file);
$pgs = $dom->getElementsByTagName(“p”);
I never learn anything like this without a little project to do, so I decided to use the above to make an RSS feed for McSweeney’s Lists (which currently doesn’t have one and now that I’m using a newsreader to keep up with the web, I never remember to visit there on anything resembling a regular basis). I’ve got a cron job set up that goes out and gets the lists page each night (using Tidy to convert their circa-1999 HTML to proper XHTML that can be easily parsed with the DOM), scans it for new lists (and if it finds new ones, puts them in a DB), and then writes an RSS file.
Anyway, here’s the RSS feed for McSweeney’s Lists. Since it relies on screen scraping, my meagre PHP skills, and the good graces of McSweeney’s in not asking me to shut it down, there’s no guarantee this will work forever, so enjoy it while you can. I’m trying out Feedburner as well, so we’ll see how that goes.
Update: my code snippet was incorrect and is now fixed. Thanks to Eliot for pointing that out.
Update: As some of you may have noticed, the above RSS feed has not worked for some months now…it broke at some point and I never got around to fixing it. Additionally, McSweeney’s has contacted me and asked me to discontinue the feed, so it won’t ever be fixed. They’re looking at doing their own RSS feeds and hopefully that will happen sooner rather than later.
Kerry supporters barred from international telecom meeting by Bush Administration
Kerry supporters barred from international telecom meeting by Bush Administration. This type of thing makes me *so* angry. It’s the fucking **US** government, not the Republican government or Bush government. So! Angry!
Maybe the high price of oil isn’t
Maybe the high price of oil isn’t such a bad thing. “When you look closely, it is hard to know what effect, exactly, oil prices have on the economy.”
Part one of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series
Part one of Elizabeth Kolbert’s three-part series on global warming for the New Yorker. “Disappearing islands, thawing permafrost, melting polar ice. How the earth is changing.”
According to this article, The Simpsons have
According to this article, The Simpsons have some new writing blood and the episodes are getting better. I’m skeptical because the show has been marginal for years now…maybe I’ll have to give it another try.
How to make a fire using just
How to make a fire using just a Coke can and a chocolate bar. You use the chocolate (which is a minor abrasive) to polish the underside of the can into a mirrored surface shiny enough to focus the sun’s rays effectively.
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links)
Comparing newspapers’ online “circulation” (# of blog links) with their offline circulation. The Christian Science Monitor had the highest ratio by far, with the Wall Street Journal being almost invisible on the web (which will eventually affect their influence, I think).
Steven Johnson says watching TV makes you smarter
Steven Johnson says watching TV makes you smarter. The argument is that media has had to get more cognitively challenging to hold the attention of viewers. Evolutionarily speaking, attention is the scarce commodity that creates competition here, driving adaptation in the direction of more social and narrative complexity to hold that attention.
Creative writing time
My pal Kdunk, who gave me a lucky dollar to hang on my wall on the occasion of my going full-time on kotte.org, recently posted an intriguing photo to Flickr. As the first commenter notes, “there goes a story”. As a creative writing exercise, what’s your take on what’s going on here? Doesn’t have to be true, just make something up. A picture is worth a thousand words, but I think this one may have a few more in it than that.
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