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From a recent study: “In general, higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies”. This seems like a potential chicken/egg issue…is religion the cause of all this or do unhealty societies cause people to find religion?
PingMag interviews designer Stefan Sagmeister about his work.
Whoa, Ziploc makes giant bags now, up to 2ft x 2.7ft. When I told Meg about them, she said, “what do they hold, children?” (???) (via ghckr)
Todd Levin on the busy modern world: “I’m doing so much more, and getting so much less done”.
Neat applet that displays orbit patterns for various particle arrangements.
Flowers don’t smell as good as they used to and part of the reason is breeding…they’re breeding flowers for looks and longevity, not for scent. I believe Michael Pollan discusses this in his excellent The Botany of Desire (tulip chapter).
The Onion: Lance Armstrong’s Endurance Tested By Sheryl Crow Concert.
A complete list of nicknames that George W. Bush has for people. A lot of people think the nicknames thing is stupid, but really it’s the only sign of Bush having any sort of personality aside from that of Bad Speech Bot.
Ahhhhhh!!!! Why didn’t anyone #$%(#&ing tell me that Boards of Canada is releasing a new album next month? My excitement for this, it could cut glass, it could!
When Teen Talk Barbie came out in 1989 saying things like “math is hard”, could you imagine if blogs had existed at the time? The whole internet would have exploded with rage.
Dutch linguists are analyzing the origin of languages using the structure of the languages “such as where verbs appear in clauses”.
Bats may be the source of SARS. “Researchers found a virus closely related to the Sars coronavirus in bats from three regions of China”.
Google and NASA have announced plans to collaborate on projects like “large-scale data management, massively distributed computing, bio-info-nano convergence, and encouragement of the entrepreneurial space industry”. In 6 months, Yahoo will announce a collaboration with the Russian Space Agency to launch original content into space. Microsoft will announce in a year that they’ve had space travel capabilities built into Office for years now but no one uses it…in two years time, they’ll completely reorg around manned missions to Mars.
Awesome awesome awesome alternate trailer for Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (local mirror). Andy calls this “one of the best video clips I’ve seen all year” and he’s not wrong.
This looks like an interesting book from O’Reilly: Practical Development Environments. “This book doesn’t tell you how to write faster code, or how to write code with fewer memory leaks, or even how to debug code at all. What it does tell you is how to build your product in better ways, how to keep track of the code that you write, and how to track the bugs in your code. Plus some more things you’ll wish you had known before starting a project.”
The AIGA has podcasts and presentation materials up for some of the speakers from the Design Conference (my full coverage here). Several of the main stage speeches are up, as well as backstage interviews with some of the participants. In particular, I would recommend:
These aren’t just for designers; they’re perfectly fine for non-designers as well. Here’s the RSS file with all the resources…it should work well with your favorite podcasting software or newsreader. It’s great that the AIGA is making these presentations freely available…you’re getting a lot of the conference for free here. If I remember correctly, not even O’Reilly offers the presentations or podcasts for download after their events like Etech.
Update: Wrong again! IT Conversations has several podcasts from the last Etech conference. (thx tim)
The Army’s Be All You Can Be ads don’t really work all that well, despite being the 25th largest advertiser in the US. Recruiting is actually correlated more closely with the economy…the economy goes bad and the number of recruits goes up. Here’s a better way to spend that ad money: give it to incoming recruits as bonuses…the same strategy Amazon uses in offering free shipping to customers rather than spending that money on TV ads. (thx garrick)
Teenaged necktie maven Baruch Shemtov. He made his first tie for school and has since turned it into a business, selling his wares in Fifth Avenue shops and online for $100 apiece.
Here’s the formula for a New Yorker cartoon: take a person/entity from Column A, and have them interact with a person/entity from Column B in a location from Column C. Voila, comedy jackpot!
Neat visual history of Nikon SLR cameras. It would be neat to make an animation of how the cameras changed through time.
The new $10 bill ain’t too attractive. Why can’t we have nice things?
Tim O’Reilly op-ed about the Authors Guild’s lawsuit against Google regarding their Library Project. “Obscurity is a far greater threat to authors than copyright infringement, or even outright piracy”. The op-ed follows Tim’s earlier post on the subject.
Hot indie band Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (who I like quite alot) has sold 17,000 copies of their self-released debut. The band sends out the CDs to customers themselves and makes $8/disc (compared to $1/disc for major label groups). Their CD is available here and you can listen to some samples before buying (1, 2, 3).
First photos of the giant squid ever captured. In capturing the photos, they ripped one of the squid’s tentacles off, which has made the squid a bit angry.
Book reviews based on a random sentence from each book. On Moby-Dick: “People who enjoy witty banter will love this tale of two unlikely friends, Ahab and Stubb.”
An intrepid New York magazine reporter waits for meals at various NYC restaurants and reports back as to whether they were worth the wait or not. Shake Shack? Worth the wait. (via meg)
7 Habits of Highly Successful People. I think this may be one of my favorite McSweeney’s lists ever. (Crap, the McSweeney’s RSS feed doesn’t seem to be working properly…gotta check into that later.)
Richard Dawkins on Gerin oil, a highly addictive drug that’s dangerous to society. You may find the Internet Anagram Server useful in understanding what Dawkins is getting at.
Charlie Trotter bails out of his planned restaurant in the Time Warner Center and it seems that Vongerichten’s steakhouse might not be far behind. As I can attest from a fantastic birthday gift dinner, Per Se is doing quite well.
If public parks (like NYC’s Bryant Park) offer free wifi, why don’t expensive hotels? I can’t find the link right now, but I remember reading something awhile ago (possibly on Boing Boing) arguing that free wifi was easier and cheaper for businesses to offer than a paid option because you don’t need the ecommerce bit (sort of like a free grocery store not needing cashiers, etc.) and the free internet will bring people in.
Update: Here’s that Boing Boing post: “Operating a WiFi hotspot that you charge money for costs $30 a day. Operating a free WiFi hotspot costs $6.” (thx alex)
The streets of Marin are slick with potatoes au gratin. Terrorist attack? If so, how long before possessing a bag of Yukon Golds wins you a free trip to exotic Guantanamo Bay?
Eliot’s stalking of The Donald finally pays off with this shot from Fashion Week of him and his newish bride. (Note to Mr. Trump’s lawyers and/or law enforcement: Eliot is not really stalking Donald Trump. Well, at least I don’t think he is. I mean, he could be, but probably not. Probably.)
Buried treasure worth $10 billion (!!!) is found on the Robinson Crusoe Island by a robot invented by a Chilean company. The loot is comprised of gold and jewels stolen from the Incans by Spanish conquistadors. The estimated 2004 GDP of Chile is $169.1 billion. (via mm)
Troyis is a game that utilizes chess moves (just the knight/horsey actually). Easy to start, difficult to master.
Today is my birthday — I’m 2^5!** — so I’m taking the day off. No posts or links, aside from this one.
** That’s ! as in exclamation point, not ! as in factorial. I’m not 1.33 x 10^36 years old today.
Moreover to be purchased by “much larger multi-national company”. I worked at Moreover as a web designer for 10 months back in 2000-1.
An ode to the NYC subway’s 7 train. “What is remarkable is the sense of transference that occurs. Manhattan is an international place but it brings all the world into its orbit. Queens reverses that.”
Profile of Google’s Marissa Mayer, Google’s answer to Apple’s Jonathan Ive. She grew up about 100 miles from me in northern WI.
“Floating Island” is a mini version of Central Park being towed around Manhattan by a tugboat (photos here)…it’s a conceptual art piece by Robert Smithson. This weekend, a group of folks in a motorboat tried to board the floating park and install a miniature version of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s The Gates. When the captain of the boat towing the island “looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly”.
Cool Google Maps photo of the taxi lot at JFK. (via new york hack)
The co-screenwriter of War of the Worlds on getting credit for said screenwriting (he wrote early drafts which were later rewritten by someone else) and then going to the NYC premiere of the film. (thx stephanie)
Awesome set of food photos with little people on them. They’re buried in a Flash interface (grr, Flash), but it’s worth the trouble to find them. Skip the intro, click on “minimiam”, and then select one of the “galeries” (primeurs, gourmandise, etc.). (via dtb)
Many of these super slow motion movies are quite entertaining, moreso than the standard milk-drop and bullet-through-apple ones. My favorite is the bursting water balloon…the water retains its shape for several moments before giving into gravity. So cool.
I had this idea the other day that instead of having to open my laptop or turn on the TV to check the weather report, my toaster could burn that information onto my breakfast toast as a passive information delivery mechanism. I knew that people had wired toasters to print images on them, but I didn’t remember that someone had done the weather thing already. That got me thinking about what other information a toaster could print on bread. A graph of the previous day’s DJIA activity? Photo of your kids? The Red Sox score from last night?
There are constraints, of course. Bread is not exactly a high resolution medium. A course wheat bread would be difficult to print on while a dense rye might give you a couple dozen ppi to work with. But then you run into a contrast problem…toasted rye bread isn’t much darker than untoasted rye bread. Now, if you were to use Pop Tarts, they’re a little more high-res, a finer grained paper. You might even be able to print a few lines of text if the heating elements were precise enough…your stocks, meeting schedule for the day, top news stories, shopping list, the 5-day forecast, or a serial short story that you read over a few breakfasts (you could call them Breakfast Serials™!!). Or maybe toasters will be free in the future, with the toaster companies making their money from advertising printed on your morning toast, not unlike the free newspapers they hand out in the NYC subways.
Though what would be even better is wifi-enabled Alpha Bits. Just connect the box to your local network, pour yourself some cereal, and view the five most recent headlines from your RSS reader floating in your milk. Then right click your bowl to open up links on the screen in your refrigerator. That and a rocket-powered hoverbike, please.
If you spend any time in restaurants, you might find May We Tell You About Our Specials This Evening? as hilarious as I did.
Send in a photo showing your profile, and Turn Your Head will produce a wooden pedestal with the outline of your sillouette (the photo on the site makes more sense…).
I had more than a few of the cards in this worthless baseball card collection. Ah, commons.
Praise be, someone’s picked up the development of the MTAmazon plug-in for Movable Type. (thx jason)
Not sure if this is new or not, but Moodgrapher tracks the moods (worried, happy, depressed, sick, etc.) of LiveJournal users in order to determine what the overall mood of the world/internet/blogosphere is. (thx ben)
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