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The Onion: Tiger Woods Signs $15 Million Deal To Endorse Alex Rodriguez. “Now that beloved, recognizable superstar Tiger Woods is the new face of Alex Rodriguez, we hope to see some [endorsement] offers start rolling in.”
Paula Scher: “My favorite job is the one I’m going to do tomorrow”.
Update on the Million Dollar Homepage…it’s actually starting to fill up. He’s sold almost $100,000 worth of space so far. This is beginning to look like an absolutely brilliant idea.
Fascinating and disturbing realistic drawings of Mario and Luigi. Some things you can’t unsee. (via alice)
Six Apart announces Comet, which at this early stage is hard to define exactly, but seems to be some kind of overall repositioning/refocus of their existing products toward consumer user-friendliness. Or is it an entirely other product/platform? Anyway, I doubt whether it will be the promised “next generation blogging software”…that’s been guaranteed many times by many people/companies and has yet to be lived up to. IMO, blog tools are still in the Blogger generation (although I might be the only one who thinks that at this point).
Cory Arcangel has gone INSANE and is offering original signed posters of his work for like $20. The posters feature the haunting landscape of the old school Famicom driving game F1 Racer.
Patrick Pittman makes a good case for Homicide: Life on the Streets being the best TV show ever. I loved Homicide and am convinced it would have found a great audience in this age of TiVo and quick-to-DVD (it was a difficult show to catch on Friday nights). Re: best TV ever, The Simpsons, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and M*A*S*H have to be near the top of the list…what are your favorites?
Interview with Sidney Frank, the guy who brought Jagermeister to the US in a big way and sold his Grey Goose vodka brand to Bacardi for more than $2 billion.
Scientists have explained the Cheerio Effect, answering why things like Cheerios floating in milk tend to clump together.
Subway has gotten rid of their Sub Club cards and stamps, citing the greater ease of fraud these days with color printers and such. Before they stopped it, my dad cashed in his entire supply of cards, eating free for about two weeks.
Interview with Edward Castronova, video game economist. Quite an interesting thought from him about using MMORPGs to test economies and social systems. “I think the smart thing for the US state department to do today is build a game about Islam but make it a democracy. And set it up so that every 16-year-old from Morocco to Pakistan can go into that world when they get a computer. Not say anything overt about democracy but have them play — have them vote, for example.” (via bbj)
The science behind shyness, an “affliction” shared by 30% of the population (the lurkers in real life). Reminds of the fantastic Caring for Your Introvert from The Atlantic Monthly a couple of years ago. Sadly, the article has disappeared behind the Atlantic’s pay wall, but I posted a short excerpt here.
Update: The complete Caring for Your Introvert article is available on the author’s web site. (thx chris and several others)
I used to be a real stick in the mud when it came to big Hollywood action movies; I had no love for them at all. Since about XXX, I’ve grown to enjoy them for what they are and add them to my balanced movie-going diet. Come to think of it, the recent Star Wars movies may have contributed to this shift as well…after all, I somehow had to reconcile my childhood love of SW and the not-so-goodness of the prequels (well, minus Episode III, which I flat out loved and will fight anyone who says different to the death).
War of the Worlds, aside from all the tabloid crap that accompanied the film and its (nutball) star and his new store-bought fiance, is pretty damn entertaining to watch once you accept that it’s a cheesy Hollywood action movie.
The NY Times Magazine has launched The Funny Pages, their comics+ section. PDFs of the comics are available online…here’s the first Chris Ware strip. They’re also podcasting and the first episode is an interview with Ware by John Hodgman, assisted by organist and radio-man Jonathan Coulton.
For what seems like the last 2 hours, I’ve been reading Kevin Smith’s blog (Flickr photos here), and I have no idea why. He calls it “Kevin’s Boring Ass Life” and that’s what it is…a typical entry is not much more than “got up, checked email, dropped off kid at school, lunch, dinner, sex with wife, then watched movies/Simpsons until asleep”. Couldn’t stop reading though…
What should I read next? is what it says…you enter the title and author of a book you like and the site will suggest something for you to read next.
Interview with Hayao Miyazaki about Howl’s Moving Castle and his films in general.
As discussed previously, there’s a whole lot a restauranting going on in Chelsea on 10th Ave these days. If two is a trend, what do you call all of this?
For those who are lazy about their religion, there’s the 100-Minute Bible, sort of a Cliff Notes version of the Good Book. “The 100-Minute Bible is primarily intended for people who have an interest in Christianity but not the time (nor tenacity!) to read the whole Bible. As the title indicates most people will only take 100 minutes to read it, making it ideal for an upcoming rail or aeroplane journey.”
Epicurious lists ten hated restaurant trends. “To enjoy the brioche bread pudding, it’s really not necessary to know the name of the farm that supplied the eggs.” (via tmn)
Quick interview with Bobby Henderson, Prophet of the church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.
This is most insane travel deal I’ve ever seen…Caribbean cruise during the winter for as low as $5/person/night. Those low fares are probably difficult to find and are also all sold out by now, but still. The company behind the cruises also does easyJet and the newly opened easyHotels in London and Switzerland (rooms from 15 euros a night).
Merlin’s excellent advice for writing sensible email messages. This one is excellent advice for email and blog comments: “Emails to a thread are like comments at a meeting; think of both like your time possessing the basketball. Don’t just chuck at the net every chance you get. Hang back and watch for how you can be most useful. Minimize noise.”
Interesting rumination on the possibility of flash memory-based computers. “In two years I have a feeling that Jobs will announce an Intel-flash iBook that will be the thinest laptop ever made boasting the best battery life of any current machine”.
Nobody’s talking about the anal sex portion of a recently released survey on American sexual habits. “Evidently anal sex is too icky to mention in print. But not too icky to have been tried by 35 percent of young women and 40 to 44 percent of young men — or to have killed some of them.”
Kurzweil’s new book on the singularity is out at the end of the month. It’s a sequel to the excellent The Age of Spiritual Machines. “By 2045, we’ll get to a point where technical progress will be so fast that unenhanced human intelligence will be unable to follow it”.
Typetester is a web-based font comparison tool which somehow (I’m assuming JavaScript) can preview text in the fonts you have installed on your local machine. Pretty cool.
Neat article on Charlie Ayers, Google’s former chef, and his future plans to open his own eco-aware restaurant.
How to make X-wing fighters (from Star Wars) out of Paris Metro tickets. I gotta try this…I’ve got about a zillion of these laying around because they make great bookmarks.
Profile of Robert Trivers who “came up with the first Darwinian explanations for human cooperation, jealousy and our sense of justice that made genetic sense, and he showed how these arose from the same forces as act on all animals, from the pigeons outside his window to the fish of coral reefs”.
Scientists are having a bit of fun wondering about the genetics of wizardry in Harry Potter. “This suggests that wizarding ability is inherited in a mendelian fashion, with the wizard allele (W) being recessive to the muggle allele (M). According to this hypothesis, all wizards and witches therefore have two copies of the wizard allele (WW).”
The MacArthur Foundation has announced their 2005 Fellows…the so-called genius grant. Fellows “will be given $500,000 in ‘no strings attached’ support over the next five years”.
Suroweicki on gas prices and Katrina: “Americans are happy with the free market when it allows them to buy cheap T-shirts and twenty-nine-dollar DVD players, but they tend to like it less when they have to pay fifty dollars to fill up their gas tanks.”
Two new airlines are about to start offering all-business class service to/from NYC and London starting at prices more than half than those offered by existing carriers like AA and BA.
Kenneth LeVay has invented a new type of screw (designed using computer modeling) which works even in concrete or plastic.
The citizens of World of Warcraft are being infected by a disease that got out of hand, just like in the real world. “Blizzard recently added the Zul’Gurub instance to the game, where Hakkar, the god of blood, uses a devastating disease attack on anyone who dares fight him. Seeing as how it’s a disease and most diseases are contagious, it shouldn’t be shocking when some players come back and haven’t been cured.” (via waxy)
Here’s a sampling of the rest of the AIGA Design Conference, stuff that I haven’t covered yet and didn’t belong in a post of it’s own:
1. Design is the easy part.
2. Learn from your clients, bosses, collaborators, and colleagues.
3. Content is king.
4. Read. Read. Read.
5. Think first, then design.
6. Never forget how lucky you are. Enjoy yourself.
For more of what people are saying about the conference, check out IceRocket. There’s a bunch of photos on Flickr as well.
The list of the 100 greatest theorems in mathematics is topped by The Irrationality of the Square Root of 2 from that nutball Pythagoras. Jesus, who does Godel have to sleep with to get higher on this list…I mean, all the man did was destroy math! (I know, I know, oversimplification, please don’t send me any email….) (via cyn-c)
Planned Parenthood in Southeastern Pennsylvania is running a unique pledge drive. The idea is that you pledge an amount of money for each anti-abortion protestor that shows up outside of the PP health center. “We will place a sign outside the health center that tracks pledges and makes protesters fully aware that their actions are benefiting PPSP”. That’s genius. (via freak)
Marginal Revolution recently experimented with opening up comments on their posts and here are their results. I’ve noticed the same pattern on kottke.org, especially “the more that comments are regularly available, the more rapidly the quality of comments falls”.
Hillman Curtis has added some new (to me) videos to his series of interviews with designers, including interviews with the folks at Pentagram and David Carson.
Cymothoa exigua is a crustacean parasite that eats the tongue of the host fish and then attaches itself to the mouth of the fish and functions as the tongue would have, sharing in the food that the fish brings in.
Local man uses Google Maps to find the undiscovered remains of a Roman villa near his town in Italy.
I quite enjoyed Sagmeister’s presentation on happiness…where else but a design conference would you find a talk on that topic?[1] Early in, he suggested that visualizing happiness with design is easy (photos of someone laughing or a smiley face will do it) but that creating design that provokes happiness in the viewer is something else entirely. He then shared three designs that have made him happy recently:
Sagmeister wrapped up his talk with a list of things he has learned and how he’s used that list in a recent series of projects:
“Complaining is silly…” is my favorite, both as advice and his implementation of the design. A few of these are in this video shot by Hillman Curtis.
[1] Ok, maybe at a clown conference, but still.
PopTech announced their speakers and program recently, but it looks like they’ve sold out already.
At the beginning of the conference, sketchbooks were distributed to every attendee. We were urged to sketch our thoughts during the sessions & panels in our books and then tape the results onto the Sketch Wall in the Design Fair. As I was too busy typing into my virtual sketchbook (plus, I can’t draw), I left the drawing to others, but I did head down to the Design Fair to see what other attendees had done. Here’s a couple I found interesting:
In addition to the sketches, the wall was also being utilized more generally for graffiti, both written (with marker and paint) and created with the tape used to fasten the sketches to the wall. Here’s a favorite bit of tape graffiti (tapeffiti?):
![I [heart] undo](/cdn-cgi/image/format=auto,fit=scale-down,width=1200,metadata=none//plus/misc/images/aiga-sk-undo.jpg)
That would make a great tshirt.
Coming soon to the MoMa: Safe: Design Takes on Risk “presents more than 300 contemporary products and prototypes designed to protect body and mind from dangerous or stressful circumstances, respond to emergencies, ensure clarity of information, and provide a sense of comfort and security”.
Update: Business Week has a preview of the exhibition as well as a slideshow of some of the objects in the exhibit.
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