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If you want to sell your web startup, don’t take that much money from VCs or bootstrap the whole thing yourself. Too much money invested means that no one wants to buy your company for what your VCs require you to sell it for…especially if your business has limited prospects to begin with.
At the risk (ha!) of missing it, I waited until this late in the game to check out Safe: Design Takes On Risk at the MoMA. Great show. Two of my favorite items:
For you armchair museum goers, what looks to be the entire exhibition is available online.
Also, the MoMA around holiday time, not so crowded. (Well, relatively so. There were still a fair number of people there, just not so many as in the Build-A-Bear store on 5th Avenue.)
Two experts on street-level NYC go sightseeing in True Crime: New York City, a video game that has attempted to recreate the city down to its last manhole cover.
Stephanie Hendrick has tracked down the identity of an anonymous blogger (she matched them to a non-anonymous blog) using linguistic identity markers. See also secret sites. (via j/t)
Table of the odds of dying from various injuries. Looking at statistics like these, I’m always amazed at how worried people are about things that don’t often result in death (fireworks, sharks) and how relatively dangerous automobiles are (see, for example, this list of people on MySpace who have died…many of the deaths on the first two pages involve cars).
Me: Yeah, it’s like the plural of attorney general is attorneys general.
J: Attorneys general? I thought there was only one attorney general.
Me: Well, one for each state, and if they all go to a meeting or something…
M: Like, “all the attorneys general get together for the annual attorney general-a-thon.”
Me: Shouldn’t that be attorney-a-thon general?
Related: Engadget checked with Apple PR to see if it’s iPod shuffles or iPods shuffle. They said the former…I think it should be the latter.
AIGA Voice has an interview with Peter Morville about his new book, Ambient Findability. A question from the interview that everyone responsible for a web site should be asking themselves (emphasis mine): “Can [people] find your content, products and services despite your website?” Love that.
Profile of architect Renzo Piano. “People are starting to understand that the real challenge of the next 30 years is to turn peripheries [i.e. suburbs] into cities. The peripheries are the cities that will be. Or not. Or will never be.”
Rob Walker on the mass-produced individuality of CafePress.
Good review of Philip Tetlock’s new book about expert predicitons, Expert Political Judgment: How Good Is It? How Can We Know? “Human beings who spend their lives studying the state of the world, in other words, are poorer forecasters than dart-throwing monkeys, who would have distributed their picks evenly over the three choices.” Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen calls Tetlock’s book “one of the (few) must-read social science books of 2005”.
One of the most interesting things to come out of the secret sites discussion is that people are keeping their private journals on the web instead of in a paper journal under their mattress or in a Word document on their computer. This sounds surprising, but there’s a couple of good reasons for it:
I bet few would have predicted keeping personal diaries secret as a use of the public internet several years ago.
The economics of sex…does fear of AIDS make male less likely to self-identify as homosexual?
The Burtynsky exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum of Art sounds good. I hope to get over there before it closes on January 15. Here’s his site with lots of photographs. “He often will shoot an image on three or four different brands of film, then print each image on three or four different brands of paper…then chooses the combination that produces the richest and most vivid look.”
Stylus Magazine’s top 50 (music) singles of 2005, including the top 20 lists of each of the contributors. If you can’t find something catchy to listen to here, you’ve given up. (thx, marco)
The New Yorker has posted online Brokeback Mountain, the 1997 short story by Annie Proulx on which the Jake Gyllenylnllynyyllhaal / Heath Ledger / Ang Lee film is based.
Yahoo! buys del.icio.us…muxway is all growed up. There’s an interesting story in here somewhere about how Yahoo! is hiring/buying the “alpha geeks” (hackers, tinkerers, accidental entrepreneurs) and Google seemingly isn’t (Ph.Ds, computer scientists) and what effect that could have on each company’s development.
The Economist asks “will computer-animated humans ever look realistic on screen?” but with nary a mention of the uncanny valley.
Bunny suicides. In how many ways can a bunny off itself? (thx, richard)
Update: Turns out these are scans from The Book of Bunny Suicides. In exchange for viewing the pirated copy on the web, how about picking up one for a twisted friend for the holidays?
If I remember correctly, Tense Present (published in the April 2001 issue of Harper’s) was the first bit of writing I ever read by David Foster Wallace. I didn’t fall for him immediately. I liked the article fine, but as I thought more about it in the following weeks — particularly in light of other nonfiction I was reading in magazines and newspapers — the more I liked it. A quick search on the Web revealed that not only had this Wallace written more nonfiction for magazines, he’d written entire books and was considered by some to be the best young author writing in America. A few months later I read Infinite Jest and it was love.
Tense Present is one of the essays included in Consider the Lobster, a collection of nonfiction by Wallace due out on December 13th. It’s included under a new name (Authority and American Usage) and is, like many of the other pieces in the book, the “director’s cut” of the original, but re-reading it brought back good memories about, well, how good it was to discover Wallace’s writing.
Several of essays in CtL I’d read before, including the title essay from the Aug 2004 issue of Gourmet (which according to Gourmet EIC Ruth Reichl almost didn’t make it into the magazine at all). I read The View From Mrs. Thompson’s in Rolling Stone shortly after 9/11 and remember thinking that it was the best reaction to 9/11 that I’d seen, but reading it again 4 years later, the impact wasn’t quite the same…until the last 2-3 paragraphs when you remember that he spends the whole essay setting the table so he can hit you with the whole meal in one mouthful and you then spend several hours attempting to digest what you’ve just read.
The View… and Up, Simba, a piece on John McCain’s 2000 bid for President that also ran in Rolling Stone (at half the length under the title The Weasel, Twelve Monkeys, and the Shrub), were my favorites, but they’re all so good (if you enjoy reading nonfiction in Wallace’s signature style, which I very much do). A common complaint of Wallace’s writing is that it’s not very straightforward, even though clarity seems to be his purpose. I don’t mind the challenge the writing provides; I read Wallace for a similar reason Paul is reading surrealist poetry, to make my brain work a little bit for its reward. In The End of Print, David Carson outlined his design philosophy in relation to its ultimate goal, communication. Carson used design to make people work to decipher the message with the idea that by doing that work, they would be more likely to remember the message. I’d like to think that Wallace approaches his writing similarly.
Web design contest offers the potential winner a chance to “fire missiles remote-controlled by computer at a US military base in Iraq”. (via tmn)
The social networks of the rap music world “differ from all other human networks”. By and large, successful rap artists don’t collaborate/hang out with one another, as usually happens in other human social groups. (via cd)
iTunes Signature Maker analyzes your iTunes collection (in the browser via a Java applet) and creates a short sound collage of the music that you listen to most frequently or have rated highly. Here’s the signatute it created for me. (thx, paul)
How to make your best-of-the-year music list as hip as it can be. “Make sure to include an album that just came out. This will lead people to believe that you got an advanced copy months ago and had plenty of time to get into it.”
Three economists share a cab, getting off at three different destinations. How do they split the fare? For answers, you might look to John Nash or the Talmud.
How It Should Have Ended, alternate endings to some movies, including Star Wars, Seven, and Saving Private Ryan.
Interview with “incompetent design” theorist Don Wise. “The only reason you stand erect is because of this incredible sharp bend at the base of your spine, which is either evolution’s way of modifying something or else it’s just a design that would flunk a first-year engineering student.”
Cory Arcangel is committing Friendster Suicide tonight at The Believer Dec/Jan issue launch party at PS1. You can also follow along at home: “Friendster me sometime before [the performance], and around 8:40 EST on Thursday(ish), I assume if you keep reloading your browser window on Friendster, I think I will simply disappear from your friend list.” Antisocial networking.
There’s nothing good about the shooting of airline passenger Rigoberto Alpizar by air marshals. Guns on airplanes — I don’t care who’s wielding them under what authority — is a bad idea; some alternative thinking is needed.
A “song quilt” for Boards of Canada’s The Campfire Headphase album. “Listening to the recording, I ignored song titles; creating images that represent the intangible connection between what I was hearing and what I was ‘seeing’ in my head”. There was a design site that did something like this several years ago…one of the Swanky sites, I think. Ring a bell?
Gapminder has a ton of stats and resources about human population and development trends. (thx, chris)
Author Jeremy Mercer picks his top 10 bookstores in the world. Any personal favorites that you’d add to the list?
The Carpetbagger is a NY Times weblog written by David Carr that covers awards season in Hollywood.
Watch the kids get into a good old fashioned font fight in the comments about fake signs on the NYC subway. Don’t miss your chance to read “it’s Helvetica, bitches” in a context where it makes complete sense. (thx, j guns)
GameSpot has an ongoing series of articles about the greatest video games of all time. Lode Runner, Tetris, Quake, Oregon Trail, Defender, and Metroid all make the list.
A small selection of photos from Hong Kong. Photos from Bangkok and Saigon coming soon.
Seven key principles that Google uses to make their employees more effective. “At Google, the role of the manager is that of an aggregator of viewpoints, not the dictator of decisions.”
Penn Jillette on why he believes “there is no God”.
Great profile by Michael Lewis of Mike Leach, Texas Tech’s football coach. Leach “believes that both failure and success slow players down, unless they will themselves not to slow down.” ‘When they fail, they become frustrated. When they have success, they want to become the thinking-man’s football team.’” Must-read article if you’re even a casual football fan. Here’s another article on Leach from the SJ Merc.
Update: Steven Levitt and the Freakonomist commenters weigh in on Lewis’ article. (thx, michael)
An investigation into the properties of number spirals (and prime numbers).
Who doesn’t love advertising CMYK jokes? “A Clockwork C:0 M:60 Y:90 K:0”
Scientists have found a probable carrier for the ebola virus: fruit bats. According to the WHO, ebola causes death in “50-90% of all clinically ill cases”.
The decompression from my trip to Asia continues. I have read through ~8000 items in my newsreader and discarded almost all of them (despite much interest in solving the problem, no one has built a machine that has any idea about what content needles I want out of the media haystack).
However, one item caught my interest (although I can’t remember where I saw it): someone asked their readers how many secret sites/blogs they maintained. That is, sites that no one knows you’re the author of (written anonymously or with a nom de plume) or sites to which the general public does not have access. If I remember correctly, a large number of the respondents not only maintained a secret site, but had several. I have one secret blog, published under my own name, that only a small group of friends can read. I just started it recently (after learning that several friends have been doing this for awhile) and don’t update it very often. How about you…any secret sites? Why keep them on the down-low?
Zach Klein: “Then, just now, I remembered that I live in the future.” (Related but unrelated, now that we’re living in the future, what do we expect to happen in the actual future? This is actually a serious question…society has a collective vision of the future and now that we’re there — ubiquitous huge flat panel tvs, real-time recording/documenting of everything, Segways, personally targetted advertising, etc. — what’s our new collective vision of the future like?)
Adobe is planning on combining Flash Player and Acrobat Reader? As Todd says, “I don’t know about you, but I just got an acrid taste in my mouth”.
Update: John Dowdell notes that Adobe has clarified their position re: the above combination: “we will continue delivering the Flash Player as a small, efficient runtime for content and applications on the web”. (thx, neil)
With the release of Xbox 360, game designers are bumping up against the uncanny valley problem, where in-game avatars are looking a bit too real for comfort. “When it first lurched out of the mysterious tropical cave and fixed its cadaverous eyes on me, I could barely look at the monstrosity. I’m speaking, of course, of Naomi Watts.”
Wikipedia closes its open doors just a little bit and now requires people to register before they can edit entries on the site create new entries on the site, a change made due to recent complaints.
Update: Wikipedia requires registration to create new entries…anyone can still edit an existing entry. (thx, marco)
New feature from Slate: Today’s Pictures in collaboration with Magnum Photos.
Why are rental cars American cars? Why don’t rental car companies use the superior Japanese product?
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