When restaurants are in beta, should they
When restaurants are in beta, should they be charging you full price for dinner?
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for February 2006
Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet
Modern-Day John Henry Dies Trying To Out-Spreadsheet Excel 11.0. “Now, 20 rows down, the accounting’s hard as granite — it’s the hardest thing an office man can stand, but you keep your pencil sharp, and you keep your pencil working. It’s the life of a numbers-crunchin’ man.”
Fingernails painted with the Six Apart logo.
Fingernails painted with the Six Apart logo. Now, that’s a fan.
Boxes and Arrows has an interview with
Boxes and Arrows has an interview with Adam Greenfield on his new book, Everyware. “Increasingly invisible but present everywhere in our lives, [computing] has moved off the desktop and out into everyday life — affecting almost every one of us, whether we’re entirely aware of it or not.”
The story of downtown San Francisco’s failed
The story of downtown San Francisco’s failed Metreon. A mall by any other name is still a mall.
Canon, Sony, and Nikon top the list
Canon, Sony, and Nikon top the list of the most-used camera on Flickr. Nokia is #11.
Figure skater Johnny Weir loves to shop. (via lia)
Figure skater Johnny Weir loves to shop. (via lia)
David argues for more variation and serendipity
David argues for more variation and serendipity in video games. “…games overcompensate for their lack of variance in game play with over-the-top psychedelic graphics and sound effects. This is not a new problem of course with Pac-man and Super Mario Brothers often held up as classic examples.”
Andy unearths an old video game by
Andy unearths an old video game by Penn and Teller called Smoke and Mirrors, which famously features a game in which you drive a bus for 16 straight hours to score a single point. See also Takeshi no Chousenjou, a similarly challenging Japanese game.
Slashlinks
Ben Engebreth, a compadre of mine at the Eyebeam OpenLab, has released Slashlinks, a tool for automatically mirroring links from del.icio.us to your personal web site. At first glance it might sound like a simple archiving tool, a way to get your data out of del.icio.us, but what it actually does is reproduces your del.icio.us links on your web site.
Check out Ben’s links for an example. If you click on a tag name, you can see that not only the links but the underlying tag structure has been reproduced locally. Once the links are on your site, you can style them how you wish (as Ben has), publish them where you want, etc. And Slashlinks will also keep your local links fresh…if you keep using the publishing tools at del.icio.us to add links, they will automagically show up on your site.
Idolspize…when you simultaneously idolize and despise someone.
Idolspize…when you simultaneously idolize and despise someone.
Fox lips the new blond? A slideshow
Fox lips the new blond? A slideshow of the glut of blond female news anchors concludes by asking if big puffy “Fox” lips are the next big trend. “When Rita Cosby switched from Fox to MSNBC, a construction crane was called in to move [her lips], which resemble a pair of oily, red eels mating angrily.”
eBay bidders…”would you rather pay $10 and
eBay bidders…”would you rather pay $10 and have free shipping or pay $5 and pay $6 for shipping?” Most prefer the latter.
Ultimate screenshot collection of Tetris for the
Ultimate screenshot collection of Tetris for the Nintendo DS. Metroid + Tetris??!! Awesome.
Olympic snowboarders competed while listening to their
Olympic snowboarders competed while listening to their iPods. The goal? Effortless concentration. “It enables you to focus on what you’re doing without actually focusing, if that makes any sense. You’re not over-thinking, and that’s the best way to perform the harder tricks and maneuvers.”
You want to see the best list
You want to see the best list of advice ever, one that might save your career or remaining sanity? 9 tips for running more productive meetings.
Kian and Remee are twin daughters born
Kian and Remee are twin daughters born to a UK couple…one is black and one is white. “If a sperm containing all-white genes fuses with a similar egg and a sperm coding for purely black skin fuses with a similar egg, two babies of dramatically different colours will be born. The odds of this happening are… a million to one.”
Chris Ware overrated? That’s what this illustration fan thinks.
Chris Ware overrated? That’s what this illustration fan thinks.
Unknown (relatively speaking) indie rock bands are
Unknown (relatively speaking) indie rock bands are turning down large sums of money from GM for licensing their music for Hummer ads. “It had to be the worst product you could give a song to. It was a really easy decision. How could we go on after soundtracking Hummer? It’s just so evil.” (via rw)
For those that like wearing what you’re
For those that like wearing what you’re eating, check out Jeremy Scott’s food-inspired fashion. Hamburger shirt and french fry pants…yummy. (via culiblog)
Abortion manual for the women of South Dakota
In reaction to the South Dakota Senate passing an abortion ban bill, a woman named Molly has posted an abortion manual for the women of South Dakota:
In the 1960s and early 1970s, when abortions were illegal in many places and expensive to get, an organization called Jane stepped up to the plate in the Chicago area. Jane initially hired an abortion doctor, but later they did the abortions themselves. They lost only one patient in 13,000 — a lower death rate than that of giving live birth. The biggest obstacle they had, though, was the fact that until years into the operation, they thought of abortion as something only a doctor could do, something only the most trained specialist could perform without endangering the life of the woman.
They were deceived — much like you have probably been deceived. An abortion, especially for an early pregnancy, is a relatively easy procedure to perform. And while I know, women of South Dakota, that you never asked for this, now is the time to learn how it is done. There is no reason you should be beholden to doctors — especially in a state where doctors have been refusing to perform them, forcing the state’s only abortion clinic to fly doctors in from elsewhere.
(via cyn-c)
Were you up on the High Line
Were you up on the High Line on Feb 20? Did you lose your digital camera? It’s been found…claim it on Craigslist.
Cheaper airline tickets
TechCrunch reports on FlySpy, a site that will help people buy the lowest priced airplane ticket for a given destination:
The way it works is that I give it a departure city and a destination city and optionally a departure date and length of stay. The search result, which returns very quickly, will present me with a graph of flight prices over the next 30 days so that I can quickly look at which days are the cheapest to fly. To book a flight I just click on the point in the graph. Simple.
That’s a pretty useful UI innovation (especially if you’re able to drill down into individual days to find the lowest fare on that day), but it doesn’t help you much if your travel dates are inflexible. The killer airline reservation app that I’ve been wanting for several years would tell you when to buy your ticket for a particular flight. Airlines update their fares several times a day and hundreds of times over the course of a month. Depending on when you buy, it might cost you $250 or $620 for the same exact ticket.
What this hypothetical app would do is track fare histories and then release forecasts based on those histories. If you want a RT to SFO from JFK on 4/12/06 returning 4/17/06, the site would tell you to buy your ticket three weeks out or when the price hits $298, whichever comes first, but to never wait until the week before, when similar flights begin to sell out.
A thornier problem than the one FlySpy addresses, but it could save people a lot of money. (This would work for hotels and rental cars as well probably, although I don’t think their prices fluctuate as much.)
Oh, what a year
One year ago today, I asked the readers of kottke.org to become micropatrons and support my efforts in producing the site for a year. Over the course of three weeks, people generously sent in their financial support[1], giving me enough to pay my salary for the entire year[2] and not have to bug you about it every few days.
So the year is up and I’ve been trying to think about what to say on this occasion for, oh, about six months now, but I’m undecided even now. I guess I’ll start with the important bit.
I’m not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven’t grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org…those things just aren’t interesting to me.
The other big reason is that my life has changed a lot in the past year. Growing a new business with a novel (or at least challenging) business model requires lots of time and energy to build the necessary momentum…basically approaching it with a startup mentality: long hours, work on the weekends, less time to spend with family and friends, making work the #1 priority, etc. My (unstated) intention from the beginning was to approach the site as a startup, but along the way life intervened (in a good way) and I couldn’t focus on it as much as I wanted to. The site became a normal job, a 9-to-5 affair, which meant that I could keep up with it, but growth was hard to come by.
So what’s going to happen with kottke.org? I’m not quite sure at this point. In the short term, it’s going to be taking a back seat to some other things going on in my life. Longer term, who knows? I might look for other ways to fund my efforts on the site or maybe it goes back to being more of a hobby. But there will be posts and links and other things here almost daily, just like there have been for almost 8 years now.
And that leaves approximately everything else, if anything, unsaid. If you’re curious about something related to the end of the micropatron experiment, send me an email with your question. I’ll choose the most interesting and/or representative ones and post my responses to them in a future entry. I’ll give special consideration to questions from micropatrons. Or post your thoughts to your blog, send me a link, and I’ll compile those as well. And as always, your feedback is appreciated via email. (And sorry in advance if I can’t respond to your questions individually, although I’ll try my best.)
[1] Again, thanks to everyone who contributed for their support. In this age of ad-supported media, it means a great deal to me that you felt strongly enough about kottke.org to support it directly. I’d also like to thank Eyebeam, the companies and people who contributed the fund drive gifts, thelist, Jonah, and Meg for their help and support.
[2] Since everyone and their uncle has been asking, about 1450 micropatrons contributed $39,900 over the past year…99.9% of that coming during the 3 week fund drive.
Who knew David Sedaris’ family was so
Who knew David Sedaris’ family was so full of art experts? “I don’t know if you realize it, but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”
Video compilation of the best dunks from
Video compilation of the best dunks from the 2006 NBA dunk contest. Andre Iguodala’s off-the-back-of-the-backboard and behind-the-back dunks were both very sick and wrong.
NPR report on The Elder Wisdom Circle,
NPR report on The Elder Wisdom Circle, a group of seniors who use the combined wisdom of their ages to help people who write in with questions. What a nice idea. I love the response to the first letter…”if she really was serious about you, boy, oh boy, she would be running to the court to get a separation and divorce”. Here’s the EWC web site. (thx, jeff)
Justin reports on his family’s results of
Justin reports on his family’s results of a neat project called the Geneographic Project, co-produced by National Geographic and IBM. If you purchase a testing kit, they’ll trace the specific genetic markers of your ancestors back to (possibly) our common African root.
An Antarctic project has detected the first
An Antarctic project has detected the first neutrinos observed outside of a laboratory setting.
The fashion industry doesn’t try to control
The fashion industry doesn’t try to control its creativity the way that the music and film industries do. “The fashion world recognizes that creativity cannot be bridled and controlled and that obsessive quests to do so will only diminish its vitality. Other content industries would do well to heed this wisdom.”
A Crash Course On Complexity, Emergence and Collective Intelligence.
A Crash Course On Complexity, Emergence and Collective Intelligence.
Debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik
Debate between Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnik on the health care systems in the US and Canada. “Adam Gopnik and Malcolm Gladwell have both lived in Canada and developed strong feelings about socialized health care — pro and con.”
Modern mathematical proofs are so complex that
Modern mathematical proofs are so complex that it’s becoming impossible to prove them with absolute certainty. About a 1980 proof, an expert says “twenty-five years later we’re still not sure if it’s correct or not. We sort of think it is, but no one’s ever written down the complete proof”. I don’t think I heard my math teachers ever say “sort of”.
Representation of the London Tube map if
Representation of the London Tube map if the stations were sponsored by products or companies. I love the Pizza Hutney, Upministry of Sound, and iPoddington stops. Rather DFWesque. (via bb)
Catching cheaters with Benford’s Law
Benford’s Law describes a curious phenomenon about the counterintuitive distribution of numbers in sets of non-random data:
A phenomenological law also called the first digit law, first digit phenomenon, or leading digit phenomenon. Benford’s law states that in listings, tables of statistics, etc., the digit 1 tends to occur with probability ~30%, much greater than the expected 11.1% (i.e., one digit out of 9). Benford’s law can be observed, for instance, by examining tables of logarithms and noting that the first pages are much more worn and smudged than later pages (Newcomb 1881). While Benford’s law unquestionably applies to many situations in the real world, a satisfactory explanation has been given only recently through the work of Hill (1996).
I first heard of Benford’s Law in connection with the IRS using it to detect tax fraud. If you’re cheating on your taxes, you might fill in amounts of money somewhat at random, the distribution of which would not match that of actual financial data. So if the digit “1” shows up on Al Capone’s tax return about 15% of the time (as opposed to the expected 30%), the IRS can reasonably assume they should take a closer look at Mr. Capone’s return.
Since I installed Movable Type 3.15 back in March 2005, I have been using its “post to the future” option pretty regularly to post my remaindered links…and have been using it almost exclusively for the last few months[1]. That means I’m saving the entries in draft, manually changing the dates and times, and then setting the entries to post at some point in the future. For example, an entry with a timestamp like “2006-02-20 22:19:09” when I wrote the draft might get changed to something like “2006-02-21 08:41:09” for future posting at around 8:41 am the next morning. The point is, I’m choosing basically random numbers for the timestamps of my remaindered links, particularly for the hours and minutes digits. I’m “cheating”…committing post timestamp fraud.
That got me thinking…can I use the distribution of numbers in these post timestamps to detect my cheating? Hoping that I could (or this would be a lot of work wasted), I whipped up a MT template that produced two long strings of numbers: 1) one of all the hours and minutes digits from the post timestamps from May 2005 to the present (i.e. the cheating period), 2) and one of all the hours and minutes digits from Dec 2002 - Jan 2005 (i.e. the control group). Then I used a PHP script to count the numbers in each string, dumped the results into Excel, and graphed the two distributions together. And here’s what they look like, followed by a table of the values used to produce the chart:
| Digit | 5/05-now | 12/02-1/05 | Difference |
| 1 | 31.76% | 33.46% | 1.70% |
| 2 | 11.76% | 14.65% | 2.89% |
| 3 | 10.30% | 9.96% | 0.34% |
| 4 | 10.44% | 9.58% | 0.86% |
| 5 | 10.02% | 10.52% | 0.51% |
| 6 | 4.83% | 5.40% | 0.57% |
| 7 | 5.66% | 4.96% | 0.70% |
| 8 | 7.62% | 4.65% | 2.97% |
| 9 | 7.60% | 6.81% | 0.79% |
As expected, 1 & 2 show up less than they should during the cheating period, but not overly so[2]. The real fingerprint of the crime lies with the 8s. The number 8 shows up during the cheating period ~64% more than expected. After thinking about it for awhile, I came up with an explanation for the abundance of 8s. I often schedule posts between 8am-9am so that there’s stuff on the site for the early-morning browse and I usually finish off the day with something between 6pm-7pm (18:00 - 19:00). Not exactly the glaring evidence I was expecting, but you can still tell.
The obvious next question is, can this technqiue be utilized for anything useful? How about detecting comment, trackback. or ping spam? I imagine IPs and timestamps from these types of spam are forged to at least some extent. The difficulties are getting enough data to be statistically significant (one forged timestamp isn’t enough to tell anything) and having “clean” data to compare it against. In my case, I knew when and where to look for the cheating…it’s unclear if someone who didn’t know about the timestamp tampering would have been able to detect it. I bet companies with services that deal with huge amounts of spam (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, TypePad, Technorati) could use this technique to filter out the unwanted emails, comments, trackbacks, or pings…although there’s probably better methods for doing so.
[1] I’ve been doing this to achieve a more regular publishing schedule for kottke.org. I typically do a lot of work in the evening and at night and instead of posting all the links in a bunch from 10pm to 1am, I space them out over the course of the next day. Not a big deal because increasing few of the links I feature are time-sensitive and it’s better for readers who check back several times a day for updates…they’ve always got a little something new to read.
[2] You’ll also notice that the distributions don’t quite follow Benford’s Law either. Because of the constraints on which digits can appear in timestamps (e.g. you can never have a timestamp of 71:95), some digits appear proportionally more or less than they would in statistical data. Here’s the distribution of digits of every possible time from 00:00 to 23:59:
1 - 25.33
2 - 17.49
3 - 12.27
4 - 10.97
5 - 10.97
6 - 5.74
7 - 5.74
8 - 5.74
9 - 5.74
Killing female fetuses in the womb is
Killing female fetuses in the womb is becoming more of a problem in Punjab, India. “In the last one year in [Dhanduha village], against 12 boys only three girls were born, and in the last five years, 34 baby boys were born as against only 18 girls. A sex ratio of just 529:1000!” (via 3qd)
Fun analysis of a moviegoer’s six years
Fun analysis of a moviegoer’s six years of ticket stubs. You can see the ticket prices rise over the years, but what’s really interesting is the correspondence between the ticket price and his opinion of the movie…he ended up paying more for the movies he really liked.
Edward Burtynsky and World Changing have collaborated
Edward Burtynsky and World Changing have collaborated on a video using his photographs to depict humanity’s impact on the planet. Burtynsky has pledged $50,000 from his 2005 TED Prize (as has the Sapling Foundation) to match donations to World Changing. More information on the TED blog.
Some elderly Americans are foregoing retirement homes
Some elderly Americans are foregoing retirement homes in favor of living permanently on cruise ships, in part because they are cheaper and the service is better. (thx cathy)
Decent article about blogs (a rarity these
Decent article about blogs (a rarity these days) from the Financial Times. “Each blogger was his, or her, own printing press, spontaneously exercising their freedom to criticise. Which is great. But along the way, opinion became the new pornography on the internet.”
Favorite new word (this week): snowclone, a
Favorite new word (this week): snowclone, a description of “a type of formula-based cliche which uses an old idiom in a new context”. Like “____ is the new ____”, “____, now more than ever”, or “all your ____ are belong to us”. (via anil)
George W. Bush makes a guest post
George W. Bush makes a guest post on Design Observer: “I don’t know much about designing rugs. So I […] delegated. That’s one of the things you do in decision-making.”
Pride and Prejudice
As far as I’m concerned, Will Ferrell et al., Jon Stewart, or the Farrelly brothers have nothing on Jane Austen when it comes to humor (or would that be humour?). And this latest film adaptation of Pride & Prejudice sticks closely to the book and strikes just the right tone. The book, of course, has lots more goodies in it, but as an abridged version the film couldn’t be better. Also, since it was published back in 1813, P&P is in the public domain and can be read online for free.
Exciting new Web 2.0 product: JusFlam is “the
Exciting new Web 2.0 product: JusFlam is “the social network for people who enjoy Jesus, and flames, and rotating stuff”. The beta seems to be down at the moment…it’s throwing a “due to overwhelming server load, that is due to underwhelming development methodologies and system architecture, due to limited resources, due to limited business direction, due to giving away a complex web service for free with no feasible plan for revenue generation besides ‘getting bought by google or maybe yahoo’, we are unable to process your request at this time” error.
This guy has had enough of the
This guy has had enough of the pre-exit receipt checking at Best Buy (you’re under no legal obligation to comply) but is hassled by Best Buy employees about seeing his receipt all the way out to the parking lot.
Rob at Cockeyed is building a photographic
Rob at Cockeyed is building a photographic height/weight grid, effectively a catalog of people’s body types. Description and call for entries here.
Socials & More