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Interview with the BBC’s David Frost on his move to Al Jazeera International, a new 24-hour news station. I don’t get why Solomon is so rude in these interviews, particularly when her able subjects handle her “tough” questions with such ease.
The current weather conditions in the captials of the Axis of Evil countries.
Gamers show a “similar pattern of high performance in resisting irrelevant impulses” as bilingual people. “Maybe those kids who play video games and who are also bilingual will be the best of older adults at filtering out distractions.” (via sjb)
Time-lapse animated GIF of the Million Dollar Homepage…watch it fill up.
The Song Tapper: “search for music by tapping the rhythm of the song’s melody”. This works amazingly well.
“In the late 20th Century, the northern hemisphere experienced its most widespread warmth for 1,200 years”. “The last 100 years is more striking than either [the Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age].”
One-page full schedule for the NBC coverage of the Winter Olympics.
Gallery of the winners of the World Press Photos of the Year for 2005.
Now that I’ve closed the comments on the question of the airplane and the conveyor belt, I’m still getting emails calling me an idiot for thinking that the plane will take off. Having believed that after first hearing the question and formulating several reasons reinforcing my belief, I can sympathize with that POV, but that doesn’t change the fact that I was initially wrong and that if you believe the plane won’t take off, you’re wrong too[1].
The only thing is, I’m not sure how to prove it to you if you don’t understand the problem and the physics involved. I guess I could urge you to read the question and answer again carefully. I could tell you that not only does the conveyor belt not keep the plane stationary with respect to the ground but it *can’t* keep that plane stationary with respect to the ground[2] and once you know that, of course it’ll take off. My pal Mouser has a Ph.d in Physics from MIT and he says the plane will take off:
The airplane would take off normally, with the wheels spinning twice as fast as normal and a *slight* reduction in acceleration due to added friction.
Is that enough to convince you?
[1] This situation reminds me of Richard Dawkins’ and Jerry Coyne’s assertion that “one side can be wrong”.
[2] The motion of the conveyor belt does nothing[3] to affect the movement of the plane when the plane is in motion…it doesn’t matter if it’s moving forward, backward, at 2 MPH, or at 400 MPH. If the plane were on castors that could spin freely from side to side as well as front to back, that treadmill could be spinning 100 MPH to the left and the plane would take off.
[3] Well, almost nothing. The friction of the turning wheels will slow things down a bit, but not enough to not make the plane take off. After all, the main function of the wheels of a plane is to provide a near-frictionless interface with the ground (or whatever the plane happens to be taking off from).
Robert Birnbaum interviews physicist Lisa Randall about string theory and science popularizers.
In his review of Syriana, Ebert calls it a “hyperlink movie” [warning, some spoilers]:
A recent blog item coined a term like “hyperlink movie” to describe plots like this. (I would quote the exact term, but irony of ironies, I’ve lost the link.) The term describes movies in which the characters inhabit separate stories, but we gradually discover how those in one story are connected to those in another. “Syriana” was written and directed by Stephen Gaghan, who won an Oscar for best screenplay adaptation for “Traffic,” another hyperlink movie. A lot of Altman films like “Nashville” and “Short Cuts” use the technique. Also, recently, “Crash” and “Nine Lives.”
In a hyperlink movie the motives of one character may have to be reinterpreted after we meet another one. Consider the Matt Damon character. His family is invited to a party at the luxurious Spanish villa of the Gulf oil sheik whose sons are Nasir and Meshal. At the party, Damon’s son dies by accident. The sheik awards Damon’s firm a $100 million contract. “How much for my other son?” he asks. This is a brutal line of dialogue and creates a moment trembling with tension. Later, Damon’s wife (Amanda Peet) accuses him of trading on the life of his son. Well, he did take the deal. Should he have turned it down because his son died in an accident? What are Damon’s real motives, anyway?
The blog item Ebert is referring to could be Mark Bernstein’s post about Adaptation from January 2003:
Adaptation is strange, curious, improbable little film. It belongs in the all-time hypertext film festival. Interesting double-feature with Wonder Boys. Fascinating double-feature with Mullholland Drive. Ebert, like everyone else, loved it.
Mark also discusses the hypertext film festival in a post about Perfect Blue, which More Like This picks up on. As you can guess, I love hypertext films.
Update: In a review of Cape of Good Hope published subsequent to that of Syriana, Ebert reveals the source of the “hyperlink movie”:
The movie belongs to a genre that has been named “hyperlink cinema” by the critic Alissa Quart, in Film Comment. She suggests the structure was invented by Robert Altman, and Altman certainly brought it into modern times and made it particularly useful for showing interlocking stories in a world where lives seem to crash into each other heedlessly. “Crash,” indeed, is an example of the genre, as are Altman’s “The Player” and “Short Cuts,” and such films as “Traffic,” “Syriana,” “City of God,” “Amores Perros” and “Nine Lives.”
Quart’s article isn’t online, but here’s a bit of it:
In fact, Happy Endings could serve as proof for the currently fashionable theory that we shouldn’t worry that our web-based, video-game-loving culture is dumbing us down. Watching Happy Endings, you too can conclude, as some of our brightest young pundits have, that multi-task entertainment actually makes us sharper. If this is true, the new genre Happy Endings belongs to—hyperlink cinema—could be the most IQ-enhancing of all. Happy Endings, which Roos also scripted, joins his The Opposite of Sex (98) in the hyperlink canon, alongside the likes of Magnolia, Time Code, and, most recently, Crash (with a special mention for TV’s 24). Of them all, Happy Endings is best in show…The best thing about Happy Endings is that, like hyperlinking itself, it’s irremediably relativist. Information, character and action co-exist without hierarchy. And we are always one click away from a new life, a new story, and new meaning, all equally captivating but no better or worse than what we have just left behind.
Thanks for sending this along, Peter. Also, it occurs to me that Steven Johnson may have written about this at some point, perhaps in Everything Bad is Good for You.
ABC (owned by Disney) traded former Monday Night Football announcer Al Michaels to NBC for, in part, Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, a cartoon character created by Walt Disney in 1927, pre-Mickey.
Ouch for Amazon and A9: Udi Manber heads to Google.
This article on how Google and eBay are poorly designed seems really wrongheaded to me, although it may just be that essays that use the word “suckass” and mistake style for design will fail to convince me of anything.
How do you find extra-solar planets? “I think the techniques employed by planet-hunters are pretty cool so the following is a brief primer on how the techniques work and the pros and cons of each.”
This question posed to Cecil at The Straight Dope has occupied most of my day today:
Here’s the original problem essentially as it was posed to us: “A plane is standing on a runway that can move (some sort of band conveyer). The plane moves in one direction, while the conveyer moves in the opposite direction. This conveyer has a control system that tracks the plane speed and tunes the speed of the conveyer to be exactly the same (but in the opposite direction). Can the plane take off?”
I’ll give you a few moments to think about that before discussing the answer…
…
…
…
Cecil says that the obvious answer — that the plane does not take off because it remains stationary relative to the ground and the air — is wrong. The plane, he says, can take off:
But of course cars and planes don’t work the same way. A car’s wheels are its means of propulsion—they push the road backwards (relatively speaking), and the car moves forward. In contrast, a plane’s wheels aren’t motorized; their purpose is to reduce friction during takeoff (and add it, by braking, when landing). What gets a plane moving are its propellers or jet turbines, which shove the air backward and thereby impel the plane forward. What the wheels, conveyor belt, etc, are up to is largely irrelevant. Let me repeat: Once the pilot fires up the engines, the plane moves forward at pretty much the usual speed relative to the ground—and more importantly the air—regardless of how fast the conveyor belt is moving backward. This generates lift on the wings, and the plane takes off. All the conveyor belt does is, as you correctly conclude, make the plane’s wheels spin madly.
After reading the question this morning and discussing it with Meg for, oh, about 3 hours on and off, I was convinced that Cecil was wrong. There’s no way that plane could take off. The conveyor belt keeps pace with the speed of the plane, which means the plane remains stationary from the POV of an observer on the ground, and therefore cannot lift off.
Then I read Cecil’s answer again this evening and I’ve changed my mind; I’m fairly certain he’s right. For a sufficiently long conveyor belt, that plane is taking off. It doesn’t matter what the conveyor belt is doing because the airplane’s energy is acting on the air, not the belt. I had better luck simplifying the problem like so: imagine instead of a plane, you’ve got a rocket with wheels sitting on that belt. When that rocket fires, it’s eventually going to rocket off the end of that belt…which means that it doesn’t remain stationary to the ground and if it had wings, it would fly.
What do you think? Can that plane take off?
See also Feynman’s submerged sprinkler problem and an old argument of Newton and Huygens: can you swim faster through water or syrup?
Update: Well, that got out of control in a hurry…almost 300 comments in about 16 hours. I had to delete a bunch of trolling comments and it’s not productive to keep going, so I closed it. Thanks for the, er, discussion and remember, the plane takes off. :)
Neat counter and waterfall of purchased albums as Apple counts down to 1 billion songs purchased on the iTunes Music Store. (thx, scott)
Scientists find “lost world” of undiscovered animals in the Foja Mountains of western New Guinea. “Their finds included more than 20 new frogs, 4 butterflies and a number of plants, including 5 new palms and rhododendrons with the largest flowers on record.”
Blockbuster films are getting more expensive and accounting for less of Hollywood’s box office take…is Hollywood’s emphasis on big movies nearing its end? I’ve always thought it was dumb that the movie industry put so many of its eggs in so few baskets. (ps. Chris Anderson’s Long Tail book is available for preorder on Amazon.)
CEO pay and perks can be a good indicator of how healthy a business is, so it makes sense that investors are interested in just exactly how much chief executives make. “We shouldn’t expect to see a dent in executive compensation anytime soon. But in the long run companies that don’t balance pay with performance tend to suffer where it matters most — in the stock market.”
Charity Navigator evaluates and rates charities so you can see how well your donation will be used. There’s room for improvement, but it’s a good idea.
Since I’ve been skiing a little bit recently (for the first time in years), I decided to check out what was happening online in the skiing world. Specifically I wondered if there were any ski blogs out there and if the many ski magazines offer online archives of their content.
Just like every other topic under the sun, skiing is well covered in blog land; no chance for fresh tracks here. A couple of quick searches uncovered blogs about backcountry skiing, New England skiing, ski adventures from around the country, skiing products and fashion, Colorado skiing, an attempt to ski 120 days of powder, Euro-centric skiing, and even a skiing videoblog.
Most of the skiing blogs I found focus on their respective author’s adventures on the slopes. If someone wanted to start a skiing meta-blog (blogging not just skiing adventures but other skiing-related topics and pointing to other people’s adventures), would there be enough good information out there to point to? The magazine racks of ski country convenience stores are filled with all kinds of periodicals about skiing…how much of that content is online? From what I can tell, the skiing magazines do offer content on their sites, but not necessarily from the pages of their print magazines. Both SKI Magazine and Skiing Magazine have archived print articles on their sites, but only from June 2005 and earlier. Both have other resources like forums, skiing news, resort details, videos, and online-only features. Neither site is organized particularly well for quick information perusal and retrieval. Skipressworld offers PDF versions of their entire print magazine online, including the current issue. Powder magazine has some online archives as well as online-only features like videos and message boards.
And so on…Google News is currently featuring over 10,000 articles about skiing (although much of that is due to the impending Winter Olympics), Flickr has thousands of skiing photos, and nearly all the ski areas an resorts have web sites on which you can check the current conditions, the lines at the chairlift via webcams, and trail maps. Killington is even doing podcasts.
So there’s lots of skiing info out there. I know there must be a few skiers among the kottke.org readership…what are your favorite skiing sites and resources online?
Mashup sport: chessboxing.
The basic idea in chessboxing is to combine the no.1 thinking sport and the no.1 fighting sport into a hybrid that demands the most of its competitors - both mentally and physically. In a chessboxing fight two opponents play alternating rounds of chess and boxing. The contest starts with a round of chess, followed by a boxing round, followed by another round of chess and so on.
More from the LA Times and the Guardian.
The world’s coolest parasite; it makes zombie cockroaches! When it wants to lay its eggs, the Ampulex compressa wasp stuns a cockroach, numbs its brain, steers it back to its nest, lays an egg inside it, and eventually a larvae forms, it lunches on the cockroach’s insides, and then hatches fully grown. Just…wow. (thx, tien)
On Chinatowns. “Like many crowded Asian cities, Chinatown has mastered the art of the vertical, inspired by languages that can be written up and down, not just side to side.”
If you like to eat (and have a Ph.d), Google looks like a good place to work. (via afb)
De-Touch lets you step through how photos of models are retouched for publication. Announcement here. Made with Processing, source code is available.
Malcolm Gladwell on “power law problems” like homelessness, auto pollution, and bad cops. These problems have solutions which focus on the small number of hard-core cases, like the 5% of Denver vehicles that account for 55% of the city’s automobile pollution.
Sorry to hit you with this on a Monday morning because the falling sand game is really addicting so you might not get any work done today. Sorry in advance.
Esther Dyson: Google is blind evolution, Yahoo is intelligent design. I’m not sure that’s the right metaphor to use if you want to put Yahoo on the same level as Google.
A grid of logos of Web 2.0 companies. These names sound like a bunch of companies that make children’s toys (which when you think about it, isn’t too far from the truth).
Update: Original here.
Anil on the conservatism of liberalism (by way of explaining why Craigslist is taking away everyone else’s classifieds business). “A complete unwillingness to be critical, an almost astoundingly low set of criteria for acceptance — these aren’t the traits that encourage a community or a culture to improve.”
Interview with photographer Ryan McGinley about his work.
It’s fashion week in NYC next week and the last couple of years, Slate asked fashion expert Josh Patner to provide answers to some frequently asked questions about fashion shows (more here).
Dorian Lynskey “[charted] the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map”, much like Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear. (gs)
Neat “center of gravity” calculator for Google Earth. Inspired by Cory’s map of the center of gravity of Manhattan’s Starbucks.
In an age of media fragmentation, here are ten cultural events that are still shared collective experiences among US citizens, including the Super Bowl, Harry Potter, and The Da Vinci Code.
Some people are so addicted to email, work, and their Crackberries that they’re upgrading their bathrooms with features like TV mirrors and waterproof computers. Grab the folding chairs….it’s intervention time!
The business of selling iPod accessories is a $1 billion industry. Jesus.
After recommendations from a couple of readers, I checked out Millions a couple of weeks ago. The film was directed by Danny Boyle, who did Trainspotting and 28 Days Later, and is a children’s film. You might think this odd, but as Ebert notes,
…[the filmmakers’] delight in the film is so manifest. But they are serious filmmakers who do not know how to talk down to an audience, and although “Millions” uses special effects and materializing saints, it’s a film about real ideas, real issues and real kids. It’s not sanitized brainless eye candy. Like all great family movies, it plays equally well for adults — maybe better, since we know how unusual it is.
Reminds me a bit of Brad Bird’s The Iron Giant. Both are kids movies that most parents didn’t take their kids to, but really should have because they have a substance and soul that most other kids movies lack. And they’re perfectly good films for adults as well. But relatively few saw either of them[1], which is a shame.
[1] The unremarkable Brewster’s Millions made more at the US box office than both Millions and The Iron Giant combined.
Regarding my question about the first superhero back in October, Peter Coogan sent word about his upcoming book, Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre. “An exhaustive and entertaining study of the superhero genre, this volume traces the roots of the superhero in mythology, science fiction, and the pulps, and follows the superhero’s development to its current renaissance in film, literature, and graphic novels.”
A young designer offers some advice on getting that first job right out of design school.
Why do hotels sometimes charge for internet access and sometimes don’t? My take is that most hotels figure that it’s mostly business travelers that use the internet and therefore it’s the guests’ companies who are footing the bill and since it’s a business necessity for them, the companies pay, no matter what the daily rate. Which sucks for those of us who like a little internet on vacation or want to keep our small business expenditures down.
Alternative photography (pinhole cameras, daguerreotypes, gum bichromate prints) is making a small comeback in the midst of the digital photography revolution. Here’s some of Adam Lubroth’s work and an exhibition in Austin, TX of “historical photographic approaches in the digital age”.
Now that Oscar season is in full-on in-your-face mode, check out this list of the critics’ favorite films for 2005. Love the info design on the summary at the bottom.
This Flickr user really likes photos of people at the dentist. This one’s my favorite. (via janelle)
Responses to People on the 6 Train That Hopefully Convey My Feelings in a Polite Way. “Thank you for so gently cupping my ass when we came to a stop.”
Update: The author of this list has a blog with some quick-witted observations of NYC. (thx, robert)
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