Absurd luxury markets…”some khaki pants are
Absurd luxury markets…“some khaki pants are now selling for AS MUCH AS $1055” (emphasis mine). Holy shit.
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Entries for May 2006
Lee Siegel has a Malcolm Gladwell problem
Lee Siegel has a Malcolm Gladwell problem and, he argues, so do the rest of us. From a commenter (who gets his Dubner mixed up with his Levitt): “Gladwell is destroying literature as we know it”. (via 3qd)
Internet-only trailer for Clerks 2 by Kevin Smith.
Internet-only trailer for Clerks 2 by Kevin Smith. Going boldly where Harold and Kumar have gone before.
Top science book prize goes to David
Top science book prize goes to David Bodanis’s Electric Universe, a book about electricity. An odd choice…I read the book and it was good but not great.
“Kiva lets you loan as little as $25
“Kiva lets you loan as little as $25 to a qualified low income entrepreneur in the developing world.” Basically no-interest loans to developing countries as charity, but you get the original donation amount back. Pretty cool idea. (thx, jonah)
Dammit, today is Skip Lunch, Fight Hunger
Dammit, today is Skip Lunch, Fight Hunger day and I unknowingly made lunch plans several days ago. I’m skipping lunch tomorrow instead. I’ve had problems with this in the past as well.
Laundry bus
Spotted this on my walk to the office this morning:
If you can’t tell, it’s a bus covered with laundry. This had to be an advertisement for something (MTA employees aren’t that eccentric) and after a little poking around online, I found out it’s part of All’s “Spot the Bus” sweepstakes:
From May 15th to 26th, two all small & mighty buses covered in clothes will cruise the streets of New York City. When you see one, send a text message of the time and location to 96787. You’ll be entered in the Spot the Bus Sweepstakes.
If you’d like to take part without actually spotting the bus or even living in NYC (and have a chance at winning $5000), I took the above photo at 10:41am near 14th Street and 10th Ave in Manhattan. Good luck!
“If you could cause one invention from
“If you could cause one invention from the last hundred years never to have been made at all, which would it be, and why?” Nuclear weapons? Land mines? Internal combustion engine?
A list of the 100 most influential persons
A list of the 100 most influential persons in the world and what religion each practiced. The list should more properly be called the 100 most influential men in the world + Queens Elizabeth I and Isabella I. (via rb)
A history of the lowrider. “But the
A history of the lowrider. “But the ultimate discovery was the realization that a heavy hydro system could launch the entire front end off the ground.”
Plan is a photographic project by Aneta
Plan is a photographic project by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga consisting of overhead views of apartments. “Such an unusual effect was achieved through the use of a special technique: the overall picture of a room is an aggregate of dozens fragmentary photographs taken from above, and then merged using a computer.” More here. A bit NSFW.
List of sounds that different animals make
List of sounds that different animals make in different languages.
Update: Bzzzpeek and Sounds of the World’s Animals both let you listen to how these different animal sounds are pronounced. (thx finn, lizette, and justine)
Free wifi in Central Park? Hopefully by
Free wifi in Central Park? Hopefully by June.
Update: The free wifi in Central Park thing was supposed have been in place last September. (thx, amy)
How do scientist attribute climate-change data? In
How do scientist attribute climate-change data? In other words, how can they tell from the available data that climate change can be attributed to human causes?
Small site matter
Sorry to bug you about this, but I moved the RSS feeds for kottke.org and the remaindered links. I’m using redirects so you shouldn’t even notice anything. That is, your feedreader should be directed to the new files automagically and if you’re reading this message in a newsreader, it has worked. But if you are having problems with the new files, send me an email and I’ll get the technical team (ahem) on it right away.
New files: kottke.org RSS, kottke.org remaindered links RSS.
Flickr redesigns slightly; they’ve moved out of “
Flickr redesigns slightly; they’ve moved out of “beta” and into “gamma”. More on the redesign from Flickr HQ. (thx, joshua)
Two graphic design teams recently went head-to-head
Two graphic design teams recently went head-to-head on The Apprentice. The winning team had flat-panel monitors, OS X, and Adobe Creative Suite while the losers were still using an old version of Quark on Mac OS 9 displayed on a gigantic CRT monitor. “Graphic Design Lesson A: Get the latest hardware and software, and you will win. Always.”
Apple announces new MacBooks (iBook successor with
Apple announces new MacBooks (iBook successor with Intel chips) saying, “Meet the family. Now Complete.” Does that mean no 12” MacBook Pro?
Interview with photographer Jay Parkinson about his
Interview with photographer Jay Parkinson about his aspiring model project. “I feel that it’s a photographic cop-out to take photos of strictly beautiful people because it’s hard to take a bad photo of a beautiful person, especially a very scripted portrait.”
Video of a Dutch store celebrating its 10,000
Video of a Dutch store celebrating its 10,000 shoplifter. Transcript & translation in the comments.
My new favorite song ever for the
My new favorite song ever for the next 20 minutes is Smiley Faces by Gnarls Barkley (album @ Amazon). Can’t get enough. Thanks to Greg for turning me on to the GB.
Google Maps + Fast Food shows all the
Google Maps + Fast Food shows all the the McDonald’s, Burger Kings, Wendy’s, and Jack in the Boxes in the US on a scrollable, zoomable map. Here’s lower Manhattan + parts of Brooklyn and New Jersey. (Alternate plurals of Jack in the Box: Jacks in the Box or Jack in the Boxen?)
Why does it take Wes Anderson (and
Why does it take Wes Anderson (and Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze and PT Anderson and…) so long to make a movie? “The Eccentrics seem to be guarding their personal ideas so jealously that it sometimes suggests a creative block. The eternity of anticipation has frustrated those film lovers who look to certain artists to provide the Great American Movie.” Slate also has a review of Wes Anderson’s great Amex commerical.
In an astounding display of typographic nerdiness
In an astounding display of typographic nerdiness and obsessiveness on a level to which I can only aspire, Andrew Hearst walks us through the anomalous digital clock on the popular TV show 24. “The onscreen time sequences are dictated partly by the typographic limitations of the clock font.”
Did Vladimir Nabokov deliberately take the idea
Did Vladimir Nabokov deliberately take the idea for Lolita from a 1916 short story of the same name or did he suffer from cryptomnesia? Cryptomnesia is when you consciously forget previously learned information but subconsciously remember it. (via george, who says “It’s certainly a weird concept, that an idea can have a quantum state of being both remembered and new, and one that I think deserves more attention.”)
Browsing recent interestingness on Flickr, I ran
Browsing recent interestingness on Flickr, I ran across these photos of women photoshopped to include glass eyes, prostheses, eyepatches, and to look like amputees. This is a practice of devotees of amputee fetishism called Electronic Surgery. More examples here, here, and here. Probably a bit NSFW.
Update: Flickr has removed the users who posted those photos. Sorry.
Fleen, a blog about webcomics, examines IndieKarma
Fleen, a blog about webcomics, examines IndieKarma with an interview with the founder of the company and an analysis of its potential viability. Here’s my post on IndieKarma.
What’s playing
Long ago, I signed up on last.fm and downloaded the AudioScrobbler plugin for iTunes, which plugin listens to what I’m playing in iTunes and sends a report of it the last.fm web site. Then I promptly forgot about it. A year and a half later, it’s compiled quite a musical dossier on me: 10,300+ tracks listened to (that’s about 18 per day), my most listened to track is A Dream by Cut Copy, and my 10 most listened to artists are Ladytron, Boards of Canada, Fischerspooner, Bloc Party, John Digweed, Daft Punk, Royksopp, Pixies, Radiohead, and Sigur Ros.
Even longer ago, I used the dearly departed Kung-Tunes to place a list of my recently played music on kottke.org. Thanks to the last.fm API and a gently modified version of this PHP script, that list is back; you can find it on the front page of kottke.org.
Photographer Michael Wolf, he of the Architecture
Photographer Michael Wolf, he of the Architecture of Density photos of Hong Kong, has a new project called 100x100, which is a series of photographs “of residents in their flats in hong kong’s oldest public housing estate”. Each of the apartments is only 100 square feet in size so the photos show a wide variety of dense living spaces.
Re Croquet and the ridiculous breathlessness about
Re Croquet and the ridiculous breathlessness about it, “3-D isn’t an interface paradigm. 3-D isn’t a world model. 3-D isn’t the missing ingredient. 3-D isn’t an inherently better representation for every purpose. 3-D is an attribute, like the color blue. Any time you read or hear about how great 3-D is and how it’s going to change everything about computers and services, substitute the word blue for 3-D.” (via bbj, who says “YES YES YES!!! ALWAYS REMEMBER: 3D INTERFACES ARE WHY THOSE KIDS ALMOST GOT EATEN BY RAPTORS IN JURASSIC PARK”)
With Wal-Mart selling more organic and Whole
With Wal-Mart selling more organic and Whole Foods expanding like crazy, organic foods are moving from the counterculture to “bean-counter culture”.
Through vaccination and vigilance, the avian flu
Through vaccination and vigilance, the avian flu is under control in the Southeast Asian countries that were hardest hit with the disease. See also this map of avian flu reports.
Funny but also depressing SNL bit with
Funny but also depressing SNL bit with Al Gore last night, speaking as if he were President and Bush was the comissioner of baseball. (via rw)
The NY Times article by Steven Levitt
The NY Times article by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner about talent is still on the most emailed list a week after it went up on the site…and it’s the second-most emailed story over the last month. Also of note is how politically oriented the most blogged list is compared to the most emailed list.
American sprinter Justin Gatlin sets world record
American sprinter Justin Gatlin sets world record in the 100 meter dash: 9.76 seconds. But, could he beat a horse the length of a basketball court?
Update: Due to a rounding error on the timekeeper’s part, Gatlin merely tied the world record.
Yet more advertising….a paparazzi photo of
Yet more advertising….a paparazzi photo of Lindsey Lohan made its way onto a movie poster promoting a film that starred Lohan.
Advertising/Design Goodness is a blog that
Advertising/Design Goodness is a blog that tracks the best and worst of advertising from around the world. (thx, cap’n)
More creative advertising fun. Mark Cuban thinks
More creative advertising fun. Mark Cuban thinks that live TV commercials could save traditional TV. More at Ars Technica. (thx, flip)
Last month, an audience in London was
Last month, an audience in London was shown a 3-minute performed “commercial” before the actual play started. Inadvertently, today seems to be unique/unusual advertising day on kottke.org.
Current TV is running advertising for Sony
Current TV is running advertising for Sony that was created by a viewer. “Of course, Sony approved Mr. Ibele’s finished product before it went on the air.”
Design: e2 is an upcoming 6-part PBS
Design: e2 is an upcoming 6-part PBS special on the environment and the economy.
“The cluster effect is the effect of
“The cluster effect is the effect of buyers and sellers of a particular good or service congregating in a certain place and hence inducing other buyers and sellers to relocate there as well.”
3-D NYC buildings from Google Earth (extracted
3-D NYC buildings from Google Earth (extracted with OGLE) printed out on a 3-D printer.
BannerBlog highlights creative and interesting banner ads
BannerBlog highlights creative and interesting banner ads from around the web. Today’s ad is pretty darn clever.
Designer Michael Bierut confesses: “I am a
Designer Michael Bierut confesses: “I am a plagiarist”. “…my mind is stuffed full of graphic design, graphic design done by other people. How can I be sure that any idea that comes out of that same mind is absolutely my own?”
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