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Entries for June 2006
Could Lois Lane have Superman’s baby? “His
Could Lois Lane have Superman’s baby? “His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth’s yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach.” More discussion here. And here.
Second string
Not to go on and on about it like the stupid announcers on American TV, but this passage from Jeffrey Toobin’s New Yorker piece (sadly not online), may explain why the American team did so poorly in the World Cup:
Every kid in the American suburbs, it seems, owns a pair of shin guards. Soccer accords nicely with baby-boomer parents’ notions about sports: every kid gets to play, no one stands out too much, there’s plenty of running and trophies for all. If [John Robert’s] children are typical, they will play neighborhood soccer for a few years, with enthusiastic but inexperienced parent coaches, and then wander away from the game by adolescence. Great high-school athletes tend to migrate to football and basketball, where they can play in front of big crowds and perhaps qualify for college scholarships. Soccer in the suburbs serves mostly as a bridge between Barney and Nintendo; it’s a pleasant diversion, not a means of developing brutes like Jan Koller, to say nothing of the magicians who stock the Brazilian team.
This dovetails nicely with what my friend David wrote during a discussion about the disappearance of the US from the World Cup:
Our best athletes go to basketball, football, and baseball, roughly in that order. Soccer gets the dregs, sadly. Don’t you think Terrell Owens would be a better striker than Landon Donovan? Even a 50-year-old Darrel Green might be faster than the fastest player on the US Soccer team, and so on.
We know these guys are smart players, and they may have the same instincts that even the Brazilians and Ecuadorians do. But they’re just not nearly as good. Watching Brazil decimate Japan yesterday, even briefly, it was obvious how much stronger they were than the US team.
Over IM just now, David and I were musing about Allen Iverson’s possible greatness as a soccer player; so creative, quick, and fearless. I bet if some the NBA’s best players grew up playing soccer the way they played basketball, the US would have a pretty great team.
Second part of a two-part interview with
Second part of a two-part interview with designer Michael Bierut. “I’ve found that any reluctance I’ve had to doing more of this ‘political design’ has to do with my own fear that things like T-shirts and posters are usually feeble tools to address the enormous problems we face as a society today.” Read part one.
If I were Apple, I’d be worried
If I were Apple, I’d be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.
Update: Tim O’Reilly muses on the Ubuntu switchings.
Study by the International Energy Agency says
Study by the International Energy Agency says that “a global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world’s electricity bill by nearly one-tenth”. How? Switch away from incandescent bulbs to CFLs (now) and eventually to LEDs.
New Japanese device records smells for later
New Japanese device records smells for later playback. Smell is the sense most associated with memory, so this could be quite a compelling personal history recorder.
This guy laser-etched his Powerbook with Rene
This guy laser-etched his Powerbook with Rene Magritte’s The Son of Man with the Apple logo subbing in for the apple in the original painting.
Superman Returns
There’s a bit of a shout-out to citizen journalism in Superman Returns. Mid-movie, Daily Planet Editor in Chief White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen look at some photos of Superman spread across the chief’s desk. They’re great, iconic photos of the Man of Steel in action. White berates Olsen (and I’m paraphrasing here), “these are great and they were taken by a kid with a cameraphone. Whadda you got, Olsen?” Olsen throws his photos down on the desk; the one on top depicts a distant blurry streak across a blue sky.
“Look, in the sky, Chief.”
“It’s a bird.”
“It’s a plane.”
“No, look, it’s…”
Score one for the man on the scene.
Slate asked a collection of filmmakers and
Slate asked a collection of filmmakers and critics which movies they’ve watched the most times.
Unobserved people paid almost three times as
Unobserved people paid almost three times as much to the “honesty box” when watched by a photocopied face than in the absence of the face. See also What the Bagel Man Saw by Freakonomists Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt. I wonder if the smiley face on milk cartons deters people from drinking straight from the carton?
Update: Spiegel Online has a story with a graph depicting the results of different sets of eyes…sexy eyes did the worst while serious eyes looking straight ahead performed the best. (thx, roland)
Related to yesterday’s link about famous photography
Related to yesterday’s link about famous photography in online forums, here’s a classic Henri Cartier-Bresson getting rubbished on Flickr. “hard to tell at this size but is everything meant to be moving in this shot, all seems blurred”.
Summer reading list of photography books. It’s
Summer reading list of photography books. It’s not on the list, but I picked up New Yorkers: As Seen by Magnum Photographers at a friend’s house this weekend and found it well worth my time. (via rb)
Overheard: woman issues “rm -r *” command over the phone.
Overheard: woman issues “rm -r *” command over the phone.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma
Dear Mr. Pollan,
I am writing to you in the hopes that you can offer some assistance to me regarding a troubling household situation. My wife has been reading your recent book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, and has allowed herself to become carried away with your admittedly persuasive argument about eating more locally and ethically raised food.
At first it was just little stuff, like buying local produce and banning foodstuffs made with high fructose corn syrup. But then there was the fist-fight at the greenmarket about the sausage that Meg suspected was not humanely made because the woman selling it did not know the names of the pigs that supplied the meat. “Just one name, you heartless bitch!” she screamed as security escorted her from Union Square. The restraining order prevents Meg’s further presence at the market and I am barely tolerated in her stead.
Lately though, Mr. Pollan, the situation has become much worse. Meg has completely forsaken her marital duties, turning her evening attentions elsewhere. It took me a few weeks to discover what she was up to, but she finally admitted to tending a hayfield in an empty lot in Queens. Oh, didn’t I tell you? Meg has purchased a cow. I don’t know where this cow is located, but his name is Arthur. She’s taking me to meet him before he’s humanely slaughtered so that, and I quote precisely, “you know where your food comes from for a change”.
After the cow news became widely known in our household, Meg turned our extra bedroom into a hay mow, which mow is the subject of our building’s co-op board meeting next month. An eighth floor resident complained about the conveyor belt chucking bales into the building’s alley and the straw situation in the elevator was getting on everyone’s nerves. I dare not add to the register of complaints by mentioning my acute hay-fever at this point.
The loss of the bedroom was tolerable, but Meg has also planted a garden that takes up half of our living room. One day she just took out the hardwood flooring and replacing it with freshly turned soil. Did you know that you can buy a roto-tiller in Manhattan, Mr. Pollan? Well, I do know, and you can definitely buy a roto-tiller at the Home Depot on 23rd Street in Chelsea for a sum close to what your wife might get at a pawn shop for your wristwatch.
So you can see the predicament I’m in here, Mr. Pollan. Any advice you can offer to this sneezing, watchless, beleaguered soul would be greatly appreciated.
Yours very sincerely,
Jason Kottke
P.S. I hope this letter reaches you in a timely manner. Meg has determined that the USPS uses ethanol-based gasoline in their trucks, so this letter is “speeding” its way to you via grass-fed horseback. Pray for me.
Larger portions of food cause people to
Larger portions of food cause people to eat more. Anyone who has eaten at Chili’s and observed the girth of their clientele already knows this. Related: I remember seeing some research that showed as the size of an HTML textarea increases, the more words people write in it. (via mr)
Update: A self-refilling soup bowl experiment suggests that “visual cues of portion size may influence intake”. (thx, justin) Also, adding lanes to heavily traveled roadways increases traffic; that is, supply increases demand.
Boatloads of trailers for “historically significant films”. (via cyn-c)
Boatloads of trailers for “historically significant films”. (via cyn-c)
The 10 greatest years in gaming. I’ll always be partial to 1986.
The 10 greatest years in gaming. I’ll always be partial to 1986.
The NY Times World Cup Blog takes
The NY Times World Cup Blog takes ABC/ESPN to task for the universally crappy TV coverage of the World Cup so far, and then extends that argument to a broader condemnation of American sportscasting. Hear, hear. Balboa just straight up sucks and the graphics that cover the action during the game (including ESPN’s scrolling news alerts at the bottom of the screen) are viewer-hostile and make me want to throw my TV across the room. (via maciej)
Jeopardy king Ken Jennings has a blog. (thx, matt)
Jeopardy king Ken Jennings has a blog. (thx, matt)
Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of the 1978
Pauline Kael’s New Yorker review of the 1978 version of Superman, just after it had been released. I don’t think she much cared for it.
My new favorite weblog: The Baseball Card
My new favorite weblog: The Baseball Card Blog. I’m having acid flashbacks to my teenaged years, but without the acid. The 1989 Upper Deck set was one of the first I built from scratch, a tall order for someone whose weekly allowance was $5. I remember lusting after the Jerome Walton card in the High Numbers Series…he didn’t do so well after that rookie year of his.
Farecast, which I wrote about here, is
Farecast, which I wrote about here, is now out of private beta, meaning anyone can use the site.
TED is releasing audio and video of
TED is releasing audio and video of some of their talks for free on the web. Current offerings include Al Gore, David Pogue, and Gapminder’s Hans Rosling. They’ll be adding one talk a week from their archives.
Update: Here’s a post about the release from TED Blog.
ESPN writer Bill Simmons lists his YouTube
ESPN writer Bill Simmons lists his YouTube Hall of Fame videos.
What if some of the world’s best
What if some of the world’s best photographers had posted their photos to a photo message board? Garry Winogrand might have been told: “Man at right needs to be cropped out. Sometimes I find if I shout right before I take the picture I can get people’s attentions. If you had done so we would have been able to see more of their faces.” (via conscientious)
Seth Stevenson describes an attempt to break
Seth Stevenson describes an attempt to break out of his introverted shell by taking Paxil. Did it work? Only when he’d had a few drinks…oh and he basically lost the ability to feel emotions the rest of the time. “The fact that I considered a wholesale career change under the drug’s effects, and couldn’t complete any work, is alarming. “
Nice to be mentioned on BBC News,
Nice to be mentioned on BBC News, but what’s up with the disparaging “peppered with annoying links”? Especially when Boing Boing is mentioned as “cool” in the same sentence…their links are at least as annoying as mine. And in May, four of those “annoying links” went to the BBC News site. Up yours, BBC!
Slate has redesigned and it’s looking a
Slate has redesigned and it’s looking a little rough around the edges.
Interview with writer Sam Harris on “why
Interview with writer Sam Harris on “why religion must end”. “People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole.”
Huge Intricate Illustration Done With MS Paint
Huge intricate illustration done with MS Paint, a rudimentary drawing program. Here’s how the illustrator did it; it took him 100 hours.
Update: This one, while not as large, is quite a bit more intricate and took 500 hours to do…that’s almost 3 months of 40-hour work weeks. (thx, brandon)
Interview with Thom Yorke about politics, his
Interview with Thom Yorke about politics, his solo album, and Radiohead’s impending (yet distant) new album. (via dooce)
Natural deselection
Tom Coates recently checked out the Royal College of Art Summer Show in London and ran across this project by Tim Simpson:
…three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.
First plant to grow close to the proximity sensors wins. A simple and elegant idea.
Clever photography technique: using a SLR camera
Clever photography technique: using a SLR camera to shoot through the viewfinder of a twin lens camera, which are typically older cameras with large viewfinders. Mr. E is an early practitioner of the technique.
Chef/writer Anthony Bourdain turned 50 the other
Chef/writer Anthony Bourdain turned 50 the other day so his friends threw him a big party; Michael Ruhlman surveys the scene.
Nice profile of artist Natalie Jeremijenko. She’s
Nice profile of artist Natalie Jeremijenko. She’s putting Hudson River fish on the board of her company so that as shareholders, they will acquire personhood, and “have a say in the preservation of their grungy habitat”.
The Mannahatta Project is constructing maps of
The Mannahatta Project is constructing maps of what Manhattan was like in 1609, before its “discovery” by Henry Hudson. “The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted.” See also The Viele Map of Manhattan.
New York City named the most courteous
New York City named the most courteous city in the world. Since I’ve lived here, I’ve noticed that New Yorkers aren’t rude, they’re just busy and dislike having their time wasted. (via mr)
Andre Agassi will retire after this year’s US Open.
Andre Agassi will retire after this year’s US Open.
A collection of photo portraits of burn
A collection of photo portraits of burn survivors by John Brownlow.
Slate’s wine columnist considers which champagne Jay-Z
Slate’s wine columnist considers which champagne Jay-Z should drink now that he’s given up the Cristal. Taste and prestige are not the only considerations: “Take, for instance, this line from the Jay-Z hit ‘Can’t Knock the Hustle’: ‘My motto, stack rocks like Colorado/ auto off the champagne, Cristal’s by the bottle. ‘Salon’ can be substituted for ‘Cristal’ at no cost to the flow.”
Call A Ball is an idea for
Call A Ball is an idea for a soccer ball vending machine where balls are dispensed via an SMS from a mobile phone. You can also issue a “challenge” for other players to meet you at the machine. And if you’d like to keep the ball, it’s charged to your phone bill.
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