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Changes in rules and enforcement for the upcoming NBA season: travelling will be called more, no more full-length leg tights, no extending your arms to gain an advantageous position in the lane before free-throws, and no more wearing rubber bands. It’ll be interesting to see if the travelling calls stick…last year, I’d say an uncalled travelling violation occurred on at least 1 out of every 5 or 6 possessions. (via truehoop)
The population of earth fell into “ecological debt” with the planet yesterday. “The date symbolised the day of the year when people’s demands exceeded the Earth’s ability to supply resources and absorb the demands placed upon it.” In 1987, ecological debt day fell on December 19.
Pete Wells writes in Food and Wine about recipes, copyrights, and patents. Meg picks up the thread and argues that copyrighting recipes would stifle innovation, not promote it, rewarding mostly the lawyers who insert themselves between our food and mouths. A commenter says, “By nature, food people are generous of spirit, and recognize that the great fun of food is in the sharing.”
Portrait photographer Platon shares some remembrances of shooting famous people. “Bono told Platon that ‘a friend’ had made the rosary he wears. Which friend? Oh, the Pope, of course.” Here’s another interview with Platon. (via conscientious)
Not sure if this is the actual code or not, but the source code for MS-DOS 6.0 appears to be available on Google Code Search (by way of a search for “microsoft confidential”). More Google Code Search goodies here. (thx, aj)
Joel Johnson used to work for Gawker, recently quit, and started a smart blog about guy stuff called Dethroner. Matt Haughey noticed the quality and low level of desperation in the tone of the site (I find many of the blogs that are attempting to make money are clingy and nearly pathological in their need for attention) and interviewed Joel about the site. “So I’m just saying, I wish more people would just be happy making a modest living on the web, because I think that it’s pretty neat that it can be done.”
The Wordless Music Series is an attempt to bring together classical music and more contemporary music, the differences between which “are an artificial construction in need of dismantling”. The next concert is on 11/15/2006 in NYC and tickets are priced for young concertgoers in mind.
In addition to the race and class aspect that interests me about the book, The Blind Side is, oh, by the way, also about the sport of football, specifically the left tackle position. In the 1980s, the quarterback became increasingly important in the offensive scheme and rushing linebackers, specifically Lawrence Taylor, became a bigger part of the defensive scheme. This created a problem for the offensive line: protect the valuable & fragile quarterback from the huge, fast likes of Lawrence Taylor, whose Joe Theismann-leg-snapping exploits you’ve seen replayed on a thousand SportsCenters. The solution to this problem was to hire giant-handed men the size of houses who move like ballerinas to protect the blind side of the quarterback. Thus has the left tackle position become the second-highest paid position in the league behind the quarterbacks themselves.
When I read Lewis’ profile of Michael Oher in the New York Times, I had a crazy thought: why not cut to the chase and make the men fit to play the left tackle position into quarterbacks instead? Lewis covers this briefly near the end of the book in relating the story of Jonathan Ogden, left tackle for the Baltimore Ravens:
Now the highest paid player on the field, Ogden was doing his job so well and so effortlessly that he had time to wonder how hard it would be for him to do some of the other less highly paid jobs. At the end of that 2000 season, en route to their Super Bowl victory, the Ravens played in the AFC Championship game. Ogden watched the Ravens’ tight end, Shannon Sharpe, catch a pass and run 96 yards for a touchdown. Ravens center Jeff Mitchell told The Sporting News that as Sharpe raced into the end zone, Ogden had turned to him and said, “I could have made that play. If they had thrown that ball to me, I would have done the same thing.”
Having sized up the star receivers, Ogden looked around and noticed that the quarterbacks he was protecting were…rather ordinary. Here he was, leaving them all the time in the world to throw the ball, and they still weren’t doing it very well. They kept getting fired! Even after they’d won the Super Bowl, the Ravens got rid of their quarterback, Trent Dilfer, and gone looking for a better one. What was wrong with these people? Ogden didn’t go so far as to suggest that he should play quarterback, but he came as close as any lineman ever had to the heretical thought.
Many of the left tackles that Lewis talks about in the book can run faster than most quarterbacks, they can throw the ball just as far or farther (as a high school sophomore, Michael Oher could stand at the fifty-yard line and toss footballs through the goalposts), possess great athletic touch and finesse, have the intellect to run an offense, move better than most QBs, know the offense and defense as well as the QB, are taller than the average QB (and therefore has better field vision over the line), and presumably, at 320-360 pounds, are harder to tackle and intimidate than a normal QB. Sounds like a good idea to me.
Fuck, this pisses me off: the New Yorker is splitting up their longer pieces into multiple pages (for example: Ben McGrath’s article on YouTube). I know, everyone else does it and it’s some sort of “best practice” that we readers let them get away with so they can boost pageviews and advertising revenue at the expense of user experience, but The New Yorker was the last bastion of good behavior on this issue and I loved them for it. This is a perfect example of an architecture of control in design and uninnovation. I want the New Yorker’s web site to get better, not worse. Blech and BOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!
Update: Dan Lockton has some further thoughts on multi-page articles.
Update: The New Yorker seems to have reversed their opinion on the matter. Nice work.
Update: Nope, still busted. Crap.
Google acquires YouTube for $1.65 billion. (thx, meg)
Gothamist Maps uses Google Maps to pinpoint news alerts (fires, robberies, car accidents, etc.) on a map of NYC. Pretty cool.
Screw Chevy: “It’s not OK to use images of Rosa Parks, MLK, the Vietnam War, the Katrina disaster, and 9/11 to sell pickup trucks.”
Update: In a hamfisted tribute on the occasion of her death, Apple posted a Rosa Parks “Think Different” ad on their home page. (thx, mark)
Facadeprinter is a paint gun that prints images on the wall from 20 feet away. See also the opening credits of the A-Team.
During an interview in support of the premiere of Dr. Strangelove, an unheard interviewer expresses surprise at Peter Sellers’ use of an American accent and asks him to use an English one. Here’s a video of Sellers trying to find an accent to the interviewer’s liking:
What is that, nine different completely plausible accents in 45 seconds? I love actors who can do accents well. Sellers is my favorite, but I also like Aussie Rachel Griffiths playing Californian Brenda in Six Feet Under and Brits Idris Elba & Dominic West (drug dealer Stringer Bell and officer Jimmy McNulty on The Wire). American actors often seem to have problems doing accents although Gwyneth Paltrow does a nice posh Londoner. We saw The Departed this weekend (really good, BTW), which takes place in Boston, always an accent minefield for actors. Locally grown Mark Wahlberg and Matt Damon acquitted themselves quite well. The rest? Not so much. DiCaprio was alright, but the rest of the cast was tuning in and out like an old AM radio.
Photographs of female anatomy for artists, just in case you don’t have the resources to hire live nude models. Male anatomy photos available here. NSFW.
Parts 3 and 4 of (the must-see) Eyes on the Prize are on tonight…here’s a look at the difficulties the filmmakers went through to get the rights to all the material in the film cleared again. (thx, david)
More on Doug Block’s new documentary film, 51 Birch Street. “‘But it wasn’t until later, when we were in the car, and I asked [my dad] “Do you miss Mom?” and he said no’ that Doug Block knew he was onto a movie.” Previous post.
Steven Johnson on The Long Zoom, “the satellites tracking in on license-plate numbers in the spy movies; the Google maps in which a few clicks take you from a view of an entire region to the roof of your house; the opening shot in ‘Fight Club’ that pulls out from Edward Norton’s synapses all the way to his quivering face as he stares into the muzzle of a revolver; the fractal geometry of chaos theory in which each new scale reveals endless complexity.” And that’s just the introduction to an interview of Will Wright about his new Long Zoom game, Spore.
Abridged version of Bob Woodward’s State of Denial, which “details the infighting, disarray, and mistakes made by the Bush war council during the Iraq war”.
Can’t make it to PopTech this year? Good news: they’re showing the whole thing live on the web for free.
List of great insults. It may be apocryphal, but I’ve always loved the exchange between Lady Astor and Winston Churchill: “Lady Astor: ‘Sir, if you were my husband, I would poison your drink.’ Churchill: ‘Madam, if you were my wife, I would drink it.’” (via dooce)
Remember, responsible adults should always use sexual consent forms.
Top 100 most popular classical music pieces, featuring stuff like Beethoven’s 5th, Pomp and Circumstance, and Mozart’s Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.
Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter recently snapped a picture of the Opportunity rover perched on the rim of Victoria Crater. Opportunity drove more than 5 miles from its landing site to get there. High resolution photo here. Here’s where Opportunity is located on Mars.
Holding hands is increasingly seen as a sign of commitment and intimacy, while more seemingly intimate acts like kissing and sex are more likely to occur earlier in a “relationship”.
Lemony Snicket has finished the last of his 13-book Series of Unfortunate Events with The End.
Trailer for Christopher Guest’s new mockumentary film, For Your Consideration. Yes, Parker Posey is present and accounted for. (via wdik)
Update: The movie’s MySpace page has a clip from the movie. (thx, sam)
Update: JJG noticed a certain theme that runs through Guest’s work.
Doug Block, who you may remember was the director of Home Page (a documentary about online life circa 1997, featured Justin Hall), has a new documentary coming out called 51 Birch Street. The film is an examination of Block’s family begun after his mother died, his father quickly remarried, and Doug began to wonder how well he really knew them to begin with.
Update: David Hudson saw 51 Birch Street at SXSW and liked it.
Instead of megapixels-worth of light sensors, a new experimental camera uses a series of mirrors to focus all the light on just one sensor. Somewhat related question that I’ve been wondering about for awhile: why do digital cameras need shutters? Why can’t you just turn the sensors on and off electronically? Seems like you could then use many more arbitrary “shutter” speeds, like 5 seconds or 1/50000 of a second.
Hot new architecture trend: installing secret rooms in your home. “I always wanted one since watching Scooby-Doo way back when.” (via bb)
Museum camouflage photographs by Harvey Opgenorth. (via nick baum)
The soundtrack for Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette contains tracks by Aphex Twin, Siouxsie & The Banshees, Squarepusher, and The Strokes. Boy, people are either going to love or hate this movie.
Google launched a new code search feature today. At least two sites already offer this functionality, but a great deal of attention follows Google wherever they go.
Code search is a great resource for web developers and programmers, but like the making available of all previously unsearched bodies of information, it’s given lots of flashlights to people interested in exploring dark corners. Here are some things that people have uncovered already:
Got any other Google code search goodies? Send them along. If you find this interesting, Digg this story.
On the heels of the possible proof of the Poincare conjecture, another of the $1 million Clay Institute Millennium Prize problems has possibly been proven: the Navier-Stokes equations. The paper is available here.
Update: Oops, “This paper is being withdrawn by the author due a serious flaw.” (thx, tj)
If you’re waiting for people to stop assuming that sports fans are a bunch of beer-swilling chuckleheads, you’ll need to wait a little longer. Of the first six paragraphs of a story about Minnesota Twins outfielder Torii Hunter’s recent miscues by ESPN “senior writer” Jim Caple, here are three:
“See? This is where Bob makes his crucial mistake. When he orders the eighth beer. If he cuts himself off at seven, he probably doesn’t even talk to that woman, let alone go home with her.”
“Hank, if you had to do it all over again, would you still say those pants make your wife look fat?”
“That @#&% Johnson. I would have gotten that promotion if he hadn’t accidentally sent those bachelor party photos on an officewide e-mail. What a moron.”
Ah, the social tribulations of the red-blooded American male. He told his wife that her pants made her look fat even though she said it was ok to say so and he actually fell for it! OMG! I think read about that in a joke book in the 80s.
It’s that time of year again in the Northern Hemisphere: the leaves are changing. Here’s a map of the peak foliage times for the US. The Northeast had better get a cold snap soon or the leaves will be as lackluster as last year.
Video of a couple of young kids going all Harlem Globetrotters on the court.
Some nice photography from Corey Arnold, specifically the fishing portfolios. (via thih)
Historiography is the study of the practice of history. “When you study ‘historiography’ you do not study the events of the past directly, but the changing interpretations of those events in the works of individual historians.”
Where do Craigslist’s Missed Connections occur in NYC? Gawker has the breakdown by location and subway line.
Animated movies have an animal problem and aren’t working as well as they used to at the box office. “There are all these people saying we are going to be the next Pixar. We say, ‘Who is your John Lasseter?’” The box office performance of the Wallace and Gromit movie is unfortunate…I’ve caught it a couple of times on cable and it’s really quite good.
Nikon recently sent a bunch of new D80s to some Flickr photographers and are now using some of the shots those photographers took in an ad campaign. “Nikon did what every major brand should be doing…it got out of its own way and let the real people that counted do the talking: their own consumers.” PDF of the ad spread.
Collection of x-rated movies posters from the 60s and 70s. NSFW.
At the end of my Eyes on the Prize post from earlier this week, I asked people for their favorite books on the American civil rights movement. Here’s what I got back:
Thanks to everyone for the recommendations; these all sound great.
R.W. Apple, longtime and beloved political and food writer for the NY Times, died early this morning aged 71. “In the interests of efficiency, The New York Times recently equipped its main office with…a 185-pound, water-cooled, self-propelled, semi-automatic machine called R. W. Apple Jr.” Here’s Apple’s last piece for the Times, on the cuisine of Singapore.
Update: The NY Times put up a piece that Apple filed right before he entered the hosptial that they were going to run later in the fall: The Global Gourmand.
Update: Ed Levine wrote a nice personal remembrance of Apple. See also Trillin’s article on Apple from the New Yorker.
Passing the Gladwell Point: what’s wrong with Malcolm Gladwell? “At times, lately, Mr. Gladwell sounds like someone trying to tell other people about something he read once in a Malcolm Gladwell piece, after a few rounds of drinks.” (thx, choire)
LifePixel will modify your digital camera (Nikons or Canons, mostly) to shoot in infrared. “Camera manufacturers stop infrared light from contaminating the images by placing a hot mirror filter in front of the sensor which effectively blocks the infrared part of the spectrum while still allowing the visible light to pass. We remove this hot mirror filter and replace it with a custom manufactured infrared filter.”
Variety is reporting that the movie rights for Michael Lewis’ The Blind Side have been purchased by Fox. Most of the article is behind a paywall, but here’s the relevant bit:
After interest from multiple buyers, which included New Line and Mandalay, the “Blind Side” deal closed for $200,000 against $1.5 million and also includes $250,000 in deferred compensation. Gil Netter will produce for Fox, which did not confirm the value of the deal.
Norton released the book yesterday, but Hollywood interest was sparked when the New York Times Magazine ran an excerpt in its Sept. 24 issue.
Story, which was titled “The Ballad of Big Mike,” centered on Michael Oher, a poor, undereducated 344-pound African-American teenager in Memphis, whose father was murdered and whose mother was a crack addict. Oher had been shuffled through the public school system, despite his 0.6 grade point average and missing weeks of classes each year. But his tremendous size and quickness attracted the interest of a wealthy white couple who took him in and groomed him both athletically and academically to become one of the top high school football prospects in the country.
I’m hoping against hope that if the movie ever gets made, the interesting class and racial issues the book raises aren’t completely steamrollered out of the story in favor of pure uplifting entertainment. (thx, jen)
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