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How to choose a good book to read, a tip from Marshall McLuhan: turn to page 69, read it, and if it’s good, you’ve got a winner. (via snarkmarket)
Update: A kottke.org reader writes, “It’s known (although perhaps not well) that he often only read the left-hand pages of books. It’s one way that someone could get through as much as he did and apparently he thought there was usually too much redundancy, anyway.” (thx, steve)
Video of things you can’t do when you’re not in a pool. (thx, tana)
A 2000 year-old Greek computer accurately tracked the motion of the sun, the irregular orbit of the moon, and predicted lunar eclipses. “Remarkably, scans showed the device uses a differential gear, which was previously believed to have been invented in the 16th century. The level of miniaturisation and complexity of its parts is comparable to that of 18th century clocks.”
New invention watch: the wovel is a show shovel attached to a big wheel. It may make snow shoveling a lot easier, but it might also suffer from the Segway problem…i.e. you look like a big dork using it.
Dilbert creator Scott Adams wants Bill Gates for President, and I can’t say I disagree. “For my president I want a mixture of Mother Teresa, Carl Sagan, Warren Buffet, and Darth Vader. Bill has all of their good stuff. His foundation will save more lives than Mother Teresa ever did. He’s got the Carl Sagan intelligence and rational mind. He’s a hugely successful businessman. And I have every reason to believe he can choke people just by concentrating in their general direction.”
In an entry yesterday, I (knowingly) used the word nonplussed in a non-standard fashion. The Oxford American Dictionary on my computer tells me: “In standard use, nonplussed means ‘surprised and confused’. In North American English, a new use has developed in recent years, meaning ‘unperturbed’ — more or less the opposite of its traditional meaning. Although the use is common, it is not yet considered standard.” I’m happy to help move the English language forward (backward?) in this manner. That and I wanted to see if the language pedants in the audience were paying attention…and they certainly were. ;) (thx, everyone who sent this in)
I learned something terrific yesterday: if you take a really cold but still liquid beer out of the freezer and open it, the beer will freeze within seconds. The freezing trick also works if instead of opening the beer, you give the unopened bottle a sharp rap. The reasons I’ve found online for why the trick works varies slightly for the two cases. According to Daryl Taylor’s site for science teachers, opening the bottle changes the pressure in the bottle and thus lowers the temperature:
The sealed bottle’s envoronment has a specific volume, pressure, and temperature. By changing one, you are necessarily affecting the others. The chilled liquid has a smaller temperature, esentially the same volume, thus a smaller smaler pressure. This is, of cousre, according to the basic gas-law, PVNERT. Better known as PV=nRT. Even though the internal pressure has decreased, it is still far greater than the pressure outside the container, namely one atmosphere. Upon opening, the pressure inside drastically plunges as it tries to equalize with the atmosphere. This rapid decrease in P corresponds to a rapid decrease in T, since the V is essentially the same. This rapid drop in temperature of a liquid that is NEAR freezing actually plunges the liquid into a frozen state.
Not sure I completely buy this…does the ideal gas law work for liquids? I can see that the small amount of gas in the neck of the bottle would decrease in pressure and thus decrease in temperature and that might be enough to spur the liquid into freezing. For a better answer for both cases, I consulted the internet’s all-seeing oracle, Ask Metafilter. This comment gives a succinct answer:
The beer is below the freezing temperature, but there is not enough contamination for the ice to form. The bubbles of carbon dioxide released when the bottle is hit act as nuclei for ice crystal growth in the supercooled beer. Same thing happens in reverse when water is microwaved in a smooth container but won’t boil until hit.
This more scientific discussion of unfreezable water provides more evidence of what may be going on: supercooling effects, the carbon dioxide in solution hindering freezing (osmotic depression of freezing point), and hydration factors. Anyway, wicked cool! Supercooled beer!
Update: If you require visual proof, check out these two videos of beer freezing after it’s been opened. Here’s a video with water…so fast! (via digg)
The Whine Colored Sea issues a challenge: which directors, musicians, artists, authors, etc. followed a masterpiece with a bomb. Spielberg’s Schindler’s List followed by Jurassic Park 2 is a good example.
Design Observer’s 2006 holiday reading list. Lots of good gift ideas.
This is exactly how my day goes everyday. (thx, dianne)
Beautiful-looking 2007 calendar designed by Paula Scher and her team at Pentagram.
Buzzfeed: the new Digg? Note: I’m a Buzzfeed advisor.
Nice thread of people providing examples of gifts that aren’t really gifts. “The ideal is one that does not insult upon opening, that, in fact, seems like a great gift until living with it for a couple months.” Worst gift I’ve ever heard of anyone getting: a turtle as a housewarming gift. Who gives someone a turtle? Was the wine store closed?
I got the chance this past weekend to play the Wii at a friend’s house for a few hours. Here are some rough initial thoughts:
0. It’s fun. Really fun. Like “baby laughing hysterically for no reason other than he’s a baby and he’s alive” fun. I haven’t enjoyed a gaming system this much since a certain plumber and his green-clad brother ba-da-bum-ba-da-bum-bummed their way into our hearts.
1. Not only do I want to play it again right now (so badly) despite having to stand up and move around and stuff, I want to play it again right now (so badly) because I want to stand up and move around and stuff. Reminds me of my 15yo self; all he wanted to do was play hours and hours of basketball in my driveway.
2. With the Wii Sports Pack, Nintendo has made it possible for those who are not physically gifted to nonetheless discover and explore their athletic gifts (like manual dexterity, quickness, timing, etc.). Even your gray-haired relatives can excel at bowling: “It was her 1st time ever playing video games and she has a high of 155 so far. Wii rocks!”
3. Possibly the best thing about the Wii is that you don’t really need to be told how to use the controller. The boxing game has zero learning curve (just punch!).
4. Nintendo is betting the farm that just like megapixels don’t matter as much nowadays when buying digital cameras as lens quality, camera features, etc., the number of polygons your console’s processor spits out at what resolution matters less than how fun the games are. As someone who’s nonplussed by fancy graphics in video games, I’ll take that bet.
5. The menu interface is a little clunky. Did they not have time to get it right?
6. The day it’s possible to buy NHL ‘94 through the Wii’s Virtual Console, my life, such as it is, will be complete.
7. I’m curious how much fine control is possible with the Wiimote after a couple weeks of practice. With a conventional controller, very tiny adjustments are possible by pulsing or tapping the joypad or joystick…you can easily move Mario right to the edge of the staircase or subtly adjust your direction your kart is pointed on the track. But I found it difficult being that precise with the Wiimote while playing Super Monkey Ball.
Now all I need to do is get my own. :)
A Polish exchange student spent six months with a fundamentalist Christian family in the US and didn’t have such a good time. “When I got out of the plane in Greensboro in the US state of North Carolina, I would never have expected my host family to welcome me at the airport, wielding a Bible, and saying, ‘Child, our Lord sent you half-way around the world to bring you to us.’ At that moment I just wanted to turn round and run back to the plane.” (via clusterflock)
Hans van der Meer takes beautiful photographs of soccer fields in Europe. Also available in book form. (thx, dirk)
The Shapes Project by Allen McCollum. “I’ve designed a new system to produce unique two-dimensional ‘shapes.’ This system allows me to make enough unique shapes for every person on the planet to have one of their own. It also allows me to keep track of the shapes, so as to insure that no two will ever be alike.” Part of McCollum’s project is on display at the Friedrich Petzel Gallery in NYC. (thx, scott)
Google Maps satellite view of where Marlo hangs out on The Wire. (thx, turbanhead)
People who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.
People who have bookmarked the people who have bookmarked del.icio.us on del.icio.us.
Ed. note: At this point, the del.icio.us web server started singing “Daisy, Daisy” and soon after, Skynet achieved consciousness.
Ben Stein muses about taxes, but the Warren Buffett stuff at the beginning of the article is the most interesting bit. “In conversation it came up that Mr. Buffett doesn’t use any tax planning at all. He just pays as the Internal Revenue Code requires.”
Apparently, signing off your emails with “Best” is “something close to a brush-off”. I sign most of my emails with “Best”, especially when I don’t know the person particularly well, and I definitely don’t mean it as a brush-off. “Sincerely” is too formal, “Warmest regards” is a lie (you can’t give absolutely everyone your warmest regards), and “xoxo”…I’m not a girl. So “Best” it is…don’t take it the wrong way.
In this interview with .net magazine, Flickr founder Caterina Fake likens building an online community to throwing a party:
According to Caterina: “The most difficult part is not the technology but actually getting the people to behave well.” When first starting the community the Flickr team were spending nearly 24 hours online greeting each individual user, introducing them to each other and cultivating the community. “After a certain point you can let go and the community will start to maintain itself, explains Caterina. “People will greet each other and introduce their own practices into the social software. It’s always underestimated, but early on you need someone in there everyday who is kind of like the host of the party, who introduces everybody and takes their coat.
I recall those early days of Flickr…Stewart and Caterina were everywhere, commenting on everything. A core group of people followed their example and began to do the same, including Heather Champ, who now manages Flickr’s community in an official capacity. Matt did a similar thing with MetaFilter too…he spent a lot of time interacting with people on there, taking their coats, and before long others were pitching in.
Map of the world according to Ronald Reagan. (via strangemaps)
Two interviewers for The Onion AV Club talk about how they prepare for doing interviews. “First, I think about what I might ask subjects if I were at a party with them, just making conversation. Then I read as many interviews as I can find with the subject, so I can avoid asking questions that have been asked a thousand times, and steer around the pat answers.”
A gentlemen’s pocket globe was the thing to have in the late 1700s in England.
In P.T. Anderson’s Punch-Drunk Love, Adam Sandler’s character takes advantage of a Healthy Choice promotion for frequent flier miles, buying 1000s of miles and lots of pudding for just a few dollars. This aspect of Sandler’s character was based on a caper well-known within the frequent flier community when David Phillips purchased over 1.2 million frequent flyer miles for just under $2400, which has allowed him and his family to fly to over 20 countries for free.
Now the big thing is cheese. This weekend I was handed an opened wheel of processed cheeses by a friend. He said that his brother-in-law had caught wind of a frequent flyer promotion whereby you get 500 miles for each purchase of this cheese wheel and had purchased 75,000 miles for ~$300, which also means he’s got more opened cheese wheels than he knows what to do with. The frequent flyer forums and blogs are already on the case. These forums are actually pretty fascinating…there’s a lot of free/cheap travel to be had for those with a little time on their hands. This fellow claims to have taken advantage of airline pricing errors to fly 16 flights this year for a total cost of $77.57.
Cool composite photo of planes taking off from a busy airport. (via nickbaum)
Kevin Smith’s iTunes Celebrity Playlist got rejected by Apple because his comments were too long. “This is a great playlist. Too great, actually. We don’t have the space for comments that run that long.”
Long but great NPR interview with Ed Burns, writer and producer of The Wire. We just finished season 4 last night and it took the stuffing right out of me. I haven’t been this depressed for months. (thx to the several people who recommended this)
David echoes my reaction to seeing a Zune in person for the first time this weekend: “I just saw a Zune, and guess what? Its a piece of shit.” I usually give people a hard time for making snap judgments about technology that takes time to get to know (comments like “this interface sucks” after 20 seconds of use make my eyes go rolling), but the Zune…it’s like the story of the Getty’s Greek kouros that Gladwell tells in Blink: one look and you know it’s wrong. Andre has been trying a Zune out for the last couple of weeks and doesn’t mind it even though he’s giving up on it.
The best and worst restaurant trends in NYC for 2006. Among the worst, Mexican: “Zero progress on one of the most misunderstood and untapped cuisines in NYC.”
Penguin is releasing a series of books with blank covers with the idea being that the reader fills them in. The first books in the series include Crime and Punishment and Emma. Penguin has a gallery of reader submissions…send in your best shot.
Although Nintendo finds itself in third place in the video game console wars behind Sony and Microsoft, the company is doing really well financially while Sony and MS are maybe breaking even with their efforts. “Nintendo knew that it could not compete with Microsoft and Sony in the quest to build the ultimate home-entertainment device. So it decided, with the Wii, to play a different game entirely.”
Things have been a little slow on the site today because I broke one of my contact lenses this morning while putting them in. For most people, this isn’t much of a problem, but a) I wear hard lenses, not disposables, so they are not easily replaced (2 days to a week to order more), b) the prescription on my backup glasses is at least 7 years old and the lenses are scratched all to hell anyway, and c) without contacts or glasses, I’m functionally blind, so unless I wanted to listen to podcasts all day (gah, could you imagine anything worse?), I took off as soon as I could for the optometrist.
So, my new contacts are on order, and until then I have a new pair of glasses to wear. The thing is, since I went alone and can’t see a thing without corrective lenses, I had to choose new frames without really being able to see them properly. But I have two weeks to exchange them for other frames, so I wanted to ask your collective expert opinion…what do you think of my glasses?
Nintendo game developers Ken’ichiro Ashida and Shigeru Miyamoto talk about how the Wii was developed. “The consensus was that power isn’t everything for a console. Too many powerful consoles can’t coexist. It’s like having only ferocious dinosaurs. They might fight and hasten their own extinction.”
Players of the Nintendo Wii are getting more exercise than they bargained for; reports of “Wii elbow” abound. Making the supreme sacrifice, one gamer is “vowing nightly ‘Wii workouts’ to get in better shape”. What a trooper!
I posted the answer to the rope burning logic problem from last week. Note: the answer does not involve time travel or impossible knots.
A copy of OJ Simpson’s If I Did It sold for $8300 on eBay. The book was recalled and won’t ever be available for sale.
Update: Looks like the sale didn’t go through: “Both Seller and Myself Agreed NOT to COMPLETE Transaction…..” (thx, susan)
Matt Haughey’s got a few photos of Flickr HQ from back when they had only 4 or 5 employees and were still in Vancouver. Includes a screenshot of Flickr at the time, when it was still “all chat and shoeboxes”.
The NY Times Book Review’s 100 notable books of 2006. Making the list are several kottke.org notable books: The Ghost Map, The Omnivore’s Dilemma, Consider the Lobster, and The Blind Side.
Every year, my friend Leslie does an online Advent calendar (she’s #1 on Google for “advent calendar”). This year, she’s asking for people (like you!) to submit their favorite holiday stories for use with the calendar.
This is one of my favorite photos. It was taken by Josef Koudelka in Prague in 1968, just before the Soviet Union invaded and put a stop to The Prague Spring. To demonstrate the emptiness of the streets at noon, Koudelka stuck his wristwatch into the scene before shooting it. A simple, brilliant gesture that adds not only a temporal dimension to the photo but also a sense of solitary humanity in contrast to the empty streets.
Last week, Abbas Raza of 3 Quarks Daily posed a list of logic problems to the site’s readers. I’d seen some of these problems before and I didn’t have the time to work through the unfamiliar ones, but my favorite was the very first question:
You are given two ropes and a lighter. This is the only equipment you can use. You are told that each of the two ropes has the following property: if you light one end of the rope, it will take exactly one hour to burn all the way to the other end. But it doesn’t have to burn at a uniform rate. In other words, half the rope may burn in the first five minutes, and then the other half would take 55 minutes. The rate at which the two ropes burn is not necessarily the same, so the second rope will also take an hour to burn from one end to the other, but may do it at some varying rate, which is not necessarily the same as the one for the first rope. Now you are asked to measure a period of 45 minutes. How will you do it?
For those in the US, this is a little something to keep the conversation at the holiday dinner table interesting. I’ll post the answer here this weekend…good luck.
Update: Alright, here’s the answer. Light both ends of rope A and one end of rope B. After 30 minutes, rope A will be completely burned up and there will be 30 minutes of rope B left. Light the other end of rope B; it will burn up in 15 minutes. Total time elapsed since starting the ropes on fire: 45 minutes.
Author Thomas Harris, who has written three previous books about Hannibal Lecter, is set to come out with a fourth: Hannibal Rising.
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