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At least now we know what “Wii” stands for: it’s the sound the Wii Remote makes as it flies through the air just before hitting your TV. Wiiiiiiiii!!! “For example, in Wii Sports bowling, the proper way to let go of the ball while bowling is to release the ‘B’ button on the Wii Remote — DO NOT LET GO OF THE Wii REMOTE ITSELF.” (thx, janelle)
10 Zen Monkeys has an interview with Gina Smith about iWoz, her book on Steve Wozniak. “Another misconception that bothered him was the idea that he and Steve Jobs had designed the Apple I and the Apple II together. The sole designer of both those computers was Steve Wozniak. The sole designer.” (thx, david)
The Max Planck Institute of Molecular Cell Biology and Genetics has a logo that changes every time it gets used on letterhead or displayed on a web site. The logo system was designed by Michael Schmitz and is based on cellular automata like John Conway’s Game of Life. “Parameters [for the logo] are coupled to certain factors: number of employees = density, funding = speed, number of publications = activity. Different logos are being ‘bred’ and then picked by fitness in relation to the parameters or voted for by the employees.” Schmitz’s PDF document Evolving Logo is worth a look even if you don’t read German. (Anyone want to do a translation? It looks fascinating.) (via bbj)
Writer’s Dreamtools has a timeline of events, people, entertainment, fashion, money, etc. for every decade since 1650. This allows the writer to put herself in that time period and as a jumping off point for further historical research. Favorite categories: “who’s in” and “what’s in”. What a great resource for writers. (via youngna)
Mike Judge’s Idiocracy is out on DVD in early January. Hopefully this one will find an audience on DVD like Office Space did. The movie had a very limited release, possibly because Fox didn’t really want anyone to see it.
When you’re a Muslim in orbit, how do you determine which way Mecca is and how often you need to pray? “The ISS is more than 200 miles from the Earth’s surface and orbits the earth every ninety-two minutes, or roughly sixteen times a day. Do we have to worship eighty times a day (sixteen orbits a day multiplied by five prayer times)?”
Dick Cheney’s Google searches. “lynne cheney MySpace”
Top 50 music videos of 2006. Includes inline video so you can watch them all. (via waxy)
Just the other day I was thinking, “gosh it would be neat if they made a painting game for the Wii”. But a Bob Ross painting game for the Wii? Holy crap!
A paper by two economists tracks politically loaded phrases used by Democrats and Republicans. For instance, the Republicans use “illegal aliens” while the Democrats speak of “veterans health”. Full list of loaded phrases is here and the original paper is here.
A photoessay that follows the path of a diamond from the mines of Africa to the Western jewelry store. “In Angola, Sierra Leone, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, miners work for food but receive no wages” and “last year, grooms spent nearly $4.5 billion on engagement rings”. See also the interview with Edward Zwick, director of Blood Diamond. “By putting your credit card down, you’re essentially endorsing the practices that are involved in getting a resource. This place and that place are, in fact, interconnected.” (thx, blake)
MIT professor emeritus Seymour Papert was seriously injured by a motorbike in Hanoi and is in a coma. Papert developed the Logo programming language, among other things.
The bestselling book at Amazon for 2006? Cesar’s Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan, the Dog Whisperer.
Update: Browse the top sellers by cover.
I’m having a contest: use your Nintendo Wii avatar editor to make the best celebrity Mii. Deadline is Monday, Dec 11. Lots of good entries so far, send yours in!
The unabridged audiobook for War and Peace spans 51 CDs, runs for 70 hours, and is highly recommended.
Bookslut lists the best book covers of 2006. (via lists 2006)
Nicholas Kristof’s “Modest Proposal for a Truce on Religion,” and responses by Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins, and Daniel Dennett. “Mr. Kristof has simply become acclimatized to the convention that you can criticize anything else but you mustn’t criticize religion.”
On a recent visit to New York, writer Will Self walked the 20 miles from JFK to his hotel in Manhattan…and this was after walking 26 miles to Heathrow to catch the plane to JFK. “There were not many pedestrians out at 11:30 in the morning, and dressed all in black and snapping pictures with a digital camera, Mr. Self was a sight sufficiently exotic that he was tailed for a while by a black S.U.V.”
Photographs taken by NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor suggest that liquid water may still run on Mars. Successive photos of crater gullies show activity in the last 4 years.
The Nintendo Wii includes a nifty editor for making the avatars that you play with, which are called Miis. Here’s a video demonstrating how the editor works. The editor is suprisingly powerful for how simple it is and almost right away, people began making celebrity Miis…early efforts included Michael Jackson and Liza Minnelli. Some of the best celebrity Miis I’ve seen are Spike Lee, Borat, Steve Martin, Amy Sedaris as Jerri Blank, and Charlie Brown.
Meg and I set out to do a John Lennon Mii last nght, but as soon as we saw these eyes, we switched to Paul McCartney:
Not too shabby for a few minutes work, but I know you can do better. So, I’m having a contest to see who can make the best celebrity Mii. The rules are as follows:
1. All Miis must be made with the Nintendo Wii editor, not this Flash editor (which is cool, but not the same).
2. No cheating! Make your own Mii, don’t just copy someone else’s.
3. I love your mom, but she’s not a celebrity. Frances Bean, you can ignore this rule.
4. You retain exclusive worldwide rights to your Mii and its image, save for giving me permission to post it on kottke.org as part of the contest.
5. Judging will be done by me and possibly a panel of “celebrity” judges if I can scrounge some up. The family and friends of the judges can enter, but will be held to much higher standards than everyone else, just as in real life.
6. Only two entries per person. (And don’t enter two in your own name and then have your friend email in two more. Pick your best two, send ‘em in, and take your chances.)
7. Entry deadline is Monday, December 11th at 11:59 pm ET. The entry deadline has been moved to Wednesday, December 13th at 11:59 pm ET. I will announce the winner at some time shortly after that.
To enter, make your Mii, take a photo of it on the screen (make sure the Mii is clearly visible in the photo), and send a link to the photo to [email protected] with a subject line of “Celebrity Mii Contest” (no quotes). You can also send attachments but because of my spam situation, I cannot guarantee that they will get through to me…send a link to your entry to make sure. There will be some still-as-yet-unspecified prize (I’m thinking a Wii game or something like that) awarded to the winner. Good luck!
Update: More information on prizes (including a cool Mii statuette for the winner) and judges here.
Update: The contest is over and the results are here.
Robert Shields is the author of the world’s longest diary. It runs to 35 million words and he wrote about everything he did. Everything. “3:30-3:45 I was at the keyboard of the IBM Wheelwriter making entries for the diary.”
Richard Dawkins answers some questions from readers of the Independent. “Terrible things have been done in the name of Christ, but all he ever taught was peace and love. What’s wrong with that?”
The NBA admits that its new ball is a piece of crap and that, hey!, they should have consulted the players before they made the change. I can’t believe that businesses still function like this…what a bunch of idiots.
An increasing number of novels contain bibliographies, once the domain of the nonfiction book. I love bibliographies…bring them on.
Wonderful interview with photographer Simon Norfolk on BLDGBLOG. Norfolk photographs landscapes of war, but not just battlefields. “Because quite soon there aren’t going to be guys with guns shooting at each other. We’re quite soon getting to the era of UAVs and stuff. People aren’t even going to know what shot them - and there will be nothing to photograph.”
My upside down Mii. I was trying to make a Picassoesque Cubist Mii, but the editor isn’t that functional so this is what I ended up with instead.
I thought that said “Netherlanders”…I was ready to put that in the “odd things I didn’t know about the Dutch” column.
Welcome to your new climate: in 2006, Europe experienced its warmest autumn in 500 years. “The results show that 2006 has beaten the ‘hottest’ autumns of 1772, 1938 and 2000 by about a degree.”
Wordie is “like Flickr, but without the photos”. “Wordie lets you make lists of words — practical lists, words you love, words you hate, whatever. You can then see who else has listed the same words, and talk about it.” Lots of people love schadenfreude. (via clusterflock)
DarwiinRemote lets you use a Wii Remote as an input device for OS X. Take heart Windows users, WiinRemote is for you.
50 works of art you should see before you die, a list compiled by Guardian art critic Jonathan Jones and his readers. (via eyeteeth)
NES and SNES controller adapters for Nintendo Wii. Shipping in Q1 2007.
Russell Seitz says that cyberspace weighs roughly 2 ounces:
A statistically rough (one sigma) estimate might be 75-100 million servers @ ~350-550 watts each. Call it Forty Billion Watts or ~40 GW. Since silicon logic runs at three volts or so, and an Ampere is some ten to the eighteenth electrons a second, a straight forward calculation reveals that if the average chip runs at a Gigaherz, some 50 grams of electrons in motion make up the Internet. So as of today, cyberspace weighs less than two ounces.
Area Man Accidentally Responds To Own ‘M4M’ Ad. “He lives right in my neighborhood, he’s a professional, and he loves to work out — he sounds sexy.”
50 greatest commercials of the 1980s. Amazingly includes video of every single commercial…prepare to waste your entire afternoon. (thx, art)
Update: Here are dozens of additional 80s commercials. (thx, david)
Kids who grew up playing Madden NFL know the intricacies of the game better than many fans (and coaches) of the game “because of attention to arcane details that has demystified the complexities of football to a population that never before understood them”. (via tmn)
It’s almost a shame that I don’t get to read more of my spam because it can be highly entertaining. Here’s one of the better ones I’ve seen in a long time, a clever ad for Viagra. Warning: NSFW but LOL nonetheless.
Took in The Art of the Book lecture at the 92nd Street Y last night. Milton Glaser, Chip Kidd (“a modern day Truman Capote” I heard him described as afterward), Dave Eggers, with Michael Beirut moderating. One of the most interesting comments came late in the proceedings from Dave Eggers, who described one of the main goals of the McSweeney’s design staff as attempting to design the books as well and as beautifully as they could as objects so that people would be compelled to save them. That way, even if people didn’t have time to read them soon after purchase, they couldn’t bear to throw/give the book away and would instead put it on their shelf in the hopes — McSweeney’s hopes, that is — that the buyer would at some point pull it down off the shelf and give it another try.
This design goal runs counter to the design process behind most contemporary book jackets, which are engineered almost entirely for the purpose of eliciting in the potential buyer a “buy me” reaction within two seconds of spotting them. McSweeney’s, as a champion of authors, wants the writing to be read while most major publishing companies, as champions of their shareholders, want books to be purchased. People buying books is important to the goal of getting the writing within them read, but McSweeney’s emphasis on designing books to last in people’s homes is a clever way to pursue that goal after the sale.
Remember the whole rare stamp on a Florida absentee ballot thing? Turns out it was a fake. “The give-away signs included an incorrect number of border perforations, the stamp’s thickness and its colour.” (thx, m)
Good news: Harold and Kumar Part 2 is set to begin filming in January.
Hmm, perhaps Richard Taylor’s fractal analysis of Jackson Pollock paintings isn’t that useful after all.
Steven Johnson’s outside.in project gets some nice ink in the NY Times. (via df)
Pro baseball player Don Carman wrote up a list of stock responses to reporter’s questions…it reads like a script for almost every locker room interview I’ve ever seen. “We’re going to take the season one game at a time.”
Some couples are waiting to get married until gays and lesbians have the right to marry.
Fantastic interview with David Simon in Slate. If you’re a fan of The Wire and caught up on season four, I really recommend reading this. When Simon was asked what the show was about, he said: “it’s about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings — all of us — are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism.”
Rex Grossman, 6/19, 34 yards, 0 TDs, and 3 INTs; or why the Chicago Bears, despite their current 10-2 record and weak NFC, aren’t getting anywhere near the Super Bowl this year.
Alexa traffic graphs roughly match those from Sitemeter, indicating that Alexa is not so bad for traffic trends.
Phillies pitcher Don Carman found a box of fan mail in his garage that he had accidentally not answered 15 years ago…so he replied to them, better late than never. “He lugged the envelopes down to the Naples post office, where he discovered that most of them included 25-cent stamps. ‘I told the postman I needed 250 10-cent stamps, and 250 4-cent stamps, and he just looked at me like, “What are you doing?”’” (thx, margaret)
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