“Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because
“Extra-terrestrials have yet to find us because they haven’t had enough time to look.”
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Entries for January 2007
English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, or
English Sentences Without Overt Grammatical Subjects, or the grammar of swearing. “Chomsky observes that the adverbial elements of (39)-(42) are outside of the verb phrase and that only elements within the verb phrase play a role in strict subcategorization of verbs. That principle would clearly be violated if fuck were a verb.”
Rejoice, netizens! The hunt is over for
Rejoice, netizens! The hunt is over for the weirdest thing on the web. I give you photos of people who have gotten a piercing on their third nipple. NSFW and possibly not safe for your psyche either.
Totally crazy video of cars sliding around
Totally crazy video of cars sliding around on an icy Portland Street. The soundtrack in my head is playing The Blue Danube when I watch this. (via bb)
From the June 2000 Esquire, what Julia Child
From the June 2000 Esquire, what Julia Child has learned. “There is nothing worse than grilled vegetables.” (via ag)
A list of Reel Pop’s ten favorite
A list of Reel Pop’s ten favorite dystopian films. Running Man, La Jetée, and Blade Runner all make the cut.
BET is showing season one of The
BET is showing season one of The Wire. Not the best way to watch the show (with commercials and edited for television), but handy if you don’t have other access to it.
NYC plans to allow people to send photos to 911 and 311.
NYC plans to allow people to send photos to 911 and 311.
The upper reaches of the northern hemisphere
The upper reaches of the northern hemisphere are warming so much that new islands are being discovered, including those once thought to be peninsula. “A peninsula long thought to be part of Greenland’s mainland turned out to be an island when a glacier retreated.”
The best niche blog yet: it’s devoted
The best niche blog yet: it’s devoted to the use of the lowercase “L” in otherwise uppercase text. “WHAT THE HEll? WHY DO PEOPlE WRITE lIKE THIS?”
Pentagram has redesigned the Doomsday Clock, which
Pentagram has redesigned the Doomsday Clock, which depicts the world’s proximity to nuclear annihilation. The funny thing is that they designed the 12 o’clock face, which will never actually be needed because we’ll all be dead before the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a change to move it forward.
Cute little pixelated Albert Einstein video from eBoy.
Cute little pixelated Albert Einstein video from eBoy.
Doin’ the robot has never looked so
Doin’ the robot has never looked so good in this video for Uniqlo. (via wider angle)
The web is perfect for taking jokes
The web is perfect for taking jokes too far: a list of the phrase “my hovercraft is full of eels” in dozens of languages.
A list of fads that were popular
A list of fads that were popular in the US. Hypercolor shirts! (via fimoculous)
Notes from Apartment #5. “Dear Neighbor. When you
Notes from Apartment #5. “Dear Neighbor. When you arrive late every night, you are probably concentrating on your chores and don’t realize that this building, this street, the traffic, the people are all very still, very quiet.”
David Pennock on the steep rise of
David Pennock on the steep rise of Apple’s stock after announcing the iPhone: “Jobs’s speech could not possibly have revealed over $8 billion in previously undisclosed information”.
Update: On the other hand, analysts think that Steve Jobs’ mere presence at the company is worth $20 billion.
Ze Frank is headed to Hollywood to “
Ze Frank is headed to Hollywood to “pump that area”. (via fimoculous)
A study by researchers at the University
A study by researchers at the University of Georgia suggests that women ingesting caffeine (say, in coffee or soda) before a heavy workout reduces post-workout muscle pain by almost 50%, more than Aleve, aspirin, or Advil. (via cd)
Jargon watch: “book” as a synonym for “
Jargon watch: “book” as a synonym for “cool”. Sample usage: “That YouTube video is so book.” As books are decidedly uncool, you might wonder how this usage came about. Book is a T9onym of cool…both words require pressing 2665 on the keypad of a mobile phone but book comes up before cool in the T9 dictionary, leading to inadvertent uses of the former for the latter. (thx, david)
Singer Ben Gibbard, from The Postal Service
Singer Ben Gibbard, from The Postal Service and Death Cab for Cutie, is playing a part in the film adaptation of David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, to be directed by John Krasinski, who plays a character on the US version of The Office, which is based on the original UK version by Ricky Gervais. To sum up: indie rock book nerd tv junkie explosion!
Think locally, act globally
Back in December, Philip Greenspun was debating the gift of a water buffalo to a poor family in Asia through Heifer International, but he found out that the animal is merely a symbolic gift:
A friend got a water buffalo for Christmas from her dad. She won’t actually take delivery of the animal. The Web page says that it will be given to a family in Asia. If you read the fine print on the page, however, it turns out that there is no actual buffalo and no actual family and you won’t get a photo of your family and your buffalo. The money simply gets dumped into the common fund at the charity. We are trying to decide if this is the crummiest possible Christmas present.
Bob Thompson, currently a resident of Yunnan province in China, read Greenspun’s post and offered to help him donate an actual water buffalo to an actual family in the area. Greenspun and his friend Craig MacFarlane took him up on the offer and an animal was purchased for ~US$460 and given to a family in need:
Thompson made an 8-minute video of the whole process which is well worth viewing. (thx, tom & eric)
Interview with Dr. Nina Jablonski, student of
Interview with Dr. Nina Jablonski, student of the skin. “[My skin] is my unwritten biography. My skin reminds me that I’m a 53-year-old woman who has smiled and furrowed her brow and, on occasion, worked in the desert sun too long. I enjoy watching my skin change because it’s one of the few parts of my body that I can watch. We can’t view our livers or heart, but this we can.”
The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch, an
The Twilight Years of Cap’n Crunch, an article on olde tyme hacker, phone phreak, and tech legend John Draper. I met Draper at Etech one year; he seemed like a brilliant man not quite at ease with society. (Also, when you see a phrase like “rave scene” in a WSJ article, it’s probably a euphemism for something.)
On the site for his new novel,
On the site for his new novel, The End As I Know It, Kevin Shay is blogging pre-Y2K internet postings. “On This Day Pre-Y2K is updated daily with one or more verbatim quotations drawn from a variety of online sources, from today’s date, eight years ago.” One of my favorite posts describes “the great geek exodus from the cities late next year”.
How the newspaper gets made: 1. The Washington
How the newspaper gets made: 1. The Washington Post runs an article on Dec 24, 2006 about how the New Yorker picks its cartoons, which article mentions in passing that several of the magazine’s cartoonists gather weekly at a Manhattan restaurant. 2. Three weeks go by. 3. The NY Times publishes a piece profiling said weekly gathering of the cartoonists at the Manhattan restaurant.
The ocean blue and acidic
Most of what we hear about global warming concerns the atmosphere and its carbon dioxide levels. In the New Yorker a few weeks ago, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote about what’s happening in the ocean (not online, unfortunately it is online (thx, tim)). It turns out that like all tightly coupled systems, the ocean and the atmosphere like to be in equilibrium with each other, which means that the chemistry of the ocean is affected by the chemistry of the atmosphere. Much of the extra carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by humans over the past two hundred years is being absorbed into the ocean and slowly making the ocean more acidic.
The CO2 dissolves, it produces carbonic acid, which has the chemical formula H2CO3. As acids go, H2CO3 is relatively innocuous — we drink it all the time in Coke and other carbonated beverages — but in sufficient quantities it can change the water’s pH. Already, humans have pumped enough carbon into the oceans — some hundred and twenty billion tons — to produce a .1 decline in surface pH. Since pH, like the Richter scale, is a logarithmic measure, a .1 drop represents a rise in acidity of about thirty per cent.
As Kolbert later states, “from the perspective of marine life, the drop in pH matters less that the string of chemical reactions that follow”. The increased levels of carbonic acid in the water means there are less carbonate ions available in seawater for making shells, meaning that thousands of species that build shells or skeletons from calcium carbonate are in danger of extinction. As a particularly troubling example, coral use calcium carbonate taken from the seawater to construct themselves. Climate modeller Ken Caldeira believes that if humans keep emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere at the same rate as today, by 2075 the world’s coral reefs will begin to disappear because their rate of natural erosion will surpass their ability to grow fast enough to keep up.
The truly worrisome thing about all this is that the ocean is an extremely slow moving machine and that once in motion, it’s difficult to stop or change its course.
Profile of “radical chef” David Chang and
Profile of “radical chef” David Chang and his restaurants, Momofuku Noodle Bar (one of my favorite restaurants) and Momofuku Ssam Bar, an Asian version of Chipotle. After a vegetarian customer threatened to sue Chang for not offering vegetarian broth, he took all but one of the veggie options off the menu. “We added pork to just about everything[…] Fuck it, let’s just cook what we want.”
Six weeks ago, a blogger began a
Six weeks ago, a blogger began a Wii workout regimen to see if he could lose weight by playing Wii Sports. He lost 9 pounds and almost 2% body fat.
A list of the hardest novels to
A list of the hardest novels to film. Ulysses tops the list. How about The Mezzanine?
Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. “I’m
Lengthy interview with Steve Jobs from 1995. “I’m convinced that about half of what separates the successful entrepreneurs from the non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Ethics books gets stolen more often than
Ethics books gets stolen more often than non-ethics books. “Missing books as a percentage of those off shelf were 8.7% for ethics, 6.9% for non-ethics, for an odds ratio of 1.25 to 1.” (via mr)
This three minute scene from Fawlty Towers
This three minute scene from Fawlty Towers is just about my favorite bit of television ever. (via cyn-c)
Kottkes in the news! Hikers Albert and
Kottkes in the news! Hikers Albert and Peter Kottke rescued camper Carolyn Dorn, who had been missing in the New Mexican wilderness for five weeks. To everyone who emailed: no relation.
The original trailers for Star Wars and
The original trailers for Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Oh, and here’s a Return of the Jedi trailer.
Here’s how MacRumors did their livecast of
Here’s how MacRumors did their livecast of Steve Jobs’ MacWorld keynote. At one point, the site had 213,000 simultaneous visitors.
Booksquare surmises that turned sideways, the iPhone
Booksquare surmises that turned sideways, the iPhone — with its bright 160 ppi screen — will be pretty decent for reading books and such. (via o’reilly)
Video of the World Freehand Circle Drawing
Video of the World Freehand Circle Drawing Champion. I read somewhere recently that everyone seems to have a talent like this, something a little odd that they can do better than most people. I can spit watermelon seeds a great distance (I’ve won two contests!). What can you do?
Video from CBS News of an iPhone demonstration. (via blurbomat)
Video from CBS News of an iPhone demonstration. (via blurbomat)
Regarding some of the points in my
Regarding some of the points in my iPhone round-up from yesterday, David Pogue has some answers to those questions and a whole lot more in his iPhone FAQ. “Is it ambidextrous? -No.” What does that even mean? As a lefty, am I out of luck? (via df)
Good news, everyone! (spoken in my best
Good news, everyone! (spoken in my best Professor Hubert J. Farnsworth from Futurama): one Mars thingie (the Reconnaissance Orbiter) has spotted another Mars thingie, the Pathfinder lander and its Sojourner rover.
Which of the following works would you
Which of the following works would you choose to be lost, if only three could be saved: Michelangelo’s Pieta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Mozart’s Don Giovanni, or Einstein’s 1905 paper on relativity? Not so sure I agree with the conclusion here…surely Einstein’s paper stands as a work unto itself, apart from the discovery it contains. Plus, maybe someone else (or a group of someone elses) wouldn’t have given us relativity as elegantly and usefully as Einstein did. (via 3qd)
Back in the late 60s and early 70
Back in the late 60s and early 70s, the New Yorker serialized the first chapter of James Joyce’s Ulysses in the theater listings for long-running productions. “In 1970, New Yorker edidor Gardner Botsford explained to Time magazine that he began the serialization of Ulysses because he got bored writing the same straight capsule reviews week after week.”
iPhone round-up
By now you’ve all heard about the iPhone and read 60 billion things about it, so I’ll get straight to it. I’ve been tracking some of the best points from around the web and jotted down some thoughts of my own.
Caveat: Evaluating an interface, software or hardware, is difficult to do unless you have used it. An interface for something like a mobile phone is something you use on the time-scale of weeks and months, not minutes or hours. There are certain issues you can flag as potential problems, challenges, or triumphs after viewing demos, descriptions of functions, and the like, but until you’re holding the thing in your hand and living with it day-to-day, you really can’t say “this is going to work this way” or “I don’t like the way that functions” with anything approaching absolute confidence. With that said:
- In his keynote announcing it, Steve Jobs said the killer app for the iPhone was voice. The thing is, many people you talk to who are are under 35 use their phones more and more for text and less and less for voice. Same thing for Treo and Blackberry aficionados. Does the text entry via the touchscreen work as well as text entry via a mini keyboard? The tactility of raised buttons provides a lot of feedback to the typer’s fingers that a touchscreen does not. (Jason Fried said: “When you touch the [iPhone] it doesn’t touch you back.”) Can you type on it with your thumbs? What about if your thumbs are large? I know people who can text without looking at the keypad and/or Blackberry keyboard, that’s out the window with the touchscreen. Can you dial with one hand?
The touchscreen text entry is the biggest issue with the iPhone. If it works well, the iPhone has a good shot at success, and if not, it’s going to be very frustrating for those that rely on their mobile for text…and every potential customer of the iPhone is going to hear about that shortcoming and shy away.
- The price is pretty high. So was the price for the first iPod. And the Macintosh. Apple will approach this in a similar way to the iPod…start with a premium product at the high end and work their way down to shuffle-land. It isn’t difficult to imagine an iPhone nano that just does voice, SMS, music, and a camera. (Or an iPhone shuffle…you press the call button and it randomly calls someone from the ten contacts the shuffle synched from your computer that morning.)
- I guess we know why iPod development has seemed a little sluggish lately. When the Zune came out two months ago, it was thought that maybe Apple was falling behind, coasting on the fumes of an aging product line, and not innovating in the portable music player space anymore. I think the iPhone puts this discussion on the back burner for now. And the Zune? The supposed iPod-killer’s bullet ricocheted off of the iPhone’s smooth buttonless interface and is heading back in the wrong direction. Rest in peace, my gentle brown friend.
- How long before the other iPods start working like the iPhone? I imagine a widescreen video iPod with touchscreen but without a phone, wifi, camera, etc. will be introduced at some point after the iPhone comes out in June. Without the need for the clickwheel, the shape of the video and nano iPods becomes much more flexible. If they can cram all the memory and electronics into a smaller space, the nano could be half its current height with a touchscreen.
- What’s really kind of sad about the intensely exuberant reaction to the iPhone is that the situation with current mobile phones are so bad in the first place. It’s not like we didn’t see any of this coming or couldn’t imagine the utility of the iPhone’s features. Visual voicemail is a good idea, but the reason Nokia or Motorola didn’t introduce it years ago is that the carriers (Sprint, Verizon, T-Mobile, etc.) don’t want to support it despite its obvious utility and ease of implementation. (T-Mobile sends my Nokia phone a text message every time I get a voicemail…what could be simpler than sending the number along with it and shunting those messages to a special voicemail app on the phone to see a list of them? Listening to them out of sequence would be a bit harder, but doable. Blackberry announced they were doing this back in 2005.) Integrated Google Maps, email, and search makes obvious sense too. As for the touchscreen, we’ve all seen Jeff Han’s work on multi-touch interaction, Minority Report, and Wacom’s Cintiq, not to mention the mousepads on the MacBooks and the iPod’s clickwheel. The Japanese are pretty unimpressed with the whole thing.
What *is* fantastic about the iPhone is the way that they’ve put it all together; features are great, but it’s all about the implementation. Apple stripped out all the stuff you don’t need and made everything you do need really simple and easy. (That’s the way it appears anyway…see above caveat.)
- Regarding the above, a relevant passage from a Time magazine article on how the iPhone came about:
One reason there’s limited innovation in cell phones generally is that the cell carriers have stiff guidelines that the manufacturers have to follow. They demand that all their handsets work the same way. “A lot of times, to be honest, there’s some hubris, where they think they know better,” Jobs says. “They dictate what’s on the phone. That just wouldn’t work for us, because we want to innovate. Unless we could do that, it wasn’t worth doing.” Jobs demanded special treatment from his phone service partner, Cingular, and he got it. He even forced Cingular to re-engineer its infrastructure to handle the iPhone’s unique voicemail scheme. “They broke all their typical process rules to make it happen,” says Tony Fadell, who heads Apple’s iPod division. “They were infected by this product, and they were like, we’ve gotta do this!”
- From the video, it looks like it take four clicks (after unlocking the phone) to make a phone call. For everyday use, that seems excessive. I hope there’s going to be some sort of speed dial mechanism…with my current phone, pressing “2” and then “send” calls my wife (which I can basically do without looking, BTW).
- I don’t know what the state of the art is in voice recognition these days, but I’m a little surprised that’s not an input option here. To call someone, you say their name (my current phone does this). To text someone, you speak the message and they get the text on their end. Speaking “Google Maps, sushi near 10003” would have the expected result.
- Or maybe drawing graffiti on the screen with your fingers and other gestural input methods? You could have different swipes and taps as a speed dial mechanism…swipe the screen from top left to bottom right and then tap in the lower right hand corner to call mom, that sort of thing. Or Morse code maybe? ;)
- The OS X included with the phone obviously isn’t the version that’s running on my Powerbook right now. John Gruber proves that footnotes are often more interesting than the referring text and offers this little tidbit:
Several people have speculated that the iPhone’s version of OS X is actually a preview of what we’ll be getting with Leopard, the next version of Mac OS X.That is to say the core operating system at the core of Mac OS X, the computer OS used in Macs, and “OS X”, the embedded OS on the iPhone. More on this soon in a separate fireball, but do not be confused: Mac OS X and OS X are not the same thing, although they are most certainly siblings. The days of lazily referring to “Mac OS X” as “OS X” are now over.
- Lance warns us of the dreaded version 1.0 hardware from Apple.
- My favorite thing about the iPhone is the Google Maps integration. I would use that at least 4-5 times a week.
- Will phone numbers and addresses detected on web pages in Safari be clickable? Click to dial a phone number, click to look up an address with Google Maps, that sort of thing. Update: There’s a video online somewhere (anyone?) of a demo that shows a URL in an email and/or text message that’s clickable. (thx, Deron)
- The resolution of the screen on the iPhone is 160 ppi. People who have seen it close up report that the screen is extremely crisp and clear. Apple displays have been higher than 72 ppi for quite awhile, now but not as high as 160. How soon can we expect 160 ppi on the MacBooks?
- Double the width of the iPhone and you’ve got the iTablet. 640x480, a bigger virtual keyboard to type on, etc. Just a thought.
- My friend Chris suggested that it should ship with a dock that hooks directly to a monitor. Attach a keyboard and mouse to the monitor and voila!, you’ve got the world’s smallest portable computer.
- iPhone trademark dispute between Apple and Cisco: booorrrrr-ring.
- This is one of the biggest questions in the hardcore technology community: will Apple allow 3rd party development of widgets and apps for the iPhone? Right now it seems like they might not, but there’s a lot of speculation in the absence of information going on. It sure would be nice if they did, but Apple doesn’t have a good track record here. I bet the Dodgeball and Upcoming folks are looking at the integrated Google Maps and wishing they could integrate their apps in the same way. (And Flickr too!)
- Games! A no-brainer. Probably lots you can do with the motion sensors and proximity detectors, not to mention the touchscreen. Although the touchscreen does make it difficult to see and control the onscreen action at the same time. How would you play Pac-Man on the iPhone?
- Available in more than one color? Probably a few months after launch…or it could be right away.
- Parallels running on the iPhone was a joke, folks. Just pulling your ARM.
- Don’t you think that maybe every company should fire their founders after a few years and then hire them back a few years later? I mean, how crazy is it that Apple birthed the Apple II and the Macintosh — each a significant achievement that taken alone would have sealed Apple’s reputation for innovation in the history of computing — and then fired the guy that got them there, stumbled badly enough that they were heading for mediocrity and obscurity, and then brought Jobs back, who spurred a string of successes that has nearly overshadowed the company’s earlier achievements: OS X, the iMac, the iBooks/PowerBooks/MacBooks, the iPod, iTMS, and now the iPhone. It’s insane! Not to mention fun to watch. Perhaps Google should fire Larry and Sergey with the idea that they’ll take them back in a few years when they’re a little older, a little wiser, a little more seasoned in business, with a new perspective, and possessing an enormous amount of motivation to prove that their dismissal was a bad move.
- My favorite comment from the Digg thread about the model iPhone I made out of cardboard: “Nothing says you’ve never kissed a girl like toting around a paper iPhone.”
- From the Time article, a quote from Steve Jobs about how Apple does business: “Everybody hates their phone and that’s not a good thing. And there’s an opportunity there.”
- Interesting thoughts from Adam Baer in the wake of the iPhone announcement:
Apple has figured out a way to retain a hold on hearts and minds in a business previously based on bytes. I applaud its designs, I worry about its tactics and what they mean for the future of marketing and group think. A group that wants our devotion but doesn’t need the press, doesn’t want the press, can’t keep the press off its backs, is a group that’s more interested in mind control than in improving lives with its products.
- Some miscellaneous links: Watch the MacWorld keynote with the iPhone announcement. Fortune piece on how Apple kept the iPhone a secret for two years. David Pogue got an hour of hands-on time with the iPhone. The Digg post of the announcement got almost 20,000 diggs, more than 1,400 comments, and nearly crashed my browser when I went to look at it.
And that’s enough, I think.
New Scientist recently compiled a list of
New Scientist recently compiled a list of strange substances (with accompanying video): ferrofluids, non-Newtonian liquids, superfluids, and materials that get thicker when stretched. (via bb)
An appreciation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 100
An appreciation of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 100 years after it was painted. “It’s not just 100 years in the life of a painting, but 100 years of modernism. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon is the rift, the break that divides past and future. Culturally, the 20th century began in 1907.”
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