Nine months after the World Cup, Germany is experiencing a baby boom, which is good news because Germany’s birth rate is among the lowest in the world.
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Entries for February 2007
“A sock puppet is an additional username used by a Wikipedian who edits under more than one name.”
CodeIDE is an browser-based IDE for editing code. Supported languages include LISP, HTML, Basic, Perl, and JavaScript. My favorite bit is the scrolling list of results and error messages from other users.
FindSounds is a search engine for sounds. Here’s a collection of bee sounds. Bzzzz….
What’s the meaning of life? Wikipedia has the answer.
Virus 2 is really simple but fun game…
Virus 2 is really simple but fun game…to win, “infect” all the tiles with the same color.
A list of distinctive numbers and why they’re so special.
Update: Then again, maybe every number is interesting. (thx, edmund)
Recent Chris Ware talk
A friend of mine who works at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln emailed to let me know that they’ve posted both audio and video of a talk that Chris Ware gave at the school last week. If you’re short on time, the real meat of the video starts around 18:30 when Ware starts a slideshow that delves into his process. In addition to his series of Thanksgiving-themed New Yorker covers from last year, he also talks about some of his other work, including Rusty Brown and the strip he did for the NY Times Magazine.
I missed this somehow, but Nintendo has an extensive series of interviews up on their site between Nintendo’s president and the Wii development team. A fascinating look at the Wii’s development process. (thx, zacharie)
Quick little article on Bernie Krause, who is compiling a database of animal sounds from habitats around the world. I heard Krause speak at the first Foo Camp and his was one of the most interesting talks I’ve heard at a conference. “Krause noticed that birds who settled in compromised habitats — logged-over second-growth forests, for instance — encountered unexpected vocal competitors from other species and found their mating songs masked. Warblers that failed to find unoccupied [audio] bandwidth failed to breed, Krause observed, eventually convincing him of the validity of his niche hypothesis, the contention that animals evolve to fill vocal niches to best be heard by potential mates.” (via tim o’reilly)
Nick Tosches wonders where the desktop photo on his new computer was taken and it takes him a year (and several messages to the likes of Bill Gates, the editor of Vermont Life, and S.I. Newhouse) to find out.
How doctors make their decisions is being studied in the hopes of making medical care better. “Doctors can also make mistakes when their judgments about a patient are unconsciously influenced by the symptoms and illnesses of patients they have just seen. Many common infections tend to occur in epidemics, afflicting large numbers of people in a single community at the same time; after a doctor sees six patients with, say, the flu, it is common to assume that the seventh patient who complains of similar symptoms is suffering from the same disease.”
If Strangemaps wasn’t such a reliable source, I’d think this was a hoax. A small part of East Germany lives on in the Caribbean. Cuba gave the tiny island to the GDR in 1972 while on a state visit to East Berlin and it wasn’t mentioned in the German unification treaties. Commenters on the thread have found satellite images of the island in question, including this one.
Honeybee populations across the US are falling due to a mysterious disease. “Almond crops are immediately vulnerable because they rely on honeybee pollination at this time of year. And the insect decline could potentially affect other crops later in the year, such as apples and blueberries.”
Kremlin Inc. is from the New Yorker a few weeks ago, but it’s still very worth reading. The article details the current political situation in Russia and how in many ways, the press, business, and the political process are less free and open than under the Soviet regime. “‘I don’t know of a single case in the past six years when the Duma voted against any Presidential initiative,’ Vladimir Ryzhkov, one of the last liberal legislators willing to speak critically and publicly, told me. ‘I also don’t know of any case where the Duma adopted an initiative that came from the regions. One man makes all the rules in Russia now, and the Duma has become like a new Supreme Soviet.’”
A thoughtful article on how to make it as an actor by Jenna Fischer, the actress who plays Pam on The Office. “I have a great acting coach who says that success in Hollywood is based on one thing: opportunity meets readiness. You cannot always control the opportunities, but you can control the readiness. So study your craft, take it seriously. Do every play, every showcase, every short film, every student film you can get. Swallow your pride. Be willing to work for nothing in things you think are stupid. Make work for yourself. Make your own luck. Don’t complain. Hopefully, the work will find you if you are ready.” Worth reading even if you’re not an actor. (thx, dunstan)
New Google Maps features
Not sure when these features were added, but Google Maps now displays public transportation stops (NYC subway, the T in Boston, the L in Chicago) and building outlines for metropolitan areas. Here’s a shot of the West Village in NYC:
Tiny but useful improvements. (thx, meg)
Laser Tag is a new project from Graffiti Research Lab. The idea is that you use a high-powered laser pointer to trace a pattern on the side of a building, a camera captures that pattern, some software processes the capture, and a projector displays the graffiti-ized pattern back onto the side of the building, more or less in real-time. The effect is pretty cool. The process and source code are available here.
You may be familiar with Monty Python’s Dead Parrot sketch. This lesser known version of the sketch was made by a couple of Nigerian 419 scammers hoping to win a phony cash prize put up by a guy they tried to scam. (thx, Jeroen)
Thee Homophoner takes sum text and substitutes homophones four any soundalike words it can fined.
A peek into David Fincher’s uncompromising filmmaking process on the eve of the release of his new film, Zodiac. Jake Gyllenhaal: “David knows what he wants, and he’s very clear about what he wants, and he’s very, very, very smart. But sometimes we’d do a lot of takes, and he’d turn, and he would say, because he had a computer there, ‘Delete the last 10 takes.’ And as an actor that’s very hard to hear.”
Astronomers are tracking a 250-meter-wide asteroid called Apophis which will come within 30,000 km of earth in 2029. However, it’s too soon to tell if that near-miss will pull the asteroid into a collision course with the earth 7 years later. “Lu says the best way to deflect an asteroid is with a ‘gravity tractor’ — a spacecraft displacing about 1 metric ton that simply hovers near an asteroid and gently tweaks its orbit.”
Mag-lev bed. $1.5 million for a bed that levitates above the floor.
Joel Kotkin argues that the “superstar cities” (
Joel Kotkin argues that the “superstar cities” (New York, LA, Chicago, Boston, San Francisco) are overrated and overpriced and that the real economic and social action in the US is happening in the more affordable cities (Charlotte, Houston, Las Vegas, Phoenix). This article contains a wealth of buzzwordy phrases…in addition to “superstar cities”, Kotkin refers to a “Bloombergian luxury product”, “trustafarians”, the “Vailization effect”, “neocon anti-urbanism”, and “Mayor Bloomberg’s luxury calculus”. (via biourbanist)
Nomination for the most useless new word of 2007: beme. A beme is a meme that spreads via blogs and those that create and spread them are called bemerz.
An interview with Ootje Oxenaar, who designed a whole range of Dutch banknotes in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. “On the 1000 guilder note, it became a ‘sport’ for me to put things in the notes that nobody wanted there! I was very proud to have my fingerprint in this note - and it’s my middle finger!”
Sometimes I think that what Americans are best at is inventing new forms of conspicuous consumption. A man who sells snow guns for personal use (so that the kids can play in the snow even when the weather doesn’t oblige) says, “New Jersey is a big area for us. There’s no snow, and lots of disposable income.”
Ikea Hacker is a site that highlights using Ikea furniture and products in creative ways.
Rule of thumb to avoid photographing people with their eyes closed: divide the number of people by three (or by two if the light is bad). That means that if you’re taking a photo of 12 people, you need to take at least 4 photos to have a good chance of getting a photo with everyone’s eyes open. (via photojojo)
Update: Jeff writes: “Way back when we only used film I learned you could tell before looking at the photo whether someone blinked by asking them what color was the flash. If it was white or bluish white, then their eyes were open. If it was orange, then their eyes were closed and they had ‘seen’ the flash through their eyelids.”
Walking through the Union Square subway station is like playing the Star Wars arcade game. I go through that station every single day and I never noticed that. For shame!
A list of unboundedly long songs, songs that “continue until the singer decides (or is forced) to stop”.
World map of driving orientations. “An estimated 66% of people worldwide live in right-hand side countries, and 72% of all distances are completed while driving on the right side of the road.”
An interview with Tamir Goodman, the “Jewish Jordan”. Even in the Israeli pro leagues, he is the only Orthodox Jew playing. “Tamir [has] the respect of his coaches and teammates for his religious dedication, as well as for his ability to throw down two handed jams and no look passes.”
Blah, got sick yesterday somehow, so things will be a little sparse around here today. Back to the TV. The Wii isn’t fun when you’re sick…the last thing I want to do this afternoon is stand up.
Specific Things is a collection of photos and stories of, er, specific things like raffle winners, teams called The Pirates, and wedding cakes. (via youngna)
Some recent covers by Chip Kidd of three books by James Ellroy. The photographs on the covers are of dioramas of pulp fiction covers made by Thomas Allen. (via yda)
The Order of the Science Scouts of Exemplary Repute and Above Average Physique has some neat merit badges, including the “I’ve been published at the New Yorker” badge, the “my degree inadvertently makes me competent in fixing household appliances” badge, and the “I’ve done science with no concievable practical application” badge.
Lots of Buster Keaton movies on YouTube and Google Video.
Update: Lots more Buster Keaton films at Internet Archive. (thx, nick)
Good actors that got paid a lot of money to appear in crappy movies. Buster Keaton was in Beach Blanket Bingo?
How to learn a foreign language: read Harry Potter in translation. “The plots and scenarios are familiar enough that I can pick up the gist of what is going on even if the grammar and vocabulary escape me; but after a few times reading about the impatient lechuza in Harry’s room, I can’t help but gather that it is not lettuce but an owl.”
Neat music video by a band called The Longcut that uses infographics to tell the story of a boy and girl falling for each other.
Folding under pressure (that’s an old origami joke)
Susan Orlean has been AWOL from the pages of the New Yorker for some time now, but she’s back this week with a piece on origami and Robert Lang, former physicist and an acknowledged master of the craft.
He would have liked to have folded insects, but, in those years, bugs, as well as crustaceans, were still an origami impossibility. This was because no one had yet solved the problem of how to fold paper into figures with fat bodies and skinny appendages, so that most origami figures, even television characters and heads of state, still had the same basic shape as the paper cranes of nineteenth-century Japan. Then a few people around the globe had the idea that paper folding, besides being a pleasant diversion, might also have properties that could be analyzed and codified. Some started to study paper folding mathematically; others, including Lang, began devising mathematical tools to help with designing, all of which enabled the development of increasingly complex folding techniques. In 1970, no one could figure out how to make a credible-looking origami spider, but soon folders could make not just spiders but spiders of any species, with any length of leg, and cicadas with wings, and sawyer beetles with horns. For centuries, origami patterns had at most thirty steps; now they could have hundreds. And as origami became more complex it also became more practical. Scientists began applying these folding techniques to anything — medical, electrical, optical, or nanotechnical devices, and even to strands of DNA — that had a fixed size and shape but needed to be packed tightly and in an orderly way.
Lang’s creations are truly astounding, almost to the point of being magical, because the comparison of the finished product to a flat, uncut sheet of paper is so dissonant. Here are two views of one of Lang’s signature “bugs”, a 7” silverfish he folded in 2004. The folding pattern is followed by the completed product:
In 1987, Lang folded a 15” long cuckoo clock out of a single sheet of paper. The clock, which “made Lang a sensation in the origami world”, took him three months to design and six hours to fold. These days, he uses a computer program he wrote called TreeMaker to design his creations and a laser cutter borrowed from Squid Labs to gently score the paper for quicker & easier folding.
Squid Labs is responsible for a site called Instructables, which allows people to share step-by-step instructions for how to do just about anything, from broiled peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to origami. Lang doesn’t seem to have any instructions for his designs up on Instructables, but he shares the site’s open source and collaborative spirit…crease patterns for many of his most complex creations are available on his site and TreeMaker and ReferenceFinder are free to download (with the source code released under the GPL).
(Speaking of Instructables, here’s an easy way to get started with origami. Just grab that stack of Post-It Notes sitting on your desk (the square ones, not the letterbox ones), peel the top one off, and follow these simple instructions to make a little box out of it. It’ll take you 5 minutes…here’s mine that I did this morning.)
For more on Robert Lang and origami, check out his web site (don’t miss the foldable space telescope he’s helping to build at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory), an audio recording of Lang’s presentation from O’Reilly Media Open Source Conference 2005, an audio interview on The Connection, an interview with Cabinet magazine in 2005, and a more technical article by Lang on the mathematics and geometry of origami.
(As an aside, Lang’s physics background and current vocation reminded me of Richard Feynman and his interest in flexagons, which are basically geometric origami shapes that can flexed into different shapes. A colleague of Feynman’s invented the flexagon, which led to the formation of the Princeton Flexagon Committee, of which Feynman was a founding member.)
Topless women, NYC
Uncovered is Jordan Matter’s large gallery of photos of topless women on the streets of NYC. It’s legal for women to go topless in New York. Nsfw.
This is puzzling: former Gizmodo editor Joel Johnson wrote a terrific, blistering, spot-on rant about how bad the technology coverage of Gizmodo (and by association, many of the other gadget sites) is and how stupid their readers are for lapping it up…and they printed the whole thing on their web site. “And you guys just ate it up. Kept buying shitty phones and broken media devices green and dripping with DRM. You broke the site, clogging up the pipe like retarded salmon, to read the latest announcements of the most trivial jerk-off products, completely ignoring the stories about technology actually making a difference to real human beings, because you wanted a new chromed robot turd to put in your pocket.”
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