Entries for March 2007
Uncle Ben has been promoted to chairman of his rice company. “[The new ads are] asking us to make the leap from Uncle Ben being someone who looks like a butler to overnight being a chairman of the board.” (via designobserver)
Profile of British chef Gordon Ramsey during his effort to open a 4-star restaurant in NYC. Someone should tell this guy he’s in the hospitality business, not an understudy for R. Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket.
Mere days after I’d kicked the habit, enabling kottke.org reader Jay sends word that the heroin-like DesktopTD has updated with new modes, new bad guys, and new weapons. It’s Friday….get strung out on the new DesktopTD like it’s your first time.
A video of NYC graffiti artist Revs as he puts one of his sculptures up in the city. Rare footage indeed. “I’m into the individual spirit, anybody who does things in a solo way. Ted Kaczynski, Mother Theresa, Jesus Christ, dudes who were just out on a mission, solo.” (thx, david)
A list of the earliest printed books in select languages. Movable metal type printing in Korea predates that of Gutenberg by a couple hundred years. See also the Wikipedia entry for movable type.
If you’re running on a treadmill in Bismarck, North Dakota or Flagstaff Arizona or while orbiting the earth, are you really running the Boston Marathon?
A photo of a Jewish settler seemingly fighting about 50 soldiers by herself won a prize in the 2007 World Press Photo contest.
Update: In an earlier iteration of this post, I incorrectly identified the woman in the photo as a Palestinian…she is a Jewish settler. (thx to everyone who wrote in)
Back when type was set with individual metal letters, those letters were called “sorts”. Popular letters like a, e, t, i, etc. would occasionally run out and the printer would then be “out of sorts”.
Update: Scratch that. Individual letters are called “sorts”, but “out of sorts” came from somewhere else. (thx grant and hal)
Best short description I’ve read of what net neutrality is, from Craig Newmark: “Let’s say you call Joe’s Pizza and the first thing you hear is a message saying you’ll be connected in a minute or two, but if you want, you can be connected to Pizza Hut right away.” (via bb)
The review of the Criterion DVD of Rushmore I posted yesterday mentioned a NY Times article written by Wes Anderson about him screening Rushmore for legendary film critic Pauline Kael. The original is behind the Times paywall, but a Clusterflock commenter posted a copy. After reading it, I don’t get the hostility that other film critics directed at Anderson because of it.
There are some goldfish in Japan that live in a functioning deep fat fryer. The frying oil floats above the water where the fish live and as long as they don’t try jumping out of their layer, they’re fine. A nice side effect of this arrangement is that the fish keep the fryer clean, eating whatever food scraps fall from the fryer above. (via cyn-c)
Driving directions from New York City to Dublin, Ireland, courtesy of Google Maps. Step 23: “Swim across the Atlantic Ocean. 3462 mi.” Not sure why you have to swim to France to get to Dublin, but ok. (thx, ayush)
An HR department looking for someone with internet experience dumped emails from candidates with Hotmail email addresses because “you can’t pretend being an internet expert and use a Hotmail account at the same time”. (via bb)
Thoughtful review of the Criterion version of Rushmore. “Anderson also serves as a convenient target for people who don’t like people who like movies by Wes Anderson. […] When you get past the extraneous bullshit surrounding Anderson’s films, the crux of disagreements about him reminds me of disagreements over David Foster Wallace (or Dave Eggers, or Thomas Pynchon, or even Vladimir Nabokov). It comes down to this: Are Anderson’s stylistic tricks and distracting plot elements smoke and mirrors, or do they bring something unique to the stories he’s telling? In the case of Rushmore, I think the answer has to be the latter.” I get the feeling you could learn a lot about film by reading Matthew’s reviews of the Criterion Collection.
Artist Christian Marclay says that Apple contacted him about using his short film Telephones for their iPhone commercial. He refused and they went ahead and made the commercial using the same idea with different footage. Says Marclay, “the way they dealt with the whole thing is pretty sleazy”. TouchExplode gets credit for spotting the reference. (via df)
The Erosion Sink from Gore Design is a nice piece of design.
LeBron James’ new house: 35,440 sq ft, 2200 sq ft master suite (with 2-story walk-in closet), theater, casino, barber shop, bowling alley, and a limestone bust of LeBron wearing a headband.
Syllabus and notes from an ITP class called The Nature of Code, which focuses on “the programming strategies and techniques behind computer simulations of natural systems”. Lots of good notes and Processing code examples.
Adam and David recently reminded me of pocket, an episode of 0sil8 I did back in 2001 (the second-to-last episode actually):
pocket was a broadcast mailing list for mobile phones. People signed up and then I sent them SMS messages on their phones periodically. As I recall it only lasted a few weeks before I shut it down; there just didn’t seem to be anything interesting about broadcasting short messages to a group of friends and strangers.
Interview with Gretchen Ludwig about her dressing room photography. She started the project after she noticed her anti-advertising, anti-corporation self buying a lot of clothes from big corporations that advertise a lot. “The dressing room is not only a very private space, but it is also a space where consumers make most of their decisions. And it’s also mostly void of extraneous marketing ‘noise.’ You don’t have the trendy atmosphere, you don’t have the pressure of others watching and judging you.”
The mid-2000s may be seen in the future as not such a fantastic time for logo design. One further piece of evidence: the what-were-they-thinking? new design for the Dairy Queen logo. “[The] gold and blue curved swishes [signify] food and treats.” Don’t know about you, but that blue swish make me want to cram ice cream down my treat-hole!
John McCain is using Mike Davidson’s MySpace template (without attribution) and pulling some images directly from Davidson’s server, which is a big no-no in webmaster land. So Davidson modified one of his images displaying on McCain’s MySpace page to say that he’d reversed his position on gay marriage, especially “marriage between passionate females”.
Interview with New Yorker music critic Alex Ross about, among other things, his upcoming book on 20th century music. “Why, when paintings of Picasso and Jackson Pollock go for a hundred million dollars or more on the art market and lines from T. S. Eliot are quoted on the yearbook pages of alienated teenagers across the land, is twentieth-century classical music still considered obscure and difficult? In fact, it’s better known than most people realize. Post-1900 music is all over Hollywood soundtracks, modern jazz, alternative rock.”
Joerg Colberg asked a bunch of photographers and photography bloggers: what makes a great photo? The answers, with examples, form a great informal discussion about art, photography, and curating. “It’s hard for me to describe what makes a great photo mostly because it’s hard to predict what you might like before you see it. I’m often surprised by things that I’ve never thought I would enjoy or seek out in the world.”
Got a penny-stock spam this morning where most of the text designed to confuse spam filters was taken from kottke.org.
From: “Harriot Mckee”
Date: March 27, 2007 10:28:25 AM EDT
To:
Subject: The outside of one particular prison is all glass like an Apple Store, the furniture is nicely designed, and the sports facilities are top-notch.
CWTD Receives “National Park Award”
China World Trade Corp.
Symbol: CWTD
Price: $0.489
CWTD a diverse company involved in world trade and business services has just been awarded the “Nation Park Award” for one of the parks it manages. CWTD is expected to issue a huge news release this week. We always see big returns when they do. Read up and get ready. Get on CWTD first thing Tuesday morning!
” (via that’s how it happened) Looking for work?
Exburbians moved to the farthest reaches of suburbia for cheap real estate, willing to drive at least an hour each way to work.
Why, then, don’t we pull for the Iraqi insurgents? “There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday.
Netflix has a “take as much as you want” vacation.
That suggests that the claim may be phony, he said.
Why can’t we see ourselves in the faces of those kids firing RPGs at convoys of Halliburton trucks stealing Iraqi oil?
A French map shows that the Portuguese were the first.
All content by Jason Kottke (contact me) unless otherwise noted, with some restrictions on its use. Protect Your System From Online Intruders.
Sales of home coffee machines nearly . I didn’t think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.
You could say it would be a lifetime’s quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. (thx, jennifer)
Looking for work? Bob Saget was onto something.
I don’t think it’s any coincidence that one of the people responsible for Blogger is also responsible for Twitter.
jonreese(or how i learned to stop worrying and love the blog): Who Murdered 32 Iraqi Children?
Update: The Showtime site doesn’t seem to be available to those outside of the US.
jonreese(or how i learned to stop worrying and love the blog): America is over.
An interview with Michael Pollan about The Omnivore’s Dilemma.
Rare semi-identical twins born. “They are the result of two sperm cells fertilising a single egg, which then divided to form two embryos - and each sperm contributed genes to each child.”
Museumr lets you insert one of your Flickr photos into a museum (sort of). I gave my beer bottle-shaped sausage photo the Museumr treatment. (thx, chuck)
Video of the Bugatti Veyron reaching its top speed of 253 mph. The Veyron is the world’s fastest production car and is even faster than F1 and Indy cars. Looks like the driver had some sort of religious experience. (via clusterflock)
Restaurants are beginning to experiment with smaller portions on their menus, but since portion Supersizing has meant increased profits (and expanding American waistlines) for years, it’s a risky play. “Larger portions are so profitable because food is relatively cheap. On average, food accounts for about a third of the total cost of running a restaurant; such things as labor, equipment, advertising, rent and electricity make up the rest. So while it may cost a restaurant a few pennies to offer 25 percent more French fries, it can raise its prices much more than a few cents. The result is that larger portions are a reliable way to bolster the average check at restaurants.”
On the gentle art of selling yourself, confidence, and first impressions. “It is said that we are all three different people: the person we think we are (the one we have invented), the person other people think we are (the impression we make) and the person we think other people think we are (the one we fret about). You could say it would be a lifetime’s quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole.”
Like most of the best Onion articles, this one hovers between absolute hilarity and extremely tasteless: Anna Nicole Smith Finally Reaches Target Weight. “Forensics reports reveal that Smith’s miraculous weight loss began on Feb. 8, when she was discovered unconscious in her Hollywood, FL hotel room.”
Researchers looking into the science of happiness have found evidence that through kindness, gratitude, and optimism exercises, a person can increase their happiness level, much like physical exercise can increase physical fitness.
In 1967, psychologist Stanley Milgram began a series of investigations about the small world phenomenon. Milgram and his collaborators had people attempt to get a letter to a final recipient by sending it to a friend who was, in turn, likely to be friends with the final recipent. Each person in the chain proceeded likewise until the letter was delivered to the final recipient. Milgram found that the separation between two randomly selected Americans in this way is about 6 “hops”. His experiment recently got me thinking of a related question:
Pick a group of people who live in NYC whose members collectively know everyone else who lives in NYC. What’s the smallest number of people you’d need for that group?
For the purposes of answering the question without resorting to loopholes, let’s assume that brand new arrivals (in town less than 3 months) don’t count and that “know” means that each person considers the other an acquaintance…that is, something more than just someone they recognize or see daily. Any guesses as to the smallest group size? Better yet, is there any research out there that specifically addresses this question? Or is it impossible…are there people living in the city (shut-ins, hermits) who don’t know anyone else? I’ll share my best guess in the comments.
Daniel Gilbert on the annoying new practice of advertising objects that cry wolf. “In an advertising campaign that began last week, Nissan left 20,000 sets of keys in bars, stadiums, concert halls and other public venues. Each key ring has a tag that says: ‘If found, please do not return. My next generation Nissan Altima has Intelligent Key with push-button ignition, and I no longer need these.’” How long before these ads train us not to do anything nice for anyone for fear of being messaged at?
An anonymous author (they cannot legally reveal their identity) describes their National Security Letter gag order. Since the Patriot Act, the FBI has been sending out tens of thousands of these Letters, the recipients of which have no choice but to comply and keep absolutely quiet about it. “Living under the gag order has been stressful and surreal. Under the threat of criminal prosecution, I must hide all aspects of my involvement in the case — including the mere fact that I received an NSL — from my colleagues, my family and my friends.”
After a couple of surprising losses in the Cricket World Cup, the coach of the perennially mighty Pakistani national team turned up dead. It’s feared he was murdered.
Netflix has a “take as much as you want” vacation policy. “The worst thing is for a manager to come in and tell me: ‘Let’s give Susie a huge raise because she’s always in the office.’ What do I care? I want managers to come to me and say: ‘Let’s give a really big raise to Sally because she’s getting a lot done’ — not because she’s chained to her desk.”
Not sure that there’s a iron-clad source on this, but a new version of Katamari Damacy seems to be rolling towards the Wii. Katamari seems like one of those games that the Wii remote was made for.
The Schmidt Sting Pain Index is a measure of how painful insect stings are. The Pepsis wasp rates a 4.0 and the pain is described as “blinding, fierce, shockingly electric. A running hair drier has been dropped into your bubble bath (if you get stung by one you might as well lie down and scream).” (via that’s how it happened)
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