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A list of 16 things it takes most of us 50 years to learn. “There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday. That time is: age 11.”
Update: This list originated with Dave Barry, but some of the items on the list as no longer his. (thx, michael and justin)
What’s in a McDonald’s Chicken McNugget? 56% of it is corn and a tiny percentage is actually lighter fluid (for freshness!). (via cyn-c)
Update: There are several comments in the above thread that indicate that the chemical sprayed on McNuggets for freshness is not butane (lighter fluid). Also, the 56% corn figure counts meat from corn-fed chickens, for which corn is not a natural food. (thx, demetrice)
Get the weather report via Twitter for more than a dozen cities. Looks like it hasn’t been working for the past few days though…maybe once they get their scaling and IM issues figured out.
If, like me, you don’t have Showtime and therefore missed the first episode of This American Life last night, you can watch the entire episode on Showtime’s site.
Update: TAL has a new web site as well.
Update: The Showtime site doesn’t seem to be available to those outside of the US. (thx, jennifer)
Michael Pollan has some good advice for writing about nature and science. “So choose your first person deliberately. Too many newspaper first persons — and a lot of magazine first persons too — are written in the voice of the neutral feature-writer. They’re the voice of the Journalist. That is the least interesting first person you have. Nobody cares about journalists. They’re not normal people. So choose a first person that draws on a more normal side of your personality. And think about which one will help you tell the story. You’ll see that in very subtle ways it will shape your point of view and your tone and unlock interesting things.”
Scientists are worried that the floodgates being built to protect Venice from high tides will be insufficient if the sea level rises too much due to climate change. If sea level rises 4 meters, much of Venice and the surrounding area would be underwater. (See also: Belgium and The Netherlands.)
More men are taking their wives’ last names in marriage and are getting more shit for it too. “Van Hallgren received a scathing note from a longtime listener with a subject line that read, ‘Sam, turn in your man card.’ The listener asked what ‘sissy juice’ the host was drinking.”
A French map shows that the Portuguese were the first Europeans to discover Australia in the early 1520s, almost 250 years before Captain Cook claimed them for Britain. “‘The Vallard cartographer has put these individual charts together like a jigsaw puzzle. Without clear compass markings its possible to join the southern chart in two different ways. My theory is it had been wrongly joined.’ Using a computer Trickett rotated the southern part of the Vallard map 90 degrees to produce a map which accurately depicts Australia’s east coast.”
The temptation these days for those of us with our heads buried online all day is to call any collection of short text pieces “blog-like”. I’m going to stay on-message here and refer to J. Robert Lennon’s Pieces for the Left Hand as being rather like a Diaryland diary written by someone who is particularly clever, smart, and funny. So maybe not so blog-like after all. (Burn!)
Anyway, Pieces is a collection of 100 or so 1-to-2 page stories, both fiction and non, about, well, nothing in particular, which is why I enjoyed them so much. Many of the stories are surreal, but not in the obvious David Lynch midgets-talking-backwards kind of way. They’re more subtle, a small-town kind of surreality. And for me, the perfect thing to read on the train or plane, literary snacks to have with your pretzels.
Interesting article about the myth of American women opting out of the workforce to stay home to raise families. Most of the stories focus on white, married, upper-class women with high-earning husbands, maternity leaves are getting shorter, and bias and inflexibility in the workplace forces many women to “choose” to stay at home with the family. “The American idea of mothering is left over from the 1950s, that odd moment in history when America’s unrivaled economic power enabled a single breadwinner to support an entire family. Fifty years later we still have the idea that a mother, and not a father, should be available to her child at every moment.”
Thoughtful post on the extreme recency of recorded human history. We know very little about the people who lived before the invention of writing and collections of stories like the Bible, save for what we can glean from speechless skeletons, footprints, and other remains.
And look at how much is lost. Between the time of the couple fleeing across a field of volcanic ash and poor dead Lucy lies 400,000 years. If a Bible is a record of the struggle of a people for 2,000 years, we’d need 200 Bibles to tell us the tale of just this one obscure, remote branch of our lineage.
(thx, alexander)
Profile of Edward Tufte. “Running his own enterprise, Tufte says, allows him to work ‘elegantly, intensely, gracefully and incredibly efficiently.’”
An unusually informative top 10 list: the most magnificent trees in the world. The Quaking Aspen organism and the baobab trees are awesome.
An interview with Michael Pollan about The Omnivore’s Dilemma. “Whereas every chef in the Bay Area is deeply involved in sourcing their food with great care, and they know all their farmers and they go to farms. You still have many chefs in New York whose focus is on technique, on what happens in the kitchen, not on the farm.”
An Intelligent Designer designs a cow. “How about we give it three, no eleven, no four stomachs! Four stomachs! For the efficient eating, of the grass. I am truly inspired! Don’t stop there. How’s this? This animal should urinate milk. From its groin, no less.”
Business innovation. “Southwest has been able to generate more profits over the last 30 years than all of its incumbent competitors combined.” Other examples: Google, Vanguard, W.R. Hambrect.
Why is the burglary rate in Austria so high? Perhaps because of the great minimum security prisons. 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.
Intro for Voyagers, a TV show from the 80s about time-travelling do-gooders. I loved this show when I was a kid, but it seems to have not aged well. (via cyn-c)
Marc Hedlund, founder of the intriguing Wesabe, recently made this interesting observation:
One of my favorite business model suggestions for entrepreneurs is, find an old UNIX command that hasn’t yet been implemented on the web, and fix that. talk and finger became ICQ, LISTSERV became Yahoo! Groups, ls became (the original) Yahoo!, find and grep became Google, rn became Bloglines, pine became Gmail, mount is becoming S3, and bash is becoming Yahoo! Pipes. I didn’t get until tonight that Twitter is wall for the web. I love that.
A slightly related way of thinking about how to choose web projects is to take something that everyone does with their friends and make it public and permanent. (Permanent as in permalinked.) Examples:
Not that this approach leads naturally to success. Several companies are exploring music sharing (and musical opinion sharing), but no one’s gotten it just right yet, due in no small measure to the rights issues around much recorded music.
Zombie brands: products that were discontinued but then come back to life. Examples: Tab, McRib, and Life magazine. More on zombie brands.
The top 1000 books owned by libraries around the world. Surprisingly, no Stephen King book appears in the top 1000 but John Grisham appears 13 times. In an interesting use of del.icio.us, the entire list is tagged and categorized on the bookmarking site.
David Iglesias, one of the 8 federal prosecutors recently fired by the Bush administration, tells his story in the NY Times today. “The public has a right to believe that prosecution decisions are made on legal, not political, grounds.”
Roommate Wanted: Share My West Village Pad. “Ideally, you do not have ‘a lot’ of friends (i.e., any). But if you do, they cannot visit the apartment at any time.”
Fascinating clip from the This American Life TV show about some grade school kids who became obsessed with using fake video cameras. Animated by Chris Ware. The thing is though, I remember fights in grade school and even in the absence of fake video cameras, students didn’t step in to stop fights. (thx, matt)
The Wisdom of Children, including A Conversation at the Grownup Table, as Imagined at the Kids’ Table and How College Kids Imagine the United States Government. “FRIEND FROM WORK: I am the loudest! I am the loudest! MOM: I had a lot of wine, and now I’m crazy!”
Women in light pink playing Nintendo DS by Eliot Shepard.
Shorpy, the 100-year-old photoblog, is pulling photos from just after the turn of the century and posting them. This one’s going right in the daily reads pile.
Can’t. Stop. Playing. Desktop Tower Defense. (via damn you, schachter)
50 50 is a compilation of 50 videos of people singing 50 Cent songs.
(via your daily awesome)
Do very large snowflakes exist? “Now, theorists, weather historians and field observers are concluding that most of the reports are true and that unusually large snowflakes two to six inches wide and perhaps wider fall regularly around the globe, surprisingly big and fluffy, if seldom witnessed or celebrated.” During a snowstorm when I was in college, I saw puffy snowflake balls about 1-2 inches in diameter falling from the sky…it was the coolest thing.
As I mentioned the other day, I recently joined Twitter. I’ve been poking around its nooks and crannies ever since. Here are some observations, presented in Twitter-sized chunks:
Playing with Twitter reminds me of blogging circa 2000. Back then, all weblogs were personal in nature and most people used them to communicate with their friends and family. If I wanted to know what my friends were up to back then, I read their blogs. Now I follow Twitter (and Flickr and Vox).
The reaction to Twitter mirrors the initial reaction to weblogs…the same tired “this is going to ruin the web” and “who cares what you ate for dinner” arguments.
Also like blogs, everyone has their own unique definition of what Twitter is (stripped down blogs, public IM, Dodgeball++, etc.), and to some extent, everyone is correct. Maybe that’s when you know how you’ve got a winner: when people use it like mad but can’t fully explain the appeal of it to others. See also: weblogs, Flickr.
For people with little time, Twitter functions like an extremely stripped-down version of MySpace. Instead of customized pages, animated badges, custom music, top 8 friends, and all that crap, Twitter is just-the-facts-ma’am: where are my friends and what are they up to?
Twitter’s like Flickr without the images.
When one thing (i.e. Twitter) is easier than something else (i.e. blogging) and offers almost the same benefits, people will use it.
Twitter brings back the “type words in one box and press submit” thing that made Blogger so popular back in the day. Compare with current blogging systems. To publish a post in MT, I’ve got to fiddle with 7-9 different text boxes and options. See immediately above.
Let’s not forget Dodgeball here, which was used extensively at SXSW in 2006. (In other words, all the Twittering at SXSW 2007 was not unprecedented. Chill.) It’s more focused on location and SMS though…by allowing updates in more ways and being more flexible about the type of message allowed, Twitter is attractive to a wider group of people.
If your friends are not on Twitter, I can’t imagine it would be that interesting.
Twitterholic tracks the top 100 Twitter users in terms of followers. I know, let’s not turn absolutely everything on the web into a popularity contest!! We already know Scoble is a big blowhard and has weak ties to lots of people…let’s move on, shall we?
I wonder what the average number of followers per person is? The folks with 5 zillion followers get all the attention, but as with blogging, those posting updates for their 20 friends form the bulk of the activity.
Lists of friends and followers are presented alphabetically. Does Anil attract more friends, on average, than Veen because he always shows up near the top of the listings?
I can see why Obvious dropped Odeo for Twitter. With podcasts, you’ve got all that data locked up in binary format (no easy cut-and-paste) and it takes you 20 listening minutes before you can react to it (by commenting, by linking, etc.). With blogs, the reaction time to a post is 1-2 minutes, with Flickr it’s 5 seconds, and Twitter is 2-3 seconds. The barrier to entry for reacting to and remixing podcasts is just so much higher.
Twitter is the first thing on the web that I’ve been excited about in ages. Like years. The last thing was probably Flickr. (Talk about burying the lede.) It’s just so damn simple but useful. Again, reminds me of weblogs in that way.
If you’re on a Mac and using Twitter, download Twitterific, a little app that sits on your desktop and displays updates from your friends. My only complaint: it doesn’t completely show updates, forcing you to the web to read the last 2-3 words of a longish message. Come on…it’s only 140 characters, show them all!
Twittermap displays recent Twitter messages on Google Maps. All you do is send Twitter a message with your location — like so…the “L:10003” is the important part — and Twittermap will pick it up.
Even more mesmerizing is Twittervision…a world tour of recent Twitter messages. Just sit back and watch the updates come in one at a time, displayed on a world map. (This is in beta and Twitter’s having some downtime issues right now, so the data may be less than fresh when you go.)
Twitter seems to work equally well for busy people and not-busy people. It allows folks with little time to keep up with what their friends are up to without having to email and IM with them all day. Those with a lot of time on their hands can spend a lot of time finding new people to follow, having back-and-forths with friends all day, and updating their status 40 times a day. Too many web apps fail because they only appeal to those with abundant free time.
I’m fascinated to see where Obvious takes this app once they get their scaling issues under control.
The default display of recent messages plus your own messages is genius. Makes it feel more like a conversation. The “with friends” display is great too…perfect for discovering other people to follow.
“Friends” still isn’t the right word.
The phrase “au contraire mon Frere-Jones” is just hanging out there, waiting for someone to use it.
The Sartorialist recently went to a shop in Milan to get some new shirts. His salesperson didn’t even need to take any measurements:
Once I decided on which shirts I was going to buy I started toward the dressing room to try the shirt on for the sleeve alteration - this is where he really got me.
He just looks at me and says “what are you doing?”
“I’m trying the shirt on so you can shorten the sleeves” I said.
“It’s ok, I have it” he said.
“I’m really particular” I warned. To this point I had not said anything about my blog or anything about my background.
“I have it ” he said with a with a slight arrogance that comes from years of experience.
“Well, understand I want the length to be right here” I said pointing to the base of my wrist.
“I have it” he repeated.
“Ok, but if it is wrong you won’t have time to fix it before I leave Milan.” I warned again.
“No problem” he assured me.
Of course he got it just right:
I went back to the store two days later and damn! if the sleeve length wasn’t perfect!
I can’t recall if I’ve written about this on kottke.org before, but I had a similar experience when I went to buy a suit for my wedding. Meg and I walked into the store, talked briefly with a salesperson, telling him what I was looking for (wedding suit, black or dark grey, simple). He said, “I’ve got the perfect suit for you.” He turned on his heel and returned 5 minutes later with a simple black suit. I tried it on and it fit perfectly. The cut was just right for my body and the size was dead-on as well. Just to compare, I tried on 3-4 more suits — all simple and black/dark grey — and none of them were quite right, just like the man had said. I’d planned on looking at a few more places, but his expertise had convinced me that I’d found the right suit. It remains the only formal clothing I own that I feel completely comfortable in.
Update: The Sartorialist has more on the proper sleeve length. Most American men wear their sleeves too long.
Perl one-liner for checking if a number is prime. (via daringfireball)
The Onion: I Support The Occupation Of Iraq, But I Don’t Support Our Troops.
Harry Potter movie franchise in potential jeopardy: Emma Watson reportedly refuses to play Hermione Granger for the final two films. Paging Emmy Rossum. (Emma, Emmy, Emma, Emmy, Emma, Emmy, Emma…)
Update on The Darjeeling Limited, Wes Anderson’s new film starring Anderson regulars Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, and Jason Schwartzman. Apparently this article confirms the rumors that Bill Murray is in the film. (via goldenfiddle)
Perhaps the highest praise I can offer for Helvetica comes courtesy of Meg, who was snickering on the way into the theater about going to see a movie about a font and exited saying, “that was great, now I want to be a designer!” The rest of the audience, mostly designers and type folks, loved it as well. But for the non-design folks, what’s compelling about the movie is getting a glimpse of how designers think and work; that it’s not just about making things look pretty. The modern world is awash in signage and symbols and words and for a lot of them, especially the corporate messages, there’s a reason why they look the way they do. The story of Helvetica offers a partial key to decoding these messages.
Check out some clips from the film and the screenings schedule to find out when Helvetica will be showing in your area. Thanks to the fine folks at Veer for inviting me to the screening.
Kelly Johnson’s 14 rules of operation for the Skunk Works at Lockheed Martin. (via tim)
My post about eyetracking and men looking at crotches in photos got a bunch of attention on Digg, by far the most inbound links I’ve gotten from Digg for kottke.org post. Which kinda proves the point of the eyetracking post: that Digg’s predominantly male audience was very interested in clicking on a story about how men are interested in looking at other men’s crotches (and then commenting about how gay they aren’t for doing so). It’s perfect really.
The supervolcano under Yellowstone National Park is showing signs of increased activity. “Supervolcanoes can sleep for centuries or millennia before producing incredibly massive eruptions that can drop ash across an entire continent.”
The nominees for the 2007 Beard Awards were announced this morning. I’m disappointed that Alinea and Grant Achatz aren’t on the list more (Achatz got a lone nomination for best chef in the Great Lakes region) but am happy to see David Chang, Ssam, Thomas Keller, and Wylie Dufresne on the list.
Taking advantage of a burst steam pipe in our bedroom and the slushy weather, the wife and I finally ventured out to Momofuku Ssäm Bar. Due to the icy sidewalks, the place was less than jam-packed so we were seated immediately. From our seats at the bar, we could see David Chang slicing ham and utilizing the one-for-me-one-for-you plating technique. Hholy Ccrap, what a place!
I could go on and on about the food — it’s some of the best I’ve had in the city — but equally impressive is how the place feels and how fun it is to eat there. The staff seems imported wholesale from one of Danny Meyer’s restaurants…the service is friendly and enthusiastic and genuinely loves when when you’re excited about the food. The music ranged from the Pixies to Metallica to Bob Dylan while we were there and was at just the right volume. The vibe is more relaxed than at the Noodle Bar…the food is less “street” and “on-the-run” so you feel less rushed in your meal. The beverages are a casual and interesting mix; we had a taste of a sparkling Shiraz from The Black Chook…fizzy like champagne and red like, well, red wine. In the opening paragraphs of his recent review of Ssäm Bar, Frank Bruni does a great job capturing what’s so good about the place:
It has also put a greater premium on service, distinguished by attentive young waiters with more knowledge and palpable enthusiasm about the menu than many of their counterparts at more conventionally polished establishments.
And it has emerged as much, much more than the precocious fast-food restaurant it initially was. By bringing sophisticated, inventive cooking and a few high-end grace notes to a setting that discourages even the slightest sense of ceremony, Ssäm Bar answers the desires of a generation of savvy, adventurous diners with little appetite for starchy rituals and stratospheric prices.
They want great food, but they want it to feel more accessible, less effete. They’ll gladly take some style along with it, but not if the tax is too punishing. And that’s what they get at Ssäm Bar, sleek, softly lighted and decidedly unfussy. Most of its roughly 55 seats are at a gleaming dark wood counter that runs the length of the narrow room, though these seats afford more elbow room than exists at the much smaller Noodle Bar.
And ok, a word or two about the food. Is it even Asian? It’s more like food that tastes fantastic and you can eat with chopsticks. I would describe it as truly international food, drawing upon many influences without being obvious about it. And who cares anyway…Chang could put Swedish food on the menu and make it work. I have no real evidence or experience to back this up, but the approach to food at Ssäm seems like a new one to me, a new type of cuisine, an approach that values the tastiness and the end result over regional influence and style1. We’ll see how that prediction works out.
[1] Maybe I like this approach so much because it reminds me of the way in which I edit kottke.org. This isn’t a tech site or a design site or a pop culture site or a news site…I’ll put anything on kottke.org as long as it’s interesting, topic be damned. ↩
Finally got around to checking out Twitter. Here’s my page: http://twitter.com/jkottke. Drink the Kool-Aid, sign up, and follow me (did I mention “drink the Kool-Aid?). More to come soon.
Shoe-fitting fluoroscopes were used in the 30s, 40s, and 50s to x-ray customers’ feet to make sure their potential new shoes were fitting correctly. The machines were eventually banned because of radiation concerns, but not before causing some injuries to their operators. “Many shoe salespersons put their hands into the x-ray beam to squeeze the shoe during the fitting. As a result, one saleswoman who had operated a shoe fitting fluoroscope 10 to 20 times each day over a ten year period developed dermatitis of the hands.” (via that’s how it happened)
The WTFCNN blog takes CNN to task for their increasingly non-news news headlines. I’d highlight quite a few more things…all the Britney and Anna Nicole headlines for a start.
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