Entries for March 2007
Eater doesn’t come right out and say it (“note new equipment…”), but I think that when the Shake Shack opens for business on Wednesday, they’ll be distributing those light-up buzzer thingies that vibrate when your food is ready instead of having everyone mill around the window while employees yell things that sound like your name even though it’s not.
Update: Confirmed…the ShackWand will be in full effect. (And psst, rumor has it the Shack opens today, not Wed…)
Final episode of The Show with Ze Frank. No, thank you, Ze….the pleasure was all ours.
Antarctic glaciers are losing ice, but not because of melting. “In Greenland we know there is melting associated with the ice loss, but in Antarctica we don’t really know why it’s happening.”
A nice piece about the tools that astronauts use in space. “[The space station arm] can delicately move suited astronauts, plucking them up from the airlock and transferring them to designated work areas and back again, like a mother cat relocating kittens.”
The must-read item of the weekend: how a bunch of guys got themselves and two full van-loads of materials into the Super Bowl and distributed lights to fans to spell out a special message seen during the halftime show. This is in the hall of fame of pranks for sure. “Super Bowl XLI was a Level One national security event, usually reserved for Presidential inaugurations. We had to get two full vanloads of materials through federal marshals, Homeland Security agents, police, police dogs, bomb squads, ATF personnel, robots, and a five-ton state-of-the-art X-ray crane. It took four months and a dozen people to pull off the prank that ended up fooling the world. This is the Super Stunt.” (via waxy)
For the first time ever, a three-way tie occurred on Jeopardy. The leader going into Final Jeopardy bet to tie so that his competitors would take home big prize money instead of meager 2nd/3rd place winnings. I’m surprised there’s not more collusion of this sort on the show…although I guess there would be some prisoner’s dilemma issues. (thx, danny)
Update: The aforementioned leader has a post about the tie on his blog.
A minute-by-minute account of the West Village shooting on Wednesday night. “It was impossible to see it coming: the execution of the bartender in a pizzeria, apparently an act of revenge; the cold killings of two unarmed auxiliary police officers who trailed him, shot as they cowered at his feet while a videotape caught the horrors; the final shootout with police officers; and the gunman lying dead on Bleecker Street as wailing patrol cars swarmed in on a balmy night in Greenwich Village.”
kottke.org might be a little slow today with (hopefully short) periods of downtime. I’m doing some long-overdue maintenance on the server to pave the way for a bit of future development. In Flickr parlance, kottke.org is having a massage.
Update: Alright, we had two little blips of downtime and now it looks like the site is back up and running like a finely tuned watch, a watch with a web server running on it.
Update: Took care of one last little glitch last night…should be alright now. You may need to clear your cache to make sure everything works smoothly.
Vogue is adding blogs to their site but editor Anna Wintour hates the word “blog” so much that she’s got her staff working on alternate language. Wintour’s a little late to the party…everyone I know has been hating that word since 1999. (via fashionologie)
Lots of discussion online about this Garrison Keillor piece in Salon where he seems to assert that gay parents shouldn’t be flamboyant and immigrants, while siring lovely children, don’t hold a candle to the white cowboys riding the plains. More than anything, this piece just confuses me…is he being truthful about his opinions or is he taking a less-than-successful swipe at himself and his outdated views? I can’t really tell…more than anything, it seems poorly written.
Dale Dougherty: maybe we should get rid of the wasteful conference schwag bag that everyone ends up dumping in the garbage anyway. Amen, brother.
The Game Neverending Museum contains several screenshots and a paper transformation matrix. I got a little nostalgic for Web 1.0 looking at this.
A look at the newly redesigned Time magazine, available at newsstands today. It’s been noted elsewhere that it looks more like The Economist than it did and that the photo on the cover of Reagan crying is actually a photo illustration…the tear was added digitally.
Update: An interview with the guy who added the digital tear to Reagan. Did that Worth1000-grade Photoshopping really warrant an interview?
Using ground penetrating radar, NASA has discovered an ice deposit at Mars’ south pole so large that if melted, it would cover the entire planet under 30 feet of water.
The verbing of English nouns continues unabated. A music producer being sentenced for attempted theft tells the court that he’s got six children “on the way”. The judge thinks he’s marrying a women with 6 children but the producer replies, “no, I be concubining”.
James Randi offered a $1 million prize to any psychic who could remotely determine the contents of a box in his office. Cryptographer Matt Blaze and Jutta Degener correctly identified the object from a string of numbers that Randi published to assure contestants that he wouldn’t switch the object after a correct guess. The numbers referred to an entry in the 1995 edition of the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary that described the object. (via wired)
Ben Stein on “what’s new and hot and exciting” in the world on money: “The most sought after jobs in the United States now are jobs in finance in which basically almost no money is raised for new steel mills or coal mines, but immense sums are raised to buy companies, recapitalize them — which means pay the new owners immense special dividends and other payments for going to the trouble of taking over the company. This process results in fantastically well-paid investment bankers and private equity ‘financial engineers’ and has no measurably beneficial effect on the economy generally. It does facilitate the making of ever younger millionaires and an ever more leveraged American corporate structure.”
Related to the men look at crotches post, here’s an eyetracking study that compares how artists look at a photo with the rest of us. “Non-artists spent significantly more time looking at [human bodies and faces in the photos] than artists.” (via snarkmarket)
17-year-old Mary Masterman built a spectrograph at home for $300, thousands of dollars less than they usually cost, earning her the top prize in the Intel Science Talent Search. Interestingly, 6 of the top 10 winners were women.
What are people smuggling into Germany? Twice as much cocaine as last year, stuffed lion cubs, and wine made from cobras.
I don’t spend enough time playing Wii Sports to claim mastery in any of the events. I’m hovering around 2000 in tennis, I’ve bowled a 248 (twice), shot an 8-under in 9 holes of golf, and got my only gold medal in “Hitting the Green” with a distance of 84 feet. The big question, particularly in the Wii Tennis clubhouse, is: how high can a person’s score go in a particular sport? Anything over 2000 displays off the chart:
After poking around for a few minutes, I discovered the Wii High Scores pool on Flickr, in which were the 2310 in tennis above, several 300 games in bowling, an 8-under in golf, and 153.1 feet in “Hitting the Green”. Wii boxers in this thread claim a top score of 3124, after which it seems nearly impossible to score even a single point. Here’s a screenshot of a 3120-level boxer:
Does anyone have any Wii Sports high scores to share? Anyone over 2300 in tennis? Photo evidence is preferred.
I just realized the guy’s name was Vince. Invincible… Vince… Must have been a lot of LOLs in the conference room at Disney when they came up with that one.
Mathematician Terence Tao won both the Fields Medal and a MacArthur genius grant last year. To dumb it down for all you Fields Medal non-winners out there, that’s like doing Miss America and Miss Universe at the same time.
On March 14, 1998, I made the first post to this little site. And I’m still standin’ (yeah yeah yeah). Here’s to 9 more years. Actually, I’ll settle for making it to 10. Baby steps.
In addition to my regular duties on kottke.org, I’m editing Buzzfeed today. Stories so far: Bracket Madness, Sweet Sweet Passover Coke, and 2007 Movie Season. More to come this afternoon.
And if that weren’t enough excitement for one day, it’s also Pi Day. (Whoa, the Pi Day web site uses Silkscreen!) I bet the Pi Dayers are really looking forward to 2015 when they can extend the fun to two additional decimal places.
Things Magazine reports on The Pentominium, a 1670-foot luxury residential building planned for construction in Dubai. “The building’s concept (penthouse + condominium, you see) means that each apartment spans an entire floor, meaning that chance meetings with the other occupants, save in the blinding lobby areas, are out of the question.”
Description of attending an amazing talk by Stephen Hawking. “In the beginning there’s a long pause. Really long. The applause dies down and then… crickets. For thirty seconds… a minute… two minutes. Then suddenly, Hawking’s synthesized voice: ‘Can you hear me?’ The climactic scenes of blockbuster movies are not as thrilling.”
Todd Levin takes the whiz out of SXSW. “In addition to discussion panels, SXSW features an interesting mix of daily keynote speakers, including Sims and Spore game creator Will Wright; Phillip Torrone, the senior editor of Make magazine; and, of course, cyberpunk visionary Dan Rather. Who better to talk about emerging technology than the septuagenarian former broadcast news anchor who still refers to his (unused) computer as an ‘electronic pickle barrel’ and the internet as ‘the World Wide Possum Stew?’”
Former bitter rivals in Northern Ireland, the Democratic Unionists and former IRA leaders, are set to form a government coalition to work together on increasing the region’s economic growth. “After decades spent fighting each other to the death, these two movements will now share power, spending the next year or two arguing about school admissions and local water rates. Their long war is over.” (thx, elaine)
Among the many interesting things in Online Journalism Review’s article about using eyetracking to increase the effectiveness of news article design is this odd result:
Although both men and women look at the image of George Brett when directed to find out information about his sport and position, men tend to focus on private anatomy as well as the face. For the women, the face is the only place they viewed. Coyne adds that this difference doesn’t just occur with images of people. Men tend to fixate more on areas of private anatomy on animals as well, as evidenced when users were directed to browse the American Kennel Club site.
That is absolutely fascinating. I’d love to hear an evolutionary biologist’s take on why that is.
I’m also heartened by the article’s first featured finding: that tighter writing, more white space, and jettisoning unnecessary imagery helps readers read faster and retain more of what they’ve read.
Notes from Will Wright’s keynote at SXSW 2007. “Movies have these wonderful things called actors, which are like emotional avatars, and you kinda feel what they’re feeling, it’s very effective. Films have a rich emotional palette because they have actors. Games often appeal to the reptilian brain - fear, action - but they have a different emotional palette. There are things you feel in games - like pride, accomplishment, guilt even! - that you’ll never feel in a movie.”
Crazy incredible shot by Roger Federer against Andy Roddick. He somehow gets to Roddick’s overhead slam and slips it by him on the baseline.
New research on laughter is showing that “It’s an instinctual survival tool for social animals, not an intellectual response to wit. Itss not about getting the joke. It’s about getting along. It’s a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.”
Here’s some JavaScript you can use to make your web site work on the Wii. “Wiimote keycodes can be detected by JavaScript in the Wii Opera browser [but] I could not find a JavaScript library that facilitates handling these input events, so I created my own”
In 1998, Barry Stiefel took off from work on Friday at 5pm and was back at his desk a little more than a week later on Monday at 8am, having visited every US state in the interim (48 by car, Hawaii and Alaska by air). I love the map…except for the jog to San Francisco, it looks pretty optimized.
Profile of fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld, who admits he doesn’t know “what ‘normal’ means”.
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