Entries for March 2007
Free throw shooting is one of my favorite topics. It’s the whole relaxed concentration aspect of it: can you focus enough so that the years of practice undertaken to train the unconscious self to shoot override the conscious self’s desire to take control of the situation at hand? To me, this battle of the two minds within the individual is the essence of sport: you know how to make the shot, you know you can make the shot, but will you make the shot? Free throw shooting lays this battle bare for all to see. It’s the same shot every single time (and the easiest way to score a point in sports), you don’t have to be in top physical shape to shoot it, and yet a surprising amount of professional basketball players can’t make more than every two out of three attempts.
So, as for Gene Weingarten’s assertion (via truehoop) that if an average person took a year to practice, he could beat the best free throw shooter in the NBA, I say “hell yes”. Maybe a retired podiatrist would be a worthy candidate: 71-year-old Tom Amberry shot 2,750 in a row in 1993. Amberry was a star college basketball player and was offered a contract with the Lakers after WWII, so maybe that’s not fair…but just look at the guy.
Coming in July: Seventy-nine Short Essays on Design by Michael Bierut. Looks like some of those essays will be drawn from Design Observer.
The cover story in this week’s NY Times Magazine is called Darwin’s God and covers, from an evolutionary biology standpoint, why people believe in God. Most scientists studying the matter believe that humans have a built-in mechanism for religious belief. For instance, anthropologist Scott Atran sometimes conducts an intriguing experiment with his students:
His research interests include cognitive science and evolutionary biology, and sometimes he presents students with a wooden box that he pretends is an African relic. “If you have negative sentiments toward religion,” he tells them, “the box will destroy whatever you put inside it.” Many of his students say they doubt the existence of God, but in this demonstration they act as if they believe in something. Put your pencil into the magic box, he tells them, and the nonbelievers do so blithely. Put in your driver’s license, he says, and most do, but only after significant hesitation. And when he tells them to put in their hands, few will. If they don’t believe in God, what exactly are they afraid of?
Or rather, why are they afraid? One possible reason is that humans are conditioned to be on the lookout for “agents” and we tend to find them even when they’re not there:
So if there is motion just out of our line of sight, we presume it is caused by an agent, an animal or person with the ability to move independently. This usually operates in one direction only; lots of people mistake a rock for a bear, but almost no one mistakes a bear for a rock.
What does this mean for belief in the supernatural? It means our brains are primed for it, ready to presume the presence of agents even when such presence confounds logic. “The most central concepts in religions are related to agents,” Justin Barrett, a psychologist, wrote in his 2004 summary of the byproduct theory, “Why Would Anyone Believe in God?” Religious agents are often supernatural, he wrote, “people with superpowers, statues that can answer requests or disembodied minds that can act on us and the world.”
Another reason for the instinctive religious impulse may be that people are able to put themselves in other peoples’ minds, to think about how another person might be feeling or thinking:
Folkpsychology, as Atran and his colleagues see it, is essential to getting along in the contemporary world, just as it has been since prehistoric times. It allows us to anticipate the actions of others and to lead others to believe what we want them to believe; it is at the heart of everything from marriage to office politics to poker. People without this trait, like those with severe autism, are impaired, unable to imagine themselves in other people’s heads.
The process begins with positing the existence of minds, our own and others’, that we cannot see or feel. This leaves us open, almost instinctively, to belief in the separation of the body (the visible) and the mind (the invisible). If you can posit minds in other people that you cannot verify empirically, suggests Paul Bloom, a psychologist and the author of “Descartes’ Baby,” published in 2004, it is a short step to positing minds that do not have to be anchored to a body. And from there, he said, it is another short step to positing an immaterial soul and a transcendent God.
There’s lots more in the article…it’s well worth a read.
How many countries can you name in 10 minutes? I got just over 70…my weak spots were Africa and spelling. And 10 minutes just isn’t enough time. See also name the 50 US states in 15 minutes.
Dan Hill, who coincidentally is the director of web and broadcast at the aforementioned Monocle, has a thoughtful post about Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait, a documentary film that follows Zinedine Zidane through an entire soccer match.
Nice positive review of Monocle, a new monthly magazine that would “bond and glue all the people that roam the world”. I finally got my hands on the first issue the other day and it is quite something. “Overall, Monocle comes across as fresh, original, careful not to be influenced in its editorial choices by the media system’s herd logic (no stories on the ‘hot topic of the moment’, and zero — zero! — celebrities and people gossip).”
Nice composite photo of the lunar eclipse last night. We missed it because it was a bit cloudy and tall buildingy in NYC last night. (thx, ajit)
Update: Here’s another, another, and one more.
4-hour BBC documentary on how to be a gardener. I only watched the first few minutes, but it seems promising. (thx, avi)
On tonight’s to-do list: total lunar eclipse. Totality occurs at 5:44pm ET and will last about an hour. On the east coast of the US, the moon will already be eclipsed when it rises. Best bet for seeing it is Africa, Europe, and the Middle East (see map).
A 666 tribute to David Fincher featuring video of 6 of his commercials, 6 of his music videos, and 6 of his movies.
They’re Made Out of Meat, a classic sci-fi short story by Terry Bisson. “Thinking meat! You’re asking me to believe in thinking meat!” (thx, aj)
Update: There’s a Made of Meat short film as well. (thx, david, jack, and oscar)
For years, a myth has stated that the number of people currently living outnumber the number of people who have died. Not true says demographer Carl Haub: over 100 billion people have died on earth, compared to 6.5 billion current residents. (via 3qd)
I think it’s perfectly OK for John McCain and Barack Obama to say that the US is wasting the lives of the American troops that have been killed in Iraq. In the ignoble pursuit of politics, people are penalized for telling the truth, or at least for telling their honest opinions. Words are twisted by the media and opponents to take on other meanings. In this case, we’re supposed to be outraged for McCain and Obama suggesting that those who have chosen to serve in the armed forces are wasting their lives. Does anyone honestly believe that either of these two guys really meant to say that?
The Morning News announces the results of the Non-Expert’s Contest for Total Idioms. The phrase “if a bird can’t fly, it walks [is] used to suggest someone should stop making excuses why they can’t do something”.
In doing some research in anticipation of seeing Zodiac sometime this weekend, I came across the following tidbit:
[Zodiac is] believed to be the first full-length studio feature film shot and produced entirely as data from start to finish, with no physical media involved beyond backing up all raw imagery to 500 vaulted LTO data tapes during postproduction.
This sounds wrong to me, but I can’t think of what movie might have been both filmed and cut digitally before this one. Do Pixar’s animated features count? Surely there’s no film involved there. Does Soderbergh shoot & edit his big studio stuff digitally? The Coens edited Intolerable Cruelty digitally with Final Cut Pro but shot it on film. Maybe some of the newer action films…Superman Returns, King Kong, Batman Begins? I know there are some obsessive film-savvy kottke.org readers out there, can you shed any light on this?
Update: According to this feature on Apple’s web site, Kerry Conran shot and edited Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow digitally.
Via VSL comes word of a new book that sounds interesting: The Enlightened Bracketologist: The Final Four of Everything. “In 101 of the pettiest cultural categories — e.g., Bob Dylan cover songs, James Bond gadgets, bald guys — the authors and their team of contributors have pitted the 32 top entries against each other, in elegant NCAA-style brackets (created by design legend Nigel Holmes), and conclusively determined a winner in each field.” Here are some example brackets.
I haven’t watched much professional-grade badminton so I don’t know if this is normal, but this point lasts far longer than I would have expected.
How to build a really fantastic snow fort. “Your secret weapon would be a garden hose with a misting attachment at the end, so long as it provides an extremely gentle mist. Work from a distance, letting the water have some time to cool in the air before it hits the fort. And you’ll want to work in layers, giving the ice time to build up.”
A list of well-know logos & brands and their design histories.
Update: I took out the link because several people told me that the site I was linking to has a history of taking other’s content and passing it off as their own.
Slang suggestion: “bang the bricks” as a euphemism for getting money from an ATM. “Everybody knows how Mario from the Super Mario Brothers is getting money: He bangs against a brick with his head.”
Nice interview with Grant Achatz, owner and chef at Alinea, which many consider to be the best restaurant in America right now.
A tour of The Boring Store, the Chicago outpost of Dave Eggers’ 826 non-profit writing/tutoring conglomerate and “Chicago’s only undercover secret agent supply store”. The store joins NYC’s superhero supply store and San Francisco’s pirate supply store.
Update: The Seattle chapter of 826 runs the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Store. (thx, brooks & paul)
Brad Duke won $85 million in the Powerball lottery in 2005. Here’s how he’s spent the money so far. (via cyn-c)
Generation Kill is the newest project for HBO from David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire. It’s a 7-hour miniseries based on Marines fighting in the Iraq war. “Gritty mini will look at the early movements of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion and depict the complex challenges faced by the U.S.-led mission even in the war’s early stages.” (via crazymonk)
The letters to the editor section of the New Yorker this week contains a correction to Stacy Schiff’s piece in the magazine about Wikipedia from July 2006. The piece included an interview with Essjay who was described in the article as a tenured professor with a Ph.D. Turns out that Essjay wasn’t exactly who he said he was:
At the time of publication, neither we nor Wikipedia knew Essjay’s real name. Essjay’s entire Wikipedia life was conducted with only a user name; anonymity is common for Wikipedia administrators and contributors, and he says that he feared personal retribution from those he had ruled against online. Essjay now says that his real name is Ryan Jordan, that he is twenty-four and holds no advanced degrees, and that he has never taught.
The full editor’s note is appended to the original article.
The folks at Serious Eats are having some fun with National Pig Day, including posts and videos about pork, ham, bacon, and whatever else you can get off that wonderful, magical animal.
Yesterday’s I Did Not Know That Yesterday! tidbit concerned Sputnik 1, the Soviet satellite launched in 1957.
But what fate befell the iconic satellite? After 1,400 trips around the Earth, Sputnik burned up when it reentered the atmosphere in January of 1958 (just as it was supposed to).
The very next Sputnick launched contained the first terrestrial space traveller, Laika, a dog. Ok, wait. The first one burned up in earth’s atmosphere after three months and the second one contained a dog…that’s right, the Soviets killed that poor dog! When I heard the story of Laika as a kid, whoever I heard it from omitted that part. Although Laika didn’t burn up in the atmosphere, she was also not euthanized after 10 days of flight as Soviet scientists had planned. A Sputnik scientist recently revealed that Laika died after only a few hours in orbit from stress and overheating.
Two other (unrelated) things I didn’t know about Sputnik: that it was tiny (smaller than a basketball) and that Herb Caen coined the word “beatnik” based on Sputnik.
Wired’s cover feature for the March 2007 issue is Snack Culture. “Movies, TV, songs, games. Pop culture now comes packaged like cookies or chips, in bite-size bits for high-speed munching. It’s instant entertainment - and boy, is it tasty.” Even though kottke.org is a part of this culture, I still prefer a full meal.
Steven Johnson, new Apple rumors blogger, reads the tea leaves and surmises that Apple will soon release multitouch displays to go with Leopard and a new version of iLife.
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