10 mph, the documentary about two guys travelling
10 mph, the documentary about two guys travelling across the US on a Segway, comes out on DVD on May 29 (buy at Amazon).
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for May 2007
A tale of two cities
From the Travel section of the NY Times this past weekend, 36 Hours in Baltimore:
Baltimore is sometimes the forgotten middle child among attention-getting Eastern cities like Washington and New York. But a civic revival, which began with the harbor’s makeover 27 years ago, has given out-of-towners reason to visit. Yes, there are wonderful seafood restaurants, Colonial history, quaint waterfronts and other tourist-ready attractions. But Baltimore’s renaissance has also cultivated cool restaurants with innovative cuisine, independent theaters that showcase emerging talent and galleries that specialize in contemporary art. In other words, Baltimore is all grown up, but it’s still a big city with a small-town feel.
And from last week in the Baltimore Sun, ‘Desperate’ plan to slow crime:
Large swaths of Baltimore could be declared emergency areas subject to heightened police enforcement - including a lockdown of streets - under a city councilman’s proposal that aims to slow the city’s climbing homicide count.
The legislation - which met with a lukewarm response from Mayor Sheila Dixon’s administration yesterday, and which others likened to martial law - would allow police to close liquor stores and bars, limit the number of people on city sidewalks and halt traffic in areas declared “public safety act zones.” It comes as the number of homicides in Baltimore reached 108, up from 98 at the same time last year.
Architecture idea: a skyscraper with a single
Architecture idea: a skyscraper with a single floor. See also the tower to be built in Dubai where every floor rotates.
Nice micro-movie/commercial for VW. A YouTube
Nice micro-movie/commercial for VW. A YouTube version is also available (with poorer video and audio quality).
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil
Timelapse video of a map showing Civil War battles and movements…four years of war in four minutes. The video was produced by Harvest Moon Studio for the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum.
Why was the Sandman a villain in
Why was the Sandman a villain in Spiderman 3? “I do think the Sandman didn’t open his mind to lot of options that became available to him when he got particle-ized. I understand that you do what you know, and he had conceptualized himself as a thief and a fugitive. Maybe those were his most lucrative options when he was a man, but as Sandman, I don’t think he had to be an outlaw to make a ton of money. Considering his strength and versatility, I bet any construction firm would have hired him in a flash.” (via mr)
Scientists confirm what every TV news network,
Scientists confirm what every TV news network, conservative radio commentator, and blogger already knows: “Repeated exposure to one person’s viewpoint can have almost as much influence as exposure to shared opinions from multiple people. This finding shows that hearing an opinion multiple times increases the recipient’s sense of familiarity and in some cases gives a listener a false sense that an opinion is more widespread then it actually is.” (via snarkmarket)
Song of summer 2007?
Is there a song for summer 2007 yet? Something along the lines of Crazy in Love in 2003 and, what, Since U Been Gone in 2005…a song that comes to identify the summer to a wide variety of people. There’s been some discussion of this question, but no definite answers yet. I’ve heard MIMS’ This is Why I’m Hot in a wide array of contexts…might be a contender, but does it have the mass popularity and longevity?
When you’re out and about in the
When you’re out and about in the city during the day, who are all these other people who seemingly have nothing to do all day but putter about town? “Many people I encountered reported variations on the ‘in-between jobs’ line, and it’s not just a euphemism. Among the employed are those who will soon be without work, thanks to frictional unemployment, the inevitable periods of joblessness structured into even perfect economies.”
Update: An episode of This American Life from 2000 tackled the same subject, with a focus on Manhattan. “All those people you see in the middle of the workday, in coffee shops and bookstores? Who are they? Why aren’t they at work? Reporter George Gurley tackled these tough questions. On four separate days, he interviewed these loafers in New York.” (thx, michael)
High silica content of Martian soil is
High silica content of Martian soil is yet another indicator of past water on Mars. “The fact that we found something this new and different after nearly 1,200 days on Mars makes it even more remarkable.”
Newish trailer for Transformers (the “exclusive trailer”
Newish trailer for Transformers (the “exclusive trailer” at the top of the list). This movie may actually kick ass. Or, as with every other Bay movie I’ve seen, the reaction will probably be, “that movie really could have kicked ass if it wasn’t so stupid.” I also have a theory that the robots in the film are too much toward the realistic end of Scott McCloud’s iconic abstraction scale to be effective, but that post is for another time.
Religions ranked by number of adherents. 1. Christianity 2. Islam 3. Nonreligious.
Religions ranked by number of adherents. 1. Christianity 2. Islam 3. Nonreligious.
Obesity infographics for several countries, the percentage
Obesity infographics for several countries, the percentage of population older than 15 with a body-mass index greater than 30. That USA man is really fat.
Jezebel is a new Gawker Media blog
Jezebel is a new Gawker Media blog about…well, that’s not important. Anyway, the site is hosted at jezebel.com, which was the former personal domain of Heather Champ and the original home of The Mirror Project (timeline). Heather put the domain up for sale in January 2004…I guess Nick bought it?
Update: Never fear, vintage Jezebel merchandise is still available.
A pair of articles on the Large
A pair of articles on the Large Hadron Collider at CERN: A Giant Takes On Physics’ Biggest Questions and Crash Course. The LHC will hopefully provide the 1.21 gigawatts 7 trillion electron volts needed to uncover the Higgs boson, aka, The God Particle. “What we want is to reduce the world to objects that have no structure, that are points, that are as simple as we can imagine. And then build it up from there again.”
Why are so many web entrepreneurs so
Why are so many web entrepreneurs so young? Because the beginner’s mind is an advantage that the young have and the old can’t easily reclaim. “The principal asset a young tech entrepreneur has is that they don’t know a lot of things. In almost every other circumstance, this would be a disadvantage, but not here, and not now. The reason this is so (and the reason smart old people can’t fake their way into this asset) has everything to do with our innate ability to cement past experience into knowledge.” Wisdom is a bitch.
Alex Reisner’s cabinet of statistical wonders
While bumping around on the internet last night, I stumbled upon Alex Reisner’s site. Worth checking out are his US roadtrip photos and NYC adventures, which include an account and photographs of a man jumping from the Williamsburg Bridge.
But the real gold here is Reisner’s research on baseball…a must-see for baseball and infographics nerds alike. Regarding the home run discussion on the post about Ken Griffey Jr. a few weeks ago, Reisner offers this graph of career home runs by age for a number of big-time sluggers. You can see the trajectory that Griffey was on before he turned 32/33 and how A-Rod, if he stays healthy, is poised to break any record set by Bonds. His article on Baseball Geography and Transportation details how low-cost cross-country travel made it possible for the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants to move to California. The same article also riffs on how stadiums have changed from those that fit into urban environments (like Fenway Park) to more symmetric ballfields built in suburbs and other open areas accessible by car.
And then there’s the pennant race graphs for each year since 1900…you can compare the dominance of the 1927 Yankees with the 1998 Yankees. And if you’ve gotten through all that, prepare to spend several hours sifting through all sorts of MLB statistics, represented in a way you may not have seen before:
The goal here is not to duplicate excellent resources like Total Baseball or The Baseball Encyclopedia, but to take the same data and present it in a way that shows different relationships, yields new insights, and raises new questions. The focus is on putting single season stats in a historical context and identifying the truly outstanding player seasons, not just those with big raw numbers.
Reisner’s primary method of comparing players over different eras is the z-score, a measure of how a player compares to their contemporaries, (e.g. the fantastic seasons of Babe Ruth in 1920 and Barry Bonds in 2001):
In short, z-score is a measure of a player’s dominance in a given league and season. It allows us to compare players in different eras by quantifying how good they were compared to their competition. It it a useful measure but a relative one, and does not allow us to draw any absolute conclusions like “Babe Ruth was a better home run hitter than Barry Bonds.” All we can say is that Ruth was more dominant in his time.
I’m more of a basketball fan than of baseball, so I immediately thought of applying the same technique to NBA players, to shed some light on the perennial Jordan vs. Chamberlain vs. Oscar Robertson vs. whoever arguments. Until recently, the NBA hasn’t collected statistics as tenaciously as MLB has so the z-score technique is not as useful, but some work has been done in that area.
Anyway, great stuff all the way around.
Update: Reisner’s site seems to have gone offline since I wrote this. I hope the two aren’t related and that it appears again soon.
Update: It’s back up!
Nina Planck on the recent death by
Nina Planck on the recent death by starvation of a baby fed a vegan diet by his parents: “I was once a vegan. But well before I became pregnant, I concluded that a vegan pregnancy was irresponsible. You cannot create and nourish a robust baby merely on foods from plants.”
Summize is a product review site that
Summize is a product review site that uses sparkline-like color bars for ratings instead of stars. Here’s a bit more about how their display system works.
100 quotes from 100 movies featuring the numbers 1 through 100.
100 quotes from 100 movies featuring the numbers 1 through 100. A list of the movies is available here.
Jane magazine’s guest blog consists of reader-submitted
Jane magazine’s guest blog consists of reader-submitted photos and descriptions of their breasts. The results are both unerotic and fascinating. Because of the portrayal of women and men as near-perfect sexual objects in the media, movies, and porn, it’s easy to forget the extent of diversity of people’s bodies. “I used to think they were horrible compared to all we see in fashion mags…but now I LOVE my body and my BOOBS!!!” NSFW, I guess.
Food design by Marti Guixe. I love
Food design by Marti Guixe. I love the 7-Step Cookie…it’s got numbered bite-marks that show you how to eat it. Some larger photos of some of his projects here. (via core77)
For the four or five of you
For the four or five of you that haven’t yet read Moneyball, the entire thing is available online, courtesy of a Russian site presumably out of the reach of the American legal system.
Undiscovered bedrooms, the typical dream of the
Undiscovered bedrooms, the typical dream of the New Yorker. I always thought the undiscovered room dream story was apocryphal until Meg, unaware of the story at the time, dreamt of finding another room in our apartment a few months ago.
Projected climate map of Europe in 2071. The
Projected climate map of Europe in 2071. The map is a bit confusing…the cities are placed on the map according to their projected new climate, not their geographical location. So, in 2071, Berlin will find itself in the same climate as circa-2007 North Africa.
A less than death defying rollercoaster in
A less than death defying rollercoaster in North Korea. The ride actually gently rocks riders to sleep. (thx, graham)
Hair portraits, including those of Star Wars
Hair portraits, including those of Star Wars and Guns n Roses.
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs.
Ben Fry has updated his salary vs. performance graph for the 2007 MLB season…it plots team payrolls vs. winning percentage. The Mets and Red Sox should be winning and are…the Yankees, not so much. Cleveland and the Brewers are making good use of their relatively low payrolls.
Popular names for twins born in 2006. Almost
Popular names for twins born in 2006. Almost all of the top name pairs start with the same letter: Jacob/Joshua, Landon/Logan, Ella/Emma, and the stunningly confusing Taylor/Tyler.
The sport of cheese rolling. A wheel
The sport of cheese rolling. A wheel of cheese rolls down a hill (at 70 mph), contestants race after it, and whoever crosses the finish line first wins the cheese. Here’s a video of the madness.
Using CSS to consistently style forms buttons
Using CSS to consistently style forms buttons across IE, Firefox, and Safari.
To ensure proper quality control over the
To ensure proper quality control over the meat at his restaurants, David Burke bought a black Angus bull for $250,000; the bull’s offspring provide steaks for his diners. “The purchase made perfect business sense, he said, because by breeding the same bull, the restaurant guarantees its steaks are of the highest quality.” He named the bull “Prime”. (via serious eats)
Video of the last 10 seconds of every
Video of the last 10 seconds of every season 1 episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
Holy crap, the ottoman humping video made
Holy crap, the ottoman humping video made it on to The Daily Show. (via waxy)
Winners of the 2007 National Design Awards, including
Winners of the 2007 National Design Awards, including Apple’s Jonathan Ive and Chip Kidd.
Mocketing: making fun of your product or
Mocketing: making fun of your product or brand in order to sell the product and build the brand. Found out about mocketing from this Book Design Review post on a book called Unmarketable.
Two chat bots, Alice and Jabberwacky, converse
Two chat bots, Alice and Jabberwacky, converse with each other. “J: Yes. Would you like to hear a joke? / A: Sure, tell me about it. / J: Why don’t blind people skydive? / A: Perhaps it is impossible. / J: I think you lie a lot.” (thx, nick)
Update: Rex Sorgatz ran a similar experiment back in 2002.
Update: Interviews with Robots is an entire blog dedicated to chatbot conversations.
Jonathan Rauch on politics, journalism, and mistakes
This recent interview of journalist Jonathan Rauch is full of good stuff. On bad predictions and making mistakes:
Everybody makes [mistakes]; it’s par for the course. What I have learned is not to be too sure I’m right. The world is much more surprising than we give it credit for. That’s part of my political philosophy, my philosophy of life. That’s really fundamental to it: Trial and error is really the only thing in life that works ultimately over the long term. Journalism is like that, too, so we need to be honest about our mistakes. We often aren’t enough. Everybody makes mistakes. And we need to be a little bit cautious about making predictions.
On real journalism vs. opinion:
There’s a very talented, hard-working press corps and, of course, it represents only a small fraction of the people who are doing [journalism]. I think all the major newspapers are doing it well. Not a single one is doing it badly, the ones that are committing resources to it. The larger fraction are the parasites, the bloggers, commentators, opinionizers — I don’t exempt myself — who are feeding off of the real news that the press is providing. That larger sort of commentariat is not doing a very good job.
The future of real journalism:
What I worry about is what everyone in my business worries about: Who’s going to fund the real reporting? The magazine and newspaper business was a cross-subsidy. You had the advertising, particularly classified, and you had a local market, which subsidized the gathering of news. That model is breaking down because the bundle is breaking into pieces and it’s hard to see in the long run who funds the kind of large-scale news reporting operations that the major papers have run if the advertising is all going online and if people can all get the news for free at Yahoo.
On extremism in American politics:
The [political] system has been rigged by partisan activists to their advantage. They participate in primaries. General elections don’t matter because they’ve gerrymandered the congressional districts. They have the advantages of energy and being single-minded and they use these wedge issues which they’re very good at and which both sides conspire in using in order to marginalize the middle. The result of that is the turnout among moderates and independents is down; turnout on the extremes is up. The parties are increasingly sorted by ideology so that all the liberals are in one party and all the conservatives are in another. That is a new development in American history.
On getting out of the way of a story:
I’m not a fan of the idea that the journalist and the journalist’s attitude should be front and center. I think that a good journalist’s duty is to get out of the way. The hardest thing about journalism — the hardest thing, a much higher art than being clever — is just to get out of the way, to show the leader of the world as the reader would see it if the reader were there. Just to be eyes and ears. Calvin Trillin, another writer I greatly admired who steered me towards journalism, once said that getting himself out of his stories was like taking off a very tight shirt in a very small phone booth. He’s right.
And lots more…I recommend reading the entire thing, especially the exchange between Rauch and the interviewer about personal political identities that was too long/difficult to excerpt here. Much more from Rauch here.
A list of film’s most impressive and
A list of film’s most impressive and famous long takes, including those from Boogie Nights, Touch of Evil, Children of Men, and The Player. Featuring the now-standard YouTube clips of each long take.
My wife Meg makes A Mean Chocolate
My wife Meg makes A Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. That is to say, she asked her readers for their best chocolate chip cookie recipes, averaged the ingredient amounts, baking times, chilling times, butter consistencies, and other various techniques and baked according to the resulting recipe (which she includes so you can bake up your own batch). Some of the ingredients: “2.04 cups all-purpose flour; 0.79 tsp. salt; 0.79 tsp. baking soda; 0.805 stick unsalted butter, softened to room temperature; 0.2737 stick unsalted butter, cold; 0.5313 stick unsalted butter, melted.” Reminds me a bit of The Most Wanted Paintings project by Komar & Melamid, who averaged aesthetic preferences and taste in painting to produce works of art that appealed to everyone (to hilarious effect). (digg this?)
Technology Review asked several designers to name
Technology Review asked several designers to name their favorite technology products. Worth a look for the photos of pristine Sony Walkmans, Ataris, and Polaroid cameras.
Room ceiling heights affect how people think. “
Room ceiling heights affect how people think. “When a person is in a space with a 10-foot ceiling, they will tend to think more freely, more abstractly. They might process more abstract connections between objects in a room, whereas a person in a room with an 8-foot ceiling will be more likely to focus on specifics.”
Fresh Dialogue 23 is an upcoming AIGA NY
Fresh Dialogue 23 is an upcoming AIGA NY event (May 29) that will focus on the increasingly common phenomenon of the former audience lending a hand in designing their own experiences. Speakers include Stamen’s Eric Rodenbeck and Ze Frank. (thx, khoi)
The University of Cambridge has put online
The University of Cambridge has put online almost 5000 letters to and from Charles Darwin. (via bbc news)
Interview with artist Kristan Horton, whose project
Interview with artist Kristan Horton, whose project Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove recreates scenes from the movie using everyday household objects.
Socials & More