Video comparing sequences from Family Guy that mirror earlier sequences from The Simpsons. (via cyn-c)
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Entries for May 2007
For decades, Robert Caro’s The Power Broker has been the definitive account of Robert Moses and how contemporary NYC got built. The portrait Caro painted of Moses was less than flattering. Now folks are thinking that, hey, maybe the guy wasn’t so bad after all. “That Moses was highhanded, racist and contemptuous of the poor draws no argument even from the most ardent revisionists. But his grand vision and iron will, they say, seeded New York with highways, parks, swimming pools and cultural halls, from the Belt Parkway to Lincoln Center, and thus allowed the modern city to flower.”
I was telling a friend this weekend about an article I’d read long ago about Larry Wall approaching the development of Perl as if it were a natural language. I think this is the article in question. Perl, the first postmodern computer language and a conversation with Larry Wall also touch on Perl and linguistics.
Update: Here’s the original post to comp.lang.perl.misc by Wall. (thx, marc)
Mayor Bloomberg’s plan for a “greener” and “
Mayor Bloomberg’s plan for a “greener” and “greater” New York City includes congestion pricing for Manhattan south of 86th Street. “It’s naive to suppose that congestion isn’t itself costly. Sitting in traffic, a plumber can’t plumb and a deliveryman can’t deliver. The value of time lost to congestion delays in the city has been put at five billion dollars annually.”
Turns out that the story about the Chinese manufacturing fake eggs out of chemicals is itself fake. A reader contacted the founder of ispub.com, the site that originally ran the article, and he says they yanked the article and replaced the editor who accepted the story. (thx, jeff)
Three of the candidates in the recent Republican presidential debate said they don’t believe in evolution: Colorado Representative Tom Tancredo, Kansas Senator Sam Brownback, and former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee. Hard to believe that this is 2007 and not 1807. John McCain said he did believe in evolution but that “I also believe, when I hike the Grand Canyon and see it at sunset, that the hand of God is there also”.
Update: An earlier version of this post wrongly stated that Mitt Romney raised his hand when asked about disbelieving evolution…Tom Tancredo was the third person. (thx to several who wrote in about this)
The first photo of Earth from space was taken by a V-2 missile in 1946. Large panoramic shot of a 1948 photo is here.
A small grocery store in Emo, Ontario is competing with a nearby Wal-Mart by purchasing goods from Sam’s Club and reselling them at lower prices than the Wal-Mart offers. (via girlhacker)
Clever technique for pinching the colors from famous paintings using the Match Color tool in Photoshop. “The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?”
Are the Chinese manufacturing fake chicken eggs and passing them off as real? “Although the faked eggs looked practically the same as real ones, the consumer smelled chemicals when cooking the eggs. The egg yolk dispersed quickly when it was mixed with the egg white, and the colour was pale. No flavour could be tasted after cooking. According to the officials of the National Bureau of Industry and Commerce, the faked eggs were made from chemicals.” (via cyn-c)
Update: Turns out the story is a fake. (thx, jeff)
Costco is selling Mexican Coke
Costco is selling Mexican Coke made with sugar instead of high-fructose corn syrup, at least in the San Francisco area. “Costco has conformed to CA and U.S. rules, such as CRV (the sort-of deposit you pay for the bottle) and ‘nutrition’ labeling, so everything appears to be nice and legal.” (via serious eats)
Email bankruptcy: “choosing to delete, archive, or ignore a very large number of email messages without ever reading them, replying to each with a unique response, or otherwise acting individually on them”.
Best-player discussions are commonplace, but who’s the worst player in the NBA? I’d vote Antoine Walker as well…I’ve always felt his game was crap. (via truehoop)
An animated version of the Bayeux Tapestry, which tells the story of the Norman invasion of England in 1066. Wikipedia has more info on the tapestry and VSL has more on the video.
The top-ten 8-bit games. Can’t argue with the top 5 too much, but the other selections might be a bit off. Whither Metroid? And Tetris?
I suppose I am contractually obligated to tell you that Malcolm Gladwell was on the Colbert Report the other night.
An online Condiment Packet Museum. Exhibits include ketchup, relish, honey, and jam.
The White Glove Tracking site needs your help in finding Michael Jackson’s white glove in all 10,060 frames of Jackson’s performance of Billy Jean. “Rather then write unnecessarily complex code to find the glove in every frame of the video I am asking for the assistance of 10,060 individual internet users to simply click and drag a box around the glove in one frame.” Don’t stop ‘til you get enough (white gloves located).
Timelapse of a boat going through the Panama Canal. How the boat moves reminds me of Doom or Quake. This couple’s vacation write-up includes a trip through the canal. “The never to be forgotten trip lasted ten hours and cost Princess Cruise Lines more than $150,000 in tolls.”
Colors that have stood for things for a long time, like red for stop, green for money, and white for surrender.
Ferrari gives out a limited number of passports to VIPs, which “gives its bearer entrance to the factory, unrestricted access to all the restricted areas, and no-questions-asked carte blanche to borrow any of the cars in the factory’s fleet”. (via clusterflock)
The pace of global cities is speeding up…people are walking 10% more quickly than they did 10 years ago. Singapore is the fastest city and I’m surprised NYC isn’t in the top 5.
Fun headline of the day: Erectile dysfunction probed with engineering tool. Heh, they said “tool”.
Noah Kalina is selling signed and numbered prints of individual frames of his seminal everyday movie.
Darren Aronofsky is working on a screenplay for a film about Noah. You know, the dude with the Ark. “Noah was the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk. It’s there in the Bible — it was one of the first things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor’s guilt going on there. He’s a dark, complicated character.”
A man buys a bag of Cape Cod potato chips containing a few chips and a whole potato. Correspondence with the company and hilarity ensues.
A map of online communities. Notable features include the Blogipeligo, the Bay of Trolls, the Sea of Memes, and the Viral Straits. (thx, kayhan)
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are playing a match today on a specially designed tennis court that’s half grass (Federer’s specialty) and half clay (Nadal’s preferred surface). Story includes a photo of the kooky court. (thx, dalben)
There’s no permalink, but if you go to the Disney home page, they’re playing 9 minutes of Ratatouille, the new Pixar movie. There’s two clips…one takes place pretty close to the start of the movie and the other a bit later.
Update: For those of you outside of the US, here’s the YouTube version of the 9-minute Ratatouille clip.
Update: A more permanent and higher quality version is up on the Apple site.
Matt Haughey recently launched a new blog about “doing business online” called fortuitous. In his introductory post, Matt describes his job as “professionally screwing around on the web”, which is an accurate description of my current vocation as well.
A voxel is smallest unit of volume in a 3D image. Voxel = volumetric + pixel. (via best thing)
A father and son team have deciphered a 600-year-old code hidden in a church featured in The Da Vinci Code. “The music has been frozen in time by symbolism. It was only a matter of time before the symbolism began to thaw out and begin to make sense to scientific and musical perception.” Whoa, that’s bad enough to be worthy of Dan Brown himself.
Ariel Levy tells us about her lesbian wedding that wasn’t really a wedding (it was “a party about love”) and her struggle to find something she could wear for it. “I also didn’t feel okay about spending all my free time on the phone with the flower guy and the tent man, or about making little checklists of who was coming, and who was not coming, and who was staying at the Goodstone Inn. And I definitely did not feel okay about telling the sales staff of half the better clothing retailers in New York City that I needed something fetching to wear to my big fat gay wedding.”
Play dress-up with the Gucci spring 2007 collection. Drag and drop dresses, shoes, and handbags onto the model. Many other collections are available as well.
The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum has announced plans for expansion. I was up there this weekend checking out the Design Triennial and found the exhibition a bit small; a similar show at the expansive MoMA might have run to twice the size and would have included larger items. I hope they don’t do too much to the building though…in many rooms, the building is just as much of an attraction as the items on display.
Noctilucent clouds (really high whispy clouds) were so common where I grew up in WI that I thought they were normal. Turns out they only appear in higher latitudes, at least until recently when global warming has caused them to appear more frequently and further south.
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