Entries for June 2007
After working on this — on again and off again, mostly off — for much too long, I’m pleased to say that a significant chunk of kottke.org now has tags (around 5,100 entries are tagged, out of ~13,000). Right now, the only way to access them is through individual tag pages, but after all the bugs are ironed out, I’ll be putting them in different places around the site (front page, main archive page, etc.).
Each tag page lists all the entries1 on the site that are tagged with that particular word…some good examples to start you off are: photography, economics, lists, infoviz, food, nyc, cities, restaurants, video, timelapse, interviews, language, maps, and fashion. Each page also has a list of tags related to that particular tag and further down in the sidebar, you’ll find lists of recently popular tags, all-time popular tags, a few favorite tags of mine, and some random tags…lots of stuff to explore.
I’ve tweaked the design as well: the main column is a little wider, the post metadata look/feel is consistent among short posts and long posts, faint dotted lines now separate all entries, and per-entry tags were added to the post metadata. I’m testing all that out for eventual site-wide use. Questions, comments, bug reports, etc. are welcome…send them on in.
Update: I almost forgot, the nsfw tag.
[1] Not all the entries exactly. Until I figure out how to do some pagination, I’ve limited the number of entries to 100 for each tag page. The movies page was more than 1 Mb when all the entries were listed. ↩
As people exchange their land lines for mobile phones, phone books are getting smaller. “Americans have not been eager to list their cell numbers in phone books. Consumers and privacy advocates balked at the idea in 2004, when most of the big wireless carriers said they wanted to compile a nationwide directory. Cellphones may make it easier for people to reach each other, yet Americans are very guarded about whom they want calling them.”
A rerun, because it came up at dinner the other night: EPIC 2014, the recent history of technology and the media as told from the vantage point of 7 years in the future. “2008 sees the alliance that will challenge Microsoft’s ambitions. Google and Amazon join forces to form Googlezon. Google supplies the Google Grid and unparalled search technology. Amazon supplies the social recommendation engine and its huge commercial infrastructure.”
Photoshopped series of photos of people kissing themselves. Sort of disturbingly erotic, in an erotically disturbing way.
The 2007 MacTech 25 “honors the most influential people in the Macintosh community”. Includes a single woman.
Wikigroaning: comparing sparse Wikipedia entries about high culture topics with the more fleshed-out entries about low culture topics. For instance, compare the entries for Hammurabi, who wrote some of the world’s first legal codes, and Emperor Palpatine, who ruled the Empire in the Star Wars movies.
Blog to watch: Madame Royale, a blog about notable women from the past. (via cyn-c)
David Plotz has finished his Blogging the Bible series at Slate…he wrote about each book of the Old Testament. “While I’ve been blogging the Bible, I have tried not to take myself too seriously and not to pretend more insight than I actually have. I just wanted to read the book and write about what it’s like to read it. No essays, no philosophy, no experts.”
People who live in Greenland are loving this global warming thing. “At a science station in the ice-covered interior of Greenland, average winter temperatures rose nearly 11 degrees Fahrenheit from 1991 to 2003. Winters are shorter, ice is melting, and fish and animals are on the move.” 11 degrees in 12 years!
Photos of the absurdly polluted Citarum River in Indonesia. “Their occupants no longer try to fish. It is more profitable to forage for rubbish they can salvage and trade — plastic bottles, broken chair legs, rubber gloves — risking disease for one or two pounds a week if they are lucky.”
Forgetting May Be Part of the Process of Remembering. “A lightning memory, in short, is not so much a matter of capacity as it is of ruthless pruning.” I pointed to some similar studies in my better living through self-deception post from a couple of weeks ago.
Top 20 plays of the 2007 NBA playoffs (so far). It’s a good list but YouTube sucks for watching sports highlights…the quality is just too low. (via truehoop)
Research suggests that those who fidget are less likely to be obese. Fidgeters of the world say, “well, duh, all that moving around is good exercise”.
Facekicking, n. The act of accessing Facebook from your T-Mobile Sidekick. Coined while chatting with Jonah the other night…we decided that “facekicking” was more exciting to say than “sidebooking”.
Old chicken bones are a clue that the Polynesians made it to the Americas before the Europeans did. “The 50 chicken bones from at least five individual birds date from between 1321 and 1407 — 100 years or more before the arrival of Europeans.”
Are there many small galaxies, like the one just discovered just outside our own, orbiting the larger visible galaxies?
Four-part documentary about the making of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining: one, two, three, four. Shot by Kubrick’s daughter, Vivian.
Pirate myths uncovered: they never said “arrr”, there was no plank walking, and no treasure maps. The “arrr” and the pirate accent “originated with Robert Newton, the actor who played Long John Silver in the movies and on TV through much of the 1950s”.
Reconsidering Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: it was an influential book…too bad the science was all wrong. “She cited scary figures showing a recent rise in deaths from cancer, but she didn’t consider one of the chief causes: fewer people were dying at young ages from other diseases (including the malaria that persisted in the American South until DDT). When that longevity factor as well as the impact of smoking are removed, the cancer death rate was falling in the decade before ‘Silent Spring,’ and it kept falling in the rest of the century.”
Update: Scienceblogs’ Tim Lambert has been following a campaign to discredit Carson and her book. More here and at Google. (thx, jim & paul)
A rare positive review from Speak Up of the new London 2012 that everyone else in the world seems to hate. “I believe, despite any ensuing boo’s, that this is some of the most innovative and daring identity work we have seen in this new millennium, and the lack of cheesy and imagination-impairing gradients gives me hope that identity work can still be resurrected on a larger scale.”
Update: Coudal loves the logo.
Matt Webb’s presentation slides and transcripts are always worth reading through…this one is no exception: Products Are People Too. I hope to catch one of his talks in person someday.
From a poll in the Guardian: George Orwell’s 1984 is the definitive book of the 20th century. Gatsby, Grapes, and Brave New World also make the top 10 list.
The Inglehart-Welzel Cultural Map of the World scores the world’s countries on two axes of cultural values…from “traditional” to “secular-rational” and from “survival” to “self-expression”. (via strange maps)
Last week’s post about the third Pirates of the Caribbean movie hinted that I was having difficulty reconciling its summer blockbusterness (and all the suckiness that usual entails) and the feeling that there was something more to be discovered under the distracting explosions and swordplay. Ryland Walker Knight, writing at The House Next Door, says that Pirates trilogy is a film series worth watching seriously (emphasis mine):
The Caribbean world of Verbinski’s trilogy is, after the first film, one of constant shuffling, of tangential narrative ruptures: the world of the film, like the world we audience members live in, is chaotic. Of course, this Caribbean world is not the world we live in. In our world, there are no giant mythological squids or sea goddesses, but there are, however, pirates - and daily acts of piracy. And there are social dictums, social pacts, that we appropriate and reconstitute on an individual basis, to live with ourselves, to live with the world. The main thrust of this trilogy is that reckoning: How will we live in the world when our autonomous freedom is continually challenged?
It’s certainly not a stretch to make the connection between the autonomous freedom theme and the US government’s recent actions to limit freedoms in the name of fighting the “global war on terror”. The Onion AV Club’s Noel Murray didn’t read that much into it, but he did think it was more than just swashbuckling and gunnery:
No, I’d rather argue that Pirates is not junk. It may be a lousy movie — I’ll accept that argument, even if I more or less disagree — but it’s not just, as Nathan Lee writes in his Village Voice review, “a delivery system for two kinds of special effect: those created by computers, and those generated by Johnny Depp.” I believe that a genuine effort to delight — and not just subdue — has been made here. The movie contains the same kind of preoccupation with clockwork gags and bad guys accidentally doing good that’s been part of The Verbinski Method since Mouse Hunt. Like it or not, Pirates does have a brain, and a soul.
I almost want to go see it again, to watch it not as a blockbuster but as a film that might have a little something to say.
An interesting somewhat-inside look at Google’s search technology. I found this interesting: “When there is a blackout in New York, the first articles appear in 15 minutes; we get queries in two seconds.” No matter how hard CNN or Digg or Twitter works to harness their audience to break news, hooking up Google search queries to Google News in a useful manner would likely scoop them all every time.
Another one of those lists you love to hate: the 25 best movies you’ve never seen. Putting the horrible Boondock Saints on the list is a major boner, especially just ahead of Peter Jackson’s pre-Rings gem Heavenly Creatures.
Gunter Grass: How I Spent the War, a first-person account of an SS recruit during WWII.
Update: Here’s some biographical information about Grass, who is a Nobel Prize-winning novelist. (thx, red)
Embiggen, the fauxcabulary word created for an episode of The Simpsons, has found its way into string theory. Here’s the usage from a recently published paper on Gauge/gravity duality and meta-stable dynamical supersymmetry breaking:
Here’s the original quote from The Simpsons episode, Lisa the Iconoclast:
A noble spirit embiggens the smallest man.
The uses are probably not related, but you never know.
Apple has released three new iPhone ads in advance of the device’s release date on June 29. The third ad is the money spot. The only remaining question: how likely am I to get one within a week or two of release without standing in line for hours on end? (via df, who notes that “No other cell phone is advertised by showing off the user interface.”)
King Kobayashi’s long reign is over. Joey Chestnut broke the record for eating the most hot dogs in 12 minutes yesterday: 59 1/2. He bested the previous record by a whopping 5 3/4 dogs.
Update: To put this in perspective, Chestnut bested the old record by roughly 10%. This would be like running the 100m dash in 8.8 seconds, long jumping 32.5 feet, or completing a marathon in 1:51.
Serena Williams could kick your ass.
Nation to Ken Griffey Jr.: We Wish It Were You Hitting 765 Home Runs. “They talked about his 1989 Upper Deck rookie card, and how, instead of going down in value with every hamstring injury, it should have skyrocketed in price with his 800th, maybe 900th home run.”
I’m sure this functionality is coming, but when using the new Street View feature in combination with driving directions on Google Maps, I want a play button that drives me from the starting point to my destination, showing me the street-level view along the way.
The scale of the IceCube neutrino detector is amazing…a cubic kilometer telescope 1.5 miles deep into the ice caps of Antarctica. (via pruned, which has more thoughts on the architecture of particle physics)
Newer posts
Older posts
Socials & More