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Entries for September 2007
What sort of people buy bespoke suits: “
What sort of people buy bespoke suits: “the extremely wealthy, the status-crazed, and those so minutely particular in their needs that no preexisting suit will do”. The author finds that during the course of writing the article, he may have turned into the minutely particular sort of bespoke suit buyer.
“The most famous [status detail on a bespoke suit] is working cuff holes. On most off-the-rack suits, that row of buttons on your cuff is simply sewn on, because this way you can move them up or down during alterations; once you’ve cut the buttonholes, you can’t make the sleeve shorter or longer without screwing up the look. Another area of obsession is the stitching. On the front buttonholes and the flower loop, it shouldn’t be too even; on the lapels, staggered ‘pick stitching’ is a big plus. When laymen claim they can smell bespoke from a mile away, most tend to mean these little signatures. But focusing on flourishes betrays the big idea. That idea is that you can ask for anything — 40 pockets, a sewn-in gun holster, a third leg — and, to a certain type of person, anything else is tyranny of the designer.”
See also: English Cut, the blog of a bespoke Saville Row tailor.
The Paleolithic Diet “is the diet that
The Paleolithic Diet “is the diet that man evolved on, the diet that is coded for in our genes”. The diet consists of avoiding grains, beans, dairy, sugar, etc.; eating meat/chicken/fish, eggs, fruit, veggies, nuts, etc.; and increasing your intake of root veggies and organ meats like liver.
The personal lives of CEOs have come
The personal lives of CEOs have come under scrutiny lately because what a CEO does in his off-hours seems to have a bearing on how well his company’s stock performs. “It found that on average, the stocks of companies run by leaders who buy or build megamansions sharply underperform the market. The researchers don’t claim to know why. They theorize that some of these executives might be focused more on enjoying their wealth and less on working hard.” (via mr)
Also, I loved that the WSJ published the nickname of “Frederick E. ‘Shad’ Rowe Jr.” Shad Rowe!
Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest radio telescope,
Arecibo Observatory, the world’s largest radio telescope, is in danger of being shut down due to budget cuts. Arecibo could run for almost two years for the cost of a single F-16 fighter jet…to say nothing of the small fraction of the cost of the War in Iraq required.
Hand Job
The Morning News has a gallery of pages from Hand Job (@ Amazon), a collection of hand drawn type, and a short interview with its author, Michael Perry. It looks like a gorgeous book; you can find more images from it on Perry’s web site, which is sure to get an unusual influx of visitors searching for non-typography-oriented happy endings..
Speaking of George Saunders, KQED has audio
Speaking of George Saunders, KQED has audio of him reading a selection from The Braindead Megaphone.
Impressionism, Realism, and blogging
I’m intrigued by Marc Hedlund’s differentiation of Impressionist bloggers from Realist bloggers. My interpretation of this difference (which might not be what Marc meant by it) is that Realist blog posts are self-contained, -explanatory, and -evident entities while a post on an Impressionist blog serves to complement the whole, much like the dots making up a Seurat painting aren’t that interesting until you stand back to see the whole thing.
The downside for Impressionist blogs is that their individual posts don’t work that well outside of their intended context. If you run across a single post from an Impressionist blog in your River of News, a remixed Yahoo Pipes RSS feed, in del.icio.us, or an item in a Google search results set, it might not make a whole lot of sense. Impressionist blog posts are less likely to get Dugg or bookmarked in del.icio.us or linked around much at all. Fewer incoming links, big or small, to individual pages means fewer pageviews, which makes it more difficult to run an Impressionist blog as a business that relies on advertising revenue. If you look at most of the big blog sites, they’re all non-Impressionist blogs. All the sites whose posts are featured on the front page of Digg are non-Impressionist…those posts/articles are designed to float self-contained around the web. The blogosphere is dominated by non-Impressionist blogs and the sort of content they produce…which is sad for me because, like Marc, I value Impressionism in a weblog.
Fun photo spread from the July 2007 issue
Fun photo spread from the July 2007 issue of Vogue Italia called Super Mods Enter Rehab. I love all of the over-the-top no-underwear shots of models exiting cars.
things magazine on living in simulation: “There’s
things magazine on living in simulation: “There’s a lack of depth on the internet, a world with an atmosphere just one pixel thick that has reached out across all forms of media and turned everything into a vast, shallow pool that stretches as far as the eye can see. All visual culture is instantly at our fingertips, with the thrill of discovery superseded by a high fructose corn syrup buzz that comes from near-constant, 30fps stimulation.”
Even though a Rubik’s Cube has about 43
Even though a Rubik’s Cube has about 43 quintillion (that’s 43000000000000000000) possible configurations, it’s been proven possible to solve a cube starting in any one of those configurations in 26 moves or less. “Most researchers believe that just 20 steps are enough to solve any Rubik’s Cube, but no one has proved it yet.”
Courtesy of Wikipedia, a timeline of the
Courtesy of Wikipedia, a timeline of the world’s most important inventions, from 2.4 million years ago to the present.
A really small car from 1924. “The license
A really small car from 1924. “The license plate is almost as large as her automobile, but Miss Mary Bay likes her car because it is easy to park.”
A brief history of programming languages from
A brief history of programming languages from the September 1995 issue of Byte magazine. Amazing how many of these languages are now extinct or otherwise not widely used…and that Perl, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. didn’t make the list.
Update: I corrected the above statement about Perl et. al. not existing and modified it to read that they didn’t make the list. Perl, Ruby, nd Java all existed in one form or another in 1995. (thx to everyone who sent this in)
Describe what you did before you saw this message
Page address: http://ambrosiasw.com/utilities/itoner/
Description: Woke up to the alarm at 6:30 am. Got my son out of his crib, handed him to my wife. OJ + medication + forgot to take my multivitamin. Checked my email, Twitter, etc. Did a couple posts. Showered but didn’t shave. Took care of my son while my wife went to the gym. He played on the floor a bit, we laughed and giggled together a lot. Good times. Then he got hungry so I fed him while watching Honey I Shrunk the Kids on cable. When my wife got home around 10am, I put him down for a nap, packed up my bag, and left for work. N train to Canal then a 5 minute walk to the office. Worked on some PHP for a couple of hours, making less progress than I would have liked. Caught a baby mouse in a drinking glass at the office. Went to get lunch with the gang. First and second choices no good, but ended up at an Italian bakery/deli on Mott. Turkey and provolone on a roll with mayo and lettuce, Pepsi, and potato chips (sour cream and onion). Gave leftover sandwich to the baby mouse, AKA “Feedy”. Sat back down at my desk. Selected “iToner” from bookmarks list and waited. Error number NSURLErrorDomain:-1005.
Currently enjoying Diplo’s Pitchfork Mix 02 (track list).
Currently enjoying Diplo’s Pitchfork Mix 02 (track list). Also worth tracking down is Diplo vs. Shadow, the Megatroid Mix.
Graph of the movie poster colors of
Graph of the movie poster colors of the top-grossing movies, from the brightly colored G-rated movies to the dark and fleshy NC-17 films.
Natalie Angier’s short appreciation of water, which,
Natalie Angier’s short appreciation of water, which, before you scoff, is a pretty amazing substance despite its ubiquity. “Pulled together by hydrogen bonds, water molecules become mature and stable, able to absorb huge amounts of energy before pulling a radical phase shift and changing from ice to liquid or liquid to gas. As a result, water has surprisingly high boiling and freezing points, and a strikingly generous gap between the two. For a substance with only three atoms, and two of them tiny little hydrogens, Dr. Richmond said, you’d expect water to vaporize into a gas at something like minus 90 degrees Fahrenheit, to freeze a mere 40 degrees below its boiling point, and to show scant inclination to linger in a liquid phase.”
Tony Wright, horticulturalist, broke the unofficial world
Tony Wright, horticulturalist, broke the unofficial world record by going without sleep for more than 11 days. His trick was, when the left side of his brain tired, to switch to the right side. And then back again after the left had recovered and so on.
These audio clips from the World Livestock
These audio clips from the World Livestock Auctioneer Championships are fun to listen to. The newest ones have the best audio quality. (thx, mlarson)
Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages
So, whoa. The commonly accepted wisdom is that Vannevar Bush’s seminal As We May Think, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945, was the first time anyone had described something like the modern desktop computer and the World Wide Web. Not so, says Alex Wright in Glut: Mastering Information Through the Ages (@ Amazon). A Belgian chap named Paul Otlet described something called the “radiated library” — or the “televised book” — in 1934:
Here, the workspace is no longer cluttered with any books. In their place, a screen and a telephone within reach. Over there, in an immense edifice, are all the books and information. From there, the page to be read, in order to know the answer to the question asked by telephone, is made to appear on the screen. The screen could be divided in half, by four, or even ten if multiple texts and documents had to be consulted simultaneously. There would be a loudspeaker if the image had to be complemented by oral data and this improvement could continue to the automating the call for onscreen data. Cinema, phonographs, radio, television: these instruments, taken as substitutes for the book, will in fact become the new book, the most powerful works for the diffusion of human thought. This will be the radiated library and the televised book.
Sweet fancy Macintosh, if that’s not what we’re all doing right here on the web all day.
Much of the section in the book on Otlet was first published by Wright in a Boxes and Arrows essay called Forgotten Father: Paul Otlet. Wright’s extensive online bibliography for Glut should keep you busy for a few hours when you’re done with that. (I wish all the books I read were accompanied by such bibliographies.) I’ll also recommend a related read and one of my favorite technology books, The Victorian Internet by Tom Standage (@ Amazon):
It points out the features common to the telegraph networks of the nineteenth century and the internet of today: hype, skepticism, hackers, on-line romances and weddings, chat-rooms, flame wars, information overload, predictions of imminent world peace, and so on. In the process, I get to make fun of the internet, by showing that even such a quintessentially modern technology actually has roots going back a long way (in this case, to a bunch of electrified monks in 1746).
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to get back to my televised book.
Tickets for Helvetica’s multi-week run at the
Tickets for Helvetica’s multi-week run at the IFC Center in NYC are on sale now.
More Business Lessons From the Coffee and Donut Guy
A few years ago, I posted an entry about a Manhattan coffee and donut vendor who let his customers make their own change.
When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc. And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
I get my occasional donut in another part of town now, but I noticed something similar with my new guy. Last Friday, the woman in front of me didn’t order anything but threw down a $20, received a coffee with two sugars a moment after she’d stepped to the window, and no change. As they chatted, I learned that the woman pays for her coffee in advance. The coffee guy asked her if she was sure she owed today. “Yep,” she replied, “It’s payday today; I get paid, you get paid.” Handy little arrangement.
Now you can buy a house modeled
Now you can buy a house modeled after one of Martha Stewart’s three houses. People love these houses so much that sales are bucking the downturn in new home sales. Says a representative for the company building the homes: “It’s our version of the iPhone. It illustrates the power of something different with a brand tied to it.”
True Films
A collection of the best 150 documentaries as determined by Kevin Kelly. Kelly’s got good taste in movies — or at least it jibes with mine — and True Films is a fine guide for those looking to introduce more documentary films into their media diet.
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok is
Over at Marginal Revolution, Alex Tabarrok is advocating a game show called So You Think You Can Be President? instead of debates to better educate voters about presidential candidates. “Presidential candidates have 12 hours to get a bitterly divorcing couple to divide their assets in a mutually agreeable manner. (Bonus points are awarded if the candidate convinces the couple to stay together.)” Awesome.
Laurel over at TV Picks noticed that
Laurel over at TV Picks noticed that the conjoined twins documentary I mentioned the other day is on the Discovery Health Channel tonight at 9pm and 12am ET. DVR, set. (thx, laurel)
BTW, TV Picks looks like the rare useful entertainment site that’s not just absolutely plastered with ads and attitude. It’s a daily one-pager about what’s new, good, and notable on TV that day.
Oscar the Cat
Oscar the cat lives at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, Rhode Island. According to an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, Oscar possesses a peculiar talent…he knows when the residents there are going to die and curls up with them for comfort before they pass.
Making his way back up the hallway, Oscar arrives at Room 313. The door is open, and he proceeds inside. Mrs. K. is resting peacefully in her bed, her breathing steady but shallow. She is surrounded by photographs of her grandchildren and one from her wedding day. Despite these keepsakes, she is alone. Oscar jumps onto her bed and again sniffs the air. He pauses to consider the situation, and then turns around twice before curling up beside Mrs. K.
One hour passes. Oscar waits. A nurse walks into the room to check on her patient. She pauses to note Oscar’s presence. Concerned, she hurriedly leaves the room and returns to her desk. She grabs Mrs. K.’s chart off the medical-records rack and begins to make phone calls.
Within a half hour the family starts to arrive. Chairs are brought into the room, where the relatives begin their vigil. The priest is called to deliver last rites. And still, Oscar has not budged, instead purring and gently nuzzling Mrs. K. A young grandson asks his mother, “What is the cat doing here?” The mother, fighting back tears, tells him, “He is here to help Grandma get to heaven.” Thirty minutes later, Mrs. K. takes her last earthly breath. With this, Oscar sits up, looks around, then departs the room so quietly that the grieving family barely notices.
Where did that number come from?
Meg and I were getting ready to go out to breakfast at some obscenely early hour on Sunday morning. I retrieved a pair of jeans from the floor.
J: Hey, there’s some change in these pants.
M: Breakfast is on you, then.
J: Yeah, if we’re going to eat, like, 68 cents-worth of breakfast.
Then I reached into the pocket to find out how much was actually in there…from some purchase I don’t recall making. 68 cents exactly. In olden times, that would have been taken as a harbinger of something, that virgins would need to be sacrificed on mountaintops to appease the gods. Meg shrugs and says, “you should post that to your blog.”
Also, Grey Dog on University has the best hash browns I’ve ever eaten.
Title of the upcoming Indiana Jones film:
Title of the upcoming Indiana Jones film: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue.
An examination of the logos of terrorist organizations.
An examination of the logos of terrorist organizations.
A Prairie Home Companion
It’s been a few weeks since I saw the movie, but I still can’t get the Rhubarb Pie song out of my head:
But one little thing can revive a guy,
And that is home-made rhubarb pie.
Serve it up, nice and hot.
Maybe things aren’t as futile as you thought.Mama’s little baby loves rhubarb, rhubarb,
Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie.
Mama’s little baby loves rhubarb, rhubarb,
Beebopareebop Rhubarb Pie.
Related “fascinating” facts:
Garrison Keillor got the idea for doing A Prairie Home Companion (the radio show) after writing an article for the New Yorker about the Grand Old Opry in 1974.
While driving in unfamiliar territory in an episode of The Wire, Bodie Broadus ends up listening to A Prairie Home Companion on the radio when he can’t find any hip-hop.
The Braindead Megaphone
The title essay of George Saunders’ The Braindead Megaphone invites the reader to imagine a person at a party with a megaphone. Megaphone Guy might not have much to say, but he’s got a megaphone and so he is heard, his utterances setting the agenda for the entire party, the party’s collective intelligence (its crowd-like wisdom if you want to put it that way) determined by the intelligence of Megaphone Guy. Before long, it ruins the party because the other guests will stop being guests and become passive “reactors-to-the-Guy”.
Now imagine, metaphorically speaking, that the Megaphone Guy is the media and we, the audience of the media, are the party guests. Not all that hard to imagine because the following segment can be seen every hour on every TV news channel in the nation:
Last night on the local news I watched a young reporter standing in front of our mall, obviously freezing his ass off. The essence of his report was: Malls Tend to Get Busier at Christmas! Then he reported the local implications of his investigation: (1) This Also True At Our Mall! (2) When Our Mall More Busy, More Cars Present (3) The More Cars, the Longer it Takes Shoppers to Park! and (shockingly): (4) Yet People Still Are Shopping, Due to, it is Christmas!
It sounded like information, basically. He signed off crisply, nobody back at NewsCenter8 or wherever laughed at him. And across our fair city, people sat there and took it, and I believe that, generally, they weren’t laughing at him either. They, like us in our house, were used to it, and consented to the idea that Informing had just occurred. Although what we had been told, we already knew, although it had been told in banal language, revved up with that strange TV news emphasis (“cold WEATHer leads SOME motorISTS to drive less, CARrie!”), we took it and, I would say, it did something to us: made us dumber and more accepting of slop.
Furthermore, I suspect, it subtly degraded our ability to make bold, meaningful sentences, or laugh at stupid, ill-considered ones. The next time we feel tempted to say something like, “Wow, at Christmas the malls sure do get busier due to more people shop at Christmas because at Christmas so many people go out to buy things at malls due to Christmas being a holiday on which gifts are given by some to others” — we might actually say it, this sentiment having been elevated by our having seen it all dressed-up on television, in its fancy faux-informational clothing.
Sure, the details of the story change but the Braindead Megaphone drones on. The rest of Saunders’ essay explores this idea further, keenly skewering the media *and* the people who listen to it. A fun and thought-provoking read.
Slightly related: Without exception, everytime I look at the book’s cover photo — an amalgam of three newsreaders (one black, one white, and one Asian) formed into one person — I see Barack Obama.
Profile of designer Josh Davis on Apple’s
Profile of designer Josh Davis on Apple’s web site. “The most complex print I’ve done had 120,000 layers in Illustrator. The printer called and said, ‘How did you do this? How long did it take?’ And I said, ‘Oh, five minutes.’”
Oh, so you like the addictive games,
Oh, so you like the addictive games, eh? Gameaholic? Imbibe too much gameahol on occasion? Behold, Bloxorz.
Update: Here’s a walkthrough for the game, including passwords for each level so you can skip around. And here’s a direct link to the Flash file for full-screen playing. (thx, peter)
Cadaeic Cadenza is a 3834-word story by
Cadaeic Cadenza is a 3834-word story by Mike Keith where each word in sequence has the same number of letters as the corresponding digit in pi. (thx, mark, who has more info on constrained writing) Related: The Feynman point is the sequence of six 9s which begins 762 digits into pi. “[Feynman] once stated during a lecture he would like to memorize the digits of pi until that point, so he could recite them and quip ‘nine nine nine nine nine nine and so on.’”
Is obesity contagious?
A new study shows that if a person’s friends become obese, that person is at a great risk of obesity themselves. For close mutual friends, the risk factor for transmitted obesity increased by 171%.
Update: Dr. Jonathan Robison calls the above study “junk science”. “How does one conclude a direct causal relationship from an observational study? Bald men are more likely than men with a full head of hair to have a heart attack. Can we conclude from this that they should buy a toupee or begin using Rogaine lotion to lower their risk?” (thx, robby)
Update: Clive Thompson’s NY Times Magazine article (Sept 2009) covers this study in more detail. In addition to obesity, the study indicates that smoking, happiness, and drinking may be contagious.
Legendary party Misshapes was held for the
Legendary party Misshapes was held for the last time on Saturday night in NYC, its overness punctuated by an article in the NY Times on the party’s conclusion. My own personal overness was punctuated by not knowing about the end of Misshapes until I read it in the Times. A Mr. Cobrasnake has photos of the final night.
Subtil, a display typeface by Hanno Bennert
Subtil, a display typeface by Hanno Bennert and Alexander Gialouris that was a winning entry in the Type Directors Club 2007 competition. Love those subtly rounded ends.
Novak Djokovic lost the US Open final
Novak Djokovic lost the US Open final to Roger Federer last night but the 20-yo Serb clearly left his — how do I put this? — impression on the tournament. Here’s some video of Djokovic impersonating Maria Sharapova and Rafael Nadal at the US Open. He does several other players as well, including a fine Andy Roddick.
Update: In case you’re unfamiliar with the mannerisms of the players mentioned above, here’s video of Roddick, Sharapova, and Nadal. (thx, flip)
John Maeda describes the process of designing
John Maeda describes the process of designing the cover for the most recent issue of Key, the NY Times occasional real estate magazine.
A breaking addendum to Wednesday’s update on
A breaking addendum to Wednesday’s update on The Wire: the season four DVD of The Wire is now available for pre-order at Amazon. Release date: December 4.
For some, the hospital is a place
For some, the hospital is a place to go to get sick, not to get healthy. At the Veterans Affairs hospital in Pittsburgh, they’re cutting down on diseases passing from patient to patient by testing arriving patients for drug-resistant bacteria, more careful use of equipment, and careful isolation of the most sick. A surgical unit in the hospital has cut their infection rate by 78% since 2001.
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