The 2007 robot of the year is a mechanical arm made by Fanuc Ltd. and used for packaging. The arm is capable of grabbing 120 items per minute from a conveyor belt.
Swiveling frenetically, they analyzed digital images of items scattered randomly on a swiftly moving conveyor belt and picked up the items using suction cups that blow air in and out at their tips. They then worked together to place line up the items in rows inside boxes.
Here's a video of three of these babies in action.
What if you traded Apple stock around Steve Jobs' January Macworld keynotes...would you make any money? Short answer is yes but buying Apple stock 10 years ago and holding would have been the better move. Also interesting is the market's reaction to OS X and Jobs' installment as CEO...Apple lost 7.3% of its market cap the day after the announcement.
Sad news. Guitar Hero 3 and I have broken up. Sure, we might hook up occasionally when I'm lonely at night, but our relationship is effectively over. I can play every song1 without effort on Easy mode but can barely make it through any on Medium after dozens of tries. So so lame. I've hit the wall and my pinky is to blame...the damn thing just won't work properly and I'm unwilling to try playing with just three fingers (a la Clapton) because that seems like a dead end once Mr. Orange Button comes into play.
But the real reason is that because I don't have a natural talent for the game, the only way to get better is through deliberate practice.
Deliberate practice entails more than simply repeating a task — playing a C-minor scale 100 times, for instance, or hitting tennis serves until your shoulder pops out of its socket. Rather, it involves setting specific goals, obtaining immediate feedback and concentrating as much on technique as on outcome.
Deliberate practice...sounds like fun! Yeah, no. No doubt I could master the game with enough focused effort, but when games stop being fun and become deliberate, that's where I get off. Back to the surprising depth of Desktop TD.
[1] When relationships end, that's when the lies start. The one song I still can't play all the way through is Slayer's Raining Blood. That damn song is just random notes as far I can can tell. ↩
For his last Gawker post, Choire Sicha pens a recent history of New York City, 2000-2007.
Over the last month, I have read the Metro section from each issue of the New York Times — starting in mid-2000 and ending with today's paper. Here's what I learned.
The mathematics of well-balanced stacks of blocks. When I was a kid, I would make stacks like these for hours on end...constructing buildings was dull in comparison.
The year in buzzwords from the NY Times. Written by Grant Barrett of the excellent Double-Tongued Dictionary.
Absolute Zero looks like an interesting show on cold temperatures, airing on PBS in mid-January. For the Long Zoom fans out there, don't miss the Sense of Scale widget.
Late last week, Marc Andreessen pulled a quote from a New Yorker article written in 1951 about television:
The most encouraging word we have so far had about television came from a grade-school principal we encountered the other afternoon.
"They say it's going to bring back vaudeville," he said, "but I think it's going to bring back the book."
Before television, he told us, his pupils never read; that is, they knew how to read and could do it in school, but their reading ended there. Their entertainment was predominantly pictorial and auditory — movies, comic books, radio.
Now, the principal said, news summaries are typed out and displayed on the television screen to the accompaniment of soothing music, the opening pages of dramatized novels are shown, words are written on blackboards in quiz and panel programs, commercials are spelled out in letters made up of dancing cigarettes, and even the packages of cleansers and breakfast foods and the announcers exhibit for identification bear printed messages.
It's only a question of time, our principal felt, before the new literacy of the television audience reaches the point where whole books can be held up to the screen and all their pages slowly turned.
This sounds far fetched and Andreessen belittles the prediction, but is it really that outlandish? Literacy rates in the US have risen since the advent of television (I am not suggesting a correlation) and Steven Johnson suggests in Everything Bad Is Good For You that TV is making us smarter.
If you stop thinking of TV in the specific sense as a box on which ABC, CBS, and NBC are shown and instead imagine it in the general sense as a service that pipes content into the home to be shown on a screen, the prediction hits pretty close to the mark. The experience of using the web is not so different than reading pages of words that are "held up to the screen" while we scroll slowly through them. If we can imagine that what Paul Otlet and Vannevar Bush described as the "televised book" and the "memex" corresponds to today's web, why not give our high school principal here the same benefit of the doubt?
After more than 15 years and $14.8 billion, Boston's Big Dig project officially ends today.
A study by the Turnpike Authority found the Big Dig cut the average trip through Boston from 19.5 minutes to 2.8 minutes.
Given the number of people moving through the area each day and how much time is saved, $14.8 billion doesn't seem like such a huge amount.
The thing to do for on-strike Writers Guild members is to grow a strike beard. Several of the beards are pictured in a related slideshow.
A list of the 50 most loathsome people in America for 2007. #9 is "you" because:
You believe in freedom of speech, until someone says something that offends you. You suddenly give a damn about border integrity, because the automated voice system at your pharmacy asked you to press 9 for Spanish. You cling to every scrap of bullshit you can find to support your ludicrous belief system, and reject all empirical evidence to the contrary. You know the difference between patriotism and nationalism — it's nationalism when foreigners do it. You hate anyone who seems smarter than you. You care more about zygotes than actual people. You love to blame people for their misfortunes, even if it means screwing yourself over.
Burton is offering a $5000 prize for the best snowboarding video taken at one of the three remaining US ski areas (Alta, Taos, Deer Valley, Mad River Glen) that don't allow snowboarding. The intro video is the perfect explanation for why these four areas don't allow snowboards.
Long New Yorker profile of Benazir Bhutto from 1993, the year she was elected to a second term as Prime Minister of Pakistan.
Arresting images of Benazir Bhutto's last moments, including some shots of the suicide bomb going off nearby shortly after she was shot.
The stories of three exemplary information graphics. If you're up on your Tufte, they'll be known to you already but always worth a look.
Logo trends for 2007. (via airbag)
Really interesting interview with artist/designer Tobias Wong by Rob Walker.
That question hits an important point in my work (and pet peeve), because many people are always interested in how I get work out there, financially. And it's quite simple. If there's something I really believe in, I just find a way to make it happen. No daily Starbucks (US$4) or cigs ($8) or dining out ($20), and before you know it you've got the money to do something.
Poker, a game of "constant pricing and repricing of risk", is fast becoming a younger and more lucrative game. To wit: a 19-yo Norwegian woman won the most recent World Series of Poker and $2 million (to add to her $800,000 in internet poker winnings). Also of interest: John Wayne once won Lassie at a poker game. (??!) The article mentioned 3-time poker champ Stu "The Kid" Ungar (most poker players seem to have nicknames); his Wikipedia page and NY Times profile are interesting reads.
Ungar won or finished high in so many gin tournaments that several casinos asked him to not play in them because many players said they would not enter if they knew Ungar was playing. Ungar later said in his biography that he loved seeing his opponent slowly break down over the course of a match, realizing he could not win and eventually get a look of desperation on his face. "It was fucking beautiful," he noted.
The top 10 archeological discoveries of 2007 as determined by Archaeology Magazine. Among the discoveries are a cuneiform tablet naming someone who is also named in the Bible, more evidence that Polynesians visited the Americas before the Europeans "discovered" it, early agriculture in Peru, and early urbanization in Syria that followed a different model than other early cities.
Tell Brak seems to have grown from the outside in. In the south, cities began as a central settlement — under a single authority — that grew outward. But Ur's field survey shows that Tell Brak started as a central community ringed by smaller satellite settlements that expanded inward. "There isn't a very tight control over these surrounding villages, at least at this beginning period," says Ur. "So the assumption that we're making is that people were coming in under their own volition."
Benazir Bhutto has been assassinated in Pakistan.
Ms. Bhutto, 54, returned to Pakistan this year at a time of great volatility in a state that has been under military rule for eight years. She was the leader of the country's largest opposition political party, founded by her father, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, one of Pakistan's most flamboyant and democratically inclined prime ministers.
I love the way she leans every so slightly to the side as the train passes.
With the new season right around the corner, Heaven and Here, an excellent group blog about The Wire, is starting back up again. The latest two posts are about season two, the most underrated season IMO.
The NFL has caved and is going to simulcast the Patriots/Giants game on NBC and CBS instead of just showing it on NFL Network, a channel available to fewer than 40% of US households.
Sean Ohlencamp works at Chiat Day and recorded his computer desktop once a day for the past year. (via le monoscope)
The Indian letter writing industry (for those who are unable to write themselves) is all but extinct because of near-ubiquitous mobile phones and text messaging.
Mr. Sawant mourns the demise of the letter culture. After dropping a letter in the box, he used to imagine its winding journey. Someone far away would open what he had written on someone else's behalf; the reader would savor its kind words or its little secrets, then maybe file it away in a box, and perhaps revisit it weeks later in a burst of nostalgia.
But even Sawant admits that ringing his daughter on his mobile is much easier than writing a letter.
Photos in which there are unexpected elements or people in the background doing crazy things. (via adam)
Rankin's Eyescapes photos are great. One of my favorite things to do with Ollie is stare into his eyes and see all the wonderful whirls of color. I also like his One Dress project. (Rankin's project, not Ollie's.)
Is waterboarding torture? One man tried it out on himself to satisfy his own curiosity.
I have never been more panicked in my whole life. Once your lungs are empty and collapsed and they start to draw fluid it is simply all over. You know you are dead and it's too late. Involuntary and total panic. There is absolutely nothing you can do about it. It would be like telling you not to blink while I stuck a hot needle in your eye. At the time my lungs emptied and I began to draw water, I would have sold my children to escape. There was no choice, or chance, and willpower was not involved. I never felt anything like it, and this was self-inflicted with a watering can, where I was in total control and never in any danger. And I understood.
(via waxy)
Very few science and ideas books made it on to the 2007 "best of" lists so Edge has provided a list of their picks for the year. I didn't read any of the books on this list, although I'm currently 1/3 of the way through Jonah Lehrer's Proust Was a Neuroscientist.
Video compilation of the brightest frame from 1500 different movie explosions. Turn up the sound for this one.
Everyone's pissed at the airlines, even their employees.
Why can we not get better quality snack items for our coach customers? One customer recently compared the generic pretzel nubs we serve to the fish food you buy in a .25 gumball machine at any zoo or park.
I like the openness policy of the US Airways CEO...the "employees are going to talk about it anyway" line is exactly right.
Roger Ebert's list of the best films of 2007. He gives Juno the top slot.
I kind of feel like Rudy [Giuliani] thinks 9/11 is his birthday. He gets that excited look on his face and buys himself a cake and lights two candles and watches them burn down. And then he looks around and says, "What do I get?" And his advisors are like "$15 million in speaking fees!" and he's like, "That's even better than last 9/11!"
(via emdashes)
Long long list of the most overrated and underrated books, movies, tv shows, etc. for 2007. (via mr)
Video of Peter Sellers reciting The Beatles A Hard Day's Night in the style of Laurence Olivier doing Shakespeare's Richard III. Got all that? (via cyn-c)
Advice from a photo editor at a national magazine on how to talk about photography, particularly to those who know little about it.
I have a sweet technique I use for finding the great images from a shoot that really tends to piss-off the editors: I edit the film without reading the story. This helps me tune into which images have the most impact on me and which ones transcend subject matter and become forces in their own right.
His description of defending good photography applies to design as well.
Why have I not looked at the Wikipedia page for Ocean's Eleven before now? Best part is the description of the crazy names for the cons referenced in the movie.
Off the top of my head, I'd say you're looking at a Boesky, a Jim Brown, a Miss Daisy, two Jethros and a Leon Spinks, not to mention the biggest Ella Fitzgerald ever.
Sadly, the page for Ocean's Twelve has no corresponding list, save for a description of the Lookie-Loo with a Bundle of Joy.
Map of the world where the size of the countries correspond to how much oil they have. On this map, the Middle East is just The Middle.
A list of controversial fashion advertisements. Can't believe the Calvin Klein stuff (the 1995 campaign especially) didn't make it on there.
Non-profit writing organization 826NYC is holding a Scrabble for Cheaters competition on January 19th with the proceeds going to benefit their programs and students. The more money a team raises, the more they can cheat. Here are some of the cheats:
Flip a letter over and make it blank: $100
Add Q, Z, or X to any word, anywhere: $200
Passport: play a word in any language: $250
Reject another team's word: $450
Invent a word (must have a definition): $500
Entry information and rules available on the web site. Oh, and you'll be playing against John Hodgman.
John Maeda is leaving his position at The MIT Media Lab for the Presidency of RISD. Good luck, John.
Update: Here's a video of Maeda introducing himself as president.
Rogers Cadenhead has beaten me to the punch in calculating the winner of the Dave Winer/Martin Nisenholtz Long Bet pitting the NY Times vs. blogs to see who ranks higher in end of the year search results for the 5 most important news stories of 2007. The winner? Wikipedia.
The Times has really improved their position in Google since 2005...opening up their archives helped, I bet.
Rex has released his list of the Best Blogs of 2007 That You're (Maybe) Not Reading over at Fimoculous. Like last year, he's focused his best-of-blogs list on lesser-known sites instead of the biggies, a strategy I applaud. In fact, he doesn't even need to qualify the list as the best unknown blogs; many of the well-known blogs that usually make best-of lists, much of the Technorati Top 100, and most multi-author plastered-with-ads blogs are unremarkable...too much volume, too calculated, too focused on filling post and pageview quotas, and limited passion. If you look at the sites on Rex's list, you'll see a lot of blogs done by people who are passionate about something, not writing for a paycheck.
Rex's #1 choice is an inspired one and absolutely right on...Twitter and Tumblr revitalized personal publishing in the eyes of many who had either tired of blogging or had never seen the point in it in the first place. My only complaint about the list is that there are too many one-hit wonders on it, sites that are worth a chuckle or squee! when you first see them but don't hold up over time unless you really really like, say, snowclones. Oh, and Vulture...I really wanted to like it but really didn't get it. (Oh oh, and and Jezebel? Being against a thing is not the same as standing for something.)
Barnes & Noble's Media section is filling out nicely with audio and video interviews, readings, and conversations with a wide range of interesting authors.
Nurture is really kicking ass these days....first the IQ thing and now this.
The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found. Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.
That suggests, a la Moneyball, that buying horses with so-so lineages and training them really well could make for a better return on investment.
Foreign Policy has posted its annual list of The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2007 (unless, presumably, you read Foreign Policy).
An annotated list of movies due out in 2008. I didn't know that Darren Aronofsky was working on a new movie...about a boxer and starring Brad Pitt and Mark Wahlberg, no less.
A list of the top 10 astronomy images of 2007, including entwined galaxies and a dying star.
Eyewitness account of pimply teen absolutely killing the most difficult song on Guitar Hero 3 in the midst of holiday shopping at Best Buy.
There is complete silence. Even my son is staring slackjawed, like he does in church during communion, not understanding the content of the ritual but understanding the tone and sacredness of the space. At just over 6 minutes, the song becomes even more ludicrous. While actually playing it will ever remain for me an uncrossable gap, I am enough a student of the form to recognize the crux. He is Lance Armstrong approaching the bottom of Alpe D'Huez: Will he attack? Kyle has yet to use the Star Power crutch he has carried throughout his meditation. He continues to ignore it.
Here's a video of someone else playing the same song. In. San. Ity.
Director File has put out its list of Ten Best Music Videos of 2007. Of particular note on the list is a sweet and heartwarming video for The Bees "Listening Man" directed by Dominic Leung.
Leung began his career as a part of hammer & tongs, the creative team behind many influential music videos as well as the movies Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, on which he acted as 2nd unit director and title sequence director, and the upcoming Son of Rambow, which he edited. (via antville)
Diane Arbus' archives were recently gifted to the Met in NYC.
Unlike the belongings of artists who fade gradually from view, which are sometimes scattered, pilfered or lost, Arbus's effects were in some ways frozen in time when she committed suicide at 48. Quickly her life began to acquire a cult status paralleling that of her photography.
(via sippey)
I enjoyed reading the AV Club's The Year in Film 2007. Their hands-down best of the year was No Country For Old Men. (BTW, the term "hands-down" comes from horse racing.)
Some advice from Michael J. Fox.
No matter how much fame you have, it's not something that belongs to you. If I'm famous, that doesn't belong to me — that belongs to you. If you can't remember who I am, I'm no longer famous.
And a bunch of other stuff that's surprisingly candid and good.
Good news: Alinea's Grant Achatz announces that his cancer is in remission. Achatz found out earlier this year that he had cancer of the mouth and instead of the traditional surgery route, he worked with his doctors on a treatment that would allow him to continue to cook, his profession and passion.
The US Air Force Research Lab has come up with an idea for refueling tiny spy planes on long missions: recharging its electric motor by stealing energy while hanging from power lines.
It could even temporarily change its shape to look more like innocuous piece of trash hanging from the cable.
Why can't I stop reading these long stories about Theresa Duncan's and Jeremy Blake's suicides? Here's the latest one from Vanity Fair.
When Theresa Duncan, 40, took her own life on July 10, followed a week later by her boyfriend, Jeremy Blake, 35, their friends were stunned and the press was fascinated: what had destroyed this glamorous couple, stars of New York's multi-media art world, still madly in love after 12 years?
Looks like there will indeed be a Hobbit film and Peter Jackson is in (although not as director, at least not yet). The deal includes another film to be made that takes place between the end of The Hobbit but before LOTR. (via crazymonk)
Update: The NY Times says that Jackson will not direct as he is already booked for the period in question.
Anyone in a coining mood? If one doesn't already exist, there needs to be a term for writing a blog comment or Twitter update, thinking better of it, and then discarding it by closing the browser tab without clicking "Post". As in: "Jason, I would have responded to this post in the comments, but I ________ it instead." Any ideas?
Pixar has released a new trailer for Wall-E (HD version available). I want this movie and a robot now please.
The 25 best rock posters of all time, according to Billboard. A hit-or-miss list at best. (via quipsologies)
According to a list of effective tax rates from the Congressional Budget Office, the top 20% of households by income contribute almost 69% of the total federal tax revenue.
The "lost intro" to Star Wars, a scene featuring Luke pining for adventure on Tatooine. I'm glad it got lost. (via cyn-c)
Signs of progress and setbacks in addressing climate change at the conclusion of Nobel Laureate Al Gore's annus mirabilis. From Al Gore's Nobel lecture:
However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
Good Magazine is keeping track of Big Ideas!, one a day until all the letters of the alphabet are done. Did you know that coin flipping isn't exactly fair?
How America Lost the War on Drugs, a history of the United States government's efforts to stop its citizens from using illegal substances, primarily crack, heroin, and methamphetamines. Quite long but worth the read.
All told, the United States has spent an estimated $500 billion to fight drugs - with very little to show for it. Cocaine is now as cheap as it was when Escobar died and more heavily used. Methamphetamine, barely a presence in 1993, is now used by 1.5 million Americans and may be more addictive than crack. We have nearly 500,000 people behind bars for drug crimes - a twelvefold increase since 1980 - with no discernible effect on the drug traffic.
It's not that hard to see how things got off the rails here. Dealing with the supply of drugs is ineffective (it's too lucrative for people to stop selling and too easy to find countries which seek to profit from it) but provides the illusion of action while attacking the problem from the demand side, which appears to be more effective, comes with messy and complex social problems. What a waste. The bits about meth & the lobbying efforts by the pharmaceutical industry and the medical marijuana crackdowns are particularly maddening.
Somewhat related is a 9-part series from VBS about scopolamine, one of the world's scariest drugs (via fimoculous). Just blowing the powder into someone's face is sufficient for them to enter a wakeful zombie state and become the perfect rape or crime victim.
The last thing Andrea Fernandez recalls before being drugged is holding her newborn baby on a Bogota city bus. Police found her three days later, muttering to herself and wandering topless along the median strip of a busy highway. Her face was badly beaten and her son was gone.
The description of the effect of scopolamine on people reminds me of what the Ampulex compressa wasp does to cockroaches:
From the outside, the effect is surreal. The wasp does not paralyze the cockroach. In fact, the roach is able to lift up its front legs again and walk. But now it cannot move of its own accord. The wasp takes hold of one of the roach's antennae and leads it — in the words of Israeli scientists who study Ampulex — like a dog on a leash.
I wonder if the chemical reactions are similar in both cases.
Big feature in the NY Times Magazine about online craftsters, specifically Etsy. Thought that this bit about the downside of the site was especially interesting:
Others grouse about another side effect, price pressure: The competition is so intense on the site that new crafters can't break out, and some established ones feel they cannot raise their prices. That's a particularly thorny problem if part of your sales pitch is that you've made a thing yourself; a careful artisan can't respond to lower prices with greater volume.
Artisanship doesn't scale, apprentices take time to train, and people buy products based on price. How do artisans compete?
Radio interview with Felicia Pearson, who plays Snoop on The Wire. It's apparent from the interview that she doesn't so much act in The Wire as play herself. "I have patience." (thx, adam)
The last episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras has a message concerning celebrity and television:
"The Victorian freak show never went away," Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the "Extras" final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. "Now it's called 'Big Brother' or 'American Idol,' where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires."
To the networks, he says: "You can't wash your hands of this. You can't keep going, 'Oh, it's exploitation, but it's what the public wants.' No."
To the audience watching at home, he says: "Shame on you. And shame on me. I'm the worst of all. Cause I'm one of these people that goes, 'I'm an entertainer, it's in my blood.' Yeah, it's in my blood because a real job's too hard."
Wow, The Simpsons did a parody of Noah Kalina's Everyday video. Noah, you just graduated summa cum laude from Pop Culture University.
Update: But apparently the background music was used without permission.
A few months back a producer from the Simpsons contacted Carly about using her song 'everyday' for an upcoming episode in which they were going to parody my video. She was negotiating a rate for the song, until they never got back to her. No fee was agreed on, no contracts signed.
Maybe they decided since it was parody they didn't need permission? I don't find that likely since what little I know about Hollywood/TV is that they're really concerned about clearing rights. (thx, slava)
Update: The song rights mixup was an accidental oversight and is currently being corrected.
God's Eye View presents four important Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, including The Crucifixion, Noah's Ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.
In light of the Mitchell Report, Yanksfan vs Soxfan has proposed a record book annotation system so that sports fans can tell which records were set under the influence of which substances. The asterisk is for straight-up steroids and some of the other marks are as follows:
! = Amphetamines
$ = Gambling
|| = Cocaine
~ = Alcohol
. = Dead ball era
∞ = Wore glasses
† = Crazy religious freak
X = General douchebag
A fundamental rule of the internet:
Trying stuff is cheaper than deciding whether to try it. (Compare the cost of paying and feeding someone to do a few weeks of [Perl or PHP] hacking to the full cost of the meetings that went into a big company decision.) Don't overplan something. Just do it half-assed to start with, then throw more people at it to fix it if it works.
The current state of pigeon racing in NYC.
New York's pigeon clubs, loosely organized by geography and custom, are a cross between an urban sportsman's lodge and a time capsule of immigrant, working-class New York. Even as recently as a generation back, fleets of racing pigeons swirled above New York like pulsing gray clouds, but the numbers of racers and birds have thinned, with not enough new fliers to replace the old.
A list of anthropomorphized online video players.
YouTube - Paris Hilton. Fast, a little out of control, used by every fifteen year old in town, looks alright but you get kinda tired of seeing it everywhere.
A wiki documenting a book in progress: How Experts Fail: The Patterns and Situations in Which Experts Are Less Intelligent Than Non-Experts.
On the origin of the Earth's moon and how our planet would be different if we didn't have a moon.
The Moon has been a stabilizing factor for the axis of rotation of the Earth. If you look at Mars, for instance, that planet has wobbled quite dramatically on its axis over time due to the gravitational influence of all the other planets in the solar system. Because of this obliquity change, the ice that is now at the poles on Mars would sometimes drift to the equator. But the Earth's moon has helped stabilize our planet so that its axis of rotation stays in the same direction. For this reason, we had much less climatic change than if the Earth had been alone. And this has changed the way life evolved on Earth, allowing for the emergence of more complex multi-cellular organisms compared to a planet where drastic climatic change would allow only small, robust organisms to survive.
This photo of lower Manhattan taken from the Statue of Liberty in 1901 is plenty interesting, especially what I believe is the beginnings of the Manhattan Bridge under construction behind the Brooklyn Bridge.
Update: The bridge under construction is most likely the Williamsburg Bridge, not the Manhattan Bridge. (thx, jake)
The opening title sequence of The Kingdom is a nice 3.5 minute overview of the relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia.
The Goodie Bag podcast has an entertaining little video on Trajan, the font used ubiquitously in movie credits and posters:
Like indoor plumbing and toga parties, Trajan hails from Rome. Matter of fact, you can find almost 2,000-year-old inscriptions on Trajan's column, where they have totally off-the-leash keggers on Saturdays... Russell Crowe has co-starred with Trajan three times now.
This reminds me of Red is Not Funny, J. Tyler Helms' illustration of the wide use of bold red letters in distinctly unfunny comedies. (via cameron hunt)
Photo of Steve Jobs at his home in 1982.
This was a very typical time. I was single. All you needed was a cup of tea, a light, and your stereo, you know, and that's what I had.
This was right in the thick of Lisa/Macintosh development; I bet Jobs didn't spend a whole lot of time at home. Note: there's some bad Exif data that prevents the display of this photo in Safari (ironic, eh?)...try Firefox instead. (thx, mark)
Update: Exif data fixed, Safari away.
I still miss Leslie. Sadly it seems like all of her web sites are offline now. :( Check out Internet Archive if you'd like to read and remember.
A list of the leaked names from the Mitchell Report of MLB players that allegedly used steroids. The official Mitchell Report is here...many of the names on the preliminary list are missing. Any surprises here? Disappointments?
Update: Deadspin has the official list.
The pace of human evolution has accelerated greatly over the last 40,000 years, partially due to our population growth.
The brisk rate of human selection occurred for two reasons, Dr. Moyzis' team says. One was that the population started to grow, first in Africa and then in the rest of the world after the first modern humans left Africa. The larger size of the population meant that there were more mutations for natural selection to work on. The second reason for the accelerated evolution was that the expanding human populations in Africa and Eurasia were encountering climates and diseases to which they had to adapt genetically. The extra mutations in their growing populations allowed them to do so.
Dr. Moyzis said it was widely assumed that once people developed culture, they protected themselves from the environment and from the forces of natural selection. But people also had to adapt to the environments that their culture created, and the new analysis shows that evolution continued even faster than before.
Looks like this study answers the "Is Evolution Over?" question.
Jessica Dimmock's The Ninth Floor is a series of photos taken of heroin addicts living in a ninth floor Manhattan apartment. The NY Times and New York magazine have slideshows with a little more context. Also available in book form. NSFW. (via clusterflock)
Liquidated Logos by French street artist Zevs.
Re-painting the logos in their own colours, the artist pours paint over them, liquidating one logo after another.
I am a sucker for dripping paint.
According to their web site and TV Guide, last night's episode of Mythbusters was supposed to address the airplane on a treadmill question. They didn't and nerds everywhere are upset. According to an email from the executive producer of the show, the segment got rescheduled:
First up, for those concerned that this story has been cancelled, don't worry, planes on a conveyer belt has been filmed, is spectacular, and will be part of what us Mythbusters refer to as 'episode 97'. Currently that is due to air on January 30th.
Secondly, for those very aggrieved fans feeling "duped" into watching tonight's show, I can only apologise. I'm not sure why the listings / internet advertised that tonight's show contained POCB. I will endeavour to find out an answer but for those conspiracy theorists amongst you, I can assure you that it will have just been an honest mistake.
Not sure that's going to quench the nerdfury, but I'm glad the piece will air in January.
Tyler Cowen has taken a look at a lot of this year's "best of" lists and has some meta-recommendations for you.
The Moby Quotient determines the degree to which artists besmirch their reputations when they lend their music to hawk products or companies.
The equation factors in the artist, how "underground" they are, the social character of the company, and how wealthy the artist is. (via snarkmarket)
Regret the Error's annual list of media errors and corrections is one of my favorites...the 2007 installment doesn't disappoint. The corrections in the UK newspapers are awesome:
An article about Lord Lambton ("Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire", News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton's villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson's ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
Duelity is a split-screen movie with one half of the screen showing the six-day creation of the earth & man in scientific terms and the other half showing the Big Bang/evolution origin of the universe as it might have been written in the Bible. (Click on "watch" then "duelity" to get the full effect.) Nice use of infographics and illustration. (thx, slava)
Some clever drawings by Russell Weekes. The fig 1 fig 2 one make me chuckle every time I see it.
Oobject has collected several photos of planetarium projectors, which are wonderfully elaborate machines.
Their purpose is a bizarre reversal of a large optical telescope, taking an internal view of the the universe and projecting it on a dome, rather than creating a view from peering outside of one, but the aesthetic is somewhat similar. Another curious similarity is how much they look like some early satellites.
Some of these look like huge drills.
Led Zeppelin reunited for one concert last night in London with over 1 million people registering for the 20,000 available tickets. There are video clips available on Google Video and YouTube and two bootlegged songs have surfaced online so far.
Anhedonia is a 90-min film that uses the audio from Annie Hall and stock video footage from Getty; here's an 11-min excerpt. (thx, katerina)
A lengthy list of self-references and in-jokes in Pixar's movies, including the infamous Pizza Planet delivery truck. Mit pictures. (thx, x amount)
Henry Abbott at TrueHoop picked up on a policy that Colin Powell had when he was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Here's Mike McConnell repeating what Powell told him:
Look, I have got a rule. As an intelligence officer, your responsibility is to tell me what you know. Tell me what you don't know. Then you're allowed to tell me what you think. But you always keep those three separated.
Abbott rightly comments that that's good advice for journalists and bloggers.
Ten incredible sound recordings, including those of a castrato (a man who was forcibly castrated so that he would retain his boyish soprano), the first recorded human voice from 1878, and the last 30 minutes of audio from the Jonestown Massacre.
Eric Gill was a respected British artist and typographer — Gill Sans is his most famous typeface — but according to his diaries, he also regularly engaged in sexual relations with his sisters, his daughters, and the family dog.
For some of Gill's fans, even looking at his work became impossible. Most problematically, he was a Catholic convert who created some of the most popular devotional art of his era, such as the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, where worshippers pray at each panel depicting the suffering of Jesus.
These details of Gill's private life were revealed in a 1989 book by Fiona MacCarthy...here's a NY Times review of the book soon after it was published.
A depressing story about the media's coverage of Al Gore during the 2000 election.
Eight years ago, in the bastions of the "liberal media" that were supposed to love Gore — The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, CNN — he was variously described as "repellent," "delusional," a vote-rigger, a man who "lies like a rug," "Pinocchio." Eric Pooley, who covered him for Time magazine, says, "He brought out the creative-writing student in so many reporters... Everybody kind of let loose on the guy."
I want to believe that news outlets are in the business of news, not entertainment, but it's just not true in most cases. Even more depressing is that blogs, especially political blogs, are even worse in this regard.
One of the ongoing debates about IQ tests (besides whether they measure anything meaningful) is to what extent race affects scores. As Malcolm Gladwell explains in a review of a new book by James Flynn, for whom the Flynn Effect is named, IQ scores seem from the available data to be influenced more by nurture than nature.
Our great-grandparents may have been perfectly intelligent. But they would have done poorly on I.Q. tests because they did not participate in the twentieth century's great cognitive revolution, in which we learned to sort experience according to a new set of abstract categories. In Flynn's phrase, we have now had to put on "scientific spectacles," which enable us to make sense of the WISC questions about similarities. To say that Dutch I.Q. scores rose substantially between 1952 and 1982 was another way of saying that the Netherlands in 1982 was, in at least certain respects, much more cognitively demanding than the Netherlands in 1952. An I.Q., in other words, measures not so much how smart we are as how modern we are.
That last line is a pretty insightful way to think about IQ tests. On his blog, Gladwell references a recent article by Richard Nesbitt, who closes it with:
Most important, we know that interventions at every age from infancy to college can reduce racial gaps in both I.Q. and academic achievement, sometimes by substantial amounts in surprisingly little time. This mutability is further evidence that the I.Q. difference has environmental, not genetic, causes. And it should encourage us, as a society, to see that all children receive ample opportunity to develop their minds.
Click on world cities on a map to test your traveler IQ. Africa = nearly random clicking for me although I would have done better had I not misread Swaziland as Switzerland.
Wear Palettes takes the outfits showcased in street fashion photos snapped by The Sartorialist and makes color palettes. 1500 different palettes so far.
Yasumasa Morimura takes photos of himself recreating iconic photos like Lee Harvey Oswald's murder and Che Guevara. A bit of Cindy Sherman + these photos + maybe even a little Be Kind Rewind. At Luhring Augustine in NYC until Dec 22. (thx, tony)
Infinite Jest once again proved finite, although it?s taken me since August to get through it. This book was such a revelation the first time through that I was afraid of a reread letdown but I enjoyed it even more this time around?and got much more out of the experience too.
Right as I was finishing the book, I read a transcription of an interview with Wallace in which interviewer Michael Silverblatt asked him about the fractal-like structure of the novel:
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I don?t know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I?m going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that.
MS: It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were ? and I don?t know this kind of science, but it just ? I said to myself this must be fractals.
DFW: It?s ? I?ve heard you were an acute reader. That?s one of the things, structurally, that?s going on. It?s actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in ?94, and it went through some I think ?mercy cuts?, so it?s probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it?s interesting, that?s one of the structural ways that it?s supposed to kind of come together.
MS: ?Michael? is Michael Pietsche, the editor at Little, Brown. What is a Sierpinski Gasket?
DFW: It would be almost im- ? I would almost have to show you. It?s kind of a design that a man named Sierpinski I believe developed ? it was quite a bit before the introduction of fractals and before any of the kind of technologies that fractals are a really useful metaphor for. But it looks basically like a pyramid on acid ?
To answer Silverblatt?s question, a Sierpinski Gasket is constructed by taking a triangle, removing a triangle-shaped piece out of the middle, then doing the same for the remaining pieces, and so on and so forth, like so:
The result is an object of infinite boundary and zero area ? almost literally everything and nothing at the same time. A Sierpinski Gasket is also self-similar?any smaller triangular portion is an exact replica of the whole gasket. You can see why Wallace would have wanted to structure his novel in this fashion.
IAC's Manhattan headquarters has an absolutely massive video wall in the lobby. ITP professor Daniel Shiffman took his class over to play around with it, projecting hundreds of frames of Run Lola Run on the wall at the same time in sequence. You can see the scene cuts racing along the wall, demonstrating the franticness of the movie.
Red Cloud's farewell address to his people on July 4, 1903.
I was born a Lakota and I shall die a Lakota. Before the white man came to our country, the Lakotas were a free people. They made their own laws and governed themselves as it seemed good to them. The priests and ministers tell us that we lived wickedly when we lived before the white man came among us. Whose fault was this? We lived right as we were taught it was right. Shall we be punished for this? I am not sure that what these people tell me is true.
Red Cloud was among the top Lakota leaders in the late 1800s, commanding his people against rival tribes & the US government. He also successfully made the transition from leading his people in war to guiding and lobbying for them in peace. He died six years after making the above speech.
While not as extensive as Rex's collection of 2007 "best of" lists, I'm compiling my own collection of such lists using the bestof2007 tag.
The NY Times Magazine is out with its annual Year in Ideas issue. 2007 was the year of green — green energy, green manufacturing, and even a green Nobel Prize for Al Gore — and environmentalism featured heavily on the Times' list. But I found some of the other items on the list more interesting.
Ambiguity Promotes Liking. Sometimes the more you learn about a person or a situation, the more likely you are to be disappointed:
Why? For starters, initial information is open to interpretation. "And people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles," Norton says. If a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers "the outdoors" refers to nude beaches. And "once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that," Norton says.
I'm an optimistic pessimist by nature; I believe everything in my life will eventually average out for the better but I assume the worst of individual situations for the reasons proposed in the article above. That way, when I assume something isn't going to work out, I'm rarely disappointed.
The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid involves a technique called "mirror bees".
The best method, called "mirror bees," entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to "swarm" around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock.
What an elegant and easily implemented solution. But Armageddon and Deep Impact would have been a whole lot less entertaining using Dr. Vasile's approach.
The Cat-Lady Conundrum. More than 60 million Americans are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that most people get from their cats. And it's not exactly harmless:
Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, is looking into it. He has spent years studying Toxo's impact on human behavior. (He found, for example, that people infected with Toxo have slower reflexes and are 2.5 times as likely to get into car accidents.)
This may explain why I can't seem to get past "Easy" on Guitar Hero.
The Honeycomb Vase is actually made by bees. One unintended consequence of having a vase made out of beeswax is that flowers last longer in it:
Libertiny is convinced that flowers last longer in them, because beeswax contains propolis, an antibacterial agent that protects against biological decay. "We found out by accident," he explains. "We had a bouquet, which was too big for the beeswax vase, so we put half of the flowers in a glass vase. We noticed the difference after a week or so.
Prison Poker. This is a flat out brilliantly simple idea:
[Officer Tommy Ray] made his own deck of cards, each bearing information about a different local criminal case that had gone cold. He distributed the decks in the Polk County jail. His hunch was that prisoners would gossip about the cases during card games, and somehow clues or breaks would emerge and make their way to the authorities. The plan worked. Two months in, as a result of a tip from a card-playing informant, two men were charged with a 2004 murder in a case that had gone cold.
The Gomboc is the world's first Self-Righting Object.
It leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a "standing" position as if by magic. It doesn't have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an inflatable punching-bag doll that uses ballast to bob upright after you whack it. No, the Gomboc is something new: the world's first self-righting object.
More information is available on the Gomboc web site. You can order a Gomboc for €80 + S&H.
Update: The Gomboc is available for sale but it doesn't come cheap. The €80 version is basically a paperweight with a Gomboc shape carved out of it. It's €1000+ for a real Gomboc, which is ridiculous. (thx, nick)
The NY Times list of the 53 places to go in 2008.
Update: Greg notes something about the list that I noticed as well:
I was intrigued as the next guy by the list of 53 Places we're supposed to go in 2008, then I realized that almost without exception, the "reason" to go is the opening at long last of that destination's first "luxury" accommodations. Which seems about the dumbest reason I can think of for choosing where to travel.
Alex Goldberg, 14-yo urban hustler, has parleyed his chutzpah into free clothes, celebrity friends, and courtside Knicks seats.
Next up: Jamie Foxx. The actor was near the bar, giving a woman a massage, and saw the crowd now gathered around Alex. Foxx offered to buy him a drink. What do you want, little boy? "A pina colada," Alex said. The crowd laughed, and he got one, virgin.
Alex's adventure ended hours later, at Nobu, where the pool crowd had migrated to feast on junket sushi. He had been chatting up Venus and Serena Williams at a nearby table, and mugging for cameras with a cigar hanging from his lips while eating a bowl of ice cream. Then the faces at his table went blank. Alex looked up and saw what they saw. His mother.
Marshall McLuhan's advice on how to choose books:
Turn to page 69 of any book and read it. If you like that page, buy the book.
The Page 69 Test blog is evaluating McLuhan's suggestion book by book.
The NFL, in their infinitesimal wisdom and utilizing their stupid scheduling/blackout policy, has ensured that the best game of the weekend (Steelers vs. Patriots) will not be shown on TV in the New York City area. We get the hapless Jets instead...a team that not even Jets fans care about at this point in their 3-9 season. Our cable provider doesn't carry any NFL stations and we don't really want to trek out to a sports bar with the kiddo. Are there any other options? An illicit online broadcast? Anything?
Update: We ended up watching the game online — poor quality, dropped frames, and all. Better than braving the rain and sports bar. (thx to everyone who wrote in, especially kunal)
This Chrismukkah, why not save some space by celebrating with a treenorah? (Is it called Chrismukkah anymore, now that The OC is off the air? I wonder what Gossip Girl would call it if there were any Jews on Gossip Girl.)
Satisfy your Latke-flavored as well as ham-flavored beverage cravings with 2007 Jones Soday Holiday Pack. (via avclub)
Feast your ears on all your favorite Christmas songs composed or performed by Jews. (There are actually quite a few of them.)
Happy Chrismukkah!
On-set photos of David Lynch and cast members from the final episode of Twin Peaks. (via waxy)
Behind-the-scenes of a Gucci perfume ad directed by Lynch, referencing his own most recent feature, Inland Empire. Finished commercial here. (via spoutblog)
Upon watching Inland Empire, I was so immediately immersed, my first thought was that David Lynch should only ever shoot video. Apparently, he feels the same.
Two more movies on my horizon, both about outsiders in the music business:
Most avid readers will speak to an emotional attachment to books through associations of the senses - the roughness of the page, the smell of ink and glue - when describing a love of reading. Filmmakers and connoisseurs of film will cite an obsession with the physical properties of the celluloid through which movies are projected.
But for a generation of filmmakers who cut their filmmaker teeth by shooting with the family camcorder and editing with two VCRs, there is a logical fixation with the object of the plastic and magnetic 1/2" VHS videocassette and the visual artifacts of its recorded image.
Two movies will be released in the next months which hold the VHS aesthetic dear. One is Michel Gondry's Be Kind Rewind in which two video store clerks decide to deal with a store full of accidentally erased tapes by remaking the classic movies in their own, VHS homebrew fashion.
The other paean to VHS is Son of Rambow, Garth Jennings' film which was the darling of Sundance this year. The title is that of the homebrewed movie that two little boys make after discovering and being mindblown by a bootleg copy of Rambo: First Blood on VHS.
No trailer yet for Son of Rambow, but a review from The New York Times.
This begs the question: with Super-8 and VHS all but a distant memory, with MiniDV on the way to extinction, what formats will the future filmmakers obsess over and what artifacts will they attempt to reproduce for nostalgia as they grow up and the formats of their youth are phased out?
For the first time since the 1998 creation of the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology, the top honors have gone to girls. One of the two projects to take the $100,000 prize was the creation of a molecule to help block drug-resistant tuberculosis bacteria from reproducing. The other studied the bone growth in zebra fish.
Interesting tidbits: Three-quarters of the finalists have at least one parent who is a scientist. Girls outnumbered boys in the final round for the first time. Most of the finalists were from public schools. The most popular project was from three home-schooled girls who have conceived of a Burgercam, a system for monitoring the elimination of E. coli bacteria in burgers. (via nytimes)
Now that the trippy stills have whetted your appetite, feast your eyes on the trailer for Speed Racer, in freaking HD no less. The race courses remind me of those in Mario Kart: Double Dash, particularly Rainbow Road, Dry Dry Desert, and especially Wario Colosseum. (thx, askedrelic)
Tucked in among The Kinks, The Velvet Underground and Belle & Sebastian, the track behind the animated opening title sequence for the new movie Juno is All I Want is You by the children's folk musician Barry Louis Polisar. It's as inspired a choice for this enjoyable little movie as PT Anderson's inclusion on the Punch Drunk Love soundtrack of He Needs Me (iTunes link), Olive Oyl's love song from Robert Altman's 1980 adaptation of Popeye.
Polisar was a favorite of mine as a kid. In particular, the 1978 album Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls was my undisputed favorite record. Featuring the classics Don't Put Your Finger Up Your Nose and Never Cook Your Sister in a Frying Pan, the album has never gone out of print. Give the tracks a listen on iTunes and if you have kids, this will give them lots of laughs and teach them to rebell against their parents.
The New York Times has a review of Juno here. Amazon link to Naughty Songs for Boys and Girls here.
Update: My favorite funnyblogger Todd Levin chimes in on the Juno soundtrack at tremble.com.
I'm a philosophic man, seduced into carpentry.
-Harry Partch
The Japan Society in New York is currently staging "Delusion of the Fury," the best-known work of Harry Partch. Partch was a pioneer of microtonal music who began modifying conventional instruments, then eventually manufacturing his own instruments in order to write music that conventional instruments couldn't play. In this video from 1968, he is seen playing an instrument of his creation, the harmonic canon.
Update: Ben Tesch, who launched the collaborative weather site cumul.us in October, also developed a site for American Mavericks in honor of Harry Partch and his music. The site allows you to play virtual recreations of a large selection of Partch's instruments. It's very cool.
Activision is working with Nintendo on re-mastering the Guitar Hero III discs for the Wii, which have been mistakenly encoded to reproduce music in mono rather than in stereo. Once the re-mastering has been done, early next year, the company will swap out current Guitar Hero III discs for free.
I honestly hadn't noticed the mono issue, but I'm still waiting for my replacement 'Pet Sounds' to ship.
Woody Allen is always on.
A similar trick of media with The Wire.
A history of the laugh track at Slate.
(via and higher quality version at itisnotforyou)
A yet-to-be-released Facebook magazine/book hybrid "will be bought by Facebook experts and novices alike, as it covers everything from a step by step guide to getting started through to smart security tips." Presumably, the bookazine will include tips for responding to zombie pokes of your friend's friends' favorite nonprofit topless $1 gift wall petition.
The effect of ditching my Facebook account last week didn't register as much as it may have for some (sorry about that, my nine Facebook friends with whom I never otherwise communicate), but it's been interesting to see the current backlash manifest itself. Deleting your Facebook is the new Facebook. (via hysterical paroxysm)
Alec Baldwin must relish the opportunity to channel his rage through Jack Donaghy, the beloved heartless media executive he plays on 30 Rock, a rage in evidence at The Huffington Post in his open-skewering of the suits who own and run his show's network.
On the problem of the studios in the ongoing WGA negotiations:
They are owned by huge, creativity-deadening corporations and operated by lawyers and marketing executives who lord over the worst creative decline I have witnessed in a long time, particularly in films. In television, companies like GE view properties like NBC the way realtors view square footage. GE does not care what is on NBC. So long as the programming is relatively inoffensive, they want to earn as much per square foot as they can.
I missed this at the time, but 30 Rock snuck in a last-minute subversive writers' strike joke for its last pre-strike show.
For some defictionalized 30 Rock goods, t-shirts for the parent company of 30 Rock's NBC, Sheinhardt Wig Company, can be had here.
(via glass shallot)
The hand-painted toilet seats featured on this artist's website make me wonder if anyone has ever answered Duchamp by using a urinal as a canvas. (via cynical-c)
Update: Kohler (the Toilet People) has its own take on toilet seat art. (thx, Sadie)
These newly released stills from the upcoming 'Speed Racer' movie do a lot to lend credence to star Susan Sarandon's claim back in August that the Wachowskis' entirely unique vision for the film required the development of new, unprecedented technology and visual effects trickery. Her summary of the film's thematic elements: "It's all about cheating and betting and how things are fixed and everything else, but it's also about family values and pancakes are love."
At the time it was just a whimsical sound bite, but these new images make me head-splittingly happy, enough to buy all the way in to the pancake love. (thx joseph)
Update: Greg over at greg.org poses the question: Why does the media refuse to grant Lana (né Larry) Wachowski her right to the feminine pronoun?
You may have heard that NBC has revived the American Gladiators franchise for primetime. I had tickets reserved for tonight's taping that definitely would have been used if if I'd been able to reconcile my preteen nostalgia with the potentially many hours of sitting in a studio and cheering on cue.
Instead, I set out to learn the Gladiator names of other American Gladiators around the world.
If you were to pit Gladiator teams from around the world against each other in one arena, make it part of the penal system and introduce a fat, homicidal tenor named Dynamo to the fray, now that's a taping I would go to.
Color Matters examines four legal battles over color trademark infringement in packaging and branding, each decided by a test of "color functionality."
The U.S. courts denied Ambrit's request for protection of blue, on the basis that royal blue when used to package frozen desserts was functional and could not be monopolized in a trademark. The ruling stated "Royal blue is a 'cool color;' it is suggestive of coldness and used by a multitude of ice cream and frozen dessert producers." Although the ruling acknowledged the issue of protecting the consumer from confusion, preventing a monopoly of a functional color was a greater issue.
(via CG Explorer)
The eponymous train of Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited is fictional, but loosely based on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, nicknamed the "Toy Train." Photos found on flickr reveal a color palette as lush as that of the movie.
Regarding the theory that kids are set up for disappointment and failure later in life when they value their innate gifts too highly over their ability to grow, this Scientific American article claims that the key to developing a child's potential is teaching the child that the greatest reward comes from effort, not intelligence or ability.
The students who held a fixed mind-set, however, were concerned about looking smart with little regard for learning. They had negative views of effort, believing that having to work hard at something was a sign of low ability. They thought that a person with talent or intelligence did not need to work hard to do well. Attributing a bad grade to their own lack of ability, those with a fixed mind-set said that they would study less in the future, try never to take that subject again and consider cheating on future tests.
New episodes of The Wire, available now! Well, sort of. The Amazon page for the season 4 DVDs contains three mini prequels to the series: one with a grade school-aged Prop Joe, a teenaged Omar, and McNulty's first day with the homicide unit.
Ross Bagdasarian refined the recording technique he later used to produce The Chipmunks albums (for which he won two engineering Grammy Awards) after having used it on his 1958 novelty song 'The Witch Doctor.' Many years and many albums later, The Chipmunks made the logical transition to punk/prog-rock for the 1980 album 'Chipmunk Punk,' produced by Ross Bagdasarian, Jr., in response to enormous demand after a radio DJ jokingly sped up a Blondie track and announced it as the next Chipmunks album. A TV commerical for the album 'Chipmunk Punk' can be seen here.
So successful was the squeaky animated pop trio that it spawned a less successful knock-off, The Nutty Squirrels, a scat-singing variation on the same gag.
My anxiously-awaited Top 3 Picks from WXPN's Top 10 Kids' CDs of 2007:
I once went through a painful, protracted breakup, conducted almost entirely over this LG phone. It wasn't a bad phone, but to this day, even a picture of it is like a punch to the gut - its Major-thirds ringtone, the wallpaper mocking my heartache with its cheery blue sky. I feel a little nauseous even describing it (my description may just be nauseating, in fairness).
In 2001, I spoke to my father on this Kyocera smartphone from 8th Avenue, having run up the block from work just in time to see the first tower fall. I don't have to go into all the emotional baggage which that implies.
Now, in my current phase, I probably don't have enough perspective to characterize what of me is reflected in my current phone, but I think that in a while, I'll have an idea.
Since the time began that we were never to be found without our mobile phones (or whichever portable devices, for that matter), I feel that somehow all of the memories of the current chapter of my life are being constantly averaged out and inextricably linked to the phone that I'm using.
Do you have any similar experiences to share? Do you think that linking my identity to my gadgets entails a sort of anthropomorphism? What do you think Proust would have to say about all this? (I've never read Proust, so I'm honestly asking.) Other insightful references to prior discussions or great thinkers would be helpful as well.
Update: Michael Leddy at orange crate art has been mining his Proust and has turned up an incredibly relevant passage to the discussion:
...a thing which we have looked at long ago, if we see it again, brings back to us, along with our original gaze, all the images which that gaze contained. This is because things -- a book in its red binding, like the rest -- at the moment we notice them, turn within us into something immaterial, akin to all the preoccupations or sensations we have at that particular time, and mingle indissolubly with them.
-Marcel Proust, Finding Time Again
At long last, Apple is listed as one of the available brands of camera in the flickr Camera Finder.
This means that you can search for shots taken not only with iPhone, but with the three models of Apple's original camera line, the QuickTake (codenamed Venus, Mars, and Neptune). Currently, there are no viewable uploaded photos taken with the QuickTake 100 or 150, but there are some from the QuickTake 200.
It's also nice to see that Merlin's tree.cx pic made it to the top of the iPhone-taken 'interesting' list. (via highindustrial)
Update: A potential reason for the iPhone's relatively paltry numbers is that when you email photos from the phone, it strips the exif data out which means those photos aren't counted. I imagine many more people email photos to Flickr from the iPhone than upload them from their computers.
This rare video of a 1977 Andy Kaufman performance on the weekly musical late night TV series The Midnight Special is probably as good a litmus test as any for an appreciation of Andy. (via Paul Scheer)
I consider myself a menorah traditionalist, but this dreidle menorah in oak and stainless steel with Swarovski crystals, designed by Lev Schniderman is something I could really see myself lighting and then dreidling.
Happy almost Hanukkah.
"There's only three things I've ever been afraid of: electricity, heights, and women. And I'm married, too."
Accompanied by an exalted score, this video of a guy who flies around on the outside of helicopters and repairs high-voltage power lines is enthralling. (via whatdoiknow)
One of the most popular contestants in the four-and-a-half-year run of 'America's Next Top Model' suffers from Asperger's syndrome, a neurological disorder considered a form of autism. There's a profile of her in today's New York Times.
The database at the modeling agency Ugly NY is worth a browse, both as a showcase of an array of unique faces and as an overview of the varied ways in which people who fall outside the normal idea of beauty represent themselves commercially.
The tumblelog Ugly has a brief but positive review of the film "Fur: An Imaginary Portrait of Diane Arbus" (2006), a highly fictionalized story of the photographer Arbus, known for her portraits of people on the fringes of society. This trailer is enough to entice me.
Ridley Scott and the company behind "The Devil Wears Prada" will bring the epic story of the Gucci dynasty to the screen. From Variety:
Just when Maurizio [Gucci] was on the verge of his greatest success — a daring fashion show debuting the clothes of newcomer Tom Ford — his penchant for accumulating enemies caught up with him; Maurizio was gunned down in front of his Milan apartment in 1995.
Plenty of potential for intrigue in the history of the House of Gucci in the 1970s and 80s, fleshed out by what is sure to be extravagant production design mixed with Scott's highly-stylized aesthetic will make this an interesting project to look out for.
Previous big screen forays into the world of high fashion include this year's vanity documentary "Lagerfeld Confidential" and the maligned Robert Altman romp "Prêt-à-Porter (1994)." (via The Tastemakers Society)
Over at Making Light, Avram Grumer has kicked off a fascinating discussion from yesterday's Brawndo post here at kottke.org.
Avram notes that the introduction of a product to the real world based on one from the fictional world is nothing new, citing Holiday Inn hotel and Bubba Gump restaurant chains as examples. While he's coined the term "tlönian" for this phenomenon, based on the Borges story "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," a commenter suggests "defictionalization," a Google search of which currently places the Making Light discussion as the #2 result, so I'm thinking it has staying power.
Other notable examples of defictionalization: the Red Swingline stapler from "Office Space" (1999) (another Mike Judge movie!), the Buzz Rickson's MA-1, made in black only after William Gibson wrote it that way in "Pattern Recognition," and of course, Spinal Tap.
A Tap-related Polymer Records t-shirt is available at Last Exit To Nowhere, where fine defictionalized goods are sold. I'd wear it just to channel Paul Schaffer's Artie Fufkin as frequently as possible.
And to the snackfood and energy bar manufacturers out there: who among you has the temerity to sell me some Soylent Green?
"People say, You must have been the class clown. And I say, No, I wasn't. But I sat next to the class clown, and I studied him."
- Dr. Allan Pearl
This is why I love my Twitter: it fulfills in me a primal urge to act out in class, in little bursts. Since having moved past school and into the working world, the class clowning urge was one I'd kept dormant. As it turns out, however, blurting out ridiculous things to a roomful of people offers every bit the dopamine jolt as an adult as it did as a kid, which turns out to be very therapeutic.
In Twitter, there is a sense of ordered play. There is no judgement. You can talk to your neighbors, stand up and give a report on what you're doing, pass notes, make fart noises if that's your schtick (the highest form of comedy), or sit in the back, observing. But if you do a real banger mouthfart, like where your arm gets all wet and people actually think they smell something, there's the joy of peer approval, in the form of a "favorite."
Oh, and an added benefit of Twitter: it helps you to develop an economy of words and conciseness of ideas. Because the longest mouthfart isn't always the funniest one.
Influenced by his idol, Elvis Presley and the 1950s rock revolution, he rose to stardom as the main figure of the 60s musical movement known as Jovem Guarda (Young guard, in opposition to the 'old guard' of Brazilian music), which was the first manifestation of the Brazilian pop rock movement.
In 1966 Brazil, this man was bigger than the Beatles.
(thx, chana)
The LA Times reports on the Transportation Authority's decision to forgo the honor system for passenger ticket-taking in hopes of earning what they estimate to be $5.5 million annually on the 5% of riders who ride without paying. The cost of installing 275 turnstiles, as proposed by the MTA, would be $30 million in installation and $1 million in annual maintenance.
The move would be a major cultural shift for L.A.'s rail system, which was designed to have a more open feel than those in eastern cities, with their gates, turnstiles and barriers.
I have to admit, I know of LA's rail system only anecdotally at this point. For I, like most residents of Los Angeles, rely on my car for the daily commute. My own is particularly brutal, which, from East LA to the coast in Santa Monica, means an hour of road time each way. When a solution exists that doesn't fall far short of riders' expectations, I'll be ready and eager to ditch my car.
If you've never seen the LA Metro before or didn't know it existed, there is some fantastic evidence to be found on flickr.
Epic Records/Legacy Recordings is releasing a 25th Anniversary Special Edition of Michael Jackson's "Thriller," with bonus tracks including remixes by Akon, will.i.am, and Kanye West.
There's a nice interview on NPR with Chris Connelly, who reviewed the album for Rolling Stone in 1982.
An alternate album cover for the original Special Edition of "Thriller" can be found on wikipedia, for a look at what could have been.
The latest installment of Super Mario has received plenty of notice for its revolutionary style of gameplay. But just as striking is the intricacy of its sound design. One convention of the game is a Pull Star, a floating anchor that Mario can grab with some sort of magical, musical force which, when activated emits a creepy, almost theremin-like wail, wavering just a bit before solemnly sliding down in pitch. This sound is one of those elemental formulas for touching an emotional soft spot. The other day I was playing a level with a series of Pull Stars in succession and my girlfriend implored me to stop, as it was making her sad, and not only because I'm a grown man playing a child's video game. Here is an example of the Wailing Pull Star (and a taste of the very Vangelis-like score scattered throughout the game).
Also: via Boing Boing Gadgets, footage from a live orchestra scoring session for the game. Mario's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto sits aside and supervises.
Also also: I noticed that the menu for selecting levels to play is a musical instrument in its own right, allowing the player to create melody with chord changes and everything. It's a subtle touch.
After his last movie, "Delirious" brought in only $200,000 at the box office, a dejected Tom DiCillo, "a legend in the indie film world" reached out to Roger Ebert for answers.
"To give you some indication of how disoriented I feel at the moment," he wrote, "I am getting no real, tangible feedback from anyone. And so I'm kind of struggling on my own to make sense of how a film I put my soul into, that Buscemi put his soul into, a film that generated such strong, positive reviews, had no life in the market."
Ebert's most telling response was to the question of whether independent filmmakers have any chance of surviving this opening-weekend-takes-all era of distribution. "I don't know. Maybe DVDs and Netflix and Blockbuster on Demand and cable TV and pay-per-view and especially high-quality streaming on the Internet will rescue you and your fellow independents."
While waiting for the release of "Delirious" to video, I recommend another of DiCillo's movies, the delicious "Box of Moonlight" (1996).
(via Metafilter)
While I'm no connoisseur of energy drinks, I do appreciate a good cult comedy movie like "Idiocracy (2006)". So it's worth a laugh that the movie's fictional ultrastupid energy beverage Brawndo: The Thirst Mutilator is being put on the market by an actual extreme beverage company. For those unfamiliar with "Idiocracy" (you poor bastards) Brawndo is what we will use to irrigate the crops in our inevitably stupid future because it's got what plants crave (electrolytes).
The very Internetty commercial they've produced, I had assumed was created by the sketch group picnicface that hit YouTube six months ago with its tonally-identical Powerthirst commercial. There's no mention of a connection on the picnicface site, so it makes me wonder if liberties were taken and what credit is due.
(via tumbl.us)
Update: The voice you hear in the Brawndo spot is confirmed to be Mark from picnicface. One and the same. Credit is given, at the end of the video. Now I can mutilate my thirst with a clear conscience.
Look out, 1897. There's a new George Carlin in town, with a comprehensive no-no list of the things Major League Baseball players can't say during gameplay (especially in the presence of a lady).
The Yanksfan vs. Soxfan blog has hilarious scans of the original parchment used for an official league document intended to eradicate swearing in baseball, drafted by the owner of the National League's Cincinnati franchise. Highlights from the list:
If the mood for obscenity strikes while on the field, players, concentrate on something else, like rewaxing the curl in your moustache or sipping on a nice, cool sasparilla ginger ale (I mixed up my old-timey beverages).
People who know me know that part of my charm is how wrong I tend to do things. Raleigh St. Clair could write books on my horrid sense of direction (I couldn't tell you how to drive to my favorite restaurant yet I'm a totally awesome driver, curiously). Yesterday I made out-of-the-box mac n' cheese but ruined it so royally I ended up dumping it and having an ice cream cone for lunch (no ice cream - just the cone).
So what the hell am doing guest-writing for this man, this hero of the web whom I so admire? I'd been toying with the idea of referring to Mr. Kottke only as 'Cousin Jason' hoping this would remove any doubt as to how I'd been put up to the task. But no, we're not related. If we were, I'd have an easier time backing out at the last minute.
You may think, "Well, here you are, these are your words on the kottke blog, so you must've done something right." I wouldn't be so sure of that. But we'll see if I can't class this place up a bit while Mr. Kottke maintains his undercarriage.
For the next week, Adam Lisagor is going to be helping me out with kottke.org as I spend the week working on the site's undercarriage, performing some long-overdue maintenance and (hopefully) finishing a couple of projects begun long ago during the Golden Age of Weblogs. As it happens, Adam worked on The Day After Tomorrow, one of my favorite movies of all time. Seriously, Adam really worked on The Day After Tomorrow and, seriously, The Day After Tomorrow is one of my favorite movies of all time. (Seriously! I've seen it like 20 times.)
You may know (or get to know) Adam from the iPhone cut and paste demo video he did, his tumblelog lonelysandwich, or his Merlin Mann-recommended Twitter stream. He lives somewhere in California, which I'm told is a requirement for working on movies. But enough of that from me...I'll let Adam introduce himself tomorrow morning before he gets going. Welcome, Adam!
This year's AIGA Holiday Party features an auction conducted by Mr. John Hodgman to benefit a design mentoring program for NYC high school kids. Also, free wrapping paper.
Warning, RSSoterica and kottke.org sausage-making to follow. Matt Wood has a post up on 43Folders about how he groups his RSS feeds in Google Reader for easier reading. I use pretty much the same system as Matt, but with a few more folders. I have several folders for reading long-form blogs:
Always
Often
Sometimes
Pending
Food and Drink
Frippery
Infoglut
Always, Often, and Sometimes are self-explanatory. The Pending folder is for blogs that I'm trying out, Frippery is stuff that is non-kottke.org-related to be read during non-work hours (ha!), and the Infoglut folder contains a bunch of blogs that have a low signal-to-noise ratio and are too high volume to keep up with unless everything else is read (any multi-author pro blogs that I read (not many) are in here). For organizing non-long-form blogs, I use these folders:
Links
Yummy
Photos
Tumble
Links contains link blogs, Yummy has a bunch of stuff from del.icio.us, Photos are photoblogs, and Tumble contains tumblelogs, FFFFOUND!, and other Randomly Curated Other People's Images White Background Sites. And then for news, I have an NY Times folder, a Sci/Tech News folder, and a Keywords folder for Google News keyword searches.
All this folder business might seem overcomplicated, but I find that grouping feeds by mode helps greatly. And by mode, I mean when I'm reading link blogs, that's a different style than reading/skimming long-form blogs in the Always folder. Posts from link blogs usually take a few seconds to read/evaluate/discard while the Always folder posts take longer. If they were all lumped together, I couldn't get through them as quickly and thoroughly as I can separately. A juggling analogy will help — Wait! Don't leave, I'm almost done! — it's easier to juggle balls or clubs or knives than it is to juggle balls, knives, and clubs at the same time...same thing with different kinds of blog posts.
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