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Dopplr is doing 2008 personal annual reports for all their users that shows “data, visualisations and factoids” about their 2008 travel. They’ve also done one for Barack Obama on his behalf that you can download for free. Obama took a whopping 234 trips in 2008 and traveled 92% of the distance to the moon!
Slate has a slideshow of the most gerrymandered Congressional districts in the US. Gerrymandering is the practice of redistributing electoral boundaries in order to achieve a political advantage, often without regard to geography.
Another excellent offering from The Big Picture: photos of the Earth from NASA’s The Earth Observatory. Even if you don’t care for cliches, some of these will literally drop your jaw.
Fun new blog on Superuseless Superpowers. So far, they’ve got 13th Bullet Bulletproof (aka Eventual Kevlar Skin), Achieving 99% Opacity (aka The Slightly Invisible Man), and Ultra Short-Range Teleportation:
This unamazing power lets you teleport up to one inch away. When done in rapid succession, it gives that old-timey stop action feel. It can also really push your “popping & locking” routine to the next level.
Update: David O’Doherty possesses Very Mild Superpowers. (thx, tom)
Every few weeks, I visit The Selby, an online collection of “photographs, paintings and videos by Todd Selby of interesting people in creative spaces”, and spend way too much time clicking around, even on stuff that I’ve already seen. There are many magazines and sites — Dwell, Domino, Apartment Therapy, etc. — that run photographs of people and the spaces they live in, but those on The Selby feel more intimate and true to life; you get the feeling that Selby knows most of the people he features. Two of my favorite photos are Dustin Yellin and his huge printing machine:
and this lovely photo of Celestine Cooney and Harry Malt.
Update: Timely New York magazine interview with Todd Selby about The Selby.
Tim O’Reilly’s advice: work on stuff that matters.
The most successful companies treat success as a byproduct of achieving their real goal, which is always something bigger and more important than they are.
The best part about Tim’s advice is that it works in boom times *and* in a recession. I have some notes jotted down for this whole post that I’m probably not going to write about how to take advantage of the recession — yes, advantage…the gist: buy low! — and one of the main points is: recessions are temporary so take the long view and keep trying to do what is most important to you, i.e. stuff that matters.
Photo Cliches is a blog dedicated to collecting, uh, cliched photos. Current categories include people groping statues, people pretending to have fake penises, and my personal favorite: people doing the thumbs-up Lynndie England pose. You may also be interested in the Charlie’s Angels pose Flickr pool. (thx, phil)
Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times. (I love Cunningham’s On the Street dispatches.) The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he got interested in fashion and photography.
As a kid, I photographed people at ski resorts — you know, when you got on the snow train and went up to New Hampshire. And I did parties. I worked as a stock boy at Bonwit Teller in Boston, where my family lived, and there was a very interesting woman, an executive, at Bonwit’s. She was sensitive and aware, and she said, “I see you outside at lunchtime watching people.” And I said, “Oh, yeah, that’s my hobby.” She said, “If you think what they’re wearing is wrong, why don’t you redo them in your mind’s eye.” That was really the first professional direction I received.
The second article is a collection of recollections of Cunningham from some of the people he has photographed.
He taught me how to tell a story with pictures and that it didn’t always involve the best image. I’d say to him, “But isn’t this a better photo?” And he’d say, “Yes, child, but this photo tells the story better.” For him, it wasn’t about the aesthetics of photography. It was about storytelling.
Both articles mention that Cunningham got his first street photography into the Times when he shot a photo of the famously reclusive Greta Garbo walking on Fifth Avenue. I couldn’t find Cunningham’s Garbo photo anywhere online so I tracked down the Times article and found only this poor scan:
Here’s another shot Cunningham made that same day which didn’t end up in the paper (Garbo’s got her hand over her face). Interestingly, street photos of Garbo were not particularly rare. Here are a selection from the 1980s, including several that feature Garbo in similar clothing. Many of them were taken by creepy paparazzo Ted Leyson, who stalked Garbo for more than 10 years in NYC. Leyson took what is believed to be the last photo of Garbo before she died in 1990.
The Ravens are looking good in the playoffs but Mark Lamster imagines a football team made up of characters from The Wire. The most inspired choices:
Offensive Coordinator: Lester Freamon
FB: Thomas Hauk
MLB: Wee-Bey Brice
MLB: Cheese Wagstaff
Kicker: Ziggy Sobotka
Fan club president: Roland Pryzbylewski
The Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis compares the current recession against some past recessions and, so far at least, it doesn’t look too bad. However…
This page does not provide forecasts, and the information should not be interpreted as such.
(via mr)
Serious Eats contributor Michele Humes buys some groceries at Ikea and prepares some unexpected dishes from them, including canapés made from Swedish flatbread, crab paste, and lumpfish caviar. Don’t know why, but it never occurred to me to make spaghetti and meatballs using Ikea meatballs. (thx, david)
Leonard Bernstein conducts Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5 while comments from YouTube commenters are read. (via the rest is noise)
Sperm travels up a dark tunnel and then…saying more would ruin the ending. Just watch:
I seriously LOL’d at the reveal. Slightly NSFW, I guess. (via house next door)
Update: The video was down earlier for some reason but now it’s back up.
I didn’t watch a lot of TV last year but Todd VanDerWerff’s review of 2008’s television season makes me feel like I did.
I mean, not ALL television was bleak — Mad Men ignored the industry-wide memo and gave us one of the best seasons of television ever, while Lost and Battlestar Galactica each hit new creative highs — but the fact that The Wire and The Shield both wrapped up, with BSG and Lost soon to follow, made things SEEM that much bleaker.
I especially liked his definition of “socks folding TV”:
A good socks-folding show is one that you can sort of pay attention to and enjoy. It’s generally well-crafted, but not especially ambitious.
My all-time fave socks folding show is Star Trek: TNG. Even if you fold only when Troi is chattering away pointlessly, you can get a whole basket of clothes done before the second commercial.
Pretty Loaded is an online museum of Flash preloaders. The site itself uses a Flash preloader and, oops, the universe just exploded. I could watch this all day.
Even in Manhattan, abandoned buildings can still be found. Jake Dobkin took some photos of an abandoned school in Harlem.
This building looked like it had been empty for twenty years. Trees were growing out of the floors and poking out of dozens of holes in the roof. All the windows were gone, and the floors that weren’t covered with snow were thick with dust and the skeletons of dead pigeons. There wasn’t any evidence of human habitation — no footprints, homeless encampments, or graffiti.
He also found an abandoned ballroom, also in Harlem.
Update: Whoops, looks like Bluejake got swamped. I removed the links so the server can recover…here are the photos on Flickr instead.
My inbox is divided about the valuation of Facebook calculated using Burger King Whopper Sacrifice promotion (unfriend 10 people to get a Whopper). The majority say that even if you prevented people from refriending those they unfriended for a Whopper, a value of 12 cents for each friend link is too high and that most links are worth much less than that. That is, Facebook is awash in junk friendships of little value.
A smaller contingent is arguing that Burger King would have to pay much more to break some friendships and that Facebook’s valuation is therefore higher than the straight calculation indicates. For instance, getting Johnny Shoegazer to unfriend that girl he likes might take a considerable sum of money. I agree that Facebook is worth more than $1.8 billion in Whoppers but not because some individual links are more valuable than others…it’s about groups and networks of links. You might be able to get someone to part with 10 “junk” friends for $2.40 but could you pay them $22 more to essentially shut down their Facebook account for good? I don’t think so. It’s going to cost much more than that…and for some intense users of the site, the “buyout” amount might be surprisingly high. (I’d probably accept $24 to close my Facebook account. But I pay nothing to use Twitter and ~$25 a year for Flickr and it might take several hundred or even thousands of dollars to entice me to permanently close either of those accounts…I get so much value from them.)
The reason for this seems like it might have something to do with Metcalfe’s Law:
Metcalfe’s law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users of the system (n^2). […] Metcalfe’s law characterizes many of the network effects of communication technologies and networks such as the Internet, social networking, and the World Wide Web. It is related to the fact that the number of unique connections in a network of a number of nodes (n) can be expressed mathematically as the triangular number n(n - 1)/2, which is proportional to n^2 asymptotically.
Or for our economic purposes, the network effect:
In economics and business, a network effect (also called network externality) is the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product to other users. The classic example is the telephone. The more people own telephones, the more valuable the telephone is to each owner. This creates a positive externality because a user may purchase their phone without intending to create value for other users, but does so in any case.
As Facebook accumulates users and friendship links, the service becomes more and more valuable for each user. In Whoppernomics terms, Facebook may well be worth the $15 billion that the Microsoft deal suggested, but there are obviously problems for Facebook in thinking about their value in this way. How do they extract that value from their users? Getting a user to accept a $500 buyout for their Facebook account is different than Facebook asking that user to pay $500 to keep using their account even though the monetary value of the account is the same in either case. What Facebook is betting on is that each user will put up with hundreds of dollars worth of distractions (in the form of advertising and promotions) from their primary goal on the site (i.e. connecting with friends). Also, as Friendster and MySpace and every other social networking site has learned, membership in these services is not exclusive and users may eventually find more value in some other network with (temporarily) less distraction.
Again, assuming that we’re not taking this too seriously.
Nicholas Felton is back with his 2008 personal Annual Report. Always worth a look.
“Don’t forget…” is a street art project that consists of Photoshop palettes pasted over heavily airbrushed advertising in a metro station in Berlin. (thx, phil)
A neat poster of 60 Noses by Shawn Feeney.
A collection of sixty female and male noses, arranged chronologically from people ages 16 - 90. The original pencil drawings (based on arrest photos) are faithfully reproduced on beautifully textured, 100% cotton Hahnemühle paper.
Feeney drew the noses while working as a forensic artist.
Photos from the 2008 International Aquatic Plant Layout Contest…AKA fancily decorated aquariums. (thx, dustin)
The opening title sequence for Tarsem Singh’s The Fall.
It is hard to define…I wanted chaos without energy.
Takes a bit to get going but is lovely throughout. (via capn design)
I mentioned the Porsche/VW financial incident briefly in October, but this is an excellent layman’s explanation of what happened.
Porsche’s move took three years of careful maneuvering. It was darkly brilliant, a wealth transfer ingeniously conceived like few we’ve ever seen. Betting the right way, Porsche roiled the financial markets and took the hedge funds for a fortune.
(via capn design)
Update: Not so fast there, Porsche. Bloomberg says that the company may not have the money necessary to exercise those options and realize $24.3 billion in profits.
Update (10/2014): In a stunning reversal, VW ended up buying Porsche instead of the other way around. Here’s the whole story.
The New Yorker has a too-short excerpt of an interview with Barack and Michelle Obama done in 1996 as part of a “photography project on couples in America”.
There is a strong possibility that Barack will pursue a political career, although it’s unclear. There is a little tension with that. I’m very wary of politics. I think he’s too much of a good guy for the kind of brutality, the skepticism.
Update: Le Monde ran a more extensive excerpt of this same interview in French…ABC News had it translated into English. (thx, marshall & stacy)
For whatever reason, Bono writing a series of op-ed columns for the NY Times seemed like a bad idea. But I really enjoyed reading his first effort about the new year and Frank Sinatra. The advice is probably a little trite but you can’t say that Bono doesn’t have a way with words…the piece is more poetry or lyric than prose.
I think about this now, in this new year. The Big Bang of pop music telling me it’s all about the moment, a fresh canvas and never overworking the paint. I wonder what he would have thought of the time it’s taken me and my bandmates to finish albums, he with his famous impatience for directors, producers — anyone, really — fussing about. I’m sure he’s right. Fully inhabiting the moment during that tiny dot of time after you’ve pressed “record” is what makes it eternal. If, like Frank, you sing it like you’ll never sing it again. If, like Frank, you sing it like you never have before.
(thx, mau)
Funny surname/subject collision from the Times over the weekend: Cocaine and White Teens by Charles M. Blow.
Update: See also nominative determinism and aptronym.
An aptronym is a name aptly suited to its owner.
I knew I’d posted something about this previously. (thx, mark)
Songsmith is a piece of software by Microsoft Research that automatically creates a musical accompaniment to a singer’s voice. (The intro video is priceless.) A MetaFilter member took David Lee Roth’s vocal track from Runnin’ With The Devil and put it through Songsmith…the results are pretty great. (thx, shay)
Jauntsetter does a useful weekly roundup of travels deals specifically for New Yorkers. This week’s selection includes cheap fares to Cancun and Europe.
Video of Willard Wigan’s work. Wigan makes exceptionally tiny sculptures that fit on pin-heads or within eyes of needles. He once lost a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland:
I think I inhaled her.
Some of the parts of his sculptures are no bigger than human blood cells and to steady his hands, he works in between the beats of his heart.
The stillness of it is very important — you have to control the whole nervous system, you have to work between the heartbeat — the pulse of your finger can destroy the work.
(thx, alex)
According to this extensive chart, names of heavy metal bands fit into five main categories: death, deadly things, animals, religion, and badass misspellings. (thx, janelle)
I’d like to thank this week’s kottke.org RSS sponsor, Stephen Voss. Voss is a freelance photographer based in Washington DC who has traveled around the world shooting for magazines, organizations, and — if you read between the lines on his bio page — for himself. He’s shot Obama, the destroyed churches of New Orleans, the Fleet Foxes, Alan Greenspan, and in China. I could say more, but Voss’ portfolio speaks for itself. If your company or organization has a project that would benefit from Voss’ services, get in touch.
A photo tour of the Boston-area locations mentioned in Infinite Jest. From the photographer:
Perhaps most interestingly, although “Enfield” is not a real town, it seems to substitute for Chestnut Hill. We found a school at the top of one of the larger hills in Chestnut Hill, which we believe is the location for ETA.
Perhaps someday there will be IJ walking tours of Boston that same way there are Ulysses -based tours of Dublin or Sex and the City tours of NYC.
Burger King recently introduced a Facebook app called Whopper Sacrifice that allows users to delete ten of their friends in exchange for a Whopper sandwich. Watch the app in action.
What BK has unwittingly done here is provide a way to determine the valuation of Facebook. Let’s assume that the majority of Facebook’s value comes from the connections between their users. From Facebook’s statistics page, we learn that the site has 150 million users and the average user has 100 friends. Each friendship is requires the assent of both friends so really each user can, on average, only end half of their friendships. The price of a Whopper is approximately $2.40. That means that each user’s friendships is worth around 5 Whoppers, or $12. Do the math and:
$12/user X 150M users = $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook
That’s considerably less than the $15 billion valuation assigned to Facebook when Microsoft invested in the company in October 2007 and the lower valuations being tossed about in recent months.
P.S. Other assumptions for the sake of argument: every user is eligible for the Whopper promotion (it’s actually only valid in the US), you can sell all of your friends for multiple burgers (actually limit one per customer), and the “average user has 100 friends” means that Facebook users average 100 friends apiece (no idea what the reality is…if they’re using the median instead of the mean then that number could be higher or lower). Oh, and it’s also assumed that no one should take this too seriously.
Update: I’m getting some email saying that Facebook friendships require the assent of both parties. Is that the way it works for the BK thing? If I am friends with Mary and I unfriend her through the Whopper Sacrifice app, is she then unable to unfriend me to help get her burger? If so, then the $3.6 billion valuation drops to $1.8 billion because each unfriending event takes care of 2 friend connections, not just one. Anyone? Note: we are already taking this too seriously!
Update: Ok, it looks like unfriending on Facebook takes out two friendship connections, not just one. So that drops each user’s share to $12 and the valuation to $1.8 billion. D. Final answer, Regis. (thx, everyone)
A trio of movie-related links: Criticwatch runs down the movie critic whores of the year, DVD Beaver picks the Blu-rays of the year, and the best movies that you perhaps didn’t see in 2008.
Discover has a list of the top 100 science stories of 2008 (scroll a bit for the whole list). Post-oil, LHC, ice on Mars, cheap genomes, quantum spookiness, etc.
I’m really enjoying The Hood Internet’s third mixtape. They take pop, indie rock, & rap songs and mash them up. For instance:
Jay-Z (feat. Lil Wayne) vs Xiu Xiu
Flo Rida (feat. T-Pain) vs Hot Chip
T-Pain (feat. Chris Brown) vs TV On The Radio
Lil Kim (feat. Missy Elliott) vs MGMT
Their version of R. Kelly’s I’m a Flirt mashed with Broken Social Scene from their first mixtape was one of my favorite songs of 2007, far superior to the original IMO.
Mixtape vol. 3 track listing and downloads here.
Sign o’ the times: Chronically Indigent Resent Influx of Nouveau Poor.
“Panhandling and recycling are hard enough without extra competition,” Mr. Baxter continued. “Damn it — if too many people give blood, my income is gonna drop even more.”
(via clusterflock)
The TiltShiftMaker site lets you make your own fake tilt-shift photo (you know, the ones that make everything look miniature). Just upload a photo or choose one from the web, adjust a few parameters, and you’re all set…no Photoshop needed. Here’s one I did of Ollie in Turbine Hall at the Tate Modern (larger). (via chris glass)
I can’t decide if this is creepy or cool: a bunch of videos of dead poets reading their poems. The effect is achieved by warping photos to make it look like their mouths are moving. Here’s Poe reading The Raven and Robert Frost doing The Road Not Taken.
Natalie Portman dreams about brussels sprouts. The first comment is: “i love you please marry me”.
With apologies to Strunk and White, The Elements of Spam.
1. Form the possessive of nouns by adding ‘s, just an apostrophe, just an s, a semicolon, a w, an ampersand, a 9, or anything.
Gothamist posted an interview with Janeane Garofalo yesterday. I was struck by Garofalo’s answer to a question about her acting career slipping away after the 90s.
Oh yeah, of course. It ended around 2000. I had a lot of work in the ’90s. And then for females especially, as you get older — I’m 44 — it’s really difficult for a 44-year-old woman to get acting work. That’s just the nature of the beast. And because it’s an elective profession, it’s hard to complain about it because nobody makes you do it. Also I did a lot of mediocre stuff towards the end of the ’90s and then sort of the novelty wore off. And then I left acting to work at Air America for two-and-a-half years.
When I decided to go back into acting, it wasn’t very easy. “I took two-and-a-half years off, but I’d like to work again. Please hire me.” It sort of doesn’t work like that. So I’m just sort of grateful anytime someone wants to hire me. And TV seems to be one of the only places where older women can seek employment. Unless you sort of get lucky. There’s a saying: “you’re always just one part away from being back at work in film” for women especially. So I’m just waiting for someone to give me the green light, “Oh, let’s hire Janeane again!” I think I’m on the “has been” list until I’m not. It’s like a game of Red Rover and somebody says “come over.” Or you can create your own work, but I’m not really a screenwriter. I don’t really feel like I have the story to tell. It would just be creating content for the sake of creating content.
An interviewer wouldn’t dare ask that question of some other actors and if they did, may have received a defensive or angry answer. Garofalo answered it honestly, which is why we like her so much.
The Book Cover Archive is a new site dedicated to the “appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design”. They just launched but the site already includes 800 covers.
The Danziger Projects gallery in New York is running an exhibition called Can & Did, a collection of art, graphics, and photography from the Obama campaign. The opening party is on Inauguration night (Jan 20) and it runs through the end of February. All details in the press release.
The You Look Nice Today ensemble talk about how to make sound effects for the silent film industry.
A five-minute rap video that summarizes all five seasons of The Wire.
Police chief, yeah, his rank is proper
‘Cause of the window, he starts a war with Frank Sobotka.
MIA’s Paper Planes is still my favorite Wire-inspired song, but this is pretty sweet. (thx, about 2000 people)
A proposed bailout for the publishing industry:
The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in creating this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and National Book Foundation committees continued to award top ratings to these novels, even as unread copies piled up all over America.
These unreadable novels are clogging up our literary system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound literary institutions. As a result, Americans’ personal libraries are threatened, and the ability of readers to borrow, and of libraries to lend, has been disrupted.
(via erasing)
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