Entries for April 2009
Amalfitano had some rather idiosyncratic ideas about jet lag. They weren’t consistent, so it might be an exaggeration to call them ideas. They were feelings. Make-believe ideas. As if he were looking out the window and forcing himself to see an extraterrestrial landscape He believed (or rather like to think he believed) that when a person was in Barcelona, the people living and present in Buenos Aires and Mexico City didn’t exist. The time difference only masked their nonexistence. And so if you suddenly traveled to cities that, according to this theory, didn’t exist or hadn’t yet had time to put themselves together, the result was the phenomenon known as jet lag, which arose not from your exhaustion but from the exhaustion of the people who would still have been asleep if you hadn’t traveled. This was something he’d probably read in some science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño, page 189.
Update: From this post and its comments, it seems likely that the “science fiction novel or story and that he’d forgotten having read” was William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition or Brian Fawcett’s Soul Walker. From Pattern Recognition:
She knows, now, absolutely, hearing the white noise that is London, that Damien’s theory of jet lag is correct: that her mortal soul is leagues behind her, being reeled in on some ghostly umbilical down the vanished wake of the plane that brought her here, hundreds of thousands of feet above the Atlantic. Souls can’t move that quickly, and are left behind, and must be awaited, upon arrival, like lost luggage.
(thx, thessaly & michael)
Disney investors are getting a little antsy with Pixar and their irritating need to make movies that are good without worrying about their commercial success or how many action figures of the main characters can be sold. Says Disney’s CEO:
We seek to make great films first. If a great film gives birth to a franchise, we are the first company to leverage such success. A check-the-boxes approach to creativity is more likely to result in blandness and failure.
Invest in Dreamworks for that check-the-boxes creativity, why don’t you. (thx, kabir)
Hello photographers! I just ran across this photo (via TrueHoop) and was wondering if anyone out there knows how it was made. My guess is a combination of an IR camera, IR spotlight, and a bit of digital darkroom colorization after the fact. How else would you get lighting like that during an actual game? Anyone?
Update: Thanks, gang. Looks like a remotely fired strobe light is the culprit. No IR shenanigans needed.
Michael Ruhlman announces that his newest book is available for sale. It’s called Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.
We have been trained in America to believe that we can’t cook unless we have a recipe in hand. I am not saying recipes are bad or wrong — I use them all the time; there are plenty of recipes in the new book — but when we rely completely on recipes, we cooks do ourselves a grave disservice. We remain chained to the ground, we remain dependent on our chains. When you are dependent on recipes, you are a factory worker on the assembly line; when you possess ratios and basic technique, you own the company.
With this book, Ruhlman aims to to improve the home cook’s comfort level in the kitchen and provide a blueprint for a way of cooking that is less restrictive and more improvisational than following recipes. I haven’t seen Ratio yet, but Ruhlman’s “…of a Chef” trilogy are some of my favorite books. If you want a signed copy of Ratio (or any of his other books), you can order one directly from his site.
In 1879, Brooklyn papermaker Robert Gair developed a process for mass producing foldable cardboard boxes. One of the paper-folding machines in his factory malfunctioned and sliced through the paper, leading Gair to the realization that cutting, creasing, and folding in the same series of steps could transform a flat piece of cardboard into a box.
Gair’s invention made him a wealthy man and turned his company into an epicenter of manufacturing in Brooklyn. From Evan Osnos’ New Yorker article about Chinese paper tycoon Cheung Yan:
Gair’s box, a cheap, light alternative to wood, became “the swaddling clothes of our metropolitan civilization,” Lewis Mumford wrote. Eventually, the National Biscuit Compnay introduced its first crackers that stayed crispy in a sealed paper box, and an avalanche of manufacturers followed. Gair expanded to ten buildings on the Brooklyn waterfront. Massive migration from Europe to the United States created a manufacturing workforce in Brooklyn, to curn out ale, coffee, soap, and Brillo pads — and Gair made boxes right beside them.
Gair’s concentrated collection of buildings eventually led the area between the Brooklyn and Manhattan Bridges to be called Gairville. That area is now known as Dumbo and, in addition to tons of residential space, the neighborhood is home not to manufacturing but to architecture firms, web companies, and other creative industries.
The Gair Company’s most iconic building was also its last: the Clocktower Building, also known as Gair Building No. 7. I tracked down several of the other Gair buildings and put them on this Google Map.
Can you help fill in the holes? Email me with additions/corrections and I’ll fill them in on the map. Thanks!
Update: I found a photo of some of the buildings that comprised Gairville on Google Books. The map has a couple of additions as well.
For the next round of kottke.org RSS weekly sponsorships, I’ve lowered the price by 25%, making an excellent value even better.
Sponsorships are exclusive text ads that run in kottke.org’s RSS feed and are an ideal way for you to tell the site’s 110,000+ RSS readers a little something about you, your company, or your company’s products. Read on for details or get in touch to schedule a sponsorship today.
Infinite Jest is available for pre-order for the Kindle. However, several reviews have mentioned that the Kindle doesn’t handle large, footnoted fractal-like texts very well, so buyer beware.
Otherwise, people really seem to love Amazon’s little device: Steven Johnson, Gina Trapani, Matt Haughey. (thx, adam)
From November 2007 but still relevant: Odds of Dying in a Terrorist Attack.
You are six times more likely to die from hot weather than from a terrorist attack
You are 87 times more likely to drown than die in a terrorist attack
You are 1048 times more likely to die from a car accident than from a terrorist attack
You are 12 times more likely to die from accidental suffocation in bed than from a terrorist attack
You are eight times more likely to be killed by a police officer than by a terrorist
I guess when you’re the President, it’s just not that impressive to say that you protected the nation’s populace from accidental suffocation in bed.
After threatening as much for many months, Joshua Schachter has published a piece about how URL shorteners (TinyURL, bit.ly, is.gd, etc.) suck for everyone except the companies which build URL shorteners.
There are three other parties in the ecosystem of a link: the publisher (the site the link points to), the transit (places where that shortened link is used, such as Twitter or Typepad), and the clicker (the person who ultimately follows the shortened links). Each is harmed to some extent by URL shortening.
I agree with Schachter all around here. With respect to Twitter, I would like to see two things happen:
1) That they automatically unshorten all URLs except when the 140 character limit is necessary in SMS messages.
2) In cases where shortening is necessary, Twitter should automatically use a shortener of their own.
That way, users know what they’re getting and as long as Twitter is around, those links stay alive.
Damn you, Gruber, for getting me hooked on this checkers game for the iPhone. My checkers strategy, honed in many childhood games against my dad, is slowly coming back to me.
Not believing your ears, though, thought Espinoza, is a form of exaggeration. You see something beautiful and you can’t believe your eyes. Someone tells you something about… the natural beauty of Iceland… people bathing in thermal springs, among geysers… in fact you’ve seen it in pictures, but still you say you can’t believe it… Although obviously you believe it… Exaggeration is a form of polite admiration… You set it up so the person you’re talking to can say: it’s true… And then you say: incredible. First you can’t believe it and then you think it’s incredible.
2666 by Roberto Bolaño, page 137.
Peter Merholz asks: is your company designed for humans or fleshy automatons?
We’re placed in hierarchical org charts, remnant of railroad and factory operations of the 19th century, and find ourselves in silos that prevent us from collaborating with our colleagues.
We’re given job titles with an explicit set of responsibilities, and discouraged to perform outside that boundary.
Somehow I missed this a few weeks ago on Marginal Revolution: Do influential people develop more conventional opinions?
1. People “sell out” to become more influential.
2. As people become more influential, they are less interested in offending their new status quo-oriented friends.
3. As people become more influential, their opinion of the status quo rises, because they see it rewarding them and thus meritorious.
Trailer for a new film called Guest of Cindy Sherman. It’s a documentary about a man who becomes romantically involved with the famous artist, only to find that his ego can’t handle her fame. I wonder if we actually get to see the real Sherman in the film…the trailer is very teasing about it.
Update: Unsurprisingly, Sherman’s not happy about the film. (thx, paul)
Cathy Curtis, a former staff writer for The LA Times, shares how the web made her a better writer.
Another impetus for scanning, I believe, is the web’s seemingly limitless content. It’s like being unable to enjoy yourself at a party because you might be having a better time at someone else’s house. Add the growing mania for speed (“This #%&* site is taking 20 seconds to load!”), and it’s clear that web writing has to pick up the pace.
(via subtraction)
In a 1989 interview for Dutch television, Pixies frontman Frank Black talks about his songwriting process as creating a “poetic structure” with the melody and letting the lyrics flow from there. The Dutch graphic design studio Experimental Jetset took inspiration from Black’s approach.
When we get an assignment (which usually comes in the form of a question, a theme, a problem or a riddle), we feel as if the solution is already enclosed in the assignment itself. The design is already there; it just has to be released. Like the fist from Frank Black’s shirt.
In the month and a half after the awful redesign of their packaging, sales of Tropicana’s Pure Premium orange juice dropped 20%. !!! Same juice, different package, 20% fewer sales.
Tropicana had certainly sought to create excitement around the Pure Premium rebrand, announcing Jan. 8 a “historic integrated-marketing and advertising campaign … designed to reinforce the brand and product attributes, rejuvenate the category and help consumers rediscover the health benefits they get from drinking America’s iconic orange-juice brand.”
Who knows what the proper conclusions are to draw from all this. Did sales drop because glancing shoppers couldn’t tell Tropicana from a generic store brand? Does this underscore the importance of good design? Or should we beware of what seems like good design but turns out to be a bunch of metaphorical subterfuge? Did PepsiCo do this on purpose, a la the New Coke conspiracy? Are people stupid because they focus more on orange juice packaging than the actual juice when making buying decisions? (via df)
The folks who publish the excellent City Secrets travel books have come out with a similar guide to movies, The Ultimate Insider’s Guide to Cinema’s Hidden Gems.
City Secrets offers reflections and discoveries from the authors, artists, and historians who know each city best. Movies takes this intimate, insider’s approach to the arts, featuring brief essays and recommendations by esteemed figures in the film industry — including actors, directors, producers, and critics — and other writers and figures in the arts. Some have written on a film, or an aspect of a film (a performance, style, or theme) that they feel is overlooked or underappreciated. Others have chosen a well-known film for which they can offer personal insights or behind-the-scenes observations. Contributors include Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, Wes Anderson, Ken Auletta, Milos Forman, Anjelica Huston, Barbara Kopple, Sidney Lumet, Simon Schama, and many others.
(via vsl)
20x200 has a print by Mark Richards of an exploded Apple I machine.
In the photographs, a visual parallel between the wires delivering energy to a mechanical memory and the neural pathways of human anatomy becomes apparent. The pieces of machines are re-framed as something more than cold technology; I hope I can provide emotion, unexpected beauty and history.
(via df)
Taking a bit of code from here and a snippet from there, Robert Hodgin made an animation of 3-D snakes in Processing. Check out Hodgin’s use of constraints to spur the invention of a way to keep the snakes from overlapping.
I had no interest in adding a complete 3D physics library because my needs at this time are fairly simple. I am not worried about environment… I just want the snakes to crawl over each other. I decided to try magnetic repulsion despite thinking it probably wouldn’t work well enough. The thinking is this: Take each segment of a snake (200 segments each), and check its distance to every single other segment of every other snake on screen. Stupid, right? Yeah, pretty much. But with some optimization and only checking the segment distances if the snakes in question are close enough for overlap to be possible, I got it to run at 60 fps with 10 snakes.
Actually, when you get right down to it — the atoms in snakes’ bodies, that is — magnetic repulsion isn’t that far off from how matter achieves its electromagnetic opacity. Hodgin also made a video in which the snakes react to music. I wonder if this one’s gonna end up in iTunes. (via waxy)
Errol Morris returns to his NY Times blog with a five-part story about a photograph found in the hands of an unknown Union army soldier who died at Gettysburg. Start with part one. A description of the photograph made it into the newspaper and the identity of the man was pretty quickly discovered. But the story hardly ends there. My favorite part so far is the fourth, particularly the conversation between Morris and one of the unknown soldier’s descendants, archaeologist David Kelley.
In the first part of a five-part series, Matt Zoller Seitz examines the influences that have shaped Wes Anderson’s films.
When I interviewed Anderson for a 1998 Star-Ledger article about A Charlie Brown Christmas, directed by the late animator Bill Melendez, Anderson cited Melendez as one of three major influences on his work, so we’ll start there. Anderson told me that he and his screenwriting collaborator, Owen Wilson, conceived Rushmore hero Max Fischer as Charlie Brown plus Snoopy. He said that Miss Cross, the teacher Max adores and will draw into a weirdly Freudian love triangle with the industrialist Mr. Blume, is a combination of Charlie Brown’s teacher and his unattainable love object, the little red-haired girl.
The video (located in the right sidebar) takes longer to watch than it does to read the text, but the visual comparisons are worth it. I can’t wait to read parts 2-5. (via the house next door)
Jason’s coming back. I can’t thank him enough for locking me in this tenement with the bag of Cheetohs and the six pack of Mountain Dew, telling me to, “Link, monkey! Link!” I hope he enjoyed his time in Atlantic City.
I kid. Thanks, Jason, for giving me this opportunity, and thank you, kottke readers, for not abandoning the site in his absence.
For those curious about the other man behind a hockey mask, here are 13 Questions with an actor who played stab-happy Jason Voorhees. Thanks for bleeding, I mean reading.
Update by jkottke: Thanks for holding down the fort so ably, Ainsley. Your puntastic post titles and fondness for marine life will be missed. If you require writing services in the future, check out her small copywriting concern, Ministry of Imagery.
A wonderful little animation by Tomas Nilsson of my favorite fairytale, the one with wolves and woodsmen. This one’s all zippy infographics and diagrams.
The music gets to be a little much.
via Ektopia
A photo gallery that shows how marshmallow Peeps are made inside the Just Born confection company in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania.
Seeing a shower-capped woman dye-coat sugar with an industrial-grade sprayer puts a supreme damper on my sugar high.
Sometimes, the quickest way to a woman’s heart is a bunch of sheep illuminated with LEDs and herded into meaningful patterns. This is what you city folk have been missing.
Although it’s widely accepted that the scream heard when a lobster is dropped into a pot of boiling water is a bunch of hot air, it turns out that some crustaceans do feel pain, and have the capacity to remember it.
Some crabs that evacuated attacked the shell in the manner seen in a shell fight. Most crabs, however, did not evacuate at the stimulus level we used, but when these were subsequently offered a new shell, shocked crabs were more likely to approach and enter the new shell. Furthermore, they approached that shell more quickly, investigated it for a shorter time and used fewer cheliped probes within the aperture prior to moving in. Thus the experience of the shock altered future behaviour in a manner consistent with a marked shift in motivation to get a new shell to replace the one occupied. The results are consistent with the idea of pain in these animals.
And for a more eloquent take on the struggles of our shelled undersea edibles, there’s always David Foster Wallace’s riveting essay, “Consider the Lobster.”
via discover
The first movement of John Cage’s 4’33” is free on iTunes today. For the uninitiated, that’s one minute and forty-five seconds of silence. For free.
Sssh. I’m listening.
thx, liam m.
Switzerland is more than cheese, alps, and a blonde serving cocoa. It’s also the home of the slightly neat-freak mountain cleaners.
via swissmiss
Karrie Karahalios created a program that interprets conversations and generates real-time visual feedback. A social mirror of sorts.
The “clock” shows the progress of the talk. Three times a second, a color bar pops up showing who was speaking. The louder the speech, the longer the bar. Interruptions are shown as overlapping color bars. Every minute, a new circle of bars is rendered in a visual record akin to the rings of tree trunk.
Referred to as a “conversation clock,” it’s already been tested with kids with low-functioning autism, teaching them to vocalize. One speech specialist thinks it can help kids with Asperger’s, who tend to dominate conversations, learn not to “monologue” so much.
Marriage counselors are also using it to teach your husband how to shut up for five minutes.
A collection of quirky toilet signage. And for what to read after you’ve latched that door, there are several sites dedicated to writing found on the walls of bathroom stalls. (Warning: most of it does contain language that falls soundly in the “potty mouth” category.)
Please Do Not Throw Toothpicks in The Urinals The Crabs can Pole Vault.
I wonder if they frisk for pens and markers before allowing admittance to the Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art.
From across the pond, here’s a list of 10 stories that could be April Fool’s but aren’t. On the list:
Pubs are telling expectant mothers when they’ve had enough to drink.
Entirely unfunny. For a more joke-filled first of the month, you can always get that yodeling game for XBox360.
Designer Naoto Fukasawa has designed juice boxes that both look and feel like their juices’ fruits of origin. That newly-reinstated orange on Tropicana cartons is turning green with envy.
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