Feet up on cushion
Things will be significantly slower than usual around here this week…I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I’ll see you next week.
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Entries for June 2009
Megachurches and corporations are alike
From Joseph Clarke in Triple Canopy, a comparison of the histories of the American megachurch and corporation.
Lakewood and America’s twelve hundred other megachurches — congregations that draw between two thousand and fifty thousand people per weekend — are not simply vast machines for passive spectatorship. Sunday services are convergences of worshipers who spend their weeknights at prayer groups, Bible studies, ministries, and missionary training sessions. Successful megachurches are like well-run companies, with intricate corporate structures devised to keep each member personally engaged; their pastors are like chief executives, maximizing the productivity of laborers in the evangelism enterprise. Jumbotron notwithstanding, the architectural and organizational tropes of the megachurch are best compared to those of the modern white-collar workplace.
Netflix Prize won?
It looks as though the Netflix Prize might have been won through a combined effort of the top two teams. (thx, bergmayer)
Update: All teams have 30 days to better the current high score before the winner is declared. But, someone has won the Prize. (thx, all)
When it’s your kid, it’s not babysitting
New father Paul Drielsma thinks that the language around fatherhood needs to change.
Scour the parenting forums on the Internet and you’ll find the common lament that “DH” (darling husband) expects a medal whenever he “babysits” junior for a few hours. I have little sympathy for DH in these cases, but maybe a step in the right direction would be to stop using language that suggests hired help — to stop referring to DH’s job in the same terms as somebody who could legitimately stick his hand out at the end of his shift and demand a tip. DH isn’t babysitting, he’s parenting, and just changing that one word changes, for me at least, all sorts of connotations.
Rendered fashion
The clothes from Irina Shaposhnikova’s Crystallographica show look as though they were created with 3-D rendering software but haven’t quite finished rendering yet.
(via today and tomorrow)
The most remarkable airplane of the 20th century
A short appreciation of the SR-71 Blackbird, an airplane that was literally faster than a speeding bullet.
“It wasn’t like any other airplane,” he told me. It was terrifying, exciting, intense and humbling every time you flew. Each mission was designed to fly at a certain speed; you always knew the airplane had more. It was like driving to work in a double-A fuel dragster.”
The skin of the plane’s fuselage was a whopping 85% titanium, which was purchased, during the Cold War, from the Soviet Union.
Update: See also SR-71 Groundspeed Check, Google Map of where all the Blackbirds are, and SR-71 Disintegrates Around Pilot During Flight Test:
Everything seemed to unfold in slow motion. I learned later the time from event onset to catastrophic departure from controlled flight was only 2-3 sec. Still trying to communicate with Jim, I blacked out, succumbing to extremely high g-forces. The SR-71 then literally disintegrated around us. From that point, I was just along for the ride.
(thx, doug, clay & tom)
Why are famous paintings worth more than famous houses?
David Galbraith calculates that if buildings by famous architects were priced like paintings, a Le Corbusier building would be worth more than the entire US GDP.
The top floor of Corbusier’s Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.
In terms of signaling, it’s difficult to hang a house on one’s parlor wall…buying a Corbusier means living in it wherever it happens to be located, at least part of the year.
Potter, Stars Trek and Wars, Matrix all the same movie
You’ve likely seen this comparison of Harry Potter and the first Star Wars movie but that comparison has recently been expanded to include not only Potter and Star Wars but also The Matrix and Abrams’ Star Trek.
Once upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.
Update: The connecting theme is the monomyth. (via @adamlgerber)
Update: Or perhaps Potter is really Young Sherlock Holmes? (thx, stephen)
Great places to work
CNNMoney tells us about seven great companies to work for. For instance, a Colorado brewing company gives their employees free beer and company ownership.
After one year of work, each employee receives an ownership stake in the company and a free custom bicycle. After five years every employee enjoys an all-expenses-paid trip to Belgium — the country whose centuries-old beer tradition serves as a model for the Fort Collins, Colo., brewery. Oh yeah, and employees get two free six-packs of beer a week.
Ghostbusters III
Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh shares his idea for a Ghostbusters III screenplay based on NYNEX, the telephone company that served New York and New England from 1984 through 1997.
Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don’t stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves— but it’s the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.
Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone… and they go a little crazy.
Thing is — spoiler alert — halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn’t a phone system at all: it’s the embedded nervous system of an angel — a fallen angel — and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.
Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.
Michael Jackson dead at 50
L.A. Times Reports Jackson Is Dead | 6:24 p.m. The newspaper cited “city and law enforcement sources.” The networks and CNN are also broadcasting the news, citing the Times story.
The LA Times story is here but isn’t loading right now. Twitter is melting down a little. RIP, King of Pop.
Update: The LA Times story is loading now. Here’s what it says:
Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.
Update: My favorite Michael Jackson performance is from the MTV Awards in 1995.
It’s not a groundbreaking performance or anything — it’s like a greatest hits package — but I had it taped on VHS and watched it many many times, wondering how a person could move like that.
Logo nicknames
Deep in the conservative bowels of corporations and brand identity firms, they’ve got cute little nicknames for logos. The GE logo is The Meatball, the AT&T logo is The Death Star, and the Warner logo is Two and a Half Hot Dogs. (via quips)
Create Your Own Economy, online
Tyler Cowen previews a portion of his upcoming book, Create Your Own Economy, for Fast Company.
More and more, “production” — that word my fellow economists have worked over for generations — has become interior to the human mind rather than set on a factory floor. A tweet may not look like much, but its value lies in the mental dimension. You use Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, and other Web services to construct a complex meld of stories, images, and feelings in your mind. No single bit seems weighty on its own, but the resulting blend is rich in joy, emotion, and suspense. This is a new form of drama, and it plays out inside us — with technological assistance — rather than on a public stage.
On political sex scandals
Sage advice from Alec Baldwin about the Mark Sanford affair: Don’t Take the Bait.
Now is a wonderful opportunity to show the country what Democrats/liberals/progressives/unaligned learned from the Clinton era. Whatever personal problems that public officials deal with privately, leave them alone. This could happen to anyone, in any state, regardless of party. Why make the voters of South Carolina suffer while Sanford is skewered? If he wants to resign, so be it. If not, let him deal with it in private.
And Baldwin didn’t say this but I will: lefty political sites like HuffPo and TPM have and are devoting a lot of time and attention to these Republican sex scandals. Hey, they’re good for pageviews, right? That’s part of the problem too. Aren’t there more important political things going on in the world than this gossip?
Previously on Lost
A Bolivian TV station was duped into airing screencaps showing a plane crash from Lost thinking that it was the crash of Air France Flight 447 somehow photographed in widescreen from inside the plane.
In their rush to air exclusive photos of Flight 447’s destruction, no one in this newsroom stopped to ask the logical questions, such as: 1) How did the camera survive? and 2) Why are the photos in wide-screen format?
The answers, of course, are: 1) Because the footage is from Lost. And, 2) because the footage is from Lost.
Visualizing Twitter litter
I guess I should have included “if the link is posted to TechMeme” in the Twitter litter list.
A different wavelength
From The Onion: 95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family.
“There was a time when my sister would mention how much she wants an SUV, and I’d be unable to resist launching into a whole thing about how irresponsible and wasteful they are. But after receiving my thousandth blank, confused stare from everybody at the table, I realized it was futile,” Wilmot said. “Now, I don’t even flinch when my dad mentions he’s reading ‘this amazing book called The Celestine Prophecy.’ That’s how bad it is.”
Language shapes thought
Lera Boroditsky shares some recent studies which show that language shapes the way we think.
How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist’s native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
One of my favorite examples of this is something that Meg told me about years ago. In English, you might say something like, “I lost the keys” whereas in Spanish you could use a reflexive verb and say something more like “the keys lost themselves”. Her guess was that difference makes Spanish speakers somewhat less likely to take responsibility for their actions…e.g. I didn’t knock that vase over, it knocked itself over. (thx, david)
Update: Boy, the old inbox is humming on this one. People, including several linguists wrote in objecting to two main points. First, some said that it is far from certain that the research shows that language shapes thought; a couple people even went so far as to say that what Boroditsky wrote was just plain wrong. So there’s certainly some debate there.
The second batch of posts took issue with what my wife Meg said about Spanish speakers. Let me try to clarify and explain what she was getting at without sounding like I’m a racist who thinks the Spanish and Mexicans are irresponsible klutzes (which I don’t, if it wasn’t COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS from the subject and tone of everything else I’ve ever written on this site, but thanks for going there anyway). Instead of what I wrote above, let’s try this instead:
In my wife’s experience as a fluent speaker of Mexican Spanish and who lived in Mexico for a year, she observed that when people misplaced their keys (and this is just one of many possible examples), they are far more likely to say something like “the keys lost themselves” than “I lost the keys” whereas in American English, you would never say “the keys lost themselves”. In fact, she says that this sort of formulation is one of the quick ways to tell who speaks Mexican Spanish as a native and who doesn’t. A reader says this is called the accidental se (scroll to the bottom). So with Spanish, there’s a sense that these inanimate objects have some say in their actions, that they are “alive” and the speaker is in fact the victim. Those michevious keys lost themselves and now I’m late for work, that crazy glass tipped itself over and now I need to clean it up, etc.
In English, you could certainly say “the keys are lost” when deflecting responsibility for their loss (something everyone does, regardless of race or culture or language) but that’s clearly not the same as the keys losing themselves…that’s the real difference. I’ll let Boroditsky explain what effects this difference might have on how Spanish speakers think, if any, lest I get any more angry emails. (thx, everyone, esp. kyle)
Climatologist James Hansen: we’re almost too late re: climate change
Climatologist James Hansen, who is the director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies and the creator of one of the first climate models that predicted global warming, is convinced that the problem of climate change caused by humans is much more dire than is generally thought (subscribers only link; abstract).
Hansen has now concluded, partly on the basis of his latest modeling efforts and partly on the basis of observations made by other scientists, that the threat of global warming is far greater than even he had suspected. Carbon dioxide isn’t just approaching dangerous levels; it is already there. Unless immediate action is taken-including the shutdown of all the world’s coal plants within the next two decades-the planet will be committed to climate change on a scale society won’t be able to cope with. “This particular problem has become an emergency,” Hansen said.
Hansen is so adamant about this belief that he has begun participating in protests around the globe, an unusual level of activism for such a respected and high-ranking government official. The last sentence of the piece reads:
He said he was thinking of attending another demonstration soon, in West Virginia coal country.
Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of the piece above, reports that Hansen not only attended that demonstration but got arrested.
More on US healthcare costs
I’ve got two follow-ups to share with you regarding Atul Gawande’s New Yorker piece about healthcare costs in the US (kottke.org post). In the Wall Street Journal, Abraham Verghese argues that in order for a healthcare reform plan to be successful, it has to include cost cutting.
I recently came on a phrase in an article in the journal “Annals of Internal Medicine” about an axiom of medical economics: a dollar spent on medical care is a dollar of income for someone. I have been reciting this as a mantra ever since. It may be the single most important fact about health care in America that you or I need to know. It means that all of us — doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, drug companies, nurses, home health agencies, and so many others — are drinking at the same trough which happens to hold $2.1 trillion, or 16% of our GDP. Every group who feeds at this trough has its lobbyists and has made contributions to Congressional campaigns to try to keep their spot and their share of the grub. Why not? — it’s hog heaven. But reform cannot happen without cutting costs, without turning people away from the trough and having them eat less. If you do that, you have to be prepared for the buzz saw of protest that dissuaded Roosevelt, defeated Truman’s plan and scuttled Hillary Clinton’s proposal.
In Gawande’s example, what Verghese is saying is that you can’t just make McAllen’s healthcare system adopt an El Paso type of system without a whole lot of pain.
Gawande addressed some of the criticisms of his article on the New Yorker site. One of the major criticisms was that McAllen’s higher costs were associated with higher levels of poverty and unhealthiness:
As I noted in the piece, McAllen is indeed in the poorest county in the country, with a relatively unhealthy population and the problems of being a border city. They have a very low physician supply. The struggles the people and medical community face there are huge. But they are just as huge in El Paso — its residents are barely less poor or unhealthy or under-supplied with physicians than McAllen, and certainly not enough so to account for the enormous cost differences. The population in McAllen also has more hospital beds than four out of five American cities.
Ten Best Picture nominees for Oscars
Whoa, next year there will be ten nominated films up for the Best Picture Oscar instead of the customary five. I’d love to see a statistical analysis of how different the results are between long nominee lists and shorter subsets. (via crazymonk)
Update: It’s not quite a statistical analysis, but a couple of folks have guessed at the impact. First, from Tyler Cowen:
With five entries there are usually only two or maybe three real contenders. Strategic voting is present but manageable. There can be split votes across a particular actor or genre. With ten entries it is much harder to tell which picture will win. Counterintuitively, it might be harder for “odd” pictures to be nominated because they might end up winning. Popular movies like The Dark Knight will win more often because it will be hard not to nominate them (it didn’t even receive a nomination).
From Noel Murray at the AV Club:
With more Best Picture slots open, studios and indies alike could be pushing harder to get their movies seen. What does that mean to you, the home viewer? It might — just might — mean that some smaller movies get longer runs in the big city arthouses, and even end up finding their way into the hinterlands. Everyone knocks the taste of the Academy (and often with good reason), but it’s not like everything that gets nominated is dowdy and self-serious and simplified. And it’s certainly true that plenty of excellent movies contend for the honor of contending each season. More of those excellent-but-low-priority movies may put up more than just a token campaign, and as a result, the average movie fan may become more aware of them, and may even get to see them.
And then there’s this little tidbit from the NY Times:
In all about 300 films were eligible for awards in 2008. Were that to hold going forward, roughly one of every 30 films would become a best-picture nominee.
Breatharians
Last night I found out about the most amazing load of crap I have ever heard of: breatharianism, a extreme diet whose most dedicated followers claim to subsist on air only. There are a number of variations on this basic theme but perhaps the most colorful breatharian is Wily Brooks. From Wikipedia:
Wiley Brooks is a purported breatharian, and founder of the “Breatharian Institute of America”. He was first introduced to the public in 1980, when he appeared on the TV show That’s Incredible!. Wiley has stopped teaching in recent years, so he can “devote 100% of his time on solving the problem as to why he needed to eat some type of food to keep his physical body alive and allow his light body to manifest completely.” Wiley Brooks believes that he has found “four major deterrents” which prevented him from living without food: “people pollution”, “food pollution”, “air pollution” and “electro pollution”. In 1983 he was allegedly observed leaving a Santa Cruz 7-Eleven with a Slurpee, hot dog and Twinkies.
He told Colors magazine in 2003 that he periodically breaks his fasting with a cheeseburger and a cola, explaining that when he’s surrounded by junk culture and junk food, consuming them adds balance. On his website, Brooks explains that his future followers must first prepare by combining the junk food diet with the meditative incantation of five magic “fifth-dimensional” words which appear on his website. In the “Question and Answer” section of his website, Brooks explains that the “Double Quarter-Pounder with Cheese” meal from McDonald’s possesses a special “base frequency” and that he thus recommends it as occasional food for beginning breatharians. He then goes on to reveal that the secret of Diet Coke is “liquid light”. Prospective disciples are asked after some time on this junk food/magic word preparation to revisit his website in order to test if they can feel the magic.
He further mentions that those interested can call him on his fifth-dimensional phone number in order to get the correct pronunciation of the five magic words. In case the line is busy, prospective recruits are asked to meditate on the five magic words for a few minutes, and then try calling again; he does not explain how anyone can meditate with words they cannot yet pronounce. Brooks’s “institute”, in the past, charged varying fees to prospective clients who wished to learn how to live without food, which ranged from US$15 million to $25 million. These charges have historically been presented as limited time offers exclusively for billionaires, New lower fees have been set to $10,000 with an initial deposit of $2,000.
He wants to consume only air but can’t stop eating McDonald’s hamburgers! Diet Coke is liquid light! My impulse is to say “you just can’t make this stuff up, folks” but that’s obviously not true. Kinda makes you want to start your own completely implausible religion, doesn’t it? (thx, andy)
MTA selling subway station naming rights
The MTA is trying to sell the naming rights to the Atlantic Ave subway stop in Brooklyn to Barclays, a London bank. If approved, other rights may be sold as well. Yes, let’s make the NYC subway even more confusing than it already is, although I’m sure the MTA will come up with some reason that cramming “Domino’s® Breadbowl Pasta™ Station” onto a map makes more sense than “23rd Street”.
On the other hand, a casual study of the NYC subway map reveals the following brand names already in use:
Rockefeller Center
Columbia University
JFK Airport
Museum of Natural History
Lincoln Center
Hunter College
Yankee Stadium
Aqueduct Racetrack
Times Square
Herald Square
NY Aquarium
World Trade Center
Brooklyn Museum
Mets
But, without exception, station names are derived from nearby landmarks: streets, airports, schools, stadiums, squares, parks, etc.
Twitter litter
The problem with all of the “we’re tracking the most popular links on Twitter” sites is that link sharing on Twitter depends on (in order of decreasing relevance):
1. the time it takes to read/view the link (shorter is way better)
2. if the subject of the link is Twitter or Facebook
3. the sense of outrage aroused in the reader (the more the better)
4. if the link was published by fucking Mashable
5. retweets by popular Twitter users who have many parrot followers (i.e. disciples)
6. how interesting the link is
So unless you’re into brief but outrageous Twitter news from Mashable that you heard about from Robert Scoble — and it is incredible the number of people who are — these services just aren’t that useful. (As this post itself meets several of the above criteria, feel free to retweet.)
Apparent Plagiarism in Chris Anderson’s Free
Chris Anderson’s new book, Free, will be out early next month (you can order it for $17.81 on Amazon). Over on the VQR blog, Waldo Jaquith discovered that several passages in the book were lifted directly from Wikipedia and other sources without attribution.
These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don’t have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.
In response to a query by Jaquith — bloggers take note — sent *before* the publication of the piece, Anderson took responsibility for the copied passages, saying that they were “notes” that were originally footnoted:
This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions […] Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you’ll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book’s focus, mostly on historical asides, but that’s no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that we not directly sourced.
Anderson’s publisher, Hyperion, considers his response to be satisfactory and will correct the errors in future editions.
Two takes on gun violence in the New Yorker
A pair of related articles from the New Yorker last week. The first is a Talk of the Town piece on a water-pistol ambush game played by the students at a New York City private school.
Willis Cohen was finally killed through no fault of his own. He woke up one day and, as usual, hopped a neighbor’s fence and exited through another house. He caught a livery cab on Amity Street and headed north to the Heights. He knew he was in trouble when his driver refused to raise the windows. A member of the Gaisford team shot him in the chest through the cab’s passenger-side window as he pulled up to the school.
The second is a piece by John Seabrook is about David Kennedy and his approach to reducing gang-related murder through a combination of community support and “one strike and everyone’s out” policy.
At the initial call-in, Victor Garcia was the first to speak. He told the young men that he loved them, that they had value to their community, and that he knew they were better than their violent actions implied. Afterward, Chief Steicher addressed them, thanking them for coming, and making it clear that “this is nothing personal.” He then delivered the message: “We know who you are, we know who your friends are, and we know what you’re doing. If your boys don’t stop shooting people right now, we’re coming after everyone in your group.”
Without too much trouble, you could imagine either of these excerpts appearing in either article. A curious editorial decision to run them in the same issue.
The house that used to be there
From Marcus Buck, imprints of demolished houses left on other houses.
Photo is from Pruned. (via janelle)
Update: Medianeras, series of photos of “party walls” by José Antonio Millán. (via artifacting)
Stop masking passwords
Jakob Nielsen says: stop masking passwords in web input forms.
Usability suffers when users type in passwords and the only feedback they get is a row of bullets. Typically, masking passwords doesn’t even increase security, but it does cost you business due to login failures.
Sing it, brother. It’s even worse on the iPhone…even with the last letter thing that it gives you, I still mistype passwords all the time.
Ponyo trailer
The trailer for Ponyo, the latest animated feature film from Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, etc.). The film opened in Japan last year and made more than $150 million at the box office. The American version is dubbed and I don’t know if a subtitled version will made it to theaters in the US or not. There was a theatrical release of a subtitled Mononoke but that was a long time ago.
First trailer for HBO’s The Pacific
As a follow-up to the excellent Band of Brothers, HBO, Steven Speilberg, and Tom Hanks have teamed up to make The Pacific, a 10-part miniseries about the fighting in the Pacific during WWII from the perspective of a group of US Marines. The first trailer for the series has been released:
(via sarahnomics)
Update: So of course HBO made YouTube remove the video of the trailer. But they put up a smaller crappier version on their own site so it’s all ok, right? (Why do media companies not like people spreading their advertising around? That’s the fucking goal, yes?) Anyway, in the meantime I changed the link to the video above with a new one that hasn’t been removed yet. And if that one gets removed, you can probably find the newest ones here. (thx, greg)
How to tie a tie, shine your shoes, etc.
Garra has a fun and informative series of lifestyle how-to videos for men, including how to tie a tie (6 ways), perform a bit of table magic, wear a scarf, iron a shirt in 3 minutes, and shine a pair of shoes. See also how to bull your shoes and Bowmore’s other videos. (thx, youngna)
The 50th Law
Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, which has been influential in both halls of business and hip-hop circles, has written a new book with rapper 50 Cent called The 50th Law. Greene was initially skeptical of 50 Cent as a co-author but was impressed by their initial meeting.
He was in the midst of a power struggle with a rival rapper and he talked quite openly about the strategies he was employing, including mistakes he had made along the way. He analyzed his own actions with detachment, as if he were talking about another person. Over the last few years he had witnessed a lot of nasty maneuvering within the music business, and he seemed to want to discuss this with somebody from the outside. He was not interested in myths but reality. Contrary to his public persona, he had a Zen-like calmness that impressed me.
The main theme of the book is about fear and “the reverse power that you can obtain by overcoming [it]”.
We found stories from his own life that would illustrate these ideas, many of them culled from his days as a hustler and even highlighting mistakes along the way that taught him valuable lessons. Later, from my own research, I would bring in examples from other historical figures who exemplified this trait. Many of them would be African Americans—Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Malcolm X, Hurricane Carter, et al—whose fearless quality was forged by their harsh struggles against racism. Others would come from all periods and cultures—the Stoics, Joan of Arc, JFK, Leonardo da Vinci, Mao tse-tung, and so on.
The women of McSweeney’s
Elissa Bassist, motivated by a Christopher Hitchens query about women being less funny than men, collects a whole bunch of writing by women from McSweeney’s.
Audio of Weegee and Cartier-Bresson
Rare mp3s of Weegee and Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about photography.
Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making. It’s interesting to hear his voice, which is one of those accents you don’t hear so much in New York anymore: part Austro-Hungarian immigrant by way of the Lower East Side and part Elmer Fudd. Peter Sellers based his accent in Dr. Strangelove on Weegee’s voice after Weegee visited Kubrick’s set one day.
Yep, that’s Strangelove, alright. (via conscientious)
Flip Flop Fly Ball
Flip Flop Fly Ball is a marriage of baseball fandom and an enthusiasm for infographics. While not strictly baseball, this comparison of the sizes and shapes of sports balls is a favorite.
Find My iPhone works
Shortly after activating the Find My iPhone feature on his iPhone, Kevin loses it and then uses the feature to successfully retrieve it.
Then an amazingly lucky thing happened. I refreshed the iPhone location and the circle moved, to the corner of the block, and shrunk in size to maybe 100 feet across. I waited a minute and refreshed again. The small circle had shifted southward down Washtenaw.
“THAT WAY!”
Us three skinny white guys walked at a rapid pace in the direction of the circle. We moved past the birthday party, curious if one of the participants might be culpable, but the circle again shifted farther south. I was ready to break for our car if the phone started moving away faster than we could catch it, but it hovered at the very end of the street, at the corner of Washtenaw and Milwaukee.
I wonder if Apple imagined this sort of amateur (and potentially dangerous) police work would happen when they implemented Find My iPhone.
The story that takes 1,000 years to read
The recently published Infinity issue of Opium Magazine has a nine-word story printed on the cover that will take 1,000 years to read.
The cover is printed in a double layer of standard black ink, with an incrementally screened overlay masking the nine words. Exposed over time to ultraviolet light, the words will be appear at different rates, supposedly one per century.
But just as technology is increasing the speed of the media cycle, so too can it defeat the purpose of this experiment and allow us to read the story well before 1000 years. A UV source much stronger than the Sun should do the trick.
New Michael Moore movie
I’m not sure there’s any reason to watch the trailer for the as-yet-untitled Michael Moore documentary on the global economic meltdown; don’t we pretty much know where he stands at this point?
Wall-E end credits
The Art of the Title Sequence takes a look at the excellent ending credits for Wall-E and interviews the gentlemen responsible.
Jim Capobianco’s end credits to Andrew Stanton’s “WALL-E” are essential; they are the actual ending of the film, a perfect and fantastically optimistic conclusion to a grand, if imperfect idea. Humanity’s past and future evolution viewed through unspooling schools of art. Frame after frame sinks in as you smile self-consciously. It isn’t supposed to be this good but there it is. This is art in its own right. Peter Gabriel and Thomas Newman’s song, “Down to Earth” indulges you with some incredibly thoughtful lyrics and, from the Stone Age to the Impressionists to the wonderful 8-bit pixel sprites, you are in the midst of something special.
(via quipsologies)
Scenes from the bailout
In her own words, the wife of a CEO whose bank accepted TARP funds describes her hard times.
As you can see, being a TARP wife means, in short, making decisions according to a complex algorithm: balancing the need to look like your world hasn’t crumbled beneath you — let’s not alarm the investors! — with the need to appear duly repentant for your subprime sins.
I realize that happiness is relative when dealing with money and social status, but it was difficult to keep that in mind while reading this. (Yes, this article is a couple months old. Do not read if you’re allergic to information generated less than 30 seconds ago. Instead, you can check to see if the professor has given you another pellet yet.)
Infinite Summer is a go
Infinite Summer kicks off today and while I’m not the world’s foremost Wallace scholar, I was happy to provide a foreword to get it rolling.
So sure, it’s a lengthy book that’s heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.
Hodgman and Obama nerd it up
Video of John Hodgman’s speech at the Radio & TV Correspondents’ Dinner.
With Obama in attendance, Hodgman wonders if our Commander in Chief is indeed as nerdy as we’ve hoped.
Steve Jobs’ liver transplant
The Wall Street Journal is reporting that Apple’s Steve Jobs had a liver transplant operation done about two months ago. John Gruber has extensive coverage of Livergate; he thinks it was an Apple leak:
This must be a deliberate, timed leak from Apple. The timing is simply perfect from Apple’s perspective — midnight on the Friday of what appears to be the most successful new product launch in company history.
Whatever the case, get well soon, Steve.
Trailer for Cold Souls
Cold Souls = Being John Malkovich - John Malkovich + Paul Giamatti. Sort of.
Update: Perhaps this could be a sequel?
Radiolab on randomness
Newish episode of Radiolab about randomness: Stochasticity.
How big a role does randomness play in our lives? Do we live in a world of magic and meaning or … is it all just chance and happenstance? To tackle this question, we look at the role chance and randomness play in sports, lottery tickets, and even the cells in our own body. Along the way, we talk to a woman suddenly consumed by a frenzied gambling addiction, two friends whose meeting seems purely providential, and some very noisy bacteria.
Creepy puppet children
This might be the creepiest thing on the internet today: The Puppet Show, photos of real children modified to look like puppets.
2012 trailer
This movie just looks amazing. And horrible. A must-see trailer in HD if you like, as I do, watching the Earth being destroyed.
Update: And here’s a totally sweet trailer for 2012: It’s a Disaster. (thx, javier)
Sonic black hole
Scientists have created a sonic black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates near absolute zero.
Since atoms move between the [Bose-Einstein condensate] clouds faster than sound, any sound wave trying to escape will fall farther and farther behind, never able to escape the sonic event horizon. “It’s like trying to swim slowly against a fast current,” said Steinhauer. “The sound waves fall behind because the current is moving faster than the waves.”
Bose for speakers, Bose-Einstein for anti-speakers. Now, if we could just position one of these holes near the Fox News anchor desk, we’d be all set.
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