Robin Hood trailer
Robin Hood with Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett, directed by Ridley Scott? I’ll take five.
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Entries for December 2009
Step by step
If you’re Dan Bricklin, co-inventor of the spreadsheet, how do you go about learning a new programming environment? Just like everyone else:
In mid-September I purchased a shiny new 24” Apple iMac and an iPhone 3GS. I signed up for the Apple iPhone Developer Program. I bought some books and started doing the tutorials, step by step. I came up with the idea for an app I needed and built a prototype, then plunged in and started creating a full app that would be good for others, too.
Personally, I find this really inspiring.
Lovely chocolate
One of many from Mary and Matt. It’s a stacked bar chart *and* candy. (via youngna)
How Porsches are made: by hand
Here’s the first part in a series of five videos from the 1960s that show how Porsches are made:
A Continuous Lean has the other four parts.
The enormity of Zimbabwe’s inflation
There are at least 2 crazy passages in this article about the amount of inflation in Zimbabwe over the past 30 years.
Hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, the former Rhodesia, was a quadrillion times worse than it was in Weimar Germany.
In grade school, quadrillion was always an exaggeration but not here:
The cumulative devaluation of the Zimbabwe dollar was such that a stack of 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 (26 zeros) two dollar bills (if they were printed) in the peak hyperinflation would have be needed to equal in value what a single original Zimbabwe two-dollar bill of 1978 had been worth. Such a pile of bills literally would be light years high, stretching from the Earth to the Andromeda Galaxy.
Andromeda Galaxy! It’s our nearest galactic neighbor but still 2,500,000 light-years away. (via daveg)
Guitar Hero with 21,268 Christmas lights
This is possibly the most American thing I’ve ever seen:
Such ingenuity combined with such conspicuous waste. (via waxy)
Fire and Knives
I really like the cover on the first issue of Fire & Knives, a subscription-only food magazine based in the UK.
(via eat me daily)
The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009
One of my favorite end-of-the-year lists is Foreign Policy’s The Top Ten Stories You Missed; here’s this year’s installment. A Hotline for China and India caught my eye.
“Hotlines” between world leaders, like the legendary Moscow-Washington “red telephone” devised after the Cuban missile crisis, are designed to prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications between nuclear powers from escalating into a nuclear conflict. China and the United States have one. So do India and Pakistan. This year, the leaders of India and China agreed to set one up between New Delhi and Beijing, highlighting concerns that a worsening border dispute could quickly become the first major conflict of the multipolar era.
The making of an Eames fiberglass chair
From 1970, this video shows how Eames fiberglass shell chairs were made.
Greg Allen says:
The idea of design has been so thoroughly associated with computers in my mind, I’d forgotten the essential sculptural processes it used to involve: carving, modelmaking, molding, pouring… How design and art ever stayed separate in those days, I cannot imagine.
Ansel Adams’ Lost Los Angeles
While looking for something else at the Los Angeles Public Library, Gerard Van der Leun stumbled across some 1940s photos of LA taken by Ansel Adams. They had not been seen for a long while.
So I would conclude that with the LAPL material we are getting a rare chance to look at photographs a great photographer chose not to show the world. Obviously none of these images even touches upon the vast and central work that establish Adams as one of the greatest American photographers, but they do provide an interesting footnote to what Ansel Adams saw and thought worthy of photographing while ambling about Los Angeles during the opening months of World War II.
Warzone Tower Defense
Let’s get your Monday started off on the wrong foot: Warzone Tower Defense. A worthy alternative to Desktop Tower Defense. (thx, shay)
Updates on previous entries for Dec 11, 2009*
Imagining Earth with Saturn’s rings orig. from Dec 09, 2009
Media packaging mashups orig. from Apr 22, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
The ham sandwich theorem
The ham sandwich theorem is sometimes called ham and cheese sandwich theorem, the pancake theorem, and the Stone-Tukey theorem but not the sandwich theorem.
The ham sandwich theorem is also sometimes referred to as the “ham and cheese sandwich theorem”, again referring to the special case when n = 3 and the three objects are
1. a chunk of ham,
2. a slice of cheese, and
3. two slices of bread (treated as a single disconnected object).The theorem then states that it is possible to slice the ham and cheese sandwich in half such that each half contains the same amount of bread, cheese, and ham. It is possible to treat the two slices of bread as a single object, because the theorem only requires that the portion on each side of the plane vary continuously as the plane moves through 3-space.
No idea how this is related to the I Cut You Choose conundrum.
Jared Diamond: Will big business save the Earth?
Jared Diamond has come to believe that some large multinational companies (like Chevron, Wal-Mart, and Coca-Cola) are “among the world’s strongest positive forces for environmental sustainability”.
The embrace of environmental concerns by chief executives has accelerated recently for several reasons. Lower consumption of environmental resources saves money in the short run. Maintaining sustainable resource levels and not polluting saves money in the long run. And a clean image — one attained by, say, avoiding oil spills and other environmental disasters — reduces criticism from employees, consumers and government.
Lucas wanted David Lynch to direct Return of the Jedi
In this video, Lynch describes a visit with George Lucas and why he turned down Lucas’ offer to direct Return of the Jedi.
So, he took me upstairs and he showed me these things called Wookiees. And now this headache is getting stronger.
Iron Maiden mp3 compressed 666 times
An oldie but goodie from Cory Arcangel: an mp3 of Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast compressed 666 times. (via lined and unlined)
Global thinkers recommend books
Foreign Policy asked their list of Top Global Thinkers to recommend some books; here’s what they had to say.
Orson Welles doesn’t like Rosebud
I’m ashamed of Rosebud. I think it’s a rather tawdry device. It’s the thing I like least in Kane. It’s kind of a dollar book Freudian gag. It doesn’t stand up very well.
Even calmly answering interview questions and sipping on tea from fine china, Welles is an imposing presence. (via clusterflock)
Update: Here’s the first part of the full 50-minute CBC interview from which the snippet above was pulled. Part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six. (thx, blake)
Updates on previous entries for Dec 10, 2009*
Gorgeous maps and infographics by Stefanie Posavec orig. from Apr 07, 2008
Complete DVD set of The Wire on sale for $82 orig. from Jan 22, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Origami documentary
Between the Folds is a documentary about people who really really like origami.
Between the Folds chronicles the stories of ten fine artists and intrepid theoretical scientists who have abandoned careers and scoffed at hard-earned graduate degrees — all to forge unconventional lives as modern-day paperfolders.
Kevin Kelly gave it a rave review on True Films and it’s showing on PBS’s Independent Lens this month.
The year in ideas, 2009
The NY Times Magazine has published their Year in Ideas issue for 2009. Lots of good stuff in there. Before I got sidetracked with family obligations (Minna!), I planned on pitching the magazine’s editors a couple of ideas I noticed this year:
The Neverending Wake. We got a preview of what death in the celebrity age (more) is going be like when a cluster of notable people passed away this summer. How will we think about death when someone we know or admire dies every day for the rest of our lives?
Machine Gun Photography. Just as the introduction of the machine gun fundamentally changed warfare, so the affordable high-resolution digital video camera will change photography. Now you don’t have to wait for exactly the right moment for the perfect shot; just take 10 minutes of HD video and find the best shots later. Photography was always really about the editing anyway, right?
The future is Amish
Kevin Kelly on defining ourselves by technology we don’t use:
I’m interested in how people personally decide to refuse a technology. I’m interested in that process, because I think that will happen more and more as the number of technologies keep increasing. The only way we can sort our identity is by not using technology. We’re used to be that you define yourself by what you use now. You define yourself by what you don’t use.
“Tis not polite to say, English, but we told thee so.” See also. (via lined and unlined)
The People Speak
Loosely based on Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States, The People Speak is a show that features well-known actors reading famous speeches and letters from American history.
Using dramatic and musical performances of the letters, diaries and speeches of everyday Americans, The People Speak gives voice to those who spoke up for social change throughout U.S. history, forging a nation from the bottom up with their insistence on equality and justice.
The show starts airing this Sunday but many of the performances are already available online.
Tube typography
A lengthy discussion of the typeface for the London Underground, both the old version by Edward Johnston as well as the refresh.
“We continue to make subtle changes” Ashworth admits, “but we’re very wary about doing too much and are always happy to roll back changes if they end up not feeling ‘right.’
“The most recent major change was to the numbers 1 and 4 earlier this year. Not a lot of people noticed until a poster appeared advertising engineering work on the 14th of February — then I got A LOT of emails.”
Soap opera as performance art
Writing in the Wall Street Journal, actor James Franco explains what he’s doing on General Hospital.
I have been obsessed with performance art for over a decade-ever since the Mexican performance artist Guillermo Gomez-Pena came to visit my class at Cal Arts summer school. I finally took the plunge and experimented with the form myself when I signed on to appear on 20 episodes of “General Hospital” as the bad-boy artist “Franco, just Franco.” I disrupted the audience’s suspension of disbelief, because no matter how far I got into the character, I was going to be perceived as something that doesn’t belong to the incredibly stylized world of soap operas. Everyone watching would see an actor they recognized, a real person in a made-up world.
I’ve always liked Franco…he plays potheads but seems to have larger ambitions for himself:
James Franco is an actor who appeared in “Milk” and the “Spiderman” movies. He is currently enrolled in NYU’s MFA filmmaking program and Columbia’s MFA program for fiction writing.
(via sippey)
There’s going to be a floodie floodie
Five million years ago, a flood filled the Mediterranean Sea in only two years.
In a period ranging from a few months to two years, the scientists say that 90% of the water was transferred into the basin. “This extremely abrupt flood may have involved peak rates of sea level rise in the Mediterranean of more than 10m per day,” he and his colleagues wrote in the Nature paper.
Flexing of the Manhattan Bridge
Watch as one of Manhattan’s main arteries pulses with the entering and exiting subway trains.
Do I really look like a guy with a plan?
Career advice from Charlie Hoehn:
Therein lies the best career advice I could possibly dispense: just DO things. Chase after the things that interest you and make you happy. Stop acting like you have a set path, because you don’t. No one does. You shouldn’t be trying to check off the boxes of life; they aren’t real and they were created by other people, not you. There is no explicit path I’m following, and I’m not walking in anyone else’s footsteps. I’m making it up as I go.
Imagining Earth with Saturn’s rings
This video of what Earth would look like with Saturnine rings is pretty ho-hum, yeah, there’s a shot from orbit of the Earth with Saturn’s rings around it, and then BAM! here’s what it would look like at night in NYC:
The view from Ecuador is pretty great too.
Update: Greg Allen wants an iPhone app that adds in Saturn’s rings to any shot you take with the camera.
With the combination of GPS and orientation data that’s baked in to so many digital photographs, it should be possible to create a filter — I hear the kids call them apps now — that automatically inserts properly positioned Saturn rings into any sky you want.
An augmented reality app would be nice too.
The Noughtie List highlights, pt 1
Hey guys, it’s Jenni, the curator for The Noughties List.
First, I would like to thank everyone who have already submitted some great links. And please, don’t be shy with emailing links or any other suggestions for me. For my first post I wanted highlight defining the decade.
During the decade, people spent their time trying to name it. From what I gather, most English speaking countries have decided on “Noughties.” The US on the other hand, can’t seem to make it’s mind on what to call the decade, but many consider this The Worst Decade Ever .
When end of a decade approaches, everyone takes a moment to look back at those 10 years. There were many “oh ya..” moments for things I forgot about. Last August, Kottke posted Momus’ “one man’s view” on the decade. It’s worth a read if you haven’t read it, or read it again cause it’s really well thought out. And lastly, an opinion of the 2000s by those who were born in 2000.
Hubble goes deep
In 2004, the Hubble Space Telescope took an image called the Hubble Ultra Deep Field; basically astronomers pointed the Hubble toward an “empty” part of space and took a long-exposure shot in the visible spectrum. What they found were thousands of far away galaxies from early in the development of the universe. Now the Hubble has peered even deeper into the universe in near-infrared and captured this image:
Each one of those little specks is an entire galaxy, some only 600 million years old. Here’s a zoomed-in section:
Gimme Friction Baby
GFB is a game and it’s totally safe for work unless you want to actually get something done today. From a review at Jay is Games:
There is a certain paradigm shift that must occur when playing this game for the first time before the light goes on and the player ‘gets it’. I believe this is due to a sort of cognitive bias we have as gamers: when firing a turret we expect things to explode… and to go fast.
However, this game is anything but fast. The gameplay forces the player to slow down, think first, and to plan each shot carefully. Each game therefore becomes a careful placement of orbs rather than a quick-fire session to arrive at the end result. The slower pace gives way to excitement as an orb inches ever so close to that fearsome dotted line, and strategy emerges as the key ingredient to an award winning recipe. Those who don’t experience the paradigm shift may never appreciate the subtlety and the genius of this very simple gameplay design.
There’s also a version for the iPhone called Orbital.
Update: Here’s a Java version with rotation.
Updates on previous entries for Dec 8, 2009*
The 100 best quotes from The Wire orig. from Nov 17, 2009
National borders become natural borders orig. from Dec 01, 2009
When work is a game orig. from Dec 08, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
How con artists exploit human behavior
An extensive analysis of the seven principles of human behavior that con artists exploit (with many examples of cons). Or check out the Cliffs Notes version.
The Time principle: When you are under time pressure to make an important choice, you use a different decision strategy. Hustlers steer you towards a strategy involving less reasoning.
Stoopers
People throw away thousands of losing tickets at off-track betting parlors every day. Except that some of those losing tickets are actually winners. This is where the stoopers come in.
For the past 10 years, Jesus Leonardo has been cleaning up at an OTB parlor in Midtown Manhattan, cashing in, by his own count, nearly half a million dollars’ worth of winning tickets from wagers on thoroughbred races across the country. “It is literally found money,” he said on a recent night from his private winner’s circle. He spends more than 10 hours a day there, feeding thousands of discarded betting slips through a ticket scanner in a never-ending search for someone else’s lost treasure.
Milky Way chromoscope
Chromoscope provides views of the Milky Way galaxy in x-ray, visible, microwave, and several other EM wavelengths. This is the view in far infrared:
Brilliant frequent flyer miles scheme
At least with the cheese and pudding, you were actually buying perishable non-returnable products. But hundreds of travelers recently discovered the mother of all frequent flyer schemes: buying legal-tender $1 coins from the US Mint with free shipping and paying for them with miles-offering credit cards. Take the coins to the bank, use them to pay off the credit card, and keep the miles. Brilliant.
One FlyerTalker, identified by his online moniker, Mr. Pickles, claims to have bought $800,000 in coins. […] He earned enough miles to put him over two million total at AMR Corp.’s American Airlines, giving him lifetime platinum-elite status — early availability of upgrades for life and other perks on American and its partners around the world. He also pumped miles into his account at UAL Corp.’s United Airlines and points into his Starwood Preferred Guest program account.
(via mr)
When work is a game
Dennis Crowley notes that Target is turning checking people out into a game for their cashiers in order to speed things up.
Girl running the checkout […] said the whole thing “makes work feel like a game”.
Update: A Target employee chimed in with more information in the comments here.
How to buy on eBay
If I ever wanted to buy anything on eBay, I would probably use this advice.
I am continually amazed at how many people incrementally bid up an item they want six days before an auction is over. It’s like watching someone walk around with a switch unknown to him flipped permanently to stupid.
Updates on previous entries for Dec 7, 2009*
Jane Austen, emailer orig. from Dec 04, 2009
OK Go, WTF orig. from Dec 01, 2009
The 100 best quotes from The Wire orig. from Nov 17, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
iPhone app for cooking with ratios
Michael Ruhlman is turning his Ratio cookbook into an iPhone app.
The best-selling cookbook […] is soon to be an iPhone app that will help you calculate amounts of ingredients in all the fundamental culinary preparations. When you know a ratio, you don’t know a recipe, you know 1,000. And this application does all the calculating for you.
Nice move…an iPhone app is perhaps a better expression of the subject matter than a book.
Hating a book by its cover
Sometimes a book cover is so bad that it keeps you from reading the words within, even if those words are some of the best Twain ever wrote.
The cover of the Signet Classic [version of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn] was a drawing of a ruddy-cheeked scamp, buck teeth prominent, clutching an apple, with a perky little newsboy tam cocked at a saucy Depression-era angle. Here Huck bore an alarming similarity to both Jerry Mathers of “Leave It to Beaver” and Britney Spears. Revolting. So once again my efforts to polish off this peerless classic were stymied. I could never get more than a few pages into the book before the illustration on the cover made me sick.
Detainee 063
Detainee 063 is the interrogation log of Guantanamo Bay detainee Mohammed al-Qahtani; each entry is posted to the site seven years after it was recorded (a la The Diary of Samuel Pepys).
Over the course of the fifty days, Al-Qahtani, Detainee 063, is questioned by teams of interrogators working in shifts, typically for twenty hours a day. While individual entries of the log are sometimes brutal and unpleasant to read, what is particularly disturbing about the treatment Al-Qahtani receives is its relentlessness. By publishing the log in real time, this site is intended as a kind of re-enactment — to show how mistreatment which might not appear immediately as terrible as, for example, waterboarding, can nonetheless come to amount to nothing short of torture, how by being prolonged and unceasing it can become unbearable.
(thx, ben)
Portraits of power
At a United Nations meeting in September, New Yorker staff photographer Platon took photos of as many world leaders as her could get his hands on. Here’s a slideshow of the results.
What did the Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, ask the photographer before the shutter clicked? “Platon,” he said, “make me look good.”
Introducing the Noughtie List
As several of you guessed, the December project I mentioned the other day is a collection of lists and articles that summarize the past ten years, i.e. the decade, i.e. the 2000s, i.e. TEN YEARS, MAN, TEN!! We call it the Noughtie List.
The list is curated by Jenni Leder, an art director and fellow internet enthusiast from Dallas, TX. She would love to hear your Noughtie List suggestions, feedback, comments, etc. via email. Jenni will be posting some of her favorite finds to the front page from time to time as well.
A special thanks to Rex Sorgatz for letting us borrow the idea; his list of 2009 lists is well underway and worth a look for those who are only slightly nostalgic.
Parallel universes
Playing on a moving subway train adds an extra level of difficulty to accelerometer-based iPhone games. Not only do you have to contend with the in-game physics, you also need to compensate for the real-life accelerations, twists, and turns of the train. The effect pretty much tears your brain in half.
New fiction from David Foster Wallace
In this week’s issue, the New Yorker has a new piece of fiction by David Foster Wallace. It’s another excerpt from The Pale King.
Once when I was a little boy I received as a gift a toy cement mixer. It was made of wood except for its wheels — axles — which, as I remember, were thin metal rods. I’m ninety per cent sure it was a Christmas gift. I liked it the same way a boy that age likes toy dump trucks, ambulances, tractor-trailers, and whatnot. There are little boys who like trains and little boys who like vehicles — I liked the latter.
(thx, keenan)
Vogue Italia does Twitter fashion shoot
The December 2009 issue of Vogue Italia has a spread of photos taken by Steven Meisel presented in the style of Twitpic.
That’s Viktoriya Sasonkina; also represented are Karlie Kloss, Naomi Campbell, Christy Turlington, and Gisele Bundchen.
Jane Austen, emailer
In London during Jane Austen’s lifetime, mail didn’t move at such a snail’s pace.
Austen wrote more than 3,000 letters, many to her sister Cassandra. They corresponded constantly, starting new letters to each other the minute they finished the last one and sharing the minutia of their lives. From reading Austen’s novels, I’d always assumed that people in her era spent a long time waiting for the mail. But the show mentions that during Austen’s life, mail in London and environs was delivered six times a day. Sometimes, a letter sent in the morning was delivered the same evening. Which makes snail mail sound a lot more like email or twitttering.
Update: Two related links: The Twitter-like postcard culture of Edwardian Britain and from 1912, A History of Inland Transport and Communication in England by Edwin A. Pratt. (thx, liz & martin)
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