15 failed predictions about the future
The list includes this dandy by the awesomely named Dr. Dionysys Larder:
Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.
(via long now)
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Entries for December 2009
Quiet your text editor
Ommwriter is an interesting simple text editor.
With multiple windows and applications all vying for our attention, we have sadly adapted our working habits to that of the computer and not the other way around. Ommwriter is a humble attempt to recapture what technology has snatched away from us today: our capacity to concentrate.
Watch the demo video for a taste. A beta version is available for the Mac.
Who Lives Here?
Who Lives Here? is an interactive map of New York City that shows income levels in the various neighborhoods of the city. (thx, tom)
Unassisted home births
Whoa, I had no idea that giving birth at home without a doctor or midwife was a thing that people were doing now.
After giving birth to her first baby in the hospital, Schoenborn, 31, chose to have her next four children at home — by herself. Although her husband was in the house during the births, he didn’t help with the deliveries.
“My hospital births were very managed,” says Schoenborn. “I wanted privacy and to be free of internal exams. I wanted to give birth in an upright position and they want you to lie down. I feel birth is an instinctive process and in the hospital they treat women like they’re broken and birth like an illness.”
David Foster Wallace grammar challenge
From a nonfiction workshop taught by David Foster Wallace at Pomona College, a 10-question grammar worksheet that is titled:
IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER’S PAID YOUR TUITION
Here are the answers and explanations. I think I got 0/10 and am preparing my lawsuit.
Two-Headed Boy
Video of Jeff Mangum of Neutral Milk Hotel singing Two-Headed Boy at the Knitting Factory in NYC on March 7, 1998.
Intensity.
Ken Auletta’s media maxims
From a chapter cut from his book about Google, 25 media maxims from Ken Auletta.
2. Passion Wins
5. A Team Culture is Vital
6. Treat Engineers as Kings
15. Don’t Think of The Web as Another Distribution Platform
19. Paradox: The Web Forges Both Niche and Large Communities
Google DNS
Google announced their public DNS server today. I’m using it right now. There’s been a bunch of speculation as to why Google is offering this service for free but the reason is pretty simple: they want to speed up people’s Google search results. In 2006, Google VP Marissa Mayer told the audience at the Web 2.0 conference that slowing a user’s search experience down even a fraction of a second results in fewer searches and less customer satisfaction.
Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.
Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?
After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
Former Amazon employee Greg Linden backs up Mayer’s claim:
This conclusion may be surprising — people notice a half second delay? — but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
The rise and fall of Design Within Reach
Lawsuits, bad management, and knockoffs, oh my! From Fast Company:
Discontent has steadily grown among formerly stalwart DWR supporters. New York-based textile designer Sandy Chilewich, whose rugs and mats are stocked by DWR ($280 to $600), says she’s considering pulling her business and has been talking with other DWR designers about banding together to “tell them we don’t approve.” Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames and the guardian of their legacy, says, “DWR has been a great ambassador for the Eames story and DWR hasn’t carried knockoff Eames product, but I think one needs to look beyond that. In the long run, we don’t see our authentic product being sold next to knockoff products of any kind.”
Fantasy geopolitics
I can’t remember if it was Bill Simmons or my friend David who wanted a fantasy league for everything, but Sam Arbesman has come up with some ideas about a fantasy league of nations.
How does it work? First, you draft your countries. There are about 200 countries in the world, so in a league of 10 players, each player chooses 15 countries. To keep things fair, there are distribution requirements: There must be at least two countries from each of North America, Europe, Asia, and Africa, and at least one country from each of South America and Oceania. This will prevent a team from loading up on certain areas of the planet. (Another option is to include a GDP cap.)
Web app celebs
I started a bit of stupid fun on Twitter: #webappcelebs. Some of my favorites so far:
Pablo Picasa
Favrd Flav
Eddie Van Hahlo
Bit.ly Houston
daniel craigslist
Paul Reubens on Rails
Keira Writely
Google Lou Reader
Gwyneth Paypaltrow
Sid Del.ico.us (also: Benicio Del.ico.us)
Opera Winfrey
AIM Judy Dench
Wilford Brizzly
Eartha Typekitt
And I can’t find it, but I swear I saw someone do Lucy Hululiu, which seems so much funnier that just Lucy HuLiu for some reason.
Continuity
Continuity is an ingenious little Flash game that is one part side-scroller and one part magic square puzzle. (thx, carl)
Big cities, little states
New-ish thing from fake is the new real: outlines of the 100 most populous areas in the US. Some are cities and some are states.
The fifty largest metro areas (in blue), disaggregated from their states (in orange). Each has been scaled and sorted according to population.
By themselves, the New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago metros are the three most populous areas in the US. (via snarkmarket)
Cities, before and after
Oobject has a collection of before-and-after photographs of cities, most of which have been hit by bombs (economic or otherwise): Hiroshima, Dubai, Warsaw.
Scandalous: fake cheese used at fancy restaurant
But it’s not what you think. At Le Bernardin, one of the highest calibre restaurants in NYC, Eric Ripert and his chefs use “cheap, fake Swiss cheese full of artificial flavors” as a baseline to normalize everyone’s palates so that sauces can be judged fairly in the kitchen.
In terms of flavor, that cheese tastes identical all year long…so it give us a reference, and we can judge fairly.
Cheese. Is there anything it can’t do?
How to revive dry Play-Doh
I tried the messy, tiring, and time-consuming kneading method and the not quite effective leave-it-damp-in-the-container method. After months of tinkering, I have discovered the best and easiest way to restore dry Play-Doh to its perfect state (besides Hasbro’s former suggestion that you buy a new can). Here’s what you do:
1. Break the hard Play-Doh up into pieces the size of shelled peas and put them into a one-quart Ziploc bag.
2. Sprinkle some water in, enough to get all the pieces damp but not enough to leave a lot of excess water. Seal the bag.
3. After a few minutes, smoosh all of the Play-Doh into one corner of the bag. Let it sit this way overnight.
4. Open the bag in the morning and hand the Play-Doh to a delighted toddler. It’s as good as new! (And then rinse the bag for reuse.)
If you liked this, you may enjoy some of my other household hints: how to unshrink a wool sweater, how to make tator tot hotdish, how to make the world’s best pancakes, and how to slow-poach eggs. Look out, Heloise!
Lady Gaga + typeface = awesome
Jesus, this is nerdy (and hilarious): a Lady Gaga parody about a typeface.
(via @caterina)
Updates on previous entries for Dec 1, 2009*
Seeking someone for a December project orig. from Dec 01, 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.
Films that inspired directors
From a book called Screen Epiphanies, a few directors (Danny Boyle, Mira Nair, Martin Scorsese, etc.) share the films that first inspired them. Here’s Lars von Trier on Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon:
Watching Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon is a pleasure, like eating a very good soup. It is very stylised and then suddenly comes some emotion [when the child falls off the horse]. There is not a lot of emotion. There are a lot of moods and some fantastic photography, really like these old paintings.
Thank God he didn’t have a computer. If he had a computer at that time, you wouldn’t care, but you know he has been waiting three weeks for this mountain fog or whatever. It is overwhelming with the boy, because it is suddenly this emotional thing. The character Barry Lyndon is not very emotional. In fact, he is the opposite. He is an opportunist.
I saw the film when it came out. I was in my early twenties. The first time I saw it, I slept. It was on too late and it is a very, very long film. What is interesting is that Nicole Kidman told me Kubrick hated long films. If you have seen Barry Lyndon, the last scene of the film, where she is writing out a cheque for him, is extremely long. It goes on and on and on, but it’s beautiful.
The good thing is that Kubrick always sets his standards. Barry Lyndon to me is a masterpiece. He casts in a very strange way, Kubrick. It is a very strange cast. But that is how the film should be, of course. This thing that he liked short films was very surprising. And he liked Krzysztof Kieslowski very much. He was crazy about Kieslowski.
I don’t know if Kubrick saw any of my films, but I know Tarkovsky watched the first film I did and hated it! That is how it is supposed to be.
“The first time I saw it, I slept” will be my go-to answer for lots of things from now forward.
National borders become natural borders
Because of fences, differing policies, or different cultures, national borders also mark habitat boundaries for animals and plants. More at Edible Geography.
For example, the antlion surplus in Israel can be traced back to the fact that the Dorcas gazelle is a protected species there, while across the border in Jordan, it can legally be hunted. Jordanian antlions are thus disadvantaged, with fewer gazelles available to serve “as ‘environmental engineers’ of a sort” and to “break the earth’s dry surface,” enabling antlions to dig their funnels.
Meanwhile, the more industrial form of agriculture practised on the Israeli side has encouraged the growth of a red fox population, which makes local gerbils nervous; across the border, Jordan’s nomadic shepherding and traditional farming techniques mean that the red fox is far less common, “so that Jordanian gerbils can allow themselves to be more carefree.”
Update: As this satellite view shows, the US-Canada border quite literally forms a line that cuts through the landscape. I had no idea this fenceless border was so visible. (thx, jonathan)
Seeking someone for a December project
I am looking for an intern-type person to work on a project to commence almost immediately and lasting until the end of the year. Basically I have an idea for a thing and I don’t have the time to do it, so I’m looking for someone who wants to own the project and I’ll just be the publisher/overseeing editor/moral support. You need to know how to organize, write fluent English in short bursts, *love* lists, have good “hey, this is cool” spotting instincts, and be generally comfortable with using web publishing tools. PHP skills would be a huge plus. Time involved will vary but will be a few hours a day to start (first 3-5 days) and probably less than an hour a day afterwards, probably something that could be done in the evening if you have a dayjob but are really interested. You can be located anywhere in the world, although if you’re in NYC, I’ll buy you a cup of coffee and we can talk about the project in person.
I can’t offer to pay because while it’s a fun idea, it’s not necessarily a lucrative idea, but you’ll get full credit on the site multiple times and pretty much free reign to do what you’d like within the initial parameters of the project.
Seriously interested? Send me an email (no attachments!) with any information you feel I need to know about you and your abilities/talents/interest level. Thanks!
Update: Wow, what a response! Thanks to everyone who responded for taking the time to reply, but I’ve got enough to choose from for now. I wish I had projects for everybody, you’re a talented and motivated group!
OK Go, WTF
A delightfully low-tech but colorful music video from OK Go. Looks like it was shot it one take.
You may remember OK Go from their famous treadmill video. (thx, mike)
Update: Here’s how they made the video. (thx, everyone)
The H1N1 vaccine manufacturing process
If you missed it last week in the Thanksgiving flurry, here’s my post on how the H1N1 vaccine is made.
The most striking feature of the H1N1 flu vaccine manufacturing process is the 1,200,000,000 chicken eggs required to make the 3 billion doses of vaccine that may be required worldwide.
How to hire programmers
How Aaron Swartz hires programmers.
To find out whether someone’s smart, I just have a casual conversation with them. I do everything I can to take off any pressure off: I meet at a cafe, I make it clear it’s not an interview, I do my best to be casual and friendly. Under no circumstances do I ask them any standard “interview questions” — I just chat with them like I would with someone I met at a party. (If you ask people at parties to name their greatest strengths and weaknesses or to estimate the number of piano tuners in Chicago, you’ve got bigger problems.) I think it’s pretty easy to tell whether someone’s smart in casual conversation. I constantly make judgments about whether people I meet are smart, just like I constantly make judgments about whether people I see are attractive.
(via df)
A world flag
What the world needs is a great flag, a flag of pure bliss. Here’s one of the intermediate steps to the finished product; it’s an average of all the world’s countries’ flags weighted by population.
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