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The Raiders organization welcomed sixth-round draft choice Travis Goethel Wednesday and said the Arizona State linebacker would more than likely be asked to start as a Bay-area Realtor by the beginning of next season.
Watch as some Dutch marines board a container ship that had been hijacked by Somali pirates. The footage is from a camera mounted on one of the marines’ helmets.
A librarian’s view of working the book cart at Rikers Island.
Getting books back from the prisoners and letting them pick out new ones is a bit of controlled chaos. We stood outside the iron door to the house with our cart and had two prisoners come out at one time, check off their returned book, and pick out a new one. Each prisoner is allowed one book and one magazine. The most popular books are by far James Patterson’s novels, so popular in fact that we have to lock them up after book service because they tend to disappear. I wonder if James Patterson has any idea. National Geographic is the magazine of choice, and there is an entire box of them to choose from, some as far back as the early 80’s.
(via the browser)
It’s no secret that I could watch food-sorting robots all day. This salami sorter is no exception:
The good stuff starts around 55 seconds.
Courtship and marriage opportunities for young black women in America have been affected by the number of incarcerated young black men.
Between the ages of 20 and 29, one black man in nine is behind bars. For black women of the same age, the figure is about one in 150. For obvious reasons, convicts are excluded from the dating pool. And many women also steer clear of ex-cons, which makes a big difference when one young black man in three can expect to be locked up at some point. Removing so many men from the marriage market has profound consequences. As incarceration rates exploded between 1970 and 2007, the proportion of US-born black women aged 30-44 who were married plunged from 62% to 33%.
Using clever editing transitions, this video takes the viewer around the world in just 80 seconds.
Things that make it seem like you don’t really care about the issue of water management & scarcity at your conference about the future: 1. provide the participants on the water scarcity panel with Fiji bottled water.
Fiji, need we remind you, is an island where water supplies are scarce and locals have struggled to find clean, reliable supplies of drinking water. Meanwhile, Fiji Water owns the rights to the island’s largest underground aquifer, drawing water into its diesel-fueled factory and bottling it using heavy-weight plastic. All this makes having Fiji Water at a panel about “the most creative solutions being attempted to meet the water challenge in the United States and around the world” hard to swallow.
Or so says Errol Morris. It’s certainly the most honest advertising I’ve ever seen.
A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a crescent wrench five times and my wife’s boyfriend broke my jaw with a fence post. So if you don’t buy a trailer from me, it ain’t gonna hurt my feelings. So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home. Or don’t. I don’t care.
(via fimoculous)
There are likely several “Foursquare for X” apps out there (and many more to come), but I thought Miso was pretty interesting. From Cinematical:
Instead of checking in to a location (though you can do that too, if you link your existing Foursquare account), you check in with what you’re watching. Miso keeps track of your check-ins and rewards you with badges relating to specific genres (and sub-genres) of film and television. Link your Twitter or Facebook, and suddenly, you’re posting what you’re watching with friends and seeing what movies they’re watching as well. Genius.
iPhone/iPad-only for now.
A letter from Steve Jobs about why they don’t allow Flash on iPhones, iPods, and iPads. (Notice he specifically uses the harsher “allow” instead of the much softer “support”.)
Though the operating system for the iPhone, iPod and iPad is proprietary, we strongly believe that all standards pertaining to the web should be open. Rather than use Flash, Apple has adopted HTML5, CSS and JavaScript — all open standards. Apple’s mobile devices all ship with high performance, low power implementations of these open standards. HTML5, the new web standard that has been adopted by Apple, Google and many others, lets web developers create advanced graphics, typography, animations and transitions without relying on third party browser plug-ins (like Flash). HTML5 is completely open and controlled by a standards committee, of which Apple is a member.
Jobs sort of circles around the main issue which is, from my own perspective as heavy web user and web developer: though Flash may have been necessary in the past to provide functionality in the browser that wasn’t possible using JS, HTML, and CSS, that is no longer the case. Those open web technologies have matured (or will in the near future) and can do most or even all of what is possible with Flash. For 95% of all cases, Flash is, or will soon be, obsolete because there is a better way to do it that’s more accessible, more open, and more “web-like”.
Jordan Matter’s Dancers Among Us series features dancers from the Paul Taylor and Martha Graham Dance Companies doing everyday out-and-about things in NYC while dancing. (via pdn)
Oh, man. Now you can play the original Super Mario Bros game as Link from Zelda, Mega Man, Samus Aran, and others. Really really fun. The only thing that could make this better is if you could play as NHL94’s Jeremy Roenick or Tecmo Bowl’s Bo Jackson. (thx, will)
IANAHRSYMMV**, but here are some well-known English language logos redesigned and translated into Hebrew language logos. Nice student work from a class taught by Oded Ezer.
** I am a not a Hebrew reader so your mileage may vary.
David Graeber has been researching the history of money and debt for a book he’s writing. This abbreviated version of his findings makes for really interesting reading.
However tawdry their origins, the creation of new media of exchange — coinage appeared almost simultaneously in Greece, India, and China — appears to have had profound intellectual effects. Some have even gone so far as to argue that Greek philosophy was itself made possible by conceptual innovations introduced by coinage. The most remarkable pattern, though, is the emergence, in almost the exact times and places where one also sees the early spread of coinage, of what were to become modern world religions: prophetic Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Jainism, Confucianism, Taoism, and eventually, Islam. While the precise links are yet to be fully explored, in certain ways, these religions appear to have arisen in direct reaction to the logic of the market. To put the matter somewhat crudely: if one relegates a certain social space simply to the selfish acquisition of material things, it is almost inevitable that soon someone else will come to set aside another domain in which to preach that, from the perspective of ultimate values, material things are unimportant, and selfishness — or even the self — illusory.
You aren’t going to believe the opening credit sequence for Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void (make sure you can hear the sound too):
Really well done but there’s a 95% chance you’ll hate this. Ok, more like 98%. Reminds me of the still-brilliant trailer for A Clockwork Orange…but what a difference the music makes. (thx, jim)
The big difficulty with sous vide cooking at home is keeping the cooking temperature constant. Traditionally that has meant expensive emersion circulators with built-in heaters, although the price is down to $450 for the Sous-Vide Supreme. If only you could find something that insulated the water so that it stayed at a uniform temperature while cooking…
Fill up your beer cooler with water just a couple degrees higher than the temperature you’d like to cook your food at (to account for temperature loss when you add cold food to it), seal your food in a plastic Ziplock bag, drop it in, and close your beer cooler until your food is cooked.
Oh, and it’ll work on camping trips as well (as long as you take your thermometer along).
Kevin Fanning has worked in HR for the past 9 years so he’s dispensed a lot of job search advice to friends over the years. Now he’s collected all that knowledge into a new book called Let’s All Find Awesome Jobs.
Whenever someone I knew was engaged in a job search, I would do whatever I could to be helpful. Tell them about the mistakes I’d seen, tell them what common pitfalls to avoid. They said my feedback was helpful, so I started writing it down. I collected it into a PDF that circulated amongst my friends for a few years. I kept adding to it, and eventually it became this book.
Eight bucks via Paypal. See also Job Interview Questions I Hope They Don’t Ask Tomorrow and A Great Job Opportunity.
Frito-Lay wants to change the shape of the salt they put on their potato chips to increase the surface area exposed to taste buds and therefore decrease the amount of salt needed on each chip.
“Early on in our research, it became apparent that the majority of salt on a snack doesn’t even have time to dissolve in your saliva because you swallow it so rapidly,” explained Mehmood Khan, senior vice president and chief scientific officer and a former Mayo Clinic endocrinologist. A Wall Street Journal story later reported only about 20 percent of the salt on a chip dissolves on the tongue, and the remaining 80 percent is swallowed without contributing to taste.
I’m confused as to why “an understanding of crystal chemistry” is necessary. Why couldn’t they just crush/grind the salt into a fine powder instead? Are the cubic crystals still too big even when crushed?
This is a photographic print made by briefly exposing photosensitive paper to the light from a laptop screen and then developing the paper. No camera needed.
The creator calls prints like these Laptopograms. Here’s the code for the “shutter”:
#!/bin/sh
vbetool dpms on ; sleep 2.0; sudo vbetool dpms off
Ideas for further exploration: make prints of screen-specific subjects (desktop, web sites, email inbox, etc.) and hi-res wallet-sized prints using the iPhone.
Here’s European airspace shutting down as the ashcloud from Eyjafjallajokull drifts over the continent:
The music is an inspired choice. And here’s European airspace starting back up again:
(via infosthetics)
Marina Abramović Made Me Cry is the Tumblr blog of the moment.
Abramovic sits at a table in silence, and museum guests can sit across from her and stare. Some people couldn’t handle the heat.
In a re-read of Orwell’s Animal Farm, Christopher Hitchens notices that there’s no Lenin pig.
The social forces represented by different animals are easily recognisable — Boxer the noble horse as the embodiment of the working class, Moses the raven as the Russian Orthodox church — as are the identifiable individuals played by different pigs. The rivalry between Napoleon (Stalin) and Snowball (Trotsky) ends with Snowball’s exile and the subsequent attempt to erase him from the memory of the farm. Stalin had the exiled Trotsky murdered in Mexico less than three years before Orwell began work on the book.
After posting the Apple stock purchase vs. Apple product purchase thing this afternoon, I thought, hey, Microsoft’s stock went up a bunch after Windows 95 came out so I’ll figure out how much the software’s purchase price would be worth in Microsoft stock today. The answer was not very exciting as you can see from this graph courtesy of Google Finance:
Since the Windows 95 launch, Microsoft’s stock has only (only!) quadrupled in value while Apple’s stock has increased by more than 24 times. 24 times! That kind of growth is remarkable for a company that had already been public for 15 years and, everyone assumed, had already been through their boom time. Of course, what goes up can easily come down…
I stuck Google in there for good measure. It doesn’t show as much growth as you’d think because GOOG’s IPO-day closing price made it a very large company from the start…the chart hides Google’s pre-IPO growth in value. But still, look at how much Apple’s stock price has grown in comparison to Google’s since the latter’s IPO. (For fun, add Yahoo into the mix and dial the graph back to 1996.)
Oyster is a hotel review site. By far the best feature is that they take their own photos of the hotel rooms and facilities; the photos taken by the hotels make everything look bigger (wide-angle lenses) and brighter (professional lighting) than they usually are. (via svn)
Despite having no natural enemies and belonging to a species that completely dominates its ecosystem, local IT manager Reggie Atkinson opted to consume the processed corn snack Bugles Monday.
Another bullseye by The Onion.
In 2001, a PowerBook G4 would have set you back $3500. Suppose instead that you had purchased $3500 in Apple stock instead of the computer…that stock would now be worth about $110,000. Even an original iPod’s worth in AAPL ($399) would be worth almost $12,000 today.
Longform.org is collecting some of the best long-form journalism available on the web. See also Instapaper’s editor’s picks and @longreads on Twitter. (thx, yehuda)
Shouldn’t the HDR Hole actually extend below the baseline? Larger version is here. See also Clayton Cubitt’s three-step guide to photography:
01: be interesting. 02: find interesting people. 03: find interesting places. Nothing about cameras.
(via clusterflock)
The view is from one of the cameras close to the engines. The narration is great; you really get a sense of how many things had to be considered to make it to the Moon (like the launch pad paint that burned and charred in order to protect the underlying materials). (via df)
In defense of print orig. from Apr 23, 2010
Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in Tom Hanks movies orig. from Apr 21, 2010
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
There are a ridiculous number of microbes in the Earth’s oceans.
During an 11 month study in 2007, scientists sequenced the genes of more than 180,000 specimens from the Western English Channel. Although this level of sampling “far from exhausted the total diversity present,” they wrote, one in every 25 readings yielded a new genus of bacteria (7,000 genera in all).
That’s genus, not species. Kevin Kelly translates:
This suggests there is a long tail of life in bacteria, with a few species super-abundant, but many many species with very thin populations. At the far end of the tail there may be a billion species with only a few individuals. […] And like other kinds of long tails, the sum of all these small bits total up to exceed the sum of individuals in the most popular species. As the microbiologists involved in the Census of Marine Life like to say, this survey reveals life’s “hidden majority.”
Today only, the usually $499 DNA test from 23andMe is only $99. Ship your spit off and in a few weeks, you’ll receive information about your ancestry, health risks, and so on.
DNA testing for $100! Stick that in your flying car’s tailpipe and smoke it!
Apparently Fortune magazine had never heard of Chris Ware or had not seen any of his stuff or was not aware of his worldview before getting him to do a cover for the magazine. So of course he turned in something like this (the whole thing, larger):
and they rejected it. (via object of my obsession)
The Bloomberg administration is considering splitting 34th Street into three parts: an westbound-only section from the Hudson to 6th Ave, an eastbound-only section from 5th Ave to the East River, and a pedestrian-only section from 5th to 6th Aves.
Buses would still operate in both directions, and through the pedestrian plaza as well, but in dedicated lanes separated from passenger cars by a concrete barrier. […] A city study showed that only one in 10 people travel along 34th Street by car, including taxis; the rest walk or use mass transit. Faster buses would benefit “the majority of the people who are actually using the street”.
Wow!
At a recent talk, Dave Eggers again rose to the defense of newspapers and, more generally, to print on paper as a medium for communication.
“It’s too exciting and distracting online,” Eggers said. While print — especially long-form print — encourages hunkering down and cuddling up, online journalism fosters a kind of low-grade, perpetual ADD. Online, “there’s always some button that wants you to click to cat porn,” he said, as the audience laughed. “You try to read something, and it’s flashing, it’s telling you to go somewhere else.”
(via bobulate)
Update: The audio and transcript of the full interview are available on the On The Media site. (thx, michael)
Moleskine recently introduced a notebook for recipes.
Fully embossed cover, 3 ribbon place markers and double expandable inner pocket. Informative pages: food calendars, food facts, measurements and conversions. 6 theme-based sections to fill in: appetizers, first courses, main dishes, side dishes, desserts, cocktails. 6 tabbed sections to personalize and 16 blank pages in which to unleash your passion’s creativity.
The art of sitting orig. from Apr 22, 2010
Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in Tom Hanks movies orig. from Apr 21, 2010
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
No time is wasted. The bullet train is moving all the time. If there are 30 stations between Beijing and Guangzhou, just stopping and accelerating again at each station will waste both energy and time. A mere 5 min stop per station (elderly passengers cannot be hurried) will result in a total loss of 5 min x 30 stations or 2.5 hours of train journey time!
Factor in slowdown/speedup time and it’s even longer. (thx, nick)
Over at Playgrounder, I shared some of our family’s favorite gear for kids.
An improvised toy: Old Fashioned Quaker Oats canister ($4). You know, the big can. Buy it, eat oatmeal for months, and then give it to your kid when you’re done with it. It’s a drum, a car garage, a cave, a shaker, a block carrier, a hat, an echo chamber, a steam roller, a doll’s bed, and flower pot. Basically the perfect cheap, replaceable, recyclable, open-ended toy.
We love these in our household. My wife was howling with laughter at the Shoe Dini commercial just last night…the “problem” was that if you bent over to put on your shoes, your shirt would get wrinkled. Oh, the humanity. (thx, mark)
At the behest of MoMA, photographer Marco Anelli has been taking photographs of all the people participating in Marina Abramović’s performance in the main atrium of the museum and posting them to Flickr. To review:
Abramović is seated in [the atrium] for the duration of the exhibition, performing her new work The Artist Is Present for seven hours, five days a week, and ten hours on Fridays. Visitors are invited to sit silently with the artist for a duration of their choosing.
The photographs are mesmerizing…face after face of intense concentration. A few of the participants even appear to be crying (this person and this one too) and several show up multiple times (the fellow pictured above sat across from Abramović at least half-a-dozen times). The photos are annotated with the duration of each seating. Most stay only a few minutes but this woman sat there for six and a half hours. This woman sat almost as long as was also dressed as the artist. (It would be neat to see graphs of the durations, both per day and as a distribution.)
Has anyone out there sat across from Abramović? Care to share your experience? (via year in pictures)
Update: On the night of the opening exhibition, the third person to sit across from Abramović was her ex-boyfriend and collaborator of many years, Ulay (pictured here on Flickr). James Wescott reports on the scene:
When she looked up again, sitting opposite her was none other than Ulay. A rapturous silence descended on the atrium. Abramović immediately dissolved into tears, and for the first few seconds had trouble meeting Ulay’s calm gaze. She turned from superhero to little girl — smiling meekly; painfully vulnerable. When they did finally lock eyes, tears streaked down Abramović’s cheeks; after a few minutes, she violated the conditions of her own performance and reached across the table to take his hands. It was a moving reconciliation scene — as Abramović, of course, was well aware.
Here’s a description of one of the projects they did together in the 70s:
To create this “Death self,” the two performers devised a piece in which they connected their mouths and took in each other’s exhaled breaths until they had used up all of the available oxygen. Seventeen minutes after the beginning of the performance they both fell to the floor unconscious, their lungs having filled with carbon dioxide. This personal piece explored the idea of an individual’s ability to absorb the life of another person, exchanging and destroying it.
Wescott also sat across from the artist:
I was immediately stunned. Not by the strength of her gaze, but the weakness of it. She offered a Mona Lisa half-smile and started to cry, but somehow this served to strengthen my gaze; I had to be the mountain.
Carolina Miranda sat down across from Abramović:
When I finally sat down before Abramovic, the bright lights blocked out the crowd, the hall’s boisterous chatter seemed to recede into the background, and time became elastic. (I have no idea how long I was there.)
Amir Baradaran turned the exhibition into a venue for a performance of his own…he even made Abramović laugh. Joe Holmes got a photo of the photographer in action. (thx, yasna & patrick)
Update: The look-alike who sat with Abramović all day did an interview with BOMBLog.
At certain times I thought that we were really in sync. Other times I didn’t. Other times I was totally hallucinating. She looked like a childhood friend I once had. Then she looked like a baby. […] I thought time was flying by. Then time stopped. I lost track of everything. No hunger. No itching. No pain. I couldn’t feel my hands.
Update: Author Colm Tóibín sat opposite Abramović recently (here he is on Flickr) and wrote about it for The New York Review of Books. (thx, andy)
Update: Singer Lou Reed sat. (thx, bob)
Update: Rufus Wainwright sat. And perhaps Sharon Stone? (via mefi)
Update: More first-hand accounts from the NY Times.
Update: And CNN’s Christiane Amanpour. (thx, ian)
The Beauty of Maps is a BBC series that “[looks] at maps in incredible detail to highlight their artistic attributions and reveal the stories that they tell”. The site also links to another maps blog: Amazing Maps. (via junk_deluxe)
Eddie Feibusch opened his Manhattan zipper store on December 7, 1941 and is still plying his trade there, even after most of his competition has decamped for cheaper overseas locations.
How great are zippers? Don’t even get Mr. Feibusch started. They are watertight for deep-sea divers, airtight for NASA. “Nothing replaces a zipper,” he said. Buttons? He made a face. “A button is unpleasant,” he said.
Feibusch will even sell you a 30-foot-long zipper for $100…to wrap your hot-air balloon up. (via girlhacker)
Do movie actors exist in the worlds of the movies they star in?
You ever think about how in, like, a Tom Hanks movie, everyone lives in a reality in which there’s no such person as Tom Hanks? Because otherwise, people would be mistaking the main character for Tom Hanks all the time? So either Tom Hanks doesn’t exist in the world the movie takes place in, or he does exist but he looks like someone else?
Charlie Kaufman probably has a half-written screenplay about this stuffed in a drawer somewhere. (via jimray)
Update: Dozens reminded me that the “lookie loo with a bundle of joy” scheme in Ocean’s 12 involved the pregnant Tess Ocean character (played by Julia Roberts) looking like the movie star Julia Roberts. Several other people cited this scene in The Last Action Hero. And in Take Her, She’s Mine, character played by Jimmy Stewart is repeatedly mistaken for the famous actor, Jimmy Stewart. (thx, all)
Update: TV Tropes has many many examples of this phenomenon, which they call the Celebrity Paradox. (thx, joe)
This story is so crazy I don’t even know where to start. For one thing, Jure Robic sleeps 90 minutes or less a day when competing in ultracycling events lasting a week or more…and goes crazy, like actually insane, during the races because of it. Because he’s insane, his support crew makes all the decisions for him, an arrangement that allows Robic’s body to keep going even though his mind would have told him to quit long ago.
His system is straightforward. During the race, Robic’s brain is allowed control over choice of music (usually a mix of traditional Slovene marches and Lenny Kravitz), food selection and bathroom breaks. The second brain [AKA his support team] dictates everything else, including rest times, meal times, food amounts and even average speed. Unless Robic asks, he is not informed of the remaining mileage or even how many days are left in the race. “It is best if he has no idea,” Stanovnik says. “He rides — that is all.”
During one race, Robic hallucinated that mujahedeen on horseback were pursuing him; his support team pretended to see them too and urged Robic to outrun them. Read the whole thing…this is an awesome and disturbing story. A recent episode of Radiolab on Limits has more info.
When I pointed to the last week’s news that the SEC was suing Goldman Sachs for fraud, several people pointed me to an episode of This American Life that ran a couple of weeks ago.
A hedge fund named Magnetar comes up with an elaborate plan to make money. It sponsors the creation of complicated and ultimately toxic financial securities… while at the same time betting against the very securities it helped create. Planet Money’s Alex Blumberg teams up with two investigative reporters from ProPublica, Jake Bernstein and Jesse Eisinger, to tell the story. Jake and Jesse pored through thousands of pages of documents and interviewed dozens of Wall Street Insiders. We bring you the result: a tale of intrigue and questionable behavior, which parallels quite closely the plot of a Mel Brooks musical.
The allegation against Magnetar is that they helped create extremely risky CDOs, bought the worst part (the lowest tranche) of those CDOs for a little money, and then bought a bunch of insurance against the CDOs for a lot of money. The CDOs were basically built to fail and when they did, Magnetar lost a little money on their purchase but made a bunch more from the insurance. Pro Publica has the whole story.
Scott Berkun transcribed some of the more interesting points of a video interview with Ed Catmull done during an Economist conference last month.
[At Pixar] there is very high tolerance for eccentricity, very creative, and to the point where some are strange… but there are a small number of people who are socially dysfunctional [and] very creative — we get rid of them. If we don’t have a healthy group then it isn’t going to work. There is this illusion that this person is creative and has all this stuff, well the fact is there are literally thousands of ideas involved in putting something like this together. And the notion of ideas as this singular thing is a fundamental flaw. There are so many ideas that what you need is that group behaving creatively. And the person with the vision I think is unique, there are very few people who have that vision.. but if they are not drawing the best out of people then they will fail.
The video is embedded in Berkun’s post as well. (via sippey)
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