A reporter for the Toronto Star handed out prepaid credit cards to panhandlers and waited to see what happened.
“Can I trust you with this?” I said, handing him a $50 card and telling him to buy what he needs, but that I need it back when he was done. He nodded and scrambled to his feet. He said he would be back in a half-hour.
He came back right on time, slurping from a large McDonald’s soft drink cup — root beer — and with sweat on his brow. He wanted to have pork and rice from a Vietnamese noodle joint on Spadina but they wouldn’t take the card. So, he scrambled to McDonald’s. Lunch was a double quarter-pounder with cheese.
The reporter’s offer was frequently declined, which seems surprising at first. But panhandlers are savvy businesspeople. They didn’t want a short-term and potentially risky venture interfering with their main panhandling income stream. Eyes on the prize. (via the browser)
A year later, Obama’s appointment of Collins seemed an inspired choice. The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government’s expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end. On August 23rd, however, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, halted federal spending for embryonic-stem-cell research, putting hundreds of research projects in limbo and plunging the N.I.H. back into a newly contentious national debate.
This is fantastic: a classically trained voice teacher who knows nothing about metal analyzes five singers from the genre, from Ozzy Osbourne to Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden. Of Dickenson she says:
I have nothing but admiration for this singer. Listen how he starts off with a soft growl, then moves seamlessly into a well-supported, sustained high full-voice sound that then evolves into an effortless long scream! His diction is easily intelligible, regardless of the range he’s singing in or the effect he’s going for. He achieves an intensely rhythmic delivery of the lyrics without losing legato and musical momentum, something a lot of classical singers struggle with, especially when interpreting the many staccato and accent markings that crowd scores by Bellini, Donizetti, etc.
I’m no classically trained anything, but I have been listening to a lot of hard rock and metal from the 70s and 80s lately.1 Out of the context of its time, its genre, and whatever shock value the music held when it was first released, there is some genuinely good music there. (via clusterflock)
[1] Been doing lots of driving this summer and without a working iPod in the car, the rock stations are the only music that Meg and I can both agree on. Well, besides classical or NPR, but those won’t keep the baby quiet the way AC/DC or Skynyrd will. ↩
I remember reading that Greek and Roman statues were originally painted, but I didn’t know that through the use of modern scientific equipment, we actually know how they looked.
It is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons. Instead, I am going to let the readers of this blog see if they can figure out the contribution that each of these ten faces makes.
This 45-minute documentary on Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem is surprisingly powerful and emotional. Give it until 1:45 or so and you’ll want to watch the whole thing. The film is not really about math; it’s about all of those movie trailer cliches — “one man!”, “finds the truth!”, “fights the odds!”, etc. — except that this is actually true and poignant.
14. I don’t care if the restaurant is pouring Chateau Latour into Minnie Mouse mugs, don’t walk into a restaurant carrying your own wine glasses. It’s more pretentious than wearing a monocle and spats.
Leaf.ly is a social media site for pot smokers. You can keep track of all the types of bud you smoke (like Cork’d does for wine), check out the likely effects of smoking a new cannabis strain (these are good if you want to just play video games), and earn Foursquare-style badges. What, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.de wasn’t available?
In a 31-square-mile area in Brazil that is off limits to logging companies, the sole survivor of an uncontacted tribe lives. All by himself.
Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations they’ve encountered, determining those tribes’ fates for them. But Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his choice. They’ve dubbed this the “Policy of No Contact.” After years of often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian represents its most challenging test.
A sad story. But perhaps only to the culturally modern. It’s almost impossible to be alone in today’s world; maybe that’s not such a good thing sometimes. Loneliness on the other hand…200 messages per hour from your Twitter pals still can’t cure that.
Kamikaze pilot Masanobu Kuno wrote a farewell letter to his young son and daughter the day before he flew to his death in the Battle of Okinawa. From the translation:
Your father will become a god and watch you two closely. Both of you, study hard and help out your mother with work. I can’t be your horse to ride, but you two be good friends.
I should have a “crying at work” tag for posts like this.
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.
The note imagery relates to the value of each note:
$1 - The first African American president $5 - The five biggest native American tribes $10 - The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution $20 - 20th Century America $50 - The 50 States of America $100 - The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Needs more guilloche but other than that: fire up the presses.
This series of videos from the NY Times is called The Beauty of the Power Game and I can’t tell if they are cheap & exploitive or beautiful & revealing. They show women tennis players hitting shots in slow motion. The one of Victoria Azarenka is the best by far…the camera pans up her body slowly, showing first her footwork, then the pivot, backswing, intense focus of the eyes, swing, and finally the followthrough.
On Dec 13, 2006, the sun itself provided a crucial clue, when a solar flare sent a stream of particles and radiation toward Earth. Purdue nuclear engineer Jere Jenkins, while measuring the decay rate of manganese-54, a short-lived isotope used in medical diagnostics, noticed that the rate dropped slightly during the flare, a decrease that started about a day and a half before the flare.
If this apparent relationship between flares and decay rates proves true, it could lead to a method of predicting solar flares prior to their occurrence, which could help prevent damage to satellites and electric grids, as well as save the lives of astronauts in space.
The decay-rate aberrations that Jenkins noticed occurred during the middle of the night in Indiana — meaning that something produced by the sun had traveled all the way through the Earth to reach Jenkins’ detectors. What could the flare send forth that could have such an effect?
Jenkins and Fischbach guessed that the culprits in this bit of decay-rate mischief were probably solar neutrinos, the almost massless particles famous for flying at nearly the speed of light through the physical world — humans, rocks, oceans or planets — with virtually no interaction with anything.
Maybe the science part of 2012 wasn’t so far-fetched after all. (No, not really.)
In blind soccer, there are five on each side, a goalie and four outfield players. The goalie can be sighted or visually impaired and must stay in his designated goalie box. His teammates, meanwhile, wear eye shields so as to take away any competitive advantage from those players that may have limited vision over those who have no sight whatsoever. There are no throw-ins, as there is a wall surrounding the shrunken (at least, by typical soccer standards) playing field, and each team has someone calling out instructions from behind one of the goals. The players can call each other either by name or by shouting “Yeah!” And when you’re approaching to engage another player to steal the ball, you must shout “Voy!” — Spanish for I’m here! That means that you’ve got to discern the voice of your teammates — since everyone on the pitch is yelling “Yeah!” — and have a sense of where you are with the ball (which contains ball bearings, to help with tactility on the foot) in relation to the goal.
If 4chan’s anonymity is good for anything, it turns out, it’s good for lulz. Consider, Poole explains, how the fixed identities in other online communities can stifle creativity: where usernames are required (whether real or pseudonymous), a new user who posts a few failed attempts at humor will soon find other users associating that name with failure. “Even if you’re posting gold by day eight,” says Poole, “they’ll be like, ‘Oh, this guy sucks.’” Names, in other words, make failure costly, thus discouraging even the attempt to succeed. By the same token, namelessness makes failure cheap — nearly costless, reputation-wise, in a setting like 4chan, where the Anonymous who posted a lame joke five minutes ago might well be the same Anonymous who’s mocking it hilariously right now. And as the social-media theorist Clay Shirky has suggested in another context (explaining how the plummeting costs of networked collaboration encourage, say, a thousand open-source software projects to launch for every one that gets anywhere), the closer a community gets to “failure for free,” the better its chances of generating success.
Privately held Trader Joe’s is highly secretive and doesn’t do interviews, so Fortune did some digging around to see what makes the retail chain such a success.
A ringing bell instead of an intercom signals that more help is needed at the registers. Registers don’t have conveyor belts or scales, and perishables are sold by unit instead of weight, speeding up checkout. Crew members aren’t told the margins on products, so placement decisions are made based not on profits but on what’s best for the shopper. Every employee works all aspects of the store, and if you ask where the roasted chestnuts are he’ll walk you over instead of just saying “aisle five.” Want to know what they taste like? He can probably tell you, and he might even open the bag on the spot for you to try.
Customer service, pay people well, and trust them to do good work. That and be clever about what you sell and to whom.
In my view, however, Tutankhamun’s health was compromised from the moment he was conceived. His mother and father were full brother and sister. Pharaonic Egypt was not the only society in history to institutionalize royal incest, which can have political advantages. But there can be a dangerous consequence. Married siblings are more likely to pass on twin copies of harmful genes, leaving their children vulnerable to a variety of genetic defects. Tut ankhamun’s malformed foot may have been one such flaw. We suspect he also had a partially cleft palate, another congenital defect. Perhaps he struggled against others until a severe bout of malaria or a leg broken in an accident added one strain too many to a body that could no longer carry the load.
It’s likely that Tut’s wife was his half-sister as well.
And the thing is spinning the whole time? What I don’t understand is how he manages to suspend the laws of physics only within his personal space…it’s not like audience members are floating away or anything. (via mathowie)
The Dallas Observer has collected a few clips from movies where the music has been replaced by Cee-Lo’s Fuck You. The Dirty Dancing one is probably the best:
I wonder how the slow-dance scene at the end of Rushmore would work. Or the Enchantment Under the Sea Dance in Back to the Future. Audio NSFW. (via @erikmal)
The traffic jam has sparked some entrepreneurial spirit for local residents, which has added to traffic-hostages’ annoyance. One truck driver complained that vendors were selling instant noodles for “four times the original price while I wait in the congestion.”
Tom Vanderbuilt, who wrote the book on traffic, notes that the jam is on its way to becoming a small settlement. (via mr)
Uh oh, this one is going to be a big timesink. Timetub? Timelake? Anyway, try out Solipskier and feel the rest of your day slipping away. My top so far: 18.7 million…I got a lot better once I tried it on the iPad. (via waxy)
Somehow it became NSFW day here at kottke.org. So we’re rolling with it, in the hay. Here’s the Tron version of the Kama Sutra. It is so very NSFW even though everyone stays fully clothed in glowing blue garments.
Nick Gleis shoots the interiors of corporate jets owned by African dictators and other heads of state. I couldn’t decide which jet interior was the gaudiest, but this one is definitely a contender because of the classy naked ladies on the wall of the bedroom.
Who knew that African dictators were so nostalgic for the set design of Star Trek: The Next Generation?
Great song by Cee-Lo, who you may know as one half of Gnarls Barkley.
NSFW in both the visual and audio departments for extensive use of the phrase “fuck you”.
I love Anil’s comment that the video is “a little bit Tobias, and a little bit Sasha”. And indeed the typeface in the video is Champion Gothic, designed by Tobias Frere-Jones’ partner, Jonathan Hoefler.
Some were “sinkers”: Those who crave the sensation of being mired in deep mud, the suction that’s created when you step into water-logged clay. The stories they post to the group message boards-which have flourished over the past 15 years- suggest a shared spirit of adventure. Last summer, one quicksand fan set up a collaborative Google map for sinking holes, which now has more than 100 sites marked around the world-from the tidal muds near San Diego, Calif., to the loamy bogs of Finland. (Holes are assigned a score from 1 to 10, depending on amenities like privacy, depth, thickness, and available parking.)
Edwards is a different kind of quicksand fan, though. He has no interest in getting muddy himself-he’s more a looker than a doer, someone who likes to see pictures and film-clips of other people being submerged. Not every looker has the same tastes: Edwards calls himself a knees-to-waist kind of guy; others prefer someone stuck to the armpits; and still more are into “grim endings”-where the sinker disappears below the surface in a trail of mud bubbles. (Headfirst sinkings appeal to a small but dedicated minority.)
Watching this sewing machine animation, I feel like Homer Simpson when he first saw the drinking bird. It’s sewing the thread!
I could watch that all day. Many similar animations are available here, including the Wankel engine, a reciprocating steam engine, and the fascinating Maltese cross mechanism. (via jorn)
The beer-like way of serving champagne was found to impact its concentration of dissolved CO2 significantly less. Moreover, the higher the champagne temperature is, the higher its loss of dissolved CO2 during the pouring process, which finally constitutes the first analytical proof that low temperatures prolong the drink’s chill and helps it to retain its effervescence during the pouring process.
If you are filming a Girls Gone Wild video or are in the late stages of a wedding reception, pouring champagne directly into a person’s mouth is also an effective bubble-preservation technique. (via @matthiasrascher)
Take a little time with this one, zoom it in and out, especially on big cities. Excluding everything but the labels from the map emphasizes the Powers of Ten-like design of highly effective zoomable online maps. (via waxy)
Yakuza 3 is a video game about the Japanese gangsters (known as Yakuza). Boing Boing sent someone to put the game in front of three actual yakuza to see what they thought of it.
Of the three reviewers, only Kuroishi manages to play it all the way to the end. Two of the three are missing their pinkies — in the old days, when a yakuza or his subordinates screwed up, they chopped off pinkies as an act of atonement — and this seems to affect their gameplay.
The game got high marks overall.
M: The corporate yakuza guys get a thumbs up for realism. Nice suit. Smart. Financially savvy. Obsessed with money. Sneaky and conniving. Ruthless. S: There are a lot of guys whom I feel like I know. The dialogue is right too. They sound like yakuza. K: Braggarts, bullies, and sweet-talkers. I agree — it feels like I know the guys on the screen. M: Kiryu is the way yakuza used to be. We kept the streets clean. People liked us. We didn’t bother ordinary citizens. We respected our bosses. Now, guys like that only exist in video games. S: I don’t know any ex-yakuza running orphanages. K: There was one a few years ago. A good guy. M: You sure it wasn’t just a tax shelter? K: Sure it was a tax shelter but he ran it like a legitimate thing. You know.
Back in the late 90s, Club New York was one of the hottest clubs in the city, even though it sounds like some sort of fictional club in the direct-to-DVD Night at the Roxbury 2
Then, one wintry evening in 1999, Diddy, J-Lo, and Shyne were at the club when all hell broke loose. Guns were pulled, women were shot in the face, and when all the dust settled, Shyne and Diddy were on trial at Manhattan Criminal Court
Diddy was acquitted, while Shyne was sent to prison for 9 years.
National Geographic’s front cover is a great example of how well simple branding can be tied to a product or message. In this case, the slightly warm yellow has become a symbol of wonderful photography, intriguing articles and serves as a doorway into places worlds away.
Cardullo centers the conversation around Truffaut’s first feature film, “The 400 Blows,” the overwhelming success of which, in 1959, was a key moment in the launching of the French New Wave. As such, he gets Truffaut to talk about what went into the beginning of his career and how his filmmaking process was influenced by his years of work as a film critic and his lifelong obsession with watching movies.
Patrick Calello tells the story of how Automoblox (a wooden car toy) came about. Lots of business lessons to be gleaned from this one.
Mr. Ling, one of the partners from the injection molding factory, picked up Henry and me at our hotel. Henry was quick to inform Mr. Ling that he did not speak Cantonese, the local language. This deception positioned Henry as a spy for me, pretending to not understand the conversations between my agent, Lenny, the molder, Mr. Ling, and the tool maker. After a short while, Henry pulled me aside and advised me to get my business out of Swift Tread as swiftly as possible. He overheard the toolmaker tell Mr. Ling that there was nothing else he could do to adjust the mold. Henry also learned that my agent, Vinnie — who was supposed to have my interests at heart — was really protecting the interests of the molder.
My three-year-old son has four Automoblox cars. He loves them and plays with them as much as all his other toys and books combined. (via hello typepad)
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