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Entries for September 2010
Journalism in the age of data
A 50-minute documentary on information visualization and its use in journalism.
Lots of kottke.org regulars in there…Fry, Wattenberg, Koblin, Felton, Stamen, etc. And Amanda Cox sounds like Sarah Vowell!
No more nuclear bombs
Richard Rhodes recently gave a Long Now talk called The Twilight of the Bombs about the future obsolescence of nuclear weaponry. From Stewart Brand’s summary of the talk:
How much did the Cold War cost everyone from 1948 to 1991, and how much of that was for nuclear weapons? The total cost has been estimated at $18.5 trillion, with $7.8 trillion for nuclear. At the peak the Soviet Union had 95,000 weapons and the US had 20 to 40,000. America’s current seriously degraded infrastructure would cost about $2.2 trillion to fix — all the gas lines and water lines and schools and bridges. We spent that money on bombs we never intended to use — all of the Cold War players, major and minor, told Rhodes that everyone knew that the bombs must not and could not be used. Much of the nuclear expansion was for domestic consumption: one must appear “ahead,” even though numbers past a couple dozen warheads were functionally meaningless.
Fallon and Timberlake give rap history lesson
This is the best thing you’ll see all day. Please just watch:
The Beastie Boys and Eminem stuff killed me. Who knew Fallon could sing? (via @hodgman)
Potential Earth-like exoplanet discovered
A team of scientists has discovered a potentially habitable planet located about 20 light years from Earth.
The paper reports the discovery of two new planets around the nearby red dwarf star Gliese 581. This brings the total number of known planets around this star to six, the most yet discovered in a planetary system other than our own solar system. Like our solar system, the planets around Gliese 581 have nearly circular orbits.
The most interesting of the two new planets is Gliese 581g, with a mass three to four times that of the Earth and an orbital period of just under 37 days. Its mass indicates that it is probably a rocky planet with a definite surface and that it has enough gravity to hold on to an atmosphere, according to Vogt.
Gliese 581, located 20 light years away from Earth in the constellation Libra, has a somewhat checkered history of habitable-planet claims. Two previously detected planets in the system lie at the edges of the habitable zone, one on the hot side (planet c) and one on the cold side (planet d). While some astronomers still think planet d may be habitable if it has a thick atmosphere with a strong greenhouse effect to warm it up, others are skeptical. The newly discovered planet g, however, lies right in the middle of the habitable zone.
Sam Arbesman’s prediction of May 2011 might have been too conservative. And 20 light years…that means we could send a signal there, and if someone of sufficient technological capability is there and listening, we could hear something back within our lifetime. Contact! (thx, jimray)
On talent
From a list of rules for young photographers, a definition of talent:
Talent is not when your friends tell you they love your work, but when people who don’t like you have to admit it’s good.
Using that definition, it’s interesting that you can’t figure out whether you’re any good or not from your 300 friends on Facebook, the 23 people who liked your Tumblr post, the 415 people you follow on Twitter, or the 15 people who faved your Flickr photo.
The Master of Blue Jeans
Huh. The word “denim” comes from “serge de Nîmes”, a fabric made in Nîmes, France, and “blue jeans” comes from “Bleu de Genes”, blue pants made in Genoa (aka Genes). Both cities claim to have been manufacturing denim for centuries, but there has never been much proof in the way of artifacts and such. So the recent discovery of several paintings from the mid-1600s depicting people wearing jeans is surprising. Look at this jean jacket:
He’s even got his collar popped.
New Apollo 11 footage
Due to the Moon’s relative position in the sky as Neil Armstrong started his moonwalk, Australia was able to capture the first few minutes of his descent down the ladder before NASA was able to find a signal. But it was lost until recently; the restored footage will be shown next week at an event in Sydney.
Play Asteroids on any web page
This bookmarklet will let you play Asteroids on any web page…the enemies are the images, text, and videos on the page. You can click here to play right now on this very page. (Arrows to move, spacebar to fire, the score is in the lower right corner.) It’s pretty satisfying to blow the kottke.org front page to bits. Someone should make a multiplayer version so that everyone currently visiting a page can all play together. (thx, cary)
Obama, the Rolling Stone interview
Long interview with Barack Obama in Rolling Stone. Most of it is politics, but they also discussed music.
My iPod now has about 2,000 songs, and it is a source of great pleasure to me. I am probably still more heavily weighted toward the music of my childhood than I am the new stuff. There’s still a lot of Stevie Wonder, a lot of Bob Dylan, a lot of Rolling Stones, a lot of R&B, a lot of Miles Davis and John Coltrane. Those are the old standards.
A lot of classical music. I’m not a big opera buff in terms of going to opera, but there are days where Maria Callas is exactly what I need.
Thanks to Reggie [Love, the president’s personal aide], my rap palate has greatly improved. Jay-Z used to be sort of what predominated, but now I’ve got a little Nas and a little Lil Wayne and some other stuff, but I would not claim to be an expert. Malia and Sasha are now getting old enough to where they start hipping me to things. Music is still a great source of joy and occasional solace in the midst of what can be some difficult days.
On opinions
Robin Hanson lists 20 reasons why your opinions “function more to signal loyalty and ability than to estimate truth”.
2. You have little interest in getting clear on what exactly is the position being argued.
9. You find it easy to conclude that those who disagree with you are insincere or stupid.
16. Your opinion doesn’t much change after talking with smart folks who know more.
(via mr)
Crazy car driving skills
This is Ken Block practicing a sport called gymkhana, which is sort of the Mario Kart version of rodeo barrel racing.
The build-up is way too long…the good stuff starts at about 1:10 and the crazy-ass shit starts at 3:00. The move right at three minutes in is just absolutely fantastic as is the 360 sliding thing he does through a building. (via clusterflock)
There’s no “u” in social media
Dan Catt has written part one of a users guide to websites. It explains why sites with “social” features are so difficult to scale beyond a few hundred users and the necessary compromises made that piss off the sites’ vocal power users. Excellent stuff.
That cool “user-who-did-x-also-did-y” feature was calculated whenever you visited your homepage. This worked for the 500 initial users (the site’s builders and their friends) but started to take too long when they hit 1,000 users.
The site solved this by caching (storing the results for an amount of time) the calculations. The users complained that they were being shown incorrect data because everyone they knew was doing stuff all the time and it wasn’t updating fast enough.
The site solved this by invalidating (removing the stored results so they need to be recalculated) the cache whenever anyone did anything. The site hits 5,000 users and the cache is being invalidated every sodding second … the homepage takes too long to load.
The site solves this by writing their own custom code for managing off-line tasks and puts everything into a task queue to be processed.
98% of users accept that the section that used to be called “What your friends are doing right now” gets changed to “What your friends have recently been doing”. The other 2% of users throw a tantrum and accuse the site of being run by useless gibbering idiots.
Faith and knowledge
The Pew Research Center recently ran a religious knowledge survey in the US and the results show that atheists and agnostics know more about religion than adherents of various Judeo-Christian religions.
On average, Americans correctly answer 16 of the 32 religious knowledge questions on the survey by the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religion & Public Life. Atheists and agnostics average 20.9 correct answers. Jews and Mormons do about as well, averaging 20.5 and 20.3 correct answers, respectively. Protestants as a whole average 16 correct answers; Catholics as a whole, 14.7. Atheists and agnostics, Jews and Mormons perform better than other groups on the survey even after controlling for differing levels of education.
You can take a sample survey here. Woo, 15/15. (via mr)
True Grit by the Coen brothers
Coming this Christmas from the Coen brothers, a remake of the John Wayne classic, True Grit. Here’s the trailer:
(via devour)
1997 Royal Navy Field Gun Competition
This might not sound like much, but you need to watch this video of the 1997 Royal Navy Field Gun Competition. In it, two teams compete to navigate themselves and a cannon through an obstacle course: over walls, across chasms, and through small gaps in walls.
The strength and coordination displayed here is amazing…it’s like watching NFL linemen do ballet. (via migurski)
2010 MacArthur fellows
…aka, the genius grant. Among them are type designer Matthew Carter and David Simon, creator of The Wire. The fellows get $500,000, no strings attached.
Kanye West + Tracy Jordan
One of last week’s top tweets made this observation:
Put “Liz Lemon,” in front of Kanye’s tweets and he becomes Tracy Jordan. “Liz Lemon, I wonder what happened to my antique aquarium.”
Tom Armitage knocked up a Kanye Jordan Twitter account so you don’t even need to work at imagining. The results are often sublime. (via jimray)
Ikea cookbook
Ikea is coming out with a cookbook — the name translates as “Homemade is Best” — and the photography looks great.
On scientific journalism
This is a blog post that links to a news website article about a scientific paper. The pullquote explains it so I don’t have to bother:
In this paragraph I will state the main claim that the research makes, making appropriate use of “scare quotes” to ensure that it’s clear that I have no opinion about this research whatsoever.
In this paragraph I will briefly (because no paragraph should be more than one line) state which existing scientific ideas this new research “challenges”.
If the research is about a potential cure, or a solution to a problem, this paragraph will describe how it will raise hopes for a group of sufferers or victims.
And then I’ll make a little joke about one of the study’s possible conclusions. (via someone who actually found the thing and sent it on to this lazy “curator”)
Jure Robic, RIP
Jure Robic, the world-class ultra-endurance cyclist I wrote about earlier this year, was killed in a traffic accident in his native Slovenia late last week. He died as he lived: on his bike. (thx, @ddewey and several others)
Twenty-nine years alone
Robert King spent 29 years in prison in solitary confinement for a crime for which he was later cleared.
It was a dimly lit box, 9ft by 6ft, with bars at the front facing on to the bare cement walls of a long corridor. Inside was a narrow bed, a toilet, a fixed table and chair, and an air vent set into the back wall.
Some days I would pace up and down and from left to right for hours, counting to myself. I learned to know every inch of the cell. Maybe I looked crazy walking back and forth like some trapped animal, but I had no choice — I needed to feel in control of my space.
See also Atul Gawande’s piece about solitary from the New Yorker last year.
New Yorker iPad app
The New Yorker now has an iPad app available for download. Jason Schwartzman explains:
The NYer app is modeled after the Wired app. The app is free but each new issue is $4.99. Current magazine subscribers appear to have no option but to buy a completely separate issue if they wish to read the magazine on the iPad. As a subscriber, what exactly am I paying for if I already have the content in magazine form? Is the $4.99 simply a convenience fee?
Rotting food time lapse
A 13-day time lapse video of food rotting.
If you want to lose weight, I’d suggest the time lapse maggots diet where you watch this video everytime you feel hungry. (via devour)
Reddit FTW
Look out Digg and 4chan, here comes Reddit! Or more accurately, Reddit has been been here for awhile, why have we been ignoring it?
Both of these sites are being replaced by Reddit, a four-year-old news forum with far more educated, better-behaved users than either, but with a culture that somehow rides the middle between Digg’s slavery to the mainstream tastes of America’s teen males and 4chan’s obsession with inscrutable in-jokes and anti-humor.
Reddit got almost 300 million pageviews in July, compared to the 200 million Digg views in July that Digg founder Kevin Rose reported on his blog. So says an infographic posted on Reddit by Alexis Ohanian, one of the site’s founders, who also asks why the media continually call Reddit “tiny” and “dwarfed” by Digg. What’s more, traffic at Reddit, according to their Google Analytics, is up 24% in the last two months.
Putting your hand in the Large Hadron Collider
Several physicists weigh in on what would happen if you were to place your hand in the proton stream of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN.
There’s not a definite answer…the responses range from “nothing” to “you’d die for sure, instantly”.
Parting the Red Sea, a scientific explanation
Using computer modeling of a process called wind setdown, researchers have come up with a plausible scientific explanation of the Biblical parting of the Red Sea.
This animation shows how a strong east wind over the Nile Delta could have pushed water back into ancient waterways after blowing for about nine hours, exposing mud flats and possibly providing an overland escape route similar to the biblical account of the Red Sea parting.
The reluctant father
Photographer Phillip Toledano didn’t particularly want to be a father. But then he and his wife had a daughter.
Loulou seemed like such an alien thing, that the first time I heard her sneeze, I was filled with joy.
It was the first human thing I’d seen her do that made any sense to me.
Imagine listening to someone speaking a foreign language, and then suddenly you hear the word “McDonald’s.”
I was somewhat of a reluctant father as well. I think it’s ok to feel that this stranger in your life maybe isn’t the greatest thing ever. Newborns are hard; you do feel like chucking them out the window at times. Your interaction with others, especially with your spouse, becomes weird and one-sided and not at all about your needs and desires. But that’s how it is…you fake it ‘til you make it. Of course, I love my kids to pieces now and it’s difficult to remember when that wasn’t the case.
The case against pennies
Man, that guy really hates pennies, aka “disgusting bacteria-ridden disks of suck that fail to facilitate commerce”.
Five best movie villains of the 2000s
Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is on the list…click through for the rest. (via @tcarmody)
NYC maps exhibition
Starting tomorrow and continuing through November, Pratt Manhattan Gallery has an interesting show about maps and NYC. Among the works displayed will be:
- a three-dimensional map of the lower Manhattan skyline made of a Jell-O-like material by Liz Hickok
- a “Loneliness Map” from Craigslist’s Missed Connections by Ingrid Burrington
- personal maps created from a call for submissions by the Hand Drawn Map Association
- Bill Rankin’s maps of Not In My Back Yard-isms showcasing various geographies of community and exclusion
- a scratch-and-sniff map of New Yorkers’ smell preferences by Nicola Twilley
Opening reception is tonight from 6-8. (via edible geography)
Floating nuclear power stations
Russia is building eight floating nuclear power stations for deployment in the Arctic Ocean to support their efforts to drill for oil near the North Pole.
He says each power station, costing $400m, can supply electricity and heating for communities of up to 45,000 people and can stay on location for 12 years before needing to be serviced back in St Petersburg.
And while initially they will be positioned next to Arctic bases along the North coast, there are plans for floating nuclear power stations to be taken out to sea near large gas rigs.
“We can guarantee the safety of our units one hundred per cent, all risks are absolutely ruled out,” says Mr Zavyalov.
Yeah, what could possibly go wrong? (via @polarben)
Listen to This
Speaking of Steven Johnson and new books, Alex Ross has a post about how Johnson’s long zoom concept has influenced his music writing *and* has a new book of his own out soon called Listen to This (at Amazon). See how deftly I knitted that together in a Johnsonian way? Ahem. Anyway, here’s what Listen to This is about:
It offers a panoramic view of the musical scene, from Bach to Björk and beyond. In the Preface, I say that the aim is to “approach music not as a self-sufficient sphere but as a way of knowing the world.” I treat pop music as serious art and classical music as part of the wider culture; my hope is that the book will serve as an introduction to crucial figures and ideas in classical music, and also give an alternative perspective on modern pop.
The best part is that Ross’ web site contains an extensive collection of audio, video, and images of the works mentioned in the book.
Where Good Ideas Come From
Steven Johnson’s new book, Where Good Ideas Come From, comes out in a couple weeks. As in many of Johnson’s previous books, place plays a starring role — Interface Culture was set in cyberspace, Emergence talked extensively about cities, The Ghost Map’s epicenter was a water pump on Broad St. in London, and Mind Wide Open mapped out our brain space. In Where Good Ideas Come From, Johnson steps back to ask: what is the relationship between place and ideas? What are the attributes common to places in which innovation happens? The trailer for the book explains further.
I’ve read the book and the last chapter’s discussion of market/non-market environments & individual/network approaches in relation to innovation is alone worth the price of purchase, nevermind that the rest of it is interesting as well. Heck, even the appendix is fascinating; it contains a chronology of the key human inventions and innovations from 1400 to the present that is difficult to put down.
Jon Stewart in profile
From New York magazine a couple of weeks ago, a profile of serious funnyman Jon Stewart.
Stewart made himself into the leading critic and satirist of the media-political complex, starting with “Indecision 2000,” The Daily Show’s parody of that year’s presidential campaign. His comedy is counterprogramming-postmodern entertainment but with a political purpose. As truth has been overrun by truthiness and facts trampled by lies, he and The Daily Show have become an invaluable corrective-he’s Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, although in keeping with the fragmented culture, he’s trusted by many fewer people, about 1.8 million viewers each night. Years ago, Stewart lost out to Conan O’Brien and Jimmy Kimmel for late-night network jobs, but the shifting media fortunes have made him the long-run winner, with vastly more job security and cultural influence than his conventional talk-show competitors-and most conventional journalists.
How Shazam works
Every time I use Shazam, it feels like magic. Here’s how they make the magic happen.
The Shazam algorithm fingerprints a song by generating this 3d graph, and identifying frequencies of “peak intensity.” For each of these peak points it keeps track of the frequency and the amount of time from the beginning of the track. Shazam builds their fingerprint catalog out as a hash table, where the key is the frequency. When Shazam receives a fingerprint like the one above, it uses the first key (in this case 823.44), and it searches for all matching songs.
A movie that tells time
Christian Marclay is working on a 24-hour film called The Clock.
“The Clock” is a montage of clips from several thousand films, structured so that the resulting artwork always conveys the correct time, minute by minute, in the time zone in which is it being exhibited. The scenes in which we see clocks or hear chimes tend to be either transitional ones suggesting the passage of time or suspenseful ones building up to dramatic action. “If I asked you to watch a clock tick, you would get bored quickly,” explains the artist in remarkably neutral English. “But there is enough action in this film to keep you entertained, so you forget the time, but then you’re constantly reminded of it.”
Love that Marclay. Back when I was still doing 0sil8 — man, what a time capsule that is — one of the projects that I started working on but never got close to finishing was a clock made up of photographs…1440 photographs, one for each minute of the day.
The end of recaps
Over at The Awl, Robert Lanham recaps a Three’s Company episode from season 7 called Chrissy’s Cousin.
Next week, we have a very tough decision to make since two Richard Chamberlain miniseries, “Shogun” and “The Thorn Birds,” will be premiering opposite “Three’s Company” on the two other channels. Decisions, decisions.
Repeat, on the two other channels. (This just in: get off my lawn!)
Giant centipede catches bat!
I’m just gonna go ahead and be crass…this is some crazy-ass shit right here. Watch as a foot-long centipede catches and eats a bat.
Nature wins again! Make sure you have the audio on…the sound of the walking centipede will give you a bad case of the willies.
How popular song factories manufacture a hit
Maybe you thought this was going to be about how Dr. Luke has produced some of the catchiest tunes in recent memory (Since U Been Gone, Tik Tok, I Kissed a Girl, Girlfriend, Right Round, California Gurls). But that headline is actually from the NY Times Sunday Magazine a hundred years ago.
That sort of song could never have become popular. You couldn’t expect the messenger boy and the shopgirl to take a very keen interest in Evangeline’s wendings when they led to nowhere. The masses need something more direct — something with a more human appeal. One of the chief secrets of popular song writing is to tell a simple story and to tell it completely.
At that time no attempt was made to cater to the musical tastes of the people. It was not supposed that they had any. Almost the only approach to popular ballads were a few well-worn war songs and plantation ditties. But two or three American song writers were trying to get a hearing with the kind of appeal to the people which in England, where the music halls afforded a ready avenue for reaching the masses, had been successfully made for many years.
Vulcan hoodie
Veer’s KERN zip-up has some competition for the nerdiest use of a zipper in fashion: the Vulcan hand sign hoodie from Threadless:
Thermos to the Moon
Have you ever thought about a rocket as a giant flying Thermos bottle? You will now:
Lovely bit of production there as well. (via russell davies)
Sending their love and cigarettes down the well
The continued reports from Chile about those miners trapped in the mine are kind of fascinating. Here’s an article about the battle between the miners and the doctors, psychologists, and government officials attempting to manage them from afar.
In an effort to dominate the miners, the team of psychologists led by Mr Iturra has instituted a series of prizes and punishments. When the miners behave well, they are given TV and mood music. Other treats — like images of the outside world are being held in reserve, as either a carrot or a stick should the miners become unduly feisty.
In a show of strength, the miners have at times refused to listen to the psychologists, insisting that they are well. “When that happens, we have to say, ‘OK, you don’t want to speak with psychologists? Perfect. That day you get no TV, there is no music — because we administer these things,’” said Dr Diaz. “And if they want magazines? Well, then they have to speak to us. This is a daily arm wrestle.”
(via mr)
And on the sixth day, Lucas created Chewbacca
Ok, so this is about how George Lucas came up with idea of Chewbacca (hint: he basically stole it from someone else) and yes it’s a bit inside-baseball but it’s also a great illustration of how the creative process works and the difficulty of explaining how the magic happened even after the fact.
And that’s what this post it about; the creative process. Cultural touchstones like Star Wars might seem to have sprung fully formed from the minds of their lauded creators, but as in all creative endeavours, movie making, web design or this very post, nothing could be further from the truth. Creation is a process, and strangely, by looking at how everyone’s favority plush first-mate sprang into existance, we can learn a lot about any collaborative creative endeavour.
Also, the name of Lucas’ dog was Indiana.
Donkey Kong record falls again
Steve Wiebe has reclaimed the high score on the planet’s collective Donkey Kong arcade machine; he’s the third player to hold the top spot this year.
Wiebe last held the Donkey Kong record in spring of 2007, only to be bested by his movie rival Billy Mitchell months later. Mitchell’s score fell to New York’s Hank Chien in March of this year, but the Florida hot sauce distributor regained the title on July 31 with a score of 1,062,800 points.
You may recall Weibe’s battle with Mitchell in King of Kong.
Rough seas
This is footage from a camera on board a cruise ship from when some rough weather hit.
On August 1, the Pacific Sun ran into a heavy storm 400 miles north of New Zealand, hitting 25-foot-tall waves and 50-knot winds. Its 1732 passengers weren’t prepared to endure the madness that ensued. Absolutely crazy.
(via clusterflock)
CAPTCHA advertising
People need to pay attention to CAPTCHAs to complete all sorts of tasks on the web…so why not make the CAPTCHA an advertisement?
“Ads are just getting bigger and louder as attention online is getting so scarce,” said Solve Media CEO and founder, Ari Jacoby. “So we’re fishing where the fish are,” he said, referring to this untapped space where users are forced to spend time.
That’s brilliant. Evil brilliant, but still. (via @sippey)
iPad wine list
Restaurants using wine lists on the iPad are reporting increased sales; one restaurant says sales are up 11%.
Mr. Kendall, 43, described himself as a bit of a wine poseur. He has vacationed in Italy and Napa Valley and has a cellar at home, but he cannot remember a label from meal to meal. He knows just enough, or perhaps just little enough, to become suspicious whenever a waiter recommends a vineyard he does not know.
“In the back of your mind,” he said, “you’re always thinking: ‘O.K., is this some kind of used-car special? Did they just get 200 bottles of this?’ “
But Mr. Kendall said the ratings he found on the iPad — by the wine writer Robert M. Parker Jr. — carried credibility. He decided that the price of the cabernet franc was justified by Mr. Parker’s award of 92 points out of 100. “I found a bottle of wine that I never would have tried, and it was wonderful,” he said.
Bouncing baby bombs
This little guy is a newborn uncontrolled nuclear fisson reaction. You know, an atomic bomb.
This is from a NY Times photo slideshow of atomic bomb explosions. Check out the school bus sequence starting at slide #14.
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