Paris vs New York
The Paris vs New York blog presents a series of illustrated comparisons between the two cities: macaroons vs. cupcakes, baguette vs bagel, and espresso vs American coffee:
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Entries for October 2010
The state of iPad magazines
Fresh off several years as Design Director of nytimes.com, Khoi Vinh gives his opinion of the current batch of iPad magazine apps. I think he’s right on.
My opinion about iPad-based magazines is that they run counter to how people use tablets today and, unless something changes, will remain at odds with the way people will use tablets as the medium matures. They’re bloated, user-unfriendly and map to a tired pattern of mass media brands trying vainly to establish beachheads on new platforms without really understanding the platforms at all.
The fact of the matter is that the mode of reading that a magazine represents is a mode that people are decreasingly interested in, that is making less and less sense as we forge further into this century, and that makes almost no sense on a tablet. As usual, these publishers require users to dive into environments that only negligibly acknowledge the world outside of their brand, if at all - a problem that’s abetted and exacerbated by the full-screen, single-window posture of all iPad software. In a media world that looks increasingly like the busy downtown heart of a city - with innumerable activities, events and alternative sources of distraction around you - these apps demand that you confine yourself to a remote, suburban cul-de-sac.
The first vending machine
When would you guess the world’s first vending machine was invented? Probably 1880 or thereabouts. Not a bad guess:
It was not until the early 1880s that the first commercial coin-operated vending machines were introduced for public use. These vending machines were found in London and dispensed post cards. Around the same time, Richard Carlisle, an English publisher and bookshop owner, invented a vending machine that dispensed books. Vending machines finally made their United States debut in 1888 when the Thomas Adams Gum Company installed machines on subway platforms in New York City that vended Tutti-Frutti gum.
But as with so many other things, the Greeks got there first. A holy water-dispensing vending machine was described by Hero of Alexandria in the first-century A.D.:
A person puts a coin in a slot at the top of a box. The coin hits a metal lever, like a balance beam. On the other end of the beam is a string tied to a plug that stops a container of liquid. As the beam tilts from the weight of the coin, the string lifts the plug and dispenses the desired drink until the coin drops off the beam.
Airport security: the Dick-Measuring Device or molestation?
Jeffrey Goldberg on the TSA’s new security theater measures, including pat-downs that are so humiliating and uncomfortable that people won’t mind using the scanning machine that shows them naked.
I asked him if he was looking forward to conducting the full-on pat-downs. “Nobody’s going to do it,” he said, “once they find out that we’re going to do.”
In other words, people, when faced with a choice, will inevitably choose the Dick-Measuring Device over molestation? “That’s what we’re hoping for. We’re trying to get everyone into the machine.” He called over a colleague. “Tell him what you call the back-scatter,” he said. “The Dick-Measuring Device,” I said. “That’s the truth,” the other officer responded.
The pat-down at BWI was fairly vigorous, by the usual tame standards of the TSA, but it was nothing like the one I received the next day at T.F. Green in Providence. Apparently, I was the very first passenger to ask to opt-out of back-scatter imaging. Several TSA officers heard me choose the pat-down, and they reacted in a way meant to make the ordinary passenger feel very badly about his decision. One officer said to a colleague who was obviously going to be assigned to me, “Get new gloves, man, you’re going to need them where you’re going.”
The agent snapped on his blue gloves, and patiently explained exactly where he was going to touch me. I felt like a sophomore at Oberlin.
Big orange ball
What is this, do you think? Electron microscope photo of pollen? Infrared tennis ball? Mars? The inside of a baseball?
It’s actually a photo of the Sun taken at the H-alpha wavelength by an amateur astronomer.
Even more parkour on a skateboard
I know, I know, shut up already with the parkour and the skateboarding but this is worth watching:
The blooper reel at the beginning is entertaining (MOTHERFRICKER!), but final trick is the best one. (thx, cary)
The perfect poached egg
Kenji Lopez-Alt learns the secret to the perfectly poached eggs at Maialino. They basically use the Momofuku slow-poach technique and then finish in a simmering water bath.
The Super Mario Bros infinite 1-up
In a recent interview for the 25th anniversary of Super Mario Bros., Mario’s baby daddy Shigeru Miyamoto revealed that the infinite 1-up trick was included in the game on purpose but that the minus world was a bug.
“We did code the game so that a trick like that would be possible,” Miyamoto revealed. “We tested it out extensively to figure out how possible pulling the trick off should be and came up with how it is now, but people turned out to be a lot better at pulling the trick off for ages on end than we thought.” What about the famed Minus World? “That’s a bug, yes, but it’s not like it crashes the game, so it’s really kind of a feature, too!”
Explain the internet to a 19th century British street urchin
If you ever find yourself time travelling back to Victorian England, here’s a handy flowchart that will help you explain the internet to the youth of the era.
Robot beanbag hand can grip anything
I am unclear on exactly how this works, but it does work amazingly well.
The gripper uses the same phenomenon that makes a vacuum — packed bag of ground coffee so firm; in fact, ground coffee worked very well in the device. But the researchers found a new use for this everyday phenomenon: They placed the elastic bag against a surface and then removed the air from the bag, solidifying the ground coffee inside and forming a tight grip. When air is returned to the bag, the grip relaxes.
(thx, phil)
Complexity and the fall of Rome
In Jospeh Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies, the author argues that the fall of Rome happened because “the usual method of dealing with social problems by increasing the complexity of society [became] too costly or beyond the ability of that society”. Basically when Rome stopped expanding its territory, the fallback was relying solely on agriculture, a relatively low-margin affair.
The distances, now no longer adjacent to easily accessible coastline, were making the cost of conquest prohibitive. More to the point, the enemies Rome faced as it grew larger were vast empires themselves and were more than capable of defeating the Roman legions.
It was at this point that Rome had reached a turning point: no longer would conquest be a significant source of revenue for the empire, for the cost of further expansion yielded no benefits greater than incurred costs. Conjointly, garrisoning its extensive border with its professional army was becoming more burdensome, and more and more Rome came to rely on mercenary troops from Iberia and Germania.
The result of these factors meant that the Roman Empire began to experience severe fiscal problems as it tried to maintain a level of social complexity that was beyond the marginal yields of it’s agricultural surplus and had been dependent upon continuous territorial expansion and conquest.
Hopefully I don’t have to draw you a picture of how this relates to large bureaucratic companies.
Avatar sequels
James Cameron has announced that there will be not one but two sequels to Avatar, scheduled for 2014 and 2015.
Tiny catapult for throwing pies at bees
First there was the mini cannon. Now someone has built a tiny catapult to hurl 3mm-wide pies at bees and other insects. No, seriously! Here’s the slow motion evidence. (thx, liz)
People are awesome
A bunch of people doing amazing things on bikes, on skates, on skis, in wheelchairs, on skateboards, throwing balls, kicking balls, hitting balls, flipping over, and sliding around.
Maybe you’ve figured this out much quicker than I have, but I realized recently that one of the “topics” I cover here on kottke.org is “people are awesome” and “look at all the amazing things we can do that we’ve never done before”. And it’s not just videos like the one above where people perform physical feats of obvious novelty and amazement. It’s also kids from the projects making the cover of Fortune magazine, scientists building a tiny sun in California, inventing 3-D printers for human tissue, making wonderfully creative design and objects, drilling through entire mountain ranges with massive drills, quietly but completely changing how people think about space and time, writing books that inspire people to be more awesome, landing on the Moon, and so on and so on. (via devour, which is also awesome)
Sterling’s Gold
On Mad Men this season, Roger Sterling writes a book called Sterling’s Gold. And behold, that book is available for pre-order on Amazon in the real world.
Advertising pioneer and visionary Roger Sterling, Jr., served with distinction in the Navy during World War II, and joined Sterling Cooper Advertising as a junior account executive in 1947. He worked his way up to managing partner before leaving to found his own agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, in 1963.
During his long and illustrious career, Sterling has come into contact with all the luminaries and would-be luminaries of the advertising world, and he has acquired quite a reputation among his colleagues for his quips, barbs, and witticisms.
Taken as a whole, Roger Sterling’s pithy comments and observations amount to a unique window on the advertising world — a world that few among us are privileged to witness first-hand — as well as a commentary on life in New York City in the middle of the twentieth century.
Who knows what the book will actually be, and I thought it was a hoax at first, but Grove Press is putting this thing out so who knows.
Long reads
Nice, the @longreads Twitter account now has a web site serving as a repository of all the long-form journalism it links to. You can filter by article length and time-to-read.
Jay-Z’s empire
If this profile of Jay-Z in the WSJ is any indication, the guy doesn’t seem to have any problems anymore.
In his office, by a coffee table stacked with art books (Damien Hirst, Ed Ruscha), his Forbes magazine and a humidor, he perches on the edge of a chair with his fingers tucked into his pockets. He says he’ll always rap about variations on the same themes: drug hustling, business boasts, luxury hopscotching from Gucci to Louis Vuitton to the new Dior suit he says is a perfect fit. They’re all narrative devices:
“I’m just describing a scene, but the crux of the story is the message. Almost like a movie. Setting: South of France. This is what’s happening. This guy from out the projects who didn’t graduate from high school is now living this sort of life. And this is how he got here.”
Charlie Chaplin’s time traveller
Mesmerizing Zapruder-esque footage that seems to show a woman talking on a mobile phone at the 1928 premiere of a Charlie Chaplin film at Mann’s Chinese Theatre.
According to this guy, the simplest explanation is that the woman is a time traveller. Stick that in your Occam’s razor and shave it! (via geekologie)
Bieber, Gaga, and Netflix: Internet heavyweights
Justin Bieber uses 3% of Twitter’s infrastructure. Netflix Instant accounts for 20% of all non-mobile internet usage in the US during prime time. Now David Galbraith has done some back-of-the-envelope calculations that show Lady Gaga racking up a big bandwidth bill for Google:
My rough estimate: Lady Gaga has cost Google 10 petabytes in bandwidth same as 10,000 text messages for everyone on earth. If Lady Gaga’s Google bandwidth was charged at what ATT charges for SMS, it would have cost: 10.5 trillion dollars.
The rate for SMS messaging is obscene but the real money is in ink cartridges, right? Apparently not. HP’s basic black inkjet cartridge is available at Amazon for the astounding price of $29 and will print 495 pages. Assuming 250 words per page and six characters per word (five char/word + one space), 10 petabytes of text messages would cost only $503 billion to print out (excluding paper costs, which would add ~$89 billion to the total). Who knew that texting was more expensive than inkjet printing by a factor of 20?
The physics of everyday life
Christoph Niemann hits another one out of the park with an illustrated look at the how physics governs everything we do in life.
I loved his idea for calorie-neutral foods:
All you need is to freeze a pint of ice cream to -3706 F. The energy it will take your system to bring the ice cream up to a digestible temperature is roughly 1,000 calories, neatly burning away all those carbohydrates from the fat and sugar. The only snag is the Third Law of Thermodynamics, which says it’s impossible to go below -459 F. Bummer.
New male sartorial technology messes shit up
Mary HK Choi observes that NYC’s men have suddenly learned how to dress and now she can’t tell who’s who anymore, socioeconomically speaking.
I can’t figure out how old anyone is. I can’t figure out how gay anyone is. On silent subway morning commutes there are no tells. The brogues, desert boots and quickstrike high-tops not only have me manic-fantasy-banging every well-dressed dude on the F BECAUSE IT IS ALL SO GODDAMN GOOD but the fact that so many are suddenly well shod plus the prevalence of hard-bottoms straight CRIPPLES my ability to tell how rich anyone is. And that is fucking my game up major. Aaaaaaaaaand everyone’s watch is now the old timey Timex from J.Crew for $150 so yeah, 360 IDK. Plus, also, seriously, there must have been some clandestine colloquium workshop situation where all the dudes in all the land shucked to skivvies and got sized for their perfect pair of Uniqlo jeans and nobody said “no homo,” not even one time, because, Hi, y’all all look fantastic FUCK YOU.
Sicha and pals are Awl in (and other puns)
Nice little piece by David Carr in the NY Times about The Awl, a small batch blogging concern owned and operated by Choire Sicha, Alex Balk, and David Cho.
“My friends keep talking to me about how they want to start a Web site, but they need to get some backing, and I look at them and ask them what they are waiting for,” Mr. Sicha said. “All it takes is some WordPress and a lot of typing. Sure, I went broke trying to start it, it trashed my life and I work all the time, but other than that, it wasn’t that hard to figure out.”
Mini cannon will explode your tiny mind
Consider your day incomplete until you have witnessed the awesome power of this homemade mini cannon.
Cute boom! See also part one, which features the cannon being packed with gunpowder. (via devour)
Sherlock!
The BBC aired a new adaptation of Sherlock Holmes this summer called, simply, Sherlock. The three 90-minute episodes are set in the present day (which could have been cheesy but isn’t) and make for some really good television. American audiences can find all three episodes on Masterpiece Mystery on PBS starting this week:
Starring Benedict Cumberbatch (Atonement, The Last Enemy) in the title role, Martin Freeman (The Office, UK) as Dr. John Watson and Rupert Graves (God on Trial, The Forsyte Saga) as Inspector Lestrade, Sherlock premieres on Masterpiece mystery! on Sundays, October 24, 31, and November 7, 2010 at 9pm ET on PBS (check local listings).
In with three criminally clever whodunits, A Study in Pink (October 24), The Blind Banker (October 31) and The Great Game (November 7), consulting detective Sherlock Holmes teams up with former army doctor John Watson to solve a dizzying array of crimes with his signature deductive reasoning. From the writers of Doctor Who, Sherlock is co-created and written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat.
Worth seeking out, especially if you get PBS in HD (here’s the opening title sequence). If you miss it, the series is also available on Blu-ray and DVD on Nov 9.
Tony Wilson’s headstone
A beautiful tribute designed by Peter Saville and Ben Kelly, friends and collaborators of Wilson’s.
Shakespeare in the original pronunciation
Quite a bit is known about how English was spoken back when Shakespeare wrote his plays but productions of his plays using the original pronunciation (OP) are quite rare. Now a University of Kansas theater professor and his students are putting on a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream in the OP.
“American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels,” Meier said. “The original pronunciation performance strongly contrasts with the notions of precise and polished delivery created by John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier and their colleagues from the 20th century British theater.”
Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that “haven’t worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.) magically restored, as Bottom, Puck and company wind the language clock back to 1595.”
“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”
Here’s a sample of what to expect:
(via the history blog)
Di Fara pizza documentary
Inspiring short documentary about Dom DeMarco, owner/operator of, some say, the best pizzeria in NYC.
DeMarco doesn’t measure any of the ingredients for the dough; he just eyeballs it and can tell when the dough is right.
Back to the McIntosh
New York magazine has compiled a visual list of 28 varieties of apple grow in NY state, including many you may not have heard of before. The lumpy Calville Blanc d’Hiver, anyone?
This amazing apple has three times the vitamin C of other apples and nearly half as much vitamin C as an orange. Use Calville Blanc d’Hiver apples for fresh eating out of hand, or baked in any cooked apple desert. It also makes a sprightly apple juice and hard cider. This apple is the French choice for tarte aux pommes and unlike its rival, the legendary English Bramley, Calville Blanc holds its shape when cooked.
How Facebook decides what to show you
Thomas Weber attempted to reverse engineer the algorithm that Facebook uses for its “Top News” feed and learned some very interesting things about what Facebook chooses what to show (and not show) their users.
1. Facebook’s Bias Against Newcomers. If there’s one thing our experiment made all too clear, it’s that following 500 million people into a party means that a lot of the beer and pretzels are already long gone. Poor Phil spent his first week shouting his updates, posted several times a day, yet most of his ready-made “friends” never noticed a peep on their news feeds. His invisibility was especially acute among those with lengthy, well-established lists of friends. Phil’s perpetual conversation with the ether only stopped when we instructed our volunteers to interact with him. A dynamic which leads to…
2. Facebook’s Catch-22: To get exposure on Facebook, you need friends to interact with your updates in certain ways (more on that below). But you aren’t likely to have friends interacting with your updates if you don’t have exposure in the first place. (Memo to Facebook newcomers: Try to get a few friends to click like crazy on your items.)
This bit at the end is particularly interesting:
All the while, Facebook, like Google, continues to redefine “what’s important to you” as “what’s important to other people.” In that framework, the serendipitous belongs to those who connect directly with their friends in the real world-or at least take the time to skip their news feed and go visit their friends’ pages directly once in a while.
NYC subway photos, 1917-present
Slideshow of almost 100 years of photography of the NYC subway system by the NY Times.
The caption for the photo above reads:
1940: In a view north from 106th Street, only the supports of the old Ninth Avenue elevated line remained as the push to go underground continued.
Gorgeous Black Swan movie posters
That one is the best of the lot, but the others are great as well. (via matt)
Parkour on rollerblades
This is Mathieu Ledoux doing things on rollerblades that you ain’t ever seen before.
See also yesterday’s parkour on a skateboard, parkour on a bike, parkour with ladders, proto parkour, and just plain old parkour. (thx, @eastofwabansia and sam)
The Hobbit is moving forward
Alright, the film adaptation of The Hobbit is moving forward. After Guillermo Del Toro stepped down as director a few months ago, I heard that Jackson was set to direct and that’s what’s happening. They’ve also cast the perfect Bilbo: Martin Freeman. Freeman was Tim on The Office, Arthur Dent in the Hitchhiker’s movie, and John Watson in the excellent new Sherlock series.
Prime ministers I have known
Unless you’re from the UK (or watched Spitting Image and all sorts of other British comedies on PBS as an impressionable youth in Wisconsin), the observations of Parliamentary sketchwriter Simon Hoggart about the prime ministers he has covered might be too inside baseball, but I couldn’t help sharing this Thatcher anecdote about her unwitting skill with double entendre:
But Thatcher saved the best of all for her victory tour of the Falkland Islands. She was taken to inspect a large field gun, basically a ride-on lawnmower with a barrel several feet long. It was on a bluff, overlooking a plain on which another Argentine invasion might one day materialise. She admired the weapon, and the soldier manning it asked if she would like to fire a round.
“But mightn’t it jerk me off?” she replied. Chris Moncrieff of the Press Association, who was covering the visit, recorded the manful struggle of the soldier to keep his face, indeed his whole body, straight.
Actually, all the Thatcher stories are quite good. (thx, tom)
Glitch paintings
Andy Denzler does these great paintings that look as though they’re highly compressed JPEGs with encoding issues.
Zach Galifianakis swimsuit calendar
Vanity Fair photo shoot? Check.
Zach Galifianakis? Check.
Red ladies bathing suit? Sweet Jesus.
Butter greases the cognitive skids
After Seth Roberts started eating half a stick of butter every day, his speed in solving simple arithmetic problems increased by 30 milliseconds. Flaxseed oil also seemed to help.
This isn’t animal fat versus no animal fat. Before I was eating lots of butter, I was eating lots of pork fat. It’s one type of animal fat versus another type. Nor is it another example of modern processing = unhealthy. Compared to pork fat, butter is recent.
But watching the video of the talk, it’s unclear what’s actually being measured here…it could be that the butter is making his fingers faster at pushing the buttons. Or look at the graph…might a single line that indicates steady improvement over the course of the year also fit the data?
Parkour on a skateboard?
Ok, not quite, and Richie Jackson doesn’t look much like a typical skateboarder — more like a hippie hipster pirate — but his skills on a board are amazing.
Watch at least until he goes over the rail while the board goes under it. This reminds me a bit of the stuff that Danny MacAskill does on a bicycle. (thx, ross)
Finding the resolution of the universe
Researchers at Fermilab are building a holometer, the most precise clock ever, which will attempt to determine if the 3-D aspect of the universe is a hologram.
Black hole physics, in which space and time become compressed, provides a basis for math showing that the third dimension may not exist at all. In this two-dimensional cartoon of a universe, what we perceive as a third dimension would actually be a projection of time intertwined with depth. If this is true, the illusion can only be maintained until equipment becomes sensitive enough to find its limits. “You can’t perceive it because nothing ever travels faster than light,” says Hogan. “This holographic view is how the universe would look if you sat on a photon.”
The pain of poker
Jay Caspian Kang has a gambling problem.
Twelve thousand dollars lay wadded up in the glove compartment. I was trying to decide if I had what it took to drive home. To help delay a decision, I remember turning the radio to a Dodgers game. I don’t know how long I sat there listening to Vin Scully sing his nasally song of balls and strikes, which, even in the age of digital radio, still sounds as if it is being transmitted through a tin of victory cabbage. I remember thinking some nostalgic, self-pitying thoughts about my younger days. I forced myself to say out loud, “You are a degenerate gambler,” but doing so only made me giggle. I opened the glove box, pocketed the cash, and walked back through the sliding doors of the Commerce Casino, back to my table in the Crazy Asian 400 No-Limit Game and to the eight friends at my table who had kindly managed to save my seat.
Some time later, I drove home. All the money, of course, was gone. As I drove home through the network of highways that tie up a concrete bow just east of downtown Los Angeles, I felt no compulsion to slam the Outback into a guardrail. In fact, losing almost all the money I had in the world in six hours stirred up only a cold, scraped-out feeling of knowing-the calm that freezes out your brain when you watch someone younger make the same mistakes you made at their age. Staring out at the empty skyscrapers, I tried to figure out what might be the right reaction to losing $12,000. At the 7-Eleven on Venice and Sepulveda, I bought a bottle of Nyquil, drank half of it in the parking lot and drove the rest of the way home in a warm, creeping fog.
An appreciation of the animated GIF
Unlike 8-tracks and laserdiscs, animated GIFs won’t die.
One such function becomes clear after just a few minutes spent poking around Senor GIF. Many of the GIFs on display at the site are built around the payoff moments of Did you see that?-style viral videos. These GIFs are structured like jokes, with the barest minimum of set-up: A man on a bicycle coasts miraculously through a violent three-car accident; two dolphins arc graciously from the ocean’s surface — until a clumsy third dolphin arcs directly into the second; a man pushes a stalled van off of train tracks right before a train blasts past. There is an appealing economy to these GIFs. They get to the point instantaneously, and at the exact moment when one feels the impulse to rewind and watch the climax again, the loop restarts right where it should. In the two minutes it might take me to load a viral video and watch it in full, I can watch the money shots of 15 different viral videos. Yes, we’re talking about decadent levels of impatience, inanity, and time-wasting here, but GIFs allow us to waste less time online — or, rather, to waste it more efficiently.
Animated GIFs = long photographs.
The value of a dollar
For his The Value of a Dollar project, Jonathan Blaustein took photographs of the amount of food he could purchase for a dollar.
From an interview at the NY Times’ Lens blog:
It was a cheeseburger that initially encouraged Mr. Blaustein, 36, to pursue his project, “The Value of a Dollar.” When the economy was in the midst of its downward spiral, he visited a fast-food chain in New Mexico, where he lives. “On one menu they had a cheeseburger for a dollar,” he said. What caught his eye, though, was another menu, which featured a double cheeseburger for the same price. That additional piece of meat, and the extra slice of cheese, somehow didn’t change the price.
Memorable movie quotes extinct?
Writing for the NY Times, Michael Cieply argues that the golden age of quotable movie lines is over. The likes of “go ahead, make my day”, “you had me at hello”, and “you talking to me?” are becoming more rare…Cieply’s most recent example was Daniel Plainview’s “I drink your milkshake” from There Will Be Blood and even that wasn’t that widespread.
I have a poor memory for movie quotes, but what about the Joker’s “Why so serious?” in the Dark Knight, Jack Twist’s “I wish I knew how to quit you” in Brokeback Mountain, and the “fucking Merlot” line in Sideways?
Gangsta lorem ipsum
For all your dummy text needs, the Snoop Double Dizzle version of lorem ipsum:
Lorizzle ipsizzle dolizzle sit amizzle, consectetuer adipiscing yo mamma. Nullam sapien velizzle, its fo rizzle volutpizzle, suscipit for sure, brizzle vizzle, its fo rizzle. Pellentesque we gonna chung tortizzle. Sed eros. Stuff fizzle dolor dapibus turpizzle tempizzle shizznit. pellentesque nibh et turpizzle. Vestibulum izzle tortor. Gangsta mammasay mammasa mamma oo sa rhoncus fo shizzle. Izzle the bizzle habitasse bow wow wow dictumst. Dang dapibizzle. I’m in the shizzle we gonna chung urna, pretizzle eu, mattis mah nizzle, eleifend phat, nunc. Stuff suscipizzle. Integer sempizzle velit sizzle mofo.
Useful, funny, racist, or just culturally insensitive…you decide!
You shoot me in a dream, you better wake up and apologize
Remember the whole thing Clarence Thomas and Anita Hill with the pubic hair on the can of Coke and the Supreme Court hearings and all that? Me neither. But Clarence Thomas’ wife does; she left a voicemail on Anita Hill’s work phone asking her to apologize for what she did to her husband.
“Good morning Anita Hill, it’s Ginni Thomas,” it said. “I just wanted to reach across the airwaves and the years and ask you to consider something. I would love you to consider an apology sometime and some full explanation of why you did what you did with my husband.” Ms. Thomas went on: “So give it some thought. And certainly pray about this and hope that one day you will help us understand why you did what you did. O.K., have a good day.”
That’s either really passive aggressive, straight-up batshit insane, or the oxycontin talking. Ms. Thomas referred to the call as “extending an olive branch”, which I guess is true if she meant that the branch was stripped of leaves and the end sharpened to a point.
The Great Egg Race
The Great Egg Race was a late-70s/early-80s BBC TV show that was a kind of Junkyard Wars on a smaller and more nerdy scale. The first episode shows a number of people attempting to build small egg carrying cars powered by rubber band.
I love this stuff. I had a physics teacher in high school who presented us with a number of these challenges throughout the school year. There was the strong toothpick bridge (someone basically cheated and made a glue bridge with embedded toothpicks) and the rolling object (it had to go down a short ramp and stop on a mark about 10 feet away), but my favorites were the mouse trap-powered car and the egg drop.
The winning mouse trap car was made with a lot of assistance from the student’s father, who owned a machine shop. It was light but solid with precisely machined plastic wheels and a precisely machined axle and travelled probably twice as far as any of the other cars, which were generally built with whatever crappy off-the-shelf components could be scrounged from the local five-and-dime. I spent three satisfying late nights building my car and came in pretty close to last.
The egg drop challenge involved constructing a landing pad no taller than 12 inches for an unboiled egg. Competitors dropped their eggs from successively greater heights until the egg broke. The two winning landing pads were successful at the greatest height that our small school could muster…out a window at the top of the football field stands, probably about 35 or 40 feet tall. One was a huge box full of wool and other soft materials that could have successfully cushioned an egg dropped from the top of the Sears Tower. The other winner was a tupperware bowl full of stale popcorn that your humble blogger grabbed off the counter the morning of the challenge after completely forgetting about it over the weekend. No one was more surprised than I to discover that popcorn is an ideal egg cushioning material…not that I let on. :)
JK Rowling’s plot spreadsheet
Rowling’s writing process visualized. Looks like this page is from The Order of the Phoenix. (via famulan)
A boring drill builds an exciting tunnel
This is the massive drill that was used to bore a 35-mile-long tunnel underneath the Alps from mid-Switzerland to near the Italian border:
Boring operations in the east tunnel were completed on 15 October 2010 in a cut-through ceremony broadcast live on Swiss TV. When it opens for traffic in late 2017, the tunnel will cut the 3.5-hour travel time from Zurich to Milan by an hour and from Zurich to Lugano to 1 hour 40 minutes.
Bridge demolition
Today is the day for time lapse construction videos…this one shows the demolition of a bridge in Toronto.
It takes a minute or so to get going, but after that it’s like ants picking a tree branch bare. (thx, james)
A crack in the track
Nice time lapse of a construction crew replacing some train tracks in San Francisco.
Socials & More