8mm is an iPhone app that shoots videos that look like stuttery 8mm films.
8mm Vintage Camera brings your iPhone and iPod Touch back in time to capture the beauty and magic of old school vintage movies. By mixing and matching films and lenses, you can recreate the atmosphere of those bygone eras with 25 timeless retro looks. Dust & scratches, retro colors, flickering, light leaks, frame jitters — all can be instantly added with the swapping of a finger.
This is a hoot: in want of slacks, President Lyndon Johnson called up the Haggar clothing company and requested several pairs be made in the style of a pair he already owned. Except a little bigger in the crotch…”down where your nuts hang” as Johnson put it. Just listen:
kottke.org is off today in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Here’s his I Have a Dream speech, which remains as powerful and relevant today as it was in 1963.
Profile of a woman who makes wigs, primarily for Orthodox Jewish women and black women. She recently moved to South America to be closer to her supply.
The market for human hair is generally limited to places with impoverished populations willing to sell a two-foot ponytail — the product of two years of growth — for twenty dollars. Dark hair comes primarily from South America, India, and Mongolia. Helene says that the ample selection of hair colors and textures in South America — the result of more than twenty-five generations of intermarriage between Europeans and indigenous people — make it the ideal source region. The hair of indigenous Peruvian women is thick, straight, and black-perfect for the lace-front wigs sought by black women, who have come to represent the majority of Helene’s business — and is worn in two braids that often stretch all the way down their backs and are plaited with tassels made from Alpaca wool. Orthodox women prefer the silkier, finer texture of Argentinean hair, or else the more rare blonds and reds from eastern Europe and Russia (generically labeled as “European” hair), which garner one hundred dollars per two-foot strand. “The European hair is very bouncy,” Helene says. “It’s just characteristic — like some people have blue eyes, some people have dark eyes. With Indian hair, the bottom is poofy and doesn’t move that much. For a wig to look natural, we need the bottom to be bouncy.”
I was on the side of the road for close to 4 hours. Big jeep, blown rear tire, had a spare but no jack. I had signs in the windows of the car, big signs that said NEED A JACK and offered money. No dice. Right as I am about to give up and just hitch out there a van pulls over and dude bounds out. He sizes the situation up and calls for his youngest daughter who speaks english. He conveys through her that he has a jack but it is too small for the Jeep so we will need to brace it. He produces a saw from the van and cuts a log out of a downed tree on the side of the road. We rolled it over, put his jack on top, and bam, in business. I start taking the wheel off and, if you can believe it, I broke his tire iron. It was one of those collapsible ones and I wasn’t careful and I snapped the head I needed clean off.
Not only does it give you tasting notes on 200 North American oysters, but it lets you rate them — a great thing if you’re always forgetting which types you do or don’t like.
Early this week, I started seeing a little traffic to a post I wrote way back in March of 1999 called The new Zodiac.
An interesting calendrical tidbit: the Zodiac that everyone is familiar with today is actually based upon the movement of the sun through the constellations of 2500 years ago. Today, due to shifts in the earth’s rotation and orbit, the sun moves through 13 constellations, not just 12.
The thirteen constellation is called Ophiuchus. As I’m writing, Ophiuchus is the #1 trending topic on Twitter right now and there are dozens of news articles on the topic in outlets like Time, Huffington Post, and The Washington Post. Patient Zero of this most recent round of new Zodiac reporting is this January 9 Minneapolis Star-Tribune article in which the updated Zodiac is listed as:
Capricorn: Jan 20 - Feb 16
Aquarius: Feb 16 - Mar 11
Pisces: Mar 11 - Apr 18
Aries: Apr 18 - May 13
Taurus: May 13 - Jun 21
Gemini: Jun 21 - Jul 20
Cancer: Jul 20 - Aug 10
Leo: Aug 10 - Sept 16
Virgo: Sept 16 - Oct 30
Libra: Oct 30 - Nov 23
Scorpio: Nov 23 - Nov 29
Ophiuchus: Nov 29 - Dec 17
Sagittarius: Dec 17 - Jan 20
Aries: Apr 19 - May 14
Taurus: May 14 - Jun 21
Gemini: Jun 21 - Jul 21
Cancer: Jul 21 - Aug 11
Leo: Aug 11 - Sept 17
Virgo: Sept 17 - Oct 31
Libra: Oct 31 - Nov 21
Scorpio: Nov 21 - Nov 30
Ophiuchus: Nov 30 - Dec 18
Sagittarius: Dec 18 - Jan 21
Capricorn: Jan 21 - Feb 17
Aquarius: Feb 17 - Mar 12
Pisces: Mar 12 - Apr 19
Which calendar to believe? Who knows, but one thing is for sure: astrology remains a steamingpile of horseshit.
The researchers have shown, in fact, that with each doubling of city population, each inhabitant is, on average, 15 percent wealthier, 15 percent more productive, 15 percent more innovative, and 15 percent more likely to be victimized by violent crime regardless of the city’s geography or the decade in which you pull the data.
Remarkably, this 15 percent rule holds for a number of other statistics as well - so much so that if you tell Bettencourt and West the population of an anonymous city, they can tell you the average speed at which its inhabitants walk.
Scientists call this phenomenon “superlinear scaling.” Rather than metrics increasing proportionally with population - in a “linear,” or one-for-one fashion - measures that scale superlinearly increase consistently at a nonlinear rate greater than one for one.
“Almost anything that you can measure about a city scales nonlinearly, either showing economies in infrastructure or per capita gains in socioeconomic quantities,” Bettencourt says. “This is the reason we have cities in the first place. But if you don’t correct for these effects, you are not capturing the essence of particular places.”
Using this method, cities like LA, New York, and Houston are average while San Francisco and Boulder are above average.
They told me I have two minutes. I’m going to pop this Red Hot [candy, pops in mouth] so I’ll be finished in two minutes [mumbling with candy in mouth]. Why do you give this award? Why? Because you have to throw a party. Because you have to compete with the Golden Globes. [Cheers.] We all asked that question. You’re able to get out tonight, celebrate - without your relatives - you earned, you deserve it.
But why do you give it to Sofia Coppola? Why? Because you want to encourage her, I think. I think that’s the real reason. Look at her. Look at her! She comes from a family, mother and father both very successful, creating entertainments, amusements and thought-provoking work. She wrote a spec script for The Virgin Suicides. The ambition of these young people! Can you believe it? The ambition! She got the job as the director. She directed Lost in Translation in another country in another language, and got a prize for it. [Pause.] God, this is a hot, hot Red Hot. But I’m not going to quit on you people, because I’ve got another half in my pocket. [Pulls out of pocket and puts in mouth.] I got one-and-a-half in my mouth right now. [Mumbling.]
And the whole bit about life and success and freedom derailing careers and creative work is just spot on gold. (thx, david)
The Penguin Classics Complete Library is a massive box set consisting of nearly every Penguin Classics book ever published and is available on Amazon for only (only!) $13,413.30.
From Edwin A. Abbott to Emile Zola, the 1,082 titles in the Penguin Classics Complete Library total nearly half a million pages—laid end to end they would hit the 52-mile mark. Approximately 700 pounds in weight, the titles would tower 828 feet if you stacked them lengthwise atop each other—almost as tall as the Empire State Building. But don’t worry, a nice set of bookshelves will hold them side-by-side just fine.
If you’re on the fence about purchasing this item, here’s a review from someone who did:
This is an orgy for a book-lover. I have had a wonderful time from the moment I placed the order. They arrived in 25 boxes shrink-wrapped on a wooden pallet, over 750 lbs. of books. It took about twelve hours to unpack them, check them off the packing list (one for each box), and then check them off the list we downloaded from Amazon.com. They take up about 77 linear feet.
It would be fun to see HBO do something like this…a massive DVD or Blu-ray box set of all their hour-long dramas: The Sopranos, The Wire, Six Feet Under, Deadwood, Big Love, True Blood, Boardwalk Empire, Canivale, Rome, etc.
Maybe it’s because I have an oddly intense interest in croissants, but I found this 10-minute video about how to make them fascinating. Watch at least until the 1 kg sheet of butter is placed on the dough to be folded over several times.
Spoiler: they turn out great, which was unexpected because so often croissants are more bready and dry than flakey and moist, even in France. (thx, aaron)
PBS is airing a documentary about Jeff Bridges tonight called Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides. In a short clip from the episode, Bridges visits a The Big Lebowski memorabilia store called The Little Lebowski. Watch the cashier’s mind explode as he recognizes who just walked into his store.
And I love how he calls Joel and Ethan “The Brothers”. (via devour)
A long photo essay on the hallways and corridors of science fiction movies and television.
Alien started the kind of corridor-fetishism in screen sci-fi that Kubrick had failed to start with 2001: A Space Oddyssey, since the latter film was so visionary and expensive that practically no-one could even attempt to imitate it.
Instead Roger Christian got inventive with his lower budget and strip-mined an aircraft graveyard, strewing Alien’s Nostromo with sections and detailing from WWII bombers. This usage of full-sized ‘nurnies’ followed the long-established visual effects practice of cannibalising parts from model kits (most especially WWII tanks and destroyers) in order to provide ready-made detailing without resort to custom-crafting and vacuum-forming every last valve and pipe. By the time the 1980s set in, Alien’s strip-mined tech was practically de rigeur for screen sci-fi…
Before looking, see if you can guess the only US state currently without snow on the ground. The answer, from the NY Times:
With the arrival of snow in New York and the unusually severe storm in the South - which dumped more than a foot of snow in some areas — the National Weather Service said an unusual nationwide occurrence had taken place. There was now snow on the ground in all 50 states - including Hawaii, where snow fell on a volcano — except for Florida.
Z-Type is a fun typing game…falling enemies each have a word associated with them and you type it to blow them up. More fun than it sounds. (via @nathanperetic)
Jenny McCarthy just won’t call it quits on the whole vaccines cause autism thing. Cause she’s a mom! And moms love their children! And are strong! QED. And of course this was published by Huffington Post, the blog equivalent of Jenny McCarthy.
A study of eight industrialized countries, including the United States, shows that seemingly inexorable trends — ever more people, more cars and more driving — came to a halt in the early years of the 21st century, well before the recent escalation in fuel prices.
The Shepard scale is a sound, that when played continuously, creates the illusion of continually ascending or descending in tone. Listen to the sample on Wikipedia…it’s freaky! (via @h_fj)
No, not Reservoir Dogs. It’s called My Best Friend’s Birthday, which he made for $5000 in 1987. Here’s the surviving 36 minutes of footage; the rest was destroyed in a fire.
Some of the ideas and material in this film would be recycled for the Tarantino-penned True Romance screenplay. (via sly oyster)
In the Seahawks/Saints game over the weekend, Seahawks running back Marshawn Lynch made an improbable game-winning touchdown run. So, I can’t decide which one of these videos is better. Marshawn Lynch’s Tecmo Bowl Run:
The share price for stock in H&H Imports, Inc. went up 290% between the close of market on Friday to the end of the day today. The reason for the move? Entertainer/investor 50 Cent, who owns a portion of the tiny company, tweeted all weekend about how enthusiastic he was about the company’s success. (He also appeared on CNBC.) By one calculation, 50 made $10 million with those tweets.
Lionel Messi won the inaugural men’s 2010 FIFA Ballon d’Or today, given to the best soccer player in 2010. The award was created for 2010 by merging France Football’s Ballon d’Or and the FIFA World Player of the Year award, both of which Messi won last year as well.
FIFA also named the World XI team, the best eleven players in the world by position (kinda like the NFL’s All-Pro team). Amazingly, six of the eleven are from a single team, Spain’s FC Barcelona. (All three of the finalists for the Ballon d’Or were from Barcelona as well.)
I’ve been watching Barcelona this year and I’m not sure professional American sports has seen anything like what this team is1. On paper, they’re the best team on the planet by a wide margin (and that includes the World Cup-winning Spanish team, where several players — but not, notably, Messi — overlap) and in practice they’re almost as good. Many of the players coming off the bench could start on just about any other team in Europe. But they still have to play the games and having six of the best eleven players on the planet doesn’t guarantee wins, especially in a strongly team-oriented sport like soccer. Still lots of fun to watch them play, though.
[1] Maybe the Yankees in the 30s or 40s. Or the Celtics in the 60s. But neither of those teams had the three best players in the world on their rosters. ↩
My pal Mouser has started a sand collection and is using a macro lens to take photos of each sample. This sample was collected in Hawaii.
The green grains are olivine, the black are basalt, and the white are possibly bits of shell. Green sand is reasonably rare; the southern tip of the big island of Hawai’i is the most common place to get it.
Soap bars are more efficient than liquid soap dispensers but are also a messy pain in the ass. Enter design student Nathalie Stämpfli’s Soap Flakes. It works like a pump dispenser and grates a small amount of soap into your hand when you pump the handle.
Today, most of the soap we use is liquid soap, which contains a lot of water. Block soap instead is more concentrated and therefore has some ecological benefits: You don’t transport unnecessary water around. In place of plastic bottles you can simply use paper for packaging. The solid blocks can easily be piled and allow a greater space efficiency in a truck.
But what about the usage of soap bars? I don’t like the weird slippery feeling when I use them. It gives me goose bumps. And under the shower, it always slides out of your fingers. Hand soap also often gets dirty and accumulates bacteria when more than one person is using it.
One grew up in the South; the other grew up in Northern California. One was picked first overall; the other was picked 199th. One looks like a bouncer; the other looks like a movie star. One has been considered the best at every level since high school; the other had to repeatedly fight to prove he belonged. For years, one was considered “the talented guy who can’t come through when it matters;” the other was considered “the overachiever who always comes through when it matters.” One embraced his celebrity and enjoyed it, making goofy commercials, parodying himself in sketches and cultivating an image as a relatable Southern guy; the other morphed into an actual celebrity, dating actresses and supermodels, moving to New York and then California, gracing various magazine covers, sponsoring watches and boots, and becoming famous for playing football and for being famous.
If there’s an enduring snapshot of each guy, it’s their postgame news conferences: Brady impeccably dressed and coiffed, looking like he has to bolt in a second because he’s headed for a photo shoot; Manning standing there with that swollen, red helmet blotch on his forehead, looking like he’s about to be whisked away to the hospital for X-rays. At first glance, you’d assume Brady was the No. 1 overall pick who had been anointed as “The Next Great Quarterback” since he was 15 and Manning was the one picked 199th who had to fight for everything. Nope.
But, as Simmons curiously fails to mention, the big problem with same-position rivalries in a game like football is that Manning and Brady do not directly compete against each other. Their teams play, but the two are never on the field at the same time. Never. Contrast that with tennis, soccer, hockey, and even (sorta) baseball. And basketball. Especially basketball. Kobe and Wade (to pick just one example) battle one another at both ends of the floor for the entire game.
Chrissie Wellington never really did sports growing up. Then, in her 20s, she started running and astonishingly soon after that, starting winning every Ironman triathlon she entered. Wellington’s body and mental focus turned out to be uniquely suited to endurance events.
Then at around 130km into the bike ride, with Sutton’s words “Don’t defer to anybody” ringing in her ears, she started moving up the pack. “I came up to the lead group of girls and instead of thinking: ‘These are the champions and the best in the world’, I just went straight past them.” Even so, Wellington never believed she would hold on. “Halfway through the marathon I still never thought I would win,” she says. “You know they are behind you and you never know what they are capable of. I was running scared the whole way, thinking: ‘They’ll catch me, they’ll catch me.’ But they just didn’t.”
A really lovely seven-minute documentary about Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist.
Watching the concentration, focus, and determination in Schuman’s eyes and body as he walks around looking for photographic subjects immediately reminded me of an elite athlete; that same look was documented at length in Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. And that’s no accident…what Schuman does is an athletic pursuit as much as anything else. The way he holds his camera while walking, down by his side, slightly behind his back, hiding it from his potential subjects until he sees an opening…he’s like a running back cradling a football, probing for an opening in the defensive line.
Amazon has put Star Wars on Blu-ray up for pre-order on its site: the original trilogy for $45 or $90 for the whole thing. The release date looks like September 2011. One more time, just for old times sake, let’s all buy the same six films for the very last time. Well, until the ultra mega special holographic boxed set comes out in 2013.
This study demonstrated that student retention of material across a wide range of subjects (science and humanities classes) and difficulty levels (regular, Honors and Advanced Placement) can be significantly improved in naturalistic settings by presenting reading material in a format that is slightly harder to read…. The potential for improving educational practices through cognitive interventions is immense. If a simple change of font can significantly increase student performance, one can only imagine the number of beneficial cognitive interventions waiting to be discovered. Fluency demonstrates how we have the potential to make big improvements in the performance of our students and education system as a whole.
I agree with Lehrer…get David Carson on the horn. (thx, lara)
In 2010, Giles Turnbull learned one thing each day…here’s his list.
Jan 14. Carbon monoxide kills you by getting into your bloodstream and occupying the space inside red blood cells that would normally be filled with oxygen.
Jul 24. Every hour of every day, a billion tons of rain falls on the Earth. Much of it falls on Wales, the wettest place in Europe.
Nov 6. When your son asks “What is electricity?”, it’s wise to stop and think for a moment-or consult an encyclopedia-before launching into an answer that may grind to an unfortunate and, for the questioner, unsatisfying halt.
As if there was actually more evidence needed that vaccines don’t cause autism, the 1998 British study that linked autism to childhood vaccines was recently discovered to be an elaborate fraud. Not just incorrect, a fraud.
An investigation published by the British medical journal BMJ concludes the study’s author, Dr. Andrew Wakefield, misrepresented or altered the medical histories of all 12 of the patients whose cases formed the basis of the 1998 study — and that there was “no doubt” Wakefield was responsible.
“It’s one thing to have a bad study, a study full of error, and for the authors then to admit that they made errors,” Fiona Godlee, BMJ’s editor-in-chief, told CNN. “But in this case, we have a very different picture of what seems to be a deliberate attempt to create an impression that there was a link by falsifying the data.”
With little more than two weeks before the planned opening, he was still formulating the initial menu and pricing. For one appetizer he envisioned a Gruyere, leek and potato veloute; for another, Arctic char in aspic. For entrees he was mulling a pork cheek, a veal shank, Dover sole for two. These would probably be served as part of a three-course prix fixe for $58, he said.
Nothing too unconventional there. But beyond the plate, he said, anything goes. Although he’ll take reservations, he’s bypassing the Web service Open Table (too cumbersome). And he’s curious about having a marching band stomp through some night. Obligatory resourcefulness has given way to revolutionary thoughts.
The idea of a more politically correct Finn came to the 69-year-old English professor over years of teaching and outreach, during which he habitually replaced the word with “slave” when reading aloud. Gribben grew up without ever hearing the “n” word (“My mother said it’s only useful to identify [those who use it as] the wrong kind of people”) and became increasingly aware of its jarring effect as he moved South and started a family. “My daughter went to a magnet school and one of her best friends was an African-American girl. She loathed the book, could barely read it.”
With his NBA career over, his marriage in trouble, and rumors swirling about drinking and money problems, the greatest Sixer of his era finds himself playing minor-league basketball in Turkey and spending his nights at a T.G.I. Friday’s in Istanbul. Isn’t it, weirdly, exactly how we always thought it would end for Allen Iverson?
“It’s not about being retro,” explained Alex Storch, the Editor-in-Chief. “It’s about pushing forward. People want quality things they can hold and touch, not pseudo-journalism and themed template design on their computers. We’re excited for people that have only seen David’s books and a heavily worn copy of Ray Gun to experience his mastery of the form. We’d also like them to read some inspiring articles as well.”
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