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Entries for March 2011
Ze Frank recaps The Show episodes, five years later
Ze Frank is jotting down some notes for past episodes of The Show, the year-long daily video podcast he did five years ago.
this is the first time that I will be watching most of these episodes since they were posted. that’s weird. i have that relationship with things i make. do you? this one feels like i was searching for format. the “supreme court calendar” was set up to be a recurring joke on how boring that segment would be… but ultimately i became fascinated with the things I was going to make fun of. Incidentally the .xxx top level domain debate is still raging although the arguments for and against have swapped sides.
This is all before I had made a commitment to what is now the ubiquitous video blog jump cut, but in this episode I’m trying to play around with moving into the camera physically at transition points with a sharp cut. there’s something nice about having a physical action to hit at the beginning of a take - takes the pressure off of the words and brings energy into the frame right away. over time the cut became more important to me, and the style became less natural, more surgical (not a bad thing - but worth noting).
(via @waxypancake)
Country version of Lady Gaga’s Born This Way
Lady Gaga released a country version of her latest single, Born This Way. This isn’t a remix or cover…it’s an official release by Gaga.
I don’t care for country music much, but this really makes me smile. (via ★capndesign)
Where are all the pickpockets?
Due to tougher laws and easier opportunities in other areas of crime, pickpockets have all but vanished from the streets and trains of the US.
The decline of dipping on the rails is extraordinary. Subways were always the happiest hunting grounds for pickpockets, who would work alone or in teams. There were classic skilled canons-organized pickpocket gangs-at the top, targeting wealthier riders, then “bag workers” who went for purses, and “lush workers” who disreputably targeted unconscious drunks. Richard Sinnott, who worked as a New York City transit cop in the 1970s and ’80s, also admiringly recalls “fob workers,” a subspecies of pickpocket who worked their way through train cars using just their index and middle fingers to extract coins and pieces of paper money-a quarter here, a buck there-from riders’ pockets. “They weren’t greedy, and they never got caught,” says Sinnott. Bit by bit, fob workers could make up to $400 on a single subway trip; then they’d go to Florida in the winter to work the racetracks. Many of the city’s pickpockets trained elsewhere, “and if they were any good, they came to New York,” Sinnot says, with a touch of pride. “In the subways, we had the best there were.”
I’m generally a fan of Slate’s compulsive contrarianism, but asking if we should miss pickpocketing is just too much.
David Lynch’s hair a work of art
David Lynch’s hair compares favorably to several works of art, mostly modern, including Starry Night, Water Lilies, and Lichtenstein’s Brush Stroke.
Just, wow.
The world’s best designed newspaper
…is a newspaper from Portugal called i.
Designers are clearly thinking about the way two facing pages work together, whether the stories are related or not. This creates a flow that encourages reading without interruption.
i is composed like a beautiful piece of music. It has the discipline to play only the high notes that matter most. For example, it uses its full bleed capability sparingly. It creates strong impact, even with small things. The surprise of occasional whimsy makes the content inviting.
(via good)
Updates on previous entries for Mar 24, 2011*
Movie bar codes orig. from Mar 24, 2011
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Chartwell, the infographics font
Chartwell is a type family you can use to build all kinds of graphs and charts. Stringing letters and numbers together into ligatures, you can make things like this:
Movie bar codes
Not quite sure how these are done — it looks like each vertical slice is representative of the colors in a given frame from the film — but these moviebarcodes provide a good sense of a movie’s tone and color. This one is…any guesses?
It’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. An unexpectedly colorful film. BTW, prints are available. Oh and see also Brendan Dawes’ Cinema Redux.
Update: Here’s how you can make your own (w/ downloadable source code). (thx, @seoulfully)
First person Super Mario
Here’s what playing the original Super Mario Bros would look like from a first-person perspective.
(via devour)
Floating soccer pitch
Much of the village on the Thai island of Koh Panyee is actually floating; the island is too rocky to build much of anything on land. So when a group of kids wanted to start a soccer club, they built themselves a floating soccer pitch…which led to some interesting advantages once they started playing against other teams.
(via @dunstan)
The Presidential tent
The Sensitive Compartmented Information Facility is a tent designed to keep communications secure when the President is out and about.
Designed to withstand eavesdropping, phone tapping and computer hacking, Sensitive Compartmented Information Facilities — also known as SCIFs — are protected areas where classified conversations can be held.
They can be permanent enclosures within a building, or mobile areas set up when a world leader is on the move, to allow them to view sensitive documents or have secret conversations without any outsiders listening or hacking in.
Looking at the top photo…what about the floor? They don’t have to worry about electronic eavesdropping from below? See also Cold War giants in tiny rooms.
Television death portraits
Stephan Tillmans’ Luminant Point Arrays project is a collection of photographs of tube television screens as they’re switched off.
(via ★buzz)
The rich visual filmmaking of The Social Network
Jim Emerson has a great post about the information-rich cinematography of The Social Network.
This sense of a private/public self is reinforced in nearly every scene, with the presence of a video camera (during the depositions), laptops and monitors, or other frames within frames (screens, windows, doorways, stairways, hallways) through which we can see other people going about their lives, doing whatever they’re doing. (The extras and bit players had a lot of work in this movie.)
And then there’s the guy in the white shirt who sits there behind the Winkelvii’s lawyer. He turns out to be the videographer, and he gets one big moment when the attorneys call “lunch” and he leaps up to turn off the camera and the monitor. We’re always reminded that what we’re seeing is being documented. Even the documentation is being documented: the affidavits that have already been filed, the e-mails and texts that were sent, the blog entries, the Harvard Crimson articles entered into evidence… Whenever Mark tries to claim he doesn’t remember what he may or may not have said to Erica or the Winkelvii (Armie Hammer), there’s always something there to remind him — often in words he typed and electronically transmitted himself.
This is the “guy in the white shirt” shot:
I only saw this movie for the first time about three weeks ago, but it’s stuck in my brain…I keep coming back to it. As Emerson notes (or at least strongly hints at), the story might be specifically about Facebook, but the rest of the film is more generally about the connection and alienation of being online, of being human in a hyperconnected age. Same kind of thing Caterina was getting at in her Fear of Missing Out essay, I think.
Jonathan Ive profile
The Daily Mail has a profile of Apple’s lead designer, Jony Ive…some bits in there that I hadn’t read before, including this strange anecdote about a bad meeting that may have led to Ive’s departure to Apple:
‘We lost a great talent,’ says Grinyer. ‘We virtually created our own consultancy, Tangerine, just so that we could employ Jony (as Ive prefers to be called). And if I had to put my finger on why and where we lost him it would have to have been one day at Ideal Standard in Hull.
‘Tangerine had a consultancy contract with the bathroom-fittings company to design a toilet. I was there when Jony made an excellent presentation to this guy who was wearing a red nose because it was Comic Relief day. This clown then decided to throw his weight around and pulled apart Jony’s design. It was ridiculous. Britain lost Jony Ive then and there.’
Mad Men season five delayed
There’s currently no deal in place for the show, which probably means we won’t get to see the next season until late 2011 or early 2012 (instead of this summer).
People involved in the talks suggested this week that one or both deals may be imminent, but that may not be enough to ensure a summer start. Todd Gold, the editor in chief of XfinityTV.com, Comcast’s television news site, said it was becoming clear that the show was “right on the cusp of going one way or the other.”
“By now, the writing staff should be humming along, maybe about a month or more into work for a summer premiere,” he said. “Unless Weiner is secretly manufacturing outlines in preparation of some crazy all-night writing sessions with his staff, it might be time for fans to grow concerned.”
Spoiler alert
A montage of spoilers from 71 different films, including The Usual Suspects, Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows, Inception, and The Graduate.
Or if you prefer, something similar in t-shirt form. (via devour)
Harry Potter wizards in other movies
Here’s an infographic that shows feature films with four or more Harry Potter wizards in them.
i was watching sense & sensibility in the back of my neighbour’s minivan while on a stakeout the other night and realized that professors snape, trelawney, and umbridge had each somehow apparated into the cast. my neighbour (who is a former hogwarts alumna) pointed out that cornelius fudge and madam pomfrey were also in it. was this a record for the most harry potter wizards in a non-harry potter film?
Close but nine Potter wizards is the record…can you guess which movie before clicking through?
Long Chris Ware interview
This is the first part of a four-part interview with Chris Ware, in which he discusses comics, working, and family. Ware on becoming a father:
Yeah, it kind of fixed every mental problem that I had within an hour. So I highly recommend it if anybody out there is thinking of having children, you should really, I mean, it’s the only reason we’re here, and if you have any doubts in your mind about yourself or where your life is going, it’ll be answered easily and almost instantaneously. It’s a clich’e to say, but it also immediately sets you aside from yourself and you’re no longer the star of your own mind, which is really not a very good state of mind to be in. Unfortunately, in my country it is one that seems to be encouraged until about the age of 60 or something, now. I really think the main export of America is this sort of fountain of youth that we somehow manage to tap into, like with pop music — it’s not out of the question to see 50-year-old men still dressing like teenagers and I just feel like, “What happened?” It’s like we won World War II and now we can be idiots for the rest of time.
I don’t know about an hour, but yeah, similar experience here. Here’s part 2, part 3, and part 4.
Saul Bass title sequences
Here’s a collection of video and stills from most of the movie title sequences created by Saul Bass.
“PROJECTIONISTS - PULL CURTAIN BEFORE TITLES”.
This is the text of a note that was stuck on the cans when the reels of film for “The Man With the Golden Arm” arrived at US movie theatres in 1955. Until then the credits were referred to as ‘popcorn time.’ Audiences resented them and projectionists only pulled back the curtains to reveal the screen once they’d finished. Saul Bass’ powerful title sequence for “The Man With the Golden Arm” changed the way directors and designers would treat the opening titles.
Japan’s Dark Spring
Lovely Japan-themed New Yorker cover this week by Christoph Niemann.
(via stellar)
No one uses the phone anymore
They text, they email, they IM, but increasingly the phone call is too intrusive of a communication option for many.
“I literally never use the phone,” Jonathan Adler, the interior designer, told me. (Alas, by phone, but it had to be.) “Sometimes I call my mother on the way to work because she’ll be happy to chitty chat. But I just can’t think of anyone else who’d want to talk to me.” Then again, he doesn’t want to be called, either. “I’ve learned not to press ‘ignore’ on my cellphone because then people know that you’re there.”
“I remember when I was growing up, the rule was, ‘Don’t call anyone after 10 p.m.,’” Mr. Adler said. “Now the rule is, ‘Don’t call anyone. Ever.’”
As a long-time hater of the phone call, this is good news.
Everyday iPhone app
What a great idea…Noah Kalina, Adam Lisagor, William Wilkinson, and Oliver White made an iPhone app that helps you remember to take a daily photo of yourself inspired by Noah’s Everyday project.
Watch closely for the Noah Durden character…
Play DOS games on your Mac
Yo dawg I heard you like to play DOS games on your Mac so, uh, here’s some software to do that.
Boxer plays MS-DOS games on your Mac. It’s based on the robust DOSBox emulator, with a lot of magic sprinkled on top. Run DOS programs from Finder. Wrap your games into tidy gameboxes that launch like Mac apps. Painlessly install games from CD-then bundle the CD with your game so you don’t even need it in the drive.
Dune 2, here I come! (via ★robinsloan)
How Manhattan got its grid
The NY Times has an interactive look at how the Manhattan grid came to be.
In 1811, John Randel created a proposed street grid of Manhattan. Compare his map, along with other historic information, to modern-day Manhattan.
This article has more about the map. (via ★raul)
Radiation dose chart
With the assistance of a nuclear reactor operator, Randall Munroe came up with this handy radiation dose infographic. Doses recorded near the Fukushima plant compare to those from a single mammogram or dental x-ray. A note on how to use this chart:
If you’re basing radiation safety procedures on an internet PNG image and things go wrong, you have no one to blame but yourself.
(via df)
Social networking for cannibals
This article by Josh Kurp in The Awl is fascinating but really *really* hard to read in spots. Seriously, it’s really disturbing in spots…consider yourself forewarned.
This is what happened: A little over ten years ago, on March 9, 2001, 39-year-old Meiwes, a computer technician living in the German village of Wustefeld, brought home, had sex with and killed 44-year-old Brandes, a Berlin man who lived about 250 miles away. Meiwes then ate 44 pounds of his flesh over a period of ten months. While that may sound like murder, there’s something else that should be mentioned: Brandes wanted it all to happen.
(via ★choire)
Berkshire Anne Hathaway
When actress Anne Hathaway is in the news, shares of Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway seem to go up in price.
Companies are trying to “correlate everything against everything,” he explained, and if they find something that they think will work time and again, they’ll try it out. The interesting, thing, though, is that it’s all statistics, removed from the real world. It’s not as if a hedge fund’s computers would spit the trading strategy as a sentence: “When Hathway news increases, buy Berkshire Hathaway.” In fact, traders won’t always know why their algorithms are doing what they’re doing. They just see that it’s found some correlation and it’s betting on Buffet’s company.
(via @tcarmody)
The story of Oregon Trail
Oregon Trail is one of the most-played video games in history, and certainly one of the most popular educational games. Here’s the history of how the game was developed.
Forty years and ten iterations later, the Oregon Trail has sold over 65 million copies worldwide, becoming the most widely distributed educational game of all time. Market research done in 2006 found that almost 45 percent of parents with young children knew Oregon Trail, despite the fact that it largely disappeared from the market in the late ’90s.
A recent frenzy of nostalgia over the game has yielded everything from popular T-shirts (“You have died of dysentery”) to band tour promotions (“Fall Out Boy Trail”) to humorous references on popular websites (“Digg has broken an axle”).
“It’s hard to think of another game that endured for so long and yet has still been so successful,” says Jon-Paul Dyson, director of the International Center for the History of Electronic Games at the Strong. “For generations of computer users, it was their introduction to gaming, and to computer use itself.”
The extra who’s in everything
This extra is the acting equivalent of the Wilhelm Scream…he shows up just about everywhere.
(via stellar)
Watch Downton Abbey for free online
The first season of Downton Abbey, which I highly recommend, is available to watch online for free in two places: on Amazon (for Amazon Prime subscribers) and at Netflix Watch Instantly (for subscribers).
NY Times paywall is here
Or will be soon…they announced some of the details today.
On NYTimes.com, you can view 20 articles each month at no charge (including slide shows, videos and other features). After 20 articles, we will ask you to become a digital subscriber, with full access to our site.
Cheapest plan is about $180/year and the most expensive is $420/yr. Access is free to paper subscribers.
Photography for designers
Designer Jessica Walsh shares the photo setup she uses to document her work.
I cobbled together this set up out of the desire to properly archive my design work. Next thing I knew I started getting paid for it, and it became an integral part of my work. I am simply listing my equipment and a little bit about what I know to get some designers started in figuring out the best way to shoot their own work.
You can see the gorgeous results in her portfolio.
A Brief History of Title Design
From the excellent blog The Art of the Title Sequence, a short video called A Brief History of Title Design.
The video page has a full listing of the movies from which the opening title sequences are pulled.
Famous objects from classic movies
This site presents you with famous objects from movies and asks you to identify them. If you’re a pop culture junkie, this is your crack. (via @sippey)
Nate Dogg, RIP
Nate Dogg died yesterday; he was 41 years old.
With his deep, melodic voice and smooth soul rumble, Dogg was one of the key elements in the rise of the West Coast G-Funk sound pioneered by Death Row Records in the early 1990s. Though overshadowed by such peers as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Warren G, Nate was a critical participant in a number of major left-coast gangsta hits, including G’s “Regulate” and Dre’s iconic solo debut, 1992’s The Chronic.
How a Tokyo Earthquake Could Devastate Wall Street and the Global Economy
That’s the title of an article written by Michael Lewis in 1989.
A big quake has hit Tokyo roughly every 70 years for four centuries: 1923, 1853, 1782, 1703, 1633.
(via @daveg)
The fear of missing out
Caterina Fake on the fear and hope that underlies social media.
FOMO -Fear of Missing Out- is a great motivator of human behavior, and I think a crucial key to understanding social software, and why it works the way it does. Many people have studied the game mechanics that keep people collecting things (points, trophies, check-ins, mayorships, kudos). Others have studied how the neurochemistry that keeps us checking Facebook every five minutes is similar to the neurochemistry fueling addiction. Social media has made us even more aware of the things we are missing out on. You’re home alone, but watching your friends status updates tell of a great party happening somewhere. You are aware of more parties than ever before. And, like gym memberships, adding Bergman movies to your Netflix queue and piling up unread copies of the New Yorker, watching these feeds gives you a sense that you’re participating, not missing out, even when you are.
The last paragraph nutshells why I love the web so much. (via @bryce)
Weatherspark
Weatherspark is an impressive collection of weather data, graphs, and tools.
WeatherSpark is a new type of weather website, with interactive weather graphs that allow you to pan and zoom through the entire history of any weather station on earth.
Get multiple forecasts for the current location, overlaid on records and averages to put it all in context.
Here’s the weather for NYC. (via @bantic)
Saturn fly-by video
There is no 3-D CGI involved in this amazing Saturn fly-by video…it’s made from thousands of hi-res photographs taken by the Cassini orbiter.
Wait for the full-frame full-color video starting at around 1:00. (thx, sam)
The bracketless March Madness bracket
Gelf Magazine has an NCAA tournament bracket for those who hate filling out brackets: one devised by baseball stats master Bill James. Here’s the quickie explanation:
Sign up for your Bracketless Bracket using your Facebook ID. Instead of picking the winner of each game, all you have to do is pick your favorite team from each seed line. You pick exactly one team — no more, no less — from each seed number. You like both Kansas and Ohio State? Too bad. Pick one. Every time your team on the one-seed line wins a game at any point in the tournament, you get 100 points. Every time your 2-seed wins, you get 110 points. You get the picture; if your 16 seed wins a game, you get 250 points.
Great idea…the best part about this is that you get to pick all sorts of underdogs.
Lessons from MetaFilter
Matt Haughey’s SXSW talk, Real World Moderation: Lessons from 11 Years of Community, was quite well received so he posted a version he recorded at home to Vimeo.
After 11 years of running MetaFilter.com, I (and the other moderators) have been through just about everything, and we’ve built dozens of custom tools to weed out garbage, spammers, and scammers from the site.
I’ll cover how to identify and solve problems including identity, trolling, sockpuppets, and other nefarious community issues, show off custom tools we’ve developed for MetaFilter, and show you how to incorporate them into your own community sites.
(via @pb)
kottke.org on Jeopardy
On Jeopardy today, a contestant named Ethan responded incorrectly to a $1000 clue with “What is kottke.org?”
The best part is how disgusted the viewer is…”Are you freaking kidding me? Oh jeeezz…” Ethan, if you’re out there and if there was actually such an item, I would totally send you a kottke.org tote bag for working in a reference to kottke.org on a show that has such a storied past on the site. What a lovely 13th birthday present. (thx, justin)
Play Katamari Damacy on any web site
This bookmarklet will let you play Katamari Damacy on any web site. Activating it will display a ball on your screen that will roll up all the images and words on the screen. Try it right now on kottke.org. Works best in Firefox and Chrome. (thx, yotam)
Inventables: materials from the future
Inventables is an online store that sells “materials that designers, artists, and inventors use to develop new products and push the boundaries of what’s possible”. That’s a pretty tame description for the craziest collection of stuff I’ve ever seen…it’s like a Home Depot from the future. For instance: Suction Cup Tape, Heat-Shielding Gel (“temporarily protects surfaces in temperatures up to 7500 °F”), Translucent Concrete, and Rubber Glass (“looks like glass, breaks like glass, but feels like rubber”). (thx, pete)
Today is pi day
And in celebration, this is my new favorite fact about pi: we have calculated pi out to over 6.4 billion digits but only 39 of them are needed to calculate the circumference of a circle as big as the universe “with a precision comparable to the radius of a hydrogen atom”. (via @santheo)
All about nuclear meltdowns
I haven’t been keeping up with the Japan nuclear power plant situation as much as I want, but I wanted to pass along a few interesting articles. Over at Boing Boing, Maggie Koerth-Baker wrote a widely linked piece about how nuclear power plants work:
For the vast majority of people, nuclear power is a black box technology. Radioactive stuff goes in. Electricity (and nuclear waste) comes out. Somewhere in there, we’re aware that explosions and meltdowns can happen. Ninety-nine percent of the time, that set of information is enough to get by on. But, then, an emergency like this happens and, suddenly, keeping up-to-date on the news feels like you’ve walked in on the middle of a movie. Nobody pauses to catch you up on all the stuff you missed.
As I write this, it’s still not clear how bad, or how big, the problems at the Fukushima Daiichi power plant will be. I don’t know enough to speculate on that. I’m not sure anyone does. But I can give you a clearer picture of what’s inside the black box. That way, whatever happens at Fukushima, you’ll understand why it’s happening, and what it means.
MrReid, a physics teacher, writes about the situation at Fukushima:
Even with the release of steam, the pressure and temperature inside Unit 1 continued to increase. The high temperatures inside the reactor caused the protective zirconium cladding on the uranium fuel rods to react with steam inside the reactor to form zirconium oxide and hydrogen. This hydrogen leaked into the building that surrounded the reactor and ignited, damaging the surrounding building but without damaging the reactor vessel itself. Because the reactor vessel has not been compromised, the release of radiation should be minimal. It appears that a very similar situation has occurred at Unit 3 and that hydrogen is again responsible for the explosion seen there.
And this piece is a more meta take on the situation, What the Media Doesn’t Get About Meltdowns.
Of immediate concern is the prospect of a so-called “meltdown” at one or more of the Japanese reactors. But part of the problem in understanding the potential dangers is continued indiscriminate use, by experts and the media, of this inherently frightening term without explanation or perspective. There are varying degrees of melting or meltdown of the nuclear fuel rods in a given reactor; but there are also multiple safety systems, or containment barriers, in a given plant’s design that are intended to keep radioactive materials from escaping into the general environment in the event of a partial or complete meltdown of the reactor core. Finally, there are the steps taken by a plant’s operators to try to bring the nuclear emergency under control before these containment barriers are breached.
kottke.org, teenager
Thirteen years ago, I wrote the first entry for kottke.org. There was never a plan for the site…I just never stopped. And amazingly, I’ve been doing the site as my full-time job for over six years now. Crazy. See also from 2008, kottke.org designs through the years.
Hollywood career advice from Alec Baldwin
Apologies in advance for the Charlie Sheen mention, but Alec Baldwin’s advice to Sheen (and, belatedly, Conan) is golden.
Conan has moved on and his great talent is undiminished by his difficult experiences. I had wanted to say to him back then what I will now offer to Charlie. You can’t win. Really. You can’t. When executives at studios and networks move up to the highest ranks, they are given a book. The book is called How to Handle Actors. And one principle held dear in that book is that no actor is greater than the show itself when the show is a hit. And, in that regard, they are often right. Add to that the fact that the actor who is torturing their diseased egos is a drug addled, porn star-squiring, near Joycean Internet ranter, and they really want you to go.
Reminds me of Frank Sinatra’s letter to George Michael.
Come on George, Loosen up. Swing, man, Dust off those gossamer wings and fly yourself to the moon of your choice and be grateful to carry the baggage we’ve all had to carry since those lean nights of sleeping on buses and helping the driver unload the instruments.
(via stellar)
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