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Every song by The Beatles played simultaneously. The start times are staggered so that every song ends at the same time.
As a commenter notes, “Gets very complicated in the end. So did the Beatles.” (via waxy)
Richard Rhodes, author of two of my favorite books of all time (Making of the Atomic Bomb and Dark Sun), has written a book about one of the most intriguing people of the 20th century, Hedy Lamarr, big-time Hollywood bombshell and inventor of a frequency-hopping spread-spectrum communication system.
Hedwig (Hedy) Kiesler may be one of the greatest unsung heroes of twentieth century technological progress. An opportunistic Austrian immigrant driven by curiosity and a desire to make it as a Hollywood actress in the early years of World War II, Hedy worked with avant-garde composer George Antheil to create the technology that we depend upon today for cell phones and GPS: frequency hopping. Though Richard Rhodes presents details about everyone involved in the separate experiences that the two inventors drew upon to make their breakthrough in Hedy’s Folly, the invention itself takes center stage, driving the remarkable story with precision. Rhodes skillfully weaves together all the disparate parts of the story, from how Hedy learned about Nazi torpedoes to why George’s knowledge of player pianos was key to the invention, in order to create a highly readable genesis of the technology that influences billions of lives every day.
Jonathan Liu over at GeekDad compiled a list of the five best toys of all time.
2. Box
Another toy that is quite versatile, Box also comes in a variety of shapes and sizes. Need proof? Depending on the number and size you have, Boxes can be turned into furniture or a kitchen playset. You can turn your kids into cardboard robots or create elaborate Star Wars costumes. A large Box can be used as a fort or house and the smaller Box can be used to hide away a special treasure. Got a Stick? Use it as an oar and Box becomes a boat. One particularly famous kid has used the Box as a key component of a time machine, a duplicator and a transmogrifier, among other things.
Love it. (via @jsnell)
Lists of travel tips usually suck (get to the aiport early! make sure your passport is up to date!) but this list contains a number of good ideas that I haven’t really seen before.
13. Buy your own fruit. It sounds simple. It is simple. Just do it. You’ll love it. And I don’t mean, if there happens to be a fruit stand outside your hotel door you should buy some, because you need to have 9 servings a day. What I mean is, find fruit and buy it. Make it a daily task that you’re going to track down a fruit stand, a farmers’ market (they’re not just in San Francisco) and get some good fresh fruit. The entire process will expose you to elements of daily life you would have otherwise ignored. Trust me: You’ll have memories from your trips to buy fresh fruit.
The beginning of each episode of The Wire featured a short quote of dialogue from that episode…here are the characters saying all those quotes:
(via supercut.org)
On Twitter the other day, I asked:
Someone please write this article: profile of people who give their spouses automobiles for Christmas. Do they exist? Are they insane?
@bswest pointed me towards this 2005 NY Times piece, A Lexus for Christmas? It Happens.
“I didn’t think that happened until I sat on the showroom floor and heard someone say, ‘I’m not going to pick the car up until the 24th,’” said Rosario Criscuolo, the owner of two Lexus dealerships in Michigan. “It blew my mind. But if your wife needs a car, it’s a good way to do it, right? It saves you from having to go to the malls.”
Mr. Criscuolo said that each year, about a half-dozen customers wait until Christmas Eve to pick up their new cars.
And the demand for the oversize red bows is so strong that Lexus stockpiles them in a warehouse near its North American headquarters in Torrance, Calif.
The street skiing video has more narrative structure but the tricks pulled in this urban snowboarding video are just filthy.
(thx, river)
Girl Walk // All Day is a feature-length dance music video set in NYC…the soundtrack is Girl Talk’s All Day. Kickstarter is hosting a premiere for the film (+ dance party) on December 8 at the Brooklyn Masonic Temple…and it’s free (you just need to RSVP). Here’s the trailer:
BERG have announced an intriguing pair of products: Little Printer and BERG Cloud.
Little Printer lives in your front room and scours the Web on your behalf, assembling the content you care about into designed deliveries a couple of times a day.
You configure Little Printer from your phone, and there’s some great content to choose from - it’s what Little Printer delivers that makes it really special. We have an incredible group of launch partners, and in the run-up to shipping we’re working with them all on custom publications.
Underlying Little Printer is our new technology for connecting and controlling wireless products in the home, and we call it BERG Cloud.
We think of BERG Cloud as the nervous system for connected products. It’s built to run at scale, and could as easily operate the Web-enabled signage of a city block, as the playful home electronics of the future.
Here’s a short video of Little Printer in action:
Stephen Colbert in conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson orig. from Nov 28, 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.
80-minute video of a conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and of an out-of-character Stephen Colbert “about science, society, and the universe”. Someone needs to get this on YouTube or something…the video streaming is slooooow.
Update: Ah, here’s a mirror on YouTube. (thx, aaron)
Over the past two years, the NYPD has been taking panoramic images of crime scenes in an attempt to better record the evidence.
Each panorama takes between 3 to 30 minutes to produce, depending on the available light, and is added to a database where detectives can access it. Before the switch to the Panoscan, crime scene images sometimes took days to process. Now, soon after the photos are posted, investigators can point and click over evidence from a scene that they might have missed in the hectic hours after the crime.
Famed pizzeria Grimaldi’s is being forced out of their space under the Brooklyn Bridge and is moving up the block…without their coveted coal oven. But now comes word that Patsy Grimaldi, former owner of Grimaldi’s, is moving into the old space with a new restaurant called Juliana’s. If I recall correctly, about half of the Grimaldi’s menu is devoted to a telling of the Patsy’s/Grimaldi’s feud…looks like they’re gonna need another page or two.
Black Friday and Cyber Monday suck. But! (There’s always a but.) The thing is, there are good deals to be had if you’re in need of something. Like a KitchenAid 6-quart professional mixer for only $210 after sales and rebates.
Oh, and as long as you’re here, a few other holiday gift ideas:
- Han Solo encased in carbonite ice cube tray.
- Get yourself a yearly membership to Mlkshk. It’s $24 and Mlkshk is great.
- Do not buy Patagonia. So says Patagonia. (But seriously, if you need winter gear, buy Patagonia…it kicks ass and lasts a looong time.)
- A huge red bow to put on the Lexus you’re getting for your wife.
- Legos are too complicated these days. Just get your kid a box of plain-old Lego bricks…they’re going to get enough Potter, Star Wars, and Barbie from every other vector.
When dense briny water (left behind by newly formed sea ice) sinks, it freezes the water around it, forming an icicle that stretches to the sea floor. Then it freezes water and wildlife on the sea floor. David Attenborough narrates:
Oof…a wine by Roland Tissier has lorem ipsum on the label.
(via stellar)
This is like street skating except with alpine skis down hilly city terrain. Includes jumps over hung laundry & parked cars, railslides down stairs, etc. Crazy.
(thx to @gnuhaus for the better embed)
Update: The skier in this video, JP Auclair, was killed in a Chilean avalanche while working on a film project. (thx, david)
Here’s an interesting hypothesis: that all current life on Earth originated from a planet-wide super-organism named LUCA.
The latest results suggest LUCA was the result of early life’s fight to survive, attempts at which turned the ocean into a global genetic swap shop for hundreds of millions of years. Cells struggling to survive on their own exchanged useful parts with each other without competition — effectively creating a global mega-organism.
It was around 2.9 billion years ago that LUCA split into the three domains of life: the single-celled bacteria and archaea, and the more complex eukaryotes that gave rise to animals and plants (see timeline). It’s hard to know what happened before the split. Hardly any fossil evidence remains from this time, and any genes that date that far back are likely to have mutated beyond recognition.
(via @daveg)
Steve Silberman has a nice piece on Susan Kare, the woman who designed the original icons for the Macintosh, including a never-before-seen look at her initial sketches for some of them.
Inspired by the collaborative intelligence of her fellow software designers, Kare stayed on at Apple to craft the navigational elements for Mac’s GUI. Because an application for designing icons on screen hadn’t been coded yet, she went to the University Art supply store in Palo Alto and picked up a $2.50 sketchbook so she could begin playing around with forms and ideas. In the pages of this sketchbook, which hardly anyone but Kare has seen before now*, she created the casual prototypes of a new, radically user-friendly face of computing - each square of graph paper representing a pixel on the screen.
I can’t find a great account of it (go here and here for the basics), but the story of how Tony Stewart won the 2011 Sprint Cup Championship at the Ford 400 in Homestead, FL is flat-out amazing and as thrilling as anything that’s happened in sports over the past 12 months: an aging former champion wins five out of the last ten NASCAR races (more than 10% of his total career victories), including a final race in which he recovered from two slow pit stops (one of which was agonizingly slow), passed 118 cars total, came from back of the pack twice, made several ballsy four-across passes, and was saved from defeat by a passing rain shower. And the guy he was chasing the whole time (in this race and the points standings) was driving great…it’s just that Stewart was racing insanely great, right on the edge.
I’ve seen very little coverage of this on the big generalist sports blogs…nothing on Deadspin and only a short “Tony Stewart won some NASCAR thingie” on Grantland. Come on! Simmons, Klosterman, someone, get on this!
I’ve been on the web for 17 years now, I’m a professional link finder, and I have never in my life seen anything like these guys performing on an Indian talent show. They *start off* by biting into fluorescent light bulbs and it just gets more nuts from there.
You never really see this much bleeding on American Idol… (via unlikely words)
In this 15-minute video, Terry Gilliam talks about how he does the cut-out animations that defined the Monty Python visual aesthetic. Gilliam’s technique is all about simplicity and embracing constraint.
(via ★thoughtbrain)
On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Errol Morris talks to Tink Thompson about “The Umbrella Man”, a gentleman who was pictured in the Zapruder film standing with an open umbrella near where Kennedy was shot on a sunny day. The result is a nifty six-minute film.
For years, I’ve wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
The Updike piece from the New Yorker is available here (subscribers only, but the abstract is informative):
For example, “the umbrella man”: though the day was clear and blowy, he can be detected, in photographs, standing on the curb just about where the assassination would in a few seconds occur, holding a black umbrella above him; seconds later he is again photographed, walking away, gazing tranquilly at the scramble of horrified spectators. His umbrella is now furled. Who was he? Where is he now?
The film pairs nicely with Morris’ recent interview of Stephen King about the latter’s new novel based on the Kennedy assassination.
This is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing the DVD commentary for Total Recall. Instead of adding any context to the film, he simply describes exactly what was happening in each scene.
I have three guesses as to what’s going on here:
1. It’s a fake from a really good impersonator.
2. Arnold is dumb and he’s unaware of how dumb he is.
3. But my money’s on this one: Arnold was contractually obligated to do the DVD commentary but when it came to it, he didn’t really want to. So he torpedoed the whole thing and had some fun in the meantime. (via stellar)
An epic chart from XKCD: Money - A chart of almost all of it, where it is, and what it can do. It’s broken out into “dollars, thousands, millions, billions, trillions”…here’s just a little snippet of the billions section:
From the Smithsonian, a 1964 album of office sounds…”rustling papers, draws closing, typing and footsteps are just a few of the sounds heard on this album”. See previous obsolete sounds. (via @ian_crowther)
The sordid tale of how Jim Romenesko ended up leaving The Poynter Institute.
“How did this go off the rails?” Poynter’s attorney asked me during a Nov. 12 phone conversation about my threat to file a cease and desist order against the institute for using my name on their website after being taken off the payroll.
While travelling, Leonardo kept a small notebook at the ready for notes and sketching. In one of these notebooks, he listed a number of things he wished to accomplish in one week or month in the late 1490s.
What a jumble! Cannons, wall construction, studying the sun, ice skating in Flanders, optics, and that oh-so-casual, “Draw Milan.” It’s like his mind could wander off in any direction at any time. How did he concentrate? How did he focus?
Maybe he went in and out, plunging into a task that concentrated him fully, and then, once done, he’d spring back to the rough and tumble of Anything Goes. Great minds can go as they please.
Another giant, Michel Montaigne, the inventor of the essay, wrote that no single idea could hold him. “I cannot keep my subject still,” he wrote. “It goes along, befuddled and staggering, with a natural drunkenness.”
I like being drunk like that.
(via sly oyster)
Remember the cleverly designed Hidden Radio?
The team behind it has turned it into a radio/Bluetooth speaker and is doing a Kickstarter campaign to get production up and running…all they need is to pre-sell 1000 units.
ps. That “absurdly clever” quote they attribute to Boing Boing? That’s mine! (thx, john)
American Masters is airing a two-part documentary on Woody Allen this week on PBS.
Beginning with Allen’s childhood and his first professional gigs as a teen — furnishing jokes for comics and publicists — American Masters — Woody Allen: A Documentary chronicles the trajectory and longevity of Allen’s career: from his work in the 1950s-60s as a TV scribe for Sid Caesar, standup comedian and frequent TV talk show guest, to a writer-director averaging one film-per-year for more than 40 years.
The first part aired last night (it’s rerunning throughout the week so check listings, etc.) and the second part is tonight.
Acidic candy orig. from Nov 17, 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.
Mental Floss has a collection of clips of familar sounds from 20-30 years ago that are no longer around, including the TV channel selector clunk-clunk, manual typewriter clicking, and one of my favorite sounds: that of the rotary telephone dial. One I would have added: the manual credit card imprinter.
Since the late 1980s, Mark Landis has been donating forged paintings he’s painted to a number of museums around the country. No one really knew why…until John Gapper from The Financial Times tracked him down.
For nearly three decades, Landis has visited museums across the US in various guises and tried to donate paintings he has forged. As well as Father Scott, he has posed as “Steven Gardiner” among other aliases. He never asks for money, although museums have often hosted meals for him and made small gifts. His only stipulation is that he is donating in his parents’ names — often his actual father, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Landis Jr, a former US Navy officer.
Landis has been prolific and amazingly persistent. A few weeks before he came to Lafayette, “Father Scott” arrived at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, with a forgery of Head of a Sioux by Alfred Jacob Miller that he said he was giving in memory of his mother, “Helen Mitchell Scott”. Landis has so far offered copies of that work to five other museums. Yet in all this time, although curators speculate about his motives, no one has found out why he is doing it.
Update: Landis is the subject of a documentary film called Art and Craft.
Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history. His impressive body of work spans thirty years, covering a wide range of painting styles and periods that includes 15th Century Icons, Picasso, and even Walt Disney. And while the copies could fetch impressive sums on the open market, Landis isn’t in it for money. Posing as a philanthropic donor, a grieving executor of a family member’s will, and most recently as a Jesuit priest, Landis has given away hundreds of works over the years to a staggering list of institutions across the United States.
I wish these were bipartisan, but this suprisingly large collection of prominent Republicans made up with clown paint is still pretty amazing. Here’s Texas governor Rick Perry:
The battle between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over direct and alternating current got ugly. Really ugly, with Edison gleefully electrocuting dozens of dogs, an elephant, and even a man with “dangerous” alternating current.
When New York State sentenced convicted murderer William Kemmler to death, he was slated to become the first man to be executed in an electric chair. Killing criminals with electricity “is a good idea,” Edison said at the time. “It will be so quick that the criminal can’t suffer much.” He even introduced a new word to the American public, which was becoming more and more concerned by the dangers of electricity. The convicted criminals would be “Westinghoused.”
Westinghouse was livid. He faced millions of dollars in losses if Edison’s propaganda campaign convinced the public that his AC current would be lethal to homeowners. Westinghouse contributed $100,000 toward legal fees for Kemmler’s appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, where it was argued that death in the electric chair amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Both Kemmler and Westinghouse were unsuccessful, and on August 6, 1890, Kemmler was strapped into Harold Brown’s chair at Auburn prison and wired to an AC dynamo. When the current hit him, Kemmler’s fist clenched so tight that blood began to trickle from his palm down the arm of the chair. His face contorted, and after 17 seconds, the power was shut down. Arthur Southwick, “the father of the electric chair,” was in attendance and proclaimed to the witnesses, “This is the culmination of ten years work and study. We live in a higher civilization today.”
Yet behind the dentist, Kemmler began to shriek for air.
(thx, peter)
Acidic candy orig. from Nov 17, 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.
If you search Wolfram Alpha for “planes overhead”, it returns a list of planes passing over your current location along with a sky map of where to look.
Moby has a web site where filmmakers can download his music for use in non-profit projects. Cool!
this portion of moby.com, ‘film music’, is for independent and non-profit filmmakers, film students, and anyone in need of free music for their independent, non-profit film, video, or short. to use the site you log in(or on?) and are then given a password. you can then listen to the available music and download whatever you want to use in your film or video or short. the music is free as long as it’s being used in a non-commercial or non-profit film, video, or short.
Something to keep in mind when you’re tempted to slap a Sigur Ros song on your viral video. (via ken murphy)
Sour candy is sour because of the acidity level. The Minnesota Dental Association has compiled a chart listing several popular sour candies, all of which are acidic enough to cause tooth enamel loss and some of which are almost as acidic as battery acid! Here’s part of the chart:
(via mlkshk)
Update: I meant to add that the ph scale is logarithmic (like the Richter scale) so that a pH of 3.0 is 10 times more acidic than a pH of 4.0. That means that even the pH 1.6 & 1.8 candies on the list aren’t quite battery acid, but it also means that a pH 2.0 candy has 100x more acidity than is required to cause enamel loss, not just 2x.
This is not your typical sky time lapse…instead of looping through 365 days in one video, each day gets its own little movie in a grid.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.
Best viewed at YouTube in full-screen HD. (via data pointed)
One hundred and seventy-one people have vanished from cruise ships in the past decade. Here’s the sad and depressing story of one of them, Rebecca Coriam.
I wander into one of the bars and get talking to a waiter. “What’s it like working here?” I ask.
“It’s all about the show,” he replies. “When you’re out among the guests, you’re always on show. Even if you’re a waiter, or a cleaner, or a deck hand.”
“How long have you been on board?” I ask.
“Seven months. I’ll be going home in 40 days - 44 to be exact.” He laughs. “Seven months is long enough. Being away from your family is hard.”
“Were you on board when Rebecca Coriam vanished?” I ask.
He narrows his eyes. “I don’t know anything about it,” he says. There’s a long silence. “It didn’t happen,” he says. He looks at me. “You know that’s the answer I have to give.”
Between this and the illness oubreaks and the lawlessness and the soul-deadening, there’s no chance in hell I’ll ever take a cruise.
Drinkify matches up the music you’re listening to with a suggested drink. According to the site, Daft Punk pairs best with 6 oz. Bombay Sapphire Gin served neat, Philip Glass should be accompanied by a bottle of red wine, The Clash goes with 1 oz. cocaine + 1 oz. grenadine served in a highball, and you can probably guess what you drink while listening to Snoop Dogg:
(via coudal)
A trailer for Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox using dialogue from Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds.
(via biancolo)
Now that the folks at Next Restaurant are done with their initial menu (Paris, 1906), they’re giving it all away in a cookbook available exclusively for iBooks. And they’re going to do the same thing for each of their menus.
Next is a restaurant like no other. Every season the menu and service explore an entirely different cuisine. Buying a ticket is the only way to get in… and the entire season sold out in a few hours. The inaugural menu took diners back to Paris: 1906, Escoffier at the Ritz for a multi-course pre fixe dinner that was described by the New York Times as “Belle Epoque dishes largely unseen on American tables for generations.”
Ok, someone needs to do this: 1. Open a restaurant (in New York, say) that features old menus from Next every three months using the Next cookbooks to plan menus. 2. Call it Previous. 3. Profit!
Speaking of going fast, this is a lovely 22-minute documentary about a downhill skateboarding race in Teutonia, Brazil where the competitors reach speeds in excess of 70 mph on almost unbelievably rough pavement.
(via ★acoleman)
In a recent interview reported over at Grantland, Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner talked about how Man Men will end in its seventh season.
“I do know how the whole show ends,” he told us. “It came to me in the middle of last season. I always felt like it would be the experience of human life. And human life has a destination. It doesn’t mean Don’s gonna die. What I’m looking for, and how I hope to end the show, is like … It’s 2011. Don Draper would be 84 right now. I want to leave the show in a place where you have an idea of what it meant and how it’s related to you.”
ExtendNY extends Manhattan’s street grid worldwide. Here’s 64908th Street and 12,778th Avenue in Paris, France.
(via @bdeskin)
Rival protesting groups clashed with police and each other during Independence Day festivities in Warsaw, Poland and someone caught some of it on a camera mounted on a remote control helicopter.
This shorter video of police double-timing it down a narrow Warsaw street is almost cinematic. It reminds me of how the different camera views in the Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL broadcasting networks to invent camera systems to provide similar views. In the future, the news will look more and more like movies. (via @coudal)
One of the many micro-genres featured on kottke.org is the “going fast video”. In that spirit, here’s a car going 462 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
My favorite part is right around 30 seconds, when he hits the gas and you can see the dirt fly up from the rear wheels. Also, the driver’s demeanor is an odd combination of frightened and bored, like Bill Murray on the elliptical in Lost in Translation. Help! (via devour)
Over at In Focus, Alan Taylor has a selection of submissions from the upcoming National Geographic photo contest. Some really beauties in ther…whoa, UFO!
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