Entries for June 2012
Some Californians are shoving foie gras down their throats so fast they look like stuffed geese. As of Sunday, that food is outlawed.
Despite the prospect of a $1,000-per-day fine, a few of Lefebvre’s chef peers are rumored to be stashing away foie gras to quietly serve to favored customers, he said, and some have considered charging a fee to prepare foie gras brought in by patrons. Lefebvre won’t sell any of the product, but plans to “investigate” his options.
Sam Arbesman has turned his mesofacts concept into an upcoming book called The Half-Life of Facts.
Facts change all the time. The age at which women should get a mammogram has increased. Smoking has gone from doctor recommended to deadly while the healthiness of carbs and fat seems to be in constant flux. We used to think the Earth was the center of the universe, that Pluto was a planet, and that the brontosaurus was a real dinosaur. What we know about the world is constantly changing.
Samuel Arbesman is an expert in scientometrics, literally the science of science-how we know what we know. It turns out that knowledge in most fields evolves in systematic and predictable ways, and understanding that evolution can be enormously powerful. For instance, knowing how different branches of medicine overturn their bodies of knowledge can improve the way we train (and retrain) physicians.
The Half-Life of Facts features fascinating examples from fields as diverse as technology and literature. It will help us find new ways to measure the world while accepting the limits of how much we can know with certainty.
And a podcast! It’s called Here’s the Thing and it features a different guest every two weeks.
Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin gives the listener unique entree into the lives of artists, policy makers and performers. Alec sidesteps the predictable by taking listeners inside the dressing rooms, apartments, and offices of people such as comedian Chris Rock, political strategist Ed Rollins and Oscar winner Michael Douglas. Here’s The Thing: Listen to what happens when an inveterate guest becomes a host. Subscribe now and get new interviews every two weeks.
A recent episode featured David Letterman.
Supreme Court upholds Obama’s healthcare act orig. from Jun 28, 2012
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
In the amount of time I have spent playing Kingdom Rush on the iPad, I could have completed a second or even third college degree. So it is with some relutance that I have been made aware of the iPhone version of Kingdom Rush, out today. It’s the same game, optimized for the smaller screen on the iPhone and only 99 cents. Maybe the reason the whole “can’t use the iPad/iPhone for creation” thing persists is that everyone is using the damn things to play tower defense games instead.
This story involve: ninjas, Orange County, and SpongeBob SquarePants. Depending on who you ask, artist Todd White, lead character designer of SpongeBob SquarePants, either hired a gang of ninjas to hold hostage a gallery owner for several hours while they stole all his work from the gallery or sent his manager, his lawyer, and an off duty LAPD officer to take his art back from a gallery owner who fraudulently reproduced and signed his work.
Claiming that she had been assaulted and imprisoned, Howell told the cops that she only agreed to be recorded by the men because she was scared. “She was extremely afraid for her life,” the officer noted. Terrified for her safety, according to the report she gave the police, she told Eddy and the others what they wanted to hear and signed the settlement only because she had been coerced. She suspected that the caper was designed to eliminate her from White’s life and allow him — and Lavoie, who now worked as White’s office manager — to take over her lucrative gallery themselves. Later that month, she filed a lawsuit against White seeking $7.5 million for physical and emotional trauma. The settlement she had signed that night had no merit as far as she was concerned, and she would continue her business at the Hyatt as normal.
And to round out the art theft beat, a Salvador Dali drawing was stolen out of a NYC gallery in broad daylight last week.
The man who stole a drawing by the Surrealist painter Salvador Dalí on Tuesday wore only the most basic of disguises: that of an everyday gallery visitor, walking past the Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst works on display. And he brought only the most basic of tools for his heist: a black shopping bag.
What a wascally wabbit.
Update:
The drawing mentioned above has been returned.
I’m surprised and mostly pleased that the Supreme Court has upheld President Obama’s Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act.
The Court’s ruling means, that unless Congress acts, in 2014 all Americans will be required to purchase health insurance in the most sweeping overhaul of the nation’s health care system since the Great Society. The Court, according to early analysis, redefined the mandate as a tax, skirting some Constitutional questions but offering a dramatic affirmation to Obama’s key initiative.
Update: Josh Marshall speaks for me here.
This is an imperfect law. But what’s most important is that it provides a structure under which the country can make a start not only on universal coverage — as an ethical imperative — but on doing away with the waste and inefficiencies created by the chronic market failure of the US health insurance system. Again, that matters. And I suspect that there’s no going back.
This. This is what happens to an egg 60 feet under water.
This is gonna revolutionize poaching eggs! (via ★adamkuban)
Well, this is something…an ex-jewel thief decides to unretire and rob people with help from his robot butler. I had to look this up on IMDB to make sure it wasn’t something from Funny or Die or College Humor.
Best robotic sidekick since Mr. Spock. Now reboot Lethal Weapon with Donald Glover and a robot playing the Mel Gibson role. (Yes, I meant Donald. Danny is clearly too old for that shit.)
To demonstrate a pair of their products, Google arranged for a group of skydivers to jump out of a blimp and parachute onto the roof of the Moscone Center in San Francisco, the building in which the Google I/O was being held. The divers were each wearing a pair of Google Glass networking glasses and video chatting on a Google+ Hangout.
Here’s what it looked like from the ground:
I think this is what Robin Sloan was referencing in his tweet earlier:
Watched #GoogleIO. This company is totally Doc Brown. In one corner, an automatic banana-peeler; in the other, A WORKING TIME MACHINE.
They’re birds. With people arms.
Why am I posting this? Why do I love these so much? (via @joeljohnson)
The trick with the roshambot is that it waits until its opponent has made her choice and then chooses the winning throw in about 1 millisecond. I.e. it cheats.
I wonder what would happen if you put two of these robots against each other? (via @dens)
Gawker has rebranded their new commenting system…it’s now called Kinja. The name is recycled from a project that Nick Denton worked on with Meg Hourihan starting in 2003. Kinja 1 was an attempt to build a blog aggregator without relying solely on RSS, which was not then ubiquitous. Here’s a mockup of the site I did for them in late 2003:
Luckily they got some real designers to finish the job…here’s a version that 37signals did that was closer to how it looked at launch.
Where is the team that worked on that Kinja? Nick’s still hammering away at Gawker, Meg is raising two great children (a more difficult and rewarding task than building software), programmer Mark Wilkie is director of technology at Buzzfeed, programmer Matt Hamer still works for Gawker (I think?), intern Gina Trapani is running her own publishing/development empire & is cofounder of ThinkUp, and 37signals (they worked on the design of the site) is flying high.
David Brooks has some advice for artists, musicians, politicians, and the like: appreciate the tremendous power of your particularity.
We carry this need for paracosms into adulthood. It’s a paradox that the artists who have the widest global purchase are also the ones who have created the most local and distinctive story landscapes. Millions of people around the world are ferociously attached to Tupac Shakur’s version of Compton or J.K. Rowling’s version of a British boarding school or Downton Abbey’s or Brideshead Revisited’s version of an Edwardian estate.
Millions of people know the contours of these remote landscapes, their typical characters, story lines, corruptions and challenges. If you build a passionate and highly localized moral landscape, people will come.
Brooks roots these story landscapes to place but it’s easily expanded to any individual differentiator. Take tech companies. Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft…they all embody the particularity of their founders and have found success because of it.
Adam Gopnik reviews Elaine Pagels’ book, Revelations: Visions, Prophecy, and Politics in the Book of Revelation, for the New Yorker. Like much of the Bible, Revelation is largely a reaction to what was happening in that part of the world at the time.
Pagels then shows that Revelation, far from being meant as a hallucinatory prophecy, is actually a coded account of events that were happening at the time John was writing. It’s essentially a political cartoon about the crisis in the Jesus movement in the late first century, with Jerusalem fallen and the Temple destroyed and the Saviour, despite his promises, still not back. All the imagery of the rapt and the raptured and the rest that the “Left Behind” books have made a staple for fundamentalist Christians represents contemporary people and events, and was well understood in those terms by the original audience. Revelation is really like one of those old-fashioned editorial drawings where Labor is a pair of overalls and a hammer, and Capital a bag of money in a tuxedo and top hat, and Economic Justice a woman in flowing robes, with a worried look. “When John says that ‘the beast that I saw was like a leopard, its feet were like a bear’s and its mouth was like a lion’s mouth,’ he revises Daniel’s vision to picture Rome as the worst empire of all,” Pagels writes. “When he says that the beast’s seven heads are ‘seven kings,’ John probably means the Roman emperors who ruled from the time of Augustus until his own time.” As for the creepy 666, the “number of the beast,” the original text adds, helpfully, “Let anyone with understanding calculate the number of the beast, for it is the number of a person.” This almost certainly refers-by way of Gematria, the Jewish numerological system-to the contemporary Emperor Nero. Even John’s vision of a great mountain exploding is a topical reference to the recent eruption of Vesuvius, in C.E. 79. Revelation is a highly colored picture of the present, not a prophecy of the future.
You’ll have to read through the article to discover what early Christianity has to do with this ad for Prada perfume directed by Ridley Scott and starring Daria Werbowy:
For the most recent issue of Fast Company, Jeff Chu profiled Tadashi Yanai, the CEO of Uniqlo, one of the hottest retail companies in the world. The piece is full of interesting business & design wisdom throughout.
Yanai, though, cannot resist the American market. Around the corner from his Tokyo office, there’s a large map of Manhattan. There are push pins marking Abercrombie & Fitch, American Eagle, Forever 21, Gap, Hollister, and a half-dozen other brands that could be considered immediate competitors. Significantly, there’s one outlier marked: the Apple Store. When I ask Yanai about this, he replies simply, “People have only one wallet.”
More notably, Apple is perhaps the best example of a company whose products have become ubiquitous without losing cachet. “Specialness is nice to have,” Yanai says, “but what’s more important is being made for all.”
One of my favorite things about shopping at Uniqlo is how they hand you your credit card back:
All associates are trained, for instance, to return your credit card and receipt with both hands, as a sign of respect.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Orbitz has determined that Mac users spend 30% more per night on lodging. Obviously, this is an opportunity for Orbitz to display more expensive hotel options to Mac users.
The Orbitz effort, which is in its early stages, demonstrates how tracking people’s online activities can use even seemingly innocuous information—in this case, the fact that customers are visiting Orbitz.com from a Mac—to start predicting their tastes and spending habits.
Here’s a fairly concise rundown of shady marketing tactics Orbitz has used in the past. (via @delfuego)
In the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert says that, “with the exception of the imperial offspring of the Ming dynasty and the dauphins of pre-Revolutionary France”, American kids might be the most spoiled kids in the history of the world. Strong words but not without merit.
How did parents in different cultures train young people to assume adult responsibilities? In the case of the Angelenos, they mostly didn’t. In the L.A. families observed, no child routinely performed household chores without being instructed to. Often, the kids had to be begged to attempt the simplest tasks; often, they still refused. In one fairly typical encounter, a father asked his eight-year-old son five times to please go take a bath or a shower. After the fifth plea went unheeded, the father picked the boy up and carried him into the bathroom. A few minutes later, the kid, still unwashed, wandered into another room to play a video game.
In another representative encounter, an eight-year-old girl sat down at the dining table. Finding that no silverware had been laid out for her, she demanded, “How am I supposed to eat?” Although the girl clearly knew where the silverware was kept, her father got up to get it for her.
In a third episode captured on tape, a boy named Ben was supposed to leave the house with his parents. But he couldn’t get his feet into his sneakers, because the laces were tied. He handed one of the shoes to his father: “Untie it!” His father suggested that he ask nicely.
“Can you untie it?” Ben replied. After more back-and-forth, his father untied Ben’s sneakers. Ben put them on, then asked his father to retie them. “You tie your shoes and let’s go,” his father finally exploded. Ben was unfazed. “I’m just asking,” he said.
Writing for The New England Journal of Medicine, Atul Gawande reviews the history of surgery. The utility and efficacy of surgical procedures increased sharply with the use of anesthesia and antiseptic practices.
Before anesthesia, the sounds of patients thrashing and screaming filled operating rooms. So, from the first use of surgical anesthesia, observers were struck by the stillness and silence. In London, Liston called ether anesthesia a “Yankee dodge” - having seen fads such as hypnotism come and go - but he tried it nonetheless, performing the first amputation with the use of anesthesia, in a 36-year-old butler with a septic knee, 2 months after the publication of Bigelow’s report. As the historian Richard Hollingham recounts, from the case records, a rubber tube was connected to a flask of ether gas, and the patient was told to breathe through it for 2 or 3 minutes. He became motionless and quiet. Throughout the procedure, he did not make a sound or even grimace. “When are you going to begin?” asked the patient a few moments later. He had felt nothing. “This Yankee dodge beats mesmerism hollow,” Liston exclaimed.
It would take a little while for surgeons to discover that the use of anesthesia allowed them time to be meticulous. Despite the advantages of anesthesia, Liston, like many other surgeons, proceeded in his usual lightning-quick and bloody way. Spectators in the operating-theater gallery would still get out their pocket watches to time him. The butler’s operation, for instance, took an astonishing 25 seconds from incision to wound closure. (Liston operated so fast that he once accidentally amputated an assistant’s fingers along with a patient’s leg, according to Hollingham. The patient and the assistant both died of sepsis, and a spectator reportedly died of shock, resulting in the only known procedure with a 300% mortality.)
This seems apocryphal but I’m gonna go with it anyway: Madonna has a cleanup team sweep her tour dressing rooms after shows for bits of hair, skin, and spit the singer might have left behind so that fans cannot get ahold of her DNA.
Concert promoter Alvaro Ramos, who is overseeing the Portuguese leg of Madonna’s MDNA tour, told Britain’s Daily Mirror: “We have to take extreme care, like I have never seen for any other artist.
“We cannot even look at the dressing room after it is ready, or even open the door.”
MDNA = Madonna’s DNA?
Fun fact about Mister Rogers’ cardigan sweaters that I hadn’t heard before: his mom knitted all of them by hand for him. That may be the most perfectly perfect detail about anything that I’ve ever heard. (via ★djacobs)
Amateur bowler Bill Fong almost bowled a perfect series two years ago, something that 21 bowlers have ever accomplished. But he came up short.
His teammates aren’t interested in talking about what he can do to make his strikes more solid, though, or even tonight’s mildly competitive league game. They’re still discussing a night two years ago. They mention it every week, without fail. In fact, all you have to do is say the words “That Night” and everyone at the Plano Super Bowl knows what you’re talking about. They also refer to it as “The Incident” or “That Incredible Series.” It’s the only time anyone can remember a local recreational bowler making the sports section of the Dallas Morning News. One man, an opponent of Fong’s that evening, calls it “the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in a bowling alley.”
Bill Fong needs no reminders, of course. He thinks about that moment — those hours — every single day of his life.
There’s a twist worthy of the Usual Suspects near the end of the story.
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik….prints, tshirts, iPhone cases, etc. are available.
Here’s the entire first episode of Aaron Sorkin’s The Newsroom. You can also watch it on HBO.com but you have to register first. I doubt non-US residents can watch it in either place. Why isn’t this embeddable? I don’t understand…they don’t want more people to watch it? Does the internet girl know?
Zhao Huasen takes photos of people on bicycles and erases the bicycles.
Adam Roberts, aka The Amateur Gourmet, has a new book coming out in the fall called Secrets of the Best Chefs. For the book, Roberts traveled the US cooking with some of the country’s best chefs, including Marco Canora, Alice Waters, Anita Lo, and José Andres.
The culmination of that journey is a cookbook filled with lessons, tips, and tricks from the most admired chefs in America, including how to properly dress a salad, bake a no-fail piecrust, make light and airy pasta, and stir-fry in a wok, plus how to improve your knife skills, eliminate wasteful food practices, and create recipes of your very own. Most important, Roberts has adapted 150 of the chefs’ signature recipes into totally doable dishes for the home cook. Now anyone can learn to cook like a pro!
Adam, maybe it’s time to upgrade yourself to the Semi-Pro Gourmet?
If your jaw doesn’t drop while watching this video, you need to go to a doctor because you don’t have a jaw. Hopefully, even without a jaw, you can enjoy this edit of amazing BMX tricks.
(via @mathowie)
I was reminded earlier today of True Films, Kevin Kelly’s collection of must-see documentaries, educational films, etc.
As dogged as I have been in tracking down great true films, I have seen only a fraction of the estimated 40,000 that have been made. So I am ready for more. However I will only list true films and documentaries that are available as VHS tape or DVDs at consumer prices. In other words, films that are easy for most people to see upon request. I won’t include films that are only shown in theaters, or available via high-priced rentals, or simply out of print.
The site hasn’t been updated in over a year but the content is evergreen. True Films is also available in book and ebook formats.
In an effort to get to know them better (because access is otherwise difficult), a group of Western journalists arranged a paintball game with a group of Hezbollah fighters. The journalists fared better than you might think, but the two groups were playing different games.
We figured they’d cheat; they were Hezbollah, after all. But none of us-a team of four Western journalists-thought we’d be dodging military-grade flash bangs when we initiated this “friendly” paintball match.
The battle takes place underground in a grungy, bunker-like basement underneath a Beirut strip mall. When the grenades go off it’s like being caught out in a ferocious thunderstorm: blinding flashes of hot white light, blasts of sound that reverberate deep inside my ears.
As my eyesight returns and readjusts to the dim arena light, I poke out from my position behind a low cinder-block wall. Two large men in green jumpsuits are bearing down on me. I have them right in my sights, but they seem unfazed — even as I open fire from close range, peppering each with several clear, obvious hits. I expect them to freeze, maybe even acknowledge that this softie American journalist handily overcame their flash-bang trickery and knocked them out of the game. Perhaps they’ll even smile and pat me on the back as they walk off the playing field in a display of good sportsmanship (after cheating, of course).
Instead, they shoot me three times, point-blank, right in the groin.
From this distance (well within the 15-foot “safety zone”), paintballs feel like bee stings. I raise my hands in pain and confusion, signaling to the referee that I’m leaving the game. But the bigger one — a tall, muscular farm boy from the deep south of Lebanon who tonight is going by the name Khodor — isn’t finished with me yet: He wraps his giant hands around my body and tries to throw me over his shoulder with the kind of deftness that only comes from practice. I’m quick enough to break free and flee, but my teammate Ben isn’t so lucky. Khodor and his partner move past me in perfect military formation, plunging deeper into our defenses. Soon they apprehend Ben, pushing him ahead of them, human shield-style.
The bee orchid orig. from Jan 21, 2010
* 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’ve ever wondered if any Major League Baseball players come from your favorite city, this is the map for you. See also the 2011-2012 NHL Player map. The maps are by Mike Morton, and I’m fascinated by the fact the NHL had players from both Africa and Brazil, while MLB did not. (via @jonahkeri)
Speaking of what fast looks like, here’s a pair of synced videos that show just how fast F1 cars are. On the left are drivers participating in a track day, that is, normal folks who want to drive their cars fast on a real race course. A couple of them look like actual GT cars and are moving pretty quick. On the right, you’ve got F1 cars on the same track. It’s not even close:
Here’s an overlaid version and you can also see how much faster F1 cars are than just 25 years ago…the 2011 F1 car beats the 1986 F1 car by an amazing 22 seconds over a total time of a minute and a half. (via @coreyh)
Update: In a speed test, an F1 car starts 40 seconds after a Mercedes sports car and 25 seconds after a V8 Supercar (essentially an Australian NASCAR) and still catches them by the end of the first lap.
Back in 1999, as he prepared to make a movie called The Minority Report, Steven Spielberg gathered top science and technology types to an “idea summit” where they would share thoughts on what things might look like in 50 years. To mark the ten year anniversary of the movie’s release, Wired asked a dozen of the summit attendees to reflect on the experience. According to one participant: “There was no shortage of megalomania, although there was good reason for it.”
Photographer John Clang is using projected Skype video to make portraits of Singaporean families whose members are scattered around the globe.
In Singapore, it is a common practice for entire families to gather on special occasions for a formal picture, often at a studio, with the resulting image framed and prominently displayed at home. The growing tendency of younger family members to take jobs abroad, however, has left many modern portraits missing a relation or two. So the Singaporean photographer John Clang devised a solution, piggybacking on the video-calling technology that already helps ease the dislocation of separated family members: Skype.
(via @bdeskin)
If you make a series of horrifying photos of little girls dressed like Vegas cocktail waitresses, I will apparently always click through. First it was Susan Anderson’s High Glitz, a series of child beauty pageant contestants.
And then the last issue of the NY Times Magazine had a series of photos by Kenneth O Halloran of contestants at the World Irish Dancing Championships.
All I can think of when I see those spray tans is Homer’s makeup gun.
I know this is a “viral video” and I’m a sucker for posting it, but it’s pretty cool and fits under the umbrella of what fast looks like. Anyway, watch this Mercedes chase down a golf ball that flies off the tee at almost 180 mph.
Hole in one! And just so you don’t mistake this for some sponsored Mercedes love-fest, some shitheels in a silver Benz very much like the one in the video woke my whole family up at 5am this morning by deliberately setting off their car alarm every 30 seconds outside my house. You know, for fun.
Michael O’Malley is a “human capital consultant” (whatever that is) but has also been a beekeeper for the past ten years. Here’s what he’s learned about how bees organize themselves and manage risk.
Take, for example, their approach toward the “too-big-to-fail” risk our financial sector famously took on. Honeybees have a failsafe preventive for that. It’s: “Don’t get too big.” Hives grow through successive divestures or spin-offs: They swarm. When a colony gets too large, it becomes operationally unwieldy and grossly inefficient and the hive splits. Eventually, risk is spread across many hives and revenue sources in contrast to relying on one big, vulnerable “super-hive” for sustenance.
Here’s another lesson by analogy: No queen bee is under pressure for quarterly pollen and nectar targets. The hive is only beholden to the long term. Indeed, beehives appear to underperform at times because they could collect more. But they are not designed to maximize current returns; they are designed to prevent cycles of feast and famine (a death sentence in the natural world). They concentrate their foraging on the most lucrative patches but keep an exploratory force in the field that will ensure future revenue sources when the current ones run dry. This exploratory force (call it an R&D expenditure) increases as conditions worsen.
From Quora, some interesting answers to the question “What facts about the United States do foreigners not believe until they come to America?” The economics of food was a popular response:
Fruit and vegetable prices, compared to fast food prices:
A bag of grapes: $6
A box of strawberries: $7
1lb tomatoes: $3
McChicken: $1
Big Mac : $1 ( I think. I don’t go to McDonalds though)
HOW DOES THAT EVEN WORK?
At the same time, there are things that you wouldn’t associate with first-world countries:
Religious fanaticism
It is hard to believe that a first-world country has non-progressive ideologies, especially that hurt women (the vaginal probes and other abortion related woes). Not only that, the belief in Earth’s age, talking snake etc. Being from India, it is even harder for me to understand this. I expected US to be more progressive. It is not as crazy as back in India but still something that I think is enough to be detrimental to the progress.
Others are pleasantly surprised:
Many Indians are very surprised to find out that there are large numbers of Americans who actually love their parents and siblings and wives and children and have normal, healthy relationships with them. Our media has them convinced that all Americans are very self-centered people who throw their kids out of their homes after high school, don’t care for their parents, and divorce their spouses. And, I swear, it is literally true that many Indians do not believe that this is not true until they have been to the US and seen examples of good healthy family relationships themselves. I have had heated arguments with people who’ve never been to the US, but can give lectures on how screwed up family values in the US are.
But we could also use some improvement:
There actually is an accepted piece of clothing called a ‘wife-beater’.
(via @alexandrak)
This is a long zoom look at how pizza gets delivered to hungry people. It starts by looking at the routes taken by a Dominos delivery person during a typical night and slowly zooms out to reveal the pizza giant’s national supply chain.
Embark with Kwon on a trip that begins with a pizza delivery route in New York City, then goes across the country to California’s Central Valley, where nearly 50 percent of America’s fruits, nuts and vegetables are grown, and into the heartland for an aerial look at our farmlands.
It’s funny. Or sad. Or predictable. It’s predictably sadly funny that many tech media outlets are saying that Apple’s iPad finally has a bonafide competitor in the Microsoft Surface. Set aside for now that Surface does look genuinely interesting, that the price hasn’t been set, and the thing isn’t even out yet. For a piece of portable networking technology like a smartphone or tablet to be successful on the scale at which Apple operates, you need to have an ecosystem, a network of interacting devices, software, products, and services that work together…hardware + software is not enough. Apple, Google (and partners), Amazon, and possibly Microsoft are the only companies with the expertise and pockets deep enough to build their own ecosystems. Ok, maybe Facebook in a couple years or if Nokia can dig themselves out of their current hole, but that’s really about it.
The current parts of the phone/tablet/media ecosystem are as follows:
1. A piece of hardware at a price that compares favorably to its quality and features. Apple sells premium hardware with great features at a premium-but-still-reasonable price. Google and their partners offer a range of devices at different prices corresponding to different levels of quality and features offered. Amazon offers low-price hardware with a relatively limited but appropriate set of features. Microsoft looks to have a nice piece of hardware with promising features but the price point is pending.
2. An OS that takes proper advantage of the hardware capabilities with features in line with the price of the device. Apple has iOS, with most of its devices running the same version. Google and their partners have many different versions of Android, most of which are not the most recent version. Amazon runs a customized Android OS for the Kindle Fire and a modified version of Linux for the non-Fire Kindles. Microsoft has Windows 8, which will eventually run, in different configurations, on lots of different kinds of hardware, from desktop computers to phones.
3. An app store stocked with the applications that smartphone and tablet owners want to use. Apple has the comprehensive App Store. Google, etc. have Google Play (née Android Market), Amazon’s Appstore for Android, and other stores, on which you can get most of the most popular apps. Amazon has their Appstore for Android for the Kindle Fire. Microsoft has the Windows Phone Marketplace for the Windows Phone with a more limited selection than the other stores…it’s unclear what their plans are for a Windows 8 app store.
4. A media store with books, movies, and TV shows. Apple has the iTunes store (as well as iBooks, Newstand, etc.). Android has Google Play. Amazon has the Kindle store and Amazon Instant Video. Will Microsoft offer a way to purchase media across their Windows 8 platform? Does Windows Media Player do this?
5. A digital media hub for managing media, apps, software updates, etc. This part is a bit more optional than the others since media management is moving to the device and the cloud, but still. Apple has iTunes. Android has a variety of possible desktop managers and management happens on the device or through the cloud? You manage the Kindle stuff through Amazon’s site and on the device. Microsoft will probably go cloud/device-based at this point?
6. An integrated cloud solution for syncing apps, media, and documents across devices. Again, this isn’t crucial but will likely become so over time. Apple has iCloud. Android has Google’s suite of apps (Gmail, calendar, Google docs, Google Drive, etc.). Amazon uses Whispernet and is leveraging AWS in various ways (e.g. Cloud Drive). Will Microsoft leverage SkyDrive for their tablets and phones?
7. Sister devices. Apple has the iPhone, iPad, iPod touches, Apple TV, and their full line of OS X-powered computers. Android runs on phones and tablets, but can also run on an increasing number of other devices (Google TV, etc.). And maybe ChromeOS devices? Amazon doesn’t really have an interacting network of devices. Microsoft will have phones, the Surface, billions of desktop computers running Windows 8, and, dare I even say it, the Xbox.
You don’t need to have every single part of the ecosystem for it to thrive but the more the better. Again, Surface does look genuinely interesting (as do the Windows phones from Nokia), Windows 8 and the Metro interface look promising, and Microsoft has deep pockets but all the pieces aren’t quite there yet for them. Microsoft’s real opportunity here is the Xbox. If they can properly leverage and integrate the Xbox’s growing status as a home media hub (Xbox Live), they can fill in a lot of the holes in their fledgling ecosystem, provide people with compelling devices & media experiences, and give Apple, Google, and Amazon a real run for their (and our) money.
Artist Jason Freeny is making these neat anatomical sculptures of Lego people.
You can see more of his work in progress on his Facebook page. Reminds me of Michael Paulus’ work. (via colossal)
The prequel to Pixar’s Monsters, Inc. is coming out next summer…here’s a little teaser for it.
(via devour)
Holy levitating Slinky! orig. from Jun 19, 2012
Switzerland’s elaborate Cold War defenses orig. from Jun 19, 2012
What the NFL won’t show you orig. from Dec 02, 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.
Why does McDonald’s food look so much better in the ads than at the restaurant? Watch as the director of marketing for McDonald’s Canada buys a Quarter Pounder at McDonald’s and compares that to a burger prepared by a food stylist and retouched in post by an image editor.
Short answer: the burger at the restaurant is optimized for eating and the photo burger is optimized for looking delicious. (via ★interesting)
On the label of most Hebrew National meat products, the company (which is actually now a division of ConAgra) proclaims that, “We answer to a higher authority.” In the short run, that higher authority will be a civil court where ConAgra will defend itself against claims that its hot dogs are not actually kosher at all. Next we’ll find out that Ballpark Franks don’t really plump when you cook ‘em.
In this series of slow motion clips, you can see that if you hold a Slinky by one end and drop it, the bottom end doesn’t actually move until the top end catches up with it.
I’ve watched this like six times and it drops my jaw every time…the bottom of the Slinky JUST. DOES. NOT. MOVE. Here’s the scientific explanation:
The explanation that “it takes time for the bottom of the slinky to feel the change” might work ok, but it isn’t the best.
Then why doesn’t the bottom of the slinky fall as the top is let go? I think the best thing is to think of the slinky as a system. When it is let get, the center of mass certainly accelerates downward (like any falling object). However, at the same time, the slinky (spring) is compressing to its relaxed length. This means that top and bottom are accelerating towards the center of mass of the slinky at the same time the center of mass is accelerating downward.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
Update: See also The Physics of a Falling Slinky. (via @jeffhellman)
In the event of an invasion, the entire country of Switzerland is rigged to destroy all of its road, bridges, railroads, and other infrastructure. Or at least it was during the Cold War. Geoff Manaugh reports on a John McPhee book about the country’s defenses.
In any case, the book’s vision of the Alps as a massively constructed-or, at least, geotechnically augmented and militarily amplified-terrain is quite heady, including the very idea that, in seeking to protect itself from outside invaders, Switzerland is prepared to dynamite, shell, bulldoze, and seal itself into a kind of self-protective oblivion, hiding out in artificially expanded rocky passes and concrete super-basements as all roads and bridges into and out of the country are instantly transformed into landslides and dust.
The first reader comment is more than a little eye-popping:
I have seen this with my own eyes as a foreign student in Switzerland in 1981, when a MOUNTAIN “opened” up and four jets flew out of it, near the quiet town, Martigny.
Update: About a minute into this clip from Rick Steves’ Europe, Steves takes a tour of some of the hidden defenses of Switzerland.
(thx, nils & dennis)
Swedish artist Anders Ramsell has recreated about twelve minutes of Blade Runner using 3285 different watercolor paintings. Wow.
See also Stamen’s watercolor maps. (via ★thefoxisblack)
Is it real or is it CSS3? Amazingly, the above image was made entirely in HTML and CSS3 by Dylan Hudson. (via ★interesting)
Cold murder case solved after 23 years orig. from Jun 18, 2012
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
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