This is what it looks like to fire a gun under water
Lovely photo of a gun being fired under water.
And here’s a slow motion video of the same. Gunfire starts around 2:10.
(via neatorama)
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Entries for September 2012
US state matching game
Starting with a blank map of the US, the object is to place each state in its proper place.
My average error was 8 miles. A better test would be to start each state with the blank map…placing Colorado in the western part of the country without any guide is much tougher than doing it last. (via @notrobwalker)
Zidane head-butting statue unveiled in Paris
A 15-foot-tall statue of Zinedine Zidane head-butting Marco Materazzi by sculptor Adel Abdessemed has been placed in the courtyard of the Pompidou Center in Paris.
The statue, entitled “Headbutt,” is by the Algerian sculptor Adel Abdessemed, and coincides with an exhibition of his work in the museum. “This statue goes against the tradition of making statues to honor victories,” said Phillipe Alain Michaud, who directed the exhibition. “It is an ode to defeat… Zidane’s downward glance recalls that of Adam, chased from paradise.”
But as Michaud knows, and surely as Abdessemed intends, it is both not so simple and much simpler. It is an ode to more than defeat; but it’s also a representation of very basic feelings complicated by literary analogy. The Headbutt was full of anger, stupidity, and recklessness, but beneath them lay a damaged sense of honor. This makes it hard for even the calmest football fan to wholly begrudge Zidane his actions.
Robocars, whistlecars, and robotaxis, oh my
Brad Templeton imagines how the design of cars and other transportation systems might change with widespread use of driverless cars. I especially like the robocar used as a mobile office or a place to get a good night’s sleep as you travel from one place to the other.
The in-car environment will become more of a work and entertainment space than just a travel space. Passengers will expect things like a screen, a keyboard, and a desk. Passengers may wish to face one another (though not all are comfortable riding backwards.)
Quiet will be a very important consideration, though passengers will be allowed to wear headphones if desired, unlike drivers today.
The smooth ride (especially on the highway) of a robocar may generate demand for cars for night-travel, while the passengers sleep. Such vehicles might aim to make a trip last 8 hours rather than make the fastest possible trip, and as such would be much more energy efficient for such trips.
(This also requires a very low crash rate, as seat belts don’t work as well on flat beds.)
My guess is that the first big market for driverless cars will not be the US but somewhere smaller, more urban, and more used to experimentation with alternate modes of transportation. (via the atlantic)
Younger version of Leonardo’s Mona Lisa to go on display
The Swiss-based Mona Lisa Foundation is presenting an earlier version of the famed Leonardo da Vinci painting. According to one foundation member, “We have investigated this painting from every relevant angle and the accumulated information all points to it being an earlier version of the Giaconda in the Louvre.” Seems like a good excuse to listen to The Rolling Stones sing Mona (I Need You Baby).
Micronations
Hutt River, around 5 hours north of Perth, Australia, is one of about 70 micronations in the world, and has its own constitution, capital, and a postal service. What it does not have is international recognition. Australia has roughly half the world’s known micronations.
What it lacks, like all other micronations, is recognition from a single sovereign state. That hasn’t stopped some of Leonard’s followers from attempting to advance Hutt River’s foreign policy. The 2007 opening of an embassy and consular section in Dubai caused a minor diplomatic scandal with Australia, which accused the Hutt River “ambassador” of being a con man selling bogus travel documents. And though Hong Kong earlier this year included Hutt River on a list of legitimate places of incorporation, the move was widely dismissed as an error or a practical joke; Leonard himself is unsure of how it came to pass.
(thanks, Alex)
In which Mars Curiosity finds a river bed
Earlier this month, the Curiosity rover photographed a dry stream bed on the surface of Mars.
That’s the Mars river bed on the left and an Earth river bed on the right. Note the flat smooth rocks in the Mars pic. Pretty cool.
Opium paraphernalia collecting is a slippery slope
From Collectors Weekly, an interview with Steven Martin about his new book, Opium Fiend. Martin collects opium paraphernalia and got addicted to the stuff (the collectables and the opium) while living and collecting in SE Asia.
In 2001, I was working as a fixer and translator for a good friend of mine, Karl Taro Greenfeld, a journalist for the Asian edition of Time. He wanted to do a story about the remnants of opium smoking in Laos, which, at the time, was the only country in the world where you could see opium smoking in the traditional Chinese manner-that is, with a pipe that’s designed to vaporize the drug and a lamp as a source of heat and all the crazy, little tools and accoutrements. Through some weird quirk of history, this sort of opium smoking was eradicated every place else, but Laos still had the traditional public opium den that anybody could walk into, recline, and have an attendant prepare opium for them to smoke.
Actually, Karl’s story was more about the backpackers who were coming to Southeast Asia and causing a resurgence of opium smoking, especially in Vang Vieng, just north of the capital, Vientiane. This one little town was a must-stop on the backpackers’ circuit. Karl, who had at one time been addicted to heroin when he was living in New York City, wanted to do the story, but he didn’t want to get anywhere near the opium, obviously. While I was hired to translate and set up interviews, he asked me to smoke the drug so he could observe and write the details into his story.
It wasn’t the first time I had smoked opium. When I was traveling in the Southeast Asia mountains, the villagers would often invite me to smoke opium with them. But I had never really given it much thought until I did this story. Unlike the tribal kind of paraphernalia I had seen in the mountains, these Laotian dens were using the traditional Chinese accoutrements. After we visited the den, we went back down to the capital. I told Karl, “Hey, why don’t I take you to an antiques shop I know about that has opium pipes? It might be an interesting souvenir.” He ended up buying one, and I thought, “Why don’t I get one, too?”
From 2000: what if Apple was the largest company in the world?
So this is fun. Back in February 2000, I wrote a post about Amazon being awarded a patent for their affiliates program. In it, I wondered about a world where Apple was the largest company in the world:
And that brings us to Microsoft and Apple. Microsoft is perhaps the largest target of this sort of “boycott”, organized or otherwise. People hate Microsoft. Companies hate Microsoft. It’s the company you love to hate. Apple, on the other hand, is one of the most beloved companies in the world. People love Apple.
But what if Apple were Microsoft? What if Apple had won the battle of the PC and was the largest company in the world? People would hate them. Why? Because they would be using the same tactics as Microsoft to stay ahead and keep every bit of that advantage in anyway that they could. Apple is the way it is because they are the underdog.
I’ll even argue that life would be worse under Apple’s rein. Apple controls the OS *and* the hardware: if we were under Apple’s boot instead of Microsoft’s, we’d be paying too much for hardware as well as the software.
Nailed it! Or not. That third paragraph is pretty wrong…one of the things that contributed greatly to Apple’s rise is their commitment to pricing their products competitively. And software is cheap.
As for Apple being the underdog, I’ve always thought one of the interesting things about Daring Fireball, even from the beginning, is that John Gruber never treated Apple as an underdog. In his esteem, Apple was the best company making the best software and hardware, and the DF attitude with respect to Microsoft was very much like that of Jon Lovitz’s Michael Dukakis in a debate with Dana Carvey’s George H.W. Bush on SNL: “I can’t believe I’m losing to this guy”. Gruber proved correct…what looked like an underdog proved to be a powerhouse in the making. (thx, greg & andy)
Praystation meets Pinterest
Designer Joshua Davis is putting many of his past designs up on Pinterest. Lots of great stuff there. For example, here’s the first version of Praystation. (via ★antimega)
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore event
To celebrate the release of his new novel, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, Robin Sloan is doing two related events at the Center for Fiction in NYC.
Second thing first: At 7pm on Thu, Oct 4, there will be a launch party at the Center for Fiction hosted by Farrar, Straus and Giroux and Electric Literature. RSVP here.
But before the party, Robin will be interviewing a variety of people over a 24-hour period and streaming the whole thing online. I am one of the scheduled interviewees and I have no idea what we’ll talk about. But because my slot is right before the party starts, after almost 20 non-stop hours of Robin interviewing people, it’s possible we’ll just change into our sweatpants, split a pint of Cherry Garcia, and spoon on the couch.
Joe Biden will be right over to take your order
Hilarious New Yorker piece by Bill Barol imagining Vice President Joe Biden as a waiter in a restaurant.
Our fish special is halibut with a mango-avocado salsa and Yukon Gold potatoes, and it’s market-priced at sixteen-ninety-five. Sounds like a lot of money, right? Sounds like “Hey, Joe, that’s a piece of fish and a little topping there, and some potatoes.” “Bidaydas,” my great-grandmother from County Louth would have called ‘em. You know what I’m talking about. Just simple, basic, sitting-around-the-kitchen-table-on-a-Tuesday-night food. Nothin’ fancy, right? But, folks, that’s not the whole story. If you believe that, you’re not… getting… the whole… story. Because lemme tell you about these Yukon Gold potatoes. These Yukon Gold potatoes are brushed with extra-virgin olive oil and hand-sprinkled with pink Himalayan sea salt, and then José, our prep guy… . Well. Lemme tell you about José. (He pauses, looks down, clears his throat.)
I get… I get emotional talking about José. This is a guy who — José gets here at ten in the morning. Every morning, rain or shine. Takes the bus here. Has to transfer twice. Literally gets off one bus and onto another. Twice. Never complains. Rain, snow, it’s hailin’ out there…. The guy literally does not complain. Never. Never heard it. José walks in, hangs his coat on a hook, big smile on his face, says hello to everybody — Sal the dishwasher, Angie the sous-chef, Frank, Donna, Pat…. And then do you know what he does? Do you know what José does? I’ll tell you what he does, and folks, folks, this is the point I want to make. With his own hands, he sprinkles fresh house-grown rosemary on those potatoes (raises voice to a thundering crescendo), and they are golden brown on the outside and soft on the inside and they are delicious! They are delicious! They are delicious!
(via @tadfriend)
What if Apple launched iPhone 5 on Kickstarter?
If Apple launched the iPhone 5 on Kickstarter, it would have been the first $1 billion campaign:
$1.7 billion in sales for a weekend…not bad. I got the rough first-weekend sales numbers from Asymco and fudged the rest.
Lucky truck crash
It’s amazing how the guy in the one truck flies through the destroyed windshield and lands on his feet, with or without the assistance of a magic blankie (you be the judge).
(thanks, alex)
Both Flesh and Not, a new book of David Foster Wallace essays
A selection of previously uncollected essays from David Foster Wallace is coming out in book form in November.
Both Flesh and Not gathers 15 essays never published in book form, including “Federer Both Flesh and Not,” considered by many to be his nonfiction masterpiece; “The (As it Were) Seminal Importance of Terminator 2,” which deftly dissects James Cameron’s blockbuster; and “Fictional Futures and the Conspicuously Young,” an examination of television’s effect on a new generation of writers.
Wallace’s previous collections often included expanded articles with extra material cut from previously published pieces (like the cruise ship one and the state fair one). It would be wonderful to read a longer version of his NY Times piece on Federer but for obvious reasons I’m not holding my breath. Even just the first paragraph makes me want to sit down and read the whole thing for like a fifth time:
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.
Long profile of J.K. Rowling in the New Yorker
On the eve of the release of her first novel specifically written for adult readers, Ian Parker profiles J.K. Rowling for the New Yorker. In many ways, this passage about Harry Potter sums up Parker’s take on Rowling herself:
For all the satisfying closure provided by “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows,” gloomier readers may still detect a note of melancholy; there is a narrowness of life for former Hogwarts students, whose career opportunities barely extend beyond the wizard civil service, wizard schoolteaching, and professional Quidditch. This magical society has no use for science; there’s little commerce; and thousands of years of wizarding seems to have generated no culture beyond a short volume of fables and a tabloid newspaper. (Wizard technology is often a cutely flawed approximation of non-wizard technology — owls for e-mail — and one wonders how quickly Harry and his schoolfriends could have won their battles against the evil Lord Voldemort, given two or three cell phones and a gun.) In a time of wizard peace, at least, Harry’s separation from the real world — even as he lives in it — can seem tragic.
In a time of personal prosperity, Rowling’s separation from the real world — even as she lives in it — can seem tragic.
Things from Billy Joel’s We Didn’t Start the Fire that are still burning
China
Television
North Korea
Vaccine
Brooklyn’s got a winning team (maybe)
Disneyland
Trouble in the Suez
Lebanon
California baseball
U2 (albeit a different one)
Dylan
John Glenn
Birth control
Palestine
Terror on the airline
Ayatollah’s in Iran
Foreign debts
Homeless Vets
It will still burn on, and on, and on, and on…
Porn stars have the safest sex in the world
Because of the frequent testing and safety measures, adult film stars are perhaps the world’s safest community, STD-wise. No one in the industry has been infected with HIV since 2004. Porn star Stoya explains:
The production manager printed out a copy of each performer’s page in the APHSS database. I signed my own copy and James’s, indicating that my results were mine and accurate and that I had seen James’s and was comfortable working with him and his clean test which had been taken less than 14 days prior. He did the same. Then the production manager performed an inspection. He looked in our mouths, at both sides of our hands, and at our genitals to make sure there were no visible sores or open wounds. There was another paper to sign stating that we have no sores or open wounds on or in our mouths, hands, and genitals and had been inspected. We also looked at each others genitals, mostly for fun but if either of us had seen (or smelled) something odd we would have called off the scene ourselves.
(via @claytoncubitt)
Did blowing into Nintendo cartridges really help?
Ok, I’m gonna point you to the article discussing the whole thing but based on my years of extensive experience as a kid, I can tell you that blowing into the cartridge absolutely did work. Zelda in particular always needed a good blow before playing. (via @djacobs)
Oh cripes, Fargo to be a TV series
FX is developing a TV show “loosely based” on the Coen brothers’ Fargo.
Joel and Ethan Coen are bringing one of their signatures movies to television. FX has closed a deal to develop Fargo, an hourlong project loosely based on the Coen brothers’ 1996 comedic crime drama. The Coens will serve as executive producers on the project, which will be written/executive produced by The Unusuals and My Generation creator Noah Hawley.
(via @fimoculous)
Fruit salad trees
Plant grafting is something I always sort of knew existed, but never really thought it worked well enough to create fruit salad trees. A plant with multiple different kinds of herbs would be amazing.
In Australia, James and Kerry West grow and sell four types of fruit salad trees, each of which bears several different kinds of fruit. Stone fruit salad trees grow peaches, plums, nectarines, apricots and peachcots. Citrus salad trees offer a winter and summer orange, mandarins, lemons, limes, grapefruits, tangelos and pomelos. Multi-apple trees boast between two and four different kinds of apples and multi-nashi trees produce between two and four different kinds of Asian pears.
(thanks, Jessie)
“A startup is a company designed to grow fast”
Paul Graham explains what a startup is and how it differs from other types of businesses.
That difference is why there’s a distinct word, “startup,” for companies designed to grow fast. If all companies were essentially similar, but some through luck or the efforts of their founders ended up growing very fast, we wouldn’t need a separate word. We could just talk about super-successful companies and less successful ones. But in fact startups do have a different sort of DNA from other businesses. Google is not just a barbershop whose founders were unusually lucky and hard-working. Google was different from the beginning.
To grow rapidly, you need to make something you can sell to a big market. That’s the difference between Google and a barbershop. A barbershop doesn’t scale.
For a company to grow really big, it must (a) make something lots of people want, and (b) reach and serve all those people. Barbershops are doing fine in the (a) department. Almost everyone needs their hair cut. The problem for a barbershop, as for any retail establishment, is (b). A barbershop serves customers in person, and few will travel far for a haircut. And even if they did the barbershop couldn’t accomodate them.
Writing software is a great way to solve (b), but you can still end up constrained in (a). If you write software to teach Tibetan to Hungarian speakers, you’ll be able to reach most of the people who want it, but there won’t be many of them. If you make software to teach English to Chinese speakers, however, you’re in startup territory.
Most businesses are tightly constrained in (a) or (b). The distinctive feature of successful startups is that they’re not.
The story of how Gorilla Glass came to be
Gorilla Glass is the thin strong glass used for the screens of most smartphones. It was invented in the 1960s by Corning but was shelved in the early 1970s due to a lack of demand. The iPhone brought it out of retirement in a big way.
Chemical strengthening, the method of fortifying glass developed in the ’60s, creates a compressive layer too, through something called ion exchange. Aluminosilicate compositions like Gorilla Glass contain silicon dioxide, aluminum, magnesium, and sodium. When the glass is dipped in a hot bath of molten potassium salt, it heats up and expands. Both sodium and potassium are in the same column on the periodic table of elements, which means they behave similarly. The heat from the bath increases the migration of the sodium ions out of the glass, and the similar potassium ions easily float in and take their place. But because potassium ions are larger than sodium, they get packed into the space more tightly. (Imagine taking a garage full of Fiat 500s and replacing most of them with Chevy Suburbans.) As the glass cools, they get squeezed together in this now-cramped space, and a layer of compressive stress on the surface of the glass is formed. (Corning ensures an even ion exchange by regulating factors like heat and time.) Compared with thermally strengthened glass, the “stuffing” or “crowding” effect in chemically strengthened glass results in higher surface compression (making it up to four times as strong), and it can be done to glass of any thickness or shape.
I did glass research in college so I’m a sucker for this sort of thing. (via @joeljohnson)
Bring me James Bond. All of them.
The entire run1 of James Bond films are available in a Blu-ray box set for $150. The DVD version is $100.
[1] Well, not the entire run. Not included are Never Say Never Again (an independently produced Bond film starring Sean Connery 12 years removed from his last Bond outing) and Casino Royale (a Bond satire starring David Niven, Woody Allen, and Peter Sellers). ↩
Climate change and journalistic balance
PBS ombudsman Michael Getler calls out NewsHour for “a faulty application of journalistic balance” in a recent segment on climate change.
Although global warming strikes me as one of those issues where there is no real balance and it is wrong to create an artificial or false equivalence, there is no harm and some possibility of benefit in inviting skeptics about the human contribution and other factors to speak, but in a setting in which the context of the vast majority of scientific evidence and speakers is also made clear.
What was stunning to me as I watched this program is that the NewsHour and Michels had picked Watts — who is a meteorologist and commentator — rather than a university-accredited scientist to provide “balance.” I had never heard of Watts before this program and I’m sure most viewers don’t, as part of their routines, read global warming blogs on either side of the issue.
I’m not being judgmental about Watts or anything he said. He undoubtedly is an effective spokesperson. But it seems to me that if you decide you are going to give airtime to the other side of this crucial and hot-button issue, you need to have a scientist.
What’s good for the goose
Capital New York heard that meat from geese culled from the area around JFK Airport was donated to area food banks, but wondered what that meant exactly. (The culling program began after Captain Sullenburger’s bird-struck airplane landed in the Hudson River.) Little else was known, so they decided to get to the bottom of it. Text book investigative journalism resulted in a much clearer picture and even left open the possibility of conspiracy theories in the comments section. Did the meat get donated to food banks? Yes! Is it safe to eat? Maybe! Would the food banks accept this type of donation again? In a heartbeat!
According to Carol Bannerman, a department spokeswoman, past goose roundups ended with the animals being gassed by carbon dioxide, and the bodies dumped in a landfill. The meat, obviously, went to waste.
Officials wanted to do something different this time, she said, and knew of other states, like Pennsylvania, where donations of goose meat were common. It also turned out to be the case that many food banks — warehouse-type institutions that distribute food to hundreds of pantries and soup kitchens — in New York State frequently received donations of wild game like deer from hunters.
The people who run the food banks confirmed this, although they said they don’t get wild goose-meat donations as regularly.
A Skrillex storm with “a single giant drop”
XKCD’s What If? science feature continues to delight. This week’s question is “What if a rainstorm dropped all of its water in a single giant drop?”
The drop is now falling at 90 meters per second (200 mph). The roaring wind whips up the surface of the water into spray. The leading edge of the droplet turns to foam as air is forced into the liquid. If it kept falling for long enough, these forces would gradually disperse the entire droplet into rain.
Before that can happen, about 20 seconds after formation, the edge of the droplet hits the ground. The water is now moving at over 200 m/s (450 mph). Right under the point of impact, the air is unable to rush out of the way fast enough, and the compression heats it so quickly that the grass would catch fire if it had time.
Fortunately for the grass, this heat lasts only a few milliseconds because it’s doused by the arrival of a lot of cold water. Unfortunately for the grass, the cold water is moving at over half the speed of sound.
Future Perfect
From Steven Johnson comes Future Perfect, a new book about “progress in a networked age”.
Combining the deft social analysis of Where Good Ideas Come From with the optimistic arguments of Everything Bad Is Good For You, New York Times bestselling author Steven Johnson’s Future Perfect makes the case that a new model of political change is on the rise, transforming everything from local governments to classrooms, from protest movements to health care. Johnson paints a compelling portrait of this new political worldview — influenced by the success and interconnectedness of the Internet, but not dependent on high-tech solutions — that breaks with the conventional categories of liberal or conservative thinking.
With his acclaimed gift for multi-disciplinary storytelling and big ideas, Johnson explores this new vision of progress through a series of fascinating narratives: from the “miracle on the Hudson” to the planning of the French railway system; from the battle against malnutrition in Vietnam to a mysterious outbreak of strange smells in downtown Manhattan; from underground music video artists to the invention of the Internet itself.
At a time when the conventional wisdom holds that the political system is hopelessly gridlocked with old ideas, Future Perfect makes the timely and inspiring case that progress is still possible, and that new solutions are on the rise. This is a hopeful, affirmative outlook for the future, from one of the most brilliant and inspiring visionaries of contemporary culture.
This is contrary to what we’ve been hearing from The Shallows et al.
Entries from the 2012 National Geographic photo contest
In Focus has a selection of entries from this year’s installment of the National Geographic Photo Contest.
(via @dunstan)
The best 99 Problems jokes on Twitter
According to the data scientists at Stellar (i.e. me armed with clumsy SQL queries), people like riffing off of Jay-Z’s line from 2004’s 99 Problems:
If you’re having girl problems I feel bad for you, son
I’ve got 99 problems, but a bitch ain’t one
Here are some of the better ones I found:
@antichrista: If you got religious circumcision, I feel bad for you, son. I got 99 problems but a bris ain’t one.
@elibraden: I’m rubbing lotion on my belly rapping “I got 99 problems but ab itch ain’t one” to the elderly men in the gym locker room.
@goldengateblond: “I got 99 problems but the witch ain’t one.” — Darrin Stevens, widower
@evacide: I’ve got 99 problems, but an insufficiently sophisticated grasp of 4th amendment law ain’t one: https://t.co/E2XcSpb8
@dustmop: I got 99 problems but one of them is that i used hex and i actually have 152 other problems :(
@sween: If you’re coming to Canada to escape Obamacare, I feel bad for you son. We’ve got 99 problems but a lack of socialized medicine ain’t one.
@bagyants: “I got 99 problems, but they can wait.” - Lay-Z
@mikesacco: i got 99 problems but that’s 693 in dog problems!!
@blitznbeans: “I got 99 problems but I really need to lie back on this chair.” - Chaise-Z
@justin: I’ve got 99 problems but a view controller that works as expected on iOS 5 and doesn’t respond to user interaction on iOS 4 is the main one.
@paulypeligroso: “I got 99 problems but a bitch aint one.” - The Dalmatian parents from 101 Dalmatians.
@trevso_electric: I got 99 problems but white privilege ensures that they’re relatively trivial or easily worked out with a therapist.
@yellowcardigan: I got 99 problems but a joke structure based on a 2004 rap single ain’t one.
@lisarahmat: I got 99 problems but my math ain’t one hundred.
Let’s get a Kickstarter together to have Jay-Z rap all these lines.
How to not choke at sports
One hemisphere of your brain can cause you to over-think things and choke at key moments during athletic competitions. Scientists wondered if you could somehow break that pattern by doing something as simple as making a fist with your left hand. And it worked.
Lead researcher Juergen Beckmann, PhD, put it pretty profoundly: “Consciously trying to keep one’s balance is likely to produce imbalance.” Simple (brain-hemisphere-dependent) tasks that activate motor portions of the brain while drawing activity away from the ruminating portions can help experienced athletes perform (in terms of accuracy and complex body movements done from muscle memory) without being messed up by nerves. “Just let it happen; be the ball.”
Dyslexia-optimized typeface for Instapaper
Marco Arment has added a typeface optimized for dyslexics to Instapaper.
I’m happy to report that in this update, I added the Open-Dyslexic font by Abelardo Gonzalez. Its bottom-weighted characters are designed to reduce letter-swapping and increase differentiation between similar-looking letters, which improves readability for people with dyslexia. It’s now the bottom-most option in the font list in Instapaper’s text-controls (“aA”) panel.
Nicely done.
The soccer in Iran…is explosive
Correct me if I’m wrong, but this video of a soccer player picking up a piece of garbage and casually throwing it off the field COME TO FIND OUT IT IS SOME SORT OF EXPLOSIVE DEVICE THAT EXPLODES WHEN HE THROWS IT is crazy. I didn’t want to bury the lede on that one. The game was an AFC Champions League match between Iran’s Sepahan and Saudi Arabia’s Al-Ahli at Foolad Shahr Stadium, and the lucky player was Sepahan midfielder Adel Kolahkaj.
Here’s another version with some more detail/slow mo. I’m not wrong, right? That was totally crazy and not something you would expect during a soccer match? And it’s not fake, is it? (via cosby sweaters)
Zero gravity yo-yo tricks
It turns out that yo-yos work pretty well in space. Astronaut Don Pettit demontrates from the International Space Station.
(via explore)
The best word ever
Over the past two months, Ted McCagg has been running a contest on his blog to find the best word ever. A winner was recently announced.
(via @bobulate)
Generational warfare in the 2010s: :) vs :-)
According to research done by Stanford University’s Tyler Schnoebelen, the type of smiley you use is determined in part by your age.
Emoticons with noses are historically older. Since it is words that unite and distinguish clusters, this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary — nose users don’t mention Bieber or omg.
I am obviously a non-noser because I am down, as we kids say, with Beibler and Carly Mae and Gandgum Style and Skillet. :) (via the atlantic)
Latest iPhone game obsession: 10000000
Even after reading this rave review of 10000000, I was skeptical about trying it.
The best part of my job is randomly stumbling across a game no one knows about, by a developer no one has heard of, and have it absolutely blow my mind. It doesn’t happen often, but when it does, it results in drained batteries and dropping everything to get something on the site about it while I wait for my iPhone to charge only to return to the fray.
It just didn’t look that fun. But I did try it. Once, twice, three times. And it didn’t grab me. Then I picked it up last night and ended up playing for two hours straight. It’s taking all my self-control right now not to play it all day. In conclusion, you should totally not download this game because it will completely disrupt your entire life.
1000 years of war in 5 minutes
This is a time lapse world map showing all the battles that have occurred in the past 1000 years. Worth sitting through the whole thing to see Europe go absolutely bonkers in the late 1930s.
(via @DavidGrann)
Updates on previous entries for Sep 19, 2012*
New full trailer for The Hobbit orig. from Sep 19, 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.
Unlikely aquatic sculptor
Freelance underwater photographer Yoji Ookata recently discovered a curious underwater pattern not unlike a crop circle:
When I first saw the pictures, this seemed like a hoax on the part of Ookata (which it might still be, I guess) or the work of someone who enjoys making sand art where no one will ever see it. But Ookata convinced a camera crew to check it out and the mystery circle’s artist turns out to be a fish!
The unlikely artist — best known in Japan as a delicacy, albeit a potentially poisonous one — even takes small shells, cracks them, and lines the inner grooves of his sculpture as if decorating his piece. Further observation revealed that this “mysterious circle” was not just there to make the ocean floor look pretty. Attracted by the grooves and ridges, female puffer fish would find their way along the dark seabed to the male puffer fish where they would mate and lay eggs in the center of the circle. In fact, the scientists observed that the more ridges the circle contained, the more likely it was that the female would mate with the male. The little sea shells weren’t just in vain either. The observers believe that they serve as vital nutrients to the eggs as they hatch, and to the newborns.
Amazing. (via colossal)
New Kingdom Rush levels
The new version of Kingdom Rush for the iPad includes two new levels. Love this game and still play it way too much.
Lost radio interview with Muhammad Ali from 1966
From Blank on Blank, a great archive of lost interviews, a 1966 interview with Muhammad Ali conducted by Michael Aisner, then a high school student near Chicago.
From inside the club, Aisner and his friend watched out the front window as Ali screetched up in a red Cadillac convertible, parked in front of a fire hydrant, and jumped over the car door.
For the next 20 minutes, Ali talked boxing, footwork, why he wanted to fight — and launched into an epic, unprompted riff about traveling to Mars and fighting for the intergalactic boxing title. All went smoothly — until Aisner realized he’d forgot to turn on the tape recorder.
“I was mortified,” he says. “I said, ‘Champ, do you think you could do that again?’”
The champ obliged.
(via @LTBelcher)
New full trailer for The Hobbit
The trailer was supposed to go up later in the morning but here it is a little early.
If it gets pulled down, I’ll find another link.
Update: Apple has the trailer up now.
I didn’t expect the world to be so big
Today’s XKCD must have taken Randall several years to draw…if you click and drag, it goes on forever. Or not quite forever, but Dan Catt did some figuring and:
Ok, so the XKCD map printed at 300dpi is around 46 foot / 14 meters wide, half that at magazine 600dpi quality.
Here’s a better Google Maps-like way to explore the entire world.
The Jony Ive Leica
Leica announced a new version of their M series camera on Monday and the “one more thing” concerned a Jonathan Ive-designed special edition of the Leica M.
This camera will be the mother of all limited editions based on one simple fact: only a single unit of the camera will ever be produced. Aside from announcing this camera, not much else was revealed. It is, however, for more than just a publicity stunt: the camera will be auctioned off, and the proceeds will be donated to charity.
The regular M retails for almost $7000 so I imagine the iLeica will go for about eleventy gajillion. Also, designed? How much leeway will Ive have to really change the camera? He’ll just slap some new colorways on it, yes? (via df)
Mrs. Jesus Christ
A small piece of papyrus with 4th-century writing has turned up recently and the text on it refers to Jesus’ wife.
A historian of early Christianity at Harvard Divinity School has identified a scrap of papyrus that she says was written in Coptic in the fourth century and contains a phrase never seen in any piece of Scripture: “Jesus said to them, ‘My wife …’”
The faded papyrus fragment is smaller than a business card, with eight lines on one side, in black ink legible under a magnifying glass. Just below the line about Jesus having a wife, the papyrus includes a second provocative clause that purportedly says, “she will be able to be my disciple.”
The article says the papyrus is “probably genuine” but I wouldn’t rule out a forgery financed by Dan Brown’s Da Vinci Code fortune. (via @Rebeccamead_NYC)
Buttermilk’s time to shine
Julia Moskin reports that the production of real buttermilk is on the rise in the US.
“My buttermilk has pieces of butter floating in it, which it’s probably not supposed to,” said Ms. St. Clair, who has a herd of eight Jersey cows at her farm (called Animal Farm and located in the town of Orwell, Vt.), and makes butter and buttermilk for the chef Thomas Keller’s restaurants. “But it certainly tastes good that way.”
She, Mr. Patry and a few other dedicated dairy producers here and in the South have just begun to bring old-school buttermilk to greenmarkets and groceries, as small-scale bottling operations become more affordable.
Their efforts fit neatly into several culinary trends: working with traditional agricultural products, and embracing the once-rejected byproducts and odd bits of favored ingredients. Buttermilk even manages to represent both the American South and Scandinavia, two of the liveliest influences in food today.
Ambitious chefs all over are suddenly wallowing in buttermilk. In New York City alone, Roberto Mirarchi is saucing earthy sweet potatoes with tangy buttermilk at Blanca; Wylie Dufresne of WD-50 glazes sweetbreads with nasturtium-infused buttermilk; and the young gun Matthew Lightner strains the stuff till thick and uses it to fill crisp-fried sunchoke skins at Atera.
The resurgence of real buttermilk is great news; you can’t make the world’s best pancakes without it.
Some thoughts about XOXO
I attended the XOXO Festival in Portland, OR this past weekend. I don’t have a great deal to say about it because — and I’m not trying to be a dick here — you had to be there. As in, physically in the room with the speakers and the attendees. But I did want to mention a few things.
- XOXO was put on by Andy Baio and Andy McMillan. They killed it. And they killed it because they really really (really!) cared about what they were doing, so much so that they were (at times unsuccessfully) holding back tears as they did their outro. Do Chris Anderson or Walt Mossberg cry at the end of TED and D? I don’t think so.
- At no point during the weekend did anyone on the stage make a cynical or ironic remark. Everyone was so positive. It would be easy to mistake it for wide-eyed and naive idealism but that optimism is hard-won and tempered by experience. You can do it — we can do it — because we’ve done it before.
- XOXO attendees were generally not on their computers or phones. They listened to the talks and chatted with their nearby seatmates. It was amazingly refreshing. More conferences like this please.
- Though not specifically referenced, one of the themes of the weekend was what David Brooks referred to as “the power of the particular”. From his piece in the NY Times a few months ago:
It makes you appreciate the tremendous power of particularity. If your identity is formed by hard boundaries, if you come from a specific place, if you embody a distinct musical tradition, if your concerns are expressed through a specific paracosm, you are going to have more depth and definition than you are if you grew up in the far-flung networks of pluralism and eclecticism, surfing from one spot to the next, sampling one style then the next, your identity formed by soft boundaries, or none at all.
The whole experience makes me want to pull aside politicians and business leaders and maybe everyone else and offer some pious advice: Don’t try to be everyman. Don’t pretend you’re a member of every community you visit. Don’t try to be citizens of some artificial globalized community. Go deeper into your own tradition. Call more upon the geography of your own past. Be distinct and credible. People will come.
Examples of this power abounded at XOXO. The indie gaming scene is insanely niche but, as documented in Indie Game: The Movie, some of the best and more unique games make millions of dollars. Emily Winfield Martin felt like a misfit in art school but gained a huge following for her illustrations on Etsy and is now living her dream of creating children’s books. Julia Nunes started out playing cover songs on her ukelele in YouTube videos and now has albums and has played with Weezer and Ben Folds and appeared on Conan. Adam Savage told the story of The Adventurebilt Hat Company, which started making replicas of Indiana Jones’ hat from Raiders of the Lost Ark because they were fans of the film and ended up supplying the actual hats for the fourth Indy movie. The PDX671 food cart that took home the judges’ award in the 2012 Eat Mobile awards was parked outside of the festival both days serving cuisine from Guam. Another cart from the XOXO pod, Nong’s Khao Man Gai, serves only a single Thai dish and boasts long lunch lines. Even the numerous craft beers available all over Portland are valued by aficionados for each beer’s particular characteristics.
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