Entries for February 2013
In a deal last year, Criterion movies went from one paid online service to another (Netflix to Hulu Plus).
However from now through Monday February 18th, all Criterion movies are free on Hulu for anyone in the US. No sign-up or log-in required.
Some recommendations: Yojimbo, Schizopolis, Hoop Dreams, and Zazie dans le métro.
Update: The free weekend has ended and most Criterion movies are back behind the Hulu Plus paywall but there are still a handful of Criterion movies available to watch for free on regular-Hulu including Hoop Dreams as well as Zatoichi, Quadrophenia, and The Long Voyage Home
For anyone who’s ever been curious about what it would take to switch to a vegan diet and not hate it, Serious Eats’ J. Kenji López-Alt is going vegan for all of February.
Last year, I decided to go vegan for an entire month, chronicling my thoughts, challenges, health, and weight the entire time. I thought it’d be a fun exercise, that perhaps I’d gain some insight into my own diet and into the lives of those who live, well, a little differently than the rest of us.
So by overwhelming demand (mostly by my wife, myself, and a few very vocal readers), I’m doing it all again this year, developing 28 brand new recipes, learning from my mistakes, and surely making a few more in the process.
If you’ve ever had an inclination to go vegan or just test out the waters, I hope that a few of my thoughts and recipes here will help you do that. To get you started, I’ve compiled all 23 essays and 28 recipes in one easy-to-navigate spot.
(via
waxy)
The hubris and folly of Darth Vader at Hoth orig. from Feb 12, 2013
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
I don’t know why the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library chose to release the courtship letters between him and Lady Bird today on Valentine’s Day. I’m reading through them and it was a pretty fast and unromantic courtship. LBJ proposed to her on their first date (!) and then spent the next 10 weeks basically berating her into marrying him.
This is one of the first letters Lyndon sent Lady Bird, on September 15th 1934, two weeks after meeting her:
I’m sure that there is nothing that could be more distracting, disturbing and estranging to me than a continued evidence of indifference upon your part. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday and today Saturday and no sentiments of affection nor expressions of love. Very likely time will make the picture brighter for me but I feel terribly blue this afternoon.
Tomorrow I plan to call you. Tomorrow I plan to tell you again what you have already heard so many times and probably it will be tomorrow that I learn definitely just how and where you stand.
Write me that long letter. Tell me just how you feel—give me some reassurance if you can and if you can’t let’s understand each other now. I’m lonesome. I’m disappointed but what of it. Do you care?
In addition to letters, he also sent her a book, Nazism: An Assault on Civilization.
Um, thanks LBJ Library. Happy Valentine’s Day to you, too.
(via @UsNatArchives)
These sloths just wanna be your valentine.
Back in 1840 most people would buy, not a Valentine’s Day card for someone they loved, but a Vinegar Valentine for someone they hated.
At first, it’s easy to demonize the senders as the worst sorts of trolls or bullies. I mean, some of the most horrifying Vinegar Valentines actually suggest the recepient kill him or herself. But then, if you look at the more light-hearted Valentines, some of them start to seem like a good idea. Have you ever had a haughty saleslady scoff at you for being poor? Have you ever had to listen to a pompous windbag carry on when he doesn’t have any idea what he’s talking about? So many people are blithely unaware of their obnoxious behavior. Wouldn’t it feel great to tell them off, consequence-free?
Back in the 1840s it was the receiver, not the sender of a letter, who paid for postage & you didn’t need to provide a return address, so all the floozies and winos would pay for the privilege of hearing how disliked they were.
Nowadays if you want to send free anonymous insults that’s what the internet is for.
Happy Valentine’s Day.
(via @EvaWiseman)
The hubris and folly of Darth Vader at Hoth orig. from Feb 12, 2013
An analysis of gender on Twitter orig. from Feb 13, 2013
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
As part of a thought experiment to reform the electoral college, Neil Freeman redrew the US into 50 new states with equal population. In trying to balance the interests of the popular vote vs the integrity of states, he’s split the baby so that no one is likely to be happy. Perfect!
The map began with an algorithm that groups counties based on proximity, urban area, and commuting patterns. The algorithm was seeded with the fifty largest cities. After that, manual changes took into account compact shapes, equal populations, metro areas divided by state lines, and drainage basins. In certain areas, divisions are based on census tract lines.
Keep in mind that this is an art project, not a serious proposal, so take it easy with the emails about the sacred soil of Texas.
(via ★doingitwrong)
Born with achromatopsia, a rare condition that causes complete colour blindness, Neil Harbisson developed the eyeborg, a device that translates colours into sounds for him.
Harbisson has been claimed to be the first recognized cyborg in the world, as his passport photo now includes his device. In 2010, Neil Harbisson and Moon Ribas created the Cyborg Foundation, an international organization to help humans become cyborgs. The foundation has also experimented with other sensory devices, including an “earborg,” which translates sound into color, and a “speedborg,” which allows people to detect movement through electronic earrings that vibrate.
“One day I started hearing colors in my dreams. Then I understood what being a cyborg meant. It’s not the union between the eyeborg and my head, what converts me into a cyborg, but the union between the software and my brain. My body and the technology have united. It’s very very human to modify one’s body with human creations.”
A study of 14,000 Twitter users was published recently (pdf) by a trio of linguists and computer scientists (Bamman, Eisenstein, Schnoebelen) that looks at the gendered expression of language online.
Female markers include a relatively large number of emotion-related terms like sad, love, glad, sick, proud, happy, scared, annoyed, excited, and jealous. All of the emoticons that appear as gender markers are associated with female authors, including some that the prior literature found to be neutral or male: :) :D and ;). […] Computer mediated communication (CMC) terms like lol and omg appear as female markers, as do ellipses, expressive lengthening (e.g., coooooool), exclamation marks, question marks, and backchannel sounds like ah, hmmm, ugh, and grr.
Swears and other taboo words are more often associated with male authors: bullshit, damn, dick, fuck, fucked, fucking, hell, pussy, shit, shitty are male markers; the anti-swear darn appears in the list as a female marker. This gendered distinction between strong swear words and mild swear words follows that seen by McEnry 2006 in the BNC. Thelwall 2008, a study of the social networking site MySpace produced more mixed results: among American young adults, men used more swears than women, but in Britain there was no gender difference
I don’t want to draw too many conclusions from a single study especially one that, in my opinion, makes some questionable methodology choices (people who follow or are followed by more than 100 people are excluded from the study?) but the results point to an interesting evolution in conversational, public speech.
Update 2: Tyler Schnoebelen, one of the study’s authors reached out to clarify. The study says “we selected only those users with between four and 100 friends”, with friends being defined not as people you follow, people who follow you, or even mutual follow backs. They poll accounts and if you and someone else mention each other with a separation of at least two weeks (to eliminate one-off convos with strangers), then for the purposes of the study you and the other person are defined as friends. And they’re looking to isolate people who have between 4 and 100 of those friend connections.
Now that that’s clarified, that seems a really reasonable way to try to determine friendships on Twitter.
Update 1: David Friedman reminded me of a post he did on telegraph operators in 1890 and how female operators have a different and identifiable transmission style.
It is a peculiar fact also that an experienced operator can almost invariably distinguish a woman’s sending from a man’s. There is nearly always some peculiarity about a woman’s style of transmission. it is not necessarily a fault. Many women send very clearly and make their dots and dashes precisely as they were intended to be made. It is impossible to describe the peculiarity, but there is no doubt of its existence. Nearly all women have a habit of rattling off a lot of meaningless dots before they say anything. But some men do that too. A woman’s touch is lighter than a man’s, and her dots and dashes will not carry so well on a very long circuit. That is presumably the reason why in all large offices the women are usually assigned to work the wires running to various parts of the cities.
Historians said ancient hairstyles were so difficult to achieve they had to have been wigs. Janet Stephens, professional hairstylist and amateur scholar, took that as a challenge.
Studying translations of Roman literature, Ms. Stephens says, she realized the Latin term “acus” was probably being misunderstood in the context of hairdressing. Acus has several meanings including a “single-prong hairpin” or “needle and thread,” she says. Translators generally went with “hairpin.”
The single-prong pins couldn’t have held the intricate styles in place. But a needle and thread could. It backed up her hair hypothesis.
In 2007, she sent her findings to the Journal of Roman Archaeology.
In what may be
the ultimate YouTube fashion how-to video, Janet Stephens walks through how she reverse engineered the elusive Vestal Virgin hairstyle from statues and then shows you how to braid and bind the hair to get that look that was oh-so fashionable 1800 years ago. It makes going to a museum feel like opening a copy of Elle magazine.
A short piece of fiction by Pierce Gleeson about the people behind corporate Twitter accounts.
‘We are not building anything here,’ stated one morose-sounding detergent brand. ‘All those marketing guys pushing Twitter think you can build something on it. Awareness or brand or something. But they can’t back that up. We’re just a mirror of what’s happening in the real world. We’re just echoing awareness, not creating it. It might work for small coffee shops but for global brands we’re just a shapeless appendage.’ All this came in several messages. The brands tended to be verbose once they got talking. Probably overeducated and unemployable, like himself. He didn’t agree, he didn’t disagree. He consciously refused to give it thought. The pay was excellent for the hours he worked.
(thx @asimone)
Wired’s Spencer Ackerman breaks down Darth Vader’s military strategy in Empire Strikes Back showing how, what could have been a trouncing of the Rebels on Hoth, ended up as an Imperial pratfall.
The defenses the Alliance constructed on Hoth could not be more favorable to Vader if the villain constructed them himself. The single Rebel base (!) is defended by a few artillery pieces on its north slope, protecting its main power generator. An ion cannon is its main anti-aircraft/spacecraft defense. Its outermost perimeter defense is an energy shield that can deflect Imperial laser bombardment. But the shield has two huge flaws: It can’t stop an Imperial landing force from entering the atmosphere, and it can only open in a discrete place for a limited time so the Rebels’ Ion Cannon can protect an evacuation. In essence, the Rebels built a shield that can’t keep an invader out and complicates their own escape.
When Vader enters the Hoth System with the Imperial Fleet, he’s holding a winning hand. What follows next is a reminder of two military truths that apply in our own time and in our own galaxy: Don’t place unaccountable religious fanatics in wartime command, and never underestimate a hegemonic power’s ability to miscalculate against an insurgency.
For more meticulous skewering of Star Wars’ logic, check out the incisive
Red Letter Media reviews of the prequels.
Update: Spencer Ackerman held a roundtable discussion of experts & nerds with dissenting opinions on the what, why, and how of Hoth.
After working as a New York Times reporter for 24 years, Michael Janofsky’s first job as a freelance writer wasn’t what he was expecting.
For the better part of a year, I was the Sheikh’s blogger; or the Sheikh was my avatar. He had hired me to write a series of blogs, under his name, with the aim of ousting his half-brother, an Iranian sympathizer, who had driven him into exile years earlier. Our plan — the Sheikh’s, his handlers, and mine — was to pound out three blog entries a week to convince the Sheikh’s aging father that the tiny stretch of land controlled by the Sheikh’s family for more than 200 years was better left in the hands of my guy, who had closer ties to Washington.
It all started with a cryptic phone call.
(via @JakeSwearingen)
This ten minute film by Martin Rosete of Spanish production company Kamel Films, narrated by French actor Féodor Atkine will take your breath away. Or at least it’ll try.
“You had enough air in your suit for 3 hours. Now there’s just 3 minutes and 33 seconds left.”
(via @hughhowey)
In an allegorical turn, Tim Maly looks at the history of the hoodie and what it means to want to be private in public.
In the 1970s, hoodies made their way into hip hop and skater culture. They kept breakdancers warm while they waited their turn to hit the floor. They served another purpose. Hoods are cheap instant anonymizers. They protected graffiti artists and skateboarders as they trespassed to perform their art. They protected muggers as they performed their art too.
It is December 25th, 2012 and the Zuckerberg family is gathered around the kitchen island. They’re playing with the new Facebook Poke app and everyone has exaggerated expressions of joy. Mark is in the background, watching over them, smiling. He’s wearing his hoodie.
Close on the heels of their announcement to reunite after 10 years, The Postal Service have released a new song called “A Tattered Line of String.”
After a decade of anticipation, I’m not sure whether I’m happy or disappointed that a new Postal Service song sounds exactly like I hoped it would.
Over on his Strange Maps blog, Frank Jacobs takes a look at the shape classification of various countries and compares their economic and political histories.
The Five Types of Territorial Morphology sounds like a fun parlour game, at least in cartophile circles (is Portugal compact or elongated? Is or isn’t Somalia prorupt? Does New Zealand qualify as fragmented?) But there is a serious, geopolitical concern behind this attempt at classification. For a country’s shape has a profound impact on its economic success, and even its political viability.
Fragmented states often experience great centrifugal pressures, with separatism affecting their outlying fragments. This is true of the Philippines, the central government of which only last October concluded a peace deal with the Moro Islamic Liberation Front, which had waged a separatist guerilla on the southern island of Mindanao.
Where’s the human connection anymore? Teens these days, with their texting and what not. In my day—
1906 Punch comic, meet 2013 Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal comic.
(via @kiptw)
I’m sure you’ve seen garbage shoved into a crevice before and haven’t given it a thought beyond “gross” but now that Cabel Sasser has given a name to the odd occurrence, it’ll be hard not to notice and remember.
We all know it’s not cool to litter. If our hands are burdened with the weighty responsibility of an unwanted and snot-spent tissue, or an empty aluminum can that once held some Dr. Skipper, or even a gentle gum wrapper, the worst thing — the worst possible thing — would be to throw it on the ground. […]
I first noticed the “litterplugs” (if I may) phenomenon in Japan, ten years ago. This is the photo that started it all, a slightly bowing construction wall by Shinjuku station that immediately became a garbage can.
Cabel’s most interesting photos seem to be from Japan. I wonder if Japan has a broken windows problem with garbage. Or just fewer trash cans.
Originally build in the 3rd century, the walled city of Shibam in Yemen was one of the first urban areas with high rise buildings and is still a populated and functioning city today.
Despite being built with sun-dried mud bricks, the fortified city from the the 16th-century is in fact based on the principle of vertical construction, with almost no fenestration on the ground level, rising up to the height of eight storey. Its plan is trapezoidal, with tower houses built within the outer walls for defense from rival families and political prestige. Located in a caravan route of spice and incense across the Southern Arabian plateau, the city was built on a rocky spur, above an earlier settlement destroyed by a flood in 1532-3.
If this dense, isolated city plan looks familiar but you thought it was more modern, then you’re probably thinking of Kowloon Walled City in China. Roman Mars’ 99% Invisible radio show did a great episode about Kowloon recently.
Chris Higgins travels to the Tetris World Championship and profiles a couple of the game’s top competitors. The issue at heart is: how do approach playing and mastering a game that you can’t actually win?
When Steil achieved his current high score of 889,131 points (and 222 lines) in October of 2012, it felt like a loss. Despite being Steil’s best game to date, it represented a failure to reach the perfection of a max out. When he posted the score on Facebook for his Tetris friends to see, he wrote, “Another new high score, but what a choke job at 222 [lines]. Each new high score is a minor success as well as a monumental failure.”
This attitude pervades competitive Tetris, and it highlights the perverse aspect that the best game is still a loss. Faced with this harsh reality, NES Tetris players have devised ways to compete (the Championship), milestones to achieve (max outs and high numbers of lines per game), and ways to measure performance (max outs achieved starting at higher levels are more difficult due to the game’s speed). Fundamentally, however, players compete against themselves and lose every time.
Here’s what getting a max score on Tetris looks like:
(via @VintageZen66)
There’s an assumption that because of the relationship between metabolic rates, volume, and surface area, animals get an average of one billion heartbeats out of their bodies before they expire. Turns out there’s some truth to it.
As animals get bigger, from tiny shrew to huge blue whale, pulse rates slow down and life spans stretch out longer, conspiring so that the number of heartbeats during an average stay on Earth tends to be roughly the same, around a billion.
Mysteriously, these and a large variety of other phenomena change with body size according to a precise mathematical principle called “quarter-power scaling”.
It might seem that because a cat is a hundred times more massive than a mouse, its metabolic rate, the intensity with which it burns energy, would be a hundred times greater. After all, the cat has a hundred times more cells to feed.
But if this were so, the animal would quickly be consumed by a fit of spontaneous feline combustion, or at least a very bad fever. The reason: the surface area a creature uses to dissipate the heat of the metabolic fires does not grow as fast as its body mass.
To see this, consider a mouse as an approximation of a small sphere. As the sphere grows larger, to cat size, the surface area increases along two dimensions but the volume increases along three dimensions. The size of the biological radiator cannot possibly keep up with the size of the metabolic engine.
Humans and chickens are both outliers in this respect…they both live more than twice as long as their heart rates would indicate. Small dogs live about half as long.
There’s a blizzard bearing down on the northeastern United States and here’s some essential information you need to know if you live in an affected area:
But seriously, you should follow @EricHolthaus for the latest storm info. (Ok, so we have our first celebrity Twitter weatherman. Weather and climate are going to become a lot more important in American pop culture…at what point do Gawker or Buzzfeed launch their climate verticals?)
Update: Gawker now has a climate vertical, The Vane. (via @bgporter)
Etsy recognized that their engineering team was not as gender diverse as they wanted it to be, even after recognizing the issue and attempting to fix it. Here’s how they made some real progress.
Kellan Elliott-McCrea (@kellan), a former architect at Flickr and co-author of the OAuth spec, is now the CTO at Etsy, the world’s most vibrant handmade marketplace. During his tenure, he’s played a critical role in the company’s restructuring of its engineering organization; now, Etsy hires for diversity, particularly gender diversity. After witnessing first-hand how challenging it can be to attract women engineers, Kellan shares lessons in building a process and culture to attract female engineers. All the good stuff below belongs to him.
Etsy’s decision to pursue women engineers is indicative of a broader change: making diversity a core value. But even after a number of concerted efforts to bring more women talent onboard, the company achieved almost no progress; in fact, one year, they actually saw a thirty-five percent decline in gender diversity even when this was a priority.
Coca-Cola’s algorithmic orange juice orig. from Feb 06, 2013
The world’s zaniest U-turn orig. from Feb 07, 2013
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
With drones in the news this week, The New Yorker’s Dexter Filkins takes a look at what the drone wars are like on the receiving end of the action, and reminds us what we don’t know about drones (and their targets).
When an employee of the C.I.A. fires a missile from a unmanned drone into a compound along the Afghan-Pakistani border, he almost certainly doesn’t know for sure whom he’s shooting at.
What a day! First we were delighted by a madcap U-turn video that is probably fake, we learned there’s such a thing as windless kite flying, and now we’re learning that competitive wood planing is a thing. In Japan, the best wood planers gather each year to see who can shave the thinnest shaving off of a piece of wood. My literal jaw literally dropped when I saw how thin the shavings are:
9 microns! A micron is one-millionth of a meter or one-thousandth of a millimeter. For reference, the diameter of a red blood cell is 8-9 microns, a cloud water droplet is about 10 microns across, and an average human hair is about 100 microns across. How do you get such a thin shaving? A really sharp blade. Like maybe a knife sharped with .025 Micron Polycrystalline Diamond Spray? (via @Colossal)
Remember the guy who rode the alleged 100-foot wave? Here’s a video of some other tow-in surfers from that same location (Nazare, Portugal) on the same day. The waves aren’t quite as big as 100 feet, but the sequence starting at 1:52, where the guy falls off his board and swims like hell to get out of the way before the whole ocean crashes down on top of him (watch the top of the wave), gives you a real sense of how insane this sport is.
Great use of high definition and slow motion. (via @alexismadrigal)
From the 2013 Windless Kite Festival, Spencer Watson does a routine to an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones’ Paint It Black.
(via @dunstan)
This is straight out of an episode of Mr. Bean or Austin Powers: a driver in a tiny car tries to make a U-turn on an even tinier street in Naples and gets stuck. Traffic starts backing up. A crowd gathers. A gang of motorcyclists shows up. A church procession is blocked from going down the street. Eventually the priest gets involved in moving the car.
This better be real because it’s one of the most improbably cinematic things I’ve ever seen. (via @DavidGrann)
Update: WHY CAN’T WE HAVE NICE THINGS??! This is probably a fake.
Republic had presented the video of the jam so become “viral” on the web. In fact, the movie is the result of a staging. residents hired as extras, 24 hours and no camera but only iPhone and iPad to shoot. These are the ingredients of the video style “Benvenuti al Sud” that drove him crazy social networks and turned the spotlight on the town in the province of Naples.
Stupid Fiat. (thx, pb)
Photos from the shortlist of winners of the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards. Some stunning shots in there.
Edith, Hellrider, and Dadmonster pose for a photograph. In Botswana, heavy metal music has landed. Metal groups are now performing in nightclubs, concerts, festivals. The ranks of their fans have expanded dramatically. These fans wear black leather pants and jackets, studded belts, boots and cowboy hats. On their t-shirts stand out skulls, obscenities, historical covers of hard-rock groups popular in the seventies and eighties, such as Iron Maiden, Metallica, and AC/DC. They have created their own style, inspired by classic metal symbolism, but also borrowing heavily from the iconography of western films and the traditional rural world of Botswana. Their nicknames, Gunsmoke, Rockfather, Carrott Warmachine, Hellrider, Hardcore, Dignified Queen, may appear subversive and disturbing as their clothing, but they are peaceful and gentle. “We like to get dressed,, drink meet friends and feel free , this music is so powerful . We are lucky to live in a country tolerant and open” argues one of the leaders. A precious rarity for Africa.
Botswanian heavy metal fans and other great selections from the 2013 Sony World Photography Awards
From 1948, this is L Motors, located at 175th and Broadway in Manhattan.
Can’t believe I’d forgotten about Shorpy! Click through for a larger view. The Dodge/Plymouth dealership is long gone; that spot is now occupied by Bravo Super Markets. (via @claytoncubitt)
Both Weavesilk and New Weavesilk are lovely ways to while away the rest of the afternoon. If you liked the falling sand game, which maybe morphed into thisissand, this one’s for you. Here’s an example of the kind of art you can make on New Weavesilk from Josh LaFayette. Looks kind of like a Lightning Bear.
In January, I linked to a piece in the New Yorker about master pickpocket Apollo Robbins.
One day, over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in a Las Vegas strip mall, Robbins demonstrated his method on me. “When I shake someone’s hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left,” he said, showing me. “The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I’m finding out what kind of a partner they’re going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead I can do whatever I want with them.”
Robbins was recently a guest on the Today show and the amount of criminal shenanighans he pulls off in this four minute video is astounding:
(via digg)
Because of “the evolving experience in the stores” (aka live music is too expensive), after 27 years of playing the piano at Nordstrom in the Tacoma Mall, Juan Perez was let go in January.
Perez remembers his audition at Nordstrom, one morning in January 1986.
“There were five of us. Four beautiful young ladies, and me. They were carrying music books.”
They were dressed, he said, as if they had shopped at Nordstrom. He was not. They were carrying sheet music. Perez did not, and does not, read notes. He plays by ear.
“I was the first one to play,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting they would hire me, and I was dressed in a regular shirt. I started playing and playing as the store opened up. I didn’t even have an application.”
After playing, he drove home.
“My wife said, ‘They called. They want you to start tomorrow.’ I almost cried.”
Perez arrived in the US with $300 to his name and through hard work at the piano, has put seven of his children through college, with two more currently in college and one more attending private high school. (via brooks review)
Update: Here’s a quick update on Perez. After leaving Nordstrom, he quickly got some other gigs, including one at an upscale steakhouse and another at the Space Needle, but was also diagnosed with cancer and had to undergo surgery.
On that last Sunday in the store, Perez ended with “Piano Man” and “How Great Thou Art.”
And “Unforgettable” was the first song he played following a five-surgeon, 10-hour surgery last July to remove a tumor tangled near his heart.
A round of radiation followed surgery, and Perez has continued playing at El Gaucho, and at the Space Needle, Bellevue Square, the Bellevue Hyatt Regency, the Tacoma Yacht Club, Tacoma Golf & Country Club, the Old Cannery in Sumner and the Weatherly Inn and Narrows Glen retirement homes in Tacoma.
Recently, the management and co-workers at El Gaucho decided to help Perez with medical bills and other expenses. Management would donate half the house receipts one Sunday night, and the servers and other staff would offer all their tips.
Total raised: $31,000.
A co-worker established an online funding request.
Total raised: Nearly $12,000 at the time this story was written.
Last year, Perez returned to Nordstrom for a final performance, which was attended by the three co-presidents of the company and hundreds of his fans.
“I’ve known him for 25 years. He’s a beautiful man,” said George Lund, a 40-year Nordstrom employee who is now retired.
“Juan was the face of this store. He was the personality of this store. He could be the mayor of this city,” Lund said. “It was a magical time for a lot of customers. He made them feel comfortable, relaxed.”
After 20 minutes of greetings, of hugs and embraces, Juan returns to the piano. Four friends gather behind him and sing along to “Edelweiss.”
Then Scott Joplin’s “The Entertainer.”
The crowd fills the aisles between women’s shoes and fine jewelry. Shoppers ascending on the escalator look down and smile.
Toes tap.
“He is a blessing,” says Patricia Reynolds of Steilacoom. “He is helping people with his music.”
Perez shifts from a swift boogie-woogie riff into “Canon in D” by Johann Pachelbel.
“He just brings such beauty into people’s lives,” says Maria Fleischmann of Tacoma.
“I don’t even have words for this,” said Juan and Susan’s daughter, Agnes.
Then, “The Way You Look Tonight.”
Simply Orange juice is actually not all that simple. The taste of the the Coca-Cola-owned brand is governed by a complex algorithm that allows for the 600+ juice flavors to be tweaked throughout the year to ensure consistency. I liked The Atlantic Wire’s take on the news:
The explanation behind Coke’s complicated new orange juice scheme is nothing short of ironic. Basically, all of their customers are realizing the soda is really bad for you, so demand is shifting to healthy — or at least healthy-seeming — alternatives like juice. Coke also figured out that people are willing to pay 25 percent more for juice that’s not processed, that is, not made from concentrate. Enter Simply Orange. It is indeed just oranges, but boy have those oranges been through hell and back.
This is like White Zombie’s More Human Than Human except More Orange Juice Than Orange Juice.
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik…prints & more are available.
Update: I updated the post above to point to Businessweek’s original report on Coke’s OJ business.
A collection of starlings is called a murmuration and when they roam the skies together, it’s beautiful.
This video is more artistic than the one I linked to in 2011, but the birds are super close in the older one:
The Gameological Society’s Joe Keiser went shopping for video games in Nairobi and found a ton of PlayStation 2 knockoffs. Like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Kirk Douglas:
Full disclosure: this article exists so I can tell you all about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas: Kirk Douglas. Just look at it! It’s exquisite. The game itself is as grand as the cover. It is San Andreas, with the load screens replaced by EXTREME closeups of Kirk Douglas-and occasionally his son Michael Douglas, because hey, close enough, right? In the game, the main character appears to be a rough approximation of Kirk Douglas. Oh, and all the missions have been removed, so there’s nothing to do.
And RoboCop:
I do not doubt RoboCop’s commitment to Sparkle Motion.
This didn’t feel like 8 minutes at all, which I guess, at my age, is the whole point. (via @mrgan)
So far, humans have taken photos from the surfaces of Earth, the Moon, Venus, and Mars. But I had no idea that a photo from the surface of Titan existed:
The photo of the Saturnian moon was taken in 2005 by the Huygens probe, which was designed to land safely on the moon’s surface. From Wikipedia:
After landing, Huygens photographed a dark plain covered in small rocks and pebbles, which are composed of water ice. The two rocks just below the middle of the image on the right are smaller than they may appear: the left-hand one is 15 centimeters across, and the one in the center is 4 centimeters across, at a distance of about 85 centimeters from Huygens. There is evidence of erosion at the base of the rocks, indicating possible fluvial activity. The surface is darker than originally expected, consisting of a mixture of water and hydrocarbon ice. The assumption is that the “soil” visible in the images is precipitation from the hydrocarbon haze above.
And a special close-but-no-cigar award goes to the NEAR Shoemaker probe, which snapped this photo from about 400 feet above the surface of the near-Earth asteroid Eros:
The probe landed on the surface of Eros in February 2001 and transmitted usable data for about two weeks afterwards, none of which was photographic in nature.
In a report from 1967, Walter Cronkite takes us on a brief tour of what they imagined the home office would be like in the 2000s.
In the 21st century, it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console.
Cronkite also toured the kitchen and living room of the future.
(via viewsource)
This video of artist Li Hongbo demonstrating the complexity of his paper sculptures will blow your mind. More wild images at Dominik Mersch Gallery.
(via ★stellar)
In 1997, Dell Computer CEO Michael Dell famously said of Apple:
I’d shut it down and give the money back to the shareholders.
Today, Michael Dell is part of a consortium giving the money back to the shareholders and taking Dell Inc. private.
Under the terms of the deal, the buyers’ consortium, which also includes Microsoft, will pay $13.65 a share in cash. That is roughly 25 percent above where Dell’s stock traded before word emerged of the negotiations of its sale.
Michael S. Dell will contribute his stake of roughly 14 percent toward the transaction, and will contribute additional cash through his private investment firm, MSD Capital. Silver Lake is expected to contribute about $1 billion in cash, while Microsoft will loan an additional $2 billion.
This Justice Department memo about when the US government, without hearing or trial or due process or whatever other “rights” we as a country hold dear, can kill US citizens is fucking bullshit.
A confidential Justice Department memo concludes that the U.S. government can order the killing of American citizens if they are believed to be “senior operational leaders” of al-Qaida or “an associated force” — even if there is no intelligence indicating they are engaged in an active plot to attack the U.S.
The 16-page memo, a copy of which was obtained by NBC News, provides new details about the legal reasoning behind one of the Obama administration’s most secretive and controversial polices: its dramatically increased use of drone strikes against al-Qaida suspects abroad, including those aimed at American citizens, such as the September 2011 strike in Yemen that killed alleged al-Qaida operatives Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan. Both were U.S. citizens who had never been indicted by the U.S. government nor charged with any crimes.
The whole memo is here. A staggering disappointment from a man many think is better than this. See also: Obama’s lethal Presidency.
Last week, I ran across this list of business cards of famous people, among them Isaac Asimov, Mark Zuckerberg, and Harry Houdini. There was also this curious card for Abraham Lincoln:
It seemed a little too jokey for a proper business card, so I tracked the card to its source, The Library of Congress. The card was likely printed in 1864 by the Democratic committee as a campaign souvenir and implies Lincoln would be defeated in the ‘64 election and on his way back to Illinois to practice law (and split rails).
For their Big Mac index (a way to look at currency exchange using global Big Mac pricing) this year, the Economist has released an interactive tool for exploring the data.
The Big Mac index was invented by The Economist in 1986 as a lighthearted guide to whether currencies are at their “correct” level. It is based on the theory of purchasing-power parity (PPP), the notion that in the long run exchange rates should move towards the rate that would equalise the prices of an identical basket of goods and services (in this case, a burger) in any two countries. For example, the average price of a Big Mac in America at the start of 2013 was $4.37; in China it was only $2.57 at market exchange rates. So the “raw” Big Mac index says that the yuan was undervalued by 41% at that time.
They’re also made the data set available in .xls format for at-home analysis.
In 1983, the NY Times distributed a memo outlining the policy for computer use by employees.
5. Games and visual oddities may not be played or stored in the computer. They clutter the storage disk and slow its operation; they also encourage browsing, which leads to privacy violation. Finally, games may give new or junior staff members a misleading impression of the seriousness we attached to computer privacy.
(via @davidfg)
It would look something like this:
That’s from a series called Darkened Skies by Thierry Cohen; he photographed various cities (NYC, Paris, Tokyo, SF) and matched them up with starry skies from more remote places like Montana, Nevada, and the Sahara. New Yorkers can see Cohen’s work at the Danziger Gallery starting March 28.
See also Imagining Earth with Saturn’s Rings.
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