GLAAD has a good resource on transgender identity: Transgender 101.
Gender identity is someone’s internal, personal sense of being a man or a woman (or as someone outside of that gender binary.) For transgender people, the sex they were assigned at birth and their own internal gender identity do not match.
Trying to change a person’s gender identity is no more successful than trying to change a person’s sexual orientation — it doesn’t work. So most transgender people seek to bring their bodies more into alignment with their gender identity.
People under the transgender umbrella may describe themselves using one (or more) of a wide variety of terms, including transgender, transsexual, and genderqueer. Always use the descriptive term preferred by the individual.
I propose a different kind of software canon: Not about specific moments in time, or about a specific product, but rather about works of technology that transcend the upgrade cycle, adapting to changing rhythms and new ideas, often over decades.
Ruling is hard. This was maybe my answer to Tolkien, whom, as much as I admire him, I do quibble with. Lord of the Rings had a very medieval philosophy: that if the king was a good man, the land would prosper. We look at real history and it’s not that simple. Tolkien can say that Aragorn became king and reigned for a hundred years, and he was wise and good. But Tolkien doesn’t ask the question: What was Aragorn’s tax policy? Did he maintain a standing army? What did he do in times of flood and famine? And what about all these orcs? By the end of the war, Sauron is gone but all of the orcs aren’t gone — they’re in the mountains. Did Aragorn pursue a policy of systematic genocide and kill them? Even the little baby orcs, in their little orc cradles?
Last week, I noted on Twitter that a 700-page academic book by a French economist topped the best sellers list on Amazon. Well, Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century is still #1 on Amazon, even though the hardcover is currently out of stock. If you’re curious about this anti-Kardashian moment in our culture but don’t want to dive in fully, you can read the book’s introduction on Harvard University Press’s site.
The distribution of wealth is one of today’s most widely discussed and controversial issues. But what do we really know about its evolution over the long term? Do the dynamics of private capital accumulation inevitably lead to the concentration of wealth in ever fewer hands, as Karl Marx believed in the nineteenth century? Or do the balancing forces of growth, competition, and technological progress lead in later stages of development to reduced inequality and greater harmony among the classes, as Simon Kuznets thought in the twentieth century? What do we really know about how wealth and income have evolved since the eighteenth century, and what lessons can we derive from that knowledge for the century now under way?
It is massive (696 pages) and massively ambitious (the title is a very conscious echo of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital). It came out in France last year to great acclaim, which meant that those in the English-speaking world who pay attention to such matters knew that something big was coming. Over the past few weeks it has become one of those things that everybody’s talking about just because everybody’s talking about it. That, and it really is important.
Is it worth reading? Martin Wolf of the Financial Times called it “enthralling”; a couple people I know have described it as “a slog.” I’d liken it to a big river — muddy and occasionally meandering, but with a powerful current that keeps pulling you along, plus lots of interesting sights along the way. There are endless numbers and (ugly but generally understandable) charts, but also frequent references to the novels of Balzac and Austen, and even a brief analysis of Disney’s The Aristocats. Regular people can read this thing; it’s just a matter of the time commitment. You should definitely buy it, if your place on the income distribution allows it. It looks good on a bookshelf, plus every copy sold makes Piketty wealthier, allowing us to discover whether this alters his views about inequality.
I have not done an exhaustive search, but this intersection in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia has to have some of the craziest traffic in the world.
Once you get the gist of what the cars are doing, pay attention to the pedestrians. !!! My other favorite crazy traffic locale is Saigon, Vietnam…here’s how you cross the street there:
Move slowly and purposefully across the street and just let the traffic flow around you. It’s an odd sensation giving up so much control over your personal safety, but it’s the only way to cross so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I haven’t worn a watch in more than 25 years and I have no plans to wear one ever again, but I will watch videos on how to make watches until the heat death of the universe.
Plenty of tradition and handcraft — combined with high-tech, where it outperforms handcraft.
In his cookbook, Tartine Bread, Chad Robertson lays out, over 38 pages, the recipe for what might be the best bread in the world. The first time through, the recipe takes two weeks to make.
To Chad, bread is the foundation of a meal, the center of daily life, and each loaf tells the story of the baker who shaped it. He developed his unique bread over two decades of apprenticeship with the finest artisan bakers in France and the United States, as well as experimentation in his own ovens.
“Barry Sanders is my new idol,” Bo Jackson said after a Raiders-Lions game in 1990. “I love the way the guy runs. When I grow up, I want to be just like him.”
The Raiders won that game, and the Lions were 4-9 at the time, but it didn’t even matter.
All anyone could talk about afterward was the “little water bug” who “might rewrite history.”
This wasn’t necessarily a metaphor for Barry’s entire Lions career — he was on more playoff teams than people remember — but it definitely covers about half the years he spent in Detroit. Even when the Lions were awful, Barry would still have a few plays every game that would keep people gawking afterward.
Bo Jackson had a similar effect on people, which is part of what makes that old quote so cool. The Bo Jackson combination of speed and power is something we’d never seen before and haven’t seen since. He was a cult hero then, and the legend has only grown over the years.
I’ve always been an atypical sports fan. I grew up in Wisconsin rooting for the Packers & Brewers but switched to being a Vikings & Cubs fan sometime in high school. But despite following the Vikings at the time, my favorite player in the NFL was Barry Sanders. For my money, Sanders was pure symphonic excellence in motion, the best running back (and perhaps player) the NFL had ever seen and maybe will ever see. I wonder if one of the reasons why I like Lionel Messi so much is because he reminds me of Sanders; in stature, in strength, in quickness, in skill. Compare and contrast some of their finest runs:
This spectacular collection of more than 125 letters offers a never-before-seen glimpse of the events and people of history — the brightest and best, the most notorious, and the endearingly everyday. Entries include a transcript of the letter; a short contextual introduction; and, in 100 cases, a captivating facsimile of the letter itself.
A UK version has been available since last year and the US version will be out on May 6.
Richard Linklater (Dazed and Confused, Before Sunrise) took 12 years to make his new movie, Boyhood. The star of Boyhood, Ellar Coltrane, was seven years old when filming started, and Linklater returned to the story every year for a few days of shooting to construct a movie about a boy growing from a first-grader to an adult and his changing relationship with his parents.
From the incredible British Pathé archive, film footage from 1893 of the New York City fire brigade rushing to a fire.
Filmed nearly 120 years ago, this is quite possibly the first ever footage of the New York Fire Brigade. The film is very grainy but it clearly shows firemen rushing through New York on horse drawn engines. Behind them, you can see some sort of electric powered streetcar or trolley system with ‘Clinton Avenue’ on the back.
The elements located in the upper reaches of the periodic table are notable for their short half-lives, the amount of time during which half the mass of an element will decay into lighter elements (and other stuff). For instance, the longest lived isotope of fermium (#100) has a half-life of just over 100 days. More typical is bohrium (#107)…its half-life is only 61 seconds. The elements with the highest numbers have half-lives measured in milliseconds…the half-life of ununoctium (#118) is only 0.89 milliseconds.
So why do chemists and physicists keep looking for heavier and heavier elements if they are increasingly short-lived (and therefore not that useful)? Because they suspect some heavier elements will be relatively stable. Let’s take a journey to the picturesque island of stability.
In nuclear physics, the island of stability is a set of as-yet undiscovered heavier isotopes of transuranium elements which are theorized to be much more stable than some of those closer in atomic number to uranium. Specifically, they are expected to have radioactive decay half-lives of minutes or days, with “some optimists” expecting half-lives of millions of years.
French artist BL67 makes his works by sticking price tags directly to the canvas. Each piece is priced according to the total of the price stickers stuck to it. Here’s a close-up showing some detail:
Jim Koch is the co-founder and chairman of The Boston Beer Company, brewer of the Sam Adams beers. Part of his job is to drink professionally and he does so without getting completely sloshed. What’s his secret? Eating a packet of dry yeast before tying one on.
You see, what [expert brewer] Owades knew was that active dry yeast has an enzyme in it called alcohol dehydrogenases (ADH). Roughly put, ADH is able to break alcohol molecules down into their constituent parts of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. Which is the same thing that happens when your body metabolizes alcohol in its liver. Owades realized if you also have that enzyme in your stomach when the alcohol first hits it, the ADH will begin breaking it down before it gets into your bloodstream and, thus, your brain.
“And it will mitigate - not eliminate - but mitigate the effects of alcohol!” Koch told me.
Could have used this tip last night. Does this mean no hangovers as well?
Update: I got two kinds of feedback about this post:
1) What’s the fun in drinking alcohol if you’re not getting drunk? (Good point.)
2) Yeast doesn’t really work. What does seem to work is Pepcid AC and Zantac. From Shenglong on Hacker News:
Again, I’m not a chemist or a doctor, but from my preliminary internet research and anecdotal testing (though I have quite a few different data points), Famotadine (OTC) [Pepcid], and higher levels of APO-Ranitidine (can be prescription) [Zantac] seems to slow the rate of ethanol -> acetaldehyde, balancing out the drunkness effect more, and giving you more time to process the acetaldehyde -> acetic acid. I typically go from maxing out at 2 drinks / 3 hour period, to about 11 drinks / 3 hour period on Ranitidine, given favorable conditions. I’ve had lower levels of success with Famotadine.
And it goes without saying, I don’t recommend trying any of this at home. At the local bar on the other hand Nope, not there either. (thx, @natebirdman)
According to several sources, the FCC is set to propose new net neutrality rules “that would allow broadband providers to charge companies a premium for access to their fastest lanes.” That’s decent news for deep-pocketed companies that can pay for faster connectivity and even better news for broadband providers that can charge more for a speedier service. It’s bad news for everyone else. Faster service for some means slower service for others. Many of today’s big internet companies got that way because they had access to a level playing field. The Internet let the little guy become the big guy. And now the big guy wants to have an unfair advantage with faster pipes. The hell with that.
Man, I really like these paintings from Jeremy Mann’s Cityscape series. Particularly the NYC street scenes, like this one in Hell’s Kitchen:
Mann’s paintings seem to hold a lot of detail, even up close, but there are also broader strokes visible only from afar. Not sure if that’s novel (unlikely) but I haven’t seen it elsewhere. (via colossal)
In the 1980s, when personal computers with graphics capabilities were first introduced, Andy Warhol was an enthusiastic early adopter. In 1985, Commodore commissioned the artist to produce some art on their Amiga computer, but the work was never widely shown and was assumed lost. Then artist and retro computer nerd Cory Arcangel learned of Warhol’s Amiga experiments from this video (and perhaps this article from a 1986 issue of Amigaworld) and set in motion the process of finding out if any of the computers or storage devices in The Andy Warhol Museum contained his Amiga art.
CMU Computer Club members determined that even reading the data from the diskettes entailed significant risk to the contents, and would require unusual tools and methodologies. By February 2013, in collaboration with collections manager Amber Morgan and other AWM personnel, the Club had completed a plan for handling the delicate disk media, and gathered at The Andy Warhol Museum to see if any data could be extracted. The Computer Club set up a cart of exotic gear, while a video crew from the Hillman Photography Initiative, under the direction of Kukielski, followed their progress.
It was not known in advance whether any of Warhol’s imagery existed on the floppy disks-nearly all of which were system and application diskettes onto which, the team later discovered, Warhol had saved his own data. Reviewing the disks’ directory listings, the team’s initial excitement on seeing promising filenames like “campbells.pic” and “marilyn1.pic” quickly turned to dismay, when it emerged that the files were stored in a completely unknown file format, unrecognized by any utility. Soon afterwards, however, the Club’s forensics experts had reverse-engineered the unfamiliar format, unveiling 28 never-before-seen digital images that were judged to be in Warhol’s style by the AWM’s experts. At least eleven of these images featured Warhol’s signature.
Bryce Roberts riffs on an idea presented by Zappos founder Tony Hsieh: collision hours.
The idea is called “collision hours” and Tony posits that the success of the [Las Vegas] downtown project hangs on creating spaces to maximize “collisionable” hours.
What is a collision you may be asking? It’s simply colliding with new people and ideas. Sharing your own and being open to others. It’s unfiltered serendipity. Stepping onto the street, or into the cafe, or into the conference and making an effort to collide with as many people and ideas in a designated timeframe. And being open to the possibilities and changes of course that collisions often enact.
It strikes me that maximizing collision hours is not what you want. Per Milton Glaser, just enough is more. One of the secrets in achieving Brian Eno’s concept of scenius might be to find just the right amount of collisions for a given space.
We all know Michael Jackson invented the moonwalk on-stage during a performance of Billie Jean at the Motown 25th Anniversary show. What this video presupposes is, maybe he didn’t?
What the video shows is that as early as the 1930s, performers such as Fred Astaire, Bill Bailey, Cab Calloway, and Sammy Davis Jr. were doing something like the moonwalk. Now, Jackson didn’t get the move from any of these sources, not directly anyway. As Jackson’s choreographer Jeffrey Daniel explains, he got the moves from The Electric Boogaloos street dance crew and, according to LaToya Jackson, instructed Michael Jackson.
Which is to say, the moonwalk is yet another example of multiple discovery, along with calculus, the discovery of oxygen, and the invention of the telephone. (via open culture)
HBO is licensing some of their shows exclusively to Amazon for streaming on their Prime Instant Video service. Here’s the scoop:
Beginning May 21, Amazon Prime members will have unlimited streaming access to:
- All seasons of revered classics such as The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, Rome and Six Feet Under, and of recent favorites such as Eastbound & Down, Enlightened and Flight of the Conchords
- Epic miniseries, including Angels in America, Band of Brothers, John Adams, The Pacific and Parade’s End
- Select seasons of current series such as Boardwalk Empire, Treme and True Blood
Game of Thrones and True Detective are notably absent from the deal. But Amazon Prime subscribers will be able to stream all of the shows above for free. (via deadline)
Project Naptha is a browser extension that lets you copy text from images on the web.
Project Naptha automatically applies state-of-the-art computer vision algorithms on every image you see while browsing the web. The result is a seamless and intuitive experience, where you can highlight as well as copy and paste and even edit and translate the text formerly trapped within an image.
It’s been suggested that perhaps Johannes Vermeer painted his exacting masterpieces with the help of mirrors and lenses. Tim Jenison learned of these suggestions and started to study the problem.
He was in no rush. His R&D period lasted five years. He went to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “Looking at their Vermeers,” he says, “I had an epiphany” — the first of several. “The photographic tone is what jumped out at me. Why was Vermeer so realistic? Because he got the values right,” meaning the color values. “Vermeer got it right in ways that the eye couldn’t see. It looked to me like Vermeer was painting in a way that was impossible. I jumped into studying art.”
A recent documentary called Tim’s Vermeer (directed by Penn & Teller’s Teller) follows Jenison’s quest to construct a contraption that allows someone to paint as Vermeer did. Here’s a trailer:
Not sure you can find the movie in theaters anymore, but it should be out on DVD/download soon.
A reader saw my post about UPS drivers seldom taking left turns and sent in this story from 2006. In it, Michael Gartner shares the secret to long life relayed to him by his father: no left turns. Among other things:
My mother was a devout Catholic, and my father an equally devout agnostic, an arrangement that didn’t seem to bother either of them through their 75 years of marriage. (Yes, 75 years, and they were deeply in love the entire time.) He retired when he was 70, and nearly every morning for the next 20 years or so, he would walk with her the mile to St. Augustin’s Church. She would walk down and sit in the front pew, and he would wait in the back until he saw which of the parish’s two priests was on duty that morning. If it was the pastor, my father then would go out and take a 2-mile walk, meeting my mother at the end of the service and walking her home. If it was the assistant pastor, he’d take just a 1-mile walk and then head back to the church.
He called the priests “Father Fast” and “Father Slow.”
Nathan Pyle has written and illustrated a book about the unwritten rules for how to behave on the streets of NYC. It’s called NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette (only $6!).
In NYC Basic Tips and Etiquette, Pyle reveals the secrets and unwritten rules for living in and visiting New York including the answers to such burning questions as, how do I hail a cab? What is a bodega? Which way is Uptown? Why are there so many doors in the sidewalk? How do I walk on an escalator? Do we need be touching right now? Where should I inhale or exhale while passing sidewalk garbage? How long should I honk my horn? If New York were a game show, how would I win? What happens when I stand in the bike lane? Who should get the empty subway seats? How do I stay safe during a trash tornado?
In support of the book, Pyle animated a few of the tips and put them on Imgur. Also, the Apple ebook contains the animated versions of the illustrations. You fancy!
Film shot of London street scenes, mostly from the 1890s and 1900s.
There’s also a brief shot of Paris in 1900 right at the end. See also the extremely rare footage of Queen Victoria visiting Dublin in 1900. The Victorian era seems so long ago (and indeed she began her reign in 1837) but there she is on the modern medium of film. Yet another example of the Great Span.
Super Planet Crash is half game, half planetary simulator in which you try to cram as much orbital mass into your solar system without making any of your planets zing off beyond the Kuiper belt. You get bonus points for crowding planets together and locating planets in the star’s habitability zone. Warning: I got lost in this for at least an hour the other day.
Ooh, I really like the idea of this smartphone card game on Kickstarter: Game of Phones.
One player picks a card and gets to judge that round. They read the prompt to everyone else. Something like ‘Find the best #selfie’ or ‘Show the last photo you took’. Everyone finds something on their phones and shows the judge, who gets to choose a winner for that round. First to win 10 rounds is the overall winner.
This is pretty much what people do when they get together anyway, why not make it a game?
Wells: I am very much obliged to you, Mr Stalin, for agreeing to see me. I was in the United States recently. I had a long conversation with President Roosevelt and tried to ascertain what his leading ideas were. Now I have come to ask you what you are doing to change the world …
Stalin: Not so very much.
Wells: I wander around the world as a common man and, as a common man, observe what is going on around me.
Stalin: Important public men like yourself are not “common men”. Of course, history alone can show how important this or that public man has been; at all events, you do not look at the world as a “common man”.
Wells: I am not pretending humility. What I mean is that I try to see the world through the eyes of the common man, and not as a party politician or a responsible administrator. My visit to the United States excited my mind. The old financial world is collapsing; the economic life of the country is being reorganised on new lines.
Lenin said: “We must learn to do business,” learn this from the capitalists. Today the capitalists have to learn from you, to grasp the spirit of Socialism. It seems to me that what is taking place in the United States is a profound reorganisation, the creation of planned, that is, Socialist, economy. You and Roosevelt begin from two different starting points. But is there not a relation in ideas, a kinship of ideas, between Moscow and Washington?
In Washington I was struck by the same thing I see going on here; they are building offices, they are creating a number of state regulation bodies, they are organising a long-needed civil service. Their need, like yours, is directive ability.
SRI International and DARPA are making little tiny robots (some are way smaller than a penny) that can actually manufacture products.
They can move so fast! And that shot of dozens of them moving in a synchronized fashion! Perhaps Skynet will actually manifest itself not as human-sized killing machines but as swarms of trillions of microscopic nanobots, a la this episode of Star Trek:TNG. (via @themexican)
The small village of Ciocanesti in Romania produces the most beautiful hand-painted Easter eggs I’ve ever seen. This video is a wonderful look at the process and tradition.
First, the (duck, goose, chicken, or even ostrich) egg is drained, through a tiny hole. Then, using a method akin to batik, it is dipped in dye and painted one color at a time, with the painter applying beeswax to those areas she wants to protect from the next round of dying. The painting implement, called a kishitze, is a stick with an iron tip. (Previously, egg-painters would have used thorns or pig bristles.)
And then the wax is melted and wiped off the egg, revealing the colors underneath. So cool. (via @colossal)
Novelty: Something new
Creation: Something new and valuable
Invention: Something new, having potential value through utility
Innovation: Something new and uniquely useful
Ruh-roh. Remember the news last month about the detection of gravitational waves would have allowed scientists to see all the way back to the Big Bang? Well, that result may be in jeopardy. The problem? Dust on the lens. Well, not on the lens exactly:
An imprint left on ancient cosmic light that was attributed to ripples in spacetime — and hailed by some as the discovery of the century — may have been caused by ashes from an exploding star.
In the most extreme scenario, the finding could suggest that what looked like a groundbreaking result was only a false alarm. Another possibility is that the stellar ashes could help bring the result in line with other cosmic observations. We should know which it is later this year, when researchers report new results from the European Space Agency’s Planck satellite.
You may also remember the video of physicist Andrei Linde being told about the result, which seemed to confirm a theory that had been his life’s work. I don’t think I want to see the video of Linde being told of this stellar ashes business. Although Linde is more than aware that this is how science works…you have to go where observation takes you. (via @daveg)
Data visualization of Citi Bike trips taken over a 48-hour period in NYC:
Love seeing the swarms starting around 8am and 5:30pm but hate experiencing them. I’ve been using Citi Bike almost since the launch last year and I can’t imagine NYC without it now. I use it several times daily, way more than the subway even. I hope they can find a way to make it a viable business.
Newsreel archivist British Pathé has uploaded their entire 85,000 film archive to YouTube. This is an amazing resource.
British Pathé was once a dominant feature of the British cinema experience, renowned for first-class reporting and an informative yet uniquely entertaining style. It is now considered to be the finest newsreel archive in existence. Spanning the years from 1896 to 1976, the collection includes footage — not only from Britain, but from around the globe — of major events, famous faces, fashion trends, travel, sport and culture. The archive is particularly strong in its coverage of the First and Second World Wars.
Time Out polled more than 100 experts to find the 100 best animated movies. Here’s the top 10 (minus the top pick…you’ll have to click through for that):
10. Fantastic Mr. Fox
9. The Nightmare Before Christmas
8. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
7. The Iron Giant
6. Dumbo
5. The Incredibles
4. Toy Story
3. My Neighbor Totoro
2. Spirited Away
I’m delighted to see Fantastic Mr Fox on the list…it’s an underrated effort by Wes Anderson that will continue to grow in esteem as the years pass. No Wall-E in the top 10 though? I don’t know about that. It clocks in at #36, behind Chicken Run (the least of Aardman’s efforts in my mind) and Up, which is maybe my least favorite Pixar film. (via @garymross)
Kristian Nairn is the actor who plays Hodor on HBO’s Game of Thrones. When he’s not acting, the 6’10” Belfast resident DJs and makes music. His Soundcloud page contains a bunch of his house mixes; here’s the latest mix from three months ago:
[Warning: season 4 spoilers ahoy!] So, in the second episode of this season of Game of Thrones, something wonderfully unpleasant happens. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about and if you haven’t, you should really stop reading right now. I’ve been thinking about why it happened and who did it. This series of images over at Imgur presents a compelling explanation.
Lady Olenna gives sympathies to Sansa for the murder of her family. Watch carefully. Yoink! Olenna rubs Sansa’s neck, plays with her hair and finally snatches the right-most jewel on Ser Dontos’s necklace.
Interesting, right? (I mean, maybe not if you’ve read the books, but I haven’t so I have no idea who killed Joffrey in the books or if you ever even find out.) But there are two puzzling things about the Tyrell plot:
1. Why the hell was it so convoluted? Couldn’t Lady Olenna have brought the poison to the reception herself? Why use Sansa’s necklace? There’s no CSI: Westeros so no one would have ever suspected Sansa’s necklace being part of it. Unless the Tyrells tipped someone off about it after the fact. Also, for the love of the old gods and the new, Grandma, hasn’t Sansa been through enough without being framed for that little turd’s murder?
2. Why do it? Why then? Does Margaery stay Queen? She has no heir by Joffrey. Or is one of Joffrey’s little brothers in now? I suspect these questions will be answered in the next episode, but unless Margaery stays Queen, the Baratheon reign ends, and the Lannisters get bupkiss, I don’t see a compelling reason for the Tyrells to do this.
Bonus tidbit: this is the last we’ll see of Joffrey and also the last we’ll see of the actor who plays him, Jack Gleeson. Gleeson is retiring from acting, saying he “stopped enjoying it as much as I used to”. I bet the guy who played Malfoy in the Potter movies is breathing easier.
If you have children in your home, you have likely seen the movie Frozen and heard the song Let It Go like 50 billionty times. The movie did great in the US, coming in as the 19th biggest movie ever, but it’s done amazingly well overseas: #8 on the alltime list with a $1.1 billion gross.
The very first Kickstarter campaign I ever backed was Rachel Sussman’s project to photograph the oldest living organisms in the world.
I’m researching, working with biologists, and traveling all over the world to find and photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. I started the project 5 years ago, and have since photographed nearly 25 different organisms, ranging from the Bristlecone Pine and Giant Sequoias that you’ve surely heard of, to some truly unusual and unique desert shrubs, bacteria, a predatory fungus, and a clonal colony of Aspen trees that’s male and, in theory, immortal.
Her goal was to compile the photographs into a book. Almost four years later, the book is out. Looks like it was worth the wait. The trailer does a nice job explaining what the book is all about:
A dronie is a video selfie taken with a drone. I featured Amit Gupta’s beautiful dronie yesterday:
Other people have since taken dronies of their own and the idea seems like it’s on the cusp of becoming a thing. Here’s one taken by Joshua Works of him and his family on the shore of a lake in Nevada:
The Works clan sold most of their worldly possessions in 2011 and has been travelling the US in an Airstream ever since, logging more than 75,000 miles so far.
Adam Lisagor took this dronie of him and fellow drone enthusiast Alex Cornell standing on the roof of a building in LA:
There’s a reason that you’re going to see a lot of these from drone flyers like me, and it’s this: once you get past the novelty of taking a camera high up in the air, getting a bird’s eye view of stuff is actually a little boring.
What birds see is actually a little boring. Humans are interesting. Getting close to stuff is interesting. I bet if we could strap tiny cameras to bird heads, most of what we’d want to look at would happen when they fly close to people. If we could, we’d put cameras on bird heads to take pictures of ourselves.
The company that Amit runs, Photojojo, is going to start doing rentals soon, including kits for drone photography. And they’re gonna do flying lessons as well. For now, there’s a tutorial on the page about how to make “the perfect dronie”. (thx to everyone who sent in videos)
Uh oh, Donald Rumsfeld and I agree on something. Each year, with his tax return, Rumsfeld sends a letter to the IRS explaining that neither he or his wife are sure of how accurate their taxes are because the forms and tax code are too complex. Here is this year’s letter:
If only he had been less certain of his accuracy in an even more complex situation, like, say the whole WMD/Iraq War thing.
What feels are these? Is this poignant? Disturbing? Whatever you take away from it, this video of an obviously inebriated man trying to negotiate a fence is a metaphor for something.
Asher Svidensky’s photographs from Mongolia of apprentice eagle hunters are fantastic. (FYI, they hunt with eagles, not for them.) Among Svidensky’s subjects is a 13-year-old girl, Ashol Pan:
At the end of the photographing session, I sat down with her father and the translator to say my goodbyes, and I asked him this:
“How did it feel watching your daughter dressed in Kazakh uniform, on a mountain top, sending the eagle off and calling it back again?”
“Very good”
“And honestly… would you have considered truly training her? Would she become Mongolia’s first ever female eagle huntress?”
I expected a straightforward “No” or a joking “Maybe”, but after a short pause he replied:
“Up until two years ago my eldest son was the successor of the eagle hunting tradition in our family. Alas, two years ago he was drafted to the army, and he’s now an officer, so he probably won’t be back with the tradition. It’s been a while since I started thinking about training her instead of him, but I wouldn’t dare do it unless she asks me to do it, and if she will? Next year you will come to the eagle festival and see her riding with the eagle in my place.”
From the father’s answer I realized that the idea of women’s participation in keeping the tradition is a possible future, but just like many other aspect of Mongolian life, it’s an option which women will need to take on by themselves.
For the past couple of months, Amit Gupta has been playing around with taking moving self-portraits with a camera mounted on a drone. Here’s an early effort. This past weekend, Amit’s efforts crossed over into the realm of art. This is beautiful:
In the comments at Vimeo, Alex Dao dubbed this type of photograph a “dronie”. We’ll see if that catches on.
In Japan, the ability to perfectly imitate-and even improve upon-the cocktails, cuisine and couture of foreign cultures isn’t limited to American products; there are spectacular French chefs and masterful Neapolitan pizzaioli who are actually Japanese. There’s something about the perspective of the Japanese that allows them to home in on the essential elements of foreign cultures and then perfectly recreate them at home. “What we see in Japan, in a wide range of pursuits, is a focus on mastery,” says Sarah Kovner, who teaches Japanese history at the University of Florida. “It’s true in traditional arts, it’s true of young people who dress up in Harajuku, it’s true of restaurateurs all over Japan.”
It’s easy to dismiss Japanese re-creations of foreign cultures as faddish and derivative-just other versions of the way that, for example, the new American hipster ideal of Brooklyn is clumsily copied everywhere from Paris to Bangkok. But the best examples of Japanese Americana don’t just replicate our culture. They strike out, on their own, into levels of appreciation and refinement rarely found in America. They give us an opportunity to consider our culture as refracted through a foreign and clarifying prism.
Another example, not mentioned in the piece, is coffee. From the WSJ a couple of years ago:
“My boss won’t let me make espressos,” says the barista. “I need a year more, maybe two, before he’s ready to let customers drink my shots undiluted by milk. And I’ll need another whole year of practice after that if I want to be able to froth milk for cappuccinos.”
Only after 18 years as a barista in New York did his boss, the cafe’s owner, feel qualified to return home to show off his coffee-making skills. Now, at Bear Pond’s main branch, he stops making espressos at an early hour each day, claiming that the spike on the power grid after that time precludes drawing the voltage required for optimal pressure.
Back in the olden days, you just tied your cameraman right to the car:
Looks almost as goofy as Google Glass. Legendary F1 driver Jackie Stewart wore this stills-only proto-GoPro at the Monaco Grand Prix in 1966 (though not during the actual race):
Stewart ended up winning that race. I believe Stewart is also the model for this contraption, which looks like a film camera counterbalanced with a battery pack?
That couldn’t have been comfortable. For some reason, neither of Stewart’s helmet cams are recognized by Wikipedia as being the first documented helmet cam, which is instead attributed to a motorcycle race in 1986:
Update: Not even a bulky taped-up helmet camera can keep Steve McQueen from looking cool:
Well, he just barely looks cool. McQueen wore the helmet during the filming of 1971’s Le Mans. While researching this, I came across another film featuring McQueen that used helmet cams to get footage: 1971s On Any Sunday, a documentary about motorcycle racing. (via @jackshafer)
If you buy this digital scale on Amazon, the site assumes you might be a drug dealer. Nestled among the calibration weights listed in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought section are tobacco pipe screens, rolling papers, powders for cutting drugs (I assume), zipper bags of all sizes (including some decorated with golden skulls), empty pill capsules, and even a Dr Pepper can safe.
The US Navy is working on technology to convert seawater into fuel to power unmodified combustion engines. They recently tested the fuel (successfully!) in a replica P-51 and hope to make it commerically viable.
Navy researchers at the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL), Materials Science and Technology Division, demonstrated proof-of-concept of novel NRL technologies developed for the recovery of carbon dioxide (CO2) and hydrogen (H2) from seawater and conversion to a liquid hydrocarbon fuel.
Fueled by a liquid hydrocarbon — a component of NRL’s novel gas-to-liquid (GTL) process that uses CO2 and H2 as feedstock — the research team demonstrated sustained flight of a radio-controlled (RC) P-51 replica of the legendary Red Tail Squadron, powered by an off-the-shelf (OTS) and unmodified two-stroke internal combustion engine.
Using an innovative and proprietary NRL electrolytic cation exchange module (E-CEM), both dissolved and bound CO2 are removed from seawater at 92 percent efficiency by re-equilibrating carbonate and bicarbonate to CO2 and simultaneously producing H2. The gases are then converted to liquid hydrocarbons by a metal catalyst in a reactor system.
“In close collaboration with the Office of Naval Research P38 Naval Reserve program, NRL has developed a game-changing technology for extracting, simultaneously, CO2 and H2 from seawater,” said Dr. Heather Willauer, NRL research chemist. “This is the first time technology of this nature has been demonstrated with the potential for transition, from the laboratory, to full-scale commercial implementation.”
Your Monday morning needs a soundtrack and Danny Elfman’s score for Errol Morris’ The Unknown Known is just the thing. Available at Amazon or on iTunes.
New from Michael Ruhlman: a cookbook about the mighty egg, “A Culinary Exploration of the World’s Most Versatile Ingredient”.
For culinary visionary Michael Ruhlman, the question is not whether the chicken or the egg came first, it’s how anything could be accomplished in the kitchen without the magic of the common egg. He starts with perfect poached and scrambled eggs and builds up to brioche and Italian meringue. Along the way readers learn to make their own mayonnaise, pasta, custards, quiches, cakes, and other preparations that rely fundamentally on the hidden powers of the egg.
But often, Ruhlman argues, we don’t treat our eggs very well. Take scrambled eggs. “It’s one of the most overcooked dishes in America,” he says. “We kill our eggs with heat.”
Instead, we need, in most instances, to give the egg gentle heat. “When you cook them very slowly over very gentle heat, the curds form. And as you sit, the rest of the egg sort of warms but doesn’t fully cook and becomes a sauce for the curds. So it should be a creamy and delicious and delicate preparation.”
The photo was taken by Alfred Eisenstaedt, who was covering the University of Michigan’s marching band. When some children playing nearby set off after this practicing drum major, he snapped the photo. Said Eisenstaedt, “This is a completely spontaneous, unstaged picture.”
The photographer took many notable photos — the famous V-J Day kiss in Times Square, of Marilyn Monroe, of Albert Einstein, of Joseph Goebbels — but the drum major one above and his ballet series are my favorites (particularly this one).
Recent studies show that our physical level of hunger, in fact, does not correlate strongly with how much hunger we say that we feel or how much food we go on to consume.
As Maria Konnikova reports, a lot of things can make you hungry — a song, a book, a smell, even a study.
Being genuinely hungry, on the other hand — in the sense of physiologically needing food — matters little.
Today I learned that Hasbro released a toy based on the talking teddy bear in Kubrick/Spielberg’s A.I. W? T? F? And of course it’s super creepy:
Noel Murray has the whole story, along with an appreciation of the movie and Spielberg’s direction of it.
A.I. in particular still strikes me as a masterpiece. I thought it might be back in 2001; now I’m certain of it. But it isn’t any easier to watch in 2014 than it was before my first child was born. Like a lot of Spielberg’s films — even the earlier crowd-pleasers — A.I. is a pointed critique of human selfishness, and our tendency to assert our will and make bold, world-changing moves, with only passing regard for the long-term consequences. Spielberg carries this theme of misguided self-absorption to child-rearing, implying that parents program their kids to be cute love machines, unable to cope with the harshness of the real world. He also questions whether humankind is nothing but flesh-based technology, which emerged from the primordial ooze (represented in the opening shot of A.I. by a roiling ocean), and has been trained over millennia to respond to stimuli in socially appropriate ways. A.I. blurs the lines between human and mecha frequently, from an early shot of Monica that makes her look exactly like one of Professor Hobby’s creations, to the way Martin walks, thanks to mechanical legs.
2. And is a conjunction; so is so. Except in dialogue between particular kinds of characters, you never need both conjunctions. “He needed to eat, and so he bought food” is incorrect. In 95% of cases like this, what you want to do is cut the and.
In recent years, Chipotle has worked to promote their managers from within the company. And the tactic seems to be working.
The common element among the best-performing stores was a manager who had risen up from crew. So Moran started to outline a program that would retain and train the best managers, and reward them to the point where they would be thrilled to stay on.
After Flores expressed his frustration, Moran showed him his early notes for the restaurateur program, which is unique among fast food restaurants in that it ties pay and promotion to how well you mentor people, rather than store sales.
“It was a great meeting but I didn’t know what was going to happen. At most companies you meet the top execs and then you never hear from them again,” Flores says.
A few weeks after the October meeting, while vacationing in Houston, Flores got a call on his cell from Ells and Moran letting him know that he had been promoted to restaurateur and was getting a $3,000 bonus. Rather than waiting until he returned to Milwaukee to get him the check, it was delivered to him in Houston the following day. At the time his salary was around $38,000, and the bonus was meaningful.
“That’s when I knew the company was special,” Flores said.
Interesting bits of business wisdom throughout this piece.
From Wikipedia, a list of former trademarks and brands that have become generic terms. Some surprises: Heroin, Videotape, Zipper, Laundromat, Kerosene, Dry Ice, and Escalator.
Years of Living Dangerously is a 9-part documentary series on climate change which features celebrity correspondents like Harrison Ford, Oliva Munn, Jessica Alba, and Matt Damon reporting from around the world on different aspects of our changing climate.
The series combines the blockbuster storytelling styles of Hollywood’s top movie makers, including James Cameron and Jerry Weintraub, with the investigative skills of 60 Minutes veterans Joel Bach and David Gelber and a team of leading national news journalists and scientists.
Each YEARS correspondent — including top Hollywood stars recognized for their commitment to spotlighting and acting on the biggest issues of our time — delves into a different impact of climate change. From the damage wrought by Hurricane Sandy in the tri-state area to political upheaval caused by droughts in the Middle East to the dangerous level of carbon emissions resulting from deforestation, the series takes the viewer on a journey to understand the current and intensifying effects of climate change through vivid stories of heartbreak, hope and heroism.
The show starts airing on Showtime on April 13, but the entire first episode is available on YouTube right now:
The show is getting great reviews so far; I hope it helps move the needle. (thx, tobin)
Coming into this season, Formula One made a lot of rule changes: new engines, better turbo systems, two different power sources (fuel & electrical), fixed-ratio gearboxes, etc. The cars had to be redesigned from top to bottom. Whenever a situation like this occurs, there’s an opportunity for technical innovation (rather than the gradual improvements that tend to occur when the environment remains mostly unchanged). This year, the Mercedes team built their engines to get more out of the new turbo system than the other teams.
What Mercedes’ boffins have done, according to Sky Sports F1 technical guru Mark Hughes, is split the turbo in half, mounting the exhaust turbine at the rear of the engine and the intake turbine at the front. A shaft running through the V of the V6 engine connects the two halves, keeping the hot exhaust gases driving the turbo from heating the cool air it’s drawing into the engine.
Aside from getting cooler air into the engine and extracting more power (maybe as much as 50 horsepower), this setup also allows Mercedes to keep drivetrain components closer to the center of the car. It also allowed the team to use a smaller intercooler, which cools off the heated air before going into the engine, compared to the rest of the cars.
And the result so far? Utter Mercedes domination. Out of the three races this year, the two drivers for the Mercedes team (Lewis Hamilton and Nico Rosberg) have three first-place finishes and two second-place finishes (Hamilton had to retire with engine issues in the first race). Mercedes was certainly competitive last year, finishing second, but Red Bull-Renault easily beat them in the points race and one of their drivers finished 1st in 13 out of 19 races. More relevant to the discussion here is how easily these races are being won by Mercedes. In each of the three races, a member of the Mercedes team qualified in pole position, recorded the fastest lap, and beat the other teams’ drivers by more than 24 seconds in each case. To put that last stat in perspective, last year the winning team beat the second place team by more than 20 seconds in only three races, with the margin typically in the 3-10 second range.
So yeah, Mercedes is killing it so far. And the other teams aren’t happy about it. Shades of the situation over Speedo’s LZR Racer swimming suit.
Update: I said earlier that one of the changes was “no refueling during races” which has been the case for a few years now (hence the 2-second pit stop). Also, this video is a great explanation of how Mercedes turbo is designed and how it helps make their car go faster:
Update: The 2014 Formula One season is over and the Mercedes team sustained their advantage throughout. If anything, their advantage increased over the course of the season. Just take a look at the driver’s standings; in only one race (out of 19) did a Mercedes driver fail to finish in the top two slots. And when they won, it was usually by large margins. In the 2014 Brazilian Grand Prix for example, the two Mercedes drivers finished within 1.5 seconds of each other with the 3rd place driver finishing almost 40 seconds later. The Mercedes team finished with 701 points overall, nearly 300 points more than the second place finishers and almost equalling the number of points of the 2nd and 3rd place teams combined. Whatever the team’s technical advantage was, it was too much for the other teams to deal with.
Let’s get right to it. This is a real photo of a real human being:
It hasn’t been dramatically retouched or anything. Valeria Lukyanova has made herself into a human Barbie doll.
Her brand-new hair extensions, the color of Chardonnay, hang straight down, reaching her nonexistent hips. Her mouth is frozen in a vacant half-smile; the teeth are small and almost translucent. She’s holding a handbag shaped like a lantern. A one-eyed smiling-skull pin perches on her sky blue top, pushed to the side by the veritable shelf of silicone around which her whole body seems arranged. In the flesh — the little of it that she hasn’t whittled away with what she says is exercise and diet — Valeria looks almost exactly like Barbie. There might be some Loretta Lux-style postproduction to her photos, sure, but it’s not crucial. This is live. This is happening.
She’s also a recent convert to breatharianism (living exclusively on a diet of air), feels that humans are less beautiful now because of “race-mixing”, and gets her nails painted with “a fractal pattern from the twenty-first dimension” that came to her in a dream. There is also a human Ken doll, Justin Jedlica, who has achieved his look through more than 100 plastic surgeries:
But you’re not a fan?
I don’t really get her. I don’t get why people think she’s so interesting. She has extensions. She wears stage makeup. She’s an illusionist.
You’ve certainly had more surgeries. What’s your favorite one?
My baby is my shoulders, because nobody has anything like them. I divided these so there’s six pieces-front, middle, and back. Just like the actual anatomy.
Gofor imagines a future world where drones are cheap and ubiquitous. What sorts of things would we have personal drones do for us? Follow us home in unsafe neighborhoods? Personal traffic copters? Travel location scouting?
How long before someone uses a personal drone for the same purpose as the US government? Just think how easy and untraceable it would be to outfit a drone with a weapon, shoot someone, and then dump the drone+weapon in a lake or ocean. When it happens, the reaction will be predictable: ban personal drones. Guns don’t kill people, drones kill people, right?
“Napkin #1” is Bradley’s drawing for This American Life, a structure Ira Glass has talked about ad infinitum: This happened. Then this happened. Then this happened. (Those are the dashes.) And then a moment of reflection, thoughts on what the events mean (the exclamation point).
The description of Radiolab is the most fun to read. That show doesn’t quite have the non-linearity of Pulp Fiction, but it’s a good example of hyperlink radio (a la hyperlink cinema). (via explore)
Andrew Kim of Minimally Minimal got his hands on an original Sony Walkman and provides an interesting look back at a seminal piece of personal technology. Initially, the Walkman was billed as the “Walking Stereo with Hotline”:
Next to the dual headphones is a button labeled “Hot Line”. This was another key feature of the TPS-L2. When the user pressed the Hot Line button, the device would would override the music with audio from the built in microphone. It allowed you to listen to Subway announcements or talk to a friend without taking off your headphones. I find it to be a particularly clever idea as it uses existing parts from tape recorders. Hot Line wasn’t really a sought after feature though, and was axed in later models.
For the first post on his new blog, Tobias Frere-Jones discovers that most of the type foundries in New York in the 1800s and 1900s were all located within a few blocks of each other in lower Manhattan. Why there? Newspapers and City Hall.
I was able to plot out the locations for every foundry that had been active in New York between 1828 (the earliest records I could find with addresses) to 1909 (see below). All of the buildings have been demolished, and in some cases the entire street has since been erased. But a startling picture still emerged: New York once had a neighborhood for typography.
Gruber beat me to the punch in noting that Frere-Jones’ site doesn’t use any of the fonts from the company he was recently ousted from but instead a pair of faces (Benton Modern and Interstate) he designed before he formed his partnership with Jonathan Hoefler. Before I discovered Whitney (another Frere-Jones creation), Interstate was my go-to font for graphics for the site. Big TFJ fan, is what I’m saying.
After many days of analysis by scientists and internet sleuths alike, it’s likely that the thing pictured whizzing by the skydiver in this video is not a meteorite but a plain old rock that got packed in with his parachute. Phil Plait reports:
I actually became convinced last night, when BA Tweep Helge Bjorkhaug sent me a link to a slowed-down version of the video. Immediately before the rock flies past, I saw a second piece of debris just to the right of the skydiver’s parachute strap. It was in several frames, and clearly real.
So yeah, bummer, not a meteorite. But as Plait notes, that’s how science works.
That’s how you get to the truth, folks. Open inquiry, honest investigation, and acceptance of the line of evidence no matter where it leads.
Smithsonian Magazine has announced the finalists in their annual photography contest. The shot above is a finalist in the Mobile category…it was taken with an iPhone 5. (via colossal)
I am not a religious person, but Reverend Smith spoke a few lines of the Prayer of Saint Francis on an episode of Deadwood I watched recently and I can’t stop thinking about it. The prayer in full:
Lord, make me an instrument of Thy peace;
Where there is hatred, let me sow love;
Where there is injury, pardon;
Where there is error, truth;
Where there is doubt, faith;
Where there is despair, hope;
Where there is darkness, light;
And where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master, Grant that I may not so much seek
To be consoled as to console;
To be understood as to understand;
To be loved as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive;
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life.
The Reverend put it slightly differently:
Lord, grant that I may seek rather to comfort than to be comforted, to understand, than to be understood, to love, than to be loved…
Believer in eternal life or not, that’s a way of living life I can get behind.
Well, they do sometimes but not very often. Left turns cross traffic, which wastes time and causes accidents. So UPS routes are designed with mostly right turns…three rights make a left, you know.
UPS engineers found that left-hand turns were a major drag on efficiency. Turning against traffic resulted in long waits in left-hand turn lanes that wasted time and fuel, and it also led to a disproportionate number of accidents. By mapping out routes that involved “a series of right-hand loops,” UPS improved profits and safety while touting their catchy, environmentally friendly policy.
I wonder though, does this make the drivers unhappy?
In a five part series called “emoji-nation”, Ukrainian Nastya Ptichek mixes the work of well-known painters with graphical elements of new media. In the second part of the series, the works of Edward Hopper are augmented with social media interface icons:
The first part finds emoji doppelgangers for works of fine art while the third part uses paintings as movie poster imagery for the likes of Kill Bill and Home Alone (paired with Munch’s The Scream). For part four, Ptichek places modal dialogs over art works:
And part five plays around with several Google interface elements:
Love this kind of thing. Feels like I’ve seen something like it before though. Anyone recall?
Saturday was the 20th anniversary of the death of Kurt Cobain at the age of 27. Many have written of the anniversary, but I liked Dennis Cooper’s piece published in Spin a few weeks after Cobain’s death.
Cobain’s work nailed how a ton of people feel. There are few moments in rock as bewilderingly moving as when he mumbled, “I found it hard / It’s hard to find / Oh well, whatever / Nevermind.” There’s that bizarre, agonized, and devastating promise he keeps making throughout “Heart-Shaped Box”: “Wish that I could eat your cancer when you turn black.” Take a look in his eyes the next time MTV runs the “Heart-Shaped Box” video, and see if you can sort out the pain from the ironic detachment from the horror from the defensiveness.
Errol Morris’s latest documentary on Donald Rumsfeld, The Unknown Known, just came out in theaters. But it’s also available right now to rent/buy on Amazon and iTunes. Here’s a trailer if you need convincing.
Researchers at Stanford have observed that foraging harvester ants act like TCP/IP packets, so much so that they’re calling the ants’ behavior “the anternet”.
Transmission Control Protocol, or TCP, is an algorithm that manages data congestion on the Internet, and as such was integral in allowing the early web to scale up from a few dozen nodes to the billions in use today. Here’s how it works: As a source, A, transfers a file to a destination, B, the file is broken into numbered packets. When B receives each packet, it sends an acknowledgment, or an ack, to A, that the packet arrived.
This feedback loop allows TCP to run congestion avoidance: If acks return at a slower rate than the data was sent out, that indicates that there is little bandwidth available, and the source throttles data transmission down accordingly. If acks return quickly, the source boosts its transmission speed. The process determines how much bandwidth is available and throttles data transmission accordingly.
It turns out that harvester ants (Pogonomyrmex barbatus) behave nearly the same way when searching for food. Gordon has found that the rate at which harvester ants — which forage for seeds as individuals — leave the nest to search for food corresponds to food availability.
A forager won’t return to the nest until it finds food. If seeds are plentiful, foragers return faster, and more ants leave the nest to forage. If, however, ants begin returning empty handed, the search is slowed, and perhaps called off.
Slow television is the uninterrupted broadcast of an ordinary event from start to finish. Early efforts included burning Yule logs on TV around Christmas and driver’s views of complete British rail journeys (not to mention Andy Warhol and the pitch drop experiment), but Norwegian public television has revived the format in recent years. The first broadcast was of a 7-hour train trip from Bergen to Oslo, which was watched at some point by ~20% of Norway’s population. You can watch the entire thing on YouTube:
Not content with that, in 2011 an entire ship voyage was broadcast for 134 continuous hours. The entire voyage is available for viewing, but you can watch a 37-minute time lapse of the whole thing if you can’t spare the 5½ days:
As the show progressed and the ratings climbed (half of the Norwegian population tuned in at some point), the show became an interactive event, with people meeting the ship along to coast in order to appear as extras in the cast. Some even followed in smaller boats, filming as they went along in the ship’s wake.
That’s 41 million pages spanning nearly 2,000 years of church history that will soon be clickable, zoomable, and presumably, printable. When all is said and done, you’ll be able to read the Psalms handwritten across 13th-century vellum on your iPhone — so long as you speak ancient Greek.
I was shooting heroin and reading “The Fountainhead” in the front seat of my privately owned police cruiser when a call came in. I put a quarter in the radio to activate it. It was the chief.
“Bad news, detective. We got a situation.”
“What? Is the mayor trying to ban trans fats again?”
“Worse. Somebody just stole four hundred and forty-seven million dollars’ worth of bitcoins.”
The heroin needle practically fell out of my arm. “What kind of monster would do something like that? Bitcoins are the ultimate currency: virtual, anonymous, stateless. They represent true economic freedom, not subject to arbitrary manipulation by any government. Do we have any leads?”
“Not yet. But mark my words: we’re going to figure out who did this and we’re going to take them down … provided someone pays us a fair market rate to do so.”
“Easy, chief,” I said. “Any rate the market offers is, by definition, fair.”
Holy cow, Aardman is making a Shaun the Sheep Movie! Here’s a teaser trailer:
The movie will be out in March 2015 and the plot centers on the sheep going to the big city to retrieve the Farmer. As I wrote last year, Shaun the Sheep is wonderful family entertainment. I wonder how the lack of dialogue will translate to the feature length format? (thx, greg)
Think about it. As with an RPG, you roll a virtual character, manage your inventory and resources, and try to achieve a goal. Weight Watchers’ points function precisely like hit points; each bite of food does damage until you’ve used up your daily amount, so you sleep and start all over again. Play well and you level up — by losing weight! And the more you play it, the more you discover interesting combinations of the rules that aren’t apparent at first. Hey, if I eat a fruit-granola breakfast and an egg-and-romaine lunch, I’ll have enough points to survive a greasy hamburger dinner for a treat!
Even the Weight Watchers web tool is amazingly gamelike. It has the poke-around-and-see-what-happens elegance you see in really good RPG game screens. Accidentally snack on a candy bar and ruin your meal plan for the day? No worries: Just go into the database and see what spells — whoops, I mean foods — you can still use with your remaining points.
And those 35 extra points you get every week? They’re like a special buff or potion — a last-ditch save when you’re on the ropes.
It’s funny how quaint this seems now…the quantified self and gamification of diet & health is everywhere now. (via @arainert)
No idea if this is an April Fools thing or not, but skydiver Anders Helstrup claims that a rock whooshed past him during a wingsuit flight in 2012. And he caught the incident on video:
The relevent bit starts at about 25 seconds in. Here’s a news story and a longer version of the video report with English subtitles:
Although Helstrup is still not completely convinced that it was indeed a meteorite that flew past him, the experts are in no doubt.
“It can’t be anything else. The shape is typical of meteorites — a fresh fracture surface on one side, while the other side is rounded,” said geologist Hans Amundsen.
He explained that the meteorite had been part of a larger stone that had exploded perhaps 20 kilometres above Helstrup.
Amundsen thinks he can make out coloured patches in the stone, and believes that in that case it may be a breccia — a common type of meteorite rock.
According to the article, the search is on to find the meterorite on the ground. I poked around a bit for information on a fireball sighting over Norway on the date in question (June 17, 2012) but didn’t find anything. Smells like a hoax to me, but if it’s real, it’s the first time a post-fireball meteor has been observed and filmed while still falling.
Coming into the 1960s, a new generation of star directors began to redefine the trailer - among them was the legendary Alfred Hitchcock. Instead of showing scenes from the movie, Hitchcock, who had become quite well known to audiences from his “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” TV series, cashed in on his celebrity… taking audiences on a tour using his gallows humor style in this trailer for 1960’s Pscyho.
The reemergence of Cubism in film and commercial art in the 1960s was not lost on another emerging filmmaker - Stanley Kubrick. Having experimented with fragmented cutting styles in the trailer to 1962’s Lolita, Kubrick comes back strong in 1964’s “Dr. Strangelove” with a trailer that I consider one of the most bold and brazen pieces of movie advertising ever made.
A workspace with minimal distractions. Jane Austen asked that a certain squeaky hinge never be oiled, so that she always had a warning when someone was approaching the room where she wrote. William Faulkner, lacking a lock on his study door, just detached the doorknob and brought it into the room with him — something of which today’s cubicle worker can only dream. Mark Twain’s family knew better than to breach his study door — if they needed him, they’d blow a horn to draw him out. Graham Greene went even further, renting a secret office; only his wife knew the address or telephone number. Distracted more by the view out his window than interruptions, if N.C. Wyeth was having trouble focusing, he’d tape a piece of cardboard to his glasses as a sort of blinder.
Michael Lewis’s new book about high-frequency trading dropped on Monday with less than 24 hours notice and the media is scrambling to catch up. There’s plenty of love for Lewis and his books out there, but Tyler Cowen has been linking to some critiques. For Bloomberg, Matt Levine writes:
In my alternative Michael Lewis story, the smart young whippersnappers build high-frequency trading firms that undercut big banks’ gut-instinct-driven market making with tighter spreads and cheaper trading costs. Big HFTs like Knight/Getco and Virtu trade vast volumes of stock while still taking in much less money than the traditional market makers: $688 million and $623 million in 2013 market-making revenue, respectively, for Knight and Virtu, versus $2.6 billion in equities revenue for Goldman Sachs and $4.8 billion for J.P. Morgan. Even RBC made 594 million Canadian dollars trading equities last year. The high-frequency traders make money more consistently than the old-school traders, but they also make less of it.
1. HFT doesn’t prey on small mom-and-pop investors. In his first two TV appearances, Lewis stuck to a simple pitch: Speed traders have rigged the stock market, and the biggest losers are average, middle-class retail investors-exactly the kind of people who watch 60 Minutes and the Today show. It’s “the guy sitting at his ETrade account,” Lewis told Matt Lauer. The way Lewis sees it, speed traders prey on retail investors by “trading against people who don’t know the market.”
The idea that retail investors are losing out to sophisticated speed traders is an old claim in the debate over HFT, and it’s pretty much been discredited. Speed traders aren’t competing against the ETrade guy, they’re competing with each other to fill the ETrade guy’s order.
This vagueness about time is one of the weaknesses of the book: it’s hard to keep track of time, and a lot of it seems to be an exposé not of high-frequency trading as it exists today, but rather of high-frequency trading as it existed during its brief heyday circa 2008. Lewis takes pains to tell us what happened to the number of trades per day between 2006 and 2009, for instance, but doesn’t feel the need to mention what has happened since then. (It is falling, quite dramatically.) The scale of the HFT problem - and the amount of money being made by the HFT industry - is in sharp decline: there was big money to be made once upon a time, but nowadays it’s not really there anymore. Because that fact doesn’t fit Lewis’s narrative, however, I doubt I’m going to find it anywhere in his book.
Michael Paul Smith takes photographs of classic cars that evoke feelings of nostalgia for America in the 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s. Take a look, these are about as Pleasantville as you can get:
But as you’ll discover browsing through Smith’s collection, the cars he photographs are scale models. Here’s the set-up for that second shot:
And here’s further evidence of Smith’s trickery:
No Photoshop here…all effects are done in-camera. As Smith notes, “It is the oldest trick in the special effects book: lining up a model with an appropriate background, then photographing it.” (via @osteslag)
To state the obvious: while the male detectives of “True Detective” are avenging women and children, and bro-bonding over “crazy pussy,” every live woman they meet is paper-thin. Wives and sluts and daughters — none with any interior life. Instead of an ensemble, “True Detective” has just two characters, the family-man adulterer Marty, who seems like a real and flawed person (and a reasonably interesting asshole, in Harrelson’s strong performance), and Rust, who is a macho fantasy straight out of Carlos Castaneda. A sinewy weirdo with a tragic past, Rust delivers arias of philosophy, a mash-up of Nietzsche, Lovecraft, and the nihilist horror writer Thomas Ligotti. At first, this buddy pairing seems like a funky dialectic: when Rust rants, Marty rolls his eyes. But, six episodes in, I’ve come to suspect that the show is dead serious about this dude. Rust is a heretic with a heart of gold. He’s our fetish object — the cop who keeps digging when everyone ignores the truth, the action hero who rescues children in the midst of violent chaos, the outsider with painful secrets and harsh truths and nice arms. McConaughey gives an exciting performance (in Grantland, Andy Greenwald aptly called him “a rubber band wrapped tight around a razor blade”), but his rap is premium baloney. And everyone around these cops, male or female, is a dark-drama cliche, from the coked-up dealers and the sinister preachers to that curvy corpse in her antlers. “True Detective” has some tangy dialogue (“You are the Michael Jordan of being a son of a bitch”) and it can whip up an ominous atmosphere, rippling with hints of psychedelia, but these strengths finally dissipate, because it’s so solipsistically focussed on the phony duet.
I enjoyed the show and am seated in the McConaissance cheering section, but True Detective is far from TV’s best thing evar. And Nussbaum hits the nail right on the head: the lack of good women characters is to blame.
Something I’ve noticed about my favorite TV shows: they are mostly testosterone fests where the women are more interesting than the men. Mad Men is the perfect example. Game of Thrones is another. And Six Feet Under. Even in Deadwood, which I am rewatching now and is loads better than True Detective, women more than hold their own against the men. It’s fun to watch the men on these series generate bullshit, but it’s much more interesting to watch the great actresses who play these women navigate and elevate through the predictable male privilege.
The debates this spring will center upon the 3-D printed gun, The Liberator; Sputniko!’s Menstruation Machine; and Temple Grandin’s serpentine ramp. Debate motions will be delivered by speakers who are directly engaged in issues germane to these contemporary designs — the Liberator’s designer Cody Wilson; Chris Bobel, author of New Blood: Third-Wave Feminism and the Politics of Menstruation, and distinguished professor of law Gary Francione, to name a few. We want them — and you — to explore the the limits of gun laws and rights, the democracy of open-source design, the (im)possibility of humane slaughter, and design that supports transgender empathy.
Now showing at IFC Center in NYC: Finding Vivian Maier. Maier is the Chicago street photographer whose extensive and impressive body of work was recently discovered at an auction. John Maloof bought Maier’s work, started posting it to a blog several years ago, did a Kickstarter (one of the first I backed) to fund a documentary about Maier and her photos, and now the film is showing in theaters around the US and Canada.
And just so you can get a sense of how large these drawings are:
Here’s a peek at his process:
Reminiscent of Stephen Wiltshire’s work. And every time I see something like this, I think about when I went to the Met a few years ago and noticed the sketchbook of this guy working the membership desk. It was filled with beautifully intricate drawings of NYC-style city streets. I chatted with him about them briefly, but I wish I’d asked if he had put any of it online. Would have been neat to share his drawings with you. (via waxy)
Over the two days of work, I built the game from the map forward. What I mean is that my first goal was to get individual map pages rendering on screen. From there I moved on to the game manager component, building out the startup logic and render loop. This lead to the entity system, which in turn lead to the player entity. Once I had the player moving around I built code to check for collisions with obstacles in the map and changing the view when the player hits the edges of the screen. At this point you could explore the whole world map! It was pretty boring though.
Next I started making monsters and items for the player to interact with. Since I had common code to check for collisions, get lists of entities occupying particular squares, etc, the monsters weren’t terribly difficult to implement. The most time consuming part was getting the combat mechanics to a good place where it was challenging but not frustrating.
See, by placing a ball of meat on a hot, un-oiled griddle and smashing it down firmly into a flat, thin disk, you greatly increase the contact points between the meat and the griddle, which in turn increases the Maillard reaction. That’s the series of chemical reactions that creates the rich brown crust that makes our steaks and burgers taste so freaking good. Maximum crust = maximum flavor = maximum craving.
I’ve already discussed the basic ins and outs of smashed burgers in the past, but after writing that article, I found myself wondering, what if I were to take this to the extreme? Is there a way I can pack even more flavor into a burger?
Spoiler alert: the answer is a big fat (or should I say short smashed?) yes.
Stay Connected