Entries for July 2014
At The Morning News, Giles Turnbull offers up a fake history of blogging, er, bloggering.
Depending on who you ask, the first bloggering happened in the late 1990s, when the web was still young, and clicking links to pages where you’d click more links was cool. This was in the days when the only use for an animated GIF was to tell people you were still working on your web page. Even if you weren’t.
“I invented bloggering,” says mad old Laurence Fortey, a mad old internet guy from the old, old days. He can remember hand-coded websites. He started coding his own just weeks after Tim Berners-Lee, a tunnel engineer helping to build the STERN protein collider, discovered ancient scrolls buried in the Swiss soil that revealed the secrets of HTML.
This is a lie, but I got dozens of emails today asking, “Jason, what movie should I watch tonight?” Whoa, slow down everyone, I’ve got just the thing: Snowpiercer. It’s a Korean film from 2013 that’s just now trickling into the consciousness of the rest of the world (c.f. this Grantland piece). The film takes place entirely on a train carrying the last remaining humans speeding forever around a frozen Earth (caused by an overenthusiastic response to climate change) and director Bong Joon-ho takes full advantage of this confined and linear setting. Plus, Tilda Swinton as a Terry Gilliam-ified Maggie Thatcher is worth the price of admission alone.
Snowpiercer is out in ~350 theaters in the US, so if you’re not in a major metropolitan area, it might be a little hard to catch. But the movie is also available digitally at Amazon and iTunes.
Bread and butter is often an afterthought at restaurants…the bread can be meh and bland butter served too cold to spread. Chef Dan Richer takes the bread and butter offered at his New Jersey restaurant as seriously as any of the other items on his menu.
Cultured butter is delicious…Per Se serves it as well. (via digg)
In his new video, Casey Neistat and his son visit a German waterpark housed in a giant former airship hangar.
Some information on the structure from the waterpark’s web site:
The Tropical Islands Dome is gigantic. In fact, it is the largest free-standing hall in the world: 360 metres long, 210 metres wide and an incredible 107 metres high.
That is big enough to fit the Statue of Liberty in standing up and the Eiffel Tower lying on its side. The Tropical Islands Dome covers an area of 66,000 m², the size of eight football fields. And it is high enough to fit in the whole of Berlin’s Potsdamer Platz, with all its skyscrapers.
(via john hodgman)
Since 1979, Jadav Payeng has planted every single tree in a forest that covers some 1360 acres of an island in the Jorhat district of India. The forest helps prevent the erosion of the island and is now home to elephants, rhinos, tigers, and other animals. Forest Man is a short documentary film on how this forest came to be. (via @AdmiralTwombly)
In the same vein as the Zinn/Chomsky Lord of the Rings commentary is A People’s History of Tattooine, a Twitter conversation that Jacob Harris kicks off thusly:
What if Mos Eisley wasn’t really that wretched and it was just Obi Wan being racist again?
Some other highlights:
“more civilized time?” Check your privilege, Obi Wan
the Tusken People. Raiders presumes some malevolent intent
all I’m saying is that I don’t blame the Tusken People for steering clear of the racist, violent and armed old man
like anybody forgets what Luke and his friends did to native womp rat populations at Beggars Canyon Park
There are 46 reviews (and counting) of The Grand Budapest Hotel on TripAdvisor, which is ranked “#1 of 1 hotels in The Republic of Zubrowka”.
As an elderly women I was thoroughly delighted by the attention of the staff! Particularly the concierge, what a thoughtful generous man! Wish I could take him home to service me there! I also loved the food and the chocolate treats from mendls. Tip top!
See also Schrute Farms on TripAdvisor and TripAdvisor reviews for the Overlook Hotel. Oh and The Grand Budapest Hotel movie is now available for digital rental. (via @khoi)
Sun Noodle makes the ramen noodles for a host of the top ramen shops in NYC, LA, and elsewhere (Ivan, Momofuku, etc.)…here’s a look at how the noodles are made in their New Jersey factory:
See also how to make hand-pulled noodles and Sun Noodle’s fresh ramen kits are available for retail (via devour)
At The Bold Italic, an anonymous San Franciscan rails against the practice of going out to dinner with a group of friends for your birthday.
Look, I don’t think I’m a cheap ass, but I typically spend under $100 on a birthday gift for my own mother. And this is San Francisco; your friends are going to range from hella rich to hella poor, and the whole premise of these group dinners makes things uncomfortable for everyone. It’s not that I think birthdays need to be extravagant exercises in theme and creativity; I’m just saying there are lots of things you could do on your birthday, and a huge dinner is one of the worst. For less money and less hassle, everyone could pitch in and rent a suite at a fancy hotel with a pool. Do that. Do anything else.
(via @arainert)
In his mid-20s, James Golding was diagnosed with cancer. In the hospital, he weighed 84 pounds and was given a 5% chance of living. Five years later, he embarked on a journey to France to break the record for most distance ridden on a bike in 7 days. This video follows Golding through his record-breaking attempt.
The video was produced by the same team that did the lovely Experiments in Speed video.
Over the past century, adult per capita cigarette consumption in the US rose from nearly nothing in 1900 to a peak of more than 4000 cigarettes per year in the early 60s and then fell to the current rate of around 1000/yr. Currently, smoking in the US correlates highly with level of education and poverty.
Smoking, as it happens, also appears to be highly correlated with both poverty and education levels in the United States: 27.9 percent of American adults living below the poverty line are smokers, while just 17 percent of those living above it are, according to the CDC; 24.7 percent of American adults without a high school diploma are smokers, while 23.1 percent of those with one are. Only 9.1 percent of those with an undergraduate degree, and 5.9 percent of those with a graduate degree are smokers.
According to Wikipedia, the US is 51st among nations in annual smoking rates. Eastern Europe and Russia hold all the top spots, but their per capita rates (~2800/yr) are all lower than the rate in the US in the 60s. But that’s nothing compared to Scotland…their rate was once 7000 cigarettes per year. (via @dens)
Occasionally I’ll go to my page of addictive Flash games to revisit some old favorites. I mostly play games on my phone now, but some of these are still pretty good. One of my absolute faves is a game called Cyclomaniacs, which I’ve played all the way through several times over the years. Last night I discovered there’s a Cyclomaniacs 2. So good.
Update: There is also Cyclomaniacs Epic and a one-off called Gregmaniacs. (via @ISeeFrants)
According to data collected by a European satellite array, the Earth’s magnetic field is shifting and weakening at a greater pace than previously thought. One of the reasons for the shift might be that the magnetic North and South poles are swapping positions.
Scientists already know that magnetic north shifts. Once every few hundred thousand years the magnetic poles flip so that a compass would point south instead of north. While changes in magnetic field strength are part of this normal flipping cycle, data from Swarm have shown the field is starting to weaken faster than in the past. Previously, researchers estimated the field was weakening about 5 percent per century, but the new data revealed the field is actually weakening at 5 percent per decade, or 10 times faster than thought. As such, rather than the full flip occurring in about 2,000 years, as was predicted, the new data suggest it could happen sooner.
You can read up on geomagnetic reversals on Wikipedia. A short sampling:
These periods [of polarity] are called chrons. The time spans of chrons are randomly distributed with most being between 0.1 and 1 million years with an average of 450,000 years. Most reversals are estimated to take between 1,000 and 10,000 years. The latest one, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal, occurred 780,000 years ago. A brief complete reversal, known as the Laschamp event, occurred only 41,000 years ago during the last glacial period. That reversal lasted only about 440 years with the actual change of polarity lasting around 250 years. During this change the strength of the magnetic field dropped to 5% of its present strength.
Audacity is a sound editing program, but it turns out you can open and edit image files with it. With varying results, mostly of the glitch art variety:
(via 5 intriguing things)
From ProPublica, an alarming series of graphs and charts on animal extinction: A Disappearing Planet.
Animal species are going extinct anywhere from 100 to 1,000 times the rates that would be expected under natural conditions. According to Elizabeth Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction and other recent studies, the increase results from a variety of human-caused effects including climate change, habitat destruction, and species displacement. Today’s extinction rates rival those during the mass extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs 65 million years ago.
(via @SrikarDR)
Back in February, Smug Mode chose American counterparts for all of Doctor Who’s past incarnations. We’re talking Dick Van Dyke as the 2nd Doctor, Gene Wilder for the 4th Doctor, and Donald Glover as the 11th Doctor. Here’s a nicely done faux 50th anniversary video celebrating those Doctors:
(via @moth)
This clever and well-done visualization shows where individual NYC taxis picked up and dropped off their fares over the course of a day.
Mesmerizing. Has anyone done analysis on which drivers are the most effective and what the data shows as the most effective techniques? The best drivers must have their tricks on where to be at which times to get the most fares. (via @dens)
Jokey t-shirts for infants are almost never funny but putting the same shirts on adults is the best idea ever.
All the designs featured are actually available for sale — here’s that I Pooped Today shirt — just click on the “See all styles” button for adult options. Ok, just one more:
(via @mulegirl)
This is an old piece from McSweeney’s, but it’s absolute gold and I can’t believe I’ve been missing it all these years. In it, Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn record a DVD commentary for the first Lord of the Rings movie. So, so good.
Zinn: You’ve spoken to me before about Mordor’s lack of access to the mineral wealth that the Dwarves control.
Chomsky: If we’re going to get into the socio-economic reasons why certain structures develop in certain cultures… it’s mainly geographical. We have Orcs in Mordor — trapped, with no mineral resources — hemmed in by the Ash Mountains, where the “free peoples” of Middle Earth can put a city, like Osgiliath, and effectively keep the border closed.
Zinn: Don’t forget the Black Gate. The Black Gate, which, as Tolkien points out, was built by Gondor. And now we jump to the Orcs chopping down the trees in Isengard.
Chomsky: A terrible thing the Orcs do here, isn’t it? They destroy nature. But again, what have we seen, time and time again?
Zinn: The Orcs have no resources. They’re desperate.
Chomsky: Desperate people driven to do desperate things.
Zinn: Desperate to compete with the economic powerhouses of Rohan and Gondor.
Chomsky: Who really knows their motive? Maybe this is a means to an end. And while that might not be the best philosophy in the world, it makes the race of Man in no way superior. They’re going to great lengths to hold onto their power. Two cultures locked in conflict over power, with one culture clearly suffering a great deal. I think sharing power and resources would have been the wisest approach, but Rohan and Gondor have shown no interest in doing so. Sometimes, revolution must be —
Zinn: Mistakes are often —
Chomsky: Blood must be shed. I forget what Thomas Jefferson —
Here’s part two. And the same writers, Jeff Alexander and Tom Bissell, also did one for The Return of the King.
Helsinki has announced plans to integrate all transportation within the Finnish city into a single system with a single payment structure and run it as a public utility.
Helsinki aims to transcend conventional public transport by allowing people to purchase mobility in real time, straight from their smartphones. The hope is to furnish riders with an array of options so cheap, flexible and well-coordinated that it becomes competitive with private car ownership not merely on cost, but on convenience and ease of use.
Subscribers would specify an origin and a destination, and perhaps a few preferences. The app would then function as both journey planner and universal payment platform, knitting everything from driverless cars and nimble little buses to shared bikes and ferries into a single, supple mesh of mobility. Imagine the popular transit planner Citymapper fused to a cycle hire service and a taxi app such as Hailo or Uber, with only one payment required, and the whole thing run as a public utility, and you begin to understand the scale of ambition here.
As the Helsinki Times’ headline reads, the future resident of Helsinki will not own a car.
In 1986, the BBC produced a short documentary film on the Taylor brothers, a trio of professional cyclists from the 1930s and 40s. The three of them operated a bicycle shop, which turned out handmade bikes for decades.
Delightful. Don’t miss one of the brothers putting the racing stripes on a frame by hand starting at around 12:00. You can read a bit more about the brothers here and here. (via @cdevroe)
On each episode of the Song Exploder podcast, Hrishikesh Hirway interviews musicians about how their songs were made…”where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.” I listened to this episode about the House of Cards theme song via this 99% Invisible episode and the inaugural episode features Jimmy Tamborello of The Postal Service talking about The District Sleeps Alone Tonight:
From CineFix, a collection of ten of the most iconic and memorable editing moments in cinematic history.
(via @brillhart)
Narrated by Malcolm McDowell and featuring interviews from many collaborators and colleagues, Lost Kubrick is a short documentary on the films that Stanley Kubrick never finished.
Through interviews and abundant archival materials, this documentary examines these “lost” films in depth to discover what drew Kubrick to these projects, the work he did to prepare them for production, and why they ultimately were abandoned. Some of the unfinished project discussed here are “Napoleon”, “The Aryan Papers” and also “A.I” (which we know finally made by Steven Spielberg).
Everyone has a superpower. This guy’s superpower is that he can flip mini-pancakes faster than I thought humanly possible.
I love watching stuff like this…here’s a guy chopping lemons in half 20 times quicker than Superman himself would.
ps. This is still the world’s best pancake recipe.
In the first two installments of a series about artistic authenticity, Rex Sorgatz writes about five different people’s efforts to own a Vermeer and how you can get your very own masterpiece.
It’s possible that Vermeer — an artist who many consider the greatest painter of all time — could paint with no more acuity than you or me. Vermeer may have been a simple technologist — but a technologist who could recreate the world with scintillating photographic intensity, centuries before photography was invented, which might actually be a bigger deal than being a good painter.
I loved these articles. I wish I would have written them…I am fascinated with both Vermeer and art forgeries. Good stuff.
Two dozen people offer you their best advice on how to invest a single dollar.
I don’t have any awesome ideas for how to invest a buck, unfortunately. That is my weakness. My first instinct was to invest it in a stripper’s g-string or a barista’s tip jar. But I’m not sure how that translates as investment. I do know that the more frequently you visit/tip a barista — your neighborhood barista, who does not work at a Starbucks — the more often you are treated like family and you get free coffee. I think that the more you invest in a stripper, the less you get free things from that stripper.
Man rides the rails on a giant skateboard made out of a wooden pallet:
That worked way better than I would have expected. (via digg)
This is a reel from Mackevision, showing the visual effects they did for season 4 of Game of Thrones. I wasn’t expecting all the boats to be fake.
This reel does a better job than most in showing the process and how all the different elements fit together. Also interesting to see how much the digital greebles make everything seem way more realistic.
Update: And here’s another reel of VFX from season 4 by Rodeo FX.
In a piece for the Pottermore web site, JK Rowling writes an update on how the gang from the Harry Potter books is doing. The piece is an account of the Quidditch World Cup Final written by Rita Skeeter, the gossip columnist from the books. You need a login to read it on Pottermore, but someone uploaded it to Reddit as well.
The Potter family and the rest of Dumbledore’s Army have been given accommodation in the VIP section of the campsite, which is protected by heavy charms and patrolled by Security Warlocks. Their presence has ensured large crowds along the cordoned area, all hoping for a glimpse of their heroes. At 3pm today they got their wish when, to the accompaniment of loud screams, Potter took his young sons James and Albus to visit the players’ compound, where he introduced them to Bulgarian Seeker Viktor Krum.
About to turn 34, there are a couple of threads of silver in the famous Auror’s black hair, but he continues to wear the distinctive round glasses that some might say are better suited to a style-deficient twelve-year-old. The famous lightning scar has company: Potter is sporting a nasty cut over his right cheekbone. Requests for information as to its provenance merely produced the usual response from the Ministry of Magic: ‘We do not comment on the top secret work of the Auror department, as we have told you no less than 514 times, Ms. Skeeter.’ So what are they hiding? Is the Chosen One embroiled in fresh mysteries that will one day explode upon us all, plunging us into a new age of terror and mayhem?
That last line is one of a few references to possible new stories in the piece…the last paragraph mentions a new biography of Harry and his pals due out at the end of this month:
And for those who want to know exactly how imperfect they are, my new biography: Dumbledore’s Army: The Dark Side of the Demob will be available from Flourish and Blotts on July 31st.
Could Rowling be setting the stage for an eighth Potter book or is she just winding us up?
Buzz Aldrin just did one of Reddit’s crowdsourced Q&As. He hits it out of the park with his first answer:
Q: Is there any experience on Earth that even compares slightly to having been on the Moon?
A: My first words of my impression of being on the surface of the Moon that just came to my mind was “Magnificent desolation.” The magnificence of human beings, humanity, Planet Earth, maturing the technologies, imagination and courage to expand our capabilities beyond the next ocean, to dream about being on the Moon, and then taking advantage of increases in technology and carrying out that dream — achieving that is magnificent testimony to humanity. But it is also desolate — there is no place on earth as desolate as what I was viewing in those first moments on the Lunar Surface.
Because I realized what I was looking at, towards the horizon and in every direction, had not changed in hundreds, thousands of years. Beyond me I could see the moon curving away — no atmosphere, black sky. Cold. Colder than anyone could experience on Earth when the sun is up — but when the sun is up for 14 days, it gets very, very hot. No sign of life whatsoever.
That is desolate. More desolate than any place on Earth.
I’ve had this page of misbehaving robot animated GIFs up in a tab for a few days now and every time it pops up on my screen, I watch all of them and then I laugh. That’s it. Instant fun. The garbage truck is my favorite, but what gets me laughing the most is how exuberantly the ketchup squirting robot sprays its payload onto that hamburger bun.
A short film about how Neal’s Yard Dairy, a top seller of cheese in London, works with producers to make cheese.
I had a tour of the caves below Murray’s in the West Village where they do the same sort of thing as at Neal’s Yard. Pretty cool to see the process in action and to taste the same cheeses at different ages.
Oh, this is wonderful: Laurin Döpfner took an industrial sander to objects like logs, electronics, a camera, and a walnut, shaved off 0.5 mm at a time, and made a time lapse video of the results.
This is like a full-color MRI process. Could watch it all day. (via colossal)
In the early 1930s, Western Union and AT&T built two new buildings in lower Manhattan to house their telecommunications infrastructure. Here’s a short film about their construction and ongoing use as hubs for contemporary telecom and internet communications.
Amazing that those buildings are still being used for the same use all these years later…they just run newer and newer technology through the same old conduits.
Somehow I lived in WI for the first 17 years of my life, was a Brewers fan for many of those years, and never realized the old Brewers logo contained the letters “m” and “b” hidden in the ball and glove.
Wow. If your mind is blowing right now too, there’s a Facebook group we can join together: Best Day of My Life: When I Realized the Brewers Logo Was a Ball and Glove AND the Letters M and B. (via kathryn yu)
ps. If you’ve somehow missed the hidden arrow in the FedEx logo, here you go. Best kind of natural high there is.
In 1976, 20th Century Fox released a teaser trailer for a little film called Star Wars…aka “the story of a boy, a girl, and a universe”.
No James Earl Jones voiceover for Vader, no John Williams score (which wasn’t finished until just two months before the film premiered), but those visuals must have impressed.
Here’s the first teaser trailer for Empire Strikes Back, which features no film footage at all, just concept art drawn by Ralph McQuarrie:
And for the sake of completeness, the teaser trailer for Return of the Jedi, which appeared in theaters before Lucas changed the name from Revenge of the Jedi:
The staff and contributors of Dissolve recently listed the 50 greatest summer blockbusters ever. Here’s #50-31, #30-11, and the top 10.
Blockbusters have become such an integral part of the way we talk about films that it’s hard to believe they haven’t always been with us. But while there have always been big movies-lavish productions designed to draw crowds and command repeat business-the blockbuster as we know it has a definite start date: June 20, 1975. That’s when Jaws first hit screens in the middle of what was once, in the words of The Financial Times, a “low season” when the “only steady summer dollars came, in the U.S., from drive-in theaters.” It’s summer, after all; why go to the movies when you could be outside? Jaws changed that. Star Wars cemented that change. And now, the summer-movie season is dominated by the biggest films Hollywood has to offer.
Jaws is the no-surprise #1 but Who Framed Roger Rabbit at #8? Hmm, dunno about that. And leaving Star Wars just off the top 10 is a bold move. My personal top ten would also have included Ghostbusters — I remember vividly waiting in line in the sweltering heat outside the El Lago theater to see Ghostbusters and just being completely and utterly blown away by it — and Terminator 2. Oh and Batman. I think I saw that movie half-a-dozen times in the theater and it was just everywhere that summer…the logo, that song by Prince, everything. (via @khoi)
Sometime around 1918 in Buenos Aires, Marcel Duchamp designed a chess set:
Sometime earlier this year, Scott Kildall and Brian Sera used archival photos of the hard-to-find set, turned them into 3D models of the chess pieces, and made a pattern for 3D printing your own set:
The community at Thingaverse is already busy making interesting variations of Duchamp’s set…look at this one:
Something tells me Duchamp would have loved this whole thing.
Update: Welllllll, Duchamp may have loved this, but his estate definitely did not. Duchamp’s estate sent Kildall and Sera a cease and desist letter, forcing them to remove the 3D models from Thingiverse. Which, the irony! So, Kildall and Sera, riffing on Duchamp’s mustachioed Mona Lisa, have created a set of six 3D-printed chess pieces with mustaches modeled on the Duchamp set. Fantastic.
Life Itself, the documentary about Roger Ebert, is now out in theaters. But you can also watch it via various Video On Demand services, including Amazon and iTunes. Here’s the trailer to whet yer whistle:
These glass and wood tables made by Greg Klassen to resemble rivers and lakes are completely ridiculous and impractical but I love them.
Alas, they don’t come cheap. (via colossal)
Spanish design firm Atipo made these nifty minimalist movie posters out of card stock. I really like the one for Rear Window:
An open-and-shut case from FiveThirtyEight: Lionel Messi is far and away the best player in football. Ronaldo is the only player who is close and he’s not even all that close.
By now I’ve studied nearly every aspect of Messi’s game, down to a touch-by-touch level: his shooting and scoring production; where he shoots from; how often he sets up his own shots; what kind of kicks he uses to make those shots; his ability to take on defenders; how accurate his passes are; the kind of passes he makes; how often he creates scoring chances; how often those chances lead to goals; even how his defensive playmaking compares to other high-volume shooters.
And that’s just the stuff that made it into this article. I arrived at a conclusion that I wasn’t really expecting or prepared for: Lionel Messi is impossible.
It’s not possible to shoot more efficiently from outside the penalty area than many players shoot inside it. It’s not possible to lead the world in weak-kick goals and long-range goals. It’s not possible to score on unassisted plays as well as the best players in the world score on assisted ones. It’s not possible to lead the world’s forwards both in taking on defenders and in dishing the ball to others. And it’s certainly not possible to do most of these things by insanely wide margins.
But Messi does all of this and more.
The piece is chock-full of evidential graphs of how much of an outlier Messi is among his talented peers:
One of my favorite things that I’ve written about sports is how Lionel Messi rarely dives, which allows him to keep the advantage he has over the defense.
Watch actress Siobhan Thompson do 17 different British and Irish accents:
Much better done and more entertaining than this tour of British accents I featured back in April. (via @Atul_Gawande)
The growing inequality between the rich and poor has become one of the key stories of this era. But while the focus is on money, it’s really about something much more basic than that: Life. Americans who are affluent already live about twelve years longer than their poor and working class counterparts. And with new technologies on the way, that gap could widen dramatically. The story of the haves and the have-nots could quickly become a story of the haves and the dead. Aeon’s Linda Marsa on The Longevity Gap.
Speaking of Halt and Catch Fire, the title sequence is pretty awesome:
I am also currently trying (and mostly failing) not to have a giant crush on Mackenzie Davis, who plays crack programmer Cameron Howe on the show, reads Infinite Jest in Brooklyn coffee shops, gets anxious about talking on the phone (me too!), and has recently read The Soul of a New Machine (me too!). Am I wrong to think we’d totes be BFFs?!
Update: The Art of the Title did a feature on the H&CF titles, which includes 55 photos of storyboards. Pretty cool to see the process. (via @ScottIvers)
Update: Halt’s opening sequence was nominated for an Emmy in Outstanding Main Title Design!
Earlier today I asked my Twitter followers for recommendations for “really good” biographies about scientists. I gave Genius (James Gleick’s bio of Richard Feynman) and Cleopatra, A Life (not about a scientist but was super interesting and well-written) as examples of what I was looking for. You can see the responses here and I’ve pulled out a few of the most interesting ones below:
- Isaac Newton by James Gleick. Gleick wrote the aforementioned Genius and Chaos, another favorite of mine. I tried to read The Information last year after many glowing recommendations from friends but couldn’t get into it. Someone suggested Never at Rest is a superior Newton bio.
- The Man Who Loved Only Numbers by Paul Hoffman. I’ve read this biography of mathematician Paul Erdos; highly recommended.
- Galileo’s Daughter by Dava Sobel. I’ve never read anything by Sobel; I’ll have to rectify that.
- Einstein: His Life and Universe by Walter Isaacson. I enjoyed his problematic Jobs biography and I notice that he’s written one on Ben Franklin as well.
- Alan Turing: The Enigma by Andrew Hodges.
- American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. Bio of J. Robert Oppenheimer, leader of the Manhattan Project. See also: The Making of the Atomic Bomb, one of my favorite books ever.
- Everything and More by David Foster Wallace. I’ve heard Wallace was bit handwavy with the math in this one, but I still enjoyed it.
- Newton and the Counterfeiter by Thomas Levenson. Newton was a detective?
- The Philosophical Breakfast Club by Laura Snyder. Four-way bio of a group of school friends (Charles Babbage, John Herschel, William Whewell, and Richard Jones) who changed the world.
- The Reluctant Mr. Darwin by David Quammen. How Charles Darwin devised his theory of evolution and then sat on it for years is one of science’s most fascinating stories.
- T. rex and the Crater of Doom by Walter Alvarez. Not a biography of a person but of a theory: that a meteor impact 65 million years ago caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.
- Walt Disney by Neal Gabler. Disney isn’t a scientist, but when you ask for book recommendations and Steven Johnson tells you to read something, it goes on the list.
- The Man Who Knew Infinity by Robert Kanigel. Bio of brilliant Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan.
- Edge of Objectivity by Charles Gillispie. A biography of modern science published in 1966, all but out of print at this point unfortunately.
- Galileo at Work by Stillman Drake.
- The Age of Wonder by Richard Holmes.
And many more here. Thanks to everyone who suggested books.
Update: Because this came up on Twitter, some biographies specifically about women in science: The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Hedy’s Folly, On a Farther Shore, Marie Curie: A Life, A Feeling for the Organism, Rosalind Franklin: The Dark Lady of DNA, Jane Goodall: The Woman Who Redefined Man, and Radioactive.
Smarty Pins is a Google Maps-based geography quiz…you drop pins on the map to answer questions. You start with a total of 1000 miles and the game subtracts the number of miles you’re off by for each answer.
I just spent far too long playing this. Can you beat my score of 39? Also, this reminds me of GeoGuessr, which is a lot more difficult.
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