Entries for November 2014
Why do humans explore space? We “love to sail forbidden seas”. This is a beautiful short video narrated by Carl Sagan showing future human exploration of our solar system.
Without any apparent story, other than what you may fill in by yourself, the idea of the film is primarily to show a glimpse of the fantastic and beautiful nature that surrounds us on our neighboring worlds — and above all, how it might appear to us if we were there.
The shot starting at 2:25 of the exploration of one of Jupiter’s moons (Europa?) is fantastic. (via ★interesting)
What if George Lucas was making the new Star Wars movie instead of JJ Abrams? This recut trailer offers a glimpse of the cheesy CG madness.
So so good.
Just after the first Thanksgiving with the Pilgrims and the Native Americans came the first Black Friday with ye olde doorbusters.
And after the feaste, which did consist of water-fowl, and cod and bass and other fishes, and a great many wylde turkeys, the people of Plymouth did retire. And upon awakening they were greeted with many goodly savings, on itemes of considerable necessitie, and just in tyme for the forthcoming holidaye season!
Shoes of sturdy leather were to be had for the low, low sum of a single raccoon’s pelt, and milking cow discounts did flood with joye anyone able to parse the true meaning of “half-off.” Values on corn, squash, peas, and barley likewise were out of this (New!) worlde; and the people’s clamour to purchase a canoe, a novel form of transport that many did consider the hot new gift, was so immense that for some poore souls it did prove injurious.
The canoe came with not one, but two paddles!
Here it is, the very first look at JJ Abrams’ new Star Wars movie.
Not ashamed to say I felt chills down my spine when the music kicked in. Please please please let this not suck.
Update: From the teaser, it’s a little early to tell whether Abrams is following these four rules to make Star Wars great again (1. The setting is the frontier. 2. The future is old. 3. The Force is mysterious. 4. Star Wars isn’t cute.) but there are hints of 1&2 in there…they’re still driving those old rust-bucket X-Wings and wearing beat-up helmets.
Pianograms are visualizations of the relative distributions of piano key presses for songs. For instance, this is Prelude in C-sharp by Rachmaninov:
(via @pomeranian99)
Oh, this is great. The butchers, farmers, doctors, and children’s book librarians of Richard Scarry’s original Busy, Busy Town give way to the non-lending officer, one-percenter service provider, fart-sound app maker, and lowly immigrant in Tom the Dancing Bug’s 21st century Busy Town.
I don’t recall if I ever tweeted about it, but a few months ago I had this idea for a service for the wealthy who wanted properly broken-in jeans but didn’t want to bother wearing them around for months first without washing.1 It’s basically a dog-walking service but for jeans. It was mostly a joke, but in the age of Uber taxiing kittens to your office for you to cuddle with, no such idea is truly off the table. Huit Denim Co. is experimenting with a beta feature called the Denim Breaker Club.
You are going to break our selvedge jeans in for our customers.
You will have to agree to not wash them for 6 months.
You will have to agree to update what you get up to in them on HistoryTag.
And before you get them sent to you have pay a small deposit, which we will refund on their safe return.
When we get them back, we will expertly wash them.
And then we will sell these beautiful jeans.
You will have 20% of the sale.
So in effect you will be paid to wear jeans.
Have to admit, that’s pretty clever. (FYI: HistoryTag gives individual pieces of clothing tracking codes which you can use in social media. A Social Life of Clothes, basically.)
Update: APC offers a similar Butler program:
Nothing is created or destroyed, it is merely transformed. This adage is fulfilled in every respect by the Butler jeans concept. Customers are encouraged to bring their old denim jeans to any A.P.C. store or send it to the online store, where they will be exchanged for a new pair at half price. Broken in naturally over time, their attractive patina created and preserved in accordance with washing instructions, the jeans thus reappear, beginning a second life. But not until they have been washed, mended and marked with the initials of their former owner by our workshops. Each pair is therefore truly unique.
(via @endquote)
Update: The Guardian’s Morwenna Ferrier has more on Huit Denim Co. and their Denim Breaker Club, including an interview with one of the breakers-in.
I was one of the first breakers. They are the best jeans I’ve owned. I got involved because I’ve known David for a long time, as I used to run a clothing company. He told me about the idea and I signed up, paying an £80 deposit.
“When I handed them back, of course they smelled bad. I wore them every single day for six months. Literally. I don’t wear a suit, you see. I live in Belfast and I work in Hollywood down the road, and I cycled to work every day. I went to the rugby in them with my thermals underneath. They got soaked in the cold and rain, and so they spent a lot of time hanging and drying above a radiator. One day, when it was warm, I went and lay on the beach in them. I went to the supermarket in them, I cooked in them, I drank in them. I didn’t spill anything serious on them, thankfully. I also carved spoons in them, so by the end they were pretty covered in wood shavings.
Photographer Ernie Button photographs the dried remains of single malt scotch whiskies, which end up looking like desolate landscapes on distant worlds.
Curious as to how these patterns were formed by some kinds of whiskey but not others, Button reached out to an engineering professor at Princeton.
Dr. Stone’s group found that the key difference in whisky is that unlike coffee, it consists of two liquids — water and ethyl alcohol. The alcohol evaporates more quickly, and as the fraction of water increases, the surface tension of the droplet changes, an effect first noticed in the 19th century by an Italian scientist, Carlo Marangoni. That, in turn, generates complex flows that contribute to the patterns Mr. Button photographed.
“Here, they actually looked at what happens when you change the fluids that are drying,” said Dr. Yunker, who is soon heading to the Georgia Institute of Technology as a physics professor, “and they found some very neat effects.” (That would be neat in the usual sense of “cool and intriguing” and not as in “I’ll have my whisky neat.”)
(via @pomeranian99)
RadioISS plays streams of the radio stations that the International Space Station passes over on its continual orbit of Earth. As I’m writing this, the ISS just floated over the southern tip of South American and RadioISS is playing Radio 3 Cadena Patagonia AM 789 from Patagonia, Argentina. Ah, it just switched to Alpha 101.7 FM out of Sao Paulo, Brazil. They’re playing One by U2.
From Stuart Brown, a five-part video series on the history of graphics in video games. Here’s part one:
The entire playlist is here.
Paul Ford imagines a future where Uber is the largest company in the world, controlling much of humanity’s transportation and delivery needs.
I am Uber. I believed to 0.56 certainty that I could find a bicycle for the person doing the delivery and provide that person with a discounted rental fee. Unfortunately the city of New York insists that bicycle rental kiosks must be controlled by an entity that is not Uber and thus I am not granted the level of full control that is necessary for me to truly optimize the city. No one benefits, no one at all.
A letter to the editor in The Times today details an unusual lifesaving technique from a quick-thinking shepherd.
Sir, Atul Gawande’s article “How a checklist saved a little girl’s life” (Opinion, Nov 22) reminded me of an event in the late 1970s, when an infant fell into the garden pond of one of my neighbours. On hearing an anguished scream followed by pleas for help, I and an elderly neighbor dropped our gardening tools and struggled over the hedges and fence that separated us from the commotion.
The three-year-old girl was at the bottom of the pond; I jumped in, pulled her out and passed her lifeless body to my neighbour. He lay her down, got hold of her ankles, lifted her up and began, in a lunatic fashion, to swing her around his head. Horrified and paralysed, the child’s mother and I watched as, moments later, water poured from the child’s mouth and nose, and she gave a loud cry.
I asked my neighbour where he’d learnt to do such a thing. He said he’d been a shepherd for 30-odd years, and when lambs were born “dead” it was the standard way of making them breathe and of ridding their mouth of birth debris. But for the grace of this old shepherd, Aaron, that child would not be alive today.
Genius. I wonder if this centrifuge move might be more effective in helping lighter drowning victims breathe than CPR. (via @JRhodesPianist & @themexican)
Huh. Someone built a working particle accelerator out of Lego bricks. Ok, it doesn’t accelerate protons, but it does spin a small Lego ball around the ring much faster than I would have guessed.
Update: I stand corrected, the Lego particle accelerator does indeed accelerate protons, just a lot of them very slowly, accompanied by all manner of other particles.
For his recently released book Wild Life, Brad Wilson shot photos of all kinds of animals on a black background, resulting in unusually expressive portraits.
Reminds me of Jill Greenberg’s monkey portraits…expressive in the same way.
Dancers from legendary Bay Area hip-hop dance crews in the 1970s and 80s reminisce about the old days and show that they still have the moves.
Wonderful. There’s no school like the old school. (via waxy)
Well, lookie here, the platinum edition of Beyonce is out with a second, uh, “disc” of songs, including 7/11 and the Flawless remix w/ Nicki Minaj.
Also on Spotify and Amazon MP3. (via @jennydeluxe)
One of the major points in Charles Mann’s 1491 (great book, a fave) is that the indigenous peoples of the Americas did not live in pristine wilderness. Through techniques like cultivation and controlled burning, they profoundly shaped their environments, from the forests of New England to the Amazon.
In the 1850s, the indigenous inhabitants of Yosemite Valley, who used controlled burning to maintain the health of the forest, were driven out by a militia. As Eric Michael Johnson writes in Scientific American, the belief in the myth of pristine wilderness by naturalist John Muir has had a negative impact on the biodiversity and the ability to prevent catastrophic fire damage in Yosemite National Park.
The results of this analysis were statistically significant (p < 0.01) and revealed that shade-tolerant species such as White fir and incense cedar had increased to such an extent that Yosemite Valley was now two times more densely packed than it had been in the nineteenth century. These smaller and more flammable trees had pushed out the shade-intolerant species, such as oak or pine, and reduced their numbers by half. After a century of fire suppression in the Yosemite Valley biodiversity had actually declined, trees were now 20 percent smaller, and the forest was more vulnerable to catastrophic fires than it had been before the U.S. Army and armed vigilantes expelled the native population.
(via @charlescmann)
At some point in the 1970s, Lego included the following letter to parents in its sets:
The text reads:
The urge to create is equally strong in all children. Boys and girls.
It’s imagination that counts. Not skill. You build whatever comes into your head, the way you want it. A bed or a truck. A dolls house or a spaceship.
A lot of boys like dolls houses. They’re more human than spaceships. A lot of girls prefer spaceships. They’re more exciting than dolls houses.
The most important thing is to the put the right material in the their hands and let them create whatever appeals to them.
The letter seems like the sort of thing that might be fake, but Robbie Gonzalez of io9 presents the case for its authenticity.
In our home, Lego currently rules the roost…the kids (a boy and a girl) spend more time building with Lego than doing anything else. This weekend, they worked together to build a beach scene, with a house, pool, lifeguard station, car, pond (for skimboarding), and surfers. Dollhouse stuff basically. Then they raced around the house with Lego spaceships and race cars. Nailed it, 1970s Lego.
Update: QZ confirms, the letter is genuine.
I know, I know, no football.1 But I could not help seeing this catch last night by NY Giants receiver Odell Beckham. Many are calling it the best catch anyone has ever made in the history of the NFL.
As a player, how do you prepare yourself for making the greatest catch in history? It would be easy to dismiss this catch as a lucky fluke…one-handed, fighting off a defender, just gets it by his fingertips. But here’s the thing: Beckham practices exactly this catch:
Luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity. Preparation, kids. Preparation.
At Reddit, a user called Cabbagetroll posted a very short summary of the Bible.
GENESIS
God: All right, you two, don’t do the one thing. Other than that, have fun.
Adam & Eve: Okay.
Satan: You should do the thing.
Adam & Eve: Okay.
God: What happened!?
Adam & Eve: We did the thing.
God: Guys
THE REST OF THE OLD TESTAMENT
God: You are my people, and you should not do the things.
People: We won’t do the things.
God: Good.
People: We did the things.
God: Guys
(via @mkonnikova)
Lauren Ipsum is a book about computer science for kids (age 10 and up) published by No Starch Press.
Meet Lauren, an adventurer who knows all about solving problems. But she’s lost in the fantastical world of Userland, where mail is delivered by daemons and packs of wild jargon roam.
Lauren sets out for home, traveling through a journey of puzzles, from the Push and Pop Cafe to the Garden of the Forking Paths. As she discovers the secrets of Userland, Lauren learns about computer science without even realizing it-and so do you!
Sounds intriguing. And 1000 bonus points for making the protagonist a girl. There’s an older self-published version of the book that’s been out for a couple of years. I like the older description slightly better:
Laurie is lost in Userland. She knows where she is, or where she’s going, but maybe not at the same time. The only way out is through Jargon-infested swamps, gates guarded by perfect logic, and the perils of breakfast time at the Philosopher’s Diner. With just her wits and the help of a lizard who thinks he’s a dinosaur, Laurie has to find her own way home.
Lauren Ipsum is a children’s story about computer science. In 20 chapters she encounters dozens of ideas from timing attacks to algorithm design, the subtle power of names, and how to get a fair flip out of even the most unfair coin.
Has anyone read it?
I just upgraded to OS X Yosemite yesterday1 and the Helvetica as the system font is as jarring as everyone says it is. But that new Apple Watch font, San Francisco, seems really nice. So of course someone has worked out a way to use the Watch font as the system font on Yosemite. Here’s what you do…just type the following in Terminal.app:
ruby -e “$(curl -fsSL https://raw.github.com/wellsriley/YosemiteSanFranciscoFont/master/install)”
Then restart your computer. Full instructions are on GitHub. Here’s what it looks like:
Pretty nice. But it’s not perfect. For instance, look at the text in the Chrome tabs…it’s not aligned correctly. And if you have the fast user switching menu enabled in the menu bar, that’s weirdly misaligned too. If you’d like, you can also switch back to using the previous font, Lucida Grande.
In his recent book, How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, Chris Taylor tells the story of how avant garde cinema fan George Lucas built one of the biggest movie franchises ever.
How did a few notes scribbled on a legal pad in 1973 by George Lucas, a man who hated writing, turn into a four billion dollar franchise that has quite literally transformed the way we think about entertainment, merchandizing, politics, and even religion? A cultural touchstone and cinematic classic, Star Wars has a cosmic appeal that no other movie franchise has been able to replicate. From Jedi-themed weddings and international storm-trooper legions, to impassioned debates over the digitization of the three Star Wars prequels, to the shockwaves that continue to reverberate from Disney’s purchase of the beloved franchise in 2012, the series hasn’t stopped inspiring and inciting viewers for almost forty years. Yet surprisingly little is known about its history, its impact — or where it’s headed next.
(via mr)
On the walk back from soccer practice the other day, my sharp-eyed seven-year-old son spotted something through the partially papered-up window of a Chelsea gallery. “Hey, Kara Walker!” he says.1 And sure enough:
The gallery is Sikkema Jenkins on 22nd St and Walker’s show, Afterword, starts there tomorrow and runs through mid-January. The show is an extension of A Subtlety, Walker’s installation at the Domino Sugar Factory in Williamsburg over the summer. Several of the sugar statues and the left fist of the sugar sphinx from the Domino installation will be shown along with new video works and notes & sketches from the planning of A Subtlety. You can see some of the figures in the photo above (fashioned out of Domino Sugar, naturally) and I think that’s probably the fist in the background on the right, wrapped in plastic.
Ian Urbina writes about what passwords mean to people beyond gaining access to emails or bank balances.
I began asking my friends and family to tell me their passwords. I had come to believe that these tiny personalized codes get a bum rap. Yes, I understand why passwords are universally despised: the strains they put on our memory, the endless demand to update them, their sheer number. I hate them, too. But there is more to passwords than their annoyance. In our authorship of them, in the fact that we construct them so that we (and only we) will remember them, they take on secret lives. Many of our passwords are suffused with pathos, mischief, sometimes even poetry. Often they have rich back stories. A motivational mantra, a swipe at the boss, a hidden shrine to a lost love, an inside joke with ourselves, a defining emotional scar - these keepsake passwords, as I came to call them, are like tchotchkes of our inner lives. They derive from anything: Scripture, horoscopes, nicknames, lyrics, book passages. Like a tattoo on a private part of the body, they tend to be intimate, compact and expressive.
See also Better living through motivational passwords and The world’s worst password requirements list.
Jessica Hische and Font Bureau have teamed up to offer the typeface Hische designed for Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom. Meet Tilda (great name). Art of the Title interviewed Hische about the typeface last year.
Near the end of Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov writes:
Had I done to Dolly, perhaps, what Frank Lasalle, a fifty-year-old mechanic, had done to eleven-year-old Sally Horner in 1948?
For years, no one picked up on the fact that Sally Horner really was abducted by a man named Frank La Salle in 1948 and the crime was a definite influence on Nabokov in writing Lolita, not until Alexander Dolinin suggested it in 2005. Sarah Weinman explores the connection in Hazlitt.
On her way home from school the next day, though, the man sought her out again. Without warning, the rules had changed: Sally had to go with him to Atlantic City — the government insisted. She’d have to convince her mother he was the father of two school friends, inviting her to a seashore vacation. He would take care of the rest with a phone call and a convincing appearance at the Camden bus depot.
His name was Frank La Salle, and he was no FBI agent — rather, he was the sort G-men wanted to drive off the streets, though Sally didn’t learn that until it was far too late. It took 21 months to break free of him, after a cross-country journey from Camden, New Jersey, to San Jose, California. That five-cent notebook didn’t just alter Sally Horner’s own life, though: it reverberated throughout the culture, and in the process, irrevocably changed the course of 20th-century literature.
(via @DavidGrann)
A new Kingdom Rush game is out: Kingdom Rush Origins. Played it for a bit this morning and if you liked Kingdom Rush and Kingdom Rush Frontiers, you’ll like this one too. It’s more of the glorious same. (via @tommertron)
Lilly Yokoi was an acrobat who specialized in performing on a bicycle. During her career, she toured around the world and appeared on the Ed Sullivan show three times. In this performance from 1965, Yokoi does some seriously before-their-time tricks on her Golden Bicycle, including a no-hands handlebar spin, a no-hands wheelie, a handstand over the handlebars, and several other tricks…all in chunky high heels, mind you.
Here’s an even earlier performance, from 1961. See also some bike tricks filmed by Thomas Edison in 1899.
A defense of Cosby requires that one believe that several women have decided to publicly accuse one of the most powerful men in recent Hollywood history of a crime they have no hope of seeing prosecuted, and for which they are seeking no damages.
The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates does the math (15 women have now accused Bill Cosby) and some journalistic soul-searching: The Cosby Show.
+ Netflix has “postponed” a Cosby stand-up show scheduled for later this month. (Ya think?)
+ Cosby’s old routine about wanting to drug women’s drinks.
A look at the sound design of Interstellar, including some of the cool rigs they built to record sounds for the movie, including a truck driving through a corn field, sand hitting the outside of a car, and robots walking.
(via devour)
The Marshmallow Test was developed by psychologist Walter Mischel to study self-control and delayed gratification. From a piece about Mischel in the New Yorker:
Once Mischel began analyzing the results, he noticed that low delayers, the children who rang the bell quickly, seemed more likely to have behavioral problems, both in school and at home. They got lower S.A.T. scores. They struggled in stressful situations, often had trouble paying attention, and found it difficult to maintain friendships. The child who could wait fifteen minutes had an S.A.T. score that was, on average, two hundred and ten points higher than that of the kid who could wait only thirty seconds.
Mischel has written a book about the test, its findings, and learning greater self-control: The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.
The world’s leading expert on self-control, Walter Mischel has proven that the ability to delay gratification is critical for a successful life, predicting higher SAT scores, better social and cognitive functioning, a healthier lifestyle and a greater sense of self-worth. But is willpower prewired, or can it be taught?
In The Marshmallow Test, Mischel explains how self-control can be mastered and applied to challenges in everyday life — from weight control to quitting smoking, overcoming heartbreak, making major decisions, and planning for retirement. With profound implications for the choices we make in parenting, education, public policy and self-care, The Marshmallow Test will change the way you think about who we are and what we can be.
Here’s a video of the test in action:
Update: A recent study showed that the environment in which the test is performed is important.
Now a new study demonstrates that being able to delay gratification is influenced as much by the environment as by innate ability. Children who experienced reliable interactions immediately before the marshmallow task waited on average four times longer — 12 versus three minutes — than youngsters in similar but unreliable situations.
(thx, maggie & adam)
Now this is an ambitious Kickstarter project: Lunar Mission One wants to send an unmanned probe to an unexplored area of the Moon, land on the surface, drill a hole at least 20 meters in depth to analyze geological composition of the Moon, and then drop a time capsule in the hole that will last 1 billion years. That’s. Insane.
We’re going to use pioneering technology to drill down to a depth of at least 20m — 10 times deeper than has ever been drilled before — and potentially as deep as 100m. By doing this, we will access lunar rock dating back up to 4.5 billion years to discover the geological composition of the Moon, the ancient relationship it shares with our planet and the effects of asteroid bombardment. Ultimately, the project will improve scientific understanding of the early solar system, the formation of our planet and the Moon, and the conditions that initiated life on Earth.
The Rosetta mission has opened the way for a new era of pioneering space exploration and demonstrates the public appetite to engage with the secrets of the solar system. We want this to be a truly international mission that everyone everywhere can get involved in, so we are using Kickstarter to finance the next phase of development. This is your chance to be part of Lunar Mission One and to reserve your place in space. Your pledge will reserve you a digital memory box that will be buried in the moon during the mission as part of a 21st Century time capsule.
From the NY Times, an epic listing of recipes for traditional (and not so traditional) Thanksgiving food from each of the 50 US states. Featuring lefse from North Dakota, salty pluff mud pie from South Carolina, turkey tamales from Texas, and cheddar mashed potatoes from Vermont. (via @jimray)
Michael Lewis on a new book about billionaires, the increasing economic inequality in America, and the impact of the behavior of the very rich is having on politics and happiness. The camp breakfast anecdote at the beginning of the article is gold.
You all live in important places surrounded by important people. When I’m in the big city, I never understand the faces of the people, especially the people who want to be successful. They look so worried! So unsatisfied!
In the city you see people grasping, grasping, grasping. Taking, taking, taking. And it must be so hard! To be always grasping-grasping, and taking-taking. But no matter how much they have, they never have enough. They’re still worried. About what they don’t have. They’re always empty.
You have a choice. You don’t realize it, but you have a choice. You can be a giver or you can be a taker. You can get filled up or empty. You make that choice every day. You make that choice at breakfast when you rush to grab the cereal you want so others can’t have what they want.
The piece is filled with Lewis-esque observations throughout. Like:
Rich people, in my experience, don’t want to change the world. The world as it is suits them nicely.
And:
The American upper middle class has spent a fortune teaching its children to play soccer: how many great soccer players come from the upper middle class?
But the studies about the effects of wealth and privilege on human behavior are what caught my eye the most.
In one study, Keltner and his colleague Paul Piff installed note-takers and cameras at city street intersections with four-way stop signs. The people driving expensive cars were four times more likely to cut in front of other drivers than drivers of cheap cars. The researchers then followed the drivers to the city’s cross walks and positioned themselves as pedestrians, waiting to cross the street. The drivers in the cheap cars all respected the pedestrians’ right of way. The drivers in the expensive cars ignored the pedestrians 46.2 percent of the time — a finding that was replicated in spirit by another team of researchers in Manhattan, who found drivers of expensive cars were far more likely to double park.
Living in Manhattan, I see stuff like this all the time and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to think of the rich and privileged as anything other than assholes, always grasping, grasping, grasping, taking, taking, taking.
Shelf Life is a new video series from the American Museum of Natural History that will deep-dive into the archives of the museum and feature some of its 33 million artifacts and specimens.
From centuries-old specimens to entirely new types of specialized collections like frozen tissues and genomic data, the Museum’s scientific collections (with more than 33,430,000 specimens and artifacts) form an irreplaceable record of life on Earth, the span of geologic time, and knowledge about our vast universe.
(via the kid should see this)
From 11 bit Studios comes a game called This War of Mine which offers an unflinching view of war focusing on injury, suffering, and survival of the civilian population of a city besieged by civil war. Wired’s Matt Peckham has a good review.
This War of Mine imagines an endless civil war. Civilians are trapped in a besieged Stalingrad-like city, suffering from hunger and disease and shelling. Snipers roam the city, as apt to pick off civilians as they are insurgents. The phones don’t work. There isn’t enough food or medication. Your group operates out of a single structure, viewed from the side like a dollhouse, with apparatuses you can fiddle or upgrade to produce helpful goods or improve existing ones. Each survivor has a hierarchy of physical and mental needs equipoised against variably treacherous means of fulfilling them.
Your goal is simple: Survive. I’m not sure for how long, or if there’s even a “win” state, because the best I’ve managed so far is 25 days, and that felt interminable.
In 2012, Joe Ayoob broke the world record for the longest distance paper airplane flight with a plane designed by John Collins. In this video, Collins demonstrates how to fold that plane, the Suzanne.
Directions for the design are also available in Collins’ New World Champion Paper Airplane Book.
Today is the last day you can order the limited edition kottke.org t-shirt. Get yours now or forever be, um, something.
After much futzing about in Photoshop, I came up with the perfect simple design for the limited edition kottke.org tee shirt, featuring the familiar blue gradient that wraps all the way around the shirt. The shirt is made of fabric, has sleeves, and features a hole for your head. It’s everything you need in a shirt.
More info here.
I love this cutaway view of Washington DC’s Evening Star Building, drawn in 1922. The building is on the National Register as a Historic Landmark and was formerly the office of The Washington Star newspaper.
Best viewed huge. The whole thing is a fascinating view of how information flowed through a newspaper company in the 1920s. Raw materials in the form of electricity, water, telegraph messages, paper, and employees enter the building and finished newspapers leave out the back.
Found this via Craig Mod, who notes the Chris Ware-ness of the whole thing.
This is a great way to think about how big the planets of our solar system are: in terms of fruits.
(via boing boing)
I have not seen the movie yet (Alan Turing biopic starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Keira Knightley) but the Alexandre Desplat soundtrack is worth a listen.
Also available on Spotify or Amazon.
Whoa, how did I miss this? Steve Carell, check. Channing Tatum, check. Mark Ruffalo, check. Based on a true story, check. Positive reviews, check.
Currently on the to-do list: watch every single movie produced by Annapurna Pictures, a production and distribution company founded by Megan Ellison, who is Oracle founder Larry Ellison’s daughter. Look at this list of directors they’re working with: Kathryn Bigelow, Paul Thomas Anderson, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, Richard Linklater.
Nora Ephron’s movie Julie & Julia is based on a book by Julie Powell about her making every recipe in Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Some genius took the movie and cut all the Julie parts out of it, leaving just a movie about the life of Julia Child starring Meryl Streep.
Update: Well, that was fast…got taken down already.
Update: Looks like someone did a similar cut three months ago, Julia Sans Julie:
Let’s see how long this one lasts. (via ★interesting & @ChadwickSevern)
Last year, Greenheart Games released a game called Game Dev Tycoon in which you run a company that makes video games. As an experiment, they secretly released a cracked version of the game for pirates to download…with one small difference: players in the cracked version would always go bankrupt because of piracy issues.
The cracked version is nearly identical to the real thing except for one detail… Initially we thought about telling them their copy is an illegal copy, but instead we didn’t want to pass up the unique opportunity of holding a mirror in front of them and showing them what piracy can do to game developers. […] Slowly their in-game funds dwindle, and new games they create have a high chance to be pirated until their virtual game development company goes bankrupt.
Did the pirates learn anything or feel bad? Not really:
(via @djacobs)
0h h1 is a super simple Sudoku-type game where you need to keep the number of blue and red tiles in each row and column the same. I don’t know how people keep coming up with such simple games that are still challenging…you’d think they’d all have been invented by now. (via waxy)
I look forward to every Thursday in a way that I don’t remember awaiting the release of an episode of anything recently. There’s something very intimate about someone telling you a story that close to your ears.
That’s Jason Reitman echoing the thoughts of the many listeners who have turned Serial — a new podcast from the producers of This American Life — into the fastest growing podcast ever. Twenty years ago, we were all hooked on TV and radio. Twenty years of technology advances later, we’re all hooked on TV and radio. Content is king.
For those who are already knee deep in the Serial serial, Vox has a complete guide to every person in the podcast.
I am loving these posters for non-existent movie sequels, but the names might be even better. A sampling:
Fight Club: The 2nd Rule
Bigger Trouble in Little China
Spaceballs III: The Search for Spaceballs II
Titanic 2: Above Zero
Prints are available for all of these. (via @cabel)
Allen Hemberger cooked his way through one of the most complex cookbooks out there, the Alinea cookbook. Aside from the chefs who work in the kitchen there, Hemberger’s probably the only person to have made every single recipe. These recipes aren’t easy; look at the last one he prepared…he even struggled to find the correct ingredients.
Should I be disturbed or thankful that I’ve never been that passionate about anything ever?
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