15 failed predictions about the future
The list includes this dandy by the awesomely named Dr. Dionysys Larder:
Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.
(via long now)
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kottke.org posts about lists
Ken Auletta’s media maxims
From a chapter cut from his book about Google, 25 media maxims from Ken Auletta.
2. Passion Wins
5. A Team Culture is Vital
6. Treat Engineers as Kings
15. Don’t Think of The Web as Another Distribution Platform
19. Paradox: The Web Forges Both Niche and Large Communities
Why you should juggle
Juggler Scot Nery lists eight reasons why you, as a normal person, should learn how to juggle.
Sometimes it feels like A.D.D. makes you better at stuff, but when it comes down to it, we really need to be able to sit still and focus until something’s done. Juggling builds your focus muscles through regular practice and a built-in rewards system.
How geeks measure things
1 Warhol equals 15 minutes of fame, So if you’ve been famous for three years, that’s just over 105 kilowarhols. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s a critical point — varying from celebrity to celebrity — where that person has outstayed their welcome, and uh … becomes synonymous with a feminine hygiene product (and the bag it came in). In keeping with nuclear physics, I’m happy for this to remain as k=1 (where ‘k’ is for ‘Kanye’).
Big but never number one
From Box Office Mojo, a list of the top grossing movies in the US that were never #1 at the box office. Topping the list is the sleeper hit of sleeper hits, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Y2K, no big deal
I contributed a short essay to Newsweek’s 2010 project for the Overblown Fears list: Y2K.
Despite the media hype, the biggest story about the Y2K computer bug is that nothing happened. Trains didn’t spontaneously derail. McDonald’s didn’t roll back to turn-of-the-century pricing (no Happy Meals for a ha’penny). And the banks didn’t lose all of our money; we’d have to wait another eight years for that.
Farhad Manjoo recently did a 2-part piece on the lessons of Y2K for Slate.
Advice for the US from the Byzantine Empire
How did the Byzantine Empire stay around so long? A look at the answers might hold some lessons for the present-day United States.
Avoid war by every possible means, in all possible circumstances, but always act as if war might start at any time. Train intensively and be ready for battle at all times — but do not be eager to fight. The highest purpose of combat readiness is to reduce the probability of having to fight.
Paste Magazine’s best of the decade
They’ve got lists for books, movies, documentaries, video games, memes, comedians, and more.
Donald Barthelme’s recommended reading
A syllabus compiled by American author Donald Barthelme composed of 81 books.
If the list’s books are skewed toward Barthelme’s particular obsessions — one of the entries is “Beckett entire” — this is only to its credit. Most are novels. All but two of the books, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Flaubert’s Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality.
Update: Phil Gyford copied the list into plain old text.
How to avoid an untimely death
Number one on the list is “drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive”. And #10:
If anyone tries to force you into your car or car trunk at gun point, don’t cooperate. Fight and scream all you can even if you risk getting shot in the parking lot. If you get in the car, you will most likely die (or worse).
The author calls this “Black Swan avoidance”. (via lone gunman)
Top movies of the 2000s
From The Times in the UK, the top 100 films of the decade. Before you look, see if you can figure out which one of the following is not in the top 5:
Grizzly Man
Cache
No Country for Old Men
Team America: World Police
There Will Be Blood
I’ve seen 58 out of the 100.
Criterion Collection missteps
Vice has a list of the ten most dubious films included in the Criterion Collection…they call them little fuck-ups.
3. The Rock - Director Michael Bay, 1996
Ugh. That’s right. I failed to mention up top that there are not one, but two Michael Bay films in the Criterion Collection. It’s the kind of shock-inducing information you need delivered in increments. If they wanted to include an Alcatraz movie, uh, why not Escape from Alcatraz? Perhaps Criterion felt they needed a couple of signature “explosion” films to represent the genre. But given that logic, why not throw in Every Which Way but Loose to represent the “truck driver with an orangutan sidekick” genre too?
Also, Michael Bay is doing a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds? What? WHAT??
Restaurant server don’ts
On the NY Times small business blog, Bruce Buschel shares 50 things restaurant servers and staff should never do. The next 50 will follow next week.
Update: Aaaand here’s the second 50.
Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
At a recent conference, a group of physicists talked about the biggest answered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions in physics. Three of the questions are:
What is everything made of?
Will string theory ever be proved correct?
How far can physics take us?
Music videos of the decade
Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)
This decade’s lost species
From the Guardian, a list of species that became extinct or critically endangered during the 2000s. (via @ettagirl)
A case of the Mondays
A pair of McSweeney’s lists to brighten this sleepy Monday morning. 1. YouTube Comment or e.e. cummings?
1. loog a his lirow nose
2. there is some shit I will not eat
3. LISN bud LISN
2. What to Expect: The Third Decade
Your thirty-year-old adult may be able to…
Make a martini (vodka)
Refrain from discussing college
Get married
File his taxes (EZ form)
Remember 5-10 friends’ birthdays
Acknowledge other viewpoints (political)
Thirty dumb inventions
Life has a list of 30 dumb inventions, including the Hubbard Electrometer (invented by L Ron Hubbard to measure pain in tomatoes), the fast-draw robot, TV glasses, and the rainy day cigarette holder.
Michael Pollan’s food rules
Michael Pollan asked his readers for suggestions for food rules, and condensed all the answers down to 20. Here are my three favorites:
Never eat something that is pretending to be something else.
Don’t yuck someone else’s yum.
If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.
The best of Worldchanging
If you haven’t had occasion to dip into the Worldchanging site, they’ve compiled a list of their favorite/best/most popular articles from the past on the occasion of their sixth anniversary.
Best NBA players of the 2000s
I’m not exactly sure what I expected from such a list, but this wasn’t quite it. Kobe at #3 and Shaq is #6? Hrm.
The best movies of 2009
Too soon for that title? Anyway, Hitfix takes an early look at the Oscar contenders for 2010. Among them, Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, Star Trek, Where the Wild Things Are, Malick’s The Tree of Life, The Road, Amelia, and The Lovely Bones.
Where’s the world’s best food?
The Guardian lists the best 50 foods to eat and where to get them. I’ve had a few of these (ravioli at Babbo, pork at Gramercy, pho at Pho 24, pastrami at Katz’s, etc.) but, sucker that I am for such things, I particularly enjoyed reading about the Turkish olive oil available at an electrical supply shop in London:
At his electrical supply shop in London’s Clerkenwell, Mehmet Murat sells wonderful, intensely fruity oil from his family’s olive groves in Cyprus and south-west Turkey. Now he imports more than a 1,000 litres per year. His lemon-flavoured oil is good enough to drink on its own.
Who won the recession?
Vanity Fair has released their 2009 list of the “top 100 Information Age powers”…Goldman’s Lloyd Blankfein, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, Warren Buffett, and the Google triumvirate make up the top five. Only 12 women made the list, most of them coupled with a man. A similar list from Business Insider has a better name: The 25 Who Won the Recession. I thought this recession business was supposed to kill the influence of the financial sector…funny how that never happens.
1984, a fine year for movies
Related to yesterday’s post about the evolution of the modern blockbuster movie, a list of the most popular movies from 1984 (according to IMDB). Among them:
Beverly Hills Cop
Ghostbusters
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
Gremlins
The Karate Kid
Police Academy
Footloose
Purple Rain
Amadeus
Revenge of the Nerds
Red Dawn
The Terminator
The Killing Fields
A Nightmare on Elm Street
Sixteen Candles
Once Upon a Time in America
This Is Spinal Tap
Top Secret!
That’s a pretty good year. My God, the pop culture references.
Things that are better than a New York City hot dog
In response to a hyperbolic statement from a friend about the goodness of New York City hot dogs, Matthew Diffee compiles an extensive list of stuff that’s better. A sampling:
Nice fluffy towels
Believing in yourself
Finding a lost twenty in your coat pocket
Prince Edward Island
Coming home after being away for a while
Submarines
Supermodels
A kiss in the rain
20 cool ancient maps
Among this list of 20 fascinating ancient maps, you’ll find the island of California, a would-be beautification of Paris circa-1789, and the Modern and Completely Correct Map of the Entire World, which turned out to be nothing of the sort. (thx, john)
Pitchfork’s songs of the decade
As part of their review of the music of the 2000s, Pitchfork listed the top 500 tracks of the past decade. Here are the top 10:
10. Arcade Fire, “Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)”
9. Animal Collective, “My Girls”
8. Radiohead, “Idioteque”
7. Missy Elliott, “Get Ur Freak On”
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, “Maps”
5. Daft Punk, “One More Time”
4. Beyonce [ft. Jay-Z], “Crazy in Love”
3. M.I.A. [ft. Bun B and Rich Boy], “Paper Planes (Diplo Remix)”
2. LCD Soundsystem, “All My Friends”
1. OutKast, “B.O.B.”
Be sure to click through for the extensive explanations. It would easy to nitpick specific selections, but that’s a pretty good top 10.
Gorilla vs. Bear also shared their top songs and albums of the decade.
Uncomfortable plot summaries
Some plot summaries of movies and TV shows that might make you feel uncomfortable. Among my favorites:
THE GOONIES: Physically abused, retarded man finds love with overweight preteen.
THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST: Mel Gibson fulfills fantasy of showing a Jew beaten to a bloody pulp and killed on-screen.
TITANIC: Crazy old widow disregards lifelong memories of husband, children, and grandchildren in favor of that one time she fucked a bum.
STAR WARS: Religious extremist terrorists destroy government installation, killing thousands.
LORD OF THE RINGS: Midget destroys stolen property.
DOCTOR WHO: Elderly man serially abducts young women.
BOOGIE NIGHTS: Deformed boy goaded into life of crime.
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