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The EFF is asking a California Superior Court to protect online journalists’ confidential sources from Apple. “The writers for PowerPage and Apple Insider are journalists just like the writers for traditional newspapers and magazines”.
The first issue of O’Reilly’s Make magazine is out.
Puptastic is a new entry into the increasingly crowded arena of dog blogs.
Satellite photo of The Gates in Central Park. Art so massive you can see it from space.
Here’s what your back pocket will do to a piece of paper after 6 days hard walking in London:
When I travel, I usually write everything that’s super important to me down on a 8.5x11 piece of paper, fold it twice, and stick it in my pocket. That way, when I need to look up a phone number or jot down an address, I don’t have to get out a notebook, my computer, or hunt around for a piece of scrap paper. And it won’t ever get stolen like a cell phone or handheld might.
Anil to bloggers: “you’re just like the media you hate”. Blogs have become known for attacking and tearing down, not for understanding and building up. Sad.
Network analysis of the Flickr population. “Globally speaking there are four clusters: one including the staff and several ‘old timers’, a very large cluster including most of the network, a third cluster including mostly people from UAE, and a fourth small cluster, mostly linked with the staff and old-timers, that I don’t really understand.”
Researchers at UCLA are using HIV to hunt down cancer cells in mice.
Transatlantic relations between Europe and the US have changed since the Cold War days. “It is European leaders, not American ones, who are loosening transatlantic ties, and as much as this saddens Americans, there is little they can do about it.”
Reinventing Physics: the Search for the Real Frontier. “I am carbon, but I need not have been. I have a meaning transcending the atoms from which I am made.”
The costs of operating a car in NYC have risen 15% since 2001. And car ownership is decreasing as a result.
Greg Allen does The Math on The Gates and comes up about $15 million short. “Don’t get me wrong; I’m just as giddy as the next schoolgirl [sic] about The Gates, I just can’t see how they cost $20 million.”
A somewhat negative review of The Gates from Julie Lasky.
Here are your options if you can’t afford a bespoke (i.e. custom) suit. You can get off-the-rack, made-to-measure, and hand made off-the-rack.
Last week, I wondered aloud whether Google’s switch from dictionary.com to answers.com for their “definition” links was driven by concern for their users or was just a business deal:
The cynic in me feels like money had to have changed hands in order for this to have happened (maybe Google is an investor in GuruNet, maybe GuruNet paid for that placement), but the optimist in me says that Google is still a weird little company where the members of project teams can stumble across a better resource that will make their users happier and more productive and implement it on the live site quickly, even if the company that provides that resource could be considered a competitor.
Marissa Meyer, Product Manager for Google, was kind enough to respond to my query about it:
This decision was driven off of concern for our user experience. We are not paying answers.com for this service nor are they paying us. They were willing to work with us and design a website that we felt represented an improvement for our users over what was offered on dictionary.com (no pop-ups, dense information presentation).
That a $50 billion American company is so focused on the experience presented to its users, well, it’s pretty impressive.
Counterpoint to the earlier God Gene post. “It is reasonable to ask, as Hamer does, whether certain genes play a significant role in faith. But he is a long way from providing an answer.”
Humans may have evolved to believe in God. Well, not believe in God exactly, but to be spiritual.
A look at Roger Ebert’s home. He plays fast and loose with his rice cooker. Also, Roger, if you’re reading, have me over for a movie some time.
Flip Saunders fired as Timberwolves coach, McHale to coach rest of season. Following the Wolves this season has been painful.
More on Ray Kurzweil’s plan to live forever. “Ray Kurzweil doesn’t tailgate. A man who plans to live forever doesn’t take chances with his health on the highway, or anywhere else.”
New State Names Resulting From the Coming Wave of Mergers and Acquisitions. Including “Wisconnecticut”.
There’s an “extra leaf” variation of the new Wisconsin quarter. “Individual coins with the markings were selling for $500 to $600, depending on condition”.
Photo of Zissou by his brother, Jacques Henri Lartigue. Zissou? And looking very much like a young Max Fischer in a scene from Rushmore? Paging Wes Anderson…
Disney’s Eisner describes Pixar’s computerized human characters as “pretty pathetic”. Steve Jobs retorts sarcastically: “Our films don’t stack up to ‘Atlantis,’ ‘Emperor’s New Groove’ or ‘Treasure Planet.’”
The Chandra X-ray Observatory and the case of the missing baryons. Intergalactic gas clouds could contain the unaccounted-for 50% of the universe’s total baryons.
I dragged my ass out of bed at 6:45 this morning so that I could be in Central Park when they unfurled The Gates, the 16-day public art project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. I was not disappointed. The whole art question notwithstanding, The Gates are an amazing and moving spectacle, and it was great seeing so many people in the park this morning, sharing the experience. Here are some photos I took:
There’s so much in the news these days about our differences, conflict, and fear…The Gates are a perfect antidote for all that and for New Yorkers, a chance to come together and celebrate the city without terrorism or a power loss being involved. If you’re in New York anytime before February 27th, I urge you to head to Central Park to check it out.
The Gates Project opens tomorrow in Central Park. The project will run from February 12 to February 27. It will probably be the most photographed event ever.
A look at what happens after Mario rescues the Princess. This gets a little wakka-chikka wakka-chikka, so it’s probably not safe for work.
Fleeting: photos of the abstract art that emerged when people try to cover up graffiti.
When I first watched the cool new VW Golf GTI commercial featuring an updated Gene Kelly poppin’ and lockin’, I guess I wasn’t paying that much attention to it.
Then the other day a friend IMed me and asked, “hey have you seen this Golf GTI commercial with that guy from the crazy Kollaboration video?”
“It’s the same guy? I know that guy!” I watched the video again and sure enough, Gene Kelly was dancing with the unmistakable style of Elsewhere, aka David Bernal. After a quick search, I found a message board post from Elsewhere himself that it was indeed him in the commerical:
yup that was me along with Crumbs and another popper named Jay Walker.
I emailed David to ask him about the experience and he graciously took the time to answer a few questions.
Jason: How did you get the Golf GTI gig? Audition or had someone seen your stuff and specifically wanted you for it?
David: They specifically wanted to use me for it. I had done a Heineken Commercial several months prior and the special effects people for that commercial were going to do the effects for this VW commercial. I got an email asking me if I could dance in the rain with a prosthetic mask on and several weeks later I was in London doing just that.
jkottke: That scene from Singin’ in the Rain is one of the most famous in film, and certainly the most famous dance number in film. What was it like to be a part of an attempt to recreate and update it?
David: It was an honor and a privilege being one of the dancers in this commercial. Gene Kelly was a great dancer, singer and actor which is a lot more than I have to offer. It’s extremely flattering having a commercial that essentially implies that my moves are an updated version of Gene’s dance skills.
jkottke: Some folks have complained about the crassness of using a dead guy’s likeness to sell automobiles. As one of the actors playing the deceased, do you have any thoughts on that?
David: Yeah it’s kind of weird, but imo it kind of comes with the territory when you’re a legend. I don’t know if Gene would be too hot about the whole thing but obviously the Gene Kelly Estate approved it, so it’s apparently not that crass to them.
jkottke: I’ve read that you often freestyle when you dance, making it up as you go along, but that you also have little micro-routines that you rely on as you do. In shooting the commercial, how much of the choreography was scripted and how much did you get to ad lib? How much did you need to change your style much based on specific shots from the original film or Gene’s style?
David:It was different for each shot. For example with the close-ups they would say just do a bunch of wavy stuff, so I would simply freestyle with some waves. Most of the full body shots were more routine based. They would specifically want me to do a list of moves, but to connect everything I would naturally freestyle.
I didn’t have to change my dancing stylistically at all. They wanted me to dance the way that I dance. In fact they had us watch the original Singing in the Rain scene so many times that I started unconsciously moving a bit like Gene Kelly. The director at one point even told me that I was moving too much like Gene and I needed to move more like me.
If anything the parameters and conditions of the shoot inadvertently changed my style. The sound stage was cold and we had to dance under artificial rain for hours. To avoid freezing we wore wet suits under our already thick, tight costumes. This restricted my movement a lot. My shoes were quite uncomfortable and fake flooring we danced on was soft and spongy. I had to keep my head up and smile constantly which was very unnatural for me. Yet the biggest difficulty for me was the rigid time restraints. Since it was a commercial we had to do a lot within a small amount of time. This forced me to speed up my style more than I usually do.
jkottke: Thanks, David.
You can see more of David’s stuff on the Detours Video site, by purchasing some DVDs, or by doing a search for “david elsewhere”.
Architect Witold Rybczynski tours Disney’s planned town of Celebration and returns with photos.
A new version of the English Talmud is about to be released. Also, “for 14 years, there has been a daily [Talmud] class on the 7:51 a.m. train from Far Rockaway to Penn Station, with 15 to 20 commuters - accountants, lawyers, diamond dealers - taking over a section of the rear car”. Neat.
With a whole world of enticements available on the web, how does anyone ever get any work done anymore?. “When he hears the chiming alert of new e-mail, he forces himself to continue working for 30 seconds before looking at it. Thirty seconds, mind you, not 30 minutes.”
Flickr is one year old today. Congratulations, gang!.
“A traumatic breakup, the death of a loved one or even the shock of a surprise party can unleash a flood of stress hormones that can stun the heart, causing sudden, life-threatening heart spasms in otherwise healthy people”. “The phenomenon can trigger what seems like a classic heart attack and can put victims at risk for potentially severe complications and even death, the researchers found.”
Unlimited ride MetroCard fares are going up, effective February 27th. Craptacular.
Mike Godwin recently interviewed The Baroque Cycle author Neal Stephenson for Reason magazine. Stephenson had this to say about the role of science and technology in the US:
It is quite obvious to me that the U.S. is turning away from [science and technology]. It has been the case for quite a while that the cultural left distrusted geeks and their works; the depiction of technical sorts in popular culture has been overwhelmingly negative for at least a generation now. More recently, the cultural right has apparently decided that it doesn’t care for some of what scientists have to say. So the technical class is caught in a pincer between these two wings of the so-called culture war. Of course the broad mass of people don’t belong to one wing or the other. But science is all about diligence, hard sustained work over long stretches of time, sweating the details, and abstract thinking, none of which is really being fostered by mainstream culture.
I’ve haven’t read any of Stephenson’s novels, but I’ve become a fan of his through reading interviews like this one. I can see why he’s both beloved amongst geeks and starting to become more widely read. The Baroque Cycle trilogy sounds fascinating and right up my alley, but 2700 pages seems a little daunting, especially when I feel like I should read Cryptonomicon (928 pages) first. Then again, I was pondering reading Infinite Jest (1088 pages) again, so maybe I should just dive in.
Steven Heller on blogs, magazines, and critical design writing. “Today, however, although print may not be totally obsolete, critical design writing is fast migrating onto the Internet and to blogs in particular.”
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