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The Daughters of Freya is a serialized email mystery. “The mystery is told through emails exchanged between journalist Samantha Dempsey and the other characters. You’ll receive a few emails at random times every day over the three weeks that it takes for the mystery to unfold.”
An interview with Rob Walker, who writes about design and consumer behavior for the NY Times Magazine. “The consumer is making a decision as to whether the product succeeds or fails, and what I do is to come in afterwards and try to articulate what the consumer saw or didn’t see that makes something succeed or fail.”
Kirven Blount travels to Denmark to try out for a Danish professional basketball teams. “You go to your local gym to play basketball. Some enormous foreigners arrive. They play very well. So do you. They tell you they are professional basketball players from Denmark, and that you should fly to Copenhagen for a tryout.”
A DJ scratches out the Imperial March from Star Wars on his decks.
Medical advice from Tom Cruise. “What about vitamin F? Vitamin G? We’ve got the whole rest of the alphabet of undiscovered vitamins that nobody is pursuing.”
Typically humorless MeFi thread on Matt Webb’s recent musings on how much of the web is templated on American cities, especially SF. Unpucker, folks…it’s ok.
Chen Shaofeng paints his subjects while they paint him. The results are hung side-by-side in his show.
The first five mp3s of Beethoven’s symphonies are available for download on the BBC site. The site is really slow though…does anyone have a mirror or a BitTorrent available?
An incomplete listing of typefaces seen at Walt Disney World.
From The Morning News comes this collection of photographs of celebrities playing table tennis. Among those pictured are Henry Kissinger, Billie Jean King, Lauren Bacall, and Bob Marley. Here are Bill and Hillary Clinton:
I’d just like to take this opportunity to point out just how full of useless knowledge I am: under the rules of the USATT (specifically 10.10), you’re not allowed to touch the table with your free hand during a volley as Hillary is doing here. Point to Bill.
Matt Webb on who the web is and isn’t for (this is a great little essay). “The huge influx of cash at the turn of the millennium led to the whole Web being built in the image of the Bay area. The website patterns that started there and - just by coincidence - happened to scale to other environments, those were the ones that survived.”
skinnyCorp branches out from Threadless tees to silk ties. Naked & Angry has the same fun premise tho…patterns are submitted by people, voted upon, and the winners are made into fabric which is used to make various products.
A list of weeds you might see on the subway. Including iPodpea, Prickly Metscap, Mumblecane, Dozing Slabface, and Edgy Sweatnettle.
Interview with Jonah Peretti, director of Research and Development at Eyebeam.
David Sedaris deals with a sticky situation on the airplane. “I pulled a Times crossword puzzle from the bag beneath my seat. That always makes you look reasonable, especially on a Saturday, when the words are long and the clues are exceptionally tough.”
A map of Firefox usage in Europe. 30.5% in Finland and almost 25% in Germany.
The innuendo photo pool on Flickr. Including “Bunghole Liquors” and “Huron Drugs”.
Indian man sends a record 182,689 text messages in a month. His cell phone bill was 1411 pages long.
Rebecca is compiling a list of summer reading lists for 2005.
Soviet-style “Watch, Ride, and Report” poster spied on DC-area commuter train. Report any unusual activities directly to the Ministry of Love.
Slideshow from GMHRD, an arcade game contest in which contestants are clad only in their underwear. I missed my chance to shine at Dig Dug in my boxers because I was watching Six Feet Under. :(
I’m not what you would call a fan of world music, but I just counted the number of languages used in my music collection and came up with nine:
Seems like there should be some Italian in there as well, but I can’t find any right now. And I didn’t count Hopelandic, which is a made-up language that Sigur Ros uses in some of their songs. How many languages can you find in your music collection? Post your list or a link to your blog post in the comments.
Plunk Biggio is a blog “dedicated to Craig Biggio and his (probably unintentional) Quest to break the all time major league career record for getting hit by pitches”. He’s only 5 HBPs away from Don Baylor, the official MLB record holder.
Class “conflict” on Nantucket: the old rich meet the new super-rich. And then there’s the rest of the island’s population that can’t afford to live there anymore.
Surowiecki on crisis management. “Entrepreneurs are the cockiest of all. It may be that the very qualities that help people get ahead are the ones that make them ill-suited for managing crises.”
On lightning strike survivors. “Because strikes are so rare, and because their symptoms are so obscure, victims are often dismissed by doctors, not surprisingly, as malingerers or told they have psychosomatic disorders.”
How to avoid the exhausting planning and preparation that goes into making a second date. “This means small talk like, ‘after 6 hits while locked in my room meditating, I basically blew a fuse,’ is not exactly the combination to the master vault at U.S. Pussy Savings & Loan.”
65,000 photocopies of 300 different films made into a 14-minute short. Quite clever.
Scientist hypothesizes that Ashkenazi Jews are more intelligent as a group because of natural selection. “Put these two things together—a correlation of intelligence and success, and a correlation of success and fecundity—and you have circumstances that favour the spread of genes that enhance intelligence.”
Jason Scott on why he decided to license his straight-to-DVD documentary under a Creative Commons license. “It was in some ways a tough decision, because you want to ‘protect’ yourself, but then you realize you’re not really ‘protecting’ anything; all you’re doing is being a paranoid twitch-bag. And once you realize this, then it becomes a little easier.”
Steven Johnson appearing on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart tomorrow.
Season premiere of Six Feet Under, 9pm tonight. Can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait!
Six reasons why crunch mode doesn’t work. “There’s a bottom-line reason most industries gave up crunch mode over 75 years ago: It’s the single most expensive way there is to get the work done.”
A collection of Apple.com home page screenshots from 1996-present.
Why intelligent design isn’t. “Biologists aren’t alarmed by intelligent design’s arrival in Dover and elsewhere because they have all sworn allegiance to atheistic materialism; they’re alarmed because intelligent design is junk science.”
The WWDC keynote just ended (notes here) and the news is pretty big in Apple land: Apple is switching to Intel chips (press release). A few notes:
I’m sure there’s more, but those are the important bits. And I know this is Steve Jobs talking to us here, but from where I’m sitting (across the country, reading paraphrase transcripts), the transition has been well prepared for by Apple for a number of years and looks like it will happen a lot more smoothly than all the over-the-weekend hand-wringing indicated that it would.
Update: Dave Winer is reporting that:
1. Apple is not going into the software business, their operating system will not run on other vendor’s hardware. So you won’t be running the Mac OS on Dell, HP or IBM, for example. and 2. While Windows is not explicitly supported, they won’t do anything to prevent Windows from running on their hardware.
Update #2: From news.com:
After Jobs’ presentation, Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller addressed the issue of running Windows on Macs, saying there are no plans to sell or support Windows on an Intel-based Mac. “That doesn’t preclude someone from running it on a Mac. They probably will,” he said. “We won’t do anything to preclude that.” However, Schiller said the company does not plan to let people run Mac OS X on other computer makers’ hardware. “We will not allow running Mac OS X on anything other than an Apple Mac,” he said.
MacRumors pages, sucks…hit this Mac Observer page instead.
MacRumors has live coverage of Jobs’ keynote at WWDC. I’ll be following along and reporting if anything significant happens.
And what the heck is “peak oil” anyway?. Peak oil “predicts that future world oil production will soon reach a peak and then rapidly decline”.
On Silicon Valley’s super-rich but not rich enough serial entrepreneurs.
First of all, where did this movie come from? When a reader recommended it to me last week, I’d never heard of it before…I thought he was talking about the Cronenberg film. But it’s been out for almost six weeks now and has made $40 million at the box office (on a budget of $6.5 million). Looks to me it’s one of those films where Hollywood finally does something right and they don’t want to tell anyone about it.
I seem to be on a roll with movies lately…first Revenge of the Sith, then Primer, and now I really liked Crash. Reminded me a lot of Soderbergh’s Traffic crossed with P.T. Anderson’s Magnolia. At first, Crash seems to be about racism, but I think what Don Cheadle’s character had to say in the opening scene is closer to what it’s actually about:
I think we miss that touch so much that we crash into one another just to feel something.
He’s talking about cars in that scene, but it easily applies to the locks, guns, gated & segregated communities, money, racial epithets, and power structures we see in the rest of the film, all the technology, money, and power that people use to keep themselves safe but really just make things worse. From an interview with director Paul Haggis about the film:
It’s an odd life we live in Los Angeles, a city that uses freeways and wide boulevards to divide people by race and class. We spend most of our time encased in metal and glass; in our homes, our cars, at work. Unlike any real city, we only walk where “it’s safe”-those outdoor malls and ersatz city blocks we’ve created to feel like we’re still part of humanity, if only humanity could afford to shop where we do. We no longer truly feel the touch of strangers as we brush past them on the street.
Something tells me Jane Jacobs and James Kunstler would love this film.
The Rubik’s Cube — and the attendant speed-solving contests — are back.
Is persuasion dead?. “Persuasion just isn’t relevant to delivering elections or eyeballs. Pols have figured out that to get votes you don’t need to change minds. Even when they want to, modern media make it hard.”
I used to be a neocon. “I supported Bush’s war on Iraq and I called everyone who didn’t a liberal Kool-aid drinker. I voted for Bush in 2000 and I listened to Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and just about any right-winger on the radio that I could get a four-word talking point from to use against liberals.”
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