Metacritic, my first stop when looking for
Metacritic, my first stop when looking for movie reviews, has been purchased by CNET. Press release here. (Odd stat in press release: 170K uniques a month…seems low.)
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Entries for August 2005
Dan Barber on the embraced chaos of
Dan Barber on the embraced chaos of working in David Bouley’s kitchen. Barber, who runs the excellent Blue Hill, contributed this essay to the new book, Don’t Try This at Home (eGullet chatter).
A how-to on getting good B&
A how-to on getting good B&W photos from a digital camera. Slower has another technique.
Are Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson making
Are Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson making a Zoolander 2? I loved the original, but I’m not so sure about this one.
Some lesser-known prequels to popular movies, including
Some lesser-known prequels to popular movies, including There Are Plenty of Mohicans and Triassic Park.
News anchor Peter Jennings dead at age 67,
News anchor Peter Jennings dead at age 67, four months after announcing that he had lung cancer.
Long Tail poster boy Amazon’s tail isn’t
Long Tail poster boy Amazon’s tail isn’t as long as first reported. Oops. (But a good oops…Chris is after the truth here, not just a good story.)
The Red Delicious apple has fallen out
The Red Delicious apple has fallen out of favor. It’s been dumbed down too much for the market. For more on apples, see Michael Pollan’s excellent The Botany of Desire.
The Aristocrats
For a movie about a joke, The Aristocrats didn’t have me laughing as hard as I thought it would. The problem lies with the joke itself…I didn’t think it was funny and every time someone said the punchline, I felt I was supposed to laugh but never did. Made me uncomfortable. Like when you’re in a room with a bunch of Simpsons/Monty Python/South Park geeks and you’re the only one not laughing at the all of the references being thrown around. Highlights were Kevin Pollack’s telling as Christopher Walken and Sarah Silverman’s version, but at no time did I pee my pants laughing.
See, prefectly dry. Note: Not my actual pants. (Or hands.)
Fantastic must-read article slamming NASA with regard
Fantastic must-read article slamming NASA with regard to the Space Shuttle program. I’ve been following Maciej’s del.icio.us links about the Shuttle for weeks now and was wondering if he’d get around to writing it up. Worth the wait.
Playstation 3 to support OS X?
Playstation 3 to support OS X?. “The operating system has also yet to be clarified. The integrated Cell processor will be able to support a variety of operating systems (such as Linux or Apple’s Tiger).”
So, you wanna go into the wine business…
So, you wanna go into the wine business…. Well, listen up kid, here’s some good advice from someone who’s been there.
Results from the Digital Information Design Camp
Results from the Digital Information Design Camp run by MIT Media Lab and the AIGA. They should have worked on their interface/information design a little more…you wouldn’t know that there’s a ton of student work to view by looking at the front page.
“The hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology
“The hairy ball theorem of algebraic topology states that, in layman’s terms, ‘one cannot comb the hair on a ball in a smooth manner’”. Heh. Looks like Wikipedia has some new measures in placeto deal with spam/trolls: “This page has been protected from editing to deal with vandalism.”
Hurricane Ivan generated what is thought to
Hurricane Ivan generated what is thought to be the tallest wave ever observed. The wave was 91 feet high.
Why do people buy a smaller size
Why do people buy a smaller size of Coke when going through the McDonald’s drive-thru than when they order from the counter?. No answer is given, but it’s not the small size of the cupholders. Any ideas?
“Al-Qaida is now an idea, not an organisation”
“Al-Qaida is now an idea, not an organisation”. “The terrorist attacks organised directly by al-Qaida, most of which took place between 1998 and 2002, had two aims. One was wounding the enemy, America and its allies, but another, equally important, was to use carefully choreographed acts to impress, amaze and inspire those in the Islamic world who had yet to heed the call to arms.”
Advice from Dr. Michio Kaku on formulating
Advice from Dr. Michio Kaku on formulating a proposal for the Unified Field Theory. I can just imagine all the crackpot theories that prompted this list.
Harold and Kumar go to White Castle
Aside from William Shatner playing himself in Free Enterprise, Neil Patrick Harris’s small part in this movie is probably the greatest celebrity cameo in the history of film. I also enjoyed this bit of Lawrance Bernabo’s review of the movie on Amazon: “This film is in the great tradition of ‘Dude, Where’s My Car?’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’”. That is indeed a fine tradition. Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to plan my trip to White Castle for lunch today.
Gallery of work by guerilla artist Banksy
Gallery of work by guerilla artist Banksy from the West Bank barrier in the Palestinian territories. “An old Palestinian man said his painting made the wall look beautiful. Banksy thanked him, only to be told: ‘We don’t want it to be beautiful, we hate this wall. Go home.’”
A craigslist missed connection for any of
A craigslist missed connection for any of the hot women who were in the audience for Edward Tufte’s lecture. Not too picky, this guy, he’ll take any beautiful woman who was there. Quick, someone snap him up before he makes another sparklines pun.
Life lessons from blackjack
Life lessons from blackjack. You gotta know when to hold ‘em, know when to fold ‘em…
Counterfeiters print Excel function on jeans by accident
Counterfeiters print Excel function on jeans by accident. “The counterfeiters are using Excel or Access to store all the logos for their counterfeit jeans and then print them out onto leather. This is what happens when there is a bug in their software.”
Visualization of email archives as a mountain with layers
Visualization of email archives as a mountain with layers. “Each layer in the Mountain represents a different person. Layers are ordered by time, with the first people in the email archive at the bottom and the most recent people in the archive at the top right portion of the mountain.”
Using information from the USPTO to track
Using information from the USPTO to track how logo design in the US has changed over time. “Using this database, innovations and trends in the design of trademarks can be tracked and dissected. For example, the rise of the swoosh element, concentrated among internet and telecommunications firms in particular, can be seen developing in the mid-1990s.”
MMORPG and the Dunbar number
MMORPG and the Dunbar number. “Overall, these statistics still support my original hypothesis in my Dunbar Number post that mean group sizes will be smaller than 150 for non-survival oriented groups.”
Goin’ Dot Com! - The Musical
Goin’ Dot Com! - The Musical. Back in the day, some friends of mine and I used to joke about doing “Dot Com, the Musical”. I believe someone even wrote a song.
Maybe we’ve got it all wrong about
Maybe we’ve got it all wrong about this whole capitialism thing. “In every substantive sense, employees of a company carry more risks than do the shareholders. Also, their contributions of knowledge, skills and entrepreneurship are typically more important than the contributions of capital by shareholders, a pure commodity that is perhaps in excess supply.”
A history and examination of paint by number
A history and examination of paint by number. “It invited people who had never before held a paintbrush to enter a world of art and creativity.”
Great list of seven internet companies that
Great list of seven internet companies that should have been big or bigger, but screwed up somehow. I’ve got the comments open, so add your own thoughts. My pick: Moreover. They were into RSS before almost anyone, wanted to get into blog search in early 2001 but instead veered into the safe waters of enterprise software.
Hollywood losses
When estimating losses due to piracy in the media, movie studios are fond of using the full purchase price of the pirated DVD or movie ticket. So if I download a copy of Bewitched off of the internet, Sony (and associated companies, the theater, distributors, etc.) feels like they’ve lost $10.50[1], even if I had no plans to ever see the movie in the theatre.
So why is it when Sony defrauds their customers by fabricating movie reviews to promote the theatrical releases of some of their films, they’re only refunding $5 of the total ticket price for those that actually saw those films? Why not the full price? Or better yet, how about a refund for transportation costs, the price of any concessions purchased, estimated loss of wages for time spent watching the film, and compensation for any emotional trauma suffered as a result of thinking the movie was going to be great when it in fact sucked? That sounds about fair.
[1] Well, $10.50 if you live in Manhattan. If you live in rural Wisconsin, you’re only cheating Sony out of $8.00 or so. Well, until the movie comes out on pay-per-view and it costs $3.95. But then when the DVD comes out, Sony’s loss will shoot back to $26.99. Twelve months after the DVD release, when Bewitched is available in a value two-pack with Anchorman, Sony will only be losing $6. Whew, must be hard to keep all those losses straight.
Garrison Keillor’s ruminations on radio: what he
Garrison Keillor’s ruminations on radio: what he likes and where he sees it going. “Clear Channel’s brand of robotics is not the future of broadcasting. With a whole generation turning to iPod and another generation discovering satellite radio and internet radio, the robotic formatted-music station looks like a very marginal operation indeed.”
Design critique of the alphabet
Design critique of the alphabet. “Puhleez! The capital I without the crossbars top and bottom is either the laziest piece of design in history, or an elegant stroke of modernism. With the crossbars it’s just clunky, boring and awkward. The lowercase i is kind of cute with that little dot, I suppose, but I’m not really buying it. This one should have never made it out of the comp stage.”
Harnessing the power of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink
Harnessing the power of Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink to win at poker.
Drawings of war from children caught up
Drawings of war from children caught up in the Sudanese cleansing in Darfur. “Without any instruction or guidance, the children drew scenes from their experiences of the war in Darfur: the attacks by the Janjaweed, the bombings by Sudanese government forces, the shootings, the burning of entire villages, and the flight to Chad.”
The decline of the baseball card industry
The decline of the baseball card industry. I collected in the late 80s, early 90s. It became a lot less fun when the companies started releasing special editions in limited quantities just to drive up value and demand artificially.
Post-it Notes are used as pixels to
Post-it Notes are used as pixels to make huge images in this Bergdorf-Goodman window display.
New York magazine’s annual cheap eats in NYC issue
New York magazine’s annual cheap eats in NYC issue.
Ishmael
When I posted a link to Jared Diamond’s Discover magazine piece on agriculture being “the worst mistake in the history of the world”, two people wrote in suggesting that I read Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael. As I was between books, I did just that. Ishmael, nutshelled:
Ishmael’s paradigm of history is startlingly different from the one wired into our cultural consciousness. For Ishmael, our agricultural revolution was not a technological event but a moral one, a rebellion against an ethical structure inherent in the community of life since its foundation four billion years ago. Having escaped the restraints of this ethical structure, humankind made itself a global tyrant, wielding deadly force over all other species while lacking the wisdom to make its tyranny a beneficial one or even a sustainable one.
That tyranny is now hurtling us toward a planetary disaster of pollution and overpopulation. If we want to avoid that catastrophe, we need to work our way back to some fundamental truths: that we weren’t born a menace to the world and that no irresistible fate compels us to go on being a menace to the world.
It’s a work of philosophy, centering on technology, culture, religion, and ecology. The Platonic-dialogue-with-a-gorilla format seemed forced to me (Quinn wrote the novelized version of this story to win a $500,000 book prize)…I guess I would have preferred the shorter essay version. But Quinn’s main thesis is an interesting one and worth considering.
What sprawling postmodern novels should you be reading?
What sprawling postmodern novels should you be reading?.
Our Global Food-Service Enterprise Is Totally Down
Our Global Food-Service Enterprise Is Totally Down For Your Awesome Subculture. “In fact, the crazy, unique, cutting-edge stuff you’re into now? The entire management team here in the North American headquarters was totally into that sh*t a couple months ago! No lie, dawgs.”
The super amazing brain and abilities of
The super amazing brain and abilities of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. “Kim pilots jet fighters, pens operas, produces movies and accomplished a feat unmatched in the annals of professional golf by shooting 11 holes-in-one on the first round he ever played.”
Photos of Paris by Eugene Atget, as
Photos of Paris by Eugene Atget, as well as contemporary versions for comparison.
The club-winged manakin sings by playing its
The club-winged manakin sings by playing its feathers like a washboard. Crickets do this, but the manakin is the first vertebrate observed to do it.
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