The “Women of Design” issue of Step
The “Women of Design” issue of Step Inside Design magazine features, er, pussy cats on the cover. Here’s the story behind the cover design.
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Entries for October 2005
With 5 weeks to go in hurricane season,
With 5 weeks to go in hurricane season, tropical storm Alpha breaks the record for most named storms in the Atlantic Ocean. All of this year’s names have been used up, which means the remaining storms will be named after sequential Greek letters.
Any Starbucks in the US (and 22 other
Any Starbucks in the US (and 22 other countries) is supposed to sell you a cup of fair trade coffee if you ask them to. The Starbucks Challenge is motivating people to take them up on their offer. You can track people’s progress or join in the fun yourself.
New version of MySQL (5.0) now available. Download here.
New version of MySQL (5.0) now available. Download here.
Results of the WSJ’s 2005 Technology Innovation Awards competition.
Results of the WSJ’s 2005 Technology Innovation Awards competition.
Reap is an art project “exploring the
Reap is an art project “exploring the notion of marking and capturing time: time as memory, as process, as moments, as metamorphoses and metaphors”. I like the apple rotting one. (thx susan)
Debate between economist Milton Friedman, John Mackey (
Debate between economist Milton Friedman, John Mackey (CEO of Whole Foods) and T.J. Rodgers (CEO of Cypress Semiconductor). The discussion centers around Friedman’s assertion that “the social responsibility of business is to increase its profits”. (via mr)
James Surowiecki on insider trading and members
James Surowiecki on insider trading and members of Congress. From 1993-1998, “senators beat the market, on average, by twelve per cent annually”. Here’s a piece on the same study from the FT early last year.
A man asks MetaFilter for help in
A man asks MetaFilter for help in tracking down his grandfather’s address in 1938 Vienna and after only two days, he’s got the address as well as a bunch of other information he never knew about him. This internet thing is gonna be huge someday.
Watch Me Change is an interactive advertisement
Watch Me Change is an interactive advertisement from The Gap that lets you specify the appearance of an avatar, who then performs a striptease out of Gap clothing. Gothamist has more info and a screenshot. Sorta NSFW, I guess.
Clever billboard advertisement that changes when it rains. Somewhat NSFW.
Clever billboard advertisement that changes when it rains. Somewhat NSFW.
Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
It’s difficult to watch an animated movie these days and not compare it to Pixar’s recent efforts. I’ve all but given up on Dreamworks…they’ve drawn their line in the sand and are making unchallenging, cheesy movies full of passe pop culture references that are guaranteed to make money at the box office and on DVD (until audiences catch on, like when Disney did the same thing back in the late 80s/early 90s).
Luckily, although they distributed the film in the US, Dreamworks doesn’t seem to have had anything to do with the making of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit. The film is pure Aardman entertainment, full of dry humor, slapstick, Rube Goldbergian gadgets, and, of course, a patented W&G chase scene in which Gromit races to the rescue of a flailing Wallace. Aside from the briefest hint of a lesson regarding the dangers of genetic manipulation and a couple of jokes for adults (“may contain nuts”), W&G doesn’t have the depth or broad appeal across all ages of a Pixar film — no one’s going to be comparing it with the ideas of Ayn Rand — but it hardly matters because the film is enjoyable enough at the level on which it chooses to operate. Plus, there’s cheeeeeese!
Parable about Google’s Library Project and copyright (
Parable about Google’s Library Project and copyright (discussed here last week). “All I have to do is borrow the CDs or DVDs, downloaded music or video or whatever, copy them, and then offer some sort of ‘fair use’ excerpt index service, just like Google is doing with the books. It’s the perfect gimmick.”
Select one-star reviews from Amazon of books
Select one-star reviews from Amazon of books on Time magazine’s list of the 100 best English language novels since 1923 (discussion).
Tim Gasperak was recently in Iceland and
Tim Gasperak was recently in Iceland and took some gorgeous photos. More at his site, Big Empty.
This is what it looked like outside
This is what it looked like outside our window this morning. Snow!
Consumer electronics mash-ups
As frustrated as one can get with the US sometimes, it is truly a marvelous land of plenty. In the past few months, I’ve run across some remarkable consumer items which I’d like to share with you.
- A microwave oven with a radio in it. With a little tinkering, you may be able to take the FM signal coming into the radio and convert it into microwaves to cook the food. Lite jazz will cook that baked potato nice n’ slow or crank the hard rock station if you’re in a hurry to scorch your Healthy Choice.
- A mounted deer head that sings and talks. I know you’re all familiar with that mounted bass that plays music, but this is a whole deer head we’re talking about here. I was too amazed to note any of the songs or whether the deer lip-synchs along, but I’m sure that when you plug this sucker in, whatever it does is wonderful. It’s singing taxidermy fer crissakes!
- A refrigerator with a TV. For that 3-4 seconds it takes you to get a glass of orange juice when you’re away from the TV just in the other room. Oh, and if the TV part breaks, good luck getting it fixed. Also, there didn’t appear to be a Refrigerator Channel for viewing inside the fridge to avoid letting that precious cool out while your teenage son stands with the door (and his mouth) open for three minutes deciding what to eat/drink.
Convergence is grand, ain’t it?
Slideshow of the biggest emerging design trends
Slideshow of the biggest emerging design trends according to Murray Moss. This came out of a presentation at the 2005 AIGA Design Conference, which presentation (and audio recording) can be downloaded on the AIGADC resources page.
Why do people believe in God? Evidence
Why do people believe in God? Evidence suggests that it’s partially inherited. “The degree of religiosity was not strongly related to the environment in which the twin was brought up. Even if one identical twin had been brought up in an atheist family and the other in a religious Catholic household, they would still tend to show the same kind of religious feelings, or lack of them.”
Middle school students in Indiana and Australia
Middle school students in Indiana and Australia are building edible moon rovers, with the idea that if you’re going to ship a car to the moon or Mars, why not have it be edible when you get there?
A short interview and some photography by
A short interview and some photography by Douglas Levere from his book, New York Changing, in which he rephotographs NYC scenes captured by Berenice Abbott in the 1930s. “I realize to stand still is to move backwards, but architecture today in NYC today too often feels like it is only creating wealth and almost nothing to do with creating community.”
Great post about Florent, a restaurant in
Great post about Florent, a restaurant in the Meatpacking District, on the occasion of its 20th anniversary. I love the NYC/SF map mash-up and the photo of James Earl Jones enjoying a cup of coffee and a newspaper at the restaurant. (via eater)
things magazine has a nice little post
things magazine has a nice little post on the Internet as reliquary. Reminds me of Julian Dibbell’s comparison of weblogs to wunderkammers.
“The only debate on intelligent design that
“The only debate on intelligent design that is worthy of its subject”. Hootingly funny. (And I have no doubt that someone from the other side of the debate could construct something equally as amusing, so…)
WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg on DRM: “
WSJ tech columnist Walt Mossberg on DRM: “media companies go too far in curbing comsumers’ activities”.
Photos of the new fall menu at
Photos of the new fall menu at Alinea in Chicago, helmed by chef Grant Achatz. Looks weird, decadent, and delicious. (via afb)
A Brief Economic History of the World, 10,000
A Brief Economic History of the World, 10,000 BC-2000 AD, consisting of several PDFs. I only read the intro, but it seems pretty interesting if you’re interested in such things.
Study: people eat more when food is
Study: people eat more when food is close at hand and in sight and less when its farther away and out of sight.
Instead of state or federal boundries, the
Instead of state or federal boundries, the CommonCensus map is constructed by asking people what “cultural” part of the country they think they live in (centered around cities). A pretty cool idea but they’ve just gotten started and need more data, so cast your vote. (They’re doing sports maps too…)
With AJAX MAssive Storage System (AMASS) a
With AJAX MAssive Storage System (AMASS) a web page can store large amounts of data on a computer using hidden Flash applets. Brilliant hack, but seems like a potential security concern (an AMASS-like app could just fill up a hard drive without prompting, no?). I just looked at this briefly…would this allow one to run something like GMail offline? (I’m thinking not.) (via waxy)
Top 5 Ironic Versions of Oasis’ Wonderwall. (via zach)
Top 5 Ironic Versions of Oasis’ Wonderwall. (via zach)
MetaFilter’s doing a unique fundraiser for Creative
MetaFilter’s doing a unique fundraiser for Creative Commons (with Dropcash!)…they’ve taken two annoying MeFi users and put their banishment up to a vote…first person to get $500 pledged against them gets banned for a week.
Book author to her publishing company: your lawsuit is not helping me or my book
I got an email this morning from a kottke.org reader, Meghann Marco. She’s an author and struggling to get her book out into the hands of people who might be interested in reading it. To that end, she asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to put her book up on Google Print so it could be found, and they refused. Now they’re suing Google over Google Print, claiming copyright infringement. Meghann is not too happy with this development:
Kinda sucks for me, because not that many people know about my book and this might help them find out about it. I fail to see what the harm is in Google indexing a book and helping people find it. Anyone can read my book for free by going to the library anyway.
In case you guys haven’t noticed, books don’t have marketing like TV and Movies do. There are no commercials for books, this website isn’t produced by my publisher. Books are driven by word of mouth. A book that doesn’t get good word of mouth will fail and go out of print.
Personally, I hope that won’t happen to my book, but there is a chance that it will. I think the majority of authors would benefit from something like Google Print.
She has also sent a letter of support to Google which includes this great anecdote:
Someone asked me recently, “Meghann, how can you say you don’t mind people reading parts of your book for free? What if someone xeroxed your book and was handing it out for free on street corners?”
I replied, “Well, it seems to be working for Jesus.”
And here’s an excerpt of the email that Meghann sent me (edited very slightly):
I’m a book author. My publisher is suing Google Print and that bothers me. I’d asked for my book to be included, because gosh it’s so hard to get people to read a book.
Getting people to read a book is like putting a cat in a box. Especially for someone like me, who was an intern when she got her book deal. It’s not like I have money for groceries, let alone a publicist.
I feel like I’m yelling and no one is listening. Being an author can really suck sometimes. For all I know speaking up is going to get me blacklisted and no one will ever want to publish another one of my books again. I hope not though.
[My book is] called ‘Field Guide to the Apocalypse’ It’s very funny and doesn’t suck. I worked really hard on it. It would be nice if people read it before it went out of print.
As Tim O’Reilly, Eric Schmidt, and Google have argued, I think these lawsuits against Google are a stupid (and legally untenable) move on the part of the publishing industry. I know a fair number of kottke.org readers have published books…what’s your take on the situation? Does Google Print (as well as Amazon “Search Inside the Book” feature) hurt or help you as an author? Do you want your publishing company suing Google on your behalf?
Casual content creation
Over on the Odeo blog, Ev talks about a potentially different type of podcasting, casual content creation:
But, personally, I’m much more of a casual content creator, especially in this realm. The other night, I sent a two-minute podcast to my girlfriend, who was out of town, and got a seven-second “podcast” back that I now keep on my iPod just because it makes me smile. I sent an “audio memo” to my team a while back for something that was much easier to say than type, and I think they actually listened.
A blogging analogue would be Instapundit or Boing Boing (published, broadcast) versus a private LiveJournal[1] (shared, narrowcast). It’s like making a phone call without the expectation of synchronous communication…it’s all voicemail. I thought about doing this the other day when I needed to respond to an email with a lengthy reply. In that particular instance, I ended up sending an email instead because it was the type of thing that might have been forwarded to someone else for comment and returned, etc. But I can see myself using audio like this in the future.
[1] Integrated podcasting tools within LiveJournal would be huge, methinks.
The Onion AV Club explores the landscape
The Onion AV Club explores the landscape of underrated media and comes back with The Underrated List and a whole decade-full of underrated movies. How can anyone have misunderstood Starship Troopers? It was so over-the-top.
The T’Wolves are all about Wally Szczerbiak
The T’Wolves are all about Wally Szczerbiak this year. I’m not a Wally fan…I think he’s selfish like Kobe and not nearly so good. The Wolves should be more concerned with Garnett…he was not in peak form last year.
Astrology is valid science?
Not from The Onion: US biochemistry professor admits that astrology would be considered valid science according to his own personal definition. Said a spectator of Pennsylvania ID trial: “I can’t believe he teaches a college biology class”.
What do you do when you have
What do you do when you have a 9-to-5 job and you need to prepare for an upcoming climb by spending weeks at high altitudes? You put your office desk into an altitude chamber.
Apple announces Aperture, professional-grade software for managing
Apple announces Aperture, professional-grade software for managing and manipulating photos. A little bit o’ iPhoto mixed with Photoshop, it looks like. (Also, new Powerbooks…higher res, better battery life.)
Tumblelogs
On my web travels the other day, I came across a new (to me) kind of weblog, the tumblelog. Here are a few examples to get the gist of what a tumblelog is: hit projectionist first and then Anarchaia (which seems to have been the first one), Church Burning tumblelog, Mikael’s Tumblelog, and ones zeros majors and minors.
A tumblelog is a quick and dirty stream of consciousness, a bit like a remaindered links style linklog but with more than just links. They remind me of an older style of blogging, back when people did sites by hand, before Movable Type made post titles all but mandatory, blog entries turned into short magazine articles, and posts belonged to a conversation distributed throughout the entire blogosphere. Robot Wisdom and Bifurcated Rivets are two older style weblogs that feel very much like these tumblelogs with minimal commentary, little cross-blog chatter, the barest whiff of a finished published work, almost pure editing…really just a way to quickly publish the “stuff” that you run across every day on the web.
Many of the tumblelogs I ran across seem to be powered by Ruby on Rails, itself a quick and dirty programming framework that emphasizes fast prototyping. You can kind of see how tumblelogging is the blog equivalent of Rails. Christian Neukirchen describes how he edits his tumblelog using a templating language called Vooly.
I like the idea of tumblelogging a lot; I’ve been slowly moving kottke.org in a similar direction for awhile. Different ways of displaying various types of content…remaindered links, regular posts, book reviews, and movie reviews are all displayed differently. I’m working on incorporating photo albums and perhaps a daily photolog…as well as a couple other different types of content. I’ve been focusing a lot more on the remaindered links (because they’re more fun and closer to pure editing, which I enjoy a lot more than writing) and less on the magazine-like regular posts-with-titles. The further away from punditry I can get, the better it will be for all of us.
Gristmill reports on the sustainable food movement
Gristmill reports on the sustainable food movement and its problem with class. “Demand for locally and sustainably grown food is concentrated in cities; but prices for farmland near cities are severely inflated by development pressure. Where farmland is cheap, people are poor and accustomed to industrial food. Where people are wealthy and attracted to healthy food, farmland is dear.”
Aptronyms
Aptronym “refers to a name that is aptly suited to its owner”…Ms. Banks who works in finance, Dr. Beach the marine biologist, Art Wolfe the nature photographer, that sort of thing. See also nominative determinism. (thx robert)
For some real controversy over evolution, check
For some real controversy over evolution, check out evo devo, or “evolutionary developmental biology”. Its proponents claim that evolution works primarily by changing when certain genes are expressed, not via changing genes themselves. Scientific American has more.
Who invented noodles?
4000 year-old pot of noodles found in China, settling (for now) the “hotly contested” question of who invented the noodle.
In the five years since the sequencing
In the five years since the sequencing of the human genome, “much of the data have little immediately useful meaning, and the research has produced only a trickle of medicine”. And where medical science has failed, hucksters have filled the gap.
By watching tapes of old baseball games,
By watching tapes of old baseball games, a New York illustrator has discovered the secret of great pitchers. “Witte’s scientific theory, the specifics of which he refuses to divulge, has something to do with how successful pitchers keep their gloves elevated at the start of their windups, let their back shoulders drop, and lift their front legs high.”
Instead of emphasizing the animal, nature photographer
Instead of emphasizing the animal, nature photographer Art Wolfe takes photos that show how animals have evolved to blend into their surroundings. Copies of Wolfe’s book featuring these photos can be purchased on his site. (Also, what a perfect name for a photographer who takes artistic photos of animals.)
Twenty percent of the human genome is
Twenty percent of the human genome is patented. I expect that someday in the future, my morning will be interrupted by a lawyer telling me that the company he represents holds a patent on the biochemical conversion of foodstuffs to energy suitable for powering a biological organism and that I should cease and desist eating my Cheerios.
Frans de Waal on low frequency audio
Frans de Waal on low frequency audio as a social instrument: “The host, Larry King, would adjust his timbre to that of high-ranking guests, like Mike Wallace or Elizabeth Taylor. Low-ranking guests, on the other hand, would adjust their timbre to that of King. The clearest adjustment to King’s voice, indicating lack of confidence, came from former Vice President Dan Quayle.” (via mr)
In the New York media dictionary, “My
In the New York media dictionary, “My time at mediabistro has been great and I’m very proud of what we’ve been able to achieve in these twelve months. I know the site will continue to flourish as a must-read destination for media professionals” is defined as “whew, I’m glad that’s over with”.
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