Entries for October 2005
Out of a recent conversation popped this interesting question: who was the first superhero? After a short discussion and a few guesses (Superman, Batman, etc), it was agreed that this might be the most perfect question to ask the internet in the long history of questions.
The earliest superhero I could find reference to was Mandrake the Magician, who debuted in 1934, four years before Superman, who was probably the first popular superhero. Mandrake’s super power was his ability to “make people believe anything, simply by gesturing hypnotically”. Does anyone out there know of any superheroes who made an earlier media appearance?
There’s a related question that has some bearing on the answer to the above question: what is a superhero? There have probably been books (or at least extensive Usenet threads) written on this topic, but a good baseline definition needs to acknowledge both the “super” and the “hero” parts. That is, the person needs to have some superhuman power or powers and has to fight the bad guys. But this basic definition is flawed. Superman is an alien, not human. Batman doesn’t have any super powers…he’s a self-made superhero like Syndrome in The Incredibles. Or can a superhero be anyone (human or no) that fights bad guys and is superior to normal heroes…the cream of the hero crop? And what about a costume or alter ego…are they essential for superheroism? These are all questions well-suited for asking the internet, so have at it: what’s a good definition for a superhero?
And there’s (at least) one more angle to this as well…where did the idea of the superhero come from? As Meg suggested to me at dinner last night, was there a cultural need for a superhero during a super-crisis like the Great Depression? Or did the idea evolve gradually from regular heros (cowboys, space cowboys, etc.) to heros who were magicians (with special powers…it’s not that much of a stretch to imagine a magician possessing supernatural powers) to classic superheroes like Superman?
Time magazine asks Moby, Malcolm Gladwell, Tim O’Reilly, Clay Shirky, David Brooks, Mark Dery, and Esther Dyson about their views on the future: religion, culture, politics, etc. Gladwell: “If I had to name a single thing that has transformed our life, I would say the rise of JetBlue and Southwest Airlines. They have allowed us all to construct new geographical identities for ourselves.”
Harsh review of the user interface for The Complete New Yorker. My experience was better (changing issues took me only a few seconds), but the interface does leave a lot to be desired.
Wikipedia has a list of made-up words and expressions from The Simpsons. “Cromulent” is my favorite and should find it’s way into actual use. “Car hole” is great as well. (via bb)
This Bird Has Flown is a tribute album of The Beatles’ Rubber Soul on the 40th anniversary of its release. Includes covers by Ted Leo, The Fiery Furnaces, and Sufjan Stevens.
Opening tomorrow at the Met Museum in NYC, an exhibition of drawings by Vincent van Gogh. October 18, 2005 through December 31, 2005.
Jakob Nielsen’s latest Alertbox is about weblog usability. I actually think most of these are pretty good, but as with all such guidelines, they are made to be broken.
Two of the biggest pessimists in the business, Bill Joy and Ray Kurzweil, outline their case for not releasing the genome for the 1918 influenza virus. “The genome is essentially the design of a weapon of mass destruction. No responsible scientist would advocate publishing precise designs for an atomic bomb, and in two ways revealing the sequence for the flu virus is even more dangerous.”
Well, summer is definitely over in the eastern United States. The leaves on the trees are going or gone, sweaters and light jackets have started making their appearance, and everyone is sick of tomatoes but drinking apple cider by the gallon. As a goodbye to a great summer, here are a few photos I took over the last few months:
The above photo was taken near the end of the summer on Nantucket, just before sunset.
In the real world, the process of design depends on evolution: “To consider the iPod, it did not spring fully formed from the mind of a powerful Designer, but rather it represents one distinct point on a long evolutionary timeline.” Intelligent design is bad science and bad design. That doesn’t leave much.
Two Da Vincis long held in private collections to go on public display for the first time.
The right of Conde Nast to sell The Complete New Yorker (which is completely awesome from a content standpoint, BTW) without paying authors for republish rights is a gray area legally. National Geographic has stopped selling a similar collection because of the unsure legal terrain.
Thomas Keller gets the butter for his restaurants from 6 cows in Vermont. The woman who owns them sells more than 80% of her butter to Keller: “When you’re small you can have a relationship with the people who buy your food. The reason I’m not big is because I’m a perfectionist. I’ve got to sell to someone who is the same way.”
Clive Thompson on Life Hackers in the NY Times. I’d informally heard about the benefit of larger screens on productivity (I feel more productive with a larger screen), but this article describes some study results: “On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly.”
Steven Shaw doesn’t like a lot of food criticism and he’s not shy about telling you why. In his opinionated new book (which, as a NYC food fan, I enjoyed thoroughly), Shaw devotes much of a lengthy chapter to skewering guidebooks like Zagat’s and Michelin, starred restaurant reviews, and the undercover restaurant reviewer. Ruth Reichl, now editor-in-chief of Gourmet, recently recounted her experiences as food critic for the New York Times in her newest book, Garlic and Sapphires. Reichl employed a number of disguises when going to restaurants in order to ensure she didn’t receive special service because of her job at the Times. Shaw believes this approach is flawed and serves to distance restaurants and their customers:
It sends a signal to the public that restaurants are out to deceive us, and that in order to expose them restaurant reviewers must act as undercover investigative consumer advocates.
He prefers an approach akin to other forms of artistic criticism, with the reviewer taking a more active role in being as close to the action as possible:
There is, to my mind, absolutely nothing wrong with a critic having ties — close ties — to the community about which he writes. In my opinion, it is preferable from the standpoint of providing the best possible coverage. To me, the primary function of restaurant criticism should not be something so prosaic as reporting on the average meal and labeling it with some stars. Rather, restaurant criticism should parallel other forms of criticism — in art, literature, architecture, music — such that critics are champions of excellence who promote the best within the industry while exposing the worst.
This probably sounds like a familar argument to many who follow weblogs and the ongoing conversation about the responsibility of bloggers regarding disclosure of junkets, gifts, free movies, & review copies of books, their relationship to advertisers, who their friends are, and so forth. It’s a question of access vs. independence and objectivity. To get a story, some sort of access is often required, but then the reader might worry about biased reportage.
The key is trust (and I’m sure Shaw would agree with me here). Do you trust a particular source of information to balance her need for access to the story with the desire of her readers for her to remain as independent and fair-minded as possible? I believe that if we want better reviews, we need to be better readers and take a more active role in how we deal with information. Access isn’t necessarily bad, but what individual bloggers/journalists do with that access can be.
And when reading, you should be asking yourself, is the writer being fair here? Have they been fair in the past? If the piece you’re reading appears in the NY Times or the WSJ, how does the political orientation (if any) affect what gets printed in the paper? Are music journalists and bloggers biased in their reviews because they receive free review CDs in the mail? And if so, does that make the reviews completely worthless? If they don’t disclose things like junkets, personal relationships to their subjects, and the like, does that completely negate the review? Or can you adjust your opinion of the reviews to get something worthwhile out of them anyway?
Dealing with information has always been an imprecise science; there’s no such thing as complete objectivity. But as readers, we can encourage the writers whose work we read to be as fair as possible.
Disclosure: I purchased this book in a NYC bookstore with my own money. I have never met Steven Shaw, but I do enjoy eGullet very much. If you click on any of the links to Amazon in this piece and purchase merchandise there, I will get a small percentage (~5%) of the sale.
Librarian gets even with an annoying junk faxer and even gets the guy’s airplane seized…and all the proceeds from the sale will go to the Leukemia Society.
Somehow I missed this when it came out, but last year on the 40th anniversary of the release of Dr. Strangelove, James Earl Jones wrote about his experiences in making the film. If you like the Kubrick, Coudal has a tons of Kubrick links going on today.
An index of mp3s of old TV theme songs. Would-be DJs take note: a friend of mine was DJing a party back in college and he threw on the Knight Rider theme song and people went bonkers. (via rw)
Update: Sound America also has an extensive collection of TV themes in WAV format. (thx josh)
Right around 1985 is when American cuisine took hold in NYC…and with it came other changes. “It can be argued that fine dining finally lost its haughty attitude then, that cloches became less important than customer comment cards. A fascination with classic French cooking was forevermore trumped by an insistence on something lighter, more flexible and less hidebound. The trickle of a simpler sensibility from California became a tide. The glories of the Greenmarket took ineradicable root.”
This comment from Nick Denton (and much of the rest of the thread) demonstrates why Gawker is still worth reading on occasion. It’s disappointing Nick isn’t more involved in the day-to-day of the Gawker sites…his writing is always more entertaining than his blog empire.
Flickr photos labeled with “cameratoss”, which result from when you set your camera to a long exposure time, click the shutter, and toss it in the air. Looks like spirograph… (via matt)
As I was poking around 0sil8 this morning, I ran across this list from 1998 of movies due to be released in 1999/2000. Some were released on time, some were never released, and others were released years later. My favorite is the Charlie’s Angels speculation…with Jenny McCarthy, Jada Pinkett & Michelle Yeoh as the Angels.
Jason @ 37signals noticed a great feature of the new iMac with built-in iSight. The screen is the flash for the camera so just before you take a photo, the screen flashes a bright white. Fantastic.
A list of excellent hamburgers to be found in NYC. For more on NYC burgers, check out A Hamburger Today. I still maintain that NYC isn’t a burger town, although with all the recent activity, it may be one soon.
Well, lookie lookie. If you take a peek at the bottom of the Apple movie trailers page, they’ve added a link to an RSS file of the newest movie trailers. O’ happy day. (thx John)
Update: Dave says: “I was hoping to see permalinks to a reviews page for the movie, and an enclosure containing the trailer itself.” Me too, but baby steps, I guess.
Timeline of video games, mostly business-related. But holy crap, Hunt the Wumpus (a game I had for the TI-99) was invented in 1973? Cool.
College football and network theory meet at last. In a recent paper, a pair of researchers have devised a ranking system based on network theory (with teams that didn’t directly play each other, the theory determines who’s the better team based on games played versus a mutual foe) that is more accurate than the current polling system used to choose a college football national champion. (via cd)
Esquire jumps the gun on the whole end of the year best-of lists thing and names their favorite new restaurants of 2005, with Danny Meyer’s The Modern taking the top spot. Worth reading if only for the sidebar item on “wired and tired” dining trends.
Clive Thompson enjoys the miniest of mini games, one-button games (more here and here): “video games that have a single button to control all the action”. Many of the mini games in Wario Ware use only one control and only last 3-4 seconds.
Further discovery of Homo floresiensis bones have strengthened researchers’ argument that the so-called Hobbit is a new and distinct human species. More on Flores man at Nature, which is doing a weekly podcast now.
Peter Schjeldahl, in a harsh review of graphic novels for the New Yorker (with particular contempt for Harvey Pekar), suggests that the artistic breakthrough of graphic novels has occurred, been recognized, and “that a process of increasingly strained emulation and diminishing returns has set in”, citing Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan as the form’s peak. Here’s a positive review of Ware’s newest collection.
Inspired by Thomas Friedman’s book, A.J. Jacobs outsources his life to India. He starts with his job but is eventually letting his Indian assistants argue with his wife, read to his son at night, edit his Wikipedia entry on his behalf, and even worry for him. Ben Hammersley also recently wrote about personal outsourcing.
Typographic dating game. Who will it be for the evening…Futura, Garamond, Bodoni?
Forbes has a list of 10 chef “tastemakers”, including Thomas Keller, Alain Ducasse, and Grant Achatz.
John Gruber has a great bullet-point roundup of the Apple announcements today…mostly stuff that you won’t hear about in the tech press. (If you’re living in a shack, Apple announced video iPods, new iTunes, downloadable TV programs, new iMacs, etc. today.)
TED (the conference folks) have got themselves a blog. If you enjoy kottke.org, it looks like TEDBlog may hold your interest as well.
Here’s the recipe for the sandwich that Adam Sandler makes in Spanglish; he was taught how by Thomas Keller. “I’m told that making sure that the yolk doesn’t break until you cut the sandwich is key.”
QuotationsBook offers its quotations and search results via RSS. If someone were to write a plug-in for Movable Type for this, you could display related quotations alongside blog posts using tags (e.g. tag an entry with “friends” and you get a quotation about friends). Cool.
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