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The Oil We Eat. “With the possible exception of the domestication of wheat, the green revolution is the worst thing that has ever happened to the planet.”
Update: Here’s a Wired article on super organics, smartly breed foods that will “that will please the consumer, the producer, the activist, and the FDA”. (thx, andy)
Adam Gopnik ponders the why of the Zidane headbutt.
Trailer for Christopher Nolan’s (director of Memento and Batman Begins) new movie, The Prestige.
Hiroshi Tanaka demonstrated his “fast aging” technique for wine at the Taste3 conference. I tasted some of the “after” wine and it was better and smoother than the “before” wine. A promising technique, especially for cheaper wines and spirits.
I was fortunate enough to attend the Taste3 conference in Napa Valley, CA over the weekend. What a nice change from technology conferences. Instead of software demo CDs in the schwag bags, there were bottles of wine and chocolate and instead of BOF gatherings on podcasting, there were dinners with fine wine and yummy cheese. As you would expect, the folks in the hospitality industry are a lot more outgoing than the nerds; except for me, there was a distinct lack of people standing in corners looking down at their shoes.
For the next few days I’ll be posting some thoughts and links from the conference; I hope they’ll be as interesting as the conference was.
List of easily mispronouncable domain names. I’ve always beeen partial to WhoRepresents.com (or whorepresents.com).
The IHT compiles a list of the best and worst moments and memories from the 2006 World Cup.
Regarding the doublestrike on the Guggenheim, Design Observer has a little more information about it. “I don’t think [Frank Lloyd Wright] ever floated text.”
The hotel that inspired Fawlty Towers will soon relaunch as a 4-star boutique hotel.
Five reasons why Americans might be getting fatter that you haven’t thought of. “Sleep-deprived animals eat excessively, and humans subject to sleep deprivation show increased appetite and an increased Body Mass Index, the standard measure of excessive weight.”
FAS.research has produced a visualization of the 2006 World Cup final showing “the passes from every player to those three team-mates he passes to most frequently”. The graphic also shows the “flowbetweenness” of a player.
The Rudd Center for Food Policy and Obesity is publishing an obesity blog. (via bb)
Movie version of Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged to be made and shown in a trilogy. (via mr)
David Remnick on the Bush Administration’s sustained assault on the press. “You begin to wonder if the Bush White House, in its urgent need to find scapegoats for the myriad disasters it has inflicted, is preparing to repeat a dismal and dismaying episode of the Nixon years.”
The Metropolitan Museum of Art is raising its ticket price to $20 (from $15). The fee is recommended…you can pay nothing if you wish.
The American Masters episode on Woody Guthrie is worth a look.
Brian Eno on The Big Here. Follow-up to my post on Kevin Kelly’s Big Here quiz. (thx, zach)
Zidane apologized for the headbutt incident, but doesn’t regret his actions. He said Materazzi insulted his family, “both his mother and sister”.
Jeff Veen is posting some old screencaps of hotwired.com on Flickr; this one’s from 1994. Early 1995. Late 1995. 1996. 1997 (Packet!). 1998. 1999. 2006.
Update: Jeff has some further thoughts on the Hotwired design.
A CBC report from 1993 on a global phenomenon called “Internet”. (thx, joshua)
Update: Here’s a mirror on YouTube.
Nick Denton: the only good publicity is that on your own terms.
The proof is in the underpants: global warming is real. (via eyeteeth)
Clever McDonald’s sundial billboard. “The billboard features a real sundial whose shadow falls on a different breakfast item each hour until noon, when the shadow of the McDonald’s arches are dead center.”
In an interesting twist, those watching the World Cup Final in the stadium didn’t see Zidane headbutt Materazzi: “As a result, tens of thousands of spectators, those actually watching the game in real life, had to resort to calling or texting friends, often in faraway places like the United States or Japan, to find out what was happening in Berlin. Why was Zidane, the resurgent French hero, walking with a bowed head from the field?”
Guide for how to win at Pac-Man. “Pac-Man is the game which represents everything that’s good about gaming (any kind of gaming) and nothing that is bad.”
If you played soccer for Brazil, what would your name be? Mine is “Jasa”, although I like the result better if I switch my first/last names: Jasinho.
Conde Nast buys Wired News (and the wired.com domain name), reuniting it with Wired magazine after 8 years apart. Chris Anderson must be beside himself with joy; under the agreement with Lycos, Wired magazine couldn’t do much of anything on the web in the past eight years (which, in my mind, hurt their credibility in the eyes of anyone who was interested in online media). (via bb)
Update: Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson on the acquisition. “The result was an agreement between the two, by which Wired News (wired.com) would host our content on their site (under wired.com/wired) next to their own content, but we, the magazine, were prohibited from doing anything in the digital realm. Aside from being somewhat ironic that Wired Magazine wasn’t really wired, it was frustrating for us to be unable to walk the talk, since we didn’t control the site.”
Interesting tour/visualization imagining 10 dimensions. (thx, james)
Kevin Kelly on an intriguing concept called The Big Here:
You live in the big here. Wherever you live, your tiny spot is deeply intertwined within a larger place, imbedded fractal-like into a whole system called a watershed, which is itself integrated with other watersheds into a tightly interdependent biome. At the ultimate level, your home is a cell in an organism called a planet. All these levels interconnect. What do you know about the dynamics of this larger system around you? Most of us are ignorant of this matrix. But it is the biggest interactive game there is. Hacking it is both fun and vital.
Accompanying his post is a 30-question (plus 5 bonus questions) quiz that determines how closely you’re connected to the place in which you live. Taking the quiz as he suggests (without Googling) and then researching the actual answers using the recommendations left by previous quiz takers is a useful, humbling, and instructive exercise.
Even though I live in Manhattan, a place where so much of the surroundings are unnatural and the inhabitants are effectively disconnected from nature, I decided to tackle the quiz and expected to do poorly. And so I did. Here are my results, with commentary. (There are some spoilers below, so if you don’t want to be swayed in your answers, take the quiz first, then come back.)
Answered correctly
1) Point north.
Easy with Manhattan’s grid, although you have to remember that the avenues don’t run directly N/S.
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
Comes from upstate NY via various aqueducts and tunnels. I’ve seen parts of the old Croton Aqueduct in northern Manhattan.
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
I guessed 30 feet, Google Earth says it’s 36 feet.
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
A somewhat complicated question — by previous tribe, does it mean the English, the Dutch, the Indians, or the printing company that owned the building I currently live in? — but I basically know how all of those groups lived, more or less.
11) From what direction do storms generally come?
18) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
The skyscrapers of midtown Manhattan wouldn’t be possible without all that bedrock underneath.
19) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)?
180 days. (180 is in the ballpark, but it’s probably a little more given the proximity to the ocean.)
22) Where does the pollution in your air come from?
Cars.
31) What species once found here are known to have gone extinct?
Passenger pigeons?
Partial credit
2) What time is sunset today?
Within 15 minutes of the actual time.
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
Across the river to New Jersey. (Locate your watershed.) I don’t know enough detail to draw it.
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
I guessed bedrock, but Manhattan’s bedrock comes to the surface near midtown and points north of there, not further south where I live.
13) How many people live in your watershed?
10 million. (Actual answer is 9.1 million.)
15) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
Pigeons, hawks, falcons, ducks, sparrows. Ducks migrate. (Turns out that falcons and hawks migrate too.)
21) What was the total rainfall here last year?
50 inches. Average is ~48 inches and last years precip was ~56 inches.
24) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
Glaciers
32) What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude?
Portland, OR; Rome, Tokyo.
Correctness unknown
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
Are there plants still native to Greenwich Village? Marijuana? We grow tomatoes in our apartment, does that count?
17) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water?
500 feet? (Now that I think about it, it’s probably a lot less.)
34) Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.
East coast of Japan? East coasts of southern Africa or South America?
Absolutely wrong / no clue
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
12) Where does your garbage go?
On the curb?
14) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
16) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
23) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today?
25) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
I’m assuming Williamsburg hipster, Chelsea queer, and PR flack are not the answers they’re looking for here.
26) What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable?
27) Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated?
28) After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?
29) Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it?
30) How many days till the moon is full?
Turns out it was just full.
33) What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago?
——-
I answered 9/35 correctly and 9/35 for partial credit. I wonder if I would have done any better if I still lived in rural Wisconsin.
Update: Matt Jones is interested in building a Big Here Tricorder:
What I immediately imagined was the extension of this quiz into the fabric of the near-future mobile and it’s sensors - location (GPS, CellID), orientation (accelerometers or other tilt sensors), light (camera), heat (Nokia 5140’s have thermometers…), signal strength, local interactions with other devices (Bluetooth, uPnP, NFC/RFID) and of course, a connection to the net.
The near-future mobile could become a ‘tricorder’ for the Big Here - a daemon that challenges or channels your actions in accordance and harmony to the systems immediately around you and the ripples they raise at larger scales.
It could be possible (but probably with some help from my friends) to rapidly-prototype a Big Here Tricorder using s60 python, a bluetooth GPS module, some of these scripts, some judicious scraping of open GIS data and perhaps a map-service API or two.
Physicist Lawrence Krauss sums up his thoughts from a small conference he organized on the topic of gravity. “There appears to be energy of empty space that isn’t zero! This flies in the face of all conventional wisdom in theoretical particle physics. It is the most profound shift in thinking, perhaps the most profound puzzle, in the latter half of the 20th century.”
The IHT on a resurgence in popularity of the Georgia typeface online. (thx, newley)
A group of designers (National Design Award finalists and winners) recently declined to be honored at a White House breakfast. “It is our belief that the current administration of George W. Bush has used the mass communication of words and images in ways that have seriously harmed the political discourse in America. We therefore feel it would be inconsistent with those values previously stated to accept an award celebrating language and communication, from a representative of an administration that has engaged in a prolonged assault on meaning.”
Earlier this year, Daniel Raeburn wrote a heartbreaking piece for the New Yorker about the stillbirth of his first daughter, Irene. A year and a half later, a much happier update (online only).
The Daily Mail, with corroboration from the Times, has some information on what Marco Materazzi said to Zinedine Zidane to provoke the latter’s career ending headbutt in the 2006 World Cup final (more info on that here). They both hired lip readers to decipher Materazzi’s dialogue before the incident and this is allegedly what he said (translated from the Italian):
Hold on, wait, that one’s not for a n***er like you.
We all know you are the son of a terrorist whore.
So just fuck off.
So it might be fair to say that Materazzi got what he deserved, as did Zidane when he got sent off. Not that two wrongs make a right. Even so, I agree with these thoughts from That’s How It Happened:
[Zidane’s] willingness to headbutt Materazzi makes him more of a hero, not less. Admittedly, since France went on to lose, he’s something of a tragic hero, but a hero none-the-less. If someone insulted my race, or my religion (if I had one), I wish I’d be as ready to attack them, no matter what the circumstances. Zidane’s action highlights for the world the fact that the racial unity of France is more important than winning the World Cup.
If the lip reader is correct in what Materazzi said, I may like Zidane even more than I did before the match. (via wikipedia)
Update: Eurosport has a statement from Materazzi:
I held his shirt for a few seconds only, he turned to me, looked at me from top to bottom with utmost arrogance (and said): “if you really want my shirt, I’ll give it to you afterwards”. I answered him with an insult.
(thx, blythe)
Update: Several UK newspapers enlisted lip readers to determine what Materazzi said and ended up with many different accounts. Lip reading + language translation = unreliable. (thx, luke)
Vincent van Gogh painted turbulence quite accurately. Mexican scientists “have found that the Dutch artist’s works have a pattern of light and dark that closely follows the deep mathematical structure of turbulent flow”.
Will Moore’s Law slow down due to a lack of research funds? I’ve wondered for awhile whether Moore’s Law didn’t have more to do with the economics of the semiconductor industry than with engineering limits.
From a Guardian review of Heat, Bill Buford’s new book on, in part, celebrity chef Mario Batali:
Batali would play Bob Marley songs on the sound system, knowing the New York Times restaurant critic was a fan. He would berate staff who failed to recognise celebrities, who must be served first and given special treatment. To make a humble fish soup called cioppino, he would rummage through bins and chopping boards, collecting left overs (tomato pulp, carrot tops, onion skins), then price the dish at $29 and tell the waiters to sell the hell out of it or be fired. Short ribs prepared in advance, wrapped so tightly in plastic wrap and foil that they wouldn’t spurt sauce if stepped on, would keep in the walk-in fridge for up to a week.
Maybe that’s why a recent trip to Babbo was not the top-shelf experience we expected.
The front pages of some Italian and French newspapers on the day after the World Cup Final.
Photographic recreation of George Seraut’s painting, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (see it larger). Seurat is one of my favorite painters, and it was a treat to see this painting in Chicago recently.
The Blue People of Troublesome Creek. Due to a rare blood disorder, “four of the seven Fugate children were born with bright blue skin that lasted their entire lives.” “Over the years, the Fugates interbred repeatedly. Blue people proliferated.” (More here….scroll for the Science article.)
Zidane won the Golden Ball award, awarded by journalists to the best player of the tournament. Most of the voting for the award came before halftime of the final. Miroslav Klose’s five goals gave him the Golden Boot as the tournament’s top scorer.
Zidane’s agent says Zidane “told me Materazzi said something very serious to him but he wouldn’t tell me what”. “Zinedine didn’t want to talk about it but it will all come out in the next week. He was very disappointed and sad. He didn’t want it to end this way.”
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