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Entries for August 2006
New Improv Everywhere mission: 225 people at the
New Improv Everywhere mission: 225 people at the Home Depot in Chelsea all moving in slow motion. The sped-up video showing all the slow-moers moving at normal speed while everyone else zips around is pretty great. (thx, jakob)
Pluto not a planet anymore
Boo, astronomers, boo!!!
Astronomers meeting in the Czech capital have voted to strip Pluto of its status as a planet. About 2,500 experts were in Prague for the International Astronomical Union’s (IAU) general assembly. Astronomers rejected a proposal that would have retained Pluto as a planet and brought three other objects into the cosmic club. Pluto has been considered a planet since its discovery in 1930 by the American Clyde Tombaugh.
Screw this, what about all of Pluto’s mindshare? Now we’re going to need a new mnemonic device.
Update: Meg and I came up with a mnew mnemonic device in protest of the Pluto decision:
Man, very erroneous! Moronic jerks shouldn’t uninclude neat Pluto.
And you know what that means! Mnemonic device contest! Send in your best mnew mnemonic device for remembering the planets (either for the old 9 planets or the new 8 planets) and you’ll be entered to win an as-yet-unspecified prize. All entries must be sent with the subject line “Pluto mnemonic device contest” and must be received by 5pm ET today. I’ll publish the winners sometime soon. Contest update: Ok, pencils down, it’s 5pm and the contest has concluded. Judging will take place soon and the still-as-yet-unspecified prize will be awarded directly following.
More photography from Gerald Panter. For the
More photography from Gerald Panter. For the past 10 years, Panter has been rephotographing scenes previously photographed by Eugene Atget. Sophie Tusler and another group from USF have done similar projects. Nice panoramas too.
Author (and reader) Nick Hornby on how
Author (and reader) Nick Hornby on how to read. “Please, if you’re reading a book that’s killing you, put it down and read something else, just as you would reach for the remote if you weren’t enjoying a television programme.”
Slideshow of Gerald Panter’s photos of the
Slideshow of Gerald Panter’s photos of the fast food stands of Los Angeles. “Menus which featured hamburgers and hot dogs seem to have given way to those featuring tacos and burritos, while former purveyors of such Mexican fare now feature teriyaki and other Asian specialities.”
The Eastern Garbage Patch is a miles-wide
The Eastern Garbage Patch is a miles-wide collection of garbage in the North Pacific; the trash is collected by a slowly rotating system of current that keeps it trapped in one spot. (via pf)
Mathematical politics and the Poincare Conjecture
As I mentioned yesterday, the New Yorker published an article by Sylvia Nasar1 and David Gruber about the recent proof of the Poincare Conjecture2. (Previous coverage in the NY Times and the Guardian.) The article, which is unavailable from the New Yorker’s web site (they’ve now made it available), contains the only interview I’ve seen with Grigory Perelman, the Russian mathematician who published a potential proof of the conjecture in late 2002, gave a series of lectures in the US, and then went back to Russia. Since then, he hasn’t communicated with anyone about the proof, has quit mathematics, and recently refused the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award that mathematics has to offer, saying:
It was completely irrelevent for me. Everybody understood that if the proof is correct then no other recognition is needed.
Meanwhile, a Chinese group of mathematicians, led by Shing-Tung Yau3, are claiming that Perelman’s proof was too complicated and are offering a reworked proof instead of Perelman’s. That is, they’re claiming the first complete proof of the conjecture. Yau The active director of Yau’s mathematics institute explained the relative contributions thusly:
Hamilton contributed over fifty per cent; the Russian, Perelman, about twenty five per cent; and the Chinese, Yau, Zhu, and Cao et al., about thirty per cent. (Evidently, simple addition can sometimes trip up even a mathematician.)
Clearly the Chinese gave more than 100% in solving this proof, but Yau is regarded by some mathematicians as attempting to grab glory that does not belong to him. John Morgan, a mathematician at Columbia University, says:
Perelman already did it and what he did was complete and correct. I don’t seen anything that [Yau et al.] did different.
Yau wants to be associated with the proof of the Poincare Conjecture, to have China associated with it, and for his student, Zhu, to be elevated in status by it. The $1 million in prize money for the proof of the conjecture offered by the Clay Mathematics Institute can’t be far from Yau’s mind as well. For his part, Grigory Perelman won’t say whether he’ll accept the prize money until it is offered. Stay tuned, I guess.
[1] Nasar wrote A Beautiful Mind, a book about mathematician John Nash. ↩
[2] Poincare (properly written as Poincaré) is pronounced Pwan-cah-RAY, not Poyn-care as I said it up until a few weeks ago. ↩
[3] Yau proved a conjecture by Eugenio Calabi which gave birth to a highly useful mathematical structure called a Calabi-Yau manifold; Yau won the Fields Medal for it. The C-Y manifold is important in string theory and Andrew Wiles used it as part of his proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem. In short, Yau is a mathematical stud, no question. ↩
Fascinating charts of how the US Senate
Fascinating charts of how the US Senate votes on issues from a liberal-conservative perspective and a social issues perspective. More charts here. You’ll notice that the lines on the graphs are mostly straight up and down which means “it’s all economic; all the noise about social issues never actually flows thru into the legislative agenda.” That is, the Senate decides issues, even social issues, based mostly on economics.
NPR’s Weekend Edition report on Edward Tufte
NPR’s Weekend Edition report on Edward Tufte and his newest book, Beautiful Evidence. “Beauty is the by-product of truth and goodness.”
How to do a click heatmap on
How to do a click heatmap on your site with JavaScript and Ruby. Includes source code. Very slick.
No snakes, no planes
I made it! I can’t believe I did, but I hung in there, bucked the odds, gave 110%, and totally did it. From the blog post that kicked this whole crazy thing off to the premiere of the film this past weekend, I didn’t mention Snakes on a Plane a single time on this site. Neither did I make any ________ on a ________ jokes, see the movie on opening weekend, nor comment on any other site about it.
How did I achieve such a high level of cultural snobbery? It wasn’t easy, friends. Not reading MetaFilter helped certainly, as did looking down on reality television and those who watch it. I practiced conversational calisthenics in the mirror every night before bed: “Was that in the New Yorker or The Economist? Oh, I’m sorry, I don’t read People.”
In commemoration of this achievement, I’ve made celebratory badges to place proudly on the site (in regular and without swearing variations):
Feel free to display this badge on your web site if you also successfully avoided Snakes on a Plane. (Copy the images to your own server, please.) To those that succumbed to the temptation, fear not…the official web site has plenty of posters, wallpapers, audio clips, videos, IM icons, and screensavers for you to download.
Think you got teh hops? Here’s a
Think you got teh hops? Here’s a photo of Orlando Magic player Dwight Howard kissing the rim in practice. (via th)
The seven warning signs of bogus science. #2: “
The seven warning signs of bogus science. #2: “The discoverer says that a powerful establishment is trying to suppress his or her work.” (via cd)
50 common job interview questions and some suggestions
50 common job interview questions and some suggestions on how to answer them. (via wa)
Just started: a list of the 10,000 reasons
Just started: a list of the 10,000 reasons civilization is doomed.
Update: Shortly after I posted this link, someone added “kottke.org” as Reason #185. (thx, connor)
The NYC premiere of Blogumentary is August 30
The NYC premiere of Blogumentary is August 30 at the Pioneer Theatre in the East Village. More info and tickets here.
Grigory Perelman, who I posted about last
Grigory Perelman, who I posted about last week, has indeed won the Fields Medal for his possible proof of the Poincare Conjecture but declined the award. The current New Yorker has an article (not online) about the whole deal which I have yet to read.
A company called Freeload is offering college
A company called Freeload is offering college textbooks with advertising in them to students for free. If this works, will this mean more books with advertising in them?
Slides for Michal Migurski’s talk on data
Slides for Michal Migurski’s talk on data visualization at UX Week 2006.
Five quotes
A quick meme I found on Rivers are Damp:
Go here and look through random quotes until you find five that you think reflect who you are or what you believe.
Here are my five:
- Most advances in science come when a person for one reason or another is forced to change fields. (Peter Borden)
- The minute one utters a certainty, the opposite comes to mind. (May Sarton, Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing, 1965)
- Beware of all enterprises that require new clothes. (Henry David Thoreau (1817 - 1862), Walden)
- It’s asking a great deal that things should appeal to your reason as well as your sense of the aesthetic. (W. Somerset Maugham (1874 - 1965), ‘Of Human Bondage’, 1915)
- Your best shot at happiness, self-worth and personal satisfaction - the things that constitute real success - is not in earning as much as you can but in performing as well as you can something that you consider worthwhile. (William Raspberry)
The NY Times has a two part
The NY Times has a two part series on online pedophilia: what pedophiles are up to online (“pedophiles view themselves as the vanguard of a nascent movement seeking legalization of child pornography and the loosening of age-of-consent laws”) and looking at sites that promote nonnude but lascivious photos of children to pedophiles.
Update: In 2003, Black Table did an interview with someone working for a nonnude site called ChildSuperModels.com. (thx, kfan)
Awesome Google Maps + NYC subway map combo. (via khoi)
Awesome Google Maps + NYC subway map combo. (via khoi)
Want to draw you some diagrams, charts,
Want to draw you some diagrams, charts, or flowcharts? Try these nifty tools.
The Come Out and Play Festival looks
The Come Out and Play Festival looks awesome. “Come Out & Play is a festival dedicated to street games. It is three days of play, talks, and celebration, all focused on new types of games and play.” Takes place in NYC, Septmeber 22-24.
A new species of sea urchin has
A new species of sea urchin has been discovered on eBay. For once, that name seems to make sense.
Nice interview with Michael Frumin on the
Nice interview with Michael Frumin on the occasion of him leaving Eyebeam. “There’s so much data out there, and so little time!”
Here’s a great video of old school
Here’s a great video of old school arcade games represented using household items…here’s a Frogger screenshot. The rest of the photos and videos are worth a look as well; Roof Sex is reminiscent of Furniture Porn (nsfw). (via waxy)
New Barnaby Furnas show
The web site for the Marianne Boesky Gallery is a bit behind the times, so it doesn’t yet have the information for Barnaby Furnas’ upcoming show of his work from September 15 to October 14. The show will include his recent “flood” paintings; here’s a representative piece from the Saatchi Gallery:
Furnas’ huge flood paintings are created using a technique called “the pour”, detailed in a New Yorker article from earlier this year:
Furnas started at the high end of the canvas, not pouring but slathering on water-based Mars Black with sweeps of a wide brush. He switched to a dark red, laying it down quickly, and sometimes flinging it out in Pollock-like arcs. Sarah and Jared went into action with plastic spritz bottles, spraying water on the paint to make it spread and flow down the inclined plane. Boesky, equipped with a bottle of her own, followed their lead. The canvas began to look like a river of blood, dark and murky at the bottom, shading to a brighter and more lurid red in the middle. It was happening very fast, and changing from one second to the next-streaks of different red combining and separating, and running down to the lower end, where they dripped off the canvas into pails and other receptacles. After fifteen minutes, the whole midsection of the canvas was covered.
His Hamburger Hill piece at the 2004 Whitney Biennial was one of my favorites there, so I’ll definitely be checking out this new show.
Oh happy day, a new nonfiction article
Oh happy day, a new nonfiction article by David Foster Wallace! This one’s on Roger Federer. “Beauty is not the goal of competitive sports, but high-level sports are a prime venue for the expression of human beauty. The relation is roughly that of courage to war.” The footnotes appear on a separate page and almost comprise an article of their own. I love reading his writing about tennis. (thx, stephen)
Update: Here’s a short clip of Wallace on NPR talking about Federer. When asked about the similarities between great athletes and great novelists, Wallace suggested that great athletes possess the ability to “empathize without sympathy” with their opponent, something that is useful in fiction writing when putting yourself in the shoes of a character.
Update: This YouTube video shows the Federer/Agassi volley that Wallace describes in the epically long sentence in the second paragraph…look for it starting at 8:10. (thx, marco)
Video for Gnarls Barkley’s Smiley Faces
Video for Gnarls Barkley’s Smiley Faces, my favorite song of theirs. (Even though the mashup with the Notorious B.I.G.’s Hypontize might be better.)
David from Ironic Sans is staying in
David from Ironic Sans is staying in a New Hampshire residence once owned by Norbert Wiener, a mathematician and the founder of cybernetics and reports back about what’s on Wiener’s bookshelves.
Yesterday, almost 30 years after it was launched,
Yesterday, almost 30 years after it was launched, the Voyager spacecraft crossed the 100 AU boundry, meaning it is 100 times farther from the Sun than the Earth is. The article is worth a read. (via sb)
Rethinking Moneyball. Jeff Passan looks at how
Rethinking Moneyball. Jeff Passan looks at how the Oakland A’s 2002 draft class, immortalized in Michael Lewis’ Moneyball, has done since then. “It is not so much scouts vs. stats anymore as it is finding the right balance between information gleaned by scouts and statistical analyses. That the Moneyball draft has produced three successful big-league players, a pair of busts and two on the fence only adds to its polarizing nature.” Richard Van Zandt did a more extensive analysis back in April.
The middle of nowhere, a changing definition
From the August 2006 issue of enRoute magazine:
Middle of Nowhere isn’t a physical location. Not anymore. In this era, when we have Google Mapped every corner of the earth (and some other planets), almost no place is so remote it’s truly nowhere.
No, we think the Middle of Nowhere is a state of mind. It’s the satisfied pleasure-tinged-with-insider’s-delight that you feel when you discover something pretty great in a place where you didn’t know it thrived. So that when you experience this thing, whether it’s in the middle of a major city or a cornfield, you think, This? Is here? I had no idea!
I encountered this sensation in Minneapolis last week with the Mill City Museum, a place I didn’t know existed in a location I was intimately familiar with. It happens all the time in NYC too…there’s always some great little spot you haven’t discovered in Central Park, a shop in Chinatown selling who knows what, or even a place just around the corner from the apartment that you’ve lived in for three years that, unbeknownst to you, has served fantastic pot stickers all this time. (via moon river)
The politically incorrect alphabet. A is for
The politically incorrect alphabet. A is for abortion, B is for bomb, C is for cigarettes…
Faces are now being searched at US
Faces are now being searched at US airports for suspicious microexpressions. Psychologist Paul Ekman helped set up the program and was previously one of Malcolm Gladwell’s subjects in The Naked Face and Blink.
Three Mexican fisherman were found alive after 11
Three Mexican fisherman were found alive after 11 months of drifting on the Pacific. They survived on raw fish, rain water, and sea birds. Immediately after being resuced, “they chowed down”. (via bb)
Classic Sesame Street video clip on how crayons are made.
Classic Sesame Street video clip on how crayons are made.
Great interview with David Remnick, conducted just
Great interview with David Remnick, conducted just after he’d taken over at the New Yorker. I love this guy. (via emdashes)
Dan’s a web designer and wonders what
Dan’s a web designer and wonders what he would have done for a living 100 years ago. Building radios? Wheelwright? Newsagent?
Mill City panorama, take 1
Here’s my first attempt at a panorama of the Mill City Museum and the surrounding area:
Here’s a larger version (3000 x 912, 312 KB).
I’m not entirely satisfied with this version. I used a shareware program for OS X called DoubleTake to stitch the images together and it’s not suited for this kind of scene. Too much of the image turned out blurry & fuzzy and you have little control over which pieces of the image take precedent over the others. Some of this was probably user error and on some parts of the image (when there were less pieces involved), it did a wonderful job. I’m going to stitch a version in Photoshop by hand (and put a black background behind it) to see how it compares.
Update: Lots of photo stitching suggestions from people. Jake turned me onto Autostitch a few weeks ago, but alas it’s not available for the Mac, nor do I have one of those fancy MacBooks on which to run Parallels. Calico is an OS X app that uses the Autostitch code, I may check that out. Photoshop CS has a built-in Photomerge tool that does panoramas. Hugin is a GPLed image stitcher that works on Windows and OS X. (thx galen, dan, jake, arlo, joe, glen, jason, and nicholas)
One of the three statues on the
One of the three statues on the top of the Washburn Lofts in Minneapolis unwittingly represents the period in the city’s history when it led the world in the production of prosthetic limbs. See also The Mill City Museum. (thx, paul)
With math immortality, the Fields Medal, and $1
With math immortality, the Fields Medal, and $1 million on the line, an eccentric Russian mathematician comes from out of nowhere, proves the Poincare conjecture, and then disappears again. A whodunnit with thousands of pages of mathematical formulas.
Future Rock Hall is calculating current artists’
Future Rock Hall is calculating current artists’ chances of getting into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame using your votes and a set of predictive criteria. According to the site, the Beastie Boys currently have an 82% chance for election to the Hall in 2007.
When Computers Were Human, “the sad but
When Computers Were Human, “the sad but lyrical story of workers who gladly did the hard labor of research calculation in the hope that they might be part of the scientific community”.
Sketchbook of every piece of art in
Sketchbook of every piece of art in the Museum of Modern Art. $20.
Carl Zimmer on the origin of whales,
Carl Zimmer on the origin of whales, baleen and non. “Baleen whales evolved baleen long after splitting off from other whales. Their baleen-free ancestors apparently thrived as leopard-seal-like hunters for millions of years.”
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