In this week’s installment of the hot
In this week’s installment of the hot new show, Secret Agent: Beijing, Maciej turns the wrong way down the street and ends up with a whole bunch of new friends in law enforcement.
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Entries for August 2006
Helvetica, The Movie! “The film is studded
Helvetica, The Movie! “The film is studded with the stars of typography: Erik Spiekermann, Matthew Carter, Massimo Vignelli, Michael Bierut, Wim Crouwel, Hermann Zapf, Stefan Sagmeister, Jonathan Hoefler, Tobias Frere-Jones, Experimental Jetset.”
How I Blog
Seth Godin, who ruminates for a living, wrote a little something about how ideas are transmitted last year:
For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.
No one “sends” an idea unless:
a. they understand it
b. they want it to spread
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefitsNo one “gets” an idea unless:
a. the first impression demands further investigation
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time
Seth hits the nail right on the head with this. When I’m deciding what links to post here, I’m essentially curating ideas, collecting them to “send” to you (and to myself, in a way). And unconsciously, these seven points factor into my decision on what to post here.
a. they understand it - I read everything I post and attempt to understand an article enough to represent it accurately when linking to it.
b. they want it to spread - I pick links and write posts based on ideas that I think are in some way important, meaningful, relevent, or good for the soul. And sure, I want those ideas to be more widely known or enjoyed, even if it’s something as simple as someone getting a needed chuckle from a video of a monkey teasing a dog.
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind - This factors into anyone’s motivations for anything. In George Orwell’s 1947 essay Why I Write, his #1 reason is “sheer egoism”.
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits - If I wanted to, I could post 30 links or more a day without too much more effort on my part, but in this case, part of sending the idea is making sure the reader has enough attention to consider it.
a. the first impression demands further investigation - I spend a lot of time on getting the description of some linked text, photo, or video just right, so that the reader has a good idea of what they’re getting into. Choosing a 1-2 sentence pull-quote that accurately represents the idea of an article is key in getting people’s attention in a productive way. “This is an awesome link” is only going to cut it so many times; you need to tell people what the link is and give people an honest reason to click.
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea - I assume visitors to the site are regular readers and that they have a good sense of what happens here, but I try to limit my reliance on jargon or “in-crowd” references so that everyone can follow along.
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time - If I do all that other stuff right, hopefully you’ll trust me enough to be receptive to the ideas I’m sending you. And if not, you probably won’t trust me for long.
Like I said, all this was pretty much happening unconsciously. I’ve worked consciously on bits and pieces of it, but until I read Seth’s post, I didn’t know that this was the end-to-end process.
Anil Dash interviews Paul Lindner, one of
Anil Dash interviews Paul Lindner, one of the creators of Gopher and current Six Apart employee. Here’s my recent post on Gopher.
Top 50 movies (by gross) that were never
Top 50 movies (by gross) that were never in wide release in the US. Top 3: Rocky Horror, Boyz n the Hood, and Royal Tenenbaums.
“The Rolling Stones weren’t original. Bach wasn’t
“The Rolling Stones weren’t original. Bach wasn’t original. Einstein wasn’t original. Show me someone who is original, creative, self-expressive, and I’ll show you someone who is boring.” Pop Idol judges understand Plato
Preview of Leopard, Apple’s newest version of
Preview of Leopard, Apple’s newest version of OS X, due out in spring 2007. Some of that demo stuff was *really* corny; reminded me of the first demos of OS X back in the early 00s. Thoughts?
Update: Watch Jobs’ WWDC keynote.
Thought-provoking essay on hating America. “I find
Thought-provoking essay on hating America. “I find that my cultural observations about Guatemala are usually really about me. ‘These people are mean’ means ‘I am lonely.’ ‘Those people are loud’ means ‘I feel excluded.’ ‘This country is great’ means ‘I love being unemployed and drunk.’ When I start talking about AMERICA on the return, I’m usually still just talking about myself.”
MacRumors is updating this page live at
MacRumors is updating this page live at WWDC. (WWDC is an acronym for Apple Is Announcing Cool New Stuff Today).
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters, or why
The Biology of B-Movie Monsters, or why you just can’t scale living things up (a la King Kong) or down (like in Fantastic Voyage) without consequence. One key problem: with a theoretical 20 foot tall human, mass increases much faster than bone strength and at some point, his skeleton wouldn’t be able to support the weight.
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society
The Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society recently included a report on the 28-hour day. “There are apparently plenty of advantages to switching to a 28-hour day, including four-day work weeks, fewer daily chores, longer weekends.” This diary of someone who lives a 28-hour day is interesting.
Wes Anderson’s new film (after The Fantastic
Wes Anderson’s new film (after The Fantastic Mr. Fox) will be called The Darjeeling Limited. Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman are writing it, with Owen Wilson, Adrien Brody, and Schwartzman to star.
No surprise really that Joe Francis, the
No surprise really that Joe Francis, the guy behind Girls Gone Wild, is a turd. During the course of writing this piece, Claire Hoffman is physically assaulted by Francis and we hear of an alleged unreported rape by Francis of a 18-yo girl. “I’m sorry, baby, give me a kiss. Give me a kiss.” Yuck-o.
With Clickdensity, you put a bit a
With Clickdensity, you put a bit a JavaScript on your site and it tracks where your visitors are clicking and gives you a heat map of the results. I had the idea for this about a year ago and was going to write it up for the site to see if anyone wanted to collaborate on a prototype, but never got around to it. Nice to see the idea implemented so well.
Works of fiction (books mosly) which deal significantly with mathematics.
Works of fiction (books mosly) which deal significantly with mathematics.
Today is the WWW’s 15th birthday. “Links
Today is the WWW’s 15th birthday. “Links to the fledgling computer code for the www were put on the alt.hypertext discussion group so others could download it and play with it. On that day the web went world wide.” Here’s the alt.hypertext posting where Tim Berners-Lee releases the WWW to the world.
Google Trends: Ubuntu vs. OS X. Ubuntu
Google Trends: Ubuntu vs. OS X. Ubuntu pulled ahead in early 2006, but it still has a way to go to catch “Mac” though. The trend predates the Pilgrim/Doctorow switch…I wonder what it’ll look like after that.
Fascinating list of terms that Jeopardy fans
Fascinating list of terms that Jeopardy fans use to describe the game and different betting strategies. (via thih)
Design Within Reach is screening The Eames
Design Within Reach is screening The Eames Film Festival, featuring the short films of Charles and Ray Eames, at cities across the US. Unfortunately for me, a small town called New York City doesn’t seem to be on the schedule. :(
Amazon is selling web site thumbnails for $0.20
Amazon is selling web site thumbnails for $0.20 per 1000. That’s cheap…and totally undercuts my planned thumbnail business. Instead, I’m switching gears and targetting the luxury thumbnail market; I’m thinking thumbnails printed on letterpress hand-delivered to your home/office. (via pb)
The rules of cricket explained so that
The rules of cricket explained so that even an American can understand them. Another take by Kevin Guilfoile, this one with pies.
After Deam Kamen introduced his scooter, “segway”
After Deam Kamen introduced his scooter, “segway” became a popular misspelling for “segue”. Thirty years earlier, Thomas Pynchon used the same spelling in Gravity’s Rainbow: “But segway into the Roxbury hillside.”
Dwyane Wade highlight reel. The one where
Dwyane Wade highlight reel. The one where he goes between the legs while splitting the pick and roll defense is insane (around 2:43). (via th)
Part two of a conversation between Jesse
Part two of a conversation between Jesse James Garrett and Steven Johnson. Here’s part one. (thx, kevin)
Web 2.0, a definition of sorts
37signals recently polled the customers of their online project management application and one of the questions asked what Web 2.0 meant to them. They’ve posted 500 answers to that question on their site; it’s an interesting read. I decided to do a quick and dirty analysis of the most frequently used words by the respondents, hoping that the result would provide a collective definition of sorts for the term Web 2.0. By the time I’d finished (with several timeouts and distractive blog-related detours), I went back to the thread and saw that Jacob Kaplan-Moss had already completed an analysis. Here are his top 15 words:
web - 348
ajax - 107
applications - 93
new - 78
user - 71
apps - 44
desktop - 40
sites - 37
people - 36
internet - 36
content - 34
think - 33
software - 31
services - 30
technologies - 29
Just for kicks, here’s my top 30:
web: 347
ajax: 105
more: 99
applications: 92
new: 77
user: 69
use: 47
apps: 43
desktop: 39
sites: 38
internet: 35
people: 35
content: 33
think: 32
software: 30
using: 30
etc: 29
services: 29
next: 28
technologies: 28
interactive: 28
generation: 27
application: 25
marketing: 25
websites: 23
better: 23
social: 23
users: 22
hype: 22
buzzword: 21
interfaces: 20
For some reason (my shoddy programming skills are a likely culprit), my word counts are slightly different than Jacob’s, but they’re close. I also left in a few words that he removed but that I thought were relevant, like “more”, “use”, “using”, and “etc”. Here are a few more interesting words and their frequency counts:
community: 17
collaboration: 13
companies: 13
bubble: 10
ruby: 9
rounded: 9
gradients: 8
rails: 7
37signals: 6
tagging: 6
flickr: 5
wikis: 5
overused: 5
o’reilly: 5
hyped: 5
overhyped: 5
Not sure this provides much of a definition, but it’s fun to play around with.
Big ol’ obvious caveat: I performed a straight-up word frequency analysis which did not take into account the context of particular words (e.g. no distinction between different uses of words like “think”: “I think Web 2.0 sucks” and “Web 2.0 products make users think”), phrase frequency (“web 2.0”, “next generation”, “rounded corners”), or anything like that. This obviously limits the utility of the analysis; hence “quick and dirty”.
Update: Perhaps a better “definition” of Web 2.0 comes from the related tags at del.icio.us:
ajax
tools
web
blog
webdesign
software
design
social
programming
javascript
business
Not bad.
Update: del.icio.us did this analysis back in November 2005. (thx, maciej)
New tagline for kottke.org: “bringing you
New tagline for kottke.org: “bringing you the world’s finest treadmill music videos”.
Nice little history of Warren Moon, the
Nice little history of Warren Moon, the NFL’s first prominent black quarterback, on the occasion of his induction into the NFL Hall of Fame. (via a.whole)
Nordic geopolitics
Heading into dinner last night, I believed with certainty that Finland was one of the Scandinavian countries. I rebuffed Mr. Jones’ attempts to disabuse me of that notion before dessert arrived, but it wasn’t until this morning that I checked into the matter and found that he may be correct.
The Minneapolis Star Tribune investigated the issue back in January, finding that there’s some controversy, even among the staff at the Finnish Embassy in Washington D.C.:
I called the Finnish Embassy in Washington, D.C., where press aide Mari Poyhtari started by saying Finland is part of Scandinavia, but then someone in the background disagreed and she corrected herself. The most accurate term is Fenno-Scandinavia or the Nordic countries, Poyhtari said. But, she admitted, “We always say we’re part of Scandinavia.”
The Wikipedia page on Scandinavia, the result of a vigorous discussion on the topic, indicates that there are several possible arrangements of Scandinavian countries, depending on the grouping criteria used and who you’re talking to.
- Geographically, the Scandinavian peninsula includes mainland Norway, Sweden, and part of Finland.
- In the region, the common definition includes Norway, Denmark, and Sweden.
- Outside of the region, the term often includes not only Norway, Sweden, Denmark, and Finland but also Iceland, a grouping commonly called the Nordic countries.
- Linguistically speaking (pardon the pun), the Finnish language is unrelated to Norwegian, Danish, and Swedish, which is an argument for the cultural exclusion of Finland from Scandinavia.
So there you go, clear as mud. Probably best to avoid the issue altogether in the future by using the term Nordic instead of Scandinavian. All look same anyway.
Update: Underbelly notes that this “issue is in no way limited to Scandinavians”:
It’s the kind of muddiness you just have to expect when you consider any culture. Was Cleopatra an Egyptian? Are the Tasmanians British? What did the Byzanatines have in mind when they described themselves as “The Romans” while fighting wars against, well, Rome?
(thx, jack)
Josephine Rose Wilkie! Congratulations Mark and Tam!
Josephine Rose Wilkie! Congratulations Mark and Tam!
Part two of an interview with Paul
Part two of an interview with Paul Buckley, a creative director for Penguin, on the topic of book cover design. Part one is here.
Orgasm or excellent marinara? Can you tell
Orgasm or excellent marinara? Can you tell the difference between the faces of Food Network celebrities and porn stars? Might be a little NSFW depending on where you W. (via ed)
Vanity Fair has a report on the
Vanity Fair has a report on the military history of 9/11 (i.e. what the Air Force did to find/stop the hijacked planes), including audio tapes from the NORAD control room. (thx, andrew)
The Atlantic Monthly tackles the subject of
The Atlantic Monthly tackles the subject of Wikipedia, with a thorough telling of its beginning, one that’s lighter on Jimmy Wales’ role than usual.
Lionel Shriver: bad book covers happen because
Lionel Shriver: bad book covers happen because people use computers to design them and don’t know how to draw. What, you can’t draw with a computer? Not sure I see the cause and effect that Shriver is talking about here.
If you’re reading kottke.org at work
If you’re reading kottke.org at work and shouldn’t be, you might want to read the site as if it looked like Microsoft Word. Make other sites Work Friendly here.
Could global warming kill the internet? “The
Could global warming kill the internet? “The internet is a big network of servers, and servers are hot. They devour electricity, they run hot and they mainline air conditioning. When the global thermostat goes up, the servers start going down.” (via migurski)
Watch the first hour ever broadcast on
Watch the first hour ever broadcast on MTV. Of course, you have to wade through MTV’s crappy interface and, oops, you can’t look at it on a Mac because “Microsoft’s Windows Media Player Plug-in for Macintosh does not support Windows DRM”. Thanks, assholes. Hopefully this will show up on YouTube soon, DRM or no. (via girlhacker)
Notes from a talk that Josh Schachter
Notes from a talk that Josh Schachter did about del.icio.us and web apps. “When you track spammers, don’t give them any feedback.” (via josh)
Three of the world’s longest-running scientific experiments,
Three of the world’s longest-running scientific experiments, including an electric bell that’s been ringing since 1840 and a self-winding barometrically powered clock.
Update: Another long-running experiment: “Researchers at Michigan State University are growing and examining seedlings that have sprouted from seeds buried 120 years ago on campus. They’ve been doing this roughly every five years since 1879, when William Beal, a professor of botany at what then was Michigan Agricultural College, buried them in anticipation of learning how long seeds can remain viable.” (thx, susan)
Update: There are several “long now” experiments at Rothamsted Research involving soil and fertilizer. (via kircher)
This image of the participants of a 1927
This image of the participants of a 1927 conference on quantum mechanics sets the record for the most brainpower in one photograph. Schrodinger, Pauli, Heisenberg, Dirac, Compton, Bohr, Einstein, Planck, Curie, de Broglie, and Lorenz, all in one place.
Update: A Great Day in Harlem depicts several of the world’s top jazz musicians. More here. (thx, jim & greg)
Steven Johnson lists Five Things All Sane
Steven Johnson lists Five Things All Sane People Agree On About Blogs And Mainstream Journalism (So Can We Stop Talking About It Now?) Like Steven, I get frustrated with the rehashing of the same old points around this issue.
Obituary of Rupert Pole, with whom Anais
Obituary of Rupert Pole, with whom Anais Nin carried on one half of a bicoastal bigamous relationship. “Both men apparently chose to believe her lies, which became so numerous that she wrote them down on index cards and locked them in a box so that she could keep her stories straight.”
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