Clever demographic data visualizations using faces ripped
Clever demographic data visualizations using faces ripped out of the SkyMall catalog.
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Entries for February 2007
A paper on the tradeoff in baseball
A paper on the tradeoff in baseball between home runs and hitting for average that I don’t fully understand but seems interesting. “Both models find a significant and negative relationship between home runs per at-bat and contact rate.” (thx, aaron)
Update to the whole annoying Flickr/Yahoo
Update to the whole annoying Flickr/Yahoo login business: Heather Champ is personally giving refunds to people with pro accounts who don’t want to switch their login to Yahoo.
Update: Just so this is clear, Heather is refunding people out of her own personal PayPal account and funds. Anyone who takes her up on it gets a punch a nose from me.
Update: I didn’t read this carefully enough…it’s not Heather’s personal money. And no punch in the nose, although I might poke you in the ribs or something. (thx, rich)
Since people are “poor at predicting what
Since people are “poor at predicting what will make us happy in the future” (the term of art is miswanting), perhaps careful career planning is a waste of time. “The best strategy for career planning is this: make your best guess, try it out and don’t be surprised if you don’t like it.” I’ve done 0 minutes of career planning and I’m happy with the results. See also The Chaos Theory of Career Development.
This just in: Conan O’Brien defeats Serena
This just in: Conan O’Brien defeats Serena Williams at Wii Tennis.
How to report scientific research to a general audience.
How to report scientific research to a general audience.
Reading at a 4th grade level
We’re leaving tomorrow for a trip of the relaxing sort, so I went to the bookstore this morning to collect some reading material. I had decided not to read anything that felt too much like work or that I had to think about. What I needed was fiction like television: passive but engaging. Having procured a paperback copy of The Da Vinci Code in the B section, I wandered over to the Rs. Robbins. Roth. Rowlandson. Salinger. Hmm. No luck in the Teen section either. Finally I hit paydirt in the Kids section: the 1085 pages of the first three years of Harry Potter’s adventures at Hogwarts.
Perfect.
So, I’ll see you in a week. Posting will be light until then, but feel free to enjoy some random posts from the last 9 years of kottke.org, peruse the Best Links of 2006 list again, look at some of my photos from Anguilla in 2004, dream of NYC in the snow (will it ever again?), imagine if Manhattan visited other US cities, or visit the many fine sites in the sidebar of the front page. I’ll send you a postcard when I get back.
Pairing San Francisco neighborhoods with New York
Pairing San Francisco neighborhoods with New York neighborhoods. For instance, North Beach —> Little Italy, Hayes Valley —> Chelsea, and Mission —> Wiliamsburg.
This cool new commercial for the VW
This cool new commercial for the VW Phaeton features professional-grade shadow puppetry. (via youngna)
Each day, Brass Tacks Design chooses an
Each day, Brass Tacks Design chooses an exemplary newspaper front page and explains why it’s so good. (via newsdesigner)
Photography of Tin Tabernacles and Other Buildings
Photography of Tin Tabernacles and Other Buildings by Alasdair Ogilvie. “Largely unnoticed and ignored, corrugated iron buildings can be discovered scattered across Britain and the Empire. […] With not existing infrastructures, these newly created communities had an urgent need for churches, chapels and schools. Corrugated iron buildings fulfilled this demand.” More photos at Ogilvie’s site.
LED lightbulbs are expensive, but they last
LED lightbulbs are expensive, but they last a long time and use relatively little power. One LED lightbulb costs $35 but lasts 60,000 hours, during which time you’d have to buy 60 incandescent bulbs (at a cost of $40) and the difference in the cost of the electricity over the 60,000 hours is $360 for the incandescent versus $12 for the LED bulb. (via a.whole)
Update: Something to keep in mind…the above comparison is a bit apples and oranges because as the page states, the LED lightbulbs have a “reduced light output” compared to regular bulbs. The featured LED bulb only puts out 31 lumens of brightness while a 60 W incandescent puts out 850 lumens. (thx, kevin)
“iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that
“iConcertCal is a free iTunes plug-in that monitors your music library and generates a personalized calendar of upcoming concerts in your city.” (thx janelle)
I wanted to write more about this,
I wanted to write more about this, but I don’t have the throughput right now and the article is 5 days old at this point, so this shorter post will have to do. Michael Pollan, who is doing some of the best food writing out there right now, wrote an article in the most recent NY Times Magazine on how we should be thinking about eating. In it, he blames the rise of nutritionism (the emphasis on the nutrients contained in food rather than the food itself) for our increasingly poor diets. This goes in the must-read pile for sure, if only for the great “silence of the yams” pun. If you absolutely can’t handle the length, skip to the “Beyond Nutritionism” section at the end for Pollan’s rules of thumb for eating, my favorite of which is #5: “Pay more, eat less.”
Update: Meg summarizes Pollan’s rules of thumb with some notes of her own.
The latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter
The latest Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, is available for pre-order at Amazon and is currently the #1 seller in books.
Daylight saving change and computer systems
Not too many people are paying attention, but the Energy Policy Act of 2005 lengthened daylight saving time by four weeks in the US. Instead of beginning the first Sunday of April and running through the last Sunday in October, daylight saving time will now stretch from the second Sunday in March to the first Sunday in November. The Washington Post has an article today about the change and what impact it might have on automated systems:
The change takes effect this year — on March 11 — and it has angered airlines, delighted candy makers and sent thousands of technicians scrambling to make sure countless automated systems switch their clocks at the right moment. Unless changed by one method or another, many systems will remain programmed to read the calendar and start daylight saving time on its old date in April, not its new one in March.
The article mentions that older Microsoft products like Windows XP SP1 and Windows NT4 might require manual updates and Daring Fireball has had a few updates about how the switch effects Mac users, including this piece at TidBITS. But what about everything else? Is the version of Movable Type I’m using going to make the adjustment? What about Wordpress? Perl? Ruby? PHP? Java? Linux? I’m sure the current versions of all these programs and languages address the issue, but are there fixes and patches for those running old versions of Perl on their server?
If you’ve got any information about programs, applications, and languages affected by the change and how to address the problem, leave a comment on this thread. I’ll update the post as information comes in.
Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker’s legal writer,
Jeffrey Toobin, the New Yorker’s legal writer, has penned a piece about Google’s book scanning efforts and the legal challenges it faces. Interestingly, both Google and the publishers who are suing them say that the lawsuit is basically a business negotiation tactic. However, according to Larry Lessig, settling the lawsuit might not be the best thing for anyone outside the lawsuit: “Google wants to be able to get this done, and get permission to resume scanning copyrighted material at all the libraries. For the publishers, if Google gives them anything at all, it creates a practical precedent, if not a legal precedent, that no one has the right to scan this material without their consent. That’s a win for them. The problem is that even though a settlement would be good for Google and good for the publishers, it would be bad for everyone else.”
Jargon watch! Gaysted (adj.): “when heterosexual people
Jargon watch! Gaysted (adj.): “when heterosexual people get so wasted, they slip into seemingly gay acts”.
Video of some fellows doing The Charleston
Video of some fellows doing The Charleston to Around the World by Daft Punk. (via buzzfeed)
Update: The two fellows are Al Minns and Leon James…here’s the original video. In the final 30 seconds or so of the video, they almost look like they’re poppin’ and lockin’. (thx, paul)
The first thing ever sold on eBay
The first thing ever sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.00.
British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had high
British celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay had high hopes for his new restaurant in NYC, but it garnered only two stars from the New York Times on Thursday in a review that called the restaurant cautious, polite, predictable, and timid. NYC food site Eater reports that copies of the NY Times distributed at the hotel in which Ramsay’s restaurant is located had the Dining section, and therefore the disappointing review, removed from them.
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