This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
Opening credits for Down to Earth, a show on TBS in the early 80s (it was their first original series). The opening jingle was so catchy that I can still sing most of it even though I haven’t heard it in 20 years.
An appreciation of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and William Shatner.
This Kirk is a melancholy man who feels older than he looks. “Gallavanting around the galaxy is a game for the young, Doctor,” he tells McCoy. His voice and gait confirm that his best days are behind him. En route to the Enterprise to conduct a training mission, he can hardly contain his disdain for his new job. “I hate inspections,” he tells his helmsman. He steps aboard his old starship a shadow of his warrior self, a sad figurehead trapped in a small world of his own making. Redemption is coming, but it will cost him.
New York has a decreasing number of Jewish delis, but the reopened Second Avenue Deli will be among them.
Federman said that his clientele has gone from “95 percent Jewish to 50-50” and that changing with the times is part of business. (He now sells three varieties of tofu “cream cheese.”) “I think Second Avenue Deli, Katz’s, us, we’re all making our little sphere of the world a better place,” he said. “Doctors and lawyers basically live off other people’s misery. Part of the perk of working here is people coming in and being so happy.”
The deli’s general manager recalled his favorite customers at the old location:
But my favorite was when we had five nuns eating matzoh balls served by a Lebanese waiter — in a kosher deli. That’s New York.
See also a writeup of a panel on Jewish Cuisine and the Evolution of the Jewish Deli on Serious Eats.
What will air travel in the US look like in ten years? Five industry insiders respond.
NYC’s Chinatown is Hillary Clinton country.
In April, a single [Clinton] fundraiser in an area long known for its gritty urban poverty yielded a whopping $380,000. When Sen. John F. Kerry ran for president in 2004, he received $24,000 from Chinatown.
Hot in Japan: wearable hiding places.
By holding the sheet open and stepping to the side of the road, she showed how a woman walking alone could elude pursuers — by disguising herself as a vending machine.
The manhole bag is my favorite…”a purse that can hide your valuables by unfolding to look like a round sewer cover”.
Richard Rhodes’ Arsenals of Folly is the third book in what is now a series of “Making of” books about the atomic age, picking up where The Making of the Atomic Bomb (for which Rhodes won the Pulitzer) and Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb (which should have won a Pulitzer and is one of my favorite non-fiction books ever) left off.
In a narrative that reads like a thriller, Rhodes reveals how the Reagan administration’s unprecedented arms buildup in the early 1980s led ailing Soviet leader Yuri Andropov to conclude that Reagan must be preparing for a nuclear war. In the fall of 1983, when NATO staged a larger than usual series of field exercises that included, uniquely, a practice run-up to a nuclear attack, the Soviet military came very close to launching a defensive first strike on Europe and North America. With Soviet aircraft loaded with nuclear bombs warming up on East German runways, U.S. intelligence organizations finally realized the danger.
Random House has posted a portion of the first chapter from which I won’t quote because Rhodes’ storytelling style is nigh impossible to excerpt; he starts the story on page one and doesn’t relent until the final paragraphs. Like the above quote says, his nonfiction reads like a novel…reminds me of Tom Clancy’s books but meticulously researched and true.
Aleksandra Mir’s Newsroom 1986-2000 project features huge hand-drawn reproductions of tabloid front pages. Show is up through Oct 27 in NYC. (via quipsologies)
Rita Skeeter J.K. Rowling:
Albus Dumbledore is gay and had fallen in love with fellow wizard and friend, Gellert Grindelwald.
Fan fiction writers, you know what to do.
A Florida scientist has trained a brain consisting of cultured rat cells to fly a simulated F-22 fighter jet. [Insert “I, for one, welcome our new rat brain pilot overlords” joke here.]
To control the simulated aircraft, the neurons first receive information from the computer about flight conditions: whether the plane is flying straight and level or is tilted to the left or to the right. The neurons then analyze the data and respond by sending signals to the plane’s controls. Those signals alter the flight path and new information is sent to the neurons, creating a feedback system.
FYI, this story is a couple of years old…if that matters to you.
On the SuperSpatial blog, Martin Gittins reviews a TV series on Venice, Italy, “the city destroyed by its own beauty”.
With the indigenous population dwindling to less than 50,000, and the oldest average age in Europe, da Mosto worries for the future of the city, as he brings his children up in what has become essentially a theme park for the hordes of visitors that cross the bridge link into the city, or pull up in the huge cruise ships that stop-over in Venice.
The danger for a city as a theatre or theme-park is that it becomes a stage set, a backdrop. This inevitably treats citizens as actors, there for others amusement. This leads to a simulated city as Baudrillard would have it, a city of the hyperreal as Umberto Eco might tell us. What happens when the audience is not there?
I’ve never visited Venice, but Paris shares some of the same traits. Obviously Paris is a large cosmopolity with much more than tourism going on, but the central tourist part of the city always feels a lot like a museum to me, moreso than other large cities I’ve visted. The city is simultaneously Paris — the capital of France, host to international corporations, home to an increasingly diverse 2.1 million people, cultural center — and also Ah, Paris™, an experience comprised of a certain style of architecture, cafes spilling out into tiny streets, romantic walks along the Seine, the French waiter, macaroons, the Notre Dame, les bouquinistes, baguettes, etc. That the two identities coexist in the same space and time, one within the other (Paris as cultural hypercube?), creates the potential for some real cognitive dissonance for the frequent tourist or long-term visitor attempting to straddle both worlds.
The Erowid Experience Vaults are chock full of people describing their drug experiences; all stories are reviewed by editors. This fellow ingested mushrooms and a bunch of mescaline:
At this point, with all the Canadian biting flys and other insects accumulating on my face, I experienced death and went through several stages such as decomposition, becoming earth, growth into new plants, and spiritual reincarnation in the depths of outer-space as almost a gasseous thought floating around and observing all the cycles of everything in, on or about earth. I at once understood everything. In the middle of the night I realized that I was myself again, and bluntly stated, ‘I’m done.’ to the other members of the group. They welcomed me back and I appologized for anything I may have said or done.
Wait, you can get high on nutmeg?
Columbia Law School professor Tim Wu has written a really interesting 5-part series on Slate about “the laws we are allowed to break in America and why”.
Tolerated lawbreaking is almost always a response to a political failure — the inability of our political institutions to adapt to social change or reach a rational compromise that reflects the interests of the nation and all concerned parties. That’s why the American statutes are full of laws that no one wants to see fully enforced — or even enforced at all.
Topics include copyright, obsenity, and drug legalization.
How to make clear ice cubes: boil filtered water twice to eliminate dissolved air and minerals.
This week’s Layer Tennis match between Naz Hamid and Chris Glass is just starting. Rosecrans Baldwin commentating.
Online shoe seller Zappos demonstrates how to provide customer service on a human level:
I was just back and not ready to deal with that, so I replied that my mom had died but that I’d send the shoes as soon as I could. They emailed back that they had arranged with UPS to pick up the shoes, so I wouldn’t have to take the time to do it myself. I was so touched. That’s going against corporate policy.
And that’s not even the best part…read down to the end. (via 37signals)
Chuck Adams is one of the few remaining Morse code aficionados in the world. Adams records audiobooks in Morse, chats with others in Morse via ham radio, and can transcribe Morse at 140 words/minute.
Earlier this year, Mr. Adams sent Barry Kutner, a 50-year-old ophthalmologist from Newtown, Pa., and another world-class coder, a 100-words-per-minute version of the book. To Mr. Adams’s chagrin, Mr. Kutner wrote an email back pointing out that the gap between words was eight dits long, instead of the prescribed seven. At that pace, a dit lasts 1.2 one-thousandths of a second.
See also: Tales of the telegraph.
Yanksfan vs Soxfan mines the NY Times archive and turns up a 1914 article that mentions a youngster named Babe Ruth:
“Babe” Ruth, a youngster, opposed the Giants, who made nine hits off him. Four double plays, all started by Claude Derrick, who handled twelve outs of the thirteen chances, kept the Giants from scoring more runs.
YvS and Soccer Dad also found a series that the Times did on another youngster, Manny Ramirez, back when Manny being Manny meant hitting .650 in his senior year in high school.
This video features a nerdy-looking Seattle Sonics fan rapping about Dirk Nowitzki, Kobe Bryant, and Steve Nash. I know that doesn’t sound very funny, but it somehow is. Very. (via truehoop)
Lagerfeld Confidential is a documentary film about Karl Lagerfeld, the first such film done with Lagerfeld’s authorization. It’s playing at Film Forum in NYC later this month.
Photograph of the graves of Vincent and Theodore van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. (Don’t quite know why I’m posting this…it just struck me is all.)
It’s worth sitting through the first several minutes of this documentary on the speech patterns of Edwardian-era Britons to hear Joan Washington, the host and an accent expert, speak with several different British accents.
David Pogue has been keeping a list of questions that he doesn’t have answers for; some of them are pretty interesting.
* Why is Wi-Fi free at cheap hotels, but $14 a night at expensive ones?
* Do P.R. people really expect anyone to believe that the standard, stilted, second-paragraph C.E.O. quote was really uttered by a human being?
* Why doesn’t someone start a cellphone company that bills you only for what you use? That model works O.K. for the electricity, gas and water companies — and people would beat a path to its door.
* Why doesn’t everyone have lights that turn off automatically when the room is empty?
Tattoos for blind people can be made by placing implants under the skin to create embossed text on the skin.
Update: Somewhat related is braille graffiti. (thx, jake)
Improv Everywhere’s latest mission: 111 topless men shopping at Abercrombie and Fitch, a store that features a shirtless male greeter and tons of shirtless male advertising.
A pair of well-to-do auto enthusiasts named Alex Roy and Dave Maher set the unofficial record for crossing the US by car: 31 hours, 4 minutes, faster than the old record of 32 hours, 7 minutes.
According to Yates and his fellow Cannonballers, trying to beat that record today is pointless. Their argument goes something like this: Cannonball records were set back when the free-wheelin’ ’70s hooked up with the greed-is-good ’80s for fat lines of cocaine and unprotected sex. But these, brother, are Patriot Act days - executive-privilege end times in which no rogue deed goes untracked, no E-ZPass unlogged, no roaming cell phone unmonitored by perihelion satellite. Big Brother is definitely watching. Big Speed, the old Cannonballers say, is a quaint, 20th-century idea, like pay phones or print magazines.
Roy was inspired to take up fast driving by the short film C’était un Rendez-vous, where Claude Lelouch races through Paris at breakneck speeds to meet his sweetheart in Montmartre. Here’s the route they took, another piece on the record in the NY Times, and a book by Roy on his exploits. This is the sort of thing that is really, really cool up until the moment Roy’s tricked out BMW makes contact with a family minivan at 120mph…and then, not so much.
Update: Here’s a video of the pair zooming along on the freeway. Comment on YouTube:
Those guys look like they’re doing about 90-95… BFD. You see that all the time going up and down I-5 and I-95.. I once was doing about 90 down I-95 and got passed by a HOUSE on a flatbed truck. (yawn)
iRobot, the makers of the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, also makes a pool cleaning robot.
A review of the script for Where the Wild Things Are, written by Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze (the script, not the review):
Where the Wild Things Are is filled with richly imagined psychological detail, and the screenplay for this live-action film simply becomes a longer and more moving version of what Maurice Sendak’s book has always been at heart: a book about a lonely boy leaving the emotional terrain of boyhood behind.
Second trailer for the could-be-amazing I’m Not There, a movie about Bob Dylan, starring Christian Bale, Heath Ledger, Cate Blanchett, and three other actors as Bob Dylan. Not very related: would any of Christian Bale’s characters be any good in bed?
The half-life of irregular verbs scales with the square root of usage frequency. “Be” and “have” will be irregular for a long time but “dive”, “sting”, and “wring” have less time before they’re regularized.
The past-tense of regular verbs end in “ed.” For example, the past-tense of chide was chode, but has now regularized into chided.
Another recent study has found that the evolution of words decreases with usage. Nature has the abstract of the paper and the NY Times has a short piece as well.
“Bird,” for example, takes many disparate forms across other Indo-European languages: oiseau in French, vogel in German and so on. But other words, like the word for the number after one, have hardly evolved at all: two, deux (French) and dos (Spanish) are very similar, derived from the same ancestral sound.
In the ongoing battle between the iTunes Music Store and Amazon’s MP3 store, Amazon is giving a 20% referral fee to their associates for each song sold through the end of the year. Wow. That’s $1.80 on a $8.99 album…I wonder if Amazon’s selling these for below cost (like they did with Harry Potter.) (via nelson)
According to the person who filed a re-examination request, the US Patent Office has rejected a number of broad claims related to Amazon’s one-click patent.
In its Office Action released 9 October 2007, the Patent Office found that the prior art I found and submitted completely anticipated the broadest claims of the patent, U.S. Patent No. 5,960,411.
The patent is not off the books yet…Amazon has a chance to respond before that happens. People have been waiting for this for a long time. (via marginal revolution)
The NYC Dept of Transportation is introducing compass decals to be placed on sidewalks at subway exits to help orient disembarking passengers. I thought I’d posted a link about this idea before on kottke.org, but the only reference I can find is a discussion about compasses on manhole covers. (thx, erik)
Update: Aha, here’s the entry. John has more.
3x3 video mashup call and response old commercial row row row your boat. Oh, just go watch it, it’s cool, especially if you like The Clapper and Christian Marclay. (via waxy, from whom I’m detecting signs of life re: his blog)
A comparison of the Last.fm chart and the official UK downloads chart after Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released online last week. The top 10 on Last.fm: all Radiohead. Official chart: nada. (via adactio)
Dr. James Watson, Nobel laureate:
He says that he is “inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa” because “all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really”, and I know that this “hot potato” is going to be difficult to address. His hope is that everyone is equal, but he counters that “people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”. He says that you should not discriminate on the basis of colour, because “there are many people of colour who are very talented, but don’t promote them when they haven’t succeeded at the lower level”. He writes that “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so”.
Watson’s comments have caused some controversy. (thx, demetrice, who says “this makes Wes Anderson look like Medgar Evers”)
Two bits (bites? har har) of Apple news:
1. Steve Jobs has announced that an SDK will be available for the iPhone and iPod touch in February. No more hacking your phone to put applications on it.
2. You can now preorder OS X 10.5 (Leopard) at Amazon for $109…that’s $20 off the retail price. The offer comes with a pre-order price guarantee; if the price drops before it ships, you get it for the lower price.
Do you make a distinction between typos and misspellings, or is that just me? For example, “regualr” is a typo while “refridgerator” is a misspelling. The former is a mechanical error while the latter demonstrates a lack of specific knowledge. Both are signs of sloppy writing which might be why people don’t often distinguish the two.
Whereas Mario Batali says to spare the sauce on your pasta so that you can taste the pasta, Mark Bittman suggests the opposite: the pasta adds little flavor or nutrition so use more sauce, vegetables, and meat. Who’s right? Who cares! Have it one way one night, do it the other way some other night.
The Boston Red Sox’s designated hitter, David Ortiz, makes extensive use of video replays during games. He reviews at-bats right after they happen and can watch every pitch he’s ever seen from the pitcher that he’s facing, on demand. (via collision detection)
What if the Google homepage were optimized for Google? (via magnetbox)
As they did last year, Poptech is streaming their entire conference live on the web for free. October 18-20. They also take questions from the web audience, several of which they used last year on stage.
Historical photo detection sounds like an interesting profession.
Maureen Taylor has dated a photograph to 1913 by studying the size and shape of a Lion touring car’s headlamps. Armed with her collection of 19th-century fashion magazines, she can pinpoint the brief period when Victorian women wore their bangs in tight curls rather than swept back. Using a technique borrowed from the CIA, she identified a photo of Jesse James by examining the shape of his right ear.
See also last week’s post on forensic genealogy.
Alex Ross is the music critic for the New Yorker and the author of a new book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, “a history of the twentieth century through its music”. My interest in music skews toward the contemporary popular, so I recently took the opportunity to ask Ross a few questions about classical music from the novice-but-interested music listener’s perspective.
Jason Kottke: I’ve enjoyed classical music whenever I’ve heard it, but I don’t know too much about it. Where might I begin to explore further?
Alex Ross: My big thing is that classical music doesn’t really exist. When you have a repertory that goes from Hildegard von Bingen’s medieval chant to Vivaldi’s bustling Baroque concertos to Wagner’s five-hour music dramas to John Cage’s chance-produced electronic noise to Steve Reich’s West African-influenced “Drumming,” you’re not talking about a single sound. Whatever variety of noise you desire, we’ve got it at the classical emporium. I’d suggest plunging it at various ends of the spectrum - some Vivaldi or Bach, the Beethoven “Eroica” or some other big-shouldered nineteenth-century classic, Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (which foreshadows so much pop music to come), and Reich or Philip Glass. The idea is to get a feeling for what composers were trying to express at any given time, and, of course, deciding whether you want to follow them. There’s no correct path through the labyrinth.
Kottke: I just received a copy of your book in the mail, and it’s got a “Suggested Listening” section following the endnotes with 10 recommended recordings and 20 more if you make it through those. How did you go about choosing those? Narrowing the 20th century musical landscape down to 30 recordings…that’s pretty cheeky.
Ross: It’s very hard, not to mention cheeky, picking recommended recordings, because so often it’s a matter of personal taste, both in terms of what works really “matter” and also in terms of which recordings are best. The almighty “Rite of Spring” has received any number of brilliant recordings over the years. Having picked one of Stravinsky’s own versions - he had such a great feeling for rhythm as a conductor - I immediately wondered whether I should have chosen the recent Esa-Pekka Salonen/LA Philharmonic version on DG, which is in gleaming modern sound and is as rock-solid as any “Rite” of modern times. So it’s subjective and leads to endless argument. But I was simply recommending a bunch of starting points, not the be-all end-all ultimate Top 10 of all time. I favored recordings that were cheap, that covered a lot of ground in 60 or 70 minutes. People can listen to excerpts on iTunes and Amazon and see if they really want to plunk down the cash. One thing’s for sure: you do need to own the “Rite,” no matter what kind of music you love. It’s the original sexy.
Kottke: Related to the first question, when I go to Amazon and search for “Beethoven”, there are over 10,000 results just in the classical music category. There are even more results for Bach. Are there significant differences between all the different versions of their music? How does the bewildered beginner pick the “right” version of Bach’s works to listen to? Should you look for brand names (e.g. Yo-Yo Ma), only buy music recorded by major symphonies or put out by certain record labels, or just get whatever is cheapest?
Ross: It’s definitely overwhelming - a serious glut. I’ve been reviewing for fifteen years and in the last year or two I seem to be getting twice as many CDs as ever - not to mention all the MP3s that composers and ensembles have put up on the Internet. There are definitely some significant differences among recordings. You have a lot of expert but boring renditions and then you have the ones that touch perfection or posses exceptional emotional power. Listen to Lorrane Hunt Lieberson singing the Bach cantatas and everyone else will sound a little wan. Certain people are always reliable - Yo-Yo Ma is ever eloquent, Mitsuko Uchida is a great pianist, Claudio Abbado makes one great or near-great orchestral recording after another. You can tell from Amazon reviews when a recording has really knocked people sideways. But live concerts are always better! I’m sometimes more moved by a not great but heartfelt live performance than by a world-class recording. In the hall you feel the weight of the cellos, the resonances of tones in space, the response of the crowd, all those intangibles. Tickets are less expensive than you may think. Particularly if you’re a student, you can get amazing deals - $12 tickets for the New York Philharmonic, for example.
Kottke: One of the things I’ve noticed about classical music recordings is how reasonably priced they are, particularly the pre-20th century music. Have you read any of Discover Your Inner Economist by Tyler Cowen? In it, he suggests that to get the most value out of your music buying dollar, you should pay more attention to music that hasn’t been recently released, the idea being that there are more gems to be found in the last 200 years of music than in this week’s Billboard lists. I have a feeling you might agree with that view.
Ross: That’s an interesting theory. If you buy Maria Callas’s recording of “Tosca,” chances are it’s probably still going to deliver the goods twenty years from now, if CDs or MP3s still exist then. Fergie is maybe a riskier long-term bet. Also interesting is Chris Anderson’s Long Tail concept, which suggests that there’s more hidden commercial power in these thousands upon thousands of classical recordings than anyone suspected, even if they sell only a few times a year. The Naxos label says it gets 30-40% of total digital sales from albums that are downloaded 4 times a month or less. In any case, there’s now a huge catalogue of classical CDs that go for $10 or less. The Tashi recording of Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” one of my top 10 picks, goes for $8 on Amazon. The Amazon download site was for a while offering Wagner’s entire sixteen-hour “Ring” cycle for $13.98. This turned out to be a clerical error, but enough classical-heads converged on the bargain that for a day or two Richard Wagner was the #1 downloaded artist on Amazon, beating out Kanye West. That amused me. Watch out for these classical guys - they start slow but beat you in the end.
Kottke: Let’s say you’re still around 80 years from now, writing a sequel to The Rest is Noise about music from 1980 to 2080. What contemporary music (circa 1980-2007) will still be important and relevant in 2080?
Ross: That’s a tough question! Critics often turn out to be very wrong about what’s truly important in their own time. George Bernard Shaw, for example, considered Hermann Goetz a great composer, a worthy successor to Beethoven. Though is “wrong” the right word? If Shaw had deep feelings about that music, he was, within his personal frame of reference, absolutely right. In classical music we maybe focus too much on the idea that the opinion of posterity is the only one that matters. In any case, here are twelve works that I believe will still matter to me, at least, if by some medical miracle I’m still around in 2080:
Steve Reich, Different Trains
John Adams, Nixon in China
Kaija Saariaho, L’Amour de loin
Sofia Gubaidulina, Offertorium
Gérard Grisey, Les Espaces acoustiques
Arvo Pärt, Da pacem domine
Louis Andriessen, De Stijl
Thomas Ades, Asyla
Georg Friedrich Haas, in vain
Michael Gordon, Decasia
Magnus Lindberg, Kraft
Osvaldo Golijov, St. Mark Passion
—-
Thanks, Alex. We’ll be checking back with you in 2080 to see how you fared. Ross has a piece out in the New Yorker this week about classical music and the internet that’s related to our conversation above. He’s also constructed a fantastic enhanced bibliography for the book that includes audio samples of some of the music written discussed in the book, presumably to reduce the dancing about architecture effect.
Geoff of BLDGBLOG makes a passionate case for Los Angeles being the greatest city in America.
The whole thing is ridiculous. It’s the most ridiculous city in the world - but everyone who lives there knows that. No one thinks that L.A. “works,” or that it’s well-designed, or that it’s perfectly functional, or even that it makes sense to have put it there in the first place; they just think it’s interesting. And they have fun there. And the huge irony is that Southern California is where you can actually do what you want to do; you can just relax and be ridiculous. In L.A. you don’t have to be embarrassed by yourself.
I’m not sure I agree, but seeing as I’ve only been to LA for 24 hours in my whole life, my objections don’t carry much weight.
Reaganomics Finally Trickles Down To Area Man.
The $10 began its long journey into Kellener’s wallet in 1983, when a beefed-up national defense budget of $210 billion enabled the military to purchase advanced warhead-delivery systems from aerospace manufacturer Lockheed. Buoyed by a multimillion-dollar bonus, then-CEO Martin Lawler bought a house on a 5,000-acre plot in Montana….
Mario Batali on how to sauce pasta.
What you want to eat when you eat a bowl of pasta…is pasta. Americans overdress their pasta 99.9 percent of the time. It should never be a bowl of soup. It should be noodles, with a little stuff.
Related to the dentistry post from the other day, comes word from England that even with socialized medicine, six percent of people questioned in a survey “admitted they had resorted to self-treatment using pliers and glue”.
A photo series of people and their breakfasts. I’ve often thought that a photo series of people and their favorite condiment would reveal much about contemporary American society.
Socials & More