The true meaning of George W. Bush’s
The true meaning of George W. Bush’s favorite painting. Quoting Inigo Montoya, “I do not think it means what you think it means”. (via conscientious)
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Entries for January 2008
Observation effects
A recent study shows that when Tiger Woods plays in a golf tournament, the other players perform worse than they do when he doesn’t play.
Analyzing data from round-by-round scores from all PGA tournaments between 2002 and 2006 (over 20,000 player-rounds of golf), Brown finds that competitors fare less well — about an extra stroke per tournament — when Tiger is playing. How can we be sure this is because of Tiger? A few features of the findings lend them plausibility. The effect is stronger for the better, “exempt” players than for the nonexempt players, who have almost no chance of beating Tiger anyway. (Tiger’s presence doesn’t mean much to you if the best you can reasonably expect to finish is about 35th-there’s not much difference between the prize for 35th and 36th place.) The effect is also stronger during Tiger’s hot streaks, when his competitors’ prospects are more clearly dimmed. When Tiger is on, his competitors’ scores were elevated by nearly two strokes when he entered a tournament. And the converse is also true: During Tiger’s well-publicized slump of 2003 and 2004, when he went winless in major events, exempt competitors’ scores were unaffected by Tiger’s presence.
Research papers with a woman as the primary author are more likely to published if the author’s gender is unknown.
Double-blind peer review, in which neither author nor reviewer identity are revealed, is rarely practised in ecology or evolution journals. However, in 2001, double-blind review was introduced by the journal Behavioral Ecology. Following this policy change, there was a significant increase in female first-authored papers, a pattern not observed in a very similar journal that provides reviewers with author information. No negative effects could be identified, suggesting that double-blind review should be considered by other journals.
When watched, squirrels fool would-be nut thieves by pretending to bury nuts.
In the journal Animal Behaviour, biologist Michael Steele at Wilkes University in Pennsylvania examines squirrels’ caching of nuts. While the furry-tailed creatures made a show of digging a hole in the ground and covering it with dirt and leaves when watched, one time out of five they were faking and nothing was buried.
The squirrels’ deception increased after their nut caches were raided.
A human being should be able to
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
So sayeth Robert Heinlein’s character Lazarus Long in Time Enough for Love. (via avenues)
Info visualizations of the social networks and
Info visualizations of the social networks and cross references in the Bible.
Art Grand Slam would be the perfect
Art Grand Slam would be the perfect name for a web site showcasing the tennis-related art of Martina Navratilova. And so it is.
Almost 20 years since her last grand slam singles title, Martina Navratilova is back in action on the circuit — only this time she is turning tennis strokes into brush strokes as she helps to create a new form of contemporary art.
In its crudest and, perhaps, most joyful expression, it involves the player hitting paint-covered tennis balls at a canvas, usually marked with court lines and prepared to resemble a playing surface: clay, grass or artificial.
(via quipsologies)
A video and accompanying text from Edward
A video and accompanying text from Edward Tufte on Interface Design and the iPhone.
Update: Christopher Fahey posted a thoughtful critique of Tufte’s iPhone thoughts.
I feel like this happens to a
I feel like this happens to a lot of authors…the covers of their books end up being the opposite of what they should be.
Stamen teamed up with MySociety to produce
Stamen teamed up with MySociety to produce some lovely travel-time maps of London. My favorite is the interactive travel + housing prices map:
Next, it is clearly no good to be told that a location is very convenient for your work if you can’t afford to live there. So we have produced some interactive maps that allow users to set both the maximum time they’re willing to commute, and the median house price they’re willing or able to pay.
The commute time slider makes a lovely Mandelbrot-esque pattern as you pinch the times together. (via o’reilly radar)
A list of the 100 books every child
A list of the 100 books every child should read. No Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and probably a little Brit-heavy for those in other countries but otherwise solid. Plenty of Roald Dahl (I still occasionally reread Danny, the Champion of the World).
How does the GDP of the US
How does the GDP of the US today compare with that of other countries in the past?
China and India combined to produce nearly half the world’s economic output in 1820 compared to just 1.8% for the U.S. Our remarkable growth since 1820 has benefited from democratic institutions, a belief in capitalism, private property rights, an entrepreneurial culture, abundant resources, openness to foreign investment, the best universities, immigration and relatively transparent markets.
Emigre is posting some essays from the
Emigre is posting some essays from the back issues of its dearly departed magazine.
If you’re curious as to what designers
If you’re curious as to what designers mean when they talk about design, check out Paola Antonelli’s talk from last year’s TED conference. (BTW, TED has made publicly available a great number of talks from their conferences…like 40-50 hours of material.)
The week before Warner announced that they
The week before Warner announced that they were dropping support for HD DVD and backing the Blu-ray format, sales for players for the two formats were running roughly 50/50. The week after the announcement? Blu-ray players outsold HD DVD players more than 12 to 1. Blu-ray discs also saw a large increase in sales.
Will Ashford takes used books and creates
Will Ashford takes used books and creates art and new meanings out of them.
At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.
(via monoscope)
Update: Ashford’s work is quite similar to Tom Phillips’ A Humument, which was first published in 1970. (thx, joel)
Long-exposure photo of two people having sex
Long-exposure photo of two people having sex on a bed. (It’s mostly safe for work, believe it or not.) This reminds me of two things: the timelapse threesome scene in A Clockwork Orange and Jason Salavon’s work, specifically 76 Blowjobs and Every Playboy Centerfold. Those last tow links probably NSFW. (via the h line)
Update: Atta Kim’s work is similar too, particularly his “Sex Series”. (thx, jeff)
From a site that tracks “false words,
From a site that tracks “false words, usages, or expressions”, the definition of Michael Bayesian Filters:
1. a series of computer based filters, trained over time through an artificial intelligence process, which allow computer controlled motion picture cameras to automatically record high budget action sequences in the style of producer/director Michael Bay.
2. a method of filtering email spam that relies on producer/director Michael Bay to manually read and sort all incoming messages.
I can’t think of Michael Bay without humming this song. (via crazymonk)
Customer service
1. Usually when you order meat or cheese at the deli counter (e.g. “I’ll have a 1/2 pound of pastrami, please”), the person behind the counter tries to get as close as they can to the weight you ordered but it’s often a little over and you’re charged for the overage. I’ve noticed that what they do at Whole Foods is that they only charge you for what you asked for but they give you the little extra for free. So yesterday I asked for a 1/2 pound of roast beef, but it came out to 0.57 when he weighed it. He lifted a bit of the meat off the scale until it read 0.50, printed the ticket, and put the little extra back on the scale. It’s a nice gesture and a good example of using customer service instead of marketing or advertising to give a current customer a warm and fuzzy feeling about the company…and it only costs them 20 cents-worth of roast beef.
2. We went out to eat with some friends the other night but the restaurant was tiny, packed, and didn’t have anywhere to put Ollie’s stroller. So the owner took the stroller and put it in the back of his truck that was parked out in front of the restaurant. (While there, we dined on a cheese plate with, like, 30 to 40 different cheeses on it, some of which were made by the stroller valet himself.)
The Atlantic Monthly tore down the paywall
The Atlantic Monthly tore down the paywall on its web site today:
Beginning today, TheAtlantic.com is dropping its subscriber registration requirement and making the site free to all visitors.
Now, in addition to such offerings as blogs, author dispatches, slideshows, interviews, and videos, readers can also browse issues going back to 1995, along with hundreds of articles dating as far back as 1857, the year The Atlantic was founded.
Update: Still no RSS though. Bollocks.
White House Redux is a contest to
White House Redux is a contest to design a new residence for the President of the United States. First prize is $5000 and a free trip to NYC. A fine jury too. (via bldgblog)
Yay! Today is sub-prime mortgage day on
Yay! Today is sub-prime mortgage day on kottke.org, I guess. The collapse of the sub-prime mortgage market took everyone on Wall Street by surprise…except Goldman Sachs, which earned $11.6 billion in 2007 when everyone else lost money. How’d they do it? Michael Lewis says that Goldman went against the flow in shorting sub-prime mortgages by assuming that the entire rest of the industry, including their own expert and extremely well-paid traders, were, as Lewis puts it, “a bunch of idiots”.
Update: Here’s the WSJ article mentioned by Lewis in the above piece. (thx, andy)
The Oscar nominations are out. Surprises include
The Oscar nominations are out. Surprises include Juno for Best Picture and Cate Blanchett for Best Actress for Elizabeth: The Golden Age, a movie that received mixed reviews at best. And I’m thinking that Daniel Day-Lewis is pretty much a lock for Best Actor, no?
Update: Most of the Oscar nominated animated shorts are available online.
(I saw these mentioned in a few
(I saw these mentioned in a few places online a week or two ago but could never get to the web site. Looks like the site is back up.)
Annnnnnnnnyway. Alison Jackson takes fake what-if paparazzi photos: George Bush pumping gas, Bill Gates dancing around with an iPod, and Marilyn Monroe masturbating. A bit NSFW. (via the year in pictures, a recent discovery that’s going right into the daily reading list)
n+1 magazine has a fascinating Interview with
n+1 magazine has a fascinating Interview with a Hedge Fund Manager. Topics of conversation include the sub-prime mortgage crisis. I gotta admit that I didn’t understand some of this, but most of it was pretty interesting. (via snarkmarket)
This happened while Choire was minding the
This happened while Choire was minding the store so apologies if you’ve seen it already, but Flickr’s new Commons program is quite interesting. For a start, the Library of Congress has put 1500 photos with “no known copyright restrictions” up on Flickr for people to tag and annotate. The LoC’s extensive online image repository has always been exceedingly difficult to use so making images available on the easy-to-use Flickr is a great step forward. The response so far has been pretty good.
The tales of Kobe beef cattle being
The tales of Kobe beef cattle being raised in comfort with massages and the occasional beer might be a stretch of the truth: Kobe is expensive, delicious, but inhumanely raised beef.
From the time they are a week old until they are three and a half years old, these steers are commonly kept in a lean-to behind someone’s house where they get bored and go off their feed. Their gut stops working. The best way to start their gut working again is to give them a bottle of beer.
Grading the world’s flags. Gambia is a
Grading the world’s flags. Gambia is a surprise #1. (via marginal revolution)
Let’s talk Antarctica blogs.
Let’s talk Antarctica blogs.
Antarctic Journal is one of the best; it’s written by a grad student studying penguin ecology. Big Dead Place is also great (but not strictly a blog); check out the stories and interviews section. Also of note but of varying quality and timeliness are a blog by the British Antarctic Survey, John Bean’s Antarctica blog, a U of Delaware blog, Antarctic Blog, and Antarctica Blog.
I’m still looking forward to the SOUTH expedition blog whenever that happens.
Update: One more: 75 Degrees South. Very nice photos, as in this post. (thx, pete)
Update: More Antarctica blogs and such: UAB in Antarctica, Blog Rogers (which includes info about the book, Antarctica: Life on the Ice), Nathan Duke, elisfanclub, Concordia Base, Base Dumont d’Urville, Mr Rose Géophy CZT45, and Andrill. (thx, everyone)
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food:
Who wins the Super Bowl of Food: New York City or Boston? Ed Levine says it’s no contest: New York all the way.
What has Boston bestowed upon us, foodwise? Brown bread, baked beans, Boston cream pie, and Parker House rolls. Pretty slim pickins’, don’t you think? How far would you go out of your way for some baked beans or some brown bread? I’d only go a block or two at the most. Now if you expanded the geographic food purview of the Patriots to all of New England, that might be an interesting discussion, because then New England clam chowder, lobster rolls, and fried clams would enter into the fray.
Ed’s a bit hard on Boston here…there’s some excellent food to be found in the city and its surrounds.
Very interesting paper on the economics of
Very interesting paper on the economics of prostitution by Steven Levitt and Sudhir Venkatesh.
The transaction-level data we collected suggests that street prostitution yields an average wage of $27 per hour. Given the relatively limited hours that active prostitutes work, this generates less than $20,000 annually for a women working year round in prostitution. While the wage of a prostitute is four times greater than the non-prostitution earnings these women report (approximately $7 per hour), there are tremendous risks associated with life as a prostitute. According to our estimates, a woman working as a prostitute would expect an annual average of a dozen incidents of violence and 300 instances of unprotected sex.
The authors also noted that a prostitute was “more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one”. (via marginal revolution)
This summer’s big public art project in
This summer’s big public art project in NYC: 4 large waterfalls falling into the East River and New York Harbor, including one falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. Olafur Eliasson is the responsible party…he’s done a couple previous waterfall pieces.
Update: Eliasson’s work will also be on display at MoMA and P.S. 1 this summer, April 20 through June 30, 2008. (thx, praveen)
Steel
Steel is one of the most easily and extensively recycled materials on earth:
There are two ways to make steel: one is to create virgin steel from iron ore and coke, and the other is to melt down used steel and recycle it. Recycled steel is just as strong as virgin steel. Unlike paper and plastic, steel can be melted down and recast indefinitely; it has no structural memory. Making recycled steel, in electric-arc furnaces, or E.A.F.s, requires less capital investment than making virgin steel, which is manufactured in huge integrated mills; it also saves energy, and is easier on the environment, because not so much ore has to be mined. The only disadvantage of recycling is that it can be hard to know exactly what’s in your raw material — the steelamker must rely on the scrap dealer’s ability to separate out other metals, particularly copper, which can weaken the steel. In 2006, two out of every three tons of steel made in the U.S. came from recycled steel.
That’s from John Seabrook’s recent article on the scrap metal industry for The New Yorker (not online).
Steel production began far earlier than is commonly known…around 1400 BC in East Africa. Steel was also produced in China, India, Spain/Portugal, and other places before 1000 AD. The Bessemer Process was the first inexpensive industrial process for mass-producing high quality steel; that was in the 1850s.
In 1901, J.P. Morgan founded US Steel, which at one point made 67 percent of all steel produced in the US and was part of the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1901 to 1991. US Steel was once the largest corporation in the world, a title now held by (depending on how you define “largest”) Wal-Mart, a company that sells fewer and fewer things made of steel, or PetroChina with its $1 trillion market cap. It’s too bad oil can’t be effectively recycled after use; it’s a stretch to think of elevating our atmosphere’s carbon dioxide levels for the purpose of warming some parts of the world as recycling.
Two-hour special on the History Channel called
Two-hour special on the History Channel called Life After People, 9pm tonight and rerunning throughout the week.
What would happen to planet earth if the human race were to suddenly disappear forever? Would ecosystems thrive? What remnants of our industrialized world would survive? What would crumble fastest? From the ruins of ancient civilizations to present day cities devastated by natural disasters, history gives us clues to these questions and many more.
This appears to be unrelated to Alan Weisman’s well-reviewed The World Without Us. If it comes down to watching this or Killer of Sheep, watch Sheep.
Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a 1977 film
Charles Burnett’s Killer of Sheep, a 1977 film that was selected as one of the 100 essential films of all time by the National Society of Film Critics but was just recently released in theaters, will be shown on TCM today at 8pm and early tomorrow morning at 12:30am. Set your DVRs for this one. (big thx, max)
An apt visual metaphor from the world
An apt visual metaphor from the world of sports for the client/designer relationship.
Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon
Short teaser for Generation Kill, David Simon and Ed Burns’ next project for HBO about the Iraq War. It’s from October but I hadn’t seen it until now so maybe you hadn’t either? The 7-hour miniseries is based on Evan Wright’s book of the same name. This video discusses the book and its subject matter. (thx, david)
When I heard that chess champion Bobby
When I heard that chess champion Bobby Fischer had died, I immediately went searching for some of that “sprawling New Yorker shit” on Fischer. Sure enough, the New Yorker ran a piece on Fischer back in 1957, when he was 14 and still “Robert”. Also from their archives, a 2004 review of a book about the 1972 Spassky/Fischer match. The NY Times has extensive coverage of the hometown boy from past and present, including the annoucement of his victory against Spassky.
The I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!! scene from
The I DRINK YOUR MILKSHAKE!!! scene from There Will Be Blood. If you haven’t seen the movie, don’t watch this…it’s from a scene near the end. (P.S. DRAINAGE!!!)
Mark Gaberman on what it’s like to
Mark Gaberman on what it’s like to write for Jeopardy, which he’s been doing for 7 years.
I’ve had Alex Trebek rap Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice” — he had his mind on his money and his money on his mind that day. Did a category called “Death and Texas” just because I liked the title (and finding stuff about people dying and/or getting killed in Texas turned out to be remarkably easy). I’ve learned about Jean Sibelius, and word to the wise, if you see “blah blah blah this Finnish composer blah blah blah…”, Jean Sibelius might not be your worst guess. Well, at least if I wrote it. I’m just not that up on my Finnish composers.
This comes from a blog called Why We Write, a collection of essays by TV and film writers who are currently out of work due to the Writer’s Guild strike. My favorite part of the site is the placement of two spaces after a period instead of the HTML default of one. View the source to check out the crazy markup they use to accomplish that little bit of fussiness. (thx, mark)
Oof, I so hate to go out
Oof, I so hate to go out here with a whimper rather than a bang, but I’m BEAT. The jig is up! The thing about not having a job is that 1. You will take any and all irregular work that comes your way, and 2. You then have to do it until it’s done, no matter what (“what” being “3 a.m.” or “dental work” or even “laziness”). Plus I gotta get up in the morning and drive to South Carolina. Hellloooo, Mr. Obama! Thanks so much to Mr. Kottke for letting me muddy up his rec room this week—it was a good reboot for me, and also it didn’t drive away all the readers, each of whom seems, judging from the inbox, particularly lovely and intelligent and amusing and polite. So yay you! Your reward is that your regularly-scheduled programming returns shortly.
Update: Thanks, Choire! Enjoy your time with Mr. Obama in SC. -jkottke
“Is it too early to feel nostalgia for the 1990s?”
New York-based films at Sundance include “The Wackness,” otherwise known as “eww, that movie where Mary-Kate Olsen makes out with Ben Kingsley.”
Is it too early to feel nostalgia for the 1990s? Apparently not. “As the world starts to move faster, you can do period pieces of times closer to the present,” said Jonathan Levine, the director-writer of an adolescent coming-of-age story set against the Giuliani era in New York….To transform the city to its less gentrified self, the filmmakers threw more garbage on the street, sprayed some more graffiti, painted a mural to Kurt Cobain and obtained a “Forrest Gump” bus poster.
Well I’m pretty sure the 90s were characterized by a feeling of already-arrived auto-nostalgia, but.
Why Does New York Perform So Many Abortions Per Person?
Though its abortion rate fell 13%, California still leads the nation by far in the number of abortions, with more than 208,000 in 2005. But that looks like it’s solely due to population.
New York came in second, with more than 155,000. And while New York has around 53% of the population that California does, it has only 25% or so fewer abortions than California. (I’m doing math with lots of round numbers here.)
California has 13 million more people than Texas, and Texas has 4 million more people than New York—but Texas has a bit more than half the number of abortions of New York.
Similarly, Florida has just a million fewer people than New York, but Florida has only about 60% of the number of abortions that New York does. I can understand why there might be fewer abortions in the south—but why more abortions in New York per person than elsewhere? (Uh, if I’m doing math right.) What gives?
Reconsidered!
One of the problems of criticism is—what happens when it takes you just forever to realize that something is totally great? It took me until this week, and lots of it cropping up on shuffle, to realize that the latest PJ Harvey album, “White Chalk,” is absolutely her best. (Okay, second best—maybe nothing will ever be as cool as “Rid Of Me,” if only because who writes rock music in 5/4? ) Back in September, Pitchfork gave “White Chalk” a 6.8, and I would have given it a worse score even as recently as December. But of course, what does anyone know? “Uh Huh Her” got a 7.6, her Peel Sessions got a 7.9, “Stories from the City…” got a 5.5 and “Is This Desire?” got an Pitchfork 8.
Whoops! I’m a bad blogger, sorry to
Whoops! I’m a bad blogger, sorry to skip out. Had to go see the new Will Ferrell movie (“Semi-Pro”) this morning, which means, well, don’t ever let your freelance writer friends claim they have a rough life. Yeah, poor me, I had to go to a funny movie on a Friday morning instead of filling out TPS reports. I’d rarely say anything about a movie this far in advance (it opens February 29) so as not to totally enrage the movie’s publicists, so, in short: freakin’ hilarious. Made me love Will Ferrell all over again. (My Ferrell top five performances, in case anyone ever needs to know, in order: Stranger Than Fiction, The Producers, Anchorman, Zoolander, Talladega Nights.) And I don’t even usually like the current strain of all-boy, comedy-star, period-shtick set-up movies mostly because, well, I like actual live women in my movies.
Why Is Apple On The Starbucks Model?
Does it make sense for Apple to build a fourth store in Manhattan, hot on the heels of their new Meatpacking District outpost? Retail saturation schemes work for Dunkin’ Donuts. But in what way would the incredible overhead and costly building prices of the Apple temples serve the company? Surely there’s a good business reason for it—even though one doesn’t come to mind.
“Jake Shears” of the Scissor Sisters is
“Jake Shears” of the Scissor Sisters is working with Jeff Whitty (of “Avenue Q”) (both former go-go boys!) on a musical of “Tales of the City.” Musical theater just somehow got a whole lot gayer!
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