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Ten recurring economic fallacies, 1774-2004.
One of the most persistent is that of the broken window — one breaks and this is celebrated as a boon to the economy: the window manufacturer gets an order; the hardware store sells a window; a carpenter is hired to install it; money circulates; jobs are created; the GDP goes up. In truth, of course, the economy is no better off at all.
The online scrapbooking community was thrown into chaos when an avant-garde scrapbooker, part of a group known for expressing “their loneliness, narcissism and rage” with their scrapbooks, inadvertently broke the rules by using a photograph taken by someone else in her prizewinning entry. (thx, lane)
For the first time since 1982, an NBA team has won a game protest and the next time the Atlanta Hawks and Miami Heat meet, they’ll replay the final 51.9 seconds of the disputed game before playing the scheduled full game.
Attention American parents: Mobile phones and text messages are sexually molesting our children!!! Ah, CNN…
Eugene Mirman reports from the New Hampshire primaries in front of Wal-Mart’s, Burger Kings, and other live locations.
I saw Mitt Romney speak yesterday and at the time I was, like, I don’t really like this and then when I woke up, I HATED it.
(via mr john hodgman)
The Sound of Young America’s Jesse Thorn interviews Wendell Pierce and Andre Royo, who play The Bunk and Bubbles on The Wire. (thx, jesse)
Rich Kid Syndrome…how do you properly raise a kid who flies private jets everywhere and stands to inherit millions of dollars when he turns 25?
America’s burgeoning money culture is producing a record number of heirs — but handing down values is harder than handing down wealth.
(via andrea harner)
Dave Pell, peanut butter expert, has found the best peanut butter in the world.
I love peanut butter. But more importantly for the statement you are about to read here, I know peanut butter. I know peanut butter the way Da Vinci knew fluid mechanics, the way Einstein knew physics, the way Grand Master Flash knows a turntable, the way Tom Brady knows how to perfectly balance throwing touchdowns and humping supermodels. I have eaten it. I have coddled it. I inhaled. What can I say? That’s how I spread.
Now that Sony’s on board, all four of the major music labels are selling DRM-free music on Amazon’s MP3 store. Amazon’s giving Apple a real run for its money here.
Not sure how this became Blu-ray central all of a sudden, but here’s a bit more news. NBC Universal and Paramount might be “opening the door” for a switch to Blu-ray.
These studios have commitments to release some discs this year in HD DVD, but both have ended their exclusive commitment to that format, which is backed by a group led by Toshiba.
Edmund Hillary has died at age 88. He and Tenzing Norgay were the first people to climb to the top of Mount Everest.
The Hubble telescope recently captured an image of a double Einstein Ring.
An Einstein Ring happens when two galaxies are perfectly aligned. The closer galaxy acts as a lens, magnifying and distorting the view of a more distant galaxy. But today astronomers announced that they’ve discovered a double Einstein Ring: three galaxies are perfectly aligned, creating a double ring around the lensing galaxy.
On the occasion of Tom Brady’s incredible season, ESPN compiles a list of the 25 greatest individual seasons in sports history.
On the eve of shooting his eighth film, Zach and Miri Make a Porno, Kevin Smith recounts his experiences with the actors and rehearsals on his seven previous films.
It’s weird to work one way for so long, and slowly realize it’s not necessary anymore; that it was just something you did when you didn’t know any better. I hired pros; aside from on-set tweaking and an extra take or two, they don’t need to be broken like wild horses or worked like puppets. Those days are behind me now. Now I spend more time thinking about/working on what the flick’s gonna look like — which, I guess, should be the primary job of the director.
Planes, trains, and automobiles in Europe.
Could European airlines such as Air France-KLM, Lufthansa or Ryanair lose business as high-speed rail service expands? After all, the Eurostar now carries more than 70 percent of passenger traffic between London and Paris. And air service between Paris and Brussels has ended altogether now that trains connect those cities in 1 hour and 20 minutes.
(via short schrift)
Fantastic and disturbing Esquire article about Dateline NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” series in which people are lured to a house with the prospect of sex with minors, ambushed by a camera crew, and then arrested when they attempt to leave. I can’t say much about the article without spoiling it, but a friend who has watched the show says there’s nothing redeeming about any of the people on the show, from the show’s host on down to the would-be molesters…and how the whole thing is orchestrated off-camera makes it seem even worse. More from Esquire about the article and NBC’s rebuttal.
Recent Pacific storms have resulted in some epic big wave surfing at Cortes Bank, a seamount located 105 miles off the California coast.
The NY Times has a nice overview:
With a second major storm bearing down, four of the most experienced big-wave surfers in the world launched a boat and two Jet Skis toward Cortes Bank, an underwater mountain range whose tallest peak rises 4,000 feet from the ocean floor to within about four feet of the surface. The perilous spot, about 100 miles off the coast of Southern California, had been surfed only a handful of times in the past decade. With just the right conditions, its shallow waters turn huge ocean swells into giant, perfect breaking waves.
On a big wave site set up by Billabong, one of the riders said that 100-foot waves will be ridden out there:
Cortes Bank veteran Mike Parsons returned from the voyage absolutely certain that larger sea monsters are awaiting around the spooky open-ocean shoal. “It’s getting closer and closer now…I guarantee you there will be a 100-foot-wave ridden out there,” said Parsons. “For sure. There were several big peaks that jumped up at the top of the reef outside of us that could not have been too far off that size. If you put yourself in the right place at the right time, it will happen. It’s only a matter of time now.”
For photos and a nice audio feature with the crew that took the trip out there, head on over to Surfline.
Does one’s choice of typeface affect the grade you get on a college paper? Papers written with Georgia and Times New Roman (serifs) got As while those with Trebuchet (sans serif) got Bs.
Wired has a longish article about how the iPhone came about. I wish this story had more direct quotes and explicit references…it’s hard to read it and not take the whole thing with a huge grain of salt.
Graffiti Research Lab built their own camera rig to capture bullet time photography (a la The Matrix) for $5000-$8000. Here are the instructions to build your own and the music video they made using the rig.
Matt Stuart shoots photos of visual puns and coincidences.
A taxonomy of animals that are mascots or logos of companies.
A fine AV Club interview with the surprisingly down-to-earth Anthony Bourdain…much of it isn’t even about food. On selling out and endorsements:
Yeah, I’ve been offered cookware lines, some really gruesome reality shows that would have made me boatloads of money. The usual endorsements. I don’t know. Maybe it goes back to the heroin thing. I know what it’s like to wake up in the morning and feel ashamed of what you did yesterday. I’m just having a hard time crossing that line. I’d like to sell out. I really would!
I also learned that he writes crime novels.
A World of Warcraft player is attempting to level up two characters in the game without intentionally killing anything or anyone.
Both my priest and my rogue try not to hit anything, although there’s always a chance of a misclick when trying to open a quest item with mobs fighting near it. Both of them always wield a fishing rod, so any accidental hits won’t increase their weapon skills. Neither of them will do quests where they have to kill things.
(via clusterflock)
Sudhir Venkatesh recently sat down with some real gang members to watch some episodes of the The Wire.
The greatest uproar occurred when the upstart Marlo challenged the veteran Prop Joe in the co-op meeting. “If Prop Joe had balls, he’d be dead in 24 hours!” Orlando shouted. “But white folks [who write the series] always love to keep these uppity [characters] alive. No way he’d survive in East New York more than a minute!” A series of bets then took place. All told, roughly $8,000 was wagered on the timing of Marlo’s death. The bettors asked me — as the neutral party — to hold the money. I delicately replied that my piggy bank was filled up already.
(thx, matt)
The Star Wars Guide to the 2008 Presidential candidates featuring Grand Moff Giuliani, Obi-ron Paul-obi, Hillando Clintrissian, and Wicket Huckabee.
Man, I tell you what…you read Admiral Akbar’s resume, take a look at his long career, his credentials, and it’s amazingly clear how qualified he is to run a major government. What about his prescient snap evaluation…”It’s a trap!” We sure could have used that in Iraq.
The work of Charles and Ray Eames will be honored with a set of 16 US stamps later this year. (via chris glass)
Todd Levin begins a series on video game systems he has known. He starts off with a Radio Shack Pong knockoff and the Atari 2600. As you may remember, there were some differences between the arcade version of Pac-Man and and the Atari version:
But most disorienting of all was the hero: Pac-Man had been re-imagined as an octagon with a constantly chomping, greedy slot for a mouth, and designed so large he could scarcely squeeze through the maze. Because of Pac-Man’s macrocephalic condition, he was incapable of rounding corners, but Atari found a brilliant workaround: Pac-Man would always face west. When pushing the joystick to the right, Pac-Man simply backed into dots and energy blocks, his mouth still opening and closing rhythmically, as if crying in pain from shoving things into his rectum. Underscoring Atari Pac-Man’s overall cognitive disorder, the home game replaced the familiar rhythmic dot-munching soundtrack with a flat, repeating “bonk” note — its own digital Tourrette’s bark.
Todd Gallagher explores the myth of grabbing a dollar bill off the top of a basketball backboard and tries to find someone who can do it.
The legend of touching the top of the backboard has gone on for years, and it has been excitedly attributed to so many different players that it’s commonly assumed any number of guys in the NBA can do it. But in a sport where any individual achievement is promoted ad nauseam, we’ve never seen any proof of it actually being done.
Check out these videos of his leading candidate, James White: White doing a between-the-legs dunk from the free throw line and his dunks from the 2006 NCAA dunk contest.
Video interview with Michael Bierut about typography and design. (via typographica)
On an upcoming servicing mission scheduled for August 2008, NASA plans to upgrade the Hubble telescope to be 90 times as powerful as it currently is. 90 times!
Two powerful new instruments will be installed on the mission. The Wide Field Camera 3 (WFC3) will allow Hubble to see fainter and more distant galaxies than anything it has seen before, shedding light on the early universe. This could allow Hubble to see galaxies so far away that we see them as they were just 400 million years after the big bang.
Apple announced newer faster Mac Pros today. They start at $2799 but you can configure them up to several thousand dollars (including software and accessories).
The really expensive bits are the 32 GB of RAM ($9100), the NVIDIA Quadro FX 5600 video card ($2850), the four 15,000 RPM hard drives ($800 each), the two 30” Cinema Displays ($1700 each), a Fibre Channel Card ($1000), and an unlimited-client copy of Mac OS X Server ($999).
That’s a lot of money but you’ve got to remember that in addition to satisfying your computing needs well into the next decade, this baby will heat your entire house and provide a metal cooktop surface hot enough to prepare meals on. Mmm, 15,000 RPM omelettes! (thx, jake)
Update: Wow, configuring the new Xserve is even more expensive; adding all the possible options runs the price to over $83,000, which includes a $12,000 RAID array and $50,000 Mac OS X Server software support. $50K for support? Does Jobs come fix it himself?
Screencaps comparing the DVD and HD versions of LOTR: Fellowship of the Ring (roll over to toggle the images). Quite a difference. (thx, alex)
Gephyrophobia, a fear of bridges. One woman was stranded on Staten Island for 13 years because of her fear of crossing bridges. (One assumes she didn’t want to take the boat either.)
In the New York region, the New York Thruway Authority will lead bridge phobics over the Tappan Zee, the longest span in the state. A reluctant driver can call the authority in advance and arrange to be driven across the bridge in his or her own car by a patrol operator. The authority receives a half dozen such requests a year, officials there say.
Ramesh Mehta, a division director for the authority, said the service helped prevent situations in which a phobic driver might get stuck mid-span. “It is very dangerous to stop the car right there on the bridge, because the traffic is so great and somebody can get rear-ended,” he said.
(via girlhacker)
Three body language analysts studied two recent Roger Clemens interviews about his alleged steroid use and found that maybe he’s not telling the whole truth.
In the “60 Minutes” interview, for example, the analysts noticed that Clemens swallowed hard, looked down, and licked and pursed his lips when answering questions - all signs, they said, that he might not have been telling the truth. “That’s indicative of deception, that’s indicative of stress,” said Joe Navarro, a retired F.B.I. agent who trains intelligence officers and employees for banks and insurance companies.
The article also notes that these experts are only right about half the time and that the technique is used as a tool to evaluate if further investigation is warranted and not to determine truth.
Monsterhoodies. When the hood is up, it looks like a shark, dinosaur, or monster is biting your head off. Rrwar!!
Finding Nemo on Blu-ray might push me over the buy-a-player edge more than Warner’s plans to support the format.
If you were still on vacation last week, you might want to check out my list of the best links of 2007. I guarantee you’ll find something to get your mind off of that looming deadline.
The goal of Oded Ezer’s Typosperma Project “was to create some sort of new transgenic creatures, half (human) sperm, half letter”. (via buzzfeed)
It’s been awhile since I’ve heard anything about Spore, Will Wright’s long zoom supergame. Last summer the word was that EA’s promo machine had gotten started too early and that the game wasn’t quite ready for primetime because it wasn’t “fun”:
The unofficial word from someone on the development team is that Spore the system is almost ready but Spore the game isn’t all that much fun yet. A recent round of user testing didn’t go so well. Hence, the delay.
EA said at the time that the release date would be after March 2008, which still seems to be the case. In an October 2007 interview, Will Wright said the game was about six months away from release, which means April 2008. Even so, Wired made Spore the #2 pick on their Vaporware 2007 list. Anyone have any better intel on a release date or if the game is more fun now? Hit me on my burner.
Video of people describing their split-screened counterparts. Give this one a shot…it’s better than I made it sound. Simple, restrained, and thoughtfully made. (via snarkmarket)
Gelf Magazine, curators of always-entertaining Blurb Racket, list their picks for the worst blurbs used by movie advertisements in 2007. For instance, in reference to Live Free or Die Hard, film critic Jack Mathews actually said “the action in this fast-paced, hysterically overproduced and surprisingly entertaining film is as realistic as a Road Runner cartoon” but was quoted by 20th Century Fox as saying that the movie was “hysterically … entertaining”.
Clever shower design; the water pipe also holds the curtain up.
Demo of VideoTrace, “a system for interactively generating realistic 3D models of objects from video — models that might be inserted into a video game, a simulation environment, or another video sequence”. Starts off slow but gets interesting with the one-click truck cloning. (thx, lance)
James Gleick on the value of objects in contemporary society. Mass produced and virtual items are getting ever cheaper while items like an original copy of the Magna Carta are getting more and more expensive.
Just when digital reproduction makes it possible to create a “Rembrandt” good enough to fool the eye, the “real” Rembrandt becomes more expensive than ever. Why? Because the same free flow that makes information cheap and reproducible helps us treasure the sight of information that is not. A story gains power from its attachment, however tenuous, to a physical object. The object gains power from the story. The abstract version may flash by on a screen, but the worn parchment and the fading ink make us pause. The extreme of scarcity is intensified by the extreme of ubiquity.
Gleick doesn’t adequately nail the “why?” here somehow…seems there’s more to it than just objects with attached stories.
Update: See also The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin. (thx, finn)
Daniel Day-Lewis is flat-out amazing in this film; I can’t think of when I’ve seen a better performance. But with this movie and No Country For Old Men, both of which top many people’s lists of the best movies of 2007, I found them really good but not great. Not sure why. Maybe I’ll have better luck with Juno or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.
Living in Three Centuries, Mark Story’s photos of centenarians and other aged people. (via clusterflock)
It looks as though we finally might have a winner in the race for the high-definition successor to DVDs: Blu-ray.
With Warner on board, Blu-ray now has about 70 percent of the market locked up; Walt Disney, 20th Century Fox, MGM, Lionsgate and, of course, Sony are all on Blu-ray’s team. Warner Brothers has some of the bigger releases in 2008, including “Speed Racer,” the Batman sequel “The Dark Knight” and the sixth Harry Potter installment.
I feel like maybe I can actually buy an HD player now…
The last part of this video featuring Conan O’Brien singing The Beastie Boys’ Sabotage as Edith Bunker from All in the Family makes me laugh over and over and over.
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