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A list of drag queen names compiled so far. Perhaps when we are through we can get John Hodgman to draw caricatures of each.
Update: Lenny reminds me: “Hodgman didn’t draw the hoboes, he just named them. A bunch of cartoonists drew them, most notably Ape Lad, a.k.a. Adam Koford.”
I’d like to take a quick moment to point out a few people whose work I find extraordinary.
Aaron Winslow, who is creating a small bestiary of contemporary office life.
Barry Stone, whose photography I mentioned earlier this week.
Cooper Renner, current editor of elimae and NYPL selected poet of the 21st century.
Daryl Scroggins, a fellow clusterflocker and fiction writer whose work Gordon Lish praised in Esquire.
Diane Williams, who edits NOON, and whose fiction needs no introduction, but whose work I consider to be among the strongest in American literature.
Jane Unrue, for her extraordinary fictional voice.
Mike Sarki, whose book Zimble Zamble Zumble I designed for elimae, and whose poetry has been championed by Gordon Lish.
Mike Topp, also published at elimae and The Quarterly, whose poetry redefines the category.
Norman Lock, author of A History of the Imagination, among many others, whose writing deserves an audience as vast as his intelligence.
And, of course, Amy Mabli, who, when she presents herself to the world, will own it.
An economic discussion about the implications of trading with aliens. No, not illegal aliens.
FUH2 is a site dedicated to pictures of people flipping off Hummers.
(via cathy)
A short article about coffee and its relationship to The Enlightenment, and smart drugs and body enhancements that may lead to a second Enlightenment. Short on details, but long on implications.
An extensive — and I mean extensive — overview of the recording history of Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah. Complete with graphs.
Damn, I love that song.
(via andrew @ clusterflock)
Good notes from today’s Apple event at which they announced the developer’s kit for the iPhone. VC John Doerr also announced the iFund, a $100 million fund that will give money to companies wanting to develop applications for the iPhone. (via df)
LeBron James dropped 50 points on the Knicks in Madison Square Garden last night to chants of MVP from the New York crowd. It’s good to be the king.
Update: Did you see the buzzer beating three pointer at the end of the first quarter?! He shot it almost from mid-court, floating left. It looked effortless. It was almost like Jordan’s game ending shot against the Jazz in game six of the ‘98 Finals, but, again, from almost mid-court.
What do saw dust, cow manure, car prices, chainsaw art, and alternative energy have in common?
1. It seems that the slow housing market means that fewer scraps of wood are being reduced down to dust, which is used in the manufacture of certain interior components, like steering wheels.
2. Apparently, there are a few substitutes to sawdust in the farming industry, like cow manure.
3. Sawdust swirled as Paul Jones worked his chainsaw magic in Howard Amon Park, converting a dying tree into a work of art.
4. “Imagine a vat of liquid cow manure covering the area of five football fields and 33 feet deep,” Reuters tells us. “Meet California’s most alternative new energy.”
American scientists have harnessed MRI technology to accurately predict what image a person is seeing. The implications in the long term are that we may one day be able to record visual evidence of our dreams or “reconstruct a picture of a person’s visual experience at any moment in time.”
(via marginal revolution)
Where to begin?
Do you like squirrels?
Do you like dress-up?
Sugar Bush Squirrel — The Superstar Squirrel — Supermodel & Military Mascot.
Hope all of you are enjoying your summer as much as I’m enjoying my new yellow sandals!
(via mary @ clusterflock)
Or, “with all the dogmatism of brevity”, Ogilvy & Mather show us how to create advertising that sells. (via coudal)
Update: The link to the image was being blocked so I fixed it by pointing to a local copy.
Update: This post is now fifth when you google “Alison Stokke”. (thx, jack)
Forget the Red State / Blue State labels; the real question is Wal-Mart State or Starbucks State.
(thx, jason)
There’s a big kerfuffle (how many points do I get for that?) over Hasbro, makers of Scrabble, suing Rajat and Jayant Agarwalla over their popular Facebook application, Scrabulous.
I got two great things in the mail yesterday. I’ll talk about the second one in a bit, but the first is Kim Chinquee’s book of flash fictions and prose poems, Oh Baby. Here’s an excerpt:
She sent me pictures of the cake. They had a flaming onion, whisky sours, steak and fried potatoes. They gambled at the Soaring Eagle, losing hundreds and then thousands. “You got married to my mom,” I said to him on my end. I got married at the Justice of the Peace, picking up two people, offering to pay them. The first said no thanks and the second said he was too injured. We found another couple who seemed angelic, their voices a team, an echo. “She’s a catch,” he said, kind of laughing. I heard him on the exhale. He smoked on the back porch that faced a lake, where we’d once gone fishing, catching nothing worth keeping.
The placebo effect is real apparently even when you know it’s a placebo, and, alternately, the possibility exists that cultural expectations of whether a drug works may have an effect on how well the drug works:
There are various possible interpretations of this finding: it’s possible, of course, that it was a function of changing research protocols. But one possibility is that the older drug became less effective after new ones were brought in, because of deteriorating medical belief in it.
April 18 is Poop For Peace Day.
Mark your calenders!
(Gross.)
Update: Mandar suggests everyday is poop for peace day.
Update: If it so moves you — sorry! — Bennett has a post at the Utne Reader Blog about The Politics of Poop.
We are having a lot of fun with drag queen names (aka, porn star names) over at clusterflock. Feel free to join in the fun.
An (animated (and condensed (and brief (and truncated)))) history of evil. Almost as interesting for the comments as for the video itself.
It looks like humans are just as capable of forming bonds with robots as they are with dogs. Perhaps the robot dogs will comfort us while we propagate memes for our machine overlords.
37signals is running some experiments with the goal of making people happy in the workplace. So far they have implemented shorter work weeks, funding people’s passions, and discretionary spending accounts. The funding people’s passions idea reminds me of my time as an internet developer at Nortel in the mid-90s. We set up informal lunch-time sessions where each of us would take turns teaching others something we knew. I learned more in my time there, because of that, than I have in any other work environment. Of course, our sessions were spontaneous and definitely not institutional. They were the result of a great boss and motivated people. The idea that this sort of innovation exists institutionally speaks strongly for the culture 37signals is creating and perhaps hints at why some companies survived the initial internet bubble and others didn’t.
Update: This just in:
I am perfectly willing to acknowledge that not all of us excel at the same things, but I’m coming to believe more and more firmly that this whole “typical person” entity is a myth. I’ve never met a typical person. There are only people who are passionate about what they do, and people who aren’t. When the latter become the former, they become “atypical”, because suddenly they are self-motivated, insightful, excited, optimistic, and happy.
The way infants and adults see color is processed in the brain differently. The infant brain sees color in a pre-linguistic part of the brain. Adults, in a part of the brain that deals with language. It’s not known when or how that transition is accomplished, but:
“As an adult, color categorization is influenced by linguistic categories. It differs as the language differs,” said Kay, who is renowned for his studies on the ways that different cultures classify colors. He cited recent research on the ability of Russian speakers to detect shades of blue that English speakers classify as a single color.
Is this the contemporary equivalent of Eskimo words for snow?
In case you’re wondering if Kottke is blogging this week.
(A nice addition to Jason’s list of Single Serving Sites.)
Update: Brought to us — ironically? — by, Jason.
The world of competitive crossworld puzzles, apparently, is a lot like the world of professional golf. One no longer asks who will win the Masters, for instance. One asks, Tiger or the field? For crossword puzzle tournaments, the appropriate question, now, is, Tyler or the field?
(thx, john)
Update: Tyler Hinman was in the crossword puzzle documentary Wordplay.
I never played Dungeons & Dragons, but I did play RuneQuest in the back room of a bookshop in Bonham Texas with high school students some ten years older than me.
(One of them, a young woman I had a crush on, responded to “What’s your point?” with “I wish I could see it through all that hair.”
I thought that was pretty cool.)
All this to say a first look at the fourth edition of Dungeons & Dragons has leaked onto the web, and, sadly, “Gary Gygax, the co-creator of Dungeons & Dragons, has passed away, aged just 69.”
(thx, david)
My friend, the incredibly talented photographer, Barry Stone is exhibiting an outdoor installation of large photographs of Galaxies made from flour at the BBAP in Houston.
I’m interested in short video as a contemporary equivalent of the photograph. Here are two examples. My lovely wife talking about her lovely mother. My nephew a few years ago singing his favorite song. I love these moments, not only because they are people I love, but because I think they show, as snapshots do, how spectacular a moment can be.
Rob Haggart, aka A Photo Editor, does a great job introducing this video of Annie Leibovitz photographing Queen Elizabeth.
What I find interesting in photo shoot videos is not the 11 assistants or the lighting setup but watching the photographer interact with the subject.
As Rob says, “Annie really shows her tenacity in this video when she immediately tries to get the Queen to remove her crown after deciding it doesn’t look good in the first shot and not giving up on an original request to shoot the Queen on horseback inside the state apartments.”
Simultaneously fascinating and terrifying — like watching a trapeze artist at work.
Speaking of memes, Susan Blackmore theorizes that humans are just machines for propagating them.
Memes are using human brains as their copying machinery. So we need to understand the way human beings work.
&
Up until very recently in the world of memes, humans did all the varying and selecting. We had machines that copied — photocopiers, printing presses — but only very recently do we have artificial machines that also produce the variations, for example (software that) mixes up ideas and produces an essay or neural networks that produce new music and do the selecting. There are machines that will choose which music you listen to. It’s all shifting that way because evolution by natural selection is inevitable. There’s a shift to the machines doing all of that.
When asked what the future will look like, she says, “it will look like humans are just a minor thing on this planet with masses (of) silicon-based machinery using us to drag stuff out of the ground to build more machines.”
Good times.
Chalk one up for environmental pollutants.
Male starlings with the highest levels of endocrine disruptors in their bodies also possessed unusually developed high vocal centers, an area of the brain associated with songbirds’ songs.
Accordingly, the polluted male starlings sang songs of exceptional length and complexity — a birdsign of reproductive fitness.
Money quote: “Female starlings preferred their songs to those of unexposed males, suggesting that the polluted birds could have a reproductive advantage, eventually spreading their genes through starling populations.”
Henry Markram has built a supercomputer comprised of 2,000 IBM chips that can handle 22.8 trillion operations per second. “Each of its microchips has been programmed to act just like a real neuron in a real brain.”
Blue Brain scientists are confident that, at some point in the next few years, they will be able to start simulating an entire brain. “If we build this brain right, it will do everything,” Markram says. I ask him if that includes selfconsciousness: Is it really possible to put a ghost into a machine? “When I say everything, I mean everything,” he says, and a mischievous smile spreads across his face.
Agnes Martin is one of my favorite painters. Her advice for how to make progress in life ties in nicely with the articles I posted on options, gusto, and blogging.
To progress in life you must give up the things you do not like. Give up doing the things that you do not like to do. You must find the things that you do like. The things that are acceptable to your mind.
I keep reloading kottke.org to see if there are new posts.
Update (from Jason): I keep reloading kottke.org and seeing new posts. Excellent!
Update (from Deron): It’s like magic.
When Steve Jobs disregards a market segment — think mp3 players or cell phones — that sometimes means Apple is about to jump in and take over. When asked about Amazon’s Kindle a few months ago, Jobs said:
“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.”
Of course, that set off speculation that Apple was about to do just that, integrate a book reader into a series of portable internet devices.
It’s speculation like this that feeds the conspiracy theory in all of us. Being an Apple fan is like that — except once every few product cycles the conspiracy actually plays out.
Seems like this would have made a better mockumentary.
Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger escaped an assassination plot hatched in 1969 by the Hells Angels, a new British Broadcasting Corp. documentary has claimed.
The men tried to reach Jagger by sea. “The boat was hit by a storm and all of the men were thrown overboard.” They all survived but made no other attempt on his life.
2point8 points us to the portraiture and street photography of Arlene Gottfried:
“You get the sense that Gottfried didn’t necessarily leave her house to go get the picture wherever that picture might be, but that she lived her life with gusto and was ready for the pictures when the pictures came to her.”
Kind of a good metaphor for blogging.
Keeping too many doors open narrows our options.
“Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss,” Dr. Ariely says. In the experiment, the price was easy to measure in lost cash. In life, the costs are less obvious — wasted time, missed opportunities. If you are afraid to drop any project at the office, you pay for it at home.
Oh, I was supposed to start with a joke. You’re supposed to start with a joke.
What does a termite eat for breakfast?
Oak-meal.
(thx, aaron)
Okay, I’ll see everybody tomorrow.
An article in the Times about the transition of sales in high-end galleries to the web.
Mr. Gupta said about half of his sales take place without the presence of the buyer. “Being in Chicago, without the walk-in traffic of a gallery in New York or even L.A., I can’t imagine working without digital images,” he said. “We have a ton of European collectors, and we reach them through art fairs and digital images, a combined effort.”
(via ev +/-)
Thanks for the intro, Jason. I am honored to be hanging out for the week. I think for a lot of us, kottke.org has been a touchstone for life on the web. I remember stumbling across the site in the late ’90s, full of the invigoration many of us felt about the directions the internet allowed us to go. Even though I’ve only gotten to know Jason recently, there was a camaraderie I felt for him, this site, the work he was doing. Like I say, I’m honored to be along.
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