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Unlike the US government, Hasbro lets you print out your own Monopoly money. There are PDFs for 1,5,10,20,50,100, and 500 dollar bills.
I was told that everyone in the NYC online media scene needs to read this NY Times Magazine cover story by and about former Gawker editor Emily Gould and her oversharing problems. I was less than halfway through when I realized I’m not part of that scene, if I ever was. So, the outsider’s perspective: Gould’s story is a familiar one, well-written, and rings with truth in places with regard to microcelebrity and the difficulty of learning how much to share online.
Lucas finally does away with all those pesky human actors in an animated sequel to Episode II that no one was clamoring for. But I had to look at the trailer.
Taking in the scene at Cannes:
Defying France’s strict new antismoking laws, Sean Penn, right, president of the jury at the 61st Cannes Film Festival, lighted a cigarette at a news conference yesterday, Agence France-Presse reported. After a couple of puffs in defiance of rules that banned smoking in enclosed spaces since January, he put the cigarette aside and returned to answering reporters’ questions. But a jury member, the Iranian writer and director Marjane Satrapi, prompting laughter, then asked if anyone minded if she smoked “for medical reasons.” She lighted a cigarette; Mr. Penn and the French actress Jeanne Balibar joined her.
After a stutter step back in late February, NY Times releases their slick archive browser, TimesMachine. Here’s the announcement from the team that put it together.
TimesMachine is a collection of full-page image scans of the newspaper from 1851-1922 (i.e., the public domain archives). Organized chronologically and navigated by a simple calendar interface, TimesMachine provides a unique way to traverse the historical archives of The New York Times. Topics ranging from the Civil War to the sinking of the Titanic to the first cross-country auto race to women’s fashions in the 20s are just a few electronic flips away. And of course, there’s the advertisements.
Unfortunately, full access to the archives through TimesMachine is only available to subscribers. (via fimoculous)
Season five of The Wire on DVD is available for pre-order on Amazon. Release date is August 12, 2008. (thx, marshall)
If you need a reminder of Harrison Ford’s ability to play Indiana Jones after nearly 20 years on the shelf, it comes in the movie’s opening scene. Indy is roughly extracted from a car and tumbles to the ground. We see him stumble towards his trademark hat with that walk, a graceful stuttering step, wary of booby traps even on solid ground. Even though the camera shows us only his boots, it’s unmistakably Indiana Jones.
That walk is also a signal that Lucas and Spielberg didn’t screw this whole thing up…aside from the goofy film title (although having seen the movie, anything else would have ruined the surprise). They didn’t take the bait offered by Casino Royale or The Bourne Ultimatum and attempt to shoehorn Dr. Jones into a frenetic, circa-2008 thrill-ride. Oh, there were thrills alright and plenty of swashes were buckled, but this was an action/adventure movie straight out of the 80s. Safe territory for Lucas and Spielberg perhaps, but for someone who believes that the best 80s action adventure movies have something to teach contemporary filmmakers (#1 of a long list: Don’t make the special effects the star), the film was a thoroughly enjoyable territory in which to spend an evening. (thx to nextnewnetworks for the ticket hookup)
The music video for my song ‘Alice’, an electronic piece of which 90% is composed using sounds recorded from the Disney film ‘Alice In Wonderland’.
Said video. Said song download. (thx, sam)
The second trailer for Hancock, the Will-Smith-as-apathetic-superhero movie due out this summer, is up on Apple Trailers. I believe this is the same one I linked to on YouTube a month ago, but watch it again anyway. I am hoping against hope that this one isn’t going to be as stupid as I think and instead will be as awesome as I hope.
From this quick overview of why internet shoe retailer Zappos is such a great company, this clever hiring practice:
When Zappos hires new employees, it provides a four-week training period that immerses them in the company’s strategy, culture, and obsession with customers. People get paid their full salary during this period. After a week or so in this immersive experience, though, it’s time for what Zappos calls “The Offer.” The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: “If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you’ve worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus.” Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!
That’s pretty fucking brilliant. It applies a direct incentive of cold hard cash against what the company wants: employees dedicated not primarily to their paycheck but to the company/customers.
Absolutely incredible photos of a wedding and then an earthquake.
Can you imagine what it was like to have been photographing a wedding in Sichuan, China when 7.9 earthquake hit and shakes for three minutes? From what I understand, there were thirty-three missing guests in this church.
Possible collateral damage from the ascendence of HD and Blu-ray: people want their movies to look nice and clean and sharp and without film grain, even if the feel of a movie calls for it.
Unfortunately, what seems to happening right now is that the studio marketing folks are conducting focus groups with new Blu-ray consumers, who are saying they want perfect pictures every time. As a result, a few of the Hollywood studios are currently A) using excessive Digital Noise Reduction to completely scrub film grain from their Blu-ray releases, or B) not releasing as many older catalog titles as they might otherwise for fear that people will complain about grain. Some studios are even going so far as to scrub the grain out of NEW releases that have been shot on film. Case in point: New Line’s Pan’s Labyrinth Blu-ray Disc. When I saw this film in the theaters, it was dark and gritty. The grain was a deliberate stylistic choice — part of the artistic character of the film. New Line’s Blu-ray, on the other hand, is sparkly and glossy — almost entirely grain-free. So much fine detail has been removed that the faces of characters actually look waxy. Everyone looks like a plastic doll.
(via house next door)
I took a quick Twitter poll this morning: What’s the opposite of standing: sitting or lying down? The results: lying down wins but sitting is a close second. My favorite answer, which several people gave, is doing a headstand (or hanging upside down).
Now, what about this: What’s the opposite of sitting: lying down or standing?
A really nice remembrance of Florent, a beloved meatpacking district restaurant set to close its doors next month, by the people who knew the restaurant best.
The first time I went to Florent I had been out very late at night with some friends and we were looking for somewhere to go for breakfast at about, you know, 3:30 or 4 o’clock in the morning. We went down there and it was very dark and we came onto Gansevoort Street and the restaurant was lit up and it looked - it looked almost like a mirage. It felt magical.
The article is not just a history of Florent but also of a Manhattan and New York City that is all but gone. Says Calvin Klein:
It was alive with real downtown character types who dressed every which way: from straight, creative types of all ages, young and old, to transvestites, to probably local prostitutes. It was downtown. It was real downtown. That’s when they were cutting meat all night long. And that was during the Studio 54 days. We were young and we were having a lot of fun and we were out all night. And we’d end up in the meatpacking district, at the clubs. You went to Florent after the clubs.
Russell Davies covered the front of his laptop with blackboard paint; it now doubles as a quick jotpad for to-do lists, etc. Great idea, but I’d always forget to haul the chalk around.
Update: On the other hand, I could be a techno-utopian idiot! (May I still argue for the idea’s conceptual goodness?)
Sixteen elusive movie object of desire, including White Castle burgers in Harold & Kumar, the Ark of the Convenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and the One Ring from the LOTR trilogy.
One of the most enjoyable sessions at the New Yorker Conference was the chefs roundtable.
Bill Buford talks with the chefs David Chang, Daniel Humm, and Marc Taxiera about their influences and the future of the culinary world.
Buford talks too much and the chefs too little but he manages some good questions and fun is had.
Print Magazine has an awesome roundup of book covers, advertisements, movies posters, etc. using the “cutoff-torso-spread-leg framing device”, what Steven Heller calls “the most frequently copied trope ever used”.
Fantastic collection of photos by James Mollison of music fans who tend to dress like their idols. A book featuring the photos is due out in October.
Over a three-year period, James Mollison attended pop concerts across Europe and the United States with a mobile photography studio, inviting fans of each music star or band to pose for a portrait on their way into the concert. The result is The Disciples, an original and highly entertaining series of fifty-seven panoramic images, each featuring eight to ten music fans mimicking the manners and dress of their particular heroes. Featuring fans of Dolly Parton, Iggy Pop, Madonna, Marilyn Manson, the Rolling Stones, Bob Dylan, Snoop Dogg, and Motorhead, among many others, The Disciples is a surprising, sharp, and hilarious take on popular culture.
(via waxy)
The NY Times’ City Room blog has a short profile of photographer Nikola Tamindzic.
He uses long exposures, then shakes the camera while the shutter is still open, causing colors to blur and lights to streak. “I’m not recording what is really happening, but it’s something like what the brain is seeing late at night, especially if maybe you’re drunk or very excited,” he said. “I like that hour between 3 and 4 in the morning when desperation sets in, when you see all the anticipation of going out starting to fade. The masks drop and everybody realizes the night is not going to be everything they were hoping for.”
You may have seen Tamindzic’s photos on Gawker or on his own site, Home of the Vain. Here’s the photo with Huffington, Murdoch, et al. An archive of his photography is available at Ambrel.
A compilation of “that’s what she said” jokes from The Office. I’m retroactively embarrassed for my non-ironic use of this phrase the other day. Sorry, friends. (via fimoculous)
Over at Stingy Kids, Adriana has a thoughtful and link-filled post about South African sprinter Oscar Pistorius. Pistorius is a double-amputee who runs on carbon fiber blades in place of his lower legs; here’s a video of him running in a 400m race. Last week, the Court of Arbitration for Sport ruled that Pistorius can compete for a spot in the Beijing Olympics against “able-bodied” athletes, which overturned a previous ruling that he could not compete because his blades give him a mechanical advantage.
What’s clear is that the seemingly politically correct replacement of “disabled” with “differently abled” is not only warranted but perhaps doesn’t go far enough. How about “super abled” or “superbly abled”? Lengthen or add a bit more spring to those blades and Pistorius may win every race handily and take first in the high jump to boot.
Pistorius is not the first athlete with super abilities. Steroids and HGH are outlawed in most sports because it’s felt they give too much advantage. Baseball pitchers routinely opt for something called Tommy John surgery, many athletes get laser eye surgery to improve their vision, and many more potential augmentation schemes are right around the corner. And lest you think this is just about sports, maybe the guy in the next cubicle over is regularly taking Provigil to improve his memory, concentration, and his chances at that promotion you wanted.
Another new book out in the fall is Thomas Keller’s Under Pressure, the chef’s long-awaited cookbook on sous vide cooking.
In “Under Pressure”, Thomas Keller shows us how sous vide, which involves packing food in airtight plastic bags and cooking at low heat, achieves results that other cooking methods simply cannot — in flavor and precision. For example, steak that is a perfect medium rare from top to bottom; and meltingly tender yet medium rare short ribs that haven’t lost their flavor to the sauce. Fish, which has a small window of doneness, is easier to finesse, and salmon develops a voluptuous texture when cooked at a low temperature. Fruit and vegetables benefit too, retaining their bright colors while achieving remarkable textures. There is wonderment in cooking sous vide — in the ease and precision (salmon cooked at 123 degrees versus 120 degrees!) and the capacity to cook a piece of meat (or glaze carrots, or poach lobster) uniformly.
Under Pressure is out October 1, 2008 and plays Bowie when you open the cover. Keller and Michael Ruhlman have also begun work on a book that “will focus on family-style cooking, in the style of Ad Hoc, and great food to cook at home”.
Here’s a fun optical/muscular illusion to try out:
This morning I went into the darkest room in our house (the kids’ bathroom), closed the door, and turned off the lights for 5 minutes. There was enough light coming in through the crack in the door that after a minute or two I could begin to make out shapes in the room: A towel rack, the shower curtain. My eyes had adapted to the dark condition. Then I closed my right eye and covered it with my hand. I turned the lights back on, for a minute, until my left eye had adapted to the light. Then I turned the lights off.
I could still see the towel rack and shower curtain with my right eye, which remained adapted to darkness. But my left eye could see nothing. In fact, my left eye felt as if it was closed. I made every effort to open the eye, but it seemed that some unstoppable force was keeping it closed. The only way to make my eye feel as if it was open was to cover it with my hand. I still couldn’t see anything with the eye, but at least I could convince myself it was open.
No posting today…I was out sick most of the day. I hope tomorrow is slightly better but who knows.
Video of David Lynch putting a fan’s panties in his mouth. Not much to add.
The Amazon page for Malcolm Gladwell’s new book is up. From here, we learn that the full title is “Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don’t” and what the cover looks like. Here’s the description:
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers” — the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. Along the way he explains the secrets of software billionaires, what it takes to be a great soccer player, why Asians are good at math, and what made the Beatles the greatest rock band.
And an excerpt from the Little, Brown catalog:
Outliers is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else? In Outliers, we’re going to visit a genius who lives on a horse farm in Northern Missouri. We’re going to examine the bizarre histories of professional hockey and soccer players, and look into the peculiar childhood of Bill Gates, and spend time in a Chinese rice paddy, and investigate the world’s greatest law firm, and wonder about what distinguishes pilots who crash planes from those who don’t. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us — the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual — I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong.
This doesn’t sound exactly what I had heard his new book was going to be.
A few days ago, New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell noted that he’s almost finished with his third book. I’ve learned that the subject of this book is the future of the workplace with subtopics of education and genius.
I guess if you flip those around, that describes Outliers marginally well. According to Amazon, the book is due on November 18, 2008. (thx, kyösti)
When the new Ikea is finished, it’ll be easier than ever to get to Red Hook from Manhattan. The Serious Eats crew noticed that the free ferry deposits interested eaters about four blocks from the renowned Red Hook soccer taco vendors.
I wish this map of current US gas prices factored out the taxes included in the pump price. It seems like what the map mostly shows is the differences in taxes between states (PDF map) and not, for instance, how the distance from shipping ports or local demand affects prices. (via what i learned today)
[Part four of a recurring series…part one, part two, part three.]
According to the Indian National Crime Bureau, there were 6,787 dowry deaths in India in 2005. A dowry death occurs when a woman is killed or commits suicide due to coercion by her husband or her husband’s family in order to secure a larger dowry. [Indian National Crime Bureau]
As of August 2005, the poverty rate in Mississippi was 21.1%, the highest in the nation. The state also ranks first in senior poverty and second in child poverty. Despite being surrounded by states with relatively low poverty rates, Washington DC ranks first in child poverty and is second in overall and senior poverty. [USCCB]
Buddhist teachers Michael Roach and Christie McNally haven’t been more than 15 feet from each other in the ten years since they took an oath to that effect. They also read the same books at the same time. [NY Times]
NYC’s alternate-side parking rules will be suspended in Park Slope for a few months so that workers can replace parking signs. Residents are overjoyed because they don’t have to move their cars every few days. [NY Times]
There are at least 3 escalators in Wyoming. [Metafilter]
Velcro is 50 years old. (At least the trademark is.) [mental_floss]
The Golden Gate Bridge is younger than John McCain. [Things Younger Than John McCain]
In Oklahoma City, the interstate will be moved five blocks from downtown to an old railroad line. The new 10-lane highway, expected to carry 120,000 vehicles daily, will be placed in a trench so deep that city streets can run atop it, as if the highway weren’t there. The old highway will be converted into a tree-lined boulevard city officials hope will become Oklahoma City’s marquee street.
Several other cities have done (or are planning to do) similar highway tear downs.
“Highways don’t belong in cities. Period,” says John Norquist, who was mayor of Milwaukee when it closed a highway. “Europe didn’t do it. America did. And our cities have paid the price.”
No mention of Boston’s Big Dig, perhaps the most high-profile example of this trend.
The Wii Balance Board, the new exercise peripheral for the Nintendo Wii, was reviewed favorably by a number of people for the New York Times. A fitness professional at the Sports Center at Chelsea Piers gave it pretty high marks:
“Actually I think it’s pretty good,” she said. “You can definitely get a workout. When I started doing it, I realized all the activities were pretty much on point. There were some things I didn’t like, like the alignment in a couple of places. But over all, I thought they did a good job and this will be a good tool for people who can’t make it to the gym.”
The Wii Balance Board will be released in the US and Canada early next week.
Update: Joel Johnson has a nice round-up of exercise-themed video game accessories, from the unreleased Atari Puffer to the Wii Fit.
A list of ways to get yourself excused from the jury pool in the R. Kelly child pornography case.
I (heart) R. Kelly. Nothing gets prospective jurors booted faster than telling the prosecution they are a fan of Kelly’s. Just ask the woman who called him a “musical genius.” When prodded to say something negative about Kelly, the best she could come up with was: “He and [rapper] Jay-Z don’t get along?” Prosecutors bounced her soon after.
Another potential juror was excused for suggesting that Kelly “led the Taliban in attacking us on 9-11”.
A collection of photos of a cleaning crew washing Seattle’s Space Needle with high pressure washers (scroll down a bit).
Even though the sprayers use half the flow of a garden hose, the water shoots out at 3,000 pounds per square inch — more than enough power to send the guy behind the hose flying. “One thing we say is, it doesn’t necessarily have to be fun to be fun. There are definitely times when I’m spinning in free space and I’m like, holy cow this is terrifying and I can’t believe this is my job,” said Matt Henry, rope technician.
The company doing the work, Karcher GmbH & Co., has done similar high-profile jobs around the world, all at no cost…their web site says that these projects are good publicity for their cleaning products. Here’s a sampling of some other projects they’ve done, including the Statue of Liberty and Berlin’s Brandenburg Gate. (via girlhacker)
Here’s an update on the effort to solve the Pioneer anomaly, the unexplained deviation in motion of deep space probes from what Newton and Einstein’s theories predict.
As it sped through space, a specialist in radio-wave physics named John Anderson at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory noticed an odd thing. The spacecraft was drifting off course. The discrepancy was less than a few hundred-millionths of an inch per second for every second of spaceflight, accumulating year after year across billions of miles. Then Pioneer 11, an identical probe escaping the solar system in the opposite direction, also started to veer off course at the same rate.
Ordinarily, such small deviations might be overlooked, but not by Dr. Anderson. He monitored the trajectories six years before calling attention to the matter. “I’m a little like an accountant,” Dr. Anderson said. “We have Newton’s theory and Einstein’s theory, and when you apply them to something like this — and it doesn’t add up — it bothers me.”
The researchers, using data recovered from recently discovered Pioneer records and funded by sources outside of NASA, have figured out part of the problem but the rest remains a mystery.
Greg Allen still has his bottle of Suck Cola from when the now-defunct web site Suck was handing them out at a trade show in 1996. He’s building a registry of Suck Cola bottles…if you’ve got one, send in the details.
After your Cola information is reviewed and validated, you will be issued a Suck Cola Registry Number. I have designated my bottle SC0005, having reserved the first four Registry Numbers, SC0001-SC0004, for Suck.com co-founders Joey Anuff and Carl Steadman.
Suck the web site has now been dead for as long as it was active, but the Cola lives on.
Video of designer John Gall, who shares his five rules for book cover design.
The other great source of inspiration is the deadline.
A look at how portion sizes have changed in the US over the years.
We don’t have to eat those extra 360 calories in the tub of popcorn, but that’s easier said than (not) done. Studies indicate that when given food in larger containers, people will consume more. In a 1996 Cornell University study, people in a movie theater ate from either medium (120g) or large (240g) buckets of popcorn, then divided into two groups based on whether they liked the taste of the popcorn. The results: people with the large size ate more than those with the medium size, regardless of how participants rated the taste of the popcorn.
This one’s not holding up as well as one would think. The first time I saw it, in the theater in 1999, my reaction was “eh”. The second time, on DVD a few years ago, I thought it was great. Now I’m back closer to “eh” again.
Unfortunately, despite our best efforts, we’ve run out of money, and can no longer afford to pursue our vision of adapting great long-form content for a short-form world, at least not as a stand-alone company. As recently as yesterday morning, we thought we had the funding in place to continue our work together. But as it turns out, we don’t.
Like Cameron, I found the site useful and am sad to see it go.
Michael Bierut celebrates the elegantly simple design of the Brannock Foot-Measuring Device.
Charles F. Brannock only invented one thing in his life, and this was it. The son of a Syracuse, New York, shoe magnate, Brannock became interested in improving the primitive wooden measuring sticks that he saw around his father’s store. He patented his first prototype in 1926, based on models he had made from Erector Set parts. As the Park-Brannock Shoe Store became legendary for fitting feet with absolute accuracy, the demand for the device grew, and in 1927 Brannock opened a factory to mass produce it. The Brannock Device Co., Inc., is still in business today. Refreshingly, it still only makes this one thing. They have sold over a million, a remarkable number when one considers that each of them lasts up to 15 years, when the numbers wear off.
Bierut also notes that Tibor Kalman was a big fan of the Brannock Device, once saying:
It showed incredible ingenuity and no one has ever been able to beat it. I doubt if anyone ever will, even if we ever get to the stars, or find out everything there is to find out about black holes.
The humble shoe horn is another well designed shoe-related device that may never be bettered.
An interview with the makers of a film about secondhand clothing in Haiti.
Shell says Haitians sometimes dress better than Americans because they are used to tailoring their secondhand clothes to fit. While the pepe market makes it difficult for Haitian tailors to sell their own designs or traditional fashions; the cheap cost means, as one woman in the documentary explains, they can “adopt the look that is on television without much effort.”
Most of the clothes come from the United States.
Update: Secondhand clothing imports to Zambia killed the clothing industry there:
Mark O’Donnell, spokesperson for Zambian Manufacturers, explains that in 1991, when the country’s markets were opened to free trade, container load after container load of used clothing began to arrive in Zambia, undercutting the cost of the domestic manufacturers and putting them out of business. The skills, the infrastructure and the capital of an entire industry are now virtually extinct, with not a single clothing manufacturer left in the country today.
(thx, tj)
Joan Acocella on the paradox of New Yorkers’ seeming rudeness and helpfulness in public spaces.
[New Yorkers] make less separation between private and public life. That is, they act on the street as they do in private. In the United States today, public behavior is ruled by a kind of compulsory cheer that people probably picked up from television and advertising and that coats their transactions in a smooth, shiny glaze, making them seem empty-headed. New Yorkers have not yet gotten the knack of this. That may be because so many of them grew up outside the United States, and also because they live so much of their lives in public, eating their lunches in parks, riding to work in subways. It’s hard to keep up the smiley face for that many hours a day.
And here’s how New Yorkers deal with celebrities:
Another curious form of cooperation one sees in New York is the unspoken ban on staring at celebrities. When you get into an elevator in an office building and find that you are riding with Paul McCartney — this happened to me — you are not supposed to look at him. You can peek for a second, but then you must avert your eyes. The idea is that Paul McCartney has to be given his space like anyone else.
A tiny coat built out of living mouse stem cells that was a part of the Design and the Elastic Mind show at MoMA was killed because it was growing too fast.
Paola Antonelli, a senior curator at the museum, had to kill the coat. “It was growing too much,” she said in an interview from a conference in Belgrade. The cells were multiplying so fast that the incubator was beginning to clog. Also, a sleeve was falling off. So after checking with the coat’s creators, a group known as SymbioticA, at the School of Anatomy & Human Biology at the University of Western Australia in Perth, she had the nutrients to the cells stopped.
The b3ta folk explore what happens just outside the border of some well-known album covers. The Simon and Garfunkel and Pink Floyd/Kool-Aid ones are pretty good.
Yeondoo Jung does real-life recreations of children’s drawings. (via quips)
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