Illegal but mainstream behavior
A list of illegal behaviors that are also mainstream: pirating media/software, alcohol during Prohibition, speeding, marijuana, and sodomy. (via waxy)
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Entries for September 2008
190 Bowery
Photographer Jay Maisel bought the building at 190 Bowery 42 years ago for $102,000. Covered by graffiti and assumed by many to have been abandoned for years, it’s matured into a single family home with 6 stories, 72 rooms, 35,000 square feet, an estimated value of up to $70 million and three residents.
Food porn, porn porn
This Harper’s article from 2005 compares the food porn of the Food Network to regular porn.
Eventually, Tyler and the housewife would go cheek to cheek, lean forward, open their mouths, taste the chicken and rice, and melt into a flushed-face, simultaneous food swoon. When the inevitable sequence finally rolled, the editor kept looping their wet mouths and rapt faces as they pushed forkful after forkful of arroz con pollo past their lips, chewed, and swallowed-and pushed and chewed and swallowed again and again. “Classic porn style,” said Nitke. “They’re stretching the moment out, the orgasmic moment. In porn they’ll take a cum shot and run it in an endless loop.”
That must have been a fun one to write. See also: Food Network star or porn star? (via serious eats)
Update: Here’s an interview with the author about the article. (thx, jim)
Michael Lewis on the financial collapse
Michael Lewis looks on the bright side of the current financial crisis and finds five positive aspects.
Our willingness to believe that we can hire some expert to tell us how to outperform markets is a big problem, with big consequences. It underpins Wall Street’s brokerage operations, for instance, and leads to a lot more people giving out financial advice than should be giving out financial advice. Thanks to the current panic many Americans have learned that the experts who advise them what to do with their savings are, at best, fools.
God I hope he writes a book about all this someday, sort of a Liar’s Poker 2. He can call it Fool’s Roulette or something.
Funhouse mosaic
If I’d been walking at the time — perhaps at my treadmill desk — this photo from Cornelia Hediger would have stopped me in my tracks.
It falls apart under scrutiny but each time I go back to it after a few minutes, my initial reaction is always, “wow, cool”. (via heading east)
John Madden, football for fans
A nice short appreciation of John Madden and how his insistence on telling and showing people how the game of football is played has had an impact on how the game is played and watched.
Thus, the first tenet of Maddenism: a football game can be understood only by analyzing all its complexity. As he once put it: “Football isn’t nuclear physics, but it’s not so simple that you can make it simple. It takes some explaining to get it across.”
This is also the rare profile that mentions nothing about Madden’s bus and fear of flying.
The new Microsoft ads
After a couple of teasers starring Jerry Seinfeld, Microsoft is airing some new ads that take Apple’s “I’m a PC” out into the real world. So instead of John Hodgman’s dorky PC character (who is parodied in one of the new ads), they’ve got all sorts of people — basketball players, actresses, scientists, fashion designers, etc. — proudly declaring “I’m a PC”. As Michael Sippey mentions, the ads do communicate a “message of joy and abundance and widespread use of Personal Computing”, but they’re not “great”.
I briefly worked for a design firm in the late 90s that did a lot of advertising work. One of the hard and fast rules in the office — which was taken from a book written by a successful ad man whose name I cannot recall — was that if a company was #1 in a certain space, their advertising should never ever mention the competition, not even in an oblique fashion. And even if a company was #2, they should do the same and act as if they were #1.
That’s the problem with Microsoft’s ads. They’re still #1 and the bigger company, but by referencing Apple’s successful ad campaign, they’re acting like Apple is #1. (John Gruber made this same point the other day.) The ads fail because they serve to remind people that Apple comes up with good ideas that Microsoft then takes and shapes into something that so-called “normal people” can use or understand. Except that this isn’t 1993. With the iPod, iPhone, iMac, OS X, the Apple Stores, and the iTunes Store, Apple has their finger firmly on the pulse of what normal people want and Microsoft’s recent attempts (the Zune, Vista) to keep up by emulating Apple have failed. If MS had created the “I’m a PC” message on their own, the ads would be great, but these copy-and-paste ads lack soul and are merely “eh”.
What’s interesting is that with the I’m a Mac/I’m a PC ads, Apple mentions Microsoft explicitly, over and over, proving the old adage that rules are made to be broken. What works in Apple’s favor is that they are the #2 company and were clever about how they attacked #1. Microsoft’s hamfisted ads are almost saying to Apple, “nuh-uh, my mom thinks I’m cool” while the image of Hodgman’s frumpy PC is hard to shake and makes Windows seem lame without being overly insulting about it.
LeBron James loses at HORSE
LeBron James gets beat in a game of HORSE by a mere mortal. The crowd’s stunned silence when James loses is amazing. (via mr)
Most-rewatched movies
Question of the week over at the Onion AV Club: what movie have you rewatched the most times? My short list: Star Wars, Ocean’s 11, The Day After Tomorrow, Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. I’ve also seen Zoolander a fair number of times but not as many as the others.
For sale: Albert Einstein’s watch
Among the watches being auctioned at a sale in October is a watch once owned by Albert Einstein.
For the Einstein fan, we have a Longines that was owned by the scientist himself. It is a unique and historically important wristwatch, made in 1930.The watch was presented to Professor Albert Einstein on February 16, 1931 in Los Angeles. It is a fine, tonneau-shaped, 14K yellow gold wristwatch accompanied by various photos showing Prof. Einstein wearing the watch. Estimate: $25,000 - $35,000
You’d think that the price for timepiece once owned by the man who changed our conceptions about time and space would be substantial, but it’s one of the lower priced featured watches. And the price is not even close to the world record:
In 2002, Antiquorum established the all-time world record price for a wristwatch at auction when it sold a platinum Patek Philippe World Time Ref. 1415 from 1939 for an astounding CHF 6,603,500 (US$ 4,026,524). This record-breaking price more than doubled the previous world record price for a wristwatch at auction. Another record price for a modern watch was achieved in 2004, the unique white gold Calibre 89, also by Patek Philippe, was sold for SFr. 6,603,500 (US$ 5,002,652).
(thx, sam)
WASP clubs
While clubs that admit only WASPs are still around, their power and influence have diminished and their diversity has increased. A little. The language employed by WASPs in describing outsiders is interesting:
Acronyms like N.O.C.D. and P.L.U. are used to mean Not Our Class, Dear and People Like Us. W.O.G. refers to Wealthy Oriental Gentleman or Wise Oriental Gentleman, depending on whom you ask for a definition. “Hawaiian,” “Canadian,” and “Eskimo” all have special meaning as well. I was told by one Palm Beach resident that Hawaiian refers to anyone who pronounces the phrase “how are you” as “how ahhh yaaa” (they are howahhhyaaa-n, or Hawaiian). Another Wasp told me that, at the establishment-incubating St. Paul’s School in the early 1960s, Hawaiian was used to refer to anyone who was considered “trash.” To say that someone is Canadian can mean that they are Jewish, and Eskimo that they are African American.
Odd perfumes
Perfumer Christopher Brosius has a little shop in Brooklyn, out of which he offers several surprising and offbeat perfumes.
When my parents visited New York, I gave them a tour of my favourite scents in the shop. This took some time: the accords include clever riffs on the smell of rubber, from the intoxicating Inner Tube to a just-short-of-noxious Rubber Cement. Equally impressive is Wet Pavement, which strikes me as wearable, even pretty. Burning Leaves is startlingly alluring, and Ink smells so authentic that I held up the bottle to show my mother that the fluid was clear and not an indelible blue. Roast Beef is predictably revolting, but still a must-smell. My mother lingered over In the Library, a blend that Christopher describes as “First Edition, Russian and Moroccan Leather, Binding Cloth and a hint of Wood Polish”.
Unsurprisingly, Brosius also created the Demeter line of fragrances, featuring scents like Creme Brulee, Wet Garden, Funeral Home, Dirt, and Sugar Cookie.
17 years of daily self-portraits
Dan Hanna has made a rotating self-portrait video assembled from 17 years of daily photos, a la Noah Kalina’s Everyday video.
17 years worth of taking 2 photos a day as my head rotates in sync with the Earth around the Sun.
The split screen is a nice touch and I love watching the hair on his shaved head grow back like a Chia Pet every few months. Here’s a description of the rig he uses to take the photos. (via heading east)
Synecdoche, New York trailer
The trailer for Synecdoche, New York, the first film directed by Charlie Kaufman, who wrote Being John Malkovich, Adaptation, and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. A.O. Scott liked it at Cannes. The film will be out in limited release (NY & LA?) on Oct 24. Say sih-NECK-duh-kee…kinda like Schenectady. (via crazymonk)
Update: I removed the embedded video…I didn’t know it came with all that extra cruft around it.
Update: The video is back, YouTube-style.
Walking desks
Some people now work at walking desks, standing-height desks outfitted with treadmills.
To the uninitiated, work-walking sounds like a recipe for distraction. But devotees say the treadmill desks increase not only their activity but also their concentration. “I thought it was ridiculous until I tried it,” said Ms. Krivosha, 49, a partner in the law firm of Maslon Edelman Borman & Brand. Ms. Krivosha said it is tempting to become distracted during conference calls, but when she is exercising, she listens more intently. “Walking just takes care of the A.D.D. part,” she said.
One work-walker lost 16 pounds doing two hours of work-walking over a two-month period.
Update: Walking desk + addictiveness of World of Warcraft = 100 pound weight loss. Of course, he estimates that he gained 60-70 pounds playing Warcraft and eating Hot Tamales. (thx, johan)
Update: Walking desk footage on YouTube. (via get fit slowly)
1958 NFL championship game and modern football
Writer Mark Bowden sits down with Philadelphia Eagles coach Andy Reid to watch film from a classic football game, the 1958 NFL championship game. At several points during the session, 1958 football and contemporary football don’t even seem like the same game. Perhaps the biggest disparity is the difference in pay:
Most pro players in the 1950s held down full-time jobs off the field. Huff was a salesman for the textile company J. P. Stevens. Unitas and many of his teammates worked at Bethlehem Steel. Art Donovan, the Colts’ hilarious defensive tackle known as Fatso, was a liquor salesman. Most of the men earned less than $10,000 a year playing football. The highest-paid stars made between $15,000 and $20,000 — enough to support a middle-class lifestyle in 1958, but nothing like today’s hefty paychecks. Players who took off from their full-time jobs to play were often expected to make up the time by working long hours in the off-season.
(via df)
Ebert on starred movie ratings
As someone who gets quite a lot of shit for his movie ratings, I quite enjoyed Roger Ebert’s explanation of how he decides how many stars to give a film and why his ratings are usually higher than those of other critics. I give this bit 4 out of 4 stars:
In the early days of my career I said I rated a movie according to its “generic expectations,” whatever that meant. It might translate like this: “The star ratings are relative, not absolute. If a director is clearly trying to make a particular kind of movie, and his audiences are looking for a particular kind of movie, part of my job is judging how close he came to achieving his purpose.” Of course that doesn’t necessarily mean I’d give four stars to the best possible chainsaw movie. In my mind, four stars and, for that matter, one star, are absolute, not relative. They move outside “generic expectations” and triumph or fail on their own.
His “I like to write as if I’m on an empty sea” line is happily filed away, to be used as liberally as possible.
Remembering David Foster Wallace
This post is more for me than usual. I’ve got all these tabs open in my browser and need to close them to get some work done so I’m going to put this stuff here for now to revisit later. Any emphasis is mine.
Editors and authors remember at Slate:
You didn’t really edit David. Instead you played tennis with him using language as the ball. At Harper’s, we did three lengthy pieces together — on attending the Illinois State Fair, on sailing on a luxury cruise, and on the usage of the English language — and with each one I increasingly came to see how competitive David was. Not with me, his magazine editor, nor particularly with other writers, but with the great maw of horridness, to choose a word he might use. He was competing against the culture itself, and his pieces arrived on my desk way too long, letter-perfect, and appended with a one-line note that said something like “Here, maybe you’ll like this.”
A note from a former teacher of his at Amherst:
So here’s a true fact to embellish his reputation (not that it needs much embellishment): He wrote two senior theses at Amherst. A creative thesis in English that was his first novel, “The Broom of the System,” and a philosophy thesis on fatalism. Both were judged to be Summa Cum Laude theses. The opinion of those who looked at the philosophy thesis was that it, too, with just a few tweaks to flesh out the scholarly apparatus, was a publishable piece of creative philosophy investigating the interplay between time and modality in original ways.
That much is probably common knowledge. Here’s what is not so widely known: Though theses normally take a whole school year to write, DFW had complete drafts of his theses by Christmas, and they were finished by spring break. He spent the last quarter of his senior year reading, commenting on, and generally improving the theses of all his friends and acquaintances. It was a great year for theses at Amherst.
NASCAR Cancels Remainder Of Season Following David Foster Wallace’s Death, The Onion:
“Racing and literature are both huge parts of American life, and I don’t think David Foster Wallace would want me to make too much of that, or to pretend that it’s any sort of equitable balance,” Helton added. “That would be grotesque. But the truth is that whatever cultural deity, entity, energy, or random social flux produced stock car racing also produced the works of David Foster Wallace. And just look them. Look at that.”
Harper’s has made freely available online everything that Wallace had published in the magazine.
The davidfosterwallace tag on kottke.org.
Interview with Wallace in The Believer from Nov 2003. I don’t think I’ve ever read this one.
Wallace talks on NPR in 1997 about, among other things, relaxed concentration.
He was, in fact, extremely fond of The Wire — he stopped me in the hall one day last year and said, look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I’m really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?
A letter from an alumni of Granada House, a Boston-area treatment center, is assumed by many to have been written by Wallace:
In 1989, I already had a BA and one graduate degree and was in Boston to get another. And I was, at age 27, a late-stage alcoholic and drug addict. I had been in detoxes and rehabs; I had been in locked wards in psych facilities; I had had at least one serious suicide attempt, a course of ECT, and so on. The diagnosis of my family, friends, and teachers was that I was bright and talented but had “emotional problems.” I alone knew how deeply these problems were connected to alcohol and drugs, which I’d been using heavily since age fifteen.
A previously unpublished work from 1984 by Wallace which Ryan Niman collected from the shelves of Amherst. It’s called The Planet Trillaphon as It Stands in Relation to the Bad Thing (PDF).
Wallace filed a report on John McCain for This American Life in 2000.
Wallace wrote about the 1996 US Open for Tennis magazine.
Personal remembrances from Pomona College faculty and students. He had taught at Pomona since 2002.
A few months later, Dave was the first person we asked to contribute to McSweeney’s, thinking we could not start the journal without him. Thankfully, he sent a piece immediately, and then we knew we could begin. We honestly needed his endorsement, his go-ahead, because we were seeking, at the start at least, to focus on experimental fiction, and he was so far ahead of everyone else in that arena that without him the enterprise would seem ridiculous.
Along with his first piece, he also sent a check, for $250. That was the craziest thing: he sent a donation with his contribution. Thus he was the first donor to the journal, though he insisted that his donation remain anonymous in that first issue. I had such a problem cashing that check; I wanted to keep it, frame it, stare at it.
A 1999 interview with Wallace for Amherst magazine.
Ok, tabs are clear. Back to work, somehow.
Outside.in’s StoryMaps
Outside.in has launched a new feature called StoryMaps. When you sign up, they crawl your blog looking for mentions of places and then make a map of your posts. It doesn’t work so well for my site (mostly because — giggedy — kottke.org is all over the map, har har), but for sites that post about a lot of local stuff, it works pretty well. See Gothamist’s implementation, for instance. More on the outside.in blog. (Disclosure: I am an advisor to outside.in.)
Thread count
Finally! The truth about thread count.
In a quality product, the incremental comfort value of increasing thread count over 300 is very little. A 300 thread count can feel far superior to a 1000 thread count. Thread count has become a simple metric used by marketing people to capture interest and impress with high numbers. The problem with mass produced high thread count sheets is that to keep the price down, important elements of quality must be sacrificed, meaning in the end the customer gets a product with an impressive thread count but that probably feels no better (or even worse) than something with a lower thread count.
I am hoping that John Hodgman will shed further light on the thread count controversy (working title: CountGate) in his new book, More Information Than You Require.
Update: Even more about thread count. (thx, jeremy)
How Crayons Are Made
This is probably my all-time favorite childhood TV moment. I loved watching the smiling workers and relentless machinery turn all that formless wax into something that I USED EVERY DAY. My favorite part is the crayons popping up out of their molds. Still gives me chills, it does! BTW, the YouTube page says the video originated from Sesame Street but it was actually from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. (thx, janelle)
Update: I stand corrected…the above clip is from Sesame Street. But Mr. Rogers did show a similar clip on his show (stills here). I know I’ve seen the one on Mr. Rogers but I don’t know about the Sesame Street one. (thx, everyone)
Update: Ok, here’s the clip from Mr. Rogers. Its pace is a lot more leisurely than the Sesame Street clip.
Update: Richard Harvey composed the music for the Sesame Street segment in 1978. In this video, talks about how he put the track together.
(thx, sara)
19th century Arctic exploration photos
Photos from two Arctic expeditions, one in 1854 and the other in 1875-6.
This photo is part of the National Maritime Museum’s contribution to Flickr’s Commons project.
Grand Theft Festal
This year’s harvest of crop art from the Minnesota State Fair included Grand Theft Festal, a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Festal-brand canned corn done in millet, alfalfa, canola, and white clover seeds. The artist recorded a timelapse video of its construction. (via mark simonson)
Guesstimations
The results of some back-of-the-envelope calculations:
- The air in the Empire State Building weighs about 4 million pounds.
- The energy consumption of the world’s population will be greater than the energy coming from the sun in less than 500 years. (Peak photons?)
What’s surprising about such estimates is how often they are very close to the reality. This is especially true in a multi-step approximation, where over- and underestimates at various steps tend to cancel each other out, usually resulting in something not too far off from the truth.
Both Microsoft and Google use questions like these as part of their job interview process. We did a bunch of them in my freshman physics class; I loved them.
Update: The NY Times says that these are called Fermi Problems. (via gerry)
Soulja Boy reviews Braid
Video of rapper Soulja Boy reviewing Braid, an innovative Xbox 360 game in which a player can rewind the action to travel back in time to change previous actions in different ways. Soulja Boy *really* likes the time travel aspect of the game. I wish all game reviews were this exuberant. (via waxy)
Dignan’s notebook
Dignan’s 75-year plan from the movie Bottle Rocket.
E. Develop outside interests
a. Travel
b. Art
c. Science
(thx, tommy)
The totem fridge
For creator Stefan Buchberger, a design student at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, the idea grew out of a semester-long theme about keeping personal space clean and tidy. “I decided to create Flatshare fridge because there is nothing more disgusting than a dirty fridge in a shared flat,” he says. “At the time, I was living in such a flat!”
The fridge consists of a base station and up to four stackable modules. The modules allow each individual user to have his or her own refrigerator space and can be customized with various colorful skins as well as with add-ons like a bottle opener or a whiteboard.
The Flatshare refrigerator has the perhaps unfortunate side effect of reinforcing which household members hold lower positions on the metaphorical totem pole and therefore always need to bend down to access their unit while higher-status members can easily get at their fruit and veg without genuflection. (via cribcandy)
Every Photoshop filter
Dorothy Gambrell applies every Photoshop filter to an image in order and posted the results, including all the tweens. (via waxy)
Rothko remembrance
Mark Rothko’s daughter Kate remembers her father nearly 40 years after his death.
Rothko may have been depressed at the end of his life, he may not have been as clear as he should have been when it came to writing a will; but with regard to his work, and where it might end up, he had long held strong views. While selling to private individuals from his studio, he would scrutinise their reactions to paintings; they had to pass a test they did not know they were taking. If they failed, they went home empty-handed, irrespective of the size of their wallets. Lighting, on which wall of a gallery a painting might hang; these things obsessed him.
I saw Rothko’s Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern in May.
Only say true things
At McSweeney’s, Zadie Smith on the organizing principle of David Foster Wallace’s writing:
If we must say something, let’s at least only say true things.
Lots to say about that and him, but the words, they aren’t here yet. I don’t have heroes but made an exception for Wallace. Still stunned.
The economics of fruit picking
A British fruit company gave three economists the chance to increase the company’s fruit harvest by tinkering with pay schemes of the pickers.
The owner had been paying a piece rate — a rate per kilogram of fruit — but also needed to ensure that whether pickers spent the day on a bountiful field or a sparse one, their wages didn’t fall below the legal hourly minimum. Farmer Smith tried to adjust the piece rate each day so that it was always adequate but never generous: The more the work force picked, the lower the piece rate. But his workers were outwitting him by keeping an eye on each other, making sure nobody picked too quickly, and thus collectively slowing down and cranking up the piece rate.
Over the course of three summers, three different approaches raised the total harvest by 50% the first year, another 20% the second year, and by another 20% the third year.
Why people pirate games
Last month, indie game developer Cliff Harris asked on his blog: why do people pirate the games I make? That question made its way onto some popular web sites and he got hundreds of thoughtful responses. Kevin Kelly summed up the responses that Harris received.
He found patterns in the replies that surprised him. Chief among them was the common feeling that his games (and games in general) were overpriced for what buyers got — even at $20. Secondly, anything that made purchasing and starting to play difficult — like copy protection, DRM, two-step online purchasing routines — anything at all standing between the impulse to play and playing in the game itself was seen as a legitimate signal to take the free route. Harris also noted that ideological reasons (rants against capitalism, intellectual property, the man, or wanting to be outlaw) were a decided minority.
The gaming, music, and movie industry would do well to take note of the key sentence here: “Anything that made purchasing and starting to play difficult — like copy protection, DRM, two-step online purchasing routines — anything at all standing between the impulse to play and playing in the game itself was seen as a legitimate signal to take the free route.”
Last week, I tried to buy an episode of a TV show from the iTunes Store. It didn’t work and there was no error message. Thinking the download had corrupted something, I tried again and the same problem occurred. (I learned later that I needed to upgrade Quicktime.) Because I just wanted to watch the show and not deal with Apple’s issues, I spend two minutes online, found it somewhere for free, and watched the stolen version instead. I felt OK about it because I’d already paid for the real thing *twice*, but in the future, I’ll be a little wary purchasing TV shows from iTunes and maybe go the easier route first.
Traits of the creative personality
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality.
Furthermore, people who bring about an acceptable novelty in a domain seem able to use well two opposite ways of thinking: the convergent and the divergent. Convergent thinking is measured by IQ tests, and it involves solving well-defined, rational problems that have one correct answer. Divergent thinking leads to no agreed-upon solution. It involves fluency, or the ability to generate a great quantity of ideas; flexibility, or the ability to switch from one perspective to another; and originality in picking unusual associations of ideas. These are the dimensions of thinking that most creativity tests measure and that most workshops try to enhance.
Some of this seems like foolishness but the rest is a really interesting look at how to channel your creativity into success. (via 43f)
Travel by container ship
Another story of traveling by cargo ship.
The stevedores, or as we call them in the states, longshoremen, are becoming the latest group of tradespeople to be put out of their jobs by robots. The ships already practically steer themselves, that’s why I’m staying in the pilot’s cabin, “there is no pilot”. The course of the ship is plotted in advance as a series of vectors with turns at key points. The ship’s computer lets the officer on duty know when it’s time to make a turn, and corrects itself with GPS as a reference during the straight runs. The origin of word “cybernetic” is “kybernetes” — ‘steersman’ in Greek. So the arrangement of cargo and the logistics of operations are already optimized by software, the next step will be to link that software directly to the hardware of cranes and harvesters and turn them into robots. They will have a set of broad goals and priorities (the strategy), and the kind of basic decision making processes (the tactics) that the ship uses to stay on course autonomously: avoidance and correction.
People who travel by container ship also seem to be able to write well about the experience. Previously. Even more previously.
David Foster Wallace dead at 46
David Foster Wallace, the novelist, essayist and humorist best known for his 1996 tome “Infinite Jest,” was found dead last night at his home in Claremont, according to the Claremont Police Department. He was 46.
Jesus. No no no no. So fucking sad and unfair. I am in here and upset.
War and Peace-grade traffic
If you live and work in Los Angeles and have an average commute, you spend 72 hours a year in traffic. That’s enough time to read War and Peace once, get through Wagner’s The Ring Cycle almost five times, or watch the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy almost eight times. The page includes stats for other cities too.
Update: A closer read, a bit of arithmetic, and several emails have convinced me that the 72 hours is not the overall commute time but the time spent sitting motionless in traffic. (thx, everyone)
Talking body parts
Surreal Nike commercial featuring British sprinter Nicola Sanders and her talking body parts.
The recent architectural development of NYC
Not sure I agree with all of it, but New York magazine’s interesting piece about all the new development that has been going on in NYC for the past few years is certainly worth a read.
In the last 25 years, the city’s population has increased by a million people, and another million will be here 25 years from now. The question is not whether to make room for them but how. We could, in theory, rope off most of Manhattan to new development and push new arrivals to the city’s fringes. Had we done that years ago, we would have created a museum of shabbiness. Even doing so now would keep the city in a state of embalmed picturesqueness and let the cost of scarce space climb to even loonier heights than it already has. In its 43-year existence, the Landmarks Preservation Commission has tucked more than 25,000 buildings under its protective wing, which seems about right. Protect every tenement, and eventually millionaires can no longer afford them.
If you can’t take all the text, read it Playboy-style…there are over fifty great before-and-after photos of various new buildings around town, just keep scrolling down.
2008 Summer Paralympic Games photography
I don’t mean to link to every single thing on The Big Picture, but Alan’s knocked it out of the park again with these fantastic photos of the 2008 Summer Paralympic Games. These sports look more difficult than the ones at the regular Olympics. Take, for instance, goalball:
Participants compete in teams of three, and try to throw a ball that has bells embedded in it, into the opponents’ goal. They must use the sound of the bell to judge the position and movement of the ball. Games consist of two 10 minute halves. Blindfolds allow partially sighted players to compete on an equal footing with blind players.
The Games aren’t being broadcast on American TV but you can catch them on the web at Universal Sports.
Usain Bolt: 9.55 seconds
Some physicists have worked out what Usain Bolt’s time in the 100 meters in Beijing would have been if he hadn’t started celebrating before the finish line: 9.55 seconds. The original paper is here. I tried doing this the day after the race but even the HD footage wasn’t good enough to see the tick marks on the track and I didn’t want to mess around with all the angles. (via justin blanton)
Update: The folks at The Science of Sport lay out a much more sensible case relying on split times that Bolt would have run somewhere between 9.61 and 9.69. (thx, jim)
What is new media art?
How to identify interactive or new media art.
7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, “Yeah..yeah, I could’ve done that too..c’mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It’s so easy…”
(via russell davies)
Biking terminology
From a Copenhagen blog that highlights biking style, a plea to cool it with all the subculture cycling attitude and terminology already.
Let’s straighten things out, shall we? What you see in the photo above, taken in Copenhagen, is something we call a “cyclist”.
Not a “bicycle commuter”, nor a “utility cyclist”. Certainly not a “lightweight, open air, self-powered traffic vehicle user”. It’s a cyclist.
The Copenhagener above is not “commuting” - or at least she doesn’t call it that. She’s not going for a “bike ride” or “making a bold statement about her personal convictions regarding reduction of Co2 levels and sustainable transport methods in urban centers”.
She’s just going to work. On her bike.
(via gulfstream)
Update: The problem with biking in America: people don’t feel safe, mainly because people in cars just aren’t that aware of people on bicycles.
Big black holes
It looks like black holes can grow to be as massive as 50 billion suns. How massive is that? It’s approximately 99 duodecillion kilograms….which is a 99 followed by 39 zeros. (Put another way, if you had 99 duodecillion dollars, you could buy as many PlayStation 3s as you wanted. Blows your mind, right?)
Voice deepening gas
You know helium makes your voice go all squeaky? Adam from Mythbusters demonstrates that sulfur hexafluoride makes it do the opposite. Must get sulfur hexafluoride.
Speed skateboarding
HD video of two guys in powder-blue suits skateboarding down a hill at high velocity. This is insane, insane, insane…they even pass a car on the way down. Fast forward to 2:20 for the good stuff. (thx, dunstan)
Update: Michael Sippey made a topological map of the route these guys took.
Some recent Merlin Mann goodness
Merlin Mann has been on a tear lately. He’s been rethinking what he wants to do with 43 Folders — a site he started four years ago to think in public about Getting Things Done (and other stuff) — which rethinking has resulted in a bunch of good writing on weblogs, creative work, and online media. Some links and excerpts follow.
How to blog, the best and most succinct blogging advice I’ve ever read:
Find your obsession. Every day, explain it to one person you respect. Edit everything, skip shortcuts, and try not to be a dick. Get better.
Going through my newsreader today, most of the sites I follow are written with those things in mind. Those that don’t, out they go.
Better is a short account of Merlin’s quest to remove the unpleasant and unproductive from his life. Worth quoting at length:
What makes you feel less bored soon makes you into an addict. What makes you feel less vulnerable can easily turn you into a dick. And the things that are meant to make you feel more connected today often turn out to be insubstantial time sinks - empty, programmatic encouragements to groom and refine your personality while sitting alone at a screen.
Don’t get me wrong. Gumming the edges of popular culture and occasionally rolling the results into a wicked spitball has a noble tradition that includes the best work of of Voltaire, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and a handful of people I count as good friends and brilliant editors. There’s nothing wrong with fucking shit up every single day. But you have to bring some art to it. Not just typing.
What worries me are the consequences of a diet comprised mostly of fake-connectedness, makebelieve insight, and unedited first drafts of everything. I think it’s making us small. I know that whenever I become aware of it, I realize how small it can make me. So, I’ve come to despise it.
I’ve pointed to this one before…What Makes for a Good Blog?
Good blog posts are made of paragraphs. Blog posts are written, not defecated. They show some level of craft, thinking, and continuity beyond the word count mandated by the Owner of Your Plantation. If a blog has fixed limits on post minimums and maximums? It’s not a blog: it’s a website that hires writers. Which is fine. But, it’s not really a blog.
And then a pair of posts that serve as Merlin’s public declaration for 43 Folders’ new direction and as a blistering takedown of the productivity blogs industry, reminiscent of Joel Johnson’s classic takedown of Gizmodo and other gadget blogs published *on* Gizmodo. The first is Four Years:
At this juncture, I wish to apologize and formally atone for any role 43 Folders or I have had in popularizing “hack” as the preferred nomenclature for unmedicated knowledge workers dicking around with their “productivity system” all day. 43 Folders regrets the error.
And then Time, Attention and Creative Work:
If the work that really matters to you involves understanding a relationship between a handful of seemingly unrelated things and then figuring out the best way to portray, magnify, or resolve those relationships, then you’re already doing creative work. Any time you make a connection between two or more axes that hadn’t occurred to you 10 minutes ago, yes, you’ve done something creative. Seriously. This does not require your wearing a beret.
But, then — and this is really important — if you want to actually make something out of all that insight, and if you have the will and desire to polish and improve the execution of all the things you produce, then we’ll have a lot to talk about.
Good luck with your new direction, Merlin. I never really read 43F too much before this summer — spending a lot of time reading about all those little productivity tricks and whatnot seemed oxymoronic — but I’m paying attention now.
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