This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
A check of the Netflix Prize leaderboard shows that the team in the lead is very close to the 10% improvement needed to win the $1 million prize with 9.71%. Three members of the top team recently wrote about their experience for IEEE Spectrum.
Richard Smith is hosting the Dollar Redesign Project, which is starting to attract some interesting redesigns of American paper currency.
Ministry of Type has some further analysis, including a comparison to European bills.
A nice selection of “photos that changed the world”. Warning: some of them are NSFW and/or disturbing/upsetting. The first photo on the web was new to me.
Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!”
Sean Carroll lays out the rules for time travel for movies (but also more generally) based on our current understanding of physics.
1. Traveling into the future is easy. We travel into the future all the time, at a fixed rate: one second per second. Stick around, you’ll be in the future soon enough. You can even get there faster than usual, by decreasing the amount of time you experience elapsing with respect to the rest of the world — either by low-tech ways like freezing yourself, or by taking advantage of the laws of special relativity and zipping around near the speed of light. (Remember we’re talking about what is possible according to the laws of physics here, not what is plausible or technologically feasible.) It’s coming back that’s hard.
Infrastructurist has posted a nice two-part Field Guide to Freeway Interchanges: part one and part two. Meet The Double Trumpet, The Braided Cloverleaf, and The Spaghetti Bowl. This little fellow is The Whirlpool.
Is the recently revealed 47 million-year-old primate fossil a missing link or an overhyped publicity stunt?
But despite a television teaser campaign with the slogan “This changes everything” and comparisons to the moon landing and the Kennedy assassination, the significance of this discovery may not be known for years. An article to be published on Tuesday in PLoS ONE, a scientific journal, will report more prosaically that the scientists involved said the fossil could be a “stem group” that was a precursor to higher primates, with the caveat, “but we are not advocating this.”
From the scientific paper’s conclusion/significance section:
Darwinius masillae represents the most complete fossil primate ever found, including both skeleton, soft body outline and contents of the digestive tract. Study of all these features allows a fairly complete reconstruction of life history, locomotion, and diet. Any future study of Eocene-Oligocene primates should benefit from information preserved in the Darwinius holotype. Of particular importance to phylogenetic studies, the absence of a toilet claw and a toothcomb demonstrates that Darwinius masillae is not simply a fossil lemur, but part of a larger group of primates, Adapoidea, representative of the early haplorhine diversification.
This should provide a sufficient amount of “whoa” for the day: mathematically speaking, how are elephants and big cities the same? A: both cities and elephants have developed a similar level of efficiency in the distribution of resources and transportation.
Geoffrey West of the Santa Fe Institute and his colleagues Jim Brown and Brian Enquist have argued that a 3/4-power law is exactly what you’d expect if natural selection has evolved a transport system for conveying energy and nutrients as efficiently and rapidly as possible to all points of a three-dimensional body, using a fractal network built from a series of branching tubes — precisely the architecture seen in the circulatory system and the airways of the lung, and not too different from the roads and cables and pipes that keep a city alive.
(thx, john)
Amherst Magazine interviewed David Foster Wallace in 1999.
I’ve hit on an effective way to handle all this schizogenic stuff, which is to keep the whole thing at a very simple level, roughly a level/vocabulary that an average U.S. fifth-grader can understand. I want my work to be good. I want to like it. This is the only part that has anything to do with me. I can’t make it have an ‘impact’ on anybody else. This doesn’t mean I can’t hope it has one, but I can’t do anything to guarantee it, or even to cause it. All I can do is make something as good as I can make it (this is the sort of fact that’s both banal and profound), and promise myself that I’ll never try to publish anything I myself don’t think is good or finished. I used to have far more complex and sophisticated ways of thinking about ‘impact,’ but they always left me with my forehead against the wall.
(via howling fantods)
Both houses of Congress have recently passed credit card legislation which will cut down on credit card companies abusing their customers. The NY Times has a guide to what the new legislation could mean for consumers. The bill that passed the House contains some interesting provisions on how card companies can use type.
The House throws in what ought to be called “The Fine Print Rule.” Card companies must print their account applications and disclosures in 12-point type or greater. A supervisory board will also probably declare certain hard-on-the-eyes fonts off limits. The Senate is silent on typeface but imposes many other communication requirements.
SEC. 14. Readability requirement.
Section 122 of the Truth in Lending Act (U.S.C. 1632) is amended by adding at the end the following new subsection:
“(d) Minimum type-size and font requirement for credit card applications and disclosures. -All written information, provisions, and terms in or on any application, solicitation, contract, or agreement for any credit card account under an open end consumer credit plan, and all written information included in or on any disclosure required under this chapter with respect to any such account, shall appear-
“(1) in not less than 12-point type; and
“(2) in any font other than a font which the Board has designated, in regulations under this section, as a font that inhibits readability.”.
I haven’t seen a credit card application or bill in years (we’re paperless)…what unreadable fonts are these companies using? Do they set their terms and conditions sections in 6-pt Zapf Dingbats a la David Carson?
Apologies to those of you who descend upon this site for the current and interesting; I’m interrupting for a little personal blogging and parental advice interlude. Something happened to Ollie and me earlier today and I’m still upset about it for reasons that are unclear, so I needed to get this off my chest.
I took off work a little early today to take Ollie to the playground. We’d been there about 15 or 20 minutes and he was happy playing in his favorite plastic car. Another little boy, probably about 2.5 to 3 years old, came up to him in the car and after standing there for a moment, slapped him in the face. Now, I’ve seen enough accidental toddler flailing to know that this wasn’t it. And then he slapped him again…pretty hard. I could see Ollie drawing back, shocked and perhaps getting ready to cry. As I moved over to Ollie to intervene, the kid slapped him again and was rearing back to do it again. I grabbed his hand, said, “hey!” and moved him away from Ollie a bit.
Now, this is normal playground stuff. Usually the hitting isn’t so weirdly premeditated, but whatever…they’re too small to hurt one another unless there are shovels or sharp sticks involved. Usually you just let the kids figure it out themselves but not when one kid is just slapping the other one just for the hell of it. And in that case, the parents usually move in, settle things down, one kid apologizes to the other, everyone rolls their eyes — kids! — and everything’s fine. It’s not about discipline, it’s about teaching kids how to deal with these situations through sheer repetition.
So, I’d moved the kid away from Ollie, just a foot or so…I didn’t yank him away or anything. (I wouldn’t even have touched him if Ollie hadn’t been trapped in his car…I couldn’t just get Ollie out of the situation easily.) I repeated “hey…” and started in on the standard toddler anti-violence speech that leads to an apology, blah blah blah. The kid smiles at me like the cat who swallowed the canary and starts to run off. I took hold of his arm again so that I could finish making the peace. (Sort-of side note: We looked at a bunch of preschools for Ollie, which are not so much schools as they are organized social mixers for pre-K kids. Many of the schools stressed conflict resolution for the “twos and threes”…getting the kids playing well together and helping them work though their problems with each other is important. That’s pretty much what I was trying to do here.)
Then this kid’s mom finally appears. She yanks her kid away from me and says, “hey, what are you doing?”
“Your kid was slapping mine. I was trying to…”
“I know that. I saw.”
A bit stunned by that, I tried again. “Ok, I was just trying…”
She goes right to eleven. “How dare you! You were going to hit my child!”
My eyes and mouth are wide as this point. “What?!”
“You were going to hit him! You’re an adult, much bigger than him, you shouldn’t be hitting little boys!”
We went back and forth like this for a bit and I finally just said, “Ok, whatever. Listen, lady. I didn’t hit your kid and I wasn’t going to hit your kid. Period.” She eyed me suspiciously and moved away with her son. Ollie and I left shortly afterwards; I was pretty upset and just wanted to get the hell out of there.
On the walk home, I felt sick to my stomach. For one, I was shocked by the woman’s reaction to her child’s misbehavior. And then that she thought that I was going to hit her kid. Had she pressed the point, it could have gotten ugly…she could have called the police to have me arrested. For performing normal playground toddler intervention kiss-and-make-up! Then I started thinking that maybe I had been too rough with her son without realizing it. That really made me feel ill. It occurred to me while talking to my wife after the fact that maybe I should have let the kid walk away after he smiled at me… perhaps I have the right to protect my kid from abuse but I shouldn’t attempt to “parent” the other child in any way.
So, I guess my question for the more experienced parents in the crowd is: what’s the etiquette here? Am I being naïve in thinking that the playground is a collective parenting situation when it comes to this sort of thing? Or is touching or parenting another person’s child, no matter how slightly or what the intent, strictly off limits in this overprotective and litigious society? (Just to anticipate a common question — If your roles were reversed, would you be comfortable with someone parenting Ollie in that situation? — I’d say yes, if Ollie was slapping some other kid around, absolutely…break it up, make the peace, and move on.) I know you weren’t there and this is just one side of the story, but I’d be grateful to hear your thoughts, either in the comments or via email. Thanks.
From a few days ago on TrueHoop, a lengthy debate about who is the better player: LeBron James or Kobe Bryant. LeBron has the statistical dominance but Kobe’s game is the prettiest.
[LeBron] just doesn’t move like the best basketball player in the world. Put almost any part Kobe Bryant’s game in super slow motion, and you’ll see beauty. Every little part of his game is refined, perfected, tested and honed … Put LeBron James clips in super slow motion, and you’re liable to find things here and there that he could do a little better. That footwork, that release, that way that he walks a little bit like a duck. There is a cognitive leap. Could the best basketball player in the world have noticeable flaws?
There’s also an interesting argument in there that LeBron’s game is such that it’s very difficult to say why he’s so good other than, well, just look at him play! In the same way, LeBron is difficult for kids to imitate on the playground whereas Kobe’s catalog of moves are easy to imitate but difficult to get perfect to the extent that Kobe has.
Jim Rossignol writes about the architecture of evil lairs in video games for BLDGBLOG.
Conveniently, evil already has a visual language. Put another way: I have seen the face of evil, and it is a caricature of gothic construction. There’s barely a necromancer in existence whose dark citadel doesn’t in some way reflect real-world Romanian landmarks, such as Hunyad or Bran Castle. The visual theme of these games is so heavily dependent on previously pillaged artistic ideas from Dungeons & Dragons and Tolkien that evil ambiance is delivered by shorthand. (Of course, World of Warcraft’s Lich King gets a Stone UFO to fly around in — but it’s still the same old prefab pseudo-Medieval schtick inside). Where the enemy is extra-terrestrial, HR Giger’s influence is probably going to be felt instead.
The deadline for entering the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism is nearing. Get your entries in by June 1.
The Writing Award of $10,000 is open to writers, critics, scholars, historians, journalists and designers and given for a body of work. The Education Award of $1,000 is open to students (high school, undergraduate or graduate) whose use of writing in a single essay demonstrates originality and promise.
I don’t agree with everything on Scott Sternberg’s rules of style list, but a couple of his points are pretty interesting. I’ll spot you this one:
Whenever you start a new project or a new job, don’t tell anyone what you’re working on, because it can change direction a million times and once you start telling the world about it, you get constrained by your own mouth.
but you’ll have to find the others on your own. (via andrea inspired)
Update: A recent study has indicated that people who don’t share their goals are more successful in achieving them.
Researchers report that when dealing with identity goals — that is, the aspirations that define who we are — sharing our intentions doesn’t necessarily motivate achievement. On the contrary, a series of experiments shows that when others take notice of our plans, performance is compromised because we gain “a premature sense of completeness” about the goal.
(thx, sam)
The trailer, in HD, of Guy Ritchie’s Sherlock Holmes movie with Robert Downey Jr. (as Holmes) and Jude Law (as Watson).
Michael Lewis’ book about the ongoing financial collapse has a name: The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine.
A brilliant account — character-rich and darkly humorous — of how the U.S. economy was driven over the cliff. Truth really is stranger than fiction. Who better than the author of the signature bestseller Liar’s Poker to explain how the event we were told was impossible — the free fall of the American economy — finally occurred; how the things that we wanted, like ridiculously easy money and greatly expanded home ownership, were vehicles for that crash; and how shareholder demand for profit forced investment executives to eat the forbidden fruit of toxic derivatives.
It’s not out until November 2 but you can pre-order it from Amazon. (thx, brian)
Update: The book is out on March 15 and there’s an excerpt in the April issue of Vanity Fair.
Yesterday, Usain Bolt broke the unofficial record at the rarely contested distance of 150 meters, running it in 14.35 seconds on a temporary surface set up in Manchester’s city center. This sounds made up, but here’s the video.
(via biancolo)
Dick Cavett has been doing a version of his talk show, on and off, for about 40 years. Sometimes he couldn’t remember the guests from a show he’d just taped. Johnny Carson couldn’t either.
There is still a Cheever show of mine to be unearthed. I wish I could remember what’s on it. A worried Johnny Carson once admitted to me that he frequently couldn’t remember what was said on a show he had just finished taping. And, sometimes, who the guests were. It’s a strange thing, and one I haven’t quite figured out.
Johnny all but wiped his brow when I told him it happened to me too, and that a few days earlier I got home and it took me a good 10 minutes to be able to report with whom I had just done 90 minutes. (It was only Lucille Ball!) It’s an oddity peculiar to the live performer’s divided brain that needs exploring. It has to do with the fact that you — and the “you” that performs — are not identical.
I don’t know if this is related to separating one’s work life from the rest of it, but this happens to me all the time. If you were to ask me tonight what I’d posted to kottke.org today, I doubt I could tell you more than one or two items (out of the seven to nine items I post during a typical day). When I see friends outside of work, they sometimes remark on stuff I’ve posted recently and it usually takes me a few moments to remember what it is they’re referring to.
Finding out that others have this problem is a major load off of my mind…I really thought my memory was going down the tubes. (thx, mark)
In the past few days, I’ve read two articles on men who are experts in scientific research in an area where they themselves have a deficiency. First there was the article on George Vaillant and the Harvard Study of Adult Development I linked to on Friday. Vaillant is an expert on what makes men happy; his own research shows that close relationships with family and friends is a significant factor in people living long happy lives. But those who know him best say that he has difficulty with relationships.
But Vaillant’s closest friends and family tell a very different story, of a man plagued by distance and strife in his relationships. “George is someone who holds things in,” says the psychiatrist James Barrett Jr., his oldest friend. “I don’t think he has many confidants. I would call George someone who has a problem with intimacy.”
He’s been married four times to three women and has been estranged, at one time or another, from four out of his five children.
And then I was reading a New Yorker profile of V.S. Ramachandran, the noted behavioral neurologist who has worked on mirror therapy with amputees who experience phantom limb pain, the role of mirror neurons in autism, and synesthesia. Though his work with the brain doesn’t focus on memory, it’s still ironic that Ramachandran is almost pathologically incapable of remembering where he parked his car or when his wife’s birthday is.
“Another time,” [Ramachandran’s wife Diane] continued, “I got a call from Sears and a woman said, ‘There’s a man here who says he’s your husband and he’s trying to purchase something on this credit card.’ I said, ‘Ye-e-e-s.’ And she said, ‘We’re kind of concerned if it’s really your husband, becuase he doesn’t know your birth date.’ I said, ‘Oh, that’s my husband!’”
“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!” Ramachandran boomed. “That is a good story.”
I could not resist asking whether Ramachandran has since learned Diane’s birthday. They had been married for twenty-two years.
“I know she’s a Leo,” he said, slowly, eying her from across the table.
“I’m not Leo,” Diane said, “You’re a Leo.”
“No,” he corrected himself. “Virgo! Virgo!”
“Yup,” she said. “August 18th,” he said, with confidence.
“No,” Diane said. Then she turned to me. “See, he gets the month, because it’s the same as his.”
“It’s not the eighteenth?” Ramachandran asked.
“No.”
“Twenty-second?” he offered.
“No.”
At this point, Jaya asked, “Do you know my birthday?”
Ramachandran looked helplessly at his son and shrank into his seat. “It doesn’t mean I don’t love you,” he said.
Beethoven was deaf. Monet had vision problems when he painted some of his most well-known work. I wonder if there’s something to this beyond coincidence.
A brand timeline portrait shows all the different brands a person uses and interacts with during the course of a typical day.
Originated by Jane Sample, dozens of other people have also created portraits. (via rocketboom)
Update: Make your own at Brand My Day.
Due to a dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse will release his next album (a collaboration with Sparklehorse) as a blank CD-R, on which the buyer can then burn the album downloaded from the file-sharing network of their choice.
Please note: Due to an ongoing dispute with EMI, Danger Mouse is unable to include music on the CD without fear of legal entanglement. Therefore, he has included a blank CD-R as an artifact to use however you see fit.
This week in the New Yorker, Elizabeth Kolbert tells us that up until modern times, there have been five big mass extinctions of life on Earth. Most biologists now agree that we are in the midst of the sixth big mass extinction, one caused by humans.
Currently, a third of all amphibian speicies, nearly a third of all reef-building corals, a quarter of all mammals, and an eighth of all birds are classified as “threatened with extinction.” These estimates do not include the species that humans have already wiped out or the species for which there are insignificant data. Nor do the figures take into account the projected effects of global warming or or ocean acidification. Nor, of course, can they anticipate the kinds of sudden, terrible collapses that are becoming almost routine.
See also a related audio clip by Kolbert, the Holocene extinction event, and colony collapse disorder.
If you’re skeptical of WolframAlpha (as I was), you should watch this introduction by Stephen Wolfram. The comparison to Google (usually “is WolframAlpha a Google killer?”) is not a good one but the new service could learn a little something from the reigning champion: hide the math. One of the geniuses of Google is that it took simple input and gave simple output with a whole lot of complexity in between that no one saw and few people cared about. Plus the underlying premise of the complex computation was simplified, branded (PageRank!), and became a value proposition for Google: here’s what the web itself thinks is important about your query.
The trailer for Herb and Dorothy, about a pair of unlikely art collectors. From a 1997 article in the Austin Chronicle:
She was a librarian. Her husband was a postal worker. They lived on his salary and bought art with hers. Both are now retired. They have no children. “We bought art we could afford and that would fit into the apartment,” they say. Water from the fish tank once splashed a Warhol they owned. It later had to be restored.
Much of their collection has passed to the National Gallery of Art.
From a new collection of pieces by Mark Twain, a reading by John Lithgow and drawing by Flash Rosenberg of chapter 2.
The NY Times kicks off their new photography blog with a video that shows just how short White House photo ops are.
When a photo-op is scheduled, the photographers, camera operators and reporters gather in the colonnade outside the Oval Office and wait — sometimes it can be as long as an hour — shuffling feet and making nervous small talk until the flutter of the fingers of the young staffer who calls, “Pool.”
I mentioned Malcolm Gladwell’s piece on underdogs the other day. It’s one of the many subjects that he and Bill Simmons tackle in a three-part email conversation they had recently: part one, part two, part three. Simmons says of LeBron James:
Let’s wrap things up by tackling LeBron James. As the 2009 postseason rolls on, the King has become its most compelling story, not just because of his insane numbers, that Jordan-like hunger in his eyes, even the fact that he’s still on cruise control to some degree. (Note: I would compare him to Nigel Tufnel’s amp. He alternated between “9” and “10” in the regular season, and he’s been at 10 in the playoffs, but I can’t shake the feeling that he has an “11” in store for Kobe and the Finals. An extra decibel level, if you will. In my lifetime, Jordan could go to 11. So could Bird. Shaq and Kobe could get there together, but not apart. And really, that’s it. Even Magic could get to 10 3/4 but never quite 11. It’s a whole other ball game: You aren’t just beating teams, you’re destroying their will. You never know when you’ll see another 11. I’m just glad we’re here. End of tangent.)
I have a hunch that Kobe may not even make it to the finals. They’ve got to beat the pesky and superstarless Rockets first and those Nuggets are looking good, although the long layoff could affect their momentum. Gladwell shared one of his ideas for changing the NBA draft: let the best teams pick first.
I think the only way around the problem is to put every team in the lottery. Every team’s name gets put in a hat, and you get assigned your draft position by chance. Does that, theoretically, make it harder for weaker teams to improve their chances against stronger teams? I don’t think so. First of all, the principal engine of parity in the modern era is the salary cap, not the draft. And in any case, if the reverse-order draft is such a great leveler, then why are the same teams at the bottom of both the NFL and NBA year after year? The current system perpetuates the myth that access to top picks is the primary determinant of competitiveness in pro sports, and that’s simply not true. Success is a function of the quality of the organization.
Another more radical idea is that you do a full lottery only every second year, or three out of four years, and in the off year make draft position in order of finish. Best teams pick first. How fun would that be? Every meaningless end-of-season game now becomes instantly meaningful. If you were the Minnesota Timberwolves, you would realize that unless you did something really drastic — like hire some random sports writer as your GM, or bring in Pitino to design a special-press squad — you would never climb out of the cellar again. And in a year with a can’t-miss No. 1 pick, having the best record in the regular season becomes hugely important.
Simmons and Gladwell did this once before in 2006: part one, part two.
According to the NYC DOT, Broadway will be closed to through traffic on May 24 from 42nd to 47th Streets and from 33rd to 35th Streets to make that pedestrian mall announced back in February.
In addition to greater safety and access for pedestrians and cyclists, the project hopes to improve car traffic flow through the areas.
- Traffic lights with up to 66% more green time
- Significant travel time improvements on Sixth and Seventh Avenues
- Faster bus speeds for 70,000 daily riders
Here’s a rendition of how Times Square will look after the work is completed in August.
Hopefully this change will become permanent and the city can plant some trees there as well. Imagine, trees in Times Square! Lots more information is available on the DOT site.
By Meg Pickard, a graph of the lifespan of Twitter trending topics compares “people talking about #topic” and “people talking about talking about #topic”. Outside of Twitter, this applies to pretty much any popular newsworthy topic…the news quickly moves from “we’re telling you about Topic X” to media coverage of the media coverage of Topic X. See: Twitter’s own coverage in the media currently. (thx, @ davidfg )
Edmund Andrews, an economics reporter for the New York Times, confesses that he got caught up in “catastrophic binge on overpriced real estate” and signed a “reckless mortgage” for more money than he and his new wife could afford.
What about my alimony and child-support obligations? No need to mention them. What would happen when they saw the automatic withholdings in my paycheck? No need to show them. If I wanted to buy a house, Bob figured, it was my job to decide whether I could afford it. His job was to make it happen.
“I am here to enable dreams,” he explained to me long afterward. Bob’s view was that if I’d been unemployed for seven years and didn’t have a dime to my name but I wanted a house, he wouldn’t question my prudence. “Who am I to tell you that you shouldn’t do what you want to do? I am here to sell money and to help you do what you want to do. At the end of the day, it’s your signature on the mortgage - not mine.”
Andrews and his family aren’t all that bad off, but my mouth got all cottony while reading this as I extrapolated from his story to the millions of people who made similar deals under much more dire circumstances. A chilling first person tip-of-the-iceberg tale. (via the laboritorium, which calls the piece “an instant classic of economic crisis journalism”)
Update: According to a nice bit of reporting by Megan McArdle, Andrews failed to mention that his second wife has declared bankruptcy twice, once while married to Andrews.
Moreover, pesky bad luck isn’t really the picture painted by either filing. Rather, Ms. Barreiro seems to have spent most of the last two decades living right up to the edge of her income, and beyond, and then massively defaulting. If you structure your finances so that absolutely everything has to go right, it’s hard to blame the mortgage company when you don’t quite make it.
Andrews has been admirably open about many of the poor decisions and the wishful thinking that led him deep into debt. Nonetheless, he has laid much of the blame onto irresponsible bankers and mortgage brokers. The missing bankruptcies substantially undermine this basic narrative arc of Andrews’ story. Particularly in his book, the bankers are the villains, America’s current troubles are the inevitable denouement of their maniacal greed, and the Andrews household stands in for an American public led, by their own greed and longing and hopeful trust, into the money pit.
Seen through this lens, it’s not so much that Andrews was done in by a overly large mortgage…it was that he married a financial anchor.
Update: Andrews responds to McArdle’s claims:
These bankruptcies did occur, but they had nothing to do with our mortgage woes. They were both tied to old debts from before we were married or bought a house. They had nothing to do with my ability to get a mortgage; nor did they have anything to do with our subsequent financial problems.
And McArdle responds to his response. (This is getting complicated!)
Andrews seems to now be arguing that the Chapter 7 filings are not relevant because they didn’t affect his ability to get a mortgage. But of course the article and the book is not just about him—rightly, because unless your marriage is pretty dysfunctional, it’s a financial partnership. The two bankruptcies seem to reveal that one partner has demonstrated a historic inability to live within their means. So though the bankruptcies don’t tell us anything about their ability to get a mortgage on their house, they may tell us quite a bit about their willingness to take on a mortgage. This decision is at least as important as the bank’s. I’m sure banks would have given me all kinds of stupid mortgage loans in 2004, but I didn’t avail myself of the opportunity.
(thx, pamela)
I’ve caught the Flight Control bug that’s going around. According to the developer, the addictive iPhone game is doing huge business, selling over 700,000 copies (at $0.99 to $2.99 a copy) since its release in early March.
Worldchanging is holding an auction to raise funds for the organization and includes some great stuff (like Edward Burtynsky prints and conference passes) that is currently going for well under the street values. The auction closes at 10am PT so get your bids in.
What Makes Us Happy? asks Joshua Wolf Shenk in the June 2009 issue of The Atlantic. The article is a dual biography of two intertwined entities, a long-running study of 268 Harvard men and the study’s long-time principal investigator, George Vaillant. The study was started as a way to determine how people lived successful lives. Valliant’s main interpretation from decades of study is that how people respond or adapt to trouble correlates with their healthy aging.
At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations — like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania — which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naivete, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).
Shenk then goes on to evaluate Vaillant on his own terms, with some interesting results.
Hackers Can Sidejack Cookies, a poem by Heather McHugh.
Designs succumbing
to creeping featuritis
are banana problems.
(“I know how to spell banana,
but I don’t know when to stop.”)
I love this Nike commercial featuring puppets of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James where Bryant is heckling James about his three championship rings.
The chalk one is pretty good as well.
Nice black and white covers for science fiction books.
“Sanda created each cover using A4 paper, with all the typography printed and placed on the structure by hand,” Jones continues. “We then photographed each paper structure and, upon seeing the original black and white images, we didn’t feel that any tweaking or further alterations were needed.”
The hole punch one is my favorite. (thx, conor)
I really like the subway travel time heatmaps on Triptrop NYC.
Put in an address and you get a map of how far away everything is using the subway. 15 minutes, forty minutes, two hours — all set up with nice little colors. That’s pretty easy, I think. Triptrop can help you find a convenient place to live. It’s also a nice way to tell your friend to stop inviting you to the purple part of the Bronx, or to prove that the G isn’t actually that bad.
(via fake is the new real)
After five years, NY Times restaurant reviewer Frank Bruni is moving on to other assignments.
In his spare time, between aerobic eating and the requisite gym time to burn it all off, he has managed to produce a memoir of his lifelong, complicated relationship with food. Recognizing that the book is certain to seriously compromise his ability to be a spy in the land of food, Frank picked this as a natural time to move on. He will be turning in his restaurant-critic credentials when his memoir, “Born Round: the Secret History of a Full-Time Eater,” is published in late August.
Sad to see him go…I liked Bruni as a reviewer. But how long can the Times continue to expect their critics to remain anonymous? Savvy restaurateurs often knew when Bruni was in the house and it remains unclear whether a known reviewer is a biased reviewer.
You’ve probably already seen this, but I just finished it so I’m posting: How David Beats Goliath by Malcolm Gladwell. The main thesis is that through hard work and unconventional tactics, seemingly overmatched teams/people/armies can prevail against more powerful opponents.
It is easier to retreat and compose yourself after every score than swarm about, arms flailing. We tell ourselves that skill is the precious resource and effort is the commodity. It’s the other way around. Effort can trump ability — legs, in Saxe’s formulation, can overpower arms — because relentless effort is in fact something rarer than the ability to engage in some finely tuned act of motor coördination.
A post on Gladwell’s blog addresses some of the criticisms people had with the piece.
Another of David Foster Wallace’s short stories finds its way online: Esquire reprints Incarnations of Burned Children, originally from Oblivion.
Big fat warning: this story is really disturbing (especially if you have small children) and likely a significant part of the reason why Salon said that Wallace “has perfected a particularly subtle form of horror story” in their review of Oblivion. (via unlikely words)
If you’ve got a 16 tesla magnetic field, you can levitate a frog.
The levitation trick works because giant magnetic fields slightly distort the orbits of electrons in the frog’s atoms. The resulting electric current generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction to that of the magnet. A field of 16 teslas created an attractive force strong enough to make the frog float until it made its escape.
Best part: it doesn’t kill the frog. (via afrooz)
Update: Video of the levitating frog:
See also levitating strawberry, levitating grasshopper, and levitating water droplets. (thx, jesse)
Art director Elliott Burford makes amusing illustrations from spam subject lines.
(thx, frank)
Update: See also Spamusement. (thx, everyone on the internet)
Chemist John Sutherland has discovered a process by which ordinary chemicals could spontaneously form RNA molecules, the suspected building blocks of the first life on Earth.
Scientists have long suspected that the first forms of life carried their biological information not in DNA but in RNA, its close chemical cousin. Though DNA is better known because of its storage of genetic information, RNA performs many of the trickiest operations in living cells. RNA seems to have delegated the chore of data storage to the chemically more stable DNA eons ago. If the first forms of life were based on RNA, then the issue is to explain how the first RNA molecules were formed.
In this video, the NY Times profiles a pair of Pakistani brothers who run a business in Karachi designing and manufacturing bondage and fetish wear. As you’ll see in the video, many of the firm’s employees are unaware of what they’re making. (thx, andrew)
Supertrain was a massively promoted and extremely expensive 1979 NBC adventure drama that lasted only a few episodes before being cancelled. Along with the US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, the superflop nearly bankrupted the network.
The show featured an “atom powered steam turbine” train that could travel from NYC to LA in 36 hours. Infrastructurist has posted links to the awful and campy pilot episode of the show. Here’s part one to get you started. I love that the train’s crew is right out of a 1970s disco and the board of directors are bona fide 1890s railroad magnates. This thing is a train wreck. (Layered narrative again! Bam! (Again!))
Yesterday’s Pictures of the Day at the WSJ were particularly fine, including a US soldier in Afghanistan who didn’t have time to put on his uniform and gets caught by the camera taking up a defensive position in pink I [heart] NY boxers and flip flops.
Did you notice all the lens flares in Star Trek? JJ Abrams’ rationale for them — he refers to them as “another actor” in the movie — is pretty interesting.
I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn’t be contained in the frame. The flares weren’t just happening from on-camera light sources, they were happening off camera, and that was really the key to it. I want [to create] the sense that, just off camera, something spectacular is happening. There was always a sense of something, and also there is a really cool organic layer thats a quality of it.
Someone clever took some footage from the old series and added a bunch of lens flaring to make it look like the new film.
The result is supposed to be funny but I thought it also somewhat validated Abrams’ remarks above. (via snarkmarket & waxy)
Henry Jenkins and Snarkmarket also address my biggest problem with the movie, that the cadet-to-captain thing happened way too quickly to Kirk and his crew. Jenkins’ contention is that the new movie treats the Enterprise as a start-up company; Tim adds this gem of a line:
But it’s not academia; it’s the NBA. You give these kids the ball.
So, which NBA player is Kirk supposed to be? While not an exact comparison, I’m going to say that Kirk is Tony Parker to Spock’s Tim Duncan. And Scotty = Manu Ginobli?
This “small settings update” to Twitter sucks.
We’ve updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies. Based on usage patterns and feedback, we’ve learned most people want to see when someone they follow replies to another person they follow — it’s a good way to stay in the loop. However, receiving one-sided fragments via replies sent to folks you don’t follow in your timeline is undesirable. Today’s update removes this undesirable and confusing option.
The semi-private/semi-public thing that Twitter has going on is one of the most significant features of the service, IMO. It’s the magic. There’s serendipitous social discovery factor but more to the point: when I follow someone, I want to see *everything* they post. Those @replies to my friends’ friends are part of their narrative, part of what I want to hear from them. Arbitrarily cutting out some tweets sucks. Besides, isn’t the “problem” solved by this “feature” mostly addressed by locked accounts and private messaging?
It’s also odd that Twitter would release this feature, which makes it easier for people to communicate in self-contained groups, when it seems like the company is moving in the opposite direction towards a broadcast model, where the emphasis is on tweeting at large groups of people that you don’t know. Two big examples:
1. They inserted a “suggested users” step in the sign-up process which made a small number of people on Twitter into superusers and implied to new users that Twitter is a service for following celebrities instead of chatting with your friends.
2. And then there’s all the press they’ve been doing. You don’t go on Oprah to talk about how Twitter is for small groups.
(Would you like to post this link to Twitter?)
Update: Twitter reversed their decision on this. Sort of.
First, we’re making a change such that any updates beginning with @username (that are not explicitly created by clicking on the reply icon) will be seen by everyone following that account.
This sentence is also interesting:
The problem with the setting was that it didn’t scale and even if we rebuilt it, the feature was blunt. It was confusing and caused a sense of inconsistency.
I’m not sure that makes any sense to anyone who doesn’t work at Twitter. Maybe Twitter will wow us with simple and intuitive per-user controls but it seems to me that the service works best when it’s simple. Having to think about to what degree you’re following someone multiplied the number of people you’re following starts to feel like the friendship maintenance crap that everyone loves to hate about other social networking sites.
The New York Public Library is facing budget cuts that will close libraries on some days, cut programs for children, and place other services (like job search resources) at risk. The possible cuts come at a time when library visits are up 12% over last year and people out of work are relying on the library more than ever.
If you are a NYPL user and don’t want services cut, I urge you to write your City Council Member or the Mayor.
Socials & More