But now everything he says must be written, either first on his laptop and funneled through speakers or, as he usually prefers, on some kind of paper. His new life is lived through Times New Roman and chicken scratch. So many words, so much writing — it’s like a kind of explosion is taking place on the second floor of his brownstone. It’s not the food or the drink he worries about anymore — I went thru a period when I obsessed about root beer + Steak + Shake malts, he writes on a blue Post-it note — but how many more words he can get out in the time he has left.
I’ve always liked Ebert and I consider this version an upgrade…he’s doing his best work. (thx, david)
Perhaps we are creating a new kind of beauty. An amalgam of surgery, art, and popular culture? And if so, are the results the vanguard of human induced evolution?
Archaeologists and experts on early nautical history said the discovery appeared to show that these surprisingly ancient mariners had craft sturdier and more reliable than rafts. They also must have had the cognitive ability to conceive and carry out repeated water crossing over great distances in order to establish sustainable populations producing an abundance of stone artifacts.
Chef Keller looked down at the magazine and spoke softly: Read this tonight when you go home. His food really sounds interesting, and right up your alley. I think you should go stage there this summer….I will arrange it for you.
The pessimistic dig on Apple, says Gruber, is that it’s a supremely well-organized company organized around one irreplaceable guy. The optimistic view is that Jobs has structured it to run like his other company, Pixar, which manages to turn out hit after hit, year after year, without a charismatic celebrity leader.
If you must watch. I’m not supposed to giggle when Liam Neeson says “I love it when a plan comes together” in a sorta-American sorta-Irish accent, right?
I don’t read Spanish and the translation is a little rough in spots, but the gist of this article from the Spanish newspaper El País is that Ferran Adrià says that El Bulli will not be closing permanently and calls what was published on Friday by the NY Times “a misunderstanding”.
In 2014 we will serve meals, but we will consider the format used and the booking system. But still two years of operation of El Bulli and four years to open the doors again.
Or perhaps the restaurant is moving to Austria? Or will become a McDonald’s franchise? Who knows what El Bulli news tomorrow holds! Stay tuned. (thx, susan)
Update: Here’s some clarification from The Guardian. The restaurant will cease to be a commercial enterprise and will instead be a non-profit foundation “similar to those that run museums and art centres”.
Adrià has given himself two years to think about what the new foundation will do. “We are open to suggestions,” he said. But he is absolutely sure it will involve cooking and serving food on El Bulli’s hallowed premises.
(thx, iñigo)
Update:The NY Times clarifies (is that even a word we can apply to this mess at this point?) Adrià’s earlier statements about closing the restaurant permanently…it sounds as though he doesn’t exactly know what he’s doing with it:
“There is nothing defined except that when El Bulli opens in 2014 it will be as a foundation,” he said. “We have not decided what the structure of that foundation will be,” he continued, noting that many culinary foundations “serve food to the public.”
One man’s chickens have taught him much about “behaviour, ethics, evolution and the psychopathic nature of modern ‘efficiency’”
The longer you watch chickens, the more you think of them as people rather than some strange alien species with feathers, beady eyes and a strange language. Squint a little as you watch them enact their various roles and you can see a brood of Sainsbury’s retail managers jockeying to maintain position.
Slice and chop 2 medium onions into small pieces. Put a medium sized pan on a medium heat with a few glugs of olive oil. Add the onions to the pan, and a pinch of salt and pepper.
Some scientists have developed a promising method for targeting and destroying individual cancer cells without harming the tissue around them. Tiny (like nano tiny) gold-plated iron-nickel discs are attached to cancer-seeking antibodies. The antibodies attach themselves to the cancer cells and when an alternating magnetic field is applied, the metal nano-discs vibrate and literally shake the cancer cells to death.
Since the antibodies are attracted only to brain cancer cells, the process leaves surrounding healthy cells unharmed. This makes them unlike traditional cancer treatment methods, such as chemotherapy and radiation, which negatively affect both cancer and normal healthy cells.
Cars only steer in one dimension; planes steer in two. Even a level turn is hard in a plane, you have to coordinate two controls, except sometimes you deliberately uncoordinate them. Managing engine power is harder in a plane: two or three controls in a piston, not just a single pedal. And then there’s auxiliary controls you have to use occasionally: flaps, carburetor heat, fuel tank selector, etc. Even starting a plane requires carefully using four controls in the proper relationship.
My dad was a pilot and used to let me fly when I was little, like 5 or 6. It was easy in clear weather, easier than driving a car in fact…just keep it level. I actually didn’t even need to touch the yoke much of the time…the plane just flew itself. When I got older, I realized that what made it so effortless was that my dad was taking care of the hard part, the 95% of flying that doesn’t involve moving any of the controls. What made it look so effortless for him, even when things got tough1, was the 10,000+ hours in the cockpit of a plane, flying.
[1] Like when he made a crosswind landing in a Cessna 172 ahead of an oncoming storm which we later learned had spawned some tornadoes while running a bit lower on gas than was generally acceptable by the plane’s captain. He’d already attempted one landing, aborting after the wind dropped us like 10 feet in half a second while about 30 feet from the ground. The sensation of that crosswind landing — of gliding over the runway twenty feet off the ground at ~60-80 mph while pointed about 30 degrees off axis and then, just before touching down and presumably tumbling down the runway wing over wing, straightening out for a surprisingly gentle landing — was one of the freakiest things I’ve ever experienced, partly because I wasn’t scared at all…I knew he’d get us down safely. ↩
I was really into fractals in college (I know…) when I was making rave flyers (I know!) for a friend’s parties in Iowa (I know! I know! Shut up already!). Anyway, the thing that I really used to love doing with this fractal application that I had on my computer was zooming in to different parts of the familiar Mandelbrot set as far as I could. I never got very far…between 5 or 6 zooms in, my Packard Bell 486/66 (running Windows 3.11) would buckle under the computational pressure and hang. Therefore, I absolutely love this extremely deep HD zoom into the Mandelbrot set:
Just how deep is this computational rabbit hole?
The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were “actually” traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light.
After awhile, the self-similarity of the thing is almost too much to bear; I think I went into a coma around 5:00 but snapped to in time for the exciting (but not unexpected) conclusion. Full-screen in a dark room is recommended.
Update: This 46-minute video seems to be the deepest fractal zoom out there right now, with a zoom level of 10^10000.
The magnification factor is so much less in the video above but that one’s more fun/artistic. And 10^10000 is such an absurdly large number1 that there’s no way to think about it in physical terms…the zoom factor from the size of the universe to the smallest measurable distance (the Planck length) is only about 10^60.
This article about spray-on glass reads almost like a press release — “liquid glass spray is perhaps the most important nanotechnology product to emerge to date” — but even if half the claims are true, this stuff is going to be amazing.
The liquid glass spray produces a water-resistant coating only around 100 nanometers (15-30 molecules) thick. On this nanoscale the glass is highly flexible and breathable. The coating is environmentally harmless and non-toxic, and easy to clean using only water or a simple wipe with a damp cloth. It repels bacteria, water and dirt, and resists heat, UV light and even acids. UK project manager with Nanopool, Neil McClelland, said soon almost every product you purchase will be coated with liquid glass.
They’re even taking about spraying it on clothes as an anti-stain mechanism and on plants to keep pests and such away. Spray-on condom, anyone? (via @daveg)
A butcher’s advice on choosing a knife and how to wield it. On cutting yourself:
I am an expert. I have sliced off thumb tips and fingernails. I have shaved paper-thin wafers of my knuckle and buried a breaking/cimeter knife an inch and a half into my forearm. If it weren’t for the stainless steel chainmail “butcher bra” that Josh from Fleisher’s bought me for Christmas last year, I might not be alive to write this essay, having perhaps bled out from one of the many horrible chest wounds averted by its Mithril magic.
Were you to be close to a black hole, this program shows you what you might observe.
The optical appearance of the stellar sky for an observer in the vicinity of a black hole is dominated by bending of light, frequency shift, and magnification caused by gravitational lensing and aberration. Due to the finite apperture of an observer’s eye or a telescope, Fraunhofer diffraction has to be taken into account. Using todays high performance graphics hardware, we have developed a Qt application which enables the user to interactively explore the stellar sky in the vicinity of a Schwarzschild black hole. For that, we determine what an observer, who can either move quasistatically around the black hole or follow a timelike radial geodesic, would actually see.
For Linux and Windows only, although there are sample videos for non-downloaders or those on other machines.
The evidence comes from a study of how energy travels across the light-harvesting molecules involved in photosynthesis. The work has culminated this week in the extraordinary announcement that these molecules in a marine alga may exploit quantum processes at room temperature to transfer energy without loss. Physicists had previously ruled out quantum processes, arguing that they could not persist for long enough at such temperatures to achieve anything useful.
iProcessing is an open programming framework to help people develop native iPhone applications using the Processing language. It is an integration of the Processing.js library and a Javascript application framework for iPhone.
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
Update: More than one person has suggested that this whole thing is a hoax. Video or it didn’t happen? Feast thine eyes on someone playing a rhythm game on the iPhone with two of the meat sticks in question:
If your special lady place is looking a little dusty, spruce it up with My New Pink Button, the genital cosmetic colorant. There are four different shades, just like lipstick. The site really isn’t NSFW unless people can see your thoughts; this whole concept packs quite a visual wallop in the spotless mind.
Grant McCracken quotes Kay Ryan, reigning US Poet Laureate and sharer of my birthday, on community colleges.
I simply want to celebrate the fact that right near your home, year in and year out, a community college is quietly — and with very little financial encouragement — saving lives and minds. I can’t think of a more efficient, hopeful or egalitarian machine, with the possible exception of the bicycle.
A “jiffy” actually has a formal definition. More than one, in fact.
In electronics, a jiffy is the time between alternating current power cycles, 1/60 or 1/50 of a second in most countries.
In astrophysics and quantum physics a jiffy is the time it takes for light to travel one fermi, which is the size of a nucleon.
In computing, a jiffy is the duration of one tick of the system timer interrupt. It is not an absolute time interval unit, since its duration depends on the clock interrupt frequency of the particular hardware platform.
In 1905, Einstein came up with the concept of special relativity, published his paper on the photoelectric effect, finished his doctoral dissertation, devised the E=mc^2 concept, published a paper on Brownian motion, was approved for his doctorate, and turned 26.
A young-ish Christopher Walken appears in Annie Hall but his name is misspelled in the credits as “Christopher Wlaken”. Were this 1990, I might have invented a eastern European backstory for Wlaken, who, perhaps, Americanized his name sometime after appearing in the film. But as we live in the future, a cool hunk of glass and metal from my pocket told me — before the credits even finished rolling — that the actor was born Ronald Walken in Astoria, Queens.
David Heinemeier Hansson has some thoughts on “quality control without the quality part” nature of Apple’s App Store.
In fact, lots of software has lower quality because of the App Store process. Developers can’t easily get bug fixes out and they certainly don’t release new versions as often as they otherwise would. This harks back to the era where software was really cumbersome to release on CDs, so you did it much less frequently.
Stretching from New York to Minnesota, [Stayathomia’s] defining feature is how near most people are to their friends, implying they don’t move far. In most cases outside the largest cities, the most common connections are with immediately neighboring cities, and even New York only has one really long-range link in its top 10. Apart from Los Angeles, all of its strong ties are comparatively local.
Stewart Butterfield and his ex-Flickr co-founders have revealed what their company, Tiny Speck, has been working on for the past few months: a game called Glitch. A CNET reporter has been embedded at Tiny Speck for the past few months and has more than you probably want to know about the new company and game.
I’ve posted about hikaru dorodango a couple times before but they’re always worth another look. Dorodango start out as sloppy mud balls but through careful shaping and polishing with dirt and sand, they end up perfectly round and shiny. Here is a particularly beautiful and unusual example, made from some yellow soil in New Mexico:
That totally looks like leather! Here is a more traditional (and shiny!) example:
The printing happened on large sheets of paper which were then folded into rectangles the size of the finished pages and bound. The reader then sliced open the folds. Paper knives, variants of letter openers, were used for this purpose.
The deckle edge on modern books is an imitation of what those sliced open books looked like.
Celebrity photographer Terry Richardson has a blog to which he posts quick snaps. Sorta like everyone else on the planet except that oh, there’s Kate Moss and there’s Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen and there’s Justin Theroux and there’s Doutzen Kroes and there’s Tracy Morgan.
I spent about 30 minutes on Friday night on Chatroulette (very NSFW). You push the start button and you’re instantly in a video chat with some random person. During my session, the average “chat” lasted about 5 seconds and I observed several people drinking malt liquor, two girls making out, many many guys who disconnected as soon as they saw I wasn’t female, several girls who disconnected after seeing my face (but not before I caught the looks of disgust on theirs), 3 couples having sex, and 11 erect penises. In a Malkovichian moment, I was even connected to myself once…and then the other me quickly disconnected. In short, Chatroulette is pretty much the best site going on the internet right now.
One such story was our earlier case about the old lady and her troubles with the Revenue Department official over a land title. Fed up with requests for bribes and equipped with a zero rupee note, the old lady handed the note to the official. He was stunned. Remarkably, the official stood up from his seat, offered her a chair, offered her tea and gave her the title she had been seeking for the last year and a half to obtain without success.
Andy Baio is back with his annual report on how many Oscar nominated films have shown up online prior to the awards ceremony (ripped from screeners, DVDs, etc.). For some reason, fewer films have been leaked this year and they are taking longer to show up online.
Are studios doing a better job protecting screeners and intimidating Academy members? Or was this year’s crop of films too boring for pirates to bother with? I can’t tell if this is a scene-wide trend or localized to the Oscars only.
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