Entries for October 2013
Matt Zoller Seitz is doing a video essay series based on his new book, The Wes Anderson Collection. The first two installments, on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, are already up:
I love what he says about Rushmore:
There are few perfect movies. This is one of them.
The book and video essays came about because Anderson saw Seitz’s earlier video essay series, The Substance of Style, an examination of Anderson’s stylistic influences. Great resource for fans of Anderson and film.
Great story from the memoirs of William Moore, an Electrical Systems expert for the Apollo program in the 1960s. Moore writes about the time that he and his team had to take a trip out to the launchpad to fix something on the first unmanned launch of the Saturn V rocket.
Our goal was to enter this two level hermetically sealed, all welded steel coffin called the Mobil Launcher Base topped by a fully loaded 363 ft. high Saturn V, weighing 6.2 million pounds, and the permanently attached 380 ft. high Umbilical Tower, weighing 500k pounds. We finally stopped and left our van to walk up and into the second level of the Mobile Launcher Base. About this time, it came to my mind that during one of our training sessions we were told that one of the fully fueled prototype S11 rocket stages had been exploded out in the desert. The results showed that all buildings better be at least three miles from the launch lads — which they are. We were now within 25 feet of this 363ft tall bomb that sounded like it’s giant fuse had been lit, and we were soon going to get much closer.
(via hacker news)
Over at The Planetary Society, Emily Lakdawalla highlighted an image taken by the Cassini spacecraft of Saturn separate from its rings.
This enormous mosaic showing the flattened globe of Saturn floating amongst the complete disk of its rings must surely be counted among the great images of the Cassini mission. From Earth, we never see Saturn separate from its rings. Here, we can see the whole thing, a gas giant like Jupiter, separated at last from the rings that encircle it.
Taking this idea one step further, I removed the rings completely, along with the “ringlight” lighting up the night hemisphere, creating a more-or-less pure look of what Saturn would look like without its rings.
Larger version is available on Mlkshk.
The first trailer for Wes Anderson’s new movie. This looks great!
630 yards. Par 3. Tee is accessible only by helicopter. $1,000,000 for a hole-in-one. Meet the world’s most difficult hole of golf:
(via quora)
Professor Xavier downsizes Wolverine for being the most useless member of the X-Men.
Reason for dismissal: “Made of metal, the substance the guy we fight the most can manipulate with his mind.” (via http://stellar.io/interesting)
Google’s got themselves a quantum computer (they’re sharing it with NASA) and they made a little video about it:
I’m sure that Hartmut is a smart guy and all, but he’s got a promising career as an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator hanging out there if the whole Google thing doesn’t work out.
We all know Obama shut down the US government for fascist socialist Muslim reasons, but I persist in my childish belief that many of the Congressional Republicans are straight-up clowns.
More here in WMxdesign’s GOP Clown College Flickr set.
I’m not sure that the bad lip reading of NFL players will ever be topped, but this dubbing of Game of Thrones with alternative dialogue is pretty great too.
(via devour)
Wingsuit flyer lands safely on water orig. from Oct 15, 2013
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Apologies to G.K. Chesterton, but this piece by Scott Adams on how to succeed is actually pretty good. For starters, his first piece of advice is not to listen to successful people.
Let me start with some tips on what not to do. Beware of advice about successful people and their methods. For starters, no two situations are alike. Your dreams of creating a dry-cleaning empire won’t be helped by knowing that Thomas Edison liked to take naps. Secondly, biographers never have access to the internal thoughts of successful people. If a biographer says Henry Ford invented the assembly line to impress women, that’s probably a guess.
But the most dangerous case of all is when successful people directly give advice. For example, you often hear them say that you should “follow your passion.” That sounds perfectly reasonable the first time you hear it. Passion will presumably give you high energy, high resistance to rejection and high determination. Passionate people are more persuasive, too. Those are all good things, right?
Here’s the counterargument: When I was a commercial loan officer for a large bank, my boss taught us that you should never make a loan to someone who is following his passion. For example, you don’t want to give money to a sports enthusiast who is starting a sports store to pursue his passion for all things sporty. That guy is a bad bet, passion and all. He’s in business for the wrong reason.
My boss, who had been a commercial lender for over 30 years, said that the best loan customer is someone who has no passion whatsoever, just a desire to work hard at something that looks good on a spreadsheet. Maybe the loan customer wants to start a dry-cleaning store or invest in a fast-food franchise-boring stuff. That’s the person you bet on. You want the grinder, not the guy who loves his job.
This piece is adapted from Adams’ upcoming book, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big. Adams’ take on passion reminds me of Thomas Keller’s thoughts:
It’s not about passion. Passion is something that we tend to overemphasize, that we certainly place too much importance on. Passion ebbs and flows. To me, it’s about desire. If you have constant, unwavering desire to be a cook, then you’ll be a great cook. If it’s only about passion, sometimes you’ll be good and sometimes you won’t. You’ve got to come in every day with a strong desire. With passion, if you see the first asparagus of the springtime and you become passionate about it, so much the better, but three weeks later, when you’ve seen that asparagus every day now, passions have subsided. What’s going to make you treat the asparagus the same? It’s the desire.
(Just so I don’t bury the lede too much here: THIS IS INSANE.) Wingsuit flyers keep upping the ante. For awhile, it was enough to glide at 100 mph a foot or two off the ground. Then they started flying through gaps between skyscrapers. And then through holes in mountains. Last year, Gary Connery landed safely in a pile of cardboard boxes without the use of a parachute. And now, watch as Raphael Dumont, straps on his wingsuit, climbs an Italian mountain, and LANDS SAFELY ON A LAKE WITHOUT A PARACHUTE.
Raphael Dumont, human seaplane. That shit cray.
Update: Rumblings on Twitter are indicating that this is fake. I WANT TO BELIEVE. (But that footage of the landing is shot on the world’s shakiest camera for no reason so…)
Pop culture is rife with references to “four o’clock in the morning”. The Museum of Four in the Morning is collecting them. Here’s a supercut of some of the findings:
See also Christian Marclay’s The Clock?
A year ago yesterday, Felix Baumgartner rode in a balloon up to a height of almost 128,000 feet and jumped out. Red Bull, who sponsored the jump, has finally released the full-length footage of the jump from Baumgartner’s point-of-view.
A feature-length documentary about the jump is available on Rdio. Is it weird that this makes me want to go see Gravity again? (via devour)
As a belated recognition of Exploration Day, here’s Charles C. Mann’s piece on the history of the Americas before Columbus: 1491. This piece blew my doors off when I first read it.
Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought-an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.
This article spawned a book of the same name, which is one of my favorite non-fiction reads of the past decade.
For this week’s New Yorker, D.T. Max has written a profile of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey.
Jack Dorsey, the tech entrepreneur, takes the No. 1 bus to work, and he likes to catch the 7:06. It carries him nearly from one side of San Francisco to the other-down California Street almost to Market. A ride costs two dollars, but Dorsey has a monthly pass, so the actual price, he told me on a recent commute, is closer to a dollar seventy-five. “If you buy it in bulk, it saves you a little bit of money,” he explained. As we got on, he added, “I love the bus. It’s consistent, and it runs every few minutes. But it’s also express. If I took another bus, it’d be stopping.” The offices of Square, his mobile payment-processing service, just moved. He used to follow his bus ride with a pleasant twenty-minute walk down Mission to the San Francisco Chronicle Building, where Square rented office space; now his commute ends with a short ride on a Muni train to Square’s new headquarters, which have a panoramic view of the city. When we got to the Muni stop, Dorsey, who is thirty-six, pointed it out with the excitement of a six-year-old.
No idea if this was intentional, but Max has managed to write a piece that mirrors Twitter itself: it is both substantial and full of ridiculous things.
Nine Doctor Who episodes from the 60s featuring Patrick Troughton as the Doctor have been discovered at a TV station in Nigeria.
The BBC destroyed many of the sci-fi drama’s original transmission tapes in the 1960s and 1970s.
However, many episodes were transferred on to film for sale to foreign broadcasters. It is often these prints found in other countries that are the source of retrieved episodes.
In this case, 11 Doctor Who episodes were discovered, nine of which were missing, in the Nigerian city of Jos.
The episodes are already available for watching on iTunes: The Web of Fear and The Enemy of the World.
In Focus has a nice slideshow of photos of blimps, dirigibles, and airships, from the first flights in the early 1900s to the Hindenburg disaster to the blimps flying high over sporting events.
(via @alexismadrigal)
Kumar Pallana, one of Wes Anderson’s cast of regulars, has died at age 94. Pallana appears as Kumar in Bottle Rocket, Mr. Littlejeans in Rushmore, and as Pagoda in The Royal Tenenbaums.
Pallana led a massively interesting life before hitting the big screen at nearly 80. Born in colonial India, he lived all around the world, and first made a name for himself as an entertainer in America in the 1950s. Back then he was known as Kumar Of India, and his specialty was spinning plates-he even appeared on Captain Kangaroo in 1961. (Other feats included magic, balancing, swordplay, and juggling-you can see him do a handstand in The Royal Tenenbaums.)
Andrea Kuszewski shares some research about human intelligence and offers five techniques anyone can use to increase their IQ.
There are absolutely oodles of terrible things written and promoted on how to “train your brain” to “get smarter”. When I speak of “brain training games”, I’m referring to the memorization and fluency-type games, intended to increase your speed of processing, etc, such as Sudoku, that they tell you to do in your “idle time” (complete oxymoron, regarding increasing cognition). I’m going to shatter some of that stuff you’ve previously heard about brain training games. Here goes: They don’t work. Individual brain training games don’t make you smarter-they make you more proficient at the brain training games.
Now, they do serve a purpose, but it is short-lived. The key to getting something out of those types of cognitive activities sort of relates to the first principle of seeking novelty. Once you master one of those cognitive activities in the brain-training game, you need to move on to the next challenging activity. Figure out how to play Sudoku? Great! Now move along to the next type of challenging game. There is research that supports this logic.
A few years ago, scientist Richard Haier wanted to see if you could increase your cognitive ability by intensely training on novel mental activities for a period of several weeks. They used the video game Tetris as the novel activity, and used people who had never played the game before as subjects (I know-can you believe they exist?!). What they found, was that after training for several weeks on the game Tetris, the subjects experienced an increase in cortical thickness, as well as an increase in cortical activity, as evidenced by the increase in how much glucose was used in that area of the brain. Basically, the brain used more energy during those training times, and bulked up in thickness-which means more neural connections, or new learned expertise-after this intense training. And they became experts at Tetris. Cool, right?
Here’s the thing: After that initial explosion of cognitive growth, they noticed a decline in both cortical thickness, as well as the amount of glucose used during that task. However, they remained just as good at Tetris; their skill did not decrease. The brain scans showed less brain activity during the game-playing, instead of more, as in the previous days. Why the drop? Their brains got more efficient. Once their brain figured out how to play Tetris, and got really good at it, it got lazy. It didn’t need to work as hard in order to play the game well, so the cognitive energy and the glucose went somewhere else instead.
There’s a story about NASA’s incredibly expensive space pen and Russia’s simpler solution that gets trotted out every time some large organization introduces some complex, bloated, over-engineered product or process. The story goes like this:
During the space race back in the 1960’s, NASA was faced with a major problem. The astronaut needed a pen that would write in the vacuum of space. NASA went to work. At a cost of $1.5 million they developed the “Astronaut Pen”. Some of you may remember. It enjoyed minor success on the commercial market.
The Russians were faced with the same dilemma.
They used a pencil.
Fantastic story, right? Except that’s not what happened. NASA originally used pencils in space but pencils tend to give off things that float in zero-g (broken leads, graphite dust, shavings) and are flammable. So they looked for another solution. Independent of NASA, the Fisher Pen Company began development of a pen that could be used under extreme conditions:
Paul C. Fisher and his company, the Fisher Pen Company, reportedly invested $1 million to create what is now commonly known as the space pen. None of this investment money came from NASA’s coffers — the agency only became involved after the pen was dreamed into existence. In 1965 Fisher patented a pen that could write upside-down, in frigid or roasting conditions (down to minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit or up to 400 degrees F), and even underwater or in other liquids. If too hot, though, the ink turned green instead of its normal blue.
After testing, NASA ordered 400 Fisher pens for use on space missions at a cost of under $1000. Russia switched to using the pens a year later. Fisher still sells the original Space Pen and you can get it on Amazon for about $32.
Black MIDI music composers make “seemingly impossible” music consisting of millions of notes.
Blackers take these MIDI files and run them through software such as Synesthesia, which is kind of an educational version of Guitar Hero for the piano, and bills itself as “piano for everyone.” It’s kind of brilliant to imagine a novice piano player looking for some online tutorials and stumbling across, say, this video of the song Bad Apple, which reportedly includes 8.49 million separate notes.
Here’s a tune with 10 million notes:
And another with 110 million notes that sounds like a random TV channel played at 5000x normal speed. I really thought dubstep was going to be the “those kids and their crazy unlistenable music” transition for me, but that’s nothing compared to this. If this is what the youngs are going to be listening to in three years, count me out.
In a book called All Things Considered published in 1915, G.K. Chesterton deftly skewers the glut of books by gurus, articles linked to from Hacker News, and conference talks by entrepreneurs about how to be successful.
That a thing is successful merely means that it is; a millionaire is successful in being a millionaire and a donkey in being a donkey. Any live man has succeeded in living; any dead man may have succeeded in committing suicide. But, passing over the bad logic and bad philosophy in the phrase, we may take it, as these writers do, in the ordinary sense of success in obtaining money or worldly position. These writers profess to tell the ordinary man how he may succeed in his trade or speculation-how, if he is a builder, he may succeed as a builder; how, if he is a stockbroker, he may succeed as a stockbroker. They profess to show him how, if he is a grocer, he may become a sporting yachtsman; how, if he is a tenth-rate journalist, he may become a peer; and how, if he is a German Jew, he may become an Anglo-Saxon. This is a definite and business-like proposal, and I really think that the people who buy these books (if any people do buy them) have a moral, if not a legal, right to ask for their money back. Nobody would dare to publish a book about electricity which literally told one nothing about electricity; no one would dare publish an article on botany which showed that the writer did not know which end of a plant grew in the earth. Yet our modern world is full of books about Success and successful people which literally contain no kind of idea, and scarcely any kind of verbal sense.
Chesterton continues:
It is perfectly obvious that in any decent occupation (such as bricklaying or writing books) there are only two ways (in any special sense) of succeeding. One is by doing very good work, the other is by cheating. Both are much too simple to require any literary explanation. If you are in for the high jump, either jump higher than any one else, or manage somehow to pretend that you have done so. If you want to succeed at whist, either be a good whist-player, or play with marked cards. You may want a book about jumping; you may want a book about whist; you may want a book about cheating at whist. But you cannot want a book about Success. Especially you cannot want a book about Success such as those which you can now find scattered by the hundred about the book-market. You may want to jump or to play cards; but you do not want to read wandering statements to the effect that jumping is jumping, or that games are won by winners.
That Chesterton’s observations ring so true today is not an accident. The last time income inequality in the US was as high as it is today? The 1910s and 1920s. (via mustapha abiola)
Joan Jett and BMX, the perfect way to spend a Thursday night. It’s not Thursday, you say? Well, this video makes it feel like it is.
(via @chrispiascik)
More than you’ve ever wanted to know about the Sierpinski triangle.
Throughout my years playing around with fractals, the Sierpinski triangle has been a consistent staple. The triangle is named after Wacław Sierpiński and as fractals are wont the pattern appears in many places, so there are many different ways of constructing the triangle on a computer.
All of the methods are fundamentally iterative. The most obvious method is probably the triangle-in-triangle approach. We start with one triangle, and at every step we replace each triangle with 3 subtriangles:
The discussion even veers into cows at some point…but zero mentions of the Menger sponge though? (via hacker news)
The NHL season is only a few days old, but Sharks rookie Tomas Hertl may have already scored the goal of the year. This is crazy:
Also, that was his fourth goal of the game. (via grantland)
McDonald’s recently held an event where chefs took the ingredients used to make McDonald’s menu items and used them to make dishes that one might find at a nice restaurant. Thrillist has the report.
The slow-cooked beef with blueberry pomegranate sauce and Mac Fry gnocchi comes from McD’s chef Jessica Foust, and was, without a doubt, the best of the night. It’s their burger beef before it gets ground, plus blueberries and pomegranates from the smoothies, thinly ribboned carrots, and French fries magically turned into gnocchi.
See also a previous discussion of fast food and fine dining. Dammit, now I’m hungry for a Quarter Pounder… (via @jeb)
With Silk Road kingpin Ross Ulbricht in custody, one imagines that a whole lot of his former customers are feeling a bit nervous right about now. And they should be. Buyers and sellers are starting to get arrested.
Charles Thompson might be a little nervous as well. As he explains:
In February of 2013, I decided to order one gram of MDMA from Silk Road because I wanted to write an essay on whether it really was that easy to click a few buttons and have a package of Schedule I substances arrive at your door a week later.
It was that easy. And that’s the bad news. From The Morning News: My Brief, Binding Road.
Katie Baker notes that a prominent member of the pickup artist community has written a book about why Denmark is a bad place for pickup gurus to find women. Turns out that the Nordic country’s “excellent social welfare services” also function as an effective douchebag repellant.
Fans of the travel writer will be disappointed that “pussy literally goes into hibernation” in this “mostly pacifist nanny state,” where the social programs rank among the best in the world. Roosh’s initial admiration for those resources is almost charming, if you’re able to momentarily forget that this is a man who considers devirginizing teenagers a sport.
“A Danish person has no idea what it feels like to not have medical care or free access to university education,” an awed Roosh reports. “They have no fear of becoming homeless or permanently jobless. The government’s soothing hand will catch everyone as they fall. To an American like myself, brainwashed to believe that you need to earn things like basic health care or education by working your ass off, it was quite a shock.”
Shock turns into disbelief and then rage when Roosh is rejected by heaps of “the most unfeminine and androgynous robotic women” he’s ever met. “Not a feminine drop of blood courses through their veins,” Roosh rants. He concludes that the typical fetching Nordic lady doesn’t need a man “because the government will take care of her and her cats, whether she is successful at dating or not.”
He’s not wrong. Several of Denmark’s social services are intended to reduce gender inequality by supporting women, a sort of state feminism that he can’t accept.
This list of rules for the contemporary American male is both awesome and awful, seemingly written by a douchebag Dalai Lama. Some of the rules are thoughtful:
Measure yourself only against your previous self.
Staying angry is a waste of energy.
If you believe in evolution, you should know something about how it works.
And some are not:
Desserts are for women. Order one and pretend you don’t mind that she’s eating yours.
Yes, of course you have to buy her dinner.
Pretty women who are unaccompanied want you to talk to them.
League of Denial, the Frontline documentary on the NFL and concussions, is available online for anyone to watch for free.
Sadly, most infographics these days look like this, functioning as a cheap and easy way to gussy up numbers. But when done properly, infographics are very effective in communicating a lot of information in a short period of time and can help you see data in new ways. In The Best American Infographics 2013, Gareth Cook collects some of the best ones from over the past year. Wired has a look at some of the selections.
Holly Case takes a fresh look at Joseph Stalin through the lens of his editorial work. Is the ruthless dictator best understood as an editor?
Joseph Djugashvili was a student in a theological seminary when he came across the writings of Vladimir Lenin and decided to become a Bolshevik revolutionary. Thereafter, in addition to blowing things up, robbing banks, and organizing strikes, he became an editor, working at two papers in Baku and then as editor of the first Bolshevik daily, Pravda. Lenin admired Djugashvili’s editing; Djugashvili admired Lenin, and rejected 47 articles he submitted to Pravda.
Djugashvili (later Stalin) was a ruthless person, and a serious editor. The Soviet historian Mikhail Gefter has written about coming across a manuscript on the German statesman Otto von Bismarck edited by Stalin’s own hand. The marked-up copy dated from 1940, when the Soviet Union was allied with Nazi Germany. Knowing that Stalin had been responsible for so much death and suffering, Gefter searched “for traces of those horrible things in the book.” He found none. What he saw instead was “reasonable editing, pointing to quite a good taste and an understanding of history.”
Stalin had also made a surprising change in the manuscript. In the conclusion, the author closed with a warning to the Germans lest they renege on the alliance and attack Russia. Stalin cut it. When the author objected, pleading that the warning was the whole point of the book, Stalin replied, “But why are you scaring them? Let them try. …” And indeed they did, costing more than 30 million lives-most of them Soviet. But the glory was Stalin’s in the end.
The editor is the unseen hand with the power to change meaning and message, even the course of history. Back when copy-proofs were still manually cut, pasted, and photographed before printing, a blue pencil was the instrument of choice for editors because blue was not visible when photographed. The editorial intervention was invisible by design.
Stalin always seemed to have a blue pencil on hand, and many of the ways he used it stand in direct contrast to common assumptions about his person and thoughts. He edited ideology out or played it down, cut references to himself and his achievements, and even exhibited flexibility of mind, reversing some of his own prior edits.
Out today is The Wes Anderson Collection (at Amazon), a coffee-table book about Wes Anderson’s career.
The Wes Anderson Collection is the first in-depth overview of Anderson’s filmography, guiding readers through his life and career. Previously unpublished photos, artwork, and ephemera complement a book-length conversation between Anderson and award-winning critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The interview and images are woven together in a meticulously designed book that captures the spirit of his films: melancholy and playful, wise and childish — and thoroughly original.
Vulture has an excerpt of the chapter on The Royal Tenenbaums.
Q: Gene Hackman - it was always your dream for him to play Royal?
A: It was written for him against his wishes.
Q: I’m gathering he was not an easy person to get.
A: He was difficult to get.
Q: What were his hesitations? Did he ever tell you?
A: Yeah: no money. He’s been doing movies for a long time, and he didn’t want to work sixty days on a movie. I don’t know the last time he had done a movie where he had to be there for the whole movie and the money was not good. There was no money. There were too many movie stars, and there was no way to pay. You can’t pay a million dollars to each actor if you’ve got nine movie stars or whatever it is - that’s half the budget of the movie. I mean, nobody’s going to fund it anymore, so that means it’s scale.
That’s right, Gene Hackman (and probably the rest of them as well) worked for scale on The Royal Tenenbaums.
Anderson also talks about the scene in The Darjeeling Limited where they show everyone on the train:
Q: When you turn to reveal the tiger, what is that, the other side of the train?
A: No, it’s all one car. We gutted a car, and that is a fake forest that we built on the train, and it is a Jim Henson creature on our train car. The whole thing is one take, and I think because we did it that way, while we were doing it, we did feel this electricity, you know? There’s tension in it because it’s all real. Fake but real. I mean, that was the idea. The emotion of it, well — there’s nothing really happening in the scene, you know? They just kind of sit there, but it was a real thing that was happening. But I did at the time have this feeling like “I don’t know.”
Even if it’s fake, it’s real.
If you’re even a little bit of a magazine nerd, you’ll appreciate this: with the help of Elon Green Gay Talese annotates his celebrated celebrity profile, Frank Sinatra Has A Cold.
EG: The punctuated alliteration is gorgeous — “preened and polished”; “matured” and “molded”. How much time would you spend on such a sentence?/eg
GT: Oh, I could spend days. Sometimes these phrases come to you and sometimes they’re terrible. Sometimes you think, “Maybe that’s okay” and you let it in. I throw a lot of stuff away.
EG: What percentage of what you write for any given story do you get rid of?
GT: More than half. Because it’s so easily the case that it’s turgid or overwritten.
EG: Do you throw away more now, now that you use a computer?
GT: I don’t think so. I’ve always thrown a lot away, even when I was working on daily deadlines for newspapers. That was really expensive because at the New York Times we were typing what they called a “book” — it had seven or eight pieces of carbon. A thick thing. If you threw it away, you were destroying 11 cents worth of, well, something.
(via @yayitsrob)
CloudPaint is a fully operational online version of the original MacPaint released with the Macintosh in 1984. The source code for version 1.3 of MacPaint is available from the Computer History Museum.
From the Harvard Gazette, Walter Isaacson writes about Bill Gates’ years at Harvard.
It may have been the most momentous purchase of a magazine in the history of the Out of Town News stand in Harvard Square. Paul Allen, a college dropout from Seattle, wandered into the cluttered kiosk one snowy day in December 1974 and saw that the new issue of Popular Electronics featured a home computer for hobbyists, called the Altair, that was just coming on the market. He was both exhilarated and dismayed. Although thrilled that the era of the “personal” computer seemed to have arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down 75 cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slush to the Currier House room of Bill Gates, a Harvard sophomore and fellow computer fanatic from Lakeside High School in Seattle, who had convinced Allen to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.
What Gates and Allen set out to do, during the Christmas break of 1974 and the subsequent January reading period when Gates was supposed to be studying for exams, was to create the software for personal computers. “When Paul showed me that magazine, there was no such thing as a software industry,” Gates recalled. “We had the insight that you could create one. And we did.” Years later, reflecting on his innovations, he said, “That was the most important idea that I ever had.”
And here perhaps is the worst idea Gates ever had:
We’re not big on TV for our kids (they watch maybe two hours a week and frequently less than that), but one show we’ve come to love watching with them is Shaun the Sheep. Produced by Aardman Animations (Wallace and Gromit), Shaun the Sheep has a number of things going for it:
- No dialogue. Not even the humans talk. Everything is communicated through grunts and gestures. Your three-year-old can follow it, as can your grandfather who only speaks Chinese.
- It’s frequently hilarious. I’ve never heard Ollie laugh so hard at anything. And not just for kids…my wife and I are usually in stitches next to them on the couch.
- Non-topical, non-contemporary. The show is almost entirely self-contained…you don’t need to know anything about pop culture to get the jokes. The humor is timeless…the show will be as good in 50 years as it is now. (There are plenty of pop culture references for the parents though…as with Bugs Bunny and Wallace and Gromit.)
- Non-violent. The humor is typically not mean-spirited and not predicated on characters hurting or attacking or making fun of other characters.
- Not gender specific. Mostly. This aspect could be a lot better (e.g. all the main characters are male), but the show is not specifically for little boys or little girls in the way that some kids shows are.
In short, it’s the perfect entertainment for 3-8 year-olds and their parents. I don’t think it’s available on Netflix Instant anymore, but you can get in on iTunes and at Amazon.
One of McSweeney’s most popular online pieces is Colin Nissan’s It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers. Its sublime opening paragraph:
I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
Nissan’s piece is included in a new collection and has spawned a collectable mug. Here’s a McSweeney’s interview with Nissan about the piece and the “the whole gourd pride movement”.
McSWEENEY’S: A large part of what makes “Gourds” so funny is the language. Use of F-bombs in humor is sometimes seen as a lazy way to get a reaction from the audience, but here it just works. How do you fucking explain this?
NISSAN: Fudge if I know. It’s tricky because properly placed F-bombs really do have the power to work readers up into a lather, but they also have the power to make them think you’re a juvenile idiot with a terrible vocabulary. For whatever reason, the swearing worked in this case. I think part of it was the fact that despite the language, the voice in the piece was never really angry or negative, he was just incredibly excited. If he was angry, I actually think the swearing might have turned people off.
The internet these days is chock full of must-reads, must-sees, can’t-live-withouts, and lists (oh, the lists!) of things you need to do before you die.
As I understand it, we are now all legally obliged to watch Breaking Bad by the end of 2013. Our prisons are already full to bursting with people who failed to watch The West Wing or The Wire when they were expressly told to. I even saw a woman prosecuted last week for not having read Gone Girl. What was she thinking?
Richard Osman offers a way out of the must-see mess so that you can enjoy life again.
Of 100 Greatest Novels, you can happily ignore all of them except Scoop and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. I am assuming you’ve already read To Kill a Mockingbird for O-level. Read Shakespeare if you want to, but you don’t have to. (Though if you don’t ever read him, you’re not allowed to say he’s rubbish. Deal?) You should probably read Great Expectations, but feel free to leave Dickens there. And I think Wuthering Heights is the only Emily Brontë novel worth reading (someone will rise to this, just you wait and see).
A 7-minute time lapse video of the European front line changes during World War II, from the invasion of Poland to (spoilers!) the surrender of Germany.
Surprising to me how much of the war involves no shifting front lines…the map view really emphasizes this in a way that other WWII narratives do not. (via open culture)
In what appears to be an excerpt from Fred Vogelstein’s new book on the Apple/Google mobile rivalry, a piece from the NY Times Magazine on how the iPhone went from conception to launch. That the Macworld keynote/demo of the phone went off so well is amazing and probably even a bit lucky.
The iPhone could play a section of a song or a video, but it couldn’t play an entire clip reliably without crashing. It worked fine if you sent an e-mail and then surfed the Web. If you did those things in reverse, however, it might not. Hours of trial and error had helped the iPhone team develop what engineers called “the golden path,” a specific set of tasks, performed in a specific way and order, that made the phone look as if it worked.
But even when Jobs stayed on the golden path, all manner of last-minute workarounds were required to make the iPhone functional. On announcement day, the software that ran Grignon’s radios still had bugs. So, too, did the software that managed the iPhone’s memory. And no one knew whether the extra electronics Jobs demanded the demo phones include would make these problems worse.
Here’s video of Jobs’ presentation that day:
Smithsonian Mag goes way back to explain why we eat popcorn at the movies.
About 8,000 years ago, maize was cultivated from teosinte, a wild grass that doesn’t look much like the modern corn we know today. Popcorn — a name mostly associated with puffed kernels of corn — is actually a strain of corn, characterized by especially starchy kernels with hard kernel walls, which help internal pressure build when placed over heat. It was one of the first variations of maize cultivated in Central America. “Popcorn went north and it went south, but as far as I can see, it really only survived in South America,” says Andrew Smith, author of Popped Culture: A Social History of Popcorn. Eventually, trade and commerce brought the unique kernels northward. “Most likely, North American whalers went to Chile, found varieties of popcorn, picked them up and thought that they were cute, and brought them back to New England in the early 19th century,” Smith explains.
Terminus is a 1961 documentary depicting a day in the life of London’s Waterloo Station.
The film was directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and won several awards when it was released. (thx, nick)
Watch as several kayakers rocket down a drainage ditch in BC at speeds approaching 35 mph.
That looks like a lot of fun. See also what fast looks like. (via devour)
A promising debut by Sarah Pavis of a science program called Square 1, an attempt at a Connections-like show for the modern day. In the first episode, she explores how phone touchscreens work.
In addition to being an occasional guest editor around these parts, Sarah is a mechanical engineer, so she knows her science.
For the past few years, UK police have used a secret network of fully furnished fake houses to snare burglars. They’re called capture houses.
Based in the city of Rotherham, Stopford explained to me the hit-and-miss nature of a capture house. Some of the fake apartments have been open for as little for one day before being hit by burglars, and as long as nearly a year without being broken into even once. As Stopford went on to describe, these otherwise uninhabited residences are fully stocked, complete with electronic equipment, lights on timers, and bare but functional furniture, and they tend to be small apartments located in multi-unit housing blocks.
That apartment you pass everyday on the fourth floor, in other words, might not be an apartment at all, really, but an elaborate trap run by the police, bristling inside with tiny surveillance cameras and ready to spray invisible chemical markings onto anyone who steps inside-or slips in through the window, as the case may be.
See also bait cars and honeypots.
Photographer Edward Burtynsky’s latest project is called Water.
While trying to accommodate the growing needs of an expanding, and very thirsty civilization, we are reshaping the Earth in colossal ways. In this new and powerful role over the planet, we are also capable of engineering our own demise. We have to learn to think more long-term about the consequences of what we are doing, while we are doing it. My hope is that these pictures will stimulate a process of thinking about something essential to our survival; something we often take for granted — until it’s gone.
Water is on display this month in NYC at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery and Howard Greenberg Gallery and in London at Flowers Gallery. There is also a book and an upcoming feature-length film:
(via pdn)
In talking to Bill Simmons for a Grantland NBA preview show, former NBA star Jalen Rose predicts that Michael Jordan will play one game for the Charlotte Bobcats this season.
Per Betteridge’s law of headlines, Jordan will not play in the NBA this season, but it’s an intriguing possibility. Jordan’s 50 years old but he owns the team so you never know.
After receiving Facebook friend requests from Christopher Robin after several years of not hearing from him, the residents of the Hundred Acre Wood hold a meeting to talk about the new development.
“No disrespecting what’s clearly a very Emportent Meeting,” Eeyore began, “but to me it’s simple: Christopher Robin left to do who-knows-what-and-where, and we stayed here. Both of our lives went on. The way I see it, Christopher Robin was feeling lonely and sad last night — maybe his girlfriend just dumped him, maybe he got rejected from the graduate program he was hoping to get in to. He’d probably been drinking, and he started getting wistful for days-gone-by, so he searched us all on Facebook and so-on-and-so-on and there we have it. Trust me, Christopher Robin is probably relieved I [ignored his friend request]. He’s probably sitting in his apartment right now in a pair of ripped sweatpants, eating ice cream out of a tub and re-watching The Wire and thanking his stars he doesn’t have to actually still be friends with his old, mopey pal Eeyore.”
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