As near as I can tell, I’m
As near as I can tell, I’m runner-up for best blogger of 2003 in the eyes of IDG Sweden.
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Entries for December 2003
Florence Nightengale was a pioneer in the
Florence Nightengale was a pioneer in the field of information design.
Of 2003
Presented with no guarantees, little explanation, and in no particular order:
Emerge, Fischerspooner - About 20 seconds into my first listen, I knew I’d never grow tired of this song.
Lost in Translation - Sweet, careful, and heartbreaking. I’m eagerly awaiting more like this from Sofia Coppola and Bill Murray.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - When I first heard about the movie adaptation of LOTR, I did not have high hopes, considering Hollywood’s track record with such things. Happy to be wrong on that one.
Give Up, The Postal Service - My favorite album of the year.
You Forgot It in People, Broken Social Scene - Wonderful, right up there with The Postal Service.
Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond - A convincing thesis on how the world ended up being dominated by Western civilization (although, Diamond says, the jury is still out on China).
Nonzero, Robert Wright - Interesting view of world history through the lens of game theory.
Hey Ya!, OutKast - A great song that doesn’t fit neatly into any musical genre. Could have easily been a rock song done by The Beatles (before you snicker, read the lyrics…they’re good). Rock? R&B? Pop? Whatever. Song of the year.
The Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players - Songs inspired by and sung to slideshows purchased at estate sales seem like an easy Gen-X crowd pleaser, but the Trachtenburgs do more here than just warble to PowerPoint…the songs are both smart and entertaining.
Gramercy Tavern birthday dinner - I don’t normally eat fish, but the striped bass at the Gramercy Tavern may have been the tastiest dish I’ve ever had at a restaurant. The coffee cake they sent us home with was just the thing for breakfast the next morning.
Honorable mentions: Microcosmos, Radiohead @ MSG, Pop!Tech 2003, House of Leaves, Liar’s Poker, Moneyball, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
Get an umbrella for your pet
Get an umbrella for your pet. Available with a matching People Umbrella
FBI: be on the lookout for almanac
FBI: be on the lookout for almanac readers, they may be terrorists. Once information on the timing of the vernal equinox gets out, we’re all doomed!
52 magazines or bust
Starting the first week in January, I’m going to read a different magazine every week for the entire year (while reserving the right to quit after a couple of months if I feel like it). A variety of reasons for this, but mostly because 1) I’m hoping magazines will be a welcome change from books and weblogs, 2) I want to explore some new subjects/viewpoints, and 3) why the hell not? I may or may not write about the magazines I read on kottke.org, but I’d guess you’ll probably be hearing something about them at some point. (Lucky you!)
So, any recommendations on what I should read? I’m going to be reading issues of many popular magazines (Newsweek, National Geographic, Wired, The Economist, Harper’s, GQ, Rolling Stone, etc.), but what I’m really interested in is quality niche magazines containing good writing about a particular subject. Anything I should stay away from? Oh, and I know Manhattan is littered with magazine shops, but if you know of any particularly good ones, that would be helpful info to have.
Looking at what’s on eBay to determine
Looking at what’s on eBay to determine the health of the economy.
Old MeFi thread where I argue (wrongly
Old MeFi thread where I argue (wrongly as it turns out) that Google’s branding efforts suck.
“Embedded” just beat out “blog” for the top word of 2003
“Embedded” just beat out “blog” for the top word of 2003.
The Glimpse
The guy in front of me on the train is a writer of some sort. Peering over his shoulder at his laptop screen, I can see he’s writing the synopsis of a novel. Or a screenplay. He’s looking at screenplays (Big Fish, The Last Samurai) for reference or ideas or something. Anyway, it appears as though he’s not making much progress, his laptop sits open on the tray while he reads the newspaper.
Then a burst of energy. Inspiration. The man flicks Ctrl-N in Word, a blank page. A new story called The Glimpse. He writes:
Man on a train. A fast one. The Acela from New York to Boston.
Coming soon to a multiplex near you.
Email your loved ones after The Rature has occurred
Email your loved ones after The Rature has occurred. “After the rapture, there will be a lot of speculation as to why millions of people have just disappeared”
Which came first, the technology or the policy?
Cory Doctorow wrote a short piece for Warren Ellis’s Statements of 2004 series:
The last twenty years were about technology. The next twenty years are about policy. It’s about realizing that all the really hard problems — free expression, copyright, due process, social networking — may have technical dimensions, but they aren’t technical problems. The next twenty years are about using our technology to affirm, deny and rewrite our social contracts: all the grandiose visions of e-democracy, universal access to human knowledge and (God help us all) the Semantic Web, are dependent on changes in the law, in the policy, in the sticky, non-quantifiable elements of the world. We can’t solve them with technology: the best we can hope for is to use technology to enable the human interaction that will solve them.
A nice formulation, but, with all due respect, a wrong one. Technology and policy are always intertwined. Both of them always matter. Was the Napster saga “about” peer-to-peer technology, or the current state of copyright law and the music industry? Was the rapid growth of the commercial Internet in the US “about” advances in data networking or enlightened FCC policies? The danger lies in thinking about either element in a vacuum. Geeks and the technology industry love to think they can ignore policy battles, which is just as misguided as policy-makers thinking they can adopt laws without regard to technological reality.
Technology and policy are always intertwined, but policy often plays catch-up with technology. I think that’s what Cory’s on about here. The Internet, ubiquous & cheap data storage, portable & connected devices of all sorts, the digital abstraction of media…that’s a lot of significant technology that our global society is being asked to handle and politics & culture are scrambling to catch up. Forward-thinking industries, companies, and countries have spurred the development of some of this technology (egged on by consumers in some cases), but my feeling is that in this instance, technology is definitely playing the horse to policy’s cart.
Get your Scrabble freak a little something for the holidays
Get your Scrabble freak a little something for the holidays.
Kinja is looking for a NYC-based sysadmin
Kinja is looking for a NYC-based sysadmin. Part-to-full time, job keywords include Linux, weblogs, Apache, Tomcat, MySQL, and fun!
This homosexual marriage poll on the AFA
This homosexual marriage poll on the AFA site seems to be backfiring on them. The AFA is strongly against legalizing marriage for gay/lesbian couples.
Apple’s planning on releasing wee iPods
Apple’s planning on releasing wee iPods. 2-4 GB of storage, 400-800 song capacity
The world’s first fully automated domestic assistant
The world’s first fully automated domestic assistant will be “3 laws safe”.
User survey
The post is a post is a post format has been live on the front page of kottke.org for over a month now. At the time, many people emailed, left comments, or wrote posts on their sites observing how well or poorly it worked for them. For those who are frequent readers, how is the new format working for you? Was it a worthwhile improvement or is it getting in your way? If you found it confusing at first, has it become less so? Or is it about the same?
The Wright Brothers, some pretenders to the throne, and patents
The Wright Brothers, some pretenders to the throne, and patents. This is very high quality writing.
Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Sorry Sofia, but seeing ROTK was the best time I’ve had at the movies in a long, long time. I can’t say if this is the year’s best film or if you should go see it, but it was certainly my favorite.
AOL members can now use their AOL
AOL members can now use their AOL username to log into the iTunes Music Store. Maybe this is why a bunch of AOL Music people got canned a couple of weeks ago?
Extensive community-conducted interview with Jeffrey Steingarten at eGullet
Extensive community-conducted interview with Jeffrey Steingarten at eGullet.
Using social networks to more efficiently immunize populations
Using social networks to more efficiently immunize populations.
Perhaps the glass is half full
Mother Jones interviews Tony Kushner for their December issue. Kushner won a Pulitzer Prize for his play, Angels in America, which is currently showing as a two-part film on HBO. A bit of the interview that caught my attention:
There are a lot of politically active young people, but I feel that we’ve misled them. I have great admiration for the essayists and writers on the left, but the left decided at some point that government couldn’t get it what it wanted. As a result, it’s a movement of endless complaint and of a one-sided reading of American history, which misses the important point: Constitutional democracy has created astonishing and apparently irreversible social progress. All we’re interested in is talking about when government doesn’t work.
Kushner’s comments remind me of a piece from earlier this year by Anil Dash, who asserts that the sociopolitical trend in the US has been toward the liberal. (Although I think one could make an equally convincing case that both the Democrat and the Republicans are essentially conservative…but I’ll leave that for someone else.)
Great interview with PT Anderson and Lars Von Trier
Great interview with PT Anderson and Lars Von Trier.
Metadazzle overfizzle
Nothing takes the fun and personality out of writing like metadata. Josh Allen recently quoted Kevin Fanning as saying:
When I’m old, here’s how I’m going to describe the early 21st century: We were always having to provide people with content.
As software developers, photographers, writers, and users struggle to organize creative work so that people can locate what they’re after, the work itself has necessarily been de-emphasized. As an example, posts on weblogs can have categories, permalinks, post dates, post times, # of comments, # of new comments since your last visit, # of words, # of trackbacks, who last commented on a post, titles, authors, icons, prompts to read more, karma scores, # of versions, “email this” links, referers, and all sorts of other things:
The actual writing may be in there somewhere as well.
Photos (f-stop, shutter speed, location), wiki pages (DoNot GetMe StartedOnWikis…), online discussions (post filters, comment metadata), and Flash movies (4532 of 59103 bytes loaded) each have their own organizational accoutrements.
I wonder how Basho would have coped:
Somehow, all this makes me think of using Excel to write a love letter.
New book by Don Norman: Emotional Design:
New book by Don Norman: Emotional Design: Why We Love (Or Hate) Everyday Things.
Check current prices for books on Amazon
Check current prices for books on Amazon with a wireless device using ScoutPal.
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment found in hut
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment found in hut where Saddam was captured.
New York Film Critics Circle announces its awards for 2003
New York Film Critics Circle announces its awards for 2003. Return of the King is best picture
Google Print
Looks like Google branching out into searching more than just web sites. The Google Print FAQ says they’re experimenting with “publications” (books? magazines?):
Google’s mission is to provide access to all the world’s information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world’s information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers’ content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.
Google Print isn’t referenced anywhere else on their web site so it’s unclear as to whether it’s a planned beta, an ongoing effort, or already over, but it sounds like an effort to counter Amazon’s full-text book search efforts.
Update: Reader Xavier writes that Google Print is still working. A search for “1,000 knock knock jokes for kids” (with the results restricted to the print.google.com domain) yields this page for the book. A search for a common word like “the” reveals that around 8000 books are available, including Tolkien’s Fellowship of the Ring, David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, Crime and Punishment, and Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines.
Nintendo emulator that shows how games handle
Nintendo emulator that shows how games handle loading graphics in and out of memory. Neat insight into old school game development
Rumsfeld’s Rules, a collection of thoughts and
Rumsfeld’s Rules, a collection of thoughts and reflections from his years of service. PDF file
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