Is there a large methane lake on Titan?
Is there a large methane lake on Titan?.
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
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.
Entries for June 2005
All of Franz Ferdinand’s albums will not
All of Franz Ferdinand’s albums will not have names and will only be differentiated by color. Their second album — the black, red, and green one — will be out in September.
Snow Crash
When I mentioned Neal Stephenson here in February, several people recommended starting with the smaller Snow Crash rather than plunging head-long into Cryptonomicon or the Baroque Cycle. When I ran across a copy in my own household (who knew that we had one?), I picked it up and barely put it back down until I had finished. I mean — come on! — the main character’s name is Hiro Protagonist, but Stephenson has the chops to back that sort of cheesy bullshit up:
The Deliverator’s car has enough potential energy packed into its batteries to fire a pound of bacon into the Asteroid Belt. Unlike a bimbo box or a Burb beater, the Deliverator’s car unloads that power through gaping, gleaming, polished sphincters. When the Deliverator puts the hammer down, shit happens. You want to talk contact patches? Your car’s tires have tiny contact patches, talk to the asphalt in four places the size of your tongue. The Deliverator’s car has big sticky tires with contact patches the size of a fat lady’s thighs. The Deliverator is in touch with the road, starts like a bad day, stops on a peseta.
Why is the Deliverator so equipped? Because people rely on him. He is a roll model. This is America. People do whatever the fuck they feel like doing, you got a problem with that? Because they have a right to. And because they have guns and no one can fucking stop them. As a result, this country has one of the worst economies in the world. When it gets down to it — talking trade balances here — once we’ve brain-drained all our technology into other countries, once things have evened out, they’re making cars in Bolivia and microwave ovens in Tadzhikistan and selling them here — once our edge in natural resources has been made irrelevant by giant Hong Kong ships and dirigibles that can ship North Dakota all the way to New Zealand for a nickel — once the Invisible Hand has taken all those historical inequities and smeared them out into a broad global layer of what a Pakistani brickmaker would consider to be prosperity…
Roll model!
Aside from the entertaining writing, Snow Crash (excerpt) is packed full of ideas. Stephenson gives the reader as much to think about as do the authors of recent non-fiction books like Blink, The Wisdom of Crowds, etc. And whereas Steven Johnson gets a bunch of shit for winkingly calling his book “Everything Bad is Good for You” and suggesting that this miserable culture we’re stuck with might be good for us in some way, readers of Snow Crash might say, “hmm, that’s an interesting idea” and ruminate on it without feeling the need to completely disagree with the whole premise of the book. Is fiction better at presenting ideas in a non-theatening manner than non-fiction? Maybe Gladwell’s next book should be a novel?
“Ireland today is the richest country in
“Ireland today is the richest country in the European Union after Luxembourg”. Ireland “today has a per capita G.D.P. higher than that of Germany, France and Britain”.
Delettering the public space
Delettering the public space. “In a remarkable display of cooperation for the sake of art, every store on a popular shopping street in Vienna allowed their signage to be masked in yellow fluorescent foil.”
Death in the celebrity age
Are you worried about the future glut of obituaries in national newspapers? Because I sure am. Think about it: because of our networked world and mass media, there are so many more nationally known people than there were 30, 40, or 50 years ago. Fifty years ago, to be famous you had to be a politician, a movie star, a sports star, a general/admiral, a writer, a musician, a TV star, or rich. These days, we have many more popular sports, more sports teams, more movies are being made, there are 2-3 orders of magnitude more TV channels and programs, more music, more musical genres, more books are being written, and there’s more rich people. Plus, these days people routinely become famous for appearing in advertising, designing things, being good cooks, yammering away on the internet, etc. etc. A year’s worth of guests on Hollywood Squares…there’s 2300 people right there that probably wouldn’t have been famous in 1953, and that’s just one show.
Frankly, I don’t know how we’re all going to handle this. Chances are in 15-20 years, someone famous whose work you enjoyed or whom you admired or who had a huge influence on who you are as a person will die each day…and probably even more than one a day. And that’s just you…many other famous people will have died that day who mean something to other people. Will we all just be in a constant state of mourning? Will the NY Times national obituary section swell to 30 pages a day? As members of the human species, we’re used to dealing with the death of people we “know” in amounts in the low hundreds over the course of a lifetime. With higher life expectancies and the increased number of people known to each of us (particularly in the hypernetworked part of the world), how are we going to handle it when several thousand people we know die over the course of our lifetime?
Apple has merged their iPod and iPod Photo lines
Apple has merged their iPod and iPod Photo lines. All iPods will now have color screens.
Authorial Candy Bars, with Their Respective Tag
Authorial Candy Bars, with Their Respective Tag Lines, That Weren’t as Successful as the Oh Henry! Candy Bar. “Mrs. Dalloway Treats — ‘Woolf these down!’” and “Chaucer Sweet Cheese Bar — ‘Of harmes two the lesse is for to cheese.’”
Google Maps hack: Iraq War casualty map
Google Maps hack: Iraq War casualty map. “This page shows the progession of US military casualties from the Iraq war. Each click displays 30 more casualties, starting from the beginning of the war. Each soldier is shown in at their home town. Click their icon for more details.”
Fictional Iron Chef match-up between Thomas Keller
Fictional Iron Chef match-up between Thomas Keller and Heston Blumenthal of Fat Duck. Arguing over food science has never been so interesting.
How Danny Gregory makes those nifty watercolors
How Danny Gregory makes those nifty watercolors that illustrate The Morning News. “Roz, the color theory teacher, warned against it, but I laid down a blue underpainting!”
What’s the deal with unusual job interviews?
What’s the deal with unusual job interviews?. And more importantly, how do you deal with them?
NASA Commission says Space Shuttle still not
NASA Commission says Space Shuttle still not safe enough for flight.
“Does anyone devote as much energy to
“Does anyone devote as much energy to avoiding simple, sensible solutions as the modern graphic designer?”. Novelty is necessary to foster innovation, but is missing the mark so frequently worth the effort?
Google introduces an API for Google Maps
Google introduces an API for Google Maps. And there was much rejoicing by the cartography hacking community.
Photographer Clayton James Cubitt interviews Tom Carden
Photographer Clayton James Cubitt interviews Tom Carden about their Metropop Denim collaboration. “I don’t think the work ever belongs to the computer, any more than a photograph belongs to a camera. The computer is a tool — there wouldn’t be any artwork if I didn’t tell the computer exactly what to do — it just works a hell of a lot faster than I do!”
Humans’ worst mistake
Jared Diamond calls agriculture “the worst mistake in the history of the human race”. “With the advent of agriculture [the] elite became better off, but most people became worse off”.
How to record a podcast using GarageBand
How to record a podcast using GarageBand. Using GB like this is overkill, but there it is anyway.
How to take the sting out of a sunburn
How to take the sting out of a sunburn. By taking a hot shower?
Thoughts on turning the Sony Libre into
Thoughts on turning the Sony Libre into a “Universal Game Board”.
Why do we forget our childhood?
Why do we forget our childhood?. Because we don’t know the language at such a young age to form memories.
David Foster Wallace’s Kenyon College Commencement Address
As much as I enjoyed reading the transcript of Steve Jobs’ commencement address to the graduates at Stanford (here’s an audio version), I preferred the similar** sentiments of David Foster Wallace in his Kenyon College commencement address:
The point here is that I think this is one part of what teaching me how to think is really supposed to mean. To be just a little less arrogant. To have just a little critical awareness about myself and my certainties. Because a huge percentage of the stuff that I tend to be automatically certain of is, it turns out, totally wrong and deluded. I have learned this the hard way, as I predict you graduates will, too.
As in his writing, Wallace has a knack for depicting the world as a pretty messy place that one must navigate with a certain amount of uncertainty in order to really experience anything, which, for me, holds a little more truth than Jobs’ “grab the tiger by the tail and live, dammit” thoughts.
See also some other graduation speeches:
Conan O’Brien’s Harvard Class Day 2000 speech
Will Ferrell’s Harvard Class Day 2003 speech
Jon Stewart’s William and Mary 2004 commencement address
** Yeah, I know, all commencement addresses are pretty much the same.
Gothamist interviews The Washingtonienne, Jessica Cutler
Gothamist interviews The Washingtonienne, Jessica Cutler.
Quick sketch of London tube traffic patterns
Quick sketch of London tube traffic patterns. The spider that ate London.
Final four Beethoven symphonies in mp3 format
Final four Beethoven symphonies in mp3 format available for download on the BBC site this week.
Long, long, long, but good, good, good
Long, long, long, but good, good, good piece on Suck, “the first great website”.
A basketball fan couldn’t wait until next
A basketball fan couldn’t wait until next year, so he’s documenting 2005-6 Bulls season with NBA Live 2005. Looks like the Bulls lost their home opener.
With higher rents (and other factors), good
With higher rents (and other factors), good cheap food is getting hard to find in Manhattan.
The anti-white racism of the NBA
The anti-white racism of the NBA. “The NBA is not a league for black, white, red, blue, or green people. It is a league for winners.”
“Dear hipsters, No matter how much you
“Dear hipsters, No matter how much you loved Napoleon Dynamite, Vote For Pedro shirts aren’t cool anymore.”. The Google Ads on this entry feature Vote for Pedro shirts. Hee.
iTunes 4.9 now supports podcasting
iTunes 4.9 now supports podcasting. Boy, podcasting went from zero to corporate in no time flat. Will that pace stunt the growth of indie podcasting before it even has a chance to get started?
Slide show depicting a collection of New
Slide show depicting a collection of New York City coffee cups.
Future winners of the New Yorker cartoon caption contest
Future winners of the New Yorker cartoon caption contest. “I love being wealthy in the Hamptons.”
Theft or homage?
Nike is catching some shit for appropriating some imagery for one of their skateboarding events from a 1984 album cover by Dischord Records’ Minor Threat. Dischord is alledging that Nike stole the image:
No, they stole it and we’re not happy about it. Nike is a giant corporation which is attempting to manipulate the alternative skate culture to create an even wider demand for their already ubiquitous brand. Nike represents just about the antithesis of what Dischord stands for and it makes me sick to my stomach to think they are using this explicit imagery to fool kids into thinking that the general ethos of this label, and Minor Threat in particular, can somehow be linked to Nike’s mission. It’s disgusting.
Here are the images (original on the left):
Setting aside the difference in philosophy between the two parties, this is obviously an homage on Nike’s part (or rather, on the part of the designers working on this campaign for Nike…they probably love skating and that album and are paying their respects). Graphic design, filmmaking, pop culture, and music is full of stuff like this…sampling and ripping and riffing and homages are all part of the deal. Seems like a punk label like Dischord should be aware of that but in the above quote they sound more like a big company afraid of losing their intellectual property. Isn’t punk all about taking without permission? Or does that not apply when you don’t like the folks doing the taking? Lighten up, Dischord.
Update: Nike has apologized for producing the poster. Lame.
Update #2: I’m getting a ton of mail about this, the most about a single post in quite awhile. Without exception, you all disagree with me.
Supreme Court rules that file-sharing companies can
Supreme Court rules that file-sharing companies can be sued for what their users do with their service. Next up, gun companies being liable for murders committed with their products.
The career of major league pitcher Dock
The career of major league pitcher Dock Ellis, including how he pitched a no-hitter on acid.
Adam Greenfield sights a celebrity hero in New York
Adam Greenfield sights a celebrity hero in New York. “We finished up our meal, we retrieved our bikes, and we rode away, into the ongoing rush and joy of a life given to me in large measure by the unhappy-looking man at the table behind us.”
Interview with Soso Whaley, director of Mickey
Interview with Soso Whaley, director of Mickey D’s and Me, counterpoint to Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me. “Even without seeing [Super Size Me] I could tell from the clips and the description by Spurlock that this was nothing more than junk science masquerading as legitimate scientific discovery.”
Socials & More