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Shaun Inman’s Mint stats package contains a great easter egg. Just key in the Konami cheat code (up up, down down, left right, left right, b, a) and you’re greeted with a custom graphic. More old school video game-inspired easter eggs on web sites please.
We have a new leader in the dumbest blog-related word/phrase competition: blogometric pressure.
The funny thing about TagTagger is that it probably would be useful to tag tags; it could help tag ecosystems like del.icio.us and Flickr better determine how tagged items are related. Think of it as defining tags…the tag “andywarhol” could be metatagged something like “andy warhol nyc artist person art popculture modernart”.
If you happen to be in NYC on November 3rd, stop by Eyebeam in the evening and check out a panel that I’m on about criticism called “Everybody’s A Critic, Or Are They?” Here’s a description:
With 9 million blogs, umpteen online message boards, thousands of shows on hundreds of cable channels, and an increased number of magazines on the newsstand, the number of outlets for expressing criticism has never been higher and the barriers to would-be critics have never been lower. Is this devaluing evaluation or does the shotgun approach result in better criticism? YOU be the Judge!
Joining me on the panel are Emily Gordon, Village Voice film critic Michael Atkinson, and Columbia professor & author Duncan Watts. The wonderful Steven Heller will moderate and no doubt bring the conversation to a higher level. Details:
November 3, 2005
7:00 PM - 9:00 PM
Eyebeam (map)
540 W. 21st St.
New York, NY 10011
Jim Holt asks Freeman Dyson, Lawrence Krauss, Ed Witten and other in trying to figure out how the universe will end. Further reading: Time Without End by Freeman Dyson, Frank Tipler’s Omega Point theory, and The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilizations by Michio Kaku.
The memoirs of Winston Churchill’s bodyguard have been recently discovered. “Why, Thompson, did they allow the president [FDR], almost dying on his feet, to be there? All Europe will suffer from the decisions made at Yalta.”
Found this in my inbox the other day:
From: [email protected]
Subject: Friendster Misses You
Date: October 30, 2005 11:09:14 AM EST
I guess when your software is social and everyone it used to hang around with spends all their time with other software, it can get a little clingy. Are drunken late-night messages next?
From: [email protected]
Subject: Friendster Loves You So Much. You Were The Only One Who Really Ever Understood Friendster. Could You Come Over Right Now? Friendster Just Wants To Talk. Why Don’t You Want To Talk To Friendster? It’ll Be Different This Time, Friendster Promises. Please Call Friendster.
Date: November 23, 2005 02:49:14 AM EST
George Dyson visits Google on the 60th anniversary of John von Neumann’s proposal for a digital computer. A quote from a Googler — “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people. We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” — highlights a quasi-philosophical question about Google Print…if a book is copied but nobody reads it, has it actually been copied? (Or something like that.)
Michael Bierut offers a requiem for the AT&T logo by Saul Bass. SBC is buying AT&T, keeping the name, but introducing a new logo.
Nerdy Halloween costumes alert: Ricky dressed as Google Image Search. I know someone out there is planning their Web 2.0 or folksonomy costume. Let’s see it!
Syrupy sweet smell in Manhattan yesterday still unexplained. There were reports from all over the city, but air tests and investigations revealed very little.
Star Trek’s Sulu, George Takei, comes out. First Swoopes and now this…the self esteem of young, gay, basketball-playing Trekkies must be skyrocketing. (I keed, but seriously, pro sports and sci-fi geeks could benefit from more confident & successful gay role models for young people who’re feeling less than confident with their sexuality.)
Lots of email on this…it might be a fake/hoax.
For those of you who are Napoleon Dynamited out, how about a “Pedro Lacks Political Experience” tshirt?
I love the little sparkline graphs on information aesthetics (right sidebar). That’s some information richness. Must check out the Sparkline PHP Graphing Library at some point.
A series of art projects based on Flickr. The Flickr tag cloud tshirt is clever; the printing on the shirts is reversed so that you can read them in the mirror…”the [Flickr user’s] narrative is actually addressing himself while claiming to address others”. (via ia)
Photos from Robbie Cooper’s Alter Ego project, in which he takes photos of gamers and compares them with their in-game avatars. More photos and an article about Cooper and his photography.
Watching the World Series last week, Meg wondered, “why White/Red Sox and not Socks?” I knew that if we waited long enough, the Internet would come up with the answer. Bonus: the NY Yankees were once known as the Porchclimbers. Those rascals!
Photo gallery of an urban model railroad with scenes modeled after the streets and tracks of Philly, NJ, and NYC. The modeler even painted some tiny graffiti on some of the buildings and walls. (thx, malatron)
I’ve been reading a fair amount of fiction lately, which is not typical for me. My usual regimen of nonfiction followed by even more nonfiction has been wearing on me and I read so much news and short nonfiction pieces in keeping up with kottke.org that I’m getting a little burned out. My latest foray into fiction has been great, a welcome reprieve from a schedule that has been a little brutal recently.
The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was especially good; I burned through it like I used to do with books when I was in high school. The lives of the characters in the book start out fairly normal but get more and more strange and unsettling as the action proceeds. But from my point of view as a reader, I was overcome by a growing sense of calm as I read. Maybe it was Murakami’s quiet storytelling style, but I was especially struck by the duality of self theme running throughout the book. Many of the characters either had two distinct personalities (not in a schizophrenic sense…usually one personality before a dramatic event in their lives and a different one afterwards), talked of leaving their body & looking back on themselves, or had vague feelings that they should be someone else, that some other personality was inside them and couldn’t reveal itself. This all ties into Japanese history & culture, eastern religion & philosophy, and Murakami’s own experience[1], but I found it all personally reassuring, a reminder that you could change as a person and still essentially be who you were before or that stepping outside your normal self for a look ‘round can be a healthy thing.
[1] I knew next-to-nothing about Murakami before picking up this book, but when I finished, I did a little poking around. Via Andrea Harner, here’s an interview with him from 1997 in Salon. In it, you can definitely see how he feels disconnected with Japan, other Japanese writers, and from his past:
Because it’s my father’s story, I guess. My father belongs to the generation that fought the war in the 1940s. When I was a kid my father told me stories — not so many, but it meant a lot to me. I wanted to know what happened then, to my father’s generation. It’s a kind of inheritance, the memory of it. What I wrote in this book, though, I made up — it’s a fiction, from beginning to end. I just made it up.
Several companies who manufacture digital cameras have issued “silent recalls” due to a faulty chip distorts photos when it fails. Sony, Canon, Nikon, Olympus, and others are affected. Digital Photography Review has more; here’s the Nikon D2H & D70 advisory. (A “silent recall” isn’t an official recall…the companies are only repairing items in which the faulty chips fail.)
Update: Eliot sez: That’s the wrong service advisory for Nikon…it’s an unrelated problem. Here’s the related advisory…doesn’t affect any of their dSLRs.
You can now get prints of your photos from Flickr (in the US, more locations coming soon). You can also do a bunch of other things, like get books printed, back up your photos to DVD, and get stamps printed.
Our short national nightmare is over, Harriet Miers has withdrawn her nomination for the Supreme Court (her letter). However, our long national nightmare still has 1181 days to go.
Forbes has quite a large feature on the subject of communicating, with thoughts from Arthur C. Clarke, Carl Zimmer, Milton Glaser, Jane Goodall, etc. I haven’t read any of this yet; it looks sufficiently interesting to get it in magazine form for easier reading.
The pyramid is 100 metres high and there is evidence that it contains rooms and a monumental causeway… The plateau is built of stone blocks, which indicates the presence at the time of a highly developed civilisation.
What the fizzle? While I was apparently living in a cave, Broken Social Scene came out with a new album. What’s the skinny? Is it any good? You Forgot It In People was one of my favorite albums of the past two years.
Science triumphs again with the solution to the wobbly cafe table problem. Aside from a caveat or two, it’s always possible to correct 4-legged table wobbliness by rotating the table until it’s stable. (via cd, which is on fire lately)
US News & World Report has a list of 25 of America’s best leaders. Condoleezza Rice, Steve Jobs, Meg Whitman, Bill & Melinda Gates, etc.
Speak Up critiques the covers on the recently released list of the 40 best magazine covers of the last 40 years. Chock full of snarky designy goodness. (thx armin)
Some fun images of advertising painted on fingernails. That’s some seriously intricate work…love the soda pop nails.
New feature from Bank of America: Keep the Change. When you use your bank card, you can have your charges rounded up to the nearest dollar and the difference automatically deposited into your savings account. I think this is the first neat thing I’ve ever seen a bank do. (via coudal)
R.W. Apple on the Las Vegas dining scene and has great things to say about Joel Robuchon’s return to haute cuisine. “During the tryouts preceding its official debut, the restaurant served the best food in Las Vegas, by a decisive margin, and some of the very best French food I have ever eaten on this continent.”
Mr. Angry and Mrs. Calm is a great optical illusion…up close, she’s on the right but switches to the left when you view it from far away. (via bb)
In-game space station recently purchased for $100,000. The game, Project Entropia, lets players earn real-world cash in the game, so it’s not such a silly investment. (via cd)
Discover Magazine on a prototype of the fascinating 10,000-year clock being built by Danny Hillis and The Long Now Foundation. Here’s more info on the prototype and some photos from its launch party.
Processing applet in which an adaptive population plays tag. “If a member plays tag well (when they’re it, they tag others), they’ll live longer.” Prettiest game of tag I’ve ever seen. (via proc blogs where you’ll find lots of neat Processing-related things)
PDF (2.3 Mb) of nifty infoviz graphs that show different improvisation styles for jazz greats Miles Davis, Cannonball Adderley, and John Coltrane. More here. Reminds me a little of Tufte’s sparklines.
Interview with Jeff Bezos on Amazon’s current activities. “We have always tried to be very clear with people that we are an appropriate company only for long-term-oriented investors.”
Informal investigation of video game addiction reveals that it burns bright and fast but stops suddenly. I’ve noticed the suddenly vanished compulsion with my game playing as well. (via rw, i think)
Although the sandwich was named so after an 18th century British Earl, its invention dates back to a rabbi who lived in the first century B.C.. In my short history, I’ve eaten more than my fair share of sandwiches and while I can’t consider myself a true connoisseur, the humble sandwich is one of my favorite things to eat and the ultimate in comfort foods.
The keys to a good sandwich are the three Bs: bread, balance, and…ok, there’s only two Bs, but they’re important. Aside from the main ingredient (turkey, tuna, chicken salad, etc.), the bread has the power to make or break a sandwich. The first thing you taste when you take a bite is the bread, so it had better be good and it had better be fresh.
Balance, or how the various parts come together to make a whole sandwich experience, is even more critical than the bread. Too much meat and the sandwich tastes only of meat. (The “famous” delis in NYC are big offenders here…the amount of meat in their sandwiches is way too much. These are sandwiches for showing off, not consumption.) Too much mustard and you overwhelm that beautiful pastrami. The mighty sandwich should not be a lowly conduit for your mustard addiction; why not just eat it straight from the jar? If you’ve got a dry bread, add a slice of tomato, a little extra mayo, or save it for tuna or egg salad. If you’ve got a lot of bread (a Kaiser or sub roll, for example), you’ll probably need more of everything else to balance it out. Make sure the ingredients are distributed evenly throughout the sandwich. You should get a bit of everything in each bite…it’s a BLT, not just an L on toast. If the sandwich maker is doing his job right, you should be able to taste most of the ingredients separately and together at the same time.
Here are a few sandwiches I’ve enjoyed over the years. I haven’t included any of the ones that I regularly make for myself because they’re pretty boring, although IMO, they’re right up there with any of these.
In college, when my friends and I got sick of eating on campus (and had the money to do so), we’d venture across the street to Zio Johno’s, a little Italian place with good, cheap food. At first I just got the spaghetti or lasagna, but one time I tried the Italian sub they offered and I was hooked. The key was the super-sweet sub roll; my measely $3 was enough for both a savory dinner and sweet dessert at the same time. I’ve never found anywhere else that uses bread that sweet.
I’ve lived in NYC for three years now, but I haven’t run across a steak sandwich that rivals the one I used to get on my lunch break at The Brothers’ Deli in Minneapolis. Fried steak, fried onions, and cheddar cheese on a Kaiser roll with a side order of the best potato salad I’ve ever had[1].
Surdyk’s (say “Sir Dicks”) is an institution in Northeast Minneapolis (say “Nordeast”), the finest liquor store and cheese shop around. They also had good croissants (say “Qua Sawn” or “Cross Aunts”) on which they put fresh ham, Swiss cheese, lettuce, tomato, and mayonnaise. Mmm.
There’s nothing I like more than a good BLT, and Specialty’s in San Francisco has one of the best I’ve had. Secret ingredient: pickles. Also, they didn’t toast the bread, which I usually frown upon, but it worked well anyway.
As for New York, I don’t live close to any good delis, but when I worked in Midtown, I used to zip over to the food court below Grand Central and hit Mendy’s. Their chicken salad is top-notch; the chicken is good quality and it isn’t overwhelmed by the mayonnaise. I’m usually not such a fan of rye bread, but their rye (it’s a light rye) is fantastic and goes very well with the chicken salad. The salami is good too. I usually have half a sandwich with a cup of their chicken noodle.
Do you have a favorite sandwich? Know of any good NYC sandwich spots I should check out?
[1] Although Meg has been making this warm garlic potato salad lately that is a serious contender for the top spot.
Google is launching something called Google Base soon…an open web database type thingie. From what little info there is, this sounds very cool. (via waxy)
Merlin is collecting funny eBay ads from Google. “Looking for Handjob? Find exactly what you want today. www.eBay.com”. Dictionary.com used to have Amazon ads tied to search terms that would say things like “Buy crack cocaine at Amazon” or “Buy hookers at Amazon”. I for one welcome our new robot marketing overlords.
If you’ve ever wondered what your lowly narrator would look like with a moustache, wonder no longer.
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