Intel is retiring the “Intel Inside” saying/
Intel is retiring the “Intel Inside” saying/logo and is getting a new company logo as well…no more of the familiar “dropped e” logo. Now they’ll look like everyone else.
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Entries for December 2005
Khoi Vinh on the move…he’s the
Khoi Vinh on the move…he’s the new Design Director for NYTimes.com. From the outside, it’s one of the best jobs in web design and it’s been filled well. (via waxy)
Suck.com is (temporarily? forever?) a porn
Suck.com is (temporarily? forever?) a porn site. If it’s gone for good, it’s the end of an era. (thx, owen)
Update: Andy’s got more info and is trying to see if an archive exists anywhere.
The world’s largest ball of paint is
The world’s largest ball of paint is a baseball covered in 19,100 coats of paint, weighs 1700 pounds, and has taken 28 1/2 years to get to this stage.
The Unnatural Natural. “It was supposed to
The Unnatural Natural. “It was supposed to be a simple story about a mysterious senior-softball phenom whose legend was growing in America’s heartland. Of course, nothing is simple.”
The rest of the best (links)
In compiling the Best Links 2005 list, I initially chose over 100 links and then thought, that’s too many. These are the links that didn’t make that list but that I thought you might like to see anyway because they’re still pretty good.
Panic’s drag and drop shopping cart.
How to not get your bike stolen in New York City.
Stewart Butterfield on Flickr.
If you can’t afford bespoke… Suit options for men.
Paris through a pinhole. Some shots of Paris taken with a pinhole camera.
The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less.
Why Your Camera Does Not Matter. Maybe your gear matters less than how you use it.
CameraMail. Man sends a camera through the mail with instructions to take photos with it.
Don’t fuck with Ovid. Man helps capture thieves who stole his credit card.
Forensic types. Interview with type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.
A Coder in Courierland. A look at the world of bike couriers.
You Got To Cool It Down. The 30 least hot follow-ups to the 30 hottest things you can say to a naked woman.
Why it is hard to share the wealth. The science behind the super-rich in America.
UPS Store Sign. Irony.
Design Without Reach. Ghetto versions of Design Within Reach merchandise.
What do we know about tipping?
Tiger did it. Tiger’s amazing golf shot at Augusta.
Explicit Content Only… Editing the non-swears out of an NWA song.
The Omnivore. Jeffrey Steingarten learns to eat everything.
Everything You Thought You Knew About Grilling Is Wrong. How to grill.
The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading.
Victoria Reynolds Artwork. Beautiful paintings of meat.
It’s Fun To Play at the YMCA. Comparing NBA players to those guys at the Y.
I hates Lucas! I hates it forever! Anti-George Lucas rant.
Balls Out. How to throw a no-hitter on acid, and other lessons from the career of baseball legend Dock Ellis.
How did Mad Hot Ballroom survive the copyright cartel?
The Blurb Racket. Exposing misquotes in movie ads.
Alternate covers for romance novels.
Age Maps. Two photographs of the same person from different periods of time are spliced together.
Bad to the Last Drop. On bottled water.
Why do McDonald’s customers order smaller Cokes at the drive-thru window?
Not a Word. About intentional fake words in dictionaries.
Redemption. The NY Yankees and redemption.
My Outsourced Life. A.J. Jacobs outsources his life to India.
Destination Florent. About a landmark NYC restaurant.
Lone Star Statements. One-star Amazon reviews of a list of the 100 best novels.
The Sad Tally. A graph of suicide locations from the Golden Gate Bridge.
The Best Links 2005
Compiling a list of the best links of the year was a little more difficult than last year. I put more effort this year into selecting quality links for kottke.org, so there wasn’t a lot of chaff to be found in the archives. I also posted a lot more links this year, over half again as many as in 2004. I’m not sure this year’s installment is any better than last year’s list, but if you’ve got a little time to waste at work as 2005 winds down, there’s probably something here to keep you occupied.
The Baby Name Wizard’s NameVoyager.
The Selling of the Last Savage. Adventure travel to view Stone Age tribes in West Papua, Indonesia.
I Ate iPod Shuffle. A poem by Scott David Herman.
McDonald’s Bathroom Attendant. Improv Everywhere stations an attendant in the bathroom of the Times Square McDonald’s.
An Interview With David Foster Wallace.
Architecture of Density. Michael Wolf photographs the buildings of Hong Kong.
parking garages. Lots of diagrams of parking garages.
Escape from the Universe. How to get out when the Big Crunch comes.
Banksy Hits New York’s Most Famous Museums. The installation of unauthorized art into some of the top museums in NYC.
Dot-Con Job. A Seattle Times investigation into InfoSpace, a high-flying dot com that bilked investors out of millions.
13 things that do not make sense. A list of open scientific questions.
Life on the Scales. About the quarter-power scaling laws.
eFile for free! Free version of TurboTax Online.
Transformational geometry and iteration in cornrow hairstyles.
Stand clear of the closing doors. Lots of links about the London Tube.
Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop With Garry Winogrand. Photography how-to.
Rocky, recreated. Hilarious.
Swim boy, Swim! Man buys fish from Chinese market, sets him free in the river.
The Long Emergency. What’s going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
How to destroy the Earth and How to move the Earth.
I was going to link to Elizabeth Kolbert’s excellent series on global warming from the New Yorker, but the articles have been removed from the New Yorker site. Kolbert is working on a book maybe?
Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes.
God is Great, by which I mean, Very Very Large. Calculating the size of Jesus based on the quantities of Communion wine and wafers consumed.
Absolutely, Power Corrupts. Michael Lewis explores how power hitting has changed the game of baseball.
Capturing the Unicorn. Mathematicians help the Met restore a precious tapestry.
The Choirboy. Larry Lessig confronts a childhood abuser.
A photo of a tuxedoed man holding a sewing machine in front of a crashed UPS truck.
The Big Fish. Ten years later, the story of Suck.com, the first great website.
Why I Am Not A Christian. By Bertrand Russell.
Open letter of the Kansas School Board. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.
Transcript of Steve Jobs’ commencement speech at Stanford University.
How To Avoid The Exhausting Planning And Preparation That Goes Into Making A Second Date.
Devolution. Why intelligent design isn’t.
Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers
40 Things That Only Happen In Movies.
The Candy Man. Why children love Roald Dahl’s stories — and many adults don’t.
Photography of Edward Burtynsky.
A Rocket To Nowhere. On NASA and the Shuttle program.
Tipped Off. A call for the abolishment of tipping in restaurants.
Film Titles Designed by Saul Bass.
One side can be wrong. Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne on intelligent design.
7 Habits of Highly Successful People.
Minimiam. Food photos with little people on them.
May We Tell You Our Specials This Evening?
Kdunk on pink blanket. Wonderful photography.
Chip Kidd talks with Milton Glaser
Hello, My Name Is… Celebrity signature art project.
Panoramic photograph of suburban sprawl near San Ramon, California.
Star Wars: Episodes I-VI. The greatest postmodern art film ever.
Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep. Profile of Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach.
Interactive Transit Map. For commuting in NYC.
Mark Foo’s Last Ride. The death of a big wave surfer.
PARK(ing). A temporary urban park.
What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
Neal Stephenson’s Past, Present, and Future. An interview with the author.
The Food Detective. Interview with Michael Pollan.
David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech at Kenyon College.
The Moral-Hazard Myth. About the US healthcare system.
A list of what restaurant professionals want
A list of what restaurant professionals want to see more and less of in 2006. Anthony Bourdain wants less “Truffle oil. ‘Fusion.’ Water sommeliers. Overdesigned dining rooms. Mayonnaise on sushi. ‘Concept’ restaurants. Novelty martinis.” (via eater)
Chronological list of outrageous firsts in television
Chronological list of outrageous firsts in television history. Leave It to Beaver featured the first toilet on television in 1957. (thx, malatron)
Glee Gum sells “make your own chewing
Glee Gum sells “make your own chewing gum” kits for $10. “It’s really easy: Soften the chicle gum base, either in the microwave or on the stove. Then you add the sugar, corn syrup, and the flavor packets, knead it a little, and WOW! You’ve made your own gum!”
The 50 greatest gadgets of the last 50 years.
The 50 greatest gadgets of the last 50 years. The original Nintendo Entertainment System should really be on here…it singlehandedly made video games popular again in the US. (via rw)
Looks like the popularity of poker might
Looks like the popularity of poker might be fading. “It may be reducing down to the niche market, which would be people in their 20s, macho-man type of people”
Matt’s first impressions of and experiences with
Matt’s first impressions of and experiences with the Web sound a lot like mine (visiting those first few sites with Mosaic was a transformative experience for me, like falling in love), except I did quit grad school.
Alright, alright, that Chronic of Narnia SNL
Alright, alright, that Chronic of Narnia SNL rap thing is as funny as you think it is because you’ve already seen it, so stop reading and watch it again, would you?
Lolita was published 50 years ago and it’s
Lolita was published 50 years ago and it’s still as perverse now as it was then.
NY Times movie critics A.O. Scott,
NY Times movie critics A.O. Scott, Manohla Dargis, and Stephen Holden offer lists of their favorite films of 2005. Dargis asks, “was this a good year for the movies or what?”
The Onion provides a list of new
The Onion provides a list of new guidelines from the Transportation Security Administration. “Vermont and New York cheddars can be brought on board, but not Wisconsin cheddar — by far the sharpest cheese in the cheddar family”.
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster
The Gospel of the Flying Spaghetti Monster available for preorder at Amazon. It comes out on March 14, 2006.
New York City is in danger of
New York City is in danger of losing its creative class as the high cost of living drives people to other cities.
More and more, shoppers are judging books
More and more, shoppers are judging books by their covers. “Studies show that a book on a three-for-two table has about one and a half seconds to catch a reader’s eye.”
In-progress ideas for New Yorker cartoons. “Or
In-progress ideas for New Yorker cartoons. “Or some other recent culture reference. Or something involving wine, or Europe.”
Things Magazine has a great link-filled post about King Kong.
Things Magazine has a great link-filled post about King Kong.
Pictures of the Year 2005 from Reuters and
Pictures of the Year 2005 from Reuters and best photos of the year 2005 from Time. (thx, indrek)
Adam from Slice documented all of the
Adam from Slice documented all of the pizzerias on his 8.2 mile walk to work this morning (more). (thx, janelle)
Chris Anderson has one of the best
Chris Anderson has one of the best descriptions I’ve read of collective knowledge systems like Google, Wikipedia, and blogs: they’re probabilistic systems “which sacrifice perfection at the microscale for optimization at the macroscale”.
Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, and the Post-Oscar Career Suicide Syndrome.
Charlize Theron, Halle Berry, and the Post-Oscar Career Suicide Syndrome.
Popular toys of the last 100 years. Candy
Popular toys of the last 100 years. Candy Land was the most popular toy sold from 1940-1949.
USASODA.com has tons of images of
USASODA.com has tons of images of old soda cans. They’re a little hard to find, but there’s good stuff if you dig around a little bit.
Gothamist interview with my friend Lisa Whiteman
Gothamist interview with my friend Lisa Whiteman about her photography. Lisa is one of the most thoughtful people I know and it shows in this interview.
Gregg Easterbrook on hard-line Darwinist, Richard Dawkins. “
Gregg Easterbrook on hard-line Darwinist, Richard Dawkins. “If Dawkins’s professional goal is ‘public understanding of science,’ he is a flop, seemingly trying his best to make worse what he is supposed to fix.”
Ebert’s best movies of 2005. Crash tops the
Ebert’s best movies of 2005. Crash tops the list, which was probably my favorite from 2005 as well.
Blog search still sucks (a little)
Update: I fucked up on this post and you should reread it if you’ve read it before. After reading this post by Niall Kennedy, I checked and found that I have mentioned or linked to the site for Freakonomics 5 times (1 2 3 4 5), not 13. The other 8 times, I either linked to a post on the Freakonomics blog that was unrelated to the book, had the entry tagged with “freakonomics” (tags are not yet exposed on my site and can’t be crawled by search engines), or I used the word “Freakonomists”, not “Freakonomics”. Bottom line: the NY Times listing is still incorrect, Google and Yahoo picked up all the posts where I actually mentioned “Freakonomics” in the text of the post but missed the 2 links to freakonomics.com, Google Blog Search got 2/3 (& missed the 2 links), Technorati got 1/3 (& missed the 2 links), and IceRocket, Yahoo Blog Search, BlogPulse, & Bloglines whiffed entirely. Steven Levitt would be very disappointed in my statistical fact-checking skills right now. :(
I wish Niall had emailed me about this instead of posting it on his site, but I guess that’s how weblogs work, airing dirty laundry instead of trying to get it clean. Fair enough…I’ve publicly complained about the company he works for (Technorati) instead of emailing someone at the company about my concerns, so maybe he had a right to hit back. Perhaps a little juvenile on both our parts, I’d say. (Oh, and I turned off the MT search thing that Niall used to check my work. I’m not upset he used it, but I’m irritated that it seems to be on by default in MT…I never intended for that search interface to be public.)
———
The NY Times recently released their list of the most blogged about books of 2005. Their methodology in compiling the list:
This list links to a selection of Web posts that discuss some of the books most frequently mentioned by bloggers in 2005. The books were selected by conducting an automated survey of 5,000 of the most-trafficked blogs.
Unsurprisingly, the top spot on the list went to Freakonomics. I remembered mentioning the book several times on my site (including this interview with author Steven Levitt around the release of the book), so I checked out the citations they had listed for it. According to the Times, Freakonomics was cited by 125 blogs, but not once by kottke.org, a site that by any measure is one of the most-visited blogs out there.[1] A quick search in my installation of Movable Type yielded 13 5 mentions of the book on kottke.org in the last 9 months. I had also mentioned Blink, Harry Potter, Getting Things Done, Collapse, The Wisdom of Crowds, The Singularity is Near, and State of Fear, all of which appear in the top 20 of the Times’ list and none of which are cited by the Times as having been mentioned on kottke.org in 2005.
I chalked this up to a simple error of omission, but then I started checking around some more. Google’s main index returned only three distinct mentions of Freakonomics on kottke.org. Google Blog Search returned two results. Yahoo: 3 results (0 results on Yahoo’s blog search). Technorati only found one result (I’m not surprised). Many of the blog search services don’t even let you search by site, so IceRocket, BlogPulse, and Bloglines were of no help. (See above for corrections.) I don’t know where the Times got their book statistics from, but it was probably from one of these sites (or a similar service).
Granted this is just one weblog[2], which I only checked into because I’m the author, but it’s not like kottke.org is hard to find or crawl. The markup is pretty good [3], fairly semantic, and hasn’t changed too much for the past two years. The subject in question is not off-topic…I post about books all the time. And it’s one of the more visible weblogs out there…lots of links in to the front page and specific posts and a Google PR of 8. So, my point here is not “how dare the Times ignore my popular and important site!!!” but is that the continuing overall suckiness of searching blogs is kind of amazing and embarrassing given the seemingly monumental resources being applied to the task. It’s forgivable that the Times would not have it exactly right (especially if they’re doing the crawling themselves), but when companies like Technorati and Google are setting themselves up as authorities on how large the blogosphere is, what books and movies people are reading/watching, and what the hot topics online are but can’t properly catalogue the most obvious information out there, you’ve got to wonder a) how good their data really is, and b) if what they are telling us is actually true.
[1] Full disclosure: I am the author of kottke.org.
[2] This is an important point…these observations are obviously a starting point for more research about this. But this one hole is pretty gaping and fits well with what I’ve observed over the past several months trying to find information on blogs using search engines.
[3] I say only pretty good because it’s not validating right now because of entity and illegal character errors, which I obviously need to wrestle with MT to correct at some point. But the underlying markup is solid.
Crap-looking trailer for Mel Gibson’s new film,
Crap-looking trailer for Mel Gibson’s new film, Apocalypto. The Mel Gibson-ness of this clip is overwhelming.
A seemingly exhaustive list of the best
A seemingly exhaustive list of the best music of 2005. I think I strained my scrolling muscle.
John Lasseter at MoMA
MoMA just opened their show about Pixar last week and on Friday, we went to a presentation by John Lasseter, head creative guy at the company. Interesting talk, although I’d heard some of it in various places before, most notably in this interview with him on WNYC. Two quick highlights:
- Lasseter showed colorscripts from Pixar’s films (which can be viewed in the exhibition). A colorscript is a storyboarding technique that Pixar developed to “visually describe the emotional content of an entire story through color and lighting”. They are compact enough that the entire story fits on a single sheet and if you’re familar enough with the films, you can follow along with the story pretty well. But mostly it’s just for illustrating the mood of the film. Very cool technique (that could certainly be adopted for web design and branding projects).
- Near the end of the talk he showed a 2-3 minute clip of Cars, prefacing it with an announcement that it had never before been shown outside of Pixar.[1] Some of the CGI wasn’t completely finished, but it was certainly enough to get the gist. When the first preview trailer for Cars was released, I was skeptical; it just didn’t look like it was going to be that good. Based on the clip Lasseter showed and some of his other comments, I’m happy to report that I was wrong to be so skeptical and am very much looking forward to its release in 2006.
At 15 minutes long, the Q&A session at the end of his talk was too short. The MoMA audience is sufficiently interesting and Lasseter was so quick on his feet and willing to share his views that 30 to 40 minutes of Q&A would have been great.
[1] For you Pixar completists and AICN folks out there, the clip showed Lightning McQueen leaving a race track on the back of a flat-bed truck, bound for a big race in California. As the truck drives across the US, you see the criss-crossing expressways of the city stretch out into the long straight freeways of the American west, the roads literally cutting into the beautiful scenery. A cover of Tom Cochran’s Life is a Highway plays as the truck drives. The world of the movie features only cars, no humans…the cars are driving themselves.
Wow, Johnny Damon goes from the Red
Wow, Johnny Damon goes from the Red Sox to the Yankees. It’s looking like that Boston championship was a one-shot deal.
Pepsi’s market cap surpassed Coca-Cola’s last week
Pepsi’s market cap surpassed Coca-Cola’s last week for the first time ever. The secret to their success? Diversifying into other snacks (Frito-Lay) and beverages (Tropicana and Gatorade).
The Dover, PA evolution vs. intelligent design
The Dover, PA evolution vs. intelligent design ends with the judge ruling against the teaching of ID in the classroom because it violated the “constitutional ban on teaching religion in public schools”. “We find that the secular purposes claimed by the board amount to a pretext for the board’s real purpose, which was to promote religion.”
Forty percent capacity
So, it’s day five of my cold[1]. Last night, I was down to only two out of my five senses. My sense of taste and smell left the scene sometime on Saturday. On Sunday, I had salad and fruit for lunch because I figured if I can’t taste anything, I might as well eat healthy. Trying to smell or taste strongly aromatic substances like wine or scented shower gel produces a sensation not unlike that of tasting or smelling something, except there’s no smell or taste. It’s the weirdest thing…I don’t even know how to properly describe it. It’s like there’s a ghost of a taste and when I think too hard about trying to really taste it, it’s gone. It’ll be a relief when I finally decongest and can enjoy food again[2].
And then yesterday while driving, we went from sea level up to around 600 ft of elevation, which caused the pressure to build up in my head enough to affect my hearing. By 4pm, everything was kind muffled and I was asking Meg speak up repeatedly. I could just barely hear the hum of the highway under the car. Last night at dinner, I couldn’t taste anything, smell anything, hear anything, and my voice was so gravelly from my cold (and probably way too loud from overcompensating for the hearing loss) that listening to me was probably not very pleasant. My ears finally popped somewhat this morning and I can hear ok again, but smell and taste are still missing. Come back, guys, I miss you!
Update: Here’s an article by Jason Feifer from the Washington Post about his investigation into his poor senses of taste and smell. (thx, mim)
[1] After a bit of research this AM, I’ve determined that what I have is a cold and not the flu.
[2] I remember reading a book or article once that mentioned a person who lost their sense of taste and when it would briefly return, that person would drop whatever they were doing and go eat a great meal. Anyone know where that story is from?
The SF Chronicle has a list of
The SF Chronicle has a list of the top 100 wines of 2005.
Update: This list covers only wines from CA, WA, OR, and ID, not from the whole US or world. (thx, rich)
Crunks ‘05: The Year in Media Errors
Crunks ‘05: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections (and plagiarists). My favorite: “Norma Adams-Wade’s June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.”
Just Van Gogh!
A quick note about the Van Gogh show at the Met that’s closing at the end of the month: if you’re in NYC, go see it. Admittedly, I’m a fan of Van Gogh, but I thought this was one of the best museum exhibitions I’ve ever seen. The exhibition features drawings (as well as a few paintings) from his short 10-year career as an artist, and you can really see how much he progressed during that time and how much his drawings and paintings were related. I can’t wait to go back over to the MoMA and look at Starry Night and The Postman and view them not as paintings, but more as drawings done with paint.
NYC subways and buses are shut down
NYC subways and buses are shut down as the city’s transit workers go on strike.
Ferran Adria of El Bulli has written
Ferran Adria of El Bulli has written the world’s most expensive cookbook; it retails for $350.
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