How to DJ your first set without
How to DJ your first set without knowing how.
Update: For another take on how to DJ, see Vice’s Hey DJ, Fuck You! Anyone Can Rock the Party. (thx, dave)
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Entries for July 2006
A list of sites where you can
A list of sites where you can watch TV on the web. There’s more TV available online than I expected.
A collection of posters and promotional art
A collection of posters and promotional art from the films of Stanley Kubrick. This Clockwork Orange poster is one of my favorites; I have a copy hanging in my apartment.
Phil Gyford summarizing David Mamet on meritocracy: “
Phil Gyford summarizing David Mamet on meritocracy: “A standing ovation can be extorted from the audience. A gasp cannot.”
The first of a monthly column by
The first of a monthly column by The New Yorker’s head librarians, in which we learn that even the cartoons are fact-checked.
Who else writes the kind of essays
Who else writes the kind of essays that David Foster Wallace writes? (thx, ryan)
Examples of *very* photorealistic illustrations made with
Examples of *very* photorealistic illustrations made with the gradient mesh tool in Adobe Illustrator. Here’s a quick gradient mesh tutorial.
The Internet is going to be switched
The Internet is going to be switched off tomorrow. What five things are you going to print out?
How to be friends with someone, circa 2006. “
How to be friends with someone, circa 2006. “Do you think if I unfriend him and friend him again, when he gets the second notification he’ll friend me?”
Slightly surreal panoramic shot of the Guggenheim in NYC.
Slightly surreal panoramic shot of the Guggenheim in NYC.
Yet another recent article about baseball cards.
Yet another recent article about baseball cards. Counting mine, that’s the fifth one this week.
Richard Donner is re-editing Superman II for
Richard Donner is re-editing Superman II for a November 2006 DVD release. “Unlike many ‘special edition’ and ‘director’s cut’ movies released over the years, Superman II: The Richard Donner Cut will essentially be a completely new film.” (thx, dj)
How to fix photos that are too
How to fix photos that are too dark or too light with Photoshop. Color range + levels is your friend.
The top 50 movie endings of all time. “
The top 50 movie endings of all time. “We’re not talking about the last half hour. We mean the last minute of movie. You know, the ending.” Needless to say, spoilers. (via cyn-c)
As with much of Paul Graham’s writing,
As with much of Paul Graham’s writing, The Power of the Marginal is filled with odd conclusions and unfair assumptions, but the general ideas are interesting to consider; lots of food for thought in this one for me.
In 1980, an oil company drilled through the
In 1980, an oil company drilled through the bottom of Lake Peigneur and into a salt mine, draining a large portion of the lake into the mine. This video shows the resulting whirlpool, which sucked in the drilling platform, several barges & boats, and trees.
Stimulating
Overheard last night as my wife and I were having dinner in our apartment, alone:
If your web site isn’t pleasuring you, you shouldn’t do it anymore.
Paging Mr. Entendre, Mr. Double Entendre…
Very simple Japanese game show: fail to
Very simple Japanese game show: fail to correctly repeat a tongue twister and you get hit in the balls. Bonus video: a monkey playing with a dog.
Update: The video in question is not a game show, it’s of some sort of comedy team; here’s a bunch more of their stuff. (thx, evan and gavin)
Wu-oh. Floyd Landis had “an unusual level
Wu-oh. Floyd Landis had “an unusual level of testosterone/epitestosterone ratio” in his blood after stage 17 of the Tour de France. If his backup sample also tests positive, the title could be taken from him. You may remember stage 17 as the scene of Landis’ remarkable comeback. Cyclingnews.com says that “some athletes have naturally high levels, and can prove this through a series of tests”…is it possible that Landis was just super amped up from the effort that day?
10,000 computer-generated fake band names that sound real.
10,000 computer-generated fake band names that sound real.
Jim Caple takes a tour of the
Jim Caple takes a tour of the Topps HQ in Manhattan. “I’m only half-listening because I’ve noticed an uncut sheet of 1968 baseball cards he has framed along his office wall. I can’t help but notice that down near the lower left-hand corner of the sheet is a Nolan Ryan rookie card. Beyond mint condition.”
Henry Abbott: bloggers give credit, journalists typically
Henry Abbott: bloggers give credit, journalists typically don’t. “When Sports Illustrated breaks a story that blogs catch on to, SI gets its name and inbound links all over the blogosphere. When blogs break stories, I don’t see why mainstream media shouldn’t reciprocate.”
Phil Gyford has posted a demo version
Phil Gyford has posted a demo version of HotWired’s web site from 1995. See also Jeff Veen’s look back at some of HotWired’s designs.
Update: Net Surf covers The Spot and Yahoo getting VC and moving off of Stanford’s servers. And the background on this story by Josh Quittner, oy vey!
A pair of preview clips from the
A pair of preview clips from the forthcoming Simpsons movie. (via waxy)
Update: The clips have been removed from YouTube by Fox’s request. (thx, bob & jon)
A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell.
A Rape in Cyberspace by Julian Dibbell. The story from the early 1990s of a small online place called LambdaMOO, a violence committed in that place, and how the community that lived there dealt with it.
A couple of months ago, the Guardian
A couple of months ago, the Guardian ran an article about Timothy Leary that used a “factoid” from gullible.info, a site trafficking in fake facts. The editor of gullible.info alerted the Guardian to the error, but they still haven’t corrected the article claiming that Leary discovered a new primary color called gendale.
New Yorker article on Wikipedia. If you’ve
New Yorker article on Wikipedia. If you’ve been paying attention, there not a whole lot of new information, but it’s a nice summary. “Whereas articles once made up about eighty-five per cent of the site’s content, as of last October they represented seventy per cent. As Wattenberg put it, ‘People are talking about governance, not working on content.’” By authoring the piece, Stacy Schiff earned her very own Wikipedia page.
Friends and Family 2.0, a poem
I’m so glad I’m friends with you
I can see your Flickr pix
and your Vox posts too
Since he was 12, Gilles Trehin has been
Since he was 12, Gilles Trehin has been drawing and writing about the imaginary city of Urville, which is situated on the Mediterranean coast of France, was founded by the Phoenicians in the 12th century BC, and currently houses over 17 million inhabitants. Don’t miss the drawings. (via godammit)
The Ling, or what the kids are (
The Ling, or what the kids are (or aren’t) saying these days. “Awkward became awk, actually became actu, typical became typ, amazing became amaze and hilarious became hilar.”
Jack Shafer waxes poetic about the NY
Jack Shafer waxes poetic about the NY Times TV listing’s film capsules. Their succinctness reminds me a bit of writing remaindered links posts.
Writing prose and writing software have much
Writing prose and writing software have much in common. “Vigorous writing of words is the same as vigorous writing of software. Every word, every line of code, every interface element should tell.”
Recent studies show that family income level
Recent studies show that family income level affects the IQ of children. “The average I.Q. of children from well-to-do parents who were placed with families from the same social stratum was 119.6. But when such infants were adopted by poor families, their average I.Q. was 107.5 — 12 points lower.”
A new version of Monopoly will do
A new version of Monopoly will do away with the cash and replace it with Visa debit cards. (thx, janelle)
Exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business
Exhibition at the Science, Industry and Business Library in NYC: Places & Spaces, Mapping Science (thru Aug 31). An online exhibition is also available or browse all the maps.
Jane Jacobs revisited. “The mistake made by
Jane Jacobs revisited. “The mistake made by Jacobs’s detractors and acolytes alike is to regard her as a champion of stasis — to believe she was advocating the world’s cities be built as simulacra of the West Village circa 1960.”
Surowiecki on the difficulty of short-term thinking
Surowiecki on the difficulty of short-term thinking in business. “It’s no wonder that management theory is dominated by fads: every few years, new companies succeed, and they are scrutinized for the underlying truths that they might reveal. But often there is no underlying truth; the companies just happened to be in the right place at the right time.”
Baseball card days
Dave Jamieson used to collect baseball cards and recently uncovered his stash when he cleaned out the closet of his childhood home. In attempting to recoup some of the time and money spent in his youth on this cardboard, Jamieson found that baseball cards aren’t as popular or as lucrative as they used to be:
Baseball cards peaked in popularity in the early 1990s. They’ve taken a long slide into irrelevance ever since, last year logging less than a quarter of the sales they did in 1991. Baseball card shops, once roughly 10,000 strong in the United States, have dwindled to about 1,700. A lot of dealers who didn’t get out of the game took a beating. “They all put product in their basement and thought it was gonna turn into gold,” Alan Rosen, the dealer with the self-bestowed moniker “Mr. Mint,” told me. Rosen says one dealer he knows recently struggled to unload a cache of 7,000 Mike Mussina rookie cards. He asked for 25 cents apiece.
Close readers of kottke.org know that I collected sports cards too. I got involved in this prepubescent hobby later than most; I was 14 or 15 when a friend and his older brother — who was around 24 and collecting for investment — introduced me to it. And I loved it:
I still have them all somewhere, in boxes, collecting dust faster than value. The Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie, the 130 different Nolan Ryan cards, the complete 1989 Hoops set (with the David Robinson rookie), and several others I really can’t remember right now.
I used to spend untold hours sifting through them, looking up the values in Beckett’s Price Guide, visiting card shops, flipping through commons to complete sets, looking for patterns in Topps’ rack packs (I scored many a Jim Abbott rookie with this technique), chewing that ancient bubble gum (I bought a pack of 1983 cards once and chewed the gum…it was horrible), and keeping track of the total value of my collection with a Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheet on my dad’s 286. It was a lot of fun at the time (as the Web is fun for me now); I guess that’s about all one can ask for from a hobby.
Recently I stumbled across The Baseball Card Blog and was hit by a giant wave of nostalgia for my old obsession. One thing led to another — you know how that goes — and before I knew it, a package was speeding its way to me from a card shop in Pennsylvania containing several 1989 Fleer & Donruss wax packs, a 1989 Topps rack pack, and a couple of 1987 Topps wax packs.1
I’ve been opening a pack every few days since they arrived. Smell is the sense most powerfully associated with memory, so getting a whiff of that cardboard is really sending me back. Like a wine connoisseur, I can even smell the difference between each brand of card; the smell of Topps cards holds the strongest memories for me…the 1989 Topps set was my favorite. I opened the ‘87 Topps packs with a fellow ex-collector, but when we tried to chew the gum, it tasted like the cards and turned to a muddy dust in our mouths. But that was mostly what happened even when the gum was new, so we were unsurprised.
Because of the aforementioned slump in the baseball card collecting economy, the card packs I ordered were the same price I paid for them as a kid (factoring for inflation), even though they’re almost 20 years old and way more scarce. Back then, I used most of my $5/week allowance on cards, and it took weeks and months of patience to buy enough packs to complete a set, procure that Griffey rookie card, or amass enough Mark McGwires to trade to a friend for a desired Nolan Ryan.
As an adult, I have the cashflow to buy any card I want whenever I want (within reason). Or several boxes of cards, so as to compile complete sets instantly. Or I can just purchase the complete sets and skip the intermediate step. I could buy an entire box of 1989 Upper Deck packs — at $1.25 per pack and nearly impossible to find in rural Wisconsin, an unimaginable extravagance for me as a kid — right now on eBay. When I think about the financial advantages I now have over my 16-yo self in collecting the same exact cards, I feel like the NY Yankees (and their monster payroll) competing in a Single A league. It’s unfair and even thinking about collecting cards in that manner takes a lot of the fun out of it for me. If I do start collecting cards again, I’m going to approach it like I did back then: by hand, a little at a time, and treating even the essentially worthless commons with care. Unless Nolan Ryan is involved…in that case, the sky’s the limit, although I might have to sell my bicycle to get it. In the meantime, I’m waiting for the next household footwear purchase so I can put my newly purchased cards in the shoe box for safe keeping.
[1] A quick note on terminology. A “wax pack” is a basic pack of around 15 cards (plus gum, when cards still had gum packaged with them), so-called because the packages used to be sealed with wax. (Now they’re all probably packaged in plastic and whatnot…I don’t know, I haven’t kept up.) The bottom card in such a pack is called a “wax back” because the card got a thin layer of wax on it from the sealing process. A “rack pack” is a hanging triple pack made of see-thru plastic. A “common” is an ordinary card not worth very much, as opposed to cards or rookies, hot prospects, all-stars, and the like. A “box” contains several wax packs, typically 20-40 packs/box. A “complete set” is a collection of every card sold by a company in a particular year. The ‘89 Topps set had 792 cards. Sets were sold in factory-sealed boxes or were compiled by hand from cards acquired in packs. ↩
How to lose the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’
How to lose the ‘ums’ and ‘ahs’ from your speech. Videotape yourself and practice.
Income distributions for various US cities for
Income distributions for various US cities for the purpose of testing the “donut” hypothesis, “the idea that a city will create concentric rings of wealth and poverty, with the rich both in the suburbs and in the ‘revitalized’ downtown, and the poor stuck in between.” The hypothesis is valid for older cities, but in newer ones, “one finds ‘wedges’ of wealth occupying a continuous pie-slice from the center to the periphery”. (via moon river)
Web 2.0 style redesigns of famous logos. The
Web 2.0 style redesigns of famous logos. The BoeingBoeing one is pretty clever. (thx, mark)
Researchers in Israel and Illinois say they’ve
Researchers in Israel and Illinois say they’ve found a second code in DNA, one that deals with the positioning of proteins. Palimpsest anyone?
A star is “on the brink” of
A star is “on the brink” of going type 1a supernova, something modern scientists have never witnessed. BTW, when you’re dealing with stars, “on the brink” could refer to a period of time up to 100,000 years from now. Oh, and if you’re the type of person who likes to be a smart ass in the back of the room, you’ll note that since the star is nearly 2000 light years away, we may have already missed it. Nerd.
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