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.
The sliding rocks of Racetrack Playa.
These rocks can be found on the floor of the playa with long trails behind them. Somehow these rocks slide across the playa, cutting a furrow in the sediment as they move. Some of these rocks weigh several hundred pounds. That makes the question: “How do they move?” a very challenging one.
Includes some nice photos at the end. (via clusterflock)
Henry Abbott reviews a documentary called Quantum Hoops which documents the Caltech basketball team, winless for 21 years because all the players are walk-ons and subject to Caltech’s high admission standards.
What we are used to as college basketball is really basketball as a college major, or in many cases instead of college. Not basketball as an activity. The version at Caltech puts stuff like health, education, and love of the game first. I can’t speak for basketball, but I think a lot of colleges would be better off with that kind of athletic presence on campus. Maybe all the professional development of basketball players should take place somewhere else — somewhere that is not supposed to be about academics.
Found while browsing HBO OnDemand last night: the first 4 episodes of The Sopranos and the entire season 3 of The Wire. Go nuts.
Almost a year late, Roger Ebert shares his top movies of 2006 with us.
Yes, I know it’s a year late, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to compiling a list of the best films of 2006. I checked into the hospital in late June 2006 and didn’t get out again until spring of 2007. For a long while, I just didn’t feel like watching movies. Then something revolved within me, and I was engaged in life again.
I’ve never met Ebert, but his love of movies resounds so emphatically from his writing that if he didn’t feel like watching them, he must have been closer than I thought to shuffling off the ol’ mortal coil. It’s nice to hear his enthusiasm again. (via crazymonk)
Poignant, amusing, disturbing, hunger-inducing? I don’t know what to make of this video, but I can’t stop watching it. If you only watch one chocolate bunny melting video this year, make it this one. (via clusterflock)
For example, those participants shown the doctored photograph of the protest in Rome (top right), in which figures placed in the foreground give the impression of violence, rated the event as being significantly more violent and negative than it actually was. In their comments, they also provided false details, such as conflicts, damages, injuries and casualties that did not appear in the photos and were not documented at the event.
(via conscientious)
The design of the iPhone is such that all other mobile phones, including those released after the iPhone, look not only old but antiquated and even defective. IMO.
Early rave review for There Will Be Blood, the new PT Anderson/Daniel Day-Lewis film, calling it “maybe one of the best movies I’ve ever seen”.
Without revealing much of the plot (it’s probably better to go in cold), it’s a complex man’s simple story rendered hugely, horribly, and wonderfully in equal measure, and it’s revelatory as hell.
As an alternative to the various bestseller lists, the National Book Critics Circle is creating a monthly Best Recommended List of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as voted on by NBCC members. The first list is already up for your perusal and holiday gift-buying idea generation.
I’m writing these down in the hope that doing so will motivate me to actually get out of the apartment to check these out.
- Paula Scher: Recent Paintings at Maya Stendal. Through January 26, 2008.
- Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections at Neue Galerie. Through June 30, 2008.
- Edward Burtynsky: Quarries at Charles Cowles. Though December 1, 2007.
- This Is War! Robert Capa at Work at ICP. Through January 6, 2008.
- Georges Seurat: The Drawings at MoMA. Through January 7, 2008.
Did I miss anything? (Besides Jill Greenberg’s bear photos at Clampart?)
On the heels of their 100 notable books list, the NY Times whittles it down to the ten best of the year. I interviewed Alex Ross back in October about his top tenner, The Rest is Noise.
Don’t know how I missed this, but there’s a TiVo that records in HD that doesn’t cost four bazillion dollars. TiVo HD records 20 hours of HD programming, you can view/record two shows at once, and differs very little from the more expensive Series 3 TiVo. Amazon’s got it for $262 (retail is $299). But whoa, the Series 3, which can record 32 hours of HD programming and retails for $599, is only $399 at Amazon after rebate (note: “usually ships within 3 to 5 weeks”).
Top 50 photo series from the 2006 Critical Mass competition. Some good stuff in there if you poke around a bit…2005 and 2004 too. (via ffffound!)
Big Screen Little Screen has some info of the upcoming season of The Wire. It begins Jan 6th and the episodes will appear OnDemand a week early (they did this last year, yes?). The post also contains 5 promos for season 5. Almost here!
On the erotic appeal of the Lands’ End catalog:
These are images more invasive than any Victoria’s Secret spread, because they don’t inspire lust. This is a pornography of regret, and the longer you stare, the more seductive it becomes. These sixty pages are a self-pity trap; any sane lonely man would do well to avoid them.
(via maggie)
In the past few weeks, I’ve seen several people mention the 50 Years of Helvetica exhibit at the MoMA along with some variation of “Woo! I might need to take a trip to New York to go see this!” You should know that this exhibit takes up just a small corner of the Architecture and Design Gallery on the 3rd floor…it’s essentially a case and a handful of posters and other specimens. If you’re in the museum already, definitely check it out, but you’ll be disappointed if you make a special expensive trip just to see the Helvetica stuff.
Funny Engrish menu error at a Beijing restaurant: “stir-fried wikipedia”. (via waxy)
In 2005, the EFF informed the American public that the US government persuaded some printer manufacturers to print a code on each page output by their printers. SpiekerBlog has the details on what the code means (it’s a timestamp + serial number).
A breakdown, by height in inches, of all the stuff that appears on the 1.5+ feet of Toys R Us receipt received with the purchase of a single item. I like to imagine Greg sitting in his office with a ruler and terminal window running vi recording all the results.
A terrific post recapping the early years of photography. The oldest known color photograph was taken in 1872.
Update: Or was it? James Clerk Maxwell took this color photo of a purty ribbon in 1861. Maxwell also, and so but by the way, linked electromagnetism and light in a seminal paper from that same year, work that Albert Einstein called “the most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton”. (thx, chris)
Crash test video of a Smart Car hitting a wall at 70 mph. Compare with these tests of a pair of Chinese sedans. Ouch. (thx, eric)
Been on a bit of a Guitar Hero kick lately…I just played it for the first time recently so of course I’m looking around the web for advice, hacks, YouTube videos, etc. Nothing like a little web research to reinforce how little you know.
Anyhoo, I found this video of a 8-yo kid shredding it up on Guitar Hero 2…he missed only three notes on an expert level song and wasn’t even looking at the screen some of the time. Little blighter. If you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna go have a few alcoholic drinks, smoke some cigarettes, rent a car, and join the Army…let’s see him do all that! (P.S. I wrote a hit play!)
Quick quiz: how many HTML tags can you name in 5 minutes? I found this to be pretty difficult out of the context of actually needed to code something. That and I’m kinda rusty with any non-
/ HTML.
Foodpairing: extensive diagrams showing which foods go with other foods. See also the Synesthetic Cookbook.
Nice interview with Nintendo game designer Yoshiaki Koizumi, particularly the bits about shifting from 2-D to 3-D Mario games and Mario Galaxy. The bulk of the gameplay in Galaxy takes place on spherical surfaces:
He explained that no matter how large you make the playing field, if you walk long enough you will run into a wall, and that will make you turn around, which makes the camera turn around and runs the risk of making the player lost. With a sphere, Mario can run all he wants without falling or hitting a wall… a useful concept for getting players totally absorbed in the moment. Koizumi added that the best thing about spherical worlds is the “unity of surface,” and the “connectedness.” Neither will the player get lost easily, or need to adjust the camera - by using spheres, Koizumi said, they had created a game field that never ended.
They also talk about the Galaxy’s two-player (well, 1.5-player really) feature, which is a really nice way of getting a second passive player involved in what is essentially a one-player game. (via snarkmarket)
With the blessing of the main abbot, Shi Yong Xin, Guariglia has earned the full collaboration of the monks to create an astonishing, empathic record of the Shaolin art forms and the individuals who consider themselves the keepers of these traditions. It is the first time the monks have allowed such extensive documentation of these masters and their centuries-old art forms-from Buddhist mudras to classical kung fu-in their original setting, a 1,500-year-old Buddhist temple.
Photos and video here. Watching the videos, especially the one featuring Tong Jian Quan, I was reminded of hip hop dancing (Michael Jackson in particular) in a way that watching kung-fu and other martial arts in Hollywood movies does not.
Also, Shaolin monk Hai Deng was famous for performing a one-finger handstand. The video seems a little suspect but this performance brings the single finger handstand into the realm of possibility.
Christopher Hitchens has written a pair of articles for Vanity Fair on the growing self-improvement industry for men, offering himself up as a guinea pig for our education and entertainment. In the second article, he gets new teeth (before photo, after photo…only 6 hours between the two) and gets his nethers waxed…the male version of the Brazilian. The description of his “sack, back, and crack” epilation is too good not to share at length:
Here’s what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this “wide stance” position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required: a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened. Ms. Turlington doesn’t have this problem. The businesslike Senhora Padilha daubed away, took a purchase on the only available handhold, and then wrenched and wrenched again. The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times she soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy… Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself inside my body.
Hitchens’ first article is here.
An interesting take on the state of politics in the US:
There are very serious social problems to be addressed, but the poor, pathetic, liberals simply haven’t a clue. Conservatives, on the other, are political sophisticated and hold clear visions of what they want. It is too bad that what they want does not include caring about the poor and the otherwise afflicted, or dealing with our natural environment. Politics in the USA is no longer Elephants and Donkeys; it is now conservative Pigs and liberal Bonobos. The pigs are smart but only care about what’s in their trough. The Bonobos are polymorphous perverse and great lovers, but will be extinct in short order.
(via marginal revolution)
NYC restaurant advice from a huge douchebag Don Juan about where to wine her, dine her, and then complete the rhyming trifecta later that evening.
I have given much thought to this question of romantic restaurants. In each case you have to study the girl and find the right restaurant for her. One If by Land, Two If by Sea. Forget it. A joke. The Terrace. Never. Never. The minute you walk in she knows what you have in mind. You might as well write her a note ‘Tonight I expect to do it.’ It’s too obvious.
(via eater)
The Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzer is an awesome but little-known walking tank that was used in the German invasion of Russia during WWII.
As the war progressed, the Überschwerer Kampfschreitpanzers became less of an asset and more of a liability. Their height made it nearly impossible to hide them, and at least one was totally destroyed and another wrecked beyond repair by a concentrated rocket attack from the so-called “Stalin’s Organs.” Several others were damaged from artillery barrages, Russian dive bombers claimed another, and if reports are correct, one of the last Fortresses was taken by several P-38 Lightning pilots, who brought it down with wing-mounted rockets.
Where was this in my high school history book?
Cosmic Zoom is a 1968 animated short film directed by Eva Szasz, made under the auspices of the National Film Board of Canada, and was the inspiration of the Eames’ wonderful Powers of Ten. Cosmic Zoom was in turn based on Cosmic View: The Universe in 40 Jumps by Kees Boeke.
If you can handle just one more, GQ has a long article on David Chang, the chef/co-owner of NYC’s Momofuku restaurants.
Three years ago, David Chang was an obscure cook with a failing Manhattan noodle bar. Now he is being hailed as the most innovative and exciting chef America has seen in decades.
Decades? Please. I’m not backing down from my effusive review of Ssam Bar (Ssam Bar is one of my favorite restaurants of all time), but this decades business is bollocks. Just let the man (and his collaborators) cook and open more yummy restaurants.
Guitar Hero offers a connection to all this, but departs from it in an obvious way: You’re not actually playing the guitar. No matter how good you may get at Guitar Hero, if you decide to take up the real instrument at some point, you’ll be starting from scratch.
I don’t know what it’s like to be a rock star and there’s no way I can pick up a guitar right now and play it, but the pretend version of the whole rock n’ roll thing that Guitar Hero provides is pretty powerful, at least for this impressionable newbie. Playing Guitar Hero and believing you’re a rock star might be like eating apple pie on the internet, but if you don’t know the difference in the first place, does it matter?
The NY Times has released their list of the 100 Notable Books of 2007. Because of the amount of online reading I do and Ollie, my book-reading rate has declined dramatically…I only read two of the books on this list and one of those was Harry Potter 7.
How could Oswald have fired three shots in such a short time in assassinating John F. Kennedy? Max Holland and Johann Rush suggest that a misunderstanding of the Zapruder footage is to blame.
If this belated revelation changes nothing from one perspective — Oswald still did it — it simultaneously changes everything, if only because it disrupts the state of mind of everyone who has ever been transfixed by the Zapruder film. The film, we realize, does not depict an assassination about to commence. It shows one that had already started.
Scene: Two women on a smoke break outside in the rain, a white woman dressed all in black and a black woman dressed in all white. The woman in all black holds a giant golf umbrella with alternating black and white panels.
Excuse for missing it: Three stories up and babysitting.
See also: Unphotographable, a text account of pictures missed.
On the possible consciousness of rocks and panpsychism:
First, our brains consist of material particles. Second, these particles, in certain arrangements, produce subjective thoughts and feelings. Third, physical properties alone cannot account for subjectivity. (How could the ineffable experience of tasting a strawberry ever arise from the equations of physics?) Now, Nagel reasoned, the properties of a complex system like the brain don’t just pop into existence from nowhere; they must derive from the properties of that system’s ultimate constituents. Those ultimate constituents must therefore have subjective features themselves — features that, in the right combinations, add up to our inner thoughts and feelings. But the electrons, protons and neutrons making up our brains are no different from those making up the rest of the world. So the entire universe must consist of little bits of consciousness.
Dude! Note: the timestamp on this post is exactly 4:20 pm ET. You know what to do.
Eye-Fi is a wireless memory card for digital cameras. Once you get it set up, you take a photo with your camera and it’s automatically uploaded to your computer and to Flickr (or another photo sharing site of your choosing). The first thing you notice about the Eye-Fi is that it looks just like an ordinary 2-gig SD card…so tiny that when you use it for the first time, you almost can’t help but examine your camera from all angles to make certain that there are no wires involved. It’s magic.
But can an enchanted memory card make you a better photographer? That is, does it make you want to use your camera more and take better pictures? I’ve been testing an Eye-Fi for the past week, courtesy of my friends at Photojojo (where every order comes with a Blow Pop!). The setup and usage were pretty easy. Not having to fuss with an uploading cord was nice. I didn’t like the requirement of setting up each wireless connection you want the card to use; it should find open wireless access points when it can. But after a week of using the card, I finally figured out the optimal way to use the Eye-Fi:
1. Get a Flickr account.
2. Set the Eye-Fi to upload automatically to your Flickr account with the privacy set so that only you can see it.
3. Use Flickr’s online organization tools to publish, group, tag, or order prints of the keepers and discard/ignore the rest.
Instant online-only workflow…no intermediate “download then find the best ones then upload” steps required, everything happens right in Flickr. The lack of editing tools (brightness, levels, etc.) on Flickr might be a deal breaker for some, but for the rest, it certainly makes it easier to take a lot of photographs and get them up where family and friends can see them.
Cartoonist Scott Adams is going to be blogging a lot less on The Dilbert Blog because it’s bad for business.
I hoped that people who loved the blog would spill over to people who read Dilbert, and make my flagship product stronger. Instead, I found that if I wrote nine highly popular posts, and one that a reader disagreed with, the reaction was inevitably “I can never read Dilbert again because of what you wrote in that one post.” Every blog post reduced my income, even if 90% of the readers loved it. And a startling number of readers couldn’t tell when I was serious or kidding, so most of the negative reactions were based on misperceptions.
(thx, hurty elbow)
The Crate Review System judges video games by how the length of time it takes a player to find the first crate, “which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas”.
Please note that by crates, we mean both crates proper and the circular crate, the barrel.
(thx, joshua)
Rex Sorgatz is once again compiling “best of” lists for 2007 in more than 30 categories. Time to get an intern, dude.
Here’s a video of a car driving on Japan’s aforementioned melody roads. (thx, kyle)
Advice for young photographers, including:
In college, take a year off and drive across the country, and camp along the way. Do it with good friends that are smart; not dumbasses that just want to get high. Bring some books. Bring some audio books if you can’t read.
Michael Lewis on the unique role that kickers occupy in professional sports.
There is still some faint resistance to the notion that a kicker could ever really do anything great. Brett Favre can throw 10 more game-ending interceptions and fans will still cherish his moments of glory. Reggie Bush may fumble away a championship and still end up being known for the best things he ever does. Even offensive linemen whose names no one remembers are permitted to end their days basking in the reflected glory of having been on the field. Kickers alone are required to make their own cases.
Maybe soccer goalies can identify with NFL kickers?
Michael Frumin’s grandfather passed along to him a campaign poster from when Norman Mailer ran for mayor of NYC in 1969. The scans of the poster are wonderful.
I’m about as far from a knowledgeable design critic as you can get, but this thing is an undeniable work of art, especially in the eye of any native New Yorker.
Does anyone know who designed the poster for Mailer?
The 2008 version of Pentagram’s big-ass wall calendar is now available, featuring the typefaces of Matthew Carter. If that’s not to your liking, there’s always this calendar by Massimo Vignelli set in, you guessed it, Helvetica.
A Beddian Year is one in which your age matches the last two digits of the year you were born.
What’s sort of great about it is that it will happen to everybody if you live long enough. If you were born in 2000, it happens instantaneously. The people who were born at the end of the century have to take care of themselves.
Design challenge: design a business card-sized year-long calendar that doesn’t feature absurdly small type. Some intriguing solutions.
The BBC is planning to produce Shakespeare’s entire canon for TV…all 37 plays.
(via crazymonk)
Socials & More