Sita is a goddess separated from her beloved Lord and husband Rama. Nina is an animator whose husband moves to India, then dumps her by e-mail. Three hilarious shadow puppets narrate both ancient tragedy and modern comedy in this beautifully animated interpretation of the Indian epic Ramayana. Set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw, Sita Sings the Blues earns its tagline as “The Greatest Break-Up Story Ever Told.”
I put on the DVD and start watching. I am enchanted. I am swept away. I am smiling from one end of the film to the other. It is astonishingly original. It brings together four entirely separate elements and combines them into a great whimsical chord. You might think my attention would flag while watching An animated version of the epic Indian tale of Ramayana set to the 1920’s jazz vocals of Annette Hanshaw. Quite the opposite. It quickens.
Take a logo as simple as the Mercedes-Benz star. Just three points framed by a circle, its geometry is easily described in a few lines of Mathematica code, with some obvious parameters controlling the number of points on the star, the sharpness of the star’s points, the thickness of the outer circle, and the orientation of the star.
I started thinking about the Web of yesteryear after I got an e-mail from an idly curious Slate colleague: What did people do online back when Slate launched, he wondered? After plunging into the Internet Archive and talking to several people who were watching the Web closely back then, I’ve got an answer: not very much.
The World Wide Web was an invigorating, compelling and, frankly, amazing place in 1996. Innovations were fast, furious and quickly adopted. Clever people did clever things and pretty much everyone noticed, because “everyone” was a rather small and curious community. […] The Internet of 1996 was certainly nothing like today’s experience. But to suggest there wasn’t much to do is to ignore everything that was being done.
Salt: a world history, by Mark Kurlansky - Published in 2002, Kurlansky’s history of the world’s most important commodity is probably the best known mono-history and the only one to appear on the best-seller lists. I found it fascinating and inspiring. Kurlansky must have enjoyed his foray into mono-history because he’s followed up on Salt with Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.
Other topics covered by these books are pizza, pencils, and the alphabet. (via rebecca’s pocket (welcome back!))
Update: Several people have noted that Cod was published five years before Salt. (thx, all)
In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.
Curatorial strategies are spilling out of galleries and museums and into our everyday design practices. As emphasis shifts from designer to consumer, the vital role of designer is often that of mediator, shaping ideas and content created by others into another user experience. How have these new pivots changed the role of designer from one of artisan to one of curator? Four lecturers speak to curation as a way of design life, and how their audiences learn from, are inspired by, and gain insights from it.
Come for the Felton, stay for the Bekman, and don’t mind me, my talk’s only 10 minutes long. (Actually, I just noticed that they’re “sold out”.)
From the folks who brought you Desktop Tower Defense comes The Space Game. The gameplay looks daunting (a huge mistake for online embeddable games like this) but skip the training crap and click on the missions tab to get right into it. Playing The Space Game, I’m fondly reminded of Dune II…loved that game. (via buzzfeed)
There are two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity. There is a lot of overlap between the two — mean comments are disproportionately likely also to be dumb — but the strategies for dealing with them are different. Meanness is easier to control. You can have rules saying one shouldn’t be mean, and if you enforce them it seems possible to keep a lid on meanness.
Keeping a lid on stupidity is harder, perhaps because stupidity is not so easily distinguishable. Mean people are more likely to know they’re being mean than stupid people are to know they’re being stupid.
It’s sad that Graham’s thinking seems so out of the ordinary these days. Who cares about good comments when you just want as many comments as possible to drive pageviews and ad revenues? (via gulfstream)
The Linguists is a hilarious and poignant chronicle of two scientists — David Harrison and Gregory Anderson — racing to document languages on the verge of extinction. In Siberia, India, and Bolivia, the linguists confront head-on the very forces silencing languages: racism, humiliation, and violent economic unrest. David and Greg’s journey takes them deep into the heart of the cultures, knowledge, and communities at risk when a language dies.
This advice to museums applies equally well to troubled magazines, newspapers, companies, and the like.
The Louvre has Venus. What do you have instead? If you can answer that question confidently and concisely without a lot of stimulating-the-following-target-audiences mission statement hooey — and your answer isn’t on SecondLife, then you may be one the few museums that doesn’t suck.
You’re a museum, right? You’re not an outreach summercamp. You’re not an Imax theatre lobby. You’re not a social networking iPhone app. Be a museum. And try harder not to suck at it.
Although it seems counterintuitive, officials believe the move will actually improve the overall flow of traffic, because the diagonal path of Broadway tends to disrupt traffic where it intersects with other streets.
The streets will become pedestrian malls instead. Love this.
If you liked Planet Earth, you should probably check out Nature’s Great Events. Narrated by David Attenborough and currently airing in the UK on BBC1 and BBC HD, the series consists of six 50-minute shows, each of which features a large-scale annual event, like the spring thaw in the Arctic Circle and the sardine run along the coast of South Africa. The series was shot in HD using many of the techniques seen in Planet Earth.
If you’re in the UK, you can check out the first three episodes on the BBC site. In the US, Discovery will be airing the show sometime in the spring under the title Seasons of Survival (apparently Nature’s Great Events isn’t dramatic enough for the American audience). No word on whether Attenborough’s expert narration will also be replaced as it was in Planet Earth.
During the closing credits of the Academy Awards, a clip was shown previewing some movies that will open in 2009. None of them look like they’ll win any Oscars so I presume this was paid advertising and not editorial on the part of the program. Fun though! (via /film)
In the complex formula L represents the number of lumps in the batter and C equals its consistency. The letter F stands for the flipping score, k is the ideal consistency and T is the temperature of the pan. Ideal temp of pan is represented by m, S is the length of time the batter stands before cooking and E is the length of time the cooked pancake sits before being eaten. The closer to 100 the result is — the better the pancake.
However, a commenter notes:
According to that formula, if you left the pancake batter standing for ten years, (s-e) would be large, and so the pancake would be near perfect. If you let it stand for the same time as you left the pancake to cool, (s-e) would be zero and the pancake would be infinitely bad.
Good design is innovative. It does not copy existing product forms, nor does it produce any kind of novelty for the sake of it. The essence of innovation must be clearly seen in all functions of a product. The possibilities in this respect are by no means exhausted. Technological development keeps offering new chances for innovative solutions.
Rams was the influential designer behind many Braun products and described his design approach as “less, but better”. (via df)
Drummer Josh Freese is releasing his second solo album in eleven different limited-edition packages. The $75,000 option includes:
-T-shirt -Go on tour with Josh for a few days. -Have Josh write, record and release a 5 song EP about you and your life story. -Take home any of his drumsets (only one but you can choose which one.) -Take shrooms and cruise Hollywood in Danny from TOOL’s Lamborgini OR play quarters and then hop on the Ouija board for a while. -Josh will join your band for a month…play shows, record, party with groupies, etc…. -If you don’t have a band he’ll be your personal assistant for a month (4 day work weeks, 10 am to 4 pm) -Take a limo down to Tijuana and he’ll show you how it’s done (what that means exactly we can’t legally get into here) -If you don’t live in Southern California (but are a US resident) he’ll come to you and be your personal assistant/cabana boy for 2 weeks.
Oh yeah, and the music on CD or via download. (thx, ainsley)
Ratatouille: Male rat (Remy) dreams of becoming chef and achieves his goal even though movie sidetracks to cover ludicrous and unnecessary romance between humans part way through. This is the kind of shit that bothers me: Why is it important that the rat have a penis? Couldn’t Remy have been written for a female lead? Why not? Collette’s right — the restaurant business is tough for women, especially when even the fictional rat-as-chef barrier can only be broken by a male character. Female characters: Colette, that old lady with the gun, um… maybe some patrons?
More than a Token score: 1/10. ZOMG, we have one female character. We’d better make her fall inexplicably in love with the bumbling Linguini, stat!
He had spent four years and four months on Más a Tierra, a windswept island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 650 kilometers (404 miles) off the coast of Chile. He was as alone as a human being can be. For Selkirk, there was no “Man Friday,” a character Defoe created for his novel.
Selkirk was rescued by pirates and become one himself, making a fortune in the process. (via ny times ideas)
Heartened by the experts’ willingness to experiment, I went back to work, this time starting with hot water. I found that it’s possible to butta la pasta in 1 1/2 or 2 quarts of boiling water without having the noodles stick. Short shapes just require occasional stirring. Long strands and ribbons need a quick wetting with cold water just before they go into the pot, then frequent stirring for a minute or two.
McGee also comments that the energy equivalent of “250,000 to 500,000 barrels of oil” could be saved per year by using less water and the resulting pasta water is thicker and “very pleasant tasting”.
Okay, so you’ve all seen Wilt and Oscar’s numbers from 1962… but have you ever sat down and looked at the league averages that year? In ‘62, the average team took 107.7 shots per game. By comparison, this year the average team takes 80.2 FGA/G. If we use a regression to estimate turnovers & offensive rebounds, the league pace factor for 1962 was 125.5 possessions/48 minutes, whereas this year it’s 91.7. Oscar’s Royals averaged 124.7 poss/48, while Wilt’s Warriors put up a staggering 129.7 (the highest mark in the league). On the other hand, the 2009 Cavs are averaging a mere 89.2 poss/48. It turns out that the simplest explanation for the crazy statistical feats of 1961-62 (and the early sixties in general) is just that the league was playing at a much faster tempo in those days, with more possessions affording players more opportunities to amass gaudy counting statistics.
Matt Jones has posted the slides from his talk at Webstock entitled The Demon-Haunted World. It’s about technology and the city. Or if you’d like, the city as technology.
The car changed the development of the city irreversibly in the 20th century. I’d claim that mobiles will do the same in the 21st.
This review of Superorganism, a new book by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, is chock full of fascinating facts about ant societies and how they organize themselves.
The progress of ants from this relatively primitive state to the complexity of the most finely tuned superorganisms leaves no doubt that the progress of human evolution has largely followed a path taken by the ants tens of millions of years earlier. Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants (much like cuckoos do among birds), leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture. These agricultural ants represent the highest level of ant civilization, yet it is not plants that they cultivate, but mushrooms.
Update: The new location for the tabs is pretty disorienting so far. (So far = 10 minutes of use.) I keep glancing up in the middle to see the title of the page I’m on and it’s not there…and then I have to hunt for whichever tab I’m on. The separation of the tabs from the page content is also causing me problems. The page area is What I’m Looking At Now and the tabs are What I’m Going To Look At Soon…why separate them with a bunch of stuff (aside from the URL) that is unrelated to either of those things…i.e. What I Almost Never Need To Look At?
The studio executives wanted Laurence Olivier, Ernest Borgnine, Richard Conte, Anthony Quinn, Carlo Ponti, or Danny Thomas to play Don Corleone. Anyone but Brando, who, at 47, was perceived as poison. His recent pictures had been flops, and he was overweight, depressed, and notorious for causing overruns and making outrageous demands. WILL NOT FINANCE BRANDO IN TITLE ROLE, the suits in New York cabled the filmmakers. DO NOT RESPOND. CASE CLOSED.
But Coppola fought hard for him, and finally the executives agreed to consider Brando on three conditions: he would have to work for no money up front (Coppola later got him $50,000); put up a bond for any overruns caused by him; and-most shocking of all-submit to a screen test. Wisely, Coppola didn’t call it that when he contacted Brando. Saying that he just wanted to shoot a little footage, he arrived at the actor’s home one morning with some props and a camera.
Brando emerged from his bedroom in a kimono, with his long blond hair in a ponytail. As Coppola watched through the camera lens, Brando began a startling transformation, which he had worked out earlier in front of a mirror. In Coppola’s words, “You see him roll up his hair in a bun and blacken it with shoe polish, talking all the time about what he’s doing. You see him rolling up Kleenex and stuffing it into his mouth. He’d decided that the Godfather had been shot in the throat at one time, so he starts to speak funny. Then he takes a jacket and rolls back the collar the way these Mafia guys do.” Brando explained, “It’s the face of a bulldog: mean-looking but warm underneath.”
Coppola took the test to Bluhdorn. “When he saw it was Brando, he backed away and said, ‘No! No!’” But then he watched Brando become another person and said, “That’s amazing.” Coppola recalls, “Once he was sold on the idea, all of the other executives went along.”
Locals in Beichuan county in China’s Sichuan province, including children commuting daily to school, have to use a zip line to get across a river because the bridge that collapsed during the May 2008 earthquake has never been rebuilt. (via wsj)
In a car crash involving a modern vehicle, everything happens before the occupant is even aware of the collision.
1 ms - The car’s door pressure sensor detects a pressure wave.
5 ms - Car’s crash computer checks for insignificant crash events, such as a shopping trolley impact or incidental contact. It is still working out the severity of the crash. Door intrusion structure begins to absorb energy.
20 ms - Door and B-pillar begin to push on front seat. Airbag begins to push occupant’s chest away from the impact.
70 ms - Airbag continues to deflate. Occupant moves back towards middle of car.
Is your lack of fancy camera equipment — you know, the $3000 21-megapixel DSLR with HD video and f/1.4 lens — holding you back from making good photographs? Maybe the problem is with your thinking. Many of the great documentary photographers of the 20th century (Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, etc.) got by just fine with equipment about as flexible as the average point-and-shoot.
Low-light sensitivity? Ha! Your point-and-shoot may only be noisy at ISO 200 and below, but these guys were working with things like Kodachrome 25, eight times worse. Depth-of-field? Ha! Partially because of the style of the times, and partially because they didn’t want to deal with careful manual focus, most photojournalism of the time tended to have everything in focus — “f/8 and be there” was the rule.
I also enjoyed the advice for getting good photos of your kids with a point-and-shoot camera: “encourage them to play somewhere well-lit.” (via gulfstream)
From the recent TED conference, a demo of Siftables, blocks that are smart. What I find most interesting about Siftables is that the blocks form a computer that doesn’t need instructions but it doesn’t seem like a computer at all, i.e. the Holy Grail of computing. (via peterme)
In a NY Times op-ed piece, Emily Oberman and Bonnie Siegler argue that the Oscars should have a category for the design of title sequences. Hear, hear. Their pick for this year’s hypothetical award:
1. “WALL-E,” Susan Bradley and Jim Capobianco/Pixar. These poignant end titles, which show humans and robots flourishing on a revived Earth, offer a quick history of art, from cave paintings to van Gogh. They then proceed to retell the entire movie, this time in the pixelated style of old video games.
The about-face comes after consumers complained about the makeover in letters, e-mail messages and telephone calls and clamored for a return of the original look. Some of those commenting described the new packaging as “ugly” or “stupid,” and resembling “a generic bargain brand” or a “store brand.”
“Do any of these package-design people actually shop for orange juice?” the writer of one e-mail message asked rhetorically. “Because I do, and the new cartons stink.” Others described the redesign as making it more difficult to distinguish among the varieties of Tropicana or differentiate Tropicana from other orange juices.
David Wertheimer notes that the decoration of the packaging was not the main issue, the design was:
As a loyal Tropicana buyer, I don’t love the straw-punctured fruit or the old logo at all. What I love is Tropicana juice. And the new packaging made it hard for me to buy it. My preference was hidden in small type; the cartons no longer differentiated on the shelves. It took me longer to shop, and twice this winter I went home with the wrong juice.
I’ve written in awful enough situations that I know that the quality of the prose doesn’t depend on the circumstance in which it is composed. I don’t believe the muse visits you. I believe that you visit the muse. If you wait for that “perfect moment” you’re not going to be very productive.
The SmartSwitch is a replacement for a standard light switch that becomes more difficult to turn on when power usage is high in the household or on the grid as a whole.
Equipped with a network connection and a brake pad, the switch provides its user with tactile feedback about the amount of energy being used either within their household or by the electrical grid as a whole. SmartSwitch doesn’t restrict the user from turning on a light, but rather it passively encourages behavior change. SmartSwitches can be programmed to respond to either personal or communal electrical usage. In a home wired with SmartSwitches, lights can become harder to turn on during hours of peak demand. The switches can also be customized to reflect household-specific energy conservation goals.
That is really clever. I want the same thing for my computer…e.g. it’s more difficult to type when I shouldn’t be using it. (via o’reilly)
The Big Picture collected a bunch of photos of people at work, spinning silk yarn, on a shoe assembly line, sanding and buffing an Oscar statue, checking flour-making equipment, inspecting cigars, assembling model trains, and making toilet bowls.
Franke James received an unusual email from a stranger who invited himself and a guest to dinner at her house…in exchange for a $200 charitable donation. Read the rest in James’ illustrated story.
I Love You Forever and Always is a collection of scanned love letters and other notes written to a boy called Jon by various girls in the mid-1980s. If you grew up in the 80s, Jon’s collection is instant crack-like nostalgia.
Peter Miller has done a number of projects that involve directly exposing Polaroid instant film. Static Fields:
These Polaroids were illuminated by their own electrocution. They are cameraless images, which are immediate records of the bolts of electricity that passed through them.
My brother helped me catch these, we let them loose on the Polaroids in the basement. Polaroids are positives. This is a record of lightning bug dance-steps. Look closely and you can see the shadows of their legs.
Polaroids are removed from their case in a darkroom, laid flat and exposed as a single, light sensitive array. After they are exposed, they are reinserted into the pack and -with the lens now covered- can be processed by simply pressing the camera’s shutter and processing the film by ejecting it from the camera.
After writing The Cat in the Hat in 1955 using only 223 words, Dr. Seuss bet his publisher that he could write a book using only 50 words. Seuss collected on the wager in 1960 with the publication of Green Eggs and Ham. Here are the 50 distinct words used in the book:
a am and anywhere are be boat box car could dark do eat eggs fox goat good green ham here house I if in let like may me mouse not on or rain Sam say see so thank that the them there they train tree try will with would you
From a programming perspective, one of the fun things about Green Eggs and Ham is because the text contains so little information repeated in a cumulative tale, the story could be more efficiently represented as an algorithm. A simple loop would take the place of the following excerpt:
I do not like them in a box. I do not like them with a fox. I do not like them in a house. I do not like them with a mouse. I do not like them here or there. I do not like them anywhere. I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am.
But I don’t know…foreach (\$items as \$value) doesn’t quite have the same sense of poetry as the original Seuss.
While one shelf of the fridge is stocked with beer, the majority of its contents are condiments — mustard, mayo, black bean dip, Kraft Parmesan. Although the pantry contains Costco-size boxes of Barilla penne and jars of Classico tomato sauce, little actual cooking takes place. His daughter Jessica, 17, remembers finding the same package of frozen French fries in the freezer three years after spotting them on her first visit to the house.
This is from 2002 but still worth a read. (thx, tim)
Update:The Times wrote a sequel to the above story in 2007. The update includes a few photos of the place, which makes it look both more and less fratty than you’d think from reading the article. (thx, audrey & kevin)
The glasses work on the principle that the more liquid pumped into a thin sac in the plastic lenses, the stronger the correction. Silver has attached plastic syringes filled with silicone oil on each bow of the glasses; the wearer adds or subtracts the clear liquid with a little dial on the pump until the focus is right. After that adjustment, the syringes are removed and the “adaptive glasses” are ready to go.
Silver hopes that his glasses will help those in developing countries who cannot afford glasses with ground lenses. (thx, owen)
Critics pilloried the anti-erotic ridiculousness of the orgy, with its funereal organ music and self-sacrificing hookers and mass-like rituals involving cloaked high priests and great plumes of incense. But the orgy is more about power than sex; in that respect, it’s the opposite of some free-love hippie bacchanal, where the fucking is more democratic. Here, the rituals are about affirming the elite, and Bill doesn’t belong to this exclusionary country club, whose members are intent on subjugating their inferiors. For Bill, it’s the peak of a humiliating journey, and Kubrick accomplishes the remarkable feat of making Cruise, the brashly confident movie star, look small and scared behind that mask.
Overall, 1999 is still my favorite movie year. I saw more than 50 movies in the theater that year, including EWS, Rushmore, Princess Mononoke, Election, Run Lola Run, Being John Malkovich, Iron Giant, The Matrix, Magnolia, American Beauty, Toy Story 2, and Three Kings. Quite a year.
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