Charlie Chaplin’s Tron
Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times + Tron =
(via migurski)
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Entries for November 2010
The best of Barry Sanders
I may or may not have just spent 30 minutes watching Barry Sanders highlights on YouTube.
Probably my all-time favorite NFL player.
Google Beatbox
The latest big thing from Google: beatboxing. Just go to this page on Google Translate and press “Listen”. I laughed out loud. (via prosthetic knowledge)
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
Werner Herzog’s new film is in 3-D; it’s a documentary about the 30,000-year-old drawings recently discovered in the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave in southern France.
Herzog gained extraordinary permission to film the caves using lights that emit no heat. But Herzog being Herzog, this is no simple act of documentation. He initially resisted shooting in 3D, then embraced the process, and now it’s hard to imagine the film any other way. Just as Lascaux left Picasso in awe, the works at Chauvet are breathtaking in their artistry. The 3D format proves essential in communicating the contoured surfaces on which the charcoal figures are drawn. Beyond the walls, Herzog uses 3D to render the cave’s stalagmites like a crystal cathedral and to capture stunning aerial shots of the nearby Pont-d’Arc natural bridge. His probing questions for the cave specialists also plunge deep; for instance: “What constitutes humanness?”
Herzog pursued the film after reading Judith Thurman’s 2008 piece about the cave drawings in the New Yorker.
Has NASA discovered extraterrestrial life?
Here’s a curious press release from NASA:
NASA will hold a news conference at 2 p.m. EST on Thursday, Dec. 2, to discuss an astrobiology finding that will impact the search for evidence of extraterrestrial life. Astrobiology is the study of the origin, evolution, distribution and future of life in the universe.
I did a little research on the news conference participants and found:
1. Pamela Conrad (a geobiologist) was the primary author of a 2009 paper on geology and life on Mars
2. Felisa Wolfe-Simon (an oceanographer) has written extensively on photosynthesis using arsenic recently (she worked on the team mentioned in this article)
3. Steven Benner (a biologist) is on the “Titan Team” at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory; they’re looking at Titan (Saturn’s largest moon) as an early-Earth-like chemical environment. This is likely related to the Cassini mission.
4. James Elser (an ecologist) is involved with a NASA-funded astrobiology program called Follow the Elements, which emphasizes looking at the chemistry of environments where life evolves (and not just looking at water or carbon or oxygen).
So, if I had to guess at what NASA is going to reveal on Thursday, I’d say that they’ve discovered arsenic on Titan and maybe even detected chemical evidence of bacteria utilizing it for photosynthesis (by following the elements). Or something like that. (thx, sippey)
Update: According to Alexis Madrigal, the answer to the hyperbolic question in the headline is “no”.
I’m sad to quell some of the @kottke-induced excitement about possible extraterrestrial life. I’ve seen the Science paper. It’s not that.
Darth Spatula
It’s real and it’s spectacular.
Whether the mission is baking cookies or flipping pancakes, young Padawan cooks will love using our official Star Wars spatula featuring the fearsome Darth Vader.
And that’s not all! Williams Sonoma sells all sorts of Star Wars-themed cooking gear:
Galactic Empire™ Cupcake Decorating Kit - “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, the Jedi Kitchen Council devised a powerful new way to spread fun through the galaxy. Jedi Master pastry chefs created this extraordinary collection of tools…”
Sandwich Cutters with Vintage-Style Tin - “Transform your Jedi’s favorite sandwiches into high-energy fuel for lunches, snacks and parties with Millennium Falcon™ and Darth Vader’s TIE fighter™ sandwich cutters. Created by the Jedi Kitchen Council to celebrate the Rebel Alliance’s victory over the evil Empire, these cutters are fun and easy to use — just press and cut.” [The “Vintage-Style Tin” is actually, how you say, a metal lunchbox.]
Pancake Molds - “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away, a Jedi Kitchen Master used the Force to create three pancake molds in honor of his favorite galactic hero and villains: Yoda, Darth Vader and a stormtrooper. Use these molds to add whimsy and fun to your next pancake breakfast.” [The Vader pancake looks a lot like Hannibal Lector in his mask.]
What, no Jar-Jar Binks Home Preserves Kit? (thx, meg)
My movie release schedule
Harry Potter 7, pt 1 (Nov 19)
Black Swan (Dec 3)
Tron Legacy (Dec 17)
True Grit (Dec 22)
Somewhere (Dec 22)
I’ll be lucky to catch one of these in the theater.
How Kanye makes his musical sausage
Interesting piece on how Kanye West’s latest album, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, got made. Lots of good creative process bits, like this extensive quote from Kanye kollaborator Q-Tip:
“I’d never worked the way Kanye was working in Hawaii. Everybody’s opinions mattered and counted. You would walk in, and there’s Consequence and Pusha T and everybody is sitting in there and he’s playing music and everyone is weighing in. It was like music by committee. [Laughs.] It was fresh that everybody cared like that. I have my people that listen to my stuff-I think everybody does-but his thing is much more like, if the delivery guy comes in the studio and Kanye likes him and they strike up a conversation, he’ll go, ‘Check this out, tell me what you think.’ Which speaks volumes about who he is and how he sees and views people. Every person has a voice and an idea, so he’s sincerely looking to hear what you have to say-good, bad, or whatever.
“In art, whether it was Michelangelo or Rembrandt or all these dudes, they’ll sketch something, but their hands may not necessarily touch the paint. Damien Hirst may conceptualize it, but there’s a whole crew of people who are putting it together, like workers. His hand doesn’t have to touch the canvas, but his thought does. With Kanye, when he has his beats or his rhymes, he offers them to the committee and we’re all invited to dissect, strip, or add on to what he’s already started. By the end of the sessions, you see how he integrates and transforms everyone’s contributions, so the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. He’s a real wizard at it. What he does is alchemy, really.”
BTW, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is still on sale at Amazon for $3.99.
Intense training the key to long life?
Scientists are studying older athletes, like 91-year-old track star Olga Kotelko, to see how their bodies react to exercise. There is emerging evidence that a key to staying healthier longer is not just exercise but intense training.
You don’t have to be an athlete to notice how ruthlessly age hunts and how programmed the toll seems to be. We start losing wind in our 40s and muscle tone in our 50s. Things go downhill slowly until around age 75, when something alarming tends to happen.
“There’s a slide I show in my physical-activity-and-aging class,” Taivassalo says. “You see a shirtless fellow holding barbells, but I cover his face. I ask the students how old they think he is. I mean, he could be 25. He’s just ripped. Turns out he’s 67. And then in the next slide there’s the same man at 78, in the same pose. It’s very clear he’s lost almost half of his muscle mass, even though he’s continued to work out. So there’s something going on.” But no one knows exactly what. Muscle fibers ought in theory to keep responding to training. But they don’t. Something is applying the brakes.
And then there is Olga Kotelko, who further complicates the picture, but in a scientifically productive way. She seems not to be aging all that quickly. “Given her rather impressive retention of muscle mass,” says Russ Hepple, a University of Calgary physiologist and an expert in aging muscle, “one would guess that she has some kind of resistance.” In investigating that resistance, the researchers are hoping to better understand how to stall the natural processes of aging.
Michael Jordan advises LeBron James
Cleveland’s response to LeBron James’ boner of a Nike commercial has more heart, but this mash-up of the LeBron commercial with a previous Michael Jordan Nike commercial is an absolute masterpiece.
The Feed: a new iPad newsreader
The Feed is a new (free!) newsreader app for the iPad that syncs with Google Reader. I’ve been using Reeder and it’s been good, but I’m not a big fan of the one-at-a-time display; I prefer the River of News approach. The Feed combines the River of News approach with a nice simple design…a lovely design, IMO. Here’s how one of the app’s developers put it:
The basic idea is similar in layout to Google Reader, as we both like it. You have your news items in a long scrollable canvas. A set of arrow buttons let you quickly jump from one article to the next. Articles are marked as read as you scroll past them.
Here’s a good review. Download it at iTunes.
TGI Friday’s, the first singles bar
Over at Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley has a fascinating interview with Alan Stillman, the founder of TGI Friday’s and Smith & Wollensky. Stillman started Friday’s because, essentially, he was interested in meeting girls.
I wanted T.G.I. Friday’s to feel like a neighbourhood, corner bar, where you could get a good hamburger, good french fries, and feel comfortable. At the time, it was a sophisticated hamburger and french fry place — apparently, I invented the idea of serving burgers on a toasted English muffin — but the principle involved was to make people feel that they were going to someone’s apartment for a cocktail party.
The food eventually played a larger role than I imagined it would, because a lot of the girls didn’t have enough money to stretch from one paycheque to the other, so I became the purveyor of free hamburgers at the end of the month.
I don’t think there was anything else like it at the time. Before T.G.I. Friday’s, four single twenty-five year-old girls were not going out on Friday nights, in public and with each other, to have a good time. They went to people’s apartments for cocktail parties or they might go to a real restaurant for a date or for somebody’s birthday, but they weren’t going out with each other to a bar for a casual dinner and drinks because there was no such place for them to go.
Animated films for grown-ups
Writing for The Morning News, Matthew Baldwin shares some of his favorite animated films for adults, including some of my favorites: The Iron Giant, Spirited Away (and Princess Mononoke), and Wall-E.
Half a decade later I walked into a theater, for reasons I cannot recall, to see Princess Mononoke. It was a revelation-somehow, in my absence, animated films had gotten all grow’d up. There were no songs or dance numbers, the plot was complex and disturbing, and the running time of two hours — not to mention some shockingly violent scenes — was far from kid-friendly.
The subtext of Princess Mononoke is one of environmental protectionism-the same theme that Pocahantas wore on its sleeve. Had I had seen the former film in 1995, instead of the latter, I probably never would have left the fold.
Mad Men seasons 1-3 for only $10 each
Holy cow! Amazon has the first three seasons of Mad Men on sale for $9.99 each, DVDs or Blu-ray.
Oh, and I also noticed Kitchen-Aid’s professional 6-quart mixer on sale for $250 after rebate…that’s 50% off the regular price.
Watch Star Trek online for free
As it isn’t an official thing, I don’t quite know how this works, but you can go to Watch Trek and watch any episode of any Star Trek series from the original series to Enterprise. The quality is pretty good too.
Stem cells to aid the blind
Clinical trials are about to begin where embryonic stem cells will be injected into the eyes of people with Stargardt’s macular degeneration.
Robert Lanza, the company’s chief scientific officer, said that the first patient could receive the stem cell transplants early in the new year and although the trial is designed primarily to assess safety, the first signs of visual improvement may be apparent within weeks. “Talking to the clinicians, we could see something in six weeks, that’s when we think we may see some improvements. It really depends on individual patients but that’s a reasonable time frame when something may start to happen,” Dr Lanza said.
National Geographic 2010 photography contest
The Big Picture has a selection of photos from this year’s National Geographic photography contest. It was difficult to pick a favorite, but I’ll go with this one:
White Castle burger stuffing
For tomorrow, a turkey stuffing recipe that uses White Castle hamburgers. I’d really like to try this some year, but there’s no way my wife would go for it. Come on, it’s from scratch! (Well, except for the burgers…)
Lying phrases
There are some phrases — like “I hate to say it”, “with all due respect”, and “it’s not about the money, but…” — that sound honest but signify that the speaker is actually lying.
The point of a but-head is to preemptively deny a charge that has yet to be made, with a kind of “best offense is a good defense” strategy. This technique has a distinguished relative in classical rhetoric: the device of procatalepsis, in which the speaker brings up and immediately refutes the anticipated objections of his or her hearer. When someone says “I’m not trying to hurt your feelings, but…” they are maneuvering to keep you from saying “I don’t believe you — you’re just trying to hurt my feelings.”
See also the non-apology apology.
Cookie Monster wants to host SNL
Here’s his audition video:
Fantastic idea…I would love to see a Saturday Night Live with Sesame Street characters. Hey, if 30 Rock is really The Muppet Show…
Gotham, a history of NYC
Ever since Meg brought it home one day several years ago, I’ve wanted to read Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898. But despite the Pulitzer, I never got around to it because the physical book weighs in at 6.1 pounds and 1424 pages. Oof. On a whim the other day, I checked to see if it was available for the Kindle and, lo, here it is. In addition to the much lighter load, the free sample is extremely generous…it’s nearly 100 pages and takes you all the way up to the 1680s. Great book so far.
Map of the world rearranged by population
If all the countries in the world swapped geographic positions based on population, then you’d have something that looked a bit like this:
Take the world’s largest country: Russia. It would be taken over by its Asian neighbour and rival China, the country with the world’s largest population. Overcrowded China would not just occupy underpopulated Siberia - a long-time Russian fear - but also fan out all the way across the Urals to Russia’s westernmost borders. China would thus become a major European power. Russia itself would be relegated to Kazakhstan, which still is the largest landlocked country in the world, but with few hopes of a role on the world stage commensurate with Russia’s clout, which in no small part derives from its sheer size.
Canada, the world’s second-largest country, would be transformed into an Arctic, or at least quite chilly version of India, the country with the world’s second-largest population. The country would no longer be a thinly populated northern afterthought of the US. The billion Indians north of the Great Lakes would make Canada a very distinct, very powerful global player.
The full map is here. Interestingly, four countries stay in the same positions: the US, Ireland, Yemen, and Brazil.
David Hockney’s iPad drawings on display in Paris
The Pierre Bergé – Yves Saint Laurent Foundation in Paris is currently displaying an exhibition of David Hockney’s iPhone and iPad drawings. The exhibition is on display through Jan 30, 2011.
Hockney uses the Brushes app to create his digital paintings and even has his suits made with a pocket just for the iPad:
He picks up his iPad and slips it into his jacket pocket. All his suits have been made with a deep inside pocket so that he can put a sketchbook in it: now the iPad fits there just as snugly. Even his tux has the pocket, he tells me.
Kinect hacking
When Microsoft released the Kinect, they unwittingly provided a bunch of data hackers with a new toy. Open-source drivers were created (with Microsoft’s blessing) so that you can hook a Kinect up to a PC and do stuff like this:
That’s Robert Hodgin manipulating his Kinect data in realtime with Cinder, which is like Processing (but for C++). Here’s one with him and his cat.
Pretty Hate Machine remastered
The remastered version of NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine is out today. You can get the CD or vinyl at Amazon or mp3s at iTunes.
How not to cheat your way through college
Using statistical analysis, University of Central Florida professor Richard Quinn determined that dozens of students had cheated on a test, told them in a lecture (video below), and over 200 students confessed after the lecture.
I don’t want to have to explain to your parents why you didn’t graduate, so I went to the Dean and I made a deal. The deal is you can either wait it out and hope that we don’t identify you, or you can identify yourself to your lab instructor and you can complete the rest of the course and the grade you get in the course is the grade you earned in the course.
Hacker double agent
While assisting the Secret Service in bringing down a cybercrime ring called Shadowcrew, Albert Gonzalez was, unbeknowst to the agents he was working with, involved with a much larger scheme to steal credit card information on a massive scale. Despite making millions of dollars hacking into the databases of large companies, Gonzalez preferred living at home with his parents for three reasons:
1. he loved his mother’s cooking
2. he loved playing with his nephew
3. he could more easily launder money through his parents’ home-equity line of credit
When they pieced together how Gonzalez organized these heists later, federal prosecutors had to admire his ingenuity. “It’s like driving to the building next to the bank to tunnel into the bank,” Seth Kosto, an assistant U.S. attorney in New Jersey who worked on the case, told me. When I asked how Gonzalez rated among criminal hackers, he replied: “As a leader? Unparalleled. Unparalleled in his ability to coordinate contacts and continents and expertise. Unparalleled in that he didn’t just get a hack done — he got a hack done, he got the exfiltration of the data done, he got the laundering of the funds done. He was a five-tool player.”
Spielberg’s Abe Lincoln movie
It’s called Lincoln and will be a collection of the talents of Steven Spielberg (director), Daniel Day-Lewis (plays Lincoln), Doris Kearns Goodwin (wrote the book), and Tony Kushner (screenplay).
It is anticipated that the film will focus on the political collision of Lincoln and the powerful men of his cabinet on the road to abolition and the end of the Civil War.
A full orchestra plays John Cage’s 4’33”
Here’s video of a full orchestral performance of John Cage’s famous 4’33” composition, in which none of the performers plays his or her instrument; it’s four minutes and thirty-three seconds of ambient noise.
You’re not going to think it’s worth it, but watch the whole performance. (thx, liz)
On the merits of premature ejaculation
Evolutionary speaking, premature ejaculation may not be such a bad thing after all.
So given these basic biological facts, and assuming that ejaculation is not so premature that it occurs prior to intromission and sperm cells find themselves awkwardly outside of a woman’s reproductive tract flopping about like fish out of water, what, exactly, is so “premature” about premature ejaculation? In fact, all else being equal, in the ancestral past, wouldn’t there likely have been some reproductive advantages to ejaculating as quickly as possible during intravaginal intercourse-such as, oh, I don’t know, inseminating as many females as possible in as short a time frame as possible? or allowing our ancestors to focus on other adaptive behaviors aside from sex? or perhaps, under surreptitious mating conditions, doing the deed quickly and expeditiously without causing a big scene?
Still, for recreational sex, it blows. (As it were.)
The case of the vanishing blonde
A woman in Florida turns up raped and beaten in a ditch and can’t remember who attacked her. The security tapes at her hotel show that she didn’t leave her room that evening. What follows is a good ole fashioned detective story with a tenacious private detective getting to the bottom of the story.
He had a fixed policy. He told potential employers up front, “I’ll find out what happened. I’m not going to shade things to assist your client, but I will find out what the truth is.” Brennan liked it when the information he uncovered helped his clients, but that wasn’t a priority. Winning lawsuits wasn’t the goal. What excited him was the mystery.
The job in this case was straightforward. Find out who raped and beat this young woman and dumped her in the weeds. Had the attack even happened at the hotel, or had she slipped out and met her assailant or assailants someplace else? Was she just a simple victim, or was she being used by some kind of Eastern European syndicate? Was she a prostitute? Was she somehow implicated? There were many questions and few answers.
When science goes backward
John Horgan argues that in some areas, science and technology are moving in the wrong direction. Among those areas are space colonization, the origin of life, and ending infectious disease.
Decades ago antibiotics, vaccines, pesticides, water chlorination and other public health measures were vanquishing diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, polio, whooping cough, tuberculosis and smallpox, particularly in First World nations. In The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World out of Balance (Penguin, 1995), the journalist Laurie Garrett noted that in 1967 U.S. Surgeon General William Stewart said that it was “time to close the books on infectious diseases” (Garrett’s words) and shift resources toward non-infectious killers such as cancer and heart disease. The global eradication of smallpox in 1979 seemed to fulfill Stewart’s vision. Hopes for the end of infectious disease were soon crushed, however, by the emergence of AIDS, mutant flu viruses and antibiotic-resistant forms of old killers such as tuberculosis.
Mutations in genes and text not dissimilar
In a post called Mutated Manuscripts: The Evolution of Genes and Texts, Sam Arbesman compares genetic mutations with textual mutations caused by humans.
While fun to chronicle such similarities, these similarities can also be exploited in the same way. Mutational differences between DNA sequences can be used to understand the evolutionary history of a population, or even a group of species. And so too with variants of the same manuscript. A famous example of this is from a 1998 research article in the journal Nature that quantitatively studied the differences between the 80 surviving versions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. By subjecting the variants to a battery of genetic analyses, the researchers were able to better understand the contents of the ancestral version, Chaucer’s own copy!
Super Grandma!
Photographer Sacha Goldberger has his depressed grandmother pose for a series of outlandish superhero photos. The result was very theraputic for the 91-year-old woman.
Initially, she did not understand why all these people wrote to congratulate her. Then, little by little, she realized that her story conveyed a message of hope and joy. In all those pictures, she posed with the utmost enthusiasm. Now, after the set, Goldberger shares that his grandmother has never shown even a trace of depression.
(via mathowie)
Kubrick explains 2001
One of the more common reactions to Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey is “wait, what the hell happened exactly?” In a 1969 interview with Joseph Gelmis, Kubrick explained the plot in a very straightforward manner:
You begin with an artifact left on earth four million years ago by extraterrestrial explorers who observed the behavior of the man-apes of the time and decided to influence their evolutionary progression. Then you have a second artifact buried deep on the lunar surface and programmed to signal word of man’s first baby steps into the universe — a kind of cosmic burglar alarm. And finally there’s a third artifact placed in orbit around Jupiter and waiting for the time when man has reached the outer rim of his own solar system.
When the surviving astronaut, Bowman, ultimately reaches Jupiter, this artifact sweeps him into a force field or star gate that hurls him on a journey through inner and outer space and finally transports him to another part of the galaxy, where he’s placed in a human zoo approximating a hospital terrestrial environment drawn out of his own dreams and imagination. In a timeless state, his life passes from middle age to senescence to death. He is reborn, an enhanced being, a star child, an angel, a superman, if you like, and returns to earth prepared for the next leap forward of man’s evolutionary destiny.
That is what happens on the film’s simplest level. Since an encounter with an advanced interstellar intelligence would be incomprehensible within our present earthbound frames of reference, reactions to it will have elements of philosophy and metaphysics that have nothing to do with the bare plot outline itself.
P.S. Kubrick also stated that HAL was not gay — “HAL was a ‘straight’ computer”. (via prosthetic knowledge)
Tyler Cowen’s book picks for 2010
Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler Cowen picks some of his favorite books of the year. Cowen has never steered me wrong with a book recommendation (even in recommending his own books). Of the most interest to me this year are Siddhartha Mukherjee’s Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer (which I’ve seen rave reviews for all over the place) and Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years.
Hard-Coding Bias in Google “Algorithmic” Search Results
Have you noticed that when you search Google for the answer to a mathematical calculation, the only result it lists is Google’s own? I mean, just look at this obvious result tampering:
This “hard-coding” of calculation answers as the top search result goes against the company’s supposed policy promising completely algorithmic and unbiased results. How are other mathematical calculation sites supposed to compete against the Mountain View search and math giant? What if 45 times 12 isn’t actually 540? (I checked the calculation on Wolfram Alpha several times and on my iPhone calcuator and 540 appears to be correct. For now.)
And this isn’t even Google’s most egregious transgression. As Eric Meyer points out, Google is blocking private correspondence between private parties. That means that grandmothers aren’t getting necessary information about erectile disfunction, people aren’t finding out where they can play Texas Hold ‘Em online, and the queries of Nigerian foreign ministers are going unanswered. There are millions of dollars sitting in a bank somewhere and all they need is a loan to get it out! Google! This. Is. Un. Acce. Ptable!
P.S. I think this “research” is obvious and the conclusions are misleading and biased. But then I don’t have Ph.D. from Harvard, so what do I know?
The Hour, Britain’s Mad Men?
Dominic West, who starred as McNutty in The Wire, will play the lead character in a six-part BBC series called The Hour. The show is set in the 1950s and will air next year.
The Hour follows the launch of a topical news show in London set against the backdrop of a mysterious murder. West will play Hector Madden, the programme’s upper-crust, charismatic front man.
The series is being called the UK version of Mad Men:
The only place with better retro fashion than New York in the 1960s is London in the 1950s.
(via unlikely words)
Kindle and Kinect Christmas
Since the introduction of the iPhone, Apple has ruled the December holidays. Under the tree, by the menorah, and around the Festivus pole has appeared a steady stream of iPods, iPhones, iTunes gift cards, iPod touches, and even MacBooks. Apple has sold tons of devices in the final quarter of the last three years and, with the iPad added to the lineup, will likely do so again this year.
But I think two companies who will do even better than Apple in December this year.
The first is Amazon**. The cheapest Kindle is now only $139 (and the one with free 3G is $50 more). They are going to sell a metric crapload of these things this Christmas. And even if they don’t, they’re going to sell 50 million metric shitloads of Kindle books because you don’t even need a Kindle to read Kindle books…Amazon has readers for the iPad (which is way better than Apple’s iBooks app IMO), iPhone, Android devices, Blackberry, WinPhone 7, Windows, and OS X. I never would have predicted it, but I am a firm convert to Kindle books…and I don’t even have a Kindle. The killer feature here is Amazon’s multi-platform support. I *love* reading books on the iPad at home but when I’m out and about, if I’ve got my iPhone in my pocket, I can read a book. The best book is the one that’s always with you.
This one is more of a guess, but the other company that will do well this holiday season is Microsoft. I know, right? But have you seen this Kinect thing? It’s an add-on for Xbox 360 that takes everything people loved about the Wii and Wii Fit and makes it easier, more natural, and more powerful. Basically you hook this bar up to your Xbox 360 and it tracks your motion around the room. You’re the controller. Here’s a snippet from David Pogue’s positive review:
The Wii, by tracking the position of its remote control, was amazing for its time (2006). It’s a natural for games in which you swing one hand — bowling, tennis, golf. But the Kinect blows open a whole universe of new, whole-body simulations — volleyball, obstacle courses, dancing, flying.
It doesn’t merely recognize that someone is there; it recognizes your face and body. In some games, you can jump in to take a buddy’s place; the game instantly notices the change and signs you in under your own name. If you leave the room, it pauses the game automatically.
There’s a crazy, magical, omigosh rush the first time you try the Kinect. It’s an experience you’ve never had before.
The Kinect is available at Amazon (hey, there they are again…) bundled with Xbox 360 for $300 and separately for $150.
Danny MacAskill rides again
Danny MacAskill, the fantastic Scottish trials cyclist, is back a new video packed with gravity- and death-defying stunts.
I had a special screening of this with my three-year-old son this morning before I came into the office; he gave it two thumbs up. Way up! (via @mathowie)
Amazingly bad soccer
In the 90th minute of a quarterfinal match between Qatar and Uzbekistan in the 2010 Asian Games, you’ll see the worst ever play by a goalie and then it gets even worse.
Do animals think?
And if so, then what? Do animals feel? Do they have souls? This article is a nice overview of what we know about the thoughts and feelings of non-human animals.
But one by one, the berms we’ve built between ourselves and the beasts are being washed away. Humans are the only animals that use tools, we used to say. But what about the birds and apes that we now know do as well? Humans are the only ones who are empathic and generous, then. But what about the monkeys that practice charity and the elephants that mourn their dead? Humans are the only ones who experience joy and a knowledge of the future. But what about the U.K. study just last month showing that pigs raised in comfortable environments exhibit optimism, moving expectantly toward a new sound instead of retreating warily from it? And as for humans as the only beasts with language? Kanzi himself could tell you that’s not true.
All of that is forcing us to look at animals in a new way. With his 1975 book Animal Liberation, bioethicist Peter Singer of Princeton University launched what became known as the animal-rights movement. The ability to suffer, he argued, is a great cross-species leveler, and we should not inflict pain on or cause fear in an animal that we wouldn’t want to experience ourselves. This idea has never met with universal agreement, but new studies are giving it more legitimacy than ever. It’s not enough to study an animal’s brain, scientists now say; we need to know its mind.
Playing catch with dough
I love this video of a guy rolling out dough and tossing it several feet to another man over and over and over again…and even over a passing waiter. They’re making parathas, an Indian flatbread.
Preventing tuberculosis deaths in India
In the New Yorker, Michael Specter reports on tuberculosis, the world’s deadliest infectious disease — worldwide, more than 5000 people die from it every day. In India, misdiagnosis and improper treatment result in tens of thousands of unnecessary deaths a month and even new genetic screening machines might not help matters.
Since late 2009, the hospital has had one unique asset: a piece of equipment called a P.C.R., which can multiply tiny samples of DNA and analyze them. The device is not as fast as the GeneXpert, but it can examine the genetics of virtually any organism, including tuberculosis. The hospital’s machine, which was purchased with money from a government research grant, has never been used. “The hospital has had this for months,” Mannan said. “But nobody knows how it works.” We were standing at the door of the virology lab, where the new P.C.R. Cobas TaqMan 48, made by Roche and sold for roughly fifty thousand dollars, was resting on a shelf, still wrapped in its shipping material.
How could that be? I was staring at a machine that could alter, even save, the lives of scores of the people who were sitting nearby in the gathering heat. Mannan said nothing, though his anger was palpable.
[…] “It’s a nice lab,” Mannan said when we left. “Beautiful, actually. But if the doctors used it properly that would interfere with their private practice.”
I asked what he meant.
“It is simple,” he said. “If patients are treated at the hospital, they won’t need to pay for anything else.”
How to cheat your way through college
From The Chronicle of Higher Education, a fascinating piece by a person who makes his living writing essays for college and graduate students.
In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.
I’ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.
You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists.
His kind of service attracts three types of student:
From my experience, three demographic groups seek out my services: the English-as-second-language student; the hopelessly deficient student; and the lazy rich kid.
For the last, colleges are a perfect launching ground-they are built to reward the rich and to forgive them their laziness. Let’s be honest: The successful among us are not always the best and the brightest, and certainly not the most ethical. My favorite customers are those with an unlimited supply of money and no shortage of instructions on how they would like to see their work executed. While the deficient student will generally not know how to ask for what he wants until he doesn’t get it, the lazy rich student will know exactly what he wants. He is poised for a life of paying others and telling them what to do. Indeed, he is acquiring all the skills he needs to stay on top.
In the Nightclub by One-Half of One Dollar
A translation of 50 Cent’s hit single In Da Club into the Queen’s English.
When I arrive in my Mercedes-Benz
I find the nightclub is full of actors
Basically, a lot of different people want to have sex with me
And I mean A LOT
I fear change
Xzibit is preparing a marijuana cigarette
I am very good at interpretive dance
Gunshot injuries have had no effect on my gait
(via @dansays)
Finger skating
It is more amazing that people can do crazy things on skateboards or that some of those same crazy things can be done on tiny skateboards using your fingers?
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