Updates on previous entries for Feb 26, 2011*
Comings and goings at the NY Times orig. from Feb 25, 2011
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
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Entries for February 2011
The Kindle wants to be free
Kevin Kelly forecasts that Amazon will soon be handing out free Kindles…perhaps to Amazon Prime members.
In October 2009 John Walkenbach noticed that the price of the Kindle was falling at a consistent rate, lowering almost on a schedule. By June 2010, the rate was so unwavering that he could easily forecast the date at which the Kindle would be free: November 2011.
Since then I’ve mentioned this forecast to all kinds of folks. In August, 2010 I had the chance to point it out to Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon. He merely smiled and said, “Oh, you noticed that!” And then smiled again.
The Kindle has never been knock-it-out-of-the-park great…it looks like Amazon’s strategy is not to build a great e-reader but to build a pretty good free e-reader.
Comings and goings at the NY Times
The Grey Lady is up to something…many things and people are on the move over there, particularly with regard to the magazine.
The On Language column originated by William Safire has been cancelled.
Christoph Niemann’s excellent Abstract City blog is closing down and the feature will move to the New York Times Magazine.
This is the last The Medium column by Virginia Heffernan.
After 12 years, Randy Cohen will no longer write The Ethicist column.
Deborah Solomon won’t be doing those irritating interviews anymore.
Update: A couple I missed: Rob Walker’s Consumed and Mark Bittman’s The Minimalist are both ending. (thx, all)
Debating The Hangover
The timeline of events goes like this:
Last night, I posted the trailer for the sequel to The Hangover.
This morning, my friend David posts the following on Twitter:
Poleaxed by indication that pop culture aesthete @jkottke might actually like Hangover, the execrable frat boy flick
To which I replied a few hours later:
@daveg Are you kidding? That movie is hilarious.
Anil suggested a debate:
@jkottke @daveg I will pay you guys for an Oxford debate about the Hangover’s merits, or lack thereof.
And Michael Sippey went there and posted a video of an animated David and an animated me having a debate about The Hangover:
I thought you were a pop culture aesthete.
No, I’m from the Midwest.
You live in Manhattan.
But I grew up eating hot dogs.
But you write about expensive conceptual restaurants and post pictures of contemporary art like that thing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where the woman sat at the table all summer.
That’s a pretty accurate five-line bio of me.
Dazzle camouflage for faces
Allied ships in WWI and WWII were painted with Dazzle camouflage schemes in order to disguise the shape, speed, and orientation of the ships. CV Dazzle uses the same principle, but disguising faces from computerized facial recognition.
Bonus: you get to look like Lady Gaga.
The lonely whale
A baleen whale that’s been tracked by the Navy since 1992 can’t attract a mate because his singing voice is too high.
To make matters worse, the high-pitched whale “does not follow the known migration route of any extant baleen whale species.” The result, according to Dr. Kate Stafford, a researcher at the National Marine Mammal Laboratory in Seattle, is that the lonely whale keeps “saying ‘Hey, I’m out here,’” but “nobody is phoning home.”
Perfect poached eggs with a spoon
Michael Ruhlman uses a spoon of his own design for making perfect poached eggs.
In On Food and Cooking, Harold McGee notes that there is a liquidy part of the egg white and a viscous one. If you let the liquidy part drain, before poaching, you will have a beautiful poached egg. (People tell you to put vinegar or lemon juice in poaching water — this does nothing in my experience.) The problem was, my perforated spoons were so shallow the egg always wanted to jump out. No longer. The deep bowl of The Badass Perf spoon easily contains even a jumbo egg, as well as heaps of beans, vegetables, and pasta.
Human mass production
A tweet I liked:
The fundamental moral tragedy of industrial modernity: ‘Men have been mistaken for machines.’
The reference is from here.
Insane boat race
This is a jetsprint boat race; I’ve never seen a boat turn so sharply at such a fast speed.
Collaborative tourist snaps
For her Photo Opportunities project, Corrine Vionnet finds tourist photos of famous landmarks online and layers them to make images like this:
(thx, reed)
Queen of All Me Media
Dooce gets the NY Times Magazine treatment this weekend. More than anything, reading it made me nostalgic for a certain short period of time where people could write personal blogs intended to be read by more than just family and a few friends without worrying about money or a “personal brand”. God, those were the (clearly unsustainable) days…here’s the new reality:
Amy Oztan, who blogs at SelfishMom.com, is particularly transparent when it comes to her sponsors. She has a lot of them — companies who pay her, in money or in product, to advertise on her site or to mention them. Oztan has an entire section explaining how she makes her money, including an extensive index of tabs she uses to alert readers to the economics of everything she writes. It starts with Level 1 — “The product or service mentioned was provided to Amy free of charge (or at a considerable discount not available to the public)” — and goes up to Level 13: “This is a sponsored post. Amy was compensated to write this post. While Amy’s opinions in the post are authentic, talking points may have been suggested by the sponsor.” In between these extremes are compensation for inserting links to a certain Web site, attending an event or administering a product giveaway. Which pretty much explains why, between daily witticisms, she so regularly describes how she offered Kleenex to the woman next to her at a conference or placed her HTC HD7 Windows phone on the tray table next to her when she lucked into an empty row on her last plane trip.
How the other half of 0.1% lives
These are the people who pay full price for the clothes that appear on the runways of Paris, NY, Milan, etc.
Christine Chiu wears most items only once. The 28-year-old, who is married to the founder of Beverly Hills Plastic Surgery, goes to events every night of the week-often making multiple wardrobe changes in a single night.
“If you’re going to a gala for some kind of disease and then you go to a hip art event, you can’t wear the same thing,” Ms. Chiu says.
(via mr)
Cindy Sherman retrospective coming to MoMA
But we’ve got to wait a whole year…the exhibition opens on Feb 26, 2012.
The MoMA retrospective will be thematic. There will be rooms devoted to Ms. Sherman’s explorations of subjects like the grotesque, with images of mutilated bodies and abject landscapes, as well as a room with a dozen centerfolds, a takeoff of men’s magazines, in which she depicts herself in guises ranging from a sultry seductress to a vulnerable victim. There will also be a room that shows her work critiquing the fashion industry and stereotypical depictions of women.
Mississippi River system as subway map
A map of the Mississippi River and all its tributaries drawn in the style of Harry Beck’s London Underground map.
Prints are available. (via strange maps)
Movie Sounds Guy
A fascinating look at how a Foley artist makes all of the sounds that find their way into Hollywood films.
(thx, deron)
Brigadier Alistair Gordon Lethbridge-Stewart
Nicholas Courtney, who played the Brigadier on Doctor Who, died yesterday aged 81.
Ripped from the fake headlines
An episode of CSI:NY “borrowed” quite a few elements from a short story written by Teddy Wayne and they basically won’t admit that they did so. Whenever stuff like this happens, I think about that interview where Vanilla Ice tried to argue that the bassline from Under Pressure and Ice Ice Baby were totally different.
100-day repetitive projects
For the past five years, Michael Bierut has taught a class for aspiring designers where students have to record the results of “a design operation that [they] are capable of repeating every day” for 100 straight days. Here are some of the results.
Zak Klauck: “Over the course of 100 days, I made a poster each day in one minute. The posters were based on one word or short phrase collected from 100 different people. Anyone and everyone was invited to contribute.” The perfect exercise for a graphic designer.
Radiohead, bigger than The Beatles?
Tim Carmody gives props to Radiohead for their rare combination of longevity and relevance.
Still, I think music fans and cultural observers need to grapple with this a little: Radiohead’s first album, Pablo Honey, came out 18 years ago. Here’s another way to think about it: when that album came out, I was 13; now I’m 31. And from at least The Bends to the present, they’ve commanded the attention of the musical press and the rock audience as one of the top ten — or higher — bands at any given moment. You might have loved Radiohead, you might have been bored by them, you might have wished they’d gone back to an earlier style you liked better, but you always had to pay attention to them, and know where you stood. For 18 years. That’s an astonishing achievement.
As Anil has his hands busy with a new baby, I’ll wade in here and point out that Tim’s examples don’t include any pop, rap, R&B, or hip hop. Jay-Z hasn’t been around as long as Radiohead, but he’s getting there. The Beastie Boys had at least 15 years. Madonna and Michael Jackson each had 20 culturally relevant years, more or less. I’m probably forgetting a few, but yeah, that’s still not a long list.
A message in an NFL player’s suicide
When former NFL player Dave Duerson shot and killed himself the other day, he aimed for his chest and not his head because he wanted his brain to be in one piece and therefore available for study for signs of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, which may have led to Duerson’s suicide in the first place.
Players who began their careers knowing the likely costs to their knees and shoulders are only now learning about the cognitive risks, too. After years of denying or discrediting evidence of football’s impact on the brain — from C.T.E. in deceased players to an increasing number of retirees found to have dementia or other memory-related disease — the N.F.L. has spent the last year addressing the issue, mostly through changes in concussion management and playing rules.
Duerson sent text messages to his family before he shot himself specifically requesting that his brain be examined for damage, two people aware of the messages said. Another person close to Duerson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Duerson had commented to him in recent months that he might have C.T.E., an incurable disease linked to depression, impaired impulse control and cognitive decline.
There’s nothing good about that story at all.
Free streaming movies for Amazon Prime members
Whoa, Amazon just kicked Netflix and Apple in the nuts. Or poked them in the eye at least. Amazon Prime members can now stream about 5000 movies and TV shows for free. There aren’t a lot of new releases, but there’s some good stuff in there.
Modern art swimsuit issue
Jealous of all the attention garnered by Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes decided to compile his own swimsuit publication. Here’s a sample from a Mr. P. Picasso:
Siamese Dream cover girl now in the band
This is my favorite bit of news today: one of the little girls (the one on the left) on the Siamese Dream album cover is now actually the bass player for the Smashing Pumpkins.
The source for this is Billy Corgan on Twitter:
Just found out the weirdest news: our bass player Nicole (@xocoleyf) just admitted she is one of the girls on the cover of Siamese Dream. She said she didn’t want us to know because she thought maybe we wouldn’t let her be in the band.
Next you’re going to tell me that the Nirvana baby has joined up with Shepard Fairey…no wait, that happened too! (via @kathrynyu)
This American Life discovers Coke secret formula
Well, sorta kinda maybe almost not really discovered it. But the story is still well worth a listen…I’ve never heard Ira Glass quite so on-the-edge-of-his-seat giddy.
The formula for Coca-Cola is one of the most jealously guarded trade secrets in the world. So we were surprised to come across a 1979 newspaper article with what looked like the original recipe for Coke. Talking to historian Mark Pendergrast, author of For God, Country and Coca-Cola, we were even more surprised when we found reasons to believe the recipe is real.
If you’d like to mix up your own batch of Coca-Cola, here’s the original recipe and instructions.
Anna Wintour rumors
From The Hairpin, which may be even better than its big brother (shh, don’t tell Choire or Balk), an illustrated look at rumors they’ve heard about Vogue editor Anna Wintour.
Lovely illustrations by Lisa Hanawalt.
How to write a Twitter bio
Alex Blagg, social media 2.0 ideator, shares 15 top tips for crafting the perfect Twitter bio.
5. If you go out to bars like every night of the week, you’re not alcoholic. You’re a Foursquare Ambassador.
6. You can add “-ista” to the end of literally any word to make yourself sound approximately 47 times more stylish and savvy. (ex. Digitalista or Barista or Unemployista)
El Bulli documentary
At MoMA on Friday and Saturday: screenings of a German documentary on Ferran Adrià’s El Bulli.
For six months of the year, heralded chef Ferran Adrià and his team of experts concoct new dishes for the 30 course menu of the world famous El Bulli Restaurant. Here we watch their behind-the-scenes process, an artistic laboratory of tasting, smelling, designing and carefully recording each new idea, then selecting their top choices.
The evolution of lines
Someone draws a straight line. The next person’s task is to trace that line as precisely as possible. Repeat 500 times. The lines get really messy surprisingly fast:
As David said, this is a nice demonstration of evolution.
Spy magazine on Google Books
Google has put every issue of the influential Spy magazine up on Google Books to read for free. (via kbandersen)
Last night, a robot DJ saved my life
…or rather, it recognized my face, looked up what music I liked on Facebook and Hunch, and played it for me. Meet AutomaticDJ:
Adobe Lightroom on sale
Today only, Amazon has Adobe Lightroom on sale for $189, 37% off the regular $300 price. I’m an Aperture user myself, but I’ve heard from many that Lightroom is superior.
8-bit Safari browser
Pixelfari is an 8-bit version of Safari that renders everything in pixely fonts and graphics. Here’s what kottke.org looks like using Pixelfari:
Real designers sell their work
Well worth a listen: Dan Benjamin interviews Mike Monteiro on The Pipeline podcast about his design work and Twitter infamy. The last 10 minutes or so, where Mike calls out designers who don’t talk to clients, is gold. One of the reasons I got out of design is that I was never very good at that part of the job and as Mike says, you have to be able to not only accept but embrace selling your designs to truly succeed.
What’s Next after Alinea?
The NY Times has a preview of Grant Achatz’s and Nick Kokonas’s next restaurant Next. [Insert elaborate Who’s On First routine with a nice mise en place pun here.]
The two of them — the spare, driven artist and the comfortable, fluid patron — evoke a modern Michelangelo and Medici, bonded by mutual trust and now locked into a very public artistic endeavor. With Next, Mr. Achatz is operating at a level of creative and financial freedom enjoyed by very few artists and only a handful of chefs in history.
And this line got me more excited than I should admit:
A menu might be designed around a single day — say, the Napa Valley on Oct. 28, 1996, the day Mr. Achatz started work at the French Laundry, where he remained until 2001.
The slideshow has some photos of the food.
The Celtic Paper Tiger
Michael Lewis continues his tour of economic disasters — he wrote about Greece and Iceland for Vanity Fair and wrote an entire book on the US subprime mess — with a piece on Ireland and the country’s spectacular rise in becoming Europe’s mightiest economic engine and even steeper fall to third-world economic mess.
Even in an era when capitalists went out of their way to destroy capitalism, the Irish bankers set some kind of record for destruction. Theo Phanos, a London hedge-fund manager with interests in Ireland, says that “Anglo Irish was probably the world’s worst bank. Even worse than the Icelandic banks.”
Ireland’s financial disaster shared some things with Iceland’s. It was created by the sort of men who ignore their wives’ suggestions that maybe they should stop and ask for directions, for instance. But while Icelandic males used foreign money to conquer foreign places — trophy companies in Britain, chunks of Scandinavia — the Irish male used foreign money to conquer Ireland. Left alone in a dark room with a pile of money, the Irish decided what they really wanted to do with it was to buy Ireland. From one another. An Irish economist named Morgan Kelly, whose estimates of Irish bank losses have been the most prescient, made a back-of-the-envelope calculation that puts the losses of all Irish banks at roughly 106 billion euros. (Think $10 trillion.) At the rate money currently flows into the Irish treasury, Irish bank losses alone would absorb every penny of Irish taxes for at least the next three years.
In recognition of the spectacular losses, the entire Irish economy has almost dutifully collapsed. When you fly into Dublin you are traveling, for the first time in 15 years, against the traffic. The Irish are once again leaving Ireland, along with hordes of migrant workers. In late 2006, the unemployment rate stood at a bit more than 4 percent; now it’s 14 percent and climbing toward rates not experienced since the mid-1980s. Just a few years ago, Ireland was able to borrow money more cheaply than Germany; now, if it can borrow at all, it will be charged interest rates nearly 6 percent higher than Germany, another echo of a distant past. The Irish budget deficit — which three years ago was a surplus — is now 32 percent of its G.D.P., the highest by far in the history of the Eurozone. One credit-analysis firm has judged Ireland the third-most-likely country to default. Not quite as risky for the global investor as Venezuela, but riskier than Iraq. Distinctly Third World, in any case.
Beatles mockumentary from the year 3126
A short documentary report from a thousand years into the future about The Beatles.
First-hand records are certainly scarce. There’s a lot we don’t know about The Beatles, but we do know that these four young men — John Lennon, Paul MacKenzie, Greg Hutchinson, and Scottie Pippen — were some of the finest musicians that ever existed. The Beatles rose to prominence when they travelled from their native Linverton to America to perform at Ed Sullivan’s annual Woodstock festival.
The Middle Way of social media
From Tricycle, a magazine about Buddhism, here are ten mindful ways to use social media.
9. Practice letting go. It may feel unkind to disregard certain updates or tweets, but we need downtime to be kind to ourselves. Give yourself permission to let yesterday’s stream go. This way you won’t need to “catch up” on updates that have passed but instead can be part of today’s conversation.
Nice SEO-friendly listicle headline there! (thx, zg)
Expiring Netflix Watch Instantly alerts
queuenoodle is a Twitter account that will tell you when movies expire from Netflix Watch Instantly so you can, uh, watch them. Brought you by Twitter’s media pastamaker, Robin Sloan.
Trend: multiple mobile phone numbers
People around the world are starting to use two or more mobile phone numbers on a regular basis for a variety of reasons (and using a variety of techniques, including special 2-in-1 SIM cards).
Another motivation to have more than one number is for the user to control how one is contacted and contactable. Naturally users typically have a strategy on handing out the right number to the right person for future contactability. Our research participants most commonly report separating private and business contacts by having separate numbers. Being able to switch one number completely offline is a way of switching the mental mode, such as “I am turning my work phone off as I am not working anymore”. Small business owners and those who deal with a large number of people can identify the type of contacts easily by differentiating which phone number they use. One Chinese electronic shop owner gave out one of his mobile phone number for his best customers, ensuring that he is always reachable for them. The ease of having another mobile phone number also provides the exclusive communication channel for some, like those in early or secret relationships.
Part two of the piece is here. (via @antimega)
Chocolate face
Watch as a woman gets chocolate sauce poured all over her face for almost ten minutes.
I don’t know what to think of this one: mesmerizing? yucky? erotic? hunger-inducing? I have a hungry tingling disgust going on here…
Behind the scenes at Pixar
The New York Times gets a rare behind the scenes look at Pixar.
(via devour)
Ronaldo retires
Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, more commonly known as Ronaldo, retired from soccer today as one of the most decorated players ever: he won two Ballon d’Ors, three FIFA player of the year awards, was on two World Cup-winning Brazilian teams, and scored the most goals in World Cup history. The video is a bit fuzzy, but here are ten of Ronaldo’s greatest goals:
That backheel in #8 is just otherworldly, as is the spin move in #5. See also Ronaldo’s skills.
Evolving a car
BoxCar 2D is a fun little toy: it uses genetic algorithms to evolve little cars that can complete obstacle courses (like the ones you’d find on Cyclomaniacs). If you play this for more than a minute or two, you’ll be at it for 30 minutes, easy. (via moleitau)
LCD Soundsystem ticket debacle
So, LCD Soundsystem is retiring and to see off their fans, they decided to perform one last show at Madison Square Garden. Except that they didn’t think they’d sell the place out and didn’t pay too much attention to how the tickets were being sold. When the tickets went on sale last week, they sold out immediately. Many fans didn’t get tickets, the band’s family and friends didn’t get tickets, and even some of the band didn’t get tickets. Scalpers bought thousands upon thousands of tickets and the band is hopping mad. So they’re adding four more NYC shows right before the MSG gig to give their fans a chance to see them and to screw the scalpers by increasing the supply (and therefore lowering demand and prices).
oh-and a small thing to scalpers: “it’s legal” is what people say when they don’t have ethics. the law is there to set the limit of what is punishable (aka where the state needs to intervene) but we are supposed to have ethics, and that should be the primary guiding force in our actions, you fucking fuck.
It would be fun if all those scalpers got stuck with thousands of unsellable MSG tickets.
Who is Arcade Fire?
Arcade Fire won album of the year for The Suburbs at the Grammys last night and a lot of people don’t even know what an Arcade Fire is. Including Rosie O’Donnell.
(via @waferbaby)
Out of nowhere, a new Radiohead album!!
At least out of nowhere for me…I had no idea this album was coming. Anyway, it’s called The King of Limbs and the digital copy is out on Feb 19th. Huzzah!
Down with foodies
B.R. Myers’ rant about foodies in The Atlantic is a bit too over-the-top and over-generalized for my taste, but there is truth to be found in his arguments.
The moral logic in Pollan’s hugely successful book now informs all food writing: the refined palate rejects the taste of factory-farmed meat, of the corn-syrupy junk food that sickens the poor, of frozen fruits and vegetables transported wastefully across oceans-from which it follows that to serve one’s palate is to do right by small farmers, factory-abused cows, Earth itself. This affectation of piety does not keep foodies from vaunting their penchant for obscenely priced meals, for gorging themselves, even for dining on endangered animals-but only rarely is public attention drawn to the contradiction. This has much to do with the fact that the nation’s media tend to leave the national food discourse to the foodies in their ranks. To people like Pollan himself. And Severson, his very like-minded colleague at The New York Times. Is any other subculture reported on so exclusively by its own members? Or with a frequency and an extensiveness that bear so little relation to its size?
The first Gizmodo design
While we’re being all nostalgic, here’s what Gizmodo looked like when it launched:
The site, which launched several months before Gawker, was designed & developed by Ben and Mena Trott with the couple’s relatively new blogging software, Movable Type.
Don’t miss new music releases
Nomis is an iOS app that looks at the artists in your iPhone or iPod’s music library and shows you their latest and upcoming releases. Showed me a couple things I was unaware of: the new Cut Copy and an Underworld album from September that I’d missed. The only bummer is that it’s kind of absurdly slow in looking through your library. (thx, brandon)
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