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Cheese made with “gecko technology” orig. from Mar 30, 2012
Look how high this robot can jump! orig. from Mar 30, 2012
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Tom Schaar is the first person to land a 1080 on a skateboard ramp. He’s only 12.
It was on a MegaRamp, but still. (thx, meg)
If I hadn’t seen it on the official Emmentaler web site, I would have thought this video about cheese producers using geckos to produce better cheese was fake.
Pesky flies buzzing around our cows cause them stress. And this affects the quality of the milk. Which is why we quite simply put a gecko on our cows which gets rid of all these pesky flies — by eating them. The result is milk that is smoother, and cheese that is smoother too.
(thx, urs)
Update: sigh This is likely an early April Fools joke or whatever. INTERNET, I THOUGHT WE HAD AGREED THAT APRIL FOOLS IS STUPID AND FOR STUPID PEOPLE AND EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE TO CONFINE THE STUPIDITY TO ONE DAY, APRIL FIRST, AND NOT DO ANYTHING BEFOREHAND. God, I hate April Fools Day. Fuck you.
LG has begun mass production of flexible e-ink displays.
The new plastic display has a resolution of 1024x768 and is six inches across the diagonal, which is comparable to the Kindle and Nook. Because it’s made of plastic and not glass, though, the LG display is half the weight (14g) and 30% thinner (0.7mm) than a comparable, glass e-ink panel. Existing e-book readers need to be thick (and heavy) to protect the glass display, but LG is promising that its display is a lot more rugged. The press release says that the plastic display survives repeated 1.5-meter drop tests and break/scratch tests with a small hammer, and that it’s flexible up to 40 degrees from the mid point.
Kurt Vonnegut is just the bee’s knees, isn’t he? Here’s a letter he wrote in 1973 to the head of the school board at Drake High School in North Dakota after the school burned all of its copies of Slaughterhouse-Five in the school’s furnace.
If you were to bother to read my books, to behave as educated persons would, you would learn that they are not sexy, and do not argue in favor of wildness of any kind. They beg that people be kinder and more responsible than they often are. It is true that some of the characters speak coarsely. That is because people speak coarsely in real life. Especially soldiers and hardworking men speak coarsely, and even our most sheltered children know that. And we all know, too, that those words really don’t damage children much. They didn’t damage us when we were young. It was evil deeds and lying that hurt us.
If you’ve never seen the early seasons of The Simpsons, a good way to catch up might be to watch this:
Just a quick hack to experiment what happens if you watch a lot of The Simpsons episodes at the same time. It just took 10 lines of code and a few hours of processing.
About the video:
-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px
I also enjoyed this minimalist representation of the Simpson family in Lego:
(via @TrevorBaum)
I followed a link to this video from Twitter. “Oh, a small jumping robot,” I thought, “I bet it hops over a chair or something.” Not even close. Check this out:
Boston Dynamics is at it again…they did the Big Dog and cheetah robots as well. What are the odds that they change their name to Cyberdyne Systems in the next few years? (via @jcn)
Update: I did a quick calculation…if a 6-ft-tall human could jump as high as this robot relative to its height, they could jump 315 feet into the air, high enough to land on the roof of a 30-story building. (If you ignore the scaling issues, that is.)
A beautiful collection of railroad company logos that show the evolution of logo design from 1845 to 2000.
Lenny B. Robinson is a Maryland resident who periodically dresses up as Batman, gets into his Batmobile (a black Lamborghini adorned with Batman logos), and goes to visit sick children in hospitals.
On Monday, he pulled up in his black Lambo with yellow Batman symbols on the doors, the floor mats, the headrests — pretty much everywhere — and he was dressed in his heavy leather and neoprene uniform that he bought from a professional costume maker.
He carried two large bags of Batman books, rubber Batman symbol bracelets and various other toys up to the front desk, where the check-in attendant asked him his name.
“Batman,” he said.
Camera phones were snapping. A man in line said, “That’s the guy who got pulled over.” Someone asked where Robin was, and Batman replied, “Home studying for the SATs.”
The check-in attendant asked for identification. Batman said it was in his Batmobile. The check-in attendant, just doing her job, asked for his real name. “Lenny,” he announced. “B, as in Batman. Robinson.”
It took Batman approximately 20 minutes to reach the elevators. He stopped to hand out Batman toys to every child he saw, picking them up for pictures, asking them how they were feeling. LaTon Dicks snapped a photo of Batman standing behind her son DeLeon in his wheelchair. She’d recognized the Batmobile on her way in to the hospital. Like everyone else, she’d seen a TV report on him being stopped by the police and protested, “You can’t pull over Batman.”
More people like this please. (via @benhammersley)
A pair of recent info visualizations look as though they were painted by Vincent van Gogh. Wind Map shows the realtime flow of wind over the United States.
Perpetual Ocean is a NASA animation of ocean currents around the world.
Would be cool to see both of these rendered through Stamen’s watercolor filter.
Amazon announced recently that they bought a company named Kiva for $775 million. In cash. Kiva makes robots for fulfillment warehouses, of which Amazon has many. When I heard this news, I was all, robots are cool, but $775 million? But this short video on how the Kiva robots work made me a believer:
Also, pro-tip, it’s pronounced ro-butt. (via ★interesting)
A recent 45-minute documentary on Lionel Messi, which starts with his discovery in Argentina and runs through the end of last season.
It’s funny seeing Messi playing as a kid…the style is essentially the same, but in an even smaller package. (via @dens)
Born in a North Korean prison to parents in an arranged “reward marriage”, Shin In Geun grew up in the camp and then escaped when he was in his early 20s.
On summer nights, boys would sneak into a nearby orchard to eat unripe pears. When they were caught, the guards would beat them. The guards, though, did not care if Shin and his friends ate rats, frogs, snakes and insects. Eating rats was essential to survival. Their flesh could help prevent pellagra, which was rampant, the result of a lack of protein and niacin in their diet. Prisoners with the disease suffered skin lesions, diarrhoea and dementia. It was a frequent cause of death. Catching rats became a passion for Shin. He would meet his friends in the evening at his primary school, where there was a coal grill to roast them.
This grim tale is an excerpt from a book about the escape, Escape from Camp 14.
On his web site, Mike Daisey issues an apology for fabricating parts of the story he told on This American Life and elsewhere about the Chinese factories where Apple makes its products.
It made me reflect upon how lucky I have been to call the theater my home all these years, the only place I can imagine this kind of discourse happening. It made me grateful for the great privilege it has been to be able to call myself a storyteller and to have audiences come and listen to what I have to say, to extend their trust to me. I am sorry I was careless with that trust. For this, I would like to apologize to my audiences.
Twitter has patent for “pull to refresh” orig. from Mar 27, 2012
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Allan Benton makes ham, some of the most delicious ham you’ll ever taste. In a pair of documentaries, Benton talks about his approach to life, business, and ham. The first is short, just a couple of minutes, and offers a taste of Benton’s daily schedule:
And this one is a more straightforward documentary look at Benton and his philosophy of ham.
Benton was interviewed by Esquire in 2009:
It’s not the dollar that motivates me so much as the compliment.
and profiled by Gourmet in 2006, in which Benton takes a trip to some of the NYC restaurants using his products:
David Chang of Momofuku, the iconoclastic ramen and small plates bar, is a stalwart. He has been using Allan’s bacon and ham since January 2005. When Allan and Sharon arrive, Chang beams. He genuflects. He stands tall by the stove and dishes a soup of cockles in a ham broth. He whisks a ham-skin-scented dashi into a pan of yellow grits, then tops them with a poached egg, crescents of ruby shrimp, and a thatch of crisp chopped bacon. And as Allan and Sharon fold their napkins, Chang exits the galley kitchen and joins them at the counter.
Allan, who has the countenance and intellect of a presidentialera Jimmy Carter, ducks his head and grins. He snags an afterthought of bacon with his chopsticks and drags it through a puddle of yolk. “I had no idea what you were doing with my bacon and ham,” he says, his face twisting upward, the corners of his mouth gone vertical. “This is amazing, just amazing, especially for a purebred Tennessee hillbilly.”
I get the Benton’s ham every time I go to Ssam Bar. You can order hams and bacon from Benton’s web site, which, with its odd URL (bentonscountryhams2.com) and default page title (“Network Solutions E-Commerce Web Site - Home”), is just as delightfully old timey as the rotary telephone in Benton’s office.
Speaking of the Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote, animator Chuck Jones and his team were said to follow these simple rules when creating the cartoons:
The rules are made only slightly less interesting by their fiction; according to Wikipedia, long-time Jones collaborator Michael Maltese said he’d never heard of the rules.
A book written by Jerry Beck in 1994 called The 50 Greatest Cartoons: As Selected by 1,000 Animation Professionals does indeed contain a list of the 50 greatest cartoons as chosen by industry professionals. The list is filthy with Warner Bros cartoons, particularly by the recently aforementioned Chuck Jones (four of the top five are by Jones). I don’t know how many are available on YouTube, but I tracked down a couple to show my 4-year-old son, Ollie: Duck Amuck and Rabbit of Seville.
By the time we were finished with Rabbit of Seville, Ollie had literally peed his pants from laughing so hard. I think I’m gonna get the Looney Tunes collection on Blu-ray so we can watch more but I’m a bit afraid of what the hijinks of Wile E. Coyote and The Road Runner might do to my boy’s pants.
Loren Brichter invented the “pull to refresh” interface mechanism for Tweetie, a Twitter app he eventually sold to Twitter. Apparently he patented the idea sometime before the sale, so Twitter now owns the patent.
Paul Haddad of Tapbot says that Twitter won’t enforce the patent but, gosh, where have we heard that before?
Update: A reader pointed out that this is not a patent…it’s a patent application that hasn’t even been reviewed yet. But it’s clearly a novel invention and most likely will be accepted when reviewed. (thx, mike)
The group in charge of the High Line in NYC is considering a permanent installation for the park by Jeff Koons. It is called Train.
Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Love it, make it happen. The NY Times has more.
“We’ve had a crush on the ‘Train’ for a while now,” Mr. Hammond said in a phone interview on Monday. “To me, it looks very industrial and sculptural. The craftsmanship that went into these industrial engines is quite beautiful.”
The sculpture, to be constructed of steel and carbon fiber, would weigh several tons. It would also occasionally spin its wheels, blow a horn and emit steam.
In a statement, Mr. Koons said, “The power and the dynamic of the ‘Train’ represents the ephemeral energy that runs through the city every day.”
(via @sippey)
With their ability to move seamlessly through walls, rocks, lead shielding, and entire planets, neutrinos would seem like a great choice for a new method of wireless communication. Scientists at Fermilab have demonstrated sending messages via neutrino but the downside is that the slippery particles can also move seamlessly through detectors.
In the Fermilab experiment, the physicists fired a proton beam into a carbon target to produce a shower of particles called pions and kaons that quickly decay into neutrinos. For every pulse of 22.5 trillion protons, the physicists registered an average of 0.81 neutrino with the 170-ton MINERvA detector.
That translates into a data rate of 0.1 bits/second, or just slightly faster than America Online’s dialup service circa 1992. (Hey, hey, if you liked that one, perhaps you’ll also enjoy my impression of Dana Carvey doing George H.W. Bush.)
Nipples at the Met is a photographic collection of all the nipples on display in the permanent collection at the Met Museum in NYC.
(via @claytoncubitt)
Lionel Messi has scored 234 goals in his short career (he’s only 24), making him the top goal scorer in all competitions for FC Barcelona. Here are all of them.
What strikes me about this video, aside from the crappy quality, is that the type of goals Messi scores are not generally what you see from other top scorers. Think of the booming balls of Ronaldo for instance, which may break the sound barrier on their way into the back of the net. Many of Messi’s goals often don’t look like much. They’re chips and slow rollers and even the fast ones aren’t that fast. But what’s apparent in watching goal after goal of his is that what Messi lacks in pace, he more than makes up with quickness, placement, and timing. It’s a bit mesmerising…I can only imagine how it feels as an opposing keeper to watch the same thing happening right in front of you. (via devour)
ps. I also enjoyed reading this piece by Simon Kuper on Barcelona’s Secret to Soccer Success.
Barcelona start pressing (hunting for the ball) the instant they lose possession. That is the perfect time to press because the opposing player who has just won the ball is vulnerable. He has had to take his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception, and he has expended energy. That means he is unsighted, and probably tired. He usually needs two or three seconds to regain his vision of the field. So Barcelona try to dispossess him before he can give the ball to a better-placed teammate.
The VISTA telescope in Chile recently took a photo of the sky that contains over 200,000 galaxies. For reference, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image shows only about 10,000 galaxies (but sees further back in time, I think).
I’ve spent years studying all this, and it still sometimes gets to me: just how flipping BIG the Universe is! And this picture is still just a tiny piece of it: it’s 1.2 x 1.5 degrees in size, which means it’s only 0.004% of the sky! And it’s not even complete: more observations of this region are planned, allowing astronomers to see even deeper yet.
Here’s a full view of the image that looks sorta unimpressive:
You can download the original 17,000 x 11,000 pixel image here (250 Mb, yo) for the full effect. As a preview, this is several levels of zoom in…just a tiny part of the full image.
Bless me Father Sloan, for I have committed a radical act on the Internet. I have watched this slow motion video of ballet dancers four times and loved, yes, loved the display of precise power and grace contained therein.
And playing a remix of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place over the video? I think they made this just for me.
Many thanks to Aaron Cohen for holding down the fort here at kottke.org for the past week. You should check out the Mad Men recap he did for last night’s episode, complete with an illustration from Chris Piascik (prints and t-shirts available).
You can also find Aaron at the helm of 2012 Boston Bacon and Beer Festival…tickets go on sale soon.
Frank Bruni, who was the food critic at the NY Times for five years, was recently diagnosed with gout. Since his diagnosis, he’s had to cut back on much of his previous food and drink favorites.
You never really quite appreciate just what a cornucopia of food alternatives exists — just how many culinary directions you can set off in — until a few are cut off and you’re forced to re-route yourself. That’s a lesson that people with celiac disease and with diabetes have learned. It’s what vegetarians have long asserted. And it’s what gout is teaching me. In diet books, the word “substitution” comes across as some pathetic euphemism for “sacrifice” and “compromise,” a positive-spin noun born of negative circumstances. But substitution is indeed a plausible course, and not necessarily a punitive one. At breakfast, oatmeal thickened with a heaping tablespoon of peanut butter can provide the same wicked indulgence that pork sausage does. At dinnertime, chicken prepared with care and ingenuity can go a long way toward replacing lamb, and the right kind of omelet can be wholly satisfying.
Director James Cameron is now the record holder for deepest solo dive after his submarine, “Deepsea Challenger” made it to the bottom of the Mariana Trench a couple hours ago. The sponsors of the expedition are James Cameron, Rolex, and National Geographic making me think this will turn into a film someday. Another fact which makes it seem like I’m making this all up, which I’m not, is Paul Allen is live-Tweeting the entire thing.
I’ve been holding on to this really amazing interactive infographic of the Mariana Trench for a long time, and now is the perfect time to share it. The deepest part of the Trench is called Challenger Deep, a name Tolkien certainly would have created if he’d ever finished his pirate adventure.
4 things I’m interested in: The Roots, David Chang, fried chicken, and Twitter feuds between chefs and musicians, which is why I was so excited to see Questlove of the Roots and David Chang of Momofuku go back and forth last Wednesday. In the past, Questlove has criticized Momofuku’s fried chicken game, and now that Questo’s in the game himself, Chang feels a competition on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon is in order. The specifics and timing of the throwdown have not been defined, but one thing is clear, in a fried chicken battle between Questlove and David Chang there is at least one winner (wait for it): all of us.
In the email Jason sends to guest editors, one of the rules is, “Don’t embed any videos of ants trying to mate with their queen as their queen gets bit in the head by a spider.” I thought it was an oddly specific rule, but, you know. Today, however, when I came upon a video of ants trying to mate with their queen as their queen gets bit in the head by a spider I felt like maybe you’d want to see it. I’m not going to embed it, because that would be breaking the rules, but here’s the link because science. “A more macabre video from the insect kingdom would be hard to find”.
PS The rule about not posting pictures of your cat is new as of last night.
(via Mike Davidson)
Did you know there’s a place on Pac-Man where you can hide for a bit and the ghosts won’t touch you? I guess I haven’t been playing too much Pac-Man lately, but I’d never heard about this. Look, if you’ve heard about it, keep it to yourself, thank you very much. It’s Saturday night, why are you arguing with a blog post about Pac-Man? Lay off.
There are also patterns you can use on each level to easily achieve victory (check out that link for an example of Geocities chic).
(via Interesting)
Next month’s Vanity Fair has a Saturday worthy longread, an oral history of The Sopranos. It’s been about 5 years since the show ended, and for the most part, the major figures have not had much to say about it. There’s nothing groundbreaking, but it’s good if you were a fan.
JAMES GANDOLFINI: I’m still in love with Edie. And, of course, I love my wife, but I’m in love with Edie. I don’t know if I’m in love with Carmela or Edie or both. I’m in love with her.
EDIE FALCO: It was weird to sit down at a table read with the actresses playing Tony’s girlfriends. Occasionally I would get a sharp twinge at the back of my neck, because, especially if I’m tired, the emotional lines would bleed into each other and I’d have to kind of keep my bearings and remember, No, no, no, this is your job, and at home you have your life. Even years later, I remember when I saw Jim in God of Carnage on Broadway, and he was Marcia Gay Harden’s husband, and I had this “How come I have to be O.K. with this?” kind of feeling.
On the response to the show.
TERENCE WINTER (writer, executive producer): One F.B.I. agent told us early on that on Monday morning they would get to the F.B.I. office and all the agents would talk about The Sopranos. Then they would listen to the wiretaps from that weekend, and it was all Mob guys talking about The Sopranos, having the same conversation about the show, but always from the flip side. We would hear back that real wiseguys used to think that we had somebody on the inside. They couldn’t believe how accurate the show was.
This is James, and he goes bonkers for olives. I had grand plans to pollute Kottke.org with a Friday night cat fact post about how ‘olives have similar properties to catnip, and here’s the science behind those properties’. Due to a dearth of accomplished cat scientists, however, I wasn’t able to find any scientific basis for why some cats respond so strongly to olives. I mean, I looked at Google AND Bing, and this was the closest I got to what I was looking for. It begs the question*, given the overwhelming popularity of cats on the Internet, why are there not more experienced cat scientists producing well-trafficked cat science blogs? Hopefully this will change soon. In the meantime, at least you got a peek at James.
*One of my goals for this week was to misuse the phrase ‘begs the question’. Nailed it.
Robert Howsare’s Drawing Apparatus attaches a Sharpie to records spinning on a record player at different revolutions. It’s a good thing this video is only 1 minute 45 seconds, because I could watch it for at least 17 minutes and 6 seconds, and really who has the time?
Via Stellar
Phil Taylor is a 335 pound defensive tackle for the Cleveland Browns. He is also an expert airplane troll. Seriously, some of you out there, and you know who you are, could learn a thing or two.
Click through to see the rest of the Tweets and Phil’s row mate looking miserable.
(Thanks, Gareth)
Oh, have plans this weekend? Cancel them. There are neurons to build and Axon will help you build them. I think zombies might like this game, too, because it’s all about brainzzz.
(via Noah Gray)
Season 5 of Mad Men starts on Sunday. It’s been on hiatus for 12 years, and it might be hard to remember season 4 without some of the Mad Men related info linked below. With such a long break, there’s been quite a bit of Mad Men news floating around. In order to cut it down a little, most of this stuff is from the last week or so. Don’t try to eat it all in one sitting you’ll get a stomach ache and have to sleep off your hangover on your office couch.
-Here’s where we left off in Season 4.
-Everything Don Draper Said in Season 4.
-Although, Matthew Weiner has asked reviewers with advanced copies of Sunday’s premier not to discuss key details in their previews, such as the year this season takes place, Weiner is changing a song featured in the episode because it wasn’t released until 6 months after the episode takes place. ‘Look of Love’ was released at the beginning of 1967 placing the episode in, or around, the summer of 1966. This is about a year after Season 4 ended. Maybe this is subterfuge?
-George Lois is still mad.
-Newsweek recently had an issue celebrating the return of Mad Men where the ads were all retro. Here are all those ads.
-The psychotherapist who consulted on Mad Men’s development talks about why the characters feel so real.
-Some (spoiler free) previews of what to expect on Sunday.
Imagine if Mad Men was a Nintendo game…
Yes.
And then — it was mile 23 or 24 I think — my forearms started cramping. I didn’t even think I was using forearms. And then the crusty dried salt caking onto my face somehow got under my contacts. And my thighs had started chafing so I had to curl my shorts up inside themselves. So, in a few miles, I had gone from a runner, to a powerwalker, to this squinting blind torture victim.
Aziz Ansari has released his latest comedy special as a $5 direct download from his website. I love this model. Love it. Love it. The $5 price point is so cheap. You can’t get anything for $5 anymore. How do you suppose this fits into the constant GIVEMEMYGAMEOFTHRONESSOIDONTHAVETOPIRATEIT discussion? A discussion which boils down mostly to, IDONTLIKEHOWMUCHITCOSTS. (I didn’t realize how much of a zealot I was about this until I was typing in call caps.)
Anyway, good on Aziz for making his special so affordable. Aziz and Louis CK are the Fugazi of comedians.
In support of the release, Ansari was on Reddit for an IAmA.
Personally, I bought the special because a Die Hard reboot with Aziz in the lead would mean a lot to me.
GQ: So you’re not planning on releasing a Fast and the Furious-type action movie like this?
Aziz Ansari: That would be great. It would be great if this was so successful that I could make the money to buy the rights to Die Hard and then reboot it with me in the lead role. That would be tremendous. If enough people buy this, maybe we can do that next.
Here’s the preview of the special, which you might want to watch with headphones if you’re at work.
I can’t remember where I found these, or even how long they’ve been in my tab attic, but these tourism videos for Seoul featuring an expert boomeranger (boomerangist?) and an expert balancer are fantastic web fodder.
I don’t want to get into a discussion about whether Apple should be rejecting apps based on morality or what not, but there’s no debating the fact this app created by Luciano Foglia features the filthiest behavior any of these geometric shapes have ever been involved in. I watched it and then I needed a shower. And now I’m uncomfortable around the kitchen floor tiles.
OK, Internet, shut it down. We’ve had enough for the day. I recognize this news will be relevant and interesting to only a small percent of the Kottke population, but to those people, it is extremely and earthshatteringly relevant. Personally, my ears started ringing while reading the headline. Michael K Williams, best known for his role as Omar on The Wire, will play Ol’ Dirty Bastard in an upcoming movie.
Titled Dirty White Boy, the film focuses on the offbeat friendship between the Wu-Tang Clan co-founder and Jarred Weisfeld, a 22-year-old VH1 production assistant who through a lot of hustle (and the occasional lie) talked his way into becoming the rapper’s manager when Jones was serving a three-year stint in prison in the early 2000s.
(via @mikenizza)
Scientists recently reconstructed the first model of the prehistoric Kairuku penguin, a species of penguin discovered 30 years ago, but not put back together until now. The Kairuku was over 5 feet tall, had slender hands, and lived for over 25 million years. To contrast, the Emperor penguin, the biggest of the penguin species, is usually around three and a half feet tall.
On a personal note, I think people should fake fear these guys as much as they fake fear clowns. A 5 foot penguin? Come on.
(via anildash)
Murray Lender, the man behind the company credited with introducing most Americans to bagels has passed away. Lender, born in 1930, helped turn his father’s Connecticut bakery into a national bagel powerhouse, turning out 2.75 million Lender’s Bagels a day, while never forgetting his roots. A Connecticut friend mentioned Lender’s used to drop off green bagels for school children on St Patrick’s Day.
For you bagel purists, Murray told the AP in 1986, “Taste is a very subjective matter. It’s clear and simple: We make 2 3/4 million bagels a day. Obviously an awful lot of people are happy with it.” Coincidentally, Consumer Reports’ May issue features a bagel breakdown which honors Lender’s Bagels as one of the best. This has not gone over well in New York.
Regardless of your feelings on Lender’s Bagels, we probably wouldn’t even be having the bagel argument without Murray Lender.
(via djacobs)
Robin Sloan has a new app, Fish: a tap essay, discussing the difference between liking something on the Internet and loving something on the Internet. It’s thoughtful and well done. And it’s something you ought to check out if you spend a lot of time on sites like this one. One way or another, you’ll have an opinion, the essay demands it, and Internet that makes you think is the best kind.
In the essay, Robin mentions the difference for him between what he likes and what he loves is if he keeps going back to it. Writing up this post, the last sentence of the first paragraph specifically, I think I might have realized for the first time that for me, the difference between a Tweet or post that I like or fave or star, or whatever, and one I love is if it makes me think. I might not ever visit that URL again, but I’ll think about it later. Again and again, maybe. I love that. Since I’m simple, I sometimes also love, vs like, remarkable animal videos.
For her project My Pie Town, Debbie Grossman modified Depression-era photos to depict all-female families.
Joan Myers’ biography of Doris Caudill (Doris is in many of the pictures), Pie Town Woman, describes her husband, Faro, as less than helpful on the homestead. I had downloaded a portrait of Doris and Faro from the Library of Congress website, and because it was so high-resolution, it occurred to me that I had enough pixels to work with that I could alter the image. I removed Faro, and I loved the opportunity to look at Doris on her own and imagine a different life for her. I thought it would be fun to remake the whole town in a way that reflected my own family, and I imagined a Pie Town filled with women.
The main reason for doing so was to give us the unusual experience of getting to see a contemporary idea of family (female married couples as parents, for example) as if it were historical. But I am also very interested in using Photoshop to create imaginary or impossible images-this is something I have done in other work as well.
(via @riondotnu)
Chris sent me this crazy technical snowboard video of John Lyke riding the rail at Sugarbush. I like it. I like that it says it’s inspired by the film Drive. More snowboard videos of awesome tricks should be inspired by the film Drive.
Is there a definitive explanation as to why skate/BMX/snowboarding videos usually start with a couple scenes of someone falling down? I have a theory, but curious what you think. Let me know.
Though no launch date is mentioned, LaBullipedia is intended to be a “Wikipedia of high cooking with free access to all of its content”. Adrià has talked about this idea before, but brought it up again recently during a speech at the just launched Cancun-Riviera Maya Wine & Food Festival.
One might find a recipe for asparagus soup. But not only will this recipe grace the site but recipes for soup made from white asparagus. Then a description of what asparagus is, the types of asparagus, the history of asparagus, other ways to cook with asparagus — pretty much anything you could ever want to know about this vegetable will be on the site. Adrià didn’t, however, mention when LaBullipedia will launch.
Well, now, this is gorgeous. Stamen Design overlaid watercolor textures on OpenStreetMap map tiles to show you what it would look like if your favorite watercolorist designed Google Maps.
It’s fun to scroll and scroll. (via @tomcoates)
And since we all could stand to look at more pretty things, watch this video of what different landscapes would look like if Earth had Saturn’s rings. (via @ianmurren)
The Mimic Octopus is a species of octopus invented, discovered in 1998 off the coast of Sulawesi. Despite the video evidence to the contrary, I assume this cephalopod to be a hoax or some kind of viral marketing campaign. The Mimic Octopus protects itself from predators by mimicking other water creatures like poison sole and sea snakes. Incidentally, Poison Sole is the name of the fake death metal band I just started in my head with some of America’s finest bloggers.
The Mimic Octopus has been documented mimicking 15 different species, and think about all the other species he mimics when we’re not looking. Watch this video and giggle at around 1:20 when the Mimic Octopus runs across the ocean floor “looking something like a furry turkey with human legs”.
(Thanks, Geoffrey)
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