Updates on previous entries for Nov 27, 2013*
Brits label American states poorly orig. from Nov 27, 2013
* 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 November 2013
The changing definition of the American family
Leo Tolstoy probably wasn’t thinking of an American Thanksgiving when he opened Anna Karenina with this line: “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” These days, all families — happy or not — are less alike than ever. In the NYT, Natalie Angier takes a look at the changing definition of family:
Families are more ethnically, racially, religiously and stylistically diverse than half a generation ago — than even half a year ago. In increasing numbers, blacks marry whites, atheists marry Baptists, men marry men and women women, Democrats marry Republicans and start talk shows.
And they’re all coming over to your house for Thanksgiving, which brings us to another quote — this one from Oscar Wilde: “After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.”
The birth of the iPhone
On Medium, an excerpt of Leander Kahney’s book on Jony Ive about how the iPhone came to be developed at Apple.
Excited by Kerr’s explanation of what a sophisticated touch interface could do, the team members started to brainstorm the kinds of hardware they might build with it.
The most obvious idea was a touchscreen Mac. Instead of a keyboard and mouse, users could tap on the screen of the computer to control it. One of the designers suggested a touchscreen controller that functioned as an alternate to a keyboard and mouse, a sort of virtual keyboard with soft keys.
As Satzger remembered, “We asked, How do we take a tablet, which has been around for a while, and do something more with it? Touch is one thing, but multitouch was new. You could swipe to turn a page, as opposed to finding a button on the screen that would allow you turn the page. Instead of trying to find a button to make operations, we could turn a page just like a newspaper.”
Jony in particular had always had a deep appreciation for the tactile nature of computing; he had put handles on several of his early machines specifically to encourage touching. But here was an opportunity to make the ultimate tactile device. No more keyboard, mouse, pen, or even a click wheel-the user would touch the actual interface with his or her fingers. What could be more intimate?
Brits label American states poorly
Buzzfeed asked some Brits to label states on a US map. They didn’t do so well:
My favorite is “Further South Dakota”. In fairness, most US citizens would be hard pressed to name any of the counties of England, much less place them on a map.
Update: See how Americans fared on placing European countries. (Not well.)
Hungry helicopter eats delicious soldiers
Scheming boxes and this hungry helicopter are neck and neck for the greatest example of pareidolia (aka faces in things).
On Google’s self-driving car
Burkhard Bilger got inside the secretive Google X lab and reports back on the search giant’s effort to build a self-driving car.
The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident-about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.
And yet, for each of its failings, the car has a corresponding strength. It never gets drowsy or distracted, never wonders who has the right-of-way. It knows every turn, tree, and streetlight ahead in precise, three-dimensional detail. Dolgov was riding through a wooded area one night when the car suddenly slowed to a crawl. “I was thinking, What the hell? It must be a bug,” he told me. “Then we noticed the deer walking along the shoulder.” The car, unlike its riders, could see in the dark. Within a year, Thrun added, it should be safe for a hundred thousand miles.
America’s legal system will make it difficult for self-driving cars to be accepted here…while not a legal kerfuffle yet, see Tesla’s current difficulties w/r/t fire risk in electric cars for a taste of what’s to come with self-driving cars. Europe is more likely…someplace like Holland or Denmark. They take their public and personal transportation seriously over there.
How to quickly get good at chess
Gautam Narula on how you can improve your chess game rapidly.
The tl;dr of this training plan is, play a lot, analyze your games, and primarily study tactics. Your knowledge of openings, endgame, middlegame, etc. will come from analyzing your games and going over grandmaster games. Only study one of those specific topics if it is clear you are specifically losing because of that topic.
An audio map of US dialects
You’ve likely seen the various dialect maps of the US…the Coke/soda/pop maps. The Atlantic Video team did a wonderful thing with them…they called native speakers around the country and asked them to pronounce some of the words featured on these maps.
It’s one thing to read the difference between the pronounciations of “route”, it’s another thing entirely to hear them. I haven’t lived in the Midwest since 2000 and I have since transitioned from “pop” to “soda”, “waiting in line” to “waiting on line”, and am working on switching to “sneakers” from “tennis shoes” (or even “tennies”). But I was surprised to learn that I still pronounce “bag” differently than everyone else!
Massive collection of Eastern European matchbox labels
From Flickr, a collection of more than 1600 matchbox labels, most of them from Eastern Europe. (via @themexican)
Iconic insects are disappearing
The monarchs are late. Usually by the 1st of November, the forests of central Mexico are swarming with them. Last year, they came in record low numbers, only 60 million. This year? A week late and only 3 million. And this happening to insects across the spectrum.
A big part of it is the way the United States farms. As the price of corn has soared in recent years, driven by federal subsidies for biofuels, farmers have expanded their fields. That has meant plowing every scrap of earth that can grow a corn plant, including millions of acres of land once reserved in a federal program for conservation purposes.
Another major cause is farming with Roundup, a herbicide that kills virtually all plants except crops that are genetically modified to survive it.
As a result, millions of acres of native plants, especially milkweed, an important source of nectar for many species, and vital for monarch butterfly larvae, have been wiped out. One study showed that Iowa has lost almost 60 percent of its milkweed, and another found 90 percent was gone. “The agricultural landscape has been sterilized,” said Dr. Brower.
Roger Ebert documentary
Steve James, the director of Hoop Dreams, is raising funds on Indiegogo for a documentary based on Roger Ebert’s memoir, Life Itself.
LIFE ITSELF, the first ever feature-length documentary on the life of Roger Ebert, covers the prolific critic’s life journey from his days at the University of Illinois, to his move to Chicago where he became the first film critic ever to win the Pulitzer Prize, then to television where he and Gene Siskel became iconic stars, and finally to what Roger referred to as “his third act”; how he overcame disabilities wrought by cancer to became a major voice on the internet and through social media.
Director Steve James (HOOP DREAMS) has conducted interviews with over two dozen people, including lifelong friends, professional colleagues, the first ever interview with Gene Siskel’s wife, and filmmakers Errol Morris, Werner Herzog, Ramin Bahrani, Gregory Nava, Ava DuVernay, and Martin Scorsese, who is one of the executive producers along with Steven Zaillian.
NYC ramen map
From All-You-Can-Eat Press in Brooklyn, the New York Ramen Map.
Attention noodle lovers: this is your lucky day! Our third publication-the New York Ramen Map-is here !! It features 33 of New York’s most interesting and delicious noodle shops, plus a special glossary and regional map of ramen in Japan.
Not sure I see my favorite place on there. Same folks also do a New York Doughnut Map and a New York Burger Map.
Nirvana punks Top of the Pops in 1991
When Nirvana appeared on Top of the Pops in 1991, they were asked to only sing the lead vocal over an instrumental track. The result was perhaps the most unusual performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit ever, with the band barely playing their instruments in sync with the music and Cobain doing his best Ian Curtis/Morrisey impression.
The surge to end polio
From Wired’s Matthieu Aikins: The Surge.
In 1988 there were 350,000 cases of polio worldwide. Last year there were 223. But getting all the way to zero will mean spending billions of dollars, penetrating the most remote regions of the globe, and facing down Taliban militants to get to the last unprotected children on earth.
See also: Imagining a post-antibiotics future.
24 Hours of Happy
Pharrell has made a 24-hour music video of people dancing and lip-syncing that’s a cross between Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Girl Walk // All Day.
Girls, Girls, Girls
Girls. Trailer. Third season. HBO. January 12. Lena Dunham. Watch:
I am so excited for this show to return. I don’t think I can hide it. It’s like I’m about to lose control. Maybe I like that feeling?
Big Thanksgiving storm brewing on the east coast?
The internet’s resident meteorologist Eric Holthaus (who incidentally has given up flying because of climate change) warns that a major storm could be on its way to the East Coast in time for Thanksgiving and Hanukkah (which overlap this year and then not again until the year 79811).
Technically, the storm is a nor’easter but is looking more like a tropical storm in the computer models:
At this point, the most likely scenario would be cold, wind-driven rain in the big coastal US cities, with up to a foot of snow stretching from inland New England as far south as the Carolinas. The cold would stick around after the storm exits, with high temperatures in the 20s and wind chills possibly in the single digits as far south as New Jersey on Black Friday.
According to this afternoon’s iteration of the Euro model (a meteorological model that famously predicted superstorm Sandy’s rare left hook into New Jersey six days out), at the storm’s peak, wind gusts on Cape Cod could approach hurricane force.
We’re still a ways out, so things might change, but travel safely next week, folks. (via @marcprecipice)
Listening to the White Album 100 times, all at the same time
I have previously reported on Rutherford Chang and his large collection of first-pressings of The Beatles’ White Album.
Q: Are you a vinyl collector?
A: Yes, I collect White Albums.
Q: Do you collect anything other than that?
A: I own some vinyl and occasionally buy other albums, but nothing in multiples like the White Album.
Chang has taken 100 of those records, recorded the audio, and overlaid the resulting 100 tracks into one glorious track. Here’s Side 1 x 100 (Side 2 is available on vinyl only):
The albums, as it turns out, have also aged with some variety. Some played cleanly, others had scratches, noise from embedded dirt, or vinyl wear. And though the recordings are identical, variations in the pressings, and natural fluctuations in the speed of Mr. Chang’s analogue turntable, meant that the 100 recordings slowly moved out of sync, in the manner of an early Steve Reich piece: the opening of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” is entirely unified, but at the start of “Dear Prudence,” you hear the first line echoing several times, and by “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” the track is a nearly unrecognizeable roar.
Snowflakes, close-up
Alexey Kljatov takes amazing photographs of snowflakes. Infinite beautiful variation. The large versions are worth checking out.
Stabilized Zapruder film in HD
I linked to a stabilized version of the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination a few years ago but Antony Davison has made a version that presents the whole film in panoramic HD, resulting in an amazingly clear representation of the event.
David Bowie’s Love is Lost (Hello Steve Reich Mix by James Murphy)
James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) remixed David Bowie’s Love is Lost in the style of minimal music composer Steve Reich. Here’s the video for it by Barnaby Roper:
The video is NSFW, although most of the NS-ness is of the watching scrambled Cinemax on your uncle’s cable in 1985 variety (aka datamoshing).
It’s Pappy time
This year’s allocation of Pappy Van Winkle’s cult bourbon was recently released. There’s never enough supply to meet demand, which means two things: lines rivaling iPhone release day queues and high resale prices.
On Craigslist in NYC, bottles of Pappy are for sale for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. One seller is offering a bottle of Pappy Van Winkle 23 Year for $1,250…that’s right around $80 for each 1.5 oz pour (without any markup).
Luckily, there are some close-but-not-quite alternatives. As this article on the bourbon family tree notes, the W.L. Weller 12 Year contains the same whiskey as Pappy 15 Year, but aged three fewer years. It can be readily found online for around $26 a bottle. To bump it perhaps a little closer to actual, Bourbonr has concocted what they call Poor Man’s Pappy:
Pick up a bottle of both W.L. Weller 12 (90 proof) and Old Weller Antique 107 (107 proof). They will cost around $20-$30 each. Start off with a 50:50 mixture of the two Bourbons. The easiest way to do this is with a digital scale. If you don’t have a scale just add a tablespoon from both Bourbons to your glass. With a 50:50 ratio you have a 98.5 proof delicious Bourbon.
Next, try a different ratio. Try mixing 60:40 Antique to 12. The Bourbon blend is now 100.2 proof and much closer in taste to the 107 proof Pappy 15.
Anyone else tried this? Thoughts?
Operation Glasshole
A.J. Jacobs, who has done everything from attempting to become the world’s smartest person to living Biblically for a year, got ahold of Google Glass and used it the way that he was advised by Google not to. Jacobs used Glass to cheat at poker:
My cousin and I spend the day practicing our scheme. On his computer, he can see my cards. On my walnut-sized screen, I can see a teensy version of him holding up handwritten signs, like FOLD. Or RAISE TEN DOLLARS. Or CALL. I keep my cousin on mute for two reasons: First, I don’t want my fellow cardplayers to hear him. And second, he’s kind of a cocky bastard.
At 8:00 P.M. on a Thursday, my three unsuspecting friends come to my apartment. They know I’m testing Glass, but I tell them it’s only for e-mail. “Are you going to look up whether a straight beats a flush?” my friend Carl jokes. “Ha, ha,” I chuckle. “No, nothing like that.” (Though it’s true I barely know the rules.)
But he also uses it, Cyrano-style, to help a friend score with the ladies:
I’m married with three kids, and my wife has made it clear that Glass is not an aphrodisiac for her. So I figured I’d lend my device to a single twenty-six-year-old editor at Esquire. The plan: He’ll wear it to a downtown New York bar, and I’ll watch the live-stream video from home and tell him what to do. I’ll be his Cyrano. I’ll get a vicarious night on the town, all while eating my butternut-squash soup in the comfort of my home. I can’t wait.
I could imagine Glass Concierge becoming a future job title, basically a personal assistant who looks in on your Google Glass video feed to make helpful suggestions and advice, basically a rally co-driver for your life. (As long as your co-driver isn’t Vivek Ponnusamy.)
Magnus Carlsen’s “nettlesomeness”
The Chess World Championship is currently underway in Chennai, India. Through nine games, challenger and world #1 Magnus Carlsen is leading reigning world champ and world #8 Viswanathan Anand by the score of 6-3. It seems as though Carlsen’s nettlesomeness is contributing to his good fortunes.
Second, Carlsen is demonstrating one of his most feared qualities, namely his “nettlesomeness,” to use a term coined for this purpose by Ken Regan. Using computer analysis, you can measure which players do the most to cause their opponents to make mistakes. Carlsen has the highest nettlesomeness score by this metric, because his creative moves pressure the other player and open up a lot of room for mistakes. In contrast, a player such as Kramnik plays a high percentage of very accurate moves, and of course he is very strong, but those moves are in some way calmer and they are less likely to induce mistakes in response.
Or perhaps Carlsen’s just inspired by the lovely chess set they’re using? Either way, he needs just one draw in the remaining three games to win the Championship. Or putting it another way, Anand has to win all three of the remaining games to retain the title.
November 22, 1963, a short film by Errol Morris
Errol Morris and Tink Thompson share an obsession about the nature of photographic evidence. In a short film for the NY Times, Morris talks to Thompson about the photographic and filmic evidence of the JFK assassination, which Thompson has been investigating on and off since 1963.
Interesting that 1) there exists much more photographic evidence of the assassination than is commonly shown/known, and 2) Thompson very much has a theory of what the evidence shows but Morris doesn’t spill those particular beans:
Is there a lesson to be learned? Yes, to never give up trying to uncover the truth. Despite all the difficulties, what happened in Dallas happened in one way rather than another. It may have been hopelessly obscured, but it was not obliterated. Tink still believes in answers, and in this instance, an answer. He is completing a sequel to “Six Seconds” called “Last Second in Dallas.” Like its predecessor, this book is clearly reasoned and convincing. Of course, there will be people who will be unmoved by his or any other account.
See also Morris’ previous short film featuring Thompson & the assassination, The Umbrella Man.
Aningaaq, a Gravity companion film
[Mild spoilers] During the production of Gravity, Jonas Cuaron (co-writer of the screenplay and Alfonso Cuaron’s son) shot a short film that shows the other side of the conversation that Sandra Bullock’s character had while in the Soyuz capsule. In the film, an Inuit fisherman struggles to communicate with the distressed voice on the other end of his radio.
The short was filmed “guerrilla style” on location on a budget of about $100,000 — most of which went toward the 10-person crew’s travel costs — and Cuaron completed it in time to meld the dialogue into Gravity’s final sound mix. The result is a seamless conversation between Aningaaq and Ryan, stranded 200 miles above him, the twin stories of isolated human survival providing thematic cohesion. Still, Jonas says he was careful “to make it a piece that could stand on its own.” Should both get Oscar noms, an interesting dynamic would emerge: Two films potentially could win for representing different sides of one conversation, to say nothing of having come from father and son.
R. Kelly improvised love songs
R. Kelly is some sort of random love song generating genius apparently. On a recent visit to the Rolling Stone offices, R. Ess asked R. Kelly to sing to them about dolphins, ice hockey, newspapers, and Italian heroes. The results R. Hilarious.
(via @leecrutchley who has a new book out.)
Why do you wake up before your alarm?
Your body clock alarm is just as accurate as the one on your phone: your body naturally takes note of what time you want to wake up and wakes you up.
There’s evidence you can will yourself to wake on time, too. Sleep scientists at Germany’s University of Lubeck asked 15 volunteers to sleep in their lab for three nights. One night, the group was told they’d be woken at 6 a.m., while on other nights the group was told they’d be woken at 9 a.m..
But the researchers lied-they woke the volunteers at 6 a.m anyway. And the results were startling. The days when sleepers were told they’d wake up early, their stress hormones increased at 4:30 a.m., as if they were anticipating an early morning. When the sleepers were told they’d wake up at 9 a.m., their stress hormones didn’t increase — and they woke up groggier. “Our bodies, in other words, note the time we hope to begin our day and gradually prepare us for consciousness,” writes Jeff Howe at Psychology Today.
(via digg)
How to find Waldo
Ben Blatt sat down with a bunch of Where’s Waldo? books and found a pattern to the striped beanpole’s hiding places.
It may not be immediately clear from looking at this map, but my hunch that there’s a better way to hunt was right. There isn’t one corner of the page where Waldo is always hiding; readers would have already noticed if his patterns were so obvious. What we do see, as highlighted in the map below, is that 53 percent of the time Waldo is hiding within one of two 1.5-inch tall bands, one starting three inches from the bottom of the page and another one starting seven inches from the bottom, stretching across the spread.
Pupil control for better underwater vision
The Moken are a nomadic people who live on the coasts and islands of Thailand and Burma. They live off the bounty of the sea and have learned to control the size of the pupils in order to see better underwater.
Pupil constriction is triggered by incoming light levels — the less light (as at depth) the bigger the pupil — but the Moken have learned to override that implulse and keep their pupils small at low light levels, therefore making their eyesight sharper. (via the kid should see this)
The non-World Cup all-stars
The teams for the 2014 World Cup are almost all set (one qualifying game remains) and there are a lot of world-class players who won’t be playing in the tournament. ESPN FC has compiled a team of the best players who will miss out:
Bale, Lewandowski, and Ibrahimovic. That’s an amazing front line. If not for his hat trick yesterday, Cristiano Ronaldo, perhaps the best player in the world right now, would have made the roster in Ibrahimovic’s stead.
Updates on previous entries for Nov 19, 2013*
17-year-old Biggie Smalls freestyling orig. from Nov 19, 2013
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Did the Nazis steal the Mona Lisa?
Per Betteridge’s law of headlines, the answer to this is “no”, but it’s still an interesting yarn.
Among the many enduring mysteries of this period is the fate of the world’s most famous painting. It seems that Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa was among the paintings found in the Altaussee salt mine in the Austrian alps, which was converted by the Nazis into their secret stolen-art warehouse.
The painting only “seems” to have been found there because contradictory information has come down through history, and the Mona Lisa is not mentioned in any wartime document, Nazi or allied, as having been in the mine. Whether it may have been at Altaussee was a question only raised when scholars examined the postwar Special Operations Executive report on the activities of Austrian double agents working for the allies to secure the mine. This report states that the team “saved such priceless objects as the Louvre’s Mona Lisa”. A second document, from an Austrian museum near Altaussee dated 12 December 1945, states that “the Mona Lisa from Paris” was among “80 wagons of art and cultural objects from across Europe” taken into the mine.
The Mona Lisa was actually stolen in 1911, in one of the cleverest art heists ever pulled.
Cool interactive Bob Dylan music video
This is great fun…the people on every channel of this TV are singing Like a Rolling Stone by Bob Dylan. Including Bob Dylan himself on VH1. (via @faketv)
The Gettysburg Address turns 150
From the Google Cultural Institute, an engaging account of how Lincoln wrote the Gettysburg Address, which was delivered 150 years ago today. There are actually five surviving copies of the text of the speech written in Lincoln’s hand; they’re all different and we don’t know for sure which one he read from. You can easily compare the different versions or see the handwritten versions. Here’s the Bliss Copy of the Gettysburg Address, which Lincoln wrote down in 1864, a few months after the speech:
The Bliss Copy hangs in The White House and is the canonical version of the speech that you learned in school, hear in movies, read on the wall of the Lincoln Memorial, etc.
17-Year-Old Biggie Smalls Freestyling
From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 1989.
It’s all there…the talent, the confidence, the skills. Compare with a 17-year-old LL Cool J rapping in a Maine gymnasium in 1985. (via ★interesting)
Update: Biggie was rapping on Bedford Ave between Quincy St and Lexington Ave in Bed-Stuy. Check it out on Google Maps. (thx, debbie)
I Pixel U
I Pixel U is an iOS app that lets you selectively pixelate people and objects in photos, creating the effect of 8-bit characters in the real world. Many examples are available on Instagram.
See also Aled Lewis’ Video Games vs. Real Life series. (via prosthetic knowledge)
Short Errol Morris film on Benoit Mandelbrot
A short time before his death, Benoît B. Mandelbrot filmed an interview with Errol Morris. Morris charmingly starts off my asking Mandelbrot where “the fractal stuff” came from.
Note: as always, the “B.” in “Benoît B. Mandelbrot” stands for “Benoît B. Mandelbrot”. (via @sampotts)
A junkie’s view of the Chicago drug trade
Fascinating article about what it’s like to buy heroin on the west side of Chicago. The ritual of buying is just as exciting as the shooting up.
The fact is, and I don’t care who tries to dispute this, that a majority of the people who make the daily migration to the West Side to cop blows are as addicted to the ritual of copping dope as they are to the dope itself. It is an adrenaline rush no different than those achieved by people who jump out of airplanes. And dope fiends get to experience it every day.
(via @torrez)
NASA spin-off technologies
From Wikipedia, a list of products and technologies that have been developed with the help of NASA, including memory foam, Dustbusters, and powdered lubricants.
For more than 50 years, the NASA Innovative Partnerships Program has connected NASA resources to private industry, referring to the commercial products as spin-offs. Well-known products that NASA claims as spin-offs include memory foam (originally named temper foam), freeze-dried food, firefighting equipment, emergency “space blankets”, Dustbusters, cochlear implants, and now Speedo’s LZR Racer swimsuits. NASA claims that there are over 1650 other spin-offs in the fields of computer technology, environment and agriculture, health and medicine, public safety, transportation, recreation, and industrial productivity.
NASA did not, however, invent Teflon or Velcro. (via @tangentialism)
Nana nana nana nana, Batkid!
It’s Friday. Let’s start with something awesome. The city of San Francisco has been transformed into Gotham City for a kid named Miles who has been battling leukemia since being diagnosed at the age of one. Miles’ wish was to be Batkid. Enter the Make-a-Wish foundation (with the help of thousands of people in San Francisco). Today, Miles is performing a series of superhero feats. The day started with a special front page of the San Francisco Chronicle. You can follow the adventures of Batkid at Buzzfeed and by following Make-a-Wish exec director Patricia Wilson on Twitter. And speaking of superhero feats, Miles’ leukemia is reportedly in remission.
How to win at The Price is Right
It turns out that for many of the games on The Price is Right, a simple application of game theory is all you need to greatly increase your chances of winning. You don’t even need to know any of the prices.
In one instance, when Margie was the last contestant to bid, she guessed the retail price of an oven was $1,150. There had already been one bid for $1,200 and another for $1,050. She therefore could only win if the actual price was between $1,150 and $1,200. Since she was the last to bid, she could have guessed $1051, expanding her range by almost $100 (any price from $1051 to $1199 would have made her a winner), with no downside. What she really should have done, however, is bid $1,201. Game theory says that when you are last to bid, you should bid one dollar more than the highest bidder. You obviously won’t win every time, but in the last 1,500 Contestants’ Rows to have aired, had final bidders committed to this strategy, they would have won 54 percent of the time.
See also how a man named Terry Kniess solved The Price is Right.
Analog animated GIF player
The Giphoscope is a hand-cranked animated GIF player. At €299, this is the holiday gift for the animated GIF lover who has everything.
(via @Coudal)
“Life in Ikea is impossible”
The trailer for Alfonso Cuarón’s “Ikea”, a film about a man and a woman lost in the vast nothingness of Ikea.
(via ★interesting)
The bourbon family tree
A chart of where many varieties of bourbon come from, along with five things you can learn from the chart.
Pappy Van Winkle is frequently described by both educated and uneducated drinkers as the best bourbon on the market. It is certainly aged for longer than most premium bourbons, and has earned a near hysterical following of people scrambling to get one of the very few bottles that are released each year. Of the long-aged bourbons, it seems to be aged very gently year-to-year, and this recommends it enormously. But if you, like most people, can’t find Pappy, try W. L. Weller. There’s a 12 year old variety that retails for $23 around the corner. Pappy 15-year sells for $699-$1000 even though it’s the exact same liquid as the Pappy (same mash bill, same spirit, same barrels); the only difference is it’s aged 3 years less.
The chart is taken from the Kings County Distillery Guide to Urban Moonshining.
Written by the founders of Kings County Distillery, New York City’s first distillery since Prohibition, this spirited illustrated book explores America’s age-old love affair with whiskey. It begins with chapters on whiskey’s history and culture from 1640 to today, when the DIY trend and the classic cocktail craze have conspired to make it the next big thing. For those thirsty for practical information, the book next provides a detailed, easy-to-follow guide to safe home distilling, complete with a list of supplies, step-by-step instructions, and helpful pictures, anecdotes, and tips.
(via df)
Football as Football
Football as Football is a collection of American football team logos in the style of European football club badges. Here are badges for the Detroit Lions (in the Italian style) and New England Patriots (in the Spanish style).
Trailer for Noah
Darren Aronofsky (Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler, Black Swan) has made a movie called Noah, about Noah’s ark. It stars Russell Crowe, Jennifer Connelly, Emma Watson, and Anthony Hopkins. Here’s the trailer:
Spoiler: Noah survives and lives to the age of 950. More spoilers in Genesis Chapter 6. (via devour)
The coach who never punts
Kevin Kelley is the head football coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas. In games, he instructs his team to never punt, to never receive punts, and almost always onside kick.
The numbers Kelley cites are that eye-popping. And he isn’t cooking the books: Cal professor David Romer concluded that teams should not punt when facing fourth-and-4 or less; NFL stats analyst Brian Burke has detailed the need to rethink fourth-down decision-making; Football Outsiders has conflated punts with turnovers. You’ve even read about it on this site. Most fans and analysts who are willing to accept that change is a fundamental part of life have embraced the idea that automatically punting on fourth down doesn’t make sense.
Since Kelley took over, Pulaski is 124-22 and has won three state titles.
Colors organized neatly
I love these color typologies by photographer Emily Blincoe. This gold candy one is particularly fetching:
(via @mathowie)
Dolores T. Vollmann
Prolific and celebrated writer William T. Vollmann is a “devoted” cross-dresser.
Mr. Vollmann is 54, heterosexual and married with a daughter in high school. He began cross-dressing seriously about five years ago. Sometimes he transforms himself into a woman as part of a strange vision quest, aided by drugs or alcohol, to mind-meld with a female character in a book he’s writing. Other times it’s just because he likes the “smooth and slippery” feel of women’s lingerie.
He said his wife, who is an oncologist, is not thrilled with his outré experiments and keeps her distance. “Probably when the book comes out, it’ll be the first she’s heard of it,” he said. “I always try to keep my wife and child out of what I do. I don’t want to cause them any embarrassment.” He asked that his wife not be interviewed for this article.
Vollmann has collected self-portraits of himself as his female alter ego in The Book of Dolores. (via @DavidGrann)
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