kottke.org posts about lists
I still remember the first time I saw a guy at a restaurant talking on one of those prehistorically massive cellphones. My dad leaned over and said, “Look at that poor guy. Never let that happen to you. Never take a job that’s so all-consuming that you have to carry a phone around, even during lunch.” A lot has changed since then (although I still often see a lot of validity in my dad’s initial response to these devices) and in the forty years since Motorola engineer Martin Cooper made the first cellphone call. Wired takes a look back at the twelve cellphones that changed our world forever.
A somewhat surprising list of the least visited countries in the world in that North Korea is not even in the top 15. Somalia, with 500 annual tourists, is #2:
Why so few?
War, lack of a government for many years, violent muslim extremists, sharia law. The reputation of Somalia is extremelly close to rock bottom.
Why you may still want to visit
The government has started to function again. Mogadishu is now relatively safe and businesses are thriving. Turkish Airlines has even opened a direct twice weekly route from Istanbul.
What else
Go to the beach just outside Mogadishu or visit the Bakaara market where you can even buy your own semi-genuine Somalian passport. You may not want to use it anywhere, though. Your travel experience doesn’t extend beyond the Bahamas, Paris or Gran Canaria, you say? First of all; Why are you reading this blog post? Secondly, do not go to Somalia!
The author of the list, Gunnar Garfors, has visited 196 of the 198 countries in the world; he’s hitting the last two in the next few months: Kiribati and Cape Verde. (via @DavidGrann)
Stephen Coles of Typographica says that 2012 was “a strong year” for new typefaces. He asked dozens of designers and font makers to nominate their favorite 2012 typefaces and here’s what they had to say.
The independent foundry has also cemented its place as the new foundation of the industry. Most of this year’s selections are from very small shops, several of which are entirely new to the market. It’s also significant that, in addition to offering their fonts through retailers like FontShop, MyFonts, and the newly revived Fonts.com, most of these indie foundries now sell directly to customers through their own sites. In some cases they have eschewed outside distribution altogether. The “majors” have not simply laid down, however. Monotype, Linotype, Font Bureau, FontFont, and H&FJ are all represented in this year’s list, each with releases that are remarkably characteristic of their respective brands.
(via df)
Matt Kahn is reading every bestselling novel from each of the past 100 years.
For this blog I plan, among other things, to read and review every novel to reach the number one spot on Publishers Weekly annual bestsellers list, starting in 1913. Beyond just a book review, I’m going to provide some information on the authors and the time at which these books were written in an attempt to figure out just what made these particular books popular at that particular time.
A few things. The Silmarillion?! Was the top selling book in 1977? John Grisham appears on the list 11 different times; the guy is a machine. And it’s interesting to see when popularity and critical acclaim part ways, when the Roths, le Carrés, and E.L. Doctorows give way to the Clancys, Grishams, and Dan Browns.
From Sarah Marshall, a list of celebrity fragrances that didn’t quite make it to market.
Goldbloom by Jeff Goldblum: This fragrance, meant to be drizzled down the wearer’s forearm (preferably while in a moving car) is redolent of warm eyeglasses, tanning oil, and Velociraptor musk. Perfect for work or leisure.
Wintour Harvest by Anna Wintour: Peppery, balsamic, indecisive, and fresh. Notes of warm blood and Galliano Sequin enliven this fragrance designed for the gal on the go.
To celebrate Grand Central’s 100th birthday, The Daily Beast has 100 facts about the NYC landmark.
1. Grand Central Terminal opened its doors at midnight on February 2, 1913.
9. To commemorate the centennial on Friday, shops and eateries will price their goods as if it were 1913. [Ed note: I doubt this applies to the Apple Store.]
39. A secret trap door in the kiosk below the clock leads to a spiral staircase down to the lower level info booth.
50. M42 connects to a secret underground platform at the Waldorf Astoria.
93. In 1978’s Superman, Lex Luther’s lair is located under the terminal.
Update: Another fact: Grand Central’s clocks are purposefully off by a minute.
The idea is that passengers rushing to catch trains they’re about to miss can actually be dangerous — to themselves, and to each other. So conductors will pull out of the station exactly one minute after their trains’ posted departure times. That minute of extra time won’t be enough to disconcert passengers too much when they compare it to their own watches or smartphones … but it is enough, the thinking goes, to buy late-running train-catchers just that liiiiiitle bit of extra time that will make them calm down a bit. Fast clocks make for slower passengers.
Stephen Walt on what truths US foreign policy officials will never admit in public.
#2: “We don’t actually care that much about human rights.” Presidents, diplomats, and other politicians talk about human rights all the time, and both Congress and the Executive Branch often bully small countries over their human rights performance, especially when we have other differences with them). But when human rights concerns conflict with other interests, our ethical concerns take a back seat nearly every time. Most Americans didn’t care when the U.S.-led sanctions program against Iraq caused the deaths of several hundred thousand Iraqis (many of them children), and none of the senior officials who authorized torture during the Bush administration has faced indictment or even serious investigation (Just imagine how much we’d be howling if we suspected some foreign government had been waterboarding captive Americans!). The United States has plenty of allies whose human rights performance ranges from questionable to awful, and we continue to trade and invest in China despite its own lax human rights standards. I’m not suggesting that the U.S. government is totally indifferent to such concerns, of course; what I’m saying is that we are rarely willing to do very much or pay significant costs in order to advance human rights, unless our strategic interests run parallel. Like most countries, in short, we talk a better game on human rights than we actually deliver. But you’re not going to hear many American politicians admit it.
(via digg)
Martyn Cornell took issue with First We Feast’s list of the 20 most influential beers of all time and came up with his own list.
I mean, Bear Republic Hop Rod Rye is more influential in the history of beer than Bass Pale Ale or Barclay Perkins porter? Don’t make me weep. Allagash White trumps Hoegaarden and Schneider Weisse? (You may not like Hoegaarden or Schneider Weisse, but I hope you won’t try to deny their influence.) Gueuze, Saison and Kolsch are such important styles they deserve a representative each in a “most influential beers of all time” list, while IPA and porter are left out? I don’t think so. And the same goes for Schneider Aventinus: where are the hordes of Weissebockalikes? Sam Adams Utopias has influenced who, exactly? “Generic lager”? I see where you’re coming from, in that much of what has happened over the past 40 years in the beer world is a reaction against generic lager, but still … And I love London Pride, but it’s not even the third most influential beer that Fuller’s brews.
I like arguments about beer way more than drinking beer.
The NY Times asked a bunch of designers for their favorite book cover designs of 2012. Lots of nice work here.
Emily Badger highlights some trends in gun ownership, gun violence, and public opinion related to gun control over the past several decades.
A handful of charts paint a remarkable picture of some key shifts over the past 30 or 40 years. During that time, gun violence nationally has declined significantly even as aberrant mass shootings have grown less so; public sentiment for regulating the weapons has fallen steeply, too. Mother Jones has estimated that we’re approaching a demographic reality where our population of firearms will outpace our population of people. But hard data on the total number of civilian-owned guns in America is hard to come by, and so much of what we know on the topic is based upon what gun owners themselves say in surveys.
Paul Waldman from The American Prospect outlines ten arguments that gun advocates typically make and why they are wrong.
6. The Constitution says I have a right to own guns.
Yes it does, but for some reason gun advocates think that the right to bear arms is the only constitutional right that is virtually without limit. You have the right to practice your religion, but not if your religion involves human sacrifice. You have the right to free speech, but you can still be prosecuted for incitement or conspiracy, and you can be sued for libel. Every right is subject to limitation when it begins to threaten others, and the Supreme Court has affirmed that even though there is an individual right to gun ownership, the government can put reasonable restrictions on that right.
And we all know that if this shooter turns out to have a Muslim name, plenty of Americans, including plenty of gun owners, will be more than happy to give up all kinds of rights in the name of fighting terrorism. Have the government read my email? Have my cell phone company turn over my call records? Check which books I’m taking out of the library? Make me take my shoes off before getting on a plane, just because some idiot tried to blow up his sneakers? Sure, do what you’ve got to do. But don’t make it harder to buy thousands of rounds of ammunition, because if we couldn’t do that we’d no longer be free.
From Pro Publica back in July, the best reporting on guns in America.
In the wake of last week’s shooting in Aurora, Colo., we’ve taken a step back and laid out the best pieces we could find about guns. They’re roughly organized by articles on rights, trafficking and regulation.
More facts about guns in America from Ezra Klein, beginning with the sad fact that “shooting sprees are not rare in the United States”.
If roads were collapsing all across the United States, killing dozens of drivers, we would surely see that as a moment to talk about what we could do to keep roads from collapsing. If terrorists were detonating bombs in port after port, you can be sure Congress would be working to upgrade the nation’s security measures. If a plague was ripping through communities, public-health officials would be working feverishly to contain it.
Only with gun violence do we respond to repeated tragedies by saying that mourning is acceptable but discussing how to prevent more tragedies is not. But that’s unacceptable. As others have observed, talking about how to stop mass shootings in the aftermath of a string of mass shootings isn’t “too soon.” It’s much too late.
Rolling Stone asked a panel of experts (Busta Rhymes, Questlove, Rick Rubin, etc.) to vote on the best hip-songs ever produced. Here’s the list of their top 50 picks. Dre and Snoop’s Nuthin’ But a “G” Thang comes in at #6.
Climbing to Number Two on the singles chart in early 1993, “Nuthin’ But a ‘G’ Thang” made Dr. Dre the undisputed flag bearer of West Coast rap, while also ushering that genre into the pop mainstream. The song’s secret weapon was a relatively unknown pup named Snoop Doggy Dogg, whose verses are packed with effortless quotables. The song also introduced Dre’s masterful “G-Funk” style of production, which updated George Clinton’s legacy with slow, rubbery funk and layered synth hooks. “We made records during the crack era, where everything was hyped up, sped up and zoned out,” Chuck D explained. “Dre came with ’ “G” Thang’ and slowed the whole genre down. He took hip-hop from the crack era to the weed era.”
Listen to the entire list on Spotify. (via @gavinpurcell)
And so it begins, the end of the year lists. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, you’ve got to, um, … I’ve got nothing here. You either love them or hate them. Anyway, the NY Times’ list of the 100 notable books of the year is predictably solid and Timesish.
BRING UP THE BODIES. By Hilary Mantel. (Macrae/Holt, $28.) Mantel’s sequel to “Wolf Hall” traces the fall of Anne Boleyn, and makes the familiar story fascinating and suspenseful again.
BUILDING STORIES. By Chris Ware. (Pantheon, $50.) A big, sturdy box containing hard-bound volumes, pamphlets and a tabloid houses Ware’s demanding, melancholy and magnificent graphic novel about the inhabitants of a Chicago building.
I absolutely demolished Bring Up the Bodies over Thanksgiving break and loved it. I haven’t had a chance to sit down with Building Stories yet, but that massive and gorgeous collection is a steal at $28 from Amazon. And as far as lists go, another early favorite is Tyler Cowen’s list of his favorite non-fiction books of the year. Cowen is a demanding reader and I always find something worth reading there. (via @DavidGrann)
From Kurt Cobain’s journals, a handwritten list of the late Nirvana frontman’s 50 favorite albums, including those from Sonic Youth (duh), Pixies (double duh), and Mazzy Star.
I cannot believe these are some of the passwords people actually use:
1. password
2, 123456
3. 12345678
4. abc123
5. qwerty
6. monkey
7. letmein
8. dragon
9. 111111
10. baseball
11. iloveyou
12. trustno1
I feel more secure than ever with my “password2” password.
I’ve never seen so much household organizational porn collected in one place before. Tumblr should get a Nobel Peace Prize for propagating such useful information so far and wide. A couple of examples:
(via hacker news)
From a site called Celebrity Net Worth (I know, blech), a list of the 25 richest people of all time, adjusted for inflation. Gates, Buffett, and Rockefeller all make the list but the big cheese is Malian emperor Mansa Musa I, with a net worth of $400 billion in today’s dollars.
Mansa Musa I of Mali is the richest human being in history with a personal net worth of $400 billion! Mansa Musa lived from 1280 - 1337 and ruled the Malian Empire which covered modern day Ghana, Timbuktu and Mali in West Africa. Mansa Musa’s shocking wealth came from his country’s vast production of more than half the world’s supply of salt and gold.
(via @DavidGrann)
This is a really interesting and eclectic list of 25 TV shows that have had an impact on society beyond the water cooler. There are a few obvious choices, but most of these I hadn’t heard of.
In 2003, 24-year-old machinist Juan Catalan faced the death penalty for allegedly shooting a key witness in a murder case. Catalan told police that he couldn’t have committed the crime — he was at a Los Angeles Dodgers game at the time. He had the ticket stubs and everything!
When police didn’t buy his alibi, Catalan contacted the Dodgers, who pointed him to an unlikely hero: misanthropic comedian Larry David. On the day in question, David had been filming an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm in Dodger Stadium. It was a long shot, but maybe Catalan could be seen in the background. When his attorney watched the outtakes, it took just 20 minutes to find shots of Catalan and his daughter chowing down on ballpark dogs while watching from the stands.
Thanks to the footage, Catalan walked free after five months behind bars. And Larry David found one more thing to be self-deprecating about. “I tell people that I’ve done one decent thing in my life, albeit inadvertently,” joked David.
(via @fimoculous)
Every once in awhile, something somewhere will make a sound and no one really knows where it came from. Among the unexplained sounds listed on Wikipedia are mistpouffers, The Bloop, The Hum, and Julia.
The NOAA’s Dr. Christopher Fox does not believe its origin is man-made, such as a submarine or bomb, or familiar geological events such as volcanoes or earthquakes. While the audio profile of the Bloop does resemble that of a living creature, the source is a mystery both because it is different from known sounds and because it was several times louder than the loudest recorded animal, the blue whale.
Note: Illustration by Chris Piascik…prints & more are available.
The AV Club has compiled a list of the 50 best films of the 1990s, which decade, when you look at this list, is starting to feel like a bit of a film golden age compared to now. Here’s part one, part two, and part three.
Few talk about the ’90s as a filmmaking renaissance on par with the late ’60s and early ’70s, but for many of the film critics at The A.V. Club, it was the decade when we were coming of age as cinephiles and writers, and we remember it with considerable affection. Those ’70s warhorses like Martin Scorsese and Robert Altman posted some of the strongest work of their careers, and an exciting new generation of filmmakers — Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen, Wong Kar-Wai, Olivier Assayas, David Fincher, and Wes Anderson among them — were staking out territory of their own.
I’ve seen 35 of the 50 films and some of my favorites are Election, Eyes Wide Shut, Fargo, Groundhog Day, Boogie Nights, Being John Malkovich, Rushmore, Reservoir Dogs, Dazed and Confused, and Pulp Fiction. Some films I’m surprised didn’t make the list: Iron Giant, Three Kings, Babe: Pig in the City, and The Insider.
Flavorwire has a quick look at some noted directors (Kubrick, Wes Anderson, Fincher) and the typefaces that they often used. (via @curiousoctopus)
Over at Hacker News, npguy asked Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham about “the most frighteningly ambitious idea” he’d ever been pitched. Graham declined to answer, citing confidentiality, but Eliezer Yudkowsky responded with what another commenter called the Yudkowsky Ambition scale:
1) We’re going to build the next Facebook!
2) We’re going to found the next Apple!
3) Our product will create sweeping political change! This will produce a major economic revolution in at least one country! (Seasteading would be change on this level if it worked; creating a new country successfully is around the same level of change as this.)
4) Our product is the next nuclear weapon. You wouldn’t want that in the wrong hands, would you?
5) This is going to be the equivalent of the invention of electricity if it works out.
6) We’re going to make an IQ-enhancing drug and produce basic change in the human condition.
7) We’re going to build serious Drexler-class molecular nanotechnology.
8) We’re going to upload a human brain into a computer.
9) We’re going to build a recursively self-improving Artificial Intelligence.
10) We think we’ve figured out how to hack into the computer our universe is running on.
Serious Eats put together an extensive guide to the regional sandwich cuisine of the US that covers everything from the universally available sloppy joe and grilled cheese to the spiedie, the hot brown, and the dutch crunch.
An international edition is also available (gyro! banh mi! bocadillo! chip butty!).
If you’re anything like me, you take things like 34 People You Probably Didn’t Know Were On Seinfeld as a challenge. It’s been awhile, but I’ve seen every episode of that show (most of them at least twice) so I thought this would be easy but I totally had forgotten or didn’t realize that Jon Favreau, Catherine Keener, Amanda Peet, Denise Richards, and James Spader were on the show. Guess I’m not the Seinfeld fan I thought I was.
Every decade since 1952, Sight & Sound has polled film professionals to determine the greatest films of all time. Citizen Kane is always the winner, except for the first year. This year, however, S&S expanded the number of contributors dramatically and included online critics as well resulting in Citizen Kane’s unseating. They’ve released the list of top 50 films now, and will release a top 100 in about a month.
About a year ago, the Sight & Sound team met to consider how we could best approach the poll this time. Given the dominance of electronic media, what became immediately apparent was that we would have to abandon the somewhat elitist exclusivity with which contributors to the poll had been chosen in the past and reach out to a much wider international group of commentators than before. We were also keen to include among them many critics who had established their careers online rather than purely in print.
To that end we approached more than 1,000 critics, programmers, academics, distributors, writers and other cinephiles, and received (in time for the deadline) precisely 846 top-ten lists that between them mention a total of 2,045 different films.
I (Aaron) have seen 4 of the movies in the top 50 because I am, apparently, a Luddite philistine. Topping the list this year is Vertigo.
After half a century of monopolising the top spot, Citizen Kane was beginning to look smugly inviolable. Call it Schadenfreude, but let’s rejoice that this now conventional and ritualised symbol of ‘the greatest’ has finally been taken down a peg. The accession of Vertigo is hardly in the nature of a coup d’etat. Tying for 11th place in 1972, Hitchcock’s masterpiece steadily inched up the poll over the next three decades, and by 2002 was clearly the heir apparent. Still, even ardent Wellesians should feel gratified at the modest revolution - if only for the proof that film canons (and the versions of history they legitimate) are not completely fossilised.
There’s also a directors’ list of top 10 films. (via @chrissandoval)
A list of economic policies that, according to economists, would benefit the economy but would never fly for political reasons.
Four: Eliminate all income and payroll taxes. All of them. For everyone. Taxes discourage whatever you’re taxing, but we like income, so why tax it? Payroll taxes discourage creating jobs. Not such a good idea. Instead, impose a consumption tax, designed to be progressive to protect lower-income households.
Five: Tax carbon emissions. Yes, that means higher gasoline prices. It’s a kind of consumption tax, and can be structured to make sure it doesn’t disproportionately harm lower-income Americans. More, it’s taxing something that’s bad, which gives people an incentive to stop polluting.
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