Waiting for 2010
The AV Club lists 32 entertainments (books, movies, TV) they are most anticipating in 2010. (thx, judd)
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Top Vimeo videos of 2009
From Vimeo’s list of favorite videos of 2009, the music video for Luv Deluxe by Cinnamon Chasers:
Also worth watching is the Tarantino Mixtape, which hovers somewhere between an analysis of the themes in QuentinTarantino’s films and a toe-tapping remix of all the great music, visuals, and sounds he uses in them. (via @brainpicker)
Jim Lehrer’s rules of journalism
He listed them during the last broadcast of the The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer.
And, finally, I am not in the entertainment business.
(via df)
Best stories of the past 4.5 billion years
Now that it’s the end of 2009, The Onion is taking the opportunity to present their top ten stories of the past 4.5 billions years. #5 is Sumerians Look On In Confusion As God Creates World:
“I do not understand,” reads an ancient line of pictographs depicting the sun, the moon, water, and a Sumerian who appears to be scratching his head. “A booming voice is saying, ‘Let there be light,’ but there is already light. It is saying, ‘Let the earth bring forth grass,’ but I am already standing on grass.”
“Everything is here already,” the pictograph continues. “We do not need more stars.”
I also like The Ones We Lost:
Some of the world’s most beloved people have died over the past 4.5 billion years. Here are a few…
World-changing music
To ponder over the weekend: twenty pieces of music that changed the world. #11 on the list is Gloria Gaynor’s I Will Survive. (via @bobulate)
Lines that defined the decade
Jenni, I don’t want to step on your toes here, but I’m hoping that Scott Lamb’s excellent One-Liners of the Decade — from “Wassap!” to “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” to “I drink your milkshake” — ends up on the Noughtie List.
Best media errors and corrections of 2009
Regret the Error presents its annual list of media errors and corrections. These are two of my favorites:
An article on Aug. 2 about older alumni who have been helped by university career counselors referred imprecisely to comments by a 1990 graduate of Lehigh University who lost his job in February when his company was downsized, and a correction in this space last Sunday misspelled his surname. As the article correctly noted, he is David Monson, not Munson, and he was speaking generally — not about himself — when he said that newly unemployed people sometimes mope around the house in sweatpants.
—
ON 17 July 2008 in our front page article “Ron the Lash” we falsely reported that whilst recovering from an operation to his ankle Cristiano Ronaldo had “gone on a bender” at a Hollywood nightclub where he splashed out pounds 10,000 on champagne and vodka and threw his crutches to the ground and tried to dance on his uninjured foot. We now accept that Cristiano did not “go on a bender”, did not drink any alcohol that evening, did not spend pounds 10,000 on alcohol, nor throw his crutches to the floor or try to dance.
(via df)
Top 10 astronomy photos of 2009
One of the better lists out there: the top astronomy photos of the year. From the list, this is a more detailed view of the Martian landscape than we’re used to seeing:
My personal favorite, the photos taken by the LRO of Apollo 11’s landing site, made the list as well.
Most exciting film scripts of 2009
The Black List is the collection of scripts that got movie executives most excited in 2009. Here’s #1:
1. The Muppet Man By Christopher Weekes
What it’s about: The life and times of the late Jim Henson, the man behind Sesame Street and The Muppets.What it’s like: The Andy Kaufman biopic Man on the Moon, but with puppets. This moving story depicts the life of a creative genius, with occasional surreal appearances by the likes of Kermit and Miss Piggy.
(via subtraction)
The Top 10 Stories You Missed in 2009
One of my favorite end-of-the-year lists is Foreign Policy’s The Top Ten Stories You Missed; here’s this year’s installment. A Hotline for China and India caught my eye.
“Hotlines” between world leaders, like the legendary Moscow-Washington “red telephone” devised after the Cuban missile crisis, are designed to prevent misunderstandings or miscommunications between nuclear powers from escalating into a nuclear conflict. China and the United States have one. So do India and Pakistan. This year, the leaders of India and China agreed to set one up between New Delhi and Beijing, highlighting concerns that a worsening border dispute could quickly become the first major conflict of the multipolar era.
Global thinkers recommend books
Foreign Policy asked their list of Top Global Thinkers to recommend some books; here’s what they had to say.
The year in ideas, 2009
The NY Times Magazine has published their Year in Ideas issue for 2009. Lots of good stuff in there. Before I got sidetracked with family obligations (Minna!), I planned on pitching the magazine’s editors a couple of ideas I noticed this year:
The Neverending Wake. We got a preview of what death in the celebrity age (more) is going be like when a cluster of notable people passed away this summer. How will we think about death when someone we know or admire dies every day for the rest of our lives?
Machine Gun Photography. Just as the introduction of the machine gun fundamentally changed warfare, so the affordable high-resolution digital video camera will change photography. Now you don’t have to wait for exactly the right moment for the perfect shot; just take 10 minutes of HD video and find the best shots later. Photography was always really about the editing anyway, right?
How con artists exploit human behavior
An extensive analysis of the seven principles of human behavior that con artists exploit (with many examples of cons). Or check out the Cliffs Notes version.
The Time principle: When you are under time pressure to make an important choice, you use a different decision strategy. Hustlers steer you towards a strategy involving less reasoning.
Introducing the Noughtie List
As several of you guessed, the December project I mentioned the other day is a collection of lists and articles that summarize the past ten years, i.e. the decade, i.e. the 2000s, i.e. TEN YEARS, MAN, TEN!! We call it the Noughtie List.
The list is curated by Jenni Leder, an art director and fellow internet enthusiast from Dallas, TX. She would love to hear your Noughtie List suggestions, feedback, comments, etc. via email. Jenni will be posting some of her favorite finds to the front page from time to time as well.
A special thanks to Rex Sorgatz for letting us borrow the idea; his list of 2009 lists is well underway and worth a look for those who are only slightly nostalgic.
15 failed predictions about the future
The list includes this dandy by the awesomely named Dr. Dionysys Larder:
Rail travel at high speed is not possible because passengers, unable to breathe, would die of asphyxia.
(via long now)
Ken Auletta’s media maxims
From a chapter cut from his book about Google, 25 media maxims from Ken Auletta.
2. Passion Wins
5. A Team Culture is Vital
6. Treat Engineers as Kings
15. Don’t Think of The Web as Another Distribution Platform
19. Paradox: The Web Forges Both Niche and Large Communities
Why you should juggle
Juggler Scot Nery lists eight reasons why you, as a normal person, should learn how to juggle.
Sometimes it feels like A.D.D. makes you better at stuff, but when it comes down to it, we really need to be able to sit still and focus until something’s done. Juggling builds your focus muscles through regular practice and a built-in rewards system.
How geeks measure things
1 Warhol equals 15 minutes of fame, So if you’ve been famous for three years, that’s just over 105 kilowarhols. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that there’s a critical point — varying from celebrity to celebrity — where that person has outstayed their welcome, and uh … becomes synonymous with a feminine hygiene product (and the bag it came in). In keeping with nuclear physics, I’m happy for this to remain as k=1 (where ‘k’ is for ‘Kanye’).
Big but never number one
From Box Office Mojo, a list of the top grossing movies in the US that were never #1 at the box office. Topping the list is the sleeper hit of sleeper hits, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.
Y2K, no big deal
I contributed a short essay to Newsweek’s 2010 project for the Overblown Fears list: Y2K.
Despite the media hype, the biggest story about the Y2K computer bug is that nothing happened. Trains didn’t spontaneously derail. McDonald’s didn’t roll back to turn-of-the-century pricing (no Happy Meals for a ha’penny). And the banks didn’t lose all of our money; we’d have to wait another eight years for that.
Farhad Manjoo recently did a 2-part piece on the lessons of Y2K for Slate.
Advice for the US from the Byzantine Empire
How did the Byzantine Empire stay around so long? A look at the answers might hold some lessons for the present-day United States.
Avoid war by every possible means, in all possible circumstances, but always act as if war might start at any time. Train intensively and be ready for battle at all times — but do not be eager to fight. The highest purpose of combat readiness is to reduce the probability of having to fight.
Paste Magazine’s best of the decade
They’ve got lists for books, movies, documentaries, video games, memes, comedians, and more.
Donald Barthelme’s recommended reading
A syllabus compiled by American author Donald Barthelme composed of 81 books.
If the list’s books are skewed toward Barthelme’s particular obsessions — one of the entries is “Beckett entire” — this is only to its credit. Most are novels. All but two of the books, Knut Hamsun’s Hunger and Flaubert’s Letters (numbers 15, 40), were written in the twentieth century, most in the past thirty years. And all have that dizzying sense of otherness and surprise common to great books, an affluence of vitality.
Update: Phil Gyford copied the list into plain old text.
How to avoid an untimely death
Number one on the list is “drive the biggest vehicle you can afford to drive”. And #10:
If anyone tries to force you into your car or car trunk at gun point, don’t cooperate. Fight and scream all you can even if you risk getting shot in the parking lot. If you get in the car, you will most likely die (or worse).
The author calls this “Black Swan avoidance”. (via lone gunman)
Top movies of the 2000s
From The Times in the UK, the top 100 films of the decade. Before you look, see if you can figure out which one of the following is not in the top 5:
Grizzly Man
Cache
No Country for Old Men
Team America: World Police
There Will Be Blood
I’ve seen 58 out of the 100.
Criterion Collection missteps
Vice has a list of the ten most dubious films included in the Criterion Collection…they call them little fuck-ups.
3. The Rock - Director Michael Bay, 1996
Ugh. That’s right. I failed to mention up top that there are not one, but two Michael Bay films in the Criterion Collection. It’s the kind of shock-inducing information you need delivered in increments. If they wanted to include an Alcatraz movie, uh, why not Escape from Alcatraz? Perhaps Criterion felt they needed a couple of signature “explosion” films to represent the genre. But given that logic, why not throw in Every Which Way but Loose to represent the “truck driver with an orangutan sidekick” genre too?
Also, Michael Bay is doing a remake of Hitchcock’s The Birds? What? WHAT??
Restaurant server don’ts
On the NY Times small business blog, Bruce Buschel shares 50 things restaurant servers and staff should never do. The next 50 will follow next week.
Update: Aaaand here’s the second 50.
Seven questions that keep physicists up at night
At a recent conference, a group of physicists talked about the biggest answered (and perhaps unanswerable) questions in physics. Three of the questions are:
What is everything made of?
Will string theory ever be proved correct?
How far can physics take us?
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