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A list of anthropomorphized online video players.
YouTube - Paris Hilton. Fast, a little out of control, used by every fifteen year old in town, looks alright but you get kinda tired of seeing it everywhere.
Tyler Cowen has taken a look at a lot of this year’s “best of” lists and has some meta-recommendations for you.
Regret the Error’s annual list of media errors and corrections is one of my favorites…the 2007 installment doesn’t disappoint. The corrections in the UK newspapers are awesome:
An article about Lord Lambton (“Lord Louche, sex king of Chiantishire”, News Review, January 7) falsely stated that his son Ned (now Lord Durham) and daughter Catherine held a party at Lord Lambton’s villa, Cetinale, in 1997, which degenerated into such an orgy that Lord Lambton banned them from Cetinale for years. In fact, Lord Durham does not have a sister called Catherine (that is the name of his former wife), there has not been any orgiastic party of any kind and Lord Lambton did not ban him (or Catherine) from Cetinale at all.
Ten incredible sound recordings, including those of a castrato (a man who was forcibly castrated so that he would retain his boyish soprano), the first recorded human voice from 1878, and the last 30 minutes of audio from the Jonestown Massacre.
While not as extensive as Rex’s collection of 2007 “best of” lists, I’m compiling my own collection of such lists using the bestof2007 tag.
The NY Times Magazine is out with its annual Year in Ideas issue. 2007 was the year of green — green energy, green manufacturing, and even a green Nobel Prize for Al Gore — and environmentalism featured heavily on the Times’ list. But I found some of the other items on the list more interesting.
Ambiguity Promotes Liking. Sometimes the more you learn about a person or a situation, the more likely you are to be disappointed:
Why? For starters, initial information is open to interpretation. “And people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles,” Norton says. If a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers “the outdoors” refers to nude beaches. And “once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that,” Norton says.
I’m an optimistic pessimist by nature; I believe everything in my life will eventually average out for the better but I assume the worst of individual situations for the reasons proposed in the article above. That way, when I assume something isn’t going to work out, I’m rarely disappointed.
The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid involves a technique called “mirror bees”.
The best method, called “mirror bees,” entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to “swarm” around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock.
What an elegant and easily implemented solution. But Armageddon and Deep Impact would have been a whole lot less entertaining using Dr. Vasile’s approach.
The Cat-Lady Conundrum. More than 60 million Americans are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that most people get from their cats. And it’s not exactly harmless:
Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, is looking into it. He has spent years studying Toxo’s impact on human behavior. (He found, for example, that people infected with Toxo have slower reflexes and are 2.5 times as likely to get into car accidents.)
This may explain why I can’t seem to get past “Easy” on Guitar Hero.
The Honeycomb Vase is actually made by bees. One unintended consequence of having a vase made out of beeswax is that flowers last longer in it:
Libertiny is convinced that flowers last longer in them, because beeswax contains propolis, an antibacterial agent that protects against biological decay. “We found out by accident,” he explains. “We had a bouquet, which was too big for the beeswax vase, so we put half of the flowers in a glass vase. We noticed the difference after a week or so.
Prison Poker. This is a flat out brilliantly simple idea:
[Officer Tommy Ray] made his own deck of cards, each bearing information about a different local criminal case that had gone cold. He distributed the decks in the Polk County jail. His hunch was that prisoners would gossip about the cases during card games, and somehow clues or breaks would emerge and make their way to the authorities. The plan worked. Two months in, as a result of a tip from a card-playing informant, two men were charged with a 2004 murder in a case that had gone cold.
The Gomboc is the world’s first Self-Righting Object.
It leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a “standing” position as if by magic. It doesn’t have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an inflatable punching-bag doll that uses ballast to bob upright after you whack it. No, the Gomboc is something new: the world’s first self-righting object.
More information is available on the Gomboc web site. You can order a Gomboc for €80 + S&H.
Update: The Gomboc is available for sale but it doesn’t come cheap. The €80 version is basically a paperweight with a Gomboc shape carved out of it. It’s €1000+ for a real Gomboc, which is ridiculous. (thx, nick)
The NY Times list of the 53 places to go in 2008.
Update: Greg notes something about the list that I noticed as well:
I was intrigued as the next guy by the list of 53 Places we’re supposed to go in 2008, then I realized that almost without exception, the “reason” to go is the opening at long last of that destination’s first “luxury” accommodations. Which seems about the dumbest reason I can think of for choosing where to travel.
Almost a year late, Roger Ebert shares his top movies of 2006 with us.
Yes, I know it’s a year late, but a funny thing happened to me on the way to compiling a list of the best films of 2006. I checked into the hospital in late June 2006 and didn’t get out again until spring of 2007. For a long while, I just didn’t feel like watching movies. Then something revolved within me, and I was engaged in life again.
I’ve never met Ebert, but his love of movies resounds so emphatically from his writing that if he didn’t feel like watching them, he must have been closer than I thought to shuffling off the ol’ mortal coil. It’s nice to hear his enthusiasm again. (via crazymonk)
As an alternative to the various bestseller lists, the National Book Critics Circle is creating a monthly Best Recommended List of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as voted on by NBCC members. The first list is already up for your perusal and holiday gift-buying idea generation.
On the heels of their 100 notable books list, the NY Times whittles it down to the ten best of the year. I interviewed Alex Ross back in October about his top tenner, The Rest is Noise.
The NY Times has released their list of the 100 Notable Books of 2007. Because of the amount of online reading I do and Ollie, my book-reading rate has declined dramatically…I only read two of the books on this list and one of those was Harry Potter 7.
Rex Sorgatz is once again compiling “best of” lists for 2007 in more than 30 categories. Time to get an intern, dude.
The top 60 Japanese buzzwords and buzzphrases of 2007.
The term “monster parents” refers to Japan’s growing ranks of annoying parents who make extravagant and unreasonable demands of their children’s schools.
(via bb)
The Book Design Review blog offers up its picks for the best book covers of the year.
The American Society of Magazine Editors picks their magazine favorite covers of 2007.
Tokyo, Seattle, and Moscow all have laptop orchestras.
When Italian police recently arrested Salvatore Lo Piccolo, the suspected head of the Sicilian Mafia, they also found a list of ten commandments that served as a guide for the behavior of Mafia members.
1. No one can present himself directly to another of our friends. There must be a third person to do it.
2. Never look at the wives of friends.
3. Never be seen with cops.
4. Don’t go to pubs and clubs.
5. Always being available for Cosa Nostra is a duty - even if your wife’s about to give birth.
6. Appointments must absolutely be respected.
7. Wives must be treated with respect.
8. When asked for any information, the answer must be the truth.
9. Money cannot be appropriated if it belongs to others or to other families.
10. People who can’t be part of Cosa Nostra: anyone who has a close relative in the police, anyone with a two-timing relative in the family, anyone who behaves badly and doesn’t hold to moral values.
I smell a future bestseller: Leadership Secrets of the Cosa Nostra…it’s the new 48 Laws of Power.
Update: There are already business books inspired by the Mafia: The Mafia Manager: A Guide to the Corporate Machiavelli and Tony Soprano on Management: Leadership Lessons Inspired By America’s Favorite Mobster for a start. (thx, gleb)
87 bad predictions about the future. Irving Fisher, economics professor at Yale University, in 1929:
Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau.
And Variety, passing judgement on rock ‘n roll in 1955:
It will be gone by June.
But we all know expert predictions are crap, yeah?
A list of thirty illnesses, sorted according to whether or not you can eat the victims. Oh McSweeney’s lists, we’ve been parted too long.
As a supplement to Alex Ross’ musical recommendations, a reader recommends NPR’s list of 50 essential classical music CDs and Jazz 100, a list of the best jazz on CD. (thx, john)
A list of seven topics to avoid talking about so as to not seem boring, including “the route you took to get here”.
What do these subjects have in common? The listener has nothing to add. He or she must just hear you describe your experience.
I’m particularly sensitive to the “recent changes in your child’s nap schedule” one these days. I remember how bored I was as a non-parent with the tendency for baby-talk to completely dominate conversations.
GOOD Magazine lists seven instances in which the old-fashioned way still works best, including the use of maggots for cleaning wounds, beekeeping, and letterpress printing.
The basic idea of beekeeping is still the same as it was in the 1800s. The Langstroth hive is named after the scientist who first discovered what we called bee space-three eighths of an inch. That’s their travel space, they won’t junk it up with honey or anything. Beekeepers take advantage of that, and that’s how the hives work.
A list of fast food menu items that are really high in trans fats. The list is a bit misleading as no attempt is made to normalize portions (the top two items are multi-portion side orders) but still handy, especially for the list of places that had no items on the list (Subway, Pizza Hut, Wendy’s, In-N-Out, etc.). (via serious eats)
Update: Many Eyes user Michael created two charts to accompany the list above: a bar chart and a treemap. (thx, michael)
If you’re overwhelmed by the thought of switching to an organic diet, here’s five easy organic foods you can introduce into your household with minimal fuss and maximum impact.
Potatoes are a staple of the American diet — one survey found they account for 30 percent of our overall vegetable consumption. A simple switch to organic potatoes has the potential to have a big impact because commercially-farmed potatoes are some of the most pesticide-contaminated vegetables.
10 questions that are illegal to ask during a job interview, including Where were you born? and Do you have children?
A comparison of the Last.fm chart and the official UK downloads chart after Radiohead’s In Rainbows was released online last week. The top 10 on Last.fm: all Radiohead. Official chart: nada. (via adactio)
Every once in awhile, my friend Matt takes a photo of the whiteboard at Orbital Comics in London. The most recent one features a list of the top 10 greatest moments in movies from comics. Orbital’s MySpace page has more of their whiteboard lists.
The Onion AV Club tracks which films and directors have had the most influence on Wes Anderson, including The Graduate, Peter Bogdanovich, and Francois Truffaut.
The “uniforms” he outfits his characters in are like a variation on Charlie Brown’s zigzag shirt and Lucy’s blue dress, and there’s an atmosphere of wistful melancholy common to Peanuts cartoons and Anderson’s seriocomedies. A Boy Named Charlie Brown echoes Anderson’s persistent “sic transit gloria” theme, as Charlie Brown blazes through the rounds of a local spelling bee, then washes out at the nationals. When he returns home to a group of friends who accept him as much as they mock him, he might as well be walking in slow motion, while “Ooh La La” plays on the soundtrack.
And today they’re going to run a list of films which were influenced by Anderson…I’ll have that link a bit later.
A list of 15 of the top small workplaces of 2007. If you run a small company, there are lot of good examples to follow here.
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