@ the movies
In this week's installment of the hot new show, Secret Agent: Beijing, Maciej turns the wrong way down the street and ends up with a whole bunch of new friends in law enforcement.
West Wing cancelled after 7 seasons...the show won't survive much past President Bartlet's tenure, which seems fitting.
How the ASRG and the IETF plan to can Spam.. Initial technologies deployed within months.
Apple has released three new iPhone ads in advance of the device's release date on June 29. The third ad is the money spot. The only remaining question: how likely am I to get one within a week or two of release without standing in line for hours on end? (via df, who notes that "No other cell phone is advertised by showing off the user interface.")
I'm now the proud owner
I'm now the proud owner (at least for 3 years) of a 1900 Volkswagen Jetta...if you believe the temporary license stuck to the back window. A bit of a Y2K problem at the dealership. But I absolutely love the car....it's black and even has a six-disc CD changer in the trunk. Happiness is good music on demand. According to my roommate, I'm now offically backslash dot com all day long.
Nobody's really saying it, but
Nobody's really saying it, but the blame for the situation the Timberwolves are in lands squarely on the shoulders of Kevin Garnett, his agent, and his monster $126 million contract. With that contract in place, the Wolves cannot get the players they need to help Garnett win a championship. That's why they did that under-the-table deal. So greedy. So dumb. No matter, though. Garnett and his big contract will be gone in a year or so anyway and the Wolves will be right back where they were.
Following up on why HAL sings "Daisy, Daisy" in 2001: A Space Odyssey", Lee Hartsfeld found a 1961 record with the Bell Labs recording on it at a junk shop for $10.
Art and genocide...why doesn't Soviet and Communist Chinese propaganda imagery offend us like Nazi propaganda does? The Stalinist and Maoist regimes were responsible for more deaths than the Nazis.
Google Print
Looks like Google branching out into searching more than just web sites. The Google Print FAQ says they're experimenting with "publications" (books? magazines?):
Google's mission is to provide access to all the world's information and make it universally useful and accessible. It turns out that not all the world's information is already on the Internet, so Google has been experimenting with a number of publishers to test their content online. During this trial, publishers' content is hosted by Google and is ranked in our search results according to the same technology we use to evaluate websites.
Google Print isn't referenced anywhere else on their web site so it's unclear as to whether it's a planned beta, an ongoing effort, or already over, but it sounds like an effort to counter Amazon's full-text book search efforts.
Update: Reader Xavier writes that Google Print is still working. A search for "1,000 knock knock jokes for kids" (with the results restricted to the print.google.com domain) yields this page for the book. A search for a common word like "the" reveals that around 8000 books are available, including Tolkien's Fellowship of the Ring, David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, Crime and Punishment, and Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines.
For his last Gawker post, Choire Sicha pens a recent history of New York City, 2000-2007.
Over the last month, I have read the Metro section from each issue of the New York Times -- starting in mid-2000 and ending with today's paper. Here's what I learned.
You know those spams you get touting penny stocks? It turns out they actually work. "The team found that a spammer who bought shares the day before starting an e-mail campaign and then sold them the day after could make a return on his or her investment of 4.9%. If he or she were to be a particularly effective spammer, returns to this strategy would be roughly 6%."
Update: NPR report on the spam stocks study. (thx, jeff)
Here's the front page of the new Guardian. They've completely revamped the paper...it's smaller and has a new font, among other changes. They changed the format to Berliner because "unambiguous research [showed] that readers increasingly find broadsheet newspapers difficult to handle in many everyday situations, including commuting to work".
The BBC's annual list of 100 things we didn't know last year. "Barbie's full name is Barbie Millicent Roberts." Here are the 2005 and 2004 editions. The Tampa Tribune has a list of 50 things for 2006.
Variation on an old theme
I've got a new idea for a web site. Actually, it's really a variation on an old theme, but it won't be a part of 0sil8. I'm going to become one of those people with multiple concurrently updated personal web projects.
I also started working on a new episode of 0sil8 last night. Unfortunately, I didn't get too far before I scrapped the whole idea. I've never done that before. Usually, I muddle through until something halfway decent pops out. Not this time. The question is: am I getting smarter about choosing projects or just impatient and lazy?
Some lawyer is suing his dry-cleaner for $65 million because they lost his pants. God, I hate lawyers. (Not you, I like you.)
A fleet of rubber duckies lost off of a container ship in the North Pacific in 1992 have helped scientists map ocean currents. Some of the ducks became periodically trapped in ice packs in the Arctic Ocean, slowly journeying to the Atlantic Ocean and even to the shores of Massachusetts. (thx, adriana)
Update: Harper's did a cover story on these rubber ducks in January 2007. Subscribers only, unfortunately. (thx, ross)
New York magazine has compiled a great collection of vintage NYC videos featuring the likes of Grandmaster Flash, the construction of the Empire State Building, Andy Warhol, and Union Square, circa 1896.
Home from Berlin. Lagging badly
Home from Berlin. Lagging badly (up at 5am this morning). Sorting thru email, I'll get to yours shortly. Some pictures, reading recommendations, and lots of ideas to share.
Health care in America
Sorry for the extensive quote, but this paragraph (along with the following one) in Malcolm Gladwell's article about health care in America does a fine job in laying out why it's failing:
The U. S. health-care system, according to "Uninsured in America," has created a group of people who increasingly look different from others and suffer in ways that others do not. The leading cause of personal bankruptcy in the United States is unpaid medical bills. Half of the uninsured owe money to hospitals, and a third are being pursued by collection agencies. Children without health insurance are less likely to receive medical attention for serious injuries, for recurrent ear infections, or for asthma. Lung-cancer patients without insurance are less likely to receive surgery, chemotherapy, or radiation treatment. Heart-attack victims without health insurance are less likely to receive angioplasty. People with pneumonia who don't have health insurance are less likely to receive X rays or consultations. The death rate in any given year for someone without health insurance is twenty-five per cent higher than for someone with insurance. Because the uninsured are sicker than the rest of us, they can't get better jobs, and because they can't get better jobs they can't afford health insurance, and because they can't afford health insurance they get even sicker. John, the manager of a bar in Idaho, tells Sered and Fernandopulle that as a result of various workplace injuries over the years he takes eight ibuprofen, waits two hours, then takes eight more--and tries to cadge as much prescription pain medication as he can from friends. "There are times when I should've gone to the doctor, but I couldn't afford to go because I don't have insurance," he says. "Like when my back messed up, I should've gone. If I had insurance, I would've went, because I know I could get treatment, but when you can't afford it you don't go. Because the harder the hole you get into in terms of bills, then you'll never get out. So you just say, 'I can deal with the pain.'"
You can point fingers at what's wrong or who's responsible all day long, but the facts remain, America's health care system sucks...well, unless you're rich, in which case nothing really sucks. The BBC put it well earlier this week in writing about the crisis in New Orleans:
The uneasy paradox which so many live with in this country - of being first-and-foremost rugged individuals, out to plunder what they can and paying as little tax as they can get away with, while at the same time believing that America is a robust, model society - has reached a crisis point this week.
Today's secret word is "Spider-Man"
Today's secret word is "Spider-Man". Everytime you hear the secret word, scream real loud. I hope I'm not screaming for my money back sometime this afternoon.
I started my new job
I started my new job today. This is the fourth time that I've made such an announcement on this site. Hopefully, I will not have to make another for a long while.
The webcam will be back up soon. And, much to everyone's chagrin, I will be much less naked on it.
Now that I have this kick-ass laptop for work, I need a bag in which to haul it around. Here are some features I'm looking for:
- space for laptop, laptop accessories, Palm, cell phone, and other assorted goodies (pens, note pad, business cards, a book or two)
- separate padded laptop compartment
- padded "over-the-shoulder" strap
- black or other neutral color
- no huge logos (I'm already going to pay quite a bit for the bag...I don't need to advertise for them as well)
Are you currently using and enjoying such a bag? Email me with suggestions. Thanks in advance.
ps. The Vurt and Endo by Spire are both very close to what I'm looking for.
Notorious S.I.L.K.
I just received an email-borne virus based on my Silkscreen font:
Date: Fri, 02 Aug 2002 23:52:53 -0600 (MDT)
From: parallax <parallax@technet.sg>
Subject: Install the Silkscreen type family, unzip this
To: jason@kottke.org
Attachments: readme.bat, readme.txt
The idea is that you're so keyed up to install Silkscreen that you run readme.bat and it wreaks some particular havoc on your PC. I hope people aren't being taken in by this, but at the same time, it's fun to see my creation twisted, shifted, and reflected back to me in a completely unexpected manner.
Update: Anil tells me it's a Klez virus (or something like it). Klez looks for snippets of text related to downloadable files in the browser cache of an infected computer and emails copies of itself out to addresses found in the cache.
If you haven't seen it, it's new to you
And if you're living on Internet time, perhaps even if you have seen it. The most overused phrase at Web 2.0, aside from "at the end of the day", is some variation of "next generation" applied to software or services. Every new app being talked about here is next generation or revolutionary or __[fill in the blank]__. The sheer amount of supposed novelty being blasted at the audience is exhausting...everything is changing the world in a significant way. I imagine many of the attendees -- those who read 900 Atom/RSS files in their newsreaders daily perhaps -- find this energizing, but it saps my energy. No wonder Meg left the biz to focus on something a little less suppositious.
Jennifer Daniel has a nice one-page portfolio of design and illustration work.
The amount of processing power
The amount of processing power & throughput required to handle the information that the American citizen needs to analyze in order to make an informed decision in the upcoming presidential race exceeds the processing power & throughput of the human brain. This seems like a significant problem.
The Christian paradox in the US: "America is simultaneously the most professedly Christian of the developed nations and the least Christian in its behavior."
Suck on Big Weenie
Somehow, my online experience is now complete. Suck for Dummies got mentioned on a site called Big Weenie. Just click on the little illustrated hot dog, and you're wisked away to 0sil8. If only life were that easy.
Set-up. [Pause.] Punchline! -- GK
Pesky OS X bug: Powerbook/MacBook/MacBook Pro freezes when using Cmd-Tab. Has anyone else ran into this problem...or even better, a solution? It's happened on my Powerbook every 2-3 weeks since I got it about a year ago...and 3 times in the past two days.
Pioneer Space Plaque Redesign by Edward Tufte
Edward Tufte, well known amongst information & Web designers for his trilogy of ID bibles, puts a bit of magic into the possibility of Earth's first contact with aliens:
"Since the principles of physics hold everywhere, magic is conceivably a cosmological entertainment, with the wonder induced by theatrical illusions appreciated by all, regardless of planetary system. Accordingly the plaque aboard the Pioneer spacecraft for extraterrestrial scrutiny billions of years from now might have escaped from its conspicuously anthropocentric gestures by showing instead the universally familiar Amazing Levitation Trick."
Who says information designers don't have a sense of humor?
The Crate Review System judges video games by how the length of time it takes a player to find the first crate, "which represents the point where the developers ran out of ideas".
Please note that by crates, we mean both crates proper and the circular crate, the barrel.
(thx, joshua)
Search, always dead
Via Tim O'Reilly comes this comment from Bill Burnham:
A couple of months ago I had the pleasure of moderating a panel at TIECon on the Search Industry. Peter Norvig, Google's Director of Research, made one comment in particular that stood out in my mind at the time. In response to a question about the prospects for the myriad of search start-ups looking for funding Peter basically said, and I am paraphrasing somewhat, that search start-ups, in the vein of Google, Yahoo Ask, etc. are dead. Not because search isn't a great place to be or because they can't create innovative technologies, but because the investment required to build and operate an Internet-scale, high performance crawling, indexing, and query serving farm were now so great that only the largest Internet companies had a chance of competing.
For Norvig to say what he did seems a little crazy, given the company he works for. The first time that search died was back in 1998. Yahoo, Altavista, Hotbot, Webcrawler, and other sites had the search game all sewn up. They were all about the same in terms of quality and people found what they were looking for much of the time. No one needed another search engine, and starting a search company in such a mature market seemed like folly. Around that time, Google became a company and eventually the world figured out it really did need another search engine.
Hot on the heels of Muhammad Yunus receiving the Nobel Peace Prize for 2006, the New Yorker has an overview of the various approaches to microfinance and microcredit.
C. Montgomery Blair?
Some unintentional editorializing by the Google News computer program:
Excellent.
An ethnic dining guide; Wash. DC centric but with good general info. "Ordering the plain steak in Latin America may be a great idea, but it is usually a mistake in Northern Virginia. Opt for dishes with sauces and complex mixes of ingredients."
The year in errors
Every year, Regret the Error1 publishes a roundup of the year's media errors and corrections. I didn't think anything could beat these corrections from the 2005 list:
Norma Adams-Wade's June 15 column incorrectly called Mary Ann Thompson-Frenk a socialist. She is a socialite.
The Denver Daily News would like to offer a sincere apology for a typo in Wednesday's Town Talk regarding New Jersey's proposal to ban smoking in automobiles. It was not the author's intention to call New Jersey 'Jew Jersey.'
but the 2006 collection is a strong one. Here are some of my favorites:
A correction in this column Thursday about a June 14 Taste section recipe for French coconut pie incorrectly suggested that the recipe called for a pint of vodka.
In Wednesday's Taste section, a Washington Post recipe on Page F7 included an incorrect cooking time for carbonada (braised beef with onions and red wine). The dish should be cooked for 2 1/2 hours, not 10 to 20 minutes.
Because of an editing error, a recipe last Wednesday for meatballs with an article about foods to serve during the Super Bowl misstated the amount of chipotle chilies in adobo to be used. It is one or two canned chilies, not one or two cans.
A story in the July 24 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise incorrectly spelled Sheri Normandin's name. Also, Bobby Kincaid is not a quadriplegic.
The regional court in Duesseldorf ordered the weekly WirtschaftsWoche to print a correction to an article that claimed Piech wore "garish ties with hunting motifs" and did not know the exact number of his children from various marriages, a court spokesman said. The magazine, owned by the Handelsblatt group, had published a picture of Piech wearing a tie with a picture of a man with a gun and an elephant. It quoted Piech as saying in an interview that he had sired "about a dozen children. The exact number is not known". The court accepted Piech's argument that his comment had been meant ironically and that the motif on his tie was not a hunting motif...
Mr Wakefield is not and never has been a member of the Communist Party. The error is regretted.
In a March 17 story about protests planned against the Iraq war, The Associated Press erroneously identified Jeremy Straughn as a political socialist at Purdue University. He is a political sociologist.
She's got the patent resume of somebody that has serious skill. She loves football. She's African-American, which would kind of be a big coon. A big coon. Oh my God. I am totally, totally, totally, totally, totally sorry for that. [He meant "coup".]
Recent articles in this column may have given the impression that Mr Sven Goran Eriksson was a greedy, useless, incompetent fool. This was a misunderstanding. Mr Eriksson is in fact a footballing genius. We are happy to make this clear.
I especially like the recipe ones...just the thought of some unsuspecting reader eating her meatballs with all those chilies or the fellow debating whether he should serve his obviously raw braised beef to the rest of his family. Be sure to check out the whole list.
[1] When I first posted this, I misspelled "Regret" as "Reget". (No, really!) I deeply regret the error. (thx, mauayan)↩
Puppets are huge these days.
Puppets are huge these days. Exhibit A is the very funny sock puppet in the Pets.com commercials. I don't know what it is, but I can't get enough of those commercials. I laugh every time.
Some great puppetry is featured in Being John Malkovich. The opening scene was like nothing I'd ever seen before; I had no idea that you could do things like that with puppets.
But I think my favorite puppet appears in this Levi's commercial (well worth the download). How they managed to interject that much personality into a puppet, I will never know.
Animated characters have gotten more personable as well. Like the puppets mentioned above, the robot from Iron Giant and the toys from Toy Story 2 have far more personality that most currently working actors. More on this later.
What's the funniest word ever? I don't know about funny, but I've always enjoyed saying "Goethe".
You'll find more in the archives or you may peruse the books, movies, remaindered links, or further afield separately.
