Earlier this week, Toshiba announced that they would no longer be manufacturing or marketing HD DVD players, which effectively ended the HD disc format war going on between HD DVD and the victorious Blu-ray format. Later that day, author and tech gadget enthusiast Steven Johnson twittered the following:
Chuckling at the fact that the ENTIRE PLATFORM died a month after I bought my HD-DVD player.
Thinking that it would be interesting to hear the tale of an early adopter in the age of hyper-obsolescence, I sent Johnson a few questions that he was kind enough to answer.
Jason Kottke: Warner Brothers went exclusively Blu-ray on January 4. When did you buy your player?
Steven Johnson: Basically our old DVD player broke, and so I figured we might as well buy a next generation player if we were buying a new one. Being the renowned technology futurist that I am, I analyzed the marketplace and decided that the HD-DVD/Blu-ray standoff was going to be around for a long time, and so I might as well just pick one and go with it. I think I had HD-DVD in my head because I had been thinking about buying the XBOX-360 HD-DVD accessory, so that's what I bought. Right around December 20th I think.
Kottke: The pace of HD DVD's collapse was dizzying, even by contemporary standards. How do you feel about owning a brand new piece of obsolete technology? You're an early adopter...is this just how the game is played, even at this fantastic velocity?
Johnson: I thought it was pretty funny. I mean, the Betamax adopters at least had a few years to nag their VHS friends about the better picture quality, before the format died a slow death. But HD-DVD -- they just took it out back and shot it! I think that's what's so striking about this. I can't remember a standards war where the winner was crowned so definitively. For a few weeks there, I felt like the technology world was taunting me for my decision: I got email from Netflix saying that they were NEVER going to buy another HD-DVD again.
The consolation prize is that Apple introduced HD rentals with the AppleTV -- which we also have -- right as HD-DVD was dying, so I might be able to bypass Blu-Ray altogether, just out of spite.
Kottke: Do you think Blu-ray will achieve the popularity that DVDs did or is the age of shuttling bits around on silver platters over?
Johnson: I really hope so. I've been using the new Apple TV version for the past 48 hours, and the whole HD movie rental process is just completely painless, other than the fact that they should give you 48 hours to watch the movie once you've started it. (By the way, I don't think enough people have commented on that Take Two upgrade: it is basically an entirely new product, and Apple just gave away the upgrade for free -- I think as an implicit acknowledgment that the first iteration wasn't fully baked. Still, how cool.)
Kottke: So you're the owner of a machine that will perform its task perfectly for many years to come but is de-facto useless because you can't buy any new media for it beyond the ~400 currently available titles. Is this becoming a more commonplace situation for consumers?
Johnson: Yes and no. There are more new standards proposed, and new innovations, and thus more obsolescence, but more and more of the new standards are coming in the form of software not hardware, so the transitions aren't nearly as painful as my HD-DVD misadventure. My AppleTV box that I bought last year wouldn't let me watch HD movies or browse Flickr photos, but after twenty minutes of a software update, I can now enjoy both with ease. I think that experience is probably going to be more commonplace than my getting burned buying into the wrong silver platter.
--
Thanks, Steven.
Some cultures use whistling languages to communicate when regular speech becomes ineffective over large distances. From Wikipedia:
Whistled languages are normally found in locations with difficult mountainous terrain, slow or difficult communication, low population density and/or scattered settlements, and other isolating features such as shepherding and cultivation of hillsides. The main advantage of whistling speech is that it allows the speaker to cover much larger distances (typically 1 - 2 km but up to 5 km) than ordinary speech, without the strain (and lesser range) of shouting. The long range of whistling is enhanced by the terrain found in areas where whistled languages are used.
Here's an mp3 of two men communicating via whistling. It sounds very much like R2-D2.
Interview with Michel Gondry on his new movie, Be Kind Rewind.
I hate cynicism. I wipe it from me. I don't like cynical people. I don't like cynical movies. Cynicism is very easy. You don't have to justify it. You don't have to fight for it.
Gondry also did a hilarious remake of the film's original trailer.
Update: Maybe Gondry got the premise for the movie from an old Nickelodeon show called Amanda, Please! Or not.
A series of posts by Mark Bernstein on what he calls NeoVictorian Computing. Some interesting thoughts in there; here's a taste:
We software creators woke up one day to find ourselves living in the software factory. The floor is hard, from time to time it gets very cold at night, and they say the factory is going to close and move somewhere else. We are unhappy with our modern computing and alienated from our work, we experience constant, inexorable guilt.
and also:
Everyone has pretty much the same computer. Your computer is my computer. Nobody is really very happy about their computer; the very best minds in the field walk around with old Dells or MacBooks, just like your grandmother. Almost everyone has pretty much the same software.
Oh, and:
We sound unhappy. Our best Web discourse (Tim Bray and John Gruber and Joel Spolsky and Scott Rosenberg, for example) focuses relentlessly on what a few vendors are doing, and often pleads with those vendors for small favors: new DRM policies for our iPods, or better perspective in the application dock. Our worst discourse (usenet, slashdot, valleywag, the comment section of any popular tech blog after comment #12) is consistently puerile; it's often hard to imagine that these are written by scholars, scientists and engineers, and petulant children.
I think that last sentence is supposed to end "not petulant children", but you get the idea. (via scott rosenberg)
Paula Scher argues that the design of advertising has gotten a lot better in recent years but that the graphic design community isn't paying too much attention.
I'm not sure that the graphic design community as a whole is paying any attention to this. I don't see very many speakers from the advertising community invited to speak at design conferences (except for the very few who lead branding groups at agencies and in some circles they are still considered the enemy). I don't read about it on design blogs, and I'm not seeing books published about it. I'm not seeing advertising, in any form, turn up in any design museum exhibitions, not at the Modern, not at the Cooper-Hewitt. The Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has an annual designer award category for Communication Design and I've never seen an advertising person nominated since the award's inception.
(via quipsologies)
Job opening: the Charles Simonyi Professorship in the Public Understanding of Science at Oxford will be vacant in September 2008. If you apply and get it, you will be succeeding Richard Dawkins, who has reached the university's mandatory retirement age.
Did Alexander Graham Bell drink Elisha Gray's telephone-flavored milkshake?
On May 22, 1886, The Washington Post published a shocking front-page scoop: Zenas F. Wilber, a former Washington patent examiner, swore in an affidavit that he'd been bribed by an attorney for Alexander Graham Bell to award Bell the patent for the telephone over a rival inventor, Elisha Gray, who'd filed a patent document on the same day as Bell in 1876.
Even though Bell has been legally vindicated on this issue, Seth Shulman's new book, The Telephone Gambit, suggests that he did in fact steal a key idea from Elisha Gray. (via house next door)
O'Reilly Media and Wolfram Research are going to be collaborating on a web version of Mathematica.
Called "Hilbert" after the influential German mathematician, David Hilbert, the newly licensed software will be browser accessible and, utilizing AJAX technologies, will emulate the desktop version of the software with remarkable fidelity. "The magic of AJAX will allow OST to combine or 'mash-up' Mathematica with other web-based technologies to deliver and support high quality science and mathematics courses online such as the Calculus&Mathematica courses currently taught through NetMath at the University of Illinois and other universities," explains Scott Gray, Director of the O'Reilly School of Technology.
Hilbert should be available before the end of the year.
Photos of kids with their science experiments, including Juicy Beans, Garlic: The Silent Killer, and Extreme Wood.
Ok, now we're getting meta up in this piece. Scott took all the Single Serving Sites in my list and made a Single Serving Site that cycles through them. Here's a SSS that lists other SSS. Additionally, there's a Wikipedia entry.
Update: Ho, ho, not so fast. The Wikipedia page for Single Serving Sites has been flagged for speedy deletion for several reasons:
This article or other page provides no meaningful content or history, and the text is unsalvageably incoherent. It is patent nonsense.
It is blatant advertising for a company, product, group, service or person that would require a substantial rewrite in order to become an encyclopedia article.
Not notable: definition of days-old neologism; not covered anywhere except a popular blog and a few less-popular ones.
Heh.
Interview with a man who cut off his right hand in a staged accident because he felt that having "two hands was a defect in my body".
So it's irrational, but is it insane? It's true that a major amp makes your body less functional, so how can it be sane to do it? For me, I think the answer is in what I was going through before my amp. I was so consumed by the drive to lose my hand that I could scarcely function.
Now I've totally lost the desire to amputate anything. I'm totally used to doing things with a hand and a stump. It's true I need to ask for help like once a day, that I'm a bit slower at dish washing, keyboarding, and stuff like that, but is that worse than being seriously overweight, or being short of breath from smoking, or even trying to walk in stiletto heels?
Somewhat related: a demonstration video of Dean Kamen's mechanical arm, which he calls the Luke Arm after Luke Skywalker's sophisticated mechanical arm in the Star Wars movies. (via waxy)
Nice interview with John Gruber, proprietor of Daring Fireball. His explanation of how he selects links could easily double for mine:
As for what I link to and what I don't, it's very much like Justice Stewart's definition of obscenity: "I know it when I see it." There's a certain pace and rhythm to what I'm going for, a mix of the technical, the artful, the thoughtful, and the absurd. In the same way that I strive to achieve a certain voice in my prose, as a writer, I strive for a certain voice with regard to what I link to. No single item I post to the Linked List is all that important. It's the mix, the gestalt of an entire day's worth taken together, that matters to me.
Interesting explanation of Prince Rupert's Drops with accompanying video demonstration.
The very high stress within the drop gives rise to unusual qualities, such as the ability to withstand a blow from a hammer on the bulbous end without breaking, while the drops will disintegrate explosively if the tail end is even slightly damaged. When this happens, the large amount of potential energy stored in the drop's crystalline structure is released, causing fractures to propagate through the material at very high speed.
I did research on glass back in college but I never heard anything about this.
Thanks to an avalanche of email, I've added a bunch of new items to the Single Serving Sites listing. Now please stop emailing me suggestions!! ;)
The conventional theories in economics and politics contend that people act rationally. Elizabeth Kolbert reviews a pair of books that suggest that's not really the case.
Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious -- people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they've recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash -- but others were more surprising, even downright wacky. For instance, Tversky and Kahneman asked subjects to estimate what proportion of African nations were members of the United Nations. They discovered that they could influence the subjects' responses by spinning a wheel of fortune in front of them to generate a random number: when a big number turned up, the estimates suddenly swelled.
This portrait of Homer Simpson painted in the style of Rembrandt is strangely mesmerizing. Can't look away from those giant eyes.
The other day I posted a link to an article about Hervé This that mentioned how to unboil an egg.
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to 'uncook' the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
Michael Pusateri tried it out (using vitamin C) and it didn't work so well.
The egg was whole and appeared completely unaffected. The texture of the egg outside felt normal and in no way 'unboiled'. While I am a professional engineer, I am a amateur scientist. There are several reasons this process might not have unboiled the egg.
Any molecular gastronomists out there want to give this one a shot?
HD DVD is officially pronounced dead, having died last month when Warner switched to Blu-ray. You all can go out and buy Blu-ray players now. (And wow, that happened quickly.)
Update: Combining two recent trends on kottke.org: Hillary Clinton Is Your New HD DVD Player. (thx, raza)
This photo shoot of Lindsey Lohan as Marilyn Monroe only serves to underscore how unlike (and inferior) Lohan is compared to Monroe. Lohan is the Meet the Spartans version of Monroe. Some of the originals are here, lots more thumbnails here. NSFW.
Update: Here's an accompanying article. And Goldenfiddle had this to say:
This is, without a doubt, the saddest, stupidest, ugliest, most pointless thing ever. Bert Stern should be ashamed of himself.
Apparently, the Dribble-Drive Motion offense is all the rage in the high school and college basketball. The DDM is:
a high-scoring scheme featuring four perimeter players and a host of innovations. Unlike Knight's classic motion offense (which is based on screens) or Pete Carril's Princeton-style offense (which is based on cuts), Walberg's attack was founded on dribble penetration. To Calipari, at least, it embodied two wholly unconventional notions. One, there were no screens, the better to create spacing for drives. Two, the post man ran to the weak side of the lane (instead of the ball side), leaving the ball handler an open driving path to the basket.
The Boston Celtics use a variant of DDM as well.
Gelf Magazine enlisted the help of ZEUS, a football game analyzing computer, to see which NFL coaches called the worst plays at critical times during the 2007 season.
On average, suboptimal play-calling decisions cost each team .85 wins over the course of the season.
In particular, the world champion Giants should have won another game had they called the right plays at the right times. ZEUS also analyzed play calling in "hyper-critical" situations (those fourth-down decisions with five or fewer yards needed for the first down) and found that on average, teams made the wrong calls more than 50% of the time. Here's an interview on the results with the guys behind ZEUS.
Interview with book cover designer Peter Mendelsund. I will read any interview in which the subject replies "I still don't know" when asked how they got their job. I really like what I've seen of Mendelsund's work (sorry...his site resizes the browser window...no, wait, I'm not sorry, *he* should apologize for that); his cover for War and Peace is lovely.
Adam Shepard had $25 and the clothes on his back. As a challenge, he set himself a year to get an apartment, a car, and $2500 in savings.
To make his quest even more challenging, he decided not to use any of his previous contacts or mention his education. During his first 70 days in Charleston, Shepard lived in a shelter and received food stamps. He also made new friends, finding work as a day laborer, which led to a steady job with a moving company.
The whole thing is recounted in Shepard's book, Scratch Beginnings: Me, $25, and the Search for the American Dream. (via cyn-c)
Lately I've noticed a pattern of people building Single Serving Sites, web sites comprised of a single page with a dedicated domain name and do only one thing. Here are a few examples:
Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle showcases all the lovely things that the presidential candidate has done for you.
Sometimes Red, Sometimes Blue. Sometimes the page is read, sometimes it is blue.
Check out Is Lost a Repeat? if you need to know if the upcoming episode of Lost is a rerun.
D-E-F-I-N-I-T-E-L-Y helps you spell definitely correctly.
Now you can find out quickly from anywhere in the city or world: What Color Is the Empire State Building?
Khaaan! The classic William Shatner and his rage!
Is It Christmas? (thx, michael & andy)
Misanthropebook, a Facebook parody.
Status page for the overburdened microsocial site: Is Twitter Down? (thx, kevin)
Find out, Are We At War With Iran? (thx, kevin)
The Abe Vigoda status page. Currently alive. (thx, peter)
Gods Damn It, a Battlestar Galactica in-joke.
You can do anything at ZOMBO.com. (thx, edward)
The classic You're The Man Now Dog! (thx, jordan)
Purple has a FAQ page but it's a SSS in spirit. (thx, mike)
Oh, it's Yet Another Useless Web Site. (thx, mike)
You Sneezed! blesses you.
Use Is Paris In Jail Right Now? to see if Ms. Hilton is a free woman or not. (thx, lex)
Are you tired? Tell them why. (thx, kathi)
Am I Awesome? Very. (thx, jared)
Hypnotoad! (thx, chris)
Fuck the Sound, which is, I'm told, "IRC quotes (some NSFW) by an Autechre fanboy from Romania". (thx, huphtur)
Gentle advice to those who ask dumb questions: Just Fucking Google It. (thx, michael)
Do websites need to look exactly the same in every browser?
It's not Lupus, it's never Lupus. Some House-related thing? (thx, sharelle)
Beth Cherry keeps a single page blog with no archives. (thx, malcolm)
We Need More Lemon Pledge. Not sure what this is. (thx, zach)
From the same person: Illegal Tender Terms of Service and These are the rules.
No Time For Love, Dr. Jones. Indy, you scoundrel. (thx, wade)
And several more: Is It Tuesday?, The Internet Fire Log, Let's Turn This Fucking Website Yellow, iiiiiiii, Instant Rimshot, It Will Never Be the Same, Thank You Andy Warhol, Free Bill Stickers, raquo, The Last Page of the Internet, Thanks Ants, Is The Apple Store Down?, What Is My IP?, Hillary Clinton Is Your New Bicycle, John McCain Is Your New Bicycle, Michelle Obama Is Your New Bicycle, The Daily Nice, Defiant Dog, Hillary Clinton Is Your New HD DVD Player, and Spinning Beach Ball of Death.
Update: Ha! Alright, this got outta hand in a hurry. There are like 400 emails in my inbox, each with several Single Serving Site suggestions. I quickly went through them all, pulled out the notable ones, and called it good. Thanks to everyone who sent in suggestions.
Rex Sorgatz interviews Adrian Holovaty about Everyblock, a site that "aggregates piles of local information, like restaurant reviews and crime stats, which are then displayed block-by-block".
On a completely different note, it's been a challenge to acquire data from governments. We (namely Dan, our People Person) have been working since July to request formal data feeds from various agencies, and we've run into many roadblocks there, from the political to the technical. We expected that, of course, but the expectation doesn't make it any less of a challenge.
I believe that Everyblock will be most successful not through the utility of its site but if it can get more civic and federal agencies to release more structured data about what's going on in our cities and country. It is *our data* after all.
Nice TV ad for the Madrid Metro...a view of the city from underground.
The fellow/lady behind the excellent Strange Maps blog is doing a book, The Atlas of Strange Maps. In my mind, I have pre-pre-ordered this book...I hope it gets the well-designed cover it deserves.
@ the movies
If you've already seen King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters, I'd suggest reading Jason Scott's pair of posts about the movie. In The King of Wrong, Scott suggests that the filmmakers left out crucial details and fudged others in order to make the actual events fit the story they were trying to tell.
What I'm saying here is that a good percentage of what makes the documentary "good" are made up conflicts, inaccurate reporting, smoothed-over narratives that are meant to make you root for one side or hate the other, when in fact reality doesn't hold up to these allegations. The whole point of the narrative is that Steve is wronged, denied his rightful place in the record books because of internal machinations. But he had the championship for 3 years! He had played Billy one-on-one. Billy was not on this campaign to cut Steve off at the knees at every turn so to humiliate him and dismiss him, to his own aggrandizement.
In a follow-up post, Scott elaborates on his poor opinion of the film, drawing upon his experience making a documentary about another nerd subculture, the BBS.
Is Billy Mitchell "real"? I have no doubt that he says things that are over the top. I have no question that he goes off the rails on certain subjects. I also know that if you interview people for hours on end, at various days, you will get some pretty crazy stuff. How you choose to deal with that stuff is a little bit of who you are as an interviewer and editor and director. There's no question you can "filter for crazy", or "filter for nice", or filter for whatever the hell you wish to. I never claim that Billy's not capable of throwing out whoppers. I'm saying that when you lace his words with an implication of malice, of cheating, of lying to stay on top, then you are moving into caricature and needless trashing of a real person to achieve your goals. Chasing Ghosts has Billy Mitchell and a whole other range of players, and gives you the story without turning the whole experience of video games, and arcades, into a petty small-minded pissing match.
Scott nearly comes off as holier-than-thou about the standards that documentary filmmakers should be held to, but he clearly put his money where his mouth is when filming his BBS documentary. After a rough interview with Thom Henderson, a controversial figure in the compression software community, which interview caused Henderson to recall, with pain, a particularly difficult period in his life, Scott offered him the chance to edit it out of the movie...and something else too:
But you know, when I put together the ARC-ZIP episode (later renamed COMPRESSION) and sent it to him to see, I told him flat out. "If you're not comfortable with this, if you don't like it, let me know and it won't go in." He wrote back and said he and his wife were fine with it. I then told him I was giving him irrevocable, permanent rights to the film such that he could distribute and copy and even sell it however he pleased. He's the only other person besides myself with any rights to my films. He has it for download from his site to this day.
I enjoyed King of Kong, but reading that some of the movie's tension was manufactured sure takes the polish off of it for me.
Update: The Onion AV Club has an interview with Billy Mitchell about the movie and his take on it.
I invited [Steve Wiebe] to the Classic Gaming Expo, 2004. I invited him there, and I went up to speak onstage, as I do at each expo there. When I went up and spoke onstage, I called him to the stage, in order to honor him. I unveiled the poster in his honor, honoring his accomplishments. I did that in 2004. He was onstage with me. And I'm sorry to tell you that you can't see that, 'cause they forgot to put that in the movie.
Demo film of the Polaroid SX-70 made by Charles and Ray Eames but set to a soundtrack of The Cramps performing Garbageman. Wot? (via spurgeonblog)
In an anonymity experiment, Catherine Price attempts to recover some of her privacy by living off the information grid.
Pay for everything in cash. Don't use my regular cellphone, landline or e-mail account. Use an anonymizing service to mask my Web surfing. Stay away from government buildings and airports (too many surveillance cameras), and wear a hat and sunglasses to foil cameras I can't avoid. Don't use automatic toll lanes.
For the bit about the cellphone, I'm surprised that she didn't slip it into an antistatic or other foil-lined bag while it wasn't in use.
Photos by Taryn Simon of hidden and unfamiliar places in the US, like the marijuana crop grow room at the National Center for Natural Products Research in Mississippi. Here's a somewhat overlapping selection of photos at Wired and another at The Morning News, which includes a great letter from Disney denying Simon access to their theme park's underbelly.
After giving your request serious consideration, even though it is against company policy to consider such a request, it is with regret that I inform you that we are not willing to grant the permission you seek...As you are aware, our Disney characters, parks and other valuable properties have become beloved by young and old alike, and with this comes a tremendous responsibility to protect their use and the protection we currently enjoy. Should we lapse in our vigilance, we run the risk of losing this protection and the Disney characters as we know and love them...Especially during these violent times, I personally believe that the magical spell cast on guests who visit our theme parks is particularly important to protect and helps to provide them with an important fantasy they can escape to.
The first trailer for Indiana Jones and the Unfortunately Titled Movie Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is available...in HD even.
How to unboil an egg:
He explains that when an egg is cooked, the protein molecules unroll themselves, link up and enclose the water molecules. In order to 'uncook' the egg, you need to detach the protein molecules from each other. By adding a product like sodium borohydride, the egg becomes liquid within three hours. For those who want to try it at home, vitamin C also does the trick.
That's from an article on Hervé This, a French chemist whose medium is food.
Simple little web page: What Color is the Empire State Building? Includes an explanation of why...today it's red/pink/white for Valentine's Day.
Giles "Finds it hard to write a meaningful bio, despite being a professional writer for some 15 years now. That's horrifying. It's frightening." Turnbull on the difficulty of writing one's own biography. Having to write three-line bios is at least 33% of the reason I stopped speaking at conferences. (The other two-thirds: a) I don't like speaking at conferences, and b) conference organizers stopped asking me to speak.)
Fixing Democracy, answers to the following question:
It's the morning after the election. The president elect calls you up and says, "You know, after this grueling, absurd campaign, I now see that the state of our democracy is something we have to grapple with right away. What should I do?"
Respondents include Bill Bradley, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Dahlia Lithwick. (via snarkmarket)
A list of ten things that won't Change no matter who get elected President.
10. The primary system: Sure, the early primaries give a handful of white, rural voters disproportionate influence over the election and state caucuses make Tammany Hall look like a golden age of democratic participation, but they're an entrenched part of party politics at this point and it's not wise to mess with them. Just ask the Democrats in Michigan or Florida.
Do We Really Want Another Black President After The Events Of Deep Impact?
Related: the latest episode of This American Life leads with a fascinating piece about how the funny happens at The Onion. In a lovely paradox, it turns out that the process of making funny things isn't all that amusing...the sound of silence following the recitation of a funny possible headline in the writers' room is deep and unnerving. (thx, marshall)
Usually the combination of "Hollywood" and "Oscars" is enough to scare me off a story, but this short examination of how good actors become movie stars was pretty interesting. Of his sudden stardom, Jack Nicholson said:
I remember when that happened to me. I'd been working for 12 years, and then the part in "Easy Rider" changed my life. Very few people have ever had the experience where they sit back and say, "I am a movie star." I knew it at the first showing of "Easy Rider" at the Cannes Film Festival by how the audience reacted to the movie. A lot of people would say, "I know I'm a movie star, but, oh, I wonder what's going to happen..." I knew it then: I was a movie star. And it was great.
The story is part of the recent NY Times Magazine package on the breakthrough movie stars of 2008. The photographs of the chosen stars by Ryan McGinley are notable as well for "their attempt to wrestle the Hollywood photoshoot beast away from its recent hyper-produced overwrought incarnation".
Richard Mosse's Air Disaster, a series of photographs of air disaster simulations, on-the-ground training exercises for airport fire-fighting crews. BLDGBLOG has a short interview with the photographer.
The firemen have put out the fire in seconds. That's their job, after all. They do this with decisive brevity and great courage, sometimes walking right into flames -- but it doesn't make for an easy photograph. It's all a bit like the sexual act: the flames come up and men run in and spray everything with a high power water hose and then it's all over.
The Adam Baumgold Gallery is currently showing a series of drawing by Chris Ware, Drawings for New York Periodicals. His series that ran in the NY Times and his Thanksgiving New Yorker covers are included. Feb 1 - Mar 15, 2008. (thx, evan)
Regarding the graph of technological adoption I linked to the other day, I wrote the graph's creator** a little note, wondering if he'd done a version comparing the adoption rates directly (like this home run leaders chart). He hadn't, but he whipped one up quick and sent it to me...which saved me a lot of time in Photoshop.
I can't post it (the Times has legal dibs on it), but according to the graph (which Nicholas admits is more "guesstimate-y" than the one that ran in the Times), the five technologies that made it into 80% of US households the quickest were (with the rough year of initial availability in parentheses):
1. radio (1922)
2. microwave oven (1972)
3. VCR (1979)
4. color TV (1960)
5. cellphone (1983)
The internet has not yet reached the 80% mark and it may move into the top 5 when it does. And the way the cellphone trend is going, it might be the first to 90%. Anyway, it's interesting that the common belief is that technology is being adopted faster and faster by Americans these days but that radio was adopted faster than anything else on the chart.
** One Nicholas Felton, who you may recall from his lovely personal annual reports.
Evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson speculates about the Tyrannosaurus rex's sexual equipment.
We now have a robust understanding of how sexual pressures -- the pressures to find, impress, and seduce a mate -- influence the evolution of males and females. So much so that if you tell me a fact, such as the average size difference between males and females in a species, or the proportion of a male's body taken up by his testes, I can tell you what the mating system is likely to be. For example, where males are much bigger than females, fighting between males has been important - which often means that the biggest males maintain a harem. If testes are relatively large, females probably have sex with several males in the course of a single breeding episode.
(thx, bill)
Not much to say about this but this "I Love You, but You Love Meat" headline is best said aloud in Barney's singsong voice.
Ok, there's a bit more to say. When Meg and I first started dating, she was an almost-vegan (she ate fish and maybe eggs (I forget)). Now she eats meat and cheese and the like with greater zeal than I do. Sometimes I feel as though encouraging her to abandon veganism was my greatest contribution to our relationship; that we enjoy eating similar things has made things a lot easier.
Oh, and I love the word "vegangelical"...reminds me of Buzzfeed's vegansexuals trend.
The quintessential modern parental dilemma: What do you do with the kids when mommy and daddy need to meet up with their WoW guild to do raids?
We have two small children who need to eat dinner and raids start at 5pm. Ack! How are we going to make dinner?! There are no problems with the kids running around playing and such while we raid. They're already used to that, they play in the computer room and we can get them things that they need (you know, cups of juice, snacks, what have you) when we have breaks. Before it was easy because if I was running an instance and in the middle of combat my husband might be in a a space between pulls where he could safely go afk for 30 seconds you know. But now we'll be on the same schedule essentially. We both play support classes too (he's a holy priest, I'm a resto druid) so the guild ideally would want us to both be in a forty man raid. It's not like we can easily switch off any raid nights other than say, ZG and AQ20 runs.
(via cyn-c)
Quick hitter from Radiolab as a preview of the new season: composer David Lang talks about a piece of music he made for a morgue. Appropriate listening for the crappy rainy day here in NYC. Hopefully the weather will be better for Radiolab's live premiere of their fourth season on Feb 21 at the Angelika.
Missed this a couple of months ago: the shortlisted passages in the Bad Sex Award 2007 competition.
She nods and smiles. She is absurdly beautiful. I start to slip off my jeans and I feel her gaze as I stand in my bra and pants. Why am I embarrassed about taking off my clothes right in front of a robot? I pull the dress over my head like a schoolgirl, untie my hair, and sit down. She is smiling, just a little bit, as though she knows her effect.
To calm myself down and appear in control I reverse the problem. 'Spike, you're a robot, but why are you such a drop-dead gorgeous robot? I mean, is it necessary to be the most sophisticated machine ever built and to look like a movie star?'
Nice design of a lens cleaning tissue packet.
Firstly, there's a thumbprint placed at the bottom where they want you to put your thumb so that the tissues don't fly away in the wind when you open it up. The thumbprint is in blue, as if it had been manually printed in finger-print ink directly onto the card.
How nine cities from around the world are cutting their energy usage.
For cities, the motivation is twofold. All the hand-wringing over climate change has prompted more cities to do their part to contain greenhouse-gas emissions that most scientists believe are causing global warming. In the U.S., more than 700 mayors have signed an agreement to try to follow the Kyoto Protocol's goal of reducing greenhouse-gas emissions -- even though the Senate has rejected the treaty.
The other major motivation for cities: energy costs, which have more than doubled since 2000. Strapped for cash, municipalities are scrambling to save as much money on energy use as they can.
Jürgen Stumpf owns three wine bars in Berlin that operate on the honor system.
For the price of 1 euro (about $1.50), you rent yourself a glass and get to sample as many of the wines as you want. At the end of the night you throw some bills or coins into a big jar, the amount based on what you think is fair.
Short interview with photographer Helmut Newton.
Q: Your about to be published autobiography stops in 1982. What have the readers missed?
A: Nothing! People who reach their goals are very uninteresting. What could I have written about the last 20 years? I met a lot of awfully boring Hollywood bimbos. I earned a lot of money. I fly only first class.
NSFW if tasteful nudes aren't safe to view at your place of employ. Oh, and here's another interview with Newton with a bit more about his work.
Speaking of mining the archives of kottke.org, I just found this post that quotes a message board post by Ben Affleck about why he posts his thoughts to the web:
I think there is some responsibility on the part of those folks who benefit from the attentions of some section of the public to be responsive to that group.
It's worth noting that Affleck was one of the first celebrities to post online in a bloggish manner...he'd answer people's questions on his site's message board. (His site is now dead, but a couple of instances of the board were collected by archive.org.)
I remember one post of his in particular (which I can't find on archive.org). Ben was up late, at like 3am, playing Everquest (or maybe Ultima Online?) because he was addicted and couldn't stop. He also mentioned that he was essentially playing the game instead of being in bed with his girlfriend at the time, Gwyneth Paltrow.
Periodic table of rejected elements, including Belgium, Antipathy, Visine, and Antigone. (via del.icio.us via kottke.org 8 years ago (it's the time of year for recycled links, I guess))
Pop quiz, hotshot. There's a bomb on a bus. Once the bus goes 50 miles an hour... Who fares worst health-wise, diet soda drinkers or fried food eaters? Surprisingly, researchers have found a correlation between diet soda consumption and metabolic syndrome.
The one-third who ate the most fried food increased their risk by 25 percent compared with the one-third who ate the least, and surprisingly, the risk of developing metabolic syndrome was 34 percent higher among those who drank one can of diet soda a day compared with those who drank none.
What I Learned Today did some further digging and found a different study that links diet soda consumption and obesity.
For diet soft-drink drinkers, the risk of becoming overweight or obese was:
- 36.5% for up to 1/2 can each day
- 37.5% for 1/2 to one can each day
- 54.5% for 1 to 2 cans each day
- 57.1% for more than 2 cans each day.
If HD DVD wasn't dead before, it probably is now. Netflix has announced that it will stop carrying HD DVDs by the end of 2008 in favor of Blu-ray discs.
Since the first high-definition DVDs came on the market in early 2006, Netflix has stocked both formats. But the company said that in recent months the industry has stated its clear preference for Blu-ray and that it now makes sense for the company to initiate the transition to a single format.
However, with online movie rentals/purchases gaining momentum, it'll be interesting to see just how long Blu-ray can stay in the lead before selling bits on pieces of plastic becomes outdated. (via nelson)
Update: Best Buy is going to start recommending Blu-ray to its customers. (thx, fletcher)
Last week, Rex Sorgatz reviewed the 15-year-old first issue of Wired; lo and behold, Wired founding editor Louis Rossetto sent him a lengthy response that's a whole lot more interesting than the original review (sorry, Rex).
This beta was a full-on 120 page prototype, with actual stories re-purposed from other places, actual art, actual ads (someone quipped that it was the ultimate editor's wet dream to be able to pick their own ads), and then all the sections and pacing that was to go into the actual magazine. The cover was lifted from McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage; it was the startling black and white image of a guy's head with a big ear where his eyes should have been. The whole thing got printed and laminated in a copy shop in Berkeley that had just got a new Kodak color copier and rip. Jane, Eugene, and I went in when the shop closed on Friday evening and worked round the clock through the weekend. Took 45 minutes to print out one color page! We emerged Monday morning with the prototype, which we had spiral-bound in a shop in South San Francisco, before we boarded a plane for Amsterdam to present it to Origin's founder and CEO Eckart Wintzen, to see if he would approve the concept, agree to advertise in the magazine, and then give us the advance we crucially needed to keep the project alive.
Obituary of Charles Fawcett, who led an "unlikely" and "unbelievable" life.
In Paris Fawcett also took part in the rescue of a group of British prisoners-of-war who had been placed under French guard in a hospital ward by the Germans. By impersonating a German ambulance crew, Fawcett and a comrade marched in at 4am and ordered the French nurses to usher the PoWs out into the yard. "Gentlemen," he announced as he drove them away, "consider yourself liberated."
"You're a Yank," said a British voice.
"Never," came Fawcett's lilting southern burr, "confuse a Virginian with a Yankee."
He also romanced Hedy Lamarr, starred in movies with Sophia Loren, and got married a few times:
In three months at the end of the war, Fawcett married six Jewish women who had been trapped in concentration camps, a procedure that entitled them to leave France with an automatic American visa.
(via cyn-c)
Did you know that Paris Hilton has a movie out? Yeah, no one else cares either. The Hottie & the Nottie opened this weekend and took in only $230 per screen.
That means that, based on an $8 average ticket price, 29 paying customers showed up at each location over the 3-day [weekend]. In a country that seems fascinated with Paris Hilton, only 3,219 unlucky Americans will have been suckered into seeing Hottie by Monday morning.
Emphasis mine.
In a map of the Republik van Nieuw Nederland, Paul Burgess imagines that the Dutch never gave up their New World possessions and a republic formed centered around New Amsterdam.
New Amsterdam never gave way to New York. The Dutch kept the whole of their North American colony out of the hands of the perfidious English, in fact. New Netherland today constitutes a thriving Republic stretching from the Atlantic coast to Quebec, dividing New England from the rest of the United States.
See also Melissa Gould's map of Neu York, which imagines Manhattan as a post-WWII Nazi possession.
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