...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
[I would] grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70's, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.
Fantastic. Much more here. (via df)
He spends much of the time arresting criminals, taking people to the hospital in an ambulance, and putting out fires.
At this point my son was familiar with the game's mechanics and hopped into the ambulance. As he put the crime fighting behind him, he wondered aloud if it was possible to take people to the hospital. I instruct him to press R3, and then he was off to save a few lives. He was having a blast racing from point to point, picking up people in need, and then speeding off to Las Venturas Hospital. During one of his life saving adventures, he passed a fire house with a big, red, shiny fire truck parked out front. He didn't want to let his passengers down, so he took them to the hospital and then asked if I could guide him back to the fire truck.
After pretty much solving chess with Deep Blue, IBM is building a computer called Watson to beat human opponents at Jeopardy. It's not quite at Ken Jennings' level, but it's holding its own versus lesser humans.
Deep Blue was able to play chess well because the game is perfectly logical, with fairly simple rules; it can be reduced easily to math, which computers handle superbly. But the rules of language are much trickier. At the time, the very best question-answering systems -- some created by software firms, some by university researchers -- could sort through news articles on their own and answer questions about the content, but they understood only questions stated in very simple language ("What is the capital of Russia?"); in government-run competitions, the top systems answered correctly only about 70 percent of the time, and many were far worse. "Jeopardy!" with its witty, punning questions, seemed beyond their capabilities. What's more, winning on "Jeopardy!" requires finding an answer in a few seconds. The top question-answering machines often spent longer, even entire minutes, doing the same thing.
Possible clues have emerged that Eadweard Muybridge may not have taken all the photographs attributed to him.
Naef explains why he thinks that stereographs attributed to Muybridge were in fact taken by Watkins, who sold the negatives to Muybridge. Muybridge then printed and sold them under his own name. "I think from what I've seen and knowing what I know about Muybridge - and I'm not an expert on Watkins by any mean and Weston is - I think yes Muybridge published pictures by other people," Brookman said. "Some by Watkins potentially, but I think Muybridge was also a photographer and a significant photographer."
Tyler Green of Modern Art Notes has a three-part interview with photography curator Weston Naef about why he thinks this is so. Part one is here. (No word yet on why Muybridge has so many unnecessary letters in his name.)
Speaking of Errol Morris, it seems that his next film will be out this fall and is a documentary about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, rapist of Mormons, and dog cloning enthusiast.
According to our sources, it seems Morris has just finished up a brand new documentary, "Tabloid" aka "A Very Special Love Story" (the title is not yet final) about Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming, who, in the late seventies, abducted Kirk Anderson, a Mormon missionary in England, chained him to a bed and forced him to have sex with her. But that's hardly the weirdest thing about McKinney or the case. After jumping bail, she was eventually sentenced in absentia to one year in prison, due to the fact that Britain, at the time, didn't really have rape laws against men in the books. She was later accused of stalking her victim -- who had since married and had children -- during the 1980s and in 2008, she gained more media attention after taking her dog to Korea to be cloned.
Former NBA player, shot blocker extraordinaire, and humanitarian Manute Bol died over the weekend at age 47. He died of a rare skin condition caused by a medication he took while in Africa.
"You know, a lot of people feel sorry for him, because he's so tall and awkward," Charles Barkley, a former 76ers teammate, once said. "But I'll tell you this -- if everyone in the world was a Manute Bol, it's a world I'd want to live in."
According to Language Log, Bol may also have originated the phrase "my bad".
Ken Arneson emailed me to say that he heard the phrase was first used by the Sudanese immigrant basketball player Manute Bol, believed to have been a native speaker of Dinka (a very interesting and thoroughly un-Indo-Europeanlike language of the Nilo-Saharan superfamily). Says Arneson, "I first heard the phrase here in the Bay Area when Bol joined the Golden State Warriors in 1988, when several Warriors players started using the phrase." And Ben Zimmer's rummaging in the newspaper files down in the basement of Language Log Plaza produced a couple of early 1989 quotes that confirm this convincingly:
St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Jan. 10, 1989: When he [Manute Bol] throws a bad pass, he'll say, "My bad" instead of "My fault," and now all the other players say the same thing.
USA Today, Jan. 27, 1989: After making a bad pass, instead of saying "my fault," Manute Bol says, "my bad." Now all the other Warriors say it too.
Update: As a recent post on Language Log notes, several people picked up on this and kinda sorta got rid of the "may have" and the story became that Bol absolutely coined the phrase "my bad". Unfortunately, the evidence doesn't support that theory (although it doesn't entirely disprove it either). The internet is so proficient at twisting the original meaning of things as they propagate that Telephone should really be called Internet.
Warning: this video contains spoilers, violence, and cinematic greatness.
Many friends after seeing my video "Tarantino vs Coen Brothers" requested me to do a new video duel of directors, so I decided to do now a tribute to my two favorite directors, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, were 25 days re-watching 34 films, selected more than 500 scenes, and a hard work editing.
Tarantino vs. Coen Brothers is here; and here's Scorsese on Kubrick, in which I was delighted to learn that Scorsese thinks, as I do, that Eyes Wide Shut is underrated.
Errol Morris is back with a new piece on his NY Times blog about how the holes in people's knowledge affect their actions.
If I were given carte blanche to write about any topic I could, it would be about how much our ignorance, in general, shapes our lives in ways we do not know about. Put simply, people tend to do what they know and fail to do that which they have no conception of. In that way, ignorance profoundly channels the course we take in life. And unknown unknowns constitute a grand swath of everybody's field of ignorance.
This is part one of a five-part series in which we hear from David Dunning about the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.
After nine years offline, FEED Magazine republishes its archives.
Welcome to the archives of the web magazine FEED. Launched in May of 1995, it was among a handful of "webzines"--as they were once called--in existence then. FEED tried to re-imagine how we would read and write in the digital age even as we dedicated ourselves to the craft of writing, a craft we were perfecting as green writers and editors ourselves.
We also convinced a handful of published authors to contribute. Hence, FEED was billed as the first Web-only magazine to feature "established writers." But its ultimate legacy may be the collection of writers who published some of their earliest work at FEED, and who then went on to luminous careers: the novelist Sam Lipsyte, Wonkette's Ana Marie Cox, media theorist Clay Shirky, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross, Talkingpointmemo's Josh Marshall, and many others.
One of the pieces that FEED published was an early look at weblogs by Julian Dibbell. (You have no idea how much it bruised a certain naive blogger not to have been mentioned in that article. Perhaps there's been a certain "I'll show 'em" element to this person's blog ever since. Or so I've heard.)
This is the third part of a 1936 documentary film about a mail train traveling from London to Scotland. Be sure to watch the mail exchange process that starts about 50 seconds in.
The train doesn't even slow down to exchange the mail...the outgoing mailbags are hung low and snared by a net near the track and incoming mailbags are collected up high using a similar net.
Drive-through fast food should work more like this. (via sveinn)
The vortex cannon creates "a 200 mile-an-hour cloud"...basically an air blast that can knock stuff over at a distance.
Awesome! (thx, brandon)
Google breaks down mobile device users into three categories: repetitive now, bored now, and urgent now.
The "repetitive now" user is someone checking for the same piece of information over and over again, like checking the same stock quotes or weather. Google uses cookies to help cater to mobile users who check and recheck the same data points.
The "bored now" are users who have time on their hands. People on trains or waiting in airports or sitting in cafes. Mobile users in this behavior group look a lot more like casual Web surfers, but mobile phones don't offer the robust user input of a desktop, so the applications have to be tailored.
The "urgent now" is a request to find something specific fast, like the location of a bakery or directions to the airport. Since a lot of these questions are location-aware, Google tries to build location into the mobile versions of these queries.
This works for general web users as well. Blogs do well when they appeal to repetitive now and bored now users, but the really effective ones target all three types at once. Somehow this is related to stock and flow.
Charles Babbage built one of the first mechanical calculating machines but Ada Lovelace was the first to show how the machine's arithmetic function could be abstracted to produce things other than numbers: language, graphics, or music.
There are several other Information Pioneers shorts available on Vimeo, including profiles of Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Turing, and Hedy Lamarr.
Many of the stadiums and venues from the 2004 Athens Olympics are now lying abandoned, unused since the Games and symbolic of the disfunctional Greek economy.
Softball has no following in Greece, and the construction of a permanent softball stadium hasn't changed that. [...] Greeks like sports, but they like smoking more.
A city "winning" the right to host the Olympic Games seems like buying a pig in a poke.
Not content with movie stars, California wants its own actual stellar object. The LIFE project at the NIF (National Ignition Facility) at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory aims to create a tiny star with intense laser power. How intense? The facility increases the power of the laser beam a quadrillion times before it reaches its target:
The National Ignition Facility, located at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, is the world's largest laser system... 192 huge laser beams in a massive building, all focused down at the last moment at a 2 millimeter ball containing frozen hydrogen gas. The goal is to achieve fusion... getting more energy out than was used to create it. It's never been done before under controlled conditions, just in nuclear weapons and in stars. We expect to do it within the next 2-3 years. The purpose is threefold: to create an almost limitless supply of safe, carbon-free, proliferation-free electricity; examine new regimes of astrophysics as well as basic science; and study the inner-workings of the U.S. stockpile of nuclear weapons to ensure they remain safe, secure and reliable without the need for underground testing.
Wow. The fusion will produce high-energy neutrons, which will bombard a material capable of converting their energy into heat, which in turn will make steam and eventually electricity. But it gets even better:
In addition, the LIFE engine design can be "charged" with fission fuel. The resulting fission reactions will produce additional energy that can be harvested for electricity production. Moreover, by using depleted uranium or spent nuclear fuel from existing nuclear power plants in the blanket, a LIFE engine will be capable of burning the by-products of the current nuclear fuel cycle. Because the fusion neutrons are produced independently of the fission process, the fission fuel could be used without reprocessing. In this way, LIFE may be able to consume nuclear waste as fuel, mitigate against further nuclear proliferation, and provide long-term sustainability of carbon-free energy. A LIFE engine, via pure fusion or through the combination of fusion and fission, will generate the steady heat required to drive turbines for generating from 1,000 to 2,500 MW of safe, environmentally attractive electric power 24 hours a day for decades.
Also, free unicorns for everyone!
From a collection of old menus from Colorado, the 1892 menu from a Denver restaurant called The Boston Bakery and Lunch Room (For Ladies and Gents).
Porterhouse steak with mushrooms: 70 cents. This particular menu also contains a sort of customer bill of rights: an explanation of how waiters should treat customers and how the restaurant will catch you if you try to skip out on your check.
Now, we want your trade, and we do not care whether your check is 5¢ or $5; you will be rightly treated and correctly waited upon, or we will know the reason why, if you will only report any neglect to the head waiter or to us before leaving your seat.
The waiters are instructed to be civil and polite to every one, whether they are so to them or not, for even should the customer use bad manners, the waiter must not.
Have no conversation with the customer, except what is strictly necessary.
Give everyone a napkin who asks for it.
p>Give each one a glass of water as soon as seated.Be as quick and quiet as possible.
Place the orders down quietly; don't slam them down.
Give each customer a check as son as you serve the order and see that it is kept in sight. Very few beats come in here, but experience has taught us that there are some. We will give any waiter $2.00 who will give us information that will enable us or the head waiter to detect any one in the act of Check Beating.
We want to call the customer's attention to the fact that when we are looking at your checks and orders, it is as much to see that you are rightly served and not over-checked as that your not under-checked. Most would understand this but some might not.
See also the NYPL menu collection. (thx, micah)
Chinese masons used to make mortar using sticky rice. The practice originated at least 1500 years ago.
The secret ingredient that makes the mortar so strong and durable is amylopectin, a type of polysaccharide, or complex carbohydrate, found in rice and other starchy foods, the scientists determined. The mortar's potency is so impressive that it can still be used today as a suitable restoration mortar for ancient masonry.
(via history blog)
A lovely visual look at redesigning the map for the Moscow Metro. (thx, matt)
A new Subway has recently opened in Manhattan...hanging on the outside of the 27th floor of the skeleton of 1 World Trade Center. The Subway will move upwards as the building is constructed and it is hoped that construction workers will dine there instead of heading off-site for long lunches via a slow hoist.
"I don't think the veggies will be a big seller," said Mr. Schragger, who owns four other Subways in Manhattan. "I imagine most of the guys will want protein. Philly Cheesesteaks and the Feast."
Philly Cheesesteaks and the Feast would be a great name for a band.
Woody = McNulty, Buzz = Stringer, and Mr. Potato Head = Bunk. (via stevey)
Michael Crawford monkeys around with a map of the US. This piece is called Los Angeles Getting More Annoying as We Speak:
I also liked his alteration to a Chuck Close portrait: Rauschenberg Minus Nebraska.
Number three on this Smithsonian Magazine list is "There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we're probably in one now."
Today, according to many biologists, we're in the midst of a sixth great extinction. Mastodons may have been some of the earliest victims. As humans moved from continent to continent, large animals that had thrived for millions of years began to disappear-mastodons in North America, giant kangaroos in Australia, dwarf elephants in Europe. Whatever the cause of this early wave of extinctions, humans are driving modern extinctions by hunting, destroying habitat, introducing invasive species and inadvertently spreading diseases.
Zappos' CEO Tony Hsieh on why he sold his company to Amazon. Bascially most of Zappos' board of directors didn't approve of Hsieh's focus on employee and customer happiness at the short term expense of profits.
I left Seattle pretty sure that Amazon would be a better partner for Zappos than our current board of directors or any other outside investor. Our board wanted an immediate exit; we wanted to build an enduring company that would spread happiness. With Amazon, it seemed that Zappos could continue to build its culture, brand, and business. We would be free to be ourselves.
(via the browser)
I've only had a few of these...I am clearly not exercising my sandwich muscles enough these days. (Although the Brazilian sandwich at Project Sandwich has been treating me well lately.)
I have no idea who the singer is or what this music video is about, but I kinda can't stop watching it.
And hey, look, an informative YouTube comment:
I'm gonna take a stab at interpreting the plot of this video. The child is dying and as some sort of make a wish type thing he's wants to be a warlord, have an entourage if hot ladies and meet 2 live crew (which I'm guessing the police man and business man have set up, with 4 stand-ins but they are nervous about him realizing its not actually them) ... but he buys it, and when he fulfills the three wishes cosmic energy leaves his body and all that glorious trippy shit happens at the end.
NSFW if looking at a live version of 2 Live Crew's As Nasty As They Wanna Be album cover is frowned upon in your place of employ.
Did you know the Brontosaurus isn't actually a dinosaur?
The question of the popular Brontosaurus name verses the technically-correct Apatosaurus name came to a head in 1989 when the U.S. Post Office decided to release a set of four stamps illustrating "dinosaurs." One in the series was a picture of a large sauropod labeled Brontosaurus. This upset some dinosaur enthusiasts who accused the Postal Service of promoting scientific illiteracy, an ironic accusation given the number of museums that had the animal mislabeled for decades. While there was a hue and cry over the Brontosaurus name, few even mentioned the other, more glaring error, which was the inclusion of a Pteranodon (a flying reptile) in a set of dinosaur stamps. By definition dinosaurs do not have wings.
I totally had no idea this had happened...I must have been brainwashed by all those hours of the Flintstones I watched as a child. (via unlikely words)
Split-screen view comparing Diego Maradona's 1986 Goal of the Century with a very similar goal by current Argentinian star Lionel Messi.
Somewhere is an upcoming film from Sofia Coppola; here's the trailer.
Writer/director Sofia Coppola reunites with the film company with which she made the Academy Award-winning hit "Lost in Translation." Her new film is an intimate story set in contemporary Los Angeles; Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) is a bad-boy actor stumbling through a life of excess at the Chateau Marmont Hotel in Hollywood. With an unexpected visit from his 11-year-old daughter (Elle Fanning), Johnny is forced to look at the questions we must all confront.
As one of the few people who enjoyed Marie Antoinette, I'm of course looking forward to this. (via df)
The best way to get a sense of what kottke.org is all about is to head to the front page or check out some random entries from the archives. Follow kottke.org via RSS or Twitter.
Also: jason's twitter • silkscreen font • books • movies • photos (flickr)
Want to share your something special with kottke.org's readers? Sponsor the RSS feed for a week!
See more on the Job Board.
