...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.
How the US killed bin Laden orig. from Aug 26, 2011
Han Solo in carbonite ice cube tray!!!! orig. from Aug 26, 2011
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Fantastic account by Nicholas Schmidle in the New Yorker about how the US located and subsequently killed Osama bin Laden in his Abbottabad safehouse.
One month before the 2008 Presidential election, Obama, then a senator from Illinois, squared off in a debate against John McCain in an arena at Belmont University, in Nashville. A woman in the audience asked Obama if he would be willing to pursue Al Qaeda leaders inside Pakistan, even if that meant invading an ally nation. He replied, “If we have Osama bin Laden in our sights and the Pakistani government is unable, or unwilling, to take them out, then I think that we have to act and we will take them out. We will kill bin Laden. We will crush Al Qaeda. That has to be our biggest national-security priority.” McCain, who often criticized Obama for his naïveté on foreign-policy matters, characterized the promise as foolish, saying, “I’m not going to telegraph my punches.”
Update: There has been some question over the authenticity of this story.
Schmidle says he wasn't able to interview any of the 23 Navy SEALs involved in the mission itself. Instead, he said, he relied on the accounts of others who had debriefed the men.
But a casual reader of the article wouldn't know that; neither the article nor an editor's note describes the sourcing for parts of the story. Schmidle, in fact, piles up so many details about some of the men, such as their thoughts at various times, that the article leaves a strong impression that he spoke with them directly.
The SEALs, he writes of the raid's climactic moment, "instantly sensed that it was Crankshaft," the mission's name for bin Laden, implying that the SEALs themselves had conveyed this impression to him.
Although calling it a conspiracy probably goes a little too far...mentioning the JFK assassination when writing of the US government is like Godwin's law in online discussions. (thx, everyone)
Sorry about all those exclamation points but I just love this:
Perfect for your "Jabba goes to the Cantina" cosplay needs. (via mlkshk)
Update: Amazon is all sold out, but you can find the trays here as well.
Michael Lewis continues his financial tour of the world with a stop in Germany. What, he asks, will the Germans do about the weakening financial situation in Europe and, more to Lewis' point, why will they do it?
The deputy finance minister further disturbs my wild assumptions about him by speaking clearly, even recklessly, about subjects most finance ministers believe it is their job to obscure. He offers up, without much prompting, that he has just finished reading the latest unpublished report by I.M.F. investigators on the progress made by the Greek government in reforming itself.
"They have not sufficiently implemented the measures they have promised to implement," he says simply. "And they have a massive problem still with revenue collection. Not with the tax law itself. It's the collection which needs to be overhauled."
Greeks are still refusing to pay their taxes, in other words. But it is only one of many Greek sins. "They are also having a problem with the structural reform. Their labor market is changing-but not as fast as it needs to," he continues. "Due to the developments in the last 10 years, a similar job in Germany pays 55,000 euros. In Greece it is 70,000." To get around pay restraints in the calendar year the Greek government simply paid employees a 13th and even 14th monthly salary-months that didn't exist. "There needs to be a change of the relationship between people and the government," he continues. "It is not a task that can be done in three months. You need time." He couldn't put it more bluntly: if the Greeks and the Germans are to coexist in a currency union, the Greeks need to change who they are.
Wonderputt is a wonderfully inventive mini golf game. You might even call it whimsical. (via waxy)
Here's his final post. Not quite Jobsian, but Slashdot had a big influence in shaping early online media. Interestingly, he's given up his posting rights to the site completely.
The internet has changed dramatically since I started here, and that's part of my reason for leaving. For me, the Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site. While my corporate overlords and I haven't seen eye to eye on every decision in the last decade, I am certain that Jeff Drobick and the other executives at Geeknet will do their best. I am unquestionably confident in the abilities of the Slashdot editors and engineers -- some of whom have been here just short of forever. They have proven themselves in the best and worst of conditions to be capable and dedicated.
As part of my resignation, after this story appears I will lose the ability to post. For me, this is the most bitter pill to swallow. Posting stories has always been my favorite part of the job. I created Slashdot to share these stories with my friends from IRC and school. It was never 'work'. Now I will have to go cold turkey. I'm walking away from the soapbox I built. I wish I could continue to post stories forever, but those closest to me know that if I maintained the ability to post, I'd never move on. I'll continue to read Slashdot and hopefully my occasional story submissions will make the cut.
(via ★djacobs)
From the press release:
I have always said if there ever came a day when I could no longer meet my duties and expectations as Apple's CEO, I would be the first to let you know. Unfortunately, that day has come.
I hereby resign as CEO of Apple. I would like to serve, if the Board sees fit, as Chairman of the Board, director and Apple employee.
This can't be good news regarding his health. I hope I'm wrong. Good luck, Steve...you've been a great inspiration to me.
Great new site from Rion featuring online videos, photos, books, and other media that's appropriate for little kids.
There's just so much science, nature, music, arts, technology, storytelling and assorted good stuff out there that my kids (and maybe your kids) haven't seen. It's most likely not stuff that was made for them...
But we don't underestimate kids around here.
With obvious exceptions, media "made for kids" is mindnumbingly dumb. YouTube, Flickr, and Vimeo are amazing resources of not-made-for-kids but totally-appropriate-for-kids stuff like what Rion is posting here. I've often wanted a Wikipedia For Little Kids (for the iPad) that's almost exclusively video- and image-based that I could let Ollie loose on to learn about stuff. (via @swissmiss)
The Internet Archive has collected thousands of hours of TV news coverage from September 11, 2001 and the following days.
The 9/11 Television News Archive is a library of news coverage of the events of 9/11/2001 and their aftermath as presented by U.S. and international broadcasters. A resource for scholars, journalists, and the public, it presents one week of news broadcasts for study, research and analysis.
Television is our pre-eminent medium of information, entertainment and persuasion, but until now it has not been a medium of record. This Archive attempts to address this gap by making TV news coverage of this critical week in September 2001 available to those studying these events and their treatment in the media.
An amazing resource. But God, that's hard to watch.
Loving this new Trillwave 2 mix from The Hood Internet.
If you like that, here's the first Trillwave mix.
Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play So What.
See also Confirmation by Charlie Parker and Giant Steps by John Coltrane.
This afternoon, an earthquake hit Virginia between Charlottesville and Richmond. It measured 5.9 on the Richter scale. For an earthquake, that's in the "moderate" range but for an East Coast earthquake, it's quite unusual. A look at the historical data for the eastern US states shows that this is the biggest quake to hit this coast since 1897 (a 5.9 in VA) and the second biggest of all time (well, since they started recording such things) after a 7.3 that hit South Carolina in 1886.
This photo was taken by a camera made almost entirely out of Legos:
Even the lens is homemade; it's just plexiglass ground into shape with fine-grit sandpaper. I misunderstood: the lens is store-bought but the focusing screen is made of plexi. (via ★alexandra)
From designers Lars Marcus Vedeler and Theo Tveterås, a 3-D sculpture of the Windows Solitaire "bouncing cards" win screen:
(via colossal)
It's been great posting for you all the last week+! Thanks for the good times. I couldn't pick just one video for you tonight, so here are 3. Watch them all, but not at the same time.
This one makes me tense.
This one was filmed in 8 hours in Brooklyn. Pretty, pretty, pretty.
This one was filmed AND edited in 4 hours in Boston. (I love everything Paper Fortress does.)
I missed this last summer when it went around originally, but all of Questlove's celebrity stories are collected here. I had to post it at the end of the day because if this is relevant to your interests, and I think it may be, it's going to run roughshod over your productivity.
David Letterman
thing is...i know they brought me in for the freakish factor. but only dave bothered to ask me what do i do in real life....so when i told him he was shocked like "wait you are an established artist?" even funnier was the reference "so if this like us picking up george clintons bass player thinking we got a random freaky guy and we messed around and got an icon?"---i was flattered and said "lets hope you still feel that way when its time for my album to come out"
I'm pretty sure the Eddie Murphy story features Prince, but it's too long to even excerpt.
Phil Collins
i "organixed" the shit outta phil in 97 at the grammies when i told him some geek shit like you and stevie wonder are the best ride cymbal crashers in modern rock after bonham. i told him "do you know do you care" shows that example in his cymbal work. man i made his day with that one.
Here's Quest talking about Will Smith's house. So you know Questlove isn't easily impressed, this is the same Will Smith whose house was recently featured on the cover of Architectural Digest.
I'm telling you, the whole site is gold. Read everything.
For more Questlove awesome, see his recent interview on Pitchfork. Read everything there, too. It's great.
(Thanks, Keith)
Not completely sure what's happening here, but what a gorgeous way to spend 30 seconds on a Monday afternoon.
(Thanks, Adam)
Years ago, before this type of activity was frowned upon, scientists sent 2 groups of 11 and 12 year-old boys to live in separate sections of an Eastern Oklahoma camp. The boys didn't know about each other at first, and they quickly developed independent social hierarchies and social codes. One group named themselves the Rattlers. The other group didn't pick a name until after the groups discovered each other. They chose the Eagles, an animal that eats snakes. The scientists ratcheted up the competition between the two groups, eventually losing control of the experiment as the boys were executing violent raids on each others' camps. The scientists finally separated the camps before someone got killed, but not before documenting some interesting concepts of how groups form social norms and how they react to others they perceive as different.
This post could go on forever, so, when you have time, click through to read about realistic conflict theory and illusion of asymmetric insight.
What's fascinating to me, and the reason I'm posting, is this study seems to be closely related to Lord of the Flies, but the book was published in 1954, the same year as the study. I wasn't able to find any discussion of which came first and whether they informed each other at all.
(Via You Are Not So Smart)
John Hodgman has the details and release dates for his "FINAL BOOK OF COMPLETE WORLD KNOWLEDGE", That Is All.
YOU WILL SOON start to see changes in both design and mood that will reflect the dark, apocalyptic vision of my book, which deals with the very last information you need to know before the coming global superpocalypse called RAGNAROK, plus some information on WINE and SPORTS.
That Is All is available for pre-order on the Kindle but if it's anything like Hodgman's other books, it's more fun in paper (or in audio format).
Nice profile of BERG in the NY Times by Alice Rawsthorn.
Berg and its peers use design in the traditional way as a tool in the translation process, but they have also developed new means of enabling people to engage with technology, and to feel confident about using it. Mostly Berg does so by making complex technologies seem playful and humorous.
This chart shows former and future superheroes by movie. That is, George Clooney played Batman, so Out of Sight gets a Batman, along with another Batman for Micheal Keaton, and a Nick Fury for Sam Jackson. Lots of movies have 4 superheroes, though none on this chart have 5. Click through, you'll understand. If you want to see how they all fit together, he's made that chart, too. Raynor, you may raymember, also made the Harry Potter wizards in other movies chart.
HBO recently released a documentary about real-life superheroes. The trailer is below. It reminded me of the fascinating Rolling Stone article about Master Legend, but I can't find it on their site because Rolling Stone doesn't believe the internet needs to see old articles.
Incidentally, I found not 1, but 3 networks for real-life superheroes.
1, 2 3. But also, hipster superheroes. Hulk is only smashing ironically. And here's a list of all the superheroes. All of them.
Lastly, I'd be remiss not to mention Petsaresuperhero.es, a project I put together with a friend. You know your pet's a superhero, now you can show the world.
Skyliners Paris trailer orig. from Aug 20, 2011
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
I'd been looking for something to post to say goodnight, so it was good that Rogre sent something over. It's a fitting way to end the weekend considering it features Killian Martin and Danny MacAskill (featured here earlier in the week). The video is goofy and not as jaw-droppingly jaw-dropping as their solo videos, but they do seem to be doing their thing in a fancy theater the name of which I should know. This reminds me of the commercials where the sneaker commercials get ALL of their athletes into one commercial.
Update:
The fancy theater is the Barbican Centre, which is only in the title of the video... Thanks, everyone.
Huitlacoche (pronounced weet-la-KOH-chay) is a fungus, called corn smut in the US, that has recently become something of a delicacy. "Before, it was seen as a food of the poor. Now it's the food of the rich," following the same track as lobster. The cultivation of huitlacoche is growing dramatically, as an infected stock sells for more than a normal corn cob. The flavor is described as earthy and unique, perhaps most similar to a mushroom.
In recent decades -- before huitlacoche really took off -- the fungus largely was sauteed with garlic, onions and poblano chile strips and served by street vendors in quesadillas, folded-over corn tortillas. Then cooks realized its flavor would make nearly any dish sensational. Restaurants sometimes offer it with beef, fish, in crepes with chipotle sauce, with eggs, in cream soups or with shrimp.
I would like to eat corn smut.
(Via Balloon Juice)
In this week's NY Times Magazine, Maud Newton tells us why she doesn't like David Foster Wallace's writing and blames DFW for the voice of the internet being too familiar. Maybe she's not actually doing this, but the whole thing is really sort of annoying, too, because to me, it kind of seems like she kind of uses all of the DFW tropes she's railing against. Then again, who am I, anyway? (Those previous 2 sentences are an example of the internet writing Newton claims DFW inspired. I think I'm a master and I probably should have written the whole post in this style.) I think I missed the point, Ms. Newton, I'm a lesser thinker.
Of course, Wallace's slangy approachability was part of his appeal, and these quirks are more than compensated for by his roving intelligence and the tireless force of his writing. The trouble is that his style is also, as Dyer says, "catching, highly infectious." And if, even from Wallace, the aw-shucks, I-could-be-wrong-here, I'm-just-a-supersincere-regular-guy-who-happens-to-have-written-a-book-on-infinity approach grates, it is vastly more exasperating in the hands of lesser thinkers. In the Internet era, Wallace's moves have been adopted and further slackerized by a legion of opinion-mongers who not only lack his quick mind but seem not to have mastered the idea that to make an argument, you must, amid all the tap-dancing and hedging, actually lodge an argument.
(Via Gabe Delahaye)
I've been staring at Edlundart's weather wheel for 10 minutes trying to understand exactly how to read it. It shows relative temperature, precipitation, and wind speed, and it's just gorgeous. Bonus points for including Boston.
The Weather Wheel is based on widely available weather data, but does not display the actual numbers. Things like millimeter precipitation readings are not very meaningful to most people, so thinking of and showing these metrics in a relative way instead seemed like a clean and elegant approach.
Boris made himself a set of business cards that are brilliantly simple. Is there an award this can win? I'd vote for it.
I went looking for more minimalist business cards to see if this was the most minimal of all, but the resulting lists are annoying and most of the business cards are less minimal than this. Think, "25 BEST WORDPRESS THEMES OMG!"
On the opposite end of the spectrum, here's a crappy cell phone picture of the back of my business card based on a design by my pal Chris Piascik. This is less minimal.
(Via Minimalissimo)
Update:
Here's another pretty card from Alex Keene.
In 1996, Nick Cave was nominated by MTV for Best Male Artist. This was an award he was not interested in winning, so he wrote MTV a letter. "I am in competition with no-one." Click through to read the sincere thanks in the first paragraph, and the loony bin muse protection in the third.
(Via Stellar and @Lettersofnote)
Skyliners Paris trailer orig. from Aug 20, 2011
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
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