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kottke.org (100 unread)

• Skating with shadows

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 4:33 am by Aaron Cohen

  I've seen skatboarding dogs, but I've never seen a skateboarding shadow before. The video feels like a dream sequence in a movie, a movie where some evil wizard turns the boys of Dogtown into shadows.

  Tags: skating

• Sorkin to graduates: you're "incredibly well-educated dumb people"

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 1:07 am by Jason Kottke

  Aaron Sorkin recently gave the commencement address at Syracuse University.

  Make no mistake about it, you are dumb. You're a group of incredibly well-educated dumb people. I was there. We all were there. You're barely functional. There are some screw-ups headed your way. I wish I could tell you that there was a trick to avoiding the screw-ups, but the screw-ups, they're a-coming for ya. It's a combination of life being unpredictable, and you being super dumb.

  But also, this:

  Don't ever forget that you're a citizen of this world, and there are things you can do to lift the human spirit, things that are easy, things that are free, things that you can do every day. Civility, respect, kindness, character. You're too good for schadenfreude, you're too good for gossip and snark, you're too good for intolerance -- and since you're walking into the middle of a presidential election, it's worth mentioning that you're too good to think people who disagree with you are your enemy.

  Tags: Aaron Sorkin

• Kids review a Skrillex song

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 11:32 pm by Jason Kottke

  A bunch of cute kids review Bangarang by Skrillex.

  What is dupstep?

  I've never heard of that.

  Daddy loves dubstep.

  A couple of the kids were asked what "the drop" meant:

  I think the drop is when you drop being sensible.

  When it gets really quiet and then it gets really really really loud. BANG!

  (via ★interesting)

  Tags: music   Skrillex   video

• A blind man's first experience with echolocation

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 9:37 pm by Jason Kottke

  Austin Seraphin, who you may remember from his review of the iPhone, recently learned how to use echolocation to navigate his physical environment in a new way.

  We started out in the hallway outside of my condo. They turned an old school into lofts, so the hallways and stairwells look and sound like a school. He had me walk down the hallway without touching the walls by using echolocation. Just to make it clear: echolocation does not normally replace the use of a cane, but for this exercise I did not use a cane. I could hear the hard surfaces, and gradually the walls came into focus. I could actually do it. The walls provided the shoreline, and I could actually see them on either side and keep in the center.

  I began to understand that this required a whole new way of thinking. Justin gave constant instruction to help me learn. "Scan left. Scan right. Now scan straight ahead. You have to start thinking like a sighted person." In deed, the muscles in the back of my neck would start to hurt because I did not need to move my head as much before. Now the direction of my gaze actually meant something.

  We then journeyed to the stairwell. Now I would really begin to understand what thinking like a sighted person really meant. I scanned left, and saw a set of stairs going up like I had in my loft. I scanned right, and saw a set of stairs going down, which made sense. I scanned up, and saw something extend above and going back. What the hell? It took a minute to realize with Justin's help that I saw the set of steps above me on another stairway. I had never experienced that kind of vivid three dimensional emersion before. My brain flipped.

  See also Daniel Kish and Ben Underwood. (via waxy)

  Tags: Austin Seraphin   blind

• The sounds of Aronofsky

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 8:56 pm by Jason Kottke

  The person who made Wes Anderson From Above and Tarantino From Below has put together a supercut of distinct sounds from Darren Aronofsky's films.

  (via ★interesting)

  Tags: Darren Aronofsky   movies   video

• Straight White Male, the game of life's lowest difficulty setting

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 7:48 pm by Jason Kottke

  Using a video game metaphor, John Scalzi explains straight white male privilege for those straight white males who get hung up on the word "privilege".

  Dudes. Imagine life here in the US -- or indeed, pretty much anywhere in the Western world -- is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let's call it The Real World. You have installed The Real World on your computer and are about to start playing, but first you go to the settings tab to bind your keys, fiddle with your defaults, and choose the difficulty setting for the game. Got it?

  Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, "Straight White Male" is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

  You can lose playing on the lowest difficulty setting. The lowest difficulty setting is still the easiest setting to win on. The player who plays on the "Gay Minority Female" setting? Hardcore.

  Tags: John Scalzi

• Facebook's current valuation in BK Whoppers

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 6:28 pm by Jason Kottke

  Facebook's going public in a few days and will finally get a real valuation attached to it. During a 2009 Burger King promotion that doled out free Whoppers for deleting some of your Facebook friends, I estimated Facebook's valuation at about $1.8 billion.

  What BK has unwittingly done here is provide a way to determine the valuation of Facebook. Let's assume that the majority of Facebook's value comes from the connections between their users. From Facebook's statistics page, we learn that the site has 150 million users and the average user has 100 friends. Each friendship is requires the assent of both friends so really each user can, on average, only end half of their friendships. The price of a Whopper is approximately $2.40. That means that each user's friendships is worth around 5 Whoppers, or $12. Do the math and:

  $12/user X 150M users = $1.8 billion valuation for Facebook

  At the time, Facebook's estimated worth was anywhere between $9-15 billion, about an order of magnitude more than the company's 2009 Whopper valuation. According to the company's Key Facts page, Facebook has 901 million monthly active users as of the end of March 2012. Doing the math again:

  $12/user X 901M users = $10.8 billion valuation for Facebook

  Right now, the price range for the IPO is $34-38 a share which would put the company's overall valuation at $104 billion, the same order of magnitude more than the current Whopper valuation.

  Now, I'm no economist, but that's a lot of hamburgers.

  Tags: Burger King   economics   Facebook

• Ken Burns talks about stories

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 4:43 pm by Jason Kottke

  In this short film by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, Ken Burns shares his thoughtful perspective on what makes a good story.

  Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he's got enough time to go to the theatre. That's a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That's a good story.

  Over at the Atlantic, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg has an interview with the filmmakers.

  Tags: Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg   Ken Burns   Sarah Klein   Tom Mason   video

• Updates on previous entries for May 15, 2012*

  Posted: May 16, 2012, 8:11 am by Jason Kottke

  Dear Leader meets Sim City orig. from Jun 03, 2010
  When life gives you graffiti, make money orig. from May 14, 2012
  How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2 orig. from May 14, 2012

  * Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

  Tags: post updates

• Texas executed an innocent man

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 12:30 am by Jason Kottke

  Antonin Scalia once said that no one had ever been executed in the US for a crime they didn't commit. Well, the Columbia Human Rights Law Review is devoting its entire spring issue to the case of Carlos DeLuna, who was executed by the state of Texas in 1989 for the murder of Wanda Lopez. Their investigation reveals that another Carlos, Carlos Hernandez, actually committed the murder.

  Many other glaring discrepancies also stand out in the DeLuna case. He was put on death row largely on the eyewitness testimony of one man, Kevan Baker, who had seen the fight inside the Shamrock and watched the attacker flee the scene.

  Yet when Baker was interviewed 20 years later, he said that he hadn't been that sure about the identification as he had trouble telling one Hispanic person apart from another.

  Then there was the crime-scene investigation. Detectives failed to carry out or bungled basic forensic procedures that might have revealed information about the killer. No blood samples were collected and tested for the culprit's blood type.

  Fingerprinting was so badly handled that no useable fingerprints were taken. None of the items found on the floor of the Shamrock - a cigarette stub, chewing gum, a button, comb and beer cans - were forensically examined for saliva or blood.

  There was no scraping of the victim's fingernails for traces of the attacker's skin. When Liebman and his students studied digitally enhanced copies of crime scene photographs, they were amazed to find the footprint from a man's shoe imprinted in a pool of Lopez's blood on the floor - yet no effort was made to measure it.

  "There it was," says Liebman. "The murderer had left his calling card at the scene, but it was never used."

  Even the murder weapon, the knife, was not properly examined, though it was covered in blood and flesh.

  Other photographs show Lopez's blood splattered up to three feet high on the walls of the Shamrock counter. Yet when DeLuna's clothes and shoes were tested for traces of blood, not a single microscopic drop was found. The prosecution said it must have been washed away by the rain.

  Awful. See also Cameron Todd Willingham.

  Tags: Antonin Scalia   Cameron Todd Willingham   Carlos DeLuna   crime   death penalty   legal

• How Yahoo killed Flickr

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 10:29 pm by Jason Kottke

  From Mat Honan at Gizmodo, an account of how Yahoo bought Flickr and then frittered away all its potential.

  Because Flickr wasn't as profitable as some of the other bigger properties, like Yahoo Mail or Yahoo Sports, it wasn't given the resources that were dedicated to other products. That meant it had to spend its resources on integration, rather than innovation. Which made it harder to attract new users, which meant it couldn't make as much money, which meant (full circle) it didn't get more resources. And so it goes.

  As a result of being resource-starved, Flickr quit planting the anchors it needed to climb ever higher. It missed the boat on local, on real time, on mobile, and even ultimately on social-the field it pioneered. And so, it never became the Flickr of video; YouTube snagged that ring. It never became the Flickr of people, which was of course Facebook. It remained the Flickr of photos. At least, until Instagram came along.

  Tags: business   Flickr   Mat Honan   Yahoo

• How to blog anonymously

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 9:02 pm by Jason Kottke

  From former call girl blogger Belle de Jour, a guide on how to publish online and maintain your anonymity.

  You will need an email address to do things like register for blog accounts, Facebook, Twitter, and more. This email will have to be something entirely separate from your "real" email addresses. There are a lot of free options out there, but be aware that sending an email from many of them also sends information in the headers that could help identify you.

  When I started blogging, I set up an email address for the blog with Hotmail. Don't do this. Someone quickly pointed out the headers revealed where I worked (a very large place with lots of people and even more computers, but still more information than I was comfortable with). They suggested I use Hushmail instead, which I still use. Hushmail has a free option (though the inbox allocation is modest), strips out headers, and worked for me.

  (thx, fred)

  Tags: how to   privacy   weblogs

• Fantastic time lapse map of Europe, 1000 - 2005 A.D.

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 6:11 pm by Jason Kottke

  This time lapse covers more than 1000 years and shows the shifting national borders of Europe.

  There's also a slowed-down version that shows the year and some annotation of events. (via ★interesting)

  Tags: maps   time lapse   video

• Sabotage! You know, for kids

  Posted: May 15, 2012, 5:08 pm by Jason Kottke

  As a tribute to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, James Winters and his family made this parody of the video Sabotage with kids playing all the roles.

  Charming, although I might have gone with squirt guns instead of the more realistic item.

  (via @moth)

  Tags: Adam Yauch   Beastie Boys   James Winters   music   remix   video

• Another use for records

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 4:30 am by Aaron Cohen

  You know those Dude Perfect guys who have admirably made a job out of their ability to make viral basketball trick shots? Here are some guys doing it with vinyl LPs.
  
  

  (via Dangerous Minds)

  Tags: records

• When life gives you graffiti, make money

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 1:54 am by Jason Kottke

  Last week, graffiti "artist" Kidult painted the word ART in pink paint all over the Marc Jacobs store in Soho. The store's staff cleaned it up, but not before snapping a photo of it and dubbing it Art by Art Jacobs. And then, in an awesome twist, Marc Jacobs put the photo on a tshirt and offered it for sale: $689 or $9 less if you want it signed by the "artist". The Observer's Foster Kamer has the story.

  Jacobs, in this situation, has made one hell of a commentary about the absurd commoditization that some street art has yielded, and how easily ostensibly subversive art can actually be subverted, facile as it so often is, and it may be the best take on the matter since Exit Through The Gift Shop.

  I'm going to pay for those quotation marks with lots of email and tweets, aren't I?

  Update: Kidult has answered back with a tshirt of his own that pictures the "artist" tagging the store. $10.

  Tags: art   fashion   graffiti   Kidult   Marc Jacobs

• Moonshiners' cow shoes

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 12:13 am by Jason Kottke

  

  This is one of a pair of cow shoes worn by moonshiners during Prohibition to hide their tracks from prohibition agents. From a 1922 edition of The Evening Independent:

  A new method of evading prohibition agents was revealed here today by A.L. Allen, state prohibition enforcement director, who displayed what he called a "cow shoe" as the latest thing front the haunts of moonshiners.

  The cow shoe is a strip of metal to which is tacked a wooden block carved to resemble the hoof of a cow, which may be strapped to the human foot. A man shod with a pair of them would leave a trail resembling that of a cow.

  The shoe found was picked up near Port Tampa where a still was located some time ago. It will be sent to the prohibition department at Washington. Officers believe the inventor got his idea from a Sherlock Holmes story in which the villain shod his horse with shoes the imprint of which resembled those of a cow's hoof.

  I think I saw a woman wearing a pair of these on 6th Ave last week. (via nyer photo booth)

  Tags: fashion   Prohibition   Sherlock Holmes

• 100 ideas that changed graphic design

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 10:34 pm by Jason Kottke

  From Steven Heller and Veronique Vienne, a book about 100 Ideas that Changed Graphic Design. Maria Popova has a preview at The Atlantic.

  From how rub-on lettering democratized design by fueling the DIY movement and engaging people who knew nothing about typography to how the concept of the "teenager" was invented after World War II as a new market for advertisers, many of the ideas are mother-of-invention parables. Together, they converge into a cohesive meditation on the fundamental mechanism of graphic design -- to draw a narrative with a point of view, and then construct that narrative through the design process and experience.

  Tags: books   design   Maria Popova   Steven Heller   Veronique Vienne

• Hunting for anachronisms in Mad Men and Downton Abbey

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 8:31 pm by Jason Kottke

  Prochronism analyzes word usage in shows like Mad Men and Downton Abbey to hunt down anachronisms...like "a callback for" and "pay phone" from a recent episode of Mad Men.

  

  The big one from the charts: Megan gets "a callback for" an audition. This is, the data says, a candidate for the worst anachronism of the season. The word "callback" is about 100x more common by the 1990s, and "callback for" is even worse. The OED doesn't have any examples of a theater-oriented use of "callback" until the 1970s; although I bet one could find some examples somewhere earlier in the New York theater scene, that may not save it. It wouldn't really suite Megan's generally dilettantish attitude towards the theater, or the office staff's lack of knowledge of it, for them to be so au courant. "call-back" and "call back" don't seem much more likely.

  (via waxy)

  Tags: Downton Abbey   language   Mad Men   TV

• How Pixar almost deleted Toy Story 2

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 6:15 pm by Jason Kottke

  Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here's a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.

  Woody's hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared. And then as we kept checking, he disappeared entirely. Woody's gone.

  (via tested)

  Update: Over at Quora, Oren Jacob (the guy in the video) explains in more detail what happened.

  First, it wasn't multiple terabytes of information. Neither all the rendered frames, nor all the data necessary to render those frames in animation, model, shaders, set, and lighting data files was that size back then.

  A week prior to driving across the bridge in a last ditch attempt to recover the show (depicted pretty accurately in the video above) we had restored the film from backups within 48 hours of the /bin/rm -r -f *, run some validation tests, rendered frames, somehow got good pictures back and no errors, and invited the crew back to start working. It took another several days of the entire crew working on that initial restoral to really understand that the restoral was, in fact, incomplete and corrupt. Ack. At that point, we sent everyone home again and had the come-to-Jesus meeting where we all collectively realized that our backup software wasn't dishing up errors properly (a full disk situation was masking them, if my memory serves), our validation software also wasn't dishing up errors properly (that was written very hastily, and without a clean state to start from, was missing several important error conditions), and several other factors were compounding our lack of concrete, verifiable information.

  The only prospect then was to roll back about 2 months to the last full backup that we thought might work. In that meeting, Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how that went...

  Tags: movies   Oren Jacob   Pixar   Toy Story 2   video

• Kodak's secret nuclear reactor

  Posted: May 14, 2012, 5:04 pm by Jason Kottke

  Up until 2007, Kodak operated a small nuclear reactor that contained 3.5 pounds of weapons-grade highly enriched uranium.

  The Democrat and Chronicle learned of the facility when an employee happened to mention it to a reporter a few months ago.

  The recent silence was by design. Detailed information about nuclear power plants and other entities with radioactive material has been restricted since the 2001 terrorist attacks.

  Nuclear non-proliferation experts express surprise that an industrial manufacturer like Eastman Kodak had had weapons-grade uranium, especially in a post-9/11 world.

  "I've never heard of it at Kodak," said Miles Pomper, senior research associate at the Center for Nonproliferation Studies in Washington. "It's such an odd situation because private companies just don't have this material."

  (via @kdawson)

  Tags: Kodak   physics   science

• How a bicycle is made

  Posted: May 11, 2012, 11:00 pm by Jason Kottke

  From British Council film, a short film from 1945 that shows how a bicycle is designed and manufactured.

  (via stellar)

  Tags: cycling   how to   video

• The best rejected New Yorker covers

  Posted: May 11, 2012, 9:13 pm by Jason Kottke

  Blown Covers is a new book that details the illustrations that never made it to the front cover of the New Yorker. At Imprint, Michael Silverberg interviews Françoise Mouly, the book's author and the New Yorker's art editor since 1993, and shares some of best rejected covers. I like this one by Christoph Niemann showing the attempted return of the Statue of Liberty to France:

  

  "Think of me as your priest," she told one of them. Mouly, who cofounded the avant-garde comics anthology RAW with her husband, Art Spiegelman, asks the artists she works with -- Barry Blitt, Christoph Niemann, Ana Juan, R. Crumb -- not to hold back anything in their cover sketches. If that means the occasional pedophilia gag or Holocaust joke finds its way to her desk, she's fine with that. Tasteless humor and failed setups are an essential part of the process. "Sometimes something is too provocative or too sexist or too racist," Mouly says, "but it will inspire a line of thinking that will help develop an image that is publishable."

  Tags: books   Christoph Niemann   design   Francoise Mouly   magazines   Michael Silverberg   New Yorker

• A history of buttermilk

  Posted: May 11, 2012, 6:58 pm by Jason Kottke

  Turns out that "real" buttermilk, aka the byproduct of making butter, hasn't been common for almost a century...today it's been almost entirely replaced by cultured buttermilk.

  So how did that buttermilk, the original buttermilk, turn into the thick, sour, yogurty beverage I sampled at Threadgill's? The confusion surrounding this drink dates back to the 18th century or before. Until the age of refrigeration, milk soured quickly in the kitchen, and most butter ended up being made from the slightly spoiled stuff. As a result, some historical sources use the word buttermilk in the Laura Ingalls Wilder sense, to describe the byproduct of butter-making; others use it to describe butter-making's standard ingredient at the time-milk that had gone sour from sitting around too long. To make matters more confusing, the butter-byproduct kind of buttermilk could be either "sour," if you started out with the off milk that was itself sometimes called buttermilk, or "sweet," if you started out with fresh cream (like Laura's mom did). So, prior to the 20th century, buttermilk could refer to at least three different categories of beverage: regular old milk that had gone sour; the sour byproduct of churning sour milk or cream into butter; and the "sweet" byproduct of churning fresh milk or cream into butter.

  We occasionally get the real stuff for making the world's best pancakes and it definitely makes a difference.

  Tags: food

• Walt Disney's Taxi Driver

  Posted: May 11, 2012, 5:36 pm by Jason Kottke

  Taxi Driver reimagineered to portray Travis Bickle as obsessed with Mickey Mouse.

  (via waxy)

  Tags: movies   remix   Taxi Driver   Walt Disney

• Photo of MGM's stable of movie stars in 1943

  Posted: May 10, 2012, 11:50 pm by Jason Kottke

  A group photograph of MGM's stars and starlets under contract, taken for the studio's 20th anniversary in 1943.

  

  The full-size photo is available at Mlkshk or at Wikipedia for stargazing. Here's who's in the photo:

  Front Row: James Stewart, Margaret Sullavan, Lucille Ball, Hedy Lamarr, Katharine Hepburn, Louis B Mayer, Greer Garson, Irene Dunne, Susan Peters, Ginny Simms, Lionel Barrymore

  Second Row: Harry James, Brian Donlevy, Red Skelton, Mickey Rooney, William Powell, Wallace Beery, Spencer Tracy, Walter Pidgeon, Robert Taylor, Pierre Aumont, Lewis Stone, Gene Kelly, Jackie Jenkins

  Third Row: Tommy Dorsey, George Murphy, Jean Rogers, James Craig, Donna Reed, Van Johnson, Fay Bainter, Marsha Hunt, Ruth Hussey, Marjorie Main, Robert Benchley

  Fourth Row: Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Keenan Wynn, Diana Lewis, Marilyn Maxwell, Esther Williams, Ann Richards, Marta Linden, Lee Bowman, Richard Carlson, Mary Astor

  Fifth Row: Blanche Ring, Sara Haden, Fay Holden, Bert Lahr, Frances Gifford, June Allyson, Richard Whorf, Frances Rafferty, Spring Byington, Connie Gilchrist, Gladys Cooper

  Sixth Row:

  Ben Blue, Chill Wills, Keye Luke, Barry Nelson, Desi Arnaz, Henry O'Neill, Bob Crosby, Rags Ragland

  Tags: Hollywood   MGM   movies   photography

• Puffin Clouds

  Posted: May 10, 2012, 10:24 pm by Jason Kottke

  Not sure if these are straight photos or digital composites or whatever, but I like the images from Paul Octavious' Puffin Clouds series.

  

  (via @itscolossal)

  Tags: art   Paul Octavious   photography

• The business lessons of Patagonia

  Posted: May 10, 2012, 8:57 pm by Jason Kottke

  A profile of Yvon Chouinard, the founder of Patagonia and an unlikely business guru.

  Then he looked at everything Patagonia made, shipped or processed, and resolved to do it all more responsibly. He changed materials, switching in 1996 from conventional to organic cotton-despite the fact that it initially tripled his supply costs-because it was less harmful to the environment. He created fleece jackets made entirely from recycled soda bottles. He vowed to create products durable enough and timeless enough that people could replace them less often, reducing waste. He put "The Footprint Chronicles" up on Patagonia's website, exhaustively cataloging the environmental damage done by his own company. He now takes responsibility for every item Patagonia has ever made -- promising either to replace it if the customer is dissatisfied, repair it (for a reasonable fee), help resell it (Patagonia facilitates exchanges of used clothes on its website), or recycle it when at last it's no longer wearable.

  Posting this partially for my wife, who is a life-long Patagonia customer.

  Tags: business   Patagonia   Yvon Chouinard

• If rock bands were sandwiches

  Posted: May 10, 2012, 7:41 pm by Jason Kottke

  At McSweeney's, John Peck whips up some bandwiches.

  Bjork: Sliced narwhal, mustard, whole wheat bread.

  Grateful Dead: Lemon verbena sorbet, peanut butter, clarified hemp butter, deep-fried brownie bites, M&Ms, stale focaccia.

  Sex Pistols: Deep-fried Frank Sinatra LP, Russian mustard, spackle, tacks, stale rye bread.

  John Cage: Silence, warmth, indirect sunlight, the memory of lettuce, the idea of bread.

  The Jimi Hendrix Experience: Bacon-double cheeseburger, mescaline pesto, sourdough bread.

  Tags: food   John Peck   music   remix

• What is a hipster?

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 12:52 am by Jason Kottke

  Lorena Galliot came to NYC from France and didn't know what a hipster was. So she took to the streets of Williamsburg to find out.

  (thx, phillip)

  Tags: Lorena Galliot   NYC   video

• Paris, USA

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 11:09 pm by Jason Kottke

  Having recently published a book about Paris, France, Rosecrans Baldwin visited a number of towns named Paris around the US to see how Americans perceive the French here in 2012. Here's part one of his report.

  The survey has eight questions ranging from general opinions to particular trivia. For example, "Whose side was France on during the American Revolutionary War?"

  Sixty-six percent of respondents get it right: our side. Twenty percent are wrong. Incorrect answers include "the British," "England," "the opposite side," and, oddly, "the French." Other responses: "History was not my class in school -- I hate it," and "I am averse." My favorite comes from a gas station attendant in Lexington, Ky., who writes: "I refuse to answer the rest of this survey. I love the French language. I have had many French friends."

  One guy in a parking lot outside a Dallas strip club says, "This has got to be a trick question." And there's another person, at Phoenix Sky Harbor International Airport, who will ask me, "You mean our American Revolutionary War?" Which appears to be a general concern -- of the 55 people, at least 10 ask me to which American Revolution I am referring. Two people say, "But we didn't have a revolution."

  The Morning News is serializing the other parts of this story all this month but you can get the whole thing right now on the Kindle.

  Tags: France   Paris   Rosecrans Baldwin   USA

• Salts of the earth

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 7:08 pm by Jason Kottke

  From Food52, a round-up of ten different kinds of salt you might run across in recipes, including table salt, fleur de sel, and Himalayan salt.

  Hand-mined from ancient sea salt deposits from the Khewra Salt Mine in Pakistan, Himalayan salt is rich in minerals and believed to be one of the purest salts available -- hence its frequent use in spa treatments. It ranges in color from pure white to shades of pink and deep red. Hand cut into slabs, Himalayan salt is frequently used as a surface for serving food. Due to their ability to hold a specific temperature for an extended period of time, these slabs can be used for anything from serving cold ice cream to cooking fish, meats, and vegetables. Himalayan salt can also be used as a cooking or finishing salt. Or use it to rim the edge of a glass for a warm-weather cocktail.

  Tags: food   lists

• How Mark Zuckerberg became a good CEO

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 5:11 pm by Jason Kottke

  Writing for New York magazine, Henry Blodget explains how a young startup founder and college dropout became the CEO of a soon-to-be $100 billion company.

  When talking about Zuckerberg's most valuable personality trait, a colleague jokingly invokes the famous Stanford marshmallow tests, in which researchers found a correlation between a young child's ability to delay gratification -- devour one treat right away, or wait and be rewarded with two -- with high achievement later in life. If Zuckerberg had been one of the Stanford scientists' subjects, the colleague jokes, Facebook would never have been created: He'd still be sitting in a room somewhere, not eating marshmallows.

  Tags: business   Facebook   Henry Blodget   Mark Zuckerberg   working

• Updates on previous entries for May 8, 2012*

  Posted: May 9, 2012, 8:11 am by Jason Kottke

  Abraham Lincoln invented Facebook orig. from May 08, 2012
  Yogurt gives mice bigger balls orig. from May 07, 2012

  * Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

  Tags: post updates

• Abraham Lincoln invented Facebook

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 10:15 pm by Jason Kottke

  [Ed note: read the update below...this is likely definitely a hoax.] Intrigued by a possible connection between PT Barnum and Abe Lincoln, Nate St. Pierre travelled to the Lincoln Museum in Springfield, IL. Once there, he stumbled upon something called The Springfield Gazette, a personal newspaper made by Lincoln that is eerily similar to Facebook.

  The whole Springfield Gazette was one sheet of paper, and it was all about Lincoln. Only him. Other people only came into the document in conjunction with how he experienced life at that moment. If you look at the Gazette picture above, you can see his portrait in the upper left-hand corner. See how the column of text under him is cut off on the left side? Stupid scanned picture, I know, ugh. But just to the left of his picture, and above that column of text, is a little box. And in that box you see three things: his name, his address, and his profession (attorney).

  The first column underneath his picture contains a bunch of short blurbs about what's going on in his life at the moment - work he recently did, some books the family bought, and the new games his boys made up. In the next three columns he shares a quote he likes, two poems, and a short story about the Pilgrim Fathers. I don't know where he got them, but they're obviously copied from somewhere. In the last three columns he tells the story of his day at the circus and tiny little story about his current life on the prairie.

  Put all that together on one page and tell me what it looks like to you. Profile picture. Personal information. Status updates. Copied and shared material. A few longer posts. Looks like something we see every day, doesn't it?

  Lincoln even tried to patent the idea.

  Lincoln was requesting a patent for "The Gazette," a system to "keep People aware of Others in the Town." He laid out a plan where every town would have its own Gazette, named after the town itself. He listed the Springfield Gazette as his Visual Appendix, an example of the system he was talking about. Lincoln was proposing that each town build a centrally located collection of documents where "every Man may have his own page, where he might discuss his Family, his Work, and his Various Endeavors."

  He went on to propose that "each Man may decide if he shall make his page Available to the entire Town, or only to those with whom he has established Family or Friendship." Evidently there was to be someone overseeing this collection of documents, and he would somehow know which pages anyone could look at, and which ones only certain people could see (it wasn't quite clear in the application). Lincoln stated that these documents could be updated "at any time deemed Fit or Necessary," so that anyone in town could know what was going on in their friends' lives "without being Present in Body."

  Man, I hope this isn't a hoax...it's almost too perfect. Also, queue Jesse Eisenberg saying "Abe, if you had invented Facebook, you would have invented Facebook". (via @gavinpurcell)

  Update: Ok, I'm willing to call hoax on this one based on two things. 1) The first non-engraved photograph reproduced in a newspaper was in 1880, 35 years after the Springfield Gazette was alledgedly produced. 2) The Library of Congress says that the photograph pictured in the Gazette was taken in 1846 or 1847, a year or two after the publication date. That and the low-res "I couldn't take proper photos of them" images pretty much convinces me.

  Update: And the proof...the original Springfield Gazette sans Lincoln. (via @zempf)

  Tags: Abraham Lincoln   Facebook   Nate St. Pierre

• George Wright, arrested after 40 years on the run

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 8:25 pm by Aaron Cohen

  On the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1962, George Wright and another man walked into a gas station in NJ with the intention of robbing its owner, Walter Patterson. After a scuffle, Wright's associate shot Patterson, wounding him severely enough he would die two days later. Ten years later, after escaping from jail, Wright helped hijack an airplane with 86 passengers, ransomed the passengers for $1 million, flew to Algeria, and disappeared for 40 years. Last year he was arrested in Portugal.

  This profile in GQ by Michael Finkel is sympathetic, but fascinating. Wright is described as a positive member of the community, a man rehabilitated, which is supposed to be the purpose of prison. And yet, he's never paid for his crimes. If pressed, I'd have to say I agree with how it ended up playing out.

  During my flight back from Portugal, I try to sort out how I feel about Wright. I'm troubled, of course, by the gas-station crime--even if it wasn't his gun that fired, he still let an innocent man die. He never called for help. Still, he was a teenager at the time. You can no longer use youthful rashness as an excuse when you're 29, brandishing a loaded weapon on an airplane and holding more than ninety people hostage. That incident could've easily ended in disaster. Wright is fortunate it did not. And I am not entirely sure there aren't other crimes--crimes for which Wright wasn't caught. He may still have secrets inside him. We'll never know.

  (via Long Reads)

  Tags: crime   George Wright

• The Hood Internet: The Mixtape Volume Six

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 6:43 pm by Jason Kottke

  Wooooo! The Hood Internet has just released the sixth installment of their Mixtape series. You can listen to the whole thing here:

  or download it here. Their five previous Mixtapes are some of the most-played music in my collection...I'm listening to volume five right now actually.

  Tags: music   remix   The Hood Internet

• Mugshots from the 1920s

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 6:17 pm by Jason Kottke

  A collection of vintage mugshots from the 1920s. Crime used to be a lot more civilized.

  

  (thx, david)

  Tags: crime   fashion   photography

• Paul's Boutique would be impossible today

  Posted: May 8, 2012, 4:50 pm by Jason Kottke

  Matt Yglesias argues that because of the way copyright is viewed by the public and interpreted by lawmakers and the courts, making an album like The Beastie Boys' Paul's Boutique would be nearly impossible today.

  The death on Friday of Adam Yauch, best known as the Beastie Boys' MCA, surely sent many of us back to old albums we may not have heard for a while. And anyone who threw on Paul's Boutique, the Boys' best album, was surely struck by the sense that they don't make records like that anymore. That's not just because tastes and styles have changed. The entire album is based on lavish sampling of other recordings. "Shake Your Rump," which leads Slate's #MCATracks playlist, features samples of 14 songs by 12 separate artists. In all, the album is thought to have as many as 300 total samples. The sampling gave Paul's Boutique a sound that remains almost as distinctive today as it was when it was released in 1989.

  Perhaps the main reason-and certainly the saddest reason-that it still sounds distinctive is that a rapidly shifting legal and economic landscape made it essentially impossible to repeat.

  Tags: Beastie Boys   copyright   legal   Matt Yglesias   music

• Got to have goals

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 6:42 am by Aaron Cohen

  If you watch to the end, Gabe Brooks bunny hops over a soccer goal. A small one, but still, how high is the highest soccer goal you've ever bunny hopped over?

  Tags: bmx   Gabe Brooks

• Burning bills

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 12:46 am by Aaron Cohen

  Remember the Ice T line, "So much cash gotta keep it in Hefty bags?" These Florida brothers, illicit pill mill operators the both of them, had so much cash they had to keep it in Hefty bags, yes, but they also had so much cash they burned the $1 bills as punishment for not being $5, $10, or $20 bills. Business tip: If you have so much money you are literally burning cash, you need to take another look at operations. Chris and Jeff George are now in jail after their prescription pill empire was shut down by prosecutors.
  

  The cash piled up despite the brothers' free-spending ways. Jeff George bought a monster truck, multiple Lamborghinis and a Mercedes Saks 5th Avenue Edition. There were only five of those cars made, and George liked his so much that when he totaled it, he bought himself another, according to a friend.

  Jeff George assembled a small navy, including a 36-foot racing vessel, a 39-foot sports boat and two yachts, 38 and 55 feet in length. He also bought the shopping plaza housing his favorite strip club. The purchases were a convenient way to launder money, according to the indictment.

  At the end of the article, it says the physicians associated with the Georges' operation were among the top purchasers of oxycodone, and that their demise "played a major role in reversing both local and national trends of rapidly increasing painkiller abuse." I would love to see numbers backing that, as well as the impact on pharmaceutical company profits.

  (via @delfuego)

  Tags: Florida

• Magazine publishers turning against apps

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 11:08 pm by Aaron Cohen

  In a thoughtful piece, Jason Pontin discusses the evolving sense among magazine publishers that native apps might not be as amazing for them as originally thought. To my nose, there is the faintest whiff of sour grapes (really just a whiff), that readers did not respond as expected, and that Apple took a cut of sales. For the most part, though, the challenges illustrated in this piece are challenges faced by anyone trying to sell content. What's the best way to use new technology to build and sustain an audience?

  Pontin's solution for now?
  

  Last fall, we moved all the editorial in our apps, including the magazine, into a simple RSS feed in a river of news. We dumped the digital replica. Now we're redesigning Technologyreview.com, which we made entirely free for use, and we'll follow the Financial Times in using HTML5, so that a reader will see Web pages optimized for any device, whether a desktop or laptop computer, a tablet, or a smart phone. Then we'll kill our apps, too.

  In describing the costs associated with creating the app, Pontin uses the phrase, "untold expense of spirit," which is just a gorgeous bit of writing.

  Tags: Jason Pontin

• Yogurt gives mice bigger balls

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 10:14 pm by Aaron Cohen

  In studying yogurt's effects on obesity in mice, a team of MIT scientists discovered several unanticipated results. Basically, yogurt turned these mice into Kanye. Science is weird.

  

  First, the scientists noticed that the yogurt-eating mice were incredibly shiny. Using both traditional histology techniques and cosmetic rating scales, the researchers showed that these animals had 10 times the active follicle density of other mice, resulting in luxuriantly silky fur.

  Then the researchers spotted something particular about the males: they projected their testes outward, which endowed them with a certain "mouse swagger," Erdman says. On measuring the males, they found that the testicles of the yogurt consumers were about 5 percent heavier than those of mice fed typical diets alone and around 15 percent heavier than those of junk-eating males.

  More important, that masculinity pays off. In mating experiments, yogurt-eating males inseminated their partners faster and produced more offspring than control mice. Conversely, females that ate the yogurt diets gave birth to larger litters and weaned those pups with greater success. Reflecting on their unpublished results, Erdman and Alm think that the probiotic microbes in the yogurt help to make the animals leaner and healthier, which indirectly improves sexual machismo.

  'Mouse swagger'

  Update: Illustration by Chris Piascik.

  Tags: Kanye West   science

• The Politics of Competitive Board Gaming Amongst Friends

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 6:46 pm by Aaron Cohen

  This 10 minute film charmed the hell out of me a couple weeks ago.

  Tags: Settlers of Catan

• Not all YOU can fly

  Posted: May 7, 2012, 5:48 pm by Aaron Cohen

  Throughout it's its history, American Airlines has offered a variety of all-you-can-fly passes allowing unlimited first-class travel for life. Several people bought these passes, and actually used them, and when American started realizing how much the top users of AAirpass were costing the airline, American looked for ways to revoke the passes.
  

  In one 25-day span this year, Joyce flew round trip to London 16 times, flights that would retail for more than $125,000. He didn't pay a dime.

  In July 2004, for example, Rothstein flew 18 times, visiting Nova Scotia, New York, Miami, London, Los Angeles, Maine, Denver and Fort Lauderdale, Fla., some of them several times over. The complexity of such itineraries would stump most travelers; happily for AAirpass holders, American provided elite agents able to solve the toughest booking puzzles.

  (via @mikeindustries)

  Tags: American Airlines

• MCA

  Posted: May 5, 2012, 7:15 pm by Aaron Cohen

  I was away from the computer for most of yesterday, which is a good thing, because I don't think I would have been able to handle people on Twitter even lightheartedly joking about MCA passing away yesterday. I don't know if that happened, and I doubt I'll go look for it. (PS, this is Aaron writing.)

  My connection to the Beastie Boys hasn't been as strong in the last...ten years or so, but before that, I cared about them as much as any band I've loved, I'm talking top 5 ever. My fandom path was out of order: Licensed to Ill to Check Your Head to Paul's Boutique, because PB was over my head when it came out. I remember 7 of us leaving high school early, squeezing into one of those boxy Volvo sedans, to go to Newbury Comics to buy Ill Communication. The 7 of us each buying our own CD. I remember being in charge of getting tickets for friends to the Beastie Boys/Roots show in Worcester in 10th Grade, not getting a ticket for Ally, and Ally not speaking to me for 2 full years. I remember sitting up in the stands for that show until pretty much everyone jumped down onto the floor past the helpless guards. I remember being super angry at a friend whose puppy bit a hole in my Check Yo Head shirt in 8th grade, thinking I wouldn't be able to wear it anymore. I remember this shirt being my first tshirt ever to fall apart, to literally wear out, from being worn too much 15 years later.

  The thing that always fascinated me about the Beastie Boys was their transformation from punk rockers to party rappers to the less easily described, but amazing, place where they ended up.

  Here are some other remembrances from around the web:

  -A very good Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker:
  

  And this is the Yauch people remember: a man who could say he was sorry and not feel lessened by it; a man living within the principles of Buddhism and committed to broadening awareness of the political situation in Tibet; and a genuinely quiet person who had become more likely to make a joke at his own expense than anyone else's. Yauch's is one of the voices that can signify hip-hop within three syllables--rough, low, and strained. He got a lot done with that voice.

  -Amos Barshad in Grantland:
  

  Yauch was the leader. A small part of that was aesthetics; the premature graying hair, the permanent rasp. But it was also evident that the morality tale of the Beastie Boys -- three genius New York City smartasses who grew out of Budweiser-crushing caricatures into three endlessly curious, wholeheartedly decent adults -- was best represented by Yauch.

  -The obituary on BeastieBoys.com does a good job rounding up the Beasties myriad credits:
  

  With fellow members Michael "Mike D" Diamond and Adam "Adrock" Horovitz, Beastie Boys would go on to sell over 40 million records, release four #1 albums-including the first hip hop album ever to top the Billboard 200, the band's 1986 debut full length, Licensed To Ill-win three Grammys, and the MTV Video Vanguard Lifetime Achievement award. Last month Beastie Boys were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, with Diamond and Horovitz reading an acceptance speech on behalf of Yauch, who was unable to attend.

  -Molly Ringwald: "Being on tour with the Beastie Boys & Run DMC in the 80s. Guys were all stand-up gentlemen, tho I'm sure they feared I was the band's Yoko."

  -MCA in a 2008 interview about his film company, Oscilloscope Pictures: "Yeah, I could see doing this for a long time."

  -All of Twitter's trending topics were Beastie Boys related for a time yesterday.

  -From a good round up of musicians responding to the news, Chuck D:
  

  Last night, I took a 14 hour flight to Sydney, Australia from LA, embarking on PE's 80th tour in 25 years. I just landed to 65 texts with the news. Adam and the Boys put us on out first tour 25 years and 79 tours ago. They were essential to our beginning, middle and today. Adam especially was unbelievable in our support from then 'til now, even allowing me to induct them into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. I consider myself a strong man and my father says be prepared to lose many in your post-50 path of life. Still, I'm a bit teary-eyed leaving this plane.

  -Plus Andrew WK, "MCA PARTY HARD FOREVER." and Ghostface Killah, "My condolences to Adam "MCA" Yauch Family & the Beastie Boys. My brothers & I felt that pain before as well. Sad Day."

  -170 Beastie Boys references explained.

  -A memory from David Jacobs:
  

  I drove a lot of famous musicians and speakers to & from the Cleveland airport over my college career, but I literally lost my head driving Adam Yauch down 480 back to Oberlin. The rented minivan we were driving was swerving in traffic so much that Adam reached from the back seat and put his hands on my shoulders: "It's OK! Drive man, drive!"

  -Anil Dash, "One of the most profound things the Beasties and MCA did was show us how people can evolve, from silly boys to serious artists."

  -Questlove:
  

  The Beastie Boys were kind enough to spread the love to us on their second go round in 95. (86?s license to ill was brilliant albeit perceived novelty masterpiece, their followups 89?s paul's boutique & 91?s check your head were necessary sacrifice/build destroy exercises that RARELY work in entertainment (they traded in quick fast teen bop stardom in for rebuilding a credible fan base that would prove loyal til the very end). so once again they defied the odds in 94 with ill communication and wound up back where they started from: Stadiums.

  This could go on and on, but this is what I read this morning, via most of the folks I follow on Stellar.

  Tags: Adam Yauch   Beastie Boys   MCA

• Information Graphics, a new book from Taschen

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 11:50 pm by Jason Kottke

  This looks like an interesting new book from Taschen, Information Graphics (buy at Amazon).

  Our everyday lives are filled with a massive flow of information that we must interpret in order to understand the world we live in. Considering this complex variety of data floating around us, sometimes the best -- or even only -- way to communicate is visually. This unique book presents a fascinating historical perspective on the subject, highlighting the work of the masters of the profession who have created a number of breakthroughs that have changed the way we communicate. Information Graphics has been conceived and designed not just for designers or graphics professionals, but for anyone interested in the history and practice of communicating visually.

  The in-depth introductory section, illustrated with over 60 images (each accompanied by an explanatory caption), features essays by Sandra Rendgen, Paolo Ciuccarelli, Richard Saul Wurman, and Simon Rogers; looking back all the way to primitive cave paintings as a means of communication, this introductory section gives readers an excellent overview of the subject. The second part of the book is entirely dedicated to contemporary works by the current most renowned professionals, presenting 200 graphics projects, with over 400 examples -- each with a fact sheet and an explanation of methods and objectives -- divided into chapters by the subjects Location, Time, Category, and Hierarchy.

  Tags: books   design   infoviz

• Dubstep tap dancing

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 8:48 pm by Aaron Cohen

  "TapTronic is a progressive fusion of Irish dance and electronic music." Dancing starts at 40 seconds.

  (via The Daily What)

  Tags: dancing   dubstep

• "We can't send email more than 500 miles"

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 6:54 pm by Jason Kottke

  Still one of my favorite internet things: The case of the 500-mile email.

  I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.

  "We're having a problem sending email out of the department."

  "What's the problem?" I asked.

  "We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.

  I choked on my latte. "Come again?"

  "We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."

  "Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department like statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than 500 miles?"

  "It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily. "You see, when we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"

  "You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And you couldn't send email this whole time?"

  "We could send email. Just not more than--"

  "--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't you call earlier?"

  "Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on until just now." Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway, I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"

  "Geostatisticians..."

  "--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."

  Here's a FAQ that addresses some of the questions the more technically inclined among you may have about this story.

  Tags: email

• Death by chocolate and other dangerous desserts

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 5:27 pm by Jason Kottke

  

  From illustrator Gemma Correll. Check out the rest of her stuff, including gangsta wrap and emotional baggage.

  Tags: Gemma Correll

• Slow motion skating

  Posted: May 4, 2012, 7:11 am by Aaron Cohen

  There's angles/close ups in this video I've never seen in a skate video before.

  Tags: skating

• A practical guide to graphics for scientists and engineers

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 12:05 am by Jason Kottke

  This looks like a potentially interesting book from Felice Frankel: Visual Strategies (at Amazon).

  

  Any scientist or engineer who communicates research results will immediately recognize this practical handbook as an indispensable tool. The guide sets out clear strategies and offers abundant examples to assist researchers-even those with no previous design training-with creating effective visual graphics for use in multiple contexts, including journal submissions, grant proposals, conference posters, or presentations.

  Visual communicator Felice Frankel and systems biologist Angela DePace, along with experts in various fields, demonstrate how small changes can vastly improve the success of a graphic image. They dissect individual graphics, show why some work while others don't, and suggest specific improvements. The book includes analyses of graphics that have appeared in such journals as Science, Nature, Annual Reviews, Cell, PNAS, and the New England Journal of Medicine, as well as an insightful personal conversation with designer Stefan Sagmeister and narratives by prominent researchers and animators.

  Tags: books   design   Felice Frankel   infoviz   Visual Strategies

• Stephen Hawking reviews A Brief History of Time movie

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 9:32 pm by Jason Kottke

  From twenty years ago, Stephen Hawking reviews the film version of A Brief History of Time.

  I have been fortunate in the director of the film, Errol Morris. He is a man of integrity, with a feeling for the issues. It would have been all too easy to have someone who would have concentrated on the more sensational aspects of my private life, and my medical condition, and who would have treated the science in a superficial way. A friend of mine, who has had several television programmes based on his work, was envious of how the scientific ideas came through on the film.

  (via @errolmorris)

  Tags: A Brief History of Time   books   Errol Morris   movies   Stephen Hawking

• The iPhone: maybe the best thing for the blind since Braille

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 7:28 pm by Jason Kottke

  For some visually impaired folks, the iPhone has been nothing short of revolutionary.

  For the visually impaired community, the introduction of the iPhone in 2007 seemed at first like a disaster -- the standard-bearer of a new generation of smartphones was based on touch screens that had no physical differentiation. It was a flat piece of glass. But soon enough, word started to spread: The iPhone came with a built-in accessibility feature. Still, members of the community were hesitant.

  But no more. For its fans and advocates in the visually-impaired community, the iPhone has turned out to be one of the most revolutionary developments since the invention of Braille. That the iPhone and its world of apps have transformed the lives of its visually impaired users may seem counter-intuitive -- but their impact is striking.

  See also Austin Seraphin's account of the first week he spent using an iPhone.

  The other night, however, a very amazing thing happened. I downloaded an app called Color Identifier. It uses the iPhone's camera, and speaks names of colors. It must use a table, because each color has an identifier made up of 6 hexadecimal digits. This puts the total at 16777216 colors, and I believe it. Some of them have very surreal names, such as Atomic Orange, Cosmic, Hippie Green, Opium, and Black-White. These names in combination with what feels like a rise in serotonin levels makes for a very psychedelic experience.

  I have never experienced this before in my life. I can see some light and color, but just in blurs, and objects don't really have a color, just light sources. When I first tried it at three o'clock in the morning, I couldn't figure out why it just reported black. After realizing that the screen curtain also disables the camera, I turned it off, but it still have very dark colors. Then I remembered that you actually need light to see, and it probably couldn't see much at night. I thought about light sources, and my interview I did for Get Lamp. First, I saw one of my beautiful salt lamps in its various shades of orange, another with its pink and rose colors, and the third kind in glowing pink and red.. I felt stunned.

  (via NextDraft)

  Tags: iPhone

• What's the deal with Game of Thrones' unpredictable winters?

  Posted: May 3, 2012, 5:14 pm by Jason Kottke

  George Dvorsky details five possible scientific explanations for Westeros' seasons of unpredictable length. A "wobbly planetary tilt" is one possible reason:

  In the episode "The Kingsroad," we learn that Westeros has at least one moon. It's very possible, therefore, that they have a very small or distant moon, that is causing a variable tilt in their planet's rotational axis.

  It's interesting to note that, according to legend, Westeros used to have two moons, but "one wandered too close to the sun and it cracked from the heat" pouring out a thousand thousand dragons. Well, dragons aside, it's conceivable that some kind of cataclysmic celestial event could have wiped out their second moon, which would have thrown their planet's rotational axis out of whack.

  Tags: Game of Thrones   George Dvorsky   science   TV

• Is poor cockpit design to blame in the Air France 447 crash?

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 12:11 am by Jason Kottke

  In June 2009, an Air France flight from Rio de Janeiro disappeared without a trace. The disappearance turned crash and the questions started: how did a state-of-the-art plane go down so suddenly and who was to blame? The plane's black boxes were finally recovered after two years of searching and there's a case to be made that the design of the cockpit controls may be at least partially responsible for the crash.

  The official report by French accident investigators is due in a month and seems likely to echo provisional verdicts suggesting human error. There is no doubt that at least one of AF447's pilots made a fatal and sustained mistake, and the airline must bear responsibility for the actions of its crew. It will be a grievous blow for Air France, perhaps more damaging than the Concorde disaster of July 2000.

  But there is another, worrying implication that the Telegraph can disclose for the first time: that the errors committed by the pilot doing the flying were not corrected by his more experienced colleagues because they did not know he was behaving in a manner bound to induce a stall. And the reason for that fatal lack of awareness lies partly in the design of the control stick - the "side stick" - used in all Airbus cockpits.

  Tags: design   flying

• Stephen King: tax me, for fuck's sake!

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 10:53 pm by Jason Kottke

  Stephen King is rich, wants to pay more federal taxes, and is pretty pissed off about it.

  Mitt Romney has said, in effect, "I'm rich and I don't apologize for it." Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want -- those who aren't blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money -- is for you to acknowledge that you couldn't have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it's not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It's un-fucking-American is what it is. I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that -- sorry, kiddies-you're on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay -- not to give, not to "cut a check and shut up," in Governor Christie's words, but to pay -- in the same proportion. That's called stepping up and not whining about it. That's called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn't cost their beloved rich folks any money.

  Tags: politics   Stephen King

• The truth about caramelized onions

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 10:03 pm by Jason Kottke

  Tom Scocca wonders why recipe writers don't tell the truth about how long caramelizing onions really takes.

  Onions do not caramelize in five or 10 minutes. They never have, they never will-yet recipe writers have never stopped pretending that they will. I went on Twitter and said so, rudely, using CAPS LOCK. A chorus of frustrated cooks responded in kind ("That's on some bullshit. You want caramelized onions? Stir for 45 minutes").

  As long as I've been cooking, I've been reading various versions of this lie, over and over. Here's Madhur Jaffrey, from her otherwise reliable Indian Cooking, explaining how to do the onions for rogan josh: "Stir and fry for about 5 minutes or until the onions turn a medium-brown colour." The Boston Globe, on preparing pearl onions for coq au vin: "Add the onions and cook, stirring often, for 5 minutes or until golden." The Washington Post, on potato-green bean soup: "Add the onion and cook for 8 to 10 minutes, stirring occasionally, until golden brown."

  Tags: cooking   food   Tom Scocca

• Current iOS game obsession: Ski Safari

  Posted: May 2, 2012, 7:34 pm by Jason Kottke

  Ski Safari is an iOS game that's kind of a cross between Tiny Wings and CycloManiacs...which is to say that I love love love it. Here's my high score, about which I'm very ashamed and proud at the same time:

  

  (via @gavinpurcell)

  Tags: iPhone games   video games

• Process blog for the NY Times Graphics dept

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 2:46 am by Jason Kottke

  chartsandthings is a behind-the-scenes look at how the infographic sausage is made at the NY Times.

  Tags: design   infoviz   NY Times   weblogs

• What would the realists do?

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 1:32 am by Jason Kottke

  Stephen Walt wonders how US policy might have been different over the past 20 years if realists (as opposed to the neocons or liberal interventionists) had been in charge.

  #2: No "Global War on Terror." If realists had been in charge after 9/11, they would have launched a focused effort to destroy al Qaeda. Realists backed the war against the Taliban in Afghanistan, and a realist approach to the post-9/11 threat environment would have focused laser-like on al Qaeda and other terrorist groups that were a direct threat to the United States. But realists would have treated them like criminals rather than as "enemy combatants" and would not have identified all terrorist groups as enemies of the United States. And as noted above, realists would not have included "rogue states" like Iran, Iraq, and North Korea (the infamous "axis of evil") in the broader "war on terror." Needless to say, with realists in charge, the infamous 2002 National Security Strategy calling for preventive war would never have been written.

  Tags: lists   politics   Stephen Walt

• Basketball has 13 positions, not just 5

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 12:13 am by Jason Kottke

  Muthu Alagappan used topological data analysis to group NBA players into thirteen different player types, including Role-Playing Ball-Handler, Paint Protector, All-NBA 1st Team, and One-of-a-Kind.

  

  Tags: basketball   infoviz   Muthu Alagappan   sports

• Ebert's greatest films of all time

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 6:58 pm by Jason Kottke

  For Sight & Sound magazine, Roger Ebert came up with his picks for ten best films ever.

  "Citizen Kane" speaks for itself. "2001: A Space Odyssey" is likewise a stand-along monument, a great visionary leap, unsurpassed in its vision of man and the universe. It was a statement that came at a time which now looks something like the peak of humanity's technological optimism. Many would choose "Taxi Driver" as Scorsese's greatest film, but I believe "Raging Bull" is his best and most personal, a film he says in some ways saved his life. It is the greatest cinematic expression of the torture of jealousy -- his "Othello."

  (via df)

  Tags: best of   lists   movies   Roger Ebert

• A real-life Robinson Crusoe

  Posted: May 1, 2012, 5:44 pm by Jason Kottke

  86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw has lived alone on a tiny island in the Seychelles since 1962. He bought it for £8000 and has spent those years introducing trees and 120 giant tortoises back to the island.

  (via ★interesting-links)

  Tags: video

• Welcome to the NFL, here's your new life

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 11:44 pm by Jason Kottke

  Former NFL player Nate Jackson writes an open letter to future top NFL draft picks Andrew Luck and Robert Griffin III about how their lives are going to change.

  After negotiating your contracts, you both will surely buy a house in an affluent suburb where no 22-year-old would be happy living. Your new neighbors will be rich as well, facelifted, lipo-sucked, Xanaxed and dripping in diamonds, simply delighted to welcome you to the neighborhood. You will commission an interior decorator, recommended by a neighbor, to furnish your home. This will guarantee it feels nothing like Home. And someday, when all of this is over, you'll walk through and gaze upon the marble columns and the embroidered drapes like artifacts in a museum, wondering why you ever listened to that woman.

  A fine companion to this letter from former NFL player Trevor Pryce.

  Tags: Andrew Luck   football   Nate Jackson   Robert Griffin III   sports

• Where to eat in NYC?

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 9:42 pm by Jason Kottke

  Dozens of books have been written on this topic but for the less obsessive visitor to NYC, Serious Eats' Carey Jones has written an excellent guide to where to eat when you come to NYC. The guide is arranged along a number of different vectors like "on the cheap", "I'll go anywhere", and "five-star chefs, three-star prices". Here's the "with kids" section:

  It's sad but true that plenty of New York restaurants will raise an eyebrow if you bring in the kids. But plenty won't! Consider spacious, friendly Coppelia downtown (Latin fare) or Kefi uptown (Greek) for great food that's inexpensive for a sit-down spot and has enough simpler options that there will be something for picky eaters. The next morning, take the kids to Doughnut Plant (if you're willing to sacrifice the notion of a balanced breakfast) for all sorts of flavors they'll stare at wide-eyed. PB-loving kids will love Peanut Butter and Company for lunch, where they can get their favorite sandwich in a dozen ways. Other good options include Shake Shack for burgers or Bark for hot dogs, if you're out in Park Slope.

  If you need a snack uptown, the gigantic chocolate chip cookies at Levain should do the trick (take note: these are big enough to share). Kefi's a logical choice nearby for dinner, but if you find yourself downtown, consider Mario Batali's Otto, where parents will appreciate the sophistication and kids will love the huge plates of pasta. (Try to make a reservation as waits can be long, which might not be good with tired kids.)

  If there was a "Jason shortlist" category, I would include Ssam Bar, Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, Marea, Per Se, Mendy's (chix salad sandwich), Katz's, Ma Peche, Spotted Pig, Fedora, Joseph Leonard, Parm, Despana, Xi'an Famous Foods, Colicchio and Sons, Tia Pol, The Modern Bar Room, Pastis, Patsy's, Morandi, Murray's Cheese Shop, Hill Country Chix, Grey Dog, Nice Green Bo, Peter Luger, Keen's, Artisinal, Bouchon Bakery, Burger Joint, and The Beagle. Ok, not such a short list and I'm sure I forgot some of my favorites. (via @anildash)

  Tags: Carey Jones   food   NYC   restaurants

• Apple should buy Square and Foursquare

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 8:13 pm by Jason Kottke

  Huh, this is an interesting idea: Apple should acquire both Foursquare and Square.

  To summarize: after the deal, Apple will immediately become a giant payments company, with an installation base that is expected to encompass half of all mobile devices sold. The company will have the best local search abilities, far exceeding any existing recommendation engine. And due to its enormous reach, it will possess a payment system that merchants will line up to support.

  Tags: Apple   business   Foursquare   Square

• Cockney rhyming slang ATM

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 7:00 pm by Jason Kottke

  A number of banking machines in London offer Cockney rhyming slang as a language option. Operating the machine is simple...just insert your barrel of lard and punch in your Huckleberry Finn to get your sausage and mash.

  

  The company has also been responsible for introducing cash machines which only dispense £5 notes -- fivers as they are colloquially named or Lady Godivas in cockney.

  It also allows people to withdraw a pony -- which is £25 to non-cockney folk.

  "I was talking to Andrew Bailey, the chief cashier of the Bank of England, and he said they were trying to get more £5 notes into circulation," Mr Delnevo reflects.

  He came up with the idea that, rather than putting £5 notes in as one choice, it would be better to have £5-note only cash machines.

  "We were getting to the state where we were a £20 note society - handing over £20 for an item which cost £4.50 and handed back enough metal to act as an anchor for the aircraft carrier Ark Royal," he says.

  See also ATMs in Latin. (via @nrturner)

  Tags: language

• The bootlegging veteran

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 5:47 pm by Jason Kottke

  Hyman Strachman is one of the biggest bootleggers of Hollywood movies. He's also 92 years old, a WWII veteran, and gives his movies away to American troops serving overseas.

  "Big Hy" -- his handle among many loyal customers -- would almost certainly be cast as Hollywood Enemy No. 1 but for a few details. He is actually Hyman Strachman, a 92-year-old, 5-foot-5 World War II veteran trying to stay busy after the death of his wife. And he has sent every one of his copied DVDs, almost 4,000 boxes of them to date, free to American soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan.

  With the United States military presence in those regions dwindling, Big Hy Strachman will live on in many soldiers' hearts as one of the war's more shadowy heroes.

  "It's not the right thing to do, but I did it," Mr. Strachman said, acknowledging that his actions violated copyright law.

  Tags: Hyman Strachman   legal   movies   piracy

• A tale of two Rockefellers

  Posted: April 30, 2012, 4:35 pm by Jason Kottke

  New essay from Errol Morris in the NY Times, What's in a Name? In it, he talks about the two Rockefellers that appeared in the newspapers a few years ago...one an imposter and one real.

  Clearly, the name was also responsible for the attention he was getting in the newspaper. Clark is not just any impostor; he is a Rockefeller impostor. And as such he becomes more important, more significant. It is as if the name gives him some of the stature and allure of a real Rockefeller. A perfect example of this is the importance given to Clark in both The New York Times and The Boston Globe. He even managed to outshine Barack Obama and Joseph Biden during the week that Obama picked his running mate. Obama and Biden get a little picture at the bottom of the right-hand side of the front page. Clark gets a photo spread -- one big picture and four little ones -- at the top of the left-hand side. He also got more column inches in the newspaper than Clayton, the real Rockefeller. It's impressive.

  Tags: Errol Morris   language

• More of those historic NYC photos

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 11:12 pm by Jason Kottke

  Yesterday I linked to the massive trove of photos recently put online by the NYC Department of Records. Alan Taylor from In Focus went through a large chunk of the archive and pulled out some real gems. Great stuff.

  Tags: Alan Taylor   NYC   photography

• Kubrick rides the NYC subway

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 10:15 pm by Jason Kottke

  From the Museum of the City of New York, a collection of photos taken by Stanley Kubrick in 1946 of New York City subway passengers.

  

  The museum has in its collection more than 7200 photos taken by Kubrick of NYC while he worked as a photographer for Look Magazine. (via coudal)

  Tags: NYC   photography   Stanley Kubrick   subway

• Updates on previous entries for Apr 26, 2012*

  Posted: April 27, 2012, 8:11 am by Jason Kottke

  Vatican City ATMs use Latin orig. from Apr 26, 2012

  * Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

  Tags: post updates

• Vatican City ATMs use Latin

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 10:46 pm by Jason Kottke

  ATMs in the Vatican City have Latin as one of the language options:

  

  Anyone know what that means? Google Translate spits out a bunch of jibberish... (Photo by Seth Schoen)

  Update: Lots of slightly different answers as to what this says, but this email from a Ph.D. candidate in Classics at Columbia is representative of the spread:

  Anyhow, a super-literal translation would be something like this:

  I ask that you insert [your] card in order that you come to understand the method needing to be used.

  But more colloquially, we can do this:

  Please insert your card to learn the instructions.

  or even (although I'm really getting into sloppy translation territory here):

  Please insert your card for instructions.

  (thx, charles)

  Update: And it may be more accurate to say that Vatican City ATMs previously offered a Latin option. According to @johnke, "they removed the Latin option with a software update sometime in late 2010/early 2011".

  Tags: language   Latin   Vatican City

• Kickstart your underpants

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 9:56 pm by Jason Kottke

  Flint and Tinder is attempting to reintroduce American-made underwear back into US stores with a Kickstarter project. They've raised $39,000+ so far.

  The factory I'm working with is family owned and operated. It's over 100 years old. Just before the recession hit, they moved into a larger facility and invested in some of the capital improvements shown in the video (solar power etc.).

  At that time they had 300+ employees and were hoping to double or triple in size. When we started this project however, with the economy in free-fall, they were down to just 90.

  They've agreed to learn to make this new, high-end brand of American-made underwear. Here's the fun part though: For ever 1000 pair we sell per month, 1 full-time job has to be added back to the assembly line. Hopefully, with your support, it will help them keep the doors open.

  Tags: fashion   Kickstarter

• Massive collection of old NYC photos put online

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 7:28 pm by Jason Kottke

  The New York City Department of Records has put a huge portion of the Municipal Archive's collection of photos online, more than 870,000 in all. The server is overwhelmed at times due to heavy usage, the searching/browsing interface is not what you'd call cutting edge, and many of the photos are available in thumbnail size only, but this is still an incredible resource.

  Painters on the Brooklyn Bridge in 1914:

  

  The unfinished Manhattan Bridge in 1908:

  

  A pair of men lay dead in an elevator shaft after a failed robbery attempt:

  

  Looking east on 42nd Street, circa 1890:

  

  More of these photos can be seen at The Daily Mail. (thx, miro)

  Tags: NYC   photography

• The inflation of everything

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 6:57 pm by Jason Kottke

  Women's clothing sizes are getting larger, you can stay at 6-star hotels, and schools at all levels are giving out As to ever more students. It's the inflation of everything.

  Estimates by The Economist suggest that the average British size 14 pair of women's trousers is now more than four inches wider at the waist than it was in the 1970s. In other words, today's size 14 is really what used to be labelled a size 18; a size 10 is really a size 14. (American sizing is different, but the trend is largely the same.) Fashion firms seem to think that women are more likely to spend if they can happily squeeze into a smaller label size. But when three out of four American adults and three out of five Britons are overweight, the danger is that size inflation reduces women's incentive to eat less. Meanwhile, food-portion inflation has also made it harder to fight the flab. Pizzas now come in regular, large and very large. Starbucks coffees are Tall, Grande, Venti or (soon) Trenta. "Small" seems to be a forbidden word.

  Inflation is also distorting the travel business. A five-star hotel used to mean the ultimate in luxury, but now six- and seven-star resorts are popping up as new hotels award themselves inflated ratings as a marketing tool. "Deluxe" rooms have been devalued, too: many hotels no longer have "standard" rooms, but instead offer a choice of "deluxe" (the new standard), "luxury", "superior luxury" or "grand superior luxury".

  Tags: economics

• Radio time machine

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 5:44 pm by Jason Kottke

  Put in a year and hear popular songs from that year with Radio Time Machine. If you have a Rdio account, you can hear full songs. See also YouTube Time Machine. (via @fchimero)

  Tags: music   radio   Rdio

• Updates on previous entries for Apr 25, 2012*

  Posted: April 26, 2012, 8:11 am by Jason Kottke

  Obama slow jams the news orig. from Apr 25, 2012

  * Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

  Tags: post updates

• The art of film and TV title design

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 10:30 pm by Jason Kottke

  From PBS Off Book, a quick look at the thinking behind the opening titles for TV shows and movies, including Zombieland, Mad Men, and Se7en.

  See also Art of the Title and A Brief History of Title Design. (via devour)

  Tags: design   movies   video

• The iPhone, an automobile for your mind

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 9:00 pm by Jason Kottke

  Tom Vanderbilt says Americans don't walk as much as they used to; automobile usage has eaten into our perambulation time.

  If walking is a casualty of modern life the world over -- the historian Joe Moran estimates, for instance, that in the last quarter century in the U.K., the amount of walking has declined by 25 percent -- why then do Americans walk even less than people in other countries? Here we need to look not at pedometers, but at the odometer: We drive more than anyone else in the world. (Hence a joke: In America a pedestrian is someone who has just parked their car.) Statistics on walking are more elusive than those on driving, but from the latter one might infer the former: The National Household Travel Survey shows that the number of vehicle trips a person took and the miles they traveled per day rose from 2.32 trips and 20.64 miles in 1969 to 3.35 and 32.73 in 2001. More time spent driving means less time spent on other activities, including walking. And part of the reason we are driving more is that we are living farther from the places we need to go; to take just one measure, in 1969, roughly half of all children lived a mile or more from their school; by 2001 three out of four did. During that same period, unsurprisingly, the rates of children walking to school dropped from roughly half to approximately 13 percent.

  Sherry Turkle says young Americans don't converse as much as they used to; usage of mobile devices like the iPhone and iPod has eaten into our chat time.

  A businessman laments that he no longer has colleagues at work. He doesn't stop by to talk; he doesn't call. He says that he doesn't want to interrupt them. He says they're "too busy on their e-mail." But then he pauses and corrects himself. "I'm not telling the truth. I'm the one who doesn't want to be interrupted. I think I should. But I'd rather just do things on my BlackBerry."

  A 16-year-old boy who relies on texting for almost everything says almost wistfully, "Someday, someday, but certainly not now, I'd like to learn how to have a conversation."

  In today's workplace, young people who have grown up fearing conversation show up on the job wearing earphones. Walking through a college library or the campus of a high-tech start-up, one sees the same thing: we are together, but each of us is in our own bubble, furiously connected to keyboards and tiny touch screens. A senior partner at a Boston law firm describes a scene in his office. Young associates lay out their suite of technologies: laptops, iPods and multiple phones. And then they put their earphones on. "Big ones. Like pilots. They turn their desks into cockpits." With the young lawyers in their cockpits, the office is quiet, a quiet that does not ask to be broken.

  A cockpit or perhaps the safe bubble of the automobile? Steve Jobs was fond of saying the personal computer was "a bicycle for our mind":

  I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn't look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.

  And that's what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it's the most remarkable tool that we've ever come up with, and it's the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds."

  Perhaps then the iPhone is an automobile for our mind in that it allows us to go anywhere very quickly but isolates us along the way.

  ps. This photo that accompanies Vanderbilt's article is kind of amazing:

  

  Totally speechless. I think it's further from my desk to the bathroom here in the office than it is from that house to the bus.

  Tags: iPhone   Sherry Turkle   Steve Jobs   Tom Vanderbilt

• The Descriptive Camera

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 7:45 pm by Jason Kottke

  Using a digital camera, Mechanical Turk, and a thermal printer, Matt Richardson's Descriptive Camera outputs descriptions of photos instead of the photos themselves.

  

  After the shutter button is pressed, the photo is sent to Mechanical Turk for processing and the camera waits for the results. A yellow LED indicates that the results are still "developing" in a nod to film-based photo technology. With a HIT price of $1.25, results are returned typically within 6 minutes and sometimes as fast as 3 minutes. The thermal printer outputs the resulting text in the style of a polaroid print.

  This seems like a distant cousin of Unphotographable. (via hacker news)

  Tags: Matt Richardson   photography

• Obama slow jams the news

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 5:51 pm by Jason Kottke

  This might be the coolest thing a sitting President has ever done. Aside from, maybe, freeing the slaves or The New Deal or winning WWII.

  Update: And an amazingly depressing excerpt from a speech Obama gave earlier in the day:

  But we only finished paying off our student loans -- check this out, all right, I'm the President of the United States -- we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.

  Tags: Barack Obama   Jimmy Fallon   politics   TV   video

• Source code for Apollo and Gemini programs

  Posted: April 25, 2012, 4:55 pm by Jason Kottke

  An extensive collection gathered from all over the internet of the source code and documentation for NASA's Apollo and Gemini programs. Here's part of the source code for Apollo 11's guidance computer.

  And here's an interesting tidbit about the core rope memory used for the Apollo's guidance computer:

  Fun fact: the actual programs in the spacecraft were stored in core rope memory, an ancient memory technology made by (literally) weaving a fabric/rope, where the bits were physical rings of ferrite material.

  "Core" memory is resistant to cosmic rays. The state of a core bit will not change when bombarded by radiation in Outer Space. Can't say the same of solid state memory.

  Woven memory! Also called LOL memory:

  Software written by MIT programmers was woven into core rope memory by female workers in factories. Some programmers nicknamed the finished product LOL memory, for Little Old Lady memory.

  Tags: Apollo   Gemini   NASA   programming

• Matthew Cusick's map collages

  Posted: April 24, 2012, 4:02 am by Jason Kottke

  I love love love these collages made up of mappy bits from Matthew Cusick.

  

  

  

  (thx, mouser)

  Tags: art   maps   Matthew Cusick

• Launching barrels like rockets

  Posted: April 24, 2012, 6:44 pm by Jason Kottke

  If you mix calcium carbide and water, it produces acetylene. Acetylene is extremely flammable and can launch 55-gallon drums into the air when ignited.

  (via ★aaroncohen)

  Tags: video

• Super Mario Bros, the abridged version

  Posted: April 24, 2012, 5:26 pm by Jason Kottke

  A Super Mario Summary is a abbreviated version of the original Super Mario Bros game in which each of the levels has been squeezed into one screen. For instance, here's World 1-1:

  

  (via waxy)

  Tags: remix   Super Mario Bros   video games

• Restaurant mental health code violations

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 1:24 am by Jason Kottke

  Paul Simms lists various violations of a hypothetical restaurant mental health code. A couple of favorites:

  Solo diner blows out table candle to avoid accidentally setting his newspaper on fire, only to have it relit repeatedly by busboy.

  Member of all-white waitstaff barks at member of all-Hispanic busboy staff in way that makes customers feel like those who just stood by and watched in Vichy France.

  Tags: food   Paul Simms

• Lenny Dykstra never grew up

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 12:07 am by Jason Kottke

  Remember this New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra's "improbable post-career success story"?

  Dykstra ordered a Coke and French fries with ketchup: "And I'm actually going to have that as my meal-might be the oddest order of the day." (Healthy living was never his specialty.) When the Coke arrived, he sent it back, believing it to be Diet. After the fries were delivered, he made a show of extracting a "You're welcome" from the waiter, who had since moved on to another table. "I pay a thousand bucks a night -- actually, three thousand bucks a night -- and people are discourteous," he said, shaking his head. "There's some point in life when you have to grow up."

  For many ballplayers, the growing-up point does not arrive until after retirement, when all the freebies vanish and equipment managers and hotel maids can no longer be relied upon for regular laundry service. Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach ("the best car") and a Gulfstream ("the best jet"). The occasion for our lunch, however, was a new venture: Dykstra is launching a magazine, intended specifically for pro athletes, called The Players Club. An unfortunate number of his former teammates have ended up broke, or divorced, or worse. The week before we met, the ex-Yankee Jim Leyritz, himself twice divorced and underemployed, had hit a woman while driving home from a bar. He never grew up.

  "You've got the ten per cent who are going to find their way no matter what," Dykstra said of the athlete population. "And you get the ten per cent that are fuckheads no matter what-- we'll paste an 'L' to 'em." The rest need guidance, and Dykstra, who will write a regular column called "The Game of Life," is prepared to give it. "This will be the world's best magazine," he said.

  Since then, Dykstra has declared bankruptcy, divorced from his wife, was sentenced to three years in state prison for grand theft auto (and several other charges), and most recently was sentenced to nine months in jail for assault and indecent exposure. He's also awaiting trial on federal bankruptcy fraud charges.

  Tags: business   crime   Lenny Dykstra   sports

• RIP Facts, 360 B.C.-A.D. 2012

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 10:10 pm by Jason Kottke

  Columnist Rex Huppke mourns the death of facts in contemporary American society.

  To the shock of most sentient beings, Facts died Wednesday, April 18, after a long battle for relevancy with the 24-hour news cycle, blogs and the Internet. Though few expected Facts to pull out of its years-long downward spiral, the official cause of death was from injuries suffered last week when Florida Republican Rep. Allen West steadfastly declared that as many as 81 of his fellow members of theU.S. House of Representatives are communists.

  Facts held on for several days after that assault - brought on without a scrap of evidence or reason - before expiring peacefully at its home in a high school physics book. Facts was 2,372.

  "It's very depressing," said Mary Poovey, a professor of English at New York University and author of "A History of the Modern Fact." "I think the thing Americans ought to miss most about facts is the lack of agreement that there are facts. This means we will never reach consensus about anything. Tax policies, presidential candidates. We'll never agree on anything."

  Tags: politics   Rex Huppke

• New York City guidebook from 1916

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 8:13 pm by Jason Kottke

  Marc Cenedella found a copy of a 1916 tourist handbook for NYC on Google Books and teased out some of the more interesting bits.

  For New Yorkers and visitors of this time, "Old New York" was the time of the American Revolution. The leaders and generals of that earlier time are described as real people. Even if their actions are described in the most glowing and heroic of terms, they come alive in the pages of Rider's New York as they have not yet transcended into the mythical, distant, unrelatable figures they are today.

  George Washington, for example, appears time and again in this guide, not as a statue, or a bridge, or a Square, but as a person who "landed" just south of Laight Street, bid farewell to his men in an Address at Fraunces Tavern, or was greeted on kicking-out-the-British Day (Evacuation Day) at Union Square. Same history, different level of intimacy.

  Tags: books   Marc Cenedella   NYC

• Zero to twelve years old in under three minutes

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 6:05 pm by Jason Kottke

  Frans Hofmeester filmed his daughter Lotte once a week for the past twelve years and produced this time lapse film. We've seen this kind of thing before (Kalina, etc.) but the use of short snippets of video instead of still photos adds something.

  Hofmeester has also filmed his son in the same manner for the past nine years. (thx, david)

  Tags: Frans Hofmeester   time lapse   video

• The glamorous life of a former professional football player

  Posted: April 23, 2012, 4:38 pm by Jason Kottke

  Trevor Pryce played in the NFL for 14 years and upon retiring learned that fame and money is not much if you're not doing what you love.

  "Early retirement" sounds wonderful. It certainly did that cold night in Pittsburgh. I was going to use my time to conquer the world.

  Boy, was I wrong. Now I find myself in music chat rooms arguing the validity of Frank Zappa versus the Mars Volta. (If the others only knew Walkingpnumonia was the screen name for a former All-Pro football player and not some Oberlin College student trying to find his place in the world.) I wrote a book. I set sail on the picturesque and calming waters of Bodymore, Murdaland. And when I'm in dire straits, I do what any 8-year-old does; I kick a soccer ball against the garage hoping somebody feels sorry and says, "Hey, want to play?"

  With millions of Americans out of work or doing work for which they are overqualified, I consider myself lucky. But starting from scratch can be unsettling. If you're not prepared for it, retirement can become a form of self-imposed exile from the fulfillment and the exhilaration of knowing you did a good job.

  Tags: football   sports   Trevor Pryce   working

• Updates on previous entries for Apr 20, 2012*

  Posted: April 21, 2012, 8:11 am by Jason Kottke

  Robert Caro has a really long Johnson (biography) orig. from Apr 20, 2012

  * Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

  Tags: post updates

• Mad Men, the BitTorrent episode

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 11:32 pm by Jason Kottke

  This is an episode of Mad Men, incompletely downloaded from BitTorrent.

  The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.

  (via waxy)

  Tags: BitTorrent   Mad Men   video

• Movie mimicking

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 9:07 pm by Jason Kottke

  As Allen Fuqua travels around, he looks for movie locations and attempts to duplicate scenes from them. For instance, here's Allen and a friend reenacting a scene from Drive:

  

  (thx, stephen)

  Tags: Allen Fuqua   Drive   movies   photography   remix

• The 18th century version of Instagram

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 6:57 pm by Jason Kottke

  Popular in the 18th century, the Claude glass was a mirror that took the scene behind you and transformed it into something different, much like the filters in Instagram or Hipstamatic promise to do.

  

  The Claude glass was a sort of early pocket lens without the camera and it was held aloft to observe a vista over one's shoulder. The technology was simple: A blackened mirror reduced the tonal values of its reflected landscape, and a slightly convex shape pushed more scenery into a single focal point, reducing a larger vista into a tidy snapshot.

  Tags: Instagram

• Planet Earth, narrated by kids

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 5:36 pm by Jason Kottke

  This is great...BBC America made this promo of kids narrating the Planet Earth nature documentary in place of David Attenborough.

  (via boing boing)

  Tags: David Attenborough   Planet Earth   video

• Robert Caro has a really long Johnson (biography)

  Posted: April 20, 2012, 4:44 pm by Jason Kottke

  Charles McGrath recently profiled author Robert Caro for the NY Times Magazine. Caro has been working on a multivolume biography of Lyndon Johnson since 1976...the fourth book in the series is out next month.

  The idea of power, or of powerful people, seems to repel him as much as it fascinates. And yet Caro has spent virtually his whole adult life studying power and what can be done with it, first in the case of Robert Moses, the great developer and urban planner, and then in the case of Lyndon Johnson, whose biography he has been writing for close to 40 years. Caro can tell you exactly how Moses heedlessly rammed the Cross Bronx Expressway through a middle-class neighborhood, displacing thousands of families, and exactly how Johnson stole the Texas Senate election of 1948, winning by 87 spurious votes. These stories still fill him with outrage but also with something like wonder, the two emotions that sustain him in what amounts to a solitary, Dickensian occupation with long hours and few holidays.

  If you're a subscriber and haven't gotten to it yet, the excerpt of Caro's book in the New Yorker is very much worth reading; it covers Johnson's activities on the day Kennedy was assassinated.

  As Lyndon Johnson's car made its slow way down the canyon of buildings, what lay ahead of him on that motorcade could, in a way, have been seen by someone observing his life as a foretaste of what might lie ahead if he remained Vice-President: five years of trailing behind another man, humiliated, almost ignored, and powerless. The Vice-Presidency, "filled with trips... chauffeurs, men saluting, people clapping... in the end it is nothing," as he later put it. He had traded in the power of the Senate Majority Leader, the most powerful Majority Leader in history, for the limbo of the Vice-Presidency because he had felt that at the end might be the Presidency.

  Update: Esquire also has a long profile of Caro in next month's issue. (thx, aaron)

  Tags: books   Charles McGrath   Lyndon Johnson   Robert Caro

• A history of The Huffington Post

  Posted: April 19, 2012, 1:28 am by Jason Kottke

  A long and thorough history of The Huffington Post from Michael Shapiro at Columbia Journalism Review. HuffPo cofounder Jonah Peretti calls it "the best article that will ever be written about the creation of the Huffington Post".

  In the course of a few hours, Peretti would watch with wonderment as Arianna Huffington eased herself from setting to setting, all the while making the person she was talking with feel like the most interesting and important person in the world, hanging on every word, never shifting her attention to check one of three BlackBerries. "I loved being a gatherer," Huffington would later say. "I don't really think you can make gathering mistakes."

  Peretti saw this talent through a different prism. "Arianna," he says, "can make weak ties into strong ties."

  He returned to New York to discover that Lerer was already a few steps ahead of him. He wanted to talk about the venture the three of them would embark upon. "I remember him saying things like, 'We don't want to build a big website,'" Peretti would recall. "'We want to build an influential site.'"

  Sort of related: there's an interesting article to be written about Google's relationship with blogs. Early on, blogs provided Google's Pagerank algorithm with plenty of links to rank (I would argue that without blogs and the personal web, Pagerank simply wouldn't have worked...businesses didn't link to anyone but themselves at that time) and then a few years later, with Huffington Post leading the charge, blogs filled Google with all sorts of crap and nonsense that made it less useful.

  Tags: Arianna Huffington   Huffington Post   Jonah Peretti   Ken Lerer   Michael Shapiro   weblogs