...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.
At the newly renovated Bygone Bureau, Darryl Campbell investigates the small but vibrant poetry community that has formed in the comment threads on the NY Times website.
Tiger, Tiger burning bright
In the sex clubs of Orlando
Guess it's time you took a break
And lived life with more candor
Must've been weird, your secret life
Never an unserviced erection
Shouldn't you, though, have taught the wife
Some proper club selection?
Predicting Olympic medal counts orig. from Jan 21, 2010
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga's music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:
Lady Gaga's 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We'll look at the occult meaning of the video "Telephone".
Americans take their art and NCAA brackets too seriously, so this is perfect: America's Greatest Living American Abstract Painter Tournament. The top seeds are Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman and Mark Bradford...go and vote for your favorites. (via sippey)
Avatar is already available for pre-order on Blu-ray (and DVD). Release date is April 22.
The Big Picture has an awesome set of photos from the 2010 Winter Paralympic Games in Vancouver. Handicapped my ass...most of these events look much tougher than their regular Olympic counterparts.
How spies have used sex and romance to get information, from WWI on.
Spies use sex, intelligence, and the thrill of a secret life as bait. Cleverness, training, character, and patriotism are often no defense against a well-set honey trap.
Attention @THE_REAL_SHAQ: it's all about parabolas and backspin.
Free-throw success is also improved by adding a little backspin, which pushes the ball downward if it hits the back of the rim. The North Carolina State engineers calculated the ideal rate of free-throw backspin at three cycles per second. That is, a shot that takes one second to reach the basket will make three full revolutions counterclockwise as seen from the stands on the player's right side.
(via mr)
The hockey stick climate change graph orig. from Mar 16, 2010
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
A 26-gigapixel image of Paris. Fully zoomable and pannable. Sacré-Coeur starts out as a tiny speck and you can zoom in to see a bunch of people sitting on the steps outside.
NYC's Board of Health has lifted the ban on keeping bees in the city.
The unanimous vote amends the health code to allow residents to keep hives of Apis mellifera, the common, nonaggressive honeybee. Beekeepers will be required to register with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene and to adhere to appropriate practices. That means they must be able to control bee swarms and ensure that the hives do not interfere with pedestrians or neighbors.
Ten dollars says my wife utters the following words to me tonight: "we should raise some bees on the roof!"
A long-time trainer shares what he's learned about health and fitness. A lot of good (and questionable) stuff in this list.
Diet is 85% of where results come from...for muscle and fat loss. Many don't focus here enough.
If you eat whole foods that have been around for 1000s of years, you probably don't have to worry about counting calories
Our dependence on gyms to workout may be keeping people fat...as walking down a street and pushups in your home are free everyday...but people are not seeing it that way.
(via jorn)
In a review in Prospect, Matt Ridley, who is no slouch as a science writer himself, calls Andrew Montford's The Hockey Stick Illusion "one of the best science books in years". Pretty high praise for what Ridley also calls "the biography of a graph". Specifically, this graph:
You may have seen it in An Inconvenient Truth in this form. The graph shows the dramatic rise in temperature in the northern hemisphere over the past 100 years caused, presumably, by humans. But as Montford details in his book, the graph is incorrect.
[The author] had standardised the data by "short-centering" them -- essentially subtracting them from a 20th century average rather than an average of the whole period. This meant that the principal component analysis "mined" the data for anything with a 20th century uptick, and gave it vastly more weight than data indicating, say, a medieval warm spell.
Talk about an inconvenient truth.
Update: As expected, ye olde inbox is humming on this one. Here are a few places to look for the other other side of the story: Real Climate, Climate Progress (2, 3), New Scientist, and RealClimate. (thx, reed, barath, aaron)
Photographer Greg du Toit spent months in the disease-infested water of a Kenyan watering hole to catch intimate images of animals drinking.
Sitting in my hide, I would have to remain motionless for hours as I watched the zebra herd's painfully tentative approach. The sound of my shutter alone, would send them running.
In addition to the photos (larger versions here), du Toit contracted snail fever, malaria (twice), hook worm, and several other parasites.
I've noticed an increasing tendency by reviewers on Amazon (and Apple's iTunes and App Stores) to review things based on the packaging or format of the media with little regard shown to the actual content/plot. Here are two recent examples.
Reviews for the theatrically released versions of The Lord of the Rings on Blu-ray are mostly negative -- the aggregate rating is 1.5 out 5. These are award-winning movies but the reviews are dominated by people complaining about New Line's decision to release the theatrical versions before the extended versions that the True Fans love. A representative review:
If I were reviewing the movie itself it would get a five. This review is for the product, as listed -- in other words, I DO NOT RECOMMEND BUYING THIS PRODUCT/DVD. This product is being created FOR NO OTHER REASON than to dupe people into buying this movie twice...again.
Similarly, the early reviews for Michael Lewis' The Big Short are dominated by one-star reviews from Kindle owners who are angry because the book is not available for the device. (thx, jason)
I have always enjoyed Michael Lewis' books and was looking forward to reading The Big Short. With no availability in the US on Kindle, however, I will pass until the publisher/Amazon issue is cleared up. I actually believe that the availability of an item is relavent when giving it a review.
Compare this with traditional reviewers who focus almost exclusively on the content/plot, an approach that ignores much about how people make buying decisions about media today. Packaging is important. We judge books by their covers and even by how much they weigh (heavy books make poor subway/bus reading). Format matters. There's an old adage in photography: the best camera is the one you have with you. Now that our media is available in so many formats, we can say that the best book is the one on your Kindle or the best movie is the one on your iPhone.
Newspaper and magazine reviewers pretty much ignore this stuff. There's little mention of whether a book would be good to read on a Kindle, if you should buy the audiobook version instead of the hardcover because John Hodgman has a delightful voice, if a magazine is good for reading on the toilet, if a movie is watchable on an iPhone or if you need to see it in 1080p on a big TV, if a hardcover is too heavy to read in the bath, whether the trailer is an accurate depiction of what the movie is about, or if the hardcover price is too expensive and you should get the Kindle version or wait for the paperback. Or, as the above reviewers hammer home, if the book is available to read on the Kindle/iPad/Nook or if it's better to wait until the director's cut comes out. In the end, people don't buy content or plots, they buy physical or digital pieces of media for use on specific devices and within certain contexts. That citizen reviewers have keyed into this more quickly than traditional media reviewers is not a surprise.
Before Minna was born, we didn't know if she was a boy or a girl, so we had a bunch of names picked out for both genders. Since we are so so (SO!) done having kids, I thought I'd share our list in case someone else finds any of them useful.
Girls:
Beatrix
Greta
Coralie
Boys:
Milton
Emory
Milo
Emmett
Max/Maximilian
Hugo
Nico
Oscar
Finn
Sam
Ford
Of the girls names, Minna was my frontrunner from when we first heard it. Meg favored Beatrix for a long time but I finally convinced her of Minna's intrinsic correctness. Milo was the clear frontrunner had Minna been a boy.
Fake or no? (via delicious ghost)
Best movie scenes orig. from Mar 15, 2010
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
Marwencol is the name of fictional town built by Mark Hogancamp in his backyard in an attempt to cope with a near-fatal beating. Jeff Malmberg has made a documentary of the same name about Hogancamp's fantasy world.
After being beaten into a brain-damaging coma by five men outside a bar, Mark built a 1/6th scale World War II-era town in his backyard. Mark populated the town he dubbed "Marwencol" with dolls representing his friends and family and created life-like photographs detailing the town's many relationships and dramas. Playing in the town and photographing the action helped Mark to recover his hand-eye coordination and deal with the psychic wounds from the attack. Through his homemade therapy, Mark was able to begin the long journey back into the "real world", both physically and emotionally -- something he continues to struggle with today.
Some bits of the film are available on Vimeo. (thx, greg)
The Guardian asked several film directors to choose their favorite movie scenes. Ryan Fleck chose the chase scene from The French Connection and discovered that the 80+ mph chase was done through normal traffic with Hackman just driving like a crazy person.
I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it. It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days.
I don't know if it's my favorite or not, but the opening scene in The Matrix where the cops walk into a dusty old building to find Trinity working alone at a computer and then she flies up in the air and the camera circles around her as she kicks those cops' asses, well, let's just say I want to be that excited about seeing the rest of every single movie I watch. (via @brainpicker)
Update: The FC chase scene was actually done by stunt driver Bill Hickman. (thx, jason)
Watch a live-stream of performance artist Marina Abramović as she sits in the atrium of the MoMA all day every day until the exhibition ends on May 31. (via @gregorg)
Vanity Fair has a lengthy excerpt from Michael Lewis' new book The Big Short (out today).
As often as not, he turned up what he called "ick" investments. In October 2001 he explained the concept in his letter to investors: "Ick investing means taking a special analytical interest in stocks that inspire a first reaction of 'ick.'" A court had accepted a plea from a software company called the Avanti Corporation. Avanti had been accused of stealing from a competitor the software code that was the whole foundation of Avanti's business. The company had $100 million in cash in the bank, was still generating $100 million a year in free cash flow-and had a market value of only $250 million! Michael Burry started digging; by the time he was done, he knew more about the Avanti Corporation than any man on earth. He was able to see that even if the executives went to jail (as five of them did) and the fines were paid (as they were), Avanti would be worth a lot more than the market then assumed. To make money on Avanti's stock, however, he'd probably have to stomach short-term losses, as investors puked up shares in horrified response to negative publicity.
"That was a classic Mike Burry trade," says one of his investors. "It goes up by 10 times, but first it goes down by half." This isn't the sort of ride most investors enjoy, but it was, Burry thought, the essence of value investing. His job was to disagree loudly with popular sentiment. He couldn't do this if he was at the mercy of very short-term market moves, and so he didn't give his investors the ability to remove their money on short notice, as most hedge funds did. If you gave Scion your money to invest, you were stuck for at least a year.
Really fascinating. In a recent review, Felix Salmon called The Big Short "probably the single best piece of financial journalism ever written".
The utterances of Bea Arthur's character on Golden Girls + that's what she said = That's What Bea Said.
David Grann, author of The Lost City of Z, has a new book out, a collection of his New Yorker pieces called The Devil and Sherlock Holmes.
Michael Lewis' The Big Short orig. from May 19, 2009
* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.
This visualization represents a year in color (summer is at the top, winter at the bottom).
The images were taken of the Boston Common, courtesy of Flickr.
Foursquare co-founder Dennis Crowley recently gave a talk at a Brooklyn middle school; the Q&A included the following Qs:
Who's your favorite basketball player?
Have you every met anyone famous?
Can you really see Jupiter's moons with binoculars?
Do you know the guy who made the Sidekick?
Have you met any hip hop stars?
Over the course of their lives, salmon are known first as alevins and then fry, parr, smolts, grilse, and finally kelt.
'Smolt', 'grilse': as Richard Shelton observes, salmon are spoken of in a 'stained-glass language' of their own, their life stages marked by an ichthyological lexicon unchanged since Chaucer's time. Born in a 'redd', a shallow, gravel-covered depression dug by the female in the days before spawning, newly hatched salmon begin life as 'alevins', tiny, buoyant creatures with their yolk sacs still attached.
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