Gulfstream: 2005

The traditional year-on-year German NYE TV show is a 1963 B&W recording of an obscure British skit involving a nonagenarian birthday celebrant, her Butler, and four invisible guests.

Major manufacturer of foam blanks for surfboards suddenly closes, leading to a whole lotta surfboard theft, reflection on whether the (apparently very toxic) process can be improved.

Alternately grumpy/informative piece on the development and role of professional sports in the US. (References both Teddy Roosevelt and Chomsky!)

“I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life.”

A French far right charity (maybe just a far right group trying to be provocative) is feeding only non-Muslim and non-Jewish homeless people by serving pig-only meals.

Mil Millington’s Christmas Card: “Every single thing we’d hope to have ourselves in 2006, we hope that you may have also, after we’re bored with each one of them.” (Includes picture!)

“In-Progress Ideas for New Yorker Cartoons.”

El Kabong: “A maneuver used by Jeff Jarrett and The Honky Tonk Man in particular, it simply involves breaking a guitar over somebody’s head.” [sic]

Brazilian city contemplates requiring businesses to provide a third transvestites-only bathroom.

Piece on Oscar-winning actresses who subsequently go on to make dreck.

(1) The US apparently has a long-standing policy that any food aid must be purchased in, and shipped from, the US. (And is alone among large donors in requiring this.) (2) US nongovernmental aid organisations actually like this arrangement, because they make money by selling a whole lot of donated food that isn’t needed for emergencies. (3) Bush tried to change these rules earlier this year, but Congress voted against it.

(Hrm, I’m a bit sceptical of this, particularly (2). Are all the aid organisations really against it? Why are they been given food that is profitable to sell anyway? (Who are they selling it to?) And how can there be a surplus of food aid?)

Just discovered this. Are there any other groups aside from 43* and now 23* [update: oh, and 37*, whoops] that are using a number as a domain prefix? It seems unwise—you can’t copyright or otherwise protect a number, right? (One of my favourite naming fuckups is the motorway situation in the UK. At one point they decided give the motorway-class roads the M prefix; roads not quite up to that standard were given the A prefix. All of which meant that when they upgraded parts of the A1 to M-class standard, they had to call those parts the A1(M)…)

“Everything I have ever”: poster containing “over 400 highly detailed silhouettes [um],” printed in bright orange, then overprinted in silver paint that you can scratch off to reveal the objects you own.

Nature encourages its readers to “to push forward the grand experiment that is Wikipedia, and to see how much it can improve.”

Typography humour. I would laugh at anyone who actually wore this, but it is cute.

Surreal ad for German hardware store. More: 1, 2, 3.

Adam L. Penenberg proposes that Apple run iTunes like a stock market, with price determined by demand. “The more people who download the latest Eminem single, the higher the price will go. … Music prices would oscillate like stocks on Nasdaq, with the current cost pegged to up-to-the-second changes in the number of downloads. In essence, this is a pure free-market solution—the market alone would determine price.” One issue relating to this sort of idea is that the tracks aren’t transferrable, and this, combined with the fact that Apple know which tracks you bought, means that they could in theory apply per-customer pricing. (Own Kate Bush’s entire back catalogue? Well then you’ll likely to be willing to pay a premium for her latest album.)

Captivating “interactive essay” (photos plus commentary from the photographer) on London’s inner-city housing estates. Towards the end there are some pictures of some of the grime artists mentioned in Sasha Frere-Jones’s New Yorker grime profile.

“c-jump,” the computer programming board game. (Linking here instead of the game itself because of the comments.)

Fascinating: the Red Cross is trying to negotiate a third, “neutral” emblem. This calls for diplomats! Lots of them!

“Muahmmad (sic) Ali - How to be a Man 101.”

“Are we done with the fucking pennies yet?”

The World Health Organisation is to stop hiring people who smoke. How is this legal? If this is legal, then it should be legal to hire only smokers, which would solve the most troublesome aspect of my argument for smoking in (some) pubs…

John Seigenthaler’s Wikipedia entry was wrong for 132 days, which makes him unhappy.

Business-related stock images. (e.g. equal opportunities.)

Astronaut Dale A. Gardner—in space at great expense—seems to have spent quite some time putting handsome letters on his sign.

Curious: you have to read this through a Wikipedia filter (i.e. take best guess when hit with inconsistent information), but as it turns out, it’s actually illegal to sell or grow marijuana in the Netherlands … it’s just more-or-less officially—and consistenly—unenforced. (Mostly because of various international treaties to which the Netherlands is a signatory, it seems.)

Difficult-to-descibe art: a large wooden box (filled with people) functions as a replicator—put something in a slot in the side, get a copy back.

I don’t know—I love this cartoon.

Architect Shigeru Ban—who’s currently working on a Pompidou outpost—has several unconventional ideas, including a love for building with paper, and of working for charity.

A willingness to overturn precendent (Roe, maybe?) is not necessarily a bad thing: Bowers v. Hardwick needed to be overturned to get Lawrence v. Texas.

One hell of a kill switch: to discourage a secondary “grey market” for that (much-hyped) $100 laptop, “the machine is disabled if not connected to the network after a few days.”

Anne Applebaum has a nice Le Monde catch: “Katrina’s devastation points the finger at Bush’s system … Issues forgotten for years are back to the fore: poverty, the state’s absence, latent racism.” Oops! (Le Monde, September 5th.)

The different levels of diplomat, and their respective levels of privilege/immunity. (They can always be issued with traffic citations.)

Thrilling Pikes Peak run. (Another car movie, this time through Paris.)

“I would like to create a playground for children … a normal playground is flat but I want an undulating one, with bumps.” The ambitions of the creator of Katamari Damacy, an apparently successful video game in which the player rolls around a sticky ball, which picks up all sorts of random bits and pieces, making a bigger and bigger ball. (?)

Cory Doctorow ranting again, this time about Google Print. I do find it odd that the people who are all for Google Print appear to have no problem with the DRM that locks you out of the full-text. If it can be copied, it should be copied, right? Isn’t that the principle?

Alternative town planning: Curitiba, a midsize Brazilian city, is a surprisingly nice place to live. (Sounds suspiciously idyllic to me, though it’s probably nice in the scheme of things, and I’m interested in town planning in general.)

Is racaille, as used by Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy to describe the rioters in Paris, better translated as rabble or scum? Sarkozy’s racaille is widely considered to have been unnecessarily provocative, but to me rabble (which the BBC is using) isn’t an especially strong or offensive word. Given the reaction, scum (which the NY Times is using) seems a much better fit..

Stupidly expensive “audiophile” products … like the $485 volume knob and the $1500 power cord (“apparently the miles of lowly aluminium high voltage lines that brought your power to your house are of no consequence”). (Does anyone take these seriously? Or is it a “legal” penis-enlargement scam?)

Chuck Shepard’s News of the Weird column.

Apparently, “literally” has been used for emphasis for ages.

Map of Golden Gate suicides. (“… several people have crossed the Bay Bridge to jump from the Golden Gate; there is no record of anyone traversing the Golden Gate to leap from its unlovely sister bridge.”)

Sign mischief via iiiii. Where I went to university the signs on the study carrels could be turned from “Please return books to sorting shelves” to “Please turn books into snorting elves.”

Old school newsgroup reminiscence! This thread is somewhat representative.

Henry Blodget’s psychological profiles of Bush appointees (via their financial disclosure forms) have been rather good; this one is of Ben Bernanke. (Another, of Harriet Miers, reveals that at 60, she has a net worth of only $675,000 despite earning $624,000 a year in her last private-sector job; Blodget speculates that this may be because she’s had to spend a lot on medical care for her mother.)

Justgiving collects money for charity, but their fees (5% of donation) are more than PayPal’s…

Surreal story about conjoined twins Reba and Lori Schappell. Says Lori, of attending her sister’s country music concerts: “I have to pay, just like every other fan that comes …”

A study of that thank-you note business, via Miers.

”Why South Korea leads the world in stem-cell research.”

“The truth is that individuals and institutions usually turn to architecture at moments of decline. … ‘During a period of exciting discovery or progress there is no time to plan the perfect headquarters … The time for that comes later, when all the important work has been done.’”

Geologists puzzled after hot ground starts fire.

Google mail removing instances of “gmail” from site for UK users; from October 19th, all new accounts will be @googlemail.com. And: “What if I’m a UK user who already has a Gmail address? Will that address ever change? / Unfortunately, we don’t know…” Ouch.

“Why is Africa Still Poor?” (Book reviews.)

Fun little one-button Flash game.

Wow, there sure are a lot of products called P990.

Book review: how to be successful the hip-hop way. The author apparently gets new trainers every second day—if you’re going to go that far, why not get a fresh pair every day? It would be a waste?

Total asshole awards. (Gold is the money.)

On the greatness of Bill Simmons, ESPN’s Sports Guy. Simmons really is a helluva writer, and I wish I was able to appreciate more of what he writes. I love how his quotes archive is mostly sports quotes, but with some non-sports quotes mixed in, as if the sports/non-sports balance matched their real-world relative importance.

“Strategy for Reading the Best of CL page”

Personal filing system—involves no categorisation!

Malcolm Gladwell on the college admissions process.

The best places to live, according some calculation. (Only three countries in the top ten: Canada, Australia and Switzerland.) The problem with these lists is that they bear very little resemblance to where people say they would like to live.

Hurricane-starved bit bulls take on an actual bull.

Dahlia Lithwick is impressed with Roberts’s first day in court. (She’s not so happy with Miers’s, though it seems a little unfair for her to be personally criticised for only being in the, oh, let’s say, top 0.1% of legal professionals rather than the top 0.001%.)

How the NBA is marketing itself to China via Yao Ming. (Apparently, a few years before David Stern took over the NBA in 1984, the final was shown on tape delay.)

Planned Parenthood Southeast Pennsylvania is asking people to pledge them some amount of money for each protestor that turns up outside their clinic during Setember and October; a billboard will display a running total of the amount raised. This is kinda neat: essentially they’ve arranged things so that the greater the effort their antagonists put in, the more money they raise. The runing total is a work of genius too: without it there wouldn’t be much point doing this. (Though I can’t quite figure out why this part is so important.) It also raises the intriguing possibility that the pro-lifers would start up a pledge-a-picket scheme of their own. They could even make one up: psychologically, it would have the greatest effect if its total fluctuated randomly, but was always slightly more than Planned Parenthood’s.

Story difficult to summarise, but basically someone ran into the back of someone else’s Saab, causing some minor cosmetic damage; in lieu of damages, the perpetrator tries to get the Saab owner to accept a donation to Katrina victims.

What the “@” sign is called in different countries.

Physically possible (i.e. gravitationally possible) arrangements of planets.

Pretty reference maps. (Printable versions too.)

“How did rocks from Mars end up here on Earth?”

Man and his synthetic clothes builds up thousands of volts of static electricity, starts scorching things.

“Nobody dumbs down the finance pages. Imagine the fuss if I tried to stick the word ‘biophoton’ on a science page without explaining what it meant. I can tell you, it would never get past the subs or the section editor. But use it on a complementary medicine page, incorrectly, and it sails through.”

(In an introductions to one of the essays in Mark Bowden’s Road Work, he writes that it won an award for science writing, which was “proof positive that you didn’t need to know a lick about science to conquer science writing.” The essay itself isn’t bad, but this is a dangerous attitude—particularly when so cavalierly expressed!)

Leonard Cohen possibly broke.

Make camera-phone ready “barcodes” for URLs. Intended for pasting Wikipedia URLs on monuments, but it works with any URL. (And arbitrarily long ones, too—it seems to deal with these by making the “barcode” finer and finer. (I guess this is all somewhat similar to the CueCat.)

On black people “looting” and white people “finding.”

Dahlia Lithwick on Rehnquist.

Alice-in-Wonderland-inspired Leibovitz/Vogue picks.

List of current international border disputes—given that just about every country has one or more, it’s a puzzle that anything gets done.

Spotting the fake: the (new) New Oxford American Dictionary contains a copycat-busting fake word starting with E.

Curious: Cory Doctorow endorses ISP’s plan to monitor network traffic, report what songs are being traded (via audio-analysis software) back to record companies.

“A Collection of Word Oddities and Trivia.”

Octopus takes a shark!

Overheard in New York best of, more or less.

Good summary of a Scientific American piece on how small children think.

Profile of Hermann Chinery-Hesse, who runs a software business in Ghana. There’s an interesting section on “Africanized Code.”

Besides being compact, his programs also write frequently to disk, reducing the chances of losing data if power is lost, as it often is. Because Internet connectivity remains relatively expensive, his programs also work offline as much as possible. And to combat the rampant piracy, beta versions of software rarely leave Soft’s premises, finished products don’t have an autoinstall function (you need a Soft technician to launch them), and batches of bug fixes are often delivered individually to customers rather than generally released.

Why doesn’t Soft write everything in Linux, the open-source language available for little or no cost? It would seem a no-brainer for a software entrepreneur in a desperately poor region of the world. Not so, and the reasons show why Chinery-Hesse is no ordinary third-world software tycoon. Linux is simply impractical for his purposes. "It can’t be used for serious business," he says, because it would be too easy for employees of a business to learn to use—and abuse—the source code of essential programs.

"In Accra, an IT manager earns $100 a month," Chinery-Hesse explains. "He has access to all of a company’s data, including backups. With open-source, he can learn to generate bogus reports. He’ll delete charges and pay himself or others money." Besides, "if we went for open-source, we would be relegated to basically doing installation and training," he adds. "Do I want a country of software developers or a country of installers?"

A model complaint letter, I think. (On EasyJet.)

Excellent! More progress on lab-grown meat. I don’t understand why (some) vegetarians are objecting though. Maybe if they’re also hard-core anti-abortionists, but this can’t be many—?

Wow, Google really messes up this search—Saul Bass (in English) isn’t even on the first page. (Both Yahoo and MSN get it right.)

The awesomeness of ‘super daters’: “He found that ‘super daters’, people who have many short relationships, have a good effect on others’ lives. This is because they break up weak couples, forcing their victims to find better relationships.”

Star Wars business cards.

Wow, Nokia have gone for a splash page, with sound! How 90s!

“How vanilla became shorthand for bland.” I hate hate hate it when I get a milkshake with no flavour when I ask for a vanilla milkshake. (I also hate the fact that you can’t really buy a proper milkshake in the UK, but this is an outburst better suited to another time.)

MSN 5.0 (for Mac) looks rather nice. The features page says it can be used across different networks (!)—anyone got this to work/know what it’s about? Update: you need Live Communications Server, so basically corporates only. I didn’t realise Microsoft was officially supporting other IM networks. (Or that other networks would let them.) Curious.

Article on the rise (apparently) of supper clubs. “A good supper-club host will seat you between a person you want to work with and one you want to sleep with.”

“I judge this book by its cover, and my judgement is -- AWESOME.”

Count the film references in these Stella Artois ads!

Unusual off-field injuries to sportsmen. (David James put his back out reaching for the remote control of his TV.)

A “psycho-financial analysis of Roberts”: “Bottom line? Roberts the investor is smart and conservative but, like most of us, prone to following the herd.”

Woman falls on hot manhole cover, gets branded by Con Ed logo: “Elizabeth C. Wallenberg, 27, was burned just above her buttocks and on her left arm when she fell off her skateboard onto a cover over a steam pipe at Second Avenue and 13th Street in the East Village shortly after midnight on Aug. 11, 2004, said her lawyer Ronald Berman.”

60 Minutes hire freelance camera crews to film the exact train their profiled subject is travelling in as it speeds past.

The Pope has expensives tastes?

Really weak, meandering justification for why the BBC initialy used the word “terrorist” in 7/7 reports but now don’t.

Withering review of The Fat Duck, alleged by the Guardian to be the world’s best restaurant.

Contemporary movies that might endure for 50 years.

Thoughtful piece on what the deal is with top-selling artists who are proud to note that they have had “classical training.”

Amazon’s best-selling artists. This doesn’t match up terribly well with the RIAA’s list of top-selling artists (not the same time period, etc., but whatever): it’s not just the long tail, it’s different purchase patterns all round.

“Video Games Live”: orchestra plays video game music live. There’s some audio samples on the right-hand side.

“… it might seem galling that a group of such young people have the temerity to proposition you on handling your IT needs.” Ah, Indian outsourcing. (This company does, in fact, truly exist.)

London hospitals apparently have parachute-ready staff; just one has 31 trained doctors and paramedics. I hesitate to think what sort of disaster would require medical staff to arrive by parachute in a metropolitan area though, let alone hundreds of them.

Ah, excellent: people are seriously researching vat-grown meat. Producing meat by running sunlight, carbon dioxide, water, etc. through a cow is so not efficient! (Also, it kills the cow.)

“Given that the justice department has announced that the information Gary downloaded was not ‘classified’, and he was stoned much of the time, perhaps we can assume that Nasa is not too worried about his ‘discoveries’.”

One for snopes? 1500 Turkish sheep follow each other off a cliff; 450 die.

Jorn Barger of robotwisdom.com now semi-homeless in SF?

Lee Friedlander, and street photography in general.

What living in New York must be like, according to NY best of craigslist postings.

The All-New Sesame Street.

Trouble for Swiss Army knives.

McDonald’s is wondering whether redesigning their uniforms will encourage employees to wear their uniformes outside work.

Scrollbar art installation.

Choosing O’Connor’s successor. I quite like Grover Norquist in the NYT: “They don’t need me lobbying on this stuff—they know what to do … My only recommendation is that they nominate someone who is 12 or 13 years old.”

“Supposing you were a supervillain, would you prefer to have minions, or henchmen?”

Bikini-clad doll falls into spheres … mesmerising.

David Remnick’s elegant Tyson encomium.

“Political insiders”—Democrats and Republicans—on whether Hillary Clinton can win the nomination/Presidency in 2008. 1. “One question: do people trust her? If George Bush can play a shell game with WMDs, rely on faulty intelligence, … [etc.], then it is fair to say that the trust issue is up for grabs and certainly Hillary has a shot.” 2. “Although she is bright, talented and extremely capable of handling the job, Senator Clinton has the burden of being poised to run after John Kerry. Kerry has probably soured many Democrats on Northeastern, elite intellectuals leading our party.”

Bastard tetris: next brick is the worst brick possible, as computed by a “special algorithm.”

Why there are “American” universities everywhere.

First-hand account of the Yalta conference. Stalin apparently had a lemon tree flown in so that Roosevelt could serve his martinis with a twist.

OMG there was a “Cardinal Sin.”

Sweet drifting from the Dukes of Hazzard.

Editing “journalism’s greatest prankster,” Hunter S. Thompson.

About Grant Wood’s American Gothic: the judges weren’t impressed, but a “powerful” museum patron arranged to have the painting awarded third prize in a competition run by the Art Institute of Chicago, and then persuaded the institute to buy it.

“The 3rd Annual Nigerian EMail Conference.”

What happens when anti-smoking campaigns meet safer cigarettes?

Uber-hacker jwz finally … buys a Mac!

“To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.”—do monkeys understand money?

French stereotype reinforced: lazy French lexicographers working on the ninth edition of the standard French dictionary meet for three hours every Thursday. It’s been 70 years since the last edition, and, according to this piece, they once spent a year considering a single verb—faire.

Every page of the New Yorker on 8 (!) DVDs. If the search function is good, this might be worth getting. (Seems like the search is not full-text.) There’s at least three Talk of the Town pieces I’ve been trying to track down for years: (1) account of a class of kids who were each given an egg to look after for a week; (2) something on the wild number of area-code changes London has had over recent decades; (3) something about a (Jewish) plan to run wires over and around some big city (London again?) to increase the area of their “homes” so that they can go more places on the Sabbath. (Probably horribly mis-remembered; I think I read all of these 10 or more years ago.)

Timothy Noah’s account of his 1999 conversation with Mark Felt. In answer to Noah’s question about whether being Deep Throat would really be so terrible, Felt said: “It would be terrible. This would completely undermine the reputation that you might have as a loyal, logical employee of the FBI. It just wouldn’t fit at all.”

There’s a spot of disagreement over who owns the rights to the Guerrilla Girls name.

The business of insuring movies: the insurer of Lara Croft: Tomb Raider—The Cradle of Life “was so strict that it did not even allow director Jan de Bont to be at the Luna Temple set during shooting because he had a prior leg injury. To avoid the possibility that he might slip on the set’s wet floors, the loss-control rep had him direct the entire seven-day sequence via closed circuit TV from a remote location.” Also: Nicole Kidman is getting expensive to insure after her knee caused delays to Moulin Rouge and Panic Room; in order to secure insurance for Cold Mountain she had to put some of her salary aside in an escrow account and body doubles had to be substituted for any activity that might damage her knee, including bending down.

Not a situation puzzle: mystery man (found a month ago clad in a soaking wet suit and tie) can’t/won’t speak, but plays the piano wonderfully well. (Also noteworthy: his social worker has neither attempted to figure out what the music is that he plays, nor found the time to follow up his one “definite lead”…)

“In the early years of the Soviet Union, many believed that architecture could function as a tool of social transformation. It was a time when architecture—and the ideas it expressed—still felt dangerous.” (Audio slideshow associated with Russian Icons.)

“She finds no ‘implied’ biting in the text, and calls mere dunking ‘out of the question.’ She concurs that the crumby madeleine material is already in the spoon as it approaches Marcel’s mouth.” (Reconstructing Proust’s madeleine.)

“Unless the Vatican reconnects with ordinary people here in the Catholic heartland … the Vatican’s obstinacy may yet kindle a Re-Reformation.” Huh? So, to keep up numbers, Catholic bigwigs should promulgate ideas popular with the populace rather than those that are (so they believe) right or the truth? Isn’t this like saying that accepting Jesus as the Messiah would be a good move for Jews? I suspect that whether the Catholic church endures as a viable institution is much less of a concern to the Pope than (and here’s my caveat again: what he sees as) doing God’s will.

The number one argument against national ID cards is that it will lead to more cops and judges being killed, and the number five is that it will lead to more dirty illegal immigrants driving unsafely on the roads? Gee, I don’t want to minimise the deaths of police officers and all but—is that the best you can do? Forgive me for thinking that there might be far-reaching (and specific) civil liberties implications of a national ID card.

“So next time you decide to get a case of road rage, think twice about who you might be screaming and swearing at through the window.”

Does fungus-derived meat-substitute Quorn need a warning saying that it may provoke a severe allergic reaction?

Can the police commandeer your car? (In a lot of places yes, though if you refuse you only have to pay a fine.)

Stories of guitar greats who learn, after mastering a difficult riff, that it has actually been recorded on two guitars.

“I don’t know how it’s gross negligence really. I mean, it’s gross and sure, finding a finger in your food is traumatic, but you’ll get over it. You get over most things. Nobody intentionally chopped their finger off and put it in your food. The real person that needs to be hiring an attorney is the person who LOST THE FUCKING FINGER, you litigious motherfucker.”

I thought these were already available commerciall but whatever: HooAH! bars will soon be available to the public. “The military operational requirement for ration storage is a minimum of three years at 80 degrees F or six months at 100 degrees F, which presents a challenge not faced by other nutrition bars.”

Paul Boutin on Wikipedia. I think this article is pretty much right-on: Wikipedia is wonderful, but it’s not perfect, and it should be cited with caution (if at all). Perhaps a variation of Groucho Marx’s “I don’t care to belong to any club that will have me as a member” applies: when it turns out that I can make some sort of improvement to practically every article I read (and 90% of my edits do in fact correct mistakes of some kind that I would be horrified to find in a paid-for reference), I’m not inclined to think too highly of the source in question. Also, even if the Wikipedia ends up killing the Britannica (and it + Google probably will), this doesn’t make it better than the Britannica: it merely makes it more evolutionarily successful than the Britannica, which is quite another thing.

Doing more with less: toilet flush research.

Japanese company decides whether Christie’s or Sotheby’s should auction its artwork via Rock, Scissors, Paper.

What might happen in M. Night Shyamalan’s new film. “The sea nymph is a sexually insatiable fish but is vulnerable to water: 10 to 1.”

Antony and the Johnsons: Hope there’s someone. There’s quite a few good free MP3s on Secretly Canadian’s website: Scout Niblet’s Uptown Top Ranking and Songs: Ohia’s Farewell Transmission being but two.

“Would it be disrespectful to call an Orthodox Jew on the telephone at at time when it is not Shabbat for the Jew, but was still Shabbat for me?” (Yes.) Reading this reminded me of another religious-observance question I’ve been wondering about: what do you do if you’re a Muslim who happens to be in Antarctica during Ramadan? Apparently, what you do is fast between the hours of sunrise and sunset in a neighbouring country.

Armin Meiwes to be tried again? Huh? How is this not double jeopardy?

The best restaurants in the world.

Target’s beautifully designed new pill bottle. (Flaws of existing designs on the previous page.)

Estimation quiz. The instructions don’t really explain it properly, but the “error” you specify works a little bit like a standard deviation—it’s better if the correct answer is within the limits you specify, but you can still get some points if it’s not. (Analysis of the results (read afterwards!): 1, 2; from the second you can work out your overall rank.)

When do we get another Einstein? Would Einstein even get published today?

On Dove’s “real beauty” campaign. I don’t particularly mind these sorts of campaigns, as long as they don’t attempt to deny the existence of (or function of) ugly. We’re not all equally beautiful, and nor should we be.

The 11 white males who did OS X 10.4. (Or as trading cards.)

Conference accepts computer-generated computer science paper. (Looks like Alan Sokol, at least, was suitably cautious in not attempting to draw any strong conclusions from the fact that Social Text accepted his nonsense paper “Transgressing the Boundaries”: “From the mere fact of publication of my parody I think that not much can be deduced.”)

(I’m giving Sokol the benefit of doubt here; in an earlier piece he seemed much more gleeful: “… to test the prevailing intellectual standards, I decided to try a modest (though admittedly uncontrolled) experiment: Would a leading North American journal of cultural studies -- whose editorial collective includes such luminaries as Fredric Jameson and Andrew Ross -- publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if (a) it sounded good and (b) it flattered the editors' ideological preconceptions? The answer, unfortunately, is yes.”)

Rupert Murdoch: “The challenges of the online world.” “[Young people] want their news on demand, when it works for them. They want control over their media, instead of being controlled by it. They want to question, to probe, to offer a different angle. Think about how blogs and message boards revealed that Kryptonite bicycle locks were vulnerable to a Bic pen. Or the Swiftboat incident. Or the swift departure of Dan Rather from CBS.”

How to cut different things.

Some guy found the (integer) 13th root of a 200 digit number in just under 10 minutes!

Freshjive parodies Stussy logo; Stussy sues. (Wonder if Carrie McLaren et al. get animated about this?)

On Tony Wheeler, the founder of Lonely Planet.

“Today, more than 40 percent of the black girls born in California in a given year receive a name that not one of the roughly 100,000 baby white girls received that year.” (Piece concludes that “black names” are correlated with poorer outcomes, but not the cause.)

I don’t have any particularly strong feelings for or against Susan Sontag, but this strikes me as a particularly vulgar reminiscence. (Especially the way in which Sontag is diminished through selective quoting.)

“Almost all men agree that beer and hard alcohol are acceptable man date beverages, but wine is risky. And sharing a bottle is out of the question.”

Guess who? “What strikes one now is the similarity between the predicament of the Vatican and the predicament of the Kremlin about 45 years ago. Between the death of Stalin and the end of Khrushchev, the crucial question was: How much heresy and revisionism and autonomy can be permitted, without endangering the entire ideology of the regime?” Christopher Hitchens, natch.

Photographing medieval tapestries.

Ikea bends (but only a little!) to sell to foreign markets.

Fred Kaplan: Paul Wolfowitz might be a good choice to lead the world bank. I think he may well be a good choice too—I agree that Wolfowitz is deeply idealistic, and to the extent that he’s a hawk, he’s a hawk not because he believes has a high regard for the use of force. His interview with Sam Tannenhaus of Vanity Fair is worth reading. (One thing that Wolfowitz may have trouble with is the requirement that aid be provided “without regard to political or other non-economic influences or considerations”—democracies can’t be favoured.)

Very impressive Dahlia Lithwick piece on the debate over female opinion writers.

Headline slightly better than the reality, but: “Lab fireball ‘may be black hole’.”

Angry bed positions.

He has a point: “Before the war: bad that no countries supported the US. After: bad that all the countries that supported the US no longer support the US.”

Oh crap, Google searches now take the order or search terms into account? (bar foo) This is new, right? Now I have to figure out which of my search terms is the most important and/or try different permutations?? (Yahoo and MSN do the same thing.)

Branding America: “… in the Soviet Union of the 1950s and ’60s, there was Pravda on the one hand, Voice of America on the other. The former dished out the dreary boilerplate of the ruling Communist Party. The latter offered exciting rhythms from the forbidden outside world. … Today, an official American image, even a well-crafted one, would have to compete with a vast array of newspapers, magazines, radio broadcasts and, most crucially, satellite TV networks.”

David Greenberg’s review of a seemingly flawed right-wing history of the US is somewhat notable for its explicit division of conservatives into the “conservative elite”—neoconservatives and libertarians who respect “the values of higher education, science, reason, and expertise”—and the “populist” conservatives of talk-show radio.

Are bloggers journalists? “… bloggers play games with definitions as well, choosing whatever identity suits them at the moment. In a case pending in California, Apple Computer has subpoenaed three bloggers who reported what the company believes are trade secrets about its future products. The bloggers want to be admitted as part of the journalist class protected under California law. But in an altogether different set of circumstances, bloggers and Web sites facing the prospect of being regulated by the Federal Election Commission take the position that they are neither independent media (which faces one set of restrictions) nor partisan advocates (who face another), but rather belong to a privileged category called ‘the Internet,’ which government mustn’t tax or touch in any way.”

Watch to the end!

“Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener.”

“When’s it due back?” “The day after tomorrow.”

What chefs eat when they travel.

And this will work better than <META name="keywords" ...> because … ?

“Spy’s guide to surviving London life.”

“So you don’t care if the recording industry tanks?” “No, we need a new model … A post-pop star model, where music is free, and performers make a modest living through touring!” (See following strips.)

Renting a house in Baghdad.

”Do intravenous sedatives act instantly?” (re: Vinvent Vega stabbing Mia Wallace in Pulp Fiction.)

Obituary for The New Yorker’s one-time Grammarian, Eleanor Gould. “Miss Gould once found what she believed were four grammatical errors in a three-word sentence.”

Meghan O’Rourke’s take on the Larry Summers girls-vs.-boys episode. It’s better than William Saletan’s, which suffers from an excess in confidence.

Wow, it’s amazingly difficult to report your identity stolen.

An unauthorised bathroom attendant visits the Times Square McDonald’s…

The Vice Guide to Picking Up Chicks. (The US version has a link to a pretty PDF version.) Personally, I wouldn’t say that black people “fuck up” biggish words, but I guess Vice know what they’re doing…

The Vatican is offering exorcism lessons.

Pictures of a lass dressed up as Ronald McDonald. Unsettling! Also, she’s in the Philippines—does this make it better or worse??

On the trend towards more and more product placement in TV. “ That means we’d end up with two tiers of television—pay TV and free TV—with the free stuff functioning as a kind of Muzak, an inoffensive backdrop for commercial messages.” (This piece also claims that Seinfeld’s Pez, Snapple, Snickers and Junior Mints episodes weren’t the result of product placement deals.)

“Gay rights activists have protested at a north German zoo’s plans to test the sexual orientation of six male penguins which have displayed homosexual traits.” (Seems like one of the more benign forms of animals testing, really.)

“Stupidity as a Firing Offense,” in which Dahlia Lithwick argues that you can’t retract tenure, even to idiots like Ward Churchill, ends with the correction that he attended Sangamon State University, not Sangaman State University—even though Sangaman is what his official bio says… (Also, does the first sentence of that J.S. Mill quote actually make sense to anyone?)

Great headline: “Gangland trial witness admits no hitman experience.”

On the decline of secularism in France. A French politician suggests the state fund mosques; a 1905 law stopped the state giving money to churches, but since it had been doing exactly that for hundreds of years, Christians already had nice plots of land for their churches and plenty of money—neither of which Muslims have. (Although in some cases, the sheer number of churches probably amount to a burden on the church. Last year, in Dijon, I wanted to see how many churches I could run to in five minutes, and film this with my camera. But I left the battery in London, sadly…)

Scalia might not be too bad as Chief Justice … if liberals can get a moderate in his place. (Well, der.)

NY Times has a new, busier, most-emailed page. (And, damn, the “email this article” link doesn’t email the full text no more either … though the old email this article link works with new pages.)

“Thanks a lot, hot guy.”

Peculiar place for a thoughtful post about what it’s like to be a homicide detective.

Commercially unsuccessful user-pays chair re-released as performance art piece to demonstrate that … this is what life will be like in the future? … even though no-one would buy it? Huh? What?

William Saletan on the Larry Summers women-in-science flap.

Malcolm Gladwell reviews Jared Diamond’s “Collapse.” Apparently, the Norse colonies in Greenland died out because they’d chopped down all the trees, over-farmed the land—and wouldn’t eat fish. (I’ve heard that well-intentioned aid agencies in South-East Asia have had a similar problem: they’ve tried to feed people “broken rice” but even starving people won’t eat it because broken rice is what animals are fed.)

Is there any good reason for Google to have an outpost in, uh, the Cook Islands? (Doesn’t seem to be any “big,” “enormous,” or “i.love,” entity doing business in the Cook Islands either.)

On inaugural addresses.

Graph shows that some American brands are perceived as more “American” than others; only slight correlation between Americanness intention to avoid the brand (discussion).

Anti-seat-belt-law campaigner involved in car accident; is “ejected from car” and dies…

“… today we stand at the forefront of popular culture: independent, talented and comfortable with the skin we’re in. We are really feeling ourselves. Perhaps that’s why we’re so alarmed at the imbalance in the depiction of our sexuality and character in music. In videos we are bikini-clad sisters gyrating around fully clothed grinning brothers like Vegas strippers on meth. When we search for ourselves in music lyrics, mixtapes and DVDs and on the pages of hip-hop magazines, we only seem to find our bare breasts and butts. And when we finally get our five minutes at the mic, too many of us waste it on hypersexual braggadocio and profane one-upmanship. … This cannot continue.”

Fab skating video!

“The international press comments as tsunami relief grows competitive.” (e.g. Australians have been hailed the most generous people on earth after pledging more than $15 million for victims of the Boxing Day tsunami during a star-studded fundraising concert tonight.) At least in the first few days, the media seemed to be taking a perverse delight in figuring out exactly how many people had died. I remember hearing a radio interview with an official from Indonesia who happened to have flown over parts of Aceh; all the reporter seemed to want to know was how many people were thought to have died.

”What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?” (Richard Dawkins—boy is that man predictable—says that he can’t prove that God doesn’t exist … well, the other way round.) Simon Baron-Cohen begins his answer by saying that he is “not interested in ideas that cannot in principle be proven or disproven,” which is what I might say too—what really matters is what people believe to be true, not what is true of false.

The Economist attempts to “elucidate” what it was that Einstein did.

Wow: man gets left alone in interrogation room, pulls out a gun from his pants and shoots himself in the head.

A radio without buttons! Rocked forward/backward is on/off; “scrolling” left/right changes the volume, up/down changes the frequency (pictures/text).