Gulfstream: 2006

The ethically troubling sources of gold, chocolate, cell phones. The Economist also has a nice account of an 18th Century British sugar boycott that caused the sugar-loving Shelley some distress.

Buildings in Mecca and Medina dating back to the time of Mohamed and before are being destroyed by Wahhabists in an attempt to prevent idolatry. (The Wikipedia claims that even Saudi Arabia was against the Taliban’s destruction of the Buddhas of Bamyan.)

One day I’ll write this up properly, but in the meantime here’s another datapoint in the manipulative and misleading charity category: Heifer International’s online gift catalog lists pigs, honeybees, and a flock of ducks among the concrete and specific (and cute) gifts you can give to needy families around the world—but if you read the fine print, you find that your purchase is “symbolic” and “represents a contribution to the entire mission of Heifer International.” (To reinforce the impression that you’re not simply writing a check, the copy goes like so: “The Joy To The World collection includes two sheep, four goats, a heifer and two llamas. These animals mean new hope in the lives of the hardworking poor families who receive them. Cow and goats’ milk is full of nutrients and your animals will provide a family with daily provisions of vitamin-rich milk.” Way to subvert and distort the otherwise straightforward gift catalog concept!)

The space shuttle landing process involves flying upside down and backwards, as well as right-side up and forwards. (Point form.)

Panda sex news: “They were known for shyness, a low sex drive and a diet that was overly dependent on eating huge quantities of a barely nutritious and hard-to-digest bamboo that was inedible every six years or so.” In an effort to get their charges to mate, researchers in China tried Viagra (“We’ll never do that again … the panda was excited for 24 hours”), but have now settled on a mixture of panda porn, and swapping hot females with those not so hot at the last moment (“When the males find out, they get very angry and start fighting the female … we have had to use firecrackers and a water hose to separate them”).

Google employees will soon be able to sell their options. One of the benefits is that it gives a tangible value to the options themselves. (I look forward to a James Surowiecki explication. How well will they track the value of GOOG options themselves?

“Her Evite reply had to indicate she was glad to have been invited. It had to illustrate she had good reason for not attending. Most of all, it had to be so witty that invitees she did not even know would find themselves wishing she was coming to the party.” Too serious piece on the politics and psychology of publicly accepting or declining Evite invitations.

Oh MySQL AB, why do you need to make things so difficult? As far as I can tell, it’s at least five clicks from the MySQL Workbench product information page to the download, and to get there you have to go via the “Community” tab, dodge a not-mandatory-but-looks-like-it registration page, and download four MySQL products all at once.

Problems with the AirPort Express? Just after ordering a new one I noticed a whole lot of reviews from owners saying that their Express had died soon after the 12-month warranty expired. Mine did too! (see also)

The NY Times reports that Estonia’s admired-by-some flat tax was put in place because Estonia’s former prime minister, Mart Laar, erroneously believed that a flat tax had been implemented in the West after reading Milton Friedman’s “Free to Choose.”

Kansas Outlaws Practice of Evolution: “Violators of the new law may face punishments that include jail time, stiff fines, and rehabilitative education and training to rid organisms suspected of evolutionary tendencies.”

Iceland is about the only proper country on the list.

James Surowiecki: Nintendo is #3 in the console game, but is making solid profits. Do you need to aspire to be #1?

Not sure I’m inclined to take Firefox font-handling criticisms seriously when it comes from someone who’s unconcerned that the italic text and the Roman text on their site come from different fonts… There’s a reason italic body text is almost entirely absent from apple.com!

“A researcher uses his understanding of the human brain to advance on a popular quiz show.”

Domestic cats, bred to look like tigers!

Oh no! Darius McCollum, serial appropriator of New York public transit equipment, and subject of a long, loving Harper’s piece, has been arrested again.

Super-sexy data transformation algorithm, useful for data compression.

The ten most visited sites on the net, and how many employees they each have. Craigslist gets by with only 23 employees (although it’s true that none of the employees are engaged in producing magazines or feature films, etc.)

Interviews with the actors who dub movie stars into other languages. (It’s usually done by the same actor across the star’s career.) “It is hardest with black actors like Eddie Murphy and Will Smith. They are not only very funny but they speak very, very fast. Trying to street talk quickly in Hindi is extremely tough. After two days your mouth gets really tired.”

Photographs of iconic scenes, with street-vendor postcards and trinkets substituted for the real thing. (Makes more sense when you see it.)

Google whines about “google” turning into a verb that means “to search the internet,” urges customers to stop using it like that. (There must be a better way to prevent the evolution of language becoming a legal problem.)

“A malaise set in within a couple hours of my arriving. I thought getting a job might help. It turns out I have a lot of relatives in Hell, and, using connections, I became the assistant to a demon who pulls people’s teeth out.”

Wow, art conservators take their jobs really seriously: to fixing Steve Wynn’s ripped Picasso they’s (may) attempt to match up individual fibres. Also, I quite liked Wynn’s reaction, as reported by Nora Ephron (1, 2, 3) and The New Yorker (4): (1) Oh shit; (2) Thank God it was me; (3) This has nothing to do with money. The money means nothing to me. It’s that I had this painting in my care and I’ve damaged it.; (4) (some time later) It’s a picture, it’s my picture, we’ll fix it. Nobody got sick or died. It’s a picture. It took Picasso five hours to paint it.

How to make a $36 entree look cheap? Add a $43 entree to the menu and don’t fret if no-one buys it.

Disappointing new Sony Bravia ad: a lot of it looks computer generated (though I don’t think it is) the paint explosions aren’t fun (and the clown is creepy). You know Gandalf’s really thrilling fireworks in Lord of the Rings? Watching loads of paint being splatted onto a building could and should have been as exhilerating, but somehow Jonathan Glazer messed up.

Ha, strange: “Small Numbers of Video iPods Shipped With Windows Virus. … As you might imagine, we are upset at Windows for not being more hardy against such viruses, and even more upset with ourselves for not catching it.”

Map showing what a more equitable Middle East might look like if it were divided up along religious and ethnic lines (related discussion). This was apparently presented in a lecture at a NATO conference; Turkey wasn’t pleased.

Surprising: Fox News’s Bush approval rating poll is the least positive of three major polls (graph).

Not completely sold on the art direction here, but nice Time cover.

Two world maps superimposed on top of each other, so that you can see which points are opposite each other on the Earth’s surface. (Surprisingly little overlap; the lower part of South America is opposite to a chunk of China, and New Zealand’s south island is opposite part of Spain, but that’s about it.)

“Despite sprinting through the Andrews Air Force Base south terminal, President Bush narrowly missed his Air Force One flight to Boise earlier today after arriving just moments after the plane’s doors had closed.”

Great story: Steven Levitt, playing in a poker tournament to celebrate his 10 year wedding anniversary, plays like a crazy man in order to either lose quickly or win quickly so he can make his flight. (I won’t spoil the ending!)

The history of Trojan condoms, including the difficulties faced in marketing them throughout most of the 20th Century.

The Pale Blue Dot: a picture of Earth, taken from a very long way away, inspires some fine words from Carl Sagan about how insignificant we all are, or something.

Solid voting system in Gambia: voters drop marbles into metal drums, ringing a bell as they fall. You get your finger inked after voting, and after the polls close the marbles are poured onto solitaire-style boards for counting.

The Suspicious Looking Device: “The only function of the Suspicious Looking device is to appear as suspicious as possible, whether carried in hand or placed indiscrimately in public places.” (Thank-you for calling this a project and not art.)

I’m flying BA at least three times in the next three months and this is NOT REASSURING: one engine of a BA 747 flying from LA to London caught fire on take-off, but the pilot (after apparently consulting with BA) continued on anyway telling air traffic control that they’d decided to “get as far as we can.”

“Little Superstar.” (Sorry, haven’t been able to post for a while, Ruby on Rails messed with something and I’m now posting via RAW SQL STATEMENTS.)

Jim Holt’s review of two books critical of string theory. (Good overview of the theory and its weaknesses.) I would’ve thought that two books on string theory coming out at the same time would have been bad for both, but in this case the ability to compare and contrast books has resulted in a whole of lot reviews that otherwise wouldn’t have been written.

Toronto Hemp Company business card.

“Hey look it’s the personification of The New York Times, a smug, self-indulgent, boomer, pussy that thinks he matters and is always wrong.”

“Weasel words are words or phrases that seemingly support statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. Weasel words give the force of authority to a statement without letting the reader decide if the source of the opinion is reliable.”

25,000 Jews live in Iran, and they seem largely happy there. (Or at least the ones who will speak to journalists.) Could there be something to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s claim that he’s anti-Zionist, not anti-Semitic?

A few of the skyline silhouettes from gothamist.com properties, grouped together. (So why does the NY logo omit some of the most iconic NY buildings?)

The Indian Medical Association is apparently conducting an investigation into three doctors who were evidently captured on camera offering to amputate beggars’ limbs so that, being more pitiful, they can collect more money. (This subject is an element of Rohinton Mistry’s A Fine Balance, one of the most gruelling books I’ve ever read…)

Ruminations on Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy: why has it become such a popular cover, why is it so popular with mashup artists? Includes a link to Jack White’s pretty awesome cover at Lollapalooza. (Poor quality; be nice if this gets a proper release.)

Professor of clinical medicine at Stanford thinks alternative medicine doesn’t do anything. Acupuncture has only been formalised and standardised over the past hundred years, he says, and doesn’t do anything beyond release endorphins anyway. (How do you do double-blind studies of acupuncture anyway?)

Haunting (and disturbingly beautiful) Magnum photographs of the WTC on September 11 and days after.

Captivating: art made from cut up pieces of A4 paper.

Does anyone know why the Tate would have what appear to be sign language videos of the informational pages of their website? (e.g. the opening hours, in sign language.) What’s the demographic for this? Deaf people who can’t read? (See the RealPlayer links on the RHS.)

Journalists from The New Yorker, thoughtful individuals that they are, attempt to arrange a meeting with the famously reclusive mathematician Grigory Perelman: “Before we arrived in St. Petersburg, on June 23rd, we had sent several messages to his e-mail address at the Steklov Institute, hoping to arrange a meeting, but he had not replied. We took a taxi to his apartment building and, reluctant to intrude on his privacy, left a book—a collection of John Nash’s papers—in his mailbox, along with a card saying that we would be sitting on a bench in a nearby playground the following afternoon. The next day, after Perelman failed to appear, we left a box of pearl tea and a note describing some of the questions we hoped to discuss with him. We repeated this ritual a third time. Finally, believing that Perelman was out of town, we pressed the buzzer for his apartment, hoping at least to speak with his mother. A woman answered and let us inside. Perelman met us in the dimly lit hallway of the apartment. It turned out that he had not checked his Steklov e-mail address for months, and had not looked in his mailbox all week. He had no idea who we were.”

Illustrated history of Andre Agassi’s career, including side-by-side shots of a young and old Agassi in almost exactly the same pose.

High-performance Mini Cooper concept; a 160hp electric motor powers each wheel, and produces power upon braking: “The beauty of this dual-circuit, ultra safe system is that your green conscience can be quite content even when accelerating hard, since you are assured of collecting most of the expended energy when it is time to slow down rapidly.” Really?

“Fake-A-Wish Foundation Introduces Dying Child To Brett Favre Lookalike.” (audio)

Fitts’s Law, usability, and making Office 2007 easier to use with a mouse. (Interesting side point about how an application like Office can be made easier to use when maximised (because target areas can be made in effect infinitely wide or high); web applications can’t ever take advantage of this since they run inside a browser, and so don’t know where the edge of the screen is.)

David Brent on his hero, Nelson Mandela: “30 years in captivity. He got out in about 1990. He’s been out about 13 years ... and, he hasn’t reoffended. He’s going straight. And you’ve got to admire that. ... and it also shows you that prison works.” (8:30)

How to classify this t-shirt design? NSFW cartoon mouse sex?

“The researchers said Pluto failed to dominate its orbit around the Sun in the same way as the other planets.” WELL THEN TRY HARDER DAMMIT.

Remarkably honest and straightforward (feelingless?) autobiographical account of Robert Hughes’s first marriage. “We met at a drinks party in Notting Hill. ‘Do you want to meet the best fuck in London?’ the host delicately inquired. And he pointed to a sofa, on which sat a tall, rangy, square-jawed blonde holding a glass of warm vodka. We were introduced. Things began to click, small cogs and then larger ones to engage.”

Malcolm Gladwell: the success of a company (or country) is determined, to a great extent, by the ratio of workers to dependent non-workers. (GM has 453,000 retirees; Toyota has 258.)

Curious illustrated story about the street manicurists of Kinshasa and their male clients. “One reason why I like to look good is to forget the dirt and poverty which surrounds me.”

Why there’s a shot clock in basketball: in the 1950s, before the shot clock, teams would stall after claiming an early lead, resulting in slow, dull games with scorelines in the teens and walk-outs from spectators.

Tips for presenting to investors (and for presentations in general). “… as you approach … a description of something that could be anything, the content of your description approaches zero. If you describe your web-based database as ‘a system to allow people to collaboratively leverage the value of information,’ it will go in one investor ear and out the other.”

Live geographic traffic stats for the BBC news. This is pretty sweet, despite not being very usable. (The colours that represent different traffic levels aren’t distinct enough; it isn’t very clear what’s going on with the regional views.)

Einstein’s sex life, as gleaned from his recently-released letters, and how it was reported in the media.

Account of growing up in Scotland with two blind parents.

Apple documentation: “What is a third-party product?” And who are the first and second parties?

Great photographs, as reviewed by people on the internet. “Sam, GORGEOUS scene I luv it! Too bad u couldn't get a little more color in sky area. Blues should be a little more saturated. Also the rule is u need to have either sky or land (lake?) dominate, not just split right down the middle. Try to move the camera after u focus. A great shot though please see my entries and leave your comments. Ted.”

Why do adults in cars now deliver newspapers? Levitt doesn’t know, but there are a few good theories in the comments, e.g. (1) parents are worried about the children’s safety, and so don’t let their kids deliver papers; (2) less houses get newspapers delivered, so it’s more efficient for someone in a car to do it; (3) increases in minimum-wage laws have made it a more attractive job for adults.

An alternative cinema in Brighton is making their own Coca-Cola. (For some reason the recipe calls for a very small amount of vodka.)

Things I didn’t know: there is still Shaker community, though there are only four of them left. Their website explains why they share all their goods: “Those who give up all material things for the sake of the Gospel learn by that same Gospel that they may learn to live without assurance of the morrow in joyous confidence that they will lack nothing. The spirit of Christian poverty is more than the absence of wealth. The New Testament never condemns wealth as such, only when a person’s possessions come between him and God is there any real danger.”

An article on the pastor of an evangelical megachurch who preaches that the church should stay out of politics has (predictably) got NY Times readers all excited: it’s currently the most emailed story on the site.

[Boyd] said he first became alarmed while visiting another megachurch’s worship service on a Fourth of July years ago. The service finished with the chorus singing “God Bless America” and a video of fighter jets flying over a hill silhouetted with crosses.

“I thought to myself, ‘What just happened? Fighter jets mixed up with the cross?’ ” he said in an interview.

(Did the church play a positive role in the civil rights movement, as a critic suggests?)

Long Tail doubters: Slate says Anderson is overreaching; the WSJ says his data is bogus. I’m still pretty skeptical of this (previously); whatever the shape of Amazon’s sales tail, it’s a lot fatter than it would have been because if you want a rare book, Amazon’s pretty much the only place to get it. (Another way of looking at this is that if Amazon were the only shop you could buy from (if all purchases went through Amazon), there would be no long tail.)

The surprising advantages of rubber sidewalks: they last longer than concrete (in areas with lots of tree roots and/or snow clearing), they’re environmentally friendly (they’re made from old car tires, and weigh a quarter of the equivalent in concrete) and they’re easier on the joints. I wonder how well wheels roll on them—will they serve as anti-skater devices as well? (Looks like Yahoo News is finally using some sensible URLs.)

Some really fun Japanese Rube Goldberg devices.

“Wikipedia Celebrates 750 Years Of American Independence”: “... Little did such founding fathers as George Washington, George Jefferson, and ***ERIC IS A FAG*** know that their small, querulous republic would later become the most powerful and prosperous nation in history, the Unified States Of America.”

Fifty-year-old Bill Buford—former editor of Granta, and former literary editor of The New Yorker—recently spent two years working in various New York kitchens, including that of Mario Batali’s Babbo: “Babbo’s kitchen combined two of Buford’s great loves: combative male bonding and learning. ‘The kitchen was a kind of aggressive, hands-on university,’ he admits. ‘The excitement I felt was akin to reading John Donne for the first time or finally getting a command of Shakespeare. It was the kind of excitement I had in university.’”

“In defence of M. Night Shyamalan”—though this is a “defence” of the “with friends like these, who needs enemies?” variety. (Similar piece at Crushed by Inertia that quotes from the Shyamalan tell-all.)

Three Japanese guys domino a whole apartment-worth of stuff.

Reviews of street fashion photo blogs. Big ups The Satorialist (suitably).

Athens (where 200,000 Muslims now live) is getting its first new Mosque since the Ottoman Empire. (Spain only recently got its first Mosque since the 16th Century also.)

Seems like a bad sign: Airbus has taken no new orders for the A380 this year (more analysis).

Why does China have a 900m x 700m scale model of a 450km x 350km area of the Indian/Chinese border? (speculation)

Scene from the Miami Vice pilot, uses Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” Bill Simmons, in his pretty useful YouTube Hall of Fame, says: “Two great things about this one: First, it still holds up -- even now -- and "Vice" is about as dated as it gets. Second, up until that point, there had never been anything on TV even remotely resembling that scene. Remember, this was the same era when A) they were still freezing people's faces mid-laugh during the opening credits of any sitcom; and B) nobody realized that you could use music to accentuate dramatic TV scenes. So this was like watching Bill Russell block someone's running hook shot in the mid-'50s for the first time.”

Are cities the new countries? “The most important place to London is New York and to New York is London and Tokyo … London belongs to a country composed of itself and New York.” Mmm, tenuous.

Stealing a bike in NYC: guy steals a bike (his own) four times, and only once (apparently) does he get accosted by a member of the public—by a guy who offers him advice. At one point the cameraman gets told off by the cops for filming from the street. I meant to take some pictures of locked NYC bicycles to accompany this picture of Italian “secure” bicycles but totally forgot.

Recreation of Seurat’s “A Sunday on La Grande Jatte.”

Advertising on eggs: “The best thing about the egg concept was its intrusiveness. … As EggFusion sees it, consumers look at a single egg shells at least a few times: when they open a carton in the store to see if any eggs are cracked, if they transfer them from the carton to the refrigerator, and when they crack them open.” (CBS liked the concept so much they’ve paid for exclusive rights to the laser etching technology.)

Milk crate Tetris.

“There’s a certain combo of facial features and surrounding accessories that screams, ‘I would be an amazing host for a call-in radio show about relationship advice’ so loud even deaf people can hear it.”

I really admire the writing in Vice’s DOs and DON’Ts, those pithy captions aren’t as easy to toss off as they look. Even the winner of the caption contest doesn’t quite nail the tone, and the other entries were apparently rubbish. (The New Yorker’s caption contest is similarly disappointing: despite bringing the distributed power of the internet to bear on the cartoon captioning problem, the results are usually only about as good as an average New Yorker cartoon.)

Overheard in NY + Google Maps mashup. Nicely done!

Headbutt connoisseurs are raving about Zidane’s recent effort (see also).

The perils of introducing too many snack variants: in the last two years, after Nestle introduced Kit-Kats in flavours like lime crush, blood orange, red berry and more, UK sales dropped 18 percent.

A short piece on airport signage and wayfinding solutions. (One of the reasons I like airports is that I like looking at the (generally excellent) signage.)

On the origin and revival of Matthew Carter’s font Georgia.

A lot of work (and patents) have gone into the glass staircases at Apple Stores.

The Nocebo effect: thinking that bad things will happen is a self-fulfilling prophesy. (So should doctors lie to patients about their prospects?)

“More broadly, the data the company gets from transactions could help it improve the way it chooses which advertising to show to which users. Google says it does not currently plan to use transaction data in this way.” It’s going to become more and more difficult for Google (and other companies) to ignore this information in the future—knowing exactly how profitable individual users are is incredibly valuable. Does Google earn or lose money from your use of Google mail?

How to make a playlist for a girl: “First of all, making a mix for a girl you don’t know that well or for a girl that dumped you is the worst thing you can do. She will be lying in bed with the guy she really likes and they will both laugh their heads off at you for putting U2 on there. You can only make a playlist for a girl that you have fucked more than twice and she has to have thoroughly enjoyed herself both times (so, if you had trouble getting it up the first time then it doesn’t count and your ‘two times’ has to start on the second lay).”

No-one goes to Moscow for their honeymoon. Paris seems to be the most popular honeymoon destination.

Objectification watch: “If you lend tools to someone and they come back broken you shouldn't have to pay for the repair and that is what happened to Newcastle.” Newcastle Chairman Freddy Shepherd on the FA “borrowing” Michael Owen for the World Cup, and then breaking him.

“Israeli PM: 'One More Suicide Bombing And I'll Give Them Whatever They Want'”

Standard power connectors. e.g. the C14 the connector used by almost all computers. (Quite a lot of thought has gone into these.) Don’t know how to get there but can we have a world-wide standard for power sockets, please?

Toyota is advertising its Scion on a website visited by to 8- to 15-year olds (i.e. people who won’t buy one).

(Video) How pregnancy happens. V. disturbing Mr. Penis.

Pakistan bans The Da Vinci Code; there were protests from Christians, but the official reason seems to be that it blasphemes Islam by criticising one of its prophets—Jesus.

The ad-stripping, Cory-rant filtering version of Boing Boing has gone away. And because they sent a lot of traffic to one of his sites? Pussy.

Transport for London press release: first they get rid of the routemasters, now they tell us that London’s iconic red buses will now get white roofs to ward off heat?

Pictures of explosions. That is all. (They’re small explosions too. Pretty though.)

History of The New Yorker via the recently-released CD anthology. Less than affectionate; attempts to diminish. (e.g. “The New Yorker is the only magazine in America, probably in the world, to inspire reverence and druidical devotion.”)

“How Brazilian soccer players get their names.” The one-word names are mostly nicknames; defenders are much more likely to be known by their full names than strikers.

“Can good architecture help the sick?” Does architecture and design affect the physical well-being of those being treated for cancer? The Maggie’s Centre charity has managed to convince a number of leading architects to design treatment centres for cancer patients.

A sheep-killing bear is “savage”? Isn’t that what bears are supposed to do?

Andrew Sullivan wants to call the view that “religious faith is so important that it must also have a precise political agenda” Christianist (parallels Islamist).

Jack Shafer is not happy with the NY Times’s public editor. He’s been nowhere near as interesting as Daniel Okrent, that’s for sure.

“An Open Letter from Hungry Charles”—Hungry Charles, IFOCE’s commissioner, lays down the rules of competitive eating. Reminds me of 826 Valencia’s Gallery of Signs. I can’t decide: is “reversal of fortune” or “urge contrary to swallowing” the more amusing substitute for, you know, the V word?

The Apple II-style website of The Raconteurs, Jack White’s solo project. All Flash, and using the keyboard is mandatory! (“H for Home,” etc.)

The shapeless official website of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet’s $136bn (+ $25bn in B stock?) holding company. The Message from Warren Buffet is also charming.

Random photo set, supposedly from some guy who worked for a real shitty pool company. “Here’s T-Bone pitching a pool skimmer into the truck. This was a real good pitch executed with flawless form. T-Bone could really pitch shit into the van. His brother was a wicked baseball player.” “Safety wasn’t a top priority with the guys. Here’s Kenny jack-hammering in sandals.” “And here’s T-Bone using a Sawz-All waist deep in water.” (background)

What’s known about yawning. (Seems like not so very much.)

OMG in one post Malcolm Gladwell admits he is fallible, uses the word “alright” (three times!) and punctuates with a smiley. This is too much! Update: the “alright” is now “all right”! (Just noticed some people in the comments whining about this too.) Shame, the word is (somewhat) defensible, and the two-worder hurts the rhythm of the title a bit.

Almost perfect story for the media: two miners are trapped 1km underground in a Tasmanian gold mine; they’ve been under ground almost a week, and are likely to be trapped for two more days, but have been able to receive supplies via a small opening. (They’ve been given iPods, which seems to be a poor practical choice given the poor battery life.)

“NASA Announces Plan To Launch $700 Million Into Space.” You know where this is going, but it’s still a pleasant journey.

Don’t be mean, Apple! Also, the iLife ad is a bit unfair in that Microsoft wouldn’t be allowed to bundle anything vaguely similar with Windows. (It also seems like a rip-off of Gus Sorola’s Switch Parody. “Um … that puzzle game, with the Apple logo? That’s a great game. … I beat it but it’s still fun.”) The Which Mac are You? page pushes Intel Macs only. Nice tagline for the MacBook Pro: “Mobility’s Nobility.”

Fire fighters (in sweet suits) chainsaw open the canopy of a F22 Raptor after it refuses to open, trapping the pilot inside for 5 hours.

Why is there such a big market for skin lightening creams in Asia? (“4 out of 10 women in Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea and Taiwan now using some kind of skin-whitening cream.”) One thing I noticed in Singapore was that a surprising number the billboards there use Western models. (I’ve got some photographs documenting this somewhere, was meaning to write about this.)

“I can appreciate this prank only by ignoring the fact that his description of it is filtered through the traditional Artist Statement Bullshitizer. It's a fuckin' gag. It's not a bad one. But couching it in terms like "this work" just makes me want to punch him in the junk.”

The U.S. reluctant to release some Guantanamo inmates because they might not be well-treated by their own governments? What?

Interesting art/media projects with refreshingly straightforward descriptions of intent.

Donald Judd’s gallery/sculpture park in Marfa, Texas. (A lot of the photos are credited—but not linked—to Flickr. Can they do this?) The article has a little bit about the Marfa “Prada” (not a real store) that appears in this fabulous photograph; the IHT has more.

The LA Times buries the lede! Page 2 of a piece about executives who get paid $1 a year reveals Jobs, Brin and Page are lawbreakers: under Californian law, they’re supposed to be paid the minimum wage, which is $6.75 an hour—and possibly more, depending on whether they’re eligible for overtime. (The spokesman for the Labor Commissioner allows: “We’re not going to spend our time pursuing something like this unless we have a complaint filed on behalf of an employee.”)

The sad story of Nauru: in the 1970s, the people of Nauru were amongst the richest in the world (the whole island is basically phosphate); now the government is forced to ration electricity and water, 50% of the population has diabetes, and a big money-earner is housing would-be Australian refugees. “… Nauru's government (like most others) would rather do almost anything than cut its own budget. So it has resorted to several desperate money-raising ventures, including that old stand-by of cash-strapped third-world governments, befriending Taiwan. A sun-bleached Taiwanese flag flaps wanly outside the run-down colonial villa that serves as the island's only embassy. In return for this dubious honour, Taiwan has lent Nauru money at bargain rates.”

Beijing Olympic stadium construction photographs. (By Herzog & de Meuron; more.)

Beaver Overthinking Dam: “After much thought, Messner decided to reconstruct the anterior section of the dam with poplar wood on Tuesday, after he finished ‘highly necessary’ preparatory work chewing the branches into uniform-sized interlocking sticks. Yet such tasks struck fellow lodge members as excessive.”

A Reddit reader comments: “Anyone who complains that this shouldn’t be on the programming subreddit, shouldn't be on the programming subreddit.”

“Are copycat cars a sincere form of flattery?” The new Lexus LS looks very much like Mercedes’ S-Class.

“Typically, the videotape of the accidental discharge has been broadcast, presented or disclosed to others for the purposes of amusement and to demean and to ridicule Mr. Paige, especially in light of the accidental discharge occurring at virtually the same time that Mr. Paige told his audience that he was the only person in the room sufficiently professional enough to carry the firearm.” The DEA Agent who shot himself in foot while speaking to school kids? He’s suing the DEA for “improper disclosure” of the video.

“Six generals have spoken out against him. Is that a lot?” How many times does Rumsfeld have to offer to resign already? When Abu Ghraib was in the news, he offered to resign twice—but Bush didn’t accept his resignation. (And more recently, he’s said “we all serve at the pleasure of the President”.) Asking him again, however nicely, probably isn’t going to do it.

Head of Al-Jazeera: “George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld complain about us, but we've broadcast more than 5,000 hours of Bush's speeches, live, translated into Arabic; we have not aired more than five hours of bin Laden's.” An average of 20 hours a week over five years cannot possibly be right, so this is either wrong, misleading, or a mis-quote. (What’s especially curious is that the printed version of Newsweek uncritically uses this as the pull-quote.)

Even Homer’s brain knows that “Money can be exchanged for good and services.” Looks like he’s gonna be able to avoid having to declare this as income too, since the IRS grants you an exception if you perform less than 100 transactions a year.

“Experiment: Replace ordinary eggs in cake recipe with Cadbury Creme Eggs and observe results. Hypothesis: THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME.”

Spike Lee’s “Inside Man” (decent movie) uses this track—“Chaiyya Chaiyya”, from the Bollywood movie “Bombay Dreams”—to incredible (and improbable) effect over the opening and closing titles. (The reviewers of the movie’s soundtrack at the iTunes store and Amazon are singularly obsessed with it.)

Lymphatic filariasis—a disease which results grossly swollen limbs—affects 120 million people; there is no cure, and to eradicate it, “every infected person must be given a dose of worm-killing medicine once per year for six years.” (Or, you can have everyone eat treated salt.)

What happens when opera-goers arrive late? The late policies of various concert halls.

On Muzak, the company who make mix tapes for retailers. Former Muzak executive Alvin Collis: “I walked into a store and understood: this is just like a movie. The company has built a set, and they’ve hired actors and given them costumes and taught them their lines, and every day they open their doors and say, ’Let’s put on a show.’ It was retail theatre. And I realized then that Muzak’s business wasn’t really about selling music. It was about selling emotion—about finding the soundtrack that would make this store or that restaurant feel like something, rather than being just an intellectual proposition.”

(I’m also intrigued by Muzak’s preference for Bose and Klipsch audio equipment. Bose speakers get a lot of stick on the web, but I can remember several occasions when I’ve noticed good sound, checked out the speakers, and discovered they were Bose. Maybe their commercial equipment is better? I had a particularly enjoyable Bose-augmented ice cream at the MIT Toscanini’s a few years ago. The setup included a 10 foot by one foot black cylinder slung from the ceiling that at least looked impressive.)

Slashdotter on Boot Camp: “You get the stability of Windows with the value-of-money of Apple hardware. Sign me up.” (I so appreciate how this anonymous commenter resisted the temptation to add a smiley, too.)

Surprisingly dull and ill-fitting video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.”

French work ethic? The new labour laws are bad because “when I do get a job I will basically have to work as hard as I can to keep it.”

The Mr Men characters are 35 years old! The original author, Roger Hargreaves, died suddenly in 1988; his son has been drawing them ever since.

Target (the retailer) is for some reason donating significant amounts of time and money to police departments, helping them solve crimes that have nothing to do with “loss prevention.” According to an FBI Special Agent, Target has “one of the nation’s top forensics labs”; Target’s forensic investigators “spend 45 percent of their time offering pro-bono assistance to law enforcement.”

“The God of Realism”: Robert Hughes on Rembrandt.

Measuring poverty: in the US, the poverty line for the last 40 years has been set at three times a (very minimal) food budget. This approach has many obvious problems, but, according to this piece, it’s difficult to say even whether it underestimates or overestimates the poverty rate—“Such considerations suggest that the official measures understate the extent of poverty, but the opposite argument can also be made.” (Though it almost certainly underestimates the problem in big cities, where accommodation takes up a much larger proportion of the household budget than it used to.)

Rare picture of two US carriers (the Nimitz-class USS John C. Stennis and the Kitty Hawk-class USS John F. Kennedy), the French carrier FS Charles de Gaulle, the Royal Navy’s HMS Ocean (a sort of carrier for helicopters) and several Italian and Dutch ships.

I’m with Anil on this one: year-on-year, the tech world’s April Fool efforts are pretty dismal. (Google’s effort is particularly leaden—see the tour.) P22’s contribution is a a font of “spacing sorts,” (in metal, retailed for $10 in 1912!) which not only actually exists (“order” it), but includes the full set of Unicode spacing characters.

BusBike: exercise bikes mounted inside a buses that drive loops of Rio de Janeiro combine the best features of … wait, this doesn’t make sense.

Pleased to meet you, with meat to please you: officially licensed NASCAR® meats!

A whole heap of stuff is being built—somewhat improbably, given its history, climate, prospects—in Dubai.

Sweet-as military-styled mobile phone.

Stay Free on John Kerry’s tour rider (at the Smoking Gun): “I can't believe how clearly Kerry reconfirmed the flip-flopper tag.”

How to spin the tires (tyres, surely?) on Rolls Royce Phantom.

James Surowiecki says the newspaper business is still a decent business to be in: whilst there’s no potential for extreme growth (unlike high-tech stocks, say), they’re solidly profitable year after year, and will remain a big industry for quite some time.

Why and how physicians participate in executions. Atul Gawande describes some botched executions, interviews four physicians and a nurse who have participated, and ultimately argues that—even though he himself does not have a problem with the death penalty—if there’s no way to perform executions without the involvement of medical professionals, they shouldn’t be conducted at all.

How aircraft passenger-evacuation tests are conducted. (In a test of the A380, 873 people got off in less than 90 seconds, though they didn’t have to cope with smoke, and weren’t especially fearful for the lives.)

Dick Cheney’s “Downtime Suite” requirements. All televisions are to be tuned to Fox News! Can’t the Secret Service leave the lights on after checking out the room? And he drinks Hotel-provided water? That seems … less than prudent. (New Smoking Gun design, too.)

Trades made by Googlers. They sure are selling a lot of stock. You can also get the trades of specific people, for example, Sergey Brin.

(Debt as a percentage of GDP.) The US is below a whole lot of countries, including Japan, Germany and France. I don’t really understand what all this means, though. Why did Russia need to default on its loans when its debt is only 15% of GDP? What countries are in credit? [Some of the debt is internal; half of Japan’s debt is evidently internal, which is apparently the better sort of debt to have.]

Ha, Philip Greenspun, concerned that the new MIT swimming pool didn’t provide soap in the showers (“I thought this was kind of disgusting because it means that people don’t take soap showers before swimming (in theory someone could make an extra trip back and forth to a locker, but I haven’t seen it done)”) volunteered to donate the soap, but was knocked back. Fast-forward to now, and the pool is shut down, apparently because “the bacteria got out of control.”

Figure I should put this up: the top 50 blogs in September 2000.

The little Virgina Quarterly Review scored six nominations in the National Magazine Awards (only the Atlantic got more). “What makes VQR distinctive is simply that it has the immediacy of the Atlantic or The New Yorker, but its longer pieces (upwards of 10,000 words) appear alongside 20 pages of poetry. … Inside, the magazine has none of the coyness of the current crop of small magazines, like McSweeney’s, The Believer, or N+1.”

Spell-correction algorithms plus customer behaviour data-mining led Amazon to suggest “adoption” to customers who searched for “abortion” until recently. (They disabled this after pro-abortion campaigners complained.)

Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad (6th richest person in the world) apparently drives a 13-year-old Volvo (well, so he says)—and this when he’s not taking the bus. (There’s links to the (surprisingly humble) rides of other rich people from this page.)

Right to take photographs in public spaces trumps right to privacy. (And right to practise one’s religion, sort of.) But: only if the photographs are considered art, and you might have to prove it.

“Live Pelt, by Kelly Heaton, is a multimedia installation based on the transformation of 64 previously owned Tickle Me Elmo dolls, the popular consumer toy, into a woman’s coat. Fashioned from the toys’ pelts and electronics, the coat (entitled The Surrogate) provides full body vibration and is designed to be a substitute lover.”

OED-compiled word FAQ. They want to call CamelCase medial capitals though, which so isn’t gonna work out.

Slate has some doubts about the viability of Catholic planned city Ave Maria—shared beliefs won’t be enough, the author says, you need shared culture too. Well yeah, but residents who move there will know what they’re getting in to, so this might not be too much of a problem. Meanwhile, the Free State Project (“pro-liberty” planned city) appears to be treading water; it’s a bit hard to tell how the other Christian planned community, Christian Exodus is doing. But good luck to them all! More polarisation I say!

In 1962, a U.S. high-altitute (400km!) nuclear test knocked out one-third of the satellites in low earth orbit, including the first commercial communications satellite, Telstar.

Forgot to post about this a while ago: should Craigslist be held responsible for discriminatory ads? (“African Americans and Arabians tend to clash with me so that won’t work out” and so forth.) There’s lots of excellent edge cases here: can you post ads exclusively in foreign languages, for example? Or say “Chinese speakers preferred”? There was a fascinating case a few years ago concerning an apartment building the owner had decided to call Korean World Towers because (or so the argument went) he preferred Korean tenants. He wasn’t Korean himself, and didn’t actively discriminate against non-Koreans—so, the question was, did putting Korean in your building name amount to discrimination?

“Anti-travel” through forgotten & useless parts of Russia. (Vissarion profile)

Take a grim government-issue “Meal, Ready-to-Eat” (MRE), style it up, take a photo.

Wow, Annie Proulx is real unhappy Crash got the best picture Oscar. “And rumour has it that Lions Gate inundated the academy voters with DVD copies of Trash—excuse me—Crash a few weeks before the ballot deadline.” I didn’t think it deserved to win either, but this is unbecoming! And is it necessary to have a go at the Academy as well? “From the first there was an atmosphere of insufferable self-importance emanating from ‘the show’ which, as the audience was reminded several times, was televised and being watched by billions of people all over the world. Those lucky watchers could get up any time they wished and do something worthwhile, like go to the bathroom.” We frisbee players have a saying: it doesn’t hurt so much if you catch the disc. Would she have been so scornful had Brokeback Mountain won?

Poetry like “The Mouse’s Tail.”

Google bad news blog. This is pretty decent, although the most recent entry is wrong in claiming that the $90 million Google has offered to pay in click-fraud settlement is to settle just one case—it’s to settle all of them.

Promoting works of art: the Tate Britain has been running an unusual ad campaign recently. Basically, instead of doing what’s generally done, and promoting a special exhibition of famous art by a famous fellow and encouraging you to run along because this is the one and only time you’re gonna be able to see such fine works in your life, they’re running billboard ads that group a half-dozen works from their permanent collection around a theme—and not grand themes like war or love or the farm but themes more personal, idiosyncratic, quotidian like I have a big meeting, happily depressed and haven’t been here for ages—and suggesting that you might like to form your own personal “collection” in the same vein.

I was a bit sceptical of all this at first (the chatty, cheery tone of the ads was a little disconcerting) but I’m much more up on it now. I’m not sure if it’s right to emphasise one’s emotional responses to art over the aesthetic, but it’s an issue worth thinking about, and quite apart from all this, the ads are certainly memorable, so in that respect I guess they “sell.”

“Africa and teamwork inspire me.” Street fashion from Helsinki. (I do genuinely like this, but there is also some quality amusement to be had. Another: “Caps are the corner stone of my style. I collect them but I’ve lost all the others except this one.” More serious: “My style is neo-conservative: I'm a walking contradiction because I respect the muslim traditions, but I mix traditional clothing with punk style. I'm sure there are no other muslim girls with a similar style in Finland.”)

“Overheard made me straight.” “Huh?” “Overheard in New York, the website?” “I know what it is. How the fuck could it make you straight?”

House hunting with the super-rich and super-precious: “It’s almost time for lunch, but Wendy and her team decide to squeeze in one more viewing. ‘There’s a house owned by an artist that might have the character you’re looking for.’ Oh, Wendy, how you must wish you hadn’t done it! … Three hours later, Yuki is sobbing hysterically, Bruce is having a stand-up fight with the caretaker, and the police and an ambulance have been called.”

“Why costume designers hate the Academy Awards.”

To reduce the impact of jet travel on the environment, the founders of travel-book companies Lonely Planet and The Rough Guide are encouraging travellers to “fly less and stay longer.”

Audio of Malcolm Gladwell’s Feb 21st talk on a possible prodigies/late bloomers dichotomy. (This reminds me: in A Mathematician’s Apology, G.H. Hardy wrote: “No mathematician should ever allow himself to forget that mathematics, more than any other art or science, is a young man’s game. … I do not know an instance of a major mathematical advance initiated by a man past fifty.”)

About Yoko Ono’s art and the Fluxus movement she was part of. (She met John Lennon at an exhibition after he climbed a ladder to view one of her paintings (hung just below the ceiling) on which she’d painted the word Yes. Lennon: “It’s a great relief when you get up the ladder and you look through the spyglass and it doesn’t say no or fuck you; it says YES.”)

Good news, bad news: BBC news stories classified by mood.

“It is a sign of the times that there has been no storm of protest over the increasingly manipulative and moralistic character of anti-smoking propaganda.” I particularly dislike the ads that show the damage cigarettes do to lungs, as if it were self-evident that if something looks bad, it is bad.

Reporter goes shopping with fashion-conscious skater Johnny Weir in Turin, helps him buy his 103rd pair of sunglasses and a whole lot of other gear.

Big list of killers with the middle name Wayne.

Are mercenaries ever a justifiable response to a humanitarian crisis?

How to write about Africa: “Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa.”

The iPod, with packaging designed by Microsoft.

Problems encountered by Australians wishing to wage Jihad: “Thomas, 32, also said that although he loved Islam, his love of beer had made his conversion a dilemma.”

Um, is it not really weird that the purchaser of the 1 billionth song on iTunes gets (as well as Apple goodies) a scholarship at Julliard established in their name? I don’t see how this would drive many purchases, but if the only point of it is a PR exercise for Apple (to demonstrate support for young musicians?), why not give it in Apple’s name?

Video of Cat Power’s “Living Proof,” directed by the very strange Harmony Korine.

It’s seemingly very difficult to get hold of police complaint forms in South Florida. (Great transcripts.)

Dahlia Lithwick: should pharmacists be able to refuse to dispense the morning after pill on moral grounds? Should doctors be able to refuse to participate in executions for the same reason?

Compilation of Macworld keynote bloopers. See Steve Jobs try to work a digital camera!

Malcolm Gladwell (in his new blog!) retracts almost everything he said in favour of the American healthcare system in a 2000 debate on the relative merits of the Canadian and American systems: “I now agree with virtually everything Adam said and disagree with virtually everything I said.” This is nice, because I avoided posting this because I thought Gladwell didn’t make a very good case. (In particular, his argument that young men don’t need healthcare. “I have never bought the argument that the American system is all that bad for poor men. I think it’s fine for poor men. Remember, men don't need health care until they’re middle-aged. If you look at the population of people in America who are uninsured, they’re all young. There aren't old people on that list. And it is not a bad thing for a 25-year-old male not to have health insurance.”)

Snowboarders love their iPods, listening even when they’re competing in the Olympics.

Update on Thomas Hendry, the New Zealander who scored an honorary mention in the 1999 Darwin Awards for winning a bar competition by stapling his penis to a white crucifix, pouring lighter fluid over it, and setting it on fire. He’s now living in Melbourne, runs a goth nightclub, and still has the crucifix. (Australia has very strict quarantine controls; he had to pay customs $30 to fumigate it.)

Nice account of a bank heist in Buenos Aires: the bank was surrounded by over 100 police officers, but robbers got away with cash and safe-deposit boxes through a previously dug tunnel; no shots were fired, and it turned out that their guns were props. (more)

In NYC, moustaches are proliferating (are they?): “Two years ago, mustaches on young men drew stares. These days, few men ride the L train without one.”

“Competitive Eaters Seek to Weigh Hasselhoff’s Head.”

Kinda interesting discussion about why Pooh (and other children’s book characters) is popular amongst gay men. (Funny how Google Answers results don’t come up very often in Google searches.)

Nobel Prize for literature citations still incomprehensible. Last year’s winner: Harold Pinter, “who in his plays uncovers the precipice under everyday prattle and forces entry into oppression’s closed rooms.”

A link—or at least a correlation—between not taking risks and getting Parkinson’s? “The study found patients with Parkinson’s disease had smoked less, drank less alcohol and caffeine. They also scored lower on sensation-seeking and risk taking behaviour, and higher on anxiety and depression than the comparison group.”

What’s the deal with these pictures and characterisations of scientists, supposed produced by 7th graders before and after visiting Fermilab? They’re clearly fake in some way: what 7th grader says “in turn”? Or uses “truly” like this: “A scientist, truly, is a normal, happy, nice person.”

“For years, suspicion has been growing in the orchards of the Wenatchee Valley in Washington State and in the food industry at large that fruit, nature's original hand-held convenience food, is simply too poorly designed for today's busy eater.” Excellent piece, touches on many issues.

“Sullivan replied that he thought it meant ‘stubborn,’ but the word is a vulgar slang referring to a woman’s body part in tight clothing.”

Somewhat chilling insurgent propaganda video of a sniper operating in Iraq.

“There’s no substantial business today in charging companies money for the privilege of indexing one’s book …” I do so enjoy Cory Doctorow’s earnest rants. If you fancy yourself as a pundit on this sort of stuff, shouldn’t you know that “charging companies money for the privilege of indexing one’s book” almost exactly describes the relationship between the magazine business and Nexis? (Nexis is an (enormously expensive) full-text search engine for magazine content.) And that to some extent, this arrangement is even blessed by the courts and authors, given that they agreed to the Copyright Class Action Settlement? Is this not relevant? (I don’t know whether this should happen; I’m merely noting that it does.)

(Also, I just discovered that LexisNexis now offer a cheaper-than-Nexis service called LexisNexis AlaCarte!. The main difference is that the database is smaller (3.8 billion articles instead of 6 billion), and that you pay per article ($3 or so); searches are free. It’s not great—the New Yorker archives only go back to 1999, for example—but it’s at least affordable.)

“For Europeans, scolding the Bush administration for everything from Guantanamo to the Iraq War to secret CIA prisons has become a full-time job. But when it comes to the American scandal over President Bush’s warrantless wiretaps, there’s been a curious reaction from the other side of the Atlantic: silence. Where is the European outrage? … The three worst offenders are not countries you would suspect of playing fast and loose with civil liberties: Britain, Italy, and the Netherlands.”

“Abusive Obsessive-Compulsive Has To Punch Wife Exactly 20 Times.”

Nice multi-variate NY snow-accumulation graphic.

Interview with Dan Savage.

You joke about people getting your advice and then killing themselves, but do you have any actual anxiety about the effect your column may have on people?

No. I feel like I’m a compassionate guy, but I also feel if somebody’s grip on life or sanity is so tenuous that a joke in an advice column that usually is nothing but jokes pushes them over the edge, then if not me, it would have been a leaf blowing past them that did it, or something else. You almost have to feel that way, doing this. And also, I’m not a big anti-suicide guy. I don’t regard suicide necessarily as this huge unspeakable act of selfishness or tragedy. Some people take themselves out for completely legit reasons. Hopefully they’ll get help, hopefully they’ll think about it, but if they want to check out, I feel like they have a right to do that.

Interesting: an Iranian paper is holding a contest for Holocaust cartoons in “retaliation” (BBC’s word) for the cartoons depicting Muhammad. The paper, Hamshahri, says it’s more about probing potential free-speech inconsistencies (which is plausible in theory, at least). Jyllands-Posten has already said it will reprint the cartoons—will the other papers follow suit? (Will it be legal for them to do so? A lot of countries in Europe have specific anti-Nazi laws (governing the sale of memorabilia, at least). Is it legal to deny the Holocaust, say?)

The IE 7 team have some good ideas on how printing should work. (Has everyone given up on print style sheets by now? I never really did see the point of those: anything interesting you might do will also produce a truly disorienting user experience. If someone wants to print just give ’em another page and let them print that.)

Pete Doherty: “While he has been stopped or arrested by the police at least 10 times since November, last Friday was the worst day so far. Before dawn, Mr. Doherty was arrested here on suspicion of driving erratically while on drugs. While he was at the police station, he was arrested again, on suspicion of assaulting a fan at a recent concert. Three hours later, wandering erratically down the street, he was arrested a third time, charged with carrying heroin in his jeans.”

Oh I love slippery slopes! If you want to kill yourself by slashing your wrists, should you be given clean blades? Says one advocate: “There is a clear comparison with giving clean needles to reduce HIV.”

(I also like this one: “‘It’s rough if you’re a transsexual—it’s even rougher if you try to explain that you’re a cat in a human body,’ says another Furry fan, who bemoaned the fact that Furries can’t opt to surgically change their species in the way transexuals can change their gender.”)

Long Annie Proulx piece on how she felt about her short story “Brokeback Mountain” being made into a film.

On Ang Lee: “I was nervous about meeting Ang Lee, despite his reputation as a brilliant and highly skilled. Would we have anything to say to each other? Were the cultural gaps surmountable? … Later, there were some disagreements. In the written story the motel scene, after a four-year hiatus, stood as central. During their few hours in the Motel Siesta, Jack’s and Ennis’s paths were irrevocably laid out. In the film that Ang Lee already had shaped in his mind, the emotional surge contained in that scene would be better shifted to a later point and melded with the men’s painful last meeting. I didn’t understand this until I saw the film in September 2005 and recognised the power of this timing.”

And on seeing the film for the first time: “Here it was, the point that writers do not like to admit; film can be more powerful than the written word. I realised that if Ang Lee had been born in Barrow or Novosibirsk it would likely have been the same. He understands human feelings and is not afraid to walk into dangerous territory.”

Not ideal: Annie Proulx’s short story “Brokeback Mountain” apparently used to be at this URL, but it’s (effectively) a 404 now. The problem is that if you do a Google search for site:newyorker.com brokeback mountain it returns this page, because a whole lot of pages use “brokeback mountain” as the link text. (The Google cache page says: These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: brokeback mountain.)

(newyorker.com also isn’t returning a “real” 404 error—it’s returning a page that says the page can’t be found, but the usually-invisible response code indicates that the page loaded okay—which I suspect is compounding the problem by preventing Google from removing the page from its cache.)

Where map geeks and music geeks intersect… Map superimposes 20th Century musicians over London’s tube map; musicians at intersections supposedly lie at the intersections of musical styles, too. (Beck gets King’s Cross; the RZA (!) get Bank.) The map is apparently sponsored by London Underground, who are also selling the map; this, according to the introductory notes, is why there’s no station called Massive Attack. (I live at Buddy Holly!)

Johnny Dang is Houston’s jeweller-king of ornamental dentistry.

“There’s no reason for it to exist in English”: Garrison Keillor is very unhappy with Bernard-Henri Lévy’s survey of America. One complaint seems to be that Lévy (who comes across as quite sensible in his Salon interview) has focussed on the outlandish, extreme, supersized aspects of America: “You meet Sharon Stone and John Kerry and a woman who once weighed 488 pounds and an obese couple carrying rifles, but there’s nobody here whom you recognize. In more than 300 pages, nobody tells a joke. Nobody does much work. Nobody sits and eats and enjoys their food.”

(I don’t think this is terrifically meaningful complaint—travellers fixate on what’s different, not what’s similar. It’s not the sensibly-sized drink portions you write home about, it’s the really really big ones.)

In reponse, Lévy’s basically accuses Keillor of being a Francophobe; in his review, Keillor says, “as always with French writers, Lévy is short of facts, long on conclusions,” though this comes just after he complains about Lévy’s sweeping “as alwayses,” so it’s probably a joke.

Update 3rd Feb: added Lévy’s reponse, softened Keillor criticism.

Agenda for Iran’s Holocaust Conference. 12.15pm: Famous Jews in History: Were They Really Jews?

Amongst journalists, Tab is an improbably popular drink.

(Podcastable) Radio News from The Onion. e.g. “Report: Lab Monkeys 96 Percent More Likely To Use Cocaine Than Those In Wild.”

Great profile of a very successful and very good children’s entertainer called the Great Zucchini … who also, as it turns out, has a gambling problem, an organisational problem, and (most likely) some psychological problems as well.

A live discussion with the author of the piece addresses some of the obvious questions, like what the Great Zucchini thinks of the story, and whether the piece is likely to mess with his career, in the same way that David Friedman’s career was apparently damaged by Capturing the Friedmans.

Brad Pitt looking like Jennifer (when with Jennifer), Gwyneth (when with Gwyneth) and Angelina (when with Angelina).

Blurring images to make them look like shots of miniatures.

Great, informative, exchange between Valerie Lawson, the author of a book on the creator of Mary Poppins (Pamela Travers) and The New Yorker. Lawson felt that a recent article about Poppins carried insufficient acknowledgement of her work, given that it contained many details about Travers that could only (Lawson says) have come from her research.

What seems to be the case is that: (a) The New Yorker did do more original research than Lawson had anticipated; (b) some of the facts uncovered by Lawson were subsequently repeated in documentaries, etc. about Travers, and not sourced in ways that made clear they were due to Lawson, and this made it possible the New Yorker to argue that they had alternative sources; and (c) overall, Lawson should have been given more credit. Anyway, all this is couched in extremely delicate and precise language (particularly that of the letters from The New Yorker, who necessarily needed to be more careful) that makes wonderful, fascinating reading.

(I don’t think Lawson should have sent the final letter for publication; it doesn’t seem to reflect her feelings about the matter, and now The New Yorker have her printed complaint reduced to what the CJR describes as a “relatively benign effort.”)

“Man lives in tree after domestic spat.” (India crazy.)

Until the 50s, heroin was a legal, and relatively commonly prescribed drug in the UK.

On the dwindling numbers of craftsmen working in haute couture. “Since the 1920s, when there were about 10,000 French embroiderers, the population has shrunk to about 200, Lesage said.” Some of it does seem unnecessarily inefficient: “… it is common for Michel to send a hat to Lesage for embroidery and then to Lemarii for plumes and petals.” (Oh! to work in plumes and petals!)

Haha, first London snatches the 2012 Olympics from Paris, now this: “London set to host the start of the Tour de France in 2007.”

Mostly thoughtful and sincere criticism of Sarah Silverman’s comedy: “Silverman’s inconsistencies also extend to the convenient shield of her meticulously crafted persona of the oblivious racist, which she fades in and out of during every single interview.”

The issues surrounding Iran and its (apparent) run for nuclear weapons. (Fred Kaplan is not hopeful.)

Re audiobooks: how to read footnotes, and other textual annotations? (David Foster Wallace apparently says “dot dot dot” when he hits an ellipsis.) What to do about “I{heart}NY”?

Awesome: some guy’s list of the best 65 music videos of 2005. A lot of bands I’ve never heard of, but good descriptions, and every single link goes directly to a QuickTime-compatible download. Even more impressive: as of now, none of the links are broken! The no. 1 pick—Sigur Rós’s Glosoli—is one of my favourites as well.

The Wish FAQ: “Hint: Avoid phrases that are open to catastrophic interpretation, such as ‘for the rest of my life.’” (Sadly no ruling on this situation (Overheard in New York): “Teen boy #1: I’m starving. If I had three wishes, I’d ask for three David’s bagels. Teen boy #2: Why not just use one wish and ask for three bagels?”)

Good piece on how reality TV shows choose contestants, how the shows are run, and how contestants and failed contestants are affected by the experience. The conclusion seems to be that the producers: (a) don’t actively manipulate people, because they don’t need to—they do put prospective contestants through a lot of tests in a (largely successful) attempt to predict how they’ll behave; and (b) they will selectively edit to highlight aspects of a contestant’s personality. (Also, a psychologist involved in the screening process explained his involvement by saying: “… I saw it as a social-psych experiment, something that’s almost impossible to do now because the experiments might cause people emotional strife or discord. I was given the chance to look at people’s personalities and make predictions about their behavior and perhaps do some good in protecting someone from being put on the show who shouldn’t be.”)

Eurasians are more beautiful, healthy, intelligent, etc.? (Nice theory, not very convincing.)

The Red Cross is apparently running an ad that ridicules almost all well-meaning attempts to “save the world”—except donating blood, that is. (I can’t get the ad working on my Mac.) Whilst I do believe that every charity needs to think seriously about why it is more important than its brethren (as with religions, if they don’t believe they are more worthy than the others, they should close down), and anyone trying to get money for e.g. Greenpeace, say, should certainly be able to explain why theirs is a better cause than, say, e.g. Unicef (and vice versa), directly attacking other charities seems unproductive, ill-mannered and unbecoming.

The right way to sell RFID (cartoon). (I didn’t know Dr. Fun still existed! Some others: beavers, Knuth.)

Some cute fake signs. (Matches English signage pretty accurately, actually, particularly the tube ones: “In case of train delay / please snap stresstwig.”)

Some young Japanese are shutting themselves into their rooms, and effectively never coming out.

Interview with author of American Plastic: A Cultural History, on how plastic’s reputation has changed over the last hundred years.

Profile of Bode Miller, the maverick skier somewhat notorious for telling 60 Minutes that he’s raced drunk.

Surreal: once upon a time, prospective al-Qaida recruits filled out enrollment forms that included fields for what the applicant wanted to do after training (“Train and return,” “Jihad,” “Work within a group.”), and the details of an emergency contact.

Julian Dibbell makes $11,000 selling items on Ultima Online, asks the IRS if this is taxable income, or what. They don’t know, and suggest that he pay $650 + lawyers’ fees to find out. (I think part of the problem here is that some of this money is bound up in virtual objects still held within UO—although fundamentally I don’t see why the issue is that different to the issue of taxing stock market gains, another self-contained system of completely virtual “goods.”)

Dahlia Lithwick is reporting on Sam Alito’s confirmation hearing. “There are, it seems, better and worse ways to game your Supreme Court confirmation hearings. … Sam Alito has chosen to simply bore his way through, and as a consequence, two days into the hearings, the Democrats on the judiciary committee have hardly laid a glove on him. … There are some tangible benefits to this approach: For one thing, Alito has thus far generated not one flash of heat. There has been no clash, no argument, no losing of his temper. He is like a very, very smart rock.”

iTunes 6.0.2 phones home to Apple with your listening history? Turns out that it only does this if the “MiniStore” pane is open, but the fact that it does this at all, and never made it particularly clear that it does it, is kinda dodgy.

I do find it interesting, though, that there are people who are upset and concerned about this sort of behaviour, and there are also people who are happy to record their listening history on last.fm—and these are often the exact same people (!). Cory Doctorow, for example (who wrote the Boing Boing post), has voluntarily given last.fm almost 25000 tracks’ worth of his listening history. There are clearly significant differences between the last.fm and iTunes cases, but the practical difference seems slight. For some reason people think they are getting something from sending their listening history to last.fm, but not to the iTunes Music Store. I guess it’s that last.fm seems more … grassroots, open, community centered—but why does this make such a difference? (And can last.fm, Flickr, and so on continue to have this feel?)

The 4-Year-Old on a Blind Date.

Check out the Ron Jeremy version! (In the kinder, gentler, pre-Internet times, people took photos of passers-by being startled by a backfiring van.)

Furniture in the style of minor historical figures: artist Paul Davies, inspired by a single image of a sturdy and stolid-looking 80s video-game champ called Ned Troide (once played Defender for over 60 hours!), has created a line of “Ned Troide” furniture. (e.g. combination fake fireplace and hot dog cooker.)

Self-sacrifice is evidence of God? Email claims that mostly older Buckhannon miners gave some of their oxygen to the one survivor, a young father, and says that this “could only be the work of the Lord.” (Uh, no.)

Are take-away pizza menus good design, or bad? “The fact is, pizza flyers set up precisely the right expectations about the product and the service: cheap, cheerful and quick. The choice of visual language any graphic designer makes should be appropriate both to the message and to the intended audience.”

Somewhat eager analysis of SNL’s infamous Chronic of Narnia. “The Narnia rap doesn’t use the MCs’ extraordinary whiteness as a comedy crutch. Rather than invite easy laughs by reciting a tired checklist of ghetto stereotypes, Samberg and Parnell ditch the bling and Cristal to riff enthusiastically about the stuff they like—Magnolia Bakery’s ‘bomb frostings.’”

Flash games produced by the Nobel Prize’s education/outreach division, completely inexplicable in purpose and design. Michele puts it well: “high-minded yet fail so hard.”

For the Lord of the Flies game, for example, you not only need to have read the book (you are warned about this), but—unless you have a very good memory—need to have read the book in like the last month, because the very first thing you need to do is drag icons of various different objects (hats, glasses, etc.) and speech bubbles onto named characters.

Pictures of Volkswagen’s extremely pretty “Glass Factory,” which contains the production line for the Phaeton. It has wooden floors. (Or at least it looks like it; actual wood doesn’t seem much out of place, though.)

(Largely silent) documentary about a (largely silent) order of monks is popular in Germany.

This is No Game: “You will never know what it’s like to work on a farm until your hands are raw, just so people can have fresh marijuana. Or what it’s like to go to a factory and put in eight long hours and then go home and realize that you went to the wrong factory.”

The inexplicable popularity of Chuck Norris. (CHUCK NORRIS!)

“Plan To Straighten Out Entire Life During Weeklong Vacation Yields Mixed Results.” Letter to the editor: I sympathise…

The restaurants in Ikea’s German stores are apparently very popular: there’s only 37 stores, but they have the 11th highest revenue.

“Flocks of people wait outside early every morning in order to storm the buffet at 9 a.m., when the store opens its doors. Long-distance drivers like to use IKEAs as rest stops since most of the stores are easy to see from the highway and are located close to an exit.”

Somewhat interesting report on the reliability of Apple laptops, a subject somewhat close to my heart. I suspect the absolute numbers aren’t reliable—people would have been more likely to actually complete the survey if their machine had required a repair—but the differences in failure rates between machines, and components of machines, is interesting. The hard drive on my model of 12" PowerBook, for example, is about twice a likely to have been replaced as the average. (I had to get mine replaced.)

(Someone should also use this data to figure out if the (extremely expensive) extended warranty is in fact worthwhile.)

Lone Star Statements: One star Amazon reviews of notable books.