Gulfstream

http://www.rm116.com/adcenter/2006/03/a_gym_with_a_vi.html 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. 23:18

http://www.tastetheexcitement.com/ Pleased to meet you, with meat to please you: officially licensed NASCAR® meats! 23:05

http://www.guardian.co.uk/g2/story/0,,1708287,00.html A whole heap of stuff is being built—somewhat improbably, given its history, climate, prospects—in Dubai. 21:45

http://blog.stayfreemagazine.org/2006/03/kerry_flip_flop.html Stay Free on John Kerry’s tour rider (at the Smoking Gun): “I can't believe how clearly Kerry reconfirmed the flip-flopper tag.” 21:34

http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/03/29/docomo_music_porter_
x/ Sweet-as military-styled mobile phone. 07:22

http://money.cnn.com/2006/03/22/Autos/carreviews/rolls_maybach/
index.htm How to spin the tires (tyres, surely?) on Rolls Royce Phantom. 22:28

http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/articles/060403ta_
talk_surowiecki 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. 22:03

http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/354/12/1221 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. 21:19

http://www.slate.com/id/2138847/ 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.) 20:06

http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0322061cheney1.html 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.) 15:22

http://finance.yahoo.com/q/it?s=goog 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. 18:25

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_public_
debt (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.] 10:20

http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2006/03/22#a13365 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.” 08:14

http://beebo.org/metalog/ Figure I should put this up: the top 50 blogs in September 2000. 00:07

http://www.slate.com/id/2138219/ 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.” 08:12

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/20/technology/20amazon.html 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.) 00:00

http://www.ezprezzo.com/crazypics/lego_aircraft_carrier.html 19:27

http://www.forbesautos.com/advice/toptens/billionaire/05-
ingvar_kamprad.html 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.) 18:55

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/19/arts/design/19phot.html 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. 12:10

http://www.feldmangallery.com/pages/exhsolo/exhhea03.html “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.” 00:13

http://www.askoxford.com/asktheexperts/faq/ OED-compiled word FAQ. They want to call CamelCase medial capitals though, which so isn’t gonna work out. 10:06

http://www.slate.com/id/2138085/ 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! 08:21

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starfish_Prime 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. 23:25

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/05/weekinreview/05liptak.html 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? 21:15

http://books.guardian.co.uk/departments/travel/story/0,,
1730709,00.html “Anti-travel” through forgotten & useless parts of Russia. (Vissarion profile) 07:55

http://www.flickr.com/photos/governmentfood/ Take a grim government-issue “Meal, Ready-to-Eat” (MRE), style it up, take a photo. 00:05

http://books.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1727309,00.html 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? 21:36

http://3quarksdaily.blogs.com/3quarksdaily/2006/03/unconditional_
l.html Poetry like “The Mouse’s Tail.” 18:35

http://www.fuckedgoogle.com/ 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. 18:22

http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/yourcollection/ 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.” 23:12

http://www.hel-looks.com/ “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.”) 22:42

http://www.overheardinnewyork.com/archives/004544.html “Overheard made me straight.” “Huh?” “Overheard in New York, the website?” “I know what it is. How the fuck could it make you straight?” 07:59

http://property.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,14049-1988513,
00.html 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.” 00:02

http://www.slate.com/id/2137272/ “Why costume designers hate the Academy Awards.” 00:04

http://www.guardian.co.uk/international/story/0,,1723120,
00.html 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.” 13:40

http://www.newyorker.com/online/covers/articles/060306onco_
covers_gallery 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.”) 01:33

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20001218/danto 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.”) 01:25

http://www.latedecember.com/sites/moodnews/index.html Good news, bad news: BBC news stories classified by mood. 08:43

http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/0000000CAF8B.htm “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. 22:48