http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/30/world/30gitmo.html The U.S. reluctant to release some Guantanamo inmates because they might not be well-treated by their own governments? What? 12:25
Archives
This month: 27 entries.
http://www.helenakeeffe.com/ Interesting art/media projects with refreshingly straightforward descriptions of intent. 22:57
http://www.artnet.com/magazineus/features/drohojowska-philp/
drohojowska-philp4-19-06.asp 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. 12:52
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-dollar26apr26,0,2402981.story 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.”) 22:17
http://www.economist.com/PrinterFriendly.cfm?story_id=884045 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.” 11:36
http://www.skyscrapercity.com/showpost.php?p=7351533&postcount=1 Beijing Olympic stadium construction photographs. (By Herzog & de Meuron; more.) 21:59
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47469 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.” 21:44
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/12373162/ “Are copycat cars a sincere form of flattery?” The new Lexus LS looks very much like Mercedes’ S-Class. 21:13
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0411061foot1.html “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. 21:07
http://www.slate.com/id/2139847/ “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. 12:37
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12113769/site/newsweek/ 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.) 12:24
http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/ 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. 12:18
http://shmivejournal.livejournal.com/125746.html “Experiment: Replace ordinary eggs in cake recipe with Cadbury Creme Eggs and observe results. Hypothesis: THIS IS GOING TO BE SO AWESOME.” 15:44
http://youtube.com/watch?v=nMsv3MrbDcs 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.) 21:54
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/09/world/americas/09lymph.html 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.) 23:23
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/07/arts/music/07late.html What happens when opera-goers arrive late? The late policies of various concert halls. 08:19
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060410fa_
fact 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.) 13:30
http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=182273&cid=15065726 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.) 23:08
http://minasong.net/crazy_web.mov Surprisingly dull and ill-fitting video for Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” 21:56
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/4814762.stm 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.” 10:34
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4872780.stm 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. 10:15
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/
01/28/AR2006012801268.html 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.” 21:06
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18830 “The God of Realism”: Robert Hughes on Rembrandt. 17:08
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/articles/060403fa_
fact 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.) 09:18
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Fleet_5_nations.jpg 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. 08:51
http://www.p22.com/lanston/products/spacing_sorts.html 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. 17:24