The mile-high club: airline on airline lovin'

I love the cover of the most recent Bloomberg Businessweek:

Here's a peek at how the design process works at the magazine.

Historic explosions depicted in cauliflower

I love these cauliflower explosions done by Brock Davis...you can find them in his Food Stuff set on Flickr. Here's the Challenger explosion in cauliflower:

(via @josephholmes)

Charlotte's Web audiobook read by E.B. White

Did you know that the Charlotte's Web audiobook is read by E.B. White himself? He died in 1985 and must have recorded it before then. My wife and son listened to it on a long car trip this weekend and was declared "soooo good".

Short Errol Morris film about competitive eating

The NY Times has a short documentary film by Errol Morris on El Wingador, a five-time winner of the Wing Bowl. My favorite line from the film, uttered by an off-camera Morris:

Wait a second. That's cannibalism!

Though his several wins came early on in the competition's history, El Wingador is still competing in the Wing Bowl. In the 2012 competition, held today, El Wingador came in third while Takeru Kobayashi completely demolished the competition in his first attempt, eating 337 wings in the process.

Updates on previous entries for Feb 2, 2012*

What happened to the former slave that wrote his old master? orig. from Feb 02, 2012
The view from an old time burger joint orig. from Feb 02, 2012

* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

The view from an old time burger joint

From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.

For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home -- some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn't been altered since the early '60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.

(via @daveg)

Update: Over at Serious Eats, Ed Levine gives some advice on how to order properly at Prime Burger.

So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you're willing to wait the extra few minutes.

What happened to the former slave that wrote his old master?

You know that letter from former slave Jourdon Anderson to his old master that's been going around? First of all, it's good and you should read it.

As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you.

David Galbraith poked around a bit and found a record of Anderson still living in Ohio at the time of the 1900 census as "Jordan Anderson". Here's the relevant bit of the census form:

At the time, Anderson and his wife Mandy were in their 70s and had been married for 52 years. Mandy had borne 11 children, six of whom were still living (Anderson's letter, written in 1865, references five children, two of whom were "brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters"...not sure if they had died or not). The three children living with them in 1900 were all in their 20s, born several years after the letter was written.

There's also a record of Anderson from the 1880 census, this time as "Jordon Anderson". The birth year listed is different (1830 vs 1825) but the family relations are the same. This census lists two older children, William and Andrew, the eldest of whom was born right around the time of Jordan and Mandy's emancipation. Anderson's occupation is listed as "coachman".

I also found a record in the April 19, 1905 issue of the Dayton Daily Journal of Anderson's death. He was 79 years old.

Update: Ok, a bit more digging, with the help of an ancestry.com trial membership.

The 1870 census shows Anderson living in Ohio with Mandy, four children (Jane, Felix, William, and Andrew).

Jane is mentioned in the letter...is Felix the "Grundy" mentioned? There was a Felix Grundy who served as a US Senator from Anderson's home state of Tennessee in the 1830s who has a Tennessee county named after him...perhaps that's where the nickname came from? Also listed in the household is Percella Mcgregor, Mandy's mother.

And ho, what's this? From the 1920 Census, here's a record of who was living at 60 Burns Ave in Montgomery County, Ohio, the former address of Jordan Anderson:

Three families lived together at that address: Valentine and Abagail Anderson, who were both listed on the 1900 census form; Charles Johnson and his wife Eva, the same Eva listed as Jordan's daughter on the 1900 census form; and Samuel Stewart and his wife Scharlet, who is the same age as the Lottie listed on the 1900 census form. Everyone in the household is listed as being able to read and write, just as Jordan wished for them in his letter:

The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.

Amazing. Ancestry.com provides a lot more information about the family...here's a peek at the family tree:

Looks like Lottie lived until 1944, Eva died in 1937, and Jane in 1939. Oh and it looks like Felix is the Grundy mentioned in the letter. I'm sure there's lots more. For now, I'm going to try to alert the "owner" of the Jordan Anderson family tree to the existence of the letter...we'll see if they are related!

Update: The letter has already been added to the ancestry.com database by the tree's owner.

Early copy of Mona Lisa found

Restorers at the Prado Museum in Madrid, working on what they thought was a 16th or 17th century replica of the Mona Lisa, have discovered that the painting was actually done by a student of Leonardo's at the same time as the original.

Museum experts are in the process of stripping away a cover of black over-paint which, when fully removed, will reveal the youthfulness of the subject they say. The final area of over-paint will come off in the next few days.

The original "Mona Lisa" hangs in the Louvre but the sitter looks older than her years as the varnish is cracked. The painting is so fragile that restoration or cleaning is deemed too risky. The Prado version, however, will show the sitter as she was: a young woman in her early 20s.

Super Bowl preview for non-football fans

Just like they did last year, The Rumpus shares some of the stories of the players participating in the Super Bowl in a way that isn't as syrupy as Bob Costas.

For instance, there's Mark Herzlich, a former top NFL prospect who was diagnosed with bone cancer while in college, took a year off to beat the disease, returned to the game, and then went undrafted by every NFL team. As a last-ditch, he auditioned for training camp. By November, about two years after undergoing chemotherapy, Mark was a starting linebacker for the Giants.

There's five-foot-seven Danny Woodhead of the Patriots, a player considered too small even for Division I college football, who went to the only place that wanted him, a little school in Nebraska called Chadron State, where he worked his ass off, and by the time he graduated, he was college football's all-time leading rusher. He's still so anonymous that he worked at a sporting goods store on a day off last year and pretty much no one recognized him. Now he's a running back for a team in the goddamned Super Bowl.

Updates on previous entries for Feb 1, 2012*

Washing machine self-destructs orig. from Aug 31, 2011

* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

Gears and other mechanical things

This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.

(thx, matthew)

Through destruction, a washing machine achieves transcendence

You've seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you've seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.

At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)

Updates on previous entries for Jan 31, 2012*

Ice Cube's "Good Day" located orig. from Jan 30, 2012

* Q: Wha? A: These previously published entries have been updated with new information in the last 24 hours. You can find past updates here.

What a five-year-old thinks about famous logos

Designer Adam Ladd asked his five-year-old daughter for her impressions of several well-known logos. This is great:

(via stellar)

Mad Men season five fashion predictions

Over at Sew Weekly, Mena Trott predicts what some of the characters will be wearing in the coming season of Mad Men.

Oh, Betty. For years, she has been immaculately dressed and presented as the facade of the perfect 1950s/1960s wife. With her cinched waists and billowing skirts, she's held onto late 1950s and early 1960s fashion the longest. In season four, she's married to the anti-Don, the boring Henry Francis and is getting a little too familiar with the bottle. When you're married to Henry Francis, you just don't care any more. That should be embroidered on a pillow.

The unhappiness of technology

Over at The Wirecutter, Brian Lam writes about technology, journalism, happiness, and why "clicking the like button 1 billion times will never give you an orgasm or a hug or a high five".

The first thing I did was to take back my time. I quit all the online content that was id-provoking and knee jerk. I stopped reading the stupid hyped up news stories that are press releases or rants about things that will get fixed in a week. I stopped reading the junk and about the junk that was new, but not good. I stopped reading blogs that write stories like "top 17 photos of awesome clouds by iphone" and "EXCLUSIVE ANGRY BIRDS COMING TO FACEBOOK ON VALENTINES DAY." And corporate news that only affects the 1%. Most days, I feel like most internet writers and editors are engaging in the kind of vapid conversation you find at parties that is neither enlightening or entertaining, and where everyone is shouting and no one is saying anything. I don't have time for this.

Powers of Ten and Cosmic Zoom...which came first?

The Eames' Powers of Ten and Eva Szasz's Cosmic Zoom both came out in 1968 and were based on Kees Boeke's 1957 essay called Cosmic View. This seems like an incredible coincidence. I couldn't find anything online about which film came first or if there was any influence one way or the other, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows anything about which came out first. Hit me at jason@kottke.org.

How to pronounce things hilariously

The Pronunciation Book channel on YouTube shows you how to say various words in American English in a straightforward fashion. Here's how to say Zegna, the men's clothing brand:

This is not to be confused with the Pronunciation Manual channel, which does the same thing in the same format but much funnier and more incorrect.

I could have embedded a dozen more...I have no idea why I think these are so funny but I just cannot stop laughing at them. Ok, one more:

And this one! Make it stop!!

Chinese Oreos are tube-shaped

Well some of them are. The plain old American Oreo didn't sell so well in China, so Kraft had to rethink everything about the cookie.

It turns out that if you didn't grow up with Oreos and develop an emotional attachment to the cookie, it can be a weird-tasting little thing. And this started a whole process in the Chinese division of Kraft of rethinking what the essence of an Oreo really is.

Key terms in this article include "the essence of Oreoness" and "Twist, Lick, Dunk".

Human wormholes and the Great Span

At the end of last week's post about John Tyler's grandsons still being alive (and indeed, NY Mag did an interview with one of them), I provided a couple of other examples of living personals bridging distant historical periods and asked:

Someone needs to come up with a term for this sort of thing (history bridges? no.)

On Twitter, David Galbraith suggested "timebenders". After more thought, I came up with "human wormholes" but that's not quite right either. Tony Hiss, in a book about his father Alger (the accused Soviet spy), said that Alger had a term for stories kind of like these: the Great Span.

My father himself even had a name for a kind of ongoing closeness between people in which death is sometimes only an irrelevance. He called it "the Great Span," a sort of bucket brigade or relay race across time, a way for adjacent generations to let ideas and goals move intact from one mind to another across a couple of hundred years or more.

Hiss cites a pair of stories involving Alger (who died in 1996) and Oliver Wendell Holmes, who Alger clerked for and also figured in one of my earlier examples. In one story, Holmes told Alger about his experience fighting in the Civil War. The other story reaches back even further:

In the Holmes story Alger treasured above all others, the Justice told him that when he had been very young, his grandmother, a woman he revered, had shared her memories of the day at the beginning of the American Revolution when she was five and had stood in her father's front window on Beacon Hill in Boston and watched rank after rank of Redcoats marching through town.

Another instance of the Great Span are the three Civil War widows (Maudie Hopkins, Alberta Martin, and Gertrude Janeway) who lived into the 2000s, two of them collecting their husbands' pensions until their deaths. (thx, mike & @ithinkihaveacat)

The thing about 998,001 is...

If you divide 1 by the number 998,001, you get a list of all the three digit numbers in order except 998. Like so:

Math! (via mlkshk)

An escapes and heists film festival

BLDGBLOG is running a distributed film festival called Breaking Out and Breaking In that will explore the architecture of escapes and break-ins in movies.

Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in escapes and heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.

Watch the films at home-or anywhere you may be-and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.

The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that operate as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.

It started on Friday, but there's still plenty of time and opportunity to join in.

A pair of recent interviews

Five Minutes on The Verge: Jason Kottke:

Then it's eight more-or-less solid hours of ass-in-chair because surprisingly, that's the way stuff gets done.

The Setup: An interview with Jason Kottke:

My white desk doesn't work so well with the optical mouse, so for some dumb reason I'm using a 242-page book called Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer as a mousepad.

Ice Cube's "Good Day" located

An internet sleuth used the lyrics of Ice Cube's It Was a Good Day to figure out when his exceptional day occurred.

CLUE 3: "The Lakers beat the Super Sonics"
Dates between Yo MTV Raps air date AUGUST 6 1988 and the release of the single FEBRUARY 23 1993 where the Lakers beat the Super Sonics...

Update: Someone fact-checked the original calculation and found it wanting. (thx, trevor)

Bay of Fundy extreme tides time lapse

The Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada has some of the world's greatest tides...at times, high tide is 50+ feet higher than low tide. Here's a time lapse video of those tides in action.

Motion sculptures made with PVC pipe

Korean artist Kang Duck-Bong makes PVC pipe sculptures that look like they're moving.

(via colossal)

The human body's microbial ecosystem

In this transcript of a talk given to the attendees of the Joint Summits on Translational Science, Carl Zimmer highlights an important aspect of understanding the human body and how to treat its many maladies: the ecosystem of microbes.

The microbes in your body at this moment outnumber your cells by ten to one. And they come in a huge diversity of species -- somewhere in the thousands, although no one has a precise count yet. By some estimates there are twenty million microbial genes in your body: about a thousand times more than the 20,000 protein-coding genes in the human genome. So the Human Genome Project was, at best, a nice start. If we really want to understand all the genes in the human body, we have a long way to go.

Now you could say "Who cares? They're just wee animalcules." Those wee animacules are worth caring about for many reasons. One of the most practical of those reasons is that they have a huge impact on our "own" health. Our collection of microbes-the microbiome-is like an extra organ of the human body. And while an organ like the heart has only one function, the microbiome has many.

When food comes into the gut, for example, microbes break some of them down using enzymes we lack. Sometimes the microbes and our own cells have an intimate volley, in which bacteria break down a molecule part way, our cells break it down some more, the bacteria break it down even more, and then finally we get something to eat.

Another thing that the microbiome does is manage the immune system. Certain species of resident bacteria, like Bacteroides fragilis, produce proteins that tamp down inflammation. When scientists rear mice that don't have any germs at all, they have a very difficult time developing a normal immune system. The microbiome has to tutor the immune system in how to do its job properly. It also acts like an immune system of its own, fighting off invading microbes, and helping to heal wounds.

While the microbiome may be an important organ, it's a peculiar one. It's not one solid hunk of flesh. It's an ecosystem, made up of thousands of interacting species.

New Monty Python movie (sort of)

Monty Python member Terry Jones is set to direct a sci-fi comedy that will feature other Python members "voicing key roles". Gilliam, Cleese, and Palin have all signed on and they're working on getting Eric Idle.

Members of Monty Python's Flying Circus are reteaming for "Absolutely Anything," a sci-fi farce combining CGI and live action, with Terry Jones to direct and Mike Medavoy to produce.

Plans are for filming to begin in the U.K. this spring, with the Pythons voicing key roles as a a group of aliens who endow an earthling with the power to do "absolutely anything" to see what a mess he'll make of things -- which is precisely what happens. There's also a talking dog named Dennis who seems to understand more about the mayhem that ensues than anyone else does. Robin Williams will voice the character.

"It's not a Monty Python picture, but it certainly has that sensibility," Jones told Variety.

(via ★vuokko)

Notable typefaces of 2011

Typographica shares their favorite typefaces of 2011.

The idea is simple: I invite a group of writers, educators, type makers and type users to look back at 2011 and pick the release that excited them most.

Today's insanity: homemade bungee jumping

Maybe I'm just way over-cautious but this guy does almost kill himself while bungee jumping off a bridge using a jury-rigged climbing rope and harness, right? This is just totally batshit crazy:

Skip ahead to about 1:30...everything before that is just filler. (via ★bryce)