kottke.org

...is a weblog about the liberal arts 2.0 edited by Jason Kottke since March 1998 (archives). You can read about me and kottke.org here. If you've got questions, concerns, or interesting links, send them along.

Free Errol!

For some dumbcrap reason, the NY Times has redirected Errol Morris' excellent blog about photography and the truth -- formerly at http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com -- to some new thing called Opinionator. They did the same with Dick Cavett, Olivia Judson, etc. Oh, all the content is still there -- here's Morris' stuff -- and permalinks redirect, but there are no author-specific RSS feeds. There is only the main feed, which started shoveling a bunch of crap I didn't want to read into my newsreader. Come on Gray Lady, just give me Morris; I don't care about the rest.

Update: The Times blogs are on Wordpress and with WP you can add "/feed" to any URL and get a feed. So here's Morris' feed...which helps you and me but not much of anyone else. (thx, mark)

A blind wine tasting with Robert Parker

Robert Parker, the world's foremost wine taster, tasted a bunch of bottles from Bordeaux 2005 (a great year for Bordeaux) and couldn't tell which one was which and ranked them differently than he had before.

Blind tasting removes preconceptions about wines while maintaining the ability to rate wines in a peer group setting. Wednesday night, Parker upended the order of his published ratings of the wines and, in the process, could not correctly identify any of these wines. In print, he awarded L'Eglise Clinet, a Pomerol, a score of 100 points. While he did call it his second favorite wine of the night, it is interesting to note that he could not pick out this wine in the lineup (he thought the actual L'Eglise to be Cos, a wine that is not only from across the river, but from St. Estephe, an appellation known for the extreme tannic structure of the wines). In that same vein, he mistook Lafite, a Paulliac, for Troplong-Mondot, a new wave St. Emilion. Blind tasting can be ruthless in its outcomes.

Jonah Lehrer elaborated on the outcome of the tasting.

When we take a sip of wine, we don't taste the wine first, and the cheapness or redness second. We taste everything all at once, in a single gulp of thiswineisred, or thiswineisexpensive. As a result, the wine "experts" sincerely believed that the white wine was red, or that Lafite was actually Troplong-Mondot. Such mistakes are inevitable: Our brain has been designed to believe itself, wired so that our prejudices feel like facts, our opinions indistinguishable from the actual sensation. If we think a wine is cheap, it will taste cheap. And if we think we are tasting a grand cru, then we will taste a grand cru.

Caricature map of Europe, 1914

Keith Thompson Map

Britain is an militaristic lion with a Roman Imperial italic-type helmet. It sits upon a mound of riches gathered from its Empire.

Drawn by Keith Thompson...prints are available if you like. (thx, zoe)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 20, 2009       Keith Thompson   maps   wwi

Trabant refresh

The Trabant 601, 1963:

Trabant 1963

Wikipedia notes of the Trabant:

For advocates of capitalism it is often cited as an example of the disadvantages of centralized planning as even refueling the car required lifting the hood, filling the tank with gasoline (only 24 litres), then adding two-stroke oil and shaking it back and forth to mix.

Pollution, poor construction, and lack of availability were also issues with the East German auto.

Trabant nT concept car, 2009:

Trabant 2009

Here's the official site; plus more photos. BBC News has an overview of the project:

A German consortium is developing a slick, updated version of the Trabant, communist East Germany's famously unreliable mass-produced car. The new model is electric with solar panels on the roof -- in stark contrast to the fume-belching original.

Looks very cool.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 20, 2009       cars   Trabant

Second thoughts about carbon offsets

This article in the NY Times fits nicely with my belief that carbon offsets are bullshit.

"The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card," Justin Francis, the managing director of Responsible Travel, one of the world's largest green travel companies to embrace environmental sustainability, said in an interview. "It's seductive to the consumer who says, 'It's $4 and I'm carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.'" Offsets, he argues, are distracting people from making more significant behavioral changes, like flying less.

(via @daveg)

Idea enemies

From advertisements for a Portuguese independent film group, several ideas and their enemies.

Idea enemies

(via heavy backpack)

The uncollected stories of J.D. Salinger

Dead Caulfields maintains an unauthorized online collection of the 22 stories written by J.D. Salinger and published in Esquire, The New Yorker, The Saturday Evening Post, etc. These stories have never been collected into a book due to the reclusive author's resistance.

Spanning his literary career between the years 1940-1965, these stories display changes in both the author's style and message. While some are plainly of commercial quality, most are serious works containing an expansive gift of enlightenment and self-examination: that very-satisfying "Salinger moment".

(via @brainpicker)

Jeanne-Claude, RIP

Jeanne-Claude, one-half of the art duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude, has died at the age of 74. The front page of the couple's web site has a short tribute. I loved The Gates.

Davy Jones' wine cellar

Over at Edible Geography, Nicola Twilley collects some information about wine and beer recovered from shipwrecks, some of which has been sold for thousands of dollars per bottle.

It appears the ocean floor, if treated as a single entity, might actually be the world's largest wine cellar -- a sunken treasure trove of lost vintages awaiting rediscovery. Like squirrels digging up acorns, wreck-divers and salvage companies stumble upon another forgotten cache every few years.

Drawing is thinking

A short video in which Milton Glaser extols the virtues of drawing while drawing.

It is only through drawing that I look at things carefully.

What will the LHC find?

With regard to the Large Hadron Collider, the Higgs boson gets all the press but other potential discoveries could be more exciting and easier to detect.

However, if the theorists are right, before it ever finds the Higgs, the LHC will see the first outline of something far bigger: the grand, overarching theory known as supersymmetry. SUSY, as it is endearingly called, is a daring theory that doubles the number of particles needed to explain the world. And it could be just what particle physicists need to set them on the path to fresh enlightenment.

If you haven't been keeping up with particle physics for the past few years (as I haven't), this will bring you up to speed a bit.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 19, 2009       lhc   physics   science

Microsoft to patent Tufte's sparklines?

Microsoft has filed a patent application for sparklines and Edward Tufte, who came up with the idea for sparklines, is wondering what to do about it. (via waxy)

Spider silk tapestry

The American Museum of Natural History is displaying a 11'x4' tapestry made completely of spider silk. It took four years, required more than one million spiders, and cost $500,000 to make.

The task of silking a spider starts with a small machine -- designed centuries ago when the first attempts to silk spiders were begun -- that holds the spider down.

"The spiders are harnessed ... held down in a delicate way," Godley says, "so you need people to do this who are very tactile so the spiders are not harmed. So there's a chain of about 80 people who go out every morning at four o'clock, collect spiders, we get them in by 10 o'clock. They're in boxes, they're numbered, and then as they get silked, about 20 minutes later, they get released back into nature."

Spider silk tapestry

The vivid yellow is the natural color of the spider's silk. If you can't make it to see the exhibition at the AMNH, check out a video featuring the tapestry. (thx, renee)

Management theory and The Office

In The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office" and the followup The Gervais Principle II: Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk and Gametalk, Venkatesh Rao dissects and analyzes the American version of The Office to a degree I hadn't thought was possible.

After four years, I've finally figured the show out. The Office is not a random series of cynical gags aimed at momentarily alleviating the existential despair of low-level grunts. It is a fully-realized theory of management that falsifies 83.8% of the business section of the bookstore.

Even if you're only an occasional viewer of the show, this is worth reading through, especially if you work in an office environment. (thx, zach)

All kinds of leaves

In his excellent NY Times blog, Christoph Niemann uses leaves to illustrate a forest of ideas.

Niemann Biodiversity

Project Grizzly

The National Film Board of Canada has put Project Grizzly online for free viewing.

In this feature-length documentary, Troy James Hurtubise goes face to face with Canada's most deadly land mammal, the grizzly bear. Troy is the creator of what he hopes is a grizzly-proof suit, and he repeatedly tests his armour -- and courage -- in stunts that are both hair-raising and hilarious.

This is not to be confused with Werner Herzog's Grizzly Man, as the Wikipedia entry for Project Grizzly makes clear:

For the 2005 documentary film by Werner Herzog about late bear enthusiast Timothy Treadwell (no suit), see Grizzly Man.

No suit!

Cormac McCarthy interview

The WSJ has a conversation with Cormac McCarthy.

Your future gets shorter and you recognize that. In recent years, I have had no desire to do anything but work and be with [my son] John. I hear people talking about going on a vacation or something and I think, what is that about? I have no desire to go on a trip. My perfect day is sitting in a room with some blank paper. That's heaven. That's gold and anything else is just a waste of time.

Before reading this interview, I didn't know much about McCarthy -- he's a fellow at the Santa Fe Institute? -- but now I think I need to read The Road. (via df)

The versatility of the tuna fish sandwich

This photo on Wikipedia of a tuna, olive, and avocado sandwich is used on exactly two pages:

Tuna fish sandwich
2009 flu pandemic vaccine

On the flu vaccine page, the sandwich photo is accompanied by the caption "The vaccine contains less mercury than a typical tuna fish sandwich."

By Jason Kottke    Nov 18, 2009       food

The world's easiest pie crust

In today's installment of Cooking with the Awl, Choire Sicha shows us how to make his famous Nonchalant Smoker's E-Z Pie Crust. Baking has never been less precise!

3. Put something more than a teaspoon but something less than a tablespoon of salt in the flour. That is like "three pinches." It doesn't really matter how much! Saltiness offsets sweetness! People, who are animals, like salt!

4. Put about the same amount of sugar in the flour! Give or take! IT DOESN'T MATTER.

Choire also notes at one point that the crust "should look sort of gross".

The last opium den in the world

In 2000, Nick Tosches went in search of something that he was told didn't exist anymore: the opium den.

In the early decades of the 20th century, as the drug trade was taken over by the Judeo-Christian coalition that came to control crime, Jewish and Italian names became almost as common as Chinese names in the reports of those arrested for smuggling, selling, and den-running. While the old Chinese opium smokers died off, the new drug lords actively cultivated a market for the opium derivatives, first morphine and then heroin, two 19th-century inventions that offered far greater profit margins than opium itself.

...

The last known opium den in New York was a second-floor tenement apartment at 295 Broome Street, between Forsyth and Eldridge Streets, at the northeastern edge of Chinatown. It was run by the apartment's tenant, a Chinese immigrant named Lau, who was 57 when the joint got raided and his ass got hauled away. There were a few old pipes and lamps, 10 ounces of opium. And 40 ounces of heroin. The date was June 28, 1957. That was it. The end of the final relic of a bygone day.

DIY chicken plucking machine

Not for the squeamish. Or you can build your own. (via eat me daily)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 18, 2009       food   video

Big but never number one

From Box Office Mojo, a list of the top grossing movies in the US that were never #1 at the box office. Topping the list is the sleeper hit of sleeper hits, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 18, 2009       best of   lists   movies

Updates on previous entries for Nov 17, 2009*

The masked reviewers of the Michelin Guide orig. from Nov 17, 2009

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

Y2K, no big deal

I contributed a short essay to Newsweek's 2010 project for the Overblown Fears list: Y2K.

Despite the media hype, the biggest story about the Y2K computer bug is that nothing happened. Trains didn't spontaneously derail. McDonald's didn't roll back to turn-of-the-century pricing (no Happy Meals for a ha'penny). And the banks didn't lose all of our money; we'd have to wait another eight years for that.

Farhad Manjoo recently did a 2-part piece on the lessons of Y2K for Slate.

Nathan Myhrvold, cookbook author

Nathan Myhrvold, ex-Microsoftie and founder of an invention company called Intellectual Ventures, is also really interested in food, so much so that he's writing a monster cookbook (currently ~1500 pages) about the science of cooking.

In another discovery of culinary heat transfer physics, Dr. Myhrvold said the bulbous shape and black color of Weber grills were wrong. To achieve an even cooking temperature across the cooking grate, the inside of the grill should be vertical and shiny to reflect the heat. That can be fixed by adding an aluminum insert to the grill. "So we have directions for that," Dr. Myhrvold said.

You may remember reading about Myhrvold and IV in Malcolm Gladwell's piece on the nature of invention last year.

Pinball economics

This fun little post talks about how the economics of pinball changed as it became more and then less popular.

In 1986, Williams High Speed changed the economics of pinball forever. Pinball developers began to see how they could take advantage of programmable software to monitor, incentivize, and ultimately exploit the players. They had two instruments at their disposal: the score required for a free game, and the match probability. All pinball machines offer a replay to a player who beats some specified score. Pre-1986, the replay score was hard wired into the game unless the operator manually re-programmed the software. High Speed changed all that. It was pre-loaded with an algorithm that adjusted the replay score according to the distribution of scores on the specified machine over a specific time interval.

By Jason Kottke    Nov 17, 2009       economics   games   pinball

Electrically conductive steak as art

For his piece Steak Filter, Noah Feehan ran a video signal of a steak cooking through the actual steak. The deterioration of the video signal becomes a sign of how done the steak is.

Quite literally, I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.

The videos don't really show too much, but I love the idea. (via eat me daily)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 17, 2009       art   food   Noah Feehan   video

Movie originality and success

Prompted by my post about how few non-adapted/sequel/franchise films there are on the list of the top-grossing films of the 2000s (9 out of 50), kottke.org reader Keith took a look at the Best Picture Oscar nominees for the decade and noticed that the percentage of original properties was actually lower (7 out of 45). From his email:

This leaves 7 that are original. Gladiator, Gosford Park, Lost in Translation, Crash, Babel, Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, and Michael Clayton.

You'll note that 7/45 (15.556%) is worse than 9/50 (18%). So it seems that the box office appreciates originality more than the Academy. Take from this what you will. I might suggest that this is a poor way to truly gauge originality, as the top 50 box office grossers of the decade is a pretty high bar (500 million+), and seems to demand some kind of familiarity in order to attract the rapid widespread viewing needed for a big theatrical run. Alternately, it builds into the argument that most creativity is follow-on. I would venture a guess that if we dove deeper, into say, every movie that made at least $100 million in the decade, the ratio of original properties would be a bit more palatable.

Thanks, Keith! Also interesting is a comparison between the top grossing films of the 2000s and those for the 1990s and the 1980s. You don't have to delve too far to see how much has changed. Of the top 15 films in the 1990s, 7 are original properties: Independence Day, The Lion King, Sixth Sense, Armageddon, Home Alone, Ghost, and Twister. For the 1980s, a consensus on the top 10 grossing films is difficult to come by, but using the Wikipedia one yields 5 original properties out of the top 10: ET, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ghostbusters, Beverly Hills Cop, and Back to the Future (other lists I saw included Top Gun and Rain Man but also Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (adapted)).

Clearly sequels, adaptations, and franchises ruled in the 2000s much more than in the 1990s or 1980s. But if you go back to the 1970s, only 2 or 3 of 10 top-grossing films are original: Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and perhaps The Sting. So maybe the 2000s were a return to old ways for Hollywood?

The masked reviewers of the Michelin Guide

For the first time ever, a Michelin Guide reviewer knowingly sits down to a meal with a journalist, New Yorker writer John Colapinto. The resulting article is pretty interesting; here's my favorite bit:

Le Bernardin was one of only four restaurants in New York (along with Jean Georges, Thomas Keller's Per Se, and the now defunct Alain Ducasse at the Essex House) that earned three stars in the debut issue of the Michelin guide, and it has held on to its three stars ever since. Ripert estimates that revenues increased by eighteen per cent when the first guide came out, but the pressure to hold on to his stars has also escalated.

An 18% increase? Assuming that Le Bernardin was already booked solid before the guide came out and expenses remained constant, that means that the same number of diners generated that increase...presumably Michelin Guide readers spend more on dining than even Le Bernardin regulars do. Margins on Manhattan restaurants, even the fancy ones, generally aren't that large...an 18% increase is insane.

Update: A slight clarification. I fudged the 18% revenue increase into an 18% increase in profits...which isn't the case. But since I'm assuming that the revenue increased was generated by the about same number of customers and that most of the expenses (rent, staff, etc.) stayed the same, the profit margin had to increase by some significant amount (for a Manhattan restaurant). And if those new customers ordered more tasting menus or more expensive bottles of wine, I would assume that the profit margin on those items are higher than average as well. So, my guess is that if you asked Eric Ripert if Le Bernardin's profit margin increased after the Michelin Guide came out, he would answer in the affirmative...but it wouldn't be an 18% increase.

The 100 best quotes from The Wire

This is really well done. (thx, joris)

By Jason Kottke    Nov 17, 2009       The Wire   TV   video

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