I feel like I've pointed to this before, but in case I haven't, here's a list of the 100 best first lines from novels. I'm partial to those of Pride and Prejudice, Lolita, and Anna Karenina.
A big dog on the subway with a fur-coated owner and a brick in its mouth. And I believe it's a "pit bull-type" dog.
The life and times of "broadcast pioneer" Edward R. Murrow. "During the war, Murrow never had to play the role of the dispassionate reporter. He was an important player in the Allied war effort, and, under the circumstances, that did not conflict with his journalistic role."
Mark Rothko's Seagram murals were to hang in the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in NYC. How did they come to hang instead in the Tate Modern in London?
In Meet the Fockers, the sign on a terminal at the O'Hare airport is typeset in Chicago, an old Macintosh system font. Har har. (via mark)
Malcolm Gladwell on different types of generalizations and when it's helpful to generalize (and not). I don't know about all that, but I *hate* "pit bull-type" dogs and I still think they should be banned.
Blogs versus the NY Times in Google
In 2002, Dave Winer of Scripting News and Martin Nisenholtz of the New York Times made a Long Bet about the authority of weblogs versus that of NY Times in Google:
In a Google search of five keywords or phrases representing the top five news stories of 2007, weblogs will rank higher than the New York Times' Web site.
I decided to see how well each side is doing by checking the results for the top news stories of 2005. Eight news stories were selected and an appropriate Google keyword search was chosen for each one of them. I went through the search results for each keyword and noted the positions of the top results from 1) "traditional" media, 2) citizen media, 3) blogs, and 4) nytimes.com. Finally, the scores were tallied and an "actual" winner (blogs vs. nytimes.com) and an "in-spirit" winner (any traditional media source vs. any citizen media source) were calculated. (For more on the methodology, definitions, and caveats, read the methodology section below.)
So how did the NY Times fare against blogs? Not very well. For eight top news stories of 2005, blogs were listed in Google search results before the Times six times, the Times only twice. The in-spirit winner was traditional media by a 6-2 score over citizen media. Here the specific results:
1) Hurricane Katrina hits New Orleans.
Search term: "hurricane katrina"
3. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
13. Top media result (CNN)
56. Top NY Times mention (NY Times).
61. Top blog result (Kaye's Hurricane Blog)
Winner (in spirit): Citizen media
Winner (actual): NY Times
2) Big changes in the US Supreme Court (Rhenquist dies, O'Conner retires, Roberts appointed Chief Justice, Harriet Miers rejected).
Search term: "harriet miers"
4. Top media result (Washington Post)
5. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
8. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
11. Top blog result (TalkLeft)
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): NY Times
3) Terrorists bomb London, killing 52.
Search term: "london bombing"
1. Top media result (CNN)
2. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
21. Top blog result Schneier on Security
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
4) First elections in Iraq after Saddam.
Search term: "iraq election"
1. Top media result (BBC News)
6. Top blog result (Iraq elections newswire)
6. Top citizen media result (Iraq elections newswire)
14. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
5) Terri Schiavo legal fight and death.
Search term: "terri schiavo"
2. Top blog result (Abstract Appeal)
2. Top citizen media result (Abstract Appeal)
4. Top media result (CNN)
65. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
Winner (in spirit): Citizen media
Winner (actual): Blogs
6) Pope John Paul II dies and Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger appointed Pope Benedict XVI.
Search term: "pope john paul ii death"
1. Top media result (CNN)
3. Top citizen media result (Wikipedia)
58. Top blog result (The Pope Blog: Pope Benedict XVI)
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
7) The Israeli withdrawal from the Gaza Strip.
Search term: "gaza withdrawal"
1. Top media result (Worldpress.org)
31. Top blog result (Simply Appalling)
31. Top citizen media result (Simply Appalling)
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
8) The investigation into the Valerie Plame affair, Judith Miller, Scooter Libby indicted, etc..
Search term: "scooter libby indicted":
1. Top media result (CNN)
15. Top blog result (Seven Generational Ruminations)
15. Top citizen media result (Seven Generational Ruminations)
43. Top NY Times mention (NY Times)
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
And just for fun here's a search for "judith miller jail" (not included in the final tally):
1. Top media result (Washington Post)
3. Top blog result (Gawker)
3. Top citizen media result (Gawker)
No NY Times article appears in the first 100 results (even though there are several matching articles on the Times site).
In covering the jailing of their own reporter, the Times lagged in the Google results behind such informational juggernauts as Drinking Liberally, GOP Vixen, and Feral Scholar.
Winner (in spirit): Media
Winner (actual): Blogs
Here's the overall results, excluding the Judith Miller search:
Overall winner (in spirit): Media (beating citizen media 6-2).
Overall winner (actual): Blogs (beating the NY Times 6-2).
Some observations:
- My feeling is that Mr. Nisenholtz will likely lose his bet come 2007. Even though the nytimes.com fares very well in getting linked to by the blogosphere, it does very poorly in Google. This isn't exactly surprising given that most NY Times articles disappear behind a paywall after a week and some of their content (TimesSelect) isn't even publicly accessible at all. Also, I didn't look too closely at the HTML markup of the NY Times, but it could also be that it's not as optimized for Google as well as that of some weblogs and other media outlets.
- "www.nytimes.com" has a PageRank of 10/10, higher than that of "www.cnn.com" (9/10), yet stories from CNN consistently appeared higher in the search results than those from the Times. The Times clearly has overall authority according to Google, but when it comes to specific instances, it falls short. In some cases, a NY Times story didn't even appear in the first 100 search results for these keyword searches.
- By 2007, it may be difficult to differentiate a blog from a traditional media source. All of the Gawker and Weblogs, Inc. sites are presented in a blog format and are referred to as blogs but otherwise how are they distinguishable from traditional media? Engadget paid to send 12 people to cover the CES technology conference, probably as many or more than the Times sent. The Sundance film festival was heavily covered by paid writers for both companies as well. In the spirit in which this bet was made, I'd have a hard time counting any of their sites as blogs. (And what about kottke.org? I get paid to write it. Am I still a member of the citizen media or have I crossed over?)
- Choosing appropriate news stories and keywords for those stories was difficult in some cases. Katrina was a no-brainer, but was the Terri Schiavo story really one of the top eight news stories of 2005? Resolving the methodology for this bet in 2007 will be tricky. I wonder how the Long Bets Foundation will handle its determination of the victory.
- Wikipedia does very well in Google results for topical search terms. Overall, traditional media still dominates (in first appearance as well as number of results), but blogs and Wikipedia do very well in some instances.
- What do these results mean? Probably not a whole lot. Nisenholtz asserts that "[news] organizations like the Times can provide that far more consistently than private parties can" while Winer says that "in five years, the publishing world will have changed so thoroughly that informed people will look to amateurs they trust for the information they want". It's difficult to draw any conclusions on this matter based on these results. Contrary to what most people believe, PageRank has a bias, a point of view. That POV is based largely (but not entirely) on what people are linking to. As someone said in the discussion of this bet, this bet is about Google more than influence or reputation, so these results probably tell us more about how Google determines influence on a keyword basis rather than how readers of online informational sources value or rate those sources. Do web users prefer the news coverage of blogs to that of the NY Times? I don't think you can even come close to answering that question based on these results.
The eight news stories were culled from various sources (Lexis-Nexis, Wikipedia, NY Times) and narrowed down to the top stories that would have been prominently covered in both the NY Times and blogs.
The keyword phrase for each of the eight stories was selected by the trial and error discovery of the shortest possible phrase that yielded targeted search results about the subject in question. In some cases, the keyword phrase chosen only returned results for a part of a larger news story. For instance, the phrase "pope john paul" was not specific enough to get targeted results, so "pope john paul ii death" was used, but that didn't give results about the larger story of his death, the conclave to select a new pope, and the selection of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger as Pope Benedict XVI. In the case of "katrina", that single keyword was enough to produce hundreds of targeted search results for both Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. Keyword phrases were not tinkered with to promote or demote particular types of search results (i.e. those for blogs or nytimes.com); they were only adjusted for the relevence of overall results.
The searches were all done on January 27, 2006 with Google's main search engine, not their news specific search.
Since the spirit of the bet deals with the influence of traditional media versus that of citizen-produced media, I tracked the top traditional media (labeled just "media" above) results and the top citizen media results in addition to blog and nytimes.com results. For the purposes of this exercise, relevent results were those that linked to pages that an interested reader would use as a source of information about a news story. For citizen media, this meant pages on Wikipedia, Flickr (in some cases), weblogs, message boards, wikis, etc. were fair game. For traditional media, this meant articles, special news packages, photo essays, videos, etc.
In differentiating between "media" & citizen media and also between relevent and non-relevent results, in only one instance did this matter. Harriet Miers's Blog!!!, a fictional satire written as if the author were Harriet Miers, was the third result for this keyword phrase, but since the blog was not a informational resource, I excluded it. In all other cases, it was pretty clear-cut.
Matt calculates the cost of a la carte television, i.e. ordering TV shows from iTunes. His yearly cable bill is $648 but the cost of watching all hs favorite shows from iTunes would be $800. I bet the networks love this math, especially since it cuts the cable companies out of the loop. But in an a la carte-only world, how would you discover shows in the first place?
The Onion interviews Stephen Colbert. "It used to be, everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything."
Some of the onscreen special effects on Doctor Who were generated by a home computer called the BBC Micro. "A brief sequence during this program actually showed the BBC Basic and assembler code used to create the console display"
Burgertime art. The pickle's package is *very* disturbing to me. Yet, I cannot look away. (via nelson)
Why do journalists drink so much Tab? Futhermore, if, as conservatives would like us to believe, the political and cultural tempo of the country is being dictated by the pulse of the liberal media and they all guzzle fantastic amounts of Tab, why is Tab not more popular?
Well, Garrison Keillor sure didn't like Bernard-Henri Levy's American Vertigo much. I'm about halfway through...review soon (hopefully).
Scott Nelson produces a "tribute brand" called MIKE that's an homage to Michael Jordan, Nike branding, and shoes. After looking at his products (photos and interviews here and here), I'm amazed Nike hasn't sued him back to the Stone Age. Nelson's site is mike23.com.
The Pixar model of making creative products: "We've made the leap from an idea-centered business to a people-centered business. Instead of developing ideas, we develop people. Instead of investing in ideas, we invest in people. We're trying to create a culture of learning, filled with lifelong learners. It's no trick for talented people to be interesting, but it's a gift to be interested. We want an organization filled with interested people." Pixar University sounds *amazing*.
Judith lost her camera (and most of her pictures) on her trip to Hawaii, so she's using other people's photos from Flickr to produce a trip journal.
Hypothesis: Brad Pitt adapts his appearance to that of whoever he's dating at the time, kind of like how dogs start to look like their owners. Here's some supporting evidence.
Four things
Caterina tagged me and it's Friday, so what the hell?
Four jobs I've had:
1. Minimum wage worker, green bean canning factory
2. Tutor, in college physics
3. Web designer, for about 6 different companies
4. Blogger, kottke.org
Four movies I can watch over and over:
1. Ocean's Eleven
2. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan
3. The Day After Tomorrow
4. Finding Nemo
Four places I've lived:
1. Minneapolis
2. Rolla, MO
3. New York
4. San Francisco
Four TV shows I love:
1. Six Feet Under
2. Doctor Who (the original series)
3. Family Guy
4. Oh gosh, I dunno
Ten highly regarded and recommended TV shows that I've never watched a single minute of:[1]
1. 24
2. Lost
3. The Sopranos
4. Any reality TV show
5. Arrested Development
6. Battlestar Galactica
7. My Name is Earl
8. Deadwood
9. Desperate Housewives
10. The Wire
Four places I've vacationed:
1. Kauai, HI
2. Beijing
3. Paris
4. Rapid City, SD
Four of my favorite dishes:
1. Bologna sandwich
2. Soup dumplings
3. Cinnamon ice cream
4. Just about anything on a tasting menu
Four sites I visit daily:
1. google.com
2. flickr.com
3. robotwisdom.com
4. waxy.org
Four places I would rather be right now:
1. In a bathtub
2. On the beach
3. In space
4. Paris
Four bloggers I am tagging (but who won't do it because they're too old school...how's that for a taunt?):
1. Meg Hourihan
2. Matt Haughey
3. Paul Bausch
4. Anil Dash
[1] I added this question because I was thinking about it the other day. I know, such a bad-ass rule-breaker.
@ the movies
Spanglish
Somewhere in Spanglish, there's a damn good movie trying to get out. Not that I didn't like it; Cloris Leachman was hilarious and Adam Sandler's surreal performance simultaneously puzzled and impressed me...he seems to be turning into an actual actor. And the morality angle was solid. But there was something a little bit off about it, and I don't think it was because I thought it was going to be a straight-up comedy.
The issues involved with buying and selling moon dust. Back in 1993, a 200-milligram moon rock was sold for $442,500.
Nice interview with Josh "Shake" Schachter about del.icio.us. "I would not say [that I am an] entrepreneur - the enterprise of the thing was always dragged along by the thing itself."
Blast from the past: influential online game SiSSYFiGHT 2000. I know a married couple that met on SiSSYFiGHT.
A list of films that have the most Star Wars actors in a non-Star Wars film. Flash Gordon and Labyrinth each have 17 Star Wars actors in them. (via cd)
The delicate marketing of Brokeback Mountain. In Manhattan for example, analysis of the city's various social microclimates was used to select the opening theaters to de-emphasize the art-house aspect of the film. (via dj)
The Folk Typography Pool contains photos of type made by people who are not designers, typographers, or calligraphers. (thx, paul)
SupersizedMeals.com is a blog documenting "foodstuffs of epic proportions". Recently featured were a 100-patty burger, a 29" pizza, and a sandwich made from an entire loaf of bread sliced lengthwise.
The new Pixar overlords at Disney Animation wasted no time in cancelling Toy Story 3. "Sequels should only be made if there is a really great story that demands it, and should be the domain of those who created the original film." Could this be the end of Disney's straight-to-video animated crap-o-ramas?
Out and about
Some player names I observed while playing Fastr (a multiplayer game based on guessing tags for a selection of Flickr images) last night for about 15 minutes under my usual online nickname "jkottke":
jkottkesucks
kottkesucks
jkottkesucksass
ihatekottke
yes no one likes kottke
For some reason, this reminds me of one of my favorite scenes from Being John Malkovich where he's just popped out of his own head and onto the side of the New Jersey Turnpike and a passenger in a passing car says, "Hey Malkovich, think fast!" and pegs him in the head with a beer can.
Averaging Gradius is a movie of 15 simultaneous games of Gradius layered on top of each other. Robin says: "So what you see, instead of a single ship going at it, is a fuzzy cloud of ships -- bright where strategies overlap, faint where someone does something especially daring (or dumb)." Very cool; reminds me of Jason Salavon's amalgamation of Playboy centerfolds.
James Frey is on Oprah today and Gawker had someone blogging the show while it was being taped earlier today. Oprah hammers Frey pretty hard and he admits that most/all of the Smoking Gun's allegations were true. (thx, hillary and mike)
Email correspondance between members of The New Yorker staff and one of Caitlin Flanagan's sources in writing this story about Mary Poppins' author P.L. Travers. The source, Travers biographer Valerie Lawson, wrote a letter to the editor complaining that Flanagan had not properly attributed items in the story to Lawson. "The exchange offers a glimpse at the sausage-factory aspect of how the magazine handles complaints, and raises interesting questions about what journalists owe, in terms of recognition, to their sources."
Political party members' brains get a rush from "ignoring information that's contrary to their point of view". "None of the circuits involved in conscious reasoning were particularly engaged. Essentially, it appears as if partisans twirl the cognitive kaleidoscope until they get the conclusions they want, and then they get massively reinforced for it, with the elimination of negative emotional states and activation of positive ones."
In the spirit of the reimagined trailer for The Shining, here's Brokeback Top Gun and Sleepless in Seattle.
Winners of the Design Within Reach 2005 Champagne Chair Contest. The salon dryer chair, the high chair, and the school desk chair are pretty neat.
Established TV news stars are moving to NPR. "Network news is increasingly generating prospects for NPR in part because some broadcast journalists think the networks are veering away from serious, in-depth reports."
As France becomes more like the US in eating habits, the famously thin French are getting fatter. "Some of the reasons for the increase in obesity are those that plague the United States and much of Europe: the lure of fast food and prepared foods, the ubiquity of unhealthy snacks and sedentary lives."
Absolut is ditching their famous bottle ads campaign (which is 25 years old) in favor of references to pop culture sans bottle. (via do)
NY Times food critic Frank Bruni spends a week "undercover" as a waiter at a Boston restaurant. "People are hungry, and then they're drinking. Two of the worst states that people can be in."
Photos of the Bangladesh shipbreaking yards by Brendan Corr. Strict environmental laws in the Europe and the US make "recycling" these ships there difficult, so US and European companies outsource the salvage to Bangladesh, where laws are looser. Compare with Edward Burtynsky's photos of the same. (thx, malatron)
Update: Article from The Atlantic about shipbreaking (thx, john) and a soon-to-be released book called Breaking Ships (thx, john #2).
Cheatsheet for how to get to a human operator on various automated phone systems. When calling Best Buy, "press 1,1,1,#,# and then wait through the 3 prompts asking for your home telephone number". (thx, scott)
Manhattan's Chinatown didn't bounce back after 9/11 and the city's Chinese are moving elsewhere in the city to find cheaper rents. (via dg)
iTunes Jukebox is "a cartridge-based physical interface to iTunes". "Electronically enhanced" jewelcases can be arranged in a small tower that interfaces with iTunes to play music off of whatever CD case you put into the tower.
Some interesting photomosaics. This one of Steve Jobs is made of OS X icons and this woman is a collage of Macs and other Apple products.
High volume flow
David Carr wrote an article for the NY Times about the Washington Post's recent decision to close down comments on their blog when one of their threads turned ugly. As the article points out, the issue of web sites having problems dealing with feedback (particularly published feedback like comments) is not localized to mainstream media publications:
Mickey Kaus of kausfiles.com, which does not carry comments, said that "the world is crying out for the jerk-zapper," although he added that he thought that The Washington Post's Web site overreacted. BoingBoing, a heavily trafficked "directory of wonderful things," shut down its comments section last year. "We took a lot of heat over it," said Xeni Jardin, a founder of the site. "But until we are able to come up with a better comments system - most of what is out there is too crude - it is not worth the trouble.
If you're wondering why the comments on kottke.org aren't on more often, this is the reason.[1] This site is a one-person operation and even though I work on it full-time, I don't have the throughput to manage a lot of threads. Comment gardening (as I call it) is hard work if you want to maintain an appropriate level of discourse. And as Xeni said, the current technological and user experience solutions suck. Approved commenting, sign-in to comment, Slashdot-like comment moderation...they all have their problems.
As an experiment back in October, I opened the comments on all threads on kottke.org for a little over a week. During that time, I kept track of my comment gardening duties, basically everything I did to keep those threads clear of trolling, flaming, off-topic comments, and the like. The only thing I didn't record was how many times per day I checked for activity in all the open threads -- every 15-30 minutes or so while I was awake (~8am to midnight) -- because I would have been too busy recording the checking to actually do the checking. At one point, I had almost 60 simultaneous threads open and was spending half my day keeping up with all of them.
After more than a week, I stopped recording everything...even though most of the threads were still open and the comments, flames, trolls, and spam kept pouring in. But the resulting document will still give you some idea of what's involved with opening comments on kottke.org. I would love better tools to deal with this because I enjoy having comments open on the site and so do my readers. But for now, I think it's a better use of my time to focus on other aspects of the site and open comments when I feel a particular post would benefit from them.
[1] You can't imagine the reasons I've heard about why comments are off on kottke.org. Most of them are variations on the theme of: "All the big bloggers have their comments turned off because they're too stuck-up and self-important to care what their readers have to say, those arrogant bastards. They can't stand people disagreeing with them." And so on.
Recolored is a software program that helps colorize black & white photos. Just specify some borders and colors and it does the rest.
It's a done deal...Disney is buying Pixar. This bums me out in a lot of different ways. The big winner? Apple Computer.
A brief history of Pixar. "Even with the animation group generating income Pixar was still a money pit. That was about to change. Disney had decided they were willing to give a computer-animated movie a shot."
Quality editorial
Two weeks ago, I wrote:
In terms of editorial and quality, I am unconvinced that a voting system like Digg's can produce a quality editorial product.
Lloyd Shepherd, Deputy Director of Digital Publishing at Guardian Unlimited, has been thinking along similar lines:
Everything we do to "edit" the [Guardian Unlimited] site seeks to keep a balance between editorial instinct and the desires of the audience, and that, in doing that, we may be reflecting the "community" more fairly, both mathematically and ethically, than the likes of digg.
So how do you reflect the community more fairly? Paging Mr. Surowiecki:
In order for a crowd to be smart, [Surowiecki] says it needs to satisfy four conditions: 1. Diversity, 2. Independence, 3. Decentralization, and 4. Aggregation.
Much of the online media we're familiar with uses a mix of humans and automated systems to perform the aggregating task. Human editors choose the stories that will run in the newspaper (drawing from a number of sources of information as Lloyd illustrated), blog authors select what links and posts to put on their blog (by reading other blogs & media outlets, listening to reader feedback, and sifting through already aggregated sources like del.icio.us or Digg), and the editors of Slashdot filter through hundreds of reader submissions a day to create Slashdot's front page. Google News uses technology to decide which stories are important, based primarily on what the publishers are publishing. Digg and del.icio.us rely almost entirely on the crowd to submit and determine by a simple vote what stories go on its front page.
Some of these methods work better than others for different tasks. The product of 50,000 diverse, independent, decentralized bloggers is probably more editorially interesting, fair, and complete than that of 50,000 diverse, independent, decentralized Digg users, but the Digg vote & tally approach is less time-intensive for all concerned and the information flows faster. A site like Slashdot sits in the middle...it's a little slower than Digg but offers a more consistent editorial product. A hybrid Digg+Slashdot approach (which is not unlike the one used by individual bloggers) would be for Digg to produce a "Digg digest", a human selected (could use simple voting or let the most highly respected community members choose) collection of the best stories of the day that incorporates what was said in the comments and around the web as well. Actually, I think if you wanted to start a blog that did this, it would do very well.
Ian Albert collects really large digital images (100-900 megapixels) and constructs maps of video game worlds, including Super Mario Bros and The Legend of Zelda. (via lia)
The 50 most loathsome people in America, 2005. On Paris Hilton: "Somehow, everybody in America knew that this completely pointless person had lost her dog, and we are all diminished by the experience."
Video clip of a nude scene from Family Guy that was apparently created as an in-house joke. NSFW, unless your job is watching cartoon porn.
TrueHoop has a good roundup of Kobe's 81-point performance the other night. Quoth Henry: "This is the first time I have put something that happened last night straight into the 'basketball history' category of TrueHoop."
Eyebeam's Mike Frumin has released OGLE (OpenGL Extrator), a software package for extracting 3-D data from Windows applications. This means you can do stuff like grab the 3-D likeness of your World of Warcraft character and print it out on a 3-D printer or insert him into a Manhattan landscape (grabbed from Google Earth). Announcement here.
Cool carpenter's level Dashboard widget for Powerbooks and iBooks. I'd never played with my Powerbook's accelerometer before so this had me squealing with delight. (via df)
Aerial photos of cities taken by Olivo Barbieri with a tilt-shift lens look like scale models. I'm familiar with the tilt-shift (Jake noodled around with one awhile back), but didn't imagine you could use it to achieve such a convincing optical illusion. (via bldgblog via waxy)
Short (and a wee bit hostile) inteview with Daniel Dennett. "Nerve cells are very complicated mechanical systems. You take enough of those, and you put them together, and you get a soul."
Hossein Derakhshan is on his way to Israel, which is unusual for a native Iranian. "As a citizen journalist, I'm going to show my 20,000 daily Iranian readers what Israel really looks like and how people live there."
West Wing cancelled after 7 seasons...the show won't survive much past President Bartlet's tenure, which seems fitting.
"Since the summer of 1962, a fire, fueled by rich anthracite coal deposits, has been burning beneath the mining town of Centralia, Pennsylvania." This fire is almost old enough to have remembered where it was when JFK was assassinated. (thx, gerard)
I just found the most niche weblog ever: Hay in Art, which consists of pictures of art that feature hay in them.
Interesting graph comparing the size of new homes and the obesity rate in America (which seem to track quite closely since 1995), prompting the question, are Americans growing to fit their environment? Relatedly, Bernard-Henri Levy on American obesity: "The obesity of the body is a metaphor of another obesity. There is a tendency in America to believe that the bigger the better for everything -- for churches, cities, malls, companies and campaign budgets. There's an idolatry of bigness."
Fire at a fireworks factory = lots of explosions. I went to a fireworks display when I was a kid and about 5 minutes in, the structure they were launching them out of caught on fire and the rest of the display went off in the space of 2-3 minutes. Best fireworks I've ever seen...
Update: Wikipedia has more on this explosion, which occurred in The Netherlands in 2000. (thx to the dozens who sent this in)
The Superficial on Kate Moss and her poor taste in men: "You could stick her in a room with Brad Pitt, George Clooney, and the Kool-Aid Man, and five minutes later all you'd hear would be 'Ohhhhhh Yeah!'"
"At elementary schools, kindergartens, and preschools all across Japan, kids are losing themselves making hikaru dorodango, or balls of mud that shine." I really want to make one of these. (via rodcorp)
How do audiobook producers deal with things like footnotes, photos, interesting punctuation, and the like? "The voice manipulation, for which audiobook producer John Runnette used a 'phone filter' -- a voice-through-the-receiver effect used in radio dramas -- was an attempt to aurally convey Mr. Wallace's discursive, densely footnoted prose." Includes sample audio with examples. (thx, bill)
Giant jellyfish invade Japan STOP Creatures 2 meters wide and 450 pounds STOP Killing fish, fishing industry, and even humans STOP Run for your lives STOP
David Pogue has a great list of tongue-in-cheek rules for trolls when responding to online writing. This list is spot-on...I have a mailbag full of chuckleheaded responses that adhere to many of these points, particularly numbers 1, 2, 6, and 9.
The 3% federal excise tax on your phone bill "was imposed in 1898 to help pay for the Spanish-American War".
A list of the top 100 most valuable books. Signed first editions numbered 1-100 of Ulysses go for 100,000 pounds apiece. More about the list.
The Man Who Said No to Wal-Mart. "He looked into a future of supplying lawn mowers and snow blowers to Wal-Mart and saw a whirlpool of lower prices, collapsing profitability, offshore manufacturing, and the gradual but irresistible corrosion of the very qualities for which Snapper was known. Jim Wier looked into the future and saw a death spiral."
"Inspector Sands is a codeword used by public transport authorities in London...to alert authorities of a potential emergency without causing panic amongst travellers by explicitly mentioning the nature of the emergency." Cool! (via alice)
Online tshirt commerce is so easy now; individuals can even offer a new tshirt design every single day. My favorite shirt of the day is this scarlet/Scarlett fiddle-dee-dee one from yesterday.
The beauty of simplicity. "Blame the [lack of simplicity on the] closed feedback loop among engineers and industrial designers, who simply can't conceive of someone so lame that she can't figure out how to download a ringtone; blame a competitive landscape in which piling on new features is the easiest way to differentiate products, even if it makes them harder to use; blame marketers who haven't figured out a way to make 'ease of use' sound hip."
When I posted about a cold of mine back in December that completely killed my sense of smell and taste (they're both back now, thanks), I asked:
I remember reading a book or article once that mentioned a person who lost their sense of taste and when it would briefly return, that person would drop whatever they were doing and go eat a great meal. Anyone know where that story is from?
In response to that post (but not that specific question), I got a nice email from a reader inquiring about my recent preoccupation with smell (I've posted a couple other things about smell in the past months) and identified herself as having thought about smell recently as well. I wrote her back and recommended a favorite book of mine, A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, specifically the chapters on smell (my favorite part).
I first read this book back in college for a class and it's one of the few books I keep going back to every few years to reread[1]. After I sent that email, I went to find my dog-eared copy and started reading it. On page 40, in the section about anosmia, I found the answer to my above query. After a year-long fit of sneezing, Judith Birnberg lost her sense of smell and taste, which returned sporadically thereafter:
The anosmia began without warning... During the past three years there have been brief periods -- minutes, even hours -- when I suddenly became aware of odors and knew that this meant that I could also taste. What to eat first? A bite of banana once made me cry. On a few occasions a remission came at dinner time, and my husband and I would dash to our favorite restaurant. On two or three occasions I savored every miraculous mouthful through an entire meal. But most times my taste would be gone by the time we parked the car.
I knew I'd read that somewhere!
[1] Other books I've read more than once in adulthood[2]:
1984
Contact
Several Roald Dahl books
LoTR series
The Hobbit
Genius
Dark Sun
A People's History of the United States
1984 I've probably read 9 or 10 times since I was 10. With the exception of A People's History (I think I got the gist the first two times around), I'll probably continue to reread those books indefinitely. Books I hope to reread soon: Lolita, Infinite Jest.
[2] I reread so many books as a kid, including the Roald Dahl books alluded to above, Where the Red Fern Grows, and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.
The NYTimes profiles Susan Orlean and John Gillespie's new house in upstate New York (audio slideshow). It looks gorgeous.
The world's best short inspirational quotes including "no great thing is created suddenly" and "well done is better than well said".
David Galbraith notes that several of the top sites on the web don't validate: Yahoo, Ebay, Amazon, Google, and even "Web 2.0" newcomers Flickr, Digg, and Del.icio.us. "Are all these companies wrong, or is there something wrong with current accessibility standards?"
Haven't tried it out yet, but SeamlessWeb At Home seems like a good site for ordering Manhattan delivery (i.e. lunch/dinner) online. Plus, you get 20% off your order from some places.
The Baseball Visualization Tool was designed to help managers answer the question: should the pitcher be pulled from the game? Handy charts and pie graphs give managers an at-a-glance view of how much trouble the current pitcher is in. I wonder what TBVT would have told Grady Little about Pedro at the end of Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS?
Recently discovered human remains suggest that metrosexuals lived in Iron Age Ireland. One man's fingernails were manicured and his hands indicated he'd never done manual labor while the other wore hair gel imported from France and Spain. No word on if they wore their shirts tucked or untucked.
Very high on the list of things that don't need to be advertised is Tetris. Chances are you remember this Tetris commercial from the 80s anyway. "Use your thumbs, use your eyes, find yourself Tetrisized!"
Some PT Anderson news: A Prairie Home Companion is out this summer; Anderson seems to have co-directed this with Robert Altman, but no one seems to know just who did what. And There Will Be Blood is Anderson's newest solo project starring Daniel Day-Lewis and based on Oil! by Upton Sinclair.
Last 100 posts, part 6
[This is a semi-regular feature following up on stuff I've posted here recently.]
As expected, the Digg vs. Slashdot post got featured on Digg but not on Slashdot. In my analysis, I noted:
The Digg link happened late Saturday night in the US and the Slashdot link occurred midday on Sunday. Traffic to sites like Slashdot and Digg are typically lower during the weekend than during the weekday and also less late at night. So, Digg might be at somewhat of a disadvantage here and this is perhaps not an apples to apples comparison.
Several folks complained about this, some saying that it invalided the whole thing. The Digging of the DvS piece gives us another look at the Digg effect, from right in the middle of a weekday. Digg #2 was dugg 1441 times, got 98 comments, and sent around 10,200 people to kottke.org. By contrast, Digg #1 was dugg 1387 times, garnered 65 comments, and sent ~20,000 people to kottke.org. Digg #1 was actually more successful in driving traffic to kottke.org on a Saturday night than Digg #2 on a Thursday afternoon. Here's a graph that compares the three events:
It's hard to see the exact effect of Digg #2 on this graph (I forgot to grab a screenshot of the bandwidth graph when it happened, so all I have is the historical wide view), but it doesn't stand out that much from what happened the previous day (each one of those "bumps" is a day) and didn't have much of an effect beyond the initial spike. However, judging from the traffic that the individual Digg pages drove to kottke.org (Digg #1: 4525 people; Digg #2: 2668 people), it looks like the iPod feature was more interesting to the Digg audience than the Digg v. Slashdot post (which makes sense). So, still not exactly a fair comparison and raises more questions than provides answers.
The James Frey thread ended up with almost 950 comments before I shut it down because of redundancy and a lot of nastiness on the part of a few participants. The kottke.org record for most comments on a post is nearly 1800 on this post about The Matrix Reloaded (continued here)....that conversation, while nerdy, was a lot more civil.
After reading some of those comments and other things written about the controversy (but without having read the book), my take on Frey is that memories are subjective and readers need to cut authors some slack on that when writing memoirs. However, Frey stepped over the line in manufacturing situations that didn't happen and deserves the backlashing he's now receiving. My favorite observation on this whole deal was made by Stephen on a mailing list we're both on. In a 2003 interview for The Observer, Frey said:
I don't give a fuck what Jonathan Safran whatever-his-name or what David Foster Wallace does. I don't give a fuck what any of those people do. I don't hang out with them, I'm not friends with them, I'm not part of the literati...A book [Eggers' AHBWOSG] that I thought was mediocre was being hailed as the best book written by the best writer of my generation. Fuck that. And fuck him and fuck anybody who says that. I don't give a fuck what they think about me.
To Oprah on Larry King last week, Frey had this to say:
I admire you tremendously and thank you very much for your support. And, you know, it's -- I'm still incredibly honored to be associated with you, and I will for the rest of my life. Thank you.
The man knows who buttered his bread, that's for sure. Oh, and The Onion's take is good too. "Accounts of assault with a deadly weapon, narcotics possession, and incitement of riot actually happened during 2002 Grand Theft Auto session."
Several folks picked up on the year in cities meme...check out the trackbacks on my post and on IceRocket for a bunch of other people's lists.
Many didn't realize that my letter to Apple Support was a joke. Sure, I had post-MacWorld gadget lust, but my new Powerbook is great, does everything I want, and I don't really want the new one. Besides, everyone knows you don't buy the first version of new Apple hardware...I'm waiting until they work all the kinks out. Here's a not-so-positive review of the MacBook Pro announcement at Unsanity.
More chatter about the new corporate logos for Kodak, Intel, UPS, and AT&T.
Update on the teams and players involved in The Play. The Play = that college game with all the laterals and he was down and the band streams onto the field and the guy runs over the trombone player in the end zone. You know, The Play. (thx, david)
Scientists say there may be two different forms of laughter -- authentic laughter and that associated with humor -- and that the two developed millions of years apart during the course of human evolution.
The National Archives has a few of their documents available online, like the Emancipation Proclamation and the check for when the US bought Alaska. More in their online exhibits.
NewsFire is now a Universal Binary. I believe it's the first newsreader to make the switch.