Could Lois Lane have Superman's baby? "His Kryptonian biological makeup is enhanced by Earth's yellow sun. If Lois gets a tan, the kid could kick right through her stomach." More discussion here. And here.
How to draw a pixel head. (via sb)
Second string
Not to go on and on about it like the stupid announcers on American TV, but this passage from Jeffrey Toobin's New Yorker piece (sadly not online), may explain why the American team did so poorly in the World Cup:
Every kid in the American suburbs, it seems, owns a pair of shin guards. Soccer accords nicely with baby-boomer parents' notions about sports: every kid gets to play, no one stands out too much, there's plenty of running and trophies for all. If [John Robert's] children are typical, they will play neighborhood soccer for a few years, with enthusiastic but inexperienced parent coaches, and then wander away from the game by adolescence. Great high-school athletes tend to migrate to football and basketball, where they can play in front of big crowds and perhaps qualify for college scholarships. Soccer in the suburbs serves mostly as a bridge between Barney and Nintendo; it's a pleasant diversion, not a means of developing brutes like Jan Koller, to say nothing of the magicians who stock the Brazilian team.
This dovetails nicely with what my friend David wrote during a discussion about the disappearance of the US from the World Cup:
Our best athletes go to basketball, football, and baseball, roughly in that order. Soccer gets the dregs, sadly. Don't you think Terrell Owens would be a better striker than Landon Donovan? Even a 50-year-old Darrel Green might be faster than the fastest player on the US Soccer team, and so on.
We know these guys are smart players, and they may have the same instincts that even the Brazilians and Ecuadorians do. But they're just not nearly as good. Watching Brazil decimate Japan yesterday, even briefly, it was obvious how much stronger they were than the US team.
Over IM just now, David and I were musing about Allen Iverson's possible greatness as a soccer player; so creative, quick, and fearless. I bet if some the NBA's best players grew up playing soccer the way they played basketball, the US would have a pretty great team.
Second part of a two-part interview with designer Michael Bierut. "I've found that any reluctance I've had to doing more of this 'political design' has to do with my own fear that things like T-shirts and posters are usually feeble tools to address the enormous problems we face as a society today." Read part one.
If I were Apple, I'd be worried about this. Two lifelong Mac fans are switching away from Macs to PCs running Ubuntu Linux: first it was Mark Pilgrim and now Cory Doctorow. Nerds are a small demographic, but they can also be the canary in the coal mine with stuff like this.
Study by the International Energy Agency says that "a global switch to efficient lighting systems would trim the world's electricity bill by nearly one-tenth". How? Switch away from incandescent bulbs to CFLs (now) and eventually to LEDs.
New Japanese device records smells for later playback. Smell is the sense most associated with memory, so this could be quite a compelling personal history recorder.
This guy laser-etched his Powerbook with Rene Magritte's The Son of Man with the Apple logo subbing in for the apple in the original painting.
Superman Returns
There's a bit of a shout-out to citizen journalism in Superman Returns. Mid-movie, Daily Planet Editor in Chief White, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen look at some photos of Superman spread across the chief's desk. They're great, iconic photos of the Man of Steel in action. White berates Olsen (and I'm paraphrasing here), "these are great and they were taken by a kid with a cameraphone. Whadda you got, Olsen?" Olsen throws his photos down on the desk; the one on top depicts a distant blurry streak across a blue sky.
"Look, in the sky, Chief."
"It's a bird."
"It's a plane."
"No, look, it's..."
Score one for the man on the scene.
Unobserved people paid almost three times as much to the "honesty box" when watched by a photocopied face than in the absence of the face. See also What the Bagel Man Saw by Freakonomists Stephen J. Dubner and Steven Levitt. I wonder if the smiley face on milk cartons deters people from drinking straight from the carton?
Update: Spiegel Online has a story with a graph depicting the results of different sets of eyes...sexy eyes did the worst while serious eyes looking straight ahead performed the best. (thx, roland)
Related to yesterday's link about famous photography in online forums, here's a classic Henri Cartier-Bresson getting rubbished on Flickr. "hard to tell at this size but is everything meant to be moving in this shot, all seems blurred".
Summer reading list of photography books. It's not on the list, but I picked up New Yorkers: As Seen by Magnum Photographers at a friend's house this weekend and found it well worth my time. (via rb)
Dear Mr. Pollan,
I am writing to you in the hopes that you can offer some assistance to me regarding a troubling household situation. My wife has been reading your recent book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and has allowed herself to become carried away with your admittedly persuasive argument about eating more locally and ethically raised food.
At first it was just little stuff, like buying local produce and banning foodstuffs made with high fructose corn syrup. But then there was the fist-fight at the greenmarket about the sausage that Meg suspected was not humanely made because the woman selling it did not know the names of the pigs that supplied the meat. "Just one name, you heartless bitch!" she screamed as security escorted her from Union Square. The restraining order prevents Meg's further presence at the market and I am barely tolerated in her stead.
Lately though, Mr. Pollan, the situation has become much worse. Meg has completely forsaken her marital duties, turning her evening attentions elsewhere. It took me a few weeks to discover what she was up to, but she finally admitted to tending a hayfield in an empty lot in Queens. Oh, didn't I tell you? Meg has purchased a cow. I don't know where this cow is located, but his name is Arthur. She's taking me to meet him before he's humanely slaughtered so that, and I quote precisely, "you know where your food comes from for a change".
After the cow news became widely known in our household, Meg turned our extra bedroom into a hay mow, which mow is the subject of our building's co-op board meeting next month. An eighth floor resident complained about the conveyor belt chucking bales into the building's alley and the straw situation in the elevator was getting on everyone's nerves. I dare not add to the register of complaints by mentioning my acute hay-fever at this point.
The loss of the bedroom was tolerable, but Meg has also planted a garden that takes up half of our living room. One day she just took out the hardwood flooring and replacing it with freshly turned soil. Did you know that you can buy a roto-tiller in Manhattan, Mr. Pollan? Well, I do know, and you can definitely buy a roto-tiller at the Home Depot on 23rd Street in Chelsea for a sum close to what your wife might get at a pawn shop for your wristwatch.
So you can see the predicament I'm in here, Mr. Pollan. Any advice you can offer to this sneezing, watchless, beleaguered soul would be greatly appreciated.
Yours very sincerely,
Jason Kottke
P.S. I hope this letter reaches you in a timely manner. Meg has determined that the USPS uses ethanol-based gasoline in their trucks, so this letter is "speeding" its way to you via grass-fed horseback. Pray for me.
Larger portions of food cause people to eat more. Anyone who has eaten at Chili's and observed the girth of their clientele already knows this. Related: I remember seeing some research that showed as the size of an HTML textarea increases, the more words people write in it. (via mr)
Update: A self-refilling soup bowl experiment suggests that "visual cues of portion size may influence intake". (thx, justin) Also, adding lanes to heavily traveled roadways increases traffic; that is, supply increases demand.
Why diving makes soccer great. What a steaming pile of crap.
The 10 greatest years in gaming. I'll always be partial to 1986.
The NY Times World Cup Blog takes ABC/ESPN to task for the universally crappy TV coverage of the World Cup so far, and then extends that argument to a broader condemnation of American sportscasting. Hear, hear. Balboa just straight up sucks and the graphics that cover the action during the game (including ESPN's scrolling news alerts at the bottom of the screen) are viewer-hostile and make me want to throw my TV across the room. (via maciej)
Pauline Kael's New Yorker review of the 1978 version of Superman, just after it had been released. I don't think she much cared for it.
My new favorite weblog: The Baseball Card Blog. I'm having acid flashbacks to my teenaged years, but without the acid. The 1989 Upper Deck set was one of the first I built from scratch, a tall order for someone whose weekly allowance was $5. I remember lusting after the Jerome Walton card in the High Numbers Series...he didn't do so well after that rookie year of his.
Farecast, which I wrote about here, is now out of private beta, meaning anyone can use the site.
TED is releasing audio and video of some of their talks for free on the web. Current offerings include Al Gore, David Pogue, and Gapminder's Hans Rosling. They'll be adding one talk a week from their archives.
What if some of the world's best photographers had posted their photos to a photo message board? Garry Winogrand might have been told: "Man at right needs to be cropped out. Sometimes I find if I shout right before I take the picture I can get people's attentions. If you had done so we would have been able to see more of their faces." (via conscientious)
Seth Stevenson describes an attempt to break out of his introverted shell by taking Paxil. Did it work? Only when he'd had a few drinks...oh and he basically lost the ability to feel emotions the rest of the time. "The fact that I considered a wholesale career change under the drug's effects, and couldn't complete any work, is alarming. "
Nice to be mentioned on BBC News, but what's up with the disparaging "peppered with annoying links"? Especially when Boing Boing is mentioned as "cool" in the same sentence...their links are at least as annoying as mine. And in May, four of those "annoying links" went to the BBC News site. Up yours, BBC!
Interview with writer Sam Harris on "why religion must end". "People have morally identified with a subset of humanity rather than with humanity as a whole."
Huge intricate illustration done with MS Paint, a rudimentary drawing program. Here's how the illustrator did it; it took him 100 hours.
Update: This one, while not as large, is quite a bit more intricate and took 500 hours to do...that's almost 3 months of 40-hour work weeks. (thx, brandon)
Interview with Thom Yorke about politics, his solo album, and Radiohead's impending (yet distant) new album. (via dooce)
Natural deselection
Tom Coates recently checked out the Royal College of Art Summer Show in London and ran across this project by Tim Simpson:
...three plants compete to reach the light that feeds and nourishes them. The first one to succeed survives. The other two are automatically cut down in their prime.
First plant to grow close to the proximity sensors wins. A simple and elegant idea.
Clever photography technique: using a SLR camera to shoot through the viewfinder of a twin lens camera, which are typically older cameras with large viewfinders. Mr. E is an early practitioner of the technique.
Chef/writer Anthony Bourdain turned 50 the other day so his friends threw him a big party; Michael Ruhlman surveys the scene.
Nice profile of artist Natalie Jeremijenko. She's putting Hudson River fish on the board of her company so that as shareholders, they will acquire personhood, and "have a say in the preservation of their grungy habitat".
The Mannahatta Project is constructing maps of what Manhattan was like in 1609, before its "discovery" by Henry Hudson. "The Mannahatta Project will help us to understand, down to the level of one city block, where in Manhattan streams once flowed or where American Chestnuts may have grown, where black bears once marked territories, and where the Lenape fished and hunted." See also The Viele Map of Manhattan.
New York City named the most courteous city in the world. Since I've lived here, I've noticed that New Yorkers aren't rude, they're just busy and dislike having their time wasted. (via mr)
Slate's wine columnist considers which champagne Jay-Z should drink now that he's given up the Cristal. Taste and prestige are not the only considerations: "Take, for instance, this line from the Jay-Z hit 'Can't Knock the Hustle': 'My motto, stack rocks like Colorado/ auto off the champagne, Cristal's by the bottle. 'Salon' can be substituted for 'Cristal' at no cost to the flow."
Call A Ball is an idea for a soccer ball vending machine where balls are dispensed via an SMS from a mobile phone. You can also issue a "challenge" for other players to meet you at the machine. And if you'd like to keep the ball, it's charged to your phone bill.
Speaking of brand genericide, Heroin was actually a brand name trademarked by the Bayer drug company. (thx chris, who joked, "Can I interest you in some Heroin brand morphine substitute?")
The Tate Museum in Britain lets you make your own collection out of all their works of art. "You can create your Collection, print it as a leaflet, or send it to a friend." Current collections include The I've Just Split Up Collection, The Odd Faces Collection, and The I'm Hungover Collection. See also unofficial audio guides for MoMA and the Met. (via nick)
Excellent photos of giant flocks of European starlings, which can comprise more than a million birds. In 1866, a passenger pigeon flock was observed in southern Ontario that was a mile wide, 300 miles long, took 14 hours to pass, and was comprised of some 3.5 billion birds. That would have been a fantastic sight.
You've probably seen this by now, but if you haven't, you should. BumpTop is a prototype of a new desktop metaphor for computing, and a pretty damn intriging one at that.
Update: Peterme isn't impressed. I don't think BumpTop is going to replace WIMP either, but there are certainly some applications where some of the BT ideas could be useful.
Brand genericide
Harris Interactive recently released a list of products ranked by brand equity, a measure of the brand's popularity with US consumers. Here's the top 10:
1. Reynolds Wrap Aluminum Foil
2. Ziploc Food Bags
3. Hershey's Milk Chocolate Candy Bars
4. Kleenex Facial Tissues
5. Clorox Bleach
6. WD-40 Spray Lubricant
7. Heinz Ketchup
8. Ziploc Containers
9. Windex Glass Cleaner
10. Campbell's Soups
Marketing can be a double-edged sword. The companies who manufacture these products have done a fantastic job in marketing these products, so fantastic in some cases that the brand name is in danger of becoming a genericized trademark. From the list above, I routinely use Ziploc, Kleenex, WD-40, and Windex to refer to the generic versions of those products, even though we sometimes use Glad products instead of Ziploc, Puffs instead of Kleenex, or another glass cleaner instead of Windex. If the companies on this list aren't careful, they could lose the trademarked products that they've worked so hard to market so successfully.
Here's a list of American proprietary eponyms, or brand names that have fallen into general use. Some of the names on the list are so old or in such common use (escalator, popsicle) that I didn't even know they had been brands. Two current brands I can think of that might be in danger of genericide: iPod and Google. (via rw)
In advance of the 2008 Olympics, the Chinese are destroying the hutongs of Beijing, the tiny alleyways that connect the city. Includes a photo slideshow of the destruction.
Nice piece about Stephen Kilnisan, the self-appointed historian of NYC's diamond district, the block-long diamond capital of the US. "One of them pulls out a pouch containing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of diamonds. They haggle for a while, then the handshake. Deals are still made on handshakes here."
Michael Ruhlman is guest-blogging up a storm over at Megnut. Ruhlman is the author Soul of a Chef and (with Thomas Keller) of The French Laundry Cookbook, among many others.
Big 10th anniversary package from Slate. It's interesting to see how it has evolved. Here's a slideshow of the design through the years...the stuff about their failed subscription business model and how they lost marketshare because of it is relevent in the ongoing TimesSelect debate.
Great photo of the surf in Puerto Escondido, Mexico. (Reminds me of the work of another photographer, very large prints of waves taken head on, the ocean very dark and the crashing waves a bright, vibrant white. Beautiful stuff. Can anyone help me out?)
Update: The photographer I was thinking of is Clifford Ross. He uses a camera that he built himself to take 2.6 gigabyte images. His Mountain IV is currently on display at MoMA. (thx, david, barbara, and john)
Michael Frumin tried to get some NYC subway data from the New York City Transit Authority through Freedom Of Information Legislation for a project he wanted to do, but they denied his requests. "Given a database of anonymized Metrocard 'swipes' over some small period of time, Frumin imagined that a multitude of explorations could be embarked upon. Below is a concept sketch for one specific project idea -- a visualization, for each station in the system, of the range of locations in the city that people travel to from that area." Nice Minard-esque prototype map.
Joe Malia's privacy scarves provide mobile phone users and portable video game players with privacy, a light/glare-free texting/playing environment, and warm necks. "Users of the wearable mobile phone scarf can venture into public spaces confident that if the need to compose a private text message were to arise the object could be pulled over the face to create an isolated environment." (via eyeteeth)
List of the 25 most popular nouns (by usage) according to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary: "time, person, year, way, day, thing, man, world, life, hand, part, child, eye, woman, place, work, week, case, point, government, company, number, group, problem, fact"
Nice little profile of Language Log in the NY Times. "There is a group of very smart and very well-read people out there who like to read about language and who can put together arguments based on evidence from sources and background knowledge which is not made up or nuts." Hey, that doesn't sound like blogs!
Classic movies it's ok to hate. I love the idea of this list but I'm not sure I agree with too many of the items on it...although I'm not sure which movies would be on my list.
The WSJ hosts a DRM debate between Fritz Attaway of the MPAA and Wendy Seltzer of the EFF. "Digital rights management is the key to consumer choice." Zur? Are those irritating anti-theft packaging stickers on DVDs the key to consumer choice as well?
Putting out a daily 3-minute video show on the web is getting Ze Frank [wait for it....] a whole lot of ass. If enough people upload photos of themselves with "sports racer" written on their asses, Ze will repost the so-called "missing episode" of The Show (a copy of which I have and am trying hard not to upload to YouTube). Questions: How are these people writing so legibly on their own butts? Are they getting someone else to do it...and if so, man, that must be an awkward conversation. "You want me to write 'sports racer' where?" (Probably NSFW.)
Wikipedia contrails
Matt Webb recently posted his Wikipedia contrail, a record of his recent travels among the pages of the online encyclopedia. Neat idea. When I was a kid, we had a World Book encyclopedia which I read at any possible opportunity, and I would have loved to look back at where I'd been. Actually, it would be nice if Wikipedia kept track of this for me as well...maybe it does if you're logged in? (I don't have a Wikipedia account, so I don't know.)
Anyhoo, here's my Wikipedia contrail:
- Jason Kottke - I'm working on a bio for a conference and I checked in to see what I've been up to recently. Apparently I'm married and working on kottke.org "part time".
- Cabinet of curiosities - Doing some research for an upcoming talk.
- Stigmergy - Didn't know there was a term for it.
- Capote - Saw the film, went to read up.
- Groove Is In the Heart - Couldn't remember who sang this and "What is Love". (A: Deee-Lite.)
- Harper Lee - Truman Capote's childhood friend, wrote To Kill A Mockingbird, won a Pulitzer for it, and then barely wrote anything public again.
- Jack Dunphy - Author, companion of Truman Capote.
- Truman Capote - Wrote for the New Yorker, most famous for his "non-fiction novel", In Cold Blood, subject of the film, Capote, threw wicked parties.
- Ann Coulter, Internet troll - These two are related.
- .htaccess - Brushing up on password protecting directories.
- Keratitis, Phlyctenule - Part of my eye went all weird and squishy one evening and I was trying to find out what was going on. Wikipedia was not helpful in this regard.
- Taxicab geometry - Geometry of the driving cab, not the flying crow.
- Perplex City - Linked into this from somewhere...don't even really know what it is.
If you want to find your own contrail, type "en.wikipedia.org/wiki" into your browser and see what comes up in the autocomplete list. Here are contrails from Adrian McEwen, Tom Stafford, and rodcorp.
Sarah Trigg's work combines geographic maps with biological forms. "The explorer system [in colonial North America] caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells." More here. (via moon river)
Underground culture watch: "bug chasers" are men who are actively looking to get infected with AIDS, or "initiated into the brotherhood".
Update: When the RS article came out three years ago, it was taken apart by Andrew Sullivan in Salon and by Dan Savage. (thx jonathan, steven, scott, and tycho)
Current world record holder for most money paid for a painting: Gustav Klimt. Prize money was accepted posthumously by Maria Altmann, an heir of the painting's subject.
Damn it. I was really pulling for the Mavericks and Nowitzki to win it. Bummer: Antoine Walker has a championship. Not so bad: Gary Payton, Alonzo Mourning, and Dwyane Wade have championships. And not a bad way for Shaq to celebrate his last season as a superstar.
They're refurbishing the outside of the Guggenheim and stripping away the facade reveals a doublestrike on the "T" in "The". It's like they started putting the printing on the building and then the architect stops by and says, whoa! that text is supposed to be lower, you morons.
Review of the current crop of Apple "I'm a Mac..." commercials. Verdict? The PC is more like-able than the Mac. "[The ads] are conceptually brilliant, beautifully executed, and highly entertaining. But they don't make me want to buy a Mac."
Robert Birnbaum interview with Susan Orlean. Here's his first interview with her from 2001.
Update: I linked to this without reading it first, something I *never* do, but now that I've read it, there's really some great stuff in there about the writing process, magazines (specifically The New Yorker), and editing. And great quotes like "I'd rather work for Drunken Boat than for Time magazine, to be honest with you". Ouch for Time magazine.
Interview with photographer Chip Simons about inspiration and originality. "You can get work for fancy magazines with just a big ego."
"Shy people may be quiet, but there's a lot going on in their heads. When they encounter a frightening or unfamiliar situation -- meeting someone new, for example -- a brain region responsible for negative emotions goes into overdrive." (via mr)
The hygiene hypothesis of allergies "argues that exposure to more natural environments such as farms early in life helps train the body to respond appropriately to harmless microbes and pollen". Could also be called the "let your kids eat dirt hypothesis". Somewhat related story: my dad had allergies when he was a kid but then got stung by a bunch of bees one day and boom, no more allergies.
Online Media and the Future of Journalism, a forum celebrating the 10th anniversary of Slate at the New York Public Library. June 22, 6:30pm, with Michael Kinsley, Malcolm Gladwell, Arianna Huffington, Norm Pearlstine, and Jacob Weisberg.
Interview with Jim Buckmaster, who gives us an update on what Craiglist is up to. "If I look across the Internet at the big Internet companies, there's a large proportion of their staff that are devoted in various ways to trying to maximize revenue. Those employees I don't think are delivering much bang for the buck to the end user."
When players in World Cup games are arguing with the referees and players from the other team, what language are they speaking and can they actually understand one another? "'Any kind of fellatio comment is inevitably understood,' says [former US player] Alexi Lalas."
A group of photographers are planning to turn a giant abandoned airplane hangar into the world's largest camera (a pinhole camera to be precise). Reminds me of the Cameratruck.
Italian scientists have created glass made out of carbon dioxide. At high pressure, instead of forming a crystal (dry ice), the CO2 forms a clear, hard, vitreous material. More info. (Little known fact: I did research on glass in college, rubidium and cesium borosilicates mostly. Here's a few citations on Google Scholar.)
Ze Frank and The Show gets some coverage in the NY Times. See The Show for yourself.
Taking a drug test and feeling a bit dirty? Order a clean urine sample over the web. They even sell a kit with a fake penis for those under direct observation. (via rb)
Tutorial on how to draw a photorealistic portrait using only Photoshop 6 and a mouse. Look out, Robert Bechtle.
ideasonideas asks several prominent designers what they would have done differently at the beginning of their careers. David Carson's first crack at an answer seemed apropos for him: "not much. things have gone pretty good." Me? I would have learned how to draw.
Jay-Z is banning Cristal champagne in his clubs after some "racist" comments by the champagne house's managing director in The Economist. I think Jay-Z is confusing race with culture here; I can't imagine two cultures that are more different from each other than American hip hop and French champagne production. Despite his hesitancy about discussing a culture unfamiliar to him, I thought the director essentially said that they aren't worried about the bling lifestyle association because it's ultimately good for business. (via bb)
Here's my copy of Beautiful Evidence, Edward Tufte's new book. It's a gorgeous book; more of a report soon after I've had a chance to read it. Get yours by ordering directly from the author or via Amazon.
Alex Halavais offers some advice for students looking to cheat on school papers. "How do you think I check suspicious work? [...] I am pretty good with that Google thingy."
Research shows that the lifetime earnings of graduates who enter the job market during recessions are lower than their boom-time colleagues. "Even a decade or more later, the class of 1988 was still earning significantly less. They missed the plum jobs right out of the gate and never recovered."
The Chicago Tribune has published their list of the 50 best magazines of 2006. Top fiving it for you: The Economist, Dwell, Wired, The New Yorker, and ESPN the Magazine.
Please stop
I know everyone's upset about her new book. I'm not going to use her name, but you know who I'm talking about; she's blonde, leggy, confident, radically conservative, radically full of shit, and you hate her with the fire of a million suns. But she's also a huge troll. Wikipedia defines a troll as:
...someone who comes into an established community such as an online discussion forum, and posts inflammatory, rude or offensive messages designed intentionally to annoy and antagonize the existing members or disrupt the flow of discussion.
And the best strategy against trolls? Ignore them. If I see one more blog post, newspaper column, or debate on TV attempting to refute this woman's claims, I'm going to scream. Claims? What claims? She wrote that book to piss you off and get you to respond, thereby legitimizing her ramblings. That smile of hers? That's her celebrating a victory that you handed her without any effort. YOU'RE SMARTER THAN THAT...KNOCK IT OFF!
Verlag is a new modernist typeface from Hoefler & Frere-Jones designed for the Guggenheim Museum. More on Verlag from Typographica.
Michael Bierut recalls a phone conversation with photographer Arnold Newman. "Er...yes, I do portraits."
The AFI's list of the 100 most inspiring films of all time. Top 5: It's a Wonderful Life, To Kill a Mockingbird, Schindler's List, Rocky, and Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.
Madden NFL 06 Fans Take Video Game Into Real World
Following the examples set by PacManhattan and Nintendo Amusement Park, another popular video game is moving beyond the screen and into the real world. Enthusiasts of EA Sports' Madden NFL 06 have been spotted in various locations around the United States playing a physical game based on the bestselling title.
DeWayne Coleman of Grand Rapids, Michigan said, "it looked so fun on the screen and we thought, 'why can't we go find a flat grassy area to run around, throw the ball, and punt on fourth down?'" Other "football" groups (as they like to be called) have uploaded candid photos of their activity to the Flickr photo-sharing site.
These early amateur efforts bare a crude resemblance to the gameplay in Madden, but a professional league set to begin play this fall in several major US cities will follow Madden NFL 06 much more closely. The National Football League (NFL) will employ athletes that resemble their in-game counterparts that will play for teams named after those in Madden. The teams will go through a full 16-game season, followed by a playoff and a "Super" bowl game to determine the champion. League officials plan to bring in revenue by charging for admission, selling foodstuffs during the games, and memorabilia inspired by the virtual uniforms worn by players in the game. The video game's namesake, TV personality John Madden, will even colorfully describe the action of the games for simultaneous broadcast on network television.
Madden NFL 06 purists have criticized the NFL's ambitious efforts, saying that ticket prices are too high and the games aren't interactive enough. One Madden fan from Phoenix, Arizona summed up the frustrations: "I'm supposed to pay twice as much as I paid for the video game for one lousy live game, not including beer and hot dog costs, and I can't even control what's going on in the game? What the hell is so fun about that?"
You know that patented move that Michael Jackson does in the Smooth Criminal video where he leans and looks like he's going to tip over but then he doesn't? Turns out Jackson actually did patent that method back in 1993. The drawings are pretty funny.
Sh*t yeah, the G** D***ed history of typographical bleeping, motherf***ers! The practice was widespread as early as the late 17th century.
The International Dialects of English Archive has a ton of mp3 files of people speaking English from all over the world. "All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and you will find both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages."
FareCast
A few months ago, I took a look at FlySpy, a site that will help people buy the lowest priced airplane ticket for a given destination. It was a good step in the right direction, but I wanted more:
The killer airline reservation app that I've been wanting for several years would tell you when to buy your ticket for a particular flight. Airlines update their fares several times a day and hundreds of times over the course of a month. Depending on when you buy, it might cost you $250 or $620 for the same exact ticket.
A new site called FareCast does exactly that. It shows you the price history of a particular ticket and tells you what the price forecast is...if the price is trending up/down, how much confidence they have in that prediction, and whether you should buy your ticket now or not. FareCast also shows you price differences based on time of day, so if you've got a flexible schedule, you can fly in the cheap early afternoon rather than the expensive early morning.
The site's currently in a closed beta, the data is restricted to outgoing flights from Boston and Seattle, and they've got a challenging data-mining problem ahead of them, but the early offerings are quite impressive, helpful, and promising.
If you'd like to try it out, I'm giving away 10 invites to the FareCast beta...but you're going to have to work for it a little bit. Email me a link/article/site that you think I would find interesting/relevant enough to post on kottke.org *and* that I haven't seen before. I'll pick the 10 best and give out the invites accordingly. Be sure to send me the email address you'd like to be invited at if it's different from the one you're using to email me. Thx everyone...all the invites have been given out; if you got one, you'll be receiving your invite soon.
I can't tell if this is a joke or not, but someone seems to be quite skeptical about the "theory of gravity" on this Christian Forums site. "are you going to tell me that the gravity of the sun is strong enough to keep PLUTo in orbit but not an airplane or a little bird??????"
The advantages of showing up early to parties. I am a party early-goer for the reasons Tyler describes here...staying longer generally results in diminishing returns for me.
Despite all the hubbub about hybrid cars these days, replacing the incandescent bulbs in your house with fluorescents might result in a similar amount of carbon dioxide savings. (thx suebob)
The changing face of journalism and a comparison of when the press succeeded (Watergate) and when it failed (Enron): "The plenitude of information, not its scarcity, defines the world we live in now. And journalism must change to accommodate that fact."
Interview with designer Michael Bierut. "The best thing design can do for a company is to express that company's personality accurately and compellingly, and in so doing permit that organizations inherent strengths to prevail."
Mark Glaser to the NY Times: "Chairman Sulzberger, if you seek peace in cyberspace, if you seek prosperity for your company, if you seek to spread ideas online: Come here to this TimesSelect gate! Mr. Sulzberger, tear down this pay wall!" A rebuttal. My take: TimesSelect is a perfectly good business decision for the Times. I just think the alternatives are better business decisions.
Design Observer redesigns...looks a bit smarter than before. They joined The Deck too.
Where do the Brazilian soccer players get their names? I'm posting this instead of watching the rest of the US/Czech match because the US is playing like a high school team.
The Viele Map of Manhattan was made in 1865 and shows the original boundaries and waterways of the city. Here's a thumbnail view (with prints for sale) and the David Rumsey Map Collection has a zoomable version that you can explore. (thx, meg)
Update: Took me forever this morning, but I cobbled together a high-res version of the Viele map from the PITA Java applet on the Rumsey site. Warning: the image is quite large (9859 x 3115, 8.6 Mb) so it might crash your browser if you attempt to look at it...better to save it to a local drive and open it up in an image viewer.
Update: Here's a simple zoomable/scrollable version (a la Google Maps) of the high-res image that I whipped up with Zoomify. Thanks to Aaron for the suggestion.
Cars
[Warning, might be some spoilers.] Cars was perfect. The problem is that it was a little too perfect. After seeing the movie on Friday, Meg and I came up with three reasons why Cars missed.
1. Perfection. Some people don't like Wes Anderson's movies because of his emphasis on creating set-driven movies instead of plot- or character-driven movies (ditto George Lucas). With Cars, Lasseter has made himself a perfect world of cars -- the petulant young racer, the lawyer Porsche, the Hispanic lowrider, the hick tow truck -- but it's a world without soul, without surprise. Everything was a little too obvious.
2. Inanimate characters talking. This was the first Pixar movie in which non-human-like or non-animal characters talked. In Toy Story, Buzz, Woody, and even the T. Rex talked, but the TV didn't, nor did the Etch-a-Sketch. In A Bug's Life, only the insects talked. In Cars, you've got these inanimate objects talking to each other, and while they did a great job making them seem human, I just couldn't get into the characters; it felt fake and inauthentic.
3. Unlikable main character. For the first half of the movie, Lightning McQueen is a flat-out jerk with zero redeeming qualities. I remember reading an interview with John Lasseter recently where he was talking about one of the first rough cuts they did of Toy Story in which Woody was too sarcastic. After seeing it, they realized this and tempered Woody's sarcasm with some like-ability, so that the audience would be pulling for him to change his ways, a deep-down good guy that needs to see the light. Lightning didn't deserve redemption...he was just an asshole.
Cars is a fine movie with a lot to recommend it, but it's just not up to Pixar's normal standards. I was disappointed.