After two months of paternity leave and mostly not posting, I'm resuming work on kottke.org today. It's been wonderful getting to know my son and gaining some much needed perspective, but I've missed doing the site too...9.5 years on and there's so much yet to do. So here we go.
Two quick notes.
1. I've saved up several links found while on leave...they'll be trickling out to the blog for the next few days. Apologies if you've seen them before (some you probably haven't), but if you've been paying attention, kottke.org isn't a place for the exclusively new and fresh. There are several other sites out there for that; they function excellently but I'm going to have to go ahead and disagree with much of the blogosphere that whatever is newest is interesting to the detriment of everything else. Bollocks to the new.
2. Several people have inexplicably assumed that since I'm now a father, kottke.org is going to turn into some kind of daddyblog, and furthermore asserted that they'd like that not very much. Rest assured, not going to happen. I'm sure I'll make occasional mention of the family, but don't look for posts entitled "Umbrella Stroller Buying Guide" or "How to Buy Gender Neutral Clothing for Your Newborn (A: Don't Try, This is Nearly Impossible)". For those who want Ollie, Ollie, Ollie all the time, may I suggest checking out my Flickr stream for the occasional photo.
After working on this -- on again and off again, mostly off -- for much too long, I'm pleased to say that a significant chunk of kottke.org now has tags (around 5,100 entries are tagged, out of ~13,000). Right now, the only way to access them is through individual tag pages, but after all the bugs are ironed out, I'll be putting them in different places around the site (front page, main archive page, etc.).
Each tag page lists all the entries1 on the site that are tagged with that particular word...some good examples to start you off are: photography, economics, lists, infoviz, food, nyc, cities, restaurants, video, timelapse, interviews, language, maps, and fashion. Each page also has a list of tags related to that particular tag and further down in the sidebar, you'll find lists of recently popular tags, all-time popular tags, a few favorite tags of mine, and some random tags...lots of stuff to explore.
I've tweaked the design as well: the main column is a little wider, the post metadata look/feel is consistent among short posts and long posts, faint dotted lines now separate all entries, and per-entry tags were added to the post metadata. I'm testing all that out for eventual site-wide use. Questions, comments, bug reports, etc. are welcome...send them on in.
Update: I almost forgot, the nsfw tag.
[1] Not all the entries exactly. Until I figure out how to do some pagination, I've limited the number of entries to 100 for each tag page. The movies page was more than 1 Mb when all the entries were listed. ↩
Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently (previous installment is here):
The Celluloid Skyline exhibition at Grand Central is well worth checking out...I was up there this past weekend. Pentagram collaborated with Saunders on the exhibit and wrote up a brief piece on how it came together.
My short post on Nina Planck's reaction to the recent "death by veganism", as she calls it, of a baby boy is a good reminder that I don't always agree with the things I link to. My only criteria for posting a link is that it's interesting, whether I think it's right or wrong or am still trying to form an opinion about it. Anyway, I got lots of mail about this one, much of it that said that the parents' veganism was beside the point -- which the prosecutors and jury in the subsequent criminal case agreed with (thx, matt) -- and that a headline like "Death By Stupidity" was probably more appropriate. After all, you don't see "Death by Omnivorism" headlines every time a baby with a more traditional diet dies of starvation.
Debra from Culiblog pointed out that contrary to Planck's assertion that "there are no vegan societies", the Jainists practice vegetarianism and veganism. On the other side of the aisle, meat fan Michael Ruhlman chastised Planck for going too easy on vegans, saying that "Veganism is a colossal arrogance, a refusal to admit to our own nature, a denial of our humanity. Sometimes it kills people. And it's not very much fun, besides." You can imagine the discussion that generated...although it was nothing like the 300+ comment thread on MetaFilter.
My opinion of Cars improved with a second viewing.
Discover's chat bot conversation reminded a reader of this old interview with the Ask Jeeves search engine (thx david). Back in 2002, I interviewed ELLEGirl magazine's AIMbot:
jkottke: Do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons?
ELLEgirlBuddy: do you do anything to celebrate or recognize the changing of seasons? that's a tough choice.
jkottke: yes, to celebrate or merely recognize. that is a toughie.
ELLEgirlBuddy: yes to celebrate or merely recognize that is a toughie? i dunno.
jkottke: you seem like an actual 13 year old girl.
ELLEgirlBuddy: i haven't really made a decision 'bout that.
jkottke: growing up is tough, isn't it?
ELLEgirlBuddy: i dunno.
And whoever posted the chat bot story to Digg (5696 Diggs and counting!) used the exact wording from my original post. You're welcome!
Prime, David Burke's quarter-million-dollar Black Angus bull, has his own web site. (thx, brian)
Regarding Alex Reisner's excellent baseball statistics web site and, in particular, the pennant race graphs, here's another interesting visualization of the pennant races...you can see the teams race to the end of the year like horses. (thx, scott)
Re: my post on better living through self-deception, I've heard that pregnant women tend to forget the pain of childbirth, perhaps because "endorphins reduce the amount of information trauma victims can store". Also related tangetially is this article on research into lying and laughing, which includes this simple test to see if you're a good liar:
Are you a good liar? Most people think that they are, but in reality there are big differences in how well we can pull the wool over the eyes of others. There is a very simple test that can help determine your ability to lie. Using the first finger of your dominant hand, draw a capital letter Q on your forehead.
Some people draw the letter Q in such a way that they themselves can read it. That is, they place the tail of the Q on the right-hand side of their forehead. Other people draw the letter in a way that can be read by someone facing them, with the tail of the Q on the left side of their forehead. This quick test provides a rough measure of a concept known as "self-monitoring". High self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be seen by someone facing them. Low self-monitors tend to draw the letter Q in a way in which it could be read by themselves.
High self-monitors tend to be concerned with how other people see them. They are happy being the centre of attention, can easily adapt their behaviour to suit the situation in which they find themselves, and are skilled at manipulating the way in which others see them. As a result, they tend to be good at lying. In contrast, low self-monitors come across as being the "same person" in different situations. Their behaviour is guided more by their inner feelings and values, and they are less aware of their impact on those around them. They also tend to lie less in life, and so not be so skilled at deceit.
The skyscraper with one floor isn't exactly a new idea. Rem Koolhaas won a competition to build two libraries in France with one spiraling floor in 1992 (thx, mike). Of course, there's the Guggenheim in NYC and many parking garages.
After posting a brief piece on Baltimore last week, I discovered that several of my readers are current or former residents of Charm City...or at least have an interest in it. Armin sent along the Renaming Baltimore project...possible names are Domino, Maryland and Lessismore. A Baltimore Sun article on the Baltimore Youth Lacrosse League published shortly after my post also referenced the idea of "Two Baltimores. Two cities in one." The Wire's many juxtapositions of the "old" and "new" Baltimore are evident to viewers of the series. Meanwhile, Mobtown Shank took a look at the crime statistics for Baltimore and noted that crime has actually decreased more than 40% from 1999 to 2005. (thx, fred)
Cognitive Daily took an informal poll and found that fewer than half the respondants worked a standard 8-5 Mon-Fri schedule. Maybe that's why the streets and coffeeshops aren't empty during the workday.
Since swearing off Technorati a couple of years ago, I've been checking back every few months to see if the situation has improved. The site is definitely more responsive but their data problems seemingly remain, at least with regard to kottke.org; Google Blog Search gives consistently better results and easy access to RSS feeds of searches.
Technorati recently introduced something called the Technorati Authority number, which is a fancy name for the number of blogs linking to a site in the last six months. Curious as to where kottke.org fell on the authority scale, I checked out the top 100 blogs list. Not there, so I proceeded to the "Everything in the known universe about kottke.org" page where a portion of that huge cache of kottke.org knowledge was the authority number: 5,094. Looking at the top 100 list, that should put the site at #47, nestled between The Superficial and fishki.net, but it's not there. Technorati also currently states that kottke.org hasn't been updated in the last day, despite several updates since then and my copy of MT pinging Technorati after each update.
Maybe kottke.org has been intentionally excluded because I've been so hard on them in the past. Or maybe it's just a glitch (or two) in their system. Or maybe it's an indication of larger problems with their service. Either way, as the company is attempting to offer an authentic picture of the blogosphere, this doesn't seem like the type of rigor and accuracy that should send reputable media sources like the BBC, Washington Post, NY Times, and the Wall Street Journal scurrying to their door looking for reliable data about blogs.
Update: As of 3:45pm EST, the top 100 list has been updated to include kottke.org. The site also picked up this post right away, but failed to note a subsequent post published a few minutes later..
- Pruning the list of RSS feeds I follow.
- Digging.
- Writing about hoes.
- Keeping deer out of the <p>s.
- Growing my traffic.
- Worrying about bees.
- (Com)posting links?
- Weeding out spam from comment threads.
- ^s.
- There's never enough thyme.
- Wondering about the weather.
It's been awhile since I've done one of these. Here are some updates on some of the topics, links, ideas, posts, people, etc. that have appeared on kottke.org recently:
Two counterexamples to the assertion that cities != organisms or ecosystems: cancer and coral reefs. (thx, neville and david)
In pointing to the story about Ken Thompson's C compiler back door, I forgot to note that the backdoor was theoretical, not real. But it could have easily been implemented, which was Thompson's whole point. A transcript of his original talk is available on the ACM web site. (thx, eric)
ChangeThis has a "manifesto" by Nassim Taleb about his black swan idea. But reader Jean-Paul says that Taleb's idea is not that new or unique. In particular, he mentions Alain Badiou's Being and Event, Jacques Derrida, and Gilles Deleuze. (thx, paul & jean-paul)
When I linked The Onion's 'Most E-Mailed' List Tearing New York Times' Newsroom Apart, I said "I'd rather read a real article on the effect the most popular lists have on the decisions made by the editorial staff at the Times, the New Yorker, and other such publications". American Journalism Review published one such story last summer, as did the Chicago Tribune's Hypertext blog and the LA Times (abstract only). (thx, gene & adam)
Related to Kate Spicer's attempt to slim down to a size zero in 6 weeks: Female Body Shape in the 20th Century. (thx, energy fiend)
Got the following query from a reader:
are those twitter updates on your blog updated automatically when you update your twitter? if so, how did you do it?
A couple of weeks ago, I added my Twitter updates and recent music (via last.fm) into the front page flow (they're not in the RSS feed, for now). Check out the front page and scroll down a bit if you want to check them out. The Twitter post is updated three times a week (MWF) and includes my previous four Twitter posts. I use cron to grab the RSS file from Twitter, some PHP to get the recent posts, and some more PHP to stick it into the flow. The last.fm post works much the same way, although it's only updated once a week and needs a splash of something to liven it up a bit.
The guy who played Spaulding in Caddyshack is a real estate broker in the Boston area. (thx, ivan)
Two reading recommendations regarding the Jonestown documentary: a story by Tim Cahill in A Wolverine Is Eating My Leg and Seductive Poison by former People's Temple member Deborah Layton. (thx, garret and andrea)
In case someone in the back didn't hear it, this map is not from Dungeons and Dragons but from Zork/Dungeon. (via a surprising amount of people in a short period of time)
When reading about how low NYC's greenhouse gas emissions are relative to the rest of the US, keep in mind the area surrounding NYC (kottke.org link). "Think of Manhattan as a place which outsources its pollution, simply because land there is so valuable." (thx, bob)
NPR did a report on the Nickelback potential self-plagiarism. (thx, roman)
After posting about the web site for Miranda July's new book, several people reminded me that Jeff Bridges' site has a similar lo-fi, hand-drawn, narrative-driven feel.
In the wake of linking to the IMDB page for Back to the Future trivia, several people reminded me of the Back to the Future timeline, which I linked to back in December. A true Wikipedia gem.
I'm ashamed to say I'm still hooked on DesktopTD. The problem is that the creator of the game keeps updating the damn thing, adding new challenges just as you've finally convinced yourself that you've wrung all of the stimulation out of the game. As Robin notes, it's a brilliant strategy, the continual incremental sequel. Version 1.21 introduced a 10K gold fun mode...you get 10,000 gold pieces at the beginning to build a maze. Try building one where you can send all 50 levels at the same time and not lose any lives. Fun, indeed.
Regarding the low wattage color palette, reader Jonathan notes that you should use that palette in conjunction with a print stylesheet that optimizes the colors for printing so that you're not wasting a lot of ink on those dark background colors. He also sent along an OS X trick I'd never seen before: to invert the colors on your monitor, press ctrl-option-cmd-8. (thx, jonathan)
Dorothea Lange's iconic Migrant Mother photograph was modified for publication...a thumb was removed from the lower right hand corner of the photo. Joerg Colberg wonders if that case could inform our opinions about more recent cases of photo alteration.
In reviewing all of this, the following seem related in an interesting way: Nickelback's self-plagiarism, continual incremental sequels, digital photo alteration, Tarantino and Rodriquez's Grindhouse, and the recent appropriation of SimpleBits' logo by LogoMaid.
Got a penny-stock spam this morning where most of the text designed to confuse spam filters was taken from kottke.org.
From: "Harriot Mckee" <mwuq@symlog.com>
Date: March 27, 2007 10:28:25 AM EDT
To: <jason@kottke.org>
Subject: The outside of one particular prison is all glass like an Apple Store, the furniture is nicely designed, and the sports facilities are top-notch.
CWTD Receives "National Park Award"
China World Trade Corp.
Symbol: CWTD
Price: $0.489
CWTD a diverse company involved in world trade and business services has just been awarded the "Nation Park Award" for one of the parks it manages. CWTD is expected to issue a huge news release this week. We always see big returns when they do. Read up and get ready. Get on CWTD first thing Tuesday morning!
" (via that's how it happened) Looking for work?
Exburbians moved to the farthest reaches of suburbia for cheap real estate, willing to drive at least an hour each way to work.
Why, then, don't we pull for the Iraqi insurgents? "There comes a time when you should stop expecting other people to make a big deal about your birthday.
Netflix has a "take as much as you want" vacation.
That suggests that the claim may be phony, he said.
Why can't we see ourselves in the faces of those kids firing RPGs at convoys of Halliburton trucks stealing Iraqi oil?
A French map shows that the Portuguese were the first.
All content by Jason Kottke (contact me) unless otherwise noted, with some restrictions on its use. Protect Your System From Online Intruders.
Sales of home coffee machines nearly . I didn't think we had done enough in the diplomatic area.
You could say it would be a lifetime's quest to reconcile this battling trinity into a seamless whole. (thx, jennifer)
Looking for work? Bob Saget was onto something.
I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the people responsible for Blogger is also responsible for Twitter.
jonreese(or how i learned to stop worrying and love the blog): Who Murdered 32 Iraqi Children?
Update: The Showtime site doesn't seem to be available to those outside of the US.
jonreese(or how i learned to stop worrying and love the blog): America is over.
An interview with Michael Pollan about The Omnivore's Dilemma.
kottke.org might be a little slow today with (hopefully short) periods of downtime. I'm doing some long-overdue maintenance on the server to pave the way for a bit of future development. In Flickr parlance, kottke.org is having a massage.
Update: Alright, we had two little blips of downtime and now it looks like the site is back up and running like a finely tuned watch, a watch with a web server running on it.
Update: Took care of one last little glitch last night...should be alright now. You may need to clear your cache to make sure everything works smoothly.
On March 14, 1998, I made the first post to this little site. And I'm still standin' (yeah yeah yeah). Here's to 9 more years. Actually, I'll settle for making it to 10. Baby steps.
In addition to my regular duties on kottke.org, I'm editing Buzzfeed today. Stories so far: Bracket Madness, Sweet Sweet Passover Coke, and 2007 Movie Season. More to come this afternoon.
And if that weren't enough excitement for one day, it's also Pi Day. (Whoa, the Pi Day web site uses Silkscreen!) I bet the Pi Dayers are really looking forward to 2015 when they can extend the fun to two additional decimal places.
As promised, I've made some long overdue changes to the kottke.org RSS feeds and the remaindered links. I've combined the two kottke.org feeds -- previously one contained main posts, movie posts, and book posts and the other contained the so-called remaindered links -- into one feed, located here:
http://feeds.kottke.org/main
If you're already subscribed to the main feed, you shouldn't have to change a thing. If you're subscribed to the remaindered feed, your newsreader (if it's smart enough) should automatically and permanently redirect you to the new feed. If not, just change the subscription to point at the above feed. If you're subscribed to both, unsubscribe from the remaindered feed. The new combined feed will mirror the front page of the site...whatever appears there will appear in the feed.
Second thing: the remaindered links are dead. Long live the remaindered links. Oh, they're still here on the site, but it's been a long time since they were just links...they're more like mini posts with no titles -- some of them are actually longer than the non-mini posts. The distinction made sense when they were included in the sidebar on the front page, but not anymore. Functionally that means no separate RSS feed, no separate archives, and no separate index page...they're all gone (or will be soon). All the remaindered links posts are still available, but they're in the main monthly archives now. The point is, you don't need to worry about any of this. Just subscribe to the above feed or come to the front page each day and you'll get everything that's new on kottke.org everyday. Simple.
Things should have worked this way for, oh, the past two years, but I just never got around to changing it. What finally kicked my butt into action were two things that happened in the past two weeks. I had coffee with Cory Doctorow last weekend. He asked how things were going with kottke.org and remarked that I'm not posting nearly as much as I used to. I replied that I had been posting as much as ever, but got the feeling that Cory was only subscribed to the main RSS feed, which only accounted for about 15-20% of my total effort on the site. I wondered how many other people out there were only subscribed to the main feed and started to, oh, I guess "fret" is the right word.
Fret turned to panic when I checked my server logs. Bloglines sends along how many people are subscribed to an RSS feed in the user-agent string that's deposited in the referer logs on the server, like so:
Bloglines/3.1 (http://www.bloglines.com; 200 subscribers)
When I compared the number of subscribers to the main feed to the number subscribing to the remaindered feed, the main feed number was nearly 3 times higher. Even worse is when I looked at my server logs for the feeds (I stopped looking at my stats months ago)...visits to the main feed are outpacing visits to the remaindered feed 5:1. Which means that somewhere between 75-85% of the people who are reading kottke.org via RSS aren't even getting most of what's on the site! Which was dumb, dumb, dumb of me to let happen for all these months and why I've now corrected the situation. Interestingly, the stats from Rojo indicate the opposite situation...way more people are subscribed to the remaindered links feed than the main feed. Weird. (Another RSS stats tidbit: I've served up 58 gigabytes of RSS so far this month. That's crazy!)
As always, your bug reports, questions, and concerns are appreciated and may be directed to jason@kottke.org.
Apologizing for not posting much lately is liable to get a fellow burned at the stake around these parts but since I'm feeling a little chilly today, I figured why not. Things outside kottke.org have been taking up much of my attention for the last week or so and they've made posting here regularly and with gusto more difficult than usual. Apologies.
But also, and more relevantly, I've been working on a number of improvements for kottke.org and I'm finally rolling some of them out. On the front-end, the part you see, the changes are relatively minor but things are working differently now on the back-end. I'm still using Movable Type to edit the site, but now there's a layer of PHP that takes what MT spits out, works some magic, and presents it to you folks, an arrangement that is probably a little nuts to anyone who knows their bangs from their octothorpes, but it promises to allow me more flexibility with how I want to present things around here.
Anyway, here's what's new:
- Slight changes on the front page, including dates for the short entries and separate listings for each movie "review".
- Monthly archives are now combined. Instead of going to separate pages to see the December 2006 entries for movies, books, remaindered links, and main entries, all entries are presented on one page. Books and movies are still available on their own pages.
- A pared down the archive page to remove the superfluous monthly archives, as well as little changes to pages here and there for the same reason.
- Something fun: a page of random posts from the kottke.org archives, featuring lots of broken links, really poor writing, but also some nice posts from back when. The posts randomize every time I update, which is every hour or two during the day.
That's it for now. There will be more over the weekend, I hope, including some looooooooooooooooooong overdue changes to the RSS feeds and remaindered links. As always, your bug reports, questions, and concerns are appreciated and may be directed to jason@kottke.org.
Compiling a list of the best things I've linked to from kottke.org seems to get harder each year. I estimate posting about 2400 links to kottke.org in 2006, which is roughly one link every 2.5 hours on weekdays. Which is insane...I don't know how you guys read all of that. Last year I managed to whittle down the best-of list to ~65 links (2004's list had ~40 links), but I couldn't manage less than 100 this year. (Hell, the overflow list contains another 100 links that didn't quite make the cut...hopefully I'll be posting those in a few days.)
But enough with the statistics. Besides containing some really entertaining, informative, and provoking reading/viewing material, this list also functions as kottke.org's year in ideas for 2006, akin to the annual list in the NY Times Magazine. Climate change, the industrialization of childbirth, race & class in college & professional sports, the inherent messiness of science, adults who don't want to grow up, the role of journalism in the age of information abundance, and how creative work gets done are all ideas represented in the links below. Even the funny YouTube videos signal the arrival in 2006 of online video, especially if you throw Ze Frank in the mix. Enjoy.
Pruned found art in petri dishes. More.
The M.C. Escher-inspired art of Rob Gonsalves.
David Remnick's review of An Inconvenient Truth (and short biography of post-2000 Al Gore).
A collection of color photographs of WWII-era America from the Library of Congress. (I color-corrected some of the photos.)
New Yorker piece about the possible solving of the Poincare conjecture by Grigory Perelman.
NY Times Magazine piece by Michael Lewis on Michael Oher, excerpted from his book, The Blind Side.
The Smoking Gun's takedown of James Frey was fair, accurate, and devastating.
Line Rider. Not quite a game, not quite a toy, but hours of fun.
Tetris documentary, From Russia With Love.
Stabilized version of the Zapruder film of John F. Kennedy's assassination.
Matthew Barney and Bjork on the phone with Ikea.
The Omarosa Experiment reveals the inner workings of reality TV.
Dorodango: shiny balls of mud.
Olivo Barbieri's aerial photographs taken with a tilt-shift lens spawned some amazing Photoshopped fakes on Flickr.
Details on how to speak to a live customer support person for hundreds of companies. Indispensable.
The story of how Pixar came to be.
Wasp creates zombie cockroaches.
Falling sand, another not-a-game game.
Tap out a rhythm and Song Tapper will tell you what song it's from.
London Tube map where all the stations are sponsored by companies.
The Simpsons intro done with live actors.
Interview with Jonathan Rauch about his popular piece about introverts for The Atlantic Monthly.
Rotation Of Earth Plunges Entire North American Continent Into Darkness.
Pregnancy is a tug of war between mother and fetus over nutrients.
Extensive primers for more than three dozen film genres.
A story about 40-year-old men and women who look, talk, act, and dress like people who are 22 years old.
It's a bad time to start a company.
Horrible Segues, With Local Anchorman Clive Rutledge.
American Express commercial directed by Wes Anderson.
Photo essay of female Israeli soldiers.
The four different types of explanations.
The language of The Simpsons.
Pictures I Like For a Variety of Reasons.
David Copperfield thwarts would-be robbers with slight of hand. Hands down, the link of the year.
Magnum photographer Paul Fusco's photo essay of Chernobyl survivors.
In Praise of Loopholes.
Dozens of old Sesame Street clips on YouTube.
How to cure your asthma or hayfever using hookworm.
How one man fell for a Nigerian email scam.
Is serendipity dead?
Steven Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner tell us that expert performers -- in math, football, ballet, chess -- are made, not born.
Michael Wolf's 100x100, 100 photos of Hong Kong apartments each 100 square feet in size.
1989 New Yorker profile of Errol Morris.
A history of the lowrider.
Dozens of historical sounds in mp3 format.
10,000 sheep created by people hired online through Amazon's Mechanical Turk program.
Web 2.OH, YEAAHH!! t-shirts. Pun of the year.
Extensive gallery of Russian/Soviet propaganda and advertising posters.
Implanting magnets in your fingertips gives you a sixth magnetic sense.
The Press' New Paradigm.
A history of Manhattan's diamond district and its informal historian, Stephen Kilnisan.
Photographs of a flock of more than a million European starlings.
Photographs of burn victims by John Brownlow.
What if great photographers posted their work on the web?
Why play "what if"? Here's an Henri Cartier-Bresson being rubbished on Flickr.
An image of human eyes placed above an honesty pay box results in more people paying for their food/drinks. More.
Russian movie illustrations.
A blue-skinned family in the hills of Kentucky. More.
Daniel Raeburn writes about his stillborn daughter Irene. About two years later, her sister Willa is born.
Easily mispronounced domain names.
The Oil We Eat.
Turning innocuous video clips into naughty scenes with selective bleeping. Hilarious.
Kristoffer Garin follows a group of American men on a bride-hunting trip to the Ukraine.
MotherLoad, an extremely addictive online game.
Watch as Lake Peigner drains entirely into a hole created by an errant oil drill. More info.
The Art of the Shiv, a photo essay of prison weapons.
The Show with Ze Frank. The most consistently entertaining and informative online media in 2006.
Journalist Claire Hoffman was physically assaulted by Joe Francis while doing a piece on him and his Girls Gone Wild empire.
The physical impossibility of gigantic and microscopic movie creatures.
Argentina on Two Steaks a Day.
Bijou's Bag of Tricks. This photo makes me laugh until I cry.
Geoffrey Chaucer gets an Xbox 360.
Six years of daily photographs compiled into a movie.
The Voyager spacecraft escapes from the solar system.
David Foster Wallace writes about Roger Federer as Religious Experience.
The vast majority of the decisions in the Senate are made for economic reasons, not social ones.
1964 New Yorker profile of Bob Dylan.
How to Write a Fugue, featuring a fugue of Britney Spears' "Oops, I Did It Again".
State of Emergency, a surprisingly political fashion shoot from Vogue Italia.
What if the inflight announcement you heard while traveling was honest?
The photography of Corey Arnold, particularly of the Bering Sea crabbers.
Billionaire Steve Wynn pokes a hole in one of his Picassos with an errant elbow.
Malcolm Gladwell talks about the myth of prodigy.
Atul Gawande tells us how childbirth became industrialized.
Great list of insults.
2003 New Yorker profile of the late R.W. Apple by Calvin Trillin.
Time lapse video of a man putting on 155 t-shirts, one over the other.
Diary of a Sex Slave.
The world's best worst movie pitches.
Why There Almost Certainly Is No God by Richard Dawkins.
Scott Adams cures himself of losing his voice.
Phil Gyford's beginner's guide to freelancing.
Amateur cyclist Stuart Stevens takes performance-enhancing drugs and writes about it for Outside magazine.
New Yorker profile of Will Wright.
Maureen Gibson finds a picture of her rapist on the Engagements page of her hometown newspaper.
Comedian Aries Spears does great impressions of rappers Snoop Dogg, DMX, and Jay-Z.
A cognitive neuroscience grad student games Who Wants to Be a Millionaire.
How to talk to a climate skeptic.
NPR piece with Jason Simmons, professional rock, paper, scissors player.
Lasse Gjertsen's Amateur music video.
What NFL games are going to be on in your part of the country?
Photo of young homeless man Beavis shooting up in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco.
NPR interview with Ed Burns, creator of The Wire.
Hans van der Meer's photos of European soccer fields.
Giant magazine's list of the 50 greatest commercials of the 80s (with accompanying videos).
Slate interview with Ed Burns, creator of The Wire.
Writers Dreamtools History by Decades...facts, figures, styles, language, and goings-on for fiction writers.
Seminal experimental film La Jetée online in its entirety.
Philipp Lenssen recently asked some bloggers what their most popular post was:
I asked several bloggers about their most popular, or one of their most popular, blog posts -- the kind that made an impact on people, had skyrocketing traffic numbers, or triggered a meme or changes.
I was asked to answer the question, but didn't get my response in on time. Here's what I would have answered. In terms of pure traffic, it wasn't the biggest, but my 9/11 post and the resulting 2-3 weeks of posts subsequent to that probably had the biggest relative impact on the site. My traffic immediately doubled and didn't go back down after things settled down a little. You might say that those two weeks made kottke.org, just like they gave birth to the war/political blogs. That day opened a lot of bloggers' eyes to the cynical truth that the traditional news media already knew: other people's tragedy and pain sells.
I don't regret covering 9/11 the way that I did because it came from the heart and I got so much email from people, even weeks and months afterward, who genuinely appreciated my small contribution. But following 9/11, I've been increasingly wary of covering similar situations in the same way because, knowing that cynical truth, a part of me would be doing it for selfish reasons: writing for hits, attention, and glory. I posted a few things early on about the Indonesian tsunami and the London Tube bombings, and hardly anything about Katrina (I took a week off instead, writing about anything else during that time seemed trivial and ridiculous). In some ways, 9/11 was the defining editorial moment for kottke.org. After that experience, I took more care in why I was writing about certain topics and when the answer was "to get attention" or "because it's a hot issue" or "if I piss off [big blogger], he'll link back to me in rebuttal and boost traffic" or "if I kiss [big blogger's] ass, he'll link to me" or "I need to cover this issue for kottke.org to remain relevant in the global news conversat-blah-blah-blah", I usually take a pass. That editorial stance has probably cost kottke.org a lot of traffic over the years, but that's a trade-off I'm completely comfortable with.
As many of you don't know, I've been working less-than-diligently1 on a project with the eventual goal of adding tags to kottke.org. I posted some early results back in August of 2005. The other day, I started thinking about how tags could help people get a sense of what's been talked about recently on the site, like Flickr's listing of hot tags. I started by compiling a list of tags from the last 200 entries and ordering them by how many times they were used over that period. Here is the top 20 (with # of instances in parentheses)
photography (33), books (26), art (26), science (22), tv (21), movies (21), lists (20), video (17), nyc (16), weblogs (15), design (14), interviews (13), bestof (13), business (12), thewire (12), food (11), sports (11), games (10), language (10), music (9)
The items in bold also appear in the top 50 of the all-time popular tags, so obviously this list isn't telling us anything new about what's going on around here. To weed those always-popular tags from the list, I compared the recent frequency of each tag with its all-time frequency and came up with a list of tags that are freakishly popular right now compared to how popular they usually are. Call this list a measure of the popularity acceleration of each tag. The top 20:
blindside (3), pablopicasso (3), ghostmap (3), davidsimon (5), poptech2006 (4), thewire (12), andywarhol (3), michaellewis (4), education (4), youtube (4), richarddawkins (5), realestate (3), crime (8), working (8), school (3), dvd (4), georgewbush (4), stevenjohnson (5), writing (4), photoshop (3)
(Note: I also removed tags with less than three instances from this list and the ones below.) Now we're getting somewhere. None of these appear in the top 50 all-time list. But it's still not that accurate a list of what's been going on here recently. I've posted 3 times about Photoshop, but you can't discount entirely the 33 posts about photography. What's needed is a mix of the two lists: generally popular tags that are also popular right now (first list) + generally unpopular tags that are popular right now (second list). So I blended the two lists together in different proportions:
75% recent / 25% all-time:
davidsimon (5), poptech2006 (4), ghostmap (3), pablopicasso (3), blindside (3), thewire (12), andywarhol (3), michaellewis (4), education (4), photography (33), art (26), youtube (4), tv (21), richarddawkins (5), books (26), crime (8), video (17), working (8), realestate (3), science (22)
67% recent / 33% all-time:
davidsimon (5), poptech2006 (4), pablopicasso (3), ghostmap (3), blindside (3), thewire (12), andywarhol (3), photography (33), art (26), michaellewis (4), education (4), tv (21), books (26), youtube (4), video (17), science (22), richarddawkins (5), crime (8), movies (21), lists (20)
50% recent / 50% all-time:
thewire (12), davidsimon (5), photography (33), poptech2006 (4), blindside (3), ghostmap (3), pablopicasso (3), art (26), books (26), tv (21), science (22), movies (21), lists (20), andywarhol (3), video (17), michaellewis (4), education (4), nyc (16), weblogs (15), crime (8)
25% recent / 75% all-time:
photography (33), art (26), books (26), tv (21), science (22), movies (21), lists (20), thewire (12), video (17), nyc (16), weblogs (15), davidsimon (5), poptech2006 (4), design (14), interviews (13), bestof (13), blindside (3), ghostmap (3), pablopicasso (3), business (12)
The 75%-66% recent lists look like a nice mix of the newly & perenially popular and a fairly accurate representation of the last 3 weeks of posts on kottke.org.
Digression for programmers and math enthusiastists only: I'm curious to know how others would have handled this issue. I approached the problem in the most straighforward manner I could think of (using simple algebra) and the results are pretty good, but it seems like an approach that makes use an equation that approximates the distribution of the popularity of the tags (which roughly follows a power law curve) would work better. Here's what I did for each tag (using the nyc tag as an example):
# of recent entries: 300
# of total entries: 3399
# of recent instances of the nyc tag: 16
# of total instances of the nyc tag: 247
# of instances of the most frequent recent tag: 33
# of instances of the most frequent tag, all-time: 272
Calculate the recent and all-time frequencies of the nyc tag:
16/300 = 0.0533
247/3399 = 0.0726
Then divide the recent frequency by the all-time frequency to get the popularity acceleration:
0.0533/0.0726 = 0.7342
That's how much more popular the nyc tag is now than it has been all-time. In other words, the nyc tag is 0.7342 times as popular over the last 300 entries as it has been overall...~1/4 less popular than it usually is. To get the third list with the 75% emphasis on population acceleration and 25% on all-time popularity, I stated by normalizing the popularity acceleration and all-time frequency by dividing the nyc tag values by the top value of the group in each case (11.33 is the popularity acceleration of the blindside tag and 0.11 is the recent frequency of the photography tag (33/300)):
0.7342/11.33 = 0.0647
0.0533/0.11 = 0.4845
So, the nyc tag has a popularity acceleration of 0.0647 times that of the blindside tag and has a recent frequency that is 0.4845 times that of the most popular recent tag. Then:
0.0647*0.75 + 0.4845*0.25 = 0.1696
Calculate this number for each recent tag, rank them from highest to lowest, and you get the third list above. Now, it seems to me that I may have fudged something in the last two steps, but I'm not exactly sure. And if I did, I don't know what got fudged. Any help or insight would be appreciated.
[1] Great artists ship. Mediocre artists ship slowly. ↩
Every week, I get 3 or 4 inquiries from people looking for jobs in the web design/technology area or for employees (happily, it's more the latter than the former these days). When I hear about someone who needs some work done and I have a friend or friend of a friend who's available, I'm glad to make the connection. For the past couple of years, I've wanted to build a job board for kottke.org to make more of these connections possible, but I never got around to it. So when Jason Fried asked me if I wanted to put a link to the simple, focused 37signals Job Board on kottke.org (you'll find it on every page of the site, below The Deck ad), that seemed to be the next best thing to building my own. I've been referring people there anyway, so a stronger connection makes sense.
Seth Godin, who ruminates for a living, wrote a little something about how ideas are transmitted last year:
For an idea to spread, it needs to be sent and received.
No one "sends" an idea unless:
a. they understand it
b. they want it to spread
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits
No one "gets" an idea unless:
a. the first impression demands further investigation
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time
Seth hits the nail right on the head with this. When I'm deciding what links to post here, I'm essentially curating ideas, collecting them to "send" to you (and to myself, in a way). And unconsciously, these seven points factor into my decision on what to post here.
a. they understand it - I read everything I post and attempt to understand an article enough to represent it accurately when linking to it.
b. they want it to spread - I pick links and write posts based on ideas that I think are in some way important, meaningful, relevent, or good for the soul. And sure, I want those ideas to be more widely known or enjoyed, even if it's something as simple as someone getting a needed chuckle from a video of a monkey teasing a dog.
c. they believe that spreading it will enhance their power (reputation, income, friendships) or their peace of mind - This factors into anyone's motivations for anything. In George Orwell's 1947 essay Why I Write, his #1 reason is "sheer egoism".
d. the effort necessary to send the idea is less than the benefits - If I wanted to, I could post 30 links or more a day without too much more effort on my part, but in this case, part of sending the idea is making sure the reader has enough attention to consider it.
a. the first impression demands further investigation - I spend a lot of time on getting the description of some linked text, photo, or video just right, so that the reader has a good idea of what they're getting into. Choosing a 1-2 sentence pull-quote that accurately represents the idea of an article is key in getting people's attention in a productive way. "This is an awesome link" is only going to cut it so many times; you need to tell people what the link is and give people an honest reason to click.
b. they already understand the foundation ideas necessary to get the new idea - I assume visitors to the site are regular readers and that they have a good sense of what happens here, but I try to limit my reliance on jargon or "in-crowd" references so that everyone can follow along.
c. they trust or respect the sender enough to invest the time - If I do all that other stuff right, hopefully you'll trust me enough to be receptive to the ideas I'm sending you. And if not, you probably won't trust me for long.
Like I said, all this was pretty much happening unconsciously. I've worked consciously on bits and pieces of it, but until I read Seth's post, I didn't know that this was the end-to-end process.
Overheard last night as my wife and I were having dinner in our apartment, alone:
If your web site isn't pleasuring you, you shouldn't do it anymore.
Paging Mr. Entendre, Mr. Double Entendre...
Or are they? I was trying to think of Stalin's first name last night and came up with the following before I remembered it was Josef:
- Richard
- Bill
I had myself convinced for an uncomfortably long moment that Bill Stalin was in fact correct.
Over the past two years -- including weekends, holidays, time off, and all of the 24 hours in a day -- kottke.org has changed every 3 hours, 14 minutes, and 51 seconds. Over the past 30 days, there's been something new here every 3 hours, 21 minutes, and 7 seconds. This pace may have some bearing on the above Stalin matter. I still remember to bathe regularly, but that may be the next to go.
I'm the Design Advisor for a new small company in NYC, and we're looking for a full-time web designer. I can't tell you a whole lot about the company here, but I can say it involves the web, contagious media, & weblogs and the people responsible are creative, reasonable, smart, level-headed and not at all "dot com".
What we're looking for is a generalist sort of web designer, someone who can develop the information architecture for an information-oriented web application, do visual mockups in Photoshop/Illustrator based on the IA, code the site up with valid XHTML/CSS, doesn't flee at the sight of a little Perl or PHP code, is familiar with weblogs, and knows some JavaScript. You don't need to be completely solid on all of that, but if you're not, you should be a quick on-the-job learner and just generally curious about the world and interested in learning how it all fits together.
I will provide ad hoc feedback and you'll be working closely with Jonah Peretti and a small team of smart folks onsite in NYC (most likely in Soho or Chinatown). This is a full-time salaried position, benefits are included, and you'll get equity in the company. The position is open immediately so if you're interested, send your resume/portfolio to jobs@buzzfeed.com with a subject line of "Web Designer position" (plain text resumes and links to online resumes/portfolios are greatly preferred to email attachments). We look forward to hearing from you.
In an article for the BBC, Alan Krueger describes how the entertainment industry in the US has become more business-like over the years:
"Early on in the entertainment industry, it's in the interest of the business to think of themselves as throwing a party, not selling a product. I think they attract more of a following that way," he said.
"But over time, the industry takes more the form of a market and is driven by market forces. The Superbowl initially felt like it was rewarding its fans. But then it becomes established and the League finds it in its interest to push up prices."
As my involvement in kottke.org resembles something more like a business and less like a hobby, I've noticed the trajectory described by Krueger, both in my approach to the site and in how kottke.org's readers perceive it. I'm sure other people have experienced this when their small projects have become businesses -- like Blogger, Movable Type, del.icio.us, Upcoming, etc. -- and have struggled to maintain a "rewarding its fans" type of relationship with their customers under increasing pressure from the market to focus on other things. Craigslist has done a good job in sticking close to their initial values and not allowing their business to be driven primarily by market forces. A company like Friendster? Not so successful.
Anyway, an interesting pattern to be aware of.
Sorry to bug you about this, but I moved the RSS feeds for kottke.org and the remaindered links. I'm using redirects so you shouldn't even notice anything. That is, your feedreader should be directed to the new files automagically and if you're reading this message in a newsreader, it has worked. But if you are having problems with the new files, send me an email and I'll get the technical team (ahem) on it right away.
New files: kottke.org RSS, kottke.org remaindered links RSS.
Starting next month, kottke.org will be joining The Deck, a "creative, web + design professionals advertising network" consisting of Waxy.org, 37signals, The Morning News, Coudal Partners, Daring Fireball, A List Apart, and now this site. Here's the announcement. I am honored for kottke.org to be associated with these fine sites.
Functionally, this means that a small ad (120x90 pixels) accompanied by a bit of text will appear on (nearly) every single page of the site beginning May 1. If you've been paying any sort of attention over the past few years, you know I'm not a big fan of advertising and putting ads on kottke.org was almost the last thing on my mind. From the perspective of the reader/viewer, ads are often pushy, irrelevant, redundant, deceitful, insipid, or just plain poorly done. But advertising can also be useful when it communicates clearly, is relevant to its audience, doesn't attempt to mislead, and lets the product/service in question sell itself. An artfully done advertisement can raise the boats of all concerned: the advertiser sells more products, the reader/viewer is informed of useful or appealing products and services, and the content provider is able to feed and clothe her family.
In the past few years, mechanisms for the delivery of advertising have evolved outside the purview of traditional advertising agencies. Two of the better efforts I've seen are Google's AdSense (simple, straightforward, highly relevant (most of the time anyway)) and small ad networks like The Deck (high quality, considered, relevant). For instance, here's The Deck's policy on accepting ads:
We're picky about the advertising we'll accept. We won't take an ad unless we have paid for and/or used the product or service. Sell us something relevant to our audience and we'll sell you an ad.
That's a pretty sweet deal for advertisers and readers alike. In the past, I've dismissed advertising without experiencing it from the perspective of the content provider. By giving The Deck a go on kottke.org, I hope to gain a better understanding of the issue and fulfill my desire to keep doing kottke.org as a (nearly) full-time endeavor.
I'm going to be away for a couple of weeks, but my pal Greg Knauss is taking over posting some remaindered links while I'm gone, aided by special guests David Jacobs and perhaps even Anil Dash.
Greg was the very first guest blogger here on kottke.org (and perhaps the first guest blogger ever anywhere) back in March of 2000 when I went to SXSW and they didn't have wifi at the conference (nor did I have a laptop). Good times, back then.
When I get back, house on fire.
Today I'm starting (and hopefully completing) Operation Empty My Inbox and Operation Close All My Browser Tabs.1 Over the past month and a half, I've barely replied to any email I've gotten, so if you sent me something during that time period, I hope to get to it today and perhaps send you a reply. I've also got about 20 33 tabs open in my browser, waiting to be read, so expect some output from that as well.
Update: Ok! With the exception of 6 messages that need my attention in the next day or after I get back from my trip, my inbox is completely empty. And it only took 5 solid hours of writing, dragging, dropping, applying rules, and eye strain. Still no progress on the browser tabs glut. In fact, the inbox clear-out resulted in 6 or 8 more tabs being opened. One step forward, two steps back.
[1] I'm also starting two smaller projects, Project Learn How To Type Again (jeez, five days of almost no computer use and I've completely dogrhottem hiw tp typw) and Project Steal Footnote Technique From John Gruber, Who I Met At SXSW And Is Completely Delightful. Both of these are in lieu of what I really want to be doing right now, Project Save The Princess. Some friends lent us their GameCube with the Legend of Zelda Collector's Edition, which contains the original Zelda game which is still as fun as ever. Octoroks, Tektites, and Leevers too! ↩
Eight years ago today, I started writing in this space and just never stopped. There are some rewards for compulsive behavior.
As an eight year-old, kottke.org will be starting the third grade this year and tackling such subjects as fractions, cursive writing, the 50 states, photosynthesis, and the Dewey Decimal System. It will also be taking the bus for the first time and is quite excited about that.
One year ago today, I asked the readers of kottke.org to become micropatrons and support my efforts in producing the site for a year. Over the course of three weeks, people generously sent in their financial support[1], giving me enough to pay my salary for the entire year[2] and not have to bug you about it every few days.
So the year is up and I've been trying to think about what to say on this occasion for, oh, about six months now, but I'm undecided even now. I guess I'll start with the important bit.
I'm not going to be asking for contributions again. Part of it has to do with the reasons outlined at the bottom of this post. I haven't grown traffic enough or developed a sufficient cult of personality to make the subscription model a sustainable one for kottke.org...those things just aren't interesting to me.
The other big reason is that my life has changed a lot in the past year. Growing a new business with a novel (or at least challenging) business model requires lots of time and energy to build the necessary momentum...basically approaching it with a startup mentality: long hours, work on the weekends, less time to spend with family and friends, making work the #1 priority, etc. My (unstated) intention from the beginning was to approach the site as a startup, but along the way life intervened (in a good way) and I couldn't focus on it as much as I wanted to. The site became a normal job, a 9-to-5 affair, which meant that I could keep up with it, but growth was hard to come by.
So what's going to happen with kottke.org? I'm not quite sure at this point. In the short term, it's going to be taking a back seat to some other things going on in my life. Longer term, who knows? I might look for other ways to fund my efforts on the site or maybe it goes back to being more of a hobby. But there will be posts and links and other things here almost daily, just like there have been for almost 8 years now.
And that leaves approximately everything else, if anything, unsaid. If you're curious about something related to the end of the micropatron experiment, send me an email with your question. I'll choose the most interesting and/or representative ones and post my responses to them in a future entry. I'll give special consideration to questions from micropatrons. Or post your thoughts to your blog, send me a link, and I'll compile those as well. And as always, your feedback is appreciated via email. (And sorry in advance if I can't respond to your questions individually, although I'll try my best.)
[1] Again, thanks to everyone who contributed for their support. In this age of ad-supported media, it means a great deal to me that you felt strongly enough about kottke.org to support it directly. I'd also like to thank Eyebeam, the companies and people who contributed the fund drive gifts, thelist, Jonah, and Meg for their help and support.
[2] Since everyone and their uncle has been asking, about 1450 micropatrons contributed $39,900 over the past year...99.9% of that coming during the 3 week fund drive.
Benford's Law describes a curious phenomenon about the counterintuitive distribution of numbers in sets of non-random data:
A phenomenological law also called the first digit law, first digit phenomenon, or leading digit phenomenon. Benford's law states that in listings, tables of statistics, etc., the digit 1 tends to occur with probability ~30%, much greater than the expected 11.1% (i.e., one digit out of 9). Benford's law can be observed, for instance, by examining tables of logarithms and noting that the first pages are much more worn and smudged than later pages (Newcomb 1881). While Benford's law unquestionably applies to many situations in the real world, a satisfactory explanation has been given only recently through the work of Hill (1996).
I first heard of Benford's Law in connection with the IRS using it to detect tax fraud. If you're cheating on your taxes, you might fill in amounts of money somewhat at random, the distribution of which would not match that of actual financial data. So if the digit "1" shows up on Al Capone's tax return about 15% of the time (as opposed to the expected 30%), the IRS can reasonably assume they should take a closer look at Mr. Capone's return.
Since I installed Movable Type 3.15 back in March 2005, I have been using its "post to the future" option pretty regularly to post my remaindered links...and have been using it almost exclusively for the last few months[1]. That means I'm saving the entries in draft, manually changing the dates and times, and then setting the entries to post at some point in the future. For example, an entry with a timestamp like "2006-02-20 22:19:09" when I wrote the draft might get changed to something like "2006-02-21 08:41:09" for future posting at around 8:41 am the next morning. The point is, I'm choosing basically random numbers for the timestamps of my remaindered links, particularly for the hours and minutes digits. I'm "cheating"...committing post timestamp fraud.
That got me thinking...can I use the distribution of numbers in these post timestamps to detect my cheating? Hoping that I could (or this would be a lot of work wasted), I whipped up a MT template that produced two long strings of numbers: 1) one of all the hours and minutes digits from the post timestamps from May 2005 to the present (i.e. the cheating period), 2) and one of all the hours and minutes digits from Dec 2002 - Jan 2005 (i.e. the control group). Then I used a PHP script to count the numbers in each string, dumped the results into Excel, and graphed the two distributions together. And here's what they look like, followed by a table of the values used to produce the chart:
| Digit | 5/05-now | 12/02-1/05 | Difference |
| 1 | 31.76% | 33.46% | 1.70% |
| 2 | 11.76% | 14.65% | 2.89% |
| 3 | 10.30% | 9.96% | 0.34% |
| 4 | 10.44% | 9.58% | 0.86% |
| 5 | 10.02% | 10.52% | 0.51% |
| 6 | 4.83% | 5.40% | 0.57% |
| 7 | 5.66% | 4.96% | 0.70% |
| 8 | 7.62% | 4.65% | 2.97% |
| 9 | 7.60% | 6.81% | 0.79% |
As expected, 1 & 2 show up less than they should during the cheating period, but not overly so[2]. The real fingerprint of the crime lies with the 8s. The number 8 shows up during the cheating period ~64% more than expected. After thinking about it for awhile, I came up with an explanation for the abundance of 8s. I often schedule posts between 8am-9am so that there's stuff on the site for the early-morning browse and I usually finish off the day with something between 6pm-7pm (18:00 - 19:00). Not exactly the glaring evidence I was expecting, but you can still tell.
The obvious next question is, can this technqiue be utilized for anything useful? How about detecting comment, trackback. or ping spam? I imagine IPs and timestamps from these types of spam are forged to at least some extent. The difficulties are getting enough data to be statistically significant (one forged timestamp isn't enough to tell anything) and having "clean" data to compare it against. In my case, I knew when and where to look for the cheating...it's unclear if someone who didn't know about the timestamp tampering would have been able to detect it. I bet companies with services that deal with huge amounts of spam (Gmail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, TypePad, Technorati) could use this technique to filter out the unwanted emails, comments, trackbacks, or pings...although there's probably better methods for doing so.
[1] I've been doing this to achieve a more regular publishing schedule for kottke.org. I typically do a lot of work in the evening and at night and instead of posting all the links in a bunch from 10pm to 1am, I space them out over the course of the next day. Not a big deal because increasing few of the links I feature are time-sensitive and it's better for readers who check back several times a day for updates...they've always got a little something new to read.
[2] You'll also notice that the distributions don't quite follow Benford's Law either. Because of the constraints on which digits can appear in timestamps (e.g. you can never have a timestamp of 71:95), some digits appear proportionally more or less than they would in statistical data. Here's the distribution of digits of every possible time from 00:00 to 23:59:
1 - 25.33
2 - 17.49
3 - 12.27
4 - 10.97
5 - 10.97
6 - 5.74
7 - 5.74
8 - 5.74
9 - 5.74
[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.
In compiling the Best Links 2005 list, I initially chose over 100 links and then thought, that's too many. These are the links that didn't make that list but that I thought you might like to see anyway because they're still pretty good.
Panic's drag and drop shopping cart.
How to not get your bike stolen in New York City.
Stewart Butterfield on Flickr.
If you can't afford bespoke... Suit options for men.
Paris through a pinhole. Some shots of Paris taken with a pinhole camera.
The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less.
Why Your Camera Does Not Matter. Maybe your gear matters less than how you use it.
A Vernacular Web.
CameraMail. Man sends a camera through the mail with instructions to take photos with it.
Don't fuck with Ovid. Man helps capture thieves who stole his credit card.
Forensic types. Interview with type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones.
A Coder in Courierland. A look at the world of bike couriers.
You Got To Cool It Down. The 30 least hot follow-ups to the 30 hottest things you can say to a naked woman.
Why it is hard to share the wealth. The science behind the super-rich in America.
McNugget Number.
UPS Store Sign. Irony.
Design Without Reach. Ghetto versions of Design Within Reach merchandise.
What do we know about tipping?
Tiger did it. Tiger's amazing golf shot at Augusta.
Explicit Content Only... Editing the non-swears out of an NWA song.
The Omnivore. Jeffrey Steingarten learns to eat everything.
Everything You Thought You Knew About Grilling Is Wrong. How to grill.
The public choice economics of Star Wars: A Straussian reading.
Victoria Reynolds Artwork. Beautiful paintings of meat.
It's Fun To Play at the YMCA. Comparing NBA players to those guys at the Y.
I hates Lucas! I hates it forever! Anti-George Lucas rant.
Balls Out. How to throw a no-hitter on acid, and other lessons from the career of baseball legend Dock Ellis.
How did Mad Hot Ballroom survive the copyright cartel?
The Blurb Racket. Exposing misquotes in movie ads.
Alternate covers for romance novels.
The All-New Sesame Street.
Age Maps. Two photographs of the same person from different periods of time are spliced together.
Bad to the Last Drop. On bottled water.
Why do McDonald's customers order smaller Cokes at the drive-thru window?
Grim Meathook Future.
Not a Word. About intentional fake words in dictionaries.
Six Feet Under, 2001-2005
Being Poor
10 Reasons to Eat Local Food.
Redemption. The NY Yankees and redemption.
My Outsourced Life. A.J. Jacobs outsources his life to India.
Destination Florent. About a landmark NYC restaurant.
Lone Star Statements. One-star Amazon reviews of a list of the 100 best novels.
The Sad Tally. A graph of suicide locations from the Golden Gate Bridge.
Compiling a list of the best links of the year was a little more difficult than last year. I put more effort this year into selecting quality links for kottke.org, so there wasn't a lot of chaff to be found in the archives. I also posted a lot more links this year, over half again as many as in 2004. I'm not sure this year's installment is any better than last year's list, but if you've got a little time to waste at work as 2005 winds down, there's probably something here to keep you occupied.
The Baby Name Wizard's NameVoyager.
The Selling of the Last Savage. Adventure travel to view Stone Age tribes in West Papua, Indonesia.
I Ate iPod Shuffle. A poem by Scott David Herman.
The Making of a Molester.
McDonald's Bathroom Attendant. Improv Everywhere stations an attendant in the bathroom of the Times Square McDonald's.
An Interview With David Foster Wallace.
Architecture of Density. Michael Wolf photographs the buildings of Hong Kong.
Journey To The (Revolutionary, Evil-Hating, Cash-Crazy, And Possibly Self-Destructive) Center Of Google
parking garages. Lots of diagrams of parking garages.
Escape from the Universe. How to get out when the Big Crunch comes.
Banksy Hits New York's Most Famous Museums. The installation of unauthorized art into some of the top museums in NYC.
Dot-Con Job. A Seattle Times investigation into InfoSpace, a high-flying dot com that bilked investors out of millions.
13 things that do not make sense. A list of open scientific questions.
Life on the Scales. About the quarter-power scaling laws.
eFile for free! Free version of TurboTax Online.
Transformational geometry and iteration in cornrow hairstyles.
Stand clear of the closing doors. Lots of links about the London Tube.
Coffee and Workprints: A Workshop With Garry Winogrand. Photography how-to.
Rocky, recreated. Hilarious.
Swim boy, Swim! Man buys fish from Chinese market, sets him free in the river.
The Long Emergency. What's going to happen as we start running out of cheap gas to guzzle?
Natural Nuclear Reactors.
How to destroy the Earth and How to move the Earth.
I was going to link to Elizabeth Kolbert's excellent series on global warming from the New Yorker, but the articles have been removed from the New Yorker site. Kolbert is working on a book maybe?
Twenty-Five Years of Post-it Notes.
God is Great, by which I mean, Very Very Large. Calculating the size of Jesus based on the quantities of Communion wine and wafers consumed.
Absolutely, Power Corrupts. Michael Lewis explores how power hitting has changed the game of baseball.
Capturing the Unicorn. Mathematicians help the Met restore a precious tapestry.
The Choirboy. Larry Lessig confronts a childhood abuser.
A photo of a tuxedoed man holding a sewing machine in front of a crashed UPS truck.
The Big Fish. Ten years later, the story of Suck.com, the first great website.
Why I Am Not A Christian. By Bertrand Russell.
Open letter of the Kansas School Board. Flying Spaghetti Monsterism.
Transcript of Steve Jobs' commencement speech at Stanford University.
How To Avoid The Exhausting Planning And Preparation That Goes Into Making A Second Date.
Devolution. Why intelligent design isn't.
Why Are Movies So Bad? or, The Numbers
40 Things That Only Happen In Movies.
The Candy Man. Why children love Roald Dahl's stories -- and many adults don't.
Photography of Edward Burtynsky.
A Rocket To Nowhere. On NASA and the Shuttle program.
Tipped Off. A call for the abolishment of tipping in restaurants.
Film Titles Designed by Saul Bass.
One side can be wrong. Richard Dawkins and Jerry Coyne on intelligent design.
Million Dollar Homepage.
7 Habits of Highly Successful People.
Minimiam. Food photos with little people on them.
May We Tell You Our Specials This Evening?
Interview with Errol Morris.
Kdunk on pink blanket. Wonderful photography.
Chip Kidd talks with Milton Glaser
How Will the Universe End?
Hello, My Name Is... Celebrity signature art project.
Panoramic photograph of suburban sprawl near San Ramon, California.
Star Wars: Episodes I-VI. The greatest postmodern art film ever.
Coach Leach Goes Deep, Very Deep. Profile of Texas Tech football coach Mike Leach.
Interactive Transit Map. For commuting in NYC.
Mark Foo's Last Ride. The death of a big wave surfer.
PARK(ing). A temporary urban park.
What do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?
Neal Stephenson's Past, Present, and Future. An interview with the author.
The Food Detective. Interview with Michael Pollan.
David Foster Wallace Commencement Speech at Kenyon College.
The Moral-Hazard Myth. About the US healthcare system.
The cold weather and my schedule over the past two weeks has finally taken its toll and I've gotten myself sick. Don't know how much I'll be posting today...maybe a few links later in the day. For now, more orange juice and a warm blankie.
My friend Maciej's server died the other day, and it looks like it cannot be resurrected. He runs idlewords.com (not working at the moment, obviously), where you may have read his piece on the woes of the Space Shuttle, the one about the Wright Brothers, or about pizza in NYC (which ended up in Best Food Writing 2005). At the moment, he's a starving artist and can't afford a new server or even a vanilla hosting account. Anyone out there a reader/fan/friend of Maciej's and want to give him a little corner of your server to get his site back online? Here's his short request:
The site rarely exceeds 1GB/day bandwidth. It would be especially handy if I could install perl modules and run perl CGI scripts, but at this point I would settle just being able to keep the archive alive.
If you want to help, email mceglowski [at] gmail.com.
Update: Ok folks, looks like he's all set. Thanks!
Today was a maintenance day around kottke.org. Some long-overdue backups, upgrading the OS and some applications, cleaning up the desktop, getting rid of some unneeded files on the web server, trimming my newsreader subscriptions, going through my spam, the kind of stuff that gets put off because it just doesn't sound that fu
