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via Rhizome :8 BITa documentary about art and video gameswww.8bitmovie.com Premiering October 7th in New York at the Museum of Modern Art (8pm)(212) 708-9400 11 West 53 Street, between Fifth and...
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Originally from NEWSgrist - where spin is art by reBlogged
Wow, check out Nate's amazing Wolverine costume complete with retractable claws... - "The outfit was visualized, conceived, and conceptualized entirely by Nate, as were the claws. However, Nate did pick up quite a bit of help along the way as friends came forward to participate in the creation of what many said was "The most accurate costume I have ever seen..."" [via] - Link.And.... Halloween is fast approaching, a "maker" holiday if there ever was one! Have a great spooky project, hack, tip, costume idea, favorite material or tool related to Halloween? Email me and also stay tuned for a fun MAKE & CRAFT Halloween contest!
[Read this article] [Comment on this article]Originally from MAKE: Blog by
reBlogged by Matthew Haughey on Sep 29, 2006, 3:45PMOriginally from mathowie reBlog feed by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 1:56PM
David Roth got a job at Topps writing for the backs of baseball cards and finds that it's pretty much like any other job for a large, soulless corporation. "Baseball cards, it turned out, are not made in a card-cluttered candy land. Rather, they are created by ordinary men and women who are generally unawed by their proximity to a central part of American boyhood." (thx, patricio)Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 5:01PM
(from xkcd.com)Originally from Signal vs. Noise reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 4:59PM
Aperture 1.5 just popped up and there are two ways to get it. The first is to go through the Apple Aperture website. If you choose this route, you'll need to have your serial number handy. Luckily, you can get the number by going to the "About Aperture" dialog box.
The second way to get it is to go through Software Update. This way doesn't appear to require your serial number.
Either way, it's a big download: 125MB. I wonder if it comes with tons of sample content. I'm currently pulling it down and will be experimenting with it quite a bit tonight. More later... of course.
Originally from James Duncan Davidson by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 4:31PM
Originally from Tom Moody by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 8:25AM
My Thai cooking class experience in Bangkok. From my trip to Thailand last November, my husband and I took a great class.
Originally from megnut.com blog by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 5:40PM
When recently, Microsoft released the estimated pricing for their yet to be released OS Vista, I had wondered aloud whether it is right to price an OS at par with or even more than the cost of the hardware on which it runs. And rightly so, the cost of hardware is dropping by leaps and bounds.A Taiwanese hardware manufacturer is shipping a Linux powered PC (code named TU-40) for just (US)$99. The specification of the PC is modest and it runs with 128 MB RAM and has a 200 MHz processor. The company claims this is enough power to run lightweight GNU/Linux distributions.Fig: Front and backside of the PC
The exact specifications of the PC are as follows :
- 15-pin D-type female VGA connector
- 10/100 Ethernet
- 44-pin EIDE interface header
- CompactFlash Type I/II slot
- 2 front and 1 rear totalling 3 USB ports
- PS/2 keyboard and 6-pin mini-DIN mouse port
- AMI BIOS
- Battery-backed RTC (real-time clock)
- AC-97 V2.1 compliant CODEC
- MIC-in & line-out phone jacks
- 0 to 108 deg F (0 to 60 deg C) operating range
Fig: The actual size of the PC
Originally from All about Linux by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 11:07PM
Originally from kathryn yu dot com reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 10:14PM
When upgrading to Aperture 1.5 from a previous version, there is a pretty intense database migration that takes place. On my Mac Book Pro with about 2000 photographs in the library, the migration took a bit of time. But after crunching for a while, something less than 10 or 15 minutes, Aperture was ready to go. After it migrated the Library and all the projects, I was able to use Aperture and start working as normal. In the background, it was creating the preview images—and continued to work on them for a few hours—but all was well. The new Aperture feels smoother and a bit snappier. I really am curious to see how it feels once it's built out all the previews.
But that was just the warmup. That was the test case to see how things went. The real migration was on my G5 system with my primary library which contains over 30,000 images. Yah. That's a lot. It takes up 307GB on an external disk array. To be sure, it could use quite a bit of trimming. I've been lax on kicking out images that don't make the cut. But, on the other hand, I can easily imagine that there are lots of professional photographers who have image libraries as large as mine—or even larger.
So, with the experience of my MacBook Pro under my belt, I fired up Aperture 1.5 on the G5 and let it crunch. And crunch it did. Here are the stats:
- Conversion of library: 30 minutes
- Validation of converted library: 2 minutes
- Upgrading of 80 projects: 82 minutes
- Validation of 80 converted projects: 8 minutes
It added up to just over 2 hours of conversion time. And, after the conversion, all looks good. Of course, it's just beginning the longest part of the job: the generation of the previews. Watching the task manager, it looks like it's crunching a RAW file into a preview every 5 seconds or so. A bit of back of the envelope math puts a guesstimate of 40 hours or so to do the entire library. I don't expect it will take quite that long as my library is a good mix of 5D, 20D, and D30 RAW files as well as a fair number of JPGs. The RAW files from the 20D and the D30 will probably go much faster than the 5D files. But it's clear that the crunching will continue well into the weekend.
Somewhat interestingly, it seems that the G5 is crunching the preview images at about the same rate as my MacBook Pro. This matches the rough feeling I've had over the last few months that there's pretty much a real-world equivalence in CPU performance between my 2.16GHz Core Duo laptop and my 2x2.5GHz G5 desktop. Of course, the desktop kicks the laptop's ass in I/O (grin) as well as having a bigger screen. However, it makes it clear that the 4x3GHz Xeon should be one heck of a step up in performance.
Thankfully, the processing of the preview images doesn't seem to be stressing the system too hard, so I'm playing around with the new Aperture. It looks good so far. I'll have much more to say over the next few days I'm sure.
Update: It indeed took about 40 hours to crunch out previews for my entire library. Most of the time, my Aperture was running between 70% and 150% CPU utilization.
Originally from James Duncan Davidson by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 10:10PM
Yesterday, Microsoft announced pricing and release dates for its anticipated Zune portable media player. Once thought to be the greatest threat to Apple's dominant iPod lines, some experts now contend that the device will do more damage to Microsoft partners instead.Originally from digg / Apple reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 8:20PM
Social problems caused by longer life spans: "If an increasingly influential group of researchers is correct, the lurid spectacle of intergenerational warfare will become a typical social malady."Originally from tecznotes links by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 7:23PM
More thoughts about sportswriting:
I remember once having a discussion with a guy who knew a lot about professional basketball. He said he had asked a big sample of NBA players who they felt would be the most formidable one-on-one opponent in the league. The answer was fairly unanimous: Vince Carter. Now that's surprising. Why Carter and not Kobe Bryant or LeBron James or any number of other, far more accomplished, offensive players? The answer, this guy told me, was the same in nearly every case: "you have no idea how hard it is to do the things that Carter does."
I've always remembered that story, because it strikes me that applies to nearly every case where an outsider tries to make sense of an insider's perspective. We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks. I know a reverse slam is harder than a simple dunk. But how much harder? And how much harder again would a slam be if you had a defender drapped all over you?
This is a huge issue in the appreciation of sports. I remember watching Phil Mickelson at the PGA (or was it the U.S Open?). He was in the rough, just off the green, and chipped within a few feet of the hole. Ho-hum, I thought. He bogeyed the hole. But the color man was incredulous. Mickelson, he pointed out, had taken a FULL swing at a ball in an impossible lie and sent it 20 feet, to within an easy putt of the hole. I've never played golf, so I had no idea how hard that was, or why that was anything special. The announcer, though, had a completely different perspective.
One more example. My sister-in-law works as a chaplain in a nursing home. Every few weeks, someone who she has gotten to know dies. Can anyone who has never been in the situation of experiencing death with that regularity possible know what that feels like? My sister-in-law doesn't work long hours. She's doesn't get paid a lot of money. And she doesn't have a fancy doctorate. But I venture to say that only one in a 1000 people could do her job with any degree of diligence or sensitivity. In a way that you would have to do that job to appreciate, it's really really hard.
I think that misunderstanding over degree of difficulty issues is one of the major reasons for conflict between insiders and outsiders. We bridle at the school teacher who asks for a raise, because we don't realize--and we can never realize unless we've been a teacher ourselves--how hard being a school teacher is. Mickelson shoots 75 and says, afterward, he thought he had a great round and we scoff, but only because we don't know golf the way he does and we don't understand how insanely difficult that chip shot was.
I thought of this in trying to explain my prickliness a few weeks back over some of the criticisms directed at my "Risk Pool" article. I'm not usually thin-skinned in the face of critics. So why did I react the way I did? I think it was a degree of difficulty question. What I was saying, unconsciously, was not--"you don't understand how good that story was." It was, rather--"you don't understand how HARD that story was." Because, in truth, it was a really, really hard story. How on earth do you write 5000 words on pensions without putting your audience to sleep? It's pretty tricky, and what I wanted in my heart of hearts, I suppose, was for at least some appreciation of that effort. Even if it was a bogey, I wanted the announcer to point out what a great bogey it was.
I thought of this as well the other day when I read a long post on a sportsblog ripping into Bill Simmons. I know, I know, I'm totally in the tank for Simmons. But here's why: because the degree of difficulty of the kinds of columns he writes is sometimes off the charts. He recently did a really long account of a trip that he and two friends took to Green Bay. It was a kind of running diary. Was it the best thing he has ever done? No. Was it perfect? No. But here's the thing. As someone who writes for a living, I know something that a non-writer can't know, namely how hard a running diary like that is to write. Try it sometime. Getting the tone right, and making the prosaic interactions of a group of friends interesting and funny to an outsider audience is really really difficult. That's what I wanted to scream at the bloggers going after Simmons. You don't like that? Try pulling that off yourself sometime!
Anyway, back to sportswriters. (And I realize this has been a long digression.) Here's why I really really loved Michael Lewis's book. The degree of difficulty on telling the story of Michael Oher was really really high. Trust me. It was. It was all that I could think of when I was reading the book. I was like the announcer amazed at Mickelson's chip. And if you don't believe me, just try writing an emotionally moving. full-length account of an essentially pathologically shy, inarticulate teenager.
Originally from gladwell.com by reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 6:50PM
Lego Star Wars II (the original trilogy). It has banthas.
Originally from Wonderland by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 4:24AM
From Nokia, no less. So, if you're into emerging markets, go check it out.
Indeed, Nokia is doing a lot in emerging markets. India, China, and Brasil are the old stand-bys. But, Africa is not forgotten. I've been talking to a bunch of folks internally, and there are some really cool things already happening.
Yeah, Nokia hasn't failed to notice that by the end of next year there will be around 3 BILLION subscribers, most of the growth in emerging markets.
Hm. Right now, everyone who can afford a mobile phone can get one. I think soon, everyone who wants a mobile phone will have one. That's a whole different story.
Link: Nokia - Newsletter.
New Horizons is a quarterly newsletter targeted at anyone interested in new growth markets and reaching the next billion subscriber milestone.
This newsletter provides industry insights from different players, including operators, regulators and research companies. There are also case studies in new growth markets and information on the latest Nokia developments in this area.
Download and subscribe to your free of charge personal copy of the newsletter on the link on the left.
Originally from Lifeblog by reBlogged
Addressing envelopes by hand is a drag, but sending them through the printer often involves manual feeding hassle and jamming. When I found the Dymo Labelwriter 400, my envelope-labeling problems were over: this baby will pop out an address label in (literally) one second (or sixty a minute, if you want), using a 300 DPI thermal-printing process. The unit plugs into your computer via USB and shows up as a printer; the included software adds barcodes automatically, and allows you to store addresses in an address book for even quicker future printing. The printed material is monochrome black-on-white, and you need to use the use rolls of thermal-printable labels instead of ordinary paper labels, but the Dymo is fast as hell and turns out crisp-looking labels in no time. You can get the labels in all kind of different sizes for different uses, and it's easy to swap rolls in and out. It works great to print out labels to put on folders and boxes too.
You can even print postage, stamp by stamp or a roll at a time, by swapping in the appropriate blank-stamp label roll and pre-paying over the Web.
I've got one Labelwriter at the office and one at home, and I use both of them just about every day.
-- Thomas Lewis
Dymo Labelwriter 400 Turbo
$109
Available from Labelcity
or
Amazon
Originally from Cool Tools reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 9:00AM
rodcorp has a collection of links to photos of Marcel Duchamp.Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 12:16PM
Want to increase your income by up to 17%? Tonight, after work, go out drinking.Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 12:08PM
Thanks to my Aunt Suzi for this photo!
Originally from Andrea Harner by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 10:02AM
Two of my favorite people go head to head!!
Originally from Andrea Harner by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 10:01AM
Sterling J. Nesbitt, a graduate student in paleontology, recently took the Manhattan subway to the stop that lies beneath the American Museum of Natural History. While waiting on the platform, he checked out a way-cool bronze cast, displayed on the wall, of a Coelophysis bauri, a predatory dinosaur. Pictured above, the cast is wonderfully detailed, and even shows the contents of the dinosaur's last meal. Paleontologists have long assumed that meal was cannibalistic: The Coelophysis had eaten one of its own. But when Nesbitt looked at it, he realized they were wrong. The femur lodged in the dinosaur's stomach was that of a small crocodile. Duly inspired, Nesbitt worked up a paper reporting his findings, which was published last week in Biology Letters of the Royal Society of London. And apparently he's now upended the cannibalism consensus regarding Coelophysis. As he told the New York Times: "Our research shows that the evidence for cannibalism in Coelophysis is nonexistent," Mr. Nesbitt said in an interview, "and the evidence for cannibalism in other dinosaurs is quite thin." I love it. Pioneering paleontological research, conducted in the New York subway system! Now somebody should look into CHUDs.Originally from collision detection reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 3:48PM
Why does Ze Frank's face fill the entire screen on The Show? According to experiments described in The Media Equation, when participants were shown a series of photographs of people shot from different distances from the camera, "the faces that had the most impact on the viewers were the ones with screen-filling faces and that seemed 'closer' to the viewer, those with the least interpersonal distance".Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 3:07PM
Want to go apple picking without leaving Manhattan? There are three trees with ripe apples growing near where you get up on the High Line at 33rd Street.Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 6:56PM
Trailer for Steven Johnson's new book, The Ghost Map. If it's uncool to love book trailers, so be it. Also, I've read the book (review forthcoming); it's as interesting as it sounds in the trailer. (via sbj)Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 6:38PM
Flickr adds JSON as a response format. The biggest drag about JSON API's is that normal security restrictions on XHR prevent them from being useful.Originally from tecznotes links by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 6:13PM
I have a feeling several TrueHoop readers might qualify for the position described in this ad.
You're the passionate basketball authority that other people turn to for advice, and you wouldn't have it any other way. You know about the history of the game, what makes a great player, the best teams year in and year out, how to explain the rules to a beginner and how to construct a winning fantasy team.You're a seasoned writer with an engaging voice and an infectious enthusiasm for the topic. You're not necessarily a techie, but you're familiar with HTML.
Originally from True Hoop by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 5:24PM
In a stark contrast, cyclists are featured on the front page of the Seattle times today as part of Mayor Nickel’s plan to fight global warming and a cyclist dies from the injuries she sustained in a collision with a van.
My friends are close to the cyclist and they’re all devastated — I’m devastated. I gave her husband a ride on Bettie last week at a Schooner Exact Brewery party.
There’s a memorial ride planned tomorrow from Westlake at 5:30. I’ll be out a town visiting and old friend who suffered a heart attack, but pay my respects here, wish the family well, and hope our Mayor also notices that we also need safer streets in Seattle.
Update
KOMO’s Tracy Vedder reports on Susanne and her family
Originally from Bike Hugger by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 8:21PM
Originally from clusterflock reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 7:59PM
light years better than the last designOriginally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Sep 29, 2006, 2:14AM
Steve Yegge: Good Agile, Bad Agile. I'm not sure I believe it, but what a great rant. "This nickel-a-line-of-code gig is lame. You know where the real money is at? You start your own religion. ... There is nothing like it on the face of this earth. I could talk for hours, days about how amazing it is to work at Google, and I wouldn't be done. And they're not done either. Every week it seems like there's a new perk, a new benefit, a new improvement, a new survey asking us all if there's any possible way in which life at Google could be better."Originally from Hack the Planet reBlogged
On Flickr I learned about a story, apocryphal or not about Hemingway:
Ernest Hemingway was once prodded to compose a complete story in six words. His answer, personally felt to be his best prose ever, was "For sale: baby shoes, never used." Some people say it was to settle a bar bet. Others say it was a personal challenge directed at other famous authors.Can you write a six word story and post it in the comments? I'm still working on mine, which contains the word "Leave" so far.
Originally from Caterina.net by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 11:17AM
"The command-line tools serve as the client interface to the Amazon EC2 web service. Use these tools to register and launch instances, manipulate security groups, and more."Originally from tecznotes links by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 2:46AM
Step-by-step EC2 instructions.Originally from tecznotes links by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 2:46AM
Via, this incredibly nice and real Donkey-Kong environment. Anyway, I can’t find the name of who did this.
Why do I blog this? The guy metaphorically overlayed the digital character but effect is compelling. Le Parkour at its best? Is it the equivalent of Survival Research Labs for Alternate Reality Games? like dangerous environment for playing?
Originally from pasta and vinegar by reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 12:09PM
Originally from Cognections by reBlogged
A big dog attacked me and bit my rump. It hurt. I don't think I like big dogs anymore. :(Originally from Blue's Sunny Life by reBlogged on Sep 28, 2006, 12:56AM
Here's a first in my publishing career: Riverhead has put together a little mini-Ken-Burns documentary for The Ghost Map, with me as the sole talking head. It's a nice little preview of the book and its themes, with spooky music thrown in for good measure....
Originally from stevenberlinjohnson.com by reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 10:18PM
a 90 second animated map illustrating who has conquered the Middle East over the past 5,000 years, including the Egyptians, Turks, Jews, Romans, Arabs, Greeks, Persians, Europeans...see also mideast conflict infographics & coffin counter.
[link: mapsofwar.com]
Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 6:19PM
This morning Bourdain called my cell and said, "Ruhlman, I’ve got upsetting news."
He wasn’t kidding.
Apparently a New Jersey politician, freshman assemblyman Michael Panter, next week will introduce a bill to ban the SALE of foie gras in and out of state.
Not only would this put out of business or force the relocation of Ariane Daguin’s D’Artagnan--which would be a blow to the entire tri-state area and beyond and the countless restaurants that rely on D’Artagnan for foie-based products--but it would be a dangerous encroachment on the rights of New Yorkers and New York City chefs to eat what they want and cook what they want.
The whole issue of what happens to Daguin and her highly respected company, around whom the fine dining scene has grown during the past two decades she's been in business, is an important one that should be looked at separately.
But if the rumor is true, the foie brouhaha has reached New York in a serious way. And it's bad. The foie issue embodies the hypocrisy and corruption of so much of how our government operates. That our public officials continue to spend their time and our dollars on this is ludicrous. If they cared about their state and their country, they would address the catastrophe of how we're raising agri-hogs. That's truly inhumane. We're trashing our land and water, growing crappy food, contaminated chicken, feed lot beef and creating lakes of sewage polluted with e coli that gets on our spinach and kills our kids.
It’s a good rule to live by: don’t shit where you eat. But that’s exactly what we’re doing on a massive scale. So what do you do if you’re a local congressman? You outlaw a product that has little if any environmental impact, a product that few people buy, but that raises your stature and makes you look like a noble protector of all things cute and fuzzy.
Chicago's been through this. Now Jersey--living up to its cliché. Chicago been a laughingstock among people throughout the country who understand the issues. Its mayor is endorsing a REPEAL of the silly law that bans foie gras sales there. An article in today's trib describes how the pro-ban factions are struggling, in the face of widespread ridicule, not to lose ground. The city is not enforcing the ban anyway, so it's largely symbolic. But symbols are important.
And right now, foie gras banning is becoming a symbol of ignorant politicians grandstanding on issues they scarcely understand while the real horrors of our food supply go neglected, and continued silence is bought and paid for by agribusiness lobbying.
I've made myself clear on this issue before: more no-nothings in government telling me what I'm allowed to eat, corrupt government ignoring the agricultural catastrophes while taking self-promoting potshots at fundamentally humane businesspeople and farmers makes me mad. If this law happens it promises the beginnings of change in the restaurant scene in New York City for the worse--this, the most diverse and dynamic restaurant city on earth. That in itself is bad. But all that such a bill would portend is truly scary.
If this bill happens we need to use its indulgent foolishness to shine more light on the real problems with our food supply. And they don’t have anything to do with foie gras.
comments are open
Originally from megnut.com blog by reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 4:42PM
One of the areas in which Lightroom is innovating like crazy is in its user interface. This is, no doubt, thanks to Phil Clevenger. If you've ever used one of MetaCreations apps, such as Poser, then you've seen Phil's work before. The design aesthetic of Lightroom, of course, is evident at the macro level. The way that parts of the UI can shift on and off screen is all about making sure that you can maximize the viewing area for photographs. But, it's the smaller details of the Lightroom interface that I find to be most pleasing.
As an example of this, here are the metadata panels for both Aperture and Lightroom. Aperture's (as of 1.1.2) is on the left side and Lightroom's (as of Beta 4) is on the right. Both of these are the "default" general displays of metadata.
Aperture's metadata panel is composed of an endless series of text boxes with labels. Effective, but visually busy despite the monochrome treatment. Lightroom's panel is structured in essentially the same way, but lacks all the noise of the boxes. As well, the font selection is different between the two. Aperture puts the emphasis, in the form of bold vs. normal text, on the labels. Lightroom places the emphasis on the data. It also takes care to make sure that the data is properly presented. It uses real fractions instead of inline fractions and expresses the f-stop used with a slash between the 'f' character and the value.
Another difference is in the ordering of data. In the Aperture panel, the three important variables of aperture, shutter, and ISO are almost all grouped together (exposure compensation, which is not as important, squeezes in there), however the focal length and body used are not grouped. This is a minor difference, but it goes to show that somebody is really sweating the small things. These small details help save the user time when they use the application, so it's time well spent.
To my eyes, it's quite a bit easier to see the information being presented in the Lightroom panel than it is in the Aperture one. When I look at the Aperture panel, I have to try to pick out the important bits. The Lightroom panel, on the other hand, better presents that ever-important information of exposure, aperture, ISO, body, and lens used.
My favorite touch is that Lightroom tells you the lens used, not just the focal length. This is a really small detail that is super important to me. Lens selection is a critically important part of my creative repertoire. Being able to see it right next to the camera body used is perfect.
Finally, and most important when you are trying to maximize the screen real-estate usable for viewing images, the Lightroom panel is narrower. It manages to display the data it needs to show more clearly and with less space. Very cool. It's a well crafted and well executed piece of user interface design, and it's one of the parts of Lightroom that I really appreciate whenever I use the program.
Originally from James Duncan Davidson by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 4:21PM
Originally from hustler of culture by reBlogged
We've been craving sushi for days, but we're thinking about straying from our go-to spots. Can anybody weigh in on the best sushi restaurant in Brooklyn? The succulent pieces depicted above come from the open kitchen of Blue Ribbon Sushi (278 5th Avenue between 1st Street and Garfield Place in Park Slope), which is definitely a candidate. For fun, inventive rolls and a relaxed atmosphere, we also love Cube 63 (234 Court Street at Baltic in Cobble Hill). Cube's volacano roll (crab and shrimp in a spicy sauce) always has us coming back for more, and they occasionally infuse their drinking water with cucumbers and limes — a perfectly refreshing complement.
Photo by vanillalattegirlOriginally from Brooklyn Record by reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 11:45AM
The latest Atlantic Yards puff piece arrived in mailboxes earlier this week and the cover photo is something of a head-scratcher. We're not so sure a family in matching $75 designer polo shirts was quite who Bertha Lewis had in mind when she sold ACORN's support to Bruce Ratner for half a million bucks and a kiss. Of course, the mailer actually got the demographic just right: The large majority of apartments in the proposed complex ARE for the polo-shirt set. Too bad that wasn't made clear to all the low-income folks Ratner got to spend the day in line at the first public forum who actually have a snowball's chance in hell of getting an apartment.Originally from Brooklyn Record by reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 9:59AM
Sony has announced that its much-anticipated but often delayed Reader device - an electronic book - will go on sale in the US next month, price at $350.Originally from Guardian Unlimited: Technology blog reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 2:25PM
How Apple's clean design could be cleaner...Originally from KALIBER10000 reBlogged
A pancake recipe without words. Reminds me a little of IKEA instructions that show you how to assemble your dresser without a word of any language.
Originally from megnut.com blog by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 10:56AM
Huge gallery of unusual cloud formation photos. Personal weirdest cloud story: late afternoon in the Wisconsin fall, clouds covered perfectly one half of the sky while the other half was completely clear blue.Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 8:13PM
Nerd cartoon: "Sudo make me a sandwich."Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 7:34PM
Space tourist Anousheh Ansari is Flickring photos from the International Space Station. NASA reportedly spent 250,000 man-hours building a module to upload snapshots from space via the Flickr API.
Update: That NASA man-hours stat is a joke, sorry. NASA is not that absurdly wasteful. I have no idea how she's getting the photos on Flickr. Do they have web access on the ISS?
Update: Ansari called Larry Page today and reported that there's no internet access on the ISS. Email is delivered in batches...so she's either emailing them to Flickr or someone's uploading them for her. BTW, the first kottke.org reader in space...could you give me a call when you get there? (thx, terrell)
Update: According to Ansari's blog (from space!), email is sent from the ISS three times per day.Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 26, 2006, 5:44PM
a geographical map that displays particular smells, from horrific to sublime, encountered throughout New York's subway stations. users can mouse over any station to see the station name, subway lines, & types of smells to be found there (e.g. alcohol, body odor, chemicals, feces, food, perfumes, sewege, urine, vomit, ... )see also bio & emotion maps.
[link: gawker.com|thnkx Martin]
Originally from information aesthetics reBlogged on Sep 27, 2006, 12:50AM
Plazes is a cool location service that cleverly is building a database of locations users go to, leveraging that info to make connections, and then some.
They started with a PC app for sniffing MAC addresses of routers.
Then they added a s60 app for smartphones to sniff cellIDs (I had a tiny role in that).
Now they are adding SMS (see note below).
I like the way they are doing things for at least 2 reasons:
1) They didn't try to do everything possible in the first go. They started with the low-hanging fruit, go the service rolling, and are now adding new channels.I call this 'first go deep, then go wide'. We had a discussion about this at work, worried that 'going wide' - integrating and broadening the offering - would detract from 'going deep' - laser focus on making one thing the best damn thing. It's a tough balance.
2) They are testing all sorts of channels. They started with an easy one, that wouldn't disrupt one's behaviour too much - a PC client, easy to work with. Then they upped it a bit - the mobile client needed to be put on the phone, there's some behavioural change on the phone (really, how many times do you do something when changing cell towers?). Now they are asking the user to actively think about where they are, making them do the work (or at least that's what I think the SMS channel will require).
I've asked to check it out. I haven't been able to use the mobile version since I got my N93 (and now N73). This SMS version should work with any phone. I'd be interested in knowing what the usability will be like.
From the Plazes newsletter:
Good news for all Plazes users that like to use our service on the go, but do not own a series 60 smartphone: The Plazes SMS gateway reached alpha state! It enables the creation of Plazes, checkin / checkout to Plazes and keeping track of your friends - all via SMS!
Originally from Lifeblog by reBlogged
More on E. coli on spinach and in the digestive tracts of cattle.But the villain in this outbreak, E. coli O157:H7, is far scarier, at least for humans. Your stomach juices are not strong enough to kill this acid-loving bacterium, which is why it’s more likely than other members of the E. coli family to produce abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever and, in rare cases, fatal kidney failure.It’s not found in the intestinal tracts of cattle raised on their natural diet of grass, hay and other fibrous forage. No, O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms.thanks, MollyMagnet!
Originally from Rebecca's Pocket reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 11:31AM
From Anya Kamenetz's recent HuffPo piece on The Wire, we learn about a group blog on The Wire called Heaven and Here, a pretty meaty exploration of the show. Show creator David Simon checked in recently.Originally from kottke.org remaindered links by reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 12:39PM
Flushing, queens, nyc
www.chinatownicecreamfactory.com/
Flushing, Queens, NYC
There is a family dispute as the original opened up in Chinatown-Manhattan, and the 2nd one in Flushing is said to be a "fake."Originally from Hi Tricia! by reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 9:00PM
like Patrick Stewart, Gervais gets incredible performances out of his cameosOriginally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 1:57AM
like Patrick Stewart, Gervais gets incredible performances out of his cameosOriginally from Waxy.org Links reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 1:57AM
It’s been a while that Wil is playing with the blogject idea and I haven’t found time to explain what he is doing. He recently worked out this interesting prototype:
This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can’t store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.
(…)
The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.Why do I blog this? pushing further the notion of blogjects, focusing on input/outputs, this project is quite compelling and I like the adjacency to automatic writing and the cut-up.
More about it here: BLOG/BLOGJECT; A Blog that Dreams
Originally from pasta and vinegar by reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 3:39AM
It’s been a while that Wil is playing with the blogject idea and I haven’t found time to explain what he is doing. He recently worked out this interesting prototype:
This blog/blogject is a Janus head, 2 faced web0.0 monster sharing a memory-system styled on a palimpsest. When the limited memory it has is filled to maximum capacity it needs to reorganise it to make space otherwise it can’t store any more new blog entries. In doing this it has to try not to forget the old ones, but this is not always done with much success as memories confabulated over time become increasingly unrecognisable. This making space is done by the blogject and its functioning is modelled on how our brains interleave our memories: by dreaming. The resulting dreams are what the blogject publishes online.
(…)
The purpose or meaning of this writing is not in the writing itself but in the interpretation of it by the ones submitting writing to its memory. This property too it shares with dreams.Why do I blog this? pushing further the notion of blogjects, focusing on input/outputs, this project is quite compelling and I like the adjacency to automatic writing and the cut-up.
More about it here: BLOG/BLOGJECT; A Blog that Dreams
Originally from pasta and vinegar by reBlogged on Sep 25, 2006, 3:39AM
Originally from random($foo) reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 10:26PM
Originally from random($foo) reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 10:26PM
We are taking it one day it time. Learning as we go. As Sol observed the other day, "If you think about it, really, the whole family is homeschooling."Beautiful post from Lorraine about the decision to home school their oldest son.
Originally from hello, typepad by reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 7:25PM
We are taking it one day it time. Learning as we go. As Sol observed the other day, "If you think about it, really, the whole family is homeschooling."Beautiful post from Lorraine about the decision to home school their oldest son.
Originally from hello, typepad by reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 7:25PM
I have heard two things nearly every day for the past two weeks: 1) "I'm really happy we're homeschooling" and 2) "My brain keeps tricking me and even though we're homeschooling I keep dreaming that I have to go to school."
It's amazing to me that after only a week my son is plagued with the same anxiety dreams that I have at least once a week after 12 years of traditional schooling. So, that's how that experiment went. A bit traumatizing for the whole family. Oh, not the same kind of trauma that comes with living through war or being severely abused, but in his five-year-old world, given what it looks like, it's trauma none the less. During that first week that just became progressively worse to the point of sleepless nights, tear-filled mornings, and quiet hunger strikes, everyone told me to just wait it out. "Give it two weeks, he'll come around." Come around? You mean, after two weeks, his spirit will be sufficiently broken to the point where he'll stop begging me not to send him, stop crying and reaching for me as I drop him off in the morning, and stop silently refusing to eat his lunch?
I guess I could have waited for that, if I had magically swapped minds with some other person who was in no way invested in my children, and/or had faith in the public school system. But, you know, I couldn't do it. All I could do was follow my instincts; my intuition. What countless people described to me as typical behavior for kindergartners in the first weeks of school, was in no way typical behavior for Sol, under any circumstances. I've spent a lot of time with my children and therefore have come to understand them pretty well. I know what his anxious looks like. I know what his fearful looks like. I know how he responds to new people, places, experiences. I know about how long it takes him to come around. I know that that place was not a good place for him. And he knew it, too. And the poor guy did everything he could to tell us.
On Friday of the first week, his last day of school, I went in to observe and to eat lunch. It was just as bad as I remembered and worse than I thought it could be. I was thinking Kindergarten would be all playing and songs and read-aloud time. But I guess with the majority of children in preschool these days, that by the time they are in the big leagues, play becomes obsolete, a concept relegated to a 20-minute block called recess. Kindergarten, which used to be about transitioning from the homeworld to the schoolworld, with an emphasis on social interaction (taking turns, being part of a larger group, not biting your neighbor,) is now about acclimation. The programming period.
From what I could see in my few hours there, everything from the extended day (over 6 hours!) to the limited opportunities for socializing ("No talking") to the countless transitions (lots of standing line and walking "Quietly, hands behind your back" from one room to the other), everything is about teaching children how to be good students. And a good student is a very different thing from a good learner. Good students don't ask too many questions. Good students keep their hands and their bodies still. Good students only speak when they are permitted to. Good students do what they are told and nothing else. If you think about it being a good student is quite antithetical to learning.
Most people don't know how to respond when they learn that we are homeschooling. I've gotten lots of "That's a big decision," as if I didn't already know that. As if we haven't been learning and thinking about it for the past 6 years. There also seems to be a good deal of concern over how we will be able to teach him what he needs to know. You know, since we don't have teaching degrees, and Adam never even finished college. I just say we're not worried about it. I don't go into how all that is expected of him academically by the County School System after completion of Kindergarten is being able to count to 30 and backwards from 10 and the ability to identify individual letters. The child is reading and doing multiplication. And all this on his own, without us "teaching" him anything.
We are taking it one day it time. Learning as we go. As Sol observed the other day, "If you think about it, really, the whole family is homeschooling."
Originally from blueperiod. by reBlogged
I just had the pleasure of reading an advance copy of the new book by Michael Lewis, the author of, among other things, MoneyBall and Liar's Poker. It's called the "The Blind Side." It is simply sensational. It will be in bookstores October 2nd.
It's about a teenager from the poorest neighborhood in Memphis who gets adopted by a wealthy white family, and who also happens to be an extraordinarily gifted offensive lineman. Simultaneously Lewis tells the story of the emergence of the left tackle as one of the most important positions in modern day football. I thought MoneyBall was fantastic. But this is even better, and it made me wonder if we aren't enjoying a golden age of sportswriting right now.
First, there's Bill Simmons over at espn.com. Then there's David Foster Wallace. He wrote a piece for the New York Times magazine on Roger Federer a few weeks back, which was almost as good as the piece he wrote on the tennis player Michael Joyce a few years back--and which reminded me of how wonderful his voice is when he turns to sports. Then there's Lewis.
The three of them, of course, could be more different. Simmons is the ur-fan. Wallace is the intellectual. And Lewis? I'm not sure how to describe him, which is part of the genius of his books. It's not even clear to me that his books are about sports in the end, even though he takes sports as his subject. MoneyBall was really about discrimination. (I once tried to convince a university psychology professor that she should make MoneyBall recommended reading in her intro psych class.) And The Blind Side is as insightful and moving a meditation on class inequality in America as I have ever read--althought to put it that way, I realize, makes it sound deadly dull. It isn't. You should read it.
Originally from gladwell.com by reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 6:27PM
Remember what it was like when being a president meant you were expected to be able to string more than four words together into a coherent thought without a teleprompter?
"This is the first 20 minutes of Bill Clinton's interview with Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday. In this clip, Wallace asks Clinton why he didn't do more to capture or kill Osama bin Laden while he was in office. Clinton clearly feels like he has been set up and doesn't hold back in telling Wallace just how he feels."Originally from jwz by reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 3:13PM
The missing piece of S3! "We describe our experiences with the Chubby lock service, which is intended to provide coarse-grained locking as well as reliable (though low-volume) storage for a loosely-coupled distributed system. Chubby provides an interface much like a distributed file system with advisory locks, but the design emphasis is on availability and reliability, as opposed to high performance."Originally from tecznotes links by reBlogged on Sep 24, 2006, 1:04AM
