kottke.org

From the folks who brought you The Periodic Table of Videos, Sixty Symbols is a series of videos on the symbols used in physics and astronomy. (via snarkmarket) Tags: astronomy   physics   science  

Steven Garrity lists a short selection of metaphors related to technology freedoms. Like: If Twitter were a phone company, you could only call people who used the same phone company as you. Got any good ones to add to the list? Tags: Steven Garrity   Twitt

Errol Morris' discussion of Robert McNamara's legacy nails why McNamara was such a compelling figure. His refusal to come out against the Vietnam War, particularly as it continued after he left the Defense Department, has angered many. There's ample evidence that he felt the war was wrong...

Google announced last night that they are building a lightweight operating system based on Google Chrome: Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year...

Richard Feynman explains how trains stay on their tracks. Hint: it's not the flanges. (via jb) Tags: physics   Richard Feynman   science  

Forget Star Wars. Caitlin Moran says that Ghostbusters is the greatest movie ever made. The Great Ghostbusters Campaign must start today. Here...

Chip Kidd shares his seven favorite book cover designs (that aren't his). (via do) Tags: best of   books   Chip Kidd   design 

The only thing creepier and more irritating than those E*TRADE babies are these Evian rollerskating babies. (thx, bb) Tags: advertising   Uncanny Valley   v

Capturing Reality: The Art of Documentary is a documentary film about documentary films. Errol Morris, Werner Herzog and over 30 of today's top documentary filmmakers provide an in-depth look at non-fiction filmmaking and the steps to making a documentary...

If World War III started tomorrow, these would be the propaganda posters. Tags: design   Twitt

Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs! Tags: baseball   Ben Fry   infoviz  

The combination of Pitt and Soderbergh and Lewis wasn't enough to keep the Moneyball movie afloat...Sony canceled it "days before shooting was to begin"...

Things will be significantly slower than usual around here this week...I am on vacation. Aside from some sporadic updates, I'll see you next week. Tags: kottke.org

Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh shares his idea for a Ghostbusters III screenplay based on NYNEX, the telephone company that served New York and New England from 1984 through 1997. Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don't stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night...

David Galbraith calculates that if buildings by famous architects were priced like paintings, a Le Corbusier building would be worth more than the entire US GDP. The top floor of Corbusier's Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e...

From The Onion: 95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family. "There was a time when my sister would mention how much she wants an SUV, and I'd be unable to resist launching into a whole thing about how irresponsible and wasteful they are...

A Bolivian TV station was duped into airing screencaps showing a plane crash from Lost thinking that it was the crash of Air France Flight 447 somehow photographed in widescreen from inside the plane...

I guess I should have included "if the link is posted to TechMeme" in the Twitter litter list. A more readable list is here. Tags: Twitter

Chris Anderson's new book, Free, will be out early next month (you can order it for $17.81 on Amazon). Over on the VQR blog, Waldo Jaquith discovered that several passages in the book were lifted directly from Wikipedia and other sources without attribution...

A pair of related articles from the New Yorker last week. The first is a Talk of the Town piece on a water-pistol ambush game played by the students at a New York City private school. Willis Cohen was finally killed through no fault of his own...

From Marcus Buck, imprints of demolished houses left on other houses. Photo is from Pruned. (via janelle) Tags: architecture   Marcus Buck   photogr

Elissa Bassist, motivated by a Christopher Hitchens query about women being less funny than men, collects a whole bunch of writing by women from McSweeney's. Tags: elissabassist

Rare mp3s of Weegee and Henri Cartier-Bresson talking about photography. Below you can hear Weegee talk about picture-making...

Flip Flop Fly Ball is a marriage of baseball fandom and an enthusiasm for infographics. While not strictly baseball, this comparison of the sizes and shapes of sports balls is a favorite. Tags: design   infoviz   sp

This movie just looks amazing. And horrible. A must-see trailer in HD if you like, as I do, watching the Earth being destroyed. Tags: 2012   movies   rolandemmerich   trailers 

Is installment #5 the best Auto-Tune the News yet? Shawty! Tags: Auto-Tune   vid

Scientists have created a sonic black hole using Bose-Einstein condensates near absolute zero. Since atoms move between the [Bose-Einstein condensate] clouds faster than sound, any sound wave trying to escape will fall farther and farther behind, never able to escape the sonic event horizon...

Taking a cue from auto insurance, Safeway has devised a healthcare insurance plan that emphasizes personal responsibility. Safeway's plan capitalizes on two key insights gained in 2005. The first is that 70% of all health-care costs are the direct result of behavior...

Infographics News collects some lovely infographics from a new Portuguese newspaper called i. The style of infographics follow the general design created by Javier Errea: no fireworks, modern, compact, with cromatic impact but smart...

Geeking Out sounds interesting, but I can't go. Perhaps you'd like to? This month, we'll be discussing the interaction between science and religion with speakers including: astrophysicist and Is God a Mathematician...

A couple of weeks ago on Twitter, I asked about freely available financial data. Anyone know where to get stock data in a standard API format (XML, JSON, etc)? Just looking for hi/lo/close data, not real-time...

The NY Times on the progress being made in explaining how life arose on Earth. With these four recent advances -- Dr...

Inspired by Carl Fredricksen's house in Up, which was holding up construction of a massive building complex, deputydog uncovers some more such houses, which are actually called nail houses. Another nail house is actually a nail church...

On the Freakonomics blog, Dmitri Leybman tells us about the three main ways that the President's political party can have an impact on the economy...

The internet cloud is actually "giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators"...

Scientists may have found the first planet located in another galaxy. The evidence is a little sparse but the search technique they're using is solid...

Oliver Morton fills us in on the current happenings in the search for planets outside of our solar system. A friend of his clued him in on a technique that could be used to not only discover planets but to determine if those planets show signs of supporting Earth-like life...

This list of 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive is pretty awesome. Two of my favorites: 2. Introduce herd effect in highly personalized form. The hotel sign in the bathroom informed the guests that many prior guests chose to be environmentally friendly by recycling their towels...

Obama read Atul Gawande's article about the differences in healthcare costs in different parts of the US and was so taken by it that he had a meeting about it with his aides and mentioned the piece in a meeting with a group of Democratic senators...

Two movies from now, after Toy Story 3 and Newt, Pixar is *finally* releasing a movie with a female main character. The only problem? She's a princess. I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered...

Oh yeah the new High Line is open. Tags: highline  ny

As the universe expanded, neutrinos formed in the Big Bang may have been stretched to billions of light years across. Tags: physics  scienc

Independents: They don't want help. They want a computer terminal they can use themselves. They want up-to-date inventory numbers aligned with an up-to-date store map, so they can go find the book themselves...

Nick Popovich, "the Ernest Hemingway of super repo men", has a rule about firearms when doing repossessions: The man who tells you he's going to shoot you will not shoot you. If there isn't already, there will likely be a movie based on Popovich's exploits released someday. Tags: nickpopovich

Regarding the game of Who Can Name the Bigger Number?, Scott Aaronson shows that while 9^9^9^9 might cut the mustard in the first couple of rounds, the numbers and the notation used to express them get much more complicated...

Aaaaaaand if you liked Hedgehog Launch and Learn to Fly, you'll also probably enjoy Micro Olympics and Micro Olympics on Mars. Tags: microolympics  videogame

In a piece from 1979 called Big Wheel, artist Chris Burden took a massive 19th century iron flywheel and set it spinning with the rear wheel of a small motorcycle. The flywheel spins for *three hours* on a single charge...

Bud Caddell summarizes how to be happy with your work in the form of a Venn diagram consisting of three main overlapping areas: What We Do Well, What We Want to Do, and What We Can Be Paid to Do. (via today and tomorrow) Tags: budcaddell  business  howto  infoviz  venndiag

The NY Times Lens blog, which has been really good right from the start, has a great story today about the photographers who took the pictures of the man in the white shirt staring down the tanks in Tiananmen twenty years ago...

If you have a pair of small binder clips: then you also have a pair of emergency cuff links. Tags: evanroth  fashion  hac

From Matt Zoller Seitz, Following: a collection of movie clips where the camera follows a character through their environment. See also Seitz's The Substance of Style series on Wes Anderson's influences. Tags: mattzollerseitz  movies  vid

When the connection between two Scottish canals was disconnected, a clever solution to reconnect them was employed. Instead of linking them by a series of locks, a giant rotating wheel was constructed to lift and lower the boats the 79 feet from one canal to the other...

Opens June 2010. Tags: movies  pixar  toystory3  trail

From the introduction of part one of The Black Swan by Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull...

In the opinion of intellectual copyright attorney Brock Shinen, the short answer is "no". I admit, I think a protectable Tweet exists in theory. I have read hundreds if not thousands of Tweets and have yet to read one I believe would be protectable, but the possibility exists...

A metaphor for the current state of the American auto industry: two cars in an art gallery crashing into each other over a period of six days. (via today and tomorrow)

Typekit is an upcoming typeface hosting service which will provide vetted fonts that you can include in your site's stylesheet using the @font-face mechanism. That's where Typekit comes in. We've been working with foundries to develop a consistent web-only font linking license...

During the TV coverage of the NBA playoffs, the NBA is running commercials showing great moments in playoff history that have been edited to isolate the players from the crowd. There's Bird stealing the inbound pass, Dr...

Art Wolfe details the process he went through to get just the right photo of some Chinese fishermen. There were many false starts. By the time I was ready for the next shot, the darkening evening sky balanced the light somewhat...

From The Real Time Web is a Beautiful Distraction: The ability to pay attention, focus and strategically disconnect will be a winning discipline of the next generation of business leaders. I'm not leading anyone anywhere, but this has certainly been a winning strategy for me. Tags: attention

Andy Baio deleted the subjects from famous internet memes, leaving just the backgrounds. The results are hazy, ugly, and beautiful all at once, like last night's hookup after a night of hard drinking. Tags: andybaio

It might surprise you that introverts travel differently than extroverts, particularly because most travel magazines, guidebooks, and TV shows are produced by and for extroverts...

North Korea is in the news. Not much is known about the secretive country, but a group of interested citizens has been mapping North Korea on Google Earth using snippets of news reports here and there. More than 35,000 people have downloaded Mr. Melvin's file, North Korea Uncovered...

Unbeknownst to his close friends, Jack Kerouac invented a fantasy baseball game and played it for most of his life...

In praise of slow photography. One advantage of using larger formats is that the process is slower. It takes time to set up the camera. It takes time to visualize what you want.When doing portraits, it enables the photographer to talk and listen to subjects, to observe their behavior...

Jonah Lehrer, who is seemingly in a race with Michael Lewis these days to see who can write the most books and articles in a 12-month period, writes about self-control in the New Yorker...what it is, how it works, and how it affects things like achievement, happiness, etc...

The trailer for Herb and Dorothy, about a pair of unlikely art collectors. From a 1997 article in the Austin Chronicle: She was a librarian. Her husband was a postal worker. They lived on his salary and bought art with hers. Both are now retired. They have no children...

From a new collection of pieces by Mark Twain, a reading by John Lithgow and drawing by Flash Rosenberg of chapter 2. Tags: books  marktwain  video  whoismarktw

The NY Times kicks off their new photography blog with a video that shows just how short White House photo ops are...

Chemist John Sutherland has discovered a process by which ordinary chemicals could spontaneously form RNA molecules, the suspected building blocks of the first life on Earth...

Art director Elliott Burford makes amusing illustrations from spam subject lines. (thx, frank) Tags: elliotburford  spa

Nice black and white covers for science fiction books. "Sanda created each cover using A4 paper, with all the typography printed and placed on the structure by hand," Jones continues...

This "small settings update" to Twitter sucks. We've updated the Notices section of Settings to better reflect how folks are using Twitter regarding replies...

The New York Public Library is facing budget cuts that will close libraries on some days, cut programs for children, and place other services (like job search resources) at risk...

Did you notice all the lens flares in Star Trek? JJ Abrams' rationale for them -- he refers to them as "another actor" in the movie -- is pretty interesting. I love the idea that the future was so bright it couldn't be contained in the frame...

Ticket prices at the new Yankee Stadium are so high that if a New Yorker wants to watch a Mariners/Yankees game from the best seats, it would be a lot cheaper to fly to Seattle, stay in a nice hotel, eat fancy dinners, and see two games...

Advice from rats who trade stocks..."the latest advice from our most successful trading rats for individual investors". We are continuously crossing the best trading rats with each other in order to breed specialists in various markets for our clients...

Simon Schubert creates 2-D scenes by folding paper slightly. Only slightly...this isn't origami. See also one of my favorite things at the Met, the studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio. (via today and tomorrow) Tags: art  simonschubert

[Note: spoilers.] Bones did it for me. As soon as he sat down next to Kirk on the shuttle, I was hooked. Loved Star Trek, wanted to go again as soon we got out. J.J. Abrams did something kinda crazy with the film though. He took the entire Star Trek canon and tossed it out the window...

Whoa, 99 "essential" classical music songs on mp3 for only $7.99 at Amazon. "Album Savings: $80.12 compared to buying all songs." (thx, martin) Tags: music

Woody Allen + Larry David + the process for making a feature-length film - all but about 2 minutes of the footage = the trailer for Whatever Works. An eccentric New Yorker played by Larry David abandons his upper class life to lead a more bohemian existence...

In celebration of Star Trek opening today, Adam Kuban goes long on a piece about food in Star Trek movies and TV shows. Science fiction often holds a mirror up to contemporary culture, critiquing its practices, politics, and mores. So, too, with Romulan ale...

Mike Frumin took the NYC subway ridership data from all the way back to 1905 (!!) and graphed it on a map, with a sparkline of the ridership data for each stop. Frumin explains the project a little more here...

Absolutely gorgeous slow motion HD video of a large wave from under the water...you can clearly see the intricate and powerful architecture of the wave. Nice surfing shot too...but the wave is mesmerizing. Tags: sports  surfing  video  wat