A particularly clever bit of telemarketing revenge: transfer the salesman to a recording. Should be cool to see how it turns out.
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Welcome
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Posts for Past 60 Days
Monthly Archives: August 2006
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
String theory isn’t the golden child it used to be, but you can still learn about existing in ten dimensions.
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Two more additions to the first three links in my Scalar Series:
A clock depicting the last 4.6 billion years of history in one hour and a project in visualizing enormous numbers with pennies, from one to one quintillion. [via svn]
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
One-minute vacations are short sound recordings of various places on the planet. Some 240+ recordings in the back catalog.
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Wednesday, August 30, 2006
Rembrandt painted almost ninety self-portraits in his lifetime. Jeanne Ivy discusses what artists find when they search in the mirror.
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Tuesday, August 29, 2006
If you miss the original Zelda, you can get help. Zelda Classic reconstructs the old NES version. “Beyond that, Zelda Classic allows the development of new quests that can use either the traditional graphics or enhanced graphics, as well as new enemies, items, and challenges…If you can imagine it, you can create it (provided it’s […]
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Monday, August 28, 2006
A brief article on Librivox, which provides free, user-recorded audiobooks for works in the public domain. “If you think a recording is done badly, then please do one, and we’ll post it as well.”
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Monday, August 28, 2006
Free (as in speech) beer: “Anyone can use the recipe to brew their own FREE BEER or create a derivative of the recipe. Anyone is free to earn money from FREE BEER, but they must publish the recipe under the same license and credit our work.” They even have garish branding materials to share.
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Sunday, August 27, 2006
Slate is hosting an online edition of The 9-11 Report: A Graphical Adaptation, excerpting a chapter each day. [via badlanguage]
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Saturday, August 26, 2006
Hugh MacLeod has 10 questions for Seth Godin. Seth on wealth: “Look, there are 8 million millionaires in the USA. Why do these people go to work every day? Why not downsize appropriately and just sit on the beach? Because they’re too smart. They realize that the purpose of living isn’t to bake in the […]
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Saturday, August 26, 2006
Here’s an oldie, but a goodie. An article from Outside magazine about America’s most dangerous wilderness, Angeles National Forest:
The man in charge at headquarters, Michael J. Rogers, insists that the Angeles is the ultimate proving ground for the theory that nature can be saved from humanity’s onslaught. Rogers, who has been forest supervisor since 1990, […]
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Thursday, August 24, 2006
The Mises blog points to another “victory” in patent warfare. Creative has successfully gotten a $100 million settlement from Apple to end a suite of lawsuits, including one patent dispute about “automatic hierarchical categorization of music by metadata”.
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Thursday, August 24, 2006
The Nonist introduces us to Red-Hot and Filthy Library Smut. “Full-frontal objectification of the library itself,” featuring some pretty incredible photos. Books, shelving, tables all laid bare. Wish I were there…
≡The Law (review: 5/5)
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Frederic Bastiat was an economist and writer in France in the early 1800s. His short book/ long essay The Law is one of the best pieces of political science writing I’ve read in a while. I loved this book. The Law is about the purpose and place of law in society, and Bastiat makes his […]
≡The Tipping Point (review: 2/5)
Wednesday, August 23, 2006
I’d seen this book pop so often recently I figured it was some sort of sign. I have to say, The Tipping Point was about as disappointing as Malcolm Gladwell’s more recent book, Blink. Which doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad, just disappointing.
The topic is the “tipping point,” that mysterious fulcrum where obscure flips to […]
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
Lately, I’ve stumbled across a couple articles on Freeganism, which is a new word for me. Freegan.info describes freegans–”people who employ alternative strategies for living based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources,”–and their common tenets:
Waste Reclamation
Waste Minimization
Eco-Friendly Transportation
Rent-Free Housing
Going Green
Working Less/ Voluntary Joblessness
Here’s a piece in the BBC from […]
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
DejaVu.org offers a brief history of the internet, as well as a tool to emulate old-school web browsers like Lynx, Mosaic, and former versions of Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer. You can see what the internet looked like before it was in color. We really have come a long way.
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Wednesday, August 23, 2006
An interview with Sebastian Junger, author of The Perfect Storm and a new book about the Boston Strangler, A Death in Belmont.
What I wanted to do in the book—I said, “Look, everyone in it is dead. It doesn’t really matter. But this can be a way of talking about some important things that do endure.” […]
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Orwell’s 11 essentials for A Nice Cup of Tea. I love this bit:
“Eighthly, one should drink out of a good breakfast cup — that is, the cylindrical type of cup, not the flat, shallow type. The breakfast cup holds more, and with the other kind one’s tea is always half cold before one has […]
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
Nick Hornby writes about How to Read.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who harrumphs his way through a highly praised novel, astonished but actually rather pleased that so many people have got it so wrong.
As a consequence, the first thing to be cut from my reading diet was contemporary literary fiction. This seems […]
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Tuesday, August 22, 2006
No longer allowed to romp around in refreshing Edenic bliss, the Kool-Aid Man wears pants now. [via ptdr]
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Monday, August 21, 2006
Some great news in my inbox this morning: “Farecast is happy to announce that airfare predictions for flights out of Atlanta (ATL) are now available at Farecast.com.” Farecast predicts ticket prices and indicates fare history for the routes you’re interested in. They claim 75% accuracy in their predictions, and they also have some cool visual […]
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Monday, August 21, 2006
I feel like the Wikipedia thing has been beaten to death (almost as badly as the blogging v. journalism discussion), but I persist… Jaron Lanier writes about the rise of wiki, meta, and the Hazards of the New Online Collectivism:”it’s important to not lose sight of values just because the question of whether a collective […]
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Sunday, August 20, 2006
In 2004 Scott Williamson became the first person to “yo-yo” the Pacific Crest Trail in one year. That is, 2650 miles hiking from the the southern tip of California through Oregon and Washington to Canada, and 2650 miles back. Last spring, Steve Friedman wrote “The Unbearable Lightness of Being Scott Williamson”. It’s not so much […]
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Sunday, August 20, 2006
The GigaPxl Project produces super-detailed, ultra-high resolution panorama photography, which “adds a humanizing touch to subject material which otherwise tends to be dominated by its monumental scale.” See the image gallery, San Diego for example. As they mention on the site, I like the preservation and archival potential of this technology. If they care to, […]
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Sunday, August 20, 2006
In 1919 in the city of Boston, 21 people were killed in a flood of molasses. A reprint from an older Smithsonian article summarizes the day that “a wet, brown hell broke loose,” and why parts of Boston have yet to lose that heavy, sweet smell.
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Sunday, August 20, 2006
I remember being fascinated with stacking things when I was younger. Dominoes, rocks, cans, playing cards, you name it. If I had had the cash, I could have learned the basics of cantilever engineering by building structures made out of coins. Be sure to see some of the the insane reader submissions on beginning on […]
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Sunday, August 20, 2006
I like it better as an impish gag than as Thought-Provoking High Art, but a group has created an exhibit featuring items stolen from other art museums: “By a volitive and intentional disrupt of the existing chain of artist-curator-collector, it undermines capitalistic market orthodoxies and produces an autonomous value zone.”
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Friday, August 18, 2006
Jason Kottke points out that Wal-Mart employs 1.8 million people on the planet. And now time for fuzzy math…
The current estimates put world population at about 6.5 billion. That means Wal-Mart employs 0.0276923077% of the entire world, 1 of each 3600ish. About 64% of the world population is in the generally employable age range of […]
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Thursday, August 17, 2006
-From Design Observer: “Operation Iraqi Freedom was planned in PowerPoint — giving “death by PowerPoint” new meaning.”
Reminds me of two other great Laments on Military Presentation. One, the great image of the military regiment on the cover Edward Tufte’s essay The Cognitive Style of Powerpoint. And two, the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint. We spent a […]
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Thursday, August 17, 2006
-Zap Reader is a little web service that makes speedreading easier on the web. There’s an extension for Firefox call JS Reader that has comparable functionality.
I do some basic speed-reading in the paper world, so it’s nice to see this expand on the web. I like Zap Reader on first look, though it’s always an […]
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Thursday, August 17, 2006
-Han van Meegeren forged 7 Vermeers in the mid-1900s, raking in millions for false new paintings. “He devised a plan to paint a perfect Vermeer - neither a copy, nor a pastiche, but an original work - and, when it had been authenticated by leading art experts, acquired by a major museum, exhibited and acclaimed, […]
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Wednesday, August 16, 2006
-The BBC reports that soon we may have 3 more official planets in our solar system. To be more exact, we’ll have 8 “classical” planets and 4 “plutons”. I’m sure heated debate will ensue.
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Wednesday, August 16, 2006
-Assembled from various warning signs and postings, here is a Flickr photo collection called Stick Figures in Peril.
-CrunchGear spotlights a gun you can put on a keychain.
-The Skeptics Annotated Bible [and Koran, and Book of Mormon] lets you find all the references to violence, family values, science, etc. Also quick links to the “good stuff.”
-In […]
≡Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge (review: 3/5)
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Yes, I will read just about anything. Heidi Klum offers a collection of wit and wisdom gathered from her years of modeling in Heidi Klum’s Body of Knowledge: 8 Rules of Model Behavior (to Help You Take Off on the Runway of Life). Of course, one of the best parts of this book are the […]
≡The Time Traveler’s Wife (review: 3.5/5)
Tuesday, August 15, 2006
In recognition that I read much more than I can think cogently about, here are some quick thoughts on Audrey Niffenegger’s The Time Traveler’s Wife.
It’s a wonderful concept. Here’s the story of a guy, Henry, and a gal, Clare. Henry can time travel, but he can’t control it. He just disappears and flits from when […]
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Tuesday, August 15, 2006
Today, a special audio edition:
-If you like British accents, the British Library lets you explore almost 700 English accents and dialects, complete with analyses. [via marylaine]
-Get your fix of old time radio. Abbot & Costello, Dick Tracy, Gunsmoke, and more. I love those old commercials: cigarettes ads beamed right to your ear. There’s another where […]
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Monday, August 14, 2006
–“Color film was non-existent in 1909 Russia, yet in that year a photographer named Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii embarked on a photographic survey of his homeland and captured hundreds of photos in full, vivid color.” His original negatives are available through the Library of Congress. Sometimes you forget the world had color way back when.
–Julian Beever […]
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Saturday, August 12, 2006
–Make your own motivational poster. [via lifehacker]
–31 ways to tie your shoes, out of the trillions of possible methods.
–The video indicates that bike messengers might indeed be on crack, but it’s still a good argument for cycling v. motoring in the city.
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Saturday, August 12, 2006
–Scientists rethink the collapse of Easter Island society. Spoiler: It wasn’t just environmentally rapacious islanders, but the rats they brought along. [via ptdr]
–Anil Dash gathers the best of Zidane Headbutt spin-offs, “dedicated to the head-first fight against alleged racism, the grand tradition of ridiculous memes on the net, and the premise that “Yakety Sax” is […]
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