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”.
Category Archives: Daily Tidbits
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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…
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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 [...]
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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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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 ‚Äî 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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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 [...]
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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” [...]
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Thursday, August 10, 2006
–Via 54 Monkeys, an article in New York Times Magazine about rebellious branding: …The supposed counterculture nature of his brand might arouse some suspicion. Manufactured commodities are an artistic medium? Branding is a form of personal expression? Indie businesses are a means of dropping out? Turning your lifestyle into a business is rebellious? …Perhaps they‚Äôre [...]
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Thursday, August 10, 2006
–Georgia Tech has an online gallery & text of Edward Emerson Barnard’s book A Photographic Atlas of Selected Regions of the Milky Way, published 1927. Check out Plate No. 5, a Nebulous Region in Taurus or Plate No. 14, Dark Lanes in Ophiucus. Aside from the photos, you can also access images of the text [...]
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Thursday, August 10, 2006
–Rebecca Blood has posted an interview with Jason Kottke of kottke.org. Good stuff. Her whole Bloggers on Blogging series has been quite a treat. –Eggcorns are those phrases that “arise when a writer knows an expression well enough to employ it in an appropriate context, but is mistaken about the term’s or its constituents’ meanings, [...]
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Wednesday, August 9, 2006
–Test how well you know your 80s lyrics. Yeah… I failed mightily… –Some crossword afficionados lament the popularity of Sudoku, and look for ways to regain their lost attention. [via waxy] –Read up on what exactly information is. When I see a person like this who obviously loves math, I can’t really help but be [...]
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Wednesday, August 9, 2006
–Stephen King tells us everything we need to know about writing. – A small collection of vintage photos of the Mideast back before things got hairy. [via mr] –Novels are for females: If you are a young man and you pick up the book section, your primary impression of literature in English is going to [...]
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Tuesday, August 8, 2006
–The Time Fountain uses a strobe light for all kinds of cool effects, e.g. water drops drip backwards or float in mid-air. Bonus points for anyone who can name the soundtrack for the video. –A nice write-up examining the Atlanta Aquarium with a designer’s eye. I wouldn’t have noticed it on my own, but the [...]
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