January 27th, 2012
From 1997, the story of Martin Tytell, a.k.a. the Typewriter Man:
Mr. Tytell understands that his trade involves more than just some possibly out-of-date office machines. "We don't get normal people here," he says with a certain pride. Coincidentally or not, the second time I saw him he made a point of showing me a small typewriter in a steel case as smooth and silvery as a gun mount on an airplane wing. He told me it was an uncrushable typewriter case designed during the Second World War to survive being run over by a tank. Then he began to tell me his experiences working on typewriters for the government during the war.
[Via Longform]
January 25th, 2012
Web designers all agree: the FBI's seizure of MegaUpload is a disgrace…
Let's check out the source of the page:
<html>
<title>NOTICE</title>
<body>
<img src="banner.jpg"/>
</body>
</html>
No JavaScript. No AJAX. No CSS. Not even any tables. The image doesn't have ALT tags. Maybe you're not worried about Google indexing this page, or visually impaired people being able to read it, but I hope you realize you are just flushing the last 8 years of the Internet down the toilet. Interestingly, you went with the trailing slash that closes empty elements in XHTML but the DOCTYPE is…nothing. Whatever – this stuff is for nerds.
What we need to focus on is what a colossal missed opportunity this is for you. MegaUpload is down and the notice on the site is getting tons of exposure [...]
You must plan these operations, right? I mean, it's not like you just randomly seize private property on a whim. This is a failure of project management. You can't just bring in a designer at the last minute and expect them to polish your design turd. This is your chance to shine. Go wild. [...]
[Via Snarkmarket]
January 25th, 2012
No Robots by Kimberly Knoll and 張永翰 Yunghan Chang tells a story set in a near future where humans and robots are still learning to live alongside one another peaceably. Nice work.
[Via Alyssa Rosenberg]
January 24th, 2012
Paging through Old Love is positively hypnotic, and even more so once you give in to the temptation to start clicking on tags to follow particular names across the years.
[Via This Recording (Recommends... sidebar)]
January 24th, 2012
This is how musicians should deal with people who don't mute their mobile phones before the performance begins.
[Via Electrolite (Sidelights)]
January 23rd, 2012
It turns out that former chairman of the US Federal Reserve Alan Greenspan was laughing all the way to the (run on the) banks:
[Following the release of the minutes of the meetings of the Federal Open Market Committee's meetings for 2001-2006...]
It makes for quite a fun read if you get past all the boring economic analysis parts. In fact, if the stenographer was accurate, the Committee broke into laughter 45 times in just the January meeting! That's at least 45 jokes (some didn't get laughs – if only we knew the quality of each laughter!). I would have guessed that would be a lot relative to other meetings, right? I mean how funny would it be if the top of the housing market was also when the FOMC was telling the most jokes in their meetings?
Well, being a data nerd with nothing better to do on a Thursday night, I looked into it. To be precise, I went back for just the last six years (2001-06) and searched for how many times the stenographer's notation for laughter appeared in the released transcripts of each FOMC meeting.
Suffice it to say the data is funny…
Sadly, the minutes of meetings of the Bank of England's Monetary Policy Committee are written in a rather dry, formal style, so there doesn't seem to be much scope for a similar analysis of economic policymakers' behaviour over here.
[Via The Morning News]
January 21st, 2012
Kawamura Ganjavian's Ostrich is said to be a boon for power-nappers everwhere:
OSTRICH offers a micro environment in which to take a warm and comfortable power nap at ease. It is neither a pillow nor a cushion, nor a bed, nor a garment, but a bit of each at the same time. Its soothing cave-like interior shelters and isolates our head and hands (mind, senses and body) for a few minutes, without needing to leave our desk.
Alternatively, I can't help but think that it looks like the dormant form of something out of a creature feature.
[Via swissmiss]
January 20th, 2012
Writer/producer John Rogers, retaining a sense of proportion over SOPA:
Any screenwriter who thinks he loses more money to piracy than to Hollywood studio accounting is a child.
[Via jamoche, commenting here.]
January 20th, 2012
At McSweeney's: In Which I Fix My Girlfriend's Grandparents' WiFi and Am Hailed as a Conquering Hero.
Lo, in the twilight days of the second year of the second decade of the third millennium did a great darkness descend over the wireless internet connectivity of the people of 276 Ferndale Street in the North-Central lands of Iowa. For many years, the gentlefolk of these lands basked in a wireless network overflowing with speed and ample internet, flowing like a river into their Compaq Presario. Many happy days did the people spend checking Hotmail and reading USAToday.com.
But then one gray morning did Internet Explorer 6 no longer load The Google. Refresh was clicked, again and again, but still did Internet Explorer 6 not load The Google. Perhaps The Google was broken, the people thought, but then The Yahoo too did not load. Nor did Hotmail. Nor USAToday.com. The land was thrown into panic. [...]
[Via Pop Loser]
January 19th, 2012
To my mind, John Scalzi missed a trick when he showed his 13 year old daughter Athena a long-playing record for the first time in her life.
That is, he forgot to mention that if she wanted to hear all of the 10-15 songs the LP contained, she'd have had to get up and turn the LP over more-or-less half way through.
[Via kottke.org]
January 19th, 2012
Astronomers scanning the near-infrared sky have spotted the Eye of Sauron.
January 19th, 2012
Form letter template for acquired startups:
We are excited to continue our core mission of connecting people with solutions at our new home. Please realize that this is so vague a statement as to be completely meaningless. But we just made so much money that at the moment we genuinely believe this horseshit.
[Via Electrolite (Sidelights)]
January 17th, 2012
Marty McFly, Bruce Lee, Morpheus and Lt. Frank Drebin (and a few others) are all channeling Lionel Richie: they want to say Hello.
[Via feeling listless]
January 16th, 2012
Movies From An Alternate Universe. A different cast. A different era. A different poster.
I'm not sure even Sam Peckinpah could have convinced me that Al Pacino could play Wolverine but I would absolutely have paid good money to see Sean Connery in The Fifth Element, with Christopher Lee in the Gary Oldman role and Daniela Bianchi replacing Milla Jovovich.
Also, I so want to see Fritz Lang's 2001: Odyssee im Weltraum.
[Via MetaFilter]
January 15th, 2012
Joe Moran on a modern version of the dawn chorus:
My favourite character in Craig Taylor's Londoners, his oral history of the capital which I've just finished reading, is Craig Clark, a clerk at Transport for London's Lost Property Office near Baker Street underground station. There is a lovely opening to this section which illustrates the unconscious synchronisation of millions of urban lives: 'I arrive at Transport for London's Lost Property Office near Baker Street station when it is loudest, between eight and nine in the morning – when all the lost mobile phones, programmed by absent owners and sealed in their individual brown envelopes, begin to chirp and ring and speak in novelty voices and vibrate and arpeggio on the racks where they are shelved, each with its own designated number. The chorus gets louder every quarter of an hour, until a last burst of sound at nine o'clock, and then most alarms go quiet for the rest of the day.'
January 15th, 2012
H.L. Mencken, in response to a request for advice on how to become a magazine editor:
25 January, 1936
San Fransisco, California
Dear Saroyan,
I note what you say about your aspiration to edit a magazine. I am sending you by this mail a six-chambered revolver. Load it and fire every one into your head. You will thank me after you get to hell and learn from other editors there how dreadful their job was on earth.
(Signed, 'H.L. Mencken')