This visualization of how Twitter users reacted to Japan's 2011 earthquake acts as a small-scale companion piece to the visualisation of a year's worth of earthquakes I posted the other week.
[Via currybetdotnet]
Building a clock that will run for 10,000 years requires you to try to anticipate problems other clocks just don't face:
Notes taken during [a colloquium on the Long Now Foundation's plans to ensure that the 10,000-Year Clock keeps time despite long-term variations in the length of a day] show that, while the technical success of the Clock's durability is yet to be determined, its ability to inspire long-term thinking is already taking hold:
Neil deGrasse Tyson jested that the Long Now should put some signage on the 10,000 Year Clock so that a post-apocalyptic Earth will not think that the world will end when the clock stops working.
For one day only, Pizza Hut is getting into the wedding business:
Not content with ruining dinner, they're now looking to ruin the wedding proposal too. Specifically, Pizza Hut is hoping to trick as many as ten idiots into proposing to their significant others with a big old box of disgusting. Don't believe it?
There's certainly a set of people willing to spend $10,000 on a proposal. It's likely there's also a set of people who would propose with chain restaurant pizza. Still, it's disheartening to think that the intersection of those two sets may not simply be zero. Thankfully, it's simultaneously hilarious. [...]
[Via Marco.org]
Brian Phillips tries to explain Harry Redknapp to the world:
Harry Redknapp does not have a soul, but he has a sort of dead-eyed Cockney sparkle that's served him as a pretty adequate replacement. England's most successful English soccer manager, he's also England's most successful allegations-shrugger-offer, "Who, me?"-expression-haver, preposterous-quip-to-distract-your-attention deployer, and crafter of bespoke logic-annihilating narrative Möbius strips. When 60 police officers crash-swarmed his house as part of a conspiracy sting in 2007, Harry insisted that they were merely soliciting his help catching other people. "They have to arrest you to talk to you," he straightfacedly told the press. Oh, of course! When questioned, during his tax-evasion trial last month, about the secret Monaco bank account he'd named after his bulldog Rosie, he produced one of the greatest answers in the history of criminology. "I don't even like calling her a dog," he said. "She was better than that." The jurors returned a verdict of not guilty. I'm pretty sure some of them high-fived.
Adam Curtis recounts the story of how the cruise ship industry adapted to the era of mass leisure travel:
On many ships thousands of workers below deck work often 7 days a week, sometimes for fourteen hours a day. They are paid two to three dollars a day – depending entirely on tips to earn a living wage. The work most of them are asked to do on their shifts is impossible for one person to complete, so they in turn have to pay others to help them.
And a weird underground economy often results.
In his history of the industry, Kristoffer Garin has described how many of the workers also have to pay bribes to others elsewhere in the complex hierarchy of the ship – waiters have to bribe the cooks to make sure the food is hot, the cabin cleaners have to bribe the laundry chief to get clean sheets on time.
Sometimes I think Marina Hyde is wasted on the Guardian's Lost in Showbiz column. Then she writes a piece like Abu Qatada's weight and the showbizification of terror and I realise she's exactly where she needs to be, doing $DEITY's work:
[The Daily Mail...] is distressed the corporation should regard "extremist" as a value judgment best avoided in news reports, where "radical" would do. But more than that, it seems, they are incensed at the Beeb's guidance on Qatada's present dimensions, despite the fact it was clearly only given to ensure current rather than out-of-date stock pictures are used. "BBC staff have also been advised against using images of the preacher looking fat," the paper shrieks to its readers. "He is apparently now much slimmer than he used to be."
"Apparently"? Now come, come, Daily Mail. This disingenuity does not become you. I put it to you that you knew very well indeed that Qatada had slimmed down – just as you are aware of even minuscule cellular changes in the adipose layers of everyone from Cheryl Cole to third-tier government ministers to babies such as Harper Beckham, who are only one whitewashed inquiry into press standards away from being described as "pouring their curves" into romper-suits and the like.
I, too, have fond memories of Tobe Hooper's "Lifeforce":
LIFEFORCE is my all-time guilty pleasure movie, (am referring to the 116 minute British version of course – from IMDB: "Original unedited European version contains more violent and erotic footage Tri-Star Pictures cut from the domestic version.").
I love the epic scopeness of it all. We travel all the way from outer-space, to mist-bound foggy parks in the morn, to asylums for the criminally insane, to the secret war-rooms of the vampire Prime Minister and finally to the end of the world. And all the time the seriousness of it, the gob-smacking, "gentlemen this is a D-notice situation", seriousness of it it. LIFEFORCE has a tone like no other film.
And Mathilda May.
Walking around nude.
For what seems like forever.
posted by jettloe at 7:55 AM on February 7 [8 favorites +] [!]
So just how truncated was the US release? I'm guessing it probably lasted about 23 minutes…
My favourite part of Mark W. Shead's post on how an apparent flaw in the design of an air pistol illustrated why designers need domain knowledge is that it prompted an informative, detailed, respectful exchange of views in the comments between Shead and a reader with experience in the business of shooting air pistols at competition level. I love this sort of detailed dissection of the whys and wherefores of design work.
It turns out that in some contexts it makes perfect sense to site an air pressure gauge on an air pistol in such a way that it all but demands that the user stare straight down the barrel of the (loaded?) air pistol. Who knew?
[Via Electrolite (Sidelights)]
The small penis rule is a tactic that writers can employ to avoid libel suits:
One way authors can protect themselves [...] is to say that a character has a small penis, Mr. Friedman said. "Now no male is going to come forward and say, 'That character with a very small penis, that's me!'"
Given that the basis for the Wikipedia article that defines the rule appears to be a single New York Times article (quoted above) in which precisely one writer uses the term in passing during a wider discussion about the perils of writing about real people, I have no idea whether the phrase 'small penis rule' is a genuine term of art among libel lawyers or just a throwaway line from one writer during an interview that somehow stuck in the reporter's mind. I'd say that if the term isn't widely used then it probably should be.
[Via Pop Loser]
Evgeny Morozov laments The Death of the Cyberflâneur:
THE other day, while I was rummaging through a stack of oldish articles on the future of the Internet, an obscure little essay from 1998 – published, of all places, on a Web site called Ceramics Today – caught my eye. Celebrating the rise of the "cyberflâneur," it painted a bright digital future, brimming with playfulness, intrigue and serendipity, that awaited this mysterious online type. This vision of tomorrow seemed all but inevitable at a time when "what the city and the street were to the Flâneur, the Internet and the Superhighway have become to the Cyberflâneur."
Intrigued, I set out to discover what happened to the cyberflâneur. While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today's Internet suggests that they couldn't have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media. What went wrong? And should we worry? [...]
Morozov's argument is that most web users these days aren't going online to see if there's anything interesting out there today: they're shopping, or seeking out news headlines, or engaging with one another via walled gardens1 like Facebook.
He's not wrong that this is a description of how people choose to use the web, but I don't think that's necessarily a problem, any more than it's a problem that a lot of people who use public libraries will be engaging in a goal-oriented search for books that can improve their chances of passing an exam/finding a job/understanding what sort of optical aids they'll need if they want to see the Galilean moons of Jupiter, rather than browsing the New Fiction shelves for something to divert them from their daily routine. I suspect than most of the people walking the streets of late 19th century Paris weren't flâneurs, any more than most web users in 2001 wrote weblogs. The beauty of the web is that it lets us find and connect with other people who share our interests without letting that fact that 99.754% of web users aren't even slightly geeky about the same things as you and I get in our way, or theirs.
It's possible that one day Facebook's gravitational pull will cause us all to close down our vanity domains and start posting to our Facebook walls, but I'm sceptical that'll come to pass any time soon.
[Via Fimoculous.com]
It's one thing to be intellectually aware of the fact that there are thousands of medium-to-large magnitude earthquakes around the world each year, quite another to see their frequency, magnitude and location plotted in animated form, in great detail. It brings home just how fortunate I am to be living on a small, geologically stable island nation off the coast of the continent of Europe.
[Via Chocolate and Vodka]
Once again, it's time for me to fail miserably at predicting the Oscar winners.
I tend to like my time lapse videos plain. If the film maker can deploy their skills and equipment at a suitable location in order to compress time and reveal how the night sky shifts as the planet turns under it – or how the clouds break on mountaintops like surf, or to show me just how much ground a slow moving machine covers over the space of a week – then I'll lap it up.
Signal To Noise isn't that sort of time lapse video. It's flashier and is clearly going for visual impact rather than trying to impart information to the viewer,1 but it's so beautifully done that I enjoyed it quite a bit anyway. Definitely worth a look.
[Via Bad Astronomy]
The main thing I took away from this Q&A with Jeff Goldblum isn't anything in the interview itself. It's this bit at the end:
In short
Born: Pittsburgh, 1952
Jeff Goldblum will turn 60 later this year. 60! How the hell did that happen?1
This sort of cruelty to washing machines seems awfully … unsporting.
I swear that when someone tossed a discarded drive motor in to finish it off at the 3:45 mark I was half expecting the poor beast to send it right back with interest.
[Via kottke.org]
