Harry de Quetteville, Obituaries Editor for the Daily Telegraph, on The Art of the Obituary:

[It is...] rare for us to reflect on funeral arrangements, although there are exceptions. It may be fitting to note that a Spitfire will fly over the church where a Battle of Britain fighter pilot is being buried, or that the proprietor of a famous haunt for sozzled actors has asked for mourners to come to his funeral in costume and make up. Rob Buckman, the doctor who died last October after a career which was devoted to improving the way medics counsel the terminally ill, left instructions for a recording to be played at his own interment. It was to run: "Thank you so much for coming. Unlike the rest of you, I don't have to get up in the morning."

Can you tell the movie from the book cover?

I only got 5 out of 20. Pretty poor, really, considering that I reckon 4 out of the 20 are blindingly obvious or easily guessable.¹

[Via LinkMachineGo!]

1. Though one of those 4 requires you to know the name of the source novel rather than that of the film. ↩

Aaron Skirboll writes in praise of an invention whose time has come (again):

Thomas Watson was a respectful man. He was working as an assistant to Alexander Graham Bell in 1876 when his name became the first to be uttered into Bell's new invention, the telephone. "Mr. Watson, come here," Bell famously said. "I want to see you." Even before this monumental moment, however, Watson had proved his worth – and his neighborliness. While working out the telephone's kinks with Bell from his apartment, Watson initially had to shout to be heard over the early equipment, prompting complaints from the neighbors. So Watson, ever the courteous gent, wrapped himself inside blanket during these initial telephone trials, creating a tunnel, and, thus, the world's first phone booth: society's great unused invention. [...]

Q. Why are software development task estimations regularly off by a factor of 2-3?

A. Let's take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach…

[Via Marco.org]

Reflections by danah boyd on her first visit to the World Economic Forum in Davos:

Comparing WEF to any other event is hard, but I cracked a smile when Nick Bilton remarked that WEF is a lot like Burning Man. In so many ways, he's right. A lot of people overwhelm one extreme weather location and battle non-normative conditions (Davos is crowded, covered in ice, and extremely difficult to navigate) to interact with others. In both events, there are so many different kinds of communities colliding – sometimes interacting and sometimes not. And both cost gobs of money to attend, thereby excluding all sorts of people.

Tweet of the week, courtesy of @kjhealy, a.k.a. Kieran Healy:

Alain de Botton plans to build a series of temples for atheists. Apparently he has never heard of Apple Stores. dezeen.com/2012/01/25/ala…

[Via Crooked Timber]

The shortest lighthouse in Britain?

Elizabeth Gumport on insomnia:

It is impossible to describe insomnia to people who are sound sleepers. These are the people who trust that getting in bed will be followed by falling asleep, as surely as night follows day; these are the fearless people. Sleepless people are a very different breed. They know what insomnia really is: not just the failure to fall asleep, but the fear of that failure. For an insomniac, there is no such thing as a good night. Every evening – even if it eventually, mercifully comes to an end – is shredded by anxiety. To reach sleep the insomniac must first pass through terror. [...]

My Day by Jonesy: A Cat's Eye View of Alien…

Woken by the ship landing somewhere. Not Earth though, so go back to sleep. Woken again by a lot of shouting and neurotic activity coming from somewhere on the far side of the vessel. Honestly, can't these people show a hardworking feline any respect? But hey, since I'm up now, might as well go on the hunt for space rodents. Space rodents! Who am I kidding? No such thing, of course. When we first took off from earth, many cat-years ago, there was a family of rats nesting in the engine room, but I soon sorted them out. Maybe too soon; maybe I should have left them alone to breed a bit, so their descendants could have entertained me during the rest of the voyage. There's nothing left to hunt. Nothing. But how was I to know we'd be cooped up for so long? Anyhow, I offered generous gifts of dead rat to everyone in the crew, except the one who doesn't smell like the others; he tried to stroke me once, but got the rhythm all wrong and his fingers were too hard, so mainly I steer clear of him now.

[Via MetaFilter]

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]

A Tree Branch Separates Us.

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]

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]

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.¹

[Via This Recording (Recommends... sidebar)]

1. Warning: doing this can make you feel very, very old. Or perhaps that's just me… ↩

This is how musicians should deal with people who don't mute their mobile phones before the performance begins.

[Via Electrolite (Sidelights)]

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]

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]

A geek plays darts:

Where is the best place for a player to aim, knowing the inaccuracies of throwing?

What is the optimal strategy? Where should a player aim in order to obtain the highest expected outcome over many throws?

Should they aim for the triple 20, with a big payout on a success, but a low score from a miss? Or, should they aim for the bullseye?

Alternatively, is there some other optimal location on the board they can aim for that, whilst not the highest scoring region, has a large exapnse of middle of the road point values. Would aiming for this region, even with an inaccurate shot, get a reasonable number of points such that, on average, the expected score is the highest that can be achieved?

The true answer to this riddle, as we will see, is that "it depends…"

[Via Flowing Data]

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.]

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]