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]

Astronomers scanning the near-infrared sky have spotted¹ the Eye of Sauron.

1. Or should I say, 'have been spotted by'… ↩

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)]

Lake Dundas, Western Australia.

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]

Oh, the Places You'll Go at Burning Man! put a huge grin on my face.¹

[Via swissmiss]

1. Potentially NSFW, albeit solely because of the outfits worn by a few of the participants. ↩

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 Wolverine¹ 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]

1. Though I do find the supporting cast, with Rutger Hauer as Sabretooth and Peter Weller as Maverick … intriguing. ↩

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.'

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')

Iapetus is weird.¹

1. But not quite this weird. ↩

Alan Parker is one of a number of actors, musicians, photographers and directors the Guardian invited to recall their big career firsts:

[On making Bugsy Malone...] We spent a long time developing the splurge guns. I had imagined firing a projectile that was like the custard pie of silent movies. We settled on ping pong balls and some skilful lobbing of handfuls of synthetic cream – all disguised by artful editing. Also, the bike sedans were mostly pushed along by the assistant directors and prop men. On some lower shots, you can see that the sedans have four wheels and 10 legs.

Bugsy Malone is the kind of film you only make at the beginning of a career when you know nothing. The more you know, the less you attempt to do what's difficult and maybe impossible. It never occurred to us that we were attempting the absurd. [...]

* For the record, the quotation in this post's title isn't about Bugsy Malone: it's Kristin Hersh's reaction upon encountering the UK audience for Throwing Muses for the first time.

[Via Feeling Listless]

Stephen Wildish has produced some lovely illustrations of 'Film Alphabets', arranged by decades: The 1960s, The 1970s, The 1980s, The 1990s, and finally The 2000s.

The ones shown above are all pretty easy, but there are a couple of fairly obscure choices in each decade. I was a little surprised at how many films I recognised from the 1960s and 1970s, but there's not a single decade for which I correctly identified every film.

How many can you name?

[Via Subtraction.com]

Social media explained.

Google's Willem Van Lancker has posted a fascinating piece on the evolution of Google Maps, Google Maps: Designing the Modern Atlas:

As Google Maps has broadened in scope, we have also had to address fundamental differences in tasks as basic as navigation and driving directions. We have found that, generally speaking, people navigate primarily by street names in Western countries and by landmarks and points of interest in the East. This is due to a combination of factors including a lack of road names (e.g. in India where locals rely on landmarks) or just a more complex street addressing system (e.g. in Japan where street numbers are assigned by date of construction, not sequentially). [...]

[In Japan...] schoolchildren are taught a set of unique icons for everyday things like post offices and hospitals. To ensure familiarity in that country, replacements were created specific to Japanese users. While we employ standardized icons for many modes of transportation (e.g. buses, trams, trains), subways lack an international sign. As subways are often used by both tourists and locals, the local branding systems for subway stations worked best – helping guide users both on maps and as they navigate outside in the real world. Additionally, a custom body of regional road shields has been maintained, ensuring consistency and familiarity with real-world roadside markers.

I suppose I was somewhat aware that Google Maps featured some degree of regional customisation, but I had no idea how far it went, nor of the sheer range of factors that make maps 'work' for users in (or simply visiting) a given locale.

[Via Flowing Data]

The USB Typewriter is a hilariously anachronistic yet strangely beguiling piece of kit.¹

I strongly suspect the image of an iPad strapped to the USB Typewriter is causing the late Mr Jobs to do somewhere in the vicinity of 200rpm even as I type this.

[Via Memex 1.1]

1. Personally, if I were in the market to replace my eight year old Mac keyboard with something a little louder I'd be inclined to look for a way to hook up my Mac Mini to an IBM Model M keyboard, for nostalgia's sake. Be sure to listen to the audio of the sound of a Model M in action on that page: what a glorious racket! ↩

The Joy of Books. I'll bet you don't get that sort of unruly after hours behaviour in Amazon's warehouses.

[Via The Awl]

• Pennsylvania Farmland, Sunset.
• Iceland.
• The Hunt.
• Two women racers compete during the FIS Freestyle Ski World Cup Dual Moguls in Meribel, France, on December 20, 2011.
• Monumenta Anish Kapoor-13.
• Eagle Owl.

Lee Hardcastle's Pingu's THE THING. This is the epic extended cut, a whole two minutes long.

Back in 2005 I did an evil, evil thing.

[Via Waxy.org Links]

When Paul Rosenblatt answers the phone, he says "Bananas!", or, All you ever wanted to know about the science of making bananas ripen at the right time in the right place, on an industrial scale. Fascinating stuff.

[Via Pruned]