My new years resolution is to make an infographic on every This American Life ever made. The idea is to expand and add context to the stories and information contained in the shows. Basically, anything I am curious about while listening to the pieces.

As a big fan of This American Life, I can’t get enough of these.

[Via MetaFilter]

[...] A couple of years ago a colleague of mine was talking to Robert Smith of The Cure. My colleague mentioned me. “Ah,” said Robert Smith. “David Hepworth knows something about me that nobody else does.” Obviously, he didn’t say what that thing was or how significant or trivial it might be. I haven’t met Robert Smith this century but back in the early 80s I interviewed him a couple of times and therefore it’s possible that he did tell me something that I didn’t write. He may have told me something that I didn’t appreciate the significance of. I’ve thought about it and nothing comes to mind.

<shot level="cheap">Where he left his comb?</shot>

[Via GromBlog]

So why all the posturing about the deficit? ‘I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter,’ James Carville said in the early years of the Clinton administration. ‘But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.’ It is the bond market, more than anything else, which is currently forcing the government to pretend to take the deficit seriously. This is one of the reasons for the tensions between Gordon Brown and his chancellor. Brown is allergic to the word ‘cuts’. He clearly experiences actual physical difficulty with the term, for good reason, since it does a lot to invalidate most of what he’s done in office over the last 13 years. Darling, on the other hand, has to placate the markets, and they demand a higher degree of fiscal rectitude from the UK, which means lower spending and higher taxes. If Darling doesn’t look convincing, there will be a ‘buyer’s strike’ and nobody will want to buy the many tens of billions of pounds of debt which the British government is going to have to issue over the next years. If that happens, the government will have a very serious problem. You can lie to the electorate, but you can’t lie to the bond market, which is why there will certainly be cuts, severe ones – just not quite as severe as the Texas Chainsaw Massacre scenario implied in the budget. These constraints on action are going to be in place whoever wins the election.

1. Previously.

Eventually, Ant built my Android app out of 14 lines of Duby, and I needed the USB cable so I could ship it to the phone. The phone was handy but the USB cable was across the room, and my elderly female cat has earned a few evenings of undisturbed lap time.

Then I remembered that my laptop has a Web server and my phone was on the same home LAN, so I copied the .apk over to /Library/WebServer/Documents/whatever.apk and did an ifconfig -a | grep 192 to find my address and then pointed the phone’s browser at http://192.168.1.57/whatever.apk. The phone installed the app, I proved to myself that it worked, and did some further enjoyable tinkering, all while routing round the cat.

Alternatively, as per a comment on that post, this may have been just one more manifestation of the Cat Gravity theory.

1. Pedants will note that Tim Bray was slinging files around on his home network, not on the internet proper. They’d be right, but ‘Tim Bray’s home intranet treats sleeping cats as damage’ didn’t fit the original quotation as neatly so I fudged it. Sue me!

I’ve done a slew of collaborations over the years – more and more as time goes by, and they are always slightly different from one another, though there are more similarities than differences. One could say that some of the songs co-written with other members of Talking Heads were also collaborations, so the give and take nature of collaborative writing skills got developed early. [...]

[...] I did another collaboration recently with Yuka Honda and Petra Hayden that I believe Petra will end up singing; a couple with Dirty Projectors for the Dark Was the Night charity record; and one with Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio is in progress. More are lined up on the runway. A writer at Pitchfork critically said I’d collaborate for a bag of Doritos. I do love it, and the results are sometimes surprising, sometimes creatively successful and sometimes even popular (“Lazy” was a huge hit everywhere except the US).

1. On thinking big (April 25, 1972)

Nixon: I still think we ought to take the North Vietnamese dikes out now. Will that drown people?

Kissinger: About two hundred thousand people.

Nixon: No, no, no, I’d rather use the nuclear bomb. Have you got that, Henry?

Kissinger: That, I think, would just be too much.

Nixon: The nuclear bomb, does that bother you? … I just want you to think big, Henry, for Christsakes.

Has there ever been a more … quotable … president than Richard Milhous Nixon?

1. Introduction

Saint-making has been a major activity of the Catholic Church for centuries. The pace of sanctifications has picked up noticeably in the last several decades under the last two popes, John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Our goal is to apply social-science reasoning to understand the Church’s choices on numbers and characteristics of saints, gauged by location and socio-economic attributes of the persons designated as blessed. [...]

[Via The Browser]

What could possibly go wrong?

[Via swissmiss]

As a bonus, reading Brooker’s column this week introduced me to this bit of folklore, which in turn inspired Wes Craven to come up with this. So at least I’ve learned something new today.

1. No, I’m not going to quote it here. Trust me, it works best when read in context.

On the bright side, it’s nice to know that folks are doing their best to bridge the Uncanny Valley from both ends at once.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:25 PM on March 12

The original Hipparcos data showed that an orange dwarf star called Gliese 710 is heading our way and will arrive sometime within the next 1.5 million years.

[...]

What the new data has allowed Bobylev to do is calculate the probability of Gliese 710 smashing into the Solar System. What he’s found is a shock.

He says there is 86 percent chance that Gliese 710 will plough through the Oort Cloud of frozen stuff that extends some 0.5 parsecs into space.

[Via James Nicoll]

Unfortunately for the average person, the file system is so complex that everything outside of the desktop and the documents folder appears to be a vast labyrinth which most likely hides booby traps and minotaurs.

If your computer is being used to carry out a relatively limited set of activities, hiding the file system behind an application-oriented user interface can work well; I happily spent years using various PalmOS devices that did just that.

I think the problem arises when you try to apply that principle to a more general-purpose computer; once you have files that you might want to use in several applications – say, image files that you’ll want to view, edit and insert into documents – you need a shared file store which you can dip into and organise to suit your workflow.

While it’s true that tagging and searching can substitute for a hierarchical file system if you have a decent search tool, I’d hate to have to rely of that approach to manage a large number of files. I wonder if the first generation of iPad users will find that the approach to file storage that works well enough on their iPhone will prove inadequate when they’re trying to do real work with their iPad.

[Via Daring Fireball]

[Via MeFi user rdc, posting to this MetaFilter thread]

[Bath University...] researchers scanned noses in 3D and characterised them by tip, ridge profile and the nasion, or area between the eyes.

They found 6 main nose types: Roman, Greek, Nubian, hawk, snub and turn-up.

Since they are hard to conceal, the study says, noses would work well for identification in covert surveillance. [...]

Presumably when you walk up to an ATM you’ll be required to turn to the right, so the camera can capture your profile.

[Via Bruce Schneier]

The 1904 Olympics were such a farce that the Olympic Committee were somewhat forced to hold an interim games only 2 years later at Athens.

[Via The Memory Palace podcast, which devoted episode #26 to the story of the 1904 Olympic marathon.]

I’m only surprised they don’t keep the paperwork in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard,’.

[Via currybet dot net]

[Via Qwghlm]

Six miles from Urfa, an ancient city in southeastern Turkey, Klaus Schmidt has made one of the most startling archaeological discoveries of our time: massive carved stones about 11,000 years old, crafted and arranged by prehistoric people who had not yet developed metal tools or even pottery. The megaliths predate Stonehenge by some 6,000 years. The place is called Gobekli Tepe, and Schmidt, a German archaeologist who has been working here more than a decade, is convinced it’s the site of the world’s oldest temple. [...]

Be sure to view the photos that accompany the article.

[Via the Long Now Blog, which linked to a rather less satisfactory Newsweek story¹ about the temple.]

1. It spent too much time on Schmidt's "First the temple, then the city" thesis for my liking.

[Via MetaFilter]