Stuff from March, 2008
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on March, 2008.
Sponge
This is the archive of tumbledry happenings that occurred on March, 2008.
Designers Toolbox: Proof Reading Marks. Many of these are obsolete in this era of computers, but I still use the marks for delete, new paragraph, comma insertion, transpose, and change to lowercase.
If you happen to be cooking a delicious chicken burger from Trader Joe’s on your stove top in your apartment, and you remove it from the pan in which it was cooking, you should make sure that you turn off the gas on the hot pan. If, in the event that you forget to do this, you should not panic upon realizing that the heat has been on an empty pan, and then pour water into the pan. This action will fill your apartment with incredible amounts of (admittedly delicious smelling) chicken smoke. You should, however, DEFINITELY OPEN ALL THE WINDOWS you can get to, turn on a vent fan, and hope to everything that is good in the world that your smoke alarm doesn’t go off.
Ahh, where to start. Well, Netflix (your favorite place to rent movies online, receive them through your mail, then mail them back) has been hosting a competition for a while now. The object is to come up with an algorithm to make helpful suggestions for what a person should rent, based on their rental history. Think of it this way: teams are given access to 2+ gigabytes of data. Within this data are many anonymous movie rental histories. So, let’s say you have a history of 30 rentals from one person. The goal of the competition is to examine the first 15 rentals, then correctly predict a percentage of the next 15 rentals.
Whilst doing a bit of research for a project, I took the time to look through Wikipedia Statistics — the results were staggering. Consider this: Wikipedia averages 40 thousand (40 000) requests per second. Thus, in 3 seconds, Wikipedia receives more requests than tumbledry has in the past 5 years.
This Threadless T-Shirt by QuasiProto says “HONK if you’re about to run me over.” Too bad it’s sold out.
It’s easy to fool yourself into thinking you’ve got “it” when you’re so busy that each day slides by in a swirl of homework and exams. When there’s a clear path laid before you, with structured credits and definite milestones, you can fool yourself into living and growing by the academic metric alone. Some are intelligent enough to see beyond the schedule and grow; others, such as myself, blindly follow the rigmarole.
Know the song “Hallelujah”? The one that goes “I heard there was a secret chord that David played and it pleased the Lord, but you don’t really care for music, do you?” (That was from memory!) Anyhow, I first heard it but Rufus Wainwright, and loooved it. However, there’s much much more to this song. In this great piece, clapclap.org covers everything you’d need to know about the song.
They’re not fonts! explains the difference between “font” and “typeface.”
Graphic designers choose typefaces for their projects but use fonts to create the finished art.
Charles Apple provides great before and after comparisons between the old and new Saint Paul Pioneer Press designs. I could live with the Myriad (har) of typefaces used in the new design, if only they didn’t use the face Stainless. That one is driving be absolutely batty. Every time I look at it, I’m thinking Star-Trek type computer screen displays; it’s too sharp and computer-like.
Consider this: one month after only part of a song called “New Soul” by Yael Naim backed the first commercial for Apple’s Macbook Air, the song debuted at #9 on the Billboard Hot 100. Disregarding its precipitous tumble down the charts after that, it is easy to see that featuring music on TV can have a profound effect on sales. This brings me to my idea: illustrated radio.
I’m not a bit American Idol watcher, but Mykala just pointed me towards this fantastic cover of Lennon’s “Imagine.” It’s this 17 year old David Archuleta, and he’s just spot-on perfect with every note. I think we have a winner!
Bear with me on this: (kottke.org) is, apparently, the most popular post on kottke. It’s not actually written by Jason Kottke. I didn’t understand it when I first read it, almost exactly 8 years ago. Today, I think it makes sense.
New York Magazine has something called “The Approval Matrix” which is their “deliberately oversimplified guide to who falls where on out taste hierarchies.” I particularly enjoyed a snippet from this week’s Approval Matrix: “Obama has the most badass Secret Service code name ever: Renegade. What’s up now, axis of evil?”
A lovely little Wikipedia stub teaches us, as in programming, as in life:
There is more than one way to do it (TIMTOWTDI, usually pronounced “Tim Toady”) is a Perl motto. The language was designed with this idea in mind, so that it “doesn’t try to tell the programmer how to program.”
Somehow, the caption for this picture is hilarious to me: “Brueggie, the Bruegger’s mascot, gets checked by the Transportation Security Administration while visiting the grand opening of the CVG Airport store.”
The interesting source UsingEnglish.com defines “storm in a teacup”:
If someone exaggerates a problem or makes a small problem seem far greater than it really is, then they are making a storm in a teacup.
We’ve got things backwards. Not just you and me; it’s a bit bigger than that. Since at least the industrial revolution, and probably before, we’ve been pushing, shoving and smashing something out of our culture: art. A tiny event like the removal of art and music from school curricula has its roots not in budget cuts but in a societal shift away from art. And so the evisceration of any balance in public education (in the name of things like No Child Left Behind) is simply an indication of a greater problem, not the problem itself. A relentless march towards increased efficiency and productivity has created a society that gasps and heaves in cycles:
There are two people in the world, those who have played Peggle, and those who will love it soon. In that vein, I present to you: Peggle for iPhone Confirmed, from Boing Boing Gadgets. Imagine, being able to play Peggle, on your phone, anywhere in the world. This is a win for everyone!
A throttle-happy 20-something in a BMW pulled out in front of me, and the frothy puddle left in the car’s wake expanded just in time for my bike tires to kick the water up into my clothes.
“I’d like a car soon,” I thought.
The best comment from yet another video featuring Tom Cruise acting strangely would be the first one: “Sweet Georgia Brown is that man nutty.” Couldn’t agree more myself.
I’ve tried to reproduce the inflection present in this actual performance by comedian Mitch Hedberg:
I eat a lot of sandwiches, who doesn’t man, sandwiches are easy to eat. But I hate sandwiches at New York deli’s, too much fuckin’ meat on the sandwich. It’s like a cow with a cracker on either side.
“What would you like sir?” “A pastrami sandwich.” “Anything else?” “Yeah, a loaf of bread and some other people.”
“What kind of bread?” “Rye… no, fuck, banana… you got banana bread?” “What kind of cheese?” “Cottage.” “Get the fuck out! I’m not makin’ a banana bread, pastrami, cottage cheese sandwich. That will severely ruin my reputation.”
The BMW Isetta, particularly the Iso Isetta Turismo, is probably the cutest little car I’ve ever seen…
Because of its egg shape and bubble-like windows, it became known as a bubble car—a name later given to other similar vehicles. Other countries had other nicknames: In Germany it was das rollende Ei (the rolling egg) or the Sargwagen (literally “coffin on wheels”; the name apparently came from the small (or rather nonexistent) distance between the passengers and oncoming traffic). In France it was the yogurt pot. In Brazil it was the bola de futebol de fenemê (football (soccer) ball of a truck), and in Chile it is still called the huevito (little egg).
I debated on whether to post this and then thought “hey, it’s Friday… here we go!” So: Woman stuck after two years on toilet:
An American woman’s body had became attached to her boyfriend’s toilet after she sat on it for two years, police in Kansas said.
“She was not glued. She was not tied. She was just physically stuck by her body,” said Bryan Whipple, the sheriff of Ness County.
It appeared Pam Babcock’s skin had grown around the toilet seat, he added. “It is hard to imagine. … I still have a hard time imagining it myself.”
Leave it to your mildly deluded host to write a post about a topic on which he has almost no specific information. Nevertheless, if I can’t brainstorm at tumbledry, where can I brainstorm? (“In your own head, you’re saying” I know, but that’s not the point we’re debating.) The topic today: business. My qualifications: slim. Forecast: stormy, with a chance of incorrect conclusions.
You know that speech by Obama? The one that tackled race in America head-on? The really good one? Here’s a spot of commentary from Daily Kos: State of the Nation:
M.I.A.: Back in Action with ‘Kala’ at NPR Music writes:
M.I.A. rhymes with the swaggering bravado of a street rapper, only she favors bandoliers over bling. Parse the songwriting though, and the sensibility awkwardly falls somewhere between party girl and guerrilla fighter. The message lacks cogency, but her hooks do pack potency, even when they sound nursery rhyme-inspired.
Wow, Apple is going through the roof bonkers crazy never seen it before sales with the college crowd. Writes Ars Technica:
A statue called The Motherland Calls, (Родина-мать зовёт) stands atop a large hill overlooking Volgograd, Russia. Thing is, at 279 feet (that’s over 20 stories), it’s absolutely enormous.
Look at the person next to it in the picture! Of all the really tall statues in the world, this looks to be the only one endowed with such a sense of sweeping motion befitting its grand scale. (The YouTube video is pretty interesting).
The Guardian comes to us with a little article called “From hell,” which explores the worst movies ever made. It was written in part to discuss a recent movie made by a certain socialite who will remain nameless — it contains an absolutely fabulous sentence:
Four years ago, Fast Company wrote about Wal-Mart — and the article is still pretty interesting:
Wal-Mart is not just the world’s largest retailer. It’s the world’s largest company—bigger than ExxonMobil, General Motors, and General Electric. The scale can be hard to absorb. Wal-Mart sold $244.5 billion worth of goods last year. It sells in three months what number-two retailer Home Depot sells in a year. And in its own category of general merchandise and groceries, Wal-Mart no longer has any real rivals. It does more business than Target, Sears, Kmart, J.C. Penney, Safeway, and Kroger combined.
Recently, I’ve begun sending Katy emails entitled “Math News Today (MNT)” since I always seem to send her anything mathematical (mathemagical?) that I run across. This one, though, was too good to keep in private email. First off, the news: Tomas Rokicki has brought the moves required to solve a Rubik’s Cube down to just 25.
I don’t know if this is true or not, but a farmer in the UK who directed his sheepdogs for three hours to spell out the word ‘spring’ on the side of a hill, is a difficult story to make up. Anyhow, the pictures look amazing. Collies sure are neat dogs.
Common sense and a little physics seem to show that the radio waves from Wi-Fi internet connections (non-ionising as they are) are nothing to be concerned about:
A typical UK resident receives far more radiation from analogue radio broadcasts than they do from Wi-Fi. Radio broadcasts have operated in the UK for almost 85 years, so if we’ve not heard of any long term negative health effects caused by radio waves so far, it’s unlikely that we will do in the future.
This fresh bread made the most amazing peanut butter and jelly sandwiches ever!
Hugh Laurie of House talking to TV Guide — it’s actually a rather good interview considering it’s published in TV Guide, which to the best of my knowledge, isn’t exactly known for insightful journalism (does anyone know otherwise?). Anyhow, Laurie, when asked if he hangs out with celebrities:
My sketch of my Chris’s future. It has since been revised, but this is the general outline.
An interesting architectural guideline: “Light on two sides of every room.” The observation:
When they have a choice, people will always gravitate to those rooms which have light on two sides, and leave the rooms which are lit only from one side unused and empty.
These are magnetic… so I look forward to being able to use this on my fridge.
According to Bulletin Today, the UST news source: Brass plumbing pipes stolen from campus restroom last week:
The University of St. Thomas Public Safety Department posted an alert Friday regarding the theft of brass plumbing pipes from men’s restrooms in O’Shaughnessy Educational Center on the St. Paul campus.
The pipes were stolen Wednesday evening, March 26. That same night, pipes were stolen at Macalester College. Pipes in the Murray-Herrick Campus Center restrooms were tampered with, but not removed.
