Under Construction
I make things on the internet
For Guys, a Great Find is Often Multiplied, a New York Times piece by John Ortved, examines a penchant among men for hoarding wardrobe items.
Women shop, men stockpile. That’s one theory, anyway, of how men buy clothes differently from women. If women see shopping as an opportunity, a social or even therapeutic activity, the thinking goes, then men see it as a necessary evil, a moment to restock the supply closet.
I hate shopping, this is starting to look like a pretty good idea.
A robot making a sandwich (and popcorn). Oh, you’re not impressed?
sudo make me a sandwich
The Hangover Pt III chronicles Brett Martin’s journey through Tokyo with with Aziz Ansari, David Chang and James Murphy (from LCD Soundsystem). Crack a beer and take some time to follow the escapades of a true wolfpack.
We are not accustomed, here at GQ, to acting as a celebrity Make-A-Wish Foundation. But something about this tweet captured our attention. The grouping was unlikely, yet it made an instant kind of cosmic sense, as though you had been waiting for the picture long before it appeared. The Venn diagram of their fame might have a small overlap—I found that most people knew two of the three—but that intersection was a particular pocket of smart, inventive, forward-looking cool. The destination, too, made a certain intuitive sense, Tokyo being both a fun-house mirror of pop-culture iconography and a place where generations of Western seekers have gone to feel both reverently awed and gloriously disoriented.
A diagram from the 1969 study, A Dynamical Explanation of the Falling Cat Phenomenon, by Kane and Scher of Stanford University. Apparently one of the very few scientific papers on cat physics.
Kane and Scher neither lifted nor dropped a single cat. Instead, they created a mathematical abstraction of a cat: two imaginary cylinder-like chunks, joined at a single point so the parts could (as with a feline spine) bend, but not twist. When they used a computer to plot the theoretical bendings of this theoretical falling chunky-cat, the motions resembled what they saw in old photographs of an actual falling cat. They conclude that their theory “explains the phenomenon under consideration”.
Will Shortz has been the New York Times crossword editor for almost twenty years. He explained to Alex Hoyt how he goes about editing the puzzles.
Every crossword in the Times is a collaboration between the puzzle-maker and the puzzle editor. On average, about half the clues are mine. I may edit as few as five or ten percent of the clues, or as many as 95 percent for someone who does a great puzzle but not great clues. Why accept a puzzle when I’m going to edit 95 percent of the clues? Well, if someone sends me a great puzzle with an excellent theme and construction, you want fresh, interesting, familiar vocabulary throughout the grid, I feel it would be a shame to reject it on account of the clues, because I can always change them myself.
A selection of colour photos from the London Blitz by the Daily Mail.
Behind the scenes of modern browsers (via Hypertext).
In the years of IE 90% dominance there was nothing much to do but regard the browser as a “black box”, but now, with open source browsers having more than half of the usage share, it’s a good time to take a peek under the engine’s hood and see what’s inside a web browser. Well, what’s inside are millions of C++ lines…
I tend not to post anything that I haven’t consumed in its entirety, but exceptions can be made. As Justin pointed out, the article is a must-read for anyone interested in web development.
Scanwiches (via Subtraction). There’s a book coming out in the fall. Now I’m hungry.
From Chasing Perfection by Francis Lam.
It was astounding how something so commonplace, so elemental, could have so many variables. You just have to learn to see all those variables, to recognize what effect every moment of heat, every motion of the hands has. To get back to that thing I tasted, I would have to know exactly what to look for and nail it every step of the way.
Three eggs, salt, pepper, and a little butter. That’s all there is in a classic French omelet, but it’s enough to keep reteaching me this vital lesson: Things are only simple when you’ve stopped asking the right questions of them, when you’ve stopped finding new ways to see them. Because what you find, when you learn how to find it, is that even simple things can be wonderfully, frustratingly, world-openingly complex.
Wugazi is combination of Fugazi and Wu-Tang Clan, created by Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy. The album, 13 Chambers is available to download from their site.
Dan Solomon interviewed the pair and discussed how the album came to be. For the technically minded, Joe Gross offers a track-by-track breakdown of the album.
It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub.
In Ulysses, James Joyce mused that “a good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub”. No-one’s really sure if it was possible, and Dubliners have always felt proud that it was not straight forward. The traditional Irish way to ‘solve’ this puzzle is to walk across Dublin, and call into every pub in the way and have a pint. This way you never actually pass a pub.
What problems can’t be solved by the internet?
The Internet Archive is now archiving physical copies of books.
As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.
Recognizing that a book is just another device is important. It’s way too easy to make all sorts of cute analogies and comparisons between books and the digital world, so I’ll avoid it. How our society consumes words and images is bound to shift, but the book will still be here in fifty years.