The Deleted City

The Deleted City

The Deleted City is a digital archaeology of the world wide web as it exploded into the 21st century. At that time the web was often described as an enormous digital library that you could visit or contribute to by building a homepage. The early citizens of the net (or netizens) took their netizenship serious, and built homepages about themselves and subjects they were experts in. These pioneers found their brave new world atGeocities, a free webhosting provider that was modelled after a city and where you could get a free “piece of land” to build your digital home in a certain neighbourhood based on the subject of your homepage. Heartland was – as a neigbourhood for all things rural – by far the largest, but there were neighbourhoods for fashion, arts and far east related topics to name just a few.

 

Men as fashion hoarders

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.

Ansari, Murphy and Chang in Tokyo

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.

Cat physics

Cat falling diagram

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”.

How Will Shortz edits a crossword

Shortz crossword sample

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.

How Browsers Work

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.

The perfect omelette

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.