The carless streets of Manhattan

Bruce McCall imagines the Manhattan street with no room for cars...but there's a baby stroller lane, a Segway/skateboarding lane, and a runner/jogger lane. (via @bldgblog)

Death spiral and the other top astronomy photos of the year

Bad Astronomy lists its top fourteen astronomy photos of the year, including this nearly unbelievable spiral pattern caused by a binary star.

The object, called AFGL 3068, is a binary star, two stars in an 800-year orbit around one another. One of them is a red giant, a star near the end of its life. It's blowing off massive amounts of dark dust, which is enveloping the pair and hiding them from view. But the system's spin is spraying the material out like a water sprinkler head, causing this giant and delicate spiral pattern on the sky. And by giant, I mean giant: the entire structure is about 3 trillion kilometers (about 2 trillion miles) across.

Saddam's blood Koran

I always thought Kim Jong-il was the clear winner in the Craziest-Ass Dictator Competition, but this move from Saddam Hussein is bold indeed.

Over the course of two painstaking years in the late 1990s, Saddam Hussein had sat regularly with a nurse and an Islamic calligrapher; the former drawing 27 litres of his blood and the latter using it as a macabre ink to transcribe a Qur'an.

(thx, darren)

99 Christmas songs for $1.99

Just in time for that family Christmas party: 99 Christmas songs for $1.99 at Amazon's MP3 store.

Liquid sculpture

Shinchi Maruyama throws water from his hands or from glasses and catches the temporary sculptures they make with his camera.

The Morning News has an interview with Maruyama and a photo gallery of his work; this one is really cool.

The secret to a successful life

Kevin Smith on how to do what you love and make money doing it.

The secret to a successful life is hardly a secret; it requires you to be 

self-centered as all fuck, is all. So long as it's not at the expense of others, make yourself the center of your universe. You only get to do this ONCE, so try to take as much stress out of the process as you can.

Japanese treadmill game

Oh, this is hilarious:

On weekend web apps

Andre Torrez offers some advice for those who think that they can clone a popular web app over the weekend. The best part -- or the worst, if you're the aspiring weekend programmer -- is that each item on the list is a little Pandora's box of Alice's rabbit holes. Like this:

Lost password flow. You'll want to generate a key and store it someplace for when someone requests to reset their password. So that's another email that has to go out.

If you actually want your email to arrive at its destination, you're gonna have to worry about all this. Or go through a third-party service, which is another interface (and bill (and moving part)) that you need to worry about. You get the point...making a web app work for more than just one person is hard, way harder than it looks unless you've done it.

Charlie Kaufman and Spike Jonze getting the band back together

Well, maybe. According to the LA Times, the pair are pitching a film around that Kaufman will write and Jonze will direct.

The pair are pitching a new movie. While the plot is being kept under tight wraps -- it's a pitch, so a script has yet to be written, and Kaufman movies are famously hard to describe in a few sentences anyway -- two people familiar with the project said it has been making the rounds to independent financiers in recent weeks.

If it moves forward, the film would reunite the pair in the roles that vaulted them to fame for the first time since "Adaptation" in 2002.

Randy Quaid has gone nuts

Randy Quaid and his wife Evi are on the run and living out of their Prius in Canada because they fear the "Hollywood Star Whackers", a group they blame for the deaths of Heath Ledger, David Carradine, and maybe even Michael Jackson. No, really!

People started noticing there was something seriously amiss with the Quaids about three years ago, when Randy left the Broadway-bound musical Lone Star Love and was then banned for life from the Actors' Equity Association, the stage union, for physically and verbally abusing his fellow performers. Then came the arrests and the couple's bizarre appearances at various court dates: They wore pink handcuffs. Evi carried Randy's Golden Globe and had a "valid credit card" affixed to her forehead.

By the time they arrived in Canada, calling themselves "refugees" and claiming they were targets of an assassination plot, the Quaids had gone viral.

I asked them when they believed their troubles began. They said it was in Marfa, Texas, the rural artists' community where Giant was shot. They said they had traveled there in the summer of 2009 to "look at ranches and stuff" and erect a "Randy Quaid museum." (They'd been fixing up a building in the middle of town-reportedly without the proper permits.)

Already, Evi said, "something really weird had started happening with Randy's mail. His royalty and residual checks weren't coming. We were really, truly panicked." Adding to their unrest was the recent demise of the actor David Carradine, a friend of Randy's whose death from apparent auto-erotic asphyxiation in Thailand the Quaids believed to be suspicious.

"They" -- the aforementioned Hollywood Star Whackers -- "decide, O.K., if we knock off David, then what we can do is simply collect the insurance covering his participation in the television show he was working on overseas," Evi said. "It's almost moronic, it's so simple."

She said she also suspected Jeremy Piven's falling ill from mercury poisoning was another sign of a dastardly plot by the Broadway producers of Speed-the-Plow to collect insurance money. "It was an orchestrated hit," she said. "They could have put mescaline in his water bottle." Jeffrey Richards, one of the producers of the play, declined to comment.

Isle of Tune

Isle of Tune is a musical sequencer with a twist...you build little roads with houses, trees, streetlights, etc. that cars can then drive past, making music as they go. This is currently the top-rated island:

And here's Michael Jackson's Beat It. Neat! (via prosthetic knowledge)

Best science of 2010

Science magazine has named their top scientific breakthroughs of 2010 and the insights of the decade. The quantum paddle deservedly took the top spot:

"This year's Breakthrough of the Year represents the first time that scientists have demonstrated quantum effects in the motion of a human-made object," said Adrian Cho, a news writer for Science. "On a conceptual level that's cool because it extends quantum mechanics into a whole new realm. On a practical level, it opens up a variety of possibilities ranging from new experiments that meld quantum control over light, electrical currents and motion to, perhaps someday, tests of the bounds of quantum mechanics and our sense of reality."

In the beginning, there was dough

In another of a series of wonderfully fanciful posts for the NY Times, Christoph Niemann has some fun with creation and cookie dough.

Carine Roitfeld resigns from French Vogue

After ten years, she's stepping down as editor-in-chief.

"I had so much freedom to do everything I wanted. I think I did a good job." But she added, "When everything is good, maybe I think it's the time to do something else." She expects to complete issues through March. She said she was not sure what she would do after that. "I have no plan at all," she said.

Word Lens

This is just flat out magical...you hold your iPhone running Word Lens up to some text in, say, Spanish, and you'll automatically see it translated into English.

!!! No, like !!!!!

The year in photos, 2010

The Big Picture has chosen its best photos of the year for 2010. Part one, part two, part three. What a world we live in.

iPhone app corrects for color blindness

Dan Kaminsky's iPhone/Android app corrects for color blindness (in anomalous trichromats anyway)...just point your phone at what you want to see in color and make a few adjustments.

The vast majority of color blind people are in fact what are known as anomalous trichromats. They still have three photoreceptors, but the 'green' receptor is shifted a bit towards red. The effect is subtle: Certain reds might look like they were green, and certain greens might look like they were red.

Thus the question: Was it possible to convert all reds to a one true red, and all greens to a one true green?

The answer: Yes, given an appropriate colorspace.

Andy Baio, who is colorblind, says emphatically: "it works". (thx, derek)

How to give design feedback

Mule Design's Mike Monteiro wrote a cracking guide on how clients can give better feedback to designers.

Let the design team be the design experts. Your job is to be the business expert. Ask them how their design solutions meet your business goals. If you trust your design team, and they can explain how their recommendations map to those goals, you're fine. If you neither trust them, nor can they defend their choices it's time to get a new design team.

This should be printed out and nailed into the forehead of every designer and their clients a la Luther's Ninety-Five Theses, you know, for easy reference.

Why foie gras is not unethical

Over at Serious Eats, Kenji Lopez-Alt has a long piece about a visit he took to a foie gras producer in New York's Hudson Valley and what he learned about the ethics of foie gras production.

Even if you haven't eaten foie, pretty much everyone is familiar with the abhorrent images of mistreated ducks peddled by PETA and sites like nofoiegras.org, and indeed they are truly disturbing. Ducks crammed into wire cages just big enough to stand in with their filth-encrusted heads sticking out a hole in the front. Their feathers are scraggly and wiry (if present at all), there's often blood coming out of their nostrils, and their faces and feathers are caked with vomit and corn meal. A duck drinks scummy water out of a communal trough running in front of it while just upstream one of its less fortuitous bunkmates sits dead with its head lolling sideways, half submerged in the cloudy green water.

I've no doubt that farms like this exist in the world, and it is a terrible, atrocious tragedy. If this is how all foie-or even all meat-is produced, I'd become a vegetarian today. But video or photographic footage of one badly managed farm or even a thousand badly managed farms does not prove that the production of foie gras, as a practice, is necessarily harmful to the health or mental well-being of a duck. Foie gras production should be judged not by the worst farms, but by the best, because those are the ones that I'm going to choose to buy my foie from if at all.

So the real question is: is the production of foie gras torturous under even the best of conditions?

Those on one side would answer yes. How could force feeding an animal ever be considered anything but torture? On the other hand are those who claim that American foie farms are positively idyllic with ducks waddling around spacious pens, even queuing up for their gavage, that for a duck, none of the things we consider uncomfortable stress them out in the least. But who's right?

Old photos of New York City

The Museum of the City of New York has put a sizable chunk of their photography collection up on their web site. The interface is a little hinky, but it's worth wading through. This is 220 Spring St from 1932, from right near Sixth Avenue:

Photo credit: 220 Spring Street by Charles Von Urban. From the Collections of the Museum of the City of New York. (thx, @bamstutz)

The Year in Ideas, 2010

The annual NY Times feature is out: the Year in Ideas for 2010. A particular favorite is the ten-year retrospective by Tyler Cowen:

The editors asked Tyler Cowen, the economist who helps run the blog Marginal Revolution, to read the previous nine Ideas issues and send us his thoughts on which entries, with the benefit of hindsight, struck him as noteworthy. Do any ideas from this year's issue look promising? "I recall reading the 2001 issue when it came out," he says. "And I was hardly bowled over with excitement by thoughts of 'Populist Editing.' Now I use Wikipedia almost every day. The 2001 issue noted that, in its selection of items, 'frivolous ideas are given the same prominence as weighty ones'; that is easiest to do when we still don't know which are which."

The Tree of Life trailer

Finally, a trailer for Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life:

Sex in outer space

From a paper published in the Journal of Cosmology entitled Sex On Mars: Pregnancy, Fetal Development, and Sex In Outer Space:

Humans are sexual beings and it can be predicted that male and female astronauts will engage in sexual relations during a mission to Mars, leading to conflicts and pregnancies and the first baby born on the Red Planet. Non-human primate and astronaut sexual behavior is reviewed including romantic conflicts involving astronauts who flew aboard the Space Shuttle and in simulated missions to Mars, and men and women team members in the Antarctic. The possibilities of pregnancy and the effects of gravity and radiation on the testes, ovaries, menstruation, and developing fetus, including a child born on Mars, are discussed. What may lead to and how to prevent sexual conflicts, sexual violence, sexual competition, and pregnancy are detailed. Recommendations include the possibility that male and female astronauts on a mission to Mars, should fly in separate space craft.

A world of black rectangles

For an exhibition in Rome, Konstantin Grcic has collected a bunch of products that are basically black rectangles.

Among the items he included are a gravestone, a wallet, soap, a table, a perfume bottle, a cooking pot, a television set, a cart, an accordion, a Sudoko cube, a fireplace, a laptop, a Chanel handbag, a gas tank, a bible and Prince's "Black Album," from 1987. "How is it that so many different things made in so many different ways end being black rectangles?" Mr. Grcic asked. "They can be extremely elegant and sophisticated, or very basic, but they are such strong and powerful parts of our lives that it is impossible to imagine a world without them."

It's funny...in the column of photos accompanying the Times article, Grcic looks a bit like a black rectangle himself.

Multiuser iPad

Nice little sketch by BERG's Matt Jones for a multiuser iPad UI.

James Burke's Connections online

Every episode of the classic science/history series Connections (as well as Connections 2 and 3) is available online at YouTube.

Connections is a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.

Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g. profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries' actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.

Here's the first episode to get you started.

Warning: you may not be able to stop. If you'd like to watch the series in a less irritating format, you can always purchase it on DVD.

Socializing may improve mental function

But only if it's friendly chat...competitive conversations don't result in the same improvement. (I don't think Words With Friends counts either...)

They found that engaging in brief (10 minute) conversations in which participants were simply instructed to get to know another person resulted in boosts to their subsequent performance on an array of common cognitive tasks. But when participants engaged in conversations that had a competitive edge, their performance on cognitive tasks showed no improvement.

"We believe that performance boosts come about because some social interactions induce people to try to read others' minds and take their perspectives on things," Ybarra said. "And we also find that when we structure even competitive interactions to have an element of taking the other person's perspective, or trying to put yourself in the other person's shoes, there is a boost in executive functioning as a result."

I've noticed this effect with myself but I always thought it was the result of my introversion, i.e. competitive conversations are more stressful and sap energy and mental function more quickly than normal conversations. I know a couple of people who enjoy competitive conversation and I've largely steered clear of those interactions since realizing I always felt so blah afterwards.

Getting stuff done

Robert Hodgin is continuing his experiments in manipulating Kinect data in realtime with increasingly hilarious results. Here he multiplies himself to get more work done:

The lost Radiohead album

It's called 01 and 10...ok, it's not really a lost album. But apparently if you take the first five songs from OK Computer (from 1997) and the first five songs from In Rainbows (from 2007) and alternate them, the songs fit together musically and lyrically to form a coherent album.

Consider that In Rainbows was meant to complement OK Computer, musically, lyrically, and in structure. We found that the two albums can be knit together beautifully. By combining the tracks to form one playlist, 01 and 10, we have a remarkable listening experience. The transitions between the songs are astounding, and it appears that this was done purposefully.

The lyrics also seem to complement each other. There appears to be a concept flowing through the 01 and 10 playlist. Ideas in one song is picked up by the next, such as "Pull me out of the aircrash," and "When I'm at the pearly gates, this will be my videotape."

(via prosthetic knowledge)

The year in film, 2010

Some gloriously crazy person took clips from 270 films that were out in 2010 and mixed them together into a coherent narrative:

This year's movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I've remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.

Wonderful. Here's a list of all the films used. (thx, aaron)