A Little Less Ivy in the Bank

Robin says,

QUESTION: How has the stock market's precipitous plunge affected college endowments, especially the titanic ones, e.g. Harvard and Yale? Will it affect their scholarship programs -- many of which are generous and new?

Or did Harvard's legendary money managers somehow manage to beat the market again?

If I worked at a newspaper or financial news website I would assign this story right now. But I don't, so I'll just blog it here.

Candidate Analogies

Robin says,

A funny thread on Current.com.

Rise of the image fall of the word!

Hangul!

Robin says,

To my ever-increasing embarrassment, I am totally monolingual. Maybe that's why I am also increasingly fascinated with the typography of other languages: What's the Helvetica of Japanese? What's the Comic Sans of Hindi? Who's the hot young Arabic type designer?

This doesn't quite answer those questions, but it's pretty awesome: Jonathan Hoefler on the insanely logical and self-consistent Korean alphabet:

Typographically, I envy my Korean counterparts who get to work with Hangul, with its letterforms that always fit into a square, and can be read in any direction (horizontally or vertically.) And best of all: no kerning!

Any pointers to cool non-Roman-alphabet typography out there?

Go to Where the Party's Going, Not Where It's Been

Robin says,

Oh man, I love this. Jay Smooth of Ill Doctrine with the metaphor for success in media today: "...figuring out where the party is at nowadays, and setting yourself to be the one who's over there hosting the party."

It makes a lot more sense if you watch his whole video. Which you should.

Improving the debates

Matt says,

Last Thursday's Presidential debate was widely panned for its ridiculous format. Seriously? Two-minute responses and one-minute followups? And this is supposed to transcend talking points?

The Lehrer debate felt much meatier to me. It clearly showcased two men who had very different (but both quite substantial) views on foreign policy, and allowed them to contrast those views at length. Still, any amount of time spent paying attention to the moderator in a Presidential debate is wasted time, and Lehrer had to do a fair amount of refereeing to keep the candidates in line.

CJR's got some excellent ideas for shaking up the debate format. I've got one more:

What if we allotted to each of the candidates a block of time — say 40 minutes — and allow them to apportion it however they'd like? Engage a moderator merely to pause the debate and send the candidates in another direction if they get stuck on a particular topic, but mostly allow them to steer the debate where they'd like. Each candidate could be wired with a mic that detects when he's speaking and winds down the clock, and both the candidates and the viewers can see how much time each one has left.

You could even take this a little further by employing a team of fact-checkers who work furiously during the debate to spot misstatements of fact. If a candidate is discovered to have fudged the truth, the misstatement is revealed during the course of the debate and the candidate is docked a minute. (This would be difficult to enforce and cause a lot of partisan sniping, so the plan might be better without, but I offer it as a possibility.)

What say you, Snarkmind?

THE MEDIA

Matt says,

I love this. Ironic Sans posts a video of the CNN Election Center, left momentarily unattended. It's like an outtake from a dystopian '80s movie about the future.

60 Seconds in the Life of the Election Center from Ironic Sans on Vimeo.

Conflict in the Middle East

Matt says,

Infosthetics points to this well-done short about the standoff in the Middle East. Being five minutes long, of course it dispenses with a lot of the actual geopolitics of the matter (leaving the prophetic religious elements of the conflict entirely unmentioned, even), but it's pretty.

Lego + NRA =

Matt says,

BrickArms. Nefarious. From Things.

Political Landscapes

Matt says,

Cf. my post on "America in speeches": BLDGBLOG has a thoughtful essay on the geography of political rhetoric. (Via CJR.)

Blackwater Yard Sale!

Robin says,

Oh man, this is why you have got to sign up for the Blackwater email list:

Is this a sign of the times? How will the credit bust affect mercenary armies?? THINK OF THE CORPORATE MILITIAS, PEOPLE.

Daily Delight

Robin says,

Can't believe I haven't linked to this yet, as I've been enjoying it for weeks: Kyle T. Webster's Daily Figure. Gestural figure drawing was always my favorite part of art classes -- though I could never do it this well.

FYI, this satisfies your FDA daily recommended allowance of line art.

From Above

Robin says,

Earth from above at The Big Picture. Hint: It's not the above-ness that's so great. It's the eye for pattern and geometry. For some reason, this one really gets me.

(Also on Kottke. But I got it from the Big Picture RSS feed. Lest you think me a link-poacher.)

Musical Mario Paint

Robin says,

Hmm I feel that my links have been sub-par lately. I'll write about my current project soon... and remember there's always this (email it to your grandma!)... but in the meantime I am in love with these Mario Paint masterpieces. In no small part because I myself was a Mario Paint maestro back in the day. Man, do you remember the SNES mouse? What a weird contraption.

The Art of the Panda

Robin says,

By now you know I like title sequences better than movies themselves. The latestgreatest example is Kung-Fu Panda, which was actually fairly sweet and clever... but was also completely bested by its own title sequence. Watch it in HD here.

The Money Meltdown

Matt says,

Robin and Tim made me do it.

'I Will Have as My Student Only Mademoiselle Camille Claudel'

Robin says,

Wow. Read the tragic tale of Rodin and Camille. (Yes, that Rodin.) Intense. Why isn't this a movie yet?

P.S. Lots more artists in love!

The Global Economy

Robin says,

It's not just the U.S. markets; now the Nikkei-225 is down 5%, the Hang Seng is down 5.5%, Brazil's index is down 10%, etc., etc. For some reason, this creeps me out in a way the Dow, etc., did not.

What's the best source for smart reporting on this crisis -- from a global perspective? The Economist seems to be posting at magazine-pace... FT seems okay. What else is out there?

Elements in the Basement

Robin says,

This video:

1. dramatizes basic chemistry as interludes at a dance party
2. is crazy
3. was produced for the European Union's YouTube channel!

To all these things I say: YES.

Behold, the Maltese Falcon

Robin says,

WHOAH. Telstar Logistics has a couple of great shots of the coolest boat in the world. It sort of barely fits under the Golden Gate Bridge. I wish it belonged to an evil genius super-villain instead of a VC.

Edward Hopper on Salvia

Matt says,

The eerie art of Gregory Crewdson. (via)

Trompe L'Oeil

Matt says,

Julian Beever's three-dimensional sidewalk drawings are the new salvia. (Via.)

Orchestra of One (Age Four)

Robin says,

Video of the day: Cutest kid ever = sound machine. Give it 'til 0:50 at least! And then you won't be able to stop.

It's like that video of the crazy-haired kid (which I cannot find, because all I can think of to search for is "video crazy hair kid") except cuter.

Tweeting the Debates on Current

Robin says,

Been working on this. Get your #current hashtags ready!

Update: Neat-o video promo!

This Space Intentionally Left Blank

Robin says,

I'm going to just go ahead and put a post here with nothing in it, because I know I'm going to find something cool on Monday and want to blog it -- but will feel weird about bumping down DFW.

So now I'll just be bumping down this empty post. Which is not sad or serious at all.

An Irresistible Entertainment

Matt says,

The Howling Fantods has concluded its David Foster Wallace motivational poster contest. (via)

Gasp. DFW killed himself yesterday. How awful.

This MetaFilter thread collects some of his inimitable work:

• Incarnations of burned children, Esquire
• Good People, The New Yorker
• Host, The Atlantic
• Roger Federer as religious experience, The New York Times
• Tense present, Harper's (and, to be fair, languagehat's takedown of same)
• His interview with Charlie Rose
• A good description of that fascinating interview

Another Laptop Audio Auteur

Robin says,

This is my favorite genre, apparently. Shugo Tokumaru should do the soundtrack for the next Studio Ghibli movie. Check out his track Parachute. Does it sound like "I Saw Three Ships" to anybody else?

Close-Up

Robin says,

How much do you love this? The title sequence from To Kill a Mockingbird. Totally beautiful.

The Annotated Shampoo Aisle

Robin says,

GoodGuide looks great -- it's a database of products (mostly bathroom and kitchen stuff for now, but presumably expanding over time) connected to a deep well of information about supply chains and environmental impact. Products all get a score, 0-10. I love the idea of being able to instantly query this site from the grocery store via, say, an iPhone app.

And yo, this is the kind of project a news organization could/should have done. It's all about context!

Alexis Madrigal has the scoop at Wired.com.

House of Pancakes

Matt says,

Hee. I loved House of Leaves, too. (Via Bookslut.)

First Index

Robin says,

I know this is ridiculous, but c'mon... I'm proud of it! My first appearance in a work of Popular Non-Fiction. Big thanks to Jeff Howe for including Current, and both my colleague Ezra and I by extension.

Clearly, you should buy the book, Crowdsourcing, immediately, so as to send an unmistakable message to publishers: Snarkmaster citations mean big money!

Walker Gone Wild

Matt says,

Mpls wonder-blogger Max Sparber offers a peek at some of the most fascinating esoterica in the permanent collection of my beloved Walker Arts Center. Sample:

The Walker has dozens of pieces by Pettibon; this particular one is an ink-spattered sketch of the most self-reflective character in the history of comics, Batman, facing a woman with a gun while disconnected passaged from his endless internal monologues crowd his head. Most of the quotes a vaguely sexual, or explicit, such as a comment from Robin saying, "I have studied the bats trying to understand Batman's complex psycho-sexuality." This actually seems intended as a retort to Batman's first quote. "Robin," he says, "you came too soon."

Hard-Hitting RNC Commentary

Matt says,

Random Twitterer is right, yo. Sarah Palin's suit is the surprise hit of the night. I'm the guy that has long hated coverage of female candidates that insisted on mentioning their clothing choices, but seriously, I want that suit. Even my potential appearance in Steve Schmidt's talking points about male blogger misogyny cannot prevent me from complimenting that fierce piece of gun-metal grey hottness.

Meta-Magazine

Robin says,

Wired is running a blog that chronicles the behind-the-scenes process of "assigning, writing, editing and designing" a feature.

The feature is about Charlie Kaufman.

Meta-meta-meta-meta!

It looks great so far: videos, story pitches, emails, etc. You have to be a pretty giant nerd to enjoy this level of meta-media, but I assume you are, so check it out.

(Via Alexis Madrigal.)

Ratatatatatatat

Robin says,

MP3 of the day: Ratatat remix over on Gorilla vs. Bear.

Also: This track from High Places is lovely. But I'm a sucker for clicky-clacky music.

Understanding Googlechromazon

Robin says,

Can't decide what's cooler -- Google Chrome or the fact that they had Scott MccCloud make an explainer comic book for it.

Yeah, probably the comic book.

Update: Whoops, no, it's Chrome. This thing is beautiful.

Marshall/Biden

Matt says,

If you haven't already, definitely check out Josh Marshall's recently [re?]posted interview with Joe Biden from summer '04. Fascinating. A snippet, from when Biden describes meeting Qaddafi shortly after the announcement of the dismantlement deal:

I said, "Yeah, why, why the change of heart?" And he says, "The real question is" -- through an interpreter -- "The real question is, why did we get off this way, why did you sanction me in the first place?"

I looked at him and said, "That's easy. You're a terrorist." I didn't mince, I said, "You are a terrorist." I said, you know I leaned to him and said, "You've engaged in supporting terrorists. Matter of fact, you blew up 35 of the kids who went to my alma mater along with another hundred or so people. You're a terrorist, that's why."

He sits there and he goes like this, he goes, "That's logical." (laughs) I mean the guy was great! And I said, "So, Okay. Tell me why." And he went, Well -- I'm paraphrasing -- "Nuclear weapons didn't help you very much in Vietnam, they didn't help you in Iraq and if I ever used them you'd blow me away."

Numa Numa Rihanna

Robin says,

Well, I got my first story onto Current:News. I'm not sure whether to be proud or embarrassed of the fact that it was about Rihanna covering the Numa Numa song. (Click the pink "play this story" bar to check out the TV version!)

Shockwave Traffic Jams

Robin says,

Here's the setup:

• You're one of 20 or so cars driving around in a perfect circle.
• No seriously, it's a perfect circle.
• So your only job is to follow the car in front of you.
• And keep your speed at around 20 miles per hour.

The result? You guessed it: traffic jams!

Check out the video evidence.

And apparently this experiment corresponds to real-world observation in at least one important way: In both cases, the "shockwave" of slow-down propagates back through cars at around 12 miles per hour. It's pretty mesmerizing to watch.

Thanks, Mathematical Society of Traffic Flow!

An Evening with Rthrtha

Robin says,

Check out this fun, cut-and-paste-y music video. Give it a bit to warm up; it gets exponentially better as it goes.

I love the bats.

The song is from a group called Octopus Project -- sort of Ratatat times Pinback minus vocals. Actually, never mind, that makes no sense. I'm going to stop trying to describe music.

Bonus: Behind-the-scenes stills! Oh man that looks fun.

(Via Ted R.)

Matt Bai Talks Up The Argument

Matt says,

The Believer interviews Matt Bai. (Oh, and speaking of the NYT Magazine, I highly recommend David Leonhardt's cover story on Obamanomics if you haven't read it.)

Never Again?

Matt says,

Richard Just's lengthy explanation of why Darfur is still engulfed in genocide five years after it caught the world's attention is the most spellbinding, heartrending thing I've read in quite a bit. A surprising brew of circumstances have paralyzed us from stopping this tragedy, departing from the Problem from Hell template in a few key particulars. Do take a look.

NYT Discovers Linkblogging

Matt says,

... and it's good. (Don't miss the running tally of good reads in the sidebar.) Keep it up, Mr. Kuntz.

Buildings and Their Not-So-Secret Identities

Matt says,

The Walker Art Center recently concluded a spectacular exhibit called "Worlds Away: New Suburban Landscapes" (they've helpfully catalogued the whole exhibit in a wiki; oh Walker, how I love you). Among the highlights of the exhibit was this photo collection by Paho Mann, images of former Circle K convenience stores that have been transformed into other types of businesses -- tattoo parlors, Mexican restaurants, tuxedo rental places -- all taken from the same distance in similar light, all bearing the Circle K's suprisingly distinct form. (Also available as a Google Maps mashup, natch.)

I mentioned this to an architect friend, and he pointed me to the delightful NotFoolingAnybody.com: "a chronicle of bad conversions and storefronts past" -- photos of former chain restaurants lightly altered to house new businesses. (Such as "China Hut," the bastard offspring of -- what else? -- Pizza Hut.)

OMG I love the Web sometimes.

Dirty Talk

Matt says,

A MeFi commenter describes sex talk:

Q: You like sex? You are a person who likes the sex acts that we are currently engaged in?
A: Yes! I am! I like sex!
Q: You like sex! In fact, you are a person who likes sex as much as a prostitute likes sex!
A: YES I LIKE SEXY SEX AS IF IT WERE MY PROFESSION!! TELL ME MORE ABOUT IT
Q: YOU ENJOY THIS ACT YOU SEXY SEX PERSON etc.

Back to the Pleasant Peninsula

Robin says,

On vacation in Michigan for the next five day. You know what I'm gonna do? Not blog.

I hear there's another guy who hangs around here... maybe you can lure him out in the comments.

See you on Monday!

Socratic Dialogue as Journalistic Format

Robin says,

You know what we need more of? Socratic dialogues! Totally not kidding. It's such a natural, effective way to explore an argument. (This one's about the Obama campaign, by Atlantic blogger Marc Ambinder.)

How Is YouTube Not the Greatest Art Project Ever?

Robin says,

The question just occurred to me: How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?

Imagine a slightly parallel dimension where Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim aren't web engineers from Silicon Valley but instead art scenesters from New York. They know the language of the art world; they know how to present work in that context.

But they also have tech chops -- NYU ITP grads, say -- so their project isn't a painting or an avante-garde video but a web app. It's a platform, a system.

And that project grows into YouTube -- one of the craziest, most kaleidoscopic reflections of humanity we've ever seen. It's beautiful. It totally encapsulates and embodies the spirit of the age. And, in our parallel dimension, as the YouTube guys struggle with servers and scalability, they're also submitting it to juried shows and, I don't know, biennials or whatever. They are framing it.

Isn't that high art? Isn't that incredibly successful, important art?

Now, forget the commercial objection, because for years YouTube didn't run a single ad. And let's push our parallel dimension even further and say that Google signs on not as the project's acquirer but as its patron. The Medici of Mountain View!

Am I missing some foundational idea or definition here? I don't actually know anything about art (though I will admit I am in this frame of mind b/c I just strolled through SFMOMA yesterday) -- what would the knee-jerk art-scholar reaction be?

And what do you think?

Imperial Fleet Week

Robin says,

Oh, and if you're in San Francisco this weekend, don't forget to check out Imperial Fleet Week. Last year's was awesome. Even though the AT-ATs always trip over the MUNI lines...

The Dark Knight, Age Nine

Robin says,

Meta-media is the new media! This swede of the Dark Knight trailer acted out by kids is both a funny, charming homage and some sort of biting commentary. (Or maybe I just want it to be biting commentary?)

Video Madness

Robin says,

Wow wow wow. Check out this demo of some crazy video algorithms. I can't even quite find words for what this team is up to... but it's pretty astounding. Watch all the way through, because there are a bunch of different techniques demoed, and they get better and better.

(Via kd.to_tumblr.)

Bat-Manga!

Robin says,

Ah, the mythic confluence of all things nerdy: Random House is publishing a book called Bat-Manga, edited by Chip Kidd (of course). Here's the story:

[T]he book features Batman and Robin as you've never seen them before -- in original Japanese stories from 1966 and 1967, written and drawn by Manga master Jiro Kuwata, creator of 8-Man! -- collected and translated for the very first time, over forty years after they originally appeared.

UnbeLIEVable. Why was I not told of this sooner?

Coming Soon: coolness.snarkmarket.com

Robin says,

I like this map of famous trips throughout history from GOOD magazine... but what I like even better is their subdomain for special projects: awesome.goodmagazine.com!

Sigur Ros @ MOMA

Robin says,

I've been remiss in not posting this 'til now: Sigur Ros performs live at MOMA, on Current. Honestly, I didn't realize they could create those sounds outside of a studio. Beautiful.

The Sexiest Equation Ever

Robin says,

Er-hem.

Designing Neighborhoods

Robin says,

Ahh, the eternal lure of architecture and planning, if only because you get to make little models like this. At first I was turned off -- all those houses look the same! Blech! -- but then I started to think about how it would actually get implemented, and how it would actually feel. And then the geometry of the streets really caught me -- totally regular, but not just a boring grid. I'm into it. You?

(Via City of Sound's links.)

Flip-Flop, Schmip-Flop

Matt says,

MPR's Midmorning show today was about politicians flip-flopping. A tired subject, and nothing non-trite can be said about it. Still, I had to let this out:

What the news media often neglect in their coverage of the candidates is attention to their underlying governing philosophies. I think these provide a much more accurate guide to their behavior in office than their tendency to make shifts on small-bore, particular issues.

For all the media hullabaloo around "flip-flopping" in the Bush/Kerry election, we would have had a much keener idea of President Bush's flavor of governance had the media focused our attention on the core philosophies animating his team of advisers. Bush's reliance on and deference to those advisers, their belief in the unitary executive, their dogged insistence on loyalty über alles, their neoconservative interventionism -- all of these things could have been foreseen from what we knew in the run-up to the 2000 election. And it's those facts that would have given us a much, much clearer picture of how the Bush administration would administer its departments, how it would respond to events such as 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, a housing bust, etc.

Just take a look at one of Bush's most-cited statements since 2001, presaged in this January 2000 profile of Karl Rove by Frank Bruni: "'Anybody who gets in the way of his ambitions for the governor gets run off,' said Tom Pauken, a former chairman of the Republican Party in Texas. 'And if you're not with Karl 100 percent, you're an enemy.'"

I want to hear much, much less about flip-flops. Off-shore drilling, for all the ink given to it in the past two weeks, is an infinitesimal mote in the array of decisions and compromises #44 will have to navigate. Don't tell me what minor issues a candidate has shifted positions on, tell me what core philosophies the candidate has been consistent about, what common threads of thought weave through his speeches, his actions, and the minds of his advisers. That will give me a much clearer sense of how he'll govern.

This Wednesday

Robin says,

Attention San Francisco snarkmatrix:

Come to this Creative Commons Salon on Wednesday from 7-9 p.m. I'll be talking about Current and the fuuuture of video!

VVFS

Robin says,

Whoah! Collision of three things I'm a fan of: Nick Douglas posts about Viral Video Film School on Buzzfeed.

"This Article Documents Ongoing Warfare"

Robin says,

Holy jeez. The Wikipedia 2008 South Ossetia War entry is nuts! Look at that table on the right!

The Power of Naaature

Robin says,

Slow-motion video of lightning: YA-ZOW!!

Funny how lightning -- the real deal, the big stroke, the mighty discharge -- doesn't actually go from the sky to the ground; instead it's our earthly assault on the heavens above!

Current HQ Tour

Robin says,

Ever wonder what my office is like?

No?

Too bad. Watch this anyway.

Tales of the Gulag Archipelago

Robin says,

Wow. Thanks to the way technology and communications have changed, this is an experience no one will really ever be able to have again:

Although more than three decades have now passed since the winter of 1974, when unbound, hand-typed, samizdat manuscripts of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago first began circulating around what used to be the Soviet Union, the emotions they stirred remain today. Usually, readers were given only 24 hours to finish the lengthy manuscript -- the first historical account of the Soviet concentration camp system -- before it had to be passed on to the next person. That meant spending an entire day and a whole night absorbed in Solzhenitsyn's sometimes eloquent, sometimes angry prose -- not an experience anyone was likely to forget.

Amazing. Gotta quote the next graf too:

Members of that first generation of readers remember who gave the book to them, who else knew about it, and to whom they passed it on. They remember the stories that affected them most -- the tales of small children in the camps, or of informers, or of camp guards. They remember what the book felt like -- the blurry, mimeographed text, the dog-eared paper, the dim glow of the lamp switched on late at night -- and with whom they later discussed it.

Now that is social media. Reading those two grafs alone just gave me shivers.

McCain Green Screen Challenge

Robin says,

Man, I always wondered: Who actually enters these Colbert Report green-screen challenges? Who are the special effects ninjas walking secretly among us?

Now I know -- it's my friend Scot!

Hee hee. It's really good.

Embarrassment Manifest

Matt says,

One of the reasons I love Ask MetaFilter is that I often come across questions that I'm very curious about, but would never have thought to articulate. This question is one of those:

When I think of / remember something embarrassing from my life, I compulsively make some kind of noise. It seems to happen unconsciously, before my censor can catch it and stop myself (it even happens when I am in a quiet or inappropriate place). It's not especially loud, in fact it's often under my breath. The sound is usually just a quiet grunt, or a word/syllable or two. ... It usually only happens when I'm remembering something palpably embarrassing or humiliating from my life -- not for mild everyday kind of stuff. ... So what is this, do I have some kind of low-grade tourette's syndrome? Is there a name for this phenomenon? Does it happen to others or is it unique to me?

Megascience

Robin says,

Obvs the Large Hadron Collider as depicted on The Big Picture is mind-blowing, but don't miss the Heliotron, either.

What Startups Can Learn from Haruki Murakami

Robin says,

I want more posts like this on tech blogs!

(Okay okay, so it's not actually that mind-blowing a post... I just liked the unexpected reference. Not a lot of modern literary fiction on TechCrunch, ya know?)

Boring Boring Boring Glorious Boring Boring

Robin says,

Ugh. Enjoyed this long NYT piece on the swimmer Michael Phelps, but man, every time I read about Olympic training -- or any super-high-level athletic training -- it makes me pity the Olympians. What a monotonous routine. It's like prison -- except maybe you get a gold medal at the end.

Donkey Kong As Symbol of Modern Oligarchy

Matt says,

Kottke's plug for the Independent Documentary Association's list of the 25 best documentaries reminds me to recommend one that was underhyped last year -- The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters. I like Keith Phipps' perceptive review best; he calls it "a film about what it takes to make it in America." It's hilarious, a bit sad, and enormously revealing.

Life: Rich with Metaphor

Matt says,

Via Reddit:

Some anglerfishes of the superfamily Ceratiidae employ an unusual mating method. Because individuals are presumably locally rare and encounters doubly so, finding a mate is problematic. When scientists first started capturing ceratioid anglerfish, they noticed that all of the specimens were females. These individuals were a few inches in size and almost all of them had what appeared to be parasites attached to them. It turned out that these "parasites" were the remains of male ceratioids.

At birth, male ceratioids are already equipped with extremely well developed olfactory organs that detect scents in the water. When it is mature, the male's digestive system degenerates, making him incapable of feeding independently, which necessitates his quickly finding a female anglerfish to prevent his death. The sensitive olfactory organs help the male to detect the pheromones that signal the proximity of a female anglerfish. When he finds a female, he bites into her skin, and releases an enzyme that digests the skin of his mouth and her body, fusing the pair down to the blood-vessel level. The male then atrophies into nothing more than a pair of gonads, which release sperm in response to hormones in the female's bloodstream indicating egg release. This extreme sexual dimorphism ensures that, when the female is ready to spawn, she has a mate immediately available.

The Night They Clubbed the Deer

Matt says,

I'm not sure why this Texas Monthly story is so unsettling. The story itself is simple -- four high-school football stars, out goofing off one Friday night, capture and brutally slaughter two deer.

The characters are (for the most part) sympathetic, and aside from a possibly-superfluous Lord of the Flies reference, the author doesn't really stoke the drama at all. It might be the notion that four decent kids can do some completely inexplicable, violent thing, just out-of-the-blue. Or it might be the sensation of looking in on a place usually so far removed from the gaze of the world.

Ticket to Ride

Robin says,

Snarkpal Chris Fong writes up some excellent board games on SFGate. If you haven't tried "Ticket to Ride," you're missing out; it's fun for nerds, jocks, and burnouts alike.

In Search of Shadows

Robin says,

Over in The American Scholar, William Deresiewicz writes about the disadvantages of the elite education as commonly experienced today:

What happens when busyness and sociability leave no room for solitude? The ability to engage in introspection, I put it to my students that day, is the essential precondition for living an intellectual life, and the essential precondition for introspection is solitude.

It's a nicely-written piece, especially in the beginning.

One of Michigan State's signature songs goes, "MSU, we love thy shadows" -- and what a wonderful (if counterintuitive) thing to celebrate about a school: the shadows, the quiet spaces, the free afternoons, the empty paths.

(Via Jane.)

Powerful Picture

Robin says,

Wow -- just look at this image. (Via Alexis Madrigal.)

Kevin Kelly

Robin says,

I had no idea that Kevin Kelly told the first story ever on This American Life. (Read about it in this article.) Probs shouldn't be a surprise. All good things in the world are linked, you know -- it's a massive spiderweb of coolness.

'Basically an Intelligence-Gathering Operation'

Robin says,

I am a huge fan of Amanda Michel and Off the Bus. Nice to see her (and it) get written up in the NYT!

Physical Theories as Women

Robin says,

Ah, here's McSweeney's with a piece for the xkcd crowd:

0. Newtonian gravity is your high-school girlfriend. As your first encounter with physics, she's amazing. You will never forget Newtonian gravity, even if you're not in touch very much anymore.

1. Electrodynamics is your college girlfriend. Pretty complex, you probably won't date long enough to really understand her.

Et cetera.

What I want to know is... which girl is the theory of luminiferous ether?

This is Officially the Opposite of Mortal Kombat

Robin says,

The new game from the team behind flOw is... um... okay so listen you control a bunch of flower petals using the breeze.

Speak of this to no one.

Jenova Chen and company get credit for their simple, intuitive gameplay mechanics -- but honestly, to me it's all about the audio. Their games simply sound better than anything else out there.

The New Yorker Can Be Funny!

Matt says,

For some of you, this week's Shouts & Murmurs is the typical bland gimmick repeated ad nauseam. If you're like me, however, it will crack you up.

Location Scout

Robin says,

Quick. Let's come up with a dystopian sci-fi film concept so we can shoot it here.

Illuminated Manuscripts

Robin says,

Franke James has a terrific cross-media comic book style.

Via the Pop!Tech blog.

You Owe The Beatles Your Brain

Robin says,

Super-fun inter-disciplinary trivia: If it weren't for The Beatles, we might not have CAT scans.

Via Rex.

Consumption

Robin says,

Quiz time.

The #1 oil-consuming entity in the world is, obviously, the United States.

What's number two?

Alexis Madrigal tweets the answer.

Obsidian Wings

Matt says,

Robin previously called out Nate Silver and FiveThirtyEight for excellent coverage of this campaign season. Now I've gotta lend a hand to the gang at Obsidian Wings, especially Hilary Bok, a.k.a. Hilzoy. It first came to my attention when one of the A-Listers plugged this post about Barack Obama's legislative record. I subscribed, and ever since I've been impressed by the quality of thought, research and analysis there.

Yesterday, for example, Obama and McCain both gave major foreign policy speeches. This generated very typical news coverage and hyper-typical punditry. But it also fortunately generated a typical post from Hilzoy at Obsidian Wings, in which you get the sense that not only did she reserve comment until reading/hearing the speeches in question, but that she understood the deeper mental framework at play behind each speech. She's solidly liberal, but seems to make few assumptions about her audience.

Jobs of the Future

Robin says,

Nice, short interview with Mario Anima, a terrific colleague here at Current.

Misdirection

Robin says,

So what do you think you're looking at here? Make a guess... then click to find out. (This one's a beauty, too.)

(Via brandflakes.)

They Are Stars! No, They Are Bugs!

Robin says,

Ahhhh! Jeff Scher's new video on the NYT site is sublime. If you discover a full-screen playback button that I missed... let me know.

Update: These. are. amazing. L'Eau Life. White Out.

Another update: Links to bigger versions... with a full-screen mode! Fly By Night. L'Eau Life. White Out.

It's the Ecosystem, Stupid

Robin says,

Enjoyed the new post from Umair Haque about corporate strategy. Here's the salient bit:

Perhaps the meaning of competitive advantage, when all the games have been played and the gears of the economic machine have finally stopped moving, is this: privatize benefits and socialize costs.

That might have been sustainable in a disconnected, asset-heavy industrial economy. But it cannot hold in a hyperconnected edgeconomy. When all of us can trade ten billion times a day, if everyone's simply trying to claim benefits from everyone else, while shifting costs and risks to everyone else, the result is economic implosion.

One of the big deficits implicit in Umair's critique is long-term thinking. This is almost a cliche by now -- the tyranny of quarterly earnings statements, etc., etc. -- but that doesn't make it any less true. Zero-sum strategy gets a quicker return, and often, it feels more like progress. Non-zero-sum strategy takes longer, feels riskier -- because you see other people growing too! Jeez! Are they winning? Why aren't we winning? -- but pays out better for everybody in the end.

So the question (which I have not even a single speculative answer to) is: How could we craft markets to better reward long-term, non-zero-sum strategy?

Bat-Theory 101

Robin says,

Wordwright with the five things that make Batman Batman. His list does not describe all past Batmans: just the good ones.

P.S. In Minneapolis, we saw The Dark Knight being advertised on the side of a Landmark theater. That's right: This movie is simultaneously a summer IMAX blockbuster and an art-house flick. Awesome.

Snarkmatrix Alignment

Robin says,

I am in Minneapolis, in Matt's apartment. We are listening to Bon Iver. And talking about you.

Photographic evidence of Snarkfestival 2008 to follow.

New Kinds of Content

Robin says,

For the last several months I've been obsessed with the idea of whole new kinds of content. We think of text, audio, and video as these sort of basic, irreducible formats -- the very elements of media. But that can't be right. We're still just imitating old, linear forms.

That's why I love Kevin Kelly's concept of vizuality; it points the way towards a new video that's somehow native to the web.

It's still totally abstract at this point; I don't even really know what that means.

But I do know that it bugs me when people talk about "content" as if it's this static substance, fungible and unchanging, as Jeff Jarvis and many of his commenters do here. I left a comment of my own saying as much:

I'd argue that it's deeply old-fashioned to think of newspapers as purveyors of blobs of text, and maybe some video to go along with it, that you can just stick into any ol' CMS system. In fact, I’d say that if, as a news organization, your content fits into any ol' CMS then it’s a warning sign.

Seen any new kinds of content out there lately? Any clues, or pointers in the right direction?

American Portraits

Robin says,

What do we look like?

Electorally, like this.

Religiously, like this like this. (Click around on that one. It's really a fine piece of work.)

Linguistically, like this. (It's not red vs. blue America, folks. It's pop vs. soda America. [Coke is another country.])

(Got the religion link from the just-relaunched Interactive Narratives. Aaand there goes the evening.)

Update: I pointed to the wrong version of the religion link! Click it again -- it's even crazier now.

Gobbledy

Robin says,

The soundtrack to my life for the past couple of weeks has been "Gobbledigook" from Sigur Ros's new album. You can download it here. Skip the naked-fawns-frolicking video.

Fun fact: Who coined the term "gobbledygook"? None other than Maury Maverick, U.S. Representative and grandson of Sam Maverick, from whom the term "maverick" originated. Now that is a neologistic family.

Head for the Black Diamond

Robin says,

Smart, informative post over on the Transportation Security Administration's blog (I know!) about the new "Diamond Lane Program" that lets travelers self-select into three groups: green (for beginners and families), blue (for intermediate travelers), and black (for road warriors).

I've been through this a few times at different airports and it actually seems to work really well!

I feel like it ought to be a case study in design school, actually: Given the problem, you immediately assume the solution must have something to do with faster machines, or better-trained employees, or lasers or something. And those things might help -- but flipping the script and simply changing the inputs helps a lot, too. Seriously counter-intuitive.

Props to TSA for some good design and public communication to match.

Heartfelt Product Endorsement

Robin says,

I love Jott.

Sign up for a free account, give it your email address, and you can call an 800-number anytime, talk into the phone, and have your words instantly converted to text and emailed back to you.

(You can have it sent other places as well, of course -- texted to phone numbers, emailed to other addresses, even posted to Twitter or whatever -- but I use it exclusively for notes-to-self.)

I know, I know, this feels like the kind of thing that sounds great in theory but is somehow fatally flawed in practice. In fact it's great in practice, too -- Jott's voice-recognition software is uncanny.

Highly recommended. Will make you feel like you're living a couple of years in the future.

Ze Frank at the Helm

Robin says,

A while ago Ze Frank posted an offer on his blog: Give me your Facebook credentials, tell me a little bit about yourself, and I'll impersonate you for a week.

Obvs lots of people thought this sounded awesome.

One of them was a girl named Christine, who's now documented the experience. Ze didn't do anything crazy -- just sort of poked around, it seems -- but I love love love Christine's final analysis:

and finally, you should know that the week i had off from facebook was probably one of my best weeks in recent memory. i know it sounds absurd, but not being able to spend hours trolling facebook (during work, on my iphone, at home while watching a movie/tv show/talking to my roommates, before i dozed off to bed) left me with so much time to… read. think. run. write. do nothing. etc. in that week, i realized the extent to which i was addicted to this thing - my virtual world of friends and updates and identity molding… things that, during my week off, i didn't MISS, but felt relieved to not have to deal with. when taken away from me, this thing i spent so much time with - my facebook reality (it pains me to have to write thos words) - felt so trivial, meaningless and inconsequential.

Emphasis mine. There's your litmus test, right there. Take it away, and how much does it matter? A lot of the internet -- not all, but a lot -- falls on the lame side of the ledger right now.

I still miss The Show, though.

American Pendulum

Robin says,

Wow. An excellent, panoramic op-ed by Gary Hart in the NYT. It's about long cycles in American history, and argues we're entering a new one now.

But mostly I just liked his reference to "The Candidate":

Senator Obama has two choices. He can focus on winning the election to the exclusion of all else and, like Robert Redford in "The Candidate," ask "What do we do now?"¯ after it is over. Or he can use his campaign as a platform for designing a new political cycle and achieve a mandate for starting it.

You've seen "The Candidate," right? Best political movie ever.

(Via Thomas Goetz.)

Media is Magic

Robin says,

(For some reason this just struck me with force: Media is magic. It's leverage. It's the only possible way -- the only possible way -- for an individual, sans army or vast fortune, to touch the lives of more than a trivial number of people. We in the web-world tend to get a bit desensitized to the scale of our work, but whoah: Tens of thousands of people? Hundreds of thousands? That is a power unknown to generations past -- again, except for the tyrants and tycoons. What good timing on our part!)

(Okay, back to work.)

The War Council

Robin says,

My favorite two pieces in McClatchy's magisterial investigation of Guantanamo Bay -- that is, the pieces that I found most surprising and depressing -- were:

1. This piece on the ways in which detention centers became de facto recruitment centers for jihadis.
   
   
2. This piece on "the War Council" of five lawyers that wrote most of the opinions that cleared the way for all these abuses. Seriously, they called themselves "the War Council."

I've been reading the series on the train in the morning, which I don't recommend, because you spend the rest of the day sorta pissed off.

O Canada

Robin says,

Great note at the bottom of Chris Anderson's latest blog post.

The setup: He's just talked to a guy who runs massive server farms -- the kind that acts as substrate for Amazon's EC2 and similar systems. Many are in Washington and Oregon because of the cheap, clean electricity. The juice is even cheaper and cleaner in Canada... but Mr. Server Farm won't go north of the border:

Why not? Because of political instability. Canada's governments shift from right to left too often, he said, and the threat of regional secession was too real to risk putting multi-hundred-million-dollar data facilities there--between changes in the laws to even the slight risk of nationalization should the wrong person be elected, he thought Canada's political liabilities outweighed its energy assets.

I love that! Because I have officially never thought of Canada as being in any way risky.

'Like a Train Hobo With a Chicken Bone'

Robin says,

Outstanding tribute to George Carlin by Jerry Seinfeld:

And he didn't just "do" it. He worked over an idea like a diamond cutter with facets and angles and refractions of light. He made you sorry you ever thought you wanted to be a comedian. He was like a train hobo with a chicken bone. When he was done there was nothing left for anybody.

More Is Different

Matt says,

I quite enjoyed the Wired cover story this month, which begins by arguing that a surfeit of data is rendering the notion of scientific modeling basically obsolete, and continues by walking through several ways in which this phenomenon has manifested itself out in the world. I especially enjoyed this mini-essay about the Europe Media Monitor, which looks like a useful potential news source to scan to see what the world is talking about. You can see, for example, that it identified the pre-election violence in Zimbabwe as the biggest story of the day yesterday, and pulls together reports from all over the global press on the subject.

The Gentleman from Twitter

Robin says,

Rep. John Culberson (R-TX) is twittering. Like, really twittering:

He's the best thing since the Mars Phoenix!

Monthly Payments on the American Dream

Robin says,

I want to talk about home ownership!

Paul Krugman is back in top form with a column that reminds me why I'm a Krug-fan in the first place.

It's about the huge preference that U.S. policy expresses for home ownership vs. renting. Krugman goes through all the micro-scale concerns -- including a great comparison that likens buying a house to buying stocks on margin -- but then there's an interesting macro-perspective:

Owning a home also ties workers down. Even in the best of times, the costs and hassle of selling one home and buying another -- one estimate put the average cost of a house move at more than $60,000 -- tend to make workers reluctant to go where the jobs are.

So at the societal scale, do strong policy incentives for home ownership create, on the whole, a less mobile workforce? I think that's interesting and worth talking about! On one hand, it's obviously good to support people as they put down roots and become a more permanent part of a community. On the other hand, it's 2008, and the economic map of the U.S. is changing fast!

Very curious about any questions, ideas, rants, links, etc. on home ownership out there. (Living in San Francisco, the issue is entirely academic, so my aim is to live vicariously through the snarkmatrix.)

Large Hadron Countdown

Matt says,

Taylor points to the Large Hadron Collider countdown clock, ticking off the seconds until Earth is destroyed by a black hole colliding with a strangelet or whatever.

The Biggest Thing You've Never Heard Of

Robin says,

I'm in Princeton visiting Dan so it's good timing that I just ran across a story about the Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC) -- the biggest, most important organization you've never heard of.

When we went to Bangladesh back in 2001, it was in part because we were fascinated with the Grameen Bank, a microcredit pioneer that's well-known in the West, in part simply because they have, uh, really good PR.

By the time we left, Grameen had been totally eclipsed in our esteem by BRAC, which does more, for more people, more efficiently, and (importantly) in a much more holistic way than Grameen. BRAC essentially fills the void left by the corruption and confusion of Bangladesh's real government. And remember, this really matters: There are more than 150 million people in Bangladesh!

I'm reminded of it by FP's list of the world's most powerful NGOs: BRAC is one of five listed, along with the Gates Foundation and Doctors Without Borders. It has an annual budget of half a billion dollars and a staff of 110,000. Wow.

Wobbly Luna

Robin says,

Hey, just 'cause we're in the middle of the longest days of the year doesn't mean you should forget about the moon.

Rex, Clay, Rock Stars

Robin says,

TODO: Read Rex's piece on microfame, cross-reference with Clay Shirky's post on sub-cultural stardom, generate novel insight, post.

But maybe you'll beat me to it...

The State of Investigative Journalism

Matt says,

This strikes me as a well-informed interview with Charles Lewis, "the godfather of non-profit investigative journalism," on efforts to support the form. My favorite nugget, and the one highlighted on other sites that link to this interview, is that Lewis is modeling his new endeavor on the Children's Television Workshop:

"I use the name 'Workshop' because I was always fascinated with the Children’s Television Workshop, which of course incubated Big Bird and 'Sesame Street' and other programming," he said. "I’d like to spawn new models and new entities and make it a friendly atmosphere for entrepreneurialsm — for non-profits, for-profits and hybrids of both. That’s an unusual dimension to this."

Big River

Robin says,

WHOAH.

1. The flooding in the Midwest has been nuts.

2. No better way to experience its nuts-ness than Boston.com's The Big Picture. Just look at those photos! Wow.

Virtual Corporations

Robin says,

I'm starting my next company in Vermont!

(It's a product of the New York Law School's Do Tank, which has the tagline "democracy design workshop." That could not be any cooler.)

Wall-play-per

Matt says,

If these Blik wall decals were easier to put up, my entire apartment would be covered in Donkey Kong platforms, rolling platforms, and freaky-looking princesses. Via Brand Flakes.

Oh This Is Just Ridiculous

Robin says,

Insane browsable 3D map of Stockholm made entirely from aerial photos. And here I thought Google Earth had a lock on the gee-whiz-geography category.

Hey, I'm never going to make this, but let me get on the record for coming up with the idea: a simple iPhone 3G app that, using the phone's GPS and accelerometers, lets you snap contributions to a 3D model very similar to this one. You stand on a street corner and firehose your phone around a bit; the photos and camera orientation info get beamed up to some server, reassembled by, um, these guys apparently, and voila: crowdsourced photoreal 3D model of everything.

Thank me later.

Via Sneakmove.

Running the 21st Century Campaign

Robin says,

Obsessed with politics all of a sudden. Great panel from a Google/National Journal event if you're interested in the intersection of the internet and campaigning. Joe Rospars from the Obama campaign is (obviously) super-impressive.

Favorite phrase: "digital coattails."

P.S. I know I mentioned it once already, but seriously, if you're not reading Five Thirty-Eight, you need to be. Nate Silver has the coolest, clearest writing voice I've run across in a long time -- which is a special boon given that he's writing about insane multivariate regressions. A++.

The Music of News

Matt says,

In one of the many Tim Russert reminiscences circulating this weekend, Isaac Chotiner mentioned the grandiose theme music of Meet the Press, which has always been one of my favorite parts of the show. Naturally, this sent me spiraling deep into the Googleverse, where I was delighted to discover a GeoCities (!) site entitled "Network news music," containing the full themes of network news shows as they evolved over the years.

On the page for NBC, you'll find two versions of the theme for Meet the Press -- movement IV of a symphony entitled "The Mission," which NBC News commissioned from John Williams; the movement is called "The Pulse of Events." Movement I of "The Mission" opens the NBC Nightly News, and the third movement opened the Today Show for several years. Having grown up listening to many of these themes, it's a revelation to hear the motifs that reverberate through all of them when you play them in sequence.

It's finds like these that remind me how much I love the Web.

See also: this analysis of network news music from Slate.

Reader-Owned

Robin says,

What a neat idea, from Alfonso Serrano by way of Felix Salmon:

Personally, I think this is a really good idea: give every print subscriber one Class B voting share of NYT stock, and then give them one more share every three months thereafter, assuming their subscription is still in good standing. The securities would automatically convert to Class A shares if they were sold or transferred, or if the subscriber let his subscription lapse.

I'm sure there's some SEC craziness that renders this totally implausible, but even so, it's appealing.

(Link via my dad!)