Posts by matt

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.

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.

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.

If you’re like most people, you purchase Benadryl. A slightly smaller and savvier subset of you will always reach for the drugstore’s “generic” counterpart, e.g. Waldryl. Stop this madness, all of you.

As you might know, Benadryl (available at Walgreens.com for $5.29 for a box of 24 capsules) and Wal-dryl ($3.99 / 24 capsules) are otherwise known as “25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI.” Compare. Yes, that is 400 tablets containing 25 mg. of diphenhydramine HCI, for about $10 when you factor in shipping. Once more with feeling:

Benadryl – 22¢ / pill

Wal-dryl – 16¢ / pill

True generic – 2.5¢ / pill

As a fan of Unisom (34¢ / pill) and Claritin (66¢), the truly generic equivalents (Unisom: 3¢ Claritin: 6¢) have been a revelation.

Before you buy any mildly expensive drug over-the-counter, plug its name into Amazon and see what pops up. Many of you may already know all about this, but surely I’ve delighted someone.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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