I’m a total sucker for this kind of stuff:

Watch more National Geographic Channel videos on AOL Video

And who knew that the reason the cross bar on women’s bikes are lower is to allow space to carry an orangutan?

Via User Friendly

I’m sure there’s some good, scientific reason for this storage area at the Smithsonian:

(click for a bigger version on flickr)

(via Kottke), but there’s only one thing that comes to mind upon seeing it (tapers off around 3:20) …

What does Margaret Thatcher have to say about all of this?

The delivery is terrible, but the crowd seems to love it. I guess that’s politics for you.

Make a wish...

My blog turns two today and I’ve upgraded a bit from last year’s birthday combo – this year, I sprung for birthday Swiss Cake Rolls- extra convenient as they come two to a package.  And just what we need, a two year old toddler of a blog all hyped up on sugar running around biting people.

I kind of feel like I’m supposed to say something sentimental here, but sentimental just isn’t something I do real well.  Mostly, I’ve enjoyed sharing stuff that I think is cool/interesting/novel/insightful/clever/etc, and it’s gratifying to know a bunch of strangers out there (and a few people I know, too) stop by now and then and take the time to read what I’ve put up.

So, in the interest of keeping things, well, interesting, it’s time for my annual appeal for you to chime in-  What do you like around here?  Which posts make you go “dear god not this again”?  Favorite topics?  Favorite formats (list of links, link and commentary, two random things that are related in my mind, pictures, stories, musings, etc, etc)?  Things you love seeing links to?  Things you love reading commentary about?  Things you hate reading commentary about and would just prefer the link and get out of my way thank you very much?  Preferences for videos, music, short articles, long articles, reference to whole other sites, etc?

It’s not that I’m going to completely re-formulate the site to be all lolcats all the time, or to be a series of in depth articles on the role of Constitutional law in modern political dialog (though don’t be surprised if either pops up from time to time).  But, at the moment I have so much stuff bookmarked and little notes scribbled down of things to write about that I’m pretty sure I could blog as a full time job for the foreseeable future (aside from that no money part, and who would buy my blog Swiss Cake Rolls then?) and not really run out of material I’d like to post.  So, I don’t have any problem with giving priority to any given realm, topic, format, etc when things are slow.  You’ll still be getting whatever I happen to find interesting that day, but it’s a chance to influence which one of the 10 interesting things that I come across that day I blog about, and which 9 I bookmark to blog about later.  If you’re new around here and you’d like to get a feel for the place, there’s a little over 450 posts in the archives now, and the tags are a fairly good way to get a flavor of what I tend to post a lot about.

Also, for some of the ones people have mentioned as liking in the past, I have a vague idea for the next post in the Dino Saga, but I need to come up with a bit more of a plot wrapper around it before I start really putting it together.  Also, Free Idea Friday will be making a come back at some point here, I just need to get around to writing up a couple of them in a form other than the jumbled notes I scribble when they occur to me.  I’ve also been waffling a bit on a few of them on whether to write them up, or actually just take some of the time I’d spend blogging about them and actually do a couple of the smaller ones.

Anyway, thoughts, suggestions?

The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows falls firmly into the category of things I don’t think I really understand, but I’m pretty sure I like.  It’s a list of terms and definitions.  Each is a sort of poem about some feeling or situation, which the term labels.  A sort of free form modern poetic dictionary of life.  Or something like that.  Perhaps an example:

cumulostalgia

n. self-aware satisfaction with discussing the weather, which although a well-worn marker of shallow conversation thwarts the suspicion that any day now our fragmented and variegated selves will no longer overlap long enough to maintain a working definition of ‘we.’

Or:

anti-aliasing

n. -soc. psych. curiosity about the real flesh-and-blood people behind internet usernames, whose vivid individuality suggests that when our parents were tracing their fingers along our nameless faces looking for some hint of who we were to become, they really should have gone with Mr. Cookieface, Unicornpuncher, Dutchess Von Whatever, or Wookiegasm.

Or:

contact high-five

n. an innocuous touch by someone just doing their job—a barber, yoga instructor or friendly waitress—that you enjoy more than you’d like to admit, a feeling of connection so stupefyingly simple that it cheapens the power of the written word, so that by the year 2025, aspiring novelists would be better off just giving people a hug.

Intended or not, some of the best contemporary poetry I’ve read since college.

Via Kottke.

Ps – So, after writing this, I clicked the little information button at the top of the page, and it turns out the Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is not only cool (and has a bit better definition of itself than what I came up with above), it’s also local, written by John Koenig of St Paul.  Adding local tag…

A cool, bass-y Franken-instrument made by Diego Stocco, created by combining a piano, an electric bass, a guitar, a cabinet, a chimney (really), and, you know, whatever else was laying around that day:

Apparently it’s an original composition, but I couldn’t help but think of Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode.  I’m not the only one, someone else mentioned it in the comments on the video (on the Vimeo page, which unfortunately isn’t embed-able so you get youtube above) and Diego replies:

A friend of mine, fan of DM, told me the same.
I know some of their music, but I wasn’t thinking about that song. I was inspired by the hours of western music I’ve heard in films, it’s that kind of triplets “horse galloping” pattern you hear in the “bunch of bad-ass cowboys going to place x to fix the situation” kinda scene : )

Which I makes me sort of wish I knew how to do 3-d computer animations and such to be able to make the scene that goes with that.

For some reason it also makes me think a bit of the general vibe of Cowboy Bebop, though that admittedly usually has more horns – perhaps the general Western vibe.

Also, things like this are why I oscillate wildly between thinking I’d really like a really little place in the city with minimal stuff, and (where this comes in) a few acres of land next to a junk yard somewhere out in the country where I could hack together things like this without bothering people in the next apartment (a large reason why I don’t play my tuba more).

In case you’re not quite brave enough to don the perfect disguise, there’s now a temporary version of the Fingerstache.

Via Boing Boing.

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages is the funniest thing I’ve read in months.  I actually fell out of my chair laughing.  That said, I’m pretty sure you have to be a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages to really get much of any of the humor of it.  But if you are a huge, enormous, mega-nerd computer geek with a decent understanding of the history of programming languages, it doesn’t get much better than this.  Snip:

1964 – John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz create BASIC, an unstructured programming language for non-computer scientists.

1965 – Kemeny and Kurtz go to 1964.

Via Boing Boing.

This makes me happy.  John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek slug out their opposing theories of macroeconomics in a rap dual (don’t worry, it’s not actually that long, the last minute or so is credits):

The full lyrics and a download-able version of the song are available on the video’s site.  Not only a great intro the two opposing theories, but one of the more fair juxtapositions I’ve seen on the topic.

Also, the comments on the video on youtube are both strangely civil and informed (for the most part), which I’m pretty sure means it broke the internet.  Though, at least currently, it still features an incendiary political ad and the top related video has a thumbnail featuring a woman bent over on her hands and knees from behind while clad in a suggestive outfit touting “tight buns”, so I suppose the internet is at least trying to reassert itself:

Ahhh, youtube

Via Boing Boing

So, I’m entirely too late for the contest for best haiku describing why one would need a specific tool for squeezing a toothpaste tube, which I suppose is what I get for reading most of the blogs I follow in fits and spurts, and which is probably just as well, since I’m fairly content with my tool-free method of toothpaste tube squeezing.  However, with a fairly absurd topic like that, I couldn’t resist trying to write a few.  Here’s what I came up with:

feeble hands cramping
toothpaste hides in corners deep
man must find new tool

why must you taunt me
fuzzy teeth from days with out
just one more dollop

tried to stab the tube
for one more glob, cut my hand
blood does not clean teeth

must keep tension tight
do not want my toothpaste stripes
turned to a gray mix

Crest and stripes on flag
I have made a mess again
want to fly white flag

And, because I find it amusing, I’d like to point out that the part Animal sings is the tuba part.  Just saying.

Also, if you haven’t visited it yet, pretty much all of the Muppets Studio youtube channel is great.

What happens when you take the general creepy scariness of quicksand and freeze it to add the threat of hypothermia in with drowning?  Frazil Ice.  The video below shows more about it, but basically it’s a giant natural Slurpee that you can fall into, which forms in Yosemite National Park in the spring.  Sort of fascinating in its own right, but mostly I think the giant 1,430 foot tall natural snow cone machine at 4:20 is awesome, especially with the rainbow at 5:16.  The time lapse at 6:20 really makes the point of how volatile the stuff is too.

(Via Boing Boing)

There’s 8 other videos so far on Yosemite’s youtube channel.  I watched a couple of the others, and though not quite as weird and fascinating, they all definitely qualify as gorgeous and at least somewhat informative.  Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to find channels for any of the rest of the national parks.  If you look around on the National Park Service website, there’s some more videos out there, but they’re a little hard to find and really spread out from what I can tell.

In other news, did you know there’s a National Recreation Area in California called Whiskeytown?  There is.

That settles it, I need to go visit more of the National Parks.

So, not too long ago, I finally got around to reading Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (the guy who wrote The Tipping Point and Blink). I’ve read his other two books as well on the heavy recommendations of several people who insisted I would love them. Overall, I thought they were interesting, but there was something about them that I didn’t really like. Something about his writing style that annoyed me, and I couldn’t quite put my finger on it.

In reading Outliers, by about 20 or 30 pages in, I found myself getting mad, which I’m pretty sure isn’t the intended effect, so I started noting some of the things that made me mad. I think most of it is around the fact that everyone seems to treat his books as scientific works of fact, and with the way he presents things it’s easy to get that impression.  But, at the same time, it’s so, so, so wildly not scientific.  Later in the book, I started writing down some of the things about him and his writing style (and to some degree the wide acceptance / praise of him) that sets me off.  So, in no particular order or pretense of being scientific or anything other than one person’s rant, here’s a bunch of little pieces that in my mind add up to disliking Malcolm Gladwell.

- His language is extremely flowery, and tends to appeal strongly to the sense and to the emotions. It reads more like the script to an episode of 60 Minutes than science.
- He starts every argument with an isolated incident that is narrative, engaging, and make you sympathize with the character, and then generalizes wildly.
- The book isn’t really about outliers at all. In fact, it focuses more on large groups, patterns, and what shapes entirely average people.  He just tends to use the extreme cases as his attempt for proof. It’s like a sociology text written in the language of a political campaign speech.
- The title could just as easily be (as it is his main argument) “Nurture’s important too”. The basic premise of the book is, when you get right down to it and strip away the flowery language, that the culture you’re raised in and how people treat you is as important in determining who you are, and therefore where you end up and what you end up doing, as are your genes or personal effort. In short, an entirely unoriginal argument that’s been going on for centuries in science. At the same time, he alternates wildly between tying personal effort / perseverance to genes (nature) and then portraying it as a cultural trait (nurture) to be absorbed (as in his scientific *gafaw* attempt at explaining why Asian kids are good at math – because their culture teaches them to have more effort and determination in problem solving).
- He doesn’t provide references, he just says “there was a study that proves this” and moves on. There is a short section in the back that references scientific papers (again, giving the appearance of being scientifically rigorous), but they – 1) are buried in the back, 2) don’t have any actual footnotes, to both discourage tying a specific piece of text to evidence so it could be supported / refuted 3) never gives more than a passing, dismissive reference to any studies or works that could counter his points.  I think this – the lack of any sort of balance at all is what really sets me off.
- Because of all of the fawning adoration of him, I feel like I’ve read most of the book before I ever opened it. I had lots of moments of deja vu because it’s been quoted so heavily everywhere. Again, with everyone presenting it as fact and some sort of mild scientific break through.
- For each of his points, he claims basically all success in life can be attributed to one particular environmental factor. However, that factor varies from chapter to chapter. If we try to tie all of his “logic” together, we would find that the world should currently be ruled by Asian people from wealthy backgrounds who were born on January 1st, who lived near a computer lab growing up and have never interacted with Scottish people. Which is obviously totally supported by realit… oh wait, no, it’s not, at all.
- He loves juxtaposing things as desperate as possible to create an effect and impact in the reader’s mind, even if it’s at the cost of a logically coherent argument or understanding.
- He writes to be talked about, but not to say much.
- He uses a single quote, from a single individual, with no evidence that it speaks for a whole time (or even anything beyond just that individual’s opinion) to create broad, sweeping explanations of entire cultures.
- He places enough unrelated examples close enough together, and uses anecdotal evidence (at best) to tie them together, to make it seem as if he has created an encompassing theory of all existence, and also implies that he know how to fix it all, but never present his actual conclusion in a clear manner.  This has two results, after someone reads it, they feel like they’ve learned something really important, but they can’t quite articulate it (because he doesn’t articulate it, and if they did so accurately, it wouldn’t seem so profound anymore), which leads them to 1) tell other people they should read it, because they can’t say exactly what it was about for sure, just that it was good, and 2) makes you think that if you had just a bit more time with him, he’d either put it all together for you, or at least give you all the other wonderful pieces that didn’t quite fit in the book, so you could finally figure it all out.  In other words, he sets himself up for speaking engagements.  Each individual example is also quotable / summarize-able enough that it both gives him something to talk about (rehash) on talk shows, and lends itself easily to being quoted elsewhere (again, felt like I read half of it before I opened the book), so it spreads.  In short, he’s perfected using the points from his first book (The Tipping Point) to make himself hit a tipping point, even though he’s really just been an old set of hush puppies since then.  The strange part is that, in a way, each of his books sets up every point needed to call him out, he spells out exactly what he’s doing, as he’s doing it, and no one calls him out for it.
- The subtle, detailed, well researched and cited argument that rationally addresses its critics is dead in our society.
- He bases his arguments on sweeping groups in ways that feed on (and feed into) stereotypes.
- He leaps up and down on scale – from an individual, one school, an isolated study, to a stereotype of a whole region based on one study, a whole culture / the whole world and all of human history – gives a grand sweeping feel, but gives basically no evidence.
- It’s emotional, you feel for the characters.  Science doesn’t have characters. Even in psychology, you have patients, not protagonists.
- Not only does he only focus on environment as the sole predictor of success, he picks and chooses which parts of the environment to focus on. In his example of schools, he points out that at his personally relate-able, focused on, emotionally engaging school protagonist, everyone does orchestra, they have much much longer days, they have strict rules, but Gladwell only focuses on one thing as the solution- having 3 extra weeks of school in the summer. He argues that if we could just have kids go to school year round, it would fix everything, but ignored that maybe it’s not just the 3 extra weeks, maybe it’s the orchestra. What if every student had to take band? What if not sleeping enough is what’s actually helping them?  He focuses on the environment for causes of things, but then ignores massive portions of the environment to further his specific argument.
- He puts up as an example of the way the world should be as including a 12 year old running on 6 hours of sleep each night, every night. Six hours.
- He seems to always propose a single right way to do things- train pilots this way and you’ll always be safe, raise children this was and they’ll be hockey stars.
- He continually argues that anyone who was given the correct opportunity succeeds – but he leaves out the many, many cases of people who may have been in the right situations, but still failed. He talks about one failure in the whole book.
- In particular, a certain paragraph on page 268 took me from mildly annoyed to “must rant to the internet about this”. Let me quote it here at length:

The lesson here is very simple.  But it is striking how often it is overlooked.  We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth.  We looks at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur.  But that’s the wrong lesson.  Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.  If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?  To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determines success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.  If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars.  Now multiply that sudden flowering of talent by every field and profession.  The world could be so much richer than the world we have settled for.

Ah, the wonder!  The soaring rhetoric! The potential of a brighter future for all!!  This grand utopia if we would just listen to this one man’s wisdom!!!  Oh wait.  Fuck.  It’s chock full of more examples of logical fallacies than than a textbook on Socrates.  Let’s hit just a few of the high point of “are you fucking kidding me” in there.  “Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968.”  Really?  That’s strange, because in your example of this earlier in the same fucking book, on page 51, you tell us that every single kid in Gates’ school had the ability to have the exact same access he had, and you refer on numerous occasions to “Gates and his friends” spending all this time on this very same computer.  And you really think absolutely no other school in the world had a similar set up?  Are you sure there weren’t actually a ton of them?  Are you sure it’s not just that you haven’t heard of all the others, or even looked into it, because it might hurt your argument?  Because they didn’t happen to produce an equally famous individual despite a similar environment?  Or that someone who, oh say wasn’t even born until the next year could create software that’s currently run on multiples more computers than anything Gates ever touched? Or that with any research you would find that it never really was Gates’ technical ability that set him ahead but rather his business skills?  My, all those MBA’s out there shall be great programmers one day.  “If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”  One.  Exactly fucking one.  Microsoft is only a worthwhile example because it’s a huge monopoly.  You know how many monopolies you can have in a particular market?  Here’s a hint, it has to do with the prefix “mono”.  Perhaps you meant “How many really successful companies could we have with huge market share?”  Again, the same number.  There’s only so much room in the market.  Could they have been headed by other people?  Probably.  But that’s not going to make for a million more $260 Billion market cap companies.  Aside from that a million kids spending all their time in a computer lab to produce a million Bill Gates would mean a million kids not out spending all their time in hockey leagues.  Or playing guitar.  Or student government.  “If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars.”  No, it fucking wouldn’t.  It would have exactly as many, they would just have birthdays bunched up in January and July instead of just January (that assuming we take Galdwell’s general argument here as being valid in the first place).  Instead of screwing kids with November and December birthdays, we be screwing the ones with June and December birthdays, and spending twice as much on coaching and facilities for the opportunity.  And hey, why not make 4 leagues?!!  Then we could have 4 times as many adult hockey stars!  Hey, why stop there?  Let’s have twelve!!   How about 365?!!  Why not one for every hour of birth time?  8,760 hockey leagues and the world’s problems will be solved!!!  But wait, 8,760 hockey leagues will only give us 8,584,800 NHL level players.  With a mere 6,632,653 hockey leagues every person on the planet will be playing hockey at an NHL level.  Cripples will be able to skate!  The blind shall win shoot outs in overtime!  Infants and the elderly alike will check one another into the boards!!  All praise be to Malcolm Gladwell!!!

Has anyone else ever noticed that the clothes the sledgehammer girl is wearing in the iconic 1984 Apple commercial below really closely resemble the outfits the waitresses at Hooters wear?  Like, basically identical.  No?  Just me?  Okay.

I know it’s well past the end of basketball season, but this still makes me laugh like hell.

Super cheesy, but cute:

I wonder how much post-it note sales have increased since people started making all sorts of videos like this on youtube.

Via Ovablastic.