Gulfstream

http://thecatorialist.blogspot.com/ The Catorialist, a parody of The Satorialist. 10:42 …

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/opinion/26brooks.html David Brooks: “ The Democrats are in danger of doing to Obama what they did to their last two nominees: burying authentic individuals under a layer of prefab themes.” 09:52 …

http://www.inc.com/magazine/20080901/how-hard-could-it-be-
how-i-learned-to-love-middle-managers.html Surprising piece by Joel Spolsky in which he: (a) admits to being surprised that his Fog Creek employees—despite their private offices and dual monitors and free lunches—were unhappy; and (b) rather timidly argues that sometimes middle managers might be a good idea. 23:53 …

http://en.beijing2008.cn/90/53/column211995390.shtml The Olympic sponsors, none of which I could definitively name, due to the puzzling lack of advertising on any of the venues or athletes. 17:25 …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fighting_in_ice_hockey Fighting in ice hockey—possibly informative to those not from North America. It’s against the rules, but attracts only minor penalties provided various “rules” are followed (only two at a time, no sticks, no gloves). (Videos of hockey fights from hockeyfightsdotcom on YouTube.) 11:34 …

http://uktv.co.uk/dave/stepbystep/aid/605477 The best jokes of the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. “I can’t believe Amy Winehouse self-harms. She’s so irritating she must be able to find someone to do it for her.” 12:01 …

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/sports/olympics/22age.html The problem with any potential disqualification of gold medal-winning Chinese gymnasts on the basis of age is that it gives a gold medal to a gymnast who demonstrably isn’t the best in the world, and the best in the world is more interesting than the best European, best under-23, best without sight, best under a certain weight, etc. Younger is better because younger has less fear? That’s a poor excuse for Olympic-level athletes. (I don’t know what the solution to this problem is, but it’s certainly odd (one oddity amongst many high-level sport oddities) that a sport has got itself into a situation where there’s a worry that the best in the world got that way via abuse.) 08:04 …

http://kk.org/kk/2008/08/very-longterm-backup.php The Long Now Foundation’s modern-day Rosetta Stone: Genesis 1-3 in 1,500 different languages, plus associated information etched into a 3 inch disc, designed to last for 2,000–10,000 years. (They picked Genesis because it’s already translated into a lot of languages.) They’re hoping many individuals will pay $25,000 for their own disc (to ensure wide dispersal), and hand it down from generation to generation. 23:24 …

http://www.joshuacallaghan.com/Graphs.htm “Assortment of sculptures based on graphs and charts.” e.g. Consumer Confidence, 2006-07, brass, wood. 09:27 …

http://www.kottke.org/08/08/great-olympic-moments-on-youtube Excellent compendium of great Olympic moments on YouTube. (The uneven bars routines are particularly interesting.) 20:51 …

http://www.43folders.com/2008/08/19/good-blogs “What Makes for a Good Blog?” I didn’t realise people considered via links so important. I’ve never posted them here because they seem like a very crude way of allocating credit: finding and posting a link is often trivial (often it’s the source’s source who has done the work, for example). Also, people tend to use via links to attract attention or cosy up to other bloggers. I agree via links are sometimes interesting though, so I’ll think about adding them. (In contrast to an individual link, an entire blog does represent a significant chunk of work, which is why I have a blogroll.) 09:18 …

http://www.upgradetravelbetter.com/2008/08/19/downgrade-
made-official-united-eliminates-free-meals-on-transatlantic-
flights/ US airlines slide further into crapness: United is evidently eliminating free meals on (some) transatlantic flights. (Those out of Dulles/Washington DC.) 08:28 …

http://wwwdevel.fandm.edu/pressreleases/2002-03/206.html The Franklin & Marshall collegiate-style clothing brand got started in 1999, when a small Italian clothing company decided that it would be a nice to sell clothes bearing the name and logo of Franklin & Marshall College. They never contacted the college, and never sought a licence, but when the college eventually found out about this (via puzzled graduates travelling in Europe), they decided the best thing to do was licence the name (more from Wikipedia). 23:49 …

http://www.collegehumor.com/article:1760601 The Earth’s Facebook feed: “Georgia is no longer friends with Russia,” etc. 16:29 …

http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2008/08/09/2329786.htm ABC News buries the lede: five out of six members of “Rudely Interrupted” are physically or mentally disabled, but the story about them being invited to play at the UN avoids mentioning this until the eighth paragraph. (Their disabilities are part of their identity; the about page on their site mentions this pertinent fact immediately.) 22:59 …

http://store.theonion.com/gift-box-peaceful-progression-
smoke-alarm-p-146.html The “Peaceful Progression Smoke Alarm” from The Onion: awake to sounds of the rainforest; snooze capable. (A $7.99 empty gift box.) 20:15 …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rykTElDjFN4 Surprisingly pleasing Boba Fett/Flashdance stop motion video. 16:42 …

http://goateesaver.com/ “The GoateeSaver cuts goatee grooming time by protecting the goatee and ensuring a perfect shave every morning.” 16:39 …

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/08/01/sports/20080802_
TORCH_GRAPHIC.html The Olympic torch, from 1936 to 2008, and some background to each of the designs. 21:12 …

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-10sysadtips/
Pretty good set of 10 Linux sysadmin tips, if you’re into that sort of thing. 07:50 …

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7493076.stm Profile of a Cambodian marathon runner who lives on $50 a month, from a nice series of profiles of athletes “heading to the Olympics despite huge obstacles.” As the BBC is wont to do, though, the voice-over translation sounds like it was done by an earnest child striving mightily vary his pitch (see the passage beginning at 1:30), which endas up being quite belittling. (For better of for worse they do this pretty consistently to anyone that isn’t a statesman or famous—it’s not a developing country bias.) [text, video] 07:48 …

http://www.vimeo.com/1213401 Surprisingly compelling mini documentary about Martin the Tailor, a guy who came to the states after being in a concentration camp in World War 2, now owner a garment factory (and suit-maker for Bill Clinton). Very well put together, and looks nice on Vimeo as well. 07:22 …

http://www.tnr.com/story_print.html?id=69067f1c-d089-474b-
a8a0-945d1deb420b Negative, rather political review of Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine: “But Klein was intellectually unfazed. Rather than re-think the economicist premises of her recent radicalism, she set out to synthesize her old worldview with the post-9/11 world. … Doggedly connecting the dots, she discovered that the Iraq war was—guess what?—part of the same economic tissue that connected Nike and the World Trade Organization. Klein is nothing if not a totalistic thinker. Everything always adds up, and darkly.” 22:59 …

http://www.theamericanscholar.org/su08/elite-deresiewicz.html “Visit any elite campus in our great nation and you can thrill to the heartwarming spectacle of the children of white businesspeople and professionals studying and playing alongside the children of black, Asian, and Latino businesspeople and professionals. At the same time, because these schools tend to cultivate liberal attitudes, they leave their students in the paradoxical position of wanting to advocate on behalf of the working class while being unable to hold a simple conversation with anyone in it.” 22:54 …

http://blog.mozilla.com/metrics/2008/07/21/firefox-surpasses-
50-market-share-in-indonesia/ According to one measure, Firefox has just hit 50% market share in Indonesia, with Finland, Slovenia and Poland close behind. (I couldn’t find the data on the linked site.) 22:34 …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fciD_II7NI Feist on Sesame Street! “I love counting ... counting to the number four.” 10:13 …

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html Y Combinator’s “Ideas We’d Like to Fund.” Some great stuff here. “25. A Craigslist competitor. Craiglist is ambivalent about being a business. This is both a strength and a weakness. If you focus on the areas where it’s a weakness, you may find there are better ways to solve some of the problems Craigslist solves.” 20:59 …

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/19/us/19exclude.html Is suppressing evidence the best remedy for police (or procedural) misconduct? The US is pretty much unique in this regard. 20:03 …

http://madeinqueensfilm.com/ A documentary about the Trinidians from Queens who mod their bikes with thousand-dollar stereos. (NY Times story from last year.) 19:50 …

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7513571.stm Brother Cesare is a 62-year-old Capuchin monk who is the lead singer of an Italian heavy metal band (with video). 12:28 …

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Folly “In architecture, a folly is a building constructed strictly as a decoration…” 18:23 …

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/16/opinion/16dowd.html “May We Mock, Barack?” Maureen Down thinks Obama is too earnest. Also, once upon a time comedians did have jokes about Obama. Dowd: “It seems like a President Obama would be harder to make fun of than these guys.” Stewart: “Are you kidding me?” Stewart, Colbert together: “His dad was a goat-herder!” 09:04 …

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7510423.stm The Betancourt rescuers not only posed as aid workers, but at least one wore a Red Cross logo. I don’t know why aid organisations weren’t more critical of this, since it directly jeopardises their work. (As well as being a pretty shifty thing to do.) 22:34 …

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/technologies-behind-
google-ranking.html Some of the ways in which Google disambiguates queries, so that it can return what it thinks you want, instead of what you said you wanted. I actually wish Google would do less of this, or would at least tell you when the results are very sensitive to location or term order, etc. (The did you mean... system is fine.) A few years ago Google decided that the order of search terms was meaningful, and so now I sometimes enter various permutations of the same terms if it seems like Google is getting confused. I’d rather not have to run the same search across different versions of Google. Coincidentally, I discovered today that Google Maps reckons the Natural History Museum is on Park Avenue (about a mile away from where it should be). 22:13 …

http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24022623-
601,00.html The Pope substitutes u for you in a text message (his first?) to World Youth Day pilgrims. (It’s otherwise proper English.) 16:50 …

http://furbo.org/2008/07/14/bugging/ The only way iPhone-owning non-developers can get applications onto their iPhone is via Apple’s App Store, which makes it difficult for developers to distribute beta versions, or get users to run special debug builds of their software. 09:49 …

http://www.economist.com/opinion/displaystory.cfm?story_
id=11670357 How true is this? (On oil price speculators:) “since no oil is ever held back from the market, these bets do not affect the price of oil any more than bets on a football match affect the result.” 16:41 …

http://www.snopes.com/sports/soccer/barbados.asp The consequences of a rule that victory in overtime would be counted as a 2–0 result, and Barbados needing to win by two goals to advance to the final of the 1994 Shell Caribbean Cup: Barbados, winning 2–1, score an own goal to force overtime, leaving Grenada a frenzied few minutes to score at either end. They fail, and Barbados duly win via a golden goal in extra time. 12:12 …

http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/07/07/table-of-contents-
creative-and-beautiful-examples/ Smashing Magazine puts together some quite extraordinary spreads on design. (Mostly web design—this on, on tables of contents, is a bit of an exception.) Example after example, and not much text. I don’t know how they come up with so many good examples several times a week. 21:38 …

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2008/07/2008070201c.htm “I never would have made it this far in graduate school without the aid of marijuana.” 21:34 …

http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/07/07/iphone-
3g-prices-and-plans-for-21-countries Prices for the iPhone 3G across different markets. Customers in some countries seem to be ripped off, but you can’t really tell without knowing how much the networks paid for 3G spectrum in the first place. I don’t know what percentage of operating costs goes toward paying for spectrum, but in some countries this must be significant: in 2000 in the UK, for example, five bidders bought 3G spectrum for a combined £22.5bn. 16:43 …

http://marriedtothesea.com/051508/survival-of-the-spitefullest.gif Mammoth vs. human vs. wikipedia. A strange cartoon thing. [pic] Update Someone has edited Wikipedia. Awesome. 15:55 …

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/what-comes-next-in-
this-series-13-33-53.html Until today, Google’s homepage hasn’t had a link to their privacy policy. (I can’t remember where I read this but I think their argument was that more links hurt the user experience, and that if you want it you can Google for it.) Privacy groups have been complaining about this however, and according to this Marissa Mayer blog post, Sergey and Larry finally agreed that the homepage could link to the privacy policy—but only if the total word count didn’t change. So they took away the word “Google” from the footer and replaced it with a link to the privacy policy. (Includes the story about the angry user who sent mysterious emails consisting of a single number (the number of words on the homepage) to Google every time it changed.) 22:46 …

http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/07/man_on_the_moon_
future_and_pas.html Thirty-year old pictures from the moon, and pictures of vehicles being tested for future missions. (Is driving on the Moon really that different that you need funny looking/complicated 6-wheeled vehicles where every wheel can turn independently? Make it small and light and lift it (1/6th gravity) if it gets stuck.) 08:57 …

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/7469398.stm WWE Wrestler Kofi Kingston is ostensibly Jamaican but actually comes from a family of Ghanaian intellectuals. A family friend: “Why would a person who is very capable of going to graduate school decide to jettison all that for concussion in the face?” 11:24 …

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/google-learns-to-
crawl-flash.html Google reckons they can now index (some) Flash. Any examples of this? 07:25 …

http://www.geekologie.com/2008/06/how_romantic_dinner_in_
the_sky.php Dinner in the Sky: eat dinner on a platform suspended 50m in the air by a crane. 17:04 …

http://blogs.salesforce.com/user_experience/2008/06/salesforce-
and.html Browser stats from salesforce.com, a big site with lots of big business/enterprise customers: IE 6 52%, IE 7 31%, Firefox 2 14%, Safari 0% (rounded down from 0.4%), Other 2.5%. 16:29 …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ct5xe2Vnp6c Creepy robotic water snake. As with the Big Dog, does it move like a living thing because they were consciously copying living things, or because that turns out to be the best way? 14:26 …

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kv5d2mXy7dY Some great car driving stunts: 360° and 540° spins, synchronised slide parallel parking, changing a tire while up on two wheels. 07:07 …