Levi Michael Smith
After careful consideration we have opted not to take any of your suggestions.
four man rowing team reduces trans-Atlantic record by 11 days
The crew all suffered with food poisoning, which is particularly challenging when four men are sharing a 23 foot boat, and Leven had to perform surgery on Ray’s badly-infected toe with a knife.
dear clusterflock
Unlikely crushes.
Electronic Synesthetic Scratch-n-sniff
(thanks, Michael Lang)
The giraffe at Kelvingrove
from the comments
My old friend Sylvester (fry cook at Dan’s Coffee Shop where I worked as a dishwasher at 13) once told me that he had to wrap his dick in a cold washrag between bouts to keep it strong. He’s the one with the gold teeth with the doors that opened to a filigreed silhouette of Aretha Franklin. He also had albums set up around his big stereo in his apartment that had lines of bright yarn running from them to a thumbtack perspective point on the ceiling–like rays radiating from James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Bessie Smith…. He took me to bars in places that would have killed my mother to know about, where he introduced me as his “little white friend.”
yes
Wired: You’re a Mac user. What have you learned from the design of Apple products?
Brooks: Edwin Land, inventor of the Polaroid camera, once said that his method of design was to start with a vision of what you want and then, one by one, remove the technical obstacles until you have it. I think that’s what Steve Jobs does. He starts with a vision rather than a list of features.
Kevin Kelly interviews Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month and the new The Design of Design.
(via kottke)
Swedish Policeman Dancing
Chris Nolan Inception Research Footage
What it promises. This might get lost in the morning shuffle, but it’s interesting. Watch some of it.
(via the made shop)
fire the antilaser!
Instead of amplifying light into coherent pulses, as a laser does, an antilaser absorbs light beams zapped into it. It can be “tuned” to work at specific wavelengths of light, allowing researchers to turn a dial and cause the device to start and then stop absorbing light.
“By just tinkering with the phases of the beams, magically it turns ‘black’ in this narrow wavelength range,” says team member A. Douglas Stone, a physicist at Yale University. “It’s an amazing trick.”
We’re Going to L.A.
Suggestions are appreciated.
Outta Here
I leave the office in exactly 45 minutes and don’t return until September.
What would you do with a month off?
Summertime Friends
I wish we were sitting on glass
from the spam
This site is a walk-through for all the information you wanted about this and didn’t know who to ask. Look here, and you’ll definitely find it.
Seriously the author doesn’t realize this is staged?
Present Face – Garfunkel and Oates
Re: this conversation.
City of Ruins, 3-D aerial views of bombed-out Warsaw
“City of Ruins,” a new short documentary film, features 3-D aerial sequences that re-create the bombed-out views of Warsaw during World War II. The movie, which debuted this week at the Warsaw Uprising Museum, is directed by Tomek Baginski, who received an Oscar nomination in 2003 for his short animated film “The Cathedral.”
plug it in, plug it in
The Porsche 918 Spyder in a plug-in hybrid version is going into production, promising low emissions and 198 m.p.h.
And a price tag of $600,000.
Sinar P-SLR
Sinar has announced the ‘p-slr’ system that allows DSLR owners to use their camera bodies as digital backs with the company’s view camera system via an adapter. Currently compatible with Canon and Nikon cameras, the system gives access to a range of medium format and view camera lenses and accessories such as bellows, filters etc. An included ‘Quick Clamping’ adapter also allows users to easily change the orientation of the camera body from landscape to portrait and vice versa. The p-slr system comes in various combinations of mounting brackets, bellows and the Quick Clamping adapter, and a number of optional accessories. It will be available from next month at a retail price of 1980 Swiss Francs.
Could be interesting.
Urbanized, a new film by Gary Hustwit
Five years ago I began work on my first documentary, Helvetica, which looked at the worlds of typography and graphic design, and their impact on our visual environment. After Helvetica was released in 2007, I had the idea for a second film, Objectified, which focused on industrial design and product design, and our relationship with the manufactured objects that surround us. While working on Objectified, I realized I wanted to make a third film that would also examine how design affects our lives, and began thinking of the films as a “design trilogy” of sorts.
The third film is called Urbanized and will study urban design, or the design of cities.
(via kottke)
Cluster Bomb: Rick Neece
I first learned I had no clue what the world was about in nursery school at the age of four or five. (I was shamed for spending too much time on the toilet. Not that that was all it was about.) I became socially repressed and a near complete introvert until I was 17 years old when my family moved to Arkansas–the birthplace of my folks.
When I started High School, in 1969, three years before the move, I was five-foot tall and weighed 160 pounds. I was a round boy and a big sissy. These two things brought me a notoriety I did not care for. Consequently, I sought every opportunity to ‘step away’ from those around me by burying my nose in a book and hiding in a corner or behind a chair.
Read more
A Hard Beer
Adverts show a courting country couple apparently about to disappear into a hayloft and a bottle of the Walder Senn beer sticking up at an angle to show just how well drinkers could perform after a few pints of the brew.
(via)
I’ll show you mine if you show me yours
For years, I have been searching for a first sentence worse than the one I have in mind. Before I divulge, however (a handful of people probably already know what it is), does anyone have a sentence they feel can match the worst first sentence I have found, sight unseen? Does this post even make any sense?
The Edge of the American West
My favourite new (to me) blog:
The Edge of the American West.
Figured some of you would like it. Group blog, like here, and they possess some of that same curiosity shown by y’all. And there’s a heaping helping of smart, too.
Lots more politics than here. They deserve some attention.
via Walt
Dear Clusterflock
What do you do when you find out that someone you care about ranks Ayn Rand among their favorite authors?
