cars I’d buy, classic, vol 1.1
1972 Chevy C-10
Michael’s post reminded me I forgot the 1972 Chevy C-10. My ex-brother-in-law’s step father had a couple of these — one blue and cream, one orange and cream — nicely restored, and although I’ve always been more a Ford man, once I opened my eyes, I had to set that aside. Chevy got the second generation C/Ks right. (Of course, I want mine with classic wheels, but this was the best picture I could find.)
A Lotta More
Before I can tell my story, I’ll need an old pickup truck. Ford or Chevy, it doesn’t matter. Not a Dodge. A little rust around the wheel wells is fine, but not so much of it that the fenders are flapping like a killdeer’s wings. Faded, powdery two-tone paint is acceptable. An old comforter covering the duct tape covering the high-mileage driver’s seat is okay, too. The truck should graze in clover and timothy up past the hubcaps. Yes, the windshield is cracked.
Picher, OK January 15, 2011
There is no shortage of beautiful decay in this town. Read more about Picher.
See more of my birthday trip to Picher here.
Facebook in the 90s
“Embedding disabled by request.”
Osaka Station City fountain
via jwz
You gotta get up in the air to really see it
photoshop out of context
(thanks, Aaron)
quote out of context
This starts to explain something about Full House like why Joey stuck around all those years. At some point you’d think he’d want to sleep in a regular bedroom or bring a girl home. Or own property. Helping out his widowed friend is one thing, but devoting his life to a family that wasn’t his is another. Or was it? After seeing blonde baby after blonde baby being born, he probably knew what was up. This is why he lived with them for so many years; it was so he could be close to these girls who he knew to be his illegitimate daughters.
quote out of context
Behind its flower box framed windows, hidden away from mourners, is an automated storage system. It stores and chills encoffined corpses, delivering them through hatches and into a viewing room, day or night, whenever friends and family come to pay their respects.
(via marginal revolution)
tweet of the day
headline of the day
Mississippi man who said he was abducted by aliens dies
bobblehead
First! Half a dozen systems, set to run on auto — limbic, pulmonary, reproductive, digestive, et al. — then . . . a subconscious bank for memory, a neural map for no. Make certain the systems overlap in contradiction. A billion years of stimuli that default to the softest form of code. (Recognize environment as mold.) Finally, plop adaptive, certain I atop it all, and watch it go.
@Walmartlabs
You think of large tech companies like Google or Apple having extensive R&D labs, but Wal-Mart opened one after its low-cost advantage began to disappear.
In one experimental project expected to debut for the holiday season, @Walmartlabs has been recruiting people to test Shopycat, a Facebook and web app that uses people’s social-media profiles and comments to generate gift ideas.
“Most of the recommendation systems you see today in online shopping are based on prior transactions,” said Mr. Harinarayan, who worked for Amazon in the late 1990s when its system was developed. The system works well for books, where people tend to buy in the same genres, he said, but so much not elsewhere.
“It’s our belief that more than past transactions, your interests and what interests of yours are trending are better predictors of what you’d be interested in buying,” he said.
(via @tcarmody)
Unlike Philip K. Dick’s novel “The Minority Report” or the film inspired by the novel, the program relies on algorithms, and not mutants to predict the likelihood of something happening
The police department in Santa Cruz has employed predictive algorithms to reduce burglaries and car break-ins.
The heart of the program is the belief that criminals often commit a second or third crime in the same location and the same time as a first successful crime. For example, if a burglar is successful breaking into a home at 2 p.m. in a certain neighborhood because no one is home, the criminal will use that experience to do it again to another house in the same neighborhood around the same time.
In the case of Santa Cruz, on California’s central coast and home to a University of California campus, that would be about four days later.
The algorithm knows this because Mohler has fed eight years of data on crimes in Santa Cruz into the algorithm.
Now you know, and I guess, so do the criminals.
from the comments
Speaking of cons, as a college freshman I decided I was a talented hair stylist. I announced that I could cut anybody’s hair. I had never done such a thing, except to cut some bubble gum out of my bangs as a 5-year-old. So, three friends with beautiful, long straight hair sat down, one by one, in front of the dorm mirror. I draped their shoulders with towels. And I cut their hair into long shags. They looked fabulous and were very pleased. I continued to give them trims for a while, but eventually got bored with it.
I wish, at the time, I had announced that I was an entrepreneur amassing my first billion dollars…
spam name
Martinchalk, Cynthia.
once upon a time
I went to people’s homes where parents ignored us because they didn’t see us anyway.
headline of the day
Gordon Ramsay’s Porn Dwarf Double Eaten by Badger
tweet of the day, III
google.com/flights
(thanks, Joel)
Sunbeam Variations
Flitting about for a while, most especially since Kristin Thompson posted about it on David Bordwell’s website on cinema a week or so ago.
Riffing on D. W. Griffith’s little-known film Sunbeam (1912).
#MayoMemories
I don’t know if Hellmann’s is deleting them, but #MayoMemories should be trending right now.
(thanks, Aaron)
this post is about football statistics
The first thing Romer did was analyze every fourth down during the first quarter of every NFL game between 1998 and 2000. (He had help from a computer program.) Then, he figured out the fluctuating value of a first down at each point on the football field. After all, a first down was more valuable for a team if it occurred on an opponents two yard line than on their own twenty yard line. The next thing Romer calculated was the statistical likelihood of going for it on fourth down under various circumstances and actually getting a first down. He also calculated the probability of kicking a successful field goal from various spots on the field.
tweet of the day, II
“Uncreative Writing”
Kenneth Goldsmith in The Chronicle Review:
For the past several years, I’ve taught a class at the University of Pennsylvania called “Uncreative Writing.” In it, students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they’ve surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness.
