January 2008
61 posts
Money Sent Home by Mexicans Almost Stagnant in... →
After years of rapid growth, remittances from the U.S. to Mexico seems to be leveling off at around $24 billion. Is this because of the crackdown on illegal immigration, a weakening American economy, or (not referenced in the article) increased spending by immigrants in this country as a result of greater assimilation?
wear palettes →
An art student extrapolates color palettes from the clothes of those featured in The Sartorialist. Nice little remix project.
“These guys are going, ‘No, I’m focusing on melon. Oh sure thousands of...”
– Jerry Seinfeld on the inventors of seedless watermelon, referenced in a NYTimes article about another food-related bit — the infamous “double dip”.
“I mean I never thought I’d agree with anything Teddy Kennedy said or did,...”
– Fake Steve: Dear readers, she MUST be stopped
Super-addictive game of the moment: ChainFactor →
I got 64,993. Largest chain: 8. Beat dat!
The Sex Diaries of John Maynard Keynes →
A titillating slice of gay history: Keynes apparently recorded his sex life in great detail, albeit partially in code. A nice bit of speculation and reconstruction by Evan Zimroth, who teaches at my (semi-) alma mater, Queens College (NY).
Brattleboro (Vt.) to vote on arresting Bush,... →
“So far, Vermont is the only state Bush hasn’t visited since he became president in 2001.” Quelle surprise!
I literally cringe...
…whenever someone uses the word “peak” — as in, “that ad really peaked my interest” — instead of “pique”.
It usually happens when I read comment-threads, like it did just now. This time I happened to notice how my body reacted: I turned my head and winced, like someone had slapped me across the face.
Gotta get out more.
The CD Album Cover Game
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first article title on the page is the name of your band.
http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four words of the very last quote is the title of your album.
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/ The third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.
Tag it on flickr “CD Cover Meme”
(via xBlog)
The Law of Unintended Consequences →
Alex Tabarrok reflects on Dubner & Levitt’s article in the New York Times Magazine about TLOUC. His thumbnail definition: “The law of unintended consequences is what happens when a simple system tries to regulate a complex system.”
His conclusion is the most concise explanation of the libertarian aversion to government regulation I’ve seen:
Does the law of unintended...
Second Life banks are shut down; bank-run ensues →
The Sullivan nod →
I have no idea whether this maneuver has ever been used on me, which means it probably has:
The Sullivan nod is a sales technique used to create a subconscious suggestion to a customer to purchase one particular item out of a list of like items. It is used most frequently by bartenders and waiters when reciting lists of items (such as alcohol or wine) in the hopes of getting the customer to...
“[T]he morons who run the government are already talking about one of those...”
– Fake Steve: What, me worry?
“You can’t break Las Vegas. You never need an undo button there.”
– Dan Saffer’s SxSW presentation, “Learning Interaction Design from Las Vegas”
Jeff Whitty
Just discovered the website of Jeff Whitty, who wrote the Tony Award-winning book for Avenue Q. He’s got some great smart and funny stuff there. But it’s not a blog, just a collection of pages/stories. A few links:
The Little Darlings: Jeff and his boyfriend try out The Gene Machine. And then Jeff tries it with a non-boyfriend. Chilling!
The Letter: In which Jeff writes a supposedly...
“A man of narrow interests but great intellectual gifts — he reportedly had an...”
– Bobby Fischer, Chess Master, Dies at 64
Radar magazine unveils Madison Avenue's gay ad... →
Cute slideshow of some recent gay-targeted, gay-friendly, and gay-vague ads from major advertisers. Check out Chipotle’s big burrito — and one very naughty Volvo.
“[T]here is a tremendous amount of storytelling that needs to be told in digital...”
– Khoi Vinh, The Story So Far
Khoi Vinh
Khoi Vinh is cool. As a graphic designer he’s good at two complementary, but very different, things. (And in his role as design director of NYTimes.com I encounter him multiple times every day.)
First, look at his website Subtraction: He’s a grid maven. And he’s not precious about it — here’s the grid he uses, and here’s the (remarkably small) set of...
Panoramic New Year's Eve in Las Vegas →
For a newspaper, the Las Vegas Sun (which exists thanks to a joint-operating agreement with the LV Review-Journal) is doing some very impressive multimedia stuff — see the New Year’s link above.
Although the page grid and many of the design elements are straight off the NYTimes website, they are really doing a great job with their large-format, “let the pictures do the...
Living in my iPhone’s GPS cross-hairs. Sweet!
Bingo
Steve Jobs on the Kindle:
It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore. Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year. The whole conception is flawed at the top because people don’t read anymore.
John Gruber (correctly) parses that as follows:
So, either (a) Jobs think the Kindle is a bad concept; or (b) Apple is working...
Library of Congress + Flickr = "The Commons" →
From the LOC blog: “We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves.” The Mechanical Turk strikes again!
Heading to Macworld today. Wonder if they’ll have any iPod cases on display?
I am chastened
I don’t often get to write one of these posts, but here goes. Last year I lauded Yahoo’s idea to create “individual Web sites for entertainment brands like Harry Potter and Star Wars.” It seemed smart, despite being a copycat, fee-based version of what was already happening organically for free on MySpace at the time.
As of today, however, the guy championing that...
“I don’t need you. I’ve got hand sanitizer and a Slinky.”
– One-on-one w/Josh B.
T-minus 2 hours to the keynote. Heart-rate still normal.
Record companies, R.I.P.
Guy Hands, the fellow whose private equity firm (Terra Firma) bought EMI last year, is going to announce he’s cutting 2,000 jobs at the company. Ok, no surprise there: that’s what private equity firms do.
In an interview with the Financial Times, however, he nails the coffin shut on the old record companies’ business model:
“The industry is based still on the phenomenon...
Mixing random liquids at a friend’s salsa party, hoping for a buzz.
Hey, Wikipedia, Give Us an API! →
Nate Westheimer, guest blogging on Silicon Alley Insider, makes a very strong case for opening up Wikipedia via an API to keep Google from strangling it.
“Government-dominated health systems, insofar as they work well (a number of them...”
– Marginal Revolution: What I think I am nearly certain about
