Big Pickles

So I'm reading this article about the switch to digital broadcasting that will happen next February. I'm one of the minority that relies on analog broadcast television, but I'm not really worried about the switch. (Like many in my situation, I'll probably use the conversion as an excuse to finally get an HDTV--and possibly an HD TiVo to go with it!)

I can't get over this picture in the article, however:



This man lives in a retirement community and it looks pretty cozy. It's clean and nicely furnished with a deliberate, masculine decor. The guy looks pretty tough, or at least he used to be. But check out the teddy bear.

I wonder what kind of meaning it has for him. Did it belong to one of his kids, or his wife? It looks pretty new. But it got me thinking about what kind of objects would be meaningful to me if I were his age, and in his situation. Maybe by the time my kids are grown and gone it will be nice to have some of their old toys around to remind me of when we were all younger.

I know kids sometimes like to keep things around from their childhood, baby blankets and teddy bears and whatnot. It never occurred to me that a parent would have the same inclination towards their kids' toys. Artwork and baby shoes, sure. But now that I think about it, if I'm ever an old man living alone, I think it would be pretty cool to have one of Benjamin's worn out toy swords hanging up on my wall.

Labels: kids, tech

SquarO feels like reverse Minesweeper. They give you all the numbers, and you have to figure out where the mines are supposed to go.

My fastest time so far is :49 on Easy. I expect my times will come down as I learn the shortcuts, same as Minesweeper.

ETA: There you go, I just did one in :26.

My best time on Medium is :36.

Labels: games

These will freak you right out.

Mario

Homer Simpson

The guy that makes these just started his blog a couple of weeks ago, so be sure to check back for more.

If you haven't been rickrolled yet, just give it time.

If you don't know what rickrolling is, check out this article in the Guardian. The interview with Rick Astley at the the end is particularly entertaining.

Once you're up to speed, check out how this dude managed to pull off a live rickroll of his boss.

But, as with most things, the prize for best rickroll ever has to go to xkcd.

Labels: internet

When I was a little kid and my mom would take us to the library each week, I had a system. There were several books, or collections of books that I would look for every time.

It was the same at my school library. There was this huge picture book about astronomy, I think it was called The Universe, and if it was in, you grabbed it and checked it out. No questions asked. Having that book checked out in your name was like a status symbol in elementary school. If it was checked out (and it usually was) then you headed for this book about drilling to the center of the earth, and if it was out then you made your way to the thumb print drawing books, this funny sports cartoon book, and so on.

While this hierarchy of desirable books was dictated by what was cool at school, at the public library I was on my own, and free to indulge in books that would have subjected me to ridicule among my school friends. One of my favorite collections was the Creative Activities Program series. I always loved non-fiction as a kid, especially "how-to" books. It's probably why I learned my knots so well in scouts. These books showed you how to do things like build a submarine out of cardboard boxes, complete with working torpedo launchers.

Each week I would check out a different volume--Making, Creating, Fooling, even Sewing. But I never got to read Volume 2: Playing. I imagined it was the best one, too. I mean come on, Playing. I would dash to the shelf every time, but it was never there. I guess some other kid must have lost it or something.

The other series I would always look for was this collection of spy books. They were illustrated in this awesome 70s style that you only see on Sesame Street anymore and they were chock full of useful information. The red ones were called Spy Guides and included Secret Messages, Disguise & Makeup, and Tracking & Trailing. The blue ones were called Detective Guides and included Catching Crooks, Clues & Suspects, and Fakes & Forgeries. I haven't been able to find these anywhere, but it looks like they might have been republished as single volumes: one for spies and one for detectives.

A customer review at Amazon says it best. These books are like The Art of War for eight year olds.

Labels: books

What do Fonzie, Captian Jean-Luc Picard, and George Michael Bluth have in common? They are all figments of Tommy Westphall's imagination.

Tommy Westphall was an autistic child in the TV show St. Elsewhere. In the final episode of that series, it was revealed that Tommy had dreamt the entire run of the show. That means that any other shows that had crossovers with St. Elsewhere were also part of Tommy's dream, and so on. When you consider all the connections, it soon becomes clear that almost all of TV must have originated in Tommy's mind.

For example, characters from St. Elsewhere once visited the bar on Cheers. Cheers spun off Frasier. In Fraiser, Niles and Daphne read Caroline in the City's comic strip. CITC's Annie was hit on by Friends' Chandler. In Friends, Phoebe's twin sister Ursula is also a waitress in Mad About You. Paul from that show leased his old apartment to Kramer on Seinfeld. So all these characters exist in the same fictional sphere.

But a few connections really make things blow up. In Mad About You, Paul did a documentary narrated by The Dick Van Dyke Show's Alan Brady. And from there you can get all the way back to I Love Lucy and the Mary Tyler Moore Show, and a ton of other shows in between. It helps that some shows are crossover whores, like The X-Files (15), The Drew Carey Show (8), and Hi Honey, I'm Home, which racked up 17 crossovers in its 13 episodes on the air.

You can totally play Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon with this, and to me it's even more impressive because they are all fictional connections. Can you connect Peter Petrelli with Larry Appleton? Or The Cosby Show's Heathcliff Huxtable with Cosby's Hilton Lucas? Or the US and UK versions of The Office? I could play with this all day.

ETA: Ok, I just thought of a bunch of problems with this thing. What happens when one show treats another show as a TV show, instead of a reality? For example. Paul Buchman from Mad About You leases his old apartment to Kramer from Seinfeld. But George and Susan from Seinfeld are shown watching Mad About You on television one evening. How can that be? To George Costanza, Paul Buchman is not a character on a TV show, he's the real person who Kramer leased his apartment from.

If you think about it, this kind of continuity error happens anytime anyone in this multiverse treats any of the others as TV shows. There are several other examples on Seinfeld alone. Kramer gets a job on Murphy Brown. George talks to George Wendt (Norm from Cheers) and Corbin Bernsen (Arnie Becker from L.A. Law) backstage at The Tonight Show. None of this should be possible because to the Seinfeld gang, Murphy Brown should be a real reporter, Cheers a real bar, and Becker a real lawyer.

Labels: tv

Got this from Suzanne.


The rules are simple:

Bold movies you have watched and liked.

Turn red movies you have watched and loved.

Italicize movies you saw and didn’t like.

Leave as is movies you haven’t seen.


* The Godfather (1972)
* The Shawshank Redemption (1994)
* The Godfather: Part II (1974)
* The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1966)
* Pulp Fiction (1994)
* Schindler’s List (1993)
* Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)
* One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
* Casablanca (1942)
* The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
* Star Wars (1977)
* 12 Angry Men (1957)
* Rear Window (1954)
* No Country for Old Men (2007)
* Goodfellas (1990)
* Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
* The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
* City of God (2002)
* Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
* The Usual Suspects (1995)
* Psycho (1960)
* Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
* Citizen Kane (1941)
* The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
* North by Northwest (1959)
* The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002)
* Fight Club (1999)
* Memento (2000)
* Sunset Blvd. (1950)
* Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
* It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
* The Matrix (1999)
* Taxi Driver (1976)
* Se7en (1995)
* Apocalypse Now (1979)
* American Beauty (1999)
* Vertigo (1958)
* Amélie (2001)
* The Departed (2006)
* Paths of Glory (1957)
* American History X (1998)
* To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)
* Chinatown (1974)
* Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)
* The Third Man (1949)
* A Clockwork Orange (1971)
* Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
* The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)
* Alien (1979)
* The Pianist (2002)
* The Shining (1980)
* Double Indemnity (1944)
* L.A. Confidential (1997)
* Leben der Anderen, Das [The Lives of Others] (2006)
* The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
* Boot, Das (1981)
* The Maltese Falcon (1941)
* Saving Private Ryan (1998)
* Reservoir Dogs (1992)
* Forrest Gump (1994)
* Metropolis (1927)
* Aliens (1986)
* Raging Bull (1980)
* Rashômon (1950)
* Singin’ in the Rain (1952)
* Rebecca (1940)
* Hotel Rwanda (2004)
* Sin City (2005)
* Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991)
* All About Eve (1950)
* Modern Times (1936)
* Some Like It Hot (1959)
* 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
* The Seventh Seal (1957)
* The Great Escape (1963)
* Amadeus (1984)
* On the Waterfront (1954)
* Touch of Evil (1958)
* The Elephant Man (1980)
* The Prestige (2006)
* Vita è bella, La [Life Is Beautiful] (1997)
* Jaws (1975)
* The Manchurian Candidate (1962)
* The Sting (1973)
* Strangers on a Train (1951)
* Full Metal Jacket (1987)
* The Apartment (1960)
* City Lights (1931)
* Braveheart (1995)
* Cinema Paradiso (1988)
* Batman Begins (2005)
* The Big Sleep (1946)
* Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939)
* Once Upon a Time in America (1984)
* Blade Runner (1982)
* The Great Dictator (1940)
* The Wizard of Oz (1939)
* Notorious (1946)
* Salaire de la peur, Le [The Wages of Fear](1953)
* High Noon (1952)
* Star Wars: Episode VI - Return of the Jedi (1983)
* Fargo (1996)
* The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)
* Unforgiven (1992)
* Back to the Future (1985)
* Ran (1985)
* Oldboy (2003)
* Million Dollar Baby (2004)
* Cool Hand Luke (1967)
* Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
* Donnie Darko (2001)
* Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)
* The Green Mile (1999)
* Annie Hall (1977)
* Kind Hearts and Coronets (1949)
* Gladiator (2000)
* The Sixth Sense (1999)
* Diaboliques, Les [The Devils] (1955)
* Ben-Hur (1959)
* It Happened One Night (1934)
* The Deer Hunter (1978)
* Life of Brian (1979)
* Die Hard (1988)
* The General (1927)
* American Gangster (2007)
* Platoon (1986)
* V for Vendetta (2005)
* Judgment at Nuremberg (1961)
* The Graduate (1967)
* The Princess Bride (1987)
* Crash (2004/I)
* The Wild Bunch (1969)
* Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)
* Letters from Iwo Jima (2006)
* Heat (1995)
* Gandhi (1982)
* Harvey (1950)
* The Night of the Hunter (1955)
* The African Queen (1951)
* Stand by Me (1986)
* Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004)
* Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
* The Big Lebowski (1998)
* The Conversation (1974)
* Little Miss Sunshine (2006)
* Wo hu cang long [Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon ] (2000)
* The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
* Gone with the Wind (1939)
* 3:10 to Yuma (2007)
* Cabinet des Dr. Caligari., Das [The Cabinet of Dr Caligari] (1920)
* The Thing (1982)
* Groundhog Day (1993)
* The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
* Sleuth (1972)
* Patton (1970)
* Toy Story (1995)
* Glory (1989)
* Out of the Past (1947)
* Twelve Monkeys (1995)
* Ed Wood (1994)
* Spartacus (1960)
* The Terminator (1984)
* In the Heat of the Night (1967)
* The Philadelphia Story (1940)
* The Exorcist (1973)
* Frankenstein (1931)
* Anatomy of a Murder (1959)
* The Hustler (1961)
* Toy Story 2 (1999)
* The Lion King (1994)
* Big Fish (2003)
* Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998)
* Bonnie and Clyde (1967)
* Young Frankenstein (1974)
* Magnolia (1999)
* A Streetcar Named Desire (1951)
* In Cold Blood (1967)
* Rosemary’s Baby (1968)
* Dial M for Murder (1954)
* All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
* Roman Holiday (1953)
* A Christmas Story (1983)
* Casino (1995)
* Manhattan (1979)
* Ying xiong [Hero] (2002)
* Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl (2003)
* Rope (1948)
* Cinderella Man (2005)
* The Searchers (1956)
* Finding Neverland (2004)
* Inherit the Wind (1960)
* His Girl Friday (1940)
* A Man for All Seasons (1966)
* Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
* The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962)

It looks like I hand reds out like candy. The only thing I've seen that I didn't like was Wizard of Oz. It just seemed so long when I was a kid. Plus I did not appreciate the scary parts.

I'm going to watch Shawshank tonight because I'm embarrassed to admit I haven't seen it yet.

ETA: Okay, I've seen it now.

Labels: movies

You know, like nunchuku skills, bow hunting skills, computer hacking skills...

Only, we're talking things like dialing a rotary phone, using a card catalog, adjusting your tv antenna, and cranking up and down a car window.

Labels: tech

The link that lead me to this picture was labeled "Good luck!"

So there is this professor who has come up with a technique to keep his students vigorously engaged in otherwise dry and tedious subject matter. Each lecture contains a lie, and the students are challenged to find it. It's more than just an attention-getting device, it also provides valuable practice in questioning and verifying everything you hear.

As one commenter is quick to point out, the professor would really have to know his stuff for this to work. Most of my teachers--especially in high school--made enough honest mistakes that their lectures would never stand up to this kind of scrutiny. So I guess the technique forced him to pay extra close attention as well.

What a neat idea.

Labels: education

I love behavioral economics. It's a beautiful amalgam of theory and counter-intuitive empirical observation. It's the opposite of ideology. It acknowledges that people don't always behave the way we expect them to, and tries to figure out why. And according to this article, Barack Obama's wonks are rooted in it. I guess it makes sense that it was Steven Leavitt, author of Freakonomics, that turned me on to Obama over a year ago.

From the article:

As Thaler puts it, "Physics with friction is not as beautiful. But you need it to get rockets off the ground." It might as well be the motto for Obama's entire policy shop.

I think that encapsulates the difference between Obama's crew and someone like Ron Paul, who I think also has a lot of good ideas. Everything coming from Lew Rockwell and the libertarian think tanks sounds good in theory, but it feels like working out those physics problems where vacuums and frictionless surfaces are assumed. Same goes for Bush's cadre of neoconservatives and Clinton's neoliberalism. Sure, universal health care/getting rid of the Fed/invading Iraq sounds good, but is there any real evidence that things will play out in reality as well as the theory suggests? It's all deductive, and assumes that if we fix policy around over-arching principles, the details will bear out those principles.

I have no way of knowing whether Obama would be a good president, but I like the idea that his people strive to form policy that accounts for and relies on hard data, rather than trying to implement a broad ideology that is assumed will bring about desired results. I'm willing to give the inductive approach a try. It seems more scientific, even humbler. It acknowledges that no one really knows what will happen until we try something out.

Labels: politics

Vanity Fair has reconstructed several iconic Hitchcock scenes with modern actors. It's interesting what choices they've made to reconstruct the scenes.

Most of them substitute today's glamorous stars for yesterday's--Charlize Theron, Gwyneth Paltrow, and Scarlett Johansson are all beautiful as Grace Kelly, and Naomi Watts and Jodi Foster work well as Tippi Hedren.

But you know someone's having some fun when Seth Rogen is cast in Cary Grant's role.

Labels: movies

Like Pacman, but you control the ghosts.

Labels: games

What do the 41-9 Boston Celtics and the 25-0 Memphis Tigers have in common?

The Dribble-Drive Motion offense.

Labels: sports

Once when I was a kid, I mentioned to my mom that I tend to associate numbers with certain colors. She responded that it sounded like I had a neat idea for a Swatch watch. This was the eighties, after all, when Swatches were all the rage.

I didn't think much of it, really. When you're a kid, it seems like colors are often used as a memory aid. In first grade, Mrs. Parker's class was green, Mrs. Tyler's class was blue, etc. So I always assumed that the letter P is green and the month of May is yellow because I had some memory of similar associations from childhood. Probably I'm just remembering some colored refrigerator magnets or something.

Today, my officemate Scott directed me to the wikipedia page on synesthesia. He was reading about a piano player that had it, and it reminded him of Ratatouille, where the rat sees colors and hears music when he tastes certain flavors. He thought it would be a cool condition to have.

I'm now convinced I have grapheme-color synesthesia. It's strongest for digits, but I also get colors for letters, days of the week, months of the year, etc. I don't know why it would be cool to have, though. I can't remember it ever coming in handy for anything. I just figured everyone did this.

The colors I see:

Labels: wikipedia

The trailer for the new movie is out. It's even in HD!

My premature verdict: better than Rocky Balboa and Rambo, in the 80s action hero reprise genre. Unlike those two, this movie isn't Ford's attempt to relive his glory days--in fact, it took some convincing by Spielberg before he would even agree to do it.

But there will still be some acknowledgment that the character is past his prime, as evidenced by this line from the trailer:

Indy friend: This ain't gonna be easy.
Indy: Not as easy as it used to be.

Labels: movies

There are a ton of websites I use regularly that I don't think I've ever mentioned here because they seem like common knowledge, but today I got to thinking that maybe they aren't. For example, no matter how many times I mention it, it seems like there is always someone in our office who has never heard of Snopes. (That probably says more about our turnover than anything else.) So here's a few:

IMDB: Just kidding, everyone already knows this one.

Google Maps: ...is the best! True dat! Double True!

Okay, seriously now...

AMG: All Music Guide, like IMDB but for music. In fact, I actually like its sister site, All Movie Guide, better than IMDB, though it's still in beta.

Metacritic: Collects reviews on all kinds of media from various sources and combines them into an aggregate "metascore."

Snopes: Urban legend and hoax debunker. Whenever you get an email warning you about the latest carjacking scheme or that Barack Obama is a terrorist, you can usually count on Snopes to make you feel stupid for having believed it for a second.

(This website has become so popular that email hoaxes now tend to include "I checked it on Snopes and it's TRUE!" Notwithstanding, check it on Snopes and you will probably find that it's not so much.)

The Drudge Report: Not always the most accurate, but almost always the first with breaking news. Mostly politics, some entertainment gossip.

ConsumerSearch: Sort of like Metacritic but for consumer goods, they gather multiple professional reviews from various sources and use them to determine a winner. Epinions is a good site for consumer reviews, but it's gotten cumbersome lately.

Weather Underground: My favorite weather site, it has very detailed information from neighborhood weather stations, if you need that data for a project or a log or something.

Dinkytown: I don't know what's up with the name, but this site has every kind of financial calculator you can imagine. Very useful for simple models and projections (How long will my money last, etc.) I use it at work all the time.

Zillow: Map of real estate values. Careful, if you haven't seen this one before, you may end up spending the rest of the day looking up the market value of all your friends' houses.

That's probably enough for now, but I'm sure there are tons I've forgotten.

Labels: internet

I'm loving this band. Their name is a little off-putting at first, but then again so is Barenaked Ladies. They are Canadian, too, so maybe that has something to do with it.



(via BoingBoing)

Labels: music, video

This American Life is a very compelling radio show that airs on NPR on the weekends. Each episode is composed of several "acts" that share a theme. This week's theme is "Tough Room," and I'm linking to it because three of the four acts deal with stuff I'm interested in.

Free download

Act 1 is about the Onion, Act 3 is about LDS Missionaries, and Act 4 is about Malcolm Gladwell. (I'm sure Act 2 is interesting, too.)

Labels: audio

You don't see too many websites like this anymore. It's too bad, really. Someday our kids won't believe us when we tell them how bad it used to be out there.

Note: Be sure to hit refresh several times. It gets better.

Labels: internet