Ramblings & ephemera
From Farhad Manjoo’s “iPod: I love you, you’re perfect, now change” (Salon: 23 October 2006):
There are very few consumer products about which you’d want to read a whole book — the Google search engine, the first Mac, the Sony Walkman, the VW Beetle. Levy proves that the iPod, which turns five years old today, belongs [...]
Posted on October 23rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Technology, business | Comments Off
From Wikipedia’s “Pirahã language“:
The Pirahã language is a language spoken by the Pirahã - an indigenous people of Amazonas, Brazil, who live along the Maici river, a tributary of the Amazon.
Pirahã is believed to be the only surviving member of the Mura language family, all other members having become extinct in the last few centuries. [...]
Posted on July 13th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Language & Literature, Writing Ideas | Comments Off
From Noah Shachtman’s “Chameleon Weapons Defy Detection” (Defense Tech: 27 March 2006):
Last week I talked to Anthony Taylor, managing partner of an outfit which makes weapons which can be hidden in plain sight. You can be looking right at one without realizing what it is.
One type is the exact size and shape of a credit [...]
Posted on July 11th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Wash U: Tech in Changing Society, Webster U: InfoSec Management, security | Comments Off
From Adam Goodheart’s “The Last Island of the Savages” (The American Scholar, Autumn 2000, 69(4):13-44):
This is how you get to the most isolated human settlement on earth [North Sentinel Island, in the Andaman Islands]: You board an evening flight at JFK for Heathrow, Air India 112, a plane full of elegant sari-clad women, London-bound businessmen, [...]
Posted on June 3rd, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From “Fuzzy maths” (The Economist: 11 May 2006):
MATHEMATICALLY confident drivers stuck in the usual jam on highway 101 through Silicon Valley were recently able to pass time contemplating a billboard that read: “{first 10-digit prime found in consecutive digits of e}.com.†The number in question, 7427466391, is a sequence that starts at the 101st digit [...]
Posted on June 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Technology, business, weird | Comments Off
From Christer Hamp’s “Archaeoacoustics“:
By archaeoacoustics I mean the recovery of sounds from the time before the invention of recording. This implies that such sounds would have been recorded inadvertently, while intending to do sometring else. Not much has been written about this subject and only very few experiments have been made, but I find the [...]
Posted on May 9th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Technology, history | Comments Off
From The New York Times Magazine’s “Skin Literature“:
Most artists spend their careers trying to create something that will live forever. But the writer Shelley Jackson is creating a work of literature that is intentionally and indisputably mortal. Jackson is publishing her latest short story by recruiting 2,095 people, each of whom will have one word [...]
Posted on April 1st, 2006 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, Fiction, Language & Literature, On Writing, weird | Comments Off
From “Man recites pi from memory to 83,431 places“:
A Japanese psychiatric counselor has recited pi to 83,431 decimal places from memory, breaking his own personal best of 54,000 digits and setting an unofficial world record, a media report said Saturday.
Akira Haraguchi, 59, had begun his attempt to recall the value of pi - a mathematical [...]
Posted on March 4th, 2006 by Scott Granneman
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From The Age:
Scientists running a pioneering experiment with “living robots” which think for themselves said they were amazed to find one escaping from the centre where it “lives”.
The small unit, called Gaak, was one of 12 taking part in a “survival of the fittest” test at the Magna science centre in Rotherham, South Yorkshire, [...]
Posted on November 29th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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From sleazy and how!:
I’m a sucker for a sleazy mystery or a trampy romance novel from the 1950’s-60’s. I usually buy these silly books more for the covers than the stories, but sometimes both are equally bizarre.
This is a gallery of some of the better books I’ve come across. Some have book summaries, others [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff, Language & Literature, history | Comments Off
From The Invisible Library:
The Invisible Library is a collection of books that only appear in other books. Within the library’s catalog you will find imaginary books, pseudobiblia, artifictions, fabled tomes, libris phantastica, and all manner of books unwritten, unread, unpublished, and unfound.
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Word [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, Language & Literature | Comments Off
From John Baez:
The Voynich manuscript is by far the most mysterious of all texts. It is seven by ten inches in size, and about 200 pages long. It is made of soft, light-brown vellum. It is written in a flowing cursive script in alphabet that has never been seen elsewhere. Nobody knows what it means. [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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From Ohio.com:
It was 11:15 p.m. on a warm June night in 1950, and the area of Times Square was buzzing with people leaving the theaters.
Suddenly, in the midst of traffic appeared an odd-looking man, about 30 years old. He wore mutton-chop whiskers and quaint clothing that had gone out of style decades before.
The man [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, science, weird | Comments Off
From Making Light:
The funny thing is, I’ve seen time travellers in NYC. Or at any rate I’ve seen people I thought were time travellers, and one case where I was sure.
This happened one day back in the 1980s. I was riding the subway home from work, and this kid got on at 34th or [...]
Posted on November 28th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, science, weird | Comments Off
If fiction can be regarded as a culture’s subconscious, then it’s clear that we are a nation obsessed with the very rich. From avaricious caricatures like The Simpsons’ Montgomery Burns to literary character studies like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby, our culture — both high and low — is littered with images of billionaires and [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, business | Comments Off
From BrainChannels:
Mr. Csikszentmihalyi (pronounced chick-sent-me-high-ee) is chiefly renowned as the architect of the notion of flow in creativity; people enter a flow state when they are fully absorbed in activity during which they lose their sense of time and have feelings of great satisfaction. Mr. Csikszentmihalyi describes flow as “being completely involved in an activity [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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From Twin Galaxies
For the first time in video game playing history, a perfect score was achieved on the legendary arcade game, Pac-Man.
On July 3, 1999 at 4:45 P.M., taking nearly six hours to accomplish the feat — on one quarter — Billy Mitchell, 33, a Fort Lauderdale hot sauce manufacturer visiting the famous Funspot Family [...]
Posted on November 27th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, Technology | Comments Off
From Best Undiscovered Museum of Americana:
It’s hard to imagine how anything so big could be such a well-kept secret, but there are only two kinds of people in the world: those who haven’t heard of the Shelburne Museum , and those who rave about it. I’m one of the latter.
Situated on 45 acres outside Burlington, [...]
Posted on November 1st, 2005 by Scott Granneman
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From "The Producer" in the 15 October 2001 issue of The New Yorker, an article about the Hollywood producer Brian Grazer:
His creation achieved its brilliant apotheosis a few years ago, when he reconceived Brian Grazer as a form of performance art. He started putting photographs of himself, grinning like a pixie, in dime-store frames and [...]
Posted on October 16th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Commonplace Book, Cool Stuff, True Stories | Comments Off
Go here. Make yer own.
’nuff said.
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Posted on July 7th, 2005 by Scott Granneman
Filed under: Cool Stuff | Comments Off