Taken today with Instagram while I was at the NJ Historical Fair

Someone has taken the time to count the number of gunshots fired at James Bond (aka Agent 007) throughout all 22 Bond movies.

It turns out that there have been over 4,600 shots fired at him.

A static well-aimed shot would almost certainly have proved lethal, but assuming all 4662 were “on the run”, the probability of a single fatal shot is about 5 per cent. That is, the chance of a single shot missing is 0.95, and hence the probability of all shots missing is 0.954662 or 1.4 × 10-104, which is as close to zero as makes no difference

Now, about all of those Bond Girls he has gotten to know so well.

via New Scientiest by way of NextDraft.

A Tribute to Adam Yauch, Composed Entirely of Beastie Boys Lyrics

Born and bred Brooklyn — U.S.A.
They call me Adam Yauch but I’m M.C.A.
Like a lemon to a lime, a lime to a lemon
I sip the def ale with all the fly women (1)
I’m not James at 15 or Chachi in charge
I’m Adam and I’m adamant about living large (2)
I’ve got more rhymes than I’ve got gray hairs
And that’s a lot because I’ve got my share (3)
Now what do we have here, an outlaw and his beer
I run this land, you understand, I make myself clear. (4)
M.C. for what I am and do
the A is for Adam and the lyrics; true
so as pray and hope and the message is sent
and I am living in the dreams that I have dreamt (5)
I wish for peace between the races
Someday we shall all be one (6)
That’s right y’all
Don’t get uptight y’all (7)
I’m out and I’m gone
I tell you now I keep it on and on. (8)

via The Washington Post by way of Buzzfeed.

Via The Daily

The NYC Department of Records has released almost 900,000 never before seen photos from their archives dating as far back as the 1890′s. The Daily Mail has a bunch posted on their site. As of now, the NYC Department of Records site has crashed because of the incoming volume of traffic.

Oh, here is a modern shot of the corner in the above photo.

For all of you who were wondering, here is what the back of the Instragram camera looks like. A little geeky humor from Cole Rise over on Dribble.

It was on the moonless night of March 24 and 25, 1944, that 76 Allied prisoners of war, most of them British, clambered down a 30-foot shaft and crawled through a 340-foot-long tunnel below the supposedly escape-proof Stalag Luft III camp in eastern Germany — the daring breakout that was celebrated in the classic 1963 movie “The Great Escape.”

In their pockets, the escapees carried what looked like officially stamped documents, identification cards, business cards and even letters written in German from purported wives and sweethearts, all of which were intended to make it possible for them to befuddle a hapless guard or police officer stopping them on their way to freedom.

Flight Lt. Alex Cassie, a British bomber pilot, was one of a half-dozen artists who had been forging those documents for months, playing a central role in the larger conspiracy to free hundreds of the nearly 1,000 airmen in the camp. They called their unit Dean and Dawson, after a well-known London travel agency.

Mr. Cassie created many of the falsified documents, papers and assets that the 76 escapees used to help them escape Nazi Germany. He and his fellow POW used great ingenuity and inventiveness in planning out their task. They used paper from the nicest book bindings for the passport and identification cards. They got ink, photos and information by bribing the German guards with cigarettes. More broadly, they used planks from their beds as support beams for their tunnels, and used the heels of boots as stamps for the forged paperwork.

The 1963 movie “The Great Escape” was a loosely accurate description of this event, with the typical Hollywood flair. Its funny to read the less than kind 1963 review of the movie which today is considered a classic.

Ironically, while his fellow POW’s shimmied their way through the tunnel that evening, Mr. Cassie stayed behind because he was claustrophobic and could not handle the tight enclosure of the long tunnel to freedom. His decision to stay ended up working to his favor as 73 of the 76 escapees were captured and 50 of them were subsequently executed by the Germans.

Who knew Ping Pong could be so technologically advanced? The above table has an advanced computer system baked into the table, along with a touch surface that responds to voice and real object interactions. So that means you can see where every shot landed incase there is an earth shaking dispute over that double break point serve that just nicked the corner of the table.

The table is part of a broader list of Unbelievable Futuristic Design Concepts That Inspire Creativity.

Via Interpretation By Design

An absolutely awesome script titled FOOL.JS, full with Mr. T visual, that you too can easily enable on your website.

And when you are done, you can prank unsuspecting visitors to your site with things like an endless loop of Rick Astley, making your site unclickable, and my favorite, the wonky prank that places your site a little off kilter.

Look out on 4/1/13! :)

Whoever is to blame, the truth is that there has been no bigger missed opportunity in the technology business than AOL Instant Messenger. There’s an investor we (ed: SAI) know in New York who swears AOL blew it when it didn’t turn AIM into a full-on Skype competitor.

When I briefly worked at AOL and on the IM product, it was sometimes referred to as AOL’s “800 pound gorilla” because it had so so many registered users that AOL had no idea what to do with. I guess they never figured out what to do with them and now their once dominant market position has eroded in a major way.

Via SAI

I don’t understand why the NFL can’t get their act together when it comes to Overtime rules during the regular season. I mean, the way the have it now just doesn’t pass the VP of Common Sense or “grandmother” rule (i.e. If you explained this to your grandmother, would she get it?).

Today, the NFL leaders voted to adopt the current Playoff OT rules for all regular season games which are:

An overtime in the regular season now will end on a team’s first possession only if it scores a touchdown or the defense forces a safety. If the team kicks a field goal on its first possession, the opposing team also will get a possession. If it also kicks a field goal, the extra period continues.

As it stands, the Playoff OT rules are just insanely silly – its kinda sorta sudden death – if you score a TD you win right then and there, but it is not sudden death if you score a field goal. These rule changes were made 2 years ago after the New Orleans Saints did what several other teams have done and won the coin toss, marched down the field, and kicked a field goal. Only difference was that their drive won them the NFC Championship instead of giving a random 5-6 team a .500 record.

To me, the way the NBA handles Overtime is the way to go, and in many ways the NFL is a similar ebb-and-flow type of sport with multiple ways to score points. The way the NBA does it is it has a 5 minute extra period – whoever has more points at the end wins. If it is still tied, they play another 5 minutes and so on until a team wins.

I’ve never played football, so I fully admit I don’t know the subtle nuances of these elements of the game. However, from watching the sport for years, it seems to me that teams would still demonstrate a sense of urgency and high levels of game strategy in approaching a full 5 minute extra session compared to the “if/than” option that they just voted to go with. The amount of elapsed “real” time that a full 5 minute session would take wouldn’t be that much different than what we see in today’s format. Having a full 5 minute extra period would give much more of an even balance of responsibilitiy to the offenses and defenses of both teams. And probably most importantly, it won’t force fans to go to the rule book when an overtime game happens to understand the nuances of the “your team didn’t win because the other team scored a TD in ‘Sudden Death Overtime’ after you scored first” scenario. At least by playing out a short, 5 minute extra period, the scenario is crystal clear. Keep on playing until whoever has the most points when the clock hits 0:00 wins.

Things are complex enough today. Do we really need this complexity in the already complex game of football?

For example, one man owns land where he built a gas station in what he thought was South Carolina, but is now revealed to be North Carolina. He says his station will be worthless due to higher gas taxes in North Carolina, and that the business-boosting sales of fireworks is now illegal.

The governments of each of the states are assuring all people impacted (roughly 90) by the shift of the border will “be taken care of”, whatever that means. At least those folks who are unexpectedly becoming citizens of North Carolina can now support a basketball program (UNC – Chapel Hill) that has had decidedly more success than the program at the University of South Carolina.

Via Consumerist

A neat photo of Daytona Beach, FL from 1904. Clearly it wasn’t the Spring Break destination that it is today.

Via Shorpy Historical Photo Archive

Lionel Messi, the brilliant striker for Barcelona, broke the club’s all time record for goals scored last night in spectacular fashion, netting a hat trick (his 10th of the season).

To put this in perspective, Messi has scored 235 goals for Barcelona and he is all of 24 years old. The previous record for Barcelona, held by Cesar Rodriguez, took 11 years to accomplish while Messi took barely 6.

Via Bleacher Report.

This year marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic (along with several other important 100th anniversaries including the opening of Fenway Park, the introduction of the Oreo Cookie, and the opening of L.L. Bean in Maine to name a few).

As the years pass, the story of the doomed ship continues to fascinate. Here is a list of famous people who just missed boarding the Titanic for its maiden and last voyage.

The list includes J.P Morgan (above), Milton Hershey, and Henry Clay Frick.

It appears that my WordPress install was hacked through a vulnerability in the TimThumb plug ins I had installed into WordPress.

Now that my site is back from the brink, I guess the only reasonable thing to do is take this opportunity to re-set my site and re-design it. So in the coming weeks, things may be a bit funky here while I work through how to clean up the site and make some very much needed upgrades to how the site works in normal browsers as well as all other forms of devices out there.

In late March, my alma mater Syracuse University will be releasing the digitized archives of Marcel Breuer’s 30,000 drawings, photographs, and other materials from the early stages of his illustrious architecture and design career (at breuer.syr.edu…but the site is not up yet).

Breuer achieved remarkable success as a student in the furniture workshop of the Bauhaus, leading Walter Gropius to offer him a faculty position in 1925. That same year, he earned widespread critical acclaim for his tubular steel “Wassily” chair, which incorporated the radical simplicity of form and interest in industrial materials often espoused by the Bauhaus. Breuer helped to redefine post-war American domestic architecture through projects like the “bi-nuclear” house and the demonstration house in the garden of New York’s Museum of Modern Art (1949). He designed some 60 private residences by the mid-1950s, all of which are represented in the Marcel Breuer Digital Archive.

I am not a huge fan of Bauhaus style, but Breuer’s impact on the world of design and architecture can not be denied. Similar to how Frank Lloyd Wright extended his designs into the interior of the building, Breuer did the same with his furniture designs. Some of the most distinctive and lasting furniture and chair designs were developed by Breuer. When you go to a Doctor’s offic, more times than not you will sit in one of his Ceska chairs. When I was younger, a friend and neighbor of mine had one of his Wassily Chairs in their house.

Also, next to Rem Koolaas, Walter Gropius (Breuer’s mentor) is one of the coolest architect’s name out there. :P

via Inside SU

Opening day of MLB Spring Training. A ton of photos over at Buzzfeed.

via Buzzfeed

An angry man went into a Target outside of Minneapolis, demanding to talk to a manager: My daughter got this in the mail!” he said. “She’s still in high school, and you’re sending her coupons for baby clothes and cribs? Are you trying to encourage her to get pregnant?”

The manager didn’t have any idea what the man was talking about. He looked at the mailer. Sure enough, it was addressed to the man’s daughter and contained advertisements for maternity clothing, nursery furniture and pictures of smiling infants. The manager apologized and then called a few days later to apologize again.

On the phone, though, the father was somewhat abashed. “I had a talk with my daughter,” he said. “It turns out there’s been some activities in my house I haven’t been completely aware of. She’s due in August. I owe you an apology.

via Forbes

I love this t-shirt.

“I weep for the future.”

Found on Pinterest

NASA will be shutting down the last of its IBM Mainframe computers located at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, AL. The Mainframes used by NASA “back in the day” were large enough to fill a room, while today they are the size of a refrigerator. From NASA’s Linda Cureton:

In my first stint at NASA, I was at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center as a mainframe systems programmer when it was still cool. That IBM 360-95 was used to solve complex computational problems for space flight. Back then, I comfortably navigated the world of IBM 360 Assembler language and still remember the much-coveted “green card” that had all the pearls of information about machine code. Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic – today, “there’s an app for it!”

There are no listed details on what will be replacing the Mainframes, probably because of security reasons.

via NASA.

I went with my son to see Star Wars: The Phantom Menace yesterday on the big screen and in 3D.  And to no one’s surprise, the movie has not gotten any better with the new effects. Menace is easily the worst of the three “prequels” and wins by a nose over the whole Ewok thing from “Return of the Jedi”.

When movies are re-released with new bells and whistles, its always interesting to recollect about what people’s initial reaction was to the movie, to see if time has healed any wounds or opened new ones. With Menace, neither is the case. This release of Phantom Menace is, daresay, a little worse than the original because you have to watch the movie with the stupid 3D glasses on and cringe at the way a movie franchise that SHOULD have been built for 3D demonstrated no redeeming enhancements from the visual effect that felt like it was hacked into the master copy using iMovie.

As in 1999, the one element of awesomeness in this movie is Darth Maul. From an original review of Phantom Menace in 1999, this snippet from Eric Davis at Movies.com sums his presence up:

Darth Maul was — and still is — the greatest thing about Episode I. He’s scary and menacing, and you’re frightened by him. The dude rocks a duel lightsaber, which totally kicked my world’s ass when I first witnessed the ferociously-paced fight scene between Maul, Obi-Wan and Qui-Gon — perhaps the film’s greatest sequence — and one of the best Star Wars lightsaber battles the series has to offer.

You are begging and pleading for more of him in this movie…maybe some “never before seen” fight sequences that look stunningly awesome in 3D…something, anything to expand his presence in the movie and make it worthy of the epic series it is part of. But alas, we are stuck with Nute Gunray and a Senatorial debate over taxes that apes those in this Galaxy.

I’ll just stick with the original Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back, thank you very much.

via Moviefone.

The original specifications for Lego from their 1958 patent filing. Pretty detailed specifications for the basic Lego brick.

Via Man Made

I love this. Built by Lineposters. Their Etsy Store has versions from Boston, Washington DC, San Francisco, Berlin, Paris, London, Tokyo and a few others.

VentureBeat has learned that job search startup Simply Hired has laid off approximately 20 percent of its staff, according a source close to the company

But wait, there’s more:

In a second case of irony, Simply Hired owns the website www.simplyfired.com. When you go to simplyfired.com, the site re-directs to simplyhired.com. With regard to the layoffs, that’s unfortunate.

via VentureBeat.

I was listening to Leo Laporte’s iPad Today on his TWIT network and during the most recent episode (#82) of the show, he and Sarah Lane walked through MacWorld. One of the people they met up with was Bert Monroy, who is a prolific Photoshop artist. One of the pieces of art he did was the above featured Times Square, which is jaw dropping. The actual artwork is 5 feet high by 25 feet wide, its file size is 6.5 Gigabytes, it used over half a million Photoshop layers and it took over 4 years to complete!!

I downloaded this week’s copy of Sports Illustrated to my iPad (I also found a paper version of it in my mailbox too…very strange concept, this magazine thing.) and to my intense horror, saw that Tom Brady and my Patriots were gracing their cover. How could they?

For those of you uninitiated into the ways of sports superstition and Sports Illustrated, it is well documented that sports teams and athletes appearing on the cover of SI have subsequently suffered athletic failure and injury of all shapes and sizes. For those of you naysayers, read through the list on the Wikipedia page…its too frequent an occurrence to be a fluke.

And beyond the Wikipedia page, just take a look at the image above from my SI iPad app library. Four of the past six covers (including this week’s with the Pats on it) have featured NFL teams in the Playoffs. And what do you know…every NFL team featured on the cover (before this week) have been promptly dispatched from the playoffs – Tebow and the Broncos, Rodgers and the Packers, and Alex Smith and the 49ers.

My only hope that the Patriots don’t end up suffering this same indignity is that SI does the noble and right thing and put the Giants on next week’s cover which comes out ahead of the Super Bowl. Maybe having the Giants on the cover next week will “out-jinx” having the Patriots on the cover this week. I can only hope!

UPDATE 2.1.12: Well, it looks like SI has it out for the Patriots. Coming off of last week’s cover shot of Tom Brady, they went ahead and pulled a double doozy on the Patriots by putting owner Bob Kraft on its cover. That’s two weeks in a row of bad SI cover karma.

Really neat CGI “flythrough” by Cristobal Vila that depicts the construction of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater and provides some interesting views of the building. Even though its a digital rendering, its a pretty neat video.

Via Clusterflock

Artist Scott Garner with a decidedly modern take on the traditional still life. Luckily, there were no beverages in the picture.

Via today and tomorrow.

A pair of teenagers in Toronto constructed a homemade weather balloon that they then released into the sky with a few Lego accessories – including a Lego Minifigure. After a bit over 90 minutes up at an altitude of around 80,000 feet, their balloon came back to earth but not after taking several photos of the Lego

Via Make Magazine.

Lets Go Patriots!

Amazing photos of the Costa Concordia that ran aground off the coast of Italy.

Via Buzzfeed

I think Warby Parker needs to work on tweaking its re-targeting algorithm. There were even more WP ads lower down on the page #overkill #inefficiency

In a related note, I just sent them my resume yesterday and I’d be happy to talk to them about how I can fix this issue.

Over the holiday break, I began to build up my collection of desktop backgrounds since its so easy to rotate desktop backgrounds on my new iMac. In my online travels, I discovered the great site SimpleDesktops and went a bit overboard downloading desktops from the site. And in looking at the examples on their site, I got inspired to develop a bunch on my own. So, with little fanfare, I would like to share my collection of minimal dekstop wallpapers for your viewing and downloading pleasure. All the backgorunds are sized for a 27″ iMac desktop (2560 px x 1440 px) however you should be able to download them and your Mac/PC should resize them.

Below are a few examples to whet your appetite. I’ve developed several related to Superheros, English Premier League teams, MLB teams, London Underground Tube Stops, and a few Random Ones that strike my fancy. Visit my Sandbox page or go here to see the full collection.

Queens Park Tube Stop

Harry Potter

The Bat Signal!

If you happen to be traveling in northern Sweden, and you need to scratch that “bonding with nature” itch, check out the Treehotel in Harads, Sweden. You can choose from a variety of treehouses including the super-cool Birdsnest and Mirrorcube rooms.

Via Yatzer

Back in 1961, J.R.R. Tolkien and his Lord of the Rings epic were nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature but the Nobel committee felt his work was “second rate prose”. In addition to Tolkien, the Nobel committee dismissed the works of Robert Frost, EM Forster and other not to shabby writers.

The prose of Tolkien – who was nominated by his friend and fellow fantasy author CS Lewis – "has not in any way measured up to storytelling of the highest quality", wrote jury member Anders Österling. Frost, on the other hand, was dismissed because of his "advanced age" – he was 86 at the time – with the jury deciding the American poet’s years were "a fundamental obstacle, which the committee regretfully found it necessary to state". Forster was also ruled out for his age – a consideration that no longer bothers the jury, which awarded the prize to the 87-year-old Doris Lessing in 2007 – with Österling calling the author "a shadow of his former self, with long lost spiritual health".

Nobel committee, the Eye of Sauron is upon you.

Via The Guardian (UK).

I really could have used these during my undergrad years at Syracuse.

via LikeCool

Only three days until Festivus! I hope you have all found your alumninum poles in the crawlspace under your house.

There has been a lot of turmoil this year around the country and the world. I am anticipating some serious ramifications from the Airing of Grievances.

As it turns out, after going up in the 70′s and 80′s, the average price per brick has actually been trending down. I sampled the prices of sets through the years as listed on brickset.com from across themes and set sizes. To try to make it an apples-to-apples comparison, I excluded minifigs by themselves, accessories, promotional items, games, or anything that required batteries, as well as Mindstorms, Duplo, and non-brick items.

One theory noted in the article is that the Lego sets of today are far more complex and thus have far more pieces than those of the 1970′s and 1980′s, So looking at it on a “per brick” may be skewing the numbers lower.

At the end of the day though, I think what this is telling us is that we should go out and get that epic 3,000 piece, 8 lb, 50 inch long Star Wars “Super Star Destroyer” kit for $400.

Clean yourself like Brad Pitt and Edward Norton. Buy a bar of soap as depicted on the film’s movie poster.

The film’s director David Fincher has been receiving a lot of attention recently from his work on “The Social Network” plus his upcoming “Girl With The Dragon Tattoo” movie release, and as such, his early movies like Fight Club have been receiving some retro acclaim.

via Omni Consumer Products — Fight Club Soap

In keeping with the previous post showing Pulp Fiction edited in chronological order, here is a great poster mock up for the movie. Love the rendering of Marvin!

via olaf cuadras ferré.

I have always wanted to do this but never did. I’m glad someone got around to it! Fantastic!!

via Buzzfeed

This is awesome.

Order the Poster Here – Framed or Unframed.

via TNW

Atop the Mustang food chain that year was the legendary Boss 429, of which only 858 were built during the car’s two-year production run. Truth be told, these models weren’t even built by Ford, which already had a plate full of ongoing special projects. Instead, the build of the Boss 429 Mustang was farmed out to Kar Kraft.

Building the Boss 429 from a production Mustang was no minor task, since engine mounts, suspension mounts and even shock towers had to be moved to accommodate the 429 cubic-inch V-8. While rated at 375 horsepower for insurance purposes, it’s widely believed that the 429 cranked out closer to 500 horsepower in stock trim.

According to the article, the car is capable of breaking an 11.0 second quarter mile, which seems a little unrealistic to me when modern Corvettes can’t even break 12.0 seconds.

via Motorauthority

What in the name of Steve Carell is going on? Now you can buy Dunder Mifflin paper at Quill, a subsidiary of Staples!! Heritics!!

Go Directly to Quill’s website to purchase your authentic Dunder Mifflin paper

Via Buzzfeed

Via Geeky Gadgets

An interesting project is underway in Milan, Italy where architect Sefano Boeri designed a pair of highrises that incorporate trees on the exterior of every floor.

The concept of reforestation within the city context intends to minimize the expansion of established urban fabric for additional green spaces while still increasing biodiversity which has been lost during development. the implementation of this project serves as a model for contemporary european cities for linking a building with nature within city limits.

The design of the buildings incorporated how the plants and trees would produce CO2 for the building and the area around it. Practically speaking, I’m wondering who is going to trim those trees on the higher floors.

via Designboom

via Etsy

The correlation with ratings [and Tweets] is much stronger. “When you look at the volume of same-day Tweets about a show, it’s a significant factor in explaining that show’s ratings.” “If Nielsen’s our blood pressure, I’d like you to think of Twitter as our heartbeat. It’s the EKG of attention around a show.”

This is just another example of why Steve Jobs and so many others have been obsessed with distrupting the TV industry. The Neilsen ratings model of TV measurement has always been fundamentally broken. Digital TV services (Apple TV, Boxee, Roku, etc.) and services like Twitter and IntoNow now give marketers, advertisers and media companies the opportunity to mash up data sources and extract a level of insight never before seen.

Twitter alone can deliver a depth of knowledge at the aggregate level is pretty staggering and this is just another example of that. Services like DataSift and Gnip enable you to tap into the Twitter firehose and dig into some pretty amazing insights that can help inform so many business decisions.

Gladwell’s work has been widely criticized from the pages of New York Magazine (“The bigger criticism of Gladwell is not that he’s unoriginal but that he’s unserious”) to the New York Times (“Mr. Gladwell has conflated fraud with overvaluation.”) to the Columbia Journalism Review (“Of course Gladwell lacks rigor – he’s a feature writer, not a brain scientist.”) — which also notes that he is rather well-remunerated through corporate speaking fees — and beyond. Many of those criticisms note that his biggest works are more often than not distillations of other people’s research and ideas… and that they tend to almost exclusively support a consumerist, elitist philosophy.

And BofA has had its recent share of PR disasters as well with its TARP bailouts, mass layoffs and $5 bank fee fiasco. Seems to me BofA needs a hell of a lot more than Malcolm Gladwell to get its ship in order, while I will be interested to see how a BofA paycheck will influence Gladwell’s perspective on future books and stories.

Awesome video from my friends at Twink. Twink is a toy piano band and the brainchild of my former colleague at Lycos, Mike Langlie. Watch and listen…its addictive and catchy!

Photo of the Jefferson Memorial and the Tidal Basin that I took early in the morning this past Saturday.

The Apple Store on 5th Avenue unveiled its new glass cube that now only uses 15 panes of glass vs the previous version that had 90.

Via Business Insider

I want.  Four Seasons, Bora Bora.

But as noted in the comments on Fancy, the walk along that catwalk after a few too many Umbrella cocktails could be treacherous.

via Fancy

Basically, you just submit your Gmail address to the site and Find Big Email does a one time scan of your Gmail account email account. From a security POV, it doesn’t ask you for your password. I don’t know the technical way it is able to scan your Gmail account, but I have not had any issues. More details on security questions related to the service can be found here and here.

Anyway, the one time scan then creates a set of labels based on the different file sizes of your emails and it creates some custom labels (Biggest, > 2MB, > 500kb, > 100kb) using Gmail’s advanced label/search functions that then populate your label list. Go to those labels and all the emails that meet those size criteria are listed right there for you to see. From there, delete away and clear out your digital email attic. The nice thing is that if you ever start to encroach on your disc space limitation sometime in the future, just click on one of these labels (“Biggest” emails or emails over 2MB) and all of those emails will be there to pick off and delete.

Great set of photos from Germany’s famous celebration of BEER.

via Boston.com’s Big Picture

“Who the hell is Ken Dahlberg?” President Richard M. Nixon asked on June 23, 1972, his voice captured on tape in the Oval Office. He would find out soon enough. Without Kenneth H. Dahlberg, Nixon might not have become ensnared in the Watergate scandal and been forced to resign.

Mr. Dahlberg, who died on Tuesday (October 4, 2011) at 94, became the unwitting link between the Nixon re-election campaign and the five men who, only days before Nixon’s remark, were charged with breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate complex in Washington.

He had been a fund-raiser for Nixon’s re-election campaign, and his name was on a $25,000 cashier’s check that had been deposited in the bank account of one of the burglars, Bernard L. Barker. The money was to help cover the burglars’ expenses, and Mr. Barker had withdrawn that amount in $100 bills. He was carrying more than $5,000 when he was arrested on June 17 (1972).

If Woodward & Bernstein don’t uncover the connection between Dahlberg and the Committee to Re-Elect The President (Nixon), the whole Watergate connection between Nixon and Watergate may not have been made. Or, it would have been exceedingly harder to uncover the connection.

As Deep Throat said, “Follow the money”.

I’ve said it several times, but to me, the unraveling of the Watergate scandal is still one of the most fascinating stories in history.

via The NY Times

I remember when Steve first hired us, he said: ‘I hired you because you’ve done very good large buildings, and you’ve done great houses.’ If you’re doing houses, then you’re thinking about the subtleties of a building.’

As is legend now, Jobs’ laser focus on the user experience within Apple’s products also extended all the way to the retail experience, to the point where Jobs perceived retail as simply an extension of the overall Apple product line.

via NY Times

I love this. So well done and funny.

Via Awesome Infographics

via NPR

Seriously awesome Lego replicas of M.C. Escher’s gravity defying drawings. The above is a Lego depiction of his 1953 work “Relativity”. A few more are on the Daily Mail article linked below.  How cool is this?!?

via the Daily Mail

The dealer, who accompanied the men during the test drive, noticed the car was missing upon opening shop the next morning. How could this have happened to such an expensive car with such a (presumably) expensive security system? Simple: the car features a keyless ignition system, with no physical key. An electronic key sits in the driver’s pocket allowing one-touch access to opening the doors and turning the car on. Sounds like a fast pass for a simple switcheroo for these techy thieves.

For all the fancy, high tech keyless entry solutions, sometimes analog keys are the best solutions.

via Time Magazine News Feed

The story went that a few weeks into Henderson’s stint with the Mariners, he walked up to [John] Olerud at the batting cage and asked him why he wore a batting helmet in the field. Olerud explained that he had an aneurysm at nine years old and he wore the helmet for protection. Legend goes that Henderson said, “Yeah, I used to play with a guy that had the same thing.” Legend also goes that Olerud said, “That was me, Rickey.”

Henderson played with Olerud on the Blue Jays and the Mets.

And another…

To this day and dating back 25 years, before every game he plays, Henderson stands completely naked in front of a full length locker room mirror and says, “Ricky’s the best,” for several minutes.

via American McCarver

via Brothers Brick

What is a Red Sox fan to do today? I hope to provide some practical assistance. Accordingly, below you will see my e-mail “out of office” reply. You are welcome to cut and paste it into your own. I find it weeds out some of the annoying correspondence I am getting.
—————
I am in the office, but filtering e-mails with the following warnings:
1) If you are NOT from a certain part of the country (New England), please be aware of the following:
–You are probably NOT as funny as you think you are.
–No, I don’t “have to admit” it was an amazing game. I don’t “have to admit” anything. This is America, and I have amendments on my side.
–There is a good chance I already don’t like you.
2) If you are from the New England area:
–No, I can’t believe it either.
–No, I don’t want to talk about it.
–In fact, let’s never speak of this again…filing it away with that Super Bowl, 1986, and that thing with the glittered indelible body paint.

Duuuude, pour me some coffee. The bowling tonight was way out of hand.

I’ve seen many remakes of this iconic Edward Hopper painting, but this may be one of the finest out there

via clusterflock

This past weekend, it was announced that Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh will be leaving the Big East conference and joining the ACC.

My Syracuse Orange(men) are now part of the ACC. That just sounds wrong.

I have taken a few days to let this sink in. And in those few days, I have rationalized that from a business, relevance, and survival perspective relative to the current state (fiasco) that is college athletics, I can understand and agree with the move. Yet from a historical and emotional perspective, they are ripping out their athletic heart and soul and as far as I can see, signaling an end to the Big East conference as we know it.

Above and beyond any school in the Big East conference, it could be argued that Syracuse put the conference on the map. No disrespect to Georgetown, Villanova, Pitt, St. John’s and others. But to a high school kid, the spectacle of a sold out Carrier Dome and Brent Musburger saying “You are looking live at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse, NY where today the Syracuse Orangemen will be taking on [insert team here]…” was (and still is) breathtaking. It drove athletes from Southern California to play basketball in the Big East and Syracuse, NY. Think about that for a second.

But this move is not about basketball. Its about football, money, survival, and relevance. The Big East was a basketball conference that tried to become a football conference. In my mind, no matter how hard it tried, it could never get the same respect for football as it did for basketball. In football circles, it was always second tier to the SEC, SWC/Big 12, etc. even though it had a seat at the BCS table. And in the end, that perception/reality was what did the conference in. The Big East’s basketball roots and success did not mean a thing.

The irony about this whole situation is that now the ACC has 5 former Big East schools (Boston College, Virginia Tech, Miami, Syracuse, Pitt) and from what I have heard, two more may be on the way. So as was very accurately Tweeted the other day by Pete Abraham (@peteabe) of the Boston Globe, the new look ACC may very well end up being structured as follows:

Proposed ACC divisions: Real ACC: UNC, Duke, Clem, MD, UVa, NCSU, WF. Fake ACC: FSU, BC, Miami, Syr. Pitt, GaTech, Va Tech

18 Sep ’11 12:33 PM via TweetDeckReplyRetweetFavorite

@PeteAbe

Pete Abraham

Yes, I understand the necessity to make this move. But the sports fan in me is not too excited about it.

The present study found that 9 minutes of viewing a popular fast-paced fantastical television show immediately impaired 4-year-olds’ [executive function], a result about which parents of young children should be aware.

This study is completely bogus for the simple fact that they did not test against the core audience that Spongebob is targeted towards – which is any kid over 6 (or stoned college students). Plus, the burden of knowing what is right and wrong for your kid to watch needs to be decided by the parent, not some study from UVA.

My son loves Spongebob. He takes a Spongebob view of the world – in that he sometimes relates things he sees or experiences in real life to Spongebob’s world. For example, from a post of mine a few years ago:

My son is a big fan of Spongebob Squarepants and all his cronies from the Krusty Krab (OK, Daddy watches it here and there too :). So a couple of weeks ago he was watching the “Who Bob, What Pants” episode, in which Spongebob suffers amnesia and somehow finds his way to a town unknown to him called New Kelp City. In his visit to New Kelp City, he is referred to as a “jobless deadbeat”.

So with this context, I take you to my son’s Kindergarten class. His teacher is talking to the class about the poor Economy and specifically discusses how people are losing their jobs and are unemployed. So as any good teacher would do, she reviews the discussion with the class to see who was paying attention. And during this review, she asks the class “So class, what is the word for people who are not working?”. And without missing a beat, my son raises his hand and blurts out “Jobless deadbeats!”.

I would have paid money to have seen his teacher’s face when he said this.

Ah, the wonderful world of Spongebob.

Seen at my local bus depot. I don’t think I’ve ever seen the word “except” used in this manner. :)

Supposedly, summer vacation happens because that’s when the kids are home from school, although having the kids home from school is no vacation. And supposedly the kids are home from school because of some vestigial throwback to our agricultural past.

This is nonsense. The little helping hands of farm children were needed during spring planting and fall harvest. (And they must have been more helpful than the little hands of today’s children, or our grandparents would have died of starvation.) Farm kids, if they went to school at all, went in midsummer and midwinter, when nothing much was doing around the barn.

Summer vacation is, in fact, based on horse crap. American urbanization predated the automobile. Horses and what they leave behind them clogged cities that were already insalubrious from coal smoke, industry and notional sewage systems. Come summer, it was vacation time because—if you had any sense, common or olfactory—you vacated.

I have to say, I love having the kids home from school but wow, it is a lot of work to keep them occupied and not at each other’s throats.

via the Wall St. Journal

There have always existed disputes among the competing parties, divergent opinions, while the fans of each brand were convinced that theirs was the best product. Last, but not least, the rivals have even conducted ad campaigns against the competing brands. This project mostly approaches the visual “conversations” between the company logos and the ways that they influence each other, hence the name of the project, Brandversations. It is a parallel between the modern and the old, some of the slogans dating back to the 40s and 50s.

Yes, I am a heretic for displaying the one above. :)

via Logo Design Love

On the Youtube page of the Museum, visitors can leave comments. One person said they should add Yahoo! to the list. Chuckle.

via Swiss Miss ]]> http://www.sgclark.com/2011/09/obsolete-objects/feed/ 0 http://www.sgclark.com/2011/09/tweets-from-the-week-of-2011-09-05/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=tweets-from-the-week-of-2011-09-05 http://www.sgclark.com/2011/09/tweets-from-the-week-of-2011-09-05/#comments Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:30:00 +0000 Stephen Clark http://www.sgclark.com/2011/09/tweets-from-the-week-of-2011-09-05/

Some photos of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater in Bear Run, PA that I took several years ago when we traveled out to the Pittsburgh area. Better late than never. :)

Super cool photo set depicting New York City moving from Day to Night in one photo. Basically, the photographer took a huge set of photos from the same position over the course of a day and then layered them together to show the transition. The above one of the Flatiron Building is one of my favorites since the building itself is a natural divider between day and night.

Via Amusing Planet

For all of your JRR Tolkien/Hobbit/LOTR fans getting geared up for the 2012 release of The Hobbit, you too can live like Bilbo Baggins. Out in Montana, you can rent a Hobbit House like those found in The Shire. Only this one comes with Cable and HDTV. I’m imagining that this would not be optimal for the over 6 foot crowd.

Via Nerd Approved

A quick video of Boston Globe photographer Jim Davis describes how he anticipated and photographed each leg of the 5-4-3 triple play that the Red Sox pulled off vs the Tampa Bay Rays on August 16. Pretty awesome that he was thinking about and anticipating for such a rare play.

Click for larger size

After taking some inspiration from Boris Simus and his Minimal Contact/Biz Card design, I went ahead and tried one on for size myself. My online “brand” situation is very similar to Boris’s in that my “sgclark” id represents this domain, my @sgclark Twitter handle, and my Facebook and Google+ id’s. I may even get it processed as my personal card at someplace like Moo. TBD.

Also, I’m on a bit of a minimalist kick right now as I’m really studying and paying more attention to clean, clear user interactions both online and offline. I’ve even taken to cleaning up my own site a bit with this new U/X. I’m not fully done with this as I’m tweaking it here and there.

Last year my federal tax bill — the income tax I paid, as well as payroll taxes paid by me and on my behalf — was $6,938,744. That sounds like a lot of money. But what I paid was only 17.4 percent of my taxable income (edit: using these numbers, you can back out that his taxable income was roughly $39.878 Million) — and that’s actually a lower percentage than was paid by any of the other 20 people in our office. Their tax burdens ranged from 33 percent to 41 percent and averaged 36 percent.

He then illustrated how wealth has shifted so dramatically over the past 20 years:

Since 1992, the I.R.S. has compiled data from the returns of the 400 Americans reporting the largest income. In 1992, the top 400 had aggregate taxable income of $16.9 billion and paid federal taxes of 29.2 percent on that sum. In 2008, the aggregate income of the highest 400 had soared to $90.9 billion — a staggering $227.4 million on average — but the rate paid had fallen to 21.5 percent.

Meaning, in 1992, the top 400 earners in the USA had, on average, $42 Million per household, and a federal tax rate of 29.2% – while in 2008, those numbers were $227 Million per household and a federal tax rate of 21.2%. So that’s a 537% increase in per household income and a 36% relative decrease in taxes paid/tax rate (Obviously, the absolute tax dollars has increased with the absolute increase in earnings). Doing some basic thumbnail math, if the tax rate had remained constant at the same 29.2% from 1992, that would be an extra $7 Billion in tax revenue for the USA from this segment of the population.

He then proposed a policy approach to address the top earners in the USA (and I was pretty surprised by how really really small the absolute numbers were):

But for those making more than $1 million — there were 236,883 such households in 2009 — I would raise rates immediately on taxable income in excess of $1 million, including, of course, dividends and capital gains. And for those who make $10 million or more — there were 8,274 in 2009 — I would suggest an additional increase in rate.

My friends and I have been coddled long enough by a billionaire-friendly Congress. It’s time for our government to get serious about shared sacrifice.

So to put that in perspective, backing out the 8,274 who made $10 Million+, that leaves 228,609 who earned between $1 Million and $10 Million. Again with some thumbnail math since I don’t have the specifics, lets say 50% of those 228K folks earned $1MM, 35% earned $5MM, and 15% earned $9MM. That’s roughly $822 Billion in taxable income. Using the same tax rates noted above, the 2008 taxes at 21.5% of income, represents $177 Billion in tax revenue. Using the 1992 tax rate of 29.2% equates to $240 Billion in tax revenue. Meaning in 2008, the US had $63 Billion less annual tax revenue compared to if the 1992 tax rate was left unchanged.

So if we add up the estimated $7 Billion from the top 400 earners and the estimated $63 Billion from the $1MM – $10MM earners by keeping the tax rates at 1992 levels (29.2%), that’s a grand total of $70 Billion dollars in annual tax revenue we are not accounting for today because of tax rate reductions. Factor in the taxable income for those 7,874 folks who earn between $10MM and $227MM (the latter number is the avg. of the top 400 earners in 2008), and we have a pretty decent chunk of change annually to at least put a dent in our fiscal issues (in addition to the spending cuts).

#imjustsayin

Go visit the amazing Tumblr Awesome People Hanging Out Together. Some fantastic photos of very random famous folks together. For the above image, I got my architecture/arts geek out, even though I was never a big fan of Bauhaus:

Josef Albers, Marcel Breuer, Gunta Stölzl, Oskar Schlemmer, Wassily Kandinsky, Walter Gropius, Herbert Bayer, László Moholy-Nagy and Hinnerk Scheper on the roof of the Bauhaus Building, Dessau, 1928

Other random but awesome ones include Kanye West and Evil Knievel, The Who and Jimi Hendrix and this epic side eye shot

As of the time of this post, Amazon UK is reporting that the Rucanor Aluminum Baseball Bat in Silver sales have increased 52,211% in the past 24 hours.  Its sales rank is #17, which is up from 8,993.

Nice.  Well done, England. #nosarcasm

To the rubbish pile that the Internet is creating, alongside the road maps, newspapers and music CDs, add one more artifact of consumer life, the paper receipt.

Major retailers, including Whole Foods Market, Nordstrom, Gap Inc. (which owns Old Navy and Banana Republic), Anthropologie, Patagonia, Sears and Kmart, have begun offering electronic versions of receipts, either e-mailed or uploaded to password-protected Web sites. And more and more customers, the retailers report, are opting for paperless.

I have to say that this is one of the most wonderful advances to come to “in store” purchases in, well, forever.  Not surprisingly, whenever I make a purchase at an Apple store, having them email me the receipt is one less thing to worry about. I know its in my Inbox and with Gmail’s filters, I can set it up to “automagically” file itself under my “Apple > Receipts” tag/folder. Getting rid of clutter is such a wonderful thing.

via NYTimes.com

We’re Knights of the Round Table,
We dance when ere we’re able,
We do routines and chorus scenes
With footwork impeccable.
We dine well here in Camelot,
We eat ham and jam and spam a lot.

Lego Plants vs. Zombies…created by my 8 year old son.

I’m not sure what is more impressive: this Lego creation or him reeling of with 95% accuracy the names of each of the plants in the game just by looking at the images.

My logic has been that using a service like Pandora satisfies my music need to discover new albums, artists, and songs since I can listen to songs I’m familiar with and it also enables me to discover new music similar to what I’m familiar with. Plus, when I look at my music purchase history these days, I generally buy 8-10 MP3 albums a year which is roughly equivalent to the Spotify annual cost plus I already have several thousand songs already in my personal music library.  In essence, its been:

MP3′s I Purchased/Owned + Pandora = Musically Happy Steve

However, my music world has now been thrown for a tizzy as I have just discovered via Buzzfeed an insanely cool plug in for the Chrome browser that may have tipped the scales towards Spotify.  The plug in basically enables you to take all the songs you have “thumbed up” on your Pandora stations and import them into a Spotify playlist (click through to original post to see the details).

So for example, on Pandora, I have a Say Hi (To Your Mom) Pandora station (based on the awesome Seattle band of the same name) and, as with my other stations, regularly “Thumbs Up” several songs per session.  Now, this plug in takes that curated list that has been compiled over time and puts it in your own Spotify playlist.

For those of you Spotify users, here is the link to the aforementioned playlist – Say Hi Favorites

I can now pump all the songs I’ve ever “liked” via Pandora into Spotify.  I can discover new songs, albums and artists by discovering shared and public playlists.  No decisions have been made yet, but Spotify is moving to the head of the class really really quickly.

Plug-in discovery via Buzzfeed

Crush the competition in your next water balloon fight with this Water Balloon Filler. Put the gadget on the end of your hose and quickly fill the balloon and tie its knot up to 10x faster than the “analog” method.

Via Likecool

Example of a charging station that will be installed in England

Over the next few months, electric car chargers will be installed in service areas owned by the Welcome Break chain and located along British motorways

Within 18 months all 27 service areas in the country that are owned by the Welcome Break chain will boast a spot for electric vehicle owners to top up or fully recharge using either the fast charge (32A supply), or the slower supply (13A) for an overnight charge if staying at the nearby hotel. Dale Vince, CEO of Ecotricity, argued that this is a major step toward more widespread acceptance:

Via TreeHugger

Yes, the Old Spice Guy is back in all his buff, towel covered glory for a series of quick video clips in a similar fashion to last year. Only this time, he’s taking on Fabio in a “Mano A Mano in El Bano” steel cage video match to the death (or, until one of them gets more votes online).

A handful of the Fabio videos are kinda funny. But more striking to me is the clear awkwardness of Fabio while recording these videos. I don’t know if that is part of the act or not, but looking at the Fabio videos head to head against the Old Spice Guy (Isiah Mustafa) makes you really appreciate the Old Spice Guy’s skill and talent.

Earlier, I was over at Flip Flop Fly In, the awesome site by Craig Robinson that has all sorts of baseball infographics.  I was intrigued by one that compared the all time records of the White Sox and the Red Sox (a vernable battle of the, er, Soxes), and it got me thinking about how the Red Sox have done against other teams.  So as Craig does, I headed over to Baseball Reference to check out the details and channel my inner Cliff Clavin.

Since 1901, the Red Sox have won a total of 8,877 games, while losing 8,270 (across AL and NL teams, although the vast majority of the games have obviously come against AL teams), giving them an all time winning percentage of .518. For comparison, that ranks the Sox 4th all time behind the Yankees (.568), the NY/SF Giants (.538), and the Brooklyn/LA Dodgers (.524) and basically tied with the St. Louis Cardinals.

The Red Sox have had the most success against the Baltimore Orioles, winning 1,148 games against 930 losses, for a .552 winning percentage. Sadly, the Sox have had the least success against the Yankees, with 950 wins against 1,127 losses, or 177 games below .500.

What’s worse, the Yankees are one of only two AL teams who have scored more runs than the Sox in head to head competition.  The Yanks are averaging 8% (0.39 more runs per game) more runs per game when playing the Sox.

On a relative basis, the Red Sox have had the most success against the Tampa Bay Rays, winning 60% of the game against them (139-92).

Surprisingly, the other AL team that has given the Red Sox trouble is the Cleveland Indians.  The Indians are averaging 3% (0.14 RPG) more runs per game vs the Red Sox, and have beaten the Sox 1,019 times (vs. 956 wins by Boston).  The only other AL team that the Red Sox have a losing record against is, of all teams, the Kansas City Royals.  The Royals hold a 2 game advantage over the Red Sox as of today, however the Red Sox have outscored them by about 5% on a per game basis.

The Red Sox have the most absolute wins against the Orioles, the Oakland A’s (1,053), and the Detroit Tigers (1,018).  They are the only three teams who the Sox have won over 1,000 game against.  The next closest team to the 1,000 win plateau is the aforementioned Indians.

So there you go, a quick synopsis of what the Red Sox have done against the American League since 1901.  You can see the full grid of stats against all MLB teams here.  I didn’t include NL teams as there are just not enough games played against that league, leaving the data a bit unstable since there were so few games to draw from.  One item that was interesting within the set of NL teams was that the Sox have only played the Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds 6 times each during the regular season.

Detectives are examining a computer, paperwork and a phone found in a bin near the riverside London home of Rebekah Brooks, the former chief executive of News International.

The Guardian has learned that a bag containing the items was found in an underground car park in the Design Centre at the exclusive Chelsea Harbour development on Monday afternoon.

The car park, under a shopping centre, is yards from the gated apartment block where Brooks lives with her husband, a former racehorse trainer and close friend of David Cameron.

It is understood the bag was handed in to security at around 3pm, and that shortly afterwards Brooks’s husband, Charlie, arrived and tried to reclaim it. He was unable to prove the bag was his and the security guard refused to release it.

Via The Guardian

Google says the algorithms have taught it valuable lessons, from obvious ones (entrepreneurs who have started successful companies are more likely to do it again) to less obvious ones (start-ups located far from the venture capitalist’s office are more likely to be successful, probably because the firm has to go out of its way to finance the start-up.)

If I were them, I’d look at ways to improve battery life, remove our dependence on wireless carriers and cable companies, and develop a legitimate flux capacitor to promote time travel (ok, one of those is a joke).

Via NYTimes.com