Christopher.kantossteve steve steve steve steve steve steve steve
After serving as the soloist for Wonder Woman’s now iconic theme music in Batman V. Superman: Dawn Of Justice, cellist Tina Guo uploaded her own even more badass take on Hans Zimmer’s score to her YouTube channel. Guo also served as a soloist on the new Wonder Woman movie as well.
Christopher.kantossteve what are you doing for lunch today.
Linguist Ken Hale had a preternatural ability to learn new languages. “It was as if the linguistic faculty which normally shuts off in human beings at the age of 12 just never shut off in him,” said his MIT colleague Samuel Jay Keyser.
“It’s more like a musical talent than anything else,” Hale told The New York Times in 1997. “When I found out I could speak Navajo at the age of 12, I used to go out every day and sit on a rock and talk Navajo to myself.” Acquiring new languages became a lifelong obsession:
In Spain he learnt Basque; in Ireland he spoke Gaelic so convincingly that an immigration officer asked if he knew English. He apologised to the Dutch for taking a whole week to master their somewhat complex language. He picked up the rudiments of Japanese after watching a Japanese film with subtitles.
He estimated that he could learn the essentials of a new language in 10 or 15 minutes, well enough to make himself understood, if he could talk to a native speaker (he said he could never learn a language in a classroom). He would start with parts of the body, he said, then animals and common objects. Once he’d learned the nouns he could start to make sentences and master sounds, writing everything down.
He devoted much of his time to studying vanishing languages around the world. He labored to revitalize the language of the Wampanoag in New England and visited Nicaragua to train linguists in four indigenous languages. In 2001 his son Ezra delivered his eulogy in Warlpiri, an Australian aboriginal language that his father had raised his sons to speak. “The problem,” Ken once told Philip Khoury, “is that many of the languages I’ve learned are extinct, or close to extinction, and I have no one to speak them with.”
“Ken viewed languages as if they were works of art,” recalled another MIT colleague, Samuel Jay Keyser. “Every person who spoke a language was a curator of a masterpiece.”
Christopher.kantosit's always a good time for sassy trump
Christopher.kantosyesss.
It's been over 15 years since Ellen DeGeneres took the stage for a proper stand-up special. With a smash hit daytime talk show, a record-setting Twitter account and bonafide American treasure status, DeGeneres doesn't exactly need the exposure of ano...
Christopher.kantosI haven't clicked but I hope the punchline is the parents got a rare type of food poisoning and were never able to eat in a restaurant ever again following the incident.
I didn't set out to give my son his first bite of pizza made by a Michelin-rated chef in Italy — it just happened.
It was my family's first visit to Rome and my husband and I had hungrily made a list of must-eat pizzerias, trattorias, and gelaterias we wanted to visit throughout our two-week stint. The fact that our almost 1-year-old was with us didn't sway our sweet, savory, or star-level proclivities toward the Eternal City's great food establishments. If we were going to travel across an ocean to one of the world's most delicioso districts, we were going to eat well — child or not!
Christopher.kantosI'm sure everyone has at least one good example. Trying to think of mine.
Christopher.kantosNEW STUDY Dogs are BAD for you because they increase your likelihood of DEATH because you may be hit if you were to cross the stret to pet them!!! Dogs = Bad!
Sparkling water is often considered to be a healthy (and delicious) alternative to sodas and high-sugar drinks, but a new study has made some troubling findings about how healthy sparkling water really is. Spoiler alert: It might not be as good for you as you may think.
Christopher.kantosA must download!
Not Hotdog by SeeFood Technologies is an iPhone app that lets you know if the think you have is a hotdog or not a hotdog. If you watch Silicon Valley, you will understand the significance of this.
Christopher.kantosI think they mean "Proof that Japanese will do Anything as long as it can be put on TV" and I thank them for that
Are you bored? Is there a wheeled vehicle within your grasp, like a Honda Gyro delivery scooter? You should probably grab a friend and do some racing—because you can.
Christopher.kantoswhaat
Christopher.kantosinteresting.
Christopher.kantossteve tampopo is so hot right now
This review originally appeared in the New Yorker and appears here with permission from the author’s estate. And be sure to cop the new Blu-ray edition of Tampopo from the Criterion Collection.
Christopher.kantospouring some out for my homies.
Some of the best things ever seen or used on the web can’t be saved. They’re already gone. These are some of them, nominated by Kottke readers.
Google Reader. On the one hand, Google kind of ruined RSS, up until then the best distribution method for serial content, by turning it into a product. At the end, some of the best RSS readers weren’t even RSS readers, just frontends for Google Reader, which handled all the resource-intensive work.
On the other hand, Google Reader was a really wonderful community. It had a lightweight social graph component, but it was really oriented around news and stories and blog updates that people shared. Everything that people wanted online comments to be, Google Reader was. And when it ended, it took all of that away, leaving social media networks — which were really never designed to do content distribution — as the only game in town. I honestly don’t know if we’ve ever recovered.
Geocities. Geocities was a lot of people’s first experience making and reading home pages, putting their lives, personalities, contact information, getting email addresses, and anything else they wanted to share out on the web. The “cities” conceit made it sortable and browsable: they weren’t quite geographical and weren’t quite thematic, but a weird combination of the two. It got bought by Yahoo, back when Yahoo was buying and blending everything, and went the way of all such things.
Now Geocities exists only in Japan, but, like a lot of “first websites,” you can emulate it if you want using Glitch. As Anil Dash writes, “millions of people created their own websites in the era before today’s social networks took over. Learning to tweak HTML to create a GeoCities page, or to customize CSS to make a MySpace page look perfect, was a rite of passage for the first 10 or 15 years of the web.”
Think Secret was an early tech blog focused on Apple, back when Apple was very far from the biggest company in the world. Writing and reading about it, especially rumors about new products, was just a weird obsession for a handful of people. Anyways, Think Secret and its editor Nick “de Plume” Ciarelli got sued for violating trade secrets, and Think Secret was shut down as part of a settlement right as the iPhone was turning Apple into the company everybody was talking about all of the time. Things break another way, and that site’s worth millions of dollars today. Then again, that didn’t save Gawker — so who knows.
Television Without Pity practically invented the genre of TV episode recaps, starting with Dawson’s Creek. Now they’re everywhere! It got bought by NBC in 2007 and shut down in 2014, but supposedly it’s coming back. We’ll see. Nope, turns out it’s just the shell of the website; TWOP won’t running new material after all. But the founders of TWOP went on to start previously.tv. (Thanks, @adrienneLaF, @michelet.)
Nothing lasts forever on the World Wide Web. Even death.
Update: So many people, after this story went live, answered “what about Suck.com?” that I had to make an update.
Reading Suck is bizarre now, because on the one hand, its wry, teasing, sweetly cynical voice has shaped so much of what we know of the web, but its style is actually quite different. It’s like reading Don Quixote and realizing that Cervantes’s book somehow contains, in miniature, every novel that came after it, but that it is also somehow older and stranger and more imaginative than all of them. Also, that every tech or media hype or hustle is exactly the same as one that happened twenty-odd years before it. This is why reporters who’ve been covering Silicon Valley forever have such a twisted sense of humor.
Anyways, the archive still exists; the best way to get it, in my opinion, is the Suck Again email newsletter, which posts every instance of Suck twenty years after its original publication date. Suck is dead; long live Suck.
Tags: best of the webChristopher.kantosI need a box in my life.
Abigail Tucker, author of "The Lion in the Living Room," explains what's going on when cats hop into boxes: imagination. "Our houses are strange places for apex predators to live 24/7. A lot of cats are just hopelessly bored."
Here's more from Cat Health.
Boxes Decrease Stress
A study was recently done on cats that were entering a Dutch animal shelter. Some of the cats were given cardboard boxes in their cages and some were not. The cats were then evaluated for stress, using the Kessler and Turner Cat Stress Score, a scientific scale for quantifying stress in cats. Stress levels in the cats that were provided with boxes was much lower than in the ones without boxes.
Christopher.kantosI have not clicked but the headline warrants an autoshare
Employees at a petting zoo in Moscow are livid over the treatment it says its raccoon received during a video shoot. The zoo’s representatives claim that Tomas the raccoon was rented to a production company for a commercial shoot that turned out to be an “erotic video” and now Tomas is “traumatized.”
Christopher.kantosyou're a day early google.
It all started with smart thermostats, refrigerators, and light bulbs. Then Google Home came along and made your entire house smarter. But what about the backyard, the final frontier in smart homes? Two words: “Ok Gnome.”
Google Gnome is a voice-activated, hands-free tool designed to make backyard living effortless. Need to know what animal is squeaking in your bushes? Stay still and ask Gnome what sound an opossum makes. Running low on birdseed? That’s where Gnome comes in. You can even use Gnome’s proprietary high-intensity lasers to trim your hedges into whatever shape your heart desires. The only thing that can fence in Google Gnome is the literal fence surrounding your yard.
The future is here, and it’s a real breath of fresh air. Discover it for yourself at g.co/GoogleGnome.
The one consistent hallmark of our pissboy president’s two-month-long paranoid sitcom is his habit of retreating to Twitter to inflict his delusions on the rest of us. The diminishing returns of tweeting “fuck you” at the man several times are apparent. But, as with most jobs, incendiary responses to our least capable…
Christopher.kantosinteresting.
A seat on the Mexico City subway has a protruding molded torso and cock. Part art project and part PSA, it's supposedly there to highlight the sexual harassment experienced by female passengers. It has proven controversial, reports the BBC.
Underneath a video of the stunt, which has been seen more than 700,000 times in the past 10 days, some viewers praised the idea, while others called it "sexist" and unfair to men.
Not quite sure how a penis everyone is forced to look at and may inadvertently sit on helps the cause, but, man, that video.
Christopher.kantosisn't there some lemon stealer porn or something.
Perhaps the best perk of living in California, better than proximity to robber barons or weed, is the ubiquitous presence of fruit trees. Anecdotally speaking, everyone has a dang lemon, orange, plum, or avocado tree. Even when our fair state was in the worst throes of the mega drought, one could grow healthy batches…
Christopher.kantoswe keep pushing the "nothing good happens after" time back huh.
Christopher.kantosyay minnesota.
Last fall, I wrote about the strange case of Minnesota governor Mark Dayton, a left-wing billionaire heir to the Target fortune who came to power and reversed his Republican predecessors' Reagonomic idiocy, instead raising taxes on rich people, increasing public spending, and creating shared prosperity for the people of Minnesota. (more…)
Christopher.kantosok let's all calm down a bit.
Sunglasses may soon be able to do more than take your picture. At SXSW on Tuesday, Visa revealed a prototype pair that can be used to pay for purchases. A small NFC chip resides in one of the arms and is linked to the user's Visa account. So, rather...
Christopher.kantossign me up.
The new Panasonic Stain Master machines have an intensive stain-removal mode which is being marketed in India as a curry-stain removal button; it also has other Indian-focused modes, such as one for removing hair oil. They are planning other Stain Masters customized for other Asian markets with stain-removal buttons tailored to their national cuisines and stubbourn stains. (more…)
Christopher.kantosIt Northfield.
This morning, BBC News was interviewing Pusan National University professor Robert Kelly live from what is apparently his home office and someone else apparently wanted his attention...
Christopher.kantosSteve, we can start to Hangouts Meet all day instead. Much less awkward.
Last year, we talked about doubling down on our enterprise focus for Hangouts and our commitment to building communication tools focused on the way teams work: from anywhere, at anytime. More than half of the workforce will contribute remotely by 2020, so businesses require purpose-built tools to help employees succeed. Our customers have told us it should be effortless for them to connect over video and that chat should be more collaborative, so we’re evolving Hangouts to focus on two experiences that help bring teams together and keep work moving forward: Hangouts Meet and Hangouts Chat.
Hangouts Meet is a new video meeting experience with one goal: make joining meetings effortless so that people can be as productive as they are when they’re face-to-face. We've consistently heard from customers about ways we can improve Hangouts, like making it easier to work with external clients or reducing the ‘time to start’ a meeting to zero. That's why we've built Hangouts Meet to have a light, fast interface and smart participant management.
Running 30-person video conferences smoothly is easy with Meet. Simply start your meetings with a shared link — no accounts, plugins, downloads or hassles. Meet provides a place for everyone to join from Calendar, an email invite or an ad-hoc share. If you’re dialing in from a conference room, your laptop or using the dedicated mobile app, just a few clicks and you’re in.
Braintree, a PayPal service, has been using Hangouts Meet over the past three months to connect employees across board rooms, meeting rooms, breakout spaces and offices. "Based on initial use, Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced,” says Jerome Knapp, Manager of Systems Administration at Braintree. “Starting a meeting or sharing a document from the web, calendar invite or meeting room involves a single click. It’s an antidote to the VC fatigue that’s stopped my users and executives from taking full advantage of other systems.”
With Meet, native, full-screen presenting makes it easy to showcase your team’s projects. And as Meet integrates directly with G Suite, information you need about each meeting is automatically pulled from Calendar. For our G Suite Enterprise customers, each meeting comes with a dedicated dial-in phone number, so team members on the road can feel connected and productive in meetings despite wi-fi or data issues.
Hangouts Meet is one of the most frictionless video conferencing systems we’ve experienced.Jerome Knapp Systems Administration at Braintree
Hangouts Chat is an intelligent communication app for teams that takes direct messaging in Hangouts and evolves it to reflect the way modern teams talk business.
Working on a project means bringing cross-functional teams together, discussing tasks that need to get done and sharing your work. Chat is built with exactly this in mind.
Dedicated, virtual rooms create a lasting home for each project, with threaded conversations so your team’s progress is easy to follow. Chat’s deep integration with G Suite means shared content from Drive and Docs, or photos and videos can be viewed directly in conversations. And powerful, filterable search in Chat makes it easy to find all your content dating back to the start of the project.
Chat is built not only to reflect the way teams work, but to provide a platform for the enterprise tools they work with. The Hangouts Chat platform supports a wide range of capabilities — from bots to simple scripting using Google App Script — and integrates with third-party applications so teams can do more right from within the conversation. Some companies we’re teaming up with to build out the platform include: Asana, Box, Prosperworks and Zendesk. And to make workflows even easier, Chat features @meet, an intelligent bot built on top of the Hangouts platform that uses natural language processing and machine learning to automatically schedule meetings for your team with Hangouts Meet and Google Calendar.
Hangouts Meet is generally available today and will gradually roll out to all G Suite customers over the next few weeks. G Suite customers can apply to try Hangouts Chat through the Early Adopter Program.
Christopher.kantosPeak sports for anyone who cares about those sports things.
Christopher.kantosUgh stop. (I'm reading this eating cold leftover pizza)
Tom Brady fans might not be able to live his lifestyle, but now they can eat like the American Super Bowl champion. The New England Patriots Quarterback launched a meal kit service called TB12 Performance Meals that offers subscribers plant-based meals with dishes like crispy turnip cakes with tabbouleh, white lentil risotto with roasted vegetables, and ramen with gingered greens and broccolini.
Christopher.kantosthis is quite amusing.
Miami lawyer Stephen Gutierrez was in court defending an alleged arsonist when his pants literally caught on fire. However, please don't assume that Gutierrez is a liar, liar. Apparently he had been playing with an e-cigarette in his pocket. From the Miami Herald:
Stephen Gutierrez, who was arguing that his client’s car spontaneously combusted and was not intentionally set on fire, had been fiddling in his pocket as he was about to address jurors when smoke began billowing out his right pocket, witnesses told the Miami Herald.
He rushed out of the Miami courtroom, leaving spectators stunned. After jurors were ushered out, Gutierrez returned unharmed, with a singed pocket, and insisted it wasn’t a staged defense demonstration gone wrong, observers said.
