Ben Wolf

This video, shot at 36,000 frames per second, shows a balloon popping underwater. I am not quite sure what I expected, but it wasn't this.

For instance, the air bubbles do not immediately rise to the surface...it takes them about 20-25 ms to get in the mood. Compare with a slow motion video of popping a water balloon in air:

Again, watch how it takes for gravity to kick in. It's like Wile E. Coyote after having run off a cliff, hanging in midair holding a sign that says "EEP!" (via @BadAstronomer)

Tags: physics   science   video

Wine ratings are all over the place, particularly when price enters the picture. This video explains that the most expensive wine is not always the best tasting wine, but you might prefer it anyway.

(via @riondotnu)

Tags: economics   food   video   wine

Four years ago I had the privilege of meeting Brunello Cucinelli at his company’s home office in Solomeo. It sounds cliché to say, but it was a day that fundamentally changed how I see the world as a consumer, a businessman and as a human. More philosophical than anyone you will ever meet in the clothing business (possibly in life in general), Brunello is a catalyst for fundamental positive change. It’s just his nature. It sounds contrived when you read some blogger say it, but in reality, Brunello Cucinelli (the man and the company) is one of the most compelling people I have ever met. If character and integrity took the human form it would be Brunello Cucinelli. The fact that he sells some of the finest made and best looking clothing is almost just a happy coincidence.

My pal the esteemed writer Om Malik made the pilgrimage to Solomeo himself to meet Brunello and learn more about the man his billion dollar enterprise operating quietly in Italy’s green heart. His interview is as important and compelling as any I have read. The coversation stands out because of both Om’s beautiful perspective and Brunello’s equally unique world view.

With a nod to the tech world (and John Gruber), below I pulled out my favorite bits and pieces from this great conversation between two men of considerable respect. Here’s the original interview which is a must read.

Brunello on how to treat people:

Basically, what is human dignity made of? If we work together, say, and, even with one look, I make you understand that you are worth nothing and I look down on you, I have killed you. But if I give you regards and respect — out of esteem, responsibility is spawned. Then out of responsibility comes creativity, because every human being has an amount of genius in them. Man needs dignity even more than he needs bread.

On credibility:

In order to be credible, you must be authentic and true. Twenty years ago, something might be written about you in a newspaper. Then this newspaper would be scrapped, and that would be it. But now your statement stays [online] for the next 20 to 50 years — who knows how long for. To be credible, you must be consistent in the way you behave.

Brunello on work life balance: 

In this company, you cannot send emails after 5:30 PM, when the company closes for the evening.

I do not want to assign work to you where I feel responsible for ruining or altering your private life.

It’s not 24/7, because here in the company, you start at 8 AM, and at 5:30 PM you are forbidden to work any further. No emails can be sent to more than two addressees, just one or two. No group mailing. Why must a single email be read by 10 different people, unless it’s the 10 people who are interested in that specific issue? In order to disperse responsibility?

Here, no meetings with mobile phones. No one is allowed to bring them into the meeting room. You must look me in the eye. You must know things by heart. You must know all of your business with a 1 to 2 percent error rate. It is also training for your mind. It is also a question of respect, because I have never called someone on a Saturday or a Sunday. No one is allowed to do so. We must discover this, because if individuals rest properly, then it is better.

On craft:

Om: You dropped out of engineering school to design cashmere sweaters. What was the attraction to cashmere?

Brunello: I had read Theodore Levitt, the American, who used to say that developed countries were supposed to manufacture special handcrafted goods, because one day, new people would arrive who would make the same things but at a better price. The idea of doing luxury, “made in Italy” has always been with me.

Why cashmere? Because I was using something that theoretically never goes to waste. You never throw away a cashmere pullover. The idea of manufacturing something that you never scrap, you never throw away — I liked it very much. Mind you, I had no money in my pocket at that time. Absolutely nothing.

Managing a craft oriented luxury business in an increasingly connected world:

Brunello: What I have tried to do is manage the American market as if it were a domestic market together with Europe. I speak to the Dallas store as if it were the Venice store. Someone from San Francisco basically listens to the same music as someone from Milan. They wear roughly the same clothes. They have their iPad, their iPhone. Just think of how mankind has become more homogeneous.But true luxury lies in the fact that you are not too widely known.

On U.S. manufacturing:

Om: There’s a lot of talk of manufacturing revival in the United States. Do you think it is feasible? If it is, what are the lessons from Italy that the U.S. can take?

Brunello: I think that there is a trend toward going back to manufacturing there. People want to buy a “made in the U.S.” thing. You want to buy a French champagne, but you also want to buy something from your own country.

We have to rebuild the basis of all the skills. For example, the schools for arts and crafts. We have to start rebuilding. In order to do that, we need to give moral and economic dignity back to this kind of craft. Say you are a tailor. If you earn $1,200 a month, you are sort of ashamed to say that that’s your trade, because that’s the culture. We have to do the opposite. It should be that if someone sees you are a tailor, they say, “Oh, you are plying a very great trade, the tailor.” That’s the moral dignity I’m talking about.

Finally:

Om: I want fewer interruptions in my day. I have eliminated a lot of things from my life. I’m on a declining scale of wanting things. Fewer and fewer things. I think that is one of the reasons I find your approach to life, a more philosophical approach to business, fascinating.

Brunello: A 58-year-old man committed suicide, a great Italian manager, I think last year, or a couple of years ago. He wrote, “I spent a whole life running, chasing work, without realizing, at all, of the great ideals, of great values of life.”

This is a question of balance. Those who come to me and say, “You know, I work 15 hours a day,” I say, “I am not interested.” I am interested in the quality of working hours, not the quantity. The brain of the human being. Do you think that during the first five hours of the day you are the same as you are in the last five hours? No way. You’re tired, and if you’re tired, you stop listening, and the decisions you make are risky.

“It’s completely out of my hands. I’m looking at those people out there, but I don’t know what I’m seeing. And they’re watching me, too. But they don’t know what they’re looking at. My best guess is that they’ll keep on loving me till they start hating me, or their Waylon duds wear out. Because they already hate me a little, just because I’m me and they’re them. That’s why they always go on about how talented you are. Because they hate you. Because if they had this talent, they would be you. The fact that you’ve worked like a dog, lived like a horse thief, and broke your mama’s heart to do whatever you do, that don’t mean diddly-squat. To them, it’s talent. Supposedly, you got it, and, supposedly, they don’t. So eventually you’re bound to disappoint them.”

- Waylon Jennings, quoted in Dave Hickey’s Air Guitar

From Ralph Mirebs, photos of the abandoned Baikonur Cosmodrome, which houses the remains of the Buran programme, the Soviet version of the Space Shuttle program. (thx, tim)

Tags: Buran   photography   Ralph Mirebs   Soviet Union   space

Several years ago, I was given as a gift a remote session with a bibliotherapist at the London headquarters of the School of Life, which offers innovative courses to help people deal with the daily emotional challenges of existence. I have to admit that at first I didn’t really like the idea of being given a reading “prescription.” I’ve generally preferred to mimic Virginia Woolf’s passionate commitment to serendipity in my personal reading discoveries, delighting not only in the books themselves but in the randomly meaningful nature of how I came upon them (on the bus after a breakup, in a backpackers’ hostel in Damascus, or in the dark library stacks at graduate school, while browsing instead of studying). I’ve long been wary of the peculiar evangelism of certain readers: You must read this, they say, thrusting a book into your hands with a beatific gleam in their eyes, with no allowance for the fact that books mean different things to people—or different things to the same person—at various points in our lives. I loved John Updike’s stories about the Maples in my twenties, for example, and hate them in my thirties, and I’m not even exactly sure why.

See the rest of the story at newyorker.com

Related:
How the Other Elizabeth Taylor Reconciled Family Life and Art
When a Bookstore Closes, an Argument Ends
Secret Histories

Chapter 2 of Steal Like An Artist in a tweet.

In this week’s newsletter: Dylan’s theft, Matisse’s dog, Kimmy Schmidt’s theme song, and more.

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Environment

This is the haunting journey of three plastic bottles that impact the fate of the planet. The emblematic animation traces the life cycle of three different types of plastic and the consequences each have on our world.

Plastic is a synthetic material that can be molded into a variety of shapes while soft and then set into a rigid form. Its versatile nature has shaped society in ways that are both helpful and harmful for humanity. 

If this is the case, is there a way to stop the negative cycle? If we can shape plastic for use, can we also mold ourselves a better future?

Ware's singing brings warmth to electronic music and a swooning quality to her own pop, so it's no surprise that her visit to the Tiny Desk was filled with casual poise and spontaneity.

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Swedish folksinger Kristian Matsson, known to most of us as the Tallest Man On Earth, has a new album called Dark Bird Is Home coming out next month, and we've already heard the early single "Sagres." The album's title track, the second song we've heard from the LP, starts out as a lovely, … More »

My Morning Jacket did a Reddit AMA a few hours ago, and Jim James further confirmed that he's one of the most empathetic, thoughtful people in the industry right now. Someone asked him how he felt about the new My Morning Jacket album The Waterfall leaking early, and here's what he had to … More »

Plants and Animals

We know our eyes are easily deceived, but what about our ears? Can we be fooled into hearing something that isn't there?

Take a look at this ASAPScience video explaining auditory illusions and phenomena such as the 'Shepard Tone Illusion'

 

 

 

This simple nontoxic trick is a little miracle ... and no ants were harmed in the writing of this story.

In a beautifully stark performance, the band plays two songs from the new Kintsugi and two older favorites — one from Plans and one from Transatlanticism.

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Out of Towner:::GLENN KOTCHE@ GATH “That’s it” Slingshot Festival

A week ago, Paul Kalanithi, who was 37, died from lung cancer. He had recently finished his neurosurgery residency at Stanford and was a father to an infant daughter.

He was also a writer. If you haven't read his "How Long Have I Got Left?" or "Before I Go," you should.

In this video, he talks about how time changes as you face your mortality. "Clocks are now kind of irrelevant to me," he says. "Time, where it used to have kind of a linear progression feel to it, now feels more like a space."

Tags: cancer   death   videos

After years of suffering from a negative image, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer brand will finally close its (virtual and physical) doors. The company’s chief marketing officer Chris Capossela announced the news at the recent Microsoft Convergence conference......
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My answer to that question, having read nothing about it beyond this article, is "it sounds like a bit of a stretch, but what an interesting thing to think about". This theory about how humans and wolves (and later, dogs) teamed up to outcompete Neanderthals for food is being forwarded by anthropologist Pat Shipman, author of the new book, The Invaders: How Humans and Their Dogs Drove Neanderthals to Extinction.

Modern humans formed an alliance with wolves soon after we entered Europe, argues Shipman. We tamed some and the dogs we bred from them were then used to chase prey and to drive off rival carnivores, including lions and leopards, that tried to steal the meat.

"Early wolf-dogs would have tracked and harassed animals like elk and bison and would have hounded them until they tired," said Shipman. "Then humans would have killed them with spears or bows and arrows.

"This meant the dogs did not need to approach these large cornered animals to finish them off -- often the most dangerous part of a hunt -- while humans didn't have to expend energy in tracking and wearing down prey. Dogs would have done that. Then we shared the meat. It was a win-win situation."

At that time, the European landscape was dominated by mammoths, rhinos, bison and several other large herbivores. Both Neanderthals and modern humans hunted them with spears and possibly bows and arrows. It would have been a tricky business made worse by competition from lions, leopards, hyenas, and other carnivores, including wolves.

"Even if you brought down a bison, within minutes other carnivores would have been lining up to attack you and steal your prey," said Shipman. The answer, she argues, was the creation of the human-wolf alliance. Previously they separately hunted the same creatures, with mixed results. Once they joined forces, they dominated the food chain in prehistoric Europe -- though this success came at a price for other species. First Neanderthals disappeared to be followed by lions, mammoths, hyenas and bison over the succeeding millennia. Humans and hunting dogs were, and still are, a deadly combination, says Shipman.

(via @robinsloan)

Tags: books   humans   Neanderthals   Pat Shipman   The Invaders

“I had a hard time [writing] at first, and then much less of a hard time. I started writing quite a bit. I wanted to write a self-help book — From Writer’s Block to Graphomania in Two Easy Weeks … [W]hen I stopped thinking about whether it was good or bad, and I just started doing it, things changed.”

- Errol Morris (cf. Lynda Barry)

Misophonia, in which certain ordinary sounds offend or irritate the listener, presents special challenges to a primary care physician.

After seeing the Homer Simpson coma theory the other day, a reader sent me this story from an anonymous poster on Reddit who lived 10 years of "a different life" entirely in his head while he was briefly unconscious after being hit by a car.

I met a wonderful young lady, she made my heart skip and my face red, I pursued her for months and dispatched a few jerk boyfriends before I finally won her over, after two years we got married and almost immediately she bore me a daughter.

I had a great job and my wife didn't have to work outside of the house, when my daughter was two she [my wife] bore me a son. My son was the joy of my life, I would walk into his room every morning before I left for work and doted on him and my daughter.

One day while sitting on the couch I noticed that the perspective of the lamp was odd, like inverted. It was still in 3D but... just.. wrong. (It was a square lamp base, red with gold trim on 4 legs and a white square shade). I was transfixed, I couldn't look away from it. I stayed up all night staring at it, the next morning I didn't go to work, something was just not right about that lamp.

No idea if this is actually true, but if so, that's one of the most terrifying things I've ever heard. I had a similar but far less scary experience. A few years ago, I fainted. I was told I was out for about 8-10 seconds, but within that time, I had a dream that lasted for ~30 minutes. The details have faded but at the time, the dream felt very real and super vivid and I was pretty freaked out by it. I can't imagine what feeling like you've lived 10 years in an instant would feel like. (via @monsur)

Franklin, the first black member of Charles Schulz's Peanuts gang, made his debut in July 1968. His presence came about through the efforts of Los Angeles schoolteacher Harriet Glickman, who wrote Schulz several letters in the wake of Martin Luther King Jr's assassination arguing that the inclusion of black characters in the most popular comic strip in America would be a positive thing. Here is her initial letter to Schulz:

After some back and forth between Schulz and Glickman, Franklin made his first appearance in the strip.

Franklin's introduction was part of a five-day sequence featuring Sally tossing away Charlie Brown's beach ball and Franklin rescuing it. In some ways, this seems an aggressive bit of integration -- many American public beaches, while no longer legally segregated, were still de facto segregated at the time. In other ways, the strips suggest what might be seen today as an excess of caution; of the twenty panels of the series, Franklin is in ten panels and Sally is in eight, but never is Franklin in the same panel as the white girl. Franklin would not reappear for another two and a half months, when he came for a visit to Charlie Brown's neighborhood. He was somewhat lighter skinned here, which seems to be less a matter of trying to make him acceptable to the readers and more a matter of cutting back on shading lines which were overpowering his facial features. Franklin's job in this series was to react to the oddness of the neighborhood kids, and that was a precursor to what would be his primary role in the strip as a whole. Perhaps due to excessive caution, Franklin was never granted any of the sort of usual quirks that define a Peanuts character, the very sort of mistake that Glickman was warning about when she called for one of the black kids to be "a Lucy."

His inclusion made news nationally and upset many people, particularly in the South. Schulz had a conversation with the president of the comic's distribution company:

I remember telling Larry at the time about Franklin -- he wanted me to change it, and we talked about it for a long while on the phone, and I finally sighed and said, "Well, Larry, let's put it this way: Either you print it just the way I draw it or I quit. How's that?"

(via @essl)

Tags: Charles Schulz   comics   Harriet Glickman   Peanuts   racism

If you have a child of two or three, or can borrow one, let her give you beginning lessons in looking.
—Corita Kent and Jan Steward, Learning By Heart

This weekend we visited the Umlauf Sculpture Garden here in Austin. Towards the end of our visit, I spent at least half an hour at the very edge of the garden with my back to the beautiful art and scenery, watching the cars whiz by on Robert E. Lee Road.

Going to an art museum with a two-year-old will make you rethink what’s interesting and what’s art. (After all, what are cars but fast, colorful, kinetic sculptures?) This, of course, should be the point of museums: to make us look closer at our everyday life as a source of art and wonder.

After I posted about the experience, Roberto Greco sent me this great picture of some children in the 1960s looking through a grate at the San Francisco Art Museum:

It reminded me that ten years ago I’d spent hours at the Art Institute of Chicago when I came across this weird sculpture:

I asked the museum guard, rather innocently, “Can you tell me more about this piece?”

She looked at me and said, “It keeps the paintings from melting.”

I smiled, thanked her, and snuck a picture.

“For so many years we have been learning to judge and dismiss — I know what that thing is — I’ve seen it a hundred times — and we’ve lost the complex realities, laws, and details that surround us,” write Kent and Steward in Learning By Heart. “Try looking the way the child looks—as if always for the first time—and you will, I promise, feel wider awake.”

Borrow a kid. Spend some time trying to see through their eyes. You will discover new things.