somewhere between fun and depressing are these answers.
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Game: Google Feud is a game that challenges you to guess the top ten Google autocompletes for a particular word or term. For instance, the game might prompt you with “my friend is addicted to” and you have to fill in the rest of the query. (FYI, the top ten autocompletes for this example are weed, her phone, drugs, coke, pills, drama, oxycodone, crack, anime, and alcohol.) — Mark Frauenfelder
Stuff: Over the years, I’ve had to buy a variety of bras for different types of dresses and tops (racerback, backless, strapless, etc.), but the most useful purchase I’ve made has been Nippies. I’ve had these for a couple years now. They are washable, reusable and so comfortable I forget I have them on. — Claudia Lamar
Tip: Before buying something on Amazon, enter the URL for the product at fakespot.com. This free service will analyze how many shill reviewers have rated a product, and award a “Fakespot Grade” from A to F. A low grade doesn’t necessarily mean a product is bad, it just means you shouldn’t take the reviews and user ratings into consideration when making your decision to buy something. — MF
Tool: I’m trying out Splash, a cool free experimental photo search engine from 500Pixels. You sketch the rough contours of a photo you seek in color, and it will display two dozen images that “match” your sketch. The match is mostly in color, mood, and rough shapes, but it does present you with some interesting images, all licensable. — Kevin Kelly
Readables: A long time ago, after a bad breakup I read If the Buddha Dated by Charlotte Kasi. By the time I had finished the book, it was covered in notes and dog-eared pages, and I felt healed and ready to move on. Now, as a newlywed, I am enjoying listening to If the Buddha Married on Audible. So many great insights and communication tips. — CL
Stuff: All my dress shirts are now “Non-Iron” cotton material. I don’t know how this stuff works, but the ones I clumsily fold into my luggage, will unwrinkle shortly after I put them on. I use Non-Iron Oxford shirts from Land’s End and L.L. Bean, but most clothing brands seem to carry them. Eagle brand Non-Iron shirts are popular on Amazon. — KK
steve and i went to gloucester this summer. it was weird and delightful.
c. 1900
Image: Library of Congress
Incorporated in 1642, the Massachusetts town of Gloucester has been one of the centers of the North Atlantic fishing industry for centuries. And it's seen more than its fair share of heartbreak.
The town grew rapidly in the 1800s, as it provided a convenient launching point for trips to the fertile offshore fishing grounds of George’s Bank and the Grand Banks.
Gloucester fishermen sailed in specially designed schooners optimized for speed and holding capacity to reach the banks, fill up on cod and other fish and return as quickly as possible. Many of these ship designs were unsafe and prone to capsizing in bad weather, however: Between 1866 and 1890, some 2,450 men and 380 schooners were lost at sea. Read more...
The Playlist has compiled a list of the top film scores of the 21st century (so far).1 Tron: Legacy should be much higher than #49...it is perhaps my favorite Daft Punk album. And I don't know how they left Philip Glass' fantastic score for The Hours off. Glad to see Upstream Color, There Will Be Blood, and Requiem for a Dream so high on the list though.
I love film scores -- I listen to them while I work -- so here are a few of my favorites that are available on Spotify:
Not available on Spotify but worth seeking out elsewhere: The Fog of War, Sunshine, and Her.
This is not to be confused with the list of the best movie soundtracks. The score is the music composed specifically for a film while a soundtrack features songs from other artists and albums that appear in a film. More or less.↩
In addition to robots that run fast, can't be knocked over, launch themselves 30 feet into the air, and climb up walls, Boston Dynamics also makes robots who move like people. Now, imagine if that robot swore like a longshoreman while going about its duties. This made me laugh super hard. (via @nickkokonas)
About 170 years ago, during Japan's Edo period, a 34-foot scroll called Fart Battle (He-gassen) was created by unknown artisan(s). The work lives on in glorious hi-res digitized collection at Waseda University. (more…)
Fans of the Netflix original series Stranger Things will recall the grim fate of Nancy's earnest friend Barb, who, like Will, is taken by the Demogorgon and last seen in the Upside Down looking real dead.
Fans will also recall that besides a few meager tears from Nancy, there's generally not much concern shown for Barb.
In a deleted scene from the Season 1 parody sketch on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon, Barb returns to ask Mike, Lucas, Dustin and Eleven some pretty reasonable questions, like, why was there no search party for her? Why wasn't she rescued? Why does everyone love Will more? Read more...
this is touching. also a reminder of what a fucking spark mel brooks is. for those keeping count at home, he's 90.
Comedian and director Mel Brooks stopped by The Tonight Show to reminisce about his dear friend and colleague Gene Wilder, who passed away earlier this week at age 83.
"He was sick, and I knew it...I expected he would go, but when it happens, it's still tremendous and it's a big shock," Brooks said. "I'm still reeling from no more Gene...I can't call him. He was such a wonderful part of my life."
Brooks told hilarious stories and memories about Wilder, and recounted about how their collaborations for films like The Producers, Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein came about.
"Okay Jim, since you are my guest, and I am your host, what are your pleasures? What do you like to do?"
"Oh I don't know. Play chess. Screw."
"Well let's play chess."
Gene Wilder as The Waco Kid.
Gene Wilder died aged 83 Monday, leaving an unforgettable legacy on celluloid.
From his Oscar-nominated turn as an accountant in Mel Brooks' The Producers to his roles in Blazing Saddles and Young Frankenstein, his work with Richard Pryor in the likes of Stir Crazy and See No Evil, Hear No Evil,and of course his inimitable take on Willy Wonka, he's delighted generations.
He also has the dubious honor of becoming a massive internet meme.
His smiling face, taken from a screengrab of the 1971 movie Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, has graced a thousand images and gifs expressing condescension since first surfacing five years ago. Read more...
read y'maths. surfaces and randomness are interesting!
Standard geometric objects can be described by simple rules — every straight line, for example, is just y = ax + b — and they stand in neat relation to each other: Connect two points to make a line, connect four line segments to make a square, connect six squares to make a cube.
These are not the kinds of objects that concern Scott Sheffield. Sheffield, a professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, studies shapes that are constructed by random processes. No two of them are ever exactly alike. Consider the most familiar random shape, the random walk, which shows up everywhere from the movement of financial asset prices to the path of particles in quantum physics. These walks are described as random because no knowledge of the path up to a given point can allow you to predict where it will go next.
work over the past few years, Sheffield and his frequent collaborator, Jason Miller, a professor at the University of Cambridge, have shown that these random shapes can be categorized into various classes, that these classes have distinct properties of their own, and that some kinds of random objects have surprisingly clear connections with other kinds of random objects. Their work forms the beginning of a unified theory of geometric randomness.
“You take the most natural objects — trees, paths, surfaces — and you show they’re all related to each other,” Sheffield said. “And once you have these relationships, you can prove all sorts of new theorems you couldn’t prove before.”
In the coming months, Sheffield and Miller will publish the final part of a three-paper series that for the first time provides a comprehensive view of random two-dimensional surfaces — an achievement not unlike the Euclidean mapping of the plane.
“Scott and Jason have been able to implement natural ideas and not be rolled over by technical details,” said Wendelin Werner, a professor at ETH Zurich and winner of the Fields Medal in 2006 for his work in probability theory and statistical physics. “They have been basically able to push for results that looked out of reach using other approaches.”
A Random Walk on a Quantum String
In standard Euclidean geometry, objects of interest include lines, rays, and smooth curves like circles and parabolas. The coordinate values of the points in these shapes follow clear, ordered patterns that can be described by functions. If you know the value of two points on a line, for instance, you know the values of all other points on the line. The same is true for the values of the points on each of the rays in this first image, which begin at a point and radiate outward.
Norbert Wiener of MIT gave a precise mathematical description of this process, which is called Brownian motion.
Brownian motion is the “scaling limit” of random walks — if you consider a random walk where each step size is very small, and the amount of time between steps is also very small, these random paths look more and more like Brownian motion. It’s the shape that almost all random walks converge to over time.
Two-dimensional random spaces, in contrast, first preoccupied physicists as they tried to understand the structure of the universe.
In string theory, one considers tiny strings that wiggle and evolve in time. Just as the time trajectory of a point can be plotted as a one-dimensional curve, the time trajectory of a string can be understood as a two-dimensional curve. This curve, called a worldsheet, encodes the history of the one-dimensional string as it wriggles through time.
“To make sense of quantum physics for strings,” said Sheffield, “you want to have something like Brownian motion for surfaces.”
For years, physicists have had something like that, at least in part. In the 1980s, physicist Alexander Polyakov, who’s now at Princeton University, came up with a way of describing these surfaces that came to be called Liouville quantum gravity (LQG). It provided an incomplete but still useful view of random two-dimensional surfaces. In particular, it gave physicists a way of defining a surface’s angles so that they could calculate the surface area.
In parallel, another model, called the Brownian map, provided a different way to study random two-dimensional surfaces. Where LQG facilitates calculations about area, the Brownian map has a structure that allows researchers to calculate distances between points. Together, the Brownian map and LQG gave physicists and mathematicians two complementary perspectives on what they hoped were fundamentally the same object. But they couldn’t prove that LQG and the Brownian map were in fact compatible with each other.
“It was this weird situation where there were two models for what you’d call the most canonical random surface, two competing random surface models, that came with different information associated with them,” said Sheffield.
Beginning in 2013, Sheffield and Miller set out to prove that these two models described fundamentally the same thing.
The Problem With Random Growth
Sheffield and Miller began collaborating thanks to a kind of dare. As a graduate student at Stanford in the early 2000s, Sheffield worked under Amir Dembo, a probability theorist. In his dissertation, Sheffield formulated a problem having to do with finding order in a complicated set of surfaces. He posed the question as a thought exercise as much as anything else.
David Kaplan, Petr Stepanek and Ryan Griffin for Quanta Magazine; music by Kevin MacLeod
Nature’s Symmetries: In this 2-minute video, David Kaplan explains how the search for hidden symmetries leads to discoveries like the Higgs boson.
“I thought this would be a problem that would be very hard and take 200 pages to solve and probably nobody would ever do it,” Sheffield said.
But along came Miller. In 2006, a few years after Sheffield had graduated, Miller enrolled at Stanford and also started studying under Dembo, who assigned him to work on Sheffield’s problem as way of getting to know random processes. “Jason managed to solve this, I was impressed, we started working on some things together, and eventually we had a chance to hire him at MIT as a postdoc,” Sheffield said.
In order to show that LQG and the Brownian map were equivalent models of a random two-dimensional surface, Sheffield and Miller adopted an approach that was simple enough conceptually. They decided to see if they could invent a way to measure distance on LQG surfaces and then show that this new distance measurement was the same as the distance measurement that came packaged with the Brownian map.
To do this, Sheffield and Miller thought about devising a mathematical ruler that could be used to measure distance on LQG surfaces. Yet they immediately realized that ordinary rulers would not fit nicely into these random surfaces — the space is so wild that one cannot move a straight object around without the object getting torn apart.
The duo forgot about rulers. Instead, they tried to reinterpret the distance question as a question about growth. To see how this works, imagine a bacterial colony growing on some surface. At first it occupies a single point, but as time goes on it expands in all directions. If you wanted to measure the distance between two points, one (seemingly roundabout) way of doing that would be to start a bacterial colony at one point and measure how much time it took the colony to encompass the other point. Sheffield said that the trick is to somehow “describe this process of gradually growing a ball.”
It’s easy to describe how a ball grows in the ordinary plane, where all points are known and fixed and growth is deterministic. Random growth is far harder to describe and has long vexed mathematicians. Yet as Sheffield and Miller were soon to learn, “[random growth] becomes easier to understand on a random surface than on a smooth surface,” said Sheffield. The randomness in the growth model speaks, in a sense, the same language as the randomness on the surface on which the growth model proceeds. “You add a crazy growth model on a crazy surface, but somehow in some ways it actually makes your life better,” he said.
The following images show a specific random growth model, the Eden model, which describes the random growth of bacterial colonies. The colonies grow through the addition of randomly placed clusters along their boundaries. At any given point in time, it’s impossible to know for sure where on the boundary the next cluster will appear. In these images, Miller and Sheffield show how Eden growth proceeds over a random two-dimensional surface.
The first image shows Eden growth on a fairly flat — that is, not especially random — LQG surface. The growth proceeds in an orderly way, forming nearly concentric circles that have been color-coded to indicate the time at which growth occurs at different points on the surface.
Martin Hairer of the University of Warwick won the Fields Medal in 2014 for work that overcame just these kinds of obstacles. “You always need some kind of amazing clever trick to do it.”
Random Exploration
Sheffield and Miller’s clever trick is based on a special type of random one-dimensional curve that is similar to the random walk except that it never crosses itself. Physicists had encountered these kinds of curves for a long time in situations where, for instance, they were studying the boundary between clusters of particles with positive and negative spin (the boundary line between the clusters of particles is a one-dimensional path that never crosses itself and takes shape randomly). They knew these kinds of random, noncrossing paths occurred in nature, just as Robert Brown had observed that random crossing paths occurred in nature, but they didn’t know how to think about them in any kind of precise way. In 1999 Oded Schramm, who at the time was at Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington, introduced the SLE curve (for Schramm-Loewner evolution) as the canonical noncrossing random curve.
mathematicians who are not yet 40.) As it was, two people who worked with him built on his work and went on to win the prize: Wendelin Werner in 2006 and Stanislav Smirnov in 2010. More fundamentally, the discovery of SLE curves made it possible to prove many other things about random objects.
“As a result of Schramm’s work, there were a lot of things in physics they’d known to be true in their physics way that suddenly entered the realm of things we could prove mathematically,” said Sheffield, who was a friend and collaborator of Schramm’s.
For Miller and Sheffield, SLE curves turned out to be valuable in an unexpected way. In order to measure distance on LQG surfaces, and thus show that LQG surfaces and the Brownian map were the same, they needed to find some way to model random growth on a random surface. SLE proved to be the way.
“The ‘aha’ moment was [when we realized] you can construct [random growth] using SLEs and that there is a connection between SLEs and LQG,” said Miller.
SLE curves come with a constant, kappa, which plays a similar role to the one gamma plays for LQG surfaces. Where gamma describes the roughness of an LQG surface, kappa describes the “windiness” of SLE curves. When kappa is low, the curves look like straight lines. As kappa increases, more randomness is introduced into the function that constructs the curves and the curves turn more unruly, while obeying the rule that they can bounce off of, but never cross, themselves. Here is an SLE curve with kappa equal to 0.5, followed by an SLE curve with kappa equal to 3.
two papers in their proof of the equivalence between LQG and the Brownian map on the scientific preprint site arxiv.org; they intend to post the third and final paper later this summer. The work turned on the ability to reason across different random shapes and processes — to see how random noncrossing curves, random growth, and random two-dimensional surfaces relate to one another. It’s an example of the increasingly sophisticated results that are possible in the study of random geometry.
“It’s like you’re in a mountain with three different caves. One has iron, one has gold, one has copper — suddenly you find a way to link all three of these caves together,” said Sheffield. “Now you have all these different elements you can build things with and can combine them to produce all sorts of things you couldn’t build before.”
Many open questions remain, including determining whether the relationship between SLE curves, random growth models, and distance measurements holds up in less-rough versions of LQG surfaces than the one used in the current paper. In practical terms, the results by Sheffield and Miller can be used to describe the random growth of real phenomena like snowflakes, mineral deposits, and dendrites in caves, but only when that growth takes place in the imagined world of random surfaces. It remains to be seen whether their methods can be applied to ordinary Euclidean space, like the space we live in.
A public library in Finland has found a new way to keep relevant to its users. It’s doubling as a Karaoke bar.
The library, located in the Helsinki suburb of Tikkurila, has installed a soundproofed karaoke booth where library cardholders can book a free two-hour session. While it might seem like sacrilege to introduce caterwauling singers into an environment where even loud page turning can normally get you shushed, Tikkurila Library clearly knows which way the wind is blowing. Since 1980, the number of Finnish pubic libraries has halved, and the tendency to consolidate many sites into larger branches makes smaller institutions particularly prone to be sidelined. By providing 3,300 songs to sing (and a suitably muffled isolation chamber in which to do so), the library is wisely pushing its role as a community meeting place.
But Karaoke? Choosing it as a crowd-puller is perhaps less odd than it sounds. This is Finland, after all, which founded the Karaoke World Championships in 2003 and where playback singing is a particular national obsession (well documented in this photo piece). This isn’t even the first time a Finnish institution has used Karaoke to attract more users. In 2014, Finnish State Railways installed a singing booth in the restaurant car of the Helsinki to Oulu express.
Finland’s karaoke library isn’t just about getting people to use a service whose popularity has dropped, however. It’s also about creating a third space for socializing. The Finns have a reputation for being hard drinkers—such is the high cost of alcohol taxes in the country (or so the popular truism goes) that if Finns are going to go to a bar and spend, they want to achieve an at least medium level of inebriation to make up for the cost. By providing a place to sing without drinking, the library is providing a space for people who are put off or intimidated by a boozy crowd. As library regular Anniina Rantanen told Finnish broadcaster YLE:
"I get so nervous. Fortunately you can practice the songs in peace here and you can sing while you’re sober."
This sounds like a healthy enough innovation for people who hate bars. Now all the rest of us need is libraries where you can read while drunk.
If you've watched Stranger Things, you've probably noticed Steve Harrington: popular, privileged, charming yet totally repulsive '80s teen hunk with a glorious head of hair.
And if you've watched Parks & Recreation, you've probably noticed Jean-Ralphio, the oddly well-connected, privileged, clueless, charming in a "can't get rid of him" friend of Tom Haverford, who also had a glorious head of hair.
Ben Schwartz (who plays Jean-Ralphio on Parks and Rec) visited the Late Late Show with James Corden to address the issue — is Steve Harringtom Jean-Ralphio's real father? Read more...
Kids of the '90s will probably remember the short-lived Disney cartoon series Talespin, which depicted Baloo the Bear from The Jungle Book as a 1930s pilot in the Pacific Islands. Even though the series didn't last, its catchy theme song embedded itself in our minds — and it happens to mash up quite nicely with Star Wars footage.
Han Solo and Baloo do seem to have a lot in common.
For the sake of transparency, it would be sort of nice to see stuffy politicians confess, "I'm a bag of dicks."
Run the Jewels and DJ Shadow imagined that world in their new video for their collaboration, "Nobody Speak." It all ends in a fist fight, which is at least better than nuclear war.
“We wanted to make a positive, life-affirming video that captures politicians at their election-year best," explained DJ Shadow in the video's description. "We got this instead.”
"It's such a dope video. It's what I really wish Trump and Hillary would just do and get it over with," added Killer Mike, who is in the Bernie or Bust camp. "And even in that fight, I think Hillary would win — and that's not an endorsement." Read more...
i got into a conversation with some urban planners last week who said that moses should be blamed for all of this because "he was just an engineer." i was so incensed i didn't even know where to begin.
Robert Moses gets remembered as the father of New York's modern urban plan, the "master builder" who led the proliferation of public benefit corporations, gave NYC its UN buildings and World's Fairs, and the New Deal renaissance of the city: he was also an avowed racist who did everything he could to punish and exclude people of color who lived in New York, and the legacy of his architecture-level discrimination lives on in the city today.
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between the titles and the music, this is gonna come in SO handy. sometime. somewhere. somehow.
If you like those Stranger Things titles, you'll love this Image West demo featuring the capabilities of the amazing Scanimate system. (And I already lived through ITC Benguiat and Century Gothic once, let's not bring them back).
1) this is from the forbidden research summit. 2) sweet jack lew, that's a lot of money. 3) essential cause. 4) shall we all misbehave?
Linkedin founder Reid Hoffman has bankrolled an experimental, one-time prize of $250,000 that the Media Lab will award for research that harnesses "responsible, ethical disobedience aimed at challenging the norms, rules, or laws that sustain society’s injustices?"
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Jenna Maroney is one of many characters we love to hate on 30 Rock — her outlandish, selfish statements are just as shocking and funny every time we binge the show on Netflix.
Now the internet can enjoy Jenna-isms in another light: new Tumblr page Donald Maroney features pictures of Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump perfectly paired with Jenna Maroney quotes.
Speaking of SD and David Pasquesi, here's the film that pretty much sums up the short-attention spans that drive our company at Coudal Partners, Regrets: Hobbies.
