Old school book printing

Printing a Book, Old School from Armin Vit on Vimeo.

This is a facinating video of how books were made, or maybe they are mostly still made this way? Even more impressive is the thought that newspapers did this process every day for each new edition.
Another thought I had was if you went back in time to say pre printing press times, would you be able to describe how books are made? Would you be able to describe anything beyond a simple screw press? How to bind them by hand? I certainly couldn't have described how to print the pages in the manner described in the film, let alone how exactly an digital printer does it today. Looking deeper I was surprised to find that digital printing accounts for only 9% of printing. The wikipedia page on modern printing is interesting reading as well.

SWAT

I've blogged before about the effect of the War on Drugs on the US:
The War on Drugs
The Land of the Free?
To add to these, here's another social cost paid by citizens of the United States for the War on Drugs is the prevalent use of SWAT teams to serve warrants and make arrests. From the ACLU "Blog of Rights: Officer Acquitted in Fatal Shooting of Unarmed Woman and Baby":

SWAT raids are usually forced, aggressive, unannounced entry by heavily armed policemen dressed as soldiers, and are often accompanied by flash-bang grenades and major damage to the residence or business.

And they occure roughly 40,000 times a year! From "Overkill: the Rise of Paramilitary Police Raids in America":

Americans have long maintained that a man’s home is his castle and that he has the right to defend it from unlawful intruders. Unfortunately, that right may be disappearing. Over the last 25 years, America has seen a disturbing militarization of its civilian law enforcement, along with a dramatic and unsettling rise in the use of paramilitary police units (most commonly called Special Weapons and Tactics, or SWAT) for routine police work. The most common use of SWAT teams today is to serve narcotics warrants, usually with forced, unannounced entry into the home.

These increasingly frequent raids, 40,000 per year by one estimate, are needlessly subjecting nonviolent drug offenders, bystanders, and wrongly targeted civilians to the terror of having their homes invaded while they’re sleeping, usually by teams of heavily armed paramilitary units dressed not as police officers but as soldiers. These raids bring unnecessary violence and provocation to nonviolent drug offenders, many of whom were guilty of only misdemeanors. The raids terrorize innocents when police mistakenly target the wrong residence. And they have resulted in dozens of needless deaths and injuries, not only of drug offenders, but also of police officers, children, bystanders, and innocent suspects.

3 million Americans behind bars, paramilitary home invasions, Rockerfeller laws that make selling two ounces of marijuana punishable the same as second degree murder (a minimum of 15 years to life in prison, and a maximum of 25 years to life in prison)... boy am I happy Canada didn't follow the US down this awefull rabbit hole.

Goatee Guide!

This is the kind of product I wonder why I didn't think of sooner! Link

Epic bad album covers

This collection is good for half a dozen laugh minimum. Link

Simpson's Quizes

"Troy McClure film or actual terrible movie?" quiz.
I got 10 out of 15. A toughy, here's a list of all his films.

"Simpson's softball" quiz. I got 8 out of 9. Much easier.

Olympic Torches and Event Schedule

The New York Times is king for churning out interactive stuff.
Here's a link for pics of the Olympic torches as they have evolved over time. Link
Here's a link for Olympic event schedules. Link

Amazing paper art

This is amazing stuff, I'm always super impressed when the materials are so humble, and the results are so amazing. Link Link

Pixar's Blockbuster Secrets

Facinating article from the Harvard Business Review. I had no idea that Pixar was on such a roll:

Wall-E is the studio’s ninth consecutive number-one movie since the release of Toy Story in 1995, an unparalleled record of creative and commercial success.

Turns out they have a very different business model from the rest of Hollywood. Link

Impossible to watch without flinching at the end

This is one big snake. Link

Elivis isn't dead, he just time-travelled back to Rome!

Link

Inside the Lego Factory

Automation that makes my knees weak. Link
And there's a very cute vid link called "Galactic Empire Cloning Stormtroopers in Lego Factory". Link

This would cause me to poo the bed

Montreal woman awakens to find python under her bed
Link

Tattoos that will make you feel dumb

Another post on tattoos. We've all seen sites that show bad tattoos, even laser (ouch) tattoos, but this one shows tattoos that require explanations, explanations I often can't understand anyway. The one for the tattoo pictured is:

"Now, for the explanation. This is a formula called the Y Combinator. It is a fixed-point combinator in the lambda calculus and was discovered by Haskell Curry, a rather prolific mathematician and logician whose work helped start Computer Science.

"What this formula does is calculates the fixed point of a function, which in turn allows for recursion by calling on that fixed point; recursion is perhaps the single most important concept in Computer Science. Being a computer scientist and a mathematician, this formula is very important to me and represents the innate beauty of computer science and mathematical logic."


Or this one:
"It is an approximation of the locus of connectedness for the Julia sets of the family of functions f(z) = z^2 + lambda/(z^2) (rotated by pi/2). This is analogous to the standard Mandelbrot set (which applies to the family f(z) = z^2 + c), but holds additional fascination because for lambda values which are in the interior of one of the subdomains of the connectedness locus, the Julia set is a Universal Curve. To me this represents the structure unifying chaos (since Julia sets are chaotic) and order (since Universal Curves act as a sort of catalog of all planar curves)."


Link

Literary Tattoos

The title says it all, over at Contrariwise: Literary Tattoos are a very cool collection of tats. Must be the geek in me but a lit tattoo is something I might ink, some meaningful quote that sums up my worldview. Maybe "Beware, simple, easy to understand wrong answers to complex questions", which I guess is not the point as the quote is not from literature. Probably more to the point would be one of the following from who else but Oscar Wilde; (source)

Experience is the name every one gives to their mistakes.

Whenever cannibals are on the brink of starvation, Heaven, in its infinite mercy, sends them a fat missionary.

Always forgive your enemies. Nothing annoys them so much.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

My problem would be choosing, I'd want a bullet list with about five or six. The Braille one is fascinating. I'd love to hear examples of what you'd consider. Link

How to make everyone happy

From Seth Godin's blog

Greg sent me an article about a bridge in Folsom. $117 million spent, it needs a name.

How about "Johnny Cash"? He's famous, he made Folsom famous, he's dead, his daughter said yes, he has fans, they need tourists... you get the idea.

City Council votes 4 to 1 against.

The two key money quotes:

“Why would we promote a prison? We are known for a lot more things than the prison.”

and my favorite:

In regards to the Folsom Lake Crossing name, King said “just about everybody I’ve talked to is happy.”

Here's the takeaway: If you are willing to satisfy people with good enough, you can make just about everybody happy. If you delight people and create change that lasts, you're going to offend those that hate change in all its forms. Your choice.

"Clinically Proven"

Ever wondered what the term "Clinically Proven" means, it gets bandied about by marketers alot. Here's an article that delves into what it really means.
Link

The War on Drugs

The insanity of mandatory minimum sentences and the resulting flood of petty offenders filling up US prisons (largely the poor who cannot afford good lawyers) will one day be looked at the same way we look at the Gulags of the Soviet Union (see my previous post entitled "The Land of the Free?"). Thanks to Lara for forwarding this facinating article. Her quote is from a ways down in the article, about 4/5 of the way.

Curry, who had been driving Brown's car, in which a one-pound rock of crack was hidden, imagined he would pay a price; he imagined he would serve a short jail sentence and then be given a chance to atone for the sins of his naivete. He had no criminal record. One FBI agent called him a "flunky."

But there were federal laws, hurriedly passed by Congress, and those laws decreed that drug offenders were subject to mandatory minimum sentences, and those who trafficked in crack were especially susceptible. Despite sympathy from a judge who could do nothing to help him, Derrick Curry was sentenced to 19 years and seven months in prison for his role in a drug conspiracy under laws that had been passed in the summer of 1986, in the midst of an unprecedented cry for reform in the wake of the death of Leonard K. Bias.

For starters, "a one-pound rock of crack"!!!??? I had no idea a rock of crack could attain that dimension. The catch 22 in US politics is that to stand up and say "mandatory sentences are nuts, we need to change how we solve our drug abuse problem" is to be called weak on crime, your odds of being elected diminish greatly. As they were passing the laws that sentenced Curry, the legislators knew it was crazy, but if pressed would all quickly add "of course I'm for it".

Amid the fury and panic and ignorance, amid what Sterling calls a "legislative frenzy," Congress acted in a bipartisan fashion, passing the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986. One Oklahoma legislator admitted it was "out of control," but added, "of course I'm for it." The law established mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenders; it also decreed that possession or sale of 1/100th of an amount of crack cocaine as compared to powder cocaine (5 grams versus 500 grams) would trigger those mandatory minimum sentences.

Fortunately it looks as though the tide is slowly ebbing, bi partisan bills are beining to be brought forward. Slowly, slowly the situation will redress, in a decade or two, amid the ruins of litterally millions of US citizens who have spent time in prisons, and live with criminal records.
Link

The Sneakiest Goal in the History of Soccer

Found this over at Digg, the title says it all.

Calling David Attenborough

Photo: Jill M. Lassaline

A few days back I was holding Simon and hanging out in the front lawn for a few minutes before loading him into the car. A family of Chickadees (Janet's call) had set up a nest in a tree in our front yard, two of the chicks were on the ground in our front yard looking like they had just exited the nest. Both were doing their best to try flying. One off to my right was actually getting off the ground a bit. I was pointing this out to Simon who was fascinated. The little chick we were watching made a big effort and got a few feet off the ground, and flew like crazy maybe four feet along when WHAM, in streaked a hawk and nailed it about five feet from where we were standing and in an instant was gone.
Okay dokay, moving on, I'm glad Simon's only one and what just happened is lost on him.



Photo: Jim Parrish

My Dad just got back from Italy

I pick Merv up at the airport yesterday and he tells me how he scored a single ticket to the opera the night before. It was a fabulous seat, the opera was Carmen, the male lead was Andrea Bocelli. Being ever social Merv introduces himself using the little Italian he knows to the woman seated beside him, roughly the same age, who, with limited English, introduces herself as Monica, Monica Mussolini. Merv comments on how that is a famous surname, any relation? She replies "daughter", or at least that is all Merv understands, later I discover he was sitting beside Donna Monica Mussolini, widow of the late Vittorio, Mussolini's eldest son.

Here's a link to an interesting article on her:

The mass over, Donna Monica Mussolini, widow of the late Vittorio, Mussolini's eldest son, led the congregation out of the llth-century church into the ferocious midday heat, then down into the dark crypt at one end of the cemetery to file past the stone tombs of the Duce and members of his immediate family. Candles flickered and the air was thick with the sweet smell of lilies as Signora Mussolini stood in front of the Duce's tomb, on which is a giant stone bust of her father-inlaw's head. She raised her right arm in the Roman salute and delivered the traditional fascist greeting. 'A noi!' (`To us'). She then patted the nearby tomb of Vittorio, who died last year [1997], kissed it and left.

C-Shirt: T-Shirts, But Way Cooler With CC

Many thanks to Steve M for pointing this very cool posting on the CC blog about a Japanese t-shirt company taking mass customization to the next level!

From the post:

First, the conventional idea: users submit t-shirt designs which can be viewed online and ordered for printing. However, the twist is that since all the designs are placed under CC, Nota provides an interface with which to edit and reproduce these designs accordingly.

Even better, the service is outfitted to work with some enabled mobile devices, so if you see a shirt you like on the street, you can scan the Quick Response (QR) code included on each design with your phone, which will capture a unique address where you can load and edit the t-shirt before getting it yourself.
Link

Photoshop Disasters

The blog is called Photoshop Disasters, love it!

Carl Sagan

I found myself watching clips of Carl Sagan on YouTube, I'd forgotten how mesmerizing he was, still is. The clip I watched had some amazing footage of rural India, which took me back to visiting my sponsor child Punam in the Terrai region of southern Nepal. It was a double pleasure to listen to this most erudite man while watching amazing footage.
Link

Urban Explorers

I've seen these pictures before, and love the concept of exploring urban landscapes in our midst.
Link

Understanding Introverts

I was nosing around Neil Stephenson's (one of my favourite authors) personal web site, a fun collection of tidbits. Under the "Author" section he has a list of randomish thoughts, I clicked on "Introvert" and it led to an article over at Atlantic.com entitled "Caring for your Introvert". This article was a bit of a bombshell for me, an unrepentant Extrovert married to an Introvert.

Extroverts are energized by people, and wilt or fade when alone. They often seem bored by themselves, in both senses of the expression. Leave an extrovert alone for two minutes and he will reach for his cell phone. In contrast, after an hour or two of being socially "on," we introverts need to turn off and recharge. My own formula is roughly two hours alone for every hour of socializing. This isn't antisocial. It isn't a sign of depression. It does not call for medication. For introverts, to be alone with our thoughts is as restorative as sleeping, as nourishing as eating. Our motto: "I'm okay, you're okay—in small doses."

Link

I'm sure my wife Janet will be very pleased my understanding of her is vastly increased, and I'll shut up more often... The article was written in 2003, and was apparently immensly popular; there are alot of Introverts chaffing at the hegemony of Extroverts. One follow-up article regarded whether Introverts and Extroverts can make good couples (let's hope so!). From the reader feedback:

I think, as an introvert, that the companionship of an extrovert can be very beneficial. The extroverted partner is like a shield for the introvert in social settings. I caution, however, that the "social" needs of the introvert can become burdensome for the extrovert. The burden is borne by requiring the extroverted partner to carry the load, provide the motivation and energy to engage in the social scene. The intro-extrovert relationship can be a palliative for the introvert, but an absolute chore for the extrovert who must often carry the full load of managing social arrangements and engagements. In the end, as a result of the effort required, the introvert may deprive the extrovert of the oft-needed joy of the social life the extrovert needs to thrive.

I just married an extrovert a few months ago. I have always treasured any alone time that I can get, and it takes a all of my energy to "act" like an extrovert for more than a few hours. He has to have people in the house every waking moment, and I get my fill after about two hours and want to just hide in another room and accomplish things other than visiting. I guess it comes down to finding balance in all things, because he does bring more living and memories and relationships to my life, but it also wears me out. I don't think it's healthy for him to have zero alone time to reflect on his life and thoughts, so I'm still working on the compromise part of our social life. If both of us were introverts, maybe we would be really miserable and depressed and have no enjoyment out of life whatsoever, so as long as we both can balance things out, its a great combination.

I'm a female introvert. One problem with an extroverted spouse (I should know, I had one!) is that this person is always wanting to go to parties, to social events, out to dinner with other couples, to family get-togethers. Either the introverted spouse has to go too and be miserable (hearing: "What's the matter, why aren't you having a good time?"), or the introverted spouse stays home, making the extroverted spouse irritated ("Can't you at least come to one of these things?"), and leading other attendees to assume something is wrong with your marriage.

Link

Cool Interactive

A bit of a waste of time, but mesmerizing none-the-less. Left mouse click to jog through the different configurations. From www.webupon.com
Link

Table of Elements

A very fun Table of Elements, sadly I've lost the thread of where I found it...
Link

First sleep, second sleep

This is one of those pieces of trivia I've dragged up on occasion that I suspect most people I've told it to speculated I was making up. At long last I present a source.

For many centuries, and perhaps back to Homer, Western society slept in two shifts. People went to sleep, got up in the middle of the night for an hour or so, and then went to sleep again. Thus night — divided into a “first sleep” and “second sleep” — also included a curious intermission.

Link

Land of the Free?

Link to larger view of this chart

A couple of titles the United States can lay claim to that I'm sure the average citizen of the United States is unaware of:
Largest inmate population in the world.
Largest percentage of population in prison.

From Wikipedia:

In absolute terms, the United States currently has the largest inmate population in the world, with more than 2½ million^[14] or more than one in a hundred adults^[15] in prison and jails. Although the United States represents less than 5% of the world's population, over 25% of the people incarcerated around the world are housed in the American prison system. Pulitzer Prize winning author Joseph T. Hallinan wrote in his book Going Up the River: Travels in a Prison Nation, "so common is the prison experience that the federal government predicts one in eleven men will be incarcerated in his lifetime, one in four if he is black." In 2002, both Russia and China^[16] By October 2006, the Russian prison population declined to 869,814 which translated into 611 prisoners per 100,000 population. also had prison populations in excess of 1 million.

As a percentage of total population, the United States also has the largest imprisoned population, with 739 people per 100,000 serving time, awaiting trial or otherwise detained.^[17]

The US rate of 700-739 (depending on the source) per 100,000 people is in rare company. From The Straight Dope (dated Feb 2004, so perhaps the discrepency between Wikipedia and Snopes is that an additional 500,000 people have entered the US prison system in the last four years):

According to the International Centre for Prison Studies at King's College London, the U.S. currently has the largest documented prison population in the world, both in absolute and proportional terms. We've got roughly 2.03 million people behind bars, or 701 per 100,000 population. China has the second-largest number of prisoners (1.51 million, for a rate of 117 per 100,000), and Russia has the second-highest rate (606 per 100,000, for a total of 865,000). Russia had the highest rate for years, but has released hundreds of thousands of prisoners since 1998; meanwhile the U.S. prison population has grown by even more. Rounding out the top ten, with rates from 554 to 437, are Belarus, Bermuda (UK), Kazakhstan, the Virgin Islands (U.S.), the Cayman Islands (UK), Turkmenistan, Belize, and Suriname, which you'll have to agree puts America in interesting company. South Africa, a longtime star performer on the list, has dropped to 15th place (402) since the dismantling of apartheid.

Cecil at The Strait Dope ads that maybe, or even probably China and North Korea are vastly under reporting the number of prisoners in the dock, which would maybe knock the USA down from the gold medal to the bronze, but regardless, hardly a podium Americans can be proud to be on.

Link to Wikipedia Article
Link to The Strait Dope Article

Flavor Tripping Parties

This is a party I want to host! From the New York Times

They were among 40 or so people who were tasting under the influence of a small red berry called miracle fruit at a rooftop party in Long Island City, Queens, last Friday night. The berry rewires the way the palate perceives sour flavors for an hour or so, rendering lemons as sweet as candy.

Link

The Secret to Raising Smart Kids

I'm going to read this article every time Simon's birthday rolls around, just to remind myself of how it's the effort he puts in that counts. From Scientific American: Link

Numbers made personal

When we hear news of tragedies like China's recent earthquake a number like 50,000 dead is hard to fathom, it becomes a statistic. Scroll through this collection of photos and each of those 50,000 become a person again. Warning, the pictures are often graphic.

Visuwords

Saw a link to this over at Neatorama (courtesy of Eli Schwimmer), very fun, an interactive, visual dictionary. This is how my mind works...

Some of the nodes can be expanded by double clicking, though I haven't figured out what the rules are showing which can be expanded. Try the word "moral", it seems to have alot of nodes that can be explored.

I Love Funny Kid Videos

Not sure if it has something to do with becomeing a dad in this last year, but I love funny kid videos! Wait for the kid at the end...



Funny Kids - video powered by Metacafe

Did Pirates Invent Modern "Workers Compensation"

Photo: David Ball

The Freakonomics blog over at the NYTimes is a fun place. They had a post on Pirates (ie the swashbucklers of the high seas) called "Are Pirates the Key to Understanding the World?" I read some of an article by Peter T. Leeson it listed; Pirational Choice: The Economics of Infamous Pirate Practices. In it I found out that pirates of the late 17th and early 18th century used...

...an early form of workers' compensation to support crew members injured during duty. In Captain Bartholomew Roberts' pirate crew, for instance, the company's articles of agreement stipulated that "If . . . any Man should lose a Limb, or become a Cripple in their Service, he was to have 800 Dollars, out of the publick Stock, and for lesser Hurts, proportionately" (Johnson 1726-1728 [1999]: 12). Before dividing up their loot, pirate crews deducted the insurance amounts their articles identi…ed, distributed these sums to injured pirates, and then divided the rest.

I googled around for the history of Workers Compensation and found an article called "Workers' Compensation, A Brief History" by Lloyd Harger. He places the birth of modern workers' compensation laws in Germany in the early 19th century:

Germany took the lead in the protection of injured workers in 1838 by passing legislation protecting railroad employees and passengers in the event of accidents. Further changes were made in 1854 when a law was passed requiring certain classes of employers to contribute to sickness funds and in 1876 a “Voluntary Insurance Act” was passed, which failed in actual operation. Bismarck introduced a Compulsory Plan in 1881, which was enacted in stages and finalized in 1884 and is the model for our present system.

Unless someone tells me otherwise, I'm going to give cred to the swashbucklers for it! Comment if you have any more info...

Simon's First Steps

My son Simon turned one years old this last week, Grandma and Papa visited from Ontario, and Simon treated them to his first steps, and amazingly Janet caught them on video! How special will it be for him to one day see himself take his first steps!
It's often occurred to me that Simon will have his whole life documented in film; I have him in-utero kicking, I have him moments after birth, I'll document everything until he leaves home. His generation will have their lives documented like few before, save the children of celebrities or royalty.

Economist "Light", But Good!

In response the post Economist and Mother Jones, my friend Lara King mentioned More Intelligent Life, kind of a human interest compendium of what is written by The Economist. I went and checked it out and loved it! I'll be posting more from there in the future...

I'm Hiring Her!

I've been on hockey teams, volley ball teams, band, track teams, triathlon teams, and above all else (with regards to fundraising) swim teams, and I've gone door to door to sell a lot of things to raise money. Bottle drives, swim-a-thons, oranges, coupon books, and chocolate covered almonds are what memory brings to mind, I'm sure I'm suppressing the memory of more though. So I have to bow down to this girl, who leaves me in awe!

Jennifer Sharpe knows how to sell Girl Scout cookies. She sold them to friends. She sold them to strangers. She even convinced her orthodontist to buy the popular sweet treats.

And now, with 17,323 boxes sold under her name, the 15-year-old Dearborn girl is believed to have sold more cookies in a single season than anyone in the United States ever, according to Girl Scout officials.

Link

New York Stock Exchange Runs Trades On Red Hat Linux

Wow, Linux, the NYSE, in bed together, make lots of children! The barbarians are at Microsoft's gate. Link

Economist and Mother Jones

In a better world, more of it's opinions would be formed after reading from two very fine websites:
www.Economist.com and www.MotherJones.com
Both of these sites have more well written analysis, I'll say it again, analysis, not rhetoric, analysis, than 99% of the web put together.

Great tits cope well with warming

John at work sent this my way courtesy of the BBC. Link

The Shine Comes off Greenspan

Greenspan was regarded as godlike for so long he could have marched us all off a cliff at will, oh wait he did a couple of times. He will be remembered as the finest honer of financial bubbles since the Dutch and their tulips. It is impresive that after being chastized for the dot.com bubble, he solved that with the housing bubble, kind of like solving a headache by taking painkillers that soon give you cancer.

50 Years In Space

A very cool interactive graphic over at Popular Mechanics.

The Best Feel Good Story I've Read In Awhile!

Finding a story this soul affirming in the giant river of bad news, scare stories our media loves to deliver is like going for a swim in one of those pig poo holding ponds and comming away with a dimond you stumbled on with your big toe while wading in.

Florence Russell is looking forward to this year’s offerings. On a recent Saturday she watched from the end of Alabama Avenue as gardeners worked compost into beds at Hands and Hearts Garden, one of the sites where the Wilkses keep beds, along with 24 other growers. Fresh greens, she said, would be a welcome alternative to tough collards from the local grocery.

“This is something good happening here,” Ms. Russell said.

Link

Another story in the same vein a few weeks later on May 20th, this time from Philidelphia; Link