CREATExCHANGE

Flickr users can now upload video to their accounts. I uploaded a video during the beta test but since I’m not a pro user, I can’t show it to anyone now that Flickr’s gone public with the video uploading.

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I required redemption. When I arrived home two weeks ago after work, I was informed by my wife that I’d forgotten our anniversary. Eep. To partially make up for my cliched gaffe, I put my efforts towards getting a reservation at Momofuku Ko…the notoriously hard-to-get-into Momofuku Ko.¹ We’re big fans of the other two Momofukus, so I logged into their online reservation system and happened to get something for last Friday night.

But this isn’t a story about their reservation system; too many of those have been written already. Bottom line: the food is wonderful and should be the focus of any Ko tale. Two dishes in particular were the equal of any I’ve had at other more expensive restaurants. The first was a pea soup with the most tender langoustine. The second dish, the superstar of the restaurant, was a coddled egg with caviar, onion soubise, and tiny potato chips (photo). Didn’t want that one to end. And I didn’t even mention the shaved foie gras (with Reisling built right in!) or the English muffins amuse or the nice wine pairings.

For the full food porn treatment, check out Kathryn’s photoset, a review at Goodies First, Ed Levine’s preview, Ruth Reichl’s first look, and a review by The Wandering Eater.

[1] Two quick notes on the reservation process.

1. I spent all of five minutes on a Saturday morning making the reservation on the Ko web site. It can be done.

2. Chang and co. are serious about the web site being the only way to get into the restaurant. As we were leaving after our meal, a friend of Chang’s and bona fide celebrity stopped in to say hi. After some chit chat, the fellow asked if he could get a reservation at Ko for the next evening. Chang laughed, apologized, and told him that he had to go through the web site. They’re not kidding around, folks. ↩

Graphical demonstration of the hand signals needed to buy and sell commodities on the floor of the New York Mercantile Exchange.

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Video of the top 50 soccer goals. A dubbed-from-VCR YouTube video is probably not the best way to watch these, but that’s the hand we’ve been dealt.

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My wife is a bit of a statistics nut. A few years ago, she hooked herself up to a heart rate monitor during a playoff football game and graphed the results. Sometimes I think she does things just so she’s got an excuse to open up Excel. So I wasn’t really surprised when she showed me this graph yesterday afternoon:

That’s a record of Meg’s weight from when she got pregnant with Ollie to the present, 80 weeks of data in all…40 weeks with Ollie on the inside and 40 on the outside.

Charles Joseph Minard may get all the accolades for his graphic of Napolean’s march to Moscow, but for me, the above chart is the most beautiful ever created. When I look at it, I see Ollie. The graph is a portrait of him, as sure as this photo is. It’s also a record of an intense time for our family. I’m reminded of Meg, happy and pregnant but also struggling with her changing body. Trips we took, doctor visits, the growing belly and anticipation, the birth itself, and then falling off the cliff into the giddy, difficult unknown of new parenthood. And then you can see Meg slowly but surely getting back into shape while being a full-time stay-at-home mom (and managing an architecture project to boot), and achieving her goal of getting back to her pre-baby fitness level in a scant 8 months. You can’t really see it, but there’s a happy father and proud husband in there somewhere as well.

That’s a lot of emotional impact for a simple black and white line graph with few labels. Imagine if it were in color and isometric 3-D!

I feel like I’ve posted this one before but the Google says no so….LUNCH is a blog written by a couple of NYC architects who believe in the sanctity, sanity, and satiety of the lunch break.

We believe leaving the office everyday for lunch is an invaluable ritual. In a time and city where people are constantly rushing around, trying to accomplish three tasks at once, taking a moment to have a civilized meal becomes even more vital. Eating at your desk while reading emails, surfing the world wide web, snarfing down a bland turkey sandwich from the deli down the street is NOT lunch.

Each day they post photos of their lunches and afternoon snacks.

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Ten ideas for making NYC streets a more friendly place for those not in automobiles, including the woonerf, bicycle boulevards, and the green grid.

A woonerf, which is surfaced with paving blocks to signal a pedestrian-priority zone, is, in effect, an outdoor living room, with furniture to encourage the social use of the street. Surprisingly, it results in drastically slower traffic, since the woonerf is a people-first zone and cars enter it more warily. “The idea is that people shall look each other in the eye and maneuver in respect of each other,” Mr. Gehl said.

Pedestrian, cyclists, and motorists looking each other in the eye reminded me of a passage that Tyler Cowen pulled from Peter Moskos’ Cop in the Hood:

Car patrol eliminated the neighborhood police officer. Police were pulled off neighborhood beats to fill cars. But motorized patrol — the cornerstone of urban policing — has no effect on crime rates, victimization, or public satisfaction. Lawrence Sherman was an early critic of telephone dispatch and motorized patrol, noted, “The rise of telephone dispatch transformed both the method and purpose of patrol. Instead of watching to prevent crime, motorized police patrol became a process of merely waiting to respond to crime.”

Officers traveling in high speeds in cars apart from pedestrian and living areas makes it difficult for them to look potential criminals in the eye. (thx, meg)

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Some great photos of Americans commuting by Vincent Laforet using a tilt shift lens. (via dryden is home)

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A chronological list of fears, from childhood through parenthood. (via lone gunman)

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This is the ninth installment in an occasional series of updates to recent kottke.org posts. Previous installment is here, from almost a year ago. Eep.

Two still-active threads: will a helicopter on a treadmill take off? and my favorite kottke.org thread in recent memory, loads of people sharing words that they mispronounce on purpose.

Ben Saunders had to break off his attempt at a speed record to the North Pole after only eight days because of an equipment failure. The bolts on his skis snapped.

Those few hours in the tent were some of the lowest of my life; I thought of all the people that had gone so far out of their way to make this expedition happen, of the weeks of intense preparation, the months of training and the years of experience, testing and perfecting everything from my diet to the design of the sledge. This expedition was the physical embodiment of one of the biggest and most audacious dreams I’ve ever had, and the whole thing hung from a giant chain that involved countless people, places, promises and pieces of equipment. It turned out on Friday morning that the weakest link of that entire chain was a pair of screws, each with a head the size of my little finger tip, and each snapped clean in half.

Speaking of the cold north, I lamented the lack of charts in this post about the earlier onset of spring thaw in the northern hemisphere. Erin whipped one up for us.

Related to these architectural offices in an old auto body shop are the offices of a small London start-up operating out of a carriage from the London Tube.

You want strange restaurant names? I give you, The Butt and Oyster. (thx, nick)

The lost Prada sunglasses have not been found by their owner.

More abandoned amusement park photos: Maryland’s Enchanted Forest and Seoul’s Dreamland. (thx, guy & ross)

The business of parenting was a popular post…maybe I should turn kottke.org into a dad blog? Well, until that happens, here’s a couple of related items that people sent in. First up is an NPR story on teaching kids how to play. Part of the solution discussed in the story? Deliberate practice. It’s all connected, isn’t it? And here’s an earlier related story. (thx, michael & matt)

Here’s a tangential connection: reading magazines within a Google Maps interface is related to telling stories using maps. And of course, there’s Microsoft’s Seadragon technology, demoed briefly at the start of this TED presentation. (thx, barrett)

Back in January, I linked to an interview of a hedge fund manager at n+1. They’ve posted a second interview with the same manager and he discusses, among other things, what happened with that whole Bearn Sterns run-outta-money government bailout thing.

More on the periodic table. Periodically is an album put together by DBLF Studios featuring 119 songs, one for each element. Peep the lyrics; here’s a bit of the lithium tune:

I’m unbelievable for non-linear optics
high performance jet helicpotics
I have numerous commercial applications
am no longer integral for atomic weapons
unfortunately meth-amphetamines I do catalyze
I absorb carbon dioxide when I hydroxize
nuclear fusion totally relies on me
I allow the criminally insane to go running free

There is also Tom Lehrer’s The Elements, a recitation of the elements of the periodic table, sung to the tune of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Major-General’s Song. Of course you can hear it on YouTube. (thx, george & philip)

A pair of responses to Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market: Myths, Media, Motives: A Cautionary Tale and The Nonsense of “Rent Vs. Buy Myths That Ruined the Housing Market”.

MovieStamer has filled out a bit more.

Some popular tags from the last three weeks: standardoperatingprocedure, movies, photography, lists, design, books, abughraib, video, food, science, errolmorris, interviews, war, bestof, nyc, videogames, games, typography, www, tv, art, sports, sex, architecture, and religion.

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Crayon Physics is PC-only so I can’t play it, but Magic Pen will do in a pinch. Don’t start playing unless you’ve got a few hours to spare. (via waxy)

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Some poop in a cave in Oregon has been dated to more than 14,000 years ago and identified as human, adding to other evidence that humans inhabited the Americas before the well-known Clovis people.

Other archaeologists agreed that the findings established more firmly than before the presence of people on the continent at least 1,000 years before the well-known Clovis people, previously thought to be the first Americans. Recent research at sites in Florida and Wisconsin also appears to support the earlier arrivals, and a campsite in Chile indicates migration deep into South America by 14,600 years ago.

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The airplane on a conveyor belt question was just recently settled and we’re confronted with a related question: will a helicopter on a turntable take off? The image is short on details and likely a joke, but let’s assume that the turntable will match the speed of the helicopter’s rotor (and further that the rotor’s speed is measured relative to the helicopter and the turntable’s speed is relative to the ground, otherwise it doesn’t make much sense). Will the helicopter take off? Does it matter which way the turntable is spinning relative to the rotor? (thx, daniel)

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Gorgeous maps and infographics by Stefanie Posavec that map the literary geography of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac’s literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec’s approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces.

The sentence drawings are really worth checking out.

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Great set of photographs showing how the Space Shuttle gets ready for takeoff, from the Vertical Assembly Building all the way to the launch pad.

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How to catch a thief…of Netflix DVDs:

After having to file multiple Netflix movies as “lost in the mail” I began to get suspicious that there was more than just a careless mailman at fault. So what better to do than point a video camera at the mailbox and try to catch a Netflix thief.

…of cars:

An internet posse of Canadian gearheads used an online forum, Facebook and Google Maps to take down what might be the world’s dumbest car thief — and posted video of the arrest on YouTube.

…of saddles:

A week after dozens of people ransacked an Oregon home in response to a Craigslist ad offering its contents for free, police have arrested a couple for orchestrating the online hoax as part of a bid to cover up an earlier burglary at the property. Brandon and Amber Herbert were nabbed last night for allegedly posting the March 22 Craigslist ad, which claimed that the Jacksonville ranch’s owner had to leave town so suddenly that his belongings — which included a horse — were available for the taking.

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The new Coen Brothers film sounds interesting:

Burn After Reading is an upcoming comedy film, set for a September 12, 2008 release, starring John Malkovich, George Clooney, Tilda Swinton, Frances McDormand and Brad Pitt, and made by Joel and Ethan Coen. According to the Coens the plot will focus on the world of the CIA, physical fitness in Washington, D.C., and internet dating. The film is the follow up to the Academy Award winning No Country For Old Men and has been described by Tilda Swinton as “…a kind of monster caper movie. All of us are monsters — like, true monsters. It’s ridiculous. It’s much lighter than ‘No Country for Old Men.’”

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Steve Zissou and friends, done with Legos.

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A list of 63 must-have grunge fonts. Back in 1996, this would have been my thing. Is grunge type coming back?

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Preliminary results from a small Swedish study suggest that effects of steroid use stay with you even after stopping.

Rather than returning to their original proportions, the muscles of the steroid users who’d stopped taking the drug looked remarkably similar to those of the subjects who were still using. They also had larger muscle fibers and more growth-inducing “myonuclei” in their muscle cells than the nonsteroid users.

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Just got around to reading Ben McGrath’s New Yorker profile of Lenny Dykstra, the former baseball All-Star who has, somewhat improbably, become rich post-baseball as a business owner and day trader.

Dykstra last played in the majors in 1996, at age thirty-three. Improbably, he has since become a successful day trader, and he let me know that he owns both a Maybach (”the best car”) and a Gulfstream (”the best jet”).

But maybe not so improbably…Dykstra has a canny sense for business:

Dykstra chose car washes, he says, because of the automobile-centric culture in California, and because “it was a business that couldn’t be replaced by a computer chip.” He brought his own frustrated consumer experiences to bear in creating the business model, and eliminated many of the usual array of motor-oil choices-startup, high-mileage, various blends-from his inventory. “You get the shit out of the ground,” he said, referring to standard Castrol GTX, “or the shit made in the laboratory that’s the perfect lubricant” (Syntec). “Meaning, it’s either A or B. It’s not about the oil. It’s about the people. They got confused.” He stocked the places with baseball memorabilia and flat-screen TVs, and served free coffee (”the good kind”), so that customers would associate the experience with luxury rather than with cumbersome chores.

One of the characteristics of Dykstra the businessman is his constant use of baseball metaphors and comparisons. Here’s a listing from the article:

The Players Club, in contrast to the television installation, would be “major league,” he explained, and to that end he was assembling an editorial staff of “.300 hitters,” and lining up sponsors to match.

Dykstra’s business card gives an address for the “headquarters” of The Players Club, at 245 Park Avenue, which he describes as “big league-like, top five addresses in the world.”

Next, he took a call from a designer he wanted to hire for the magazine. “You worked for Esquire and In Style,” he said, delivering a pep talk. “That’s called the big leagues. It’s like in baseball. You can’t go above the major leagues. There’s not another league. We’re teeing it up high, dude.”

He quoted from Confucius, Dickens, and Billy Joel, and balanced straight stock picks (”Intel is the N.Y. Yankees of the chipmakers”) with musings about fatherhood and current events, like the war in Iraq, seldom passing up the opportunity to draw extended sports analogies.

“My approach in investing is much the same as my approach to hitting,” he wrote. “I would rather take a walk or single and reach first than shoot for a home run and strike out swinging.”

Dykstra hopes the magazine will help players recognize the importance of marriage and family. He drew three stick figures and named them Tom, Dick, and Harry. Above Tom, he drew a man and a woman-two parents. Dick got a father but no mother, and Harry the reverse. “Do you know the studies and what they’ve proven?” he asked. “You should look that up, dude. Like, bad things. It’s like the one-one count.” The one-one count is another of Dykstra’s baseball metaphors for life, meant to illustrate that some moments, and the choices they bring, are more fateful than others (i.e., the next pitch makes all the difference), or, in this case, that circumstances set in motion during the early stages of development are difficult to overcome later on. If a batter falls behind, one ball and two strikes, he’s in a hole from which, the statistics augur, he will not recover, even if he is Barry Bonds; and if he gets ahead, to two balls and one strike, he wrests control from the pitcher and takes charge of his own destiny. Having two parents puts you in control of life’s count, and enables you to become a .300 hitter.

Here’s an archive of Dykstra’s articles on trading for The Street.

Errol Morris returns to his Times blog for the first time since his examination of the Roger Fenton photographs and covers re-enactments in documentary films, a technique he pioneered in the excellent The Thin Blue Line, and how it applies to truth in photography.

Critics argue that the use of re-enactments suggest a callous disregard on the part of a filmmaker for what is true. I don’t agree. Some re-enactments serve the truth, others subvert it. There is no mode of expression, no technique of production that will instantly produce truth or falsehood. There is no veritas lens — no lens that provides a “truthful” picture of events. There is cinema verite and kino pravda but no cinematic truth.

And then:

Is the problem that we have an unfettered capacity for credulity, for false belief, and hence, we feel the need to protect ourselves from ourselves? If seeing is believing, then we better be damn careful about what we show people, including ourselves — because, regardless of what it is — we are likely to uncritically believe it.

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Based on a paper about “copy-move forgery”, a couple of programmers have come up with a program that algorithmically detects whether a photograph has been photoshopped using the cloning technique. It works very well on Adnan Hajj’s doctored Reuters photo of an attack on Beirut.

See also: how to detect photo forgeries.

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Review of Clerks, 14 years after it was released. Verdict: it doesn’t hold up that well.

I don’t think I laughed more than a couple of times. And for the past 14 years, all I could remember about the film was the pick-up hockey game on the roof and the big punchline about Dante’s ex-girlfriend’s encounter in the bathroom. In the years that have followed, the cult of Kevin Smith has waxed and waned but mostly endured, spinning off into comic books, diaries, and concert appearances, several well-trafficked websites (and many other fan sites), and other assorted merchandise and pop-cultural flotsam.

I’ve never understood why Clerks was so well-regarded. Actually, now that I think about it, despite an affection for Mallrats shared by almost no one with any sense, I don’t like any of Smith’s movies but I do like Smith and the way that he goes about making his films…if that makes any sense at all. (Ok, Chasing Amy was alright and Jersey Girl was underrated.)

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Frank Bruni, the food critic for the NY Times, wrote yesterday about the difficulty of getting a reservation at David Chang’s new Momofuku Ko restaurant. Ko’s online reservation system is the *only* way of procuring a seat at the tiny Manhattan restaurant…no walk-ins, no friends of the chef or celebs getting preferential treatment. It works more or less like Ticketmaster’s online ticketing: you select the number of guests, it shows you the available reservation times (if any), you click on a time, and if that time is still available when you click it, only then does the system hold your choice while you fill in some information.

It’s a simple system; seats for dinner are released on the site a week in advance at 10am each day and the people that click on their preferred times first get the reservations. Ko takes only 32 reservations each night and the restaurant is one of the hottest in town, which means that all the reservations are gone each day in seconds…sometimes in 2 or 3 seconds. Just like Radiohead tickets on Ticketmaster.

Except that diners are not used to this sort of thing. One of Bruni’s readers got irritated that he got through to the pick-a-time screen but then when he clicked on his preferred time was told that the reservation was already gone. Someone had beaten him to the punch. So he emailed the restaurant for an explanation. The exchange between the restaurant and the snubbed patron should be familiar with anyone who has done web development for clients or any kind of tech support.

In a nutshell, the would-be patron said (and I’m paraphrasing here), “your system is unfair and broken,” and the folks at Ko replied, “sorry, that’s how the internet works”. The comments on the post are both fascinating and disappointing, with many people attempting to debunk Ko’s seemingly lame excuse of, well, that’s how the internet works. Except that’s pretty much the right answer…although it’s clearer to say that that’s how a web server communicates with a web browser (and even that is a bit imprecise). When the pick-a-time page is downloaded by a particular browser, it’s based on the information the web server had when it sent the page out. The page sits unchanged on your computer — it doesn’t know anything about how many reservations the web server has left to dole out — until the person clicks on a time. An anonymous commenter in Bruni’s thread nails the choice that a web developer has to face in this instance:

This is a multi-user concurrency problem that all sites with limited inventory and a high demand (users all clicking the button all at the same time) have to deal with. It’s not an easy problem to solve.

The easier method (which the Ko site has chosen) is to not “lock” a reservation slot until the very end. You submit your party size and the system looks for available slots that it knows about. It shows you the calendar page, with the available slots it knows about (if any). This doesn’t update in real time because they haven’t implemented it to know about the current state of inventory. This can be done, but it’s more complicated.

The more complicated method is to lock a reservation slot upon beginning of the checkout process, with a time out occurring if the user takes too long to finish, or some other error occurs (in other systems this can be a blacklisted credit card number). If this happens, the system throws the reservation slot back into the pool. However, you need to give people a mechanism to keep trying for ones that get thrown back into the pool (like a “Try Again” button).

Building something like this not impossible (see Ticketmaster) but requires a much more real-time system that is aware of who has what, and what stage of the checkout process they’re in - in addition to total available inventory. Building a robust system like this is not cheap.

Even then, you might get shut out. You submit your party size, everything is already gone, and you never get to the calendar page. It just moves up the “sold out” disappointment to earlier in the process.

A subsequent commenter suggests using “Web 2.0″ technologies (I think he’s talking specifically about Ajax) but as Anonymous suggests, that would increase the complexity of the system on the server side (unnecessarily in my mind) while moving up the “’sold out’ disappointment to earlier in the process”. Plus, that sort of system could put you “on hold” for several minutes while the reservations are taken by the folks in front of you until you’re told, “too bad, all gone”. I’m not sure that’s preferable to being told sooner and may result in much more irritation on the part of potential diners.

In my opinion (as a web developer and as someone who has used Ko’s reservation system from start to finish), Ko’s system does it right. You’re locked into a reservation by the system only when you’ve chosen exactly what you want. It favors the web user who’s prepared & lucky and is simple for Ko to implement and maintain. That the logic used to produce this simple system takes three paragraphs to explain to an end user is irrelevent. After all, a restaurant dinner is easy to eat but explaining how it came to be that way fills entire books.

This might seem too inside baseball for most readers — the number of people interested in new NYC restaurants *and* web development is likely quite small, even among kottke.org’s readership — but there’s an interesting conflict going on here between technology and customer service. What kind of a problem is this…technological or social? Bruni’s correspondent blamed the technology and much of the focus of the discussion has been on the process of procuring a reservation. But the main limiting factor is the enormous demand for seats; tens of thousands of people a week vying for a few hundred seats per week. The technology is largely irrelevent; whatever Ko does, however well the reservation system works or doesn’t work, nearly all of the people interacting with the restaurant are going to be disappointed that they didn’t get in.

Recent research suggests that:

There is no clear evidence of benefit from drinking increased amounts of water.

In particular, scientists found no evidence that the common recommendation of eight 8-oz glasses of water per day has any benefit. NPR busts some additional water myths.

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The bracket for Market Madness (aka the Fed 2008 Final Four Rate Cuts) pairs the biggest banks in the world against each other. Who’ll be bailed out next? See also: Bracket Madness.

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Short interview with bassist Colin Greenwood about the State of Radiohead, among other things.

Pitchfork: The Pitchfork review of Hail to the Thief put forth the idea that “anything Radiohead does from here on out will sound like Radiohead”…

CG: That’s like a late-night stoner comment. At about three in the morning — after you’ve put on Captain Beefheart and you put the red scarf over the light bulb — it makes a lot of sense. But the next morning you’re like, “I don’t know, maybe the world is fucked and we didn’t solve it.” So I don’t know about that.

Sounds like he’s got Pitchfork figured out. And as your musical sommelier, I’d recommend the 2007 In Rainbows with this interview.

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Kevin Kelly says that people whose fields have been Turing’d — outsourced in some way to computers — are in general more receptive to then adopting other potentially disruptive technologies.

We have this long list of tasks and occupations that we humans believe only humans can do. Used to be things like using tools, language, painting, playing chess. Now, one by one they get Turing’d. A computer beats them. Does it better.

So far we’ve can check off arithmetic, spelling, flying planes, playing chess, wiring chips, scheduling tasks, welding, etc. All have been Turing’d.

Computer scientists are great to work with, because in general they are completely fearless. They were Turing’d long ago. They grok that many of the tasks they used to do can be done much better by computers. On the other hand, doctors as a rule are loathed to accept new technology because what they do is hard to delegate to computers. Ditto for a lot of biologists.

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People have a limited supply of willpower.

The brain has a limited capacity for self-regulation, so exerting willpower in one area often leads to backsliding in others. The good news, however, is that practice increases willpower capacity, so that in the long run, buying less now may improve our ability to achieve future goals — like losing those 10 pounds we gained when we weren’t out shopping.

This explains *so much*.

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