J.D. Shapiro, original screen writer of Battlefield Earth, the movie recently voted worst movie of the decade, shares the history behind how he got tangled in the mess in the first place.
Let me start by apologizing to anyone who went to see "Battlefield Earth."
It wasn't as I intended -- promise. No one sets out to make a train wreck. Actually, comparing it to a train wreck isn't really fair to train wrecks, because people actually want to watch those.
Wired has yet another amazing feature article, this time about Gerald Daniel Blanchard, a young man traveling around the world and performing several large heists.
The plane slowed and leveled out about a mile aboveground. Up ahead, the Viennese castle glowed like a fairy tale palace. When the pilot gave the thumbs-up, Gerald Blanchard looked down, checked his parachute straps, and jumped into the darkness. He plummeted for a second, then pulled his cord, slowing to a nice descent toward the tiled roof. It was early June 1998, and the evening wind was warm. If it kept cooperating, Blanchard would touch down directly above the room that held the Koechert Diamond Pearl. He steered his parachute toward his target.
Bruce Eckel has a very interesting post up on his blog about what he calls "Wrong Correctnes", a theme he sees in the latest book from Malcom Gladwell. It's well worth a read!
Ironically, a model becomes a problem when it starts to work enough of the time that you begin to believe in it. You start to see the model as the world, and it becomes annoying and time consuming to constantly remind yourself that "all models are wrong, some are useful." In fact, humans are too limited not to see the world through our abstractions.
A rediscovered classic over at Wired - how a crew of ship salvagers travels around the world and attempts to rescue ships lost at sea. This particular article tells the story about an operation aboard the Cougar Ace, a large vehicle transport ship enroute from Japan to the U.S. with store ready Mazdas as its cargo when it almost capsizes.
A phone rings. Rich Habib opens his eyes and blinks in the darkness. He reaches for the phone, disturbing a pair of dogs cuddled around him. He was going to take them to the river for a swim today. Now the sound of his phone means that somewhere, somehow, a ship is going down, and he's going to have to get out of bed and go save it.
While cleaning out a few old links that have been living in my browser for way too long now, one of the items that had survived so far was an article from the Penn Gazette about how yawning is a good thing for your brain.
Several recent brain-scan studies have shown that yawning evokes a unique neural activity in the areas of the brain that are directly involved in generating social awareness and creating feelings of empathy. One of those areas is the precuneus, a tiny structure hidden within the folds of the parietal lobe. According to researchers at the Institute of Neurology in London, the precuneus appears to play a central role in consciousness, self-reflection, and memory retrieval.
The life of the game tester might seem glamorous for the uninvited masses, but this article from the Seattly Weekly from back in 2007 tells the real tale about how things are on the inside.
One table is occupied with a group playing Magic: The Gathering, a card-based game that requires a 20-sided die and, evidently, the ability to make voices in the high-pitched style of Monty Python.
Tyler Thompson has a go at redesigning the current version of the boarding pass. There's a lot to be done here to make the boarding passes more friendly to the people actually reading them, and hopefully some of the ideas can make it into production. I'm sure there's quite a few parts of the boarding pass which has to be present that these designs doesn't account for, but it's quite a nice start.
This all started on a recent flight aboard a Delta Airlines plane. I was heading back from New York where I had met up with fellow designer Dustin Curtis. [...] I was inspired by Dustin and his attitude towards shittily designed things, to say the least. I was bored so I started rummaging through my stuff trying to find something to read when I grabbed my boarding pass. So I stared at it for a while. Rubbed my eyes, then stared at it some more.
Read the article and see the examples over at Tyler Thompson's blog.
There's an interesting article up on the New York Times about the current situation between merchants and the big credit card companies (such as VISA and Mastercard), providing a bit of inside information about how the pay processing industry really works.
“It’s a penny here or there,” said Moshe Katri, an analyst who tracks the payments industry for Cowen and Company. “But when you have a billion transactions or more, it adds up.”
From the great guys over at FiveThirtyEight comes an illustrative article about the actual danger of a terrorist attack on commercial flights.
These departures flew a collective 69,415,786,000 miles. That means there has been one terrorist incident per 11,569,297,667 mles flown. This distance is equivalent to 1,459,664 trips around the diameter of the Earth, 24,218 round trips to the Moon, or two round trips to Neptune.
SFGate, home of the San Francisco Chronicle, tells the tale of the little island republic of Nauru - who made their wealth by scraping up bird droppings up until 1990 - and then had to start trading their diplomatic recognition. Amazing tale.
They have known the best and worst of life. Not so long ago, Nauru was the wealthiest nation on Earth, per capita. Now it's among the poorest. Its people are fat and sick, giving the nation two more superlatives. More people are obese, per capita, than any other nation, and more suffer from diabetes, at least 2 out of every 5 people.
