Set of photos from Andy Ihnatko comparing image quality of iPhone and Droid cameras. Yes, the Droid has a flash and more megapixels, but the iPhone does a better job overall, at least for my money. Ihnatko’s conclusion is that even though the Droid has a 5 megapixel camera, the iPhone has better software behind the camera.
(via df)
Researchers believe that a newly opened rift in the Ethiopian desert will one day become a new ocean. The crack, 35 miles long, opened in a matter of days in 2005, set in motion by a volcanic eruption and forced apart by magma pushing up through the middle of the rift.
The African and Arabian plates meet in the remote Afar desert of Northern Ethiopia and have been spreading apart in a rifting process – at a speed of less than 1 inch per year – for the past 30 million years. This rifting formed the 186-mile Afar depression and the Red Sea. The thinking is that the Red Sea will eventually pour into the new sea in a million years or so. The new ocean would connect to the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden, an arm of the Arabian Sea between Yemen on the Arabian Peninsula and Somalia in eastern Africa.
(via kottke)
Fascinating bit of history from the early days of html, wherein Marc Andreessen proposes the use of a new tag to embed images in the text of a document.
Marc’s
<img>element didn’t mandate a common graphics format; it didn’t define how text flowed around it; it didn’t support text alternatives or fallback content for older browsers. And 16, almost 17 years later, we’re still struggling with content sniffing, and it’s still a source of crazy security vulnerabilities. And you can trace that all the way back, 17 years, through the Great Browser Wars, all the way back to February 25, 1993, when Marc Andreessen offhandedly remarked, “MIME, someday, maybe,” and then shipped his code anyway.The ones that win are the ones that ship.
(via kottke)
Franz Welser-Most, the director of the Cleveland Orchestra, is taking on a second job – director of the Vienna State Opera.
No, the incoming director of the state opera — the massive, complicated and powerful institution at Vienna’s cultural heart — is most inspired by the future, not the legendary past. When Welser-Most, 49, takes over for Seiji Ozawa next season, the only direction he’ll be looking is forward.
“What excites me is the potential of the house, not its history, great as it is. Tradition has to be something lively.”
Maybe as early as the end of this year, Netflix will bring its streaming service to the Wii. Here’s hoping we won’t have to wait for the Wii HD to be released.
Speaking of Stephen King, Goodreads has the official trailer for Under the Dome, his new novel. Since when do they make trailers for books?
The hardcover will be released on November 10, but even though it shares the same price, Scribner isn’t releasing the e-book version until the day before Christmas.
However:
Thanks to an online price war among Target.com, Amazon and Walmart.com, the hardcover for “Under the Dome,” “Going Rogue” and other popular November releases can be pre-ordered for $9 or less, a strong source of concern among publishers and independent booksellers, who cannot afford to charge so little.
Nine dollars? That’s nuts.
Jet has been trained to anticipate seizures, panic attacks and plunging blood sugar and will alert his owner to these things by staring intently at her until she does something about the problem. He will drop a toy in her lap to snap her out of a dissociative state. If she has a seizure, he will position himself so that his body is under her head to cushion a fall.
Jet seems like a genius, but is he really so smart? In fact, is any of it in his brain, or is it mostly in his sniff?
How much cognitive ability does a dog really have? There’s no clear consensus, but recent research has produced interesting results. Even if you have trouble accepting that a canine brain processes information in a way similar to a human brain, some dogs are capable of remarkable behavior.
Despite the strained relations between the countries, the curators of the Kennedy library and the Castro regime have over the years found common ground, enough that the library announced this week that Cuba has shared copies of 3,000 letters and documents from the Hemingway archives at the country’s Ministry of Culture. The material fills a hole in the library’s collection, which purports to have the most comprehensive body of the Nobel Prize-winning author’s writings.
The documents include an alternate ending to For Whom the Bell Tolls, as well as correspondence with the likes of Robert Capa, Sinclair Lewis and Ingrid Bergman.
The board of ICANN has voted to allow non-Latin characters in web addresses. For many web surfers, this is a great leap forward in accessibility.
This change only affects domain names — anything that comes after the dot, such as .com, .cn or .jp. Until now, they could only be in 37 characters — 26 Latin letters, 10 digits or a dash. But starting next year, domain names can be the characters of any language.
And:
This is a boon especially for users who find it cumbersome to type in Latin characters to access Web pages. Of the 1.6 billion Internet users today worldwide, more than half use languages that have scripts that are not based on the Latin alphabet.
A lot has happened since Philadelphia last won the Series.
“The bottom line is we’re a pretty inexperienced team, and for many of these young players, this will be the first time they’ve been to the World Series in a year.” Manuel said. “A lot has changed in that time. If you would have told me last October that this country would elect a black president before the Philadelphia Phillies made it back to the World Series, I would have laughed in your face.”
(via df)
A study of the tax returns of F. Scott Fitzgerald provides a snapshot of his lifestyle in the first half of the 20th century.
Over Fitzgerald’s working life, he reported a total of $449,713 in gross income, and he paid $24,666 in taxes—thus the effective tax rate of 5.5 percent. Most of his earnings came from the short stories and, later, the movies. His best novels, The Great Gatsby (1925) and Tender Is the Night (1934), did not produce much income. Royalties from The Great Gatsby totaled only $8,397 during Fitzgerald’s lifetime. Today Gatsby is read in nearly every high school and college and regularly produces $500,000 a year in Scottie’s trust for her children.
(via kottke)
Michael Chabon’s new book is out. It’s a collection of personal essays exploring, among other things, parenting and what it means to be a man.
What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it—nowhere that I was willing to let her go.
There is an excerpt over at The New York Review of Books.
Ah, Autumn.
When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is—fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.
(via roger ebert)
Today I’m finally launching the newest version of this site, and I couldn’t be happier. The redesign has been a long time in the making, and, frankly, I’m ready to spend some time thinking about something else. I’ve been working at it, whenever I could spare the time, for the better part of the year, all the while taking a break from publishing anything at all. I’m actually a bit awestruck that it is somehow October (and almost Halloween!) and I’m just getting to write this now. October? Really?
I’m excited about the changes, both the ones you can see and the ones you cannot. Most notably, after hand-rolling everything up to this point, I’ve taken the plunge into blogging software. Most everyone I know who has used WordPress has a good word for it, and it has certainly proven to be flexible and easy to use so far.
I’ve also reorganized how the content is presented, which was the driving force behind the project. I believe this format will serve me much better, plus make the site easier to read. And hopefully the new design will allow the content to take center stage, let the visual elements recede, and still give the reader that sense of place.
After the dust settles a bit and I get back into the business of maintaining content, I’ll begin adding new features and filling out the site. There’s lots more to come.