Though I’ve found the turbulent history of the Middle East to be fascinating, I’ve never before found a resource so eloquent as the Maps of War Imperial History which enables one to see 5000 years of empire building and state history in about 90 seconds.
Though a lot of the empires shown here are familiar, I had no idea their respective magnitudes or durations.
(via Coolhunting)
I feel like I need to offer an apology for what I’m about to link to or at least some kind of explanation but all I can say is the “I found a hooker” video had me laughing out loud (perhaps partly because of the shock value).
The other videos from William Sledd’s YouTube page are also embarrassingly captivating. It’s especially good if you are a trendy teenager with an interest in fashion—for the record, if it weren’t for my sister or female friends picking out clothes for me, I’m sure that most of the time I would be a fashion disaster. (The tie in the above photo for example, looks hideous to me, but what do I know?)
Oh, and as a prediction, I have a feeling William Sledd will be showing up on mainstream TV any day now.
About a month ago I entered the SAT Blogger Challenge, an experiment to see how regular “bloggers” like myself compare to high school students in the United States with regard to essay writing ability.
I got a 4.
The challenge:
Directions: Think carefully about the issue presented in the following excerpt and the assignment below.
‘I have learned that success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which he has overcome while trying to succeed.’
– Booker T. WashingtonAssignment: What is your opinion on the idea that struggle is a more important measure of success than accomplishment? Plan and write an essay in which you develop your point of view on this issue. Support your position with reasoning and examples taken from your reading, studies, experience, or observations.
Without further ado, here is my essay spelling mistakes and all.
Success as measured by struggle rather than in accomplishment conveys the romantic notion that it doesn’t matter how well you do, so long as you try.
If success could be defined as merely the amount of effort one applied to any given problem then it would be fair to say that both the Russians and the Americans were ’successful’ in the race for the moon, but it was the United States that landed there first. Continuing with that line of thinking, if struggle is all that matters, then the current war in Iraq has been very successful for the United States – from start to present. It looks like they are headed for a lot of success in the future too.
It is important to remember that the struggle to accomplish a given goal is a very important part of success, however, I believe, that it’s disingenuous to pretend that success can be defined merely by how hard one attempts to complete their goal.
Success is synonomous with accomplishment while struggle only relates to success in that often a successful endevour was possible due to conviction, deadication, and hard work. So, while the importance of struggle should not be ignored, a success can only accurately measured in terms of accomplishment. The bright math student who correctly completes his homework with very little effort is much more successful than the struggling student who slaves over his work and yet despite his effort does a horrible job.
Success must be defined as the accomplishment. The struggle is merely what helps one complete that accomplishment.
See Dave Munger’s analysis on the challenge.
I like the combination of new media skills that were used to create this interesting Toyota commercial.
Back in New York City for post production, the most interesting challenge was to design the type. We ended up designing just one custom-made alphabet for all the cars, but made all sorts of letter-like shapes for everything else. We made fun letters looking like buildings, trees, clouds, leaves and birds. We made letters carved into a cliff, and a flock of sheep forming a sentence. None of it could have been achieved with off-the-shelf fonts.
After watching the video, take a second to go back and pan through the video to see all the creative font placements. Also check out the this second ad in the series.
Michael J. Fox talks To Katie Couric about Parkinson’s, Rush Limbaugh, and stem cell research.
Rabbit is a creepy remix of old graphics from 1950s illustrations that have been rendered into animation in Adobe After effects. It’s a beautifully creepy story—just in time for Halloween.
Update: PingMag has an interesting interview with director Run Wrake.
Originally uploaded by bcompetent.
Halloween pysanky by Becky! They’re a little scary looking, but I guess that’s the idea!
Malcolm Gladwell’s New Yorker piece on predicting box office hits with algorithms relates Hollywood’s efforts to determine the value of a movie when it’s still in script form. The major problem they are facing is that with so many variables it’s hard to tell which elements are helping or hindering box office returns. It seems to boil down to the fact that in the end, “nobody knows anything about anything” or do they? As Gladwell’s works usually are, this one is a tremendously good read.
I recently subscribed to the This American Life podcast and I love it. They just started offering their show as a free podcast this week and I’m so glad they did; consider me hooked.
A quick description of their show for those that have never heard of it:
One of the problems with our show from the start has been that whenever we try to describe it in a sentence or two, it sounds awful. For instance: Each week we choose a theme and put together different kinds of stories on that theme. That doesn’t sound like something we’d want to listen to on the radio, and it’s our show. In the early days of the program, in frustration, we’d sometimes tell public radio program directors that it’s basically just like Car Talk. Except just one guy hosting. And no cars.
It’s easy to say what we’re not. We’re not a news show or a talk show or a call-in show. We’re not really formatted like other radio shows at all.
Instead, we do these stories that are like movies for radio. There are people in dramatic situations where things happen to them.
There are funny moments and emotional moments and—hopefully—moments where the people in the story say interesting, surprising things about it all. It has to be surprising. It has to be fun. There are shows on public radio with no sense of fun or surprise and we hate those shows.
There was an accident at work last week. No one was hurt, but I was almost seriously injured.
Here’s the situation, some walls were taken out of the change rooms because they are rebuilding everything. At least one wall had heating vents going through it and when they moved the wall out, they left the bricks on top of the vent.
There was a guy grinding some metal bits out of the ground right where I wanted to pile some blocks. If he hadn’t been there, I would have just been piling away happily. Instead I asked him if I could start my pile beside him—if I would be out of his way or if I should just wait until he was done. He said yes so I just walked a few steps away to grab some blocks from the pallet and a couple of guys—I’m not sure who they are, (they call them the tin-bangers), started hammering on the vents, presumably to bring them down. Even though this particular job was supposed to have been done long before the bricklayers got there and certainly it shouldn’t have been done while there were four of us working beneath the vents, I guess they thought it was a good idea to be working on it right then.
All of a sudden about six bricks came falling out of the sky and landed beside the grinding guy on the ground and right where I was about to pile my blocks. It was so close to hitting him, and me, it was just CRAZY.
Some of the bricks hit the new wall that had just been built and knocked one of its blocks right out of the fresh cement onto the ground.
One of the guys stopped pounding when he saw the accident but the other idiot—probably the one that actually caused the bricks to fall, didn’t even stop for a good 30 seconds. Somebody yelled at the grinding guy to get out of the way because there were still more bricks up there and the guy just kept pounding. Did I mention he’s an idiot!?
Anyway, needless to say, I was pretty shocked that I was almost struck down by six bricks that fell from about four meters. That would have left a pretty deep mark.
Some might call it a near miss, but I think a near hit is a more accurate description. I also don’t think anyone reported the incident. “No blood; no foul” I guess. I can’t wait to finish this job.
