Professionally. From the tail-end of a recent interview with the sprinter:
Ultimately, he says, he'd love to make a go of playing football professionally. He's being deadly serious. One of the perks of being Usain Bolt is that sporting stars love to meet him, so whenever he's travelling and there's time, he tries to train with a top football team. Last year it was Manchester United, a few days ago it was Bayern Munich. He's still carrying a copy of the French sporting newspaper L'Equipe, which features a spread on his football skills and praise from Bayern manager Louis van Gaal. He shows me a photo of himself with his arm wrapped round the dwarfed 6ft German forward Miroslav Klose. "If I keep myself in shape, I can definitely play football at a high level," he says.
"With his physical skills, I reckon he could play in the Premier League," Simms says.
Professional American football would be even more of a no brainer...Randy Moss with Darrell Green speed++.
From the October 1971 issue of Esquire, Secrets of the Little Blue Box, an early mainstream piece on phone phreaking.
About eleven o'clock two nights later Fraser Lucey has a blue box in the palm of his left hand and a phone in the palm of his right. He is standing inside a phone booth next to an isolated shut-down motel off Highway 1. I am standing outside the phone booth.
Fraser likes to show off his blue box for people. Until a few weeks ago when Pacific Telephone made a few arrests in his city, Fraser Lucey liked to bring his blue box to parties. It never failed: a few cheeps from his device and Fraser became the center of attention at the very hippest of gatherings, playing phone tricks and doing request numbers for hours. He began to take orders for his manufacturer in Mexico. He became a dealer.
Fraser is cautious now about where he shows off his blue box. But he never gets tired of playing with it. "It's like the first time every time," he tells me.
Fraser puts a dime in the slot. He listens for a tone and holds the receiver up to my ear. I hear the tone.
Fraser begins describing, with a certain practiced air, what he does while he does it.
"I'm dialing an 800 number now. Any 800 number will do. It's toll free. Tonight I think I'll use the ----- [he names a well-know rent-a-car company] 800 number. Listen, It's ringing. Here, you hear it? Now watch."
He places the blue box over the mouthpiece of the phone so that the one silver and twelve black push buttons are facing up toward me. He presses the silver button - the one at the top - and I hear that high-pitched beep.
"That's 2600 cycles per second to be exact," says Lucey. "Now, quick. listen."
He shoves the earpiece at me. The ringing has vanished. The line gives a slight hiccough, there is a sharp buzz, and then nothing but soft white noise.
"We're home free now," Lucey tells me, taking back the phone and applying the blue box to its mouthpiece once again. "We're up on a tandem, into a long-lines trunk. Once you're up on a tandem, you can send yourself anywhere you want to go." He decides to check out London first. He chooses a certain pay phone located in Waterloo Station. This particular pay phone is popular with the phone-phreaks network because there are usually people walking by at all hours who will pick it up and talk for a while.
He presses the lower left-hand corner button which is marked "KP" on the face of the box.
"That's Key Pulse. It tells the tandem we're ready to give it instructions. First I'll punch out KP 182 START, which will slide us into the overseas sender in White Plains." I hear a neat clunk-cheep. "I think we'll head over to England by satellite. Cable is actually faster and the connection is somewhat better, but I like going by satellite. So I just punch out KP Zero 44. The Zero is supposed to guarantee a satellite connection and 44 is the country code for England. Okay... we're there. In Liverpool actually. Now all I have to do is punch out the London area code which is 1, and dial up the pay phone. Here, listen, I've got a ring now."
I hear the soft quick purr-purr of a London ring. Then someone picks up the phone. "Hello," says the London voice.
"Hello. Who's this?" Fraser asks.
"Hello. There's actually nobody here. I just picked this up while I was passing by. This is a public phone. There's no one here to answer actually."
"Hello. Don't hang up. I'm calling from the United States."
"Oh. What is the purpose of the call? This is a public phone you know."
"Oh. You know. To check out, uh, to find out what's going on in London. How is it there?"
"Its five o'clock in the morning. It's raining now."
"Oh. Who are you?"
The London passerby turns out to be an R.A.F. enlistee on his way back to the base in Lincolnshire, with a terrible hangover after a thirty-six-hour pass. He and Fraser talk about the rain. They agree that it's nicer when it's not raining. They say good-bye and Fraser hangs up. His dime returns with a nice clink.
"Isn't that far out," he says grinning at me. "London. Like that."
Interestingly, a number of the early phone phreaks were blind kids, including Joe Engressia, who could whistle a perfect 2600 hertz tone.
Commodity traders are following farmers on Twitter, hoping for clues about crop forecasts and such.
Last week Grisafi started receiving tweets from European farmers saying the weather was hotter and drier than weather reports indicated. He'd been short the wheat market on the assumption that prices would fall. After reading the tweets, however, he realized the commodity might be in shorter supply than the market expected and got out of his position, avoiding a loss as prices rose.
In 1996, Tom Junot won the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing for a story published in GQ called The Rapist Says He's Sorry. It's about a man named Mitchell Gaff:
Who is Mitchell Gaff? Well, he is that which, at this moment in our history, frightens us the most-about ourselves, and about our democracy's ability to contain what is worst in us. Mitch is a sex offender, but not only a sex offender; he is a rapist, but not only a rapist. He is, in the words of a law written in 1990 by the Washington state legislature, "a sexual predator"-that is, someone who "suffers from a mental abnormality or personality disorder which makes [him] likely to engage in predatory acts of sexual violence if not confined in a secure facility." Now, never mind for the moment that this law created a category of mental illness unrecognized by modern psychiatry, and that it did so for the purpose of enabling the state to achieve in the name of mercy what it couldn't in the name of justice: the removal of men like Mitchell Gaff from the face of the earth. What's important to know right now is that Mitch Gaff is or has been a human being who hurts other human beings for sexual pleasure: not out of need, not to gain the dire exigencies of food, shelter, money, transportation and status, but out of want-because he likes it. It's the wanting that scares us the most, of course, because of what we know about our own wanting-that it rises from someplace deep within us, that it is immune to intention and that it doesn't just go away. We want Mitch to go away. It hardly matters that he has done his time; that he has, in that quaint old phrase, "paid his debt to society"; and that his continued incarceration is probably unconstitutional. We want him to go away for as long as his wanting lasts, and that's why the state of Washington invented something called the Special Commitment Center.
There's a short intro available here as well as a special note by Junot at the end of the main article. And after you read the article, there are two further updates on Mitch Gaff here (complete with inappropriately lusty personal ads running alongside the article) and here.
Roger Ebert's eating career is over, but his career as a food writer is just taking off. His new cookbook, which comes out in three weeks, is about how to prepare just about any meal in a rice cooker.
He both writes and thinks about food in the present tense. Ask about favorite foods and he'll scribble a note: "I love spicy and Indian." An offer to bring some New Jersey peaches to his summer home here on the shore of Lake Michigan brings a sharp defense of Michigan peaches and a menu idea. "Maybe for dessert we could have a salad of local fresh fruits."
"Food for me is in the present tense," he said. "Eating for me is now only in the past tense." He says he has a "voluptuous food memory" that gets stronger all the time.
"I can remember the taste and smell of everything, even though I can no longer taste or smell," he said.
Here are the opening couple of paragraphs from the post that evolved into the cookbook:
First, get the Pot. You need the simplest rice cooker made. It comes with two speeds: Cook, and Warm. Not expensive. Now you're all set to cook meals for the rest of your life on two square feet of counter space, plus a chopping block. No, I am not putting you on the Rice Diet. Eat what you like. I am thinking of you, student in your dorm room. You, solitary writer, artist, musician, potter, plumber, builder, hermit. You, parents with kids. You, night watchman. You, obsessed computer programmer or weary web-worker. You, lovers who like to cook together but don't want to put anything in the oven. You, in the witness protection program. You, nutritional wingnut. You, in a wheelchair.
And you, serving in Iraq or Afghanistan. You, person on a small budget who wants healthy food. You, shut-in. You, recovering campaign worker. You, movie critic at Sundance. You, sex worker waiting for the phone to ring. You, factory worker sick of frozen meals. You, people in Werner Herzog's documentary about life at the South Pole. You, early riser skipping breakfast. You, teenager home alone. You, rabbi, pastor, priest,, nun, waitress, community organizer, monk, nurse, starving actor, taxi driver, long-haul driver. Yes, you, reader of the second-best best-written blog on the internet.
There's also a Q&A on the Times site with Ebert.
The Art of the Title Sequence interviews Napoleon Dynamite director Jared Hess about how the film's instant-classic title sequence came about.
We actually had Jon Heder placing all the objects in and out [of frame], and then showed it to Searchlight who really liked it and thought it was great, but some lady over there was like "There are some hangnails, or something -- the hands look kinda gross! It's really bothering me, can we re-shoot some of those? We'll send you guys a hand model." We were like "WHAT?!" This of course was my first interaction with a studio at all, so they flew out a hand model a couple weeks later, who had great hands, but was five or six shades darker than Jon Heder. So we reshot, but they're now intermixed, so if you look there are like three different dudes hands (our producer's are in there too.) It all worked our great though and was a lot of fun.
The interview also addresses Pablo Ferro's involvement and the Napoleon Dynamite animated series currently in development.
This summer's dry English weather has been unexpectantly good for archaeology. Aerial surveys over dry cropland has revealed the outlines of several prehistoric and Roman ruins.
The surveys show marks made when crops growing over buried features develop at a different rate from those nearby.
Photos here. (via clusterflock)
Vanity Fair has a really interesting but depressing look at how The President of the United States spends a typical day navigating the upfuckedness of national American politics and its capital, Washington DC -- which Rahm Emanuel calls Fucknutsville.
We think of the presidency as somehow eternal and unchanging, a straight-line progression from 1 to 44, from the first to the latest. And in some respects it is. Except for George Washington, all of the presidents have lived in the White House. They've all taken the same oath to uphold the same constitution. But the modern presidency -- Barack Obama's presidency -- has become a job of such gargantuan size, speed, and complexity as to be all but unrecognizable to most of the previous chief executives. The sheer growth of the federal government, the paralysis of Congress, the systemic corruption brought on by lobbying, the trivialization of the "news" by the media, the willful disregard for facts and truth -- these forces have made today's Washington a depressing and dysfunctional place. They have shaped and at times hobbled the presidency itself.
For much of the past half-century, the problems that have brought Washington to its current state have been concealed or made tolerable by other circumstances. The discipline of the Cold War kept certain kinds of debate within bounds. America's artificial "last one standing" postwar economy allowed the country to ignore obvious signs of political and social decay. Wars and other military interventions provided ample distraction from matters of substance at home. Like many changes that are revolutionary, none of Washington's problems happened overnight. But slow and steady change over many decades -- at a rate barely noticeable while it's happening -- produces change that is transformative. In this instance, it's the kind of evolution that happens inevitably to rich and powerful states, from imperial Rome to Victorian England. The neural network of money, politics, bureaucracy, and values becomes so tautly interconnected that no individual part can be touched or fixed without affecting the whole organism, which reacts defensively. And thus a new president, who was elected with 53 percent of the popular vote, and who began office with 80 percent public-approval ratings and large majorities in both houses of Congress, found himself for much of his first year in office in stalemate, pronounced an incipient failure, until the narrowest possible passage of a health-care bill made him a sudden success in the fickle view of the commentariat, whose opinion curdled again when Obama was unable, with a snap of the fingers or an outburst of anger, to stanch the BP oil spill overnight. And whose opinion spun around once more when he strong-armed BP into putting $20 billion aside to settle claims, and asserted presidential authority by replacing General Stanley McChrystal with General David Petraeus. The commentariat's opinion will keep spinning with the wind.
(via waxy)
World champion free diver Herbert Nitsch is planning on executing a no limits dive to 1000 feet. That's 300 feet more than the current record set by Nitsch three years ago.
(via @dunstan)
A reporter for the Toronto Star handed out prepaid credit cards to panhandlers and waited to see what happened.
"Can I trust you with this?" I said, handing him a $50 card and telling him to buy what he needs, but that I need it back when he was done. He nodded and scrambled to his feet. He said he would be back in a half-hour.
He came back right on time, slurping from a large McDonald's soft drink cup -- root beer -- and with sweat on his brow. He wanted to have pork and rice from a Vietnamese noodle joint on Spadina but they wouldn't take the card. So, he scrambled to McDonald's. Lunch was a double quarter-pounder with cheese.
The reporter's offer was frequently declined, which seems surprising at first. But panhandlers are savvy businesspeople. They didn't want a short-term and potentially risky venture interfering with their main panhandling income stream. Eyes on the prize. (via the browser)
Designing Obama, a book chronicling how the visual branding of the Obama campaign came about, is available in several formats, most notably in a completely free online version. Written by the campaign's design director, the making of the book was funded through the first big Kickstarter campaign.
The New Yorker has a long profile of Francis Collins, the ardent Christian whom Obama picked to head up the NIH, and the NIH's role in embryonic stem cell research.
A year later, Obama's appointment of Collins seemed an inspired choice. The President had found not only a man who reflected his own view of the harmony between science and faith but an evangelical Christian who hoped that the government's expansion of embryonic-stem-cell research might bring the culture war over science to a quiet end. On August 23rd, however, Judge Royce C. Lamberth, of the Federal District Court for the District of Columbia, halted federal spending for embryonic-stem-cell research, putting hundreds of research projects in limbo and plunging the N.I.H. back into a newly contentious national debate.
This is fantastic: a classically trained voice teacher who knows nothing about metal analyzes five singers from the genre, from Ozzy Osbourne to Bruce Dickinson of Iron Maiden. Of Dickenson she says:
I have nothing but admiration for this singer. Listen how he starts off with a soft growl, then moves seamlessly into a well-supported, sustained high full-voice sound that then evolves into an effortless long scream! His diction is easily intelligible, regardless of the range he's singing in or the effect he's going for. He achieves an intensely rhythmic delivery of the lyrics without losing legato and musical momentum, something a lot of classical singers struggle with, especially when interpreting the many staccato and accent markings that crowd scores by Bellini, Donizetti, etc.
I'm no classically trained anything, but I have been listening to a lot of hard rock and metal from the 70s and 80s lately.1 Out of the context of its time, its genre, and whatever shock value the music held when it was first released, there is some genuinely good music there. (via clusterflock)
[1] Been doing lots of driving this summer and without a working iPod in the car, the rock stations are the only music that Meg and I can both agree on. Well, besides classical or NPR, but those won't keep the baby quiet the way AC/DC or Skynyrd will. ↩
The list includes Roman concrete, Damascus steel, and a napalm-like weapon called Greek fire. (via @ebertchicago)
I remember reading that Greek and Roman statues were originally painted, but I didn't know that through the use of modern scientific equipment, we actually know how they looked.
(via @brainpicker)
A list of the most important typefaces of the last decade.
It is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been "important" for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons. Instead, I am going to let the readers of this blog see if they can figure out the contribution that each of these ten faces makes.
And here it is. He's written 40 entries about capitalism and 44 about the blockade. (via @tcarmody)
The puzzles are ordered from easiest to hardest...the hard ones seem impossible.
This 45-minute documentary on Andrew Wiles' proof of Fermat's Last Theorem is surprisingly powerful and emotional. Give it until 1:45 or so and you'll want to watch the whole thing. The film is not really about math; it's about all of those movie trailer cliches -- "one man!", "finds the truth!", "fights the odds!", etc. -- except that this is actually true and poignant.
Microsoft billionaire Nathan Myhrvold's monster 2400-page cookbook will be out in December but you can preorder it now for only $500. That's steep but the book's got some great blurbs from the likes of McGee, Blumenthal, Adrià, and Chang. A 20-page excerpt is available if you need convincing.
From Alan Richman in GQ, some no-nonsense guidelines for ordering wine at a restaurants.
14. I don't care if the restaurant is pouring Chateau Latour into Minnie Mouse mugs, don't walk into a restaurant carrying your own wine glasses. It's more pretentious than wearing a monocle and spats.
Leaf.ly is a social media site for pot smokers. You can keep track of all the types of bud you smoke (like Cork'd does for wine), check out the likely effects of smoking a new cannabis strain (these are good if you want to just play video games), and earn Foursquare-style badges. What, duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu.de wasn't available?
In a 31-square-mile area in Brazil that is off limits to logging companies, the sole survivor of an uncontacted tribe lives. All by himself.
Advanced societies invariably have subsumed whatever indigenous populations they've encountered, determining those tribes' fates for them. But Brazil is in the middle of an experiment. If peaceful contact is established with the lone Indian, they want it to be his choice. They've dubbed this the "Policy of No Contact." After years of often-tragic attempts to assimilate into modern life the people who still inhabit the few remaining wild places on the planet, the policy is a step in a totally different direction. The case of the lone Indian represents its most challenging test.
A sad story. But perhaps only to the culturally modern. It's almost impossible to be alone in today's world; maybe that's not such a good thing sometimes. Loneliness on the other hand...200 messages per hour from your Twitter pals still can't cure that.
Kamikaze pilot Masanobu Kuno wrote a farewell letter to his young son and daughter the day before he flew to his death in the Battle of Okinawa. From the translation:
Your father will become a god and watch you two closely. Both of you, study hard and help out your mother with work. I can't be your horse to ride, but you two be good friends.
I should have a "crying at work" tag for posts like this.
A very nice US currency redesign by Dowling Duncan.
When we researched how notes are used we realized people tend to handle and deal with money vertically rather than horizontally. You tend to hold a wallet or purse vertically when searching for notes. The majority of people hand over notes vertically when making purchases. All machines accept notes vertically. Therefore a vertical note makes more sense.
The note imagery relates to the value of each note:
$1 - The first African American president
$5 - The five biggest native American tribes
$10 - The bill of rights, the first 10 amendments to the US Constitution
$20 - 20th Century America
$50 - The 50 States of America
$100 - The first 100 days of President Franklin Roosevelt.
Needs more guilloche but other than that: fire up the presses.
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