Link Banana

I think Jason Kottke just won the award for my favorite liveblog of well… anything. In its entirety:

Jason Kottke and a few high-end linen sellers, are convinced that thread count (of bed sheets and other linens) doesn’t matter. As someone who has handled his fair share of low quality, high thread count sheets, I think they’re more than right.

This is unquestionably the greatest “watch me change over time” video I’ve seen.

(via Heading East)

Also, Kottke points to Dan Hanna’s description of how he took the pictures for the video.

The Large Hadron Collider has already begun some test runs, and will soon be getting down to real science. Cosmic Variance offers a list of what the device is looking for and an obviously arbitrary estimation of how likely it is to find it. Everyone’s favorite possibility:

Stable Black Holes That Eat Up the Earth, Destroying All Living Organisms in the Process: 10^-25%. So you’re saying there’s a chance?

(via kottke)

A woodworker considers the new-to-epidemic of the bats being broken in Major League Baseball games. It’s an interesting read.

(via kottke)

Like most commenters on the series, I feel like these pictures of well-maintained rooftop decks straddle the like between creepy and healthy voyeurism.

(via kottke)

This is certainly the coolest graph I’ve seen in a while. It might be the coolest ever.

(via kottke)

An under-understood truth:

Paul Krugman was observing that even though the political coverage is the part of the media that people like to talk about, it’s actually fairly marginal to the business. The New York Times is known for its hard news coverage, but he observes that from a business perspective it’s primarily a fashion and food publication that runs a small political news operation on the side. One issue of T Magazine, he says, pays for an entire NYT European bureau.

(via kottke)

This picture is very cool. That is all.

(via kottke)

From Tierra del Fuego’s Yaghan language, the definition of this “world’s most succinct word”:

It describes a look shared by two people with each wishing that the other will initiate something that both desire but which neither one wants to start. This could perhaps be translated more succinctly as “eye-contact implying ‘after you…’”. A more literal approximation is “ending up mutually at a loss as to what to do about each other”.

(via kottke)

Far more variable than you might think. The comparison of various renderings is well worth a look.

(via kottke)

That is kind of a self-evident fact, but with their increasing use in high-tech gadgets there’s justifiably increasing worry about the depletion of certain elements.

Gallium is thought to make up 0.0015 percent of the Earth’s crust and there are no concentrated supplies of it. We get it by extracting it from zinc or aluminum ore or by smelting the dust of furnace flues. Dr. Reller says that by 2017 or so there’ll be none left to use. Indium, another endangered element—number 49 in the periodic table—is similar to gallium in many ways, has many of the same uses (plus some others—it’s a gasoline additive, for example, and a component of the control rods used in nuclear reactors) and is being consumed much faster than we are finding it. Dr. Reller gives it about another decade. Hafnium, element 72, is in only slightly better shape. There aren’t any hafnium mines around; it lurks hidden in minute quantities in minerals that contain zirconium, from which it is extracted by a complicated process that would take me three or four pages to explain. We use a lot of it in computer chips and, like indium, in the control rods of nuclear reactors, but the problem is that we don’t have a lot of it. Dr. Reller thinks it’ll be gone somewhere around 2017.

(via kottke)

Fifty things — some thoroughly reasonable, some a tad odd — that are being blamed on the high price of oil. My personal favorites:

22. Bacon and ham could get more expensive. (WSJ)
28. Demand for wine is weakening. (Portland Business Journal)
32. One Virginia library mulls bringing back the bookmobile. (Daily Times, Maryland)

(via kottke)

Like Mr. Kottke, I’m fascinated by color photos from an era usually seen in black-and-white. After explaining autochrome, he offers these links:

Here’s a slideshow of some photos taken by this process. Here’s some autochromes of Mark Twain from 1908.

More early color photography (not necessarily autochromes): Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii’s stunning photographs of Russia circa 1909-1915, photos of WWI, photos of WWII, and photos of America in the late 30s/early 40s (color corrected).

China, forced by the Olympic to worry about the translations of restaurant’s food names, has mandated changes to some of the weirdest ones. Dishes being changed:

• Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman (to become “Mapo tofu”)
• Chicken without sexual life (to become “Steamed pullet”)
• Husband and wife’s lung slice (to become “Beef and ox tripe in chili sauce”)

(via kottke, who also highlights a Manhattan restaurant serving “sea urchin bukkake”)

I sometimes fancy myself rather spartan, but living with only 100 things — as Dave Bruno is trying for — sounds like a bridge too far.

“Stuff starts to overwhelm you,” says Dave Bruno, 37, an online entrepreneur who looked around his San Diego home one day last summer and realized how much his family’s belongings were weighing him down. Thus began what he calls the 100 Thing Challenge. (Apparently, Bruno is so averse to excess he can’t refer to 100 things in the plural.)

(via kottke)

Matt Kirkland has stripped away the fluffy cuteness behind Elmo and other plush toys to reveal the creepy-looking robots underneath.

(via kottke)

A few months ago, a team from Rensselaer and Rice Universities made a surface the blackest black that was ever called black.

(via kottke)

For some reason, I’ve watched this video every time it’s shown up in my feedreader (which has been a lot). There’s something great about it.

(originally via Kottke)

Speaking of Hitler… The Telegraph tells the rather interesting story of the German archeologist who inspired Harrison Ford’s character:

Like Jones, Rahn was an archaeologist, like him he fell foul of the Nazis and like him he was obsessed with finding the Holy Grail - the cup reputedly used to catch Christ’s blood when he was crucified. But whereas Jones rode the Grail-train to box-office glory, Rahn’s obsession ended up costing him his life.

(via kottke.org)