Link Banana

It’s not the nature of the errors that so amazing, it’s their sheer number. I thought we were supposed to value print for soberness and fact checking the internet doesn’t provide:

An appraisal on Saturday about Walter Cronkite’s career included a number of errors. In some copies, it misstated the date that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed and referred incorrectly to Mr. Cronkite’s coverage of D-Day. Dr. King was killed on April 4, 1968, not April 30. Mr. Cronkite covered the D-Day landing from a warplane; he did not storm the beaches. In addition, Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon on July 20, 1969, not July 26. “The CBS Evening News” overtook “The Huntley-Brinkley Report” on NBC in the ratings during the 1967-68 television season, not after Chet Huntley retired in 1970. A communications satellite used to relay correspondents’ reports from around the world was Telstar, not Telestar. Howard K. Smith was not one of the CBS correspondents Mr. Cronkite would turn to for reports from the field after he became anchor of “The CBS Evening News” in 1962; he left CBS before Mr. Cronkite was the anchor. Because of an editing error, the appraisal also misstated the name of the news agency for which Mr. Cronkite was Moscow bureau chief after World War II. At that time it was United Press, not United Press International.

(via kottke)

I’m pretty sure I’ll find fault with any such list that fails to include the word “marshmallow,” but Robert Beard’s is an interesting list.

(I think I also have to object to all words — especially French imports — with silent letters.)

(via kottke)

And because I haven’t done it in over a year, any nominations?

Made manifest in the number of ways we can get on and off roads that don’t slow down.

(via kottke)

Noted for posterity: not all — perhaps even few — writers always enjoy the act of writing.

(via kottke)

Tyler Cowen thinks that influential people have more conventional opinions. While I find his theories interesting, I have to wonder if this isn’t a simple selection bias: people become and stay influential because their view are widely held. I also tend to think that  “conventional wisdom” has more merit than the whole discussion gives it.

(via kottke)

A nihilistic counterpoint to the previous post:

What’s good about boredom, about anguish and the sense of meaninglessness of your own, of everything else’s existence, is that it is not a deception. Try to embrace, or let yourself be embraced by, boredom and anguish, which are larger than you anyhow. No doubt you’ll find that bosom smothering, yet try to endure it as long as you can, and then some more. Above all, don’t think you’ve goofed somewhere along the line, don’t try to retrace your steps to correct the error. No, as W. H. Auden said, “Believe your pain.” This awful bear hug is no mistake. Nothing that disturbs you ever is.

(via kottke)

The most interesting part is the list of magnet and sticky states. I’m shocked to see New York at the bottom of their magnetic list. I’d expect NYC would at least make it most magnetic state in the Rust Belt, but I guess not.

(via kottke)

Apparently, that’s what a Greek would say to things that we’d call Greek.

The strangest thing I see on chart is that some French apparently call things they don’t understand Javanese. Is there some historical linkage I don’t know about between the people of France and an Indonesian island? A commenter suggests that the chart may be intending Javanais.

(via kottke)

A fun and well-designed game to slurp up a few minutes of your time?

(via kottke)

Sounds boring and technical until you see this.

(via kottke)

Someone’s adding Photoshop pallettes and dialogues to obviously altered advertisements on the Berlin Metro.

(via kottke)

The New York Times slideshow is well done.

(via kottke)

Kottke’s right: this video of one of Jupiter’s moons, as taken from the Hubble Space Telescope, looks like (fairly marginal) CGI.

Perhaps part of the reason this is so impressive is that I rarely think in metric. But: all the gold that’s been mined in human history would probably fail to fill a cube 25 meters per side. Even in feet — 82 — that seems a pretty modest volume.

(via kottke)

What luxuries — nicer versions of necessities — do you think are worth their cost? Also: what recession?

(via Kottke, whose opinions are worth perusal)

I’d always figured that the making of hot dogs was one thing better left unseen, but the unsavoriness of the watery “meat” is just incredible.

(via Kottke)

This took up at least 90 minutes of my day. It’s deceptively simple. And according to a BuzzFeed commenter, a ripoff of Galcon.

(via kottke)

An ephemeral art display explains the beauty of ephemerality. For those too lazy to find the translation in the comments, every twelve hours the wall reads:

Time passes, and each time time passes, something gets erased.

(via kottke)

Like Mr. Kottke, I had no idea that it involved a spiral. Also, school films from the 1940s and ’50s are a style that I may never tire of. And: the book that caused someone to dig out the video.

Inspired by Merlin Mann, I’m posting one of the best tweets I’ve seen in a while:

The dissemination of what’s important to the world is too significant a task to be left to algorithms and popularity contests.