teendrama :: hello my name is dennis.

"As for the Leaper, it hasn’t gone away, but has moved from the front to the rear. The famous hood..."

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:34:00 -0400

“As for the Leaper, it hasn’t gone away, but has moved from the front to the rear. The famous hood ornament is partly a casualty of globalization, Mr. Callum said, since such protrusions are banned for pedestrian-safety reasons in many countries.”

- Okay, last times article (I was reading in bed this morning - shut up!), but here’s the last paragraph in a piece about the new Jaguar. The “leaper” is what the Jaguar people call the cat emblem on the hood. I noticed it started disappearing from their cars (the big Benz logo / ornament too) but never realized it was pedestrian safety thing.

Design - Jaguar XJ Is Back With Some Bite - NYTimes.com

Also, not to car-nerd out, but the Jaguar XJ looks like a clear mashup of the Aston DB9 and the Benz C55. Not sure why these design influences are skipped over by the writer.

One more sidenote. My dad used to have an old Jag. The thing was 100 miles long. Eventually when the thing fell apart to the point where he had to get a new one, he donated the old on to the town (to replace their even-more-aging “Senior Mobile” for Senior Citizens). Which of course causes a shit-show with the neigboring towns (eventually resulting in an editorial in the local paper) about how Medway was using it’s town funds inappropriately. Ha! Read the whole story here.

"Going back a month or two, we come to live mussels in individual bowls of water and a collection of..."

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:23:56 -0400

“Going back a month or two, we come to live mussels in individual bowls of water and a collection of the world’s smallest waffles. Last fall, like a squirrel hiding acorns, he would bring his favorite vegetables to bed with him, or deposit them in his toy chest.”

- From another piece in the Times about a five year old who’s parents found him squirreling away little pieces of food (the beginning of collection habits?). I LOL’ed when I imagined the mini waffles. Ha!

Cooking With Dexter - Mummy Dearest - NYTimes.com

"Dietary restriction seems to set off an ancient strategy written into all animal genomes, that when..."

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 11:20:51 -0400

“Dietary restriction seems to set off an ancient strategy written into all animal genomes, that when food is scarce resources should be switched to tissue maintenance from breeding. In recent years biologists have had considerable success in identifying the mechanisms by which cells detect the level of nutrients available to the body. The goal is to find drugs that trick these mechanisms into thinking that famine is at hand. People could then literally have their cake and eat it, too, enjoying the health benefits of caloric restriction without the pain of forgoing rich foods.”

- From an article in the NYT about studing the diets of monkeys to isolate the chemical elements of living longer and then creating drugs to reproduce those chemicals without the diet restrictions.

As I was reading this I couldn’t hep but to think that this has to be an awful idea (akin to naivety of folks in the 50s when it came to smoking - “what can possibly be wrong with this?”

Dieting Monkeys Offer Hope for Living Longer - NYTimes.com

foursquare gets its plugs in the NY Observer...

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 00:13:13 -0400

Reeee-blllllooooggggggg (sorry, for some reason this is funny to me every time)

foursquare:

If Foursquare goes the way Crowley hopes it will (that is, if you all join), your everyday activities—from your commute to your grocery-shopping—would unlock what he calls “contextually relevant information”: tips, tricks and thoughts sourced directly from people you know. It would “make people more aware of the cities they live in,” and “motivate you to do things you wouldn’t normally do,” Crowley said. If Foursquare succeeds—if it’s adopted by enough people—it would fundamentally change the way many people interact with the city. It might well make today’s guidebooks, weekly event listings, and reviews look like the early versions of Mapquest by comparison.

“With Foursquare, Dennis Crowley Aims Past the Nerds” , NY Observer (July 10)

http://nyfi.observer.com/arts-culture/268/foursquare-dennis-crowley-aims-past-nerds

Not sure where the “nerds” part came from, but John Fischer manages to sum up foursquare better than we seem to do in our pitches. :)

mikehudack: youmightfindyourself: What advantages does this...

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 18:27:18 -0400

mikehudack:

youmightfindyourself:

What advantages does this motor car have over, say, a train — which I could also afford?

Me, Nora, Benedikta, Nick and Kati ripping up the free food...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 20:25:00 -0400

Me, Nora, Benedikta, Nick and Kati ripping up the free food platter at Picnic NYC @ The New Museum

Digging this pic (and glad I recently got a haircut :)

(via nickbilton)

mikehudack: youngmanhattanite: caro: Nice. This is big, like...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 18:05:36 -0400

mikehudack:

youngmanhattanite:

caro:

Nice.

This is big, like bigger than big. Game-changing, even. (It’s not, but c’mon, have some fun.)

Krucoff = punch in the nuts!

Btw, this is the round of foursquare promos that we’re explicitly calling attention to. (should be 5 in NYC by end of the week). Bigger / better stuff in the works, stay tuned.

foursquare: caro: Smart! Foursquare links to food trucks’...

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 15:17:28 -0400

foursquare:

caro:

Smart! Foursquare links to food trucks’ Twitter accounts. They should also make it possible to link to non-mobile establishments’ accounts as well, considering how many of them use Twitter now — and maybe even a widget on the Web site and (if possible) in the mobile app that pulls in the most recent tweets.

ps: Right now you can only add a Twitter account to a place by using our “edit venue” tools (which are only available to Superusers, Mayors and the person who originally added the venue). If that’s you tho, go for it!

(and of course @caro was the first to discover this :)

An Open Letter to Dwell Magazine

Wed, 08 Jul 2009 12:21:58 -0400

Dear Dwell:

Love the magazine. As a favor, I have rewritten the Table of Contents of your July/August issue:

Cover        House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 43    House with Vertical Wood Slats
Page 52    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 58    Ice Cream Makers
Page 66    Pavilion with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 70    Philadelphia
Page 80    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 88    House with Horizontal Wood Slats
Page 96    House with Vertical Wood Slats

I hope you find this useful.

Fondly,

Jeff Speck, AICP
Washington, DC

(via MetropolisMag)

With the Wi-Fi signals you’ve previously found cataloged...

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 12:19:00 -0400

With the Wi-Fi signals you’ve previously found cataloged away and kept from offering any further treasure, the game is constantly and aggressively trying to push you back into the real world, to abandon your usual routine routes and further explore — and to work socially to identify which places around you offer the best bits of kit (ie. “the Starbucks on Main Street gives you a wicked space helmet”) — and making a game out of life itself is precisely, in the end, just what makes it such a rare and valuable gem.

(via The War-driver’s delight: WiFi treasure hunting in Aspyr’s Treasure World | Offworld)

… This is Nintendo DS game (“Club Treasure World”) that encourages you to explore the physical world. As you explore, you find “stars” (aka points) for finding wi-fi hotspots (kind of like foursquare checkins earn your points). When you’ve collected all the points in your neighborhood, move onto another one, etc.

area/code did something similar w/ Plundr… wi-fi hotspots are islands and you trade between them. If you live in Brooklyn and work in Union Square, you can set up a trade route between those two locations. Plundr was both based on GPS (each island was tied to a lat/long based on wi-fi SSID and Skyhook’s datase) and multi-player (so the server and potentially other players knew your location) and which made it hard to pitch to Nintendo as a legit title (there’s a danger in exposing the location of DS users to other users).

These guys get around it by using location in the abstract - you never know where the wifi hotspot is, you just know if it’s new to you or whether you’ve been there before. A simplication for sure, but clever.

http://www.clubtreasureworld.com/

"The fireflies flashing in the air are all males. Down in the grass, Dr. Lewis points out, females..."

Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:35:38 -0400

“

The fireflies flashing in the air are all males. Down in the grass, Dr. Lewis points out, females are sitting and observing. They look for flash patterns of males of their own species, and sometimes they respond with a single flash of their own, always at a precise interval after the male’s. Dr. Lewis takes out a penlight and clicks it twice, in perfect Photinus greeni. A female Photinus greeni flashes back.

“Most people don’t realize there’s this call and response going on,” Dr. Lewis said. “But it’s very, very easy to talk to fireflies.”

”

- Was digging this NYT article about how firefly flashes are used to comunicate during mating process.

HeatherD and I were in a field with a thousand fireflies during the Montauk fireworks and now I’m thinking maybe I could have used some penlight magic to get them to flash to the beat of Billy Jean or something.

Seduction and Deceit in a Firefly’s Flashes - NYTimes.com

Pretty Back-to-the-Future-esque, but the church in our hometown...

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 11:16:00 -0400

Pretty Back-to-the-Future-esque, but the church in our hometown (Medway, MA) was struck by lightning and caught on fire! (this morning, me thinks)

Apparently moments later the the steeple FELL OFF and crashed on the ground.

Big Dig & JJ got the call while they were out having breakfast (JJ’s home for a wedding). They ditched pancakes just in time to take this pre-steeple-collapse pic.

More pics here.

(via jonathan crowley)

caro: Weren’t some people talking yesterday about CAPTCHAs that...

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 02:57:42 -0400

caro:

Weren’t some people talking yesterday about CAPTCHAs that made great band names?

"Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) — ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real..."

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 18:06:56 -0400

“Easter Eggs for Real Life (Neil Gaiman) — ok, I know easter eggs are already part of real life, but this is still cool. Gaiman recommends a restaurant run by a friend, and the friend has set up a special phrase that to mention to the server, at which point something good and special will happen for them to eat or drink. Think of it as a restaurant Easter Egg. I love language, I love Gaiman’s books, I love surprises, and I love that here Gaiman’s using the digital sense of Easter Egg (surprise hidden in a program) rather than the analog sense (because there’s no searching involved).”

- Easter Eggs for Real Life

(via O’Reily Radar)

I think someone ruffied my ramen.

Sat, 27 Jun 2009 14:28:18 -0400

Me + Mari + Naveen went to lunch as Menkui Tei - a Japanese place near Cooper Union. I had the ramen and got super sick afterwards - not sick in the stomach, but sick in the head. I was lightheaded and couldn’t see straight. Sitting at my desk after lunch, it was like I had the spins from a crazy college night of drinking.

I went home early and took a nap. When I got up about an hour later I couldn’t walk straight I was so lightheaded.

It eventually got better, though the sick-in-the-head kept coming back at weird times. I went out to dinner w/ Nick & Nora and as we ate I started getting crazy again. They both said it was prob from a large amount of MSG (in the ramen broth?) and the returning craziness was my body continuing to break it down.

I feel 100x better today, but here’s what I found via wikipedia on Glutamic acid, a component of MSG:

Research into health effects

In April 1968, Robert Ho Man Kwok wrote a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, coining the term “Chinese restaurant syndrome”:

I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant, especially one that served northern Chinese food. The syndrome, which usually begins 15 to 20 minutes after I have eaten the first dish, lasts for about two hours, without hangover effect. The most prominent symptoms are numbness at the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness and palpitations…^[5]

In 1969 the Chinese restaurant syndrome was attributed to the flavor enhancer glutamate largely due to the widely-cited article “Monosodium L-glutamate: its pharmacology and role in the Chinese Restaurant Syndrome” published in the journal Science.^[6] The syndrome is often abbreviated as CRS and also became known under the names Chinese food syndrome and monosodium glutamate symptom complex.

Symptoms attributed to the Chinese restaurant syndrome are rather common and unspecific and have included burning sensations, numbness, tingling, feelings of warmth, facial pressure or tightness, chest pain, headache, nausea, rapid heartbeat, bronchospasm in people with asthma, drowsiness, and weakness.^[7]

While many people believe that monosodium glutamate (MSG) is the cause of these symptoms, an association has never been demonstrated under rigorously controlled conditions, even in studies with people who were convinced that they were sensitive to the compound.^[8]^[9]^[10]^[11] Adequately controlling for experimental bias includes a placebo-controlled double-blinded experimental design and the application in capsules because of the strong and unique after-taste of glutamates.^[8]

In the 2004 version of his book, On Food and Cooking, noted food scientist Harold McGee states, “[after many studies], toxicologists have concluded that MSG is a harmless ingredient for most people, even in large amounts.”

Of course, I ping Mari and Naveen with this story and Naveen says…

ps. i told you not to finish the broth without noodles! :)

Ha, f’er!

"Tracking your mpg since the car was last turned on, it begins to fill from the left once your mpg..."

Thu, 25 Jun 2009 16:54:40 -0400

“Tracking your mpg since the car was last turned on, it begins to fill from the left once your mpg exceeds 25. With this display you can see from moment to moment just how your actions contribute to gas mileage, and before you know it (if you’re like me), you’re engaged in trying to inch it up ever further. You coast just a bit more, you moderate your speed, you avoid jackrabbit starts. And, if you’ve really done well, by the time you turn the car off you may have topped 35 mpg. What does the car do then? It flashes, in all caps, “EXCELLENT!” I half-expected it to ask me to enter my initials for the high score list.”

- Or, “How to turn driving a Toyota Prius into a video game”

Terra Nova: On Expertise

(btw, found this while reviewing someone’s notes from the State of Play conf I spoke at last week)

Holy Shit. Look at this lobster roll (from Arnolds out on Cape...

Thu, 18 Jun 2009 13:28:48 -0400

Holy Shit. Look at this lobster roll (from Arnolds out on Cape Cod - Mom & Dad sent this to me). Montauk, you should be ashamed of yourself.

"I mean, I don’t’ give a sh*t how they’re tweeting in the newsroom… this is a dying industry… how is..."

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:56:58 -0400

““I mean, I don’t’ give a sh*t how they’re tweeting in the newsroom… this is a dying industry… how is the NYTimes replacing thousand-word [pieces] with 120 characters?””

- Pat Kiernan on the 140 Characters Conference panel on Twitter in the newsroom. (via gillianmae)

Wow, if I knew Pat Kiernan was gonna throw around s-bombs, I would’ve considered the $895

(via adamiss)

(via mikehudack)

My buddies Josh & Tarikh from Uncommon Projects are working...

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 17:36:54 -0400

My buddies Josh & Tarikh from Uncommon Projects are working on some super slick “what happens when you mount your iPhone on your bike” apps. First up = Bikenik (coming soon). Think: Nike+ with handlbars :):

Sent from my stoopid iPhone

"Download a map to get started mapping this area from street level. Add details like businesses,..."

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 16:17:14 -0400

“Download a map to get started mapping this area from street level. Add details like businesses, parks, schools, buildings, paths, post boxes, cash machines and other useful landmarks. When you’re finished, post a scan of your annotated map to trace your handwritten changes and notes directly into OpenStreetMap.”

- Aaron Cope going guerilla + low tech with user-generated city guides. I heart this so far.

The map I just made here:

http://walking-papers.org/print.php?id=3w9w8n29

Make your own map:

http://walking-papers.org/

Links for 2009-04-11 [del.icio.us]

Sun, 12 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

Wall stick ons : Dezign With a Z, Glow in the Dark Wall Decals
glow in the dark stickers (stars etc!)

Links for 2009-04-02 [del.icio.us]

Fri, 03 Apr 2009 00:00:00 PDT

History of PC Engine / Turbografx book
Want want want want want... picture history of the PC Engine (aka Turbografx here in the US). Though sadly, only available in French. (I have the same book from them, except for history of Nintendo - the company - all the way from playing cards to arcade to SF2 on SNES)

Links for 2009-02-13 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 14 Feb 2009 00:00:00 PST

arielwaldman wiki / location
ariels' thoughts on dodgeball (outsider's perspective/ archive). friends w/ harryh

Links for 2009-01-25 [del.icio.us]

Mon, 26 Jan 2009 00:00:00 PST

NYT inauguration party photos
by Diana Levine

Links for 2009-01-13 [del.icio.us]

Wed, 14 Jan 2009 00:00:00 PST

Black Mountain Ski Area | Weddings/Functions
Says Shoops: "Sorry Denny but I call it... if i get married it's going to be here"

Links for 2009-01-09 [del.icio.us]

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 00:00:00 PST

The ABS Avalanche Airbag
Avalanche safety = airbag hidden in backpack. Alterntaive to transponder.
Backcountry Access Tracker DTS beacon
Bryce recommends.

Links for 2009-01-05 [del.icio.us]

Tue, 06 Jan 2009 00:00:00 PST

TTR = Ranking system for international freestyle snowboard contests
Homework for an argument McD and I were having over whether the [Mountain] Dew Tour actually "counts" for anything.