Eightface

The perfect omelette

From Chasing Perfection by Francis Lam.

It was astounding how something so commonplace, so elemental, could have so many variables. You just have to learn to see all those variables, to recognize what effect every moment of heat, every motion of the hands has. To get back to that thing I tasted, I would have to know exactly what to look for and nail it every step of the way.

Three eggs, salt, pepper, and a little butter. That’s all there is in a classic French omelet, but it’s enough to keep reteaching me this vital lesson: Things are only simple when you’ve stopped asking the right questions of them, when you’ve stopped finding new ways to see them. Because what you find, when you learn how to find it, is that even simple things can be wonderfully, frustratingly, world-openingly complex.

Wugazi

Wugazi is combination of Fugazi and Wu-Tang Clan, created by Cecil Otter and Swiss Andy. The album, 13 Chambers is available to download from their site.

Dan Solomon interviewed the pair and discussed how the album came to be. For the technically minded, Joe Gross offers a track-by-track breakdown of the album.

Cross Dublin without passing a pub

It is possible to cross Dublin without passing a pub.

In Ulysses, James Joyce mused that “a good puzzle would be to cross Dublin without passing a pub”. No-one’s really sure if it was possible, and Dubliners have always felt proud that it was not straight forward. The traditional Irish way to ‘solve’ this puzzle is to walk across Dublin, and call into every pub in the way and have a pint. This way you never actually pass a pub.

What problems can’t be solved by the internet?

The book as a device

The Internet Archive is now archiving physical copies of books.

As the Internet Archive has digitized collections and placed them on our computer disks, we have found that the digital versions have more and more in common with physical versions. The computer hard disks, while holding digital data, are still physical objects. As such we archive them as they retire after their 3-5 year lifetime. Similarly, we also archive microfilm, which was a previous generation’s access format. So hard drives are just another physical format that stores information. This connection showed us that physical archiving is still an important function in a digital era.

Recognizing that a book is just another device is important. It’s way too easy to make all sorts of cute analogies and comparisons between books and the digital world, so I’ll avoid it. How our society consumes words and images is bound to shift, but the book will still be here in fifty years.

Insane urban bike race

First-person video from a downhill urban bike race (via hypertext).

Scotch pronunciation

How to pronounce scotch names, just in case you were wondering (via tbr). I’ve definitely got a few of these wrong in the past.

IGA fail commercial

I saw this commercial for IGA air during the 2nd Stanley Cup playoff game. I’m pretty sure the kid says “fail” at the end. It has to be one of the most mainstream applications of the fail meme that I’ve seen. There’s also a French version of the commercial.

Update: I realized after the post, that it was a certain kind of mainstream. Honestly, there’s a relatively small Anglo population watching CBC in Montreal, but the commercial aired… so a reasonable number of people must have seen it.

Mobius Ship

Möbius Ship by Tim Hawkinson at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. But will it float?

Godin on popularity

Seth Godin on popularity.

In general, the search for popular is wildly overrated, because it corrupts our work, eats away at our art and makes it likely we’ll compromise to please the anonymous masses.

Rejection hurts

Researchers at the University of Michigan have found that rejection hurts, and not just in a metaphorical sense. The study found that “social rejection shares somatosensory representations with physical pain” (via nyt). Maybe artists, musicians and poets have been on to something all of these years.