- Sacha Baron Cohen, civil rights scholar
- “Baron Cohen made a pilgrimage to the birthplace of Martin Luther King while doing research for his dissertation in Cambridge. Entitled ‘A Case of Mistaking Identities – the Jewish Black Alliance,’ the thesis examines the nature of cooperation between the African-American and Jewish communities and suggests ways of how to improve relations in the current day. His professor describes it as a major work of importance on the civil rights movement and is suggested reading for history students in Cambridge.”
- DropSend for sale, opens kimono
- “How much profit does DropSend bring in each month? Revenue: $9,041.81 per month (and growing by 8.6% per month) Costs: $2,100 per month (Servers at 365main.com + maintenance) Profit: $6,941.81 per month.”
- BusinessWeek: Jeff Bezos' Risky Bet
- “Bezos wants Amazon to run your business, at least the messy technical and logistical parts of it, using those same technologies and operations that power his $10 billion online store. In the process, Bezos aims to transform Amazon into a kind of 21st century digital utility. It’s as if Wal-Mart had decided to turn itself inside out, offering its industry-leading supply chain and logistics systems to any and all outsiders, even rival retailers. Except Amazon is starting to rent out just about everything it uses to run its own business, from rack space in its 10 million square feet of warehouses worldwide to spare computing capacity on its thousands of servers, data storage on its disk drives, and even some of the millions of lines of software code it has written to coordinate all that.”
- Internet Addiction Test
- “How do you know if you’re already addicted or rapidly tumbling toward trouble? The Internet Addiction Test is the first validated and reliable measure of addictive use of the Internet.” [tx wax]
- The influence of Rube Goldberg
- “A Rube Goldberg machine, according to Webster’s, is ‘a comically involved, complicated invention, laboriously contrived to perform a simple operation’ — for example, to unfold a napkin…You can find Goldbergiana, Goldberg-style inventions and feel his influence in a lot of places…”
- 9rules: “Toyota Loves 9rules So Much, They Used Our Leaf”
- “The Toyota plant in Georgetown, Kentucky must really think 9rules is something nifty, because for their ‘In the Interest of Women’ conference (website/logo here) they took a 9rules leaf, flipped it horizontally and turned it green to celebrate their love!”
- The “In the Air Tonight” scene from the Miami Vice pilot
Bill Simmons writes, “Two great things about this one: First, it still holds up — even now — and ‘Vice’ is about as dated as it gets. Second, up until that point, there had never been anything on TV even remotely resembling that scene. Remember, this was the same era when A) they were still freezing people’s faces mid-laugh during the opening credits of any sitcom; and B) nobody realized that you could use music to accentuate dramatic TV scenes.”
Torley
on 08 Nov 06What an eclectic collection of fun links… ah, I adore the music of Jan Hammer!
Marko
on 08 Nov 06Actually, In the Air tonight is by Phil Collins. But indeed I do remember the impression that particular scene made on me back then. Today, every other scene is laced by music.
Grant Hutchins
on 08 Nov 06Two comments:
First, I did a little bit of research into Internet Addiction for one of my college courses, and we found that it’s a bit misleading. The web site you link to is run by one of the biggest proponents of the idea that one could become “addicted” to the Internet, while there has been research to the contrary. Addiction implies a physical inability to stop doing something, and that hasn’t been shown.
Also, the criteria she uses to define Internet Addiction are based on Gambling Addiction’s entry in the DSM-IV, the go-to book for psychology. As the only non-substance addiction in that book, Gambling Addiction has been under fire too. And many of the criteria for Gambling Addiction seemed to be haphazardly converted to apply to the Internet. We found that you could apply these criteria to anything in life, like jogging, and easily call it an addiction.
For more information, you can read the site of a well-known skeptic of Dr. Young’s theories. I’m sure she means well but I don’t buy it.
My second comment is that I think I hear the Universal telephone ring in that video clip! The characteristic warbling is there.
Chad Allen
on 08 Nov 06Fantastic scene! Remember when you actually had to stop the car and find a payphone to actually make a phone all!
Kester
on 08 Nov 06Seems a little dated for an Internet Addiction Test to open with a question implying respondents have to “go on-line” in the first place – as if people still double click a dial up short cut! How preposterous.
Trevor Turk
on 08 Nov 06I wrote a little piece about how I’m suspicious that Amazon.com and 37signals might be building the “ultimate” Rails hosting solution, in case anyone is interested ;P
Todd
on 08 Nov 06The internet addiction test shows its bias in the scale of the questions. The lowest level is “Rarely” rather than “Never” so it works under the assumption that the test taker performs all of those negative behaviors at least “rarely” and probably more.
Additionally, from a very basic form building perspective, checkboxes? Really? For multiple choice questions that I presume should only have one answer? You can’t see me, but I’m slowly shaking my head.
Ben Darlow
on 09 Nov 06I just love that Miami Vice clip. Obviously Michael Mann was experimenting with this kind of stylistic marriage of music and cinema way before Heat, which also has two similar moments – when Robert De Niro is driving along the freeway before he and Pacino meet on-screen for the first time, and the final scene with the two of them backlit by the lights from the runway, as Moby’s “God Moving Over The Face of the Waters”, more recently re-used by Apple for their Intel advert.
Jason
on 10 Nov 06Love the black Ferrari Daytona Spyder in the pilot. They really should have kept that instead of switching to the Testarossas.
Also the phone booth shot is nice – remember phone booths?
This discussion is closed.