buy nothing, pay now
the designers republic webshop is online. i need to have much more money and a much larger home, so i can actually buy the posters for sale.
(Saturday, February 16, 2002)

richter at moma (nyt)
"No doubt some people will find Mr. Richter's paintings thorny and glum and retreat from this show confused. I think this is one of the finest, most beautiful and strangely moving exhibitions of the work of a living painter in years. And while you could quibble about one picture or another, it is just about pitch perfect as an overview of this 70-year-old German master's maddeningly kaleidoscopic and exquisitely refined output."
(Friday, February 15, 2002)

another example of headline/article diversion
Headline: "Study Suggests Less Sleep Is OK"

Not until the seventh paragraph do you find a major questioning of the study methodology: "Sleep experts said the research, though provocative, has several flaws. The study was not actually designed to look at sleep's effect on longevity. It relied on patients' recollections of their sleep habits and did not ask if they took naps. It did not look at the quality of people's sleep or whether they felt drowsy all day."

Then the article goes on to mention the problems with the survey sample: "Dr. Phyllis Zee, director of Northwestern Memorial Hospital's sleep disorders center, said the results probably do not reflect the general population because participants were not randomly selected but were mainly friends and relatives of volunteers for the American Cancer Society, which collected the data as part of a 1982 survey on cancer risks."

So, if you just skim the headlines, you'd have a much different impression than if you actually read the article. Because, really, this shouldn't even be in the newspaper at all; another flawed study that makes a good headline but bad science.

Grrr! Bad media, bad!
(Friday, February 15, 2002)

nyc etiquette
complete, thorough, and well thought out. bravo!
(Thursday, February 14, 2002)

dinner party tips (onion)
"Bon mots should be tossed off to the left, continuing in a clockwise direction."
(Thursday, February 14, 2002)

house votes to ban soft money (nyt)
"By early Wednesday evening, Republican strategists admitted that they probably could not stop the Shays-Meehan bill from final passage. Their concession came after the House, by a thin 219-to-209 vote, defeated an amendment favored by the National Rifle Association that would have exempted advertisements 'pertaining to the Second Amendment' from the restrictions on issue advertising contained in the Shays-Meehan bill."

So, even during the process of having soft money banned, soft money interests (in this case the NRA) attempt to get their interests coddled. Grrr!
(Thursday, February 14, 2002)

boston hotties
"Ideal first date: Tie between a quiet restaurant in the North End and playing with blocks in my room."
(Monday, February 11, 2002)

after the ussr, nokia? (nyt)
"(A company the size of Nokia in proportion to the population of its host country would, in the case of the United States, employ about 1 million people.)"
...
"The challenge to the country's traditional values from the disparity between the new wave of millionaires and ordinary Finns came to light most famously last month when a top Nokia executive, Anssa Vanjoki, was fined a staggering $100,000 for a relatively minor speeding offense on his Harley-Davidson motorcycle.

"Mr. Vanjoki was traveling at 46 miles an hour in a 30-mile-an-hour zone. The fine, as is customary in Finland, was calculated as a proportion of his most recent audited earnings — inflated in this case by the sale of Nokia stock that earned him in excess of $2 million."
(Wednesday, February 6, 2002)

chuck close! (washington post)
the post does a good job here of explaining close's experiments with process over the years. he's a very intelligent, engaging man, and his work is awfully good.
(via nubbin)
(Tuesday, February 5, 2002)

push returns!
ESPN's Bottom Line for your desktop. (If you're running Windows 98 or better, that is.)

This is a much more useful version of push than PointCast ever was. I imagine it's been out for a while, and that there are stock tickers and everything else that can stream, but I really like this a lot. It works and it looks good.
(Monday, February 4, 2002)

amatuers versus pros at airports (nyt)
count me as one of the pros, even though i'm hardly travelling at all these days. i need to get one of those tumi rolling overhead bin cases. it would make my airport life much easier.
(Sunday, February 3, 2002)

more details on the shoes at sfo (sj mercury news)
a laundry list of what went wrong. it's very frightening.
(Friday, February 1, 2002)

peter dreher
speaking of good german painters, peter dreher is another one. he's of the same gernation as richter, polke and blinky palermo, and he's very good.

(i own two of his glass paintings, and they are stunning works of art.)
(Friday, February 1, 2002)

gerhard richter (nyt magazine)
"When your works sell for millions of dollars, as Richter's do at auction, you can indulge yourself if you are an obsessive-compulsive. Richter's life, like his work, depends upon absolute control, and there is something both elegant and alarming about that condition."

I can't wait to go to MoMA and see the Richter retrospective. He is simply an amazing painter, the best working today.
(Friday, February 1, 2002)

To stay drier, do you walk or run in rain? (seattle times)
"The Ledrick theory — run, spend less time in the rain, get less wet — would be true enough if rain landed only on the top of your head and shoulders.

"But the problem gets slippery when you consider that you end up running into raindrops, wetting the considerable surface area of your face, chest and leg fronts. So now you have to factor in how much surface area is exposed for how long — a function of things such as kinematics, relative velocity, vector components and flux."
(Friday, February 1, 2002)

ben brown is a web applications powerhouse
and i am planning on using some of his software, real soon-like.
(Friday, February 1, 2002)

GiveQuick!
it's back online.

i repeat, it's back online!
(Friday, February 1, 2002)

self-involvement
another pixellated funny four-box thing.
(Friday, February 1, 2002)