Erich Segal died this past Sunday at 72 . A Yale classics professor, he also wrote the bestselling book and award winning screenplay for "Love Story"-a film Vanity Fair called, "the first of the modern-day blockbusters"-which popularized the catchphrase "Love means never having to say you’re sorry." The male protagonist Oliver Barrett IV was modeled on a combination of then Harvard students, Tommy Lee Jones and Al Gore.
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News
The people behind "autotune the news" apply their craft to Dr. King's "I Have a Dream" speech.
Built in 1873 in a space originally used as an alley between two homes, a 9.5 feet wide, 2 bedroom, 2 bath townhouse apartment in the West Village recently sold for a not so skinny price of $2.1 million. New York Post has some neat photos of the apartment's slim, but charming interior.
[Via]
No, this isn't a mock news item from The Onion. UPI reported recently that a floor of a Swedish Weight Watchers clinic collapsed during a weigh in of 20 members. The best part of the article came in the end:
Weight Watchers said the cause of the collapse is being investigated.
Sherlock, I think I have a solid theory as to the cause.
Google announced on their blog:
Over the next few weeks, we’re rolling out the ability to upload all file types to the cloud through Google Docs, giving you one place where you can upload and access your key files online. Because Google Docs now supports files up to 250 MB in size, which is larger than the attachment limit on most email applications, you’ll be able to backup large graphics files, RAW photos, ZIP archives and much more to the cloud. More importantly, instead of carrying a USB drive, you can now use Google Docs as a more convenient option for accessing your files on different computers.
As Boing Boing pointed out, it appears Google is getting into the YouSendIt business. Not that I would do this, but this is quite a handy method for sharing music files.
Learn Something Everyday features one interesting fact per day accompanied by a whimsical illustration, like the one above about Mickey and Minnie Mouse that was published on Monday, January 11.
In the Wall Street Journal, a ranked list of the 200 best and worst jobs in 2009 "based on five criteria - environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress - according to a newly released study from job site CareerCast.com."
On the heels of the recent Wall Street Journal article about the rumored upcoming Apple tablet, John Martellaro wrote an interesting piece on how that Journal article "had all the earmarks of a controlled leak." He then goes on to explain how Apple does this. Martellaro is writing from some position of insight as he was once a Senior Marketing Manager at Apple. [Via]
Tsutomu Yamaguchi, 93, died on Monday as a result of stomach cancer. He was the only official survivor of both atomic bombs dropped during World War II. He was visiting on a business trip as a then 29-year-old engineer when the first bomb detonated over Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945. He returned the next day to his home in Nagasaki with ruptured eardrums and a burned upper torso. A few days later on Aug. 9, the second atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
It is believed there were about 165 twice-bombed persons in Japan, known as “nijyuu hibakusha,” although municipal officials in both cities have said Mr. Yamaguchi was the only person to be officially acknowledged as such.
Over 150,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of both atomic bombs. As Andrew Sullivan wrote, "Tsutomu Yamaguchi was either the luckiest or unluckiest guy ever."
This recent news story reconfirms my belief that the best animal ever is the golden retriever. This is an irrefutable fact. Also, RIP Rudy!
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The Economist looks at the very complicated issue of which language dead or alive might be considered the toughest language in the world.
For sound complexity, one language stands out. !Xóõ, spoken by just a few thousand, mostly in Botswana, has a blistering array of unusual sounds. Its vowels include plain, pharyngealised, strident and breathy, and they carry four tones. It has five basic clicks and 17 accompanying ones. The leading expert on the !Xóõ, Tony Traill, developed a lump on his larynx from learning to make their sounds. Further research showed that adult !Xóõ-speakers had the same lump (children had not developed it yet).
The magazine settles ultimately on Tuyuca of eastern Amazon which is spoken by fewer than 1,000 people.
It has a sound system with simple consonants and a few nasal vowels, so is not as hard to speak as Ubykh or !Xóõ. Like Turkish, it is heavily agglutinating, so that one word, hóabãsiriga means “I do not know how to write.” Like Kwaio, it has two words for “we”, inclusive and exclusive. The noun classes (genders) in Tuyuca’s language family (including close relatives) have been estimated at between 50 and 140. Some are rare, such as “bark that does not cling closely to a tree”, which can be extended to things such as baggy trousers, or wet plywood that has begun to peel apart.
Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something.Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, whilediga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb. Evidential languages force speakers to think hard about how they learned what they say they know.
Just use Google Translate guys. SHEESH.
The website "Give 2009 the Finger" gives a fitting wave goodbye to 2009.
Now that you've finished reading this, you can go back to thinking the world revolves around you.
GOOD Magazine's interactive infograph of what topics and stories the mainstream press focused on in 2009 based on the following data:
The website Journalism.org monitors the news from 55 outlets every week, calculating what percent of the week’s print, television, radio, and internet reporting is devoted to each story.
[Via]
All palindromic fans should be looking forward to the second day of the new year in 2010.
That day is a palindromic date in standard American (mmddyyyy) format: 01-02-2010, expressed backwards as a date is precisely 01-02-2010.
The Grey Lady also presents some related puzzles for you math-do-gooders (Paging Doctor Mad DR2 aka the smartest guy I went high school with, seriously).
Good Magazine recap this decade through the lens of culture.
2001September 11th devastates the world.
Kofi Annan wins the Nobel Peace Prize.
Wikipedia launches, forever changing the face of human knowledge.
Apple introduces the iPod, revolutionizing music culture, and a new generation of white-earbudded youngsters takes to the streets.
And that iPod only held 512 MB of music.
These events feel like it happened both yesterday and a long, long time ago. Is there a word for this feeling? If there is, it's probably a long German word, right?
This story is a few years old, but think of it and count your blessings if you think you are having a bad Christmas. Yours might be bad, but it's not stuck-upside-down-in-a-septic-tank bad. Could there be anything worse? I submit that there is not. On December 25, 2007, an Iowa resident, Robert Schoff, 77, trying to fix a toilet problem, fell, and found himself stuck upside down in his septic tank for over an hour before his wife spotted him. After being rescued by fire fighters, Schoff said in the understatement of that year, "It was the worst Christmas Eve I've ever had."
No shit.
Yale University Press' top 10 notable quotes of 2009.
1. "Keep your government hands off my Medicare." - Speaker at health care reform town hall meeting in Simpsonville, S.C., commenting on the government-created Medicare program, quoted by The Washington Post on July 28.
[Hat tip: Kaizar!]