Day: January 16, 2009

The Prado 2.0

Users of the Google Earth software can simply type in “Prado, Madrid” to be “flown” in to the virtual front door of the museum, where they are greeted by this explanation of the project, alongside 14 thumbnails of the paintings that can be viewed in high-resolution:

We present a virtual tour of fourteen masterpieces from the Museo Nacional del Prado, displayed in ultra high resolution, enabling you to see details of the paintings that have never been seen before. Thanks to the high resolution of the digital images, you can view the whole painting or zoom in on a small fragment. Given the plethora of masterpieces housed at the Museum, choosing which works to include was no easy task but this selection represents the best of the collection.

The Lede Blog – NYTimes.com

Amazing resolution. Let’s hope other museums follow the Prado’s lead.

Coffee Strong Enough to Ward Off Alzheimer’s

The researchers note that previous studies have shown that coffee drinking improves cognitive performance, and caffeine reportedly reduces the risk of Parkinson’s disease.

The researchers say it’s not known how coffee would offer protection against dementia, but that coffee drinking also has been associated with a decreased risk of type 2 diabetes, which is a risk factor for dementia. The authors speculate that the effect may have something to do with coffee’s antioxidant capacity in the blood.

WebMD

An acquired taste worth acquiring.

Namibia: Land of Awesome

NewMexiKen has a subscription to the magazine mental_floss (thank you Nora and Jason). Each issue they profile a country — the “50-Cent Tour” they call it. In the Jan-Feb issue the subject is Namibia. I looked for links to the article but found only this mental_floss Blog item instead.

The opening paragraph resonated quite well — I was having the same reaction to the magazine article the blogger did:

Elaborating on last week’s post on the nature of wanderlust, today I have a practical example to share. Here’s how wanderlust works. You’re minding your own business, and then something lands in front of you — say, this month’s issue of Mental_floss. You flip to the back of the mag and devour a great feature article on Namibia, and you start to feel a funny tickle in your brain. That sounds interesting, says the tickle, which leads you to the internet, where you start looking up Namibia on Wikipedia and a few hours later are looking it up on Kayak (the plane ticket comparison site). … Lonely Planet calls it “one of those dreamlike places that make you question whether something so visually orgasmic could actually exist.”

Speaking of Speeches

He said he then walked the girls over to the other side of the Lincoln Memorial, where the 16th president’s celebrated Civil War-era second inaugural address is etched. Obama said his younger daughter, 7-year-old Sasha, asked whether he would be giving a similar speech.

“And I said, ‘Well, actually, that’s a short version, but yeah, I will,’ ” Obama recalled. “And then Malia says, ‘First African American president — it better be good.’

“So I just want you to know the pressures I’m under here from my children.”

washingtonpost.com

He comes close to that, the greatest inaugural speech in American history, and he’ll have done something.

Frankly I’d like a version of Fired up! Ready to go! That’s what we need.

Idle thought

Not to joke too much1 about something that could have been an enormous tragedy, but how much do you suppose passengers on board U.S. Air Flight 1549 will receive in compensation for their landing in the Hudson River?

From what I’ve read it sounds as if the pilot is a genuine hero. Good thing the marine who ejected over San Diego last month wasn’t flying this plane.

Update: Can the Passengers of Flight 1549 Sue for Emotional Distress?

Update Two: In case you were wondering, about that airplane in the Hudson. Interesting assessment.
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1 Howard Stern reportedly was once fired from his radio job in D.C. for inquiring on the air in 1982 after a plane crashed into the 14th Street Bridge, how much the fare was from National Airport to the 14th Street Bridge.

Another idle thought

NewMexiKen always felt and said that buying stuff from Circuit City was too much like buying it out of the back of a truck — annoying, snide, self-important jerks1 — but now the truck has gone.

Circuit City Will Be Liquidated, Sources Say – CNBC.com

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1 Not all 35,000 employees of Circuit City, of course, nor perhaps all 567 stores. I do feel badly for their personal loss.

January 16th

Author William Kennedy is 81 today.

His first novel, The Ink Truck, came out in 1969, and didn’t sell very well. He began writing a series of novels about a big, down-at-heel Irish family full of storytellers and brawlers. One of these novels, Ironweed (1984), is about a derelict on the run from his past. Thirteen publishers rejected it because they thought no one would want to read about bums. But it was published, and it won the Pulitzer, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a Pen/Faulkner award, all in the same year.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Kennedy made it big at age 56.

Dian Fossey is 77 today.

She lived alone for 18 years, studying mountain gorillas in the cold, rainy mountains of Rwanda. She was the first person ever approached by gorillas in the wild, and she would sit with them for hours while they swatted her gently with leaves and played with her hair. She wrote a book about her experience called Gorillas in the Mist (1983).

The Writer’s Almanac

Fossey made it big at age 51.

Albert Pujols is 29 today. Pujols made it big at age 21.

Also having birthdays today, Marilyn Horne (75), A.J. Foyt (74), Ronnie Milsap (66), Debby Allen (59), Sade (50) and Kate Moss (35).

Dizzy Dean was born 99 years ago today.

Jay Hanna Dizzy Dean, the brash Cardinals fireballer, burst upon the big league scene in 1932 and averaged 24 wins over his first five full campaigns. A winner of four consecutive National League strikeout crowns, Diz was 30-7 in 1934 (the last National League pitcher to record 30 wins) when he and his brother Paul led the Gashouse Gang to the World Championship. A broken toe suffered in the 1937 All-Star Game led to an arm injury that eventually shortened his playing days. He later embarked on a successful broadcasting career.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Ethel Merman was born 101 years ago today.

Flat N All That

The ever-awesome Matt Taibbi disconstructs Tom Friedman (who was once worth reading); a laugh-out-loud takedown of someone who constantly needs taking down.

Taibbi begins:

When some time ago a friend of mine told me that Thomas Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, was going to be a kind of environmentalist clarion call against American consumerism, I almost died laughing.

Beautiful, I thought. Just when you begin to lose faith in America’s ability to fall for absolutely anything—just when you begin to think we Americans as a race might finally outgrow the lovable credulousness that leads us to fork over our credit card numbers to every half-baked TV pitchman hawking a magic dick-enlarging pill, or a way to make millions on the Internet while sitting at home and pounding doughnuts— along comes Thomas Friedman, porn-stached resident of a positively obscene 114,000 square foot suburban Maryland mega-monstro-mansion and husband to the heir of one of the largest shopping-mall chains in the world, reinventing himself as an oracle of anti-consumerist conservationism.

Where does a man who needs his own offshore drilling platform just to keep the east wing of his house heated get the balls to write a book chiding America for driving energy inefficient automobiles? Where does a guy whose family bulldozed 2.1 million square feet of pristine Hawaiian wilderness to put a Gap, an Old Navy, a Sears, an Abercrombie and even a motherfucking Foot Locker in paradise get off preaching to the rest of us about the need for a “Green Revolution”? Well, he’ll explain it all to you in 438 crisply written pages for just $27.95, $30.95 if you have the misfortune to be Canadian.

Why is it?

Why is it that if you buy orange juice in a waxed cardboard container, say Tropicana Pure Premium High Pulp, it has a pour spout on the top, but if you buy milk in a waxed cardboard container you have to rip open a corner of the top to make a pour spout? Why can’t milk have a plastic spout too?