Last night I woke up from a seemingly unrelated dream, and wrote down the following household recycling tip: Since you generally buy bigger gifts for people the longer you know them, to keep the gift wrap re-usable, wrap your initial gifts in way too much paper.

Look, it’s a dream, so the premises may not be entirely right, but the logic is impeccable: If you wrap your initial (small) gift in just enough wrapping paper, it’ll be too small to wrap the subsequent (bigger) gifts you buy. So, wrap that first gift in enough paper to cover your later gifts.

You’re welcome, planet Earth.

[Tags: dreams recycling ]

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These images from Chris Jordan make clear the vastness of the various sorts of stuff we squander. (Thanks to Joachim for the link.)

[Tags: visuals big_numbers tufte ]

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You have to admit, the guy looks like George Washington. You know, the guy on the dollar bills that used to be in your pocket.

[Tags: bernie_madoff separated_at_birth ]

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Paul English points to this as the worst presidential Freudian slip:

That’s pretty embarrassing, but I don’t it’s Freudian in the sense of revealing anything other than the neural difficulties in pronouncing “success.” It’s surprising we don’t pronounce it “sex sucks” or “suck sex” a full 40% of the time.

On the other hand, I don’t know how to explain this one from McCain except as revealing something deep and dark about his frame:

That one is just plain weird.

[Tags: freudian_slips embarrassing_moments ]

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Ah, the Web!

I used to make bread every week. When I went to make it again, I discovered that my old index card for Tassajara bread was illegible with age. Ten second later, I found it on the Web.

The good thing about Tassajara is that it basically never fails. You can vary the ingredients pretty much as you want, throwing in oats, wheat germ, rye flower, iron filings and small pebbles, and the stuff will still rise, cook and be pretty much delicious. And magnetic. (Hint: Add some dental floss and you don’t have to clean your teeth afterwards.)

[Tags: bread recipes ]

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ExpertWitness.com lists experts willing to testify in court for you, for a pretty penny. It’s got over 1,000 categories, including experts in gates, loading docks, and well logging. Click on a category and you go to a page that begins with an explanation. For example, here’s the explanation for the category “exercise equipment”:

Exercise equipment is any object used in exercise. This can include balls, treadmills, weights, bicycles, track shoes, jungle gyms, or protective equipment such as a back brace. An exercise machine is any machine used in exercise. These range from simple spring-like devices to computerized electromechanical rides to recirculating-stream swimming pools

Pretty straightforward. But the rather self-referential category of “Expert Referrals” seems to have snarled the system:

Find referrals Expert Referrals experts and consultants for referrals Expert Referrals litigation support. Available to be referrals Expert Referrals expert witnesses and provide referrals Expert Referrals forensic consulting in referrals Expert Referrals litigation, in addition prepare referrals Expert Referrals expert witness reports for use in deposition and/or in-court trial testimony.

A global search-and-replace or mailmerge on boilerplate gone wrong? (Try replacing “referrals Expert Referrals” with, say, “exercise equipment.”)

[Tags: experts snarls expert_witnesses ]

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Nicole Aylwin at iposgoode suggests that we ought to consider “intellectual property” policy in terms of its effects on culture, rather than sticking solely within the “property” frame. Seems right to me.

[Tags: ip copyright copyleft free_culture ]

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Punya Mishra blogs a “story that connects cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstader, Oriya writer and poet J. P. Das, and the father of non-violence Mahatma Gandhi.” It contains some of my favorite things: Reflections on the nature of the Web, “serendipitous connectability,” and Scott Kim-style ambigrams.

Ambigrams are words printed in such a way that they can be read in ambiguous ways. Sometimes they can be read backwards and forwards (even though they’re not palindromes), sometimes they can be inverted or flipped, sometimes they contain other words (e.g., “true” written in such a way that you can also read it as “false”). Scott Kim‘s book Inversions has long been a favorite of mine, and the current issues of the relatively obscure journal WordWays has another bunch.

Punya recounts how it came to his attention that none other than Mahatma Gandhi worked on writing his name so that it could be read at one and the same time in English or in Hindi. (He has provided a scan of the pages of the book by an Indian civil servant that discloses this.) The path to this discovery is unlikely, reaching through strangers, hyperlinks and family. And it leads to an ambigram by Gandhi!

(Note that I did indeed find this page by ego-surfing my own name, since Punya cites a book of mine. But, rather than attributing this to my own narcissism, let’s just attribute it to what Punya calls serendipitious connectability.) [Tags: gandhi wordways scott_kim punya_mishra ambigrams wordplay ]

 

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WowTattoos has ambigrams for over 1,000 names, and a generator for words it doesn’t have. They’re not as beautifully clever as Scott Kim’s — they tend to look like gothic text — but it’s still pretty impressive.

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Directors of ten law school libraries, including Harvard’s John Palfrey, have signed an “aspirational” document, called the Durham Statement on Open Access, that “calls for all law schools to stop publishing their journals in print format and to rely instead on electronic publication coupled with a commitment to keep the electronic versions available in stable, open, digital formats.”

This is wonderful.

The statement calls for the end of paper versions of the journals, not merely supplementing them with electronic versions, because printing them costs so much and is bad for the environment. I don’t know if the drafters of the Statement were also thinking that going purely digital would help force a change in mindsets, but I suspect that that would be one of the most important consequences.

[Tags: open_access law_school law_journals publishing media scholarship copyright copyleft everything_is_miscellaneous ]

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In something like 2002, I wrote and posted a kid’s version of my book, Small Pieces Loosely Joined, under a non-commercial Creative Commons license. Now Peter Ford has taken it upon himself to create a site with a copy of it with a facility that lets anyone comment on any paragraph. He’s hoping to get the must off of it, stem the link rot, etc.

I totally love this.

[Tags: crowd-sourcing wisdom_of_the_crowd publishing small_pieces books ]

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