Ambassador

The United Nations has appointed Earth’s ambassador should aliens touch down in the near future.

—Meet Mazlan Othman, the United Nations ambassador to extraterrestrials

Gourmet Live and Rewarding Experiences

The short version: Gourmet Live, the new iPad app that reimagines Gourmet as a sort of massively multiplayer magazine, is live. I’ve been working on this for the past six months, and I’m enormously proud of it.

—Anil Dash

Taylor vs. Risk

I very much enjoyed Layer Tennis today.

George Lucas Stole Chewbacca, But It's Okay

Fascinating, in-depth piece on where the ideas for Chewie came from and how the character developed through various drafts. I especially like the aside pointing out that Chewie really doesn’t do anything in any of the movies except add needed flair.

Mr. Frogger

I was touring Steve’s Retro Room, and I leafed through his newly acquired collection of arcade cabinet marquees. I pulled this one out and felt a million guns of empathy shoot a million bullets of sadness and guilt right through my cerebro-arterial core.

Frogger was a regular guy on his way to work. Dear god.

—Neven Mrgan

Click through for the picture and the full story.

Buzz Anderson on Twitter and Why He Sold Birdfeed

There are a lot of reasons I took the opportunity to sell Birdfeed when I did—the personal toll the bruising iPhone Twitter client market was taking on me, imminent financial concerns, the opportunity to be an early employee at Square—but without a doubt, my perception of an emerging, strong product direction at Twitter played a big part.

—Buzz Anderson

It’s silly to say, but I still miss using Birdfeed. Twitterrific works wondefully, but nothing quite has the elegance Birdfeed did.

Uniforms

All of the 2010 MLB uniforms, pixel-style.

Twitter and RSS

I’ve seen this quote by Dave Winer a few times today (in my RSS reader):

Why does Twitter work better for news than Google Reader? SImple, Twitter gives you what’s new now. You don’t have to hunt around to find the newest stuff. And it doesn’t waste your time by telling you how many unread items you have. Who cares.

Scripting News: How to reboot RSS

Me, I want to see almost no links on Twitter. For me, Twitter is for keeping up with people I want to keep up with, and by design it’s an on-the-go medium. If I’m checking my timeline waiting for a Metro train, I’m probably not ready to read a long article that might come in as a link, and I’ll probably forget to look at it later (though Instapaper helps with that). When I open up my RSS reader I know I’m going to find some things that I want to sit down and read. Blogs, Google Reader, Buzz, etc. are for sharing stuff. Twitter is for sharing thoughts.

Dalek Blueprints

“The following images contain the blueprints for a Dalek.”

Eyehole Paintings

Eyehole Paintings with Adam West

Soda Pop

Neat short documentary about a store that only sells soda pop.

Language Log: More Pseudo-Latin Plurals

Found when searching the plural of “omnibus” (which is apparenty already plural).

Roger Ebert Presents at the Movies

“This is the rebirth of a dream,” said Ebert, who partnered in recent years with Richard Roeper before cancer robbed him of the ability to speak. He said he will act as co-producer and employ a computer voice to appear on every episode with segments titled Roger’s Office devoted to classic, overlooked and new films.

Chicago Sun-Times

Hugo Awards

Moon, starring Sam Rockwell and directed by Duncan Jones, won this year’s Hugo for “Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form”. I recommend it highly. Here’s the Netflix link.

The Doctor Who episode “The Waters of Mars” won for short form, and was very good science fiction. All you need to know is that The Doctor is a time-traveller. Netflix link

I’ve also read China Miéville’s The City & the City. I liked it a lot but I think people expected something from him and were put off when it wasn’t weird enough.

Your Dalek Blueprints are Enclosed

Greatest of All Time

[Who's the highest-paid athlete of all time?](http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/roundtable/roundtable/greatest-of-all-time.php)

Apple's Problem with TV

John Siracusa, arguing that Apple should go all-in with a set-top box. Make it the only box you need in your media cabinet. Let it record TV, play DVDs, stream Netflix, and sell you iTunes stuff all in one interface.

Something you can watch for when Steve Jobs debuts products are cues that he personally doesn’t have a lot of passion for them. He knows lots of people play and care about games, but he doesn’t. Game Center is important to iPod owners and will help Apple sell to them, but Jobs clearly doesn’t have much enthusiasm for it in his talk. Compare the Game Center segment to any feature at all he talked about when he showed off the iPad for the first time.

Several years ago Apple released Keynote, which was later joined by Pages and Numbers as the iWork suite. Keynote was a program Apple designed specifically for Jobs because he so hated the existing presentation apps out there (that is, PowerPoint). When Jobs wants something, he has his team design the very best (in his eyes) version of it possible.

I really, really wonder what Steve Jobs’s home entertainment center looks like. Maybe he just has an Apple TV and watches pay-per-view movies on it. I’d think if it were the spaghetti mess of wires and boxes most of us have, it’d drive him crazy and he’d direct his engineers to solve the problem. Apple TV would truly be that one box to rule them all. How hard would it be to throw in a DVD slot and a DVR application? That Apple hasn’t is, just guessing here, because Jobs doesn’t watch much TV and isn’t a live sports fan.

JFK to Lyndon Johnson

Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?

Letters of Note: Is there a space program which which we could win?