Links for Later 3-22-16

1. Lessons from the very prolific Isaac Asimov.
2. Sleek cyberpunk fashion short film by ACRONYM (recommended by William Gibson).
3. Generic NYT article on Millennials.
4. Donald Trump is not making a lot of sense.
5. Ted Cruz is the worst person in the world.
6. Mapping creativity. Not sure I buy these studies, or the article's conclusions.
7. Stewart Lee wrote a negative review of his own show.

Library Porn: Karl Lagerfeld's Shelving Method

 

I had seen the photos of Karl Lagerfeld's enviable library before, so of course I could tell that most of the books are shelved horizontally. What I did not realize until Rain Noe pointed it out over on Core77 is that this is not just an eccentricity. It's an ergonomic hack, so Lagerfeld doesn't have to turn his head to read the titles. Note that in the closeup of the shelves below, all (or at least most) of the titles are turned for easiest reading.

Bonus Karl Lagerfeld item, from his daily schedule:

I never have lunch, but when I do, I ask them to bring it to me in the house. I actually have two houses. This house here, it's only for sleeping and sketching, and I have another house two-and-a-half meters away for lunch and dinner and to see people, and where the cook is and all that. I don't want that here. Even if the place is huge, I want to be alone. If I want something, I call them, and they're next door, they come. The studio is next door, the office is next door. If I have guests and butlers, I don't want them in my house. Everything is next door.

Bad Camo

After $5M and who knows how many lives wasted, the Army is dumping a useless pixellated camouflage it adopted to copy the Marines. What they should have done, and what the Marines did, is go to Home Depot:

The Army’s camouflage researchers say the story of the universal pattern’s origins begins when they helped develop a similarly pixilated camouflage now worn by the Marine Corps. That pattern, known as MARPAT, first appeared in 2002 after being selected from among dozens of candidates and receiving plenty of input from Marines on the ground at the sniper school in Quantico, Va. The Marines even found one of the baseline colors themselves, an earth tone now called Coyote Brown.

“They went to Home Depot, looked at paint swatches, and said, ‘We want that color,’ ” said Anabelle Dugas, a textile technologist at Natick who helped develop the pattern. That particular hue, she added, was part of a paint series then sold by Ralph Lauren.

Links for Later 5-22-12

1. DC brothel longread
2. Lesson plans for $700,000, Alex
3. Branson: Dress like a human
4. Seal / signet rings from the classical revival
5. How to support R&D&D&D (Research & Development & Demonstration & Deployment) or, When the Military-Industrial Complex was a Good Thing
6. The story of the transition of Laura Jane Grace, nee Tom Gabel, of Against Me!
7. How to improve expert prediction

Links for Later 3-14-12

Hey, hey, it's Pi Day. Happy 3.14

1. Skyscraper competition
2. Tom McCarthy interview in Interview
3. Greg Smith quits Goldman Sachs via New York Times op-ed
4. GTD + Evernote = productivity
5. Travis Barker gets a head tattoo. This hurts just to see.
6. Fundamentalist atheists

The Incense Game

Now there is a perfume I’m working on that’s inspired by The Tale of Genji that will be made from extremely rare ingredients. It will be fabulously expensive because they’re incredibly hard to get. Much of it has to do with the Japanese ritual of burning incense. There are two words for it: one’s the ritual of burning incense and the other is a game where incense is burned and people are asked either to identify or they’ll burn various things and try to combine a smoke that’s really beautiful. Or people will talk about poetry or literature or what the smell the smoke inspires in them. That was very popular at the time that The Tale of Genji was written.

-Christopher Brosius

in an interview with Bookriot

about his perfume "In the Library"

Links for Later 12-11-11

1. Kay Nielsen's fairy tale illustrations are beautiful
2. Basquiat's hair 
3. Charlie Hoehn on working for free to work the way you need to
4. Growing frankincense
5. Update on the Bradley Manning trial: military objects to 38 of 48 proposed witnesses, tries to select "embedded" journalists. Who's running the prosecution of this thing, Vladimir Putin?
6. "Full Unconcealed Panic"
7. SOPA and Protect IP Act explained again
8. LAPD acts illegally against Occupy LA

Links for Later

1. What Tim Tebow can't do
2. Cutbacks demolishing the New York Public Library
3. Lunch with Stewart Lee
4. Any member of Congress who votes to lock up American citizens without charges or trial should themselves be locked up without charges or trial
5. Time for me to fly
6. SOPA compromise in the wings?
7. Matt Damon talks about water.org
8. Lululemon lives to regret those stupid John Galt bags
9. Automating your startup with Wicked Start
10. Your smartphone is tracking your every move. Lawsuits pending
11. Military spending multiplier < Domestic spending multiplier
12. Mohawk Movember with Kellan Lutz

Links for Later

1. "If the human brain — with 100 billion neurons forging trillions of connections — were not complicated enough, research now suggests that every neuron may have its very own genome." (via marginal revolution)
2. How, why and when cold calling beats AdWords
3. Are heroin-addicted rats just unhappy with their lives? (via eli)
4. Supercongress won't succeed
5. Return of a 30's haircut
6. James O'Keefe accused of doing political dirty work
7. Against SOPA / Protect IP

Coverup

Rick "Zombieboy" Genest becomes the spokesmodel for a very special makeup product. Weird to see what he looks like without the tattoos.

Links for Later

1. Felix Salmon on NPR's This American Life on Intellectual Ventures patent troll strategy
2. New publishing business models
3. A Keynesian question
4. Defeatist nonsense about liberals and Obama
5. How large is your vocabulary?
6. Dumbledore's strategy beat Voldemort's
7. Debt ceiling scenarios
8. Jameson Lindeskog's obituary. Note the ending.
9. Elizabeth Drew on the debt ceiling
10. Robert Pattinson's Cosmopolis haircut
11. Walter Pater, Giordano Bruno
12. GE Lessing, Laocoon

Links for Later

1. Grace Coddington (via longreads)


2. Obama = Democrats' Nixon ?


3. Obama on compromise


4. How to Disappear


5. David Foster Wallace-esque character in the upcoming Jeffrey Eugenides novel

Links for Later

1. story of a lost e e cummings poem
2. Garance Dore at the AmFar benefit
3. Halcyon comes up with Altly, an alternative to Facebook
4. Loft from Loftylovin
5. Bradley Cooper: "Since Limitless opened, my agent calls me every morning and asks, 'Do you feel any different?' And I'm like, 'Nope. Do you feel any different?'"

Links for Later

1. Dave and Toph Eggers interviewed
2. Econonomic Hit Man confessions continue
3. What's driving the debt?
4. 3-d rendered fuselage desk
5. Why Stephen Colbert is really founding a Super PAC
6. The Purity Test
7. Republican governors Walker, Kasich, Scott plunging in polls
8. Repeal petition for Ohio's union busting bill at 95% after only 30 days
9. Superman goes to England

Links for Later

1. Tim Heatherington and Chris Hondros memorial at the Photography Post
2. The scene in the situation room. Closeup of Obama's face.
3. The liberals' stealth budget looks better than anything else out there.
4. Silly Bin Laden & Obama photoshoppery.
5. 100 rules for being an entrepreneur
6. The press conference from last night
7. How to get a job in VC
8. Tech company infographic
9. Cool house
10. What's Obama thinking about the economic recovery?
11. Zombie Boy before the tattoos
12. NYT on the day's events
13. Another cool house

Links for Later

1. Christopher Brosius makes an invisible scent


2. Ezra Klein: Barack Obama "is a moderate Republican of the early 1990's"


3. Glenn O'Brien interviewed over at A Continuous Lean

Muse

In this interview with Lee Carter at Hint Magazine, Nicola Formichetti talks about how (and why) he got Rick Genest (Zombie Boy) to be the face of Mugler.

You changed the whole collection?
Well, I added more, by taking stuff from him, making it a bit darker and gothicy. So basically I Facebooked him and was like, "You know, I'm doing this thing in Paris and I would love you to be there in two weeks." He emailed me back straightaway and he was like, "Yeah, sure, I would love to, but I don’t have a passport." And then I start thinking how the fuck is he going to get a passport in time?

I mean, it's unusual to have a tattoo on your face, but is it a crime? What did you do?
I had no idea what to do. I was calling my lawyers, saying we have to get this guy to Paris. But then I thought, maybe he doesn’t need to be there physically. Maybe I can do a film or a picture. So I told him I would go to him in two days. I called my friend Mariano [Vivanco, photographer] and my manager. We got together the first week after the holidays as I was about to leave for Paris to work on the last bit of the collection. I remember thinking I have to do this, I just have a gut feeling, I have to work with this guy. Everyone said he's a freak, why would I want to do that to a luxury brand? Anyway, I didn’t listen to anyone and just went. I brought some clothes, a couple of suits, and I actually made lots of clothes the night before I left New York. I had pieces sent from Paris and was just making stuff in my house, and then took everything to Montreal and we did a photo shoot and video. The photos are the ones we just launched as a visual campaign.

(via tr)

Links for Later

1. How to be a good cavalry officer
2. Aerotropolis: a pair of conversations between BLDGBLOG's Geoff Manaugh and Greg Lindsey & John Kasarda, authors of Aerotropolis.
3. The Conversation
4. John Kasich's dismal poll numbers, thanks to the anti-union bill and similar nonsense

Links for Later

1. Algorithm for flocking (or swarming) behavior
2. Barbarous hair for Argentinians
3. Helmut Newton on appropriating photographic style
4. Coffee: how to make a flat white
5. 11 lessons from economic papers (via mr)

Links for Later

1. Banh Mi recipe
2. Thinking "in more memorable ways"
3. Lakoff: What the assault on unions really means. Budget deficits as ruse.
4. Garance Dore and Scott Schuman
5. Krugman: Wisconsin Power Play