In a bizarre example of Second Life leaking into the real world, a political assembly on Saturday led by chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov was disrupted by a flying penis.

Kasparov is a leader of the Other Russia movement, a loose coalition of activists opposing Vladamir Putin and the current Russian government. Over 700 people showed up for the event in central Moscow, but Kasparov’s speech was interrupted when a large phallus-shaped helicopter started buzzing around the room. The Moscow Times attributed the prank to “a couple of pro-Kremlin Young Russia activists.”

Warning: Mildly NSFW images and video follow.

Continue reading “Garry Kasparov Griefed by Flying Penis” →

How has the record industry changed in the last 50 years? Using the Whitburn Project spreadsheet I talked about yesterday, I’ve been trying to dig into some of the underlying trends. Today, I’ll be tackling the longevity and diversity of pop songs, and a look at which decades had one-hit wonders.

Longevity of a Pop Song

One of the trickier questions I’ve been trying to visualize is how long pop songs are staying on the charts relative to the past. Are they staying on the charts longer than in the past?

In the chart below, I plotted the total number of weeks charted for all 23,924 songs that appeared on the Billboard Hot 100 from 1957 to earlier this year. (In other words, a little dot on the “60” line means there was a song released that week that stayed on the Hot 100 chart for 60 weeks.)

See the heavy dropoff on the 20th week starting in 1991? In an attempt to increase diversity and promote newer artists and songs, Billboard changed their methodology, removing tracks that had been on the Hot 100 for twenty consecutive weeks and slipped below the 50th position. These songs, called “recurrents,” were then moved to their own chart in 1991, the Hot 100 Recurrent.

Unfortunately, this shift makes it much harder to compare the last 15 years to the decades before it. In the chart below, I’ve isolated the effect by only showing songs that reached the top 50.

A couple interesting observations… Looking at the very bottom of the chart, you can see that in the last couple years, it’s become very common for a single to appear in the Top 50 and fall out of the Hot 100 within four weeks. Prior to the mid-1990s, this almost never happened.

Also, songs are staying in the Top 50 for far longer than they used to. Unfortunately, I don’t have any actual sales numbers to compare to, so it’s hard to say if these 30-70 week singles are massive megahits eclipsing the #1 singles of the past, or if it’s because the record industry is producing fewer hits than before.

Diversity

Did Billboard’s methodology changes in 1991 make the charts more diverse, like they hoped? By looking at the total number of unique songs that have charted yearly, it’s clear their changes did nothing to slow the decline.

According to Billboard, the late 1960s were the peak of musical diversity in popular music, with 743 different songs appearing on the 1966 Billboard Top 100. It’s fallen consistently since, hitting an all-time low in 2002 with only 295 songs. Since then, it’s improved only slightly, with 351 unique songs appearing on last year’s Top 100.

One Hit Wonders

I’ve always thought the 1970s were the decade of the one-hit wonder, but now I have the data to see for sure.

In raw numbers, the 1960s had more one-hit wonders than any other decade, followed closely by the 1950s. But that’s not entirely fair since, as we saw earlier, there were simply more unique songs on the 1960s charts. To find out the true numbers, we need to look at the number of one-hit wonders as a percentage of all songs in the Top 100.

This tells a totally different story. The 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s all had about the same ratio of one-hit wonders to hits by more established artists. The big surprise for me is that 1950s, 1990s, and 2000s really seem to be the eras where one-hit wonders dominated the charts.

Joshua Porter was wondering about the longest-charting one-hit wonders of all time. The longest-charting one-hit wonder to hit the #1 spot is Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day” from 2006, which stayed on the charts for 32 weeks. The one-hit wonder that stayed at the #1 longest is Anton Karas’ “The Third Man Theme” from 1950, which stayed in the #1 position for 11 weeks. Finally, the longest-charting one-hit wonder to appear anywhere in the Top 100 is Duncan Sheik’s “Barely Breathing” from 1997, which peaked at #16 but stayed in the top 100 for 55 weeks.

Have any other questions about the data, or done any analysis yourself? I’d love to hear about it.

May 20: Don’t miss Mike Frumin’s chart of pop longevity,from 1998-2002.

May 21: Using the Whitburn data, Tom Whitwell generated a tag cloud showing the top 100 commonly-used words in song names. Dianne Warren should write a #1 hit called “Love my Baby Blue Heart: A Girl’s Night Song.”

July 14: Pedro did some additional analysis, including artists with multiple hits in the same week and one-week wonders.

For the last ten years, obsessive record collectors in Usenet have been working on the Whitburn Project — a huge undertaking to preserve and share high-quality recordings of every popular song since the 1890s. To assist their efforts, they’ve created a spreadsheet of 37,000 songs and 112 columns of raw data, including each song’s duration, beats-per-minute, songwriters, label, and week-by-week chart position. It’s 25 megs of OCD, and it’s awesome.

As far as I know, this is the first time the project and its data have ever been discussed outside of Usenet. Despite its illegality, they’ve created a wonderful resource and you can do some fun things with the data. For the next three days, I’m going to publish some analysis and insights gleaned from their work. Update: I published an entry about one-hit wonders and pop longevity.

Continue reading “The Whitburn Project: 120 Years of Music Chart History” →

Continuing the series of portrayals of technology from the VHS era, here’s another contribution from Martin Brewer, who brought us the first episode of The Net. This is another BBC Two show, an episode of Horizon from 1993 on “The Electronic Frontier.”

The broad theme of the episode is the information economy, and it’s a whirlwind tour of influential people and tech in the pre-Web 1990s. They focus heavily on Microsoft, Apple, and General Magic, with interviews from key players from each. (Plus, great footage of their headquarters and workspaces.) There’s plenty of footage of vintage ’90s tech in here, including giant cell phones, Windows NT 3.1, the Newton, General Magic’s Magic Cap, Corbis, Encarta on CD-ROM, interactive TV and software agents. Some of the highlights, with screenshots, after the video below.

Note: Like all the other materials I post here, this video is completely out-of-print and unavailable commercially, digitized from an old VHS tape. If it ever comes back into print, or the copyright holders contact me, I’ll take it down immediately. (Update: YouTube is blocking my upload in some countries, so I replaced the video embed below with this copy from the Internet Archive.)

Continue reading “BBC Two's Horizon on "The Electronic Frontier" in 1993” →

For the last few weeks, I’ve been spending every Friday with a small group of brilliant geeks — Rael Dornfest, Asha Dornfest, Chris Anderson, Greg Borenstein, and Adam Greene — for a weekly one-day hackathon. We call it Bottlecap Labs, a place to bounce around ideas, support each other’s work, and occasionally whip up a project.

The first is ZombieURL, a TinyURL-clone with a twist.

Put in a URL, send it to a friend, and enjoy. Keep a camera nearby to capture the fun. (Here’s a Zombie-fied version of Waxy, for example.)

(Warning: We’re not responsible for emotional scarring, concussions, or heart failure as a result of using ZombieURL.)

From an anonymous source close to the company, I’ve found myself in possession of the “Infocom Drive” — a complete backup of Infocom’s shared network drive from 1989. This is one of the most amazing archives I’ve ever seen, a treasure chest documenting the rise and fall of the legendary interactive fiction game company. Among the assets included: design documents, email archives, employee phone numbers, sales figures, internal meeting notes, corporate newsletters, and the source code and game files for every released and unreleased game Infocom made.

For obvious reasons, I can’t share the whole Infocom Drive. But I have to share some of the best parts. It’s just too good.

So let’s start with the most notorious — Milliways: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, the unreleased sequel to Infocom’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For the first time, here’s the full story: with never-before-seen design documents, internal emails, and two playable prototypes. Sit back, this might take a while.

Note: I’ve pieced together this history from emails and notes from the Infocom Drive. I haven’t contacted any of the people mentioned, so if you’re a primary source or authority, please get in touch so I can make corrections.

Update: Don’t miss the comments section. Infocom alumni Dave Lebling, Steve Meretzky, Amy Briggs, and Tim Anderson all comment on the story, Zork co-author Marc Blank helps correct an error, and writer Michael Bywater provides an alternative view of the events.

November 26, 2009:

After much consideration, I’ve edited this entry to remove the private correspondence that I never sought permission to publish. In my eagerness to share the story, I rushed to post instead of taking the time to reach out to everyone involved, against the recommendations of my source. At the time, I felt that 20 years of distance and the material’s historical value was enough to warrant bringing it to light without contacting each individual. I was wrong, and I’d like to apologize to each of the Infocom employees for my lapse in judgment.

On these pages, I’ve frequently waded into murky legal waters and I’m used to catching a certain amount of heat. But this article cost me far more than I ever anticipated — I lost a very close friend because of it. I deeply regret the error.

— Andy.

Continue reading “Milliways: Infocom's Unreleased Sequel to Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy” →

One of the biggest criticisms of Google’s App Engine have been cries of lock-in, that the applications developed for the platform won’t be portable to any other service. This morning, Chris Anderson, the Portland-based cofounder of the Grabb.it MP3 blog service, just released AppDrop — an elegant hack proving that’s not true.

AppDrop is a container for applications developed with the Google App Engine SDK, running entirely on Amazon’s EC2 infrastructure. Just like Google’s Appspot, anyone can use a modified SDK to deploy their App Engine apps directly to Amazon EC2 instead of Google, and they work without modification.

This proof-of-concept was built in only four days and can be deployed in virtually any Linux/Unix hosting environment, showing that moving applications off Google’s servers isn’t as hard as everyone thought.

How does it work? Behind the scenes, AppDrop is simply a remote installation of the App Engine SDK, with the user authentication and identification modified to use a local silo instead of Google Accounts. As a result, any application that works with the App Engine SDK should work flawlessly on AppDrop. For example, here’s Anderson’s Fug This application running on Google App Engine and the identical code running on EC2 at AppDrop.

Of course, this simple portability comes at the cost of scalability. The App Engine SDK doesn’t use BigTable for its datastore, instead relying on a simple flat file on a single server. This means issues with performance and no scalabity to speak of, but for apps with limited resource needs, something as simple as AppDrop would work fine.

I spoke to Chris this morning about his project and where he wants it to go. “AppDrop is open-source just like the Google SDK, so I’m hoping someone will come along and take it to the next level,” he said. “It wouldn’t be hard for a competent hacker to add real database support. It wouldn’t be that hard to write a Python adapter to MySQL that would preserve the BigTable API. And while that wouldn’t be quite as scalable as BigTable, we’ve all seen that MySQL can take you pretty far. On top of that, you could add multiple application machines connecting to the central database, and load-balancing, and all that rigamarole.”

While this is only a hack, it demonstrates that App Engine developers don’t need to live in fear of Google’s reprisal. “The upshot is that if you put a lot of time into an App Engine app, and then run afoul of Google, you have alternatives, even if they are more work.”

Update: Chris announced the project on his own blog, with some design notes.

April 20, 2008: Addressing concerns with data lock-in, Google announced that large-scale data import and export for will be coming soon to App Engine.

This insane montage of (nearly) every instance of “What?” from the LOST series started me thinking about this genre of video meme, where some obsessive-compulsive superfan collects every phrase/action/cliche from an episode (or entire series) of their favorite show/film/game into a single massive video montage.

For lack of a better name, let’s call them supercuts. (Thanks, Ryan.)

Here are some examples I could find, but I’m sure there must be more. Post ’em in the comments and I’ll add them. Bonus points for supercuts with the most clips, the shortest clips, and in additional genres (sports? politics?).

UPDATE: This entire list (and many more) is now on Supercut.org. Add more there!

Film

Glengarry Glen Ross – Obscenity Count

Glengarry Glen Ross – “The Leads”

Ship, Computer, and Sauce in the first six Star Trek films

Shia LaBeouf in “No No No No”

Requiem for a Dream, montage of every drug montage (meta!)

Casino, every “fuck”

Big Lebowski, every “fuck”

Big Lebowski, Every “dude”

Big Lebowski, Every “man” (thx, Matt)

True Romance, every kill from the finale

True Romance, every “fuck”

Rushmore, handjob references (thx, Matt)

Scarface, every “fuck” (thx, oscar)

The Departed, every “fuck” (thx, oscar)

Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, every “fuck” (thx, MeatFarley)

All the pauses and silence in His Girl Friday from 1940 (thx, progosk)

The Incredibles, buttons, doors, and explosions (thx, Joshua)

Fargo, every “yeah” (thx, Doobybrain)

Charles Bronson Death Wish Bodycount (thx, Dave)

Chris Hefner’s Talking Picture (The Road to Ruin), removes all words from a 1938 film (thx, Jamie)

Boondock Saints, every “fuck” (thx, Brandon)

Midnight Run, every “fuck” (thx, Lakawak)

Miscellaneous films, cops turning in their badge and gun (thx, Darrin)

Every “McFly” from the Back to the Future trilogy

Cell phone cliches in horror films

Mirror scares

Nearly every Hitchcock film cameo (thx, Oscar)

“We’ve Got Company” (thx, Buzzfeed)

“Get out of there!” (via Buzzfeed)

“It’s Gonna Blow!”

Every lightsaber ignition/retraction from the Star Wars series (thx, Buzzfeed)

Everything Chris Klein Says in “The Legend of Chun Li” (thx, Jeff)

“You look like shit.”

Every Arnold Schwarzenegger scream (thx, Buzzfeed)

Every Nicolas Cage freak-out

In 3D! (thx, Joe)

Every “Michael” in The Lost Boys

“Now if you’ll excuse me…”

“Blah blah blah.”

7 minutes of face slaps in film

“It’s Showtime!”

“Nooooooooo!” (thx, Scott)

Every Bone Steven Segal Has Broken

TV

Every “What?” from the LOST series

Legend of Zelda TV show, Excuse Me, Princess!

Knight Rider – Turbo Boosts

CSI: Miami, Caruso’s One-Liners

The Simpsons, every couch intro

The Sopranos, Every single whacking

Ojamajo Doremi, every transformation

Star Trek: The Next Generation, Last 10 seconds of every episode of season 1

Every Dragonball Z transformation

Mighty Morphin’ Power Rangers, every finishing move from Season 1

Deadwood, every curse in Episode 1, 2, and 3 (thx, Brian W)

LOST, Sawyer says “Son of a Bitch” (thx, Jordan)

Rozen Maiden, every “Desu” (527 times! More context, thx Jason)

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, every mention of “Buffy” from Season 1 (Chuck Jones)

Battlestar Galactica, every “frak” from season 1 (thx, Nowak)

Big Brother’s Julie Chen, every “but first” (thx, Cardhouse)

House M.D., every “lupus” reference (thx, engtech)

LOST, Sawyer’s nicknames in the first three seasons (thx, oscar)

Rachael Ray, “Mmm!”

MTV’s Newport Harbor, 82 “like”s in one episode (thx, Jamie)

Red Dwarf, every “smeg” reference in all 52 episodes (thx, arto)

LOST, Desmond saying “Brother” (thx, cypher)

The Wire, Clay Davis’ “Sheeeeeit” (thx, dunk3d)

24, Jack Bauer says “damn it” (thx, jonathan)

The Simpsons – Homer’s D’ohs, excerpt from an official episode (thx, Scott)

Scrubs – Every Girls Name to J.D. from Dr. Cox (thx, oscar)

Naruto – Every Rasengan from the filler story arcs (thx, Binkley)

The Hills, without the dialogue (thx, Rex)

Bea Arthur says “Whoa!” on the Golden Girls (thx, BWE)

The Office – “That’s What She Said” (thx, Jason)

“I’m not here to make friends” from every reality TV show (thx, Rich)

Dr. Who – “What are you doing here?” (thx, Duncan)

The Sopranos, every profanity

The Royle Family, every “My Arse!” (thx, Dunk)

Stargate SG-1’s Teal’c says “Indeed” (thx, Torley)

Kramer’s Entrances from Seinfeld (thx, Buzzfeed)

Every “Dude” from Hurley on LOST

Every Secret Ingredient from Iron Chef America (thx, Oscar)

Mad Men’s Don Draper says, “What?”

Every cigarette smoked on Mad Men

Every “Christmas” from the 90210 Christmas special

Star Trek, Spock says “Fascinating” (thx, Scott)

MST3K, The Many Names of David Ryder (thx, Nathaniel)

Games

Half-Life series, every G-Man sighting (and part 2)

Every Famicon (NES) Game Title Screen

Metal Gear Solid questions? (thx, William)

Miscellaneous Sources

Various films, Wilhelm Screams

Various films, The Slow Clap

Various films, NOOO!

Steve Jobs says “Boom!” in Mac keynotes (thx, Jeff)

Clip from Christian Marclay’s “Telephones” from 1995 (thx, progosk)

iPhone “Hello” ad, heavily inspired by “Telephones” (thx, progosk)

Phil Collins’ “In the Air Tonight,” every “Oh Lord” (thx, oscar)

2008 State of the Union, without any speech

Bill Gates says “Uh…” in Rocketboom interview

Collage of “Zoom In and Enhance” scenes

“Hey, Guys!”, collection of YouTube beauty guru intros

Collection of “Myspace salutes” (more context)

“I Could Tell You, But Then I’d Have to Kill You”

“We’re not in Kansas anymore.”

Club Drunk Party Hands, every use of those four words in the Billboard Top 10 for 2010

All the pauses in Sarah Palin’s response to the 2011 Arizona shootings

Obama says “spending”

Audio

Only the inhaling from an hour of NPR’s All Things Considered (Chuck Jones)

Loveline, every question asked by the hosts (Chuck Jones)

Loveline, every name mentioned in alphabetical order (Chuck Jones)

Loveline, every “Yes” and “No” (Chuck Jones)

Loveline, every number (Chuck Jones)

Loveline, interjections (Chuck Jones)

Loveline, dead air (Chuck Jones)

NWA’s Straight Outta Compton, obscenities only (thx, oscar)

Honorable Mention

A commenter points to the work of Chicago artist Chuck Jones, who’s created a number of excellent audio and video supercuts he calls Isolation Studies. I’ve listed them all above.

The “Most Obsessive” award goes to artists Jennifer & Kevin McCoy for their work Every Shot, Every Episode from 2001, a 277 DVD set compiling 10,000 clips from Starsky & Hutch, arranged by categories like “Every Dead Body,” “Every Mirror,” “Every Gunshot,” and “Every Affirmative Response.” Other work of theirs includes I Number the Stars, a shot-by-shot index of the first 20 Star Trek episodes in 120 categories, How I Learned, a 10,000 shot inventory of the show Kung Fu in over 100 categories, and Every Anvil, cataloguing the violence in 100 Looney Tunes cartoons. Mind-blowing. (Thx, Buzzfeed!)

June 15, 2011:

The earliest supercut appears to be Joseph Cornell’s “Rose Hobart”, a short film from 1936. It compiles nearly every scene featuring the obscure actress in the 1931 B-movie, East of Borneo.

Want more? Michael Bell-Smith and I launched a site dedicated to the supercut genre at Supercut.org.

For the first time since I started blogging in 2002, I’ve redesigned Waxy.org. Over the last six years, I’ve grown pretty sick of the old design but never found the time to rework it. Mostly, the changes are cosmetic. Cleaner design, new logo, bigger type, headlines, better iPhone support, and more space devoted to Waxy Links.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to change my URL structure, removing some cruft and giving some additional length to the slugs. All old URLs should redirect, thanks to some mod_rewrite magic and a little PHP.

One change that might affect you is that you’ll now be seeing all of my longer articles in the Waxy Links feed, so you might want to unsubscribe from the main feed to avoid getting duplicates. Since I generally only post once a day, and I try to only write things I’d want to link to, this seems like a good alternative to linking to my own posts. If you really don’t like this change, please let me know privately and I’ll work something out.

What do you think? Nothing’s permanent, so I’m all ears.

Update: You’re probably seeing some weirdness in the RSS feed. Links appearing in the articles RSS feed, tons of old entries, and links pointing directly to Waxy.org instead of the sites I was linking to. All of these problems are fixed! But feedreaders take time to update, so it’ll be resolved as soon as your RSS reader of choice sees the updated feed. Sorry!

Earlier today, I received an email from Steve Ducharme, the producer/director of the Internet Power series that I digitized last month. “I produced, edited and narrated that video many years ago,” he wrote. “Thanks for digging it out. I haven’t seen it in years. We really have come a long way since then.”

In the comments, several people pointed out a noticeable mistake in the video in which the narrator claims Mosaic was developed in 1934. As it turns out, this was fixed in later editions. “I actually came out with a corrected version of that tape,” said Ducharme. “In a later version, it was changed to the correct year of 1936. (Kidding, of course, 1993.)”

He also gives some insight into how hard it was to capture video in the early ’90s. “We had to rent this gigantic VGA to NTSC converter for about $500 a day to capture those screens,” said Ducharme. “It was huge, had to be rolled in and had an operator to work it. Must go now. Am feeling old. Thanks again.”

Thanks for the info, Steve! And with that, it’s on to Volume 2…

Internet Power Volume 2: Discover the World of Online Education

“Many people believe that the Internet will have the same impact on society as the invention of the printing press did! It will change our world dramatically by making vast amounts of information available to everyone worldwide… if you know how to use it!”

With those breathless words, we start the second volume of Internet Power, the video tutorial series about the Internet from 1995. While the last episode focused on Entertainment, this one teaches you about Education — museums, libraries, and other research tools.

It’s very similar to the first episode with an almost-identical structure, but focusing on a new set of vintage websites. Microsoft’s Bret Arsenault appears again, and they focus on Yahoo! again.

Highlights

03:21. Using Yahoo circa 1995 to search for “civil war” sites. The results are in alphabetical order by category name, rather than any attempt at ordering by relevancy.

“We click on the hypertext link, the Civil War Gallery. The URL address for this site is hidden in the link and it automatically takes us to the Civil War Gallery.” Updated September 25, 1995!

05:55. “A reminder to you that clicking on links and moving from site to site usually will take a few seconds depending on the speed of your computer’s modem. For the purposes of this video, we are moving instantly to each screen with the help of video editing.”

06:30. Downloading a 1MB JPG from the Library of Congress and viewing it in ImageView for Windows.

10:15. Listening to a WAV audio greeting from Michael Heyman, the Secretary of the Smithsonian Museum. 40 seconds of filler!

11:35. “This will get you started, but the best thing to do is follow the hypertext links. Explore the Internet and discover your own favorite sites. It’s kind of like going to a new city! The streets aren’t familiar at first, but after traveling around for a while you’ll discover your favorite places in the city that have the activities and interests you’re looking for.”

12:00. “The Internet has not forgotten about the children of the world.” I love this line.

13:00. “This brings us to, of all places, the CIA Website. Don’t worry! It’s okay that we’re here. They keep their top-secret files someplace else.”

16:40. “Speaking of science projects, it’s pretty difficult going all the way through school without having to do a science project. If this is the case for you, there are ideas on the Internet if you look for them.”

20:20. Searching for tuition rates for the University of Washington. In 1994, $969 per quarter for full-time residents, $2,733 for non-residents. (Just for fun, I looked up the current rates. $2,129 for residents, $7,377 for non-residents.)

23:30. Browsing SPRY’s Gopher server, explaining how to download JPG files with Gopher.

25:50. “But if you really want to see the power of the Internet for doing research and finding information, just click on the folder ‘Libraries of the Internet.’ Now hold onto your hats and click the icon that says ‘Other Libraries around the US.’ Up comes over 100 libraries that you can click on and get even more information of all kinds.” He finally concludes, “Never again will you be able to use the excuse of ‘Gee, I just couldn’t make it to the library last night!'”

27:00. The big ending. “Not bad for 30 minutes, is it? We think you will agree after watching this video that the Internet will change the way we learn forever. Well, we’re off to our next website and we hope you enjoy the Internet as much as we do. Remember, in the next century, the person with the most information wins. Good luck on your journey, surf wisely, and have a great time!”

URL Addresses for Websites We Visited

Here’s a list of the URLs mentioned in the credits.

Smithsonian, http://www.si.edu

Virtual Science and Math Fair, http://www.educ.wsu.edu/fair_95 (misspelled as www.educ.wsu)

KidsWeb, http://www.npac.syr.edu:80/textbook/kidsweb

Yahoo!, http://www.yahoo.com

Internet College Exchange, http://www.usmall.com/college

University of Washington, http://www.washington.edu

Midlink, http://longword.cs.ucf.edu/~midlink

Web 66, http://web66.coled.umn.edu/schools.html

Welcome to the Planets, http://stardust.jpl.nasa.gov/planets

Library of Congress, http://www.loc.gov (misspelled as www.loc/gov)

Civil War Photo Gallery, http://www.magibox.net/~civilwar/harper.html