I stumbled upon a site called World’s Famous Photos, which starts out just enthralling and slowly becomes agonizingly depressing.

You might first get drawn to some particularly iconic historical photographs, like Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima or “Tank Man” in Tiananmen Square.  You might peek in on the lighter fare like the cover of Abbey Road or V-J Day in Times Square.

But in the end you won’t be able to avoid the September 11 attacks, the Oklahoma City bombing, and the wars, famines, fires, protests, and genocides that a century of photography has recorded and that now sit arrayed before you on your computer screen just waiting to be absorbed.

Google Maps has finally introduced the one feature it’s needed most since the site first came into being: it shows all the places that match your search at once, instead of just ten at a time.

Suppose you search for Dunkin Donuts in Boston, MA.  They’re everywhere, of course.  You still get only ten pin icons, labeled A through J, but now tiny circles dot the entire map to identify every location in the city.  Clicking any dot will produce the same “speech bubble” full of details you’d expect from any other map icon.

Apparently Google put this in over a month ago, but I haven’t noticed it until now.

William H. Whyte did extensive research in 1980 on what makes city plazas popular or unpopular.  He published a book called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces detailing his team’s findings, which are, generally, fascinating.

There’s a companion video, which is surprisingly difficult to find.  Direct Cinema Limited sells a DVD for $95 licensed for public performances, but no ordinary (and cheap) “home use” copy seems to be available online.

Fortunately, through the magic of YouTube, you can watch the first 10 minutes, which will make you want to immediately pay the $95 for your own copy.  My favorite remark in that introduction:

The number one activity is people looking at other people.

Here are the “girl watchers.”  They’re a bit disdainful, looking down their noses as though the girls aren’t worth their talents.  But it’s all machismo.  We have never ever seen a girl watcher make a pass at a girl.  We’ve seen very few others do that for that matter.

But of course!  They’re girl watchers.  Actually talking to a girl would inhibit their ability to watch them!

(via Kottke)

The service Ask Sunday charges a monthly fee to perform routine tasks for subscribers.  For example, you might ask them (by e-mail, phone, fax, or website) to make a reservation at a particular restaurant, or to call local stores to find where a particular product is in stock.  Really, you can ask for anything that can be completed in 20 to 30 minutes.  Other suggestions from their site:

Update/Cancel Subscriptions: Figure out how to update the mailing address for my Business Week subscription.

Phone-in Purchases: Call J.Crew and order me the Cotton cable crewneck sweater in faded black.

Administrative: Contact American Airlines and see that I get frequent flyer credit for my flight last week. I forgot to add my AAdvantage number at the airport.

Lost Luggage: I just landed in Dubai from Emirates flight EK202 and my luggage didn’t turn up. Please contact the lost luggage department and help me track it down.

Store Hours: How late is the Crate and Barrel open on West North Avenue in Chicago?

It’s an interesting idea.  Each small task we need to do takes only a few minutes, but collectively those tasks can take hours.  Sunday’s basic plan costs $37 per month for up to 15 requests, so if each request takes 20 minutes you’re valuing your time at or above $7.40 per hour.

I’m not about to subscribe, but services like this make our world interesting.

I stumbled onto an article in the New York Post on the identify of The Waiter from the blog Waiter Rant (which I’ve mentioned before).  Among other things, it says:

And profiling diners based on age, sex and race is still rampant in the industry. “I try not to fall into that trap,” says Dublanica. “I’ve had waiters say to me, ‘this group doesn’t tip well’ – whatever. I don’t believe that. The people who have given me the worst tips of my life have been white Anglo-Saxon males.”

Anybody else think the only difference between “this group doesn’t tip well” and “white Anglo-Saxon males have given me the worst tips of my life” is that the latter names a specific group?

YouTube comments are infamously the most inane drivel found anywhere in the entire history of humanity’s written communication. In particular, I’ve always been bothered (to the extent I ever read YouTube comments) by the egotism implicit in the “discussion.”  Commenters make their primary purpose communicating to others their unique expertise in any subject, and hence their unique qualification to judge it.  With nobody caring what anyone else has written, and instead focusing only on showcasing their own knowledge, showmanship wholly replaces any semblance of commentary.

Hence, when I read about artist Steve Lambert’s project reading aloud YouTube comments, I did not expect to be impressed.

I was impressed.

While playing a video of Leonard Bernstein conducting the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, performers read aloud comments that were earlier posted in response to the same video.

The juxtaposition of this beautiful piece of music in a classic performance with the jarring inhumanity of the modern responses makes the result inexplicably enthralling.

(via Kottke)

You might remember Dan Gilbert as the author of Stumbling on Happiness or as the presenter of one of the best-ever TED Talks back in 2004 (posted online in 2006).

I’ve just found a 15 minute talk he gave at Pop!Tech in 2007 on global climate change and why our brains don’t seem to care much about it.

It takes you just milliseconds to duck when somebody throws a baseball at your head because your brain is an exquisitely engineered “get out of the way” machine, and it’s constantly scanning the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get.

Quite apart from the interesting content, that particular sentence was wonderfully phrased.

Sine-Wave Speech is created by taking regular speech and essentially reducing it down to sine waves, absent all the complexities that make normal speech understandable.

Listen to a sample and you’ll hear nothing but whistles and beeps.

On the other hand, listen to the original sound (ordinary speech) and then listen to exactly the same sample again.

Then panic.

The theory is that the brain’s very perception of the sound is colored by its past experiences of listening to similar sounds.  You perceive, at a low level, that you’re hearing speech, and therefore you can decipher it.  I suppose it’s not unlike how we adjust to listening to people with heavily accented speech, but it’s so much more extreme that it’s scary.

Listen to four more samples on that page, and not only will you get the same effect or all four, but you’ll even get better at deciphering the sine-wave version the first time around.

(via Kottke)