Five best movie villains of the 2000s

Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men is on the list…click through for the rest. (via @tcarmody)

• best of
• lists
• movies
• The 2000s

Habits of mind

Originally written for mathematics students, this list of useful habits of mind is applicable to nearly anyone doing anything.

• lists
• mathematics

100 great movie moments

A collection by Roger Ebert from 1995. The moments include:

Samuel L. Jackson and John Travolta discuss what they call Quarter Pounders in France, in “Pulp Fiction.”

Jack Nicholson trying to order a chicken salad sandwich in “Five Easy Pieces.”

“I love the smell of napalm in the morning,” dialogue by Robert Duvall, in “Apocalypse Now.”

• best of
• lists
• movies
• Roger Ebert
• video

Top ten lost technologies

The list includes Roman concrete, Damascus steel, and a napalm-like weapon called Greek fire. (via @ebertchicago)

• best of
• lists

Top ten typefaces of the 2000s

A list of the most important typefaces of the last decade.

It is not a list of my favorite typefaces, nor is it a list of the most popular typefaces. Instead, it is a list of typefaces that have been “important” for one reason or another. However, I am not going to provide my reasons. Instead, I am going to let the readers of this blog see if they can figure out the contribution that each of these ten faces makes.

• best of
• lists
• typography

Famous last words

The Guardian has the famous last words of 10 authors. As I am fundamentally opposed to lists in slide show format, especially lists with one list item per slide, the quotations are below. Click through to see the pictures. The chance all of these last words are 100% accurate is something much less than 100%. Points to the Guardian for including 2 women on this list. A lot of lists like this would be male-only.

Samuel Johnson - ‘Iam moriturus’ (I who am about to die)
Lord Byron - ‘Come, come, no weakness; let’s be a man to the last!’
Emily Dickinson - ‘I must go in, the fog is rising’
Robert Louis Stevenson - ‘What’s that? Do I look strange?’
Anton Chekhov - ‘It’s a long time since I drank champagne’
Mark Twain - ‘Death, the only immortal, who treats us alike, whose peace and refuge are for all. The soiled and the pure, the rich and the poor, the loved and the unloved’
Leo Tolstoy - ‘We all reveal … our manifestations … This manifestation is over … That’s all’
Franz Kafka - ‘Dearest Max, my last request: Everything I leave behind me … in the way of diaries, manuscripts, letters (my own and others’), sketches, and so on, (is) to be burned unread’
Virginia Woolf - ‘I feel certain that I’m going mad again …’
James Joyce - ‘Does nobody understand?’

(Via Sagatrope)

• authors
• lists

50 Highest paid athletes

Sports Illustrated is out with its list of 50 highest paid AMERICAN athletes. (This distinction is important because there’s also an international list.) I wouldn’t say I was surprised by the list, but there were several ‘huh’ moments. For instance, close your eyes. Close them. Now picture the 3rd highest paid athlete on the planet. What sport is he playing? If you said boxing, you’re right. Floyd Mayweather made $60m last year. I’m curious if I were to make a list of the 50 highest paid American athletes how many of these names I would have come up with.

Other tidbits:
$28,847,406 separates #1 Tiger Woods ($90m) from #2 Phil Mickelson.
$73,733,163 separates Tiger from #50 A.J. Burnett.
Shaq still makes more than Kobe, which must really bug Kobe.
#2 highest paid QB is Matthew Stafford, who is the 2nd year QB of the Lions.
#28 Darrius Heyward-Bey is the first player I hadn’t heard of on the list.
There are 15 football players on this list, not one of whom is Tom Brady or Drew Brees.
Maria Sharapova is the only woman on either list, #20 on the international list with around $19m.

There is an international list, which is filthy with soccer players and Formula 1 drivers. For some reason non-American athletes (Ichiro, Pau Gasol) that play in the US are on the international list.

• lists
• sports

Etymology of musical genre names

Flavorwire has a post on the etymology of 10 musical genre names. This is the type of thing that you wonder about from time to time, but probably never bothered to look up.

Punk: While “punk” was once (and still, occasionally) catch-all slang for a young delinquent, “punk rock” first appeared in a 1970 Chicago Tribune article, uttered by Ed Sanders of The Fugs. Although the band was one of punk’s immediate ancestors, Sanders went on to define the term as “redneck sentimentality.” The next year, Dave Marsh of Creem used “punk rock” to describe ? and the Mysterians. Its meaning evolved from there, originally encompassing a slew of Nuggets-era garage-rock bands and eventually solidifying into a more rigid description of the mid-’70s bands we think of as “punk.”

(Via @tcarmody and @brainpicker)

• lists
• music
• words

Comedy MVPs

Bill Simmons recently compiled a list of the MVPs of comedy from 1975 to the present. Here’s a portion of the list:

1989: Dana Carvey
1990: Billy Crystal
1991: Jerry Seinfeld
1992: Jerry Seinfeld, Mike Myers (tie)
1993: Mike Myers
1994: Jim Carrey
1995: Chris Farley
1996: Chris Rock

Unlikely Words has the full list and you can go to Simmons’ site to read the list with annotations. Such as:

1982-84: Eddie Murphy
The best three-year run anyone has had. Like Bird’s three straight MVPs. And by the way, “Beverly Hills Cop” is still the No. 1 comedy of all time if you use adjusted gross numbers.

• best of
• Bill Simmons
• lists

Writing tips for anyone

Author Janet Fitch wrote a list of 10 Writing Tips That Can Help Almost Anyone.

Long ago I got a rejection from the editor of the Santa Monica Review, Jim Krusoe. It said: “Good enough story, but what’s unique about your sentences?” That was the best advice I ever got. Learn to look at your sentences, play with them, make sure there’s music, lots of edges and corners to the sounds. Read your work aloud. Read poetry aloud and try to heighten in every way your sensitivity to the sound and rhythm and shape of sentences. The music of words.

• Janet Fitch
• lists
• writing

Best sites for film criticism

An annotated list of the best film criticism blogs. (via the house next door)

• best of
• lists
• movies
• weblogs

How to improve creativity

A two part (one, two) series on using psychological techniques to improve your creativity.

Interviews with 22 Nobel Laureates in physiology, chemistry, medicine and physics as well as Pulitzer Prize winning writers and other artists has found a surprising similarity in their creative processes (Rothenberg, 1996).

Called ‘Janusian thinking’ after the many-faced Roman god Janus, it involves conceiving of multiple simultaneous opposites. Integrative ideas emerge from juxtapositions, which are usually not obvious in the final product, theory or artwork.

Physicist Niels Bohr may have used Janusian thinking to conceive the principle of complementarity in quantum theory (that light can be analysed as either a wave or a particle, but never simultaneously as both).

(via lone gunman)

• how to
• lists
• psychology

Why intelligent people fail

Pretty much why everyone else fails (minus a lack of intelligence).

1. Lack of motivation. A talent is irrelevant if a person is not motivated to use it. Motivation may be external (for example, social approval) or internal (satisfaction from a job well-done, for instance). External sources tend to be transient, while internal sources tend to produce more consistent performance.

• lists

Architecture’s most important buildings

From a panel of 52 experts surveyed by Vanity Fair, a list of the 21 most important works of architecture created since 1980. The top three:

1. Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim in Bilbao
2. Renzo Piano’s Menil Collection in Houston
3. Peter Zumthor’s Thermal Baths in Vals, Switzerland

Here are the complete results of the survey.

• architecture
• best of
• lists

Time’s best blogs of 2010

On the list are kottke.org favorites like Hilobrow, The Sartorialist, Shorpy, The Awl, and Roger Ebert’s Journal.

• best of
• lists
• weblogs

The worst movies never made

A list of ten movies that weren’t made…and a good thing they weren’t. Including a Lord of the Rings adaptation with The Beatles.

According to Roy Carr’s The Beatles at the Movies, talks were once in the works for a Beatle-zation — with John Lennon wanting to play Gollum, Paul McCartney Frodo, George Harrison Gandalf, and Ringo Starr Sam. Collaborating with director John Boorman, screenwriter Rospo Pallenberg thought the Beatles should play the four hobbits (and agreed with McCartney that he would be the ideal Frodo).

• best of
• lists
• movies
• The Beatles
• The Lord of the Rings

Upcoming sci-fi films

A list of the 20 most anticipated sci-fi films of 2011. Notable entries include Tarsem Singh’s Immortals (“mythic warrior Theseus battles demons and Titans on his way to becoming a legendary Greek hero”), Steven Soderbergh’s Contagion (“an international team of doctors is assembled by the Centers for Disease Control to battle an outbreak of a deadly virus”; stars Damon, Paltrow, Winslet, Fishburne, Cotillard, and Law, Jude Law), and Kenneth Branagh’s Thor (“superbeing Thor is cast out of the cosmic realm of Asgard and forced to live among humans, where he must find a way to both defend Earth and reclaim his birthright”).

• lists
• movies

The ten most disturbing scientific discoveries

Number three on this Smithsonian Magazine list is “There have been mass extinctions in the past, and we’re probably in one now.”

Today, according to many biologists, we’re in the midst of a sixth great extinction. Mastodons may have been some of the earliest victims. As humans moved from continent to continent, large animals that had thrived for millions of years began to disappear-mastodons in North America, giant kangaroos in Australia, dwarf elephants in Europe. Whatever the cause of this early wave of extinctions, humans are driving modern extinctions by hunting, destroying habitat, introducing invasive species and inadvertently spreading diseases.

• lists
• science

The 101 best sandwiches in NYC

I’ve only had a few of these…I am clearly not exercising my sandwich muscles enough these days. (Although the Brazilian sandwich at Project Sandwich has been treating me well lately.)

• best of
• food
• lists
• NYC
• sandwiches

Ten maps that changed the world

The head of the map collections department at the British Library shares ten maps that changed the world.

5. Google Earth. Google Earth presents a world in which the area of most concern to you (in this instance, Avebury in Wiltshire) can be at the centre, and which - with mapped content overlaid - can contain whatever you think is important. Almost for the first time, the ability to create an accurate map has been placed in the hands of everyone, and it has transformed the way we view the world.

• lists
• maps

The 50 Greatest Hip Hop Samples Of All Time

This breaks a few of the rules on my list of Rules for Lists, but I’m a sucker for hip hop samples.

(via waxy)

• best of
• hip-hop
• lists

The best summer blockbusters ever

The full list has 30 films on it.

• best of
• lists
• movies

Properties of successful web apps

From VC Fred Wilson, The 10 Golden Principles of Successful Web Apps.

A transcript is here.

• Fred Wilson
• lists

The Four Great Inventions of ancient China

They are as follows:

the compass
gunpowder
papermaking
printing

There are also many other inventions, including fermented drink, forks, and the noodle.

• China
• lists

2009 book sales figures

In fiction, Dan Brown was #1 but James Patterson appears *five times* in the top 25. On the nonfiction side, a certain former Alaskan governor (no, not Walter J. Hickel) tops the list. The full list is here. (via the millions)

• best of
• best of 2009
• books
• lists

When programming errors attack!

From a bunch of security experts, the top 25 most dangerous programming errors that can lead to serious software vulnerabilities.

Cross-site scripting and SQL injection are the 1-2 punch of security weaknesses in 2010. Even when a software package doesn’t primarily run on the web, there’s a good chance that it has a web-based management interface or HTML-based output formats that allow cross-site scripting. For data-rich software applications, SQL injection is the means to steal the keys to the kingdom. The classic buffer overflow comes in third, while more complex buffer overflow variants are sprinkled in the rest of the Top 25.

• best of
• lists
• programming

Americans don’t like movies with subtitles

Only nine foreign films have grossed more than $20 million in the US:

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Life Is Beautiful
Hero
Pan’s Labyrinth
Amelie
Jet Li’s Fearless
Il Postino
Like Water for Chocolate
La Cage aux Folles

And only 22 have made more than $10 million. There are some great great films on the full list. (via latimes)

• lists
• movies

Health and fitness tips from a trainer

A long-time trainer shares what he’s learned about health and fitness. A lot of good (and questionable) stuff in this list.

Diet is 85% of where results come from…for muscle and fat loss. Many don’t focus here enough.

If you eat whole foods that have been around for 1000s of years, you probably don’t have to worry about counting calories

Our dependence on gyms to workout may be keeping people fat…as walking down a street and pushups in your home are free everyday…but people are not seeing it that way.

(via jorn)

• food
• lists

Best movie scenes

The Guardian asked several film directors to choose their favorite movie scenes. Ryan Fleck chose the chase scene from The French Connection and discovered that the 80+ mph chase was done through normal traffic with Hackman just driving like a crazy person.

I did a little bit of research about how they shot the scene. Phenomenal. Basically they just did it. There was no security blocking off other traffic, just Hackman in a car with a camera mounted on the front. They went crazy, lost their minds, and went for it. It was the kind of thing that you just would never get away with these days.

I don’t know if it’s my favorite or not, but the opening scene in The Matrix where the cops walk into a dusty old building to find Trinity working alone at a computer and then she flies up in the air and the camera circles around her as she kicks those cops’ asses, well, let’s just say I want to be that excited about seeing the rest of every single movie I watch. (via @brainpicker)

Update: The FC chase scene was actually done by stunt driver Bill Hickman. (thx, jason)

• lists
• movies

The Meta Awards

The categories include:

Best Long, Rambling Speech, Which Must Be Forcefully Cut Short by the Orchestra, Given After Receiving This Award

Most Worthy of Winning This Award By Sheer Virtue of the Number of Times She Has Not Previously Won This Award

(via @tcarmody)

• lists