Linked List: February 18, 2019

Monday, 18 February 2019

The Official Fast Food French Fry Power Rankings 

It is astounding how strongly I agree with these rankings from Lucas Kwan Peterson at the LA Times. I know it’s fighting words to slag on In-N-Out, but their fries really are dreadful:

And bringing up the rear is In-N-Out. Before you tell me there’s a way to “hack” these fries, or somehow make them better, either by loading them with American cheese and secret sauce, or by ordering them well-done, I will grant this: It certainly doesn’t make the fries any worse. Just as dumping the fries into a dirt pile on the shoulder of a highway access road and running over that pile with my car would also probably not make the fries any worse.

WorldWideWeb 

Jeremy Keith:

Nine people came together at CERN for five days and made something amazing. I still can’t quite believe it.

Coming into this, I thought it was hugely ambitious to try to not only recreate the experience of using the first ever web browser (called WorldWideWeb, later Nexus), but to also try to document the historical context of the time. Now that it’s all done, I’m somewhat astounded that we managed to achieve both.

Want to see the final result? Here you go.

Very fun, and impressive in-browser recreation of the NeXT interface. Daring Fireball is mostly readable — the biggest hindrance is the lack of support for HTML entities.

‘Wherein the Collector Puts His Passions on Display’ 

Martin McClellan, writing for The Seattle Review of Books back in 2016:

But here is the heart of it: his collection is what allowed Mr. Jay his unique take on magic and entertaining. With such a library, Mr. Jay is able to fully articulate Nabokov’s rules for good readers, that one should have an imagination, a memory, a dictionary, and some artistic sense. So, given his library, and having then the imagination to read well, the memory to recall his topics, a dictionary (and thesaurus, as anybody who has witnessed his patter or writing can attest), and the artistic sense to take these disparate historical inputs and spin them into stage shows that both marveled with their sublime skill and craft, and also startled for their stylistic lack of embarrassing modern magical pretense (although, certainly, on occasion, with a subtle wink, embracing a sort of Mellvillian riverboat conman affectation, the hallmark of the street performer’s garb, bridging the society they keep, from the society they bilk), it is no surprise that Mr. Jay achieved the heights of performing arts that he did. He proofed the theorem; should our society collapse, Mr. Jay will always have a profession, and that would be the exchange of coins (us) for providing wonders (him). And no doubt, his off-hours would be spent recording his memories and knowledge into books for the future Ricky Jays to find.

‘You Know, I Think I Probably Could’ 

Michael Chabon, remembering Ricky Jay:

Though I knew him for seventeen years, I never had the chance to spend as much time with him as I would have liked. So I was, am, and always will be grateful that among those rare occasions was the day I accompanied him—traveled in his wake, would be more like it—to the California International Antiquarian Book Fair. The experience was kind of a cross between walking into a Strip casino with Frank Sinatra in his heyday, touring violin shops in Cremona with Itzhak Perlman, making a circuit of the Tokyo fish market with Jiro Ono, and returning to the North Pole with Santa Claus after a long night’s around-the-world journey.