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Ben Fry just updated his interactive salary vs performance graph that compares the payrolls of major league teams to their records. Look at those overachieving Rays and Marlins! And those underachieving Indians, Mets, and Cubs!

The New Yorker has an iPhone-specific site up. (thx, @level39)

The clothes from Irina Shaposhnikova's Crystallographica show look as though they were created with 3-D rendering software but haven't quite finished rendering yet.

(via today and tomorrow)

Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh shares his idea for a Ghostbusters III screenplay based on NYNEX, the telephone company that served New York and New England from 1984 through 1997.

Pay phones ring for no reason, and they don't stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves-- but it's the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.

Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone... and they go a little crazy.

Thing is -- spoiler alert -- halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel -- a fallen angel -- and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.

Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.

Deep in the conservative bowels of corporations and brand identity firms, they've got cute little nicknames for logos. The GE logo is The Meatball, the AT&T logo is The Death Star, and the Warner logo is Two and a Half Hot Dogs. (via quips)

From The Onion: 95 Percent Of Opinions Withheld On Visit To Family.

"There was a time when my sister would mention how much she wants an SUV, and I'd be unable to resist launching into a whole thing about how irresponsible and wasteful they are. But after receiving my thousandth blank, confused stare from everybody at the table, I realized it was futile," Wilmot said. "Now, I don't even flinch when my dad mentions he's reading 'this amazing book called The Celestine Prophecy.' That's how bad it is."

I've got two follow-ups to share with you regarding Atul Gawande's New Yorker piece about healthcare costs in the US (kottke.org post). In the Wall Street Journal, Abraham Verghese argues that in order for a healthcare reform plan to be successful, it has to include cost cutting.

I recently came on a phrase in an article in the journal "Annals of Internal Medicine" about an axiom of medical economics: a dollar spent on medical care is a dollar of income for someone. I have been reciting this as a mantra ever since. It may be the single most important fact about health care in America that you or I need to know. It means that all of us -- doctors, hospitals, pharmacists, drug companies, nurses, home health agencies, and so many others -- are drinking at the same trough which happens to hold $2.1 trillion, or 16% of our GDP. Every group who feeds at this trough has its lobbyists and has made contributions to Congressional campaigns to try to keep their spot and their share of the grub. Why not? -- it's hog heaven. But reform cannot happen without cutting costs, without turning people away from the trough and having them eat less. If you do that, you have to be prepared for the buzz saw of protest that dissuaded Roosevelt, defeated Truman's plan and scuttled Hillary Clinton's proposal.

In Gawande's example, what Verghese is saying is that you can't just make McAllen's healthcare system adopt an El Paso type of system without a whole lot of pain.

Gawande addressed some of the criticisms of his article on the New Yorker site. One of the major criticisms was that McAllen's higher costs were associated with higher levels of poverty and unhealthiness:

As I noted in the piece, McAllen is indeed in the poorest county in the country, with a relatively unhealthy population and the problems of being a border city. They have a very low physician supply. The struggles the people and medical community face there are huge. But they are just as huge in El Paso -- its residents are barely less poor or unhealthy or under-supplied with physicians than McAllen, and certainly not enough so to account for the enormous cost differences. The population in McAllen also has more hospital beds than four out of five American cities.

The problem with all of the "we're tracking the most popular links on Twitter" sites is that link sharing on Twitter depends on (in order of decreasing relevance):

1. the time it takes to read/view the link (shorter is way better)
2. if the subject of the link is Twitter or Facebook
3. the sense of outrage aroused in the reader (the more the better)
4. if the link was published by fucking Mashable
5. retweets by popular Twitter users who have many parrot followers (i.e. disciples)
6. how interesting the link is

So unless you're into brief but outrageous Twitter news from Mashable that you heard about from Robert Scoble -- and it is incredible the number of people who are -- these services just aren't that useful. (As this post itself meets several of the above criteria, feel free to retweet.)

From Marcus Buck, imprints of demolished houses left on other houses.

Photo is from Pruned. (via janelle)

Robert Greene, author of The 48 Laws of Power, which has been influential in both halls of business and hip-hop circles, has written a new book with rapper 50 Cent called The 50th Law. Greene was initially skeptical of 50 Cent as a co-author but was impressed by their initial meeting.

He was in the midst of a power struggle with a rival rapper and he talked quite openly about the strategies he was employing, including mistakes he had made along the way. He analyzed his own actions with detachment, as if he were talking about another person. Over the last few years he had witnessed a lot of nasty maneuvering within the music business, and he seemed to want to discuss this with somebody from the outside. He was not interested in myths but reality. Contrary to his public persona, he had a Zen-like calmness that impressed me.

The main theme of the book is about fear and "the reverse power that you can obtain by overcoming [it]".

We found stories from his own life that would illustrate these ideas, many of them culled from his days as a hustler and even highlighting mistakes along the way that taught him valuable lessons. Later, from my own research, I would bring in examples from other historical figures who exemplified this trait. Many of them would be African Americans--Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Miles Davis, Malcolm X, Hurricane Carter, et al--whose fearless quality was forged by their harsh struggles against racism. Others would come from all periods and cultures--the Stoics, Joan of Arc, JFK, Leonardo da Vinci, Mao tse-tung, and so on.