Month: July 2012

An Interview with Aaron Paul of Breaking Bad

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For all you Breaking Bad fans out there, this is a must-read interview with Aarol Paul (the man who plays Jesse Pinkman) in GQ.

A few highlights, including this gem where we find out that Pinkman was supposed to only last one season on the show:

GQ: With Breaking Bad, I’ve heard again and again that Vince’s original intention was for you to be finished after one season. Then something happened—you were good!—and so the plan shifted. 

Aaron Paul: Well, I never knew that the original idea was to kill off Jesse. I had no idea. So my first meeting was—I mean, it was probably the sixth or seventh pilot that I read that season. First one that I went out for. But when I read it, I was like, AMC? They’re doing original programming? I thought they only played old Westerns.But it was hands-down the best pilot that I’ve ever read. In all honesty, I didn’t think it would see the light of day, because you don’t see stuff like that on TV.

This is the only way to watch the show I think: marathon…

GQ: It seemed like everyone I know sort of binged to catch up on Breaking Bad over the last year or two, and watched the whole series in one go. Do you hear from fans that they’re watching the show that way? 

Aaron Paul: All the time. People have come up to me saying, “I’ve watched all four seasons in four days.” And I’m like, “Well, that’s impossible.” But people assure me they really do it.

On working with Bryan Cranston:

GQ: You and Bryan, in interviews I’ve seen you guys do—even after the Emmys, for example [Bryan has won three for his role on BB, and Aaron has won one]—it seems that you have just an incredibly strong friendship.

Aaron Paul: We do. And I’ll be honest: I was a decent actor before. I’m not going to beat myself up, but I—you can always learn. But after working on Breaking Bad, it’s like going to an extreme acting workshop every day. Working with Bryan, he’s just—he’s on such a different level than me.

Aaron Paul is getting married. He met the girl at Coachella. His words on “knowing” when you meet the right person for you:

But you know when people say, “When you know, you know”? It was crazy. The moment that happened—even leading up to the kiss on the Ferris wheel, I couldn’t imagine myself being without her. Because just the idea of doing this all the time was such a fantasy of mine—I was like, “Wait, can this actually exist?” I don’t know—maybe this is just one those crazy, whirlwind Coachella romances that you always hear about.

Season 5 premiere is tomorrow night!

Reading the Masters

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Federico Pereiro from Argentina offers this advice: read the Masters. 

Some time ago, I came across the Wikipedia article of Niels Henrik Abel, and something there burnt its way into my mind.

Abel changed the face of mathematics, despite dying at 27. And here comes the thing – I give the mic to Wikipedia now:

When asked how he developed his mathematical abilities so rapidly, he replied “by studying the masters, not their pupils.”

By studying the masters, not their pupils.

The proposition is a bit like trying to climb a wall instead of a stair. Already I found straining to follow the gist of the textbooks of the subject I was interested – how could I deal with the masters?

Click through the post to see his suggestions on reading the Masters of Computer Science.

Americans Living Larger

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Recession? What recession? Bloomberg reports:

The percentage of new single-family homes greater than 3,000 square feet has grown by one-third in the last decade, according to data released last month by the U.S. Census Bureau. The increase has occurred even while 4.3 million homes have been foreclosed upon since January 2007, a result of the housing- bubble collapse and economic meltdown. Slightly more than 1 in 4 new homes built last year were larger than 3,000 square feet, the highest percentage since 2007.

This is even more mind-boggling:

The Census Bureau reports that the average size of a U.S. house rose in 2011 to 2,480 square feet, up from 2,392 square feet in 2010. The 2011 figure is 62.6 percent larger than the 1,525-square-foot average size in 1973.

So people are buying fewer newer homes, but when they do, they want to get that 3,000 square foot McMansion. Makes total sense.

The London Cab-otel

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Here’s a fun way to tap into the booming tourism market that comes with the Olympic Games. David Weekes, a full-time cab driver in London, has transformed his iconic black cab into a hotel for one, available to rent for £50 (US$78.50) a night. CNNGo explains:

The taxi comes with a “memory foam” mattress, pillow, duvet, a bedside lamp and a Paddington Bear teddy. 

It also offers a solar-powered fridge, a radio, an iPad and camping chairs and a portable table on request. 

But Weekes does have two rules: no smoking and no pets. 

The listing to book the cab-otel is here.

The History of the @-Reply on Twitter

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Garrett Murray didn’t invent the Twitter @-reply, but he provides some good background on its history:

I have always half-jokingly taken credit for inventing the @reply on Twitter. Or at least for starting its wide-spread use on Twitter—I got the idea from seeing people do it over at Flickr, where it had been happening for more than a year. But until today I continued to claim I was the first person to do it on Twitter. Recently, user @rabble put together a blog post titled Origin of the @reply – Digging Through Twitter’s History, in which he did some research to show when it was first used. Only his research isn’t entirely correct and it doesn’t give fair credit to everyone involved.

It turns out that I’m not the inventor of the @reply, though I’m definitely one of the pioneers. Robert Andersen seems to be the father of the @reply on Twitter. He sent this message on November 2, 2006 at 8:58PM (all times in this post are Pacific—if you’re reading this from the Tumblr Dashboard, all the dates will look funky):

@ buzz – you broke your thumb and youre still twittering? that’s some serious devotion

I like his thought about collective consciousness when he and a bunch of other people started using the (now indispensable) @-reply on the same day in November 2006.

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Related: the Twitter hashtag (#) was invented by Chris Messina in 2007. 

Exploring New York Through Pickup Basketball

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Isaac Eger moved to New York City on a whim: no job, no girlfriend, no aspirations. But he had one curiosity: the city’s mythical ownership of pickup basketball. Were its legendary courts just New York hype? He set out exploring the pick-up courts in what he describes as a “a little stream of consciousness, a little underreported, full of a bunch of first names and first impressions”:

If New York is the city that never sleeps, it is probably because the city never shuts up.

Drowning the shriek of sneakers and the clangs of missed shots is the constant trash talk from the players on and off the court.

“Shoot it! I dare you!”

“You ain’t got nothing.”

“I’m gonna score from the block next time. Wait and see.”

Players on the city’s courts comment on what you wear, how you look, how you smell, what you do, how you blink and breathe. Cries and hoots from the sidelines fill the park when someone gets crossed, blocked or dunked on.

On being close:

Though everything seems to be less than an hour away, people do not appear too inclined to venture far beyond their neighborhood. Perhaps there is a level of comfort that comes with picking a court and sticking with it — like picking your favorite bar or cigarette brand. All of the players seem to know one another’s nicknames, tricks and extended families.

The city’s busy, congested courts have influenced the style of play that takes place on them. For instance, I haven’t run across many pure shooters, but I have encountered a lot of athletes with wicked ball-handling skills. My theory is that because the courts here are so packed with players, there is not enough time or space to practice jump shots.

That is why so many shooters, I suspect, are cornfed boys from the Midwest and prep schoolers from the suburbs: the country and sprawl quarantine them, and they have nothing to do but practice fundamentals by their lonesome.

His conclusion on the guys he played with on the courts:

We weren’t going to be friends. Ever.

But teammates? Perhaps.

Relativistic Baseball

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One of my favorite comics, XKCD, is now up to something new: answering interesting questions with physics!

The first question: What would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90% the speed of light? The answer…

The constant fusion at the front of the ball pushes back on it, slowing it down, as if the ball were a rocket flying tail-first while firing its engines. Unfortunately, the ball is going so fast that even the tremendous force from this ongoing thermonuclear explosion barely slows it down at all. It does, however, start to eat away at the surface, blasting tiny particulate fragments of the ball in all directions. These fragments are going so fast that when they hit air molecules, they trigger two or three more rounds of fusion.

After about 70 nanoseconds the ball arrives at home plate. The batter hasn’t even seen the pitcher let go of the ball, since the light carrying that information arrives at about the same time the ball does. Collisions with the air have eaten the ball away almost completely, and it is now a bullet-shaped cloud of expanding plasma (mainly carbon, oxygen, hydrogen, and nitrogen) ramming into the air and triggering more fusion as it goes. The shell of x-rays hits the batter first, and a handful of nanoseconds later the debris cloud hits.

When it reaches the batter, the center of the cloud is still moving at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light. It hits the bat first, but then the batter, plate, and catcher are all scooped up and carried backward through the backstop as they disintegrate. The shell of x-rays and superheated plasma expands outward and upward, swallowing the backstop, both teams, the stands, and the surrounding neighborhood—all in the first microsecond.

Suppose you’re watching from a hilltop outside the city. The first thing you see is a blinding light, far outshining the sun. This gradually fades over the course of a few seconds, and a growing fireball rises into a mushroom cloud. Then, with a great roar, the blast wave arrives, tearing up trees and shredding houses.

Everything within roughly a mile of the park is leveled, and a firestorm engulfs the surrounding city. The baseball diamond is now a sizable crater, centered a few hundred feet behind the former location of the backstop.

This is going to be awesome.

Zuckerberg’s Freshman Roommate: An Olympian

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Bloomberg has a good story on Samyr Laine, a roommate of Mark Zuckerberg at Harvard (in the now famous room D11). Laine will compete in the triple jump at the London Olympics for Haiti, the country of his parents’ birth.

Remembers Laine:

We had a good time our freshman year in Straus, we played a ton of PlayStation. We probably didn’t sleep nearly as much as we should have. None of us slept as little as Mark did, and now you can see why.

Laine, 27, holds Harvard records for the triple jump, both indoors at 51 feet, 11 1/4 inches (15.83 meters) and outdoors at 53 feet, 7 1/2 inches, which compare with the world outdoor record of 60 feet, 1/4 inch by Britain’s Jonathan Edwards in 1995.

This was my favorite tidbit from the story:

Laine still laughs at an incident from freshman year. He remembers Zuckerberg running out of their dorm room after oversleeping and missing the first hour of a computer science final exam, only to get the highest mark in the class.

“The mastery he had of computer science, even as a freshman, it was almost comical,” Laine said. “We would often try to see how fast he could hack into our computers.”

Full story here.

World Domination Summit 2012: Readings

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This past weekend, I attended the World Domination Summit. This was my second #WDS (I blogged about last year’s experience here, here, and here). I will post thoughts of my own about this year’s event a little bit later, but I wanted to highlight these five posts by other attendees that have resonated with me so far:

1) “10 Things I Learned at the World Domination Summit” by Elana Miller:

There is no great time to create, so you learn to keep creating, even if you don’t feel like it. If you wait around for the creative well to flow before you start doing anything, you might be waiting for a long time. People who learn to put in the work even when they don’t feel like it are able to chip away at their goals, one small step at a time.

2) “The $100 Bet” by Rami the Gutsy Geek. Everyone in attendance at #WDS this year received a $100 gift (investment) as the event concluded on Sunday afternoon. Chris Guillebeau, the founder of World Domination Summit, encouraged us to do something unique and inspiring with the gift, with the underlying themes of community, adventure, and service. What kind of story will you tell? So I liked the bet that Rami proposed:

More importantly, when you trusted me with $100 in cash to kickstart a goal, well, I couldn’t let you down. But I’m a competitive guy, and “here’s $100, go live a dream” doesn’t work for me as well as putting my pride on the line.

Instead, I’ve opted to turn the money into a bet, with 10-to-1 odds in your favor.

Here’s the deal: I bet you $100 that by July 5th 2013 [editor’s note: July 5th 2013 will be the opening night of WDS next year], my book will be ready for publishing.

I may not have an agent or a publishing deal, but I will have a fully finished manuscript.

3) “Don’t Stop Believing” by Brandon Sutton. Brandon provides some detail on how he was chosen to go on stage and sing Journey’s “Don’t Stop Believing” to a crowd of 1,000 attendees:

As surely as I write this, the music started, and Journey’s massive hit song, Don’t Stop Believing began to play. Chris got the crowd started as the rest of us provided backup. A few lines into the song, Michelle nudged me forward and Chris turned around and handed me the microphone.

This is probably a good time to mention that I’m not a fan of karaoke, have never sung karaoke, and haven’t sung in front of people since I was a little kid in church.

But there I was, on stage with a live microphone and 1,000 people singing along to one of the songs that defined an entire generation. After the initial shock wore off, I embraced it and really got into the groove. The music carried me away to a place I never knew existed, and the inner performer in me assumed the role.

Lunging forward to reach out to the crowd, the words and emotions poured out of me like a raging river. It was something I never in a million years expected, but wow did it kick off the weekend with a bang. Talk about vulnerability!

Brandon also gave a heartfelt presentation about Kids of the Gulf, a documentary film featuring two kids that are determined to have a positive impact in the Gulf coast region in the aftermath of the BP oil spill in 2010. I encourage you to check it out.

4) “World Domination Summit 2.0 and 8 Ways to Take Action on the Inspiration” by Farnoosh. I wanted to highlight this passage, which rang true for me last year and might happen again this year (and I have the feeling for others as well):

Oh yes, the stories. Inspiration was at the heart of every story. Stories like overcoming breast cancer and living to play it in a humorous song on the guitar, or building a water charity that helps deliver clean water to the poorest villages of Africa after wasting away the first part of life as a night-club promoter. Stories of waking up to a miserable career after 20 years of service to a company and turning things around because it’s never too late. Stories of starting businesses and making sacrifices and building something that makes a difference in this world.

Stories of not taking no for an answer and not playing by the conventional rules and systems, stories of finding solutions rather than playing a victim all your life.

Stories of believing in the infinite power of your dreams, and the true potential within your reach.

Inspiration is the easy part. You just have to be open to receiving, to hearing stories, to watching and observing and listening, and you will be filled to the brim with inspiration.

What comes after inspiration, now that’s not so easy. That’s the part where things stop looking sexy and shiny and sweet. That’s the day after the conference. That’s the long afternoon when you are home alone staring at your monitor and trying to re-capture the moments.

5) “What 1,000 Boomer’s Kids Did This Past Weekend” by Ken Solin at the Huffington Post. I really enjoyed Ken’s perspective on the event:

I don’t recall any speakers talking about making money beyond following your dreams and hopefully making a few bucks. The speakers preached being doers, not talkers. These young men and women already know something I only discovered in my sixties: Life isn’t just about stuff. They could teach their parents something about that.

For the first time in a very long while, I felt hopeful about America’s future. With men and women like those attending the WDS Conference, perhaps there’s hope after all. Their global approach to problems on a very personal level feels like a huge shift from the apathy that abounds in America regarding Third World people.

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If you’ve found any other inspring/interesting posts recapping the event, please leave a comment below. Thanks!

How to Deliver a Perfect Compliment

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Finding the perfect compliment isn’t a riddle at all. It’s not as though there’s one for every person at every time. It’s a matter of finding the right moment rather than insisting on one.

The quote above is from a really, really great piece by Tom Chiarella titled “The Perfect Compliment.” Tom goes on assignment trying to come up with the perfect compliment (if it exists). In the beginning, it’s all a numbers game to him: he encounters strangers and dishes out one liners: “Nice Shoes. Great tie.” One day, he delivers more than 1,000 compliments…

But then, as his observation of compliments grows, he re-engineers his technique. As he writes:

If a worthwhile compliment needs anything, it is the weight of realization behind it. So I fell back, watched people go about their jobs, the quality of their interactions, the way they looked at their reflection as they walked the street. I registered. And I learned, or started to learn, that a compliment is a partnership, because the pleasure of giving it lies in its effect upon the person receiving it. What I’d been doing was little more than a salesman’s trick, poorly played. I’d succeeded only in making myself bold enough to broadcast my judgments — dry little seeds spun out on the lawn of humanity — on the fly. I had to risk a little connection.

His compliments become more interesting and from the heart:

All I can say is, that is a classy umbrella. It looks old-timey and right for you.

My mother always wanted me to wear a corduroy coat like that. Now I see why.

Near the end of his adventure, Tom’s decision was to deliver one genuine compliment, one that would be heartfelt but also move the recipient:

In the end, the compliments I came up with were tailored and quirky in the best way. Most of all, they were thorough. I liked delivering them. I enjoyed plumbing the reactions. I sometimes considered for days what I would say before delivering one. Or I’d run after someone for my one chance to say what needed to be said. I’d sit in the broad doorway of the coffee shop for an entire day, feet in the sunshine, shoulders in the cool. I did not go on the hunt anymore. I scanned for a single, worthy compliment in the craw of each day.

Tom Chiarella, you have written a wonderful piece. I hope others can learn from you.