This NASA video about Curiosity’s landing sequence. Sample hotness:

* The unique problem of Mars’ really thin atmosphere.

* A supersonic parachute.

* Sky crane.

Bonus: To add to the degree of difficulty, the NASA number jockeys also positioned another satellite and worked a camera on a timer to capture the exact moment Curiosity deployed. As the kids say, hotttt.

It would be nice if someone in Bloomberg’s office–or the DA’s office–would do something about this. But then, they have to work with those guys.

Two pieces over the weekend, the first a review of David Kirby’s Death at SeaWorld in the Wall Street Journal.

The second, the Batman nerd opus. It’s not quite on the level of this:

It’s in the little things. His essay on Chick-fil-A, for instance, is like a highlight reel of writing, but tucked away in it is a throwaway line on “light grandparenting” that just kills.

Santino makes a very persuasive case that Adam Smith, the very mean person who made a spectacle of himself by telling off a Chick-fil-A worker at the drive-through and then posting the exchange on YouTube, shouldn’t have been fired from his job as CFO of a medical device manufacturer.

I disagree. Sort of.

First off, it’s always lousy when anyone loses their job. Even jerks. It’s just no fun, no matter who you are.

Second, if Smith was a low-level employee at his company the case for him keeping his job would be much stronger. But the fact that he’s so high up the corporate structure–CFO is a big deal–carries with it a couple of problems. (1) Corporate officers have a different level of responsibility to the company than do front-office grunts. Part of that is to not publicly embarrass the company. It’s a burden, obviously. But these guys get compensated for it. (2) As a high-level officer making such a public stink, his company could easily be worried that he’s costing them business with clients who find his manner and/or views unpleasant. Not an unreasonable concern. (3) His company could also be worried about future HR litigation: If a lower-level worker filed a hostile workplace complaint against them, citing Smith and claiming that the workplace was intolerant of something or other, that video would be a real problem. And the company’s prior knowledge of the video would be, I suspect, highly problematic.

In any case, I hope he lands on his feet.

Galley Friend Gabriel Rossman’s long-awaited (for me) book on how FM radio still drives chart success in the recording industry is finally out. It’s called Climbing the Charts.

If you’ve followed Rossman’s stuff elsewhere you know how good he is at taking complicated pointy-headed models and making them accessible to normal readers. He’s one of those rare academics–like Paul Cantor–whose base sensibility is firmly popular. He just happens to have the formal scholarly structure built on top of it.

Go pick up a copy. You’ll thank yourself.

As a supplement to this first-blush reaction to The Dark Knight Rises I’m now ready with some spoiler-filled observations. Proceed at your own risk. The rest below the fold. (more…)

Subject header: “50 Shades Outsells Harry Potter!”

That’s from the literary PR agency (Smith Publicity) pimping publisher The Writer’s Coffee Shop Publishing House. The flack begins her email by noting, “Earlier this morning, the news broke that the Fifty Shades trilogy has now officially outsold Harry Potter.”

Here’s the fine print:

Incredible as it may sound, J.K. Rowling’s compendium of seven Harry Potter books is no longer the best-selling book series on Amazon UK — that crown has now been passed toE. L. James’ monumentally popular Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy. James’ books have sold over four million copies in print and on Kindle since going on sale in March 2012, making her the most successful author of all time on Amazon’s British portal.

In terms of individual books, the first novel in the series, carrying the titular name of Fifty Shades of Grey, has been outselling Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by a factor of two to one in recent weeks, which has resulted in it becoming the all-time bestselling book on Amazon UK. Amazon also tells us that Fifty Shades is comfortably topping the bestseller chart in both print and Kindle editions in the US, but it doesn’t seem to have yet managed to break any records the way it has in the UK.

It’s hard to unpack all of this, but we’ll give it a try. The only hard number we’re given is that 50 Shades of Grey has sold 4M+ books (on the Amazon UK portal) since March. So what Harry Potter book is that supposedly better than? Unclear. The story says it’s been outselling Deathly Hallows by 2-1. Which is great, except that Deathly Hallows came out five years ago. On the first day of release, Deathly Hallows moved 2.65M copies just in the UK. I haven’t been able to find final numbers for the book in Britain. Is it possible that in the ensuing five years Deathly Hallows failed to sell another 1.4M copies in the UK? I guess. But that seems implausible.

Then there’s this story from 2008 claiming that the Harry Potter series has sold 400M copies, worldwide.

Again, that’s not dispositive. But I can’t really imagine how a series selling only 4M+ copies could outrank any of the HP books–unless they mean that it’s outselling them right at this minute.

I emailed the the reporter from the Verge. We’ll see what he says.

This blog began in 2004 basically because of Russian gymnast Svetlana Khorkina. Here’s the first post about her:

 Obsessing over Svetlana Khorkina tonight, I caught NBC’s Very Special Package on the Russian gymnast. “I know that people look at me,” she says to the camera. “They watch me.”

“I have been great for a long time,” she says.

Speaking of these Olympics, she tells the NBC crew: “I want to win as badly as I want to mother my own child. . . . I will go there and get what belongs to me.”

I mention this only as an excuse to re-re-link to the greatest Cintra Wilson column of all time about Khorkina: The Movie. Totally, completely epic:

Later that night in the competition, Sveta advances to the parallel bars — her strongest event — but, after several mind-boggling swoops through the air, misses the bar and falls miserably onto her knees. She stands on the mat, humiliated, her sequined leotard torn at one shoulder, rivulets of body glitter streaking down her cheeks along with her tears.

“As Jesus is watch me, I will never, never,” she growls, clenching her fists, “never let one of those little bitch win me at the event again, as long as I am alive. I will eat her face.”

Thunderous music. The crowd applauds for Sveta despite her terrible failure. Sveta beats her breast and bites her cheek hard enough to enable her to spit blood at the audience, cursing them all in Russian: “May you have four generations of harelipped children!”

One of Sveta’s young protigis wins a separate event, against her. Crying with joy, the younger girl runs to Sveta for approval. Sveta whispers: “Go away from me and die, you tiny whore.” She smiles and hugs the confused girl for the cameras.

What makes it all so perfect is that it’s maybe half a degree off from the real thing. Here, for instance, is the Khorkina discussing her competition at the 2004 Olympics:

“These little girls don’t have my experience, my maturity and my pleasure to the public.”

Svetlana Khorkina–maybe the greatest heel in the history of sports. I miss her.

Courtesy of Galley Friend R.S.–Instapaper’s Marco Arment’s review of John Siracusa’s review of OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. Sample awesome:

 The 10.8 review maintains Siracusa’s standard at approximately 26,000 words, an impressive feat given that the interval between 10.7 and 10.8 was much shorter than most previous OS X update intervals.

This is not a quick read, so it’s a good opportunity to try a read-later method such as Safari’s Reading List, which Apple invented completely on their own.