General

My post on the [six-hour scene](http://johnaugust.com/archives/2008/the-six-hour-scene) dovetails nicely with this speech by Clay Shirky, which argues that we’re living in an era that’s wrestling with a cognitive surplus:

> So how big is that surplus? So if you take Wikipedia as a kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project–every page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in every language that Wikipedia exists in–that represents something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of thought.

Where this line of reasoning gets fascinating is when you factor in other ways people spend their surplus, such as television:

> Let’s say that everything stays 99 percent the same, that people watch 99 percent as much television as they used to, but 1 percent of that is carved out for producing and for sharing. The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That’s about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 10,000 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.

I haven’t read Shirky’s book yet, but the article is [worth a look](http://www.herecomeseverybody.org/2008/04/looking-for-the-mouse.html).

(Thanks to [John Gruber](http://daringfireball.net) for the link.)

foot clutter: the tendency for people’s feet to get stacked up unnaturally when combining single shots together to form a group shot.

Example:

This is from the promo materials in development for the web pilot. Each character needs to be in its own layer, so they can stack up for animated graphics.

Here’s a useful bookmark: [click it](http://www.unled.net/) and it will generate a first name and last name from the U.S. Census data. Refresh to try again.

So far, I’ve ended up with Michael Nickle, Sandra Gray, Jeffrey Silva and Tricia Lenz. Those might not be names for my theoretical deep-sea cowboy, but for That Guy in The Office? Perfect.

Thanks to [kottke](http://www.kottke.org/remainder/08/04/15401.html) for the link.

What the heck is a two-handed comedy? Google turns up lots of two-handed comedies, but no one explains what that means.

— jb

I don’t know if Variety invented it, but it shows up in their [slanguage dictionary](http://www.variety.com/index.asp?layout=slanguage&query=slanguage):

> **two-hander** — a play or movie with two characters; ” ‘Love Letters’ has been one of the most popular two-handers of the ’90s.” (See also: one-hander)

It’s worth looking through Variety’s made-up words list to help figure out what the hell they’re saying. In about 10% the cases, they’ve coined a term for something that probably merited a word (“kudocast,” “lense”). The other 90% are just color (“distribbery,” “ayem”).

The term that gets the most play is “ankle”:

> **ankle** — A classic (and enduring) Variety term meaning to quit or be dismissed from a job, without necessarily specifying which; instead, it suggests walking; “Alan Smithee has ankled his post as production prexy at U.”

This is probably an example of the [Sapir-Whorf hypothesis](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis): in Hollywood, no high-level executive is ever fired. They simply leave their job. By using a deliberately ambiguous term, Variety maintains the illusion that everything happens by choice.

Trivia: It’s hard to believe, but Variety apparently first coined the term “sex appeal.”