randomwalks/dj

New guide to switching to OpenStreetMap: switch2osm.org Everything you need in one handy place: how-tos, links, and why. #switch2osm

— Stamen (@stamen) January 25, 2012

I mentioned a few weeks ago that I was hoping to see more adoption of Open Street Maps this year, and the new site Switch2OSM.org is a clearinghouse for resources to do just that, ranging from "Why Switch?" to different tiling sets & server strategies. With Google's recent announcement that they're going to share data and identity between projects & products, I expect this initiative will find the wind at it's back.

People don't think about location search as something that betrays confidential data, but of course it does — starting with where you live, work and shop. Of course lots of people proactively share this data with Foursquare, Facebook, Twitter, and other products, but as Google reduces the number of privacy controls that they allow users to control, they cede one of the last philosophical differences (advantages?) they had over Facebook.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 26, 2012 7:00 AM

Some of the best decisions and designs at 37signals have emerged from intensely contested debates. Not just between Jason and me, but from anyone in the company. When sparks fly, some truly great ideas come to light.

The catch is that the heat must arise around the decision itself. Debates go off track when personal biases or old grudges come into play. So long as each party sticks to the merits, adding some fire will only unearth new angles and concerns.

This energy is so important to how 37signals operates that I consider it every time we make a hire. Is this person willing to fight for what they believe in? Will they stand up to me, Jason, or anyone else in the company if they think we’re wrong?

Detecting this rebel streak requires looking at a person’s full persona: online debates, choice of technology, writing or work samples, often just the ability to debate or question the interviewer in person.

Sometimes it’s easier just to detect a negative. Someone who’s unlikely to ever question you or your ways. A “yes man” who has only wonderfully great things to say about everything we’ve ever done. That’s a red flag.

Regardless of how you do it, find people with enough spark to care, fight, and campaign for what they believe in. What pushes you and makes you question your beliefs will make your company that much better.

Originally posted by David from Signal vs. Noise, on January 26, 2012 5:14 AM

"Designed to be 100% off the grid, the 150-square-foot unit can be flat-packed and shipped in a box that is 4 x 10 x 3 feet in size."
—The perfect and adorable House Arc can be put together easily, they claim, although it's unclear how much it costs or how to buy one immediately. There is a rentable one beside a swimming pool in Hawaii, however, although you have to bring your own tiny bathroom. [Thanks, Kirsten!]

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Originally posted by Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin, on January 26, 2012 12:30 AM

When Daniel Reis isn't looking at pizza calendars, he's asking "Do you need five-and-a-half hours of Beyoncé and Jay-Z videos? Wait, let me rephrase that: here is the five-and-a-half-hour Beyoncé and Jay-Z playlist you desperately need." Thank you.

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Originally posted by Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin, on January 26, 2012 12:00 AM

There will be no shortage of talk about the size of the contract Detroit gave to Prince Fielder ... not to mention the size of the player himself. But for the moment, let's look at teams that have had two hitters as good as Fielder and Miguel Cabrera.

Among all MLB hitters over the past 3 seasons, Cabrera and Fielder rank #2 and #5(t) in OPS+:
Read the rest »

Originally posted by John Autin from High Heat Stats, on January 25, 2012 5:42 PM

Great product design involves thinking about what features to prioritize, planning the user flow from screen to screen, getting user feedback and lots more, but at the end of the day, someone is going to be in Photoshop pushing pixels. The final visual design of a digital interface isn't going to design itself, and when a designer is crafting the look and feel, here are some elements they're typically designing:

• Buttons
• Panels
• Windows
• Profile Pictures
• Icons

If you really think about it, most interfaces (especially for iOS apps) use tons of rounded rectangles in different shapes and sizes. Long and skinny ones with lots of shine. Squarer, flatter ones with some texture. Smaller, slightly inset ones with photos inside. The list just keeps on going. I actually joke around with friends that my main job is making rounded rectangles look great, so I thought it was time to show off some common techniques.

Drawing Them

It's important to keep your elements in Photoshop in vector format as long as you can because they can be scaled and re-styled easily. To draw a rounded rectangle, I use (gasp!) the Rounded Rectangle Tool with Snap To Pixels turned on. This is incredibly important or the edges of your shape will lie on a half-pixel and look blurry. There are some other ways to draw rounded rectangles in Photoshop (which Marc Edwards has conveniently outlined) but I typically stay with the vector shape tool because it's easy.

If the edges of your shape aren't sharp, then strokes/gradients/highlights/shadows you add later won't be perfect.

Up or Down?

If your goal is to craft subtle and realistic user interfaces that look and feel like real world surfaces, you'll be making a choice: is this element popping off the screen (convex) or indented into the screen (concave)? Buttons are convex whereas large panels containing text and other elements are typically concave.

On the left is a convex button that is designed to look like it's bulging off the screen. It appears bulged out because it's made to appear just like a convex object would appear in real life if it had 90°, top-down lighting. That means that 1) the light catches the top of the object and adds a lighter stripe of highlight, 2) as the bottom bends back down towards the screen, the light is blocked and it gets darker (light-to-dark gradient), and 3) it casts a very subtle shadow, indicating that it's sitting on top of the surface. This specific combination of highlights, gradients and shadows is the most basic way to make a rounded rectangle appear bulged out and convex.

On the right is a larger panel that is designed to look inset into the screen. The fill color is a mostly-transparent black, it has some inner shadows, and then a thin white drop shadow at the bottom. If we analyze this using the same lighting conditions as the previous example, it's made to look sunken in because 1) the edges or lips of the shape are at the surface and cast an inner shadow inside (these edges block light like an awning off a building blocks the rain, causing a shadow) and 2) as the bottom edge of the shape comes back up to meet the surface, the light catches that lip and causes an edge highlight.

Download this PSD here.

Pictures

Most iPhone apps that display profile images have them look slightly sunken into the surface or popped out and semi-glossy. This is achieved with mainly the same techniques from above, but for the glossy one I added a diagonal gloss line (a white-to-transparent gradient cut into a triangle) as a separate layer.

Download this PSD here.

Mixing It Up

Although there are distinct elements common in most convex-or-concave elements, there's no special formula for how to accomplish these effects in Photoshop. I typically tweak size and opacity sliders on Inner Glow, Inner Shadow, Stroke and Drop Shadow layer styles until things look good. Other people are Bevel & Emboss specialists. Here are some more examples of rounded rectangles styled in some different (but reusable!) ways.

Download this PSD here.

Scratching The Surface

These are just some of the myriad ways you can style and use rounded rectangles in your interfaces. If you really want to see some creative designs, check out some icon designs on Dribbble. All it takes is some imagination and experimentation, and you can use gorgeous rounded rectangle designs throughout your interface.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Flyosity: Mike Rundle's interface design blog, on January 25, 2012 5:34 PM

Here's a creative solution for city dwellers looking to maximize space: Brooklyn-based architect Peter Pawlak integrated a pair of built-in desks right into a couple's bedroom, creating a home office that can be hidden away when not in use.

Pawlak found a way to provide a versatile work area for the couple, who envisioned a functional space that would conceal all evidence of their work lives; when the desk tops are closed, the built-in unit acts as a console.

Above: Pawlak used anigre wood veneer for the built-ins and seagrass wallpaper to echo the color of the veneer. A pair of Eames Soft Pad Chairs from Herman Miller have rubber wheels, which protects the fumed oak floors.

Above: The desks feature unobstructed legroom; when closed, they function as a console for art and books.

.

Above: The desktops open and close with spring-loaded levers on both sides; the lid raises to reveal a corkboard on the underside. The drawers hold files and also conceal the printer.

Originally posted by Alex from Remodelista, on January 25, 2012 1:30 PM

Tens of thousands of Egyptians gathered in Tahrir Square in Cairo today to mark the anniversary of the uprising that eventually led to the ousting of President Hosni Mubarak. Political divides are still in force with liberals and Islamists differing on their visions for the future of the country. Mubarak is now on trial for complicity in the deaths of protesters. The uprising in Egypt last year was one of the initial protests of what is called the Arab Spring, which has included the slaying of Libyan leader Moammar Khadafy and the ongoing protests in Syria. -- Lloyd Young (31 photos total)

Egyptians gather in their thousands in Tahrir Square to mark the one year anniversary of the revolution on Jan. 25, 2012 in Cairo Egypt. Tens of thousands have gathered in the square on the first anniversary of the Arab uprising which toppled President Hosni Mubarak. (Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on January 25, 2012 10:05 AM

Here we go again.

It looks like Red Hat is distributing Perl without the core library ExtUtils::MakeMaker. If you're not familiar with the details of the Perl 5 build chain, all you need to know is this: without MakeMaker, you're not installing anything from the CPAN.

Ostensibly Red Hat and other OS distribution vendors split up Perl 5 into separate packages to save room on installation media. Core Perl 5 is large and includes many, many things that not everyone uses all the time... but the obvious reaction to defining a core subset of Perl 5 that a vendor can call "perl" is another of those recurring discussions which never quite goes anywhere.

For example, who needs the documentation just to run code? (Except that the diagnostics pragma relies on the existence of perldiag.pod to run.) Who needs the huge Unicode encoding tables for ideographic languages such as you might find in Japan, China, Korea, and other Asian locals? (Answer: Asia.) Who needs the ability to install code from the CPAN? (Answer: users.)

While there's a lot of stuff in the core that probably doesn't need to be in the core, or at least installed by default (a LaTex formatter for POD, the deprecated Switch module, Perl 5.005 Thread emulation), one thing is both clear and almost never said.

I'll give you a moment to think about it.

Here's a hint: you're usually better off compiling and installing your own Perl 5 under your complete control such that you can compile in options you want (64-bit integers, for example) and out options you don't (threading imposes a 15% performance penalty even in the single-threaded case) and so that you can manage your own library paths without changing the behavior of the system). perlbrew changes the game. Learn it, like it, love it.

The perpetual discussion misses one important point:

The vendor perl—especially on installation media—is not for general purpose Perl programming. It's there only to support basic administrative programs provided with the system as a whole. That's why you don't replace the system Perl. That's why you don't mess with the system CPAN modules. That's why you fence off whatever's in /usr/bin/perl like it's Yucca Mountain and you're stuck with a '50s reactor design instead of something safe and clean.

Vendors can tune and tweak that Perl to their satisfaction to provide just what they need to install and configure a working system. They can keep it as crufty and out of date as they like. When it breaks, they get to keep all of the pieces and sew them back together like some sort of Fedorastein's monster. They just can't let it out of the lab.

This of course means that they need to provide packages of Perl 5 Actual for users and developers such that it's the full core of Perl 5. (It'd be nice if they called not-a-perl as such, but one thing at a time.)

You can't predict what users will and won't do. That's why you code defensively. The moment distributions started carving up Perl to install just the little bits they needed in the hopes that their guesses as to what users wanted were right, they put everyone in a bind.

Certainly Perl 5 could benefit from a thorough review of what's in core and why, but I suspect that even if p5p came up with packaging guidelines for all of the imaginable use cases and combinations of distributor needs and user wants, it still wouldn't solve the real problem.

(Credit Allison Randal for pointing out the real problem years ago. We've discussed several times the idea of a stripped-down VM for a real language—something with better abstraction and reuse than Bash—with easy access to libraries and a very small footprint, but it's a bigger job than either of us could accomplish. It's still a righter approach than bowdlerizing an upstream distribution.)

Originally posted by chromatic from Modern Perl Books for modern Perl programming, on January 25, 2012 9:46 AM

doyle partners' design scheme helps visitors remember history at the former site of the yankee stadium.

read more

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Designboom - Weblog, on January 25, 2012 9:32 AM

From Drinks

About the Author: You may have seen Michael Neff behind the bar at New York's Ward III and The Rum House. He stops by on Wednesdays to share insights on cocktails and the life of a barman.

More Behind The Bar

So You Want to Be a Bartender »
What Makes a Good Bar »
On Vodka Sodas and First Dates »
On Fernet Branca »
So You Want to Open a Bar »
My Cocktail Costs How Much? »

What I'm Drinking:
Great King Street Artist's Blend Scotch Whisky (neat)

There has been an interesting comment that that keeps popping up in the threads of these columns. It goes something like this:

I'm sick of the trend where bartenders think that they are god's gift to humanity. Your job is to make drinks, not to educate, babysit, or judge people. So do us all a favor; stow the attitude, and do your job."

What, exactly, is my job? As a bartender, am I a nightlife impresario who is responsible for the totality of my guests' experience, or am I a robot trained to take a few spirits, pour them in to a glass, and take people's money? In the first case, I must rely on my judgement and perspicacity to make sure that the people who sit at my bar get the experience they deserve. In the second, my most valuable asset is my ability to make drinks quickly, efficiently, and correctly.

In reality, it's a bit of both. What my job actually is depends entirely on where I happen to be working.

For example: a big bar will often come equipped with hoards of employees and complicated management structures. Is there a fight about to break out? Let's get the security manager down here. Someone needs to be cut off? That's for the floor manager. Often, a bartender is neither expected nor allowed to do anything but call someone who has a higher level of authority when a situation arises that is more complicated than making a drink and serving it.

But that's not how it works in smaller bars. Most bartenders don't have the luxury of passing off their problems to other people. In almost every bar I've ever worked, the bartenders were responsible for everything from choosing the music, counting the money, cleaning the bathrooms, dealing with unruly guests, sweeping up broken glass, and everything in between. If a neighbor called to complain about the noise, we had to fix the problem. If a person fell down and hit her head, we had to call the ambulance and prevent a lawsuit. All while making drinks, serving food, and making sure that everyone was having a good time.

One of the best bars I've ever worked, a place called Grace, was exactly this type of gig. At Grace, there was no higher level of authority to call if we had a problem. We were managers, hosts, bouncers, and bartenders at the same time. While we would certainly have cut off someone who had too much to drink, it was more important that we monitor what everyone was drinking to prevent such problems from happening in the first place. We learned very quickly that, if a crowd of drinkers is not controlled, it can quickly get out of control.

Think of it this way. When you are standing at a bar on a busy Friday night, you see a bartender or two, a register full of cash, and a whole lot of booze. When I'm working, I see the opposite: one hundred fifty people, all well in their cups, any of whom could decide at any moment that they can do anything they feel like, and there is no one to tell them differently. How is it possible that so few people can keep control of so many? We do it by establishing our authority and dealing with any deviations from acceptable behavior as firmly and directly as possible. We have to; there are usually a lot more of you than there are of us.

Does this make me seem cocky? Probably, especially to the person testing my limits. Self-important? Maybe, but we bartenders are not only there to serve you, we are also responsible for your safety, and that of everyone in the bar. There is a big difference between acting important and having an important job to do.

So the question posed above—what is a bartenders job—has a third answer. In most joints, our job is not to just make drinks, it is managing a throng of drinkers. At the end of the day, most people just want to sit down and enjoy a drink in a cool bar that makes them feel good. We bartenders are there to make sure that is possible by controlling the chaos. If we do our jobs well, a balance is struck between adults having a few drinks, and drunks running roughshod over an establishment.

Hey, NYC fans of From Behind the Bar! Michael Neff will be teaching this class on tasting and understanding spirits from micro-distilleries at the Astor Center on February 10th.

Originally posted by Michael J. Neff from Serious Eats, on January 25, 2012 9:30 AM

From the 1890s until the 1960s, the location and orientation of stamps on postcards were used for the transmission of secret messages.

For all those who are in the situation of Hero and Leander, and similarly to them can only exchange secret signs about the feelings of their hearts, here we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don't write me any more. Top right, thwart: Write me immediately. Top right, upright [once more again???]: Your love makes me happy. Top left, across: My heart belongs to someone else. Top left, upright: I love you. Bottom left, across: Leave me alone in my grief. In line with the name: Accept my love. Same place, across: I wish to see you. Same place, upside down: I love someone else.

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 25, 2012 9:20 AM

An interview with Jason Kottke on The Verge. Jason’s blog is still, consistently, the blog to read. Even more so now that he’s able to draw from Stellar.

I have two invitations to Stellar to hand out. Just ask: @torrez.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 25, 2012 9:17 AM

From a story in the Wall Street Journal:

Instead of asking for résumés, the New York venture-capital firm—which has invested in Twitter, Foursquare, Zynga and other technology companies—asked applicants to send links representing their "Web presence," such as a Twitter account or Tumblr blog...

Companies are increasingly relying on social networks such as LinkedIn, video profiles and online quizzes to gauge candidates' suitability for a job. While most still request a résumé as part of the application package, some are bypassing the staid requirement altogether...

Originally posted by Minnesotastan from TYWKIWDBI ("Tai-Wiki-Widbee"), on January 25, 2012 8:54 AM

avocadosalad:

gopy everyday.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from lather rinse repeat, on January 25, 2012 8:20 AM

Clip after clip of formerly intact objects (boats, planes, buildings) being destroyed in a matter of seconds.

(via @unlikelywords)

Tags: video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 25, 2012 8:07 AM

Letters of Note ran a 1955 letter from advertising legend David Ogilvy that details his process for writing advertising copy.

I have never written an advertisement in the office. Too many interruptions. I do all my writing at home.

Tags: advertising   David Ogilvy   writing

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 25, 2012 7:12 AM

[ by way of ]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on January 25, 2012 7:09 AM

Did you make a new year’s resolution to:

• find a new programming job?
• learn a new software language?
• finally build a Rails or iOS app?

Need some help keeping your goal? We can help. We have 3 upcoming Studios designed solely to help developers learn to build outstanding iOS or Rails apps for either themselves or their current company, or to find a new job doing so.

Ruby on Rails

March 20-22 in Reston, VA

Register

During this hands-on course, you'll learn the fundamentals of Rails by creating a full-featured app from start to finish. Over three days you will:

• Learn how to use the core features of Rails 3.2, and put them all together to build web apps like the pros.
• Get a jump start and get your questions answered so you can start crafting your own Rails applications with confidence.
• Save time and frustration by focusing exclusively on Ruby and Rails development for three days with expert guidance.

This course is intended for:

• Web programmers looking to get into Ruby on Rails development. (There are a lot of companies actively hiring Rails talent!)

• Small programming teams that need to get up to speed quickly on Rails.

• New team members who are programming Rails for the first time.

You'll come away from this course ready to create your first Rails app, or improve your existing app! Check out the full course description and all the details.

iPhone/iPad Programming

March 6-9 in Denver, CO

April 10-13 in Reston, VA

Register

Attending this hands-on programming course is a great way to quickly become productive as an iOS developer. Throughout the course you’ll build 6 example apps to boost your confidence and gain valuable experience. Over four days you will:

• Learn how to use the major tools and APIs in the latest iOS 5.0 SDK
• Get hands-on coding experience through exercises and labs
• Become proficient using Xcode 4.2, Objective-C, and Cocoa Touch programming
• Save time and frustration by focusing exclusively on iOS development for four days with expert guidance.

This course is intended for:

• Experienced programmers who are new to iOS development.

• New iOS programmers who have started building an app and need help putting all the pieces together.

• Small programming teams that need to get up to speed quickly on building iOS apps.

You'll come away from this course with the skills and knowledge to create your first iOS app, or improve your existing app. Check out the full course description and all the details.

Reserve your seat in the Studio today and make 2012 a great year for advancing your career! Register for March's courses by early February and save $400!

Originally posted by Nicole Clark from The Pragmatic Studio, on January 25, 2012 6:55 AM

Breaking Out and Breaking In: A Distributed Film Fest of Prison Breaks and Bank Heists kicks off Friday, January 27, sponsored by BLDGBLOG, Filmmaker Magazine, and Studio-X NYC.
[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath; view larger!].

Breaking Out and Breaking In is an exploration of the use and misuse of space in escapes and heists, where architecture is the obstacle between you and what you're looking for.

Watch the films at home—or anywhere you may be—and then come back to discuss the films here on BLDGBLOG. It's a "distributed" film fest; there is no central venue, just a curated list of films and a list of days on which to watch them. There's no set time, no geographic exclusion, and no limit to the food breaks or repeated scenes you might require. And it all leads up to a public discussion at Studio-X NYC on Tuesday, April 24.

The overall idea is to discuss breaking out and breaking in as spatial scenarios that operate as mirror images of one another, each process with its own tools, techniques, and unique forms of unexpected architectural expertise.

How do prisoners and burglars reinterpret the built environments around them? Where does this more aggressive understanding of space differ from the constructive insights of an architect—and how can a building be strategically unbuilt so as to get at what lies on the other side? What particular kind of spatial and temporal knowledge—where to tunnel, when to go—do these other users of buildings need to develop?

If burglary and prison breaks each require a kind of counter-manual of the city, then what might such a guide include—from precise time schedules and blindspots to the limits of surveillance—what points of weakness and unexpected parallels should it map, and what typologies of incisions or perforations would it posit to allow new routes through closed spaces?

The escape and the break-in here are both about illicit reinterpretations of space, sometimes violent, sometimes simply used against the grain, operating a building, we might say, in every way the architect—and the guards who police his or her creation—regrettably overlooked.

Conversely, how is space regulated and maintained from the standpoint of the police and the prison guard, or from the point of view of the homeowner who seeks to hide his or her private riches? What obstacles, blockades, misdirections, decoys, safe rooms, and security systems must be implemented to ensure that a given space is properly accessed?

[Image: Breaking Out and Breaking In poster by Atley Kasky and Keith Scharwath].

These are all recurring themes here on BLDGBLOG, where, over the years, we've discussed how to plan the perfect heist or to perforate a skyscraper, and how to worm your way through the interlinked foundations of London; and perhaps we might say that 19th-century architect George Leonidas Leslie, who used his spatial skills to become "the head of the most successful gang of bankrobbers known," is, in a sense, our festival's mascot or patron saint.

Over the next four months, we will be discussing these questions and many more—from how certain sequences in these films were shot to the stage sets constructed to produce them—culminating in a public event at Studio-X NYC in April.

Of course, not all of these films are escapes from prisons as such or heists specifically aimed at banks; instead, we'll explore what it means to break out from an overly managed suburban life in The Truman Show and how an elaborate home invasion goes wrong in Panic Room; we'll watch the perfectly timed dream-physics kicks and corporate secrets of Inception as well as a team of German terrorists robbing the vaults of the Nakatomi Building of its negotiated bearer bonds. And our list is by no means exhaustive, with some films chosen less for their cinematic quality or the depth of their characterization than for their discussability or the originality of their spatial propositions.

So, in order of viewing, this distributed film fest of prison breaks and bank heists includes:

—Breaking Out—

Friday, January 27, 2012
Grand Illusion (dir. Jean Renoir, 1937)

Monday, January 30, 2012
A Man Escaped (dir. Robert Bresson, 1956)

Friday, February 3, 2012
The Great Escape (dir. John Sturges, 1963)

Monday, February 6, 2012
Cool Hand Luke (dir. Stuart Rosenberg, 1967)

Monday, February 13, 2012
Papillon (dir. Franklin J. Schaffner, 1973)

Friday, February 17, 2012
Escape from Alcatraz (dir. Don Siegel, 1979)

Monday, February 20, 2012
Escape from New York (dir. John Carpenter, 1981)

Friday, February 24, 2012
Cube (dir. Vincenzo Natali, 1997)

Monday, February 27, 2012
The Truman Show (dir. Peter Weir, 1998)

Friday, March 2, 2012
The Escapist (dir. Rupert Wyatt, 2008)

—Breaking In—

Monday, March 19, 2012
Rififi (dir. Jules Dassin, 1955)

Friday, March 23, 2012
The Day They Robbed the Bank of England (dir. John Guillermin, 1960)

Monday, March 26, 2012
The Italian Job (dir. Peter Collinson, 1969) vs. The Italian Job (dir. F. Gary Gray, 2003)

Friday, March 30, 2012
Dog Day Afternoon (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1975) vs. The Third Memory (dir. Pierre Huyghe, 1999)

Monday, April 2, 2012
Die Hard (dir. John McTiernan, 1988)

Friday, April 6, 2012
Following (dir. Christopher Nolan, 1998)

Monday, April 9, 2012
Panic Room (dir. David Fincher, 2002)

Friday, April 13, 2012
Inside Man (dir. Spike Lee, 2006)

Monday, April 16, 2012
The Bank Job (dir. Roger Donaldson, 2008)

Friday, April 20, 2012
Inception (dir. Christopher Nolan, 2010)

Again, you can watch the films wherever you might be, from the Lower East Side to Rotterdam, from Toronto and Mumbai to Beijing, and then join the relevant comment threads here on BLDGBLOG (posted, I hope, within a day or two of the screening date). Further, look out for some original analyses on Filmmaker Magazine as the festival unfolds.

Finally, stop by Studio-X NYC on the evening of Tuesday, April 24, for a free public discussion featuring a stellar group of panelists soon to be announced.

I hope many of you will participate in this experiment in film curation!

(New Yorkers, note that Robert Bresson's A Man Escaped happens to be screening this week at Film Forum, so it might be a good idea to catch it before it leaves the theater).

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, on January 25, 2012 6:49 AM

David Galbraith updated his post on where the web was invented (which includes an interview with Tim Berners-Lee) to include the juicy tidbit that the building in which TBL invented the web is in France, not Switzerland.

I'll bet if you asked every French politician where the web was invented not a single one would know this. The Franco-Swiss border runs through the CERN campus and building 31 is literally just a few feet into France. However, there is no explicit border within CERN and the main entrance is in Switzerland, so the situation of which country it was invented in is actually quite a tricky one. The current commemorative plaque, which is outside a row of offices where people other than Tim Berners-Lee worked on the web, is in Switzerland. To add to the confusion, in case Tim thought of the web at home, his home was in France but he temporarily moved to rented accommodation in Switzerland, just around the time the web was developed. So although, strictly speaking, France is the birthplace of the web it would be fair to say that it happened in building 31 at CERN but not in any particular country! How delightfully appropriate for an invention which breaks down physical borders.

Tags: CERN   David Galbraith   France   Switzerland   Tim Berners-Lee   WWW

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on January 25, 2012 5:41 AM

If you're participating in Paper Garbage/Write Your Friends month, here's an additional way to pass them information:

[H]ere we publish the secrets of the language of stamps. If the stamp stands upright in the upper right corner of the card or envelope, it means: I wish your friendship. Top right, across: Do you love me? Top right, upside down: Don’t write me any more.

And so forth. (Including "You're right about my lady-friend" — right-hand top corner.) There doesn't yet seem to be code for "Inside this package you will find a piece of beautiful coded jewelry, from me to you, for no reason," but we could probably come up with something. [Via]

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See more posts by Edith Zimmerman

22 comments

Originally posted by Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin, on January 25, 2012 5:30 AM

PDFpen 5.7 now supports iCloud and has a companion iPad app. Since Apple doesn’t allow non–Mac App Store apps to access iCloud, people who bought PDFpen direct from Smile need to purchase the 99-cent PDFpen Cloud Access app. It looks like they’ve made the best of a bad situation.

Last March, I wrote “Would anyone be surprised if future versions of Mac OS X made additional features and APIs available only to App Store apps?” and was immediately called out for “blatant FUD.” Less than a year later, not only has this has come to pass, but people seem to be treating it as expected.

It’s no longer possible to write a single app that takes advantage of the full range of Mac OS X features. Some APIs only work inside the Mac App Store. Others only work outside it. Presumably, this gap will widen as more new features are App Store–exclusive, while sandboxing places greater restrictions on what App Store apps are allowed to do.

Originally posted by Michael Tsai from Michael Tsai, on January 25, 2012 5:19 AM

The latest instalment of Asaf Hanuka’s The Realist.

Originally posted by johnmartz from Drawn, on January 25, 2012 5:18 AM

A series dedicated to explaining Britain's manufactured celebrities to an American audience.

Here’s a fun game to play—well, when I say “fun game to play” I suppose I really mean “grim illustration of late capitalism’s warped values that might fleetingly distract you from the pointless quagmire of your own existence.” Anyhoo, fingers on buzzers: of the following, which genre of news story has the longest shelf-life in our ADD-pandering global media landscape: missing white girl with pretty blonde hair; white girl imprisoned for grisly murder; or famous married man sexing women who aren’t his wife? The answer, as established by the indefatigable wonks at Princeton’s Department of Research Studies to Discuss on Buzzfeed or Reddit, is that all three enjoy a statistically equal claim on our attention, and on average will attract 1,250 times the coverage of an outbreak of war, the discovery of a contagious fatal disease or a celebrity’s rad new hairstyle (not counting Jennifer Aniston but definitely counting Jennifers Lopez, Garner and Love Hewitt).

Or rather, that was the status quo until very recently. But the British press, not content with its phone hacking and privacy debates and Liz Joneses and what have you, has willfully thrown the whole delicate system into disarray with its unstinting, unwavering and well-nigh heroic focus on the romantic infidelity of footballer Ryan Giggs, who, it emerged last June (or roughly four centuries ago, in Internet years), had been cheating on his wife Stacey with yet another woman. Admittedly, that the woman in question was married to his younger brother lent some piquancy to the tale, but it is nonetheless impressive to behold the sheer number of daily headlines still dedicated to the “scandal” at the expense of actual news, aka stuff people don’t already know about in byzantine and queasy detail. So why do the casual indiscretions of this 38-year-old Welshman—winger for Manchester United, father of two, millionaire many times over—exert such a powerful pull on the media’s prurient gaze? Since it is this column’s burden and honor to shine a light into the very realms others fear to contemplate, let us seek answers, even if our quest erodes the vestigial fragments of our innocence, as it surely will. Read the full story at The Awl

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Originally posted by admin from The Hairpin, on January 25, 2012 4:30 AM

One of the more impressive DIY projects we've featured: a built-in desk made from plumbing pipes and wood shelving by Houston-based firm Analog/Dialog.

We've been admiring shelving made from plumbing pipes for a while now, every since we spotted them at the Ace Hotel in Palm Springs (we hadn't seen a version that incorporates a desk until this project, however). The best on-line tutorial for creating something similar comes from Morgan Satterfield of The Brick House; she used different lengths of plumbing pipes (all measuring a half inch in diameter) and three types of fittings, which she spray-painted black. The shelving is made of pine wood planks which were sanded and given a walnut stain. For those intrepid enough to take this on, we refer you to Satterfield's step-by-step instructions.

Above: A nice example of the plumbing-fixtures desk by Houston-based firm Analog/Dialog.

Above: The entire shelving unit, impressive in size and function.

Originally posted by Izabella from Remodelista, on January 25, 2012 4:30 AM

“You will not grasp how this furniture came into being or what it really means unless you understand this also about Charles Eames.”

Charles and Ray Eames have pioneered modernist furniture, carved out a new way to think about design, and even changed our understanding of the scales of the universe. Appearing in the September 1946 issue of arts & architecture magazine is a fantastic profile of Charles Eames (PDF) by industrial designer and architect Eliot Noyes, most famous for the IBM Selectric typewriter. Noyes captures Eames’ sprit and vision with equal parts creative admiration, entrepreneurial appreciation, and astute observation of the deeper cultural resonance — with a special emphasis on the designer’s personal values of integrity and intuition (more on that) as the building blocks of his professional legacy.

There is no need to qualify the statement. Charles Eames has designed and produced the most important group of furniture ever developed in this country. His achievement is a compound of aesthetic brilliance and technical inventiveness. He has not only produced the finest chairs of modern design, but through borrowing, improvising, and inventing techniques, he has for the first time exploited the possibilities of mass production methods for the manufacture of furniture. With one stroke he has underlined the design decadence and technical obsolescence of Grand Rapids.

When you stop and try to analyze how he approached the problem, it sounds very easy and obvious. Whatever good modern furniture we have had in this country has always been expensive. Eames wanted to produce a good set of designs and ‘take them out of the carriage trade’ by designing them so that they could be economically in quantity and sold cheaply. This meant that he must be able to use the best ways of doing things that the 20th Century could offer. Naturally he wanted his furniture to be as comfortable and useful as possible, because he never forgot that he was making his designs for use. This very direct approach made it comparatively simple. He never worried much (as many designers do) about ‘what the public wants,’ or ‘what the public will accept,’ because he had a profound belief in the public, and the conviction that if they didn’t want or wouldn’t accept the furniture which he was designing for their use, the fault lay in his designs, not in the public. He knew very well the absurdity of trying to design to an assumed public taste. It is important to realize that the furniture is an expression of this direct approach; each piece is composed as much of the personal ingredients of Charles Eames as of wood and metal. If you examine this furniture, you will find sincerity, honesty, conviction, affection, imagination, and humor. You will not grasp how this furniture came into being or what it really means unless you understand this also about Charles Eames.”

For more on the Eames’ work and legacy, don’t miss the fantastic recent film Eames: The Architect and the Painter.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

Originally posted by Maria Popova from Brain Pickings, on January 25, 2012 4:00 AM

Quick, name a website. Could be any, doesn't matter.

Photo by Simone Andress, via Shutterstock

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Originally posted by Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin, on January 25, 2012 3:30 AM

Mary Tremonte Wolf Hanky silkscreen printed bandana $7 AAAAAAOOOOOOO! Be part of the pack or a lone wolf, it's up to you... These Wolf Hankys were printed in honor of an "Up the Wolf Dykes" Operation Sappho queer danceparty, but I had been thinking a lot about the next animal to be honored with a bandana design, waiting for it to come to me... Wolves have so many connotations across cultures, I encourage you to make your own meaning with these enigmatic animals. Click here for a closeup of the full hanky: View image Please specify black, red, purple, or light blue, or we will choose for you! 22 x 22" hand-silkscreened on pre-sized 100% cotton

Originally posted by Mary Tremonte from Justseeds: Store, on January 25, 2012 12:07 AM

here's the awesome preview, with responsive design, new plugins, and tons of new components  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on January 25, 2012 12:05 AM

"She looked quite uncomfortable and unstable. ... We began to consider what might be happening at the muscle and tendon level."
—Scientists Look at the Dangers of High Heels.

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Originally posted by Edith Zimmerman from The Hairpin, on January 25, 2012 12:00 AM

I’ve become fond of a weblog called Everyday Carry. When I decided to dust off my newsreader I asked some friends for their OPMLs so I could see what they were reading and Everyday Carry was one that came in a bundle of consumer-centric feeds Adam Mathes read for Decommodify.

The basic idea is people send in photos of what they carry every day, with a little summary of what the items are and possibly a little backstory on how they acquired the item. The goal seems to be minimalism crossed with preparedness, and so there is a theme amongst the enthusiasts that I’ve been able to observe. Most carry a light, a bit of rope, a hook of some sort, a small number of keys (usually one), a knife, a wallet, and a watch.

Each post has a followup by the editor thanking them for the contribution and praising or offering a gentle suggestion about how they could achieve a more efficient everyday carry.

There are no Amazon encoded links to buy your own, that feels noteworthy.

Some time ago I decided I would not carry a bag and laptop into work. I keep my work iMac at the office and commute with only my keys, a wallet, and iPhone (with standard earbuds). My keys have an Inka Pen keychain that has saved me more times than I can count.

I don’t imagine I would ever submit to Everyday Carry, but the site is a bright spot as I read through my feeds.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on January 24, 2012 8:24 PM

‘Help!’ by Carbine

Originally posted by (author unknown) from it is all gone, david, on January 24, 2012 5:09 PM

A young Prince Fielder knew the future. I think this means the Giants are winning the Superbowl.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 24, 2012 2:46 PM

Today’s News in Pictures:

This has been Today’s News in Pictures. This has been your Daguerreotype of the Evening.

(Tiger-striped Zubaz pants: BTF)

Originally posted by Dayn Perry from NotGraphs Baseball, on January 24, 2012 2:25 PM

This Madrid-based designer has a stunning portfolio that uses a contemporary, intricate take on modernism. He’s also apparently a collage artist, as suggested in this poster he designed for what looks like a show of his collage works.

He seems like someone I would like to meet. Visit his site here.

To follow me on Twitter click here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Subtraction.com, on January 24, 2012 11:24 AM

I received a press release this morning from a new political action group; Patriots for Self-Deportation, announcing the launch of their website SelfDeport.org. Taking inspiration from Presidential Candidate Mitt Romney's recent endorsement of self deportation as the only logical, humane and responsible solution to the cancer of illegal immigration, the group's spokesman Stephen Winters has this to say: "A surprising number of authentic patriots have found in their own genealogical searches that one or more of their ancestors came here or stayed here illegally, and yet continued to make a living in this country and have children who in turn became instant citizens. Some patriots, faced with this moral dilemma, have decided to set an example for others. Knowing that their own presence in this country is not on moral solid ground, they have decided to demonstrate the highest level of civic dedication and sacrifice, and engage in self-deportation. "

As a newly-minted US citizen, it made me flush with pride to see that there are patriots out there willing to step up and kick themselves out of the country they call home, simply because of some irregularity in their ancestors' arrival proceedings. I'm looking into it myself.

Originally posted by Roger Peet from Justseeds: Blog, on January 24, 2012 10:08 AM

From Slice

It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post. Become a fan of The Food Lab on Facebook or follow it on Twitter for play-by-plays on future kitchen tests and recipe experiments.

[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]

There are some folks out there—some call them purists, I call them nuisances—who are pizza prescriptivists. These are the folks who'll tell you that, say, Chicago deep dish isn't pizza, or that if it doesn't have cheese or sauce on it, it can't be pizza. Or that pizza is always round, or that if it's not made with DOP tomatoes, it ain't the real deal.

These folks are, of course, all wrong. For if lack-of-depth, Italian tomatoes, round shape, and cheese were all requirement for pizza, then vegans (like my temporary self), Chicagoans, non-Italians, and those suffering from elipsaphobia would not be able to eat much pizza. And according to my moral philosophy—let's call it pizzism—any set of rhetoric that results in less people eating pizza must be fundamentally flawed at some level, most likely a very deep one.

Pizza need not have sauce or cheese in order for it to be insanely delicious. Exhibit A: Pizza Bianca. The long, flat, lightly dimpled, flecked-with-coarse salt, crisp-on-the-outside, just barely chewy bread sold by the square in Rome (or Sullivan street, if you prefer). Jeffrey Steingarten wrote at length about finding the perfect slice of pizza bianca at Forno, a bakery in Rome's Campo de' Fiori. I've been there. It's f*&king phenomenal (just ask Ed—he tasted pretty much the whole menu last May. My goal this week at The Pizza Lab is to bring some of that crisp, chewy, olive-oil soaked magic into my own kitchen.

The Dough

At first glance, pizza bianca looks pretty similar to certain types of focaccia, the olive-oil laden Italian bread, but the similarities are mostly superficial. Focaccia is made with an enriched dough—it has oil in it—which gives it a moister, softer texture with far less chew than pizza bianca, which is made with a lean dough.

If you actually take a look at how the suckers are made, you'd notice an even bigger difference: While focaccia are baked in a pan, pizza bianca are baked directly on the floor of the oven, much like a neapolitan pizza. The pie-men (is a pizza bianca still a pie?) will stretch the dough out to a length of about six feet on top of a monstrous paddle before dimpling it with their fingers to prevent large bubbles from forming (a major defect, according to Sullivan Street Bakery's Jim Lahey). It gets drizzled with olive oil and sprinkled with salt, then folded up accordion-style before being inserted deep into a 500-600°F oven and stretched back out with an agility that'd put WilyKit and WilyKat to shame.

Bad bubble!

While large, cavernous bubbles that char are considered a defect in pizza bianca, you still want an extremely open, wide hole structure in the crumb. The holiness of bread is pretty much directly proportional to the amount of water you add to it. Adding more water to your dough works in two ways:

• It adds more steam. When your dough goes into a hot oven, you probably notice that it expands significantly. This is due in large part to the conversion of water to steam within the bread. More water = more bubbles = airier, bubblier bread.
• It makes your gluten network looser. Gluten is the network of proteins that develops in bread dough when you combine flour and water. This network, when cooked, firms up, giving bread its structure. For optimal bubble formation, you want gluten that is very strong, yet very stretchy. Adding more water to your dough allows those bubbles to be stretched out extra-wide.

If you've followed The Pizza Lab thus far, you might remember a post in which I talked about hydration in the context of No-Roll, No-Stretch, Sicilian Style Square Pizza (and if you haven't followed, then read up!). In that post, I inadvertently managed to perfect a recipe for a focaccia-esque square pizza by adding a ton of extra water to my dough. While most pizza dough is made with a hydration level of around 65% to 70% (that is, the amount of water added weighs in at 70% of the amount of flour used), I took mine all the way up to 80%, producing a dough that nearly pours out of the mixer, yet bakes up into a supremely stretchy, light, and airy crumb.

In other words, perfect for pizza bianca.

With very wet doughs, I find that using the No Knead method is the easiest way to handle it. To develop gluten, you generally want to knead your dough to speed-up the linking process between the proteins in the flour. With the no-knead method, you simply stir together your basic ingredients (in this case bread flour, salt, yeast, and water), cover them, and let'em sit around overnight. During this time, enzymes in the flour get to work snipping up proteins and allowing them to easily link up to form gluten. An overnight rest also allows for time for some good flavor development as the yeast slowly digests the flour, creating a wide array of flavorful compounds.

Surface Tension

While the pie-men of Rome might have the training and agility to deftly shuffle 6-foot long pizzas in and out of a hot oven, I'm after more modest goals here. A couple feet long is good enough for me. Yet because of its high level of hydration, I found it very difficult—nearly impossible—to slide a pizza off my wooden peel onto a hot pizza stone without deforming it in some way.

What if I used the focaccia method of letting the dough rise directly in a rimmed baking sheet which I could then transfer to the oven?

That method works, and it's really easy—I was tempted to sign, seal, and deliver this thing as-is, but it wasn't quite right. The problem is on the undercarriage which comes out with the fried texture of focaccia or Greek pizza, not the dryer floury texture of good pizza bianca.

Delicious, but not what we're after.

I tried letting the dough rise on a sheet of parchment paper, thinking this would make it easier to transfer it to the oven. Nope. Still too wet to move without difficulty.

Turns out the easiest way is to use a hybrid method: line a rimmed baking sheet with parchment and let the dough rise directly inside. When ready to bake, I can then simply transfer the entire baking sheet to a hot pizza stone.

With the high temperatures needed for baking (550°F, or the highest your oven will go), the parchment paper rapidly browns and threatens to burn.

I found that by allowing the pizza to bake for about 5 minutes on its parchment sling, it became firm enough that I could then easily slide the parchment out from under it to allow it to continue baking directly on the stone. This also helped the bottom achieve a nicer charred-in-spots color.

Ah, now that's more like it!

Unevenly charred, nicely floury, not fried at all, with an interior crumb that's chewy and full of holes and a crisp upper crust.

The only mildly difficult part of the recipe is working with such an insanely wet dough. Unless you're an experienced baker, I'm not going to lie—your first few pies will come out deformed and misshapen. The good news? Slice it up and serve it and nobody will be the wiser. Even deformed pizza bianca tastes awesome.

If you're the type who likes rosemary, you could sprinkle a bit on top before baking along with your coarse salt. It would not be an insult to tradition. Then again, if you're the type who likes tomatoes and cheese or anchovies or thyme or gigantic slices of steak, you could also tell tradition to screw itself and follow the basic tenets of pizzism* to forge your own path towards that pie in the sky.

*There's only one commandment: thou shalt make every reasonable effort to increase the production and consumption of pizza in the universe.

Get The Recipe!

No Knead Pizza Bianca At Home! »

About the author: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt is the Managing Editor of Serious Eats where he likes to explore the science of home cooking in his weekly column The Food Lab. You can follow him at @thefoodlab on Twitter, or at The Food Lab on Facebook.

Get the Recipe!

Originally posted by J. Kenji López-Alt from Serious Eats, on January 24, 2012 10:00 AM

"Witches don't have children. Their bodies, creased and spidery, are not built for them. Children would distract and soften, steal attention from the spells at hand."
–"Toothed" is wonderful new short story by Leni Zumas about a modern day witch who drives a truck. It has a surprise ending!

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Originally posted by Jane Marie from The Hairpin, on January 24, 2012 7:00 AM

We like the Mondrian-esque palette of colors on these mirrors designed by Grain, which add both a touch of texture and color to the wall.

We've been keeping an eye on Grain, a Bainbridge Island, WA, collaborative, for a while now. Owners Chelsea Green and James Minola met during a course in Guatemala while studying at the Rhode Island School of Design. In 2008, the socially conscious couple launched a line of products created as sustainably as possible in the Pacific Northwest and in collaboration with artisan communities in Guatemala. We recently featured their popular shower curtain (see our previous post: Bath: Ty DIY Shower Curtain from Grain). The Bound Mirrors below feature hemp twine around the rim and are available in a selection of colors.

Above: Large Bound Mirror in Red Multi ($1,100) and Small Bound Mirror in Blue Multi ($750).

Above: The mirrors are made with FSC-certified Baltic birch plywood and hemp twine.

Above: The mirrors have a touch of color and texture.

Originally posted by Sarah from Remodelista, on January 24, 2012 6:30 AM

Was on IRC today and someone posted:

Which is a pretty handy guide to Catalyst dispatch flow.  ++ to whoever did it!

 

Originally posted by john from Modern Perl, on January 24, 2012 6:00 AM

I've been enjoying Tarajia Morrell's blog The Lovage recently, especially her appreciation of Harry Belafonte and the documentary Sing Your Song:

He used his gifts to shrewdly foster change and connect leaders to the masses. He is stoic and steadfast, refusing to be diverted from his path toward justice. At age eighty, he still tirelessly works on behalf of youths and minorities to try to right the mistakes that humanity can’t seem to stop perpetuating.

This seems like a decent time to remark how much I love this video of Obama singing the opening lines of "Let's Stay Together." Everyone's seen it but here it is again:^*

It's not just a good video because everyone loves Al Green, but also seems to mark a general thawing of the anxiety and disappointment surrounding Obama's presidency. It's not just that the Republican primaries have gone further off the deep end than even the most cynical lefty could have imagined (or hoped), it's that Obama seems to have reclaimed a confidence that was feared lost.

This is the kind of moment that cannot be scripted or acted. As he sings, he looks downward shyly. He loves Al Green - who doesn't? When the crowd applauds he looks at once surprised, appreciative, and embarrassed at the raucousness of their response. There's a difference between Obama's real smile and his "picture taken with a politician smile," and his sincerity is intoxicating. He briefly nods his head to the side in deference — a posture he rarely takes in public — to let the crowd know how much he's enjoying their reaction. Then the moment is over. He throws his shoulders back and reclaims his campaign persona, talking trash to his staff — an underrated staple of his stump speeches. Addressing Al Green (who is in the audience) he says: "Don't worry Reverend, I can't sing like you, but I just wanted to show my appreciation."

That's the essence of leadership: "I can't do what you do, but I appreciate how well you do it."

^*"Everyone's seen it but here it is again" is more or less my mission statement nowadays.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on January 24, 2012 5:44 AM

Introducing the newest member of the Streetsblog family… Luna Blue Evans-Snyder was born the afternoon of January 13. She weighed in at 6 pounds, 12 ounces.

As you might imagine, Tanya’s byline is going to be a little scarce over the next several weeks. If you’d like to send her well-wishes and recommendations for a good balance bike, you can reach her at tanya.c.snyder@gmail.com.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on January 24, 2012 5:02 AM

It's January. It's cold. I'm shaking the cobwebs off Loge13. So why not remember what it looked like to walk into Shea Stadium:

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on January 24, 2012 4:58 AM

Adam C. Engst:

Realizing this immediately raised my publisher hackles. “But, but, but,” I spluttered, “there’s no way in hell I’m going publish something that I can sell only in the iBookstore, and even then only if Apple approves it. There aren’t even any guidelines outlining what Apple will and will not approve!”

I think part of the complaining is about unrealized potential. Geeks don’t like to see what could be a general purpose tool limited for business or political reasons.

Originally posted by Michael Tsai from Michael Tsai, on January 24, 2012 4:26 AM

What five-year-old Albert Einstein can teach us about serendipity and the filter bubble of information.

A newborn baby would stare at a new image for an average of 41 seconds before becoming bored and tuning out on repeated showings — that’s how hard-wired our affinity for novelty is. In New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change, behavioral science writer Winifred Gallagher — whose treatise on the myth of multitasking you might recall — explores the evolutionary, biological, psychological, and cultural forces that drive our deep-seated neophilia, our tendency to ceaselessly seek out the new and different. From how our ability to respond to change saved us from extinction some 800,000 years ago to neophilia’s basic mind-body mechanisms to the profound ways in which the information age has altered our relationship with novelty, Gallagher examines the past and future of the quintessential tug-of-war between our need for survival, which relies on safety and stability, and our desire to thrive, which engenders stimulation, exploration, and innovation.

At this point in our warp-speed information age, our well-being demands that we understand and control our neophilia lest it control us. We already crunch four times more data — e-mail, tweets, searches, music, video, and traditional media — than we did just thirty years ago, and this deluge shows no signs of slackening. To thrive amid unprecedented amounts of novelty, we must shift from being mere seekers of the new to being connoisseurs of it.”

To be sure, Gallagher is careful not to paint a binary picture of good and evil in discussing neophilia, recognizing instead its dimensionality and balance of threat and benefit. She begins by citing a near-mythological anecdote about young Einstein:

A wonderful little story about five-year-old Albert Einstein, who was very slow to speak and whose parents feared he was none too bright, shows us how neophilia works and what it’s for. One day, when he was sick in bed, the boy was given the compass to fiddle with to keep him occupied. The new plaything made him wonder about magnetic fields, which got him interested in physics, and, well, you know the rest. Few of us are Einsteins, but all of us have the same capacity to be curious about something new that sparks the learning and sustained interest that lead to achievements great and small.”

Young Albert Einstein, 1882

From that perspective, neophilia can be a facilitator of serendipity, which can in turn be the gateway to discovery and creativity. The three affective foundations underpinning neophilia — surprise, curiosity, and interest — are referred to as “knowledge emotions,” Gallagher says, because they resemble thoughts in how they spur us to learn. Coupled with the capacity of the brain to act as a “surprise detector,” this makes neophilia a uniquely human adaptive advantage. In fact, as Gallagher points out, the failure to replicate this mechanism in artificial intelligence is the reason why robotic self-driving cars are still less able to detect and react to rapidly changing traffic conditions, and why the Internet is wired to give us more of what we are already looking for, rather than surprise us with something we didn’t know existed but might find infinitely interesting — in other words, why the filter bubble exists.

To survive, you must be aroused by the new and different. To be efficient and productive, however, you must focus your finite mental energy and attention on those novel sights and sounds, thoughts and feelings that somehow matter and screen out the rest. Just as arousal alerts and orients you to new things, the complementary process of adaptation helps you filter out the unimportant ones.”

(Cue in Clay Johnson’s The Information Diet.)

This, of course, is a double-edged sword. As far as the compulsion for novelty goes, a lens of particular urgency to me is that of information neophilia. As the editor of a site that features mostly evergreen content, whose interestingness quotient, meaningfulness, and relevance aren’t correlated with a date stamp, I am constantly troubled by the newsification of the web. The new floats to the top of our collective conscience, leaving boundlessly fascinating, timeless yet timely older “information” — old maps, archival photos, pioneering cinema, vintage design, out-of-print books — to rot away at the bottom, in obscure archives, away from the public eye and thus from our collective imagination.

My hope is that we, as a culture, as a society, and as individuals, will find ways to transcend this voraciousness for novelty and learn to celebrate the layered richness that lies beneath the surface foam of the new — something underlying Gallagher’s rhetoric in New, as she urges us to stay true to neophilia’s evolutionary purpose: to help us adapt, learn, and create new things that are meaningful and purposeful, discarding vacant stimuli as distraction.

Brain Pickings has a free weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays and offers the week’s best articles. Here’s what to expect. Like? Sign up.

Brain Pickings takes 450+ hours a month to curate and edit across the different platforms, and keeping it ad-free isn't easy. If it brings you any joy and inspiration, please consider a modest donation – it lets me know I'm doing something right.

Originally posted by Maria Popova from Brain Pickings, on January 24, 2012 3:00 AM

We're delighted to welcome you to the new Remodelista, which we've been working on behind the scenes for several months now.

You might remember our questionnaire asking for reader feedback a while ago; we took note of your thoughtful suggestions and observations and incorporated your ideas (better search capabilities! easier commenting! huge photos!). In addition, we've combined some of the best features of a magazine (weekly issue themes, larger images on our post pages) with the power of the web to create a richer reader experience.

Here are a few of the features we're excited about:

• Read Anywhere: Our new layout adjusts to mobile devices (iPhones, iPads, or any other mobile or tablet device), while maintaining the integrity of the site layout.
• City Guides: Our new City Guides feature more than 1,000 posts on hotels, lodging, and restaurants all over the world, organized by location.
• Improved Search and Navigation: You can now search by room, color, and type of product, from bathroom fixtures to flooring.
• Enhanced Sharing: Share content more easily via Twitter, Facebook, and Pinterest.
• Improved Comments: You'll be able to see (and make comments) immediately.
• Better Balance Between Content and Ads. As part of SAY's Clean Campaign, we'll be featuring a single spotlight ad, eliminating clutter and highlighting content. Read more at SAY.

This is just the beginning. Over the next few months, we'll be introducing more new enhancements and welcoming a roster of contributing editors (including paint expert Eve Ashcraft, among others). We hope you enjoy the new and improved Remodelista, and we'd love to hear your thoughts!

N.B.: A huge thank you to SAY's talented in-house Media Lab (thanks, Alex, William, Adrian, and Amy!) in San Francisco, who worked tirelessly on the Remodelista redesign.

Originally posted by Remodelista Team from Remodelista, on January 24, 2012 1:30 AM

Despite being a mad keen football fan since childhood I never really enjoyed kids football magazines (though I do remember having the little cardboard league tables with interchangeable tabbed team names that were published at the start if each season). Like so much sports coverage they were ahead of the publishing curve in the sense they too often descended to overawed celebrity worship. Even with today’s football magazines there’s a set agenda of celebs, top 100 lists and stats. So it’s good to see a few alternatives out there – Sepp from Germany, Spiel from Liverpool and London’s Green Soccer Journal. (and not forgetting The Blizzard, as Mathew points out in his comment).

The third GSJ is out now – here are some of the highlights that make it special for me.

The issue is a goalkeeping special, with a set of shots of England ’keepers hands from Harley Wier.…

…a clothes shoot based around the tradition of ‘jumpers for posts’…

…and an amusing look back at a 1974 soft porn feature for Viva magazine featuring NY Cosmos player Shep Messing. Unimaginable today.

Cover star Italian goalkeeper legend Gianluigi Bufon is interviewed by Paulo Bandini (the issue also has interviews with Everton’s Tim Howard and ex–Arsenal keeper Bob Wilson)…

…and this shoot based on goalie training drills made me laugh, as did a set of goalkeeper’s shirts positioned to recreate famous saves (shot by Neil Bedford).

In amongst all this are the more match-related details: a comparison of stud-tightening tools; a look at the perfect pre-match pie; a pair of young merseyside players to watch. Editor/creative directors Adam Towle and James Roper only put a foot wrong once – a shoot and fold-out poster of a glamourised nude streaker lacks the irony required to make it work.

Loving football almost as much as I love magazines, it’s great to have a publication that combines both things so well. I’ve written about new magazines taking on old genres before – Ride Journal, Carl*s Cars, Anorak, Fire & Knives – and the Green Soccer Journal is doing the same thing for football.

The Green Soccer Journal is the latest addition to the magCulture shop.

 

Originally posted by jeremy from magCulture.com/blog, on January 24, 2012 12:09 AM

I've been debating whether to post about the iBooks Author EULA or not. In general, I've been trying to avoid hotly debated and controversial subjects here for the simple fact that those discussions tend to eat up a lot of time and often aren't very productive. My opinion on iBooks Author and iBooks 2 is fairly close to some other authors I know. Because this is something that's near and dear to my heart, however, I figure it's worth a few words. And with me, a few words is usually more than a few.

There's been a lot of foofooraw since the iBooks 2 announcement last week. There's been all sorts of stories, tweets, and blog posts about how Apple is going to "steal your work" if you use iBooks Author. There's also been the all-too-familiar refrains of just how evil Apple is. It all seems vaguely familiar. Almost like… almost like we've been here before, what with all the people gnashing their teeth, rending their clothes, and complaining to the heavens about how evil Apple is because of the developer agreement app store guidelines iBooks 2 EULA.

There's also been a lot of complaints about the fact that Apple is using a proprietary format rather than using and extending ePub 3.

None of this bothers me terribly. Oh, it's not that there aren't things I would want different if I were King of the World, but the reality is that deciding whether to use iBooks Author is just another business decision for me. Emotional outcries and hyperbole are all well and good, but they don't change the parameters of the decision. Business decisions inherently involve risk, and the risk here is at a level that I'm perfectly comfortable with.

Before I explain why, though, I want to put up front that I'm not a lawyer. Well, that's not technically true, but I'm not a practicing lawyer and I'm not YOUR lawyer, so don't take anything I say as legal advice. I'm just explaining why I'm not concerned. If you have concerns, you should take those concerns to your lawyer before making up your mind.

The EULA

Make no mistake, the iBooks 2 EULA is poorly written and vague. The mere fact that people are up in arms is testament to that fact. And if the ambiguity that is there bothers you, don't use it. There are plenty of tools for creating eBooks, so if you think the risk of Apple "stealing" your work is too high, using another tool solves the problem.

There are several reasons why I'm perfectly comfortable with  the risk involved. In no particular order, those reasons are:

• It's simply not in Apple's long-term interest to take ownership of authors' books and Apple can almost always be relied upon to do what's in their own long-term best interest. Getting 30% of every iBook sale means they are motivated to keep authors happy. More than that, though, they need authors to want to write for this new platform in order to establish it as the dominant interactive next-generation eBook platform. Stealing books won't get them to that goal. Suing authors who publish non-interactive versions of their content for other platforms like the Kindle or ePub won't either.
• Although the wording is certainly vague enough that you could argue more than one interpretation, the capitalization of "Work" in the EULA (meaning it has a specific contractual meaning) combined with the verbiage, "Work you create with this software" implies that the intent is to restrict only the application-specific output. In other words, the most likely intent as I read it is to cover the proprietary file format used for the new features not supported by other existing eBook platforms.
• Even if that weren't the intent, from a purely evidentiary point of view, the other file formats that iBooks Author exports to are open, standard formats and it would be difficult for Apple to prove a particular non-interactive work was "generated" with iBooks Author even if they really did want to try and "steal our books". A PDF generated from iBooks Author would be nearly impossible to distinguish from one generated using Pages by simply copying and pasting the content from iBooks Author .
• The EULA contains the following phrase: Title and intellectual property rights in and to any content displayed by or accessed through the Apple Software belongs to the respective content owner. Basically, it explicitly states that the ownership of any content you create outside of the app and import into it is completely unaffected by any "book stealing" clause, even if such a thing existed. This seems to counter the notion that Apple is trying steal our intellectual property in the first place because unless the words and images were created directly in iBooks (as opposed to being imported from Pages, Word, Photoshop, etc.), Apple would have no claim to the content anyway. Their claim would be limited to the way the content is formatted. Again, from an evidentiary standpoint, it would be incredibly hard for Apple to prove you created the content in iBooks.
• The deal we're getting with iBooks Author isn't all that different from the deal we get when using Xcode as iOS developers, and the language of the agreements aren't all that different from each other either, and that's worked out pretty well so far.
• And last, but not least, the kicker: Let's say, for giggles, that "book stealing" was Apple's intent, and such an intent was found to be both legal and the actual intent of the contract, and Apple decided to exercise those rights to steal my books. You know what? Even with all that, it's still a hell of a lot better deal than I've ever gotten from a traditional publisher. Apple is offering 70% of the sale price to me. The most favorable contract I've ever gotten from a publisher starts at 12% of the net price the publisher gets from the distributor, wholesaler, or retailer (which is half or less of the retail price). That percentage does slowly escalate up to 20% if I sell a ton of books, but if I publish a new edition of an existing book, the escalators go back down to 12% and I have to start all over. To put this in more concrete terms, if I were to sell a book in the iBooks Store for $9.99, I would get $6.99 per book sold, which is about four times what I get when one of my current $39.99 books sells, and I'd get that money months sooner. Oh, and guess what? I don't own those books published through a traditional publisher, either. My publisher can even have someone else update the book and can continue to use my name to promote it, even if I don't like the revisions or think the update sucks.

You can go on about what Apple "might do" or "could do", but the fact is that contracts aren't magic. If Apple wanted to screw me, there's no doubt they could, with or without this language. They've got a disproportionate amount of power in this contractual relationship because they have the audience and the platform, and they also have a ton of money and lots of really, really good lawyers. If they came after me, the merits of the case would matter little because I couldn't afford to defend myself against them, anyway. That's a risk, sure, but based on my past dealings with Apple, them trying to use the legal system to screw me seems a very remote possibility, and I'm willing to accept that risk. The language of the contract does almost nothing to change the amount of risk here for me. It's little more than a red herring as far as I'm concerned.

ePub 3 vs. iBooks 2

Many people have suggested that Apple should have used the existing ePub 3 standard and worked with the standards body to extend it in whatever ways Apple needed it extended. Instead, they decided to create a proprietary file format using the older ePub 2 specification as a starting point. It is important to note, however, that Apple is not advertising this new format as being ePub; we only know it's based on ePub 2 because people have reverse engineered the generated .ibooks files.

Now, I'll be honest. In a perfect world, I'd prefer to see Apple using an open standard here. But, there isn't an existing open standard that does what Apple wanted to do, and working with a standards body to revise existing standards to meet their needs for a yet-to-be-released piece of software would have tipped their hand about the software they were developing. People would have known exactly what Apple was working on from the things they were requesting of the standards body, which would have given competitors an advantage and could have hurt Apple's negotiations with publishers. Apple's culture is steeped in secrecy, and many would argue that this secrecy has been a contributing factor to their repeated successes over the last decade. Anybody who follows the company and understands the way they work knows exactly why they made the choice that they did here. Was it the best choice for Apple? Only time will tell, but there are obvious reasons why they would think it might be.

It's also important to note that iBooks Author is completely and totally free. But really, nothing is free. TANSTAAFL. Developing both a platform to do what iBooks 2 can do and developing a tool to create content for that platform was not a trivial task and Apple almost certainly devoted a lot of resources to getting it done and to getting existing publishers on board. Apple doesn't write software to be nice, they write software to make money. In this case, they're not making money directly, but make no mistake, it was written to make Apple money. The fact that they are not letting people use this free product to compete with them, or to create works for competing platforms should surprise no one. We, as users, authors, and publishers might desire such a tool and might have all sorts of reasons why such a tool would be an awesome thing for us. But so what? I'd like a pink unicorn that farts money. That doesn't mean I should expect somebody else to find one and give it to me for free.

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish

Lastly, several people on Twitter have pointed out that Apple's move here seems frighteningly similar to what Microsoft did throughout the nineties with their infamous "embrace, extend, extinguish" campaign. There's definitely some uncomfortable similarities, but I'm not quite ready to put this in the same camp… yet.

First, iBooks is not the dominant eBook platform, so any suggestion of a monopoly would be silly. Amazon sells far more Kindle books than Apple sells iBooks, and there are other eBook platforms, including Barnes & Noble's Nook, Kobo, and Sony's eReader to name just a few of many. The very idea of embrace, extend, extinguish requires monopoly-like control of a market to be effective, which Apple doesn't remotely have here (yet). There's also been no evidence (yet) of an attempt to "extinguish" the open ePub standard, or to brand the proprietary extended version as the standard. iBooks still supports ePub, and until Apple moves to change that, we're missing the most important and deadly of the three Es, without which there's really no harm, no foul.

The Bottom Line

To quote the narrator in Peter Pan, "all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again." Many developers railed against the "unfair" restrictions of the iOS developer agreement, the inability to sell apps outside the App Store, and the review process. I'm sure there will be similar teeth-gnashing the next time Apple creates a new market or platform, or revises any of the agreements related to any of the existing ones.

And certainly, there have been bumps in the road, some of which are still around. But overall, iOS has proved to be a great platform for developers to be on. The number of iOS devices in the world now numbers in the hundreds of millions, and many of the owners of those devices have shown a willingness to pay for content, including apps, movies, and books. It's not the gold rush the mass media thought it was four years ago, but it has been fertile grounds providing a great many people with a living, including me.

It's not a perfect place, but personally, there's no other place I'd rather be. The fact that I can now do both of the things I do professionally (write apps and write books) on those same fertile grounds, excites me. The fact that I can do things while writing my books that simply weren't possible before excites me even more.

Absolutely, things could change in the future, but I'll worry about the future in the future if I need to. For now, I'm happy here and thrilled about the possibilities that iBooks 2 and iBooks Author represent.

©2008-2010 Jeff LaMarche.
http://iphonedevelopment.blogspot.com

Originally posted by Jeff LaMarche from iPhone Development, on January 23, 2012 3:58 PM

I am just sick to my teeth of doing client work. And suddenly, I’m not sure if it’s even the right thing to be doing at all. A couple of things have led me to that statement.

First: I’m up to my nose in cause-related work from some organizations traditionally thought of as the ones advocating for The Common Man. Unfortunately, neither is doing much of interest when compared against the larger backdrop of the social web, and the work they’re asking us to do is utterly brain-dead. Every time we try to talk them out something ill-advised, the result is meetings, conference calls, requests for approvals from higher-ups, and then nothing interesting—but we bill a pile of cash for it.

Nobody’s willing to try anything new, nobody even understands what they stand to lose if they don’t try something new. I’m a little burned out with billing for stupid meetings that amount to nothing.

Secondly: We’re doing work for a restaurant called Yusho lately, a turn that’s making me reconsider about my market composition. A chef who’s been around for a while owns this place, but it’s is his first property under his own steam. And the people flocking to him are other cooks from other restaurants. So this means: the people building the hype are other practitioners. (Here’s a link to Yusho’s Facebook page, which is largely populated by local chefs.) Those same people are the ones spending money on his food.

Basically, this is going to create a ripple effect for the restaurant. Since these chefs are all talking in public about eating at the restaurant, their own fans are seeing it. Those fans are going to take advice from the chefs, and then those people will start talking. And so on and so forth.

Wonder how this would work in design, without the path to public mass-popularity? Would it simply stop comfortbale with designers financing other designers by buyng posters, clothing, typeface files, and so on? I’d love to know the dollar amount spent on designer-created objects by other designers.

This addresses something bubbling in the broader scheme of American culture too—the importance and meaning of work. Pretty much everyone likes the notion of being able to attach some grater meaning to their work, some way to get some self-worth from their occupation. But increasingly, that’s becoming more difficult.

So what would happen if people began to leave the larger economy and just focused on economies based upon a favorite vocation? Would we see a community of microeconomies flourishing for shorter periods of time, and under different rules? Would it be more conducive to a learning process, if we were freer to jump from vocation to vocation, knowing we had a pool of purchasers already in place? I’d love to know how to leave client work behind.

Maybe that should be my 2012 project to cure my overall disenchantment.

Originally posted by Patric King from fixing the hobo suit, on January 23, 2012 3:11 PM