randomwalks/dj

Please consider the cover of the April 30, 2007, New Yorker, by Harry Bliss.

The drawing shows a young couple standing before a large abstract expressionist painting, apparently in a gallery; they are pleasantly dressed. Hipsters, we might call them, but they're not hipper-than-thou: the boy wears a necklace and jeans, while the girl has a black tank-top and a red skirt.

The boy has just taken a digital photo of the painting, or part of it, and is showing her the results on its little screen. She stands slightly apart, her head inclined toward the camera, her hands clasped behind her holding the gallery map. While he is planted solidly on the ground, possessing his gadget with both hands, she is ever-so-slightly distanced from it. It is clearly his gadget, his photography habit, and his capture (of the painting that stands before them).

This drawing means several things to me.

On the one hand, it might represent an arrival. The boy and the girl are about my own age; they have my style; they have an interest in art—all fine things which I approve of. And the camera: it's an instance of the digital technology, whose arrival I spent my youth waiting for (never could I understand why anyone used those baroque, circular timepieces, when digital watches told the time directly!). This couple is not of the frock-and-shawl generation that decorated New Yorker covers past: no, these are the youngsters, probably with a bit of hip-hop as well as indie rock on their iPods, and no Gershwin at all. They might be product designers, or marketers. The boy might be a coder. Possibly, this picture is a picture of our arrival on the scene: an announcement that we, the jeans-wearing creative class, we who know innately the superiority of the digital approach, we are the cultural vanguard, we are at center stage for the hopes and dreams of bourgeois America.

I want to read the picture that way, and partly I do—partly I find some hope in it. But it seems more profoundly a criticism, rather than a triumphant arrival.

Looking at the two characters' postures, I see a rift. Rather than a couple in love with each other, with art, and with technological possibility, I see a boy with a toy, and a girl with patience. He is much more engaged with the devise; she curves demurely away. Digital cameras are the most dubious of "tools," as you'll see in a moment. Whereas a film camera is (of course!) a vessel for capturing light, for making pictures, digital cameras are rather more like handheld video games. They are full of settings and switches, a field for endless play—and not only this, they can also be upgraded. The memory card and the lens can be forever interchanged, providing opportunities to experiment, to buy, and to peruse catalogs and hobbyist magazines—all with the veneer of a respectable, even artistic, hobby (unlike riding a motorcycle, which raises eyebrows). It is a boy's dream, a Game Boy, dressed in grownup's clothes.

Women, of course, are wiser than this. Women know there's no satisfaction in relationship with a device. Nothing handheld holds much interest for them. Women are whole-body people. All that play amounts to nothing: not skill, not insight, not love. Just diversion. Yet women (so sad! so tragic!) have this need for a man, this need to be protected and supported. In the pursuit of that domesticity, one needs to put up with the obsessions of the other. The woman looks on, a little bored, a little disappointed that the man is so obsessed, but unable to say anything, unable to spark a passion in him, not a passion for art, nor for experience, nor for herself. She knows that the device is distracting, that its little screen or the prints that will be made later are no substitute for the present moment. But then, she wants to be loved, to be cared for, she wants stability. In that connection, having a little patience with the boy's habitual diversion is a small price to pay. Later that night, they will watch a little TV; she will make him dinner; he will watch a ball game while she gossips with her friends. They will share nothing of their souls, they will not connect. But peace will be kept.

This picture is a picture of my whole life, in 8 1/2 x 11.

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on May 5, 2007 5:41 PM

Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Rodham Clinton is increasingly banking on politically active women to keep her on pace with Sen. Barack Obama in the ongoing sprint for campaign cash.

Originally posted by Matthew Mosk from David Jacobs' Huffs, on May 5, 2007 2:20 PM

She had raised her daughter for six years following the divorce, handled the shuttling to soccer practice and cheerleading, made sure schoolwork was done. Hardly a day went by when the two weren't together. Then Lt. Eva Crouch was mobilized with the Kentucky National Guard, and Sara went to stay with Dad.

A year and a half later, her assignment up, Crouch pulled into her driveway with one thing in mind _ bringing home the little girl who shared her smile and blue eyes. She dialed her ex and said she'd be there the next day to pick Sara up, but his response sent her reeling.

Originally posted by The Huffington Post News Team from Most Huffed News, on May 5, 2007 2:20 PM

The city cannot prevent the public from seeing documents describing intelligence that police gathered to help them create policies for arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention, a judge said Friday.

U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV made the ruling regarding documents about information the New York Police Department says it used.

Originally posted by The Huffington Post News Team from Most Huffed News, on May 5, 2007 6:00 AM

The city cannot prevent the public from seeing documents describing intelligence that police gathered to help them create policies for arrests at the 2004 Republican National Convention, a judge said Friday. U.S. Magistrate Judge James C. Francis IV made the ruling regarding documents about information the New York Police Department says it used.

Originally posted by The Huffington Post News Team from David Jacobs' Huffs, on May 5, 2007 2:00 AM

While most of the blogosphere was atwitter over the tantrums being thrown at Digg, real injustice in Los Angeles was being ignored. After watching this video I was ashamed to be part of a community (the designers and evangelists of “Web 2.0?) which sanctimoniously promotes “people power” among the spoiled and entitled while disregarding the tightening grip of authority on the poor and disenfranchised.

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on May 4, 2007 10:15 PM

This Library Journal article sheds no additional light on why Susan Kent quit on Wednesday. It was "effective immediately" and she'd been there less than three years.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from iPalimpsest, on May 4, 2007 7:08 PM

A: I learned a new word?

B :Yeah?

A: Cookie-shine?

B: Oh, not this again.

A: Yes! It's real! It means "a tea-party."

B: Wot rubbish! You're more full of rubbish than anyone I know!

A: I would believe that, but...

B: On this particular point... ?

A: Right.

B: "Cookie-shine."

A: "A tea-party."

B: This is from the same dictionary with "skew-whiff" and "pebble-dash"?

A: Yes! It's real!

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on May 4, 2007 6:18 PM

Peruvian frog juice is a starchy, milkshake-like liquid that stings the throat. To make it "Carmen Gonzalez adds three ladles of hot, white bean broth, two generous spoonfuls of honey, raw aloe vera plant and several tablespoons of maca — an Andean root also believed to boost stamina and sex drive — into a household blender. Then she drops the frog in." I may be an adventurous eater, but a steaming beer mug of frog juice just sounds gross to me.

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 4, 2007 5:48 PM

Foie gras may be losing popularity in the US, but in Quebec, the delicacy is more popular than ever. "The province is home to an industry that produces about 8,500 duck livers a week, up from a couple of hundred just a decade ago, when only a few traditional French restaurants served the delicacy. Now, foie gras is a standard menu item at upscale restaurants all over the province." [via del.icio.us/ethicurean]

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 4, 2007 4:36 PM

Although the faked eggs looked practically the same as real ones, the consumer smelled chemicals when cooking the eggs. A look at faked egg practices in China, including the addition of dyes to make the yolks look richer and a totally "human-made" egg consisting entirely of chemicals. [via Jason]

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 4, 2007 3:28 PM

Clever technique for pinching the colors from famous paintings using the Match Color tool in Photoshop. "The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?" (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 4, 2007 2:33 PM

Adam's got great photos of what to eat in San Francisco. I haven't been to all the places he visited, but I've eaten at many. Makes my tummy rumble just looking at those photos of Ad Hoc quail, the burrito, and the mere mention of Tartine.

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 4, 2007 2:26 PM

Her set at Radio City Music Hall was lush, memorable, and full of sensory overload. Full set of photographs on Flickr.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kathryn yu dot com, on May 4, 2007 12:56 PM

San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom set the stage Thursday for a political showdown, telling his critics that if they don't like his proposal to open a special court to handle so-called quality-of-life offenses, they should throw him out of office.

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by stamen to communitycourt sanfrancisco tenderloin - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by stamen from del.icio.us/stamen, on May 4, 2007 12:11 PM

What Makes a Place Great?. “Over the past 30 years Project for Public Spaces has evaluated more than 1,000 public spaces, and informally investigated tens of thousands more. From all this we have discovered that most great places—whether a grand downtown plaza or humble neighborhood park—share four key qualities....”

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on May 4, 2007 9:42 AM

I started roasting coffee beans at home a few months ago and the results have far exceeded my expectations. Freshly roasted coffee tastes great; the basic process is very simple; and with the Fresh Roast Plus, it's easy to get great, very satisfying results right from the very first batch. The FRP is basically a blow-drier in a can controlled by a simple analog timer dial. Hot air blows up into the glass basket that holds the beans -- heating and agitating them -- and then carries the chaff up through a trap before exiting the top. In five or six minutes, it roasts enough coffee to get me going for two mornings.

The heat gun/dog bowl method, which requires a tool that is essentially a hair dryer, in combination with a blend might provide more bang for the buck (if the goal is nothing more than a good cup of coffee), but this cheap roaster is a good tool for learning about roasting. The FRP allows me to hear, smell and see the beans during the roasting process, and the simple timer control permits ending the roast manually at any given moment. Still, this not a "set and forget" process. The roaster's timer is more about preventing fires than ensuring any particular result. It seems to me it was designed assuming that the user would monitor the roasting process and choose to stop at any given moment, but the house wouldn't burn down if the machine were neglected and the max time ran out.

Note: one part cracked about six weeks after I got it. However, the manufacturer sent me a replacement at no charge after a quick phone call. For longevity, I've learned, it's important to let the roaster cool between uses. This, coupled with the roaster's small batch size, might limit the roaster to one or two-drinker households.

I bought mine from Sweet Maria's along with an 8-variety assortment of single-origin beans (plus a pound of SM's French Roast blend), which meant I could plug and play. Fooling around with different roasts of single-origin coffees is great fun. Run a lighter roast and a darker roast of the same bean, taste them apart, then combine them in various proportions. Here the small-batch capacity of the FRP is not a liability, and every roast turns out a bit different even when you're trying to duplicate a previous roast. The FRP runs really quick as roasters go, and 15 seconds (or increasing/decreasing the amount of beans) can make a huge difference in the result.

That said, I'm still very new to this. When I started, I was getting great results with everything but the blend (first try was sour, second tasted burnt). I sent an email to Sweet Maria's, got a reply right away, and sorted it out. I really recommend purchasing beans from them. They sell coffee beans from all the major growing regions; many of their offerings originate from individual farms the proprietor has visited; and If you take advantage of their very deep website and buy a variety of beans, you can learns a lot about coffee such as where and how it's grown, how it's processed, and how it's bought and sold. As time goes by, I expect one can learn to appreciate "vintages" and how the coffee from a particular farm varies from year to year. Thanks to the variety of cultivars, climates and processing methods and the hundreds of flavor-influencing compounds present in each bean, not to mention the various ways of preparing coffee, it's quite a complex beverage. Roasting my own beans with the FRP adds another level to that complexity, as does knowing sometimes quite specifically about where, when and by whom they were grown. And I think there will always be more to learn.

I'd been thinking about roasting my own for some time and finally decided to start roasting when my local roaster raised the price of a pound of French Roast from $11.50 to $13.50. Most of the green beans I've bought were five to six dollars a pound. I think a pound of green beans yields about 14 oz of roasted coffee. Since switching to the Fresh Roast Plus, my electric bill has gone up three or four dollars a month (I'm roasting about six pounds per month, but had been buying three), but I think the roaster will pay for itself in less than a year. Bottom line: low initial investment, great early results, limitless potential for learning and surprises.

-- Alan Murdock

French Roast Plus Coffee Roaster
$73
$83 (includes 4lbs. of 8 coffee samples)
Available from Sweet Maria's

Or $80 from Amazon (roaster only)

Manufactured by Fresh Beans, Inc.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Cool Tools, on May 4, 2007 9:00 AM

This is exciting. Seven, yes 7!, new phones for the emerging markets (you know I love emerging market stuff). And these don't look like cheap phones, but feature-full phones and phones that fit the way folks in those regions need these phones.

Nokia knows this is big - they created a specific site to highlight all the stuff related to this launch (here).

Link to another article: Nokia chooses India for latest mobile phone launch | InfoWorld | News | 2007-05-03 | By John Ribeiro, IDG News Service

Nokia chose Delhi, India, for Thursday's launch of seven mobile phones for emerging markets, including two intended for shared use by families or entire villages.

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on May 4, 2007 4:03 AM

"A simple algorithm is given which takes an arbitrary binary search tree and rebalances it to form an optimal binary search tree. The tree is strongly optimal in that not only does it have the minimal height possible, but further, for each node, the number of nodes in its left and right subtrees differ by at most one."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on May 4, 2007 3:07 AM

Christian posted yesterday a nice essay about mobile and multi-modal interfaces (link below).

He had given me a preview of it when I saw him last week and I've been begging to have him post it so that I could point out the key tenets of his mobile device philosophy (see below).* 

To me, 'one-handed, in-out of pocket, mobile use' is the key to the success of mobile devices AND apps. It's core to the Mobile Lifestyle I've been harping about for a very long time.

Read the article for some thoughts on how Software Transformers can make mobile devices even more useful. I think it's a great thought.

Link: ChristianLindholm.com: My speech at MEX, The SW Transformer A Vision for a mobile OS:

The N95 is what phones have become.

Phones and computer are inherently different.

1. A phone is used with one hand
2. A phone must fit into the pocket
3. It should be possible to use the phone while moving.

*Of course, I learned it from him, having known him for many years.

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on May 4, 2007 2:15 AM

Sorry Dirk, Cuban, and the Mavs. You just can't compete with underdog love.

Originally posted by Zentronix from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on May 4, 2007 1:24 AM

At TED this year, Utne Reader was giving out free subscriptions to attendees. I received my first copy today.

"If Einstein were single would he join Science Connection?"

I'm going to guess no.

Sheet music to inspire social awareness, piano/vocal.

Pretty oblique activism strategies.

ANCIENT BIBLICAL HEALING SCIENCE! Wise men gave baby Jesus Frankincense/Myrrh. Recent lab reports reveal two most powerful immune builders!!

SOCIAL NUDISM! FREE CATALOG! DVD!!!

Please no.

I think my inner hippie died some time ago. I didn't notice til now. R.I.P. inner hippie. I'm glad you never tried to persuade me to wear ugly sandals. Have fun on tour.

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on May 3, 2007 11:27 PM

The fairie is still on the loose.

Originally posted by Anil Dash from hello, nintendo, on May 3, 2007 11:22 PM

an algorithmically generated visualization based on statistical information provided by Last.fm software, more particular every song listened to by a particular user over an 18 month period of time.

each colored band represents a musical artist, progressing left to right. the span is wider when listening was more frequent, & skinnier when it was not. the hue of the artist represents the time of the first listen for the particular user: cooler colors represent artists who have been listened to for a long period of time while warmer colors represent artists who are more recent in the user's listening habits.

"while this is interesting to look at, it is more significant on a personal level. when viewing your own music listening history you are reminded of past events that caused the trends to emerge."

[links: megamu.com & megamu.com]

see also visual music recommendation & musicovery & music plasma & color music & mystrands.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on May 3, 2007 10:26 PM

This week has revealed a lot about how the online mapping sites respond to disasters that close major routes and affect driving directions. Within two days of the MacArthur Maze freeway collapse in Oakland, Google Maps, Yahoo Maps and MapQuest...

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on May 3, 2007 9:28 PM

"It's a rare day that a truly good standard comes along. It's an even rarer day that the standard get widely adopted. So the developers of Atom should stand up and take a bow - not only did they hit a home run with the Atom syndication format, they've done it again with the Atom publishing protocol."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on May 3, 2007 8:43 PM

bwo the BytesForAll list/ Frederick Noronha (personally, I think the free everything - or is it 'easy everything'? ;-) is on the verge of exp/impl/osion as the irresoluble contradictions moment between the liberties given away (rather than granted) to the users will collide with their actual use of them - as in "the street finds its own use for things". The latest, hyper-bizare incident around a 'copy-righted number', spreading of which has led to people being kicked out of such 'free beer' sites right left and center, being, immo, a clear sign in that direction. By then, this particular 'business model'is bound either to collapse entirely, or to place such restrictions on users as to become completely unatractive and irrelevant. meanwhile I think people should make most of it while it lasts. cheers, patrizioo and Diiiinooos!) http://www.engagemedia.org/Members/andrewl/news/freebeer/ Free Media vs Free Beer by Andrew — last modified 2007-04-15 13:23 The free beer Richard Stallman loathes is everywhere

Originally posted by Patrice Riemens from gmane.culture.internet.nettime, on May 3, 2007 8:18 PM

The fairie is still on the loose.

Originally posted by Anil Dash from hello, nintendo, on May 3, 2007 7:22 PM

The top-ten 8-bit games. Can't argue with the top 5 too much, but the other selections might be a bit off. Whither Metroid? And Tetris? (link) (Comment on this)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 3, 2007 5:24 PM

More people know how to crack the encryption on HD-DVD disks than own HD-DVD players.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on May 3, 2007 4:37 PM

via London Review of Books:             

LRB | Vol. 29 No. 9 dated 10 May 2007 | Judith Butler

'I merely belong to them'
by Judith Butler

The Jewish Writings  by Hannah Arendt ed. Jerome Kohn · Schocken, 559 pp, $35.00

‘You know the left think that I am conservative,’ Hannah Arendt once said, ‘and the conservatives think I am left or I am a maverick or God knows what. And I must say that I couldn’t care less. I don’t think the real questions of this century get any kind of illumination by this kind of thing.’ The Jewish Writings make the matter of her political affiliation no less easy to settle. In these editorials, essays and unfinished pieces, she seeks to underscore the political paradoxes of the nation-state. If the nation-state secures the rights of citizens, then surely it is a necessity; but if the nation-state relies on nationalism and invariably produces massive numbers of stateless people, it clearly needs to be opposed. If the nation-state is opposed, then what, if anything, serves as its alternative?

Arendt refers variously to modes of ‘belonging’ and conceptions of the 'polity' that are not reducible to the idea of the nation-state. She even formulates, in her early writings, an idea of the ‘nation’ that is uncoupled from both statehood and territory. The nation retains its place for her, though it diminishes between the mid-1930s and early 1960s, but the polity she comes to imagine, however briefly, is something other than the nation-state: a federation that diffuses both claims of national sovereignty and the ontology of individualism. In her critique of Fascism as well as in her scepticism towards Zionism, she clearly opposes those disparate forms of the nation-state that rely on nationalism and create massive statelessness and destitution. Paradoxically, and perhaps shrewdly, the terms in which Arendt criticised Fascism came to inform her criticisms of Zionism, though she did not and would not conflate the two. [read on...]

Originally posted by joy garnett from NEWSgrist - where spin is art, on May 3, 2007 3:46 PM

"Beautiful singing" refers to a vocal technique and is the English translation of the title of Ann Patchett's 2001 novel Bel Canto, which I can't recommend highly enough to anyone interested in matters of translation.  The backdrop of the story, though fictionalized for the novel, is the 1996 hostage crisis at the Japanese embassy in Peru.  Patchett's novel imagines what could have taken place during the four-month stand-off, focusing on the emotional and romantic alliances that develop between human beings in such close proximity.  The opera singer Roxane Coss, the sole female hostage, meditates on the wonder of these encounters: "How else would there have been any way to get to know someone you couldn't speak to, someone who lived on the other side of the world, unless you were given an enormous amount of empty time to simply sit and wait together?" (Patchett, 238)  Of course, the character who most intrigued me was Gen, a polymath in the employ of a Japanese businessman who becomes the "official" translator for the captors and hostages.  Gen runs around all day, mediating between French, Russian, German, English, Swiss, Spanish, Italian, and Japanese but, ultimately, the hostages and their captors find themselves bound by the silences that they share and Roxane's bel canto.  Here are a few of my favorite passages on love, translation and music (spoilers ahead):

* "Wait," Gen said softly in English, trying to make the one word sound as benign as possible.  Wait, after all, did not mean that she would never go, only that her leaving would be delayed.
    She took the word in, thought about it for a moment.  She still doubted that's what he had meant even when she heard it in English.  As a child she had waited.  She had waited at school in line for auditions.  But the truth was that in the last several years no one had asked her to wait at all...And all of this, the birthday part, the ridiculous country, the guns, the danger, the waiting involved in all of it was a mockery...The line had stopped moving, even the women who were free to go now stopped to watch her, regardless of whether or not they had any idea of what she was saying.  It was in this moment of uncertainty, the inevitable pause that comes before the translation, that Roxane Coss saw the moment of her exit (70).

* "We would need a dozen translators and arbitration from the UN before we could decide to overthrow the one teenager with a knife," Jacques Maitessier said, as much to himself as anyone, and he knew what he was talking about, having once been the French ambassador to the United Nations (113).

* In response to Roxane Coss's rendition of the aria "Song to the Moon" from Rusalka: "She sings Czech like she was born into it," he whispered to Gen.
    Gen nodded.  He would never refute the beauty of her singing, the warm liquid quality of her voice that so well matched the watery Rusalka, but there was no point telling Mr. Hosokawa that this woman did not know a word of Czechoslovakian.  She sang the passion of every syllable, but none of the syllables actually managed to form themselves into recognizable words of the language. It was quite obvious that she had memorized the work phonetically, that she sang her love for Dvo?ák and her love for the translated story, but that the Czech language itself was a stranger which passed her by without a moment's recognition.  Not that this was any sort of crime, of course.  Who would even know except for him?  There were no Czech's among them (163-64).

* He tucked her into the crook of his arm and she breathed into his shoulder.  This was what it felt like, to be a man with a woman.  This was the thing Gen had missed in all the translation of language (250).

Originally posted by Adriana from Stingy Kids, on May 3, 2007 3:02 PM

  A show of hands please… Let me remind you this is the only top vote-getting question asked.  Download (0) | Play (1)   Download (0) | Play (1)  (That's Brownback, Tancredo and Huckabee with their hands up.)

Originally posted by SilentPatriot from David Jacobs' Huffs, on May 3, 2007 2:00 PM

Eastern Market, D.C.'s 134-year-old market and historic landmark was devastated by a 3 alarm fire earlier this week. The market is the oldest continuously operating fresh food market in Washington D.C. and home to cheese and fish mongers, butchers, a bakery, produce and flower vendors, outdoor farmers' market and restaurants. A couple of months ago, I visited my friends Shannon and Jason who live a few blocks from Eastern Market, and we strolled through on Saturday afternoon. We grabbed some lunch at Market Lunch, and Shannon and Jason picked up their groceries for the week. It's not hard to imagine what a loss this is to the neighborhood and city, but hopefully only a temporary one as rebuilding fund raising as already begun. Shannon and Jason have chipped in by starting a website, Save Eastern Market, aggregating and reporting on the latest news related to the rebuilding. Here are a few ways you can help. Photograph from delfeugo on Flickr

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Serious Eats: Posts and Comments by Alaina Browne, on May 3, 2007 11:59 AM

very odd hybrid of poetry, art, and platform gaming [via] 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on May 3, 2007 9:49 AM

Design for the Other 90%. Opening at the Cooper-Hewitt, this exhibition features “30 humanitarian design projects, all addressing basic needs in the areas of shelter, health, water, education, energy and transport.” The focus on economical, “low-tech” projects addressing such fundamental needs is a (self-consciously) stark contrast to the ultra-techy buzz fest of the recent design Triennial (though the One Laptop per Child appears in the current show.) So does this mark a fundamental shift in priorities? Will the values expressed here affect the way the Cooper-Hewitt evaluates design? From here it seems more like more a cabinet of curiosities than a paradigm shift. I’m also wary of how “The Other” is addressed here, but see for yourself: a slideshow of a few examples.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on May 3, 2007 12:54 AM

MacZealots: “RubyOSA is a bridge from the Ruby language to the Apple Event Manager. The Apple Event Manger allows applications to send and receive messages, or Apple events as they are called, to and from applications that support scripting.”

In other words, you can use Ruby instead of AppleScript. Cool.

Side note: I haven’t looked to see if it’s an actual OSA component or not. It probably doesn’t have to be—because who cares if it compiles and runs in Script Editor or not. But, for anyone interested in OSA components, years ago I posted OSAShell, a basic OSA component demo.

Originally posted by Brent Simmons from ranchero.com, on May 2, 2007 11:51 PM

**Updated to include link to partnership form.**

Over the past year and a half we've been excited and amazed by all of the original content that’s been created by members of the YouTube community. We've seen the content many of you create evolve to become elaborately developed series, concept videos, and sitcoms with tens of thousands of subscribers. Many of you have gone from creating videos in bedrooms and living rooms on webcams to becoming YouTube celebrities with fans and audiences all over the world.

Up until now there’s been a distinction between the content you create and the content created by YouTube's professional content partners. We want to start changing some of the perception here. Which is why we’re adding several of the most popular and prolific original content creators from the YouTube community to our partnership program. Now some of your favorite YouTube members, including Lonelygirl15, LisaNova, renetto, HappySlip, smosh, and valsartdiary, will begin to participate in the same revenue sharing and promotional opportunities that are available to YouTube's other partners. These include thousands of mid-sized to large content creators who range from video game companies to universities to production houses.

Initial user participants have been selected from the content creators that you have helped popularize by watching their videos and subscribing to their channels. Because they have built and sustained large, persistent audiences through the creation of engaging videos, their content has become attractive for advertisers, which has helped them earn the opportunity to participate on YouTube as a partner.

Participating user-partners will be treated as other content partners and will have the ability to control the monetization of the videos they create. Once they’ve selected a video to be monetized, we’ll place advertising adjacent to their content so participating user-partners can reap the rewards from their work.

So now that you’ve read this, you’re probably wondering, “How can I get in on the action?” This is only available to the initial participants. But if you create original content, have built and maintained an audience on YouTube, and think you might qualify for this program based on what’s above, you can express interest on our partnership lead form.

We hope that this program inspires people to keep creating original videos, building audiences and engaging with the YouTube community. What we’re really excited about, beyond our new partners, is that literally, at any given moment, thousands of creative people from throughout the world are posting new, original content to YouTube. It’s this community that’s shaping what the YouTube experience is now and will be in the future, and we’re incredibly excited for the prospect that holds.

Best,
The YouTube Team

Originally posted by rss@youtube.com from YouTube :: Blog, on May 2, 2007 11:00 PM

Thank GOD. I've finished Fire Emblem: Sacred Stones (what! Only 20 chapters!), and all the Advance Wars, and I've run out of brain-tickling strategy and/or adventure for my crusty old DS. So, thank you British Gaming Blog, for pointing out that Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is out soonish.

It's WindWaker-y:

Yes it is!

Jolly good!

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on May 2, 2007 7:30 PM

Study of N.B.A. Sees Racial Bias in Calling Fouls

Originally posted by Massimo1 from David Jacobs' Huffs, on May 2, 2007 7:28 PM

Do you read [Theme Magazine], a quarterly publication that covers global avant-garde Asian culture for an increasingly international readership?

I hope so. Their Spring 2007 Issue no. 9 "NERDS" is possibly their best yet.

From the editors, Jiae and John Lee:
"When no one is watching, do you laugh out loud at a joke in your head, and give yourself a high five, then a low five, before you break out the DDR mat? Do you crank up Vivaldi in your car and ponder which rendition of The Four Seasons was the best, ever? Are you an embarrassment to your friends at parties when you get a bit tipsy and start quoting lines, verbatim, from "Doctor Who"? Did you ever read LOTR and The Hobbit all in one go, just to see what continous plot lines you missed out on the last time?

Admit it. You're a nerd."

I admit it, I'm a nerd. But hey hoe, nerds have never been so cool...read Theme if you don't believe me.

Originally posted by clairehyland from l-e-mental, on May 2, 2007 5:46 PM

Am I missing something here with People's cover story touting Rachael Ray's "Recipe for Marriage"?

Just last year Rach's horndog husband was outed for having an kinky affair with a woman -- over a five year period -- whom he paid to spit on him, rub her bare feet in his face and a bunch of other fetish things. And Rachael is the authority on having a successful marriage?

Pass!

Originally posted by sbyrne from Daily Blabber, on May 2, 2007 4:59 PM

Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation's honeybees could have a devastating effect on America's dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.

Honeybees don't just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.

Originally posted by The Huffington Post News Team from Most Huffed News, on May 2, 2007 4:20 PM

Public Radio Talent Quest If you've got a face for radio, here's your chance to be the next red hot public radio newscaster! (tags: Contest Media Talent Technology NPR) Coachella: Reunions, Installations and Bjork Slideshow Coachella highlights in pictures. (tags:...

Originally posted by souris from hustler of culture, on May 2, 2007 4:18 PM

Today is the eighth birthday of Megnut. I made the very first post back in 1999, which is hard to believe as that was ages and ages ago. Since that time this site has changed dramatically, and as you know, has spent the last year in its newest incarnation as a food site. I've really enjoyed writing about food and I've learned a ton. Alas that experience has also led me a bit astray. I got involved in helping Ed Levine get Serious Eats off the ground over the last eight months, and my postings here really suffered because of that. Now that Serious Eats is off and running, I'm turning my attention back to this site, and am looking forward to another year (or more!) of food postings and discussions. But before we take off into the future, for fun here's a look back at the year that was!

In April 2006 (ok, cheating a little bit, but in April I really started post about food in earnest) I looked at Further information about foie gras production from Jeffrey Steingarten's article for Men's Vogue.

In May I reflected on Four years since the French Laundry. Also I looked at War food and Memorial Day.

June saw the arrival of guest blogger Michael Ruhlman and a nice change from usual mumblings. All his posts can be found here.

In July I traveled a lot, so Ruhlman continued to pick up the slack. But I had time to have Fun with trout, when I tried to prepare Thomas Keller's truite a la grenobloise at home and boned my first trout. I have yet to try again, but was just talking about this experience today with folks. I must get some more trout.

August 3 should be a holy day around our house, as that's the day when I discovered I was Crazy for salt. After saving some fleur de sel in my pantry for more than a year after I purchased it in Paris, I opened it and my life was forever changed. There has been no going back. I am crazy for salt.

In September my husband and I went to Austria for vacation and we experienced garlic soup for the first time. I set about recreating it at home and wrote it up with A creamy taste of Innsbruck. There was also a good discussion about Getting too full during a great meal.

October will be remembered as the month I made chicken wings with Daniel Boulud (resulting in this Serious Eats Basics: Braising video) and he whacked a wing so hard that blood splattered all over my sweater. Also I Did the Daisy May Pig Gig, which entailed eating suckling pig with a batch of friends. Highly recommended.

November may go down in history as one of my favorite months of Megnut ever. I discovered the best pie crust ever and made three pies for my family. I almost lost my mind doing an extensive Thanksgiving round-up I called the "Thanksgiving Spectacular of 2006" (best viewed by reading the November 2006 monthly archive). Though that was fun, I'm not sure I'll do it again this year. And most importantly, I received a free lobe of foie gras and proceeded to kick the Amateur Gourmet's ass in Battle Foie Gras.

December saw me do some good cooking, with my büche de Noël and Christmas dinner with goose. I also discovered Sticky Toffee Pudding from Häagen-Dazs and ate a ton of it. It seems to be gone from my store now. :(

January 2007 got off with a whimper rather than a bang, and the most interesting thing I seemed to have posted about was How natural is natural food?

In February I alerted readers to the new trend of chocolate cereal. This is when you can see the effect of spending so much time in Serious Eats. The site really started to go down hill.

March saw an annoucement from Wolfgang Puck stating he'd "use products only from animals raised under strict humane standards" and I wondered about Wolfgang Puck's humane decision. I also foolishly announced a Best chocolate chip cookie search and promised to make all the recipes readers submitted. I am still working on this. Really! Also I gave up on food due to the confusion of the current nutritional dictates.

And just this past April saw me posting about Poor man's sous vide and I got all crazed about plastic melting into sous vided food. I have still not gotten to the bottom of this issue, but that probably doesn't surprise you.

So what does that portend for the rest of the year? Hopefully more of the same: good links, funny weird food stuff, great reader interactions, and some in-depth informative writing about issues that are really important to me, like sustainable and humane food practices. I know for sure that I'll continue to enjoy being a food enthusiast, and sharing that enthusiasm with you. Thanks for reading, whether it's been for eight years, or just a few days.

comments are open

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 2, 2007 4:14 PM

Coming slowly but surely to a grocery store near you is 5 Boroughs Ice Cream. What started with little more than a couple’s wedding present followed by some kitchen experimentation has become a quest to endow every New York City neighborhood with its own signature ice cream flavor. 5 Boroughs owners Scott and Kim Myles are the Big Apple’s Ben and Jerry, sans Birkenstocks. With 8 themed flavors, such as the Jackson Heights Mangodesh (Mango ice cream with a cardamom edge), 5 Boroughs Ice Cream is now available at places like Gourmet Garage and Cobblestone Foods. 5B was founded with a strong grassroots approach- the milk for the ice cream comes from Mercer’s Dairy upstate, a collection of 7 independently owned family farms. 5 Boroughs is also involved with community building and several local charities. Gothamist had the chance to speak with ½ of 5B, Scott Myles, in his Astoria living room last week. Why Ice Cream? Kim and I got an ice cream maker as a wedding present, and it was sort of the main object I had wanted to receive off the registry. We started fooling around in the kitchen with it- I had made ice cream before; we always had a lot of Schwann’s ice cream at family reunions when I was growing up. We always had to order a minimum amount by the half gallon in order for them to deliver to our house, so we’d have a downstairs freezer always packed with ice cream. Kim’s family was kind of the same way. So we used this ice cream maker and played with flavors- I tend to be a kind of DIY guy. I’m always doing a lot of stuff like making my own peanut butter, juicing, cooking a lot at home, so ice cream was part of that. Then we had the idea one night on the couch, and started experimenting. All our friends liked what we were doing, even if it wasn’t always great. We shelved the idea for two years, just because we kind of thought it was too crazy. Then it came up again, Kim said, “I’m so glad you came back to the idea. I really think this is the one.” So we started trying again. We did some research, and I found out about a place called Ice Cream University that used to be in the Bronx. I went up there and took a short course for a long weekend. They teach you how to use a batch freezer, things like that, how to use the equipment. We were in Brooklyn doing a smaller size packaging, and later we got hooked up with a New York State program called Pride of NY, which helps small businesses, farms, and dairies. 5 Boroughs is actually now made upstate in Boonville, which is about five hours outside the city.

Originally posted by goth_hugh from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on May 2, 2007 3:08 PM

The simplicity of the name of the site Old Pictures belies the breadth and depth of the historical content it provides. Inside, there is a collection of more than 80,000 images dating from 1850 to 1940. The site's database is searchable, but designed for easy and lengthy browsing. Groups of photographs are also assembled in collections based on themes and defining moments, ranging from photos of the U.S. Civil War (warning: contains graphic photos of battlefield casualties) to British Imperialism around the world. We, of course, searched for photos of New York City and found a trove of images that really don't date from that long ago (most date 100 years ago or less), but shows a city that is unrecognizable in some images and just as familiar in others. We browsed through Old Pictures for some time and picked out some shots that we think are representative of what the site holds for visitors interested in real portraits of New York City's past.

• What looks like Riverside Park while looking north, with New Jersey and the Hudson to the left
• FDNY removes a body from the rubble of a 7th Ave. subway cavein in 1915
• Aftermath of the anarchist-attributed bombing on Wall St. in front of the J.P. Morgan headquarters in 1920
• Snow removal, 1908-style
• Penn Station under construction - 1909
• Manhattan's Madison Square in 1913
• At the funeral of Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan in the Bowery
• Anti-war gathering in Union Square - 1914
• Stuyvesant High School students at work
• The original second incarnation of the Tombs jail downtown
• The Battery battered in a 1910 storm
• A holdout mansion surrounded by newer apartment bldgs
• Football practice at Columbia University -1916

The NYCTV program "Inside the Archives" features a weekly hour of archival New York images set to music. A collection of photographer Bernice Abbot's mostly architectural photography of the city from 1935-38 called "Changing New York" is viewable at the New York Public Library's site. And the library also hosts a series of photos by Lewis Wickes Hines of the Empire State Building's construction in 1930-31. NYC Then and Now is an interesting pool of photos at flickr that documents alterations––sometimes small, sometimes dramatic––in streetscapes around the city. (Photo of a Mock Battleship being built in Union Square as part of a WWI recruiting effort. Germania Life building looms ironically in the background. From Old Pictures.)

Originally posted by nyc_daveh from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on May 2, 2007 3:06 PM

There are some very observant drivers on the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge and BQE. WCBS 2 reports that a number of drivers called 911 to report that a freighter ship was sinking in the New York Harbor. But it turns out the freighter, Dockwise Swan, is actually supposed to sink a little bit! The ship is a "semi-submersible," and can submerge to allow cargo to be taken on or off using the "float-on/float-off," "roll-on/roll-off," "skid-on/skid-off, or "lift-on/lift-off" procedures. And the freighter can submerge because there are 50 ballast tanks. See video here. And you can really nerd out on semi-submersibles and other Dockwise ships with this PDF. Update: It's likely that the semi-submersible ship was launching a specialized dredging or drilling craft. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is overseeing several contractors involved in improving multiple areas in New York Harbor, or more generally the Port of New York-New Jersey. The deepening of the Ambrose Channel, which stretches from south of the Verrazano Bridge to deep water outside of the Lower Bay, is scheduled to be completed by August of this year. Deepening of the Anchorage Channel, which extendes northward from the Verrazano to where it meets the Port Jersey Channel is scheduled for completion in January 2008. All sections of the harbor-deepening project will cost an estimated $2.5 billion, with the federal government picking up $1.3 billion of that cost.

Originally posted by jen from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on May 2, 2007 3:06 PM

Darren Aronofsky is working on a screenplay for a film about Noah. You know, the dude with the Ark. "Noah was the first person to plant vineyards and drink wine and get drunk. It's there in the Bible -- it was one of the first things he did when he reached land. There was some real survivor's guilt going on there. He's a dark, complicated character." (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 2, 2007 2:39 PM

Got an email from Michael Ruhlman this AM asking:

are you sure e coli doesn't grow in the guts of grass fed cows? i honestly don't know and would like to. i do know it grows in the guts of dogs, hogs, horses and deer (and the deer part is the scary part because they can spread it in spinach fields). Just curious.

That got me wondering, was I confused? Did I really recall everything I've read correctly? So I poked around in the Megnut archives for more information. Here are two articles that I'd linked to last fall that supported me.

From Michael Pollan's The Vegetable-Industrial Complex October 15, 2006 in the New York Times:

The lethal strain of E. coli known as 0157:H7, responsible for this latest outbreak of food poisoning, was unknown before 1982; it is believed to have evolved in the gut of feedlot cattle. These are animals that stand around in their manure all day long, eating a diet of grain that happens to turn a cow’s rumen into an ideal habitat for E. coli 0157:H7. (The bug can’t survive long in cattle living on grass.)

From Nina Planck's Leafy Green Sewage September 21, 2006 in the New York Times:

In 2003, The Journal of Dairy Science noted that up to 80 percent of dairy cattle carry O157. (Fortunately, food safety measures prevent contaminated fecal matter from getting into most of our food most of the time.) Happily, the journal also provided a remedy based on a simple experiment. When cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold.

This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home — even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say, hamburger in meat-packing plants.

Phew! I'm not making things up. Which leads me back to what I said yesterday in Vaccinating against E Coli: why isn't anyone talking about moving cows off of corn feed, even if it's only for the last week of their lives?

comments are open

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 2, 2007 2:08 PM

A man buys a bag of Cape Cod potato chips containing a few chips and a whole potato. Correspondence with the company and hilarity ensues. (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 2, 2007 1:48 PM

Apple's CEO responds to concerns about the company's commitment to the environment.

Read More...

Originally posted by arsjade@mac.com (Charles Jade) from Infinite Loop, on May 2, 2007 1:45 PM

Did you know that Tomb Raider: Anniversary was a remake of Tomb Raider? I didn't. Eurogamer has some First Impressions up, and they're good. Complimentary. It's exciting! I LOVED Tomb Raider.

Question is: did the keep the music? Either way, I'll definitely be picking this up. Being Lara is so therapeutic after a hard day at the office...

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on May 2, 2007 1:37 PM

I'm also very interested in the answer to this question! I've found some companies online that ship mangoes, but not to the U.S. :(

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Serious Eats: Posts and Comments by Alaina Browne, on May 2, 2007 1:18 PM

In our recent Outdoors Issue, ReadyMade ran a story about artist/activist/big-thinker Fritz Haeg and his genius Edible Estates project. Since

Originally posted by Derek from ReadyMade Blog, on May 2, 2007 1:11 PM

The iPhone is not a phone that also plays music, but an iPod that also makes calls. At least according to John Gruber.

Read More...

Originally posted by iljitsch@gmail.com (Iljitsch van Beijnum) from Infinite Loop, on May 2, 2007 1:05 PM

Key Food's Not-So-Thin Slice
169 Atlantic Avenue at Clinton Street
"On my last three visits to KF I’ve placed the exact same order to three different employees: half a pound of Boar’s Head Sausalito turkey, thinly-sliced. And all three times, as I later in the day find myself in the throws of sandwich preparation, I’m presented with the same abominable slabs of breast meat. [See photo above.] This turkey is not THINLY-sliced! I’m not even sure this qualifies as medium-thickness – more like medium-medium-thick, or maybe even medium-thick-thick. At first I thought maybe they’ve just got a crappy deli slicer that can’t cut below a quarter inch in thickness. But the other day I ordered some thickly-sliced turkey just to see what would happen. My order came out the exact same thickness as the thin stuff, so I think the problem stems from employees just not giving a shit." [Clean Plate Club]

Porchetta
241 Smith Street at Douglass Street
"The rumors of Porchetta’s demise were premature. Jason Neroni, infamous first for lobbying for a Beard Award and then for forging his employer’s name on checks, was thought to have brought the whole operation down, but owner Marco Rivero tells us that the new kitchen head is as good as hired and should be signing a contract in the next day or so. He projects that the restaurant will reopen on May 7 with a new menu and a new lease on life." [NY Mag's Grub Street]

After the jump: Spirito opens in Park Slope; the Times and the Sun visit and Fette Sau...

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on May 2, 2007 12:47 PM

“The most obvious way to create a mise-en-scène to support communication is to gather objects in a space, such a room, where they are simultaneously visible, and where not only the objects themselves but also the spatial relationships among them can assume significance. (…) It operates at an architectural scale when centrality asserts the importance of a building or an entrance relative to others, or a corner office suggests the status of its occupant“

Bill Mitchell, chapter 1 of “Placing Words: Symbols, Space, and the City

Why do I blog this? reading this excerpt of Mitchell’s book, I just thought it fits with this picture I took this week-end.

Originally posted by Nicolas from pasta and vinegar, on May 2, 2007 11:57 AM

A map of online communities. Notable features include the Blogipeligo, the Bay of Trolls, the Sea of Memes, and the Viral Straits. (thx, kayhan) (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 2, 2007 11:56 AM

Finally, Red Hook residents have received the traffic light they've been waiting for. The new traffic signal is located on the corner of Van Brunt and Sullivan Streets. It protects pedestrians from Fairway traffic on this busy intersection near a bus stop and a school. According to NY1 local motorists are happy about the light and so are pedestrians ? and they wouldn't mind a few more. "I think they really need some more traffic lights on Van Brunt,” said Red Hook resident Jackie Thornton. The Department of Transportation doesn't plan on installing any more traffic lights for now, but will conduct another traffic study if they are asked to do so.
Guerilla Artist Erects Red Hook Road Block [Brooklyn Record]
Hook Residents Clog Traffic for Safety [Brooklyn Record]
Woman Hit In Red Hook [Brooklyn Record]
Photo by smoothdude

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on May 2, 2007 11:13 AM

Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are playing a match today on a specially designed tennis court that's half grass (Federer's specialty) and half clay (Nadal's preferred surface). Story includes a photo of the kooky court. (thx, dalben) (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 2, 2007 10:58 AM

Amazing. Read it here. Digg it here.

And meanwhile, Digg slowly returns to normal...

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on May 2, 2007 10:40 AM

When the multi-million dollar renovation of the Brooklyn Public Library's central branch is complete, the plaza will accommodate tables and chairs, and entrance ramps for the disabled and parents with strollers. By September, the building will have a new auditorium to stage library events, like musical programs and author lectures. The library is also planning to expand its services to new neighborhoods, like Dumbo. Rather than building an entire library, though, they're looking into starting up a mini-library ? "a small store-front facility on a busy pedestrian strip that would have the basic necessities of a branch and could be used a drop off or pick up point." If it works for the community, this model that could be used throughout Brooklyn.
New Head Of Library Plans To Expand Services [NY1]
Photo by Bridge and Tunnel Club

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on May 2, 2007 10:27 AM

Issue #1: The hexadecimal sequence, 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0, which unlocks DVDs, has been leaked onto the internet. By the time of this posting, there are 20,700 results found in Google. Whose problem is it? Ultimately the problem belongs to the company that created a copy-protection scheme with this kind of vulnerability.

Issue #2: Is it illegal to post this number? Though the number posted to Digg became the most popular post in the site's history, the Digg owners decided to take the post down because they were told it was illegal. I find it really hard to imagine that posting a number like this can be illegal. This is not a personal medical record or information obtained with an NDA, this is a single password, a private industry secret that they let out of the bag.

Issue #3: Did Digg take the post down because of tight advertising relationships with the businesses that would suffer from the posting, including their own?

Whatever the answers may be, I have a great deal of admiration for the Digg team for managing a closed site in such an open way. I can only imagine they are put in these kinds of quandaries on a daily basis, trying to keep to a democratic mission while maintaining personal control.

I would suggest that Digg has a social responsibility to their own mission to end all advertising on the site. They should just get rid of all of it and move to a PBS style model if they are ready to take the next step towards boosting the integrity of their information system. This is not a rejection of advertising in general for the world, just for this kind of site. Of course they should really do whatever they want because it's theirs, an impotant reality check for eveyone that believes in community. It will be interesting to see how they continue to deal with the daily dilemmas.

Originally posted by Drew from Dembot, on May 2, 2007 2:24 AM

a data visualization technique that is able to represent long sequences of text. here chromograms are used to analyze the behavior of Wikipedia users, in order to find patterns in histories of tens of thousands of edits.

chromograms map text strings to color: the first 3 letters of a string determine the color of its representation. the 1st letter determines the hue, the 2nd letter the saturation, & the 3rd the brightness. although seemingly arbitrary, it actually reveals a series of important patterns in the editing activity of Wikipedians, such as so-called "systematic activities", or a sustained related sequence (e.g. alphabetical) of edits.

[link: ibm.com|thnkx Till!]

see also history flow & wikipedia treemap.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on May 2, 2007 12:32 AM

Jim Gettys: "Here?s the straight scoop about the changes in the OLPC specification."

Originally posted by Wes Felter from Hack the Planet, on May 1, 2007 11:07 PM

Mark Anthony Neal turns in a classic on VIBE.com. This slams as hard as Baron Davis on Dirk No-game-ski:

In the context of these questions, we can also ask why the attacks on hip hop - and why now? That some people hoped to enact political retribution for the so-called victory of Don Imus's firing, goes without saying. But I'd like to suggest that, more significantly, the current critique of hip hop is aimed at undermining the culture's potential to politicize the generations of constituents that might claim hip hop as their social movement. After high profile voter registration campaigns in 2004 that were fronted by Russell Simmons, Sean Combs and others, much was made of the lack of impact that hip hop generation voters had on the outcome of the 2004 Presidential election. The hip hop generation, in fact, embraced the franchise in unprecedented numbers, but those numbers were obscured by the unprecedented turnout of religious fundamentalists who were galvanized by issues like same-sex marriage and threats of anti-American terrorism. With no candidate on the Right likely to galvanize religious fundamentalists, the hip hop nation - which has continued to organize since 2004 - represents a legitimate political bloc. With this political bloc comes demands for social justice, particularly within the realms of the prison industrial complex, the labor force, US foreign policy, law enforcement, the electoral process, mainstream corporate media, the economy, public education and a range of other concerns.

While there has long been criticism of hip hop culture from the standpoint of social conservatives, pro-hip hop feminists, religious groups, anti-homophobia activists and hip hop heads themselves, what marks this moment as different are the attempts to force mainstream black political leadership and Democratic Presidential candidates to repudiate hip hop culture (reminiscent of the pressures placed on Reverend Jesse Jackson to distance himself from Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan in 1984).

Emblematic of these pressures is a recent Chicago Tribune editorial, which asked,

"Will Obama scold David Geffen, the entertainment mogul who is one of
his most prominent contributors and who owns Snoop Dogg's record label? Will
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton admonish rap impresario Timbaland, who recently
threw a benefit for her at his Miami home that raised $800,000?"

Asking figures like Reverend Al Sharpton, Senators Clinton and Obama, and Russell Simmons to publicly distance themselves from hip hop is a transparent attempt drive a wedge between them and a constituency that has both the energy and the creativity to galvanize a youth-based electorate in the 2008 election season.

The sexism, misogyny, violence, anti-intellectualism and homophobia that rap music traffics in is real - but it is also reflective of where American society is at this moment. Remove offensive and vulgar lyrics from rap music, and we are still faced with a society that is largely sexist, misogynistic, violent, anti-intellectual and homophobic. The real story here, is that as the hip hop generation(s) have come to maturity and begun to realize their civic, social and political responsibility, that there are many in the larger society who are disconcerted - and they should be.

Such is the reality of social change.

Bravo.

Originally posted by Zentronix from zentronix: dubwise & hiphopcentric, on May 1, 2007 9:27 PM

Shock of the Old is a technology book by David Edgerton that focuses on use in favor of invention, illustrated with examples of under-the-radar technologies (e.g. corrugated iron, DDT, etc.) that make a larger social impact than more visible, highly-touted inventions. These are a few interesting passages I've marked.

Pages 75-76:

As one philosopher of technology noted in the 1970s: "In almost no instance can artificial-rational systems be built and left alone. They require continued attention, rebuilding, and repair. Eternal vigilance is the price of artificial complexity." He noted too, that in a technological age we should ask not who governs, but what governs: "government becomes the business of recognising what is necessary and efficient for the continued functioning and elaboration of large-scale systems and the ration implementation of their manifest requirements."

Page 83:

So concerned were Ford with maintenance and repair that they investigated and standardised repair procedures, which were incorporated into a huge manual published in 1925. ... However, this plan did not work - it could not cope with the many vicissitudes and uncertainties of the car-repair business. The Fordisation of maintenance and repair, even of the Model T, did not work. As the British naval officer in charge of ship construction and maintenance in the 1920's put it: "repair work has no connection with mass-production."

Page 89, on jet engines:

Typically, there is at first a slight rise (because of unanticipated problems) and then a fall over ten years to 30 per cent of the original maintenance cost. This is due to increasing confidence in the engine itself and increasing knowledge of what needs maintenance. In other words, the maintenance schemes, programmes, and costs are not programmable in advance. In these complex system a great infrastructure of documentation, control, and surveillance is needed, and yet informl, tacit knowledge remains extremely important.

Page 114-115:

In the early 1930's there were all sorts of suggestions for the creation of an "international air police" along these lines, and similar thinking continued into the 1940's, usually with the British and Americans as that international police force. In more recent years the atomic bomb, television, and above all the internet and world-wide web have featured in this kind of techno-globalism. As we have seen, it was generally the older technologies which were crucial to global relations - today's globalisation is in part the result of extremely cheap sea and air transport, and radio and wire-based communications.

Page 169, on food production and slaughterhouses:

To understand the uniqueness and significance of these reeking factories of death, it is illuminating to cross ... the Mediterranean a century later, against a new tide of migration into Europe. In late twentieth-centure Tunisia, on several main roads through the desert there were concentrations of nearly identical small buildings lining each side of the road. Tethered next to many were a few sheep; hanging from the buildings were the still fleece-covered carcassas of their cousins. For these were the butchers' shops and restaurants. As the heavy traffic roared by one could dine, on plastic tables, without plates or cutlery, on delicious pieces of lamb taken straight from the displayed cadaver and cooked on a barbecue crudely fashioned from sheet metal. Clealy this spectacle was not a left-over from the past, or the sort of thing which attracted tourists. It was something new; a drive-in barby for the Tunisian motorist and lorry-driver in a hurry.

Page 189, on belief in technical progress:

There is an old Soviet joke which goes to the heart of the issue: an inventor goes into the ministry and says: "I have invented a new button-holing machine for our clothing industry." "Comrade," says the minister, "we have no use for your machine: don't you realise this is the age of Sputnik?" Such sentiments shaped policy, not only in rockets, and not only in the Soviet Union.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on May 1, 2007 6:06 PM

Anything anyone does to benefit the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings should be commended, but I'm a little creeped out that one of the first celebs to step forward is... R Kelly. The kiddie porn lovin' freakazoid singer is releasing a song about the aftermath of the shooting and has named it "Rise Up." According to his label, 100 percent of the net proceeds from its sale will go to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund.

Nice gesture... I think.

Originally posted by sbyrne from Daily Blabber, on May 1, 2007 5:59 PM

similar to the hot or not voting concept, this website allows users to rate computer network diagrams based on the function of the network & (unfortunately) "not the graphic design capabilities of the network administrator".

instead, the purpose of this site is to allow people to learn about computer networking & network documentation by exploring what other people have done with their networks.

[link: ratemynetworkdiagram.com]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on May 1, 2007 5:44 PM

During an REI Legendary Lunch Ride last week, I quipped, “Hey! no one told me it was bring the good wheels day!” One of the lunch ride hammerheads was all riding his Zipp’s and damn, I should’ve brought my Heds. That reminded me it was time to post a review of my new hoops.

To some, cycling is all about the wheels and earlier this year, Mark posted his Aero Wheel Wisdom and that’s the Stinger 50 he’s gluing up. I’ve also been riding the Jet 60, another great wheelset.

The Jet 60s roll really well and I use them for roleur type of courses, which are flatter circuits, also known as a kermese. The wheels reminded of Hed Alps, but lighter, and are a good all-around wheel.

For the hillier races, crits, and tighter circuits, I’ve been riding the Stinger 50s and totally dig them. They’re the fastest wheelset I’ve ridden. Of course, that’s a perception, but perception is everything. The speed I’m feeling is a direct result of the stiffness, which translates to out of the corner acceleration. They’re also exceptionally well made with Hed’s Sonic hub.

Little known facts

Hed manufactures the carbon rims for Bontrager and they rely on his patented rim shape. The Aeolus 6.5 Clincher is very similar to the Jet 60 and both are thought to produce a flywheel effect. Specifically, you get them up to speed and they carry that momentum.

Hed also designs their wheels to always get you home. So, if you’re bringing them to a lunch ride or for a commute during Bike Month and a spoke breaks or something bad happens, you’re still going to finish your ride. That can’t be said for a lot of good, race day wheels.

Originally posted by Byron from Bike Hugger, on May 1, 2007 4:53 PM

While Mac market share may be up, delays in software and no new hardware mean things could be better.

Read More...

Originally posted by arsjade@mac.com (Charles Jade) from Infinite Loop, on May 1, 2007 4:18 PM

---

I posted these photos on May 2, 2003, a day after the "flight stunt," with the caption: "The photo above and left is from Agence France-Presse. As documented here, an AP story changed to the wording of the banner to make the protestors sound more violent, or desperate, from 'Sooner or later US killers we'll kick you out' to 'Sooner or later US killers we'll kill you.' Hardly any US media ran the above photo, only AP's altered description." The photo on the left was taken in Fallujah, which the US subsequently flattened. Bush had his little jollies, but it does appear that sooner or later we're going to get kicked out. A chilling video of the aircraft carrier legions deafeningly but mechanically applauding Bush's propagandistic "Mission Accomplished" speech, with Bush's speech edited out, can be seen on YouTube (thx mark).

Four years ago, it seemed like it was only bloggers who thought the US war was wrong. The news media were 100% behind it, so millions of TV-dazzled people across the US were behind it, too. I had an argument with one of my cousins in Dallas when I told him I'd marched against the war. He said, "I've just gotta believe that the government has access to information we don't have and that they made the right decision." Steam was coming out from my collar but what could I say to convince him? "Well, I read a lot of blogs and you are one naive MoFo." Months after the Kay Report concluded that Iraq had no WMDs I was talking to a woman in NY who insisted Saddam was crafty and we just hadn't found where he had buried the weapons yet. It's taken Americans four years to conclude maybe the war wasn't a good idea but still Congress is afraid to end it and Bush and Cheney still haven't been impeached for lying us into it. It is Vietnam all over again.

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on May 1, 2007 3:51 PM

Matt Haughey recently launched a new blog about "doing business online" called fortuitous. In his introductory post, Matt describes his job as "professionally screwing around on the web", which is an accurate description of my current vocation as well. (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 1, 2007 3:36 PM

Scientists Look to Vaccines in the War on E. Coli states "cows and their manure are considered the major sources of the pathogen" but in two pages of this New York Times article there isn't a single mention of the fact that E. Coli grows in the gut of corn-fed cows, but not in grass-fed cows. Instead of switching cows to a natural diet of grass, here are the solutions under consideration to protect us from E. Coli: feeding cows sodium chlorate, a chemical used in the pulp and paper industry; probiotics, which are good bacteria; phages, viruses that infect and kill bacteria; and E. Coli vaccines for people and for cattle.

The only sensible thing in the entire article was this quote from Michael T. Osterholm, director of the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. “What really is a concern to me about this issue is we always have a tendency to want high-tech responses to what in many cases are common-sense low-tech solutions.”

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on May 1, 2007 3:20 PM

I was about to have a talk with Stewart about how much sugar he's been putting in his coffee, when I realized that it LMNOP has been jumping up on the dining room table and snarfing up all the sugar in the sugar bowl!

Two days ago, out on a walk, she ate a live snail, and yesterday, a croissant. One day I came home from work, and she and Dos Pesos had tipped over the bag of kibble, and eaten the whole thing. They didn't even greet me when I came in, they were groaning from their distended bellies. Five poops were distributed around the house. LMNOP has eaten bugs, uncooked Butternut squash, newspaper, bagels -- I wonder what you'd find if you x-rayed her. She will eat anything she finds in the street if you don't keep an eye on her. A couple months ago we were having a party at our house, and Bug and Chieka were over visiting LMNOP and Dos Pesos. Halfway through dinner we looked over and saw the cheese plate had been overturned, and four large cheeses were gone, some sliced sausage, and the crackers. All the dogs had cheese breath. Ringleader? LMNOP

This is the four of them after they'd rolled in something stinky, having a bath at the Powazek-Champs:

(photo by Heather Champ.)

LMNOP was a rescue dog, and her story is that there was an old woman in Winters, CA, who bred chihuahuas, but had had a stroke and couldn't manage them anymore. So the chihuahuas decided to breed themselves. She died, and when the coroners came, there were 47 chihuahuas at her house. And she never let them outside the house because her neighbors would report her to the Public Health Department. Can you imagine the smell?

This is why LMNOP=scavenger. The training continues.

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on May 1, 2007 2:50 PM

A voxel is smallest unit of volume in a 3D image. Voxel = volumetric + pixel. (via best thing) (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 1, 2007 2:39 PM

Another Friday night in Williamsburg, another art opening. I’ll be the first to admit that I only tend to go to these things because a friend or someone I vaguely know is being featured. And, usually once I get there, not only can I not find my friend, but often I can’t even see the art because the place is so crowded with sweaty people not paying attention to the exhibit because they’re too busy “networking” or chugging cheap booze. But this one, simply titled 8x10, was pleasantly surprising for a few reasons: We got there early, missed the crowd, the art was really good and surprisingly affordable.

Another added bonus was that it was held at About Glamour, a really great space, also home to a cool little store specializing in vintage clothes and house wares as well as local and Japanese designers.

About Glamour, 103 North 3rd Street, Williamsburg, 718-599-3044

Originally posted by Lisa from Brooklyn Record, on May 1, 2007 2:02 PM

Almost two weeks ago, Digg launched the API that we helped design. Since then, a few interesting uses have popped up that deserve a mention:

• Alex Bosworth created Who's Digging You?, a javascript-based app that cralws over your list of submitted stories and finds the people who've dugg them the most. Also throws in the usernames of submitters whose stories you digg the most for good measure.
• Derek Van Vliet made the Smart Digg Button, a Firefox browser extension that checks with Digg for every page you visit, and inserts a tiny display of digg counts for that URL from Digg. If this were Google, I'd be worried - the extension necessarily sends Digg a record of every page you visit, so it raises some privacy alarms. Still really neat though.
• Diggest is a player that shows popular videos and the Digg comments attached to them. It's the first comment-based API use I've seen, and has a great MST3K/peanut gallery feel.
• Derek Van Vliet also wrote PyDigg, one of many language-specific API toolkits. I've seen others for .NET, Ruby, Java, and so on, but Python is the language closest to my heart so I'm linking to this one.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on May 1, 2007 1:51 PM

kyte is live!.

This is the product of Thumbjive acquisition 6 months ago — NYTimes article doesn’t mention similarity to Radar is because the same person built it. Congrats Joseph!

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on May 1, 2007 1:48 PM

Today Joyent is opening up the gates to Slingshot. Please check out Slingshot for Windows and Macintosh, along with a Rails plugin that makes it easier to get your Rails application working with Slingshot, and Radiant CMS running on Slingshot. It is all available from http://developers.joyent.com. I have said more about Slingshot previously (announcement, apologia, open source). We will be releasing the source code for Slingshot next month (June, 2007) under the GPL. There will be a commercial version of Slingshot with additional features and support options. The commercial version of Slingshot will be free to developers using Joyent Accelerators.

To celebrate the launch of Slingshot, Joyent is offering Large Accelerators for a year (a $1250 value) to the developers who best port an open source Rails application to Slingshot. Examples could be:

explainPMT
Tracks
Mephisto

Etc.

Entries will be judged by Joyent. The criteria for “best port” is a combination of “ah-hah!”, “wow”, “nice”, “joyous”, “utility”, “functionality”, “originality”, “drag and drop”, “user experience”. The contest closes June 15, 2007. Please “register” for the contest by creating an entry on the developer wiki.

While Slingshot will always remain a work in progress, we have had success with a number of projects running on Slingshot. Joyent is committed to continued development of the project and your participation will help to make Slingshot a success. We hope you enjoy Slingshot.

Update: here’s the mailing list URL.

Originally posted by David Young from Joyeur, on May 1, 2007 11:24 AM

Vote now!

Originally posted by Administrator from Turbanhead.com, on May 1, 2007 10:56 AM

Martin:

I passed the May Day parade in Tokyo today and took a few photos. Union members are demanding higher minimum wage and more stable employment to fight the income gap and the problem of the so-called "working poor" who are struggling with low wages. I was also impressed by the banners and floats aiming to protect Article 9 of Japan's Peace Constitution, that renounces war.
42,000 people participated in the events in Tokyo today.

Originally posted by Martin from Metroblogging Tokyo, on May 1, 2007 10:55 AM

I am super jealous of my cousin Angelina's night with David Sedaris!

Awesomeness:

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on May 1, 2007 10:53 AM

* Thanks to my bro for the photo!
** To smell more click here.

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on May 1, 2007 10:27 AM

Play dress-up with the Gucci spring 2007 collection. Drag and drop dresses, shoes, and handbags onto the model. Many other collections are available as well. (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 1, 2007 10:01 AM

The Cooper Hewitt Design Museum has announced plans for expansion. I was up there this weekend checking out the Design Triennial and found the exhibition a bit small; a similar show at the expansive MoMA might have run to twice the size and would have included larger items. I hope they don't do too much to the building though...in many rooms, the building is just as much of an attraction as the items on display. (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on May 1, 2007 8:46 AM

Mark Bittman: Steak Frites: Seeking the Best of a Classic. We ate at Relais de L'Entrecôte [review], a meat restaurant in Geneva, on the recommendation of one of our hosts. We had no idea what we were in for, and were surprised when the waitress, approaching our table, asked only what we would like to drink and how we would like our steak done. It was delicious: sliced, sauced steak with huge pile of frites, and then when we were done...seconds!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rebecca's Pocket, on May 1, 2007 8:30 AM

Tyler Hamilton,
originally uploaded by Frank Steele.

cyclingnews.com | Giro participation of Hamilton & Jaksche in question

Tyler Hamilton and Tinkoff Credit Systems teammate Jorg Jaksche may be barred from riding in the Giro d'Italia, as Grand Tour organizers look to exclude any riders with a link to Operación Puerto.

Hamilton's case is particularly difficult, because he has just come off a 2 year suspension for blood doping, but UCI president Pat McQuaid has previously said he believes any involvement in Puerto, even if it dated from before the suspension, should be treated as a second infraction.

Grand Tour organizers agreed over the weekend to exclude riders associated with the Spanish investigation, and La Gazetta dello Sport reported on the full 6,000-page investigation file. They claim 49 additional riders (on top of 58 in the June 2006 report) are implicated by the full file.

There are some reports that Hamilton and Jaksche have been suspended, but the team denies this:

Tinkoff's Omar Piscina talked to the Associated Press today regarding Hamilton and Jaksche's alleged suspension. "We have no intention of suspending Hamilton or Jaksche. We haven't received any sort of notice from the authorities and nobody is investigating them as far as we know," said Piscina.

Piscina went farther with VeloNews:

“For me, Tyler and Jörg can start the Giro. Stories that they are suspended are not true,” Tinkoff general manager Omar Piscina told VeloNews on Monday. “Tinkoff has a list of 12 riders that can go to the Giro. Tyler is on that list and we expect him to race.”

Hamilton didn't ride Liege-Bastogne-Liege, an ASO-sponsored race he won in 2003, over the weekend.

VeloNews reporter Jason Sumner talked to Hamilton at the Tour de Georgia, and Hamilton denied any involvement:

“Take my hair if you want. Do whatever you want. For me it's all done. Nobody has ever called me about Operación Puerto. Nobody sent me any questions. People are welcome to call me. I don't know this guy - Spanish doctor Eufemiano Fuentes,” Hamilton said. “I've never met this guy. If somebody has a question, please ask me. Sure they've sent my name out to the press and I've basically gotten railroaded. But they haven't asked for my hair. If you want my hair, take it.” Hamilton then plucked a hair from his head and offered to Sumner.

Also:

VeloNews | Will Hamilton start Giro? Tinkoff says yes

Originally posted by Frank Steele from Tour de France 2007, on May 1, 2007 8:26 AM

Two weeks ago, Post announced that it was raising its price from 25 cents to 50 cents, with the change going into effect this week. Gawker noticed that a camera crew was filming the new price change for the paper, but NY1 found that the Daily News lowered its price to 25 cents for the week! So sneaky - we almost expect Rupert Murdoch (whose News Corp owns the Post) to visit Daily News owner Mort Zuckerman with a sock full of quarters! NY1 also got these comments from people buying their papers:

"I'm still a Post fan. I'll pay the extra quarter, like everyone else I'm sure will,” said one reader. “We'll all complain, but we'll all stay pay for it." “I don't think that the difference between 25 cents and 50 cents is enough to get me to switch,” added another.

There's a Times Select article about the Post's decision to raise prices: "raising the newsstand price might help stem the paper's losses, estimated to be about $70 million a year." We have a feeling most people we know will stick to reading the Post either online or over someone's shoulder on the train.

Originally posted by jen from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on May 1, 2007 8:19 AM

This blog has had a moratorium on pictures of this knucklehead, believing they add to his cult, but I want to post this one today, "Mission Accomplished Day." The rightwingers love this image because it makes their idol seem manly and the leftwingers took to calling him "Commander Codpiece" because of it, but I recently learned that the groin accentuation is because he forgot to undo his parachute strap.

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on May 1, 2007 8:11 AM

Basso Looking a Bit Too Fresh,
originally uploaded by The Electrician.

Eurosport | Basso leaves Discovery

Defending Giro champion Ivan Basso has left the Discovery Channel team, in the wake of a new look at reports he may have been involved in Operacion Puerto.

The Italian, signed by Discovery in December, is scheduled to appear in Rome before his national anti-doping agency this Wednesday after an agreement over the weekend by the Grand Tour organizers to continue to exclude riders believed to be involved in Operación Puerto.

Basso released a statement, saying in part:

“(Sports director) Johan (Bruyneel), (general manager) Bill (Stapleton) and my team mates have always believed in me and shown me great respect. This decision is my way of showing them that same respect. The team is trying to find a new sponsor and win bike races, and my situation is a distraction to both of those goals. It is important that everyone knows this was 100 percent my decision. Nobody asked me to leave. I am grateful to all of the staff and riders and wish them the best of luck.”

Also:

La Gazzetta dello Sport | Discovery-Basso è divorzio (in Italian)

ProCycling | Basso asks to be released from contract

VeloNews | Basso leaving Discovery

Originally posted by Frank Steele from Tour de France 2007, on May 1, 2007 7:27 AM

first, take a small, low square plant holder and place it in the middle of your front porch. then add no more than two red carnations. allow mrs gentleman to tend them, then resurface the next day in your best gardening gear to do it properly. strike many extravagant poses while attired thusly:

on a hot day:
dark olive trousers
white shirt
pale cream waistcoat
dark tie
brown fedora

on another hot day, on your way somewhere:
black-and-white pin-striped trousers and waistcoat
beige and brown thick striped shirt
pink handkerchief
pale brown fedora

note that green fingers do not go with any outfit. make it look as if you are inventing and serving cocktails. god gave you limbs with which to draw attention to yourself: use them.

Originally posted by dr tibbles from lady upgrade project, on May 1, 2007 7:05 AM

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on May 1, 2007 6:52 AM

Ourmedia, a site where citizen-media types — especially podcasters and video producers — can upload and discuss their work, has launched a 2.0 version of the site. The page is much clearer in its aims than before, with a clean design and many tools for citizen media creators.

Ourmedia is an alternative to YouTube, Blip.tv and other sites offering similar uploading and display capability, with a key difference. The default copyright license is a Creative Commons license, which reserves some but not all control for the copyright holder. This encourages spreading of good work in ways that honor copyright but don’t abuse it.

(Note: JD Lasica, director and co-founder of Ourmedia, is an advisor to this center and was project leader on our Principles of Citizen Journalism project. I’m also on the Ourmedia board of advisors.)

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on May 1, 2007 2:18 AM

an interactive version of the arc diagram visualization metaphor which is able to represent degrees of repetition at varying scales within a linear sequence for documents ranging from Bob Dylan songs to State of Union addresses. diagram arcs illustrate the similarity structure within a text document by drawing arcs connecting segments of a document that share similar vocabulary. rather than using arcs to connect identical patterns within a document this particular implementation instead connects segments that contain similar words.

[link: neoformix.com & neoformix.com|thnkx Jeff]

see also the original arc diagrams by Martin Wattenberg & music chart arcs & email thread arcs & radial document diagram & document icons.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on May 1, 2007 12:40 AM

Oh, Jakob.

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by yatta to collegehumor musicvideo - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/yatta, on May 1, 2007 12:22 AM

Posted by by Sophia Brueckner, Software Engineer, iGoogle

For a while now, we Googlers have used a bit of shorthand to refer to the Personalized Homepage -- a name that connotes interactivity, the Internet, and personalization all at once. Please meet iGoogle, the new name for the Google Personalized Homepage.



Developers around the world have been working hard to make more and more of the world's content available for iGoogle. Can you get, oh, some of the world's most beautiful pictures, updated daily? Check. Thousands and thousands of gadgets to choose from? Check. A personal note and picture from your sweetie? Now you can make your own, because starting today, without having any programming or web design experience at all, anyone can create Google Gadgets for iGoogle and send them to friends. Simple gadget templates include a photo gadget, a "GoogleGram" greeting card-style gadget, a YouTube video channel gadget, and a free-form gadget.

To make yours, choose the gadget template you'd like to use, enter your info, and enter your friends' email addresses. You can always make changes to your gadget, and you can even set some kinds of gadgets to update automatically so your friends will see a new message daily.

Today we're also making the themes that have been so popular on iGoogle in the U.S. available on every edition of iGoogle around the world, and we're making iGoogle available in 22 new locales. Visit iGoogle and click "Select theme" to pick a theme for your own page.

Originally posted by Karen from Official Google Blog, on April 30, 2007 11:59 PM

Er. What?

MY EYES! MY EEYYYYYYESSSSS!!

There's baby Yoda and baby Leia too, in case you had any sight left.

(Thx Kass!)

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on April 30, 2007 11:33 PM

Has WordPress slightly lost its Soul? Well, gee, I don’t know. First off, I don’t know whether you can lose souls ’slightly’, or whether they are indivisible entities which can either be lost completely or not at all. Second off, I wasn’t overly enamoured of the ’software by geeks, for geeks’ culture they had going [...]

Originally posted by that girl again from wordpress™ wank, on April 30, 2007 8:41 PM

Java Decompiler Web Service

 bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by fruminator to java hack webservice decompile - more about this bookmark...

Originally posted by fruminator from del.icio.us/fruminator, on April 30, 2007 7:26 PM

Lessig has a thoughtful post urging people to urge the RNC and DNC not to use restrictive copyrights on political debates. With more and more political expression being done in video, it is time we consider the importance of free speech in video. Video is covered by stronger copyright restrictions when it comes to citation and remix than text. Having politicians and political parties push networks to air their words under the most permissive CC license, the CC-BY license would greatly enhance the public's ability to participate in the political video dialog.

UPDATE: Lessig has an update with the crazy rules that NBC uses today for reuse of debate footage.

Comment - TrackBack

Originally posted by jito@kula.jp (Joi) from Joi Ito's Web, on April 30, 2007 6:28 PM

Jamie reviews some online wake-up services. "when you select the secureawake feature, snoozester will attempt to call you every 3 minutes for 20 minutes until you answer the call and indicate that you are awake." (link)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kottke.org, on April 30, 2007 5:27 PM

"I'm sorry."

A pause.

"Let's both be sorry!"

Stewart makes me laugh. Around our house, the other way we mock ourselves when making half-assed and partial apologies is a phrase Stewart picked up from a Shouts and Murmurs column Steve Martin wrote a few years ago, "I would like you to be more wrong than I am." viz:

My wife is having an affair with a bartender, and I have been secretly filming her and her lover having intercourse. I then sell the tapes on the floor of the stock exchange. I would like her to be more wrong than I am. Who is more wrong?

What sadfunny humans we are, Stewart says.

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on April 30, 2007 5:11 PM

At one point during our meal -- well, at two points during our meal, one of the myriad service people attending the patrons drops a piece of bread next to my chair. "Ladies and gentlemen, the sound that poor young man made when that toasted piece of heaven hit the immaculate carpet was akin to the soft keening sigh one might make upon discovering that one's pet Siamese had passed from this earthly realm to the next." A review of The French Laundry, but nothing like the usual reviews, and well worth reading.

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on April 30, 2007 3:35 PM

I have a column up on Huffington Post today, Hello, Baby! for their special Mother-Daughter campaign that they're doing in collaboration with iVillage for Mother's Day.

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on April 30, 2007 3:31 PM

The kind of attention being paid to ramp season has reached a fever pitch usually reserved for depraved celebrity gossip. Last season, after food blogger Augie enjoyed a pizza at Otto topped with ramps and a fried egg, several readers rushed over to the restaurant in attempt to order the same, and were promptly shut down by a noncompliant waitstaff. This year, Gothamist was shocked by a heaping side order of ramp greens at Telepan, and Grub Street is now reporting Mountain Sweet Berry Farm ramps have arrived at the market en masse; as ramps come to town, so goes the winter. Or something like that. Spring vegetables such as fiddlehead ferns and morels are fickle things: their flavor profiles are nuanced; they’re hardly shelf-stable, and they all have unpredictable ETA’s. Like crispy, aloe-like fiddleheads and spongy, nutty morels, ramps are also best when foraged from forests where they grow wild, another factor complicating the vegetable equation. Greenmarket ramps from Mountain Sweet Berry Farm, and the ones sold to New York restaurants by specialty produce purveyors, are a clean, cultivated version of the wild leek. Ramps differ from regular leeks, baby ones included, in that their green parts are more leaflike, and less stalk; white ramp bulbs also pack a more intense allium (read: oniony) punch than leeks. And they’re only around for a few weeks.

Originally posted by goth_hugh from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on April 30, 2007 1:25 PM

Yesterday, City Council member Simcha Felder held a press conference to announce legislation to ban menus, fliers and circulars from being distributed to homes and buildings. Introduction 427 would "make it illegal to distribute any unsolicited materials to households and buildings that display a sign indicating that they do not wish to receive them." Felder's statement said:

It doesn't matter what borough or what type of building you live in, if you live in New York City, you have been inundated with mounds of unwanted circulars and fliers. It's a waste, it's mess, and it's a threat to our quality of life. To top it off, these unwanted materials often result in Sanitation violations for home and building owners.

The NY Times explains a little more about how this has hit home for Felder: Apparently Felder's mom was fined $100 by the DOS for not clearing up circulars et al. on her stoop. He said, "You shouldn’t be responsible for cleaning up someone else’s garbage." Felder wants to fine flier-dropping folks $50. Do you think the fliers are a threat to your quality of life? Then again, sometimes delivery menus and the like do come in handy. We feel like many residents and buildings owners would love this legislation, while businesses will be unhappy. We'd like suggest a happy medium of building owners installing a plastic basket full of menus and other circulars so anyone who needs their umpteenth delivery menus can take them, but we're not sure that would ever work.

Originally posted by jen from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on April 30, 2007 1:25 PM

From the May 2007 Saveur comes this great tidbit: the full name of Cap'n Crunch! His proper name is Captain Horatio Magellan Crunch. The Horatio makes him sound British, which makes sense since his outfit looks like an English Navy get up (or something Naploean would have worn). And the Magellan gives him an air of exploration. The Crunch is straight out of Dickens. He may be Capt. H.M. Crunch aboard ship, but he'll always be Cap'n of breakfast to me.

Originally posted by meg@megnut.com (Meg Hourihan) from Megnut, on April 30, 2007 12:58 PM

What with travelling and all, I missed it—but it occured to me today that on Friday, Rebecca's Pocket was 8 years old. Thanks for reading.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rebecca's Pocket, on April 30, 2007 12:16 PM

About the Chef
George Weld is a self-taught cook who grew up in Virginia and the Carolinas. He has been cooking eggs since 2004 at his restaurant, Egg, in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, New York. In 2005, Egg was named best breakfast in New York by New York magazine and has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, the New York Daily News, Japan's Title magazine, and Charleston magazine.

Egg's address is 135A North 5th Street, Brooklyn NY 11211; 718-302-5151. It is open 7 a.m. to noon weekdays, 8 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. weekends.

About the Video Folks
cia_b is a Filipino New Yorker who writes with her mouth full at writingwithmymouthfull.com.

When not dealing with scut as a medical intern, Stan Kang flexes his one creative muscle by making still and moving images.

Originally posted by The Serious Eats Team from Serious Eats: Video and Features, on April 30, 2007 12:00 PM

TWO WORDS: SUBPOENA POWER. It appears Waxman is going to have to be firmer with Ms. Rice, since the unitary Executive has decided to place itself ABOVE the law.

Originally posted by Snow Wolf from Most Huffed News, on April 30, 2007 11:54 AM

Once or twice a day in Borough Park, a freight train crawls along the tracks of the Bay Ridge Branch at 15 mph, lumbering past houses and scrap yards before entering a half-mile tunnel under East New York. Meanwhile, nearly every product that keeps daily life running in Brooklyn—be it breakfast cereal or hospital equipment—is shipped in on diesel-spewing trucks, and that traffic is only increasing. A city traffic study has recommended creating a highway along the little-used rail bed in Bay Ridge, but a state rep is pushing for more trains and a rail tunnel under New York harbor, which he says would take a million trucks off the streets. To us, it hardly seems worth debating: The rails are there, so just use them already.
Bay Ridge Tunnel Could Solve City's Traffic Problem [NY Daily News]
Photo by URBANSCRAWL.

Originally posted by Brooklyn Record from Brooklyn Record, on April 30, 2007 10:32 AM

Three things that are making me happy right now:

1. My Sony/Ericsson w810i phone camera.
2. The page layout on Twitter.
3. display: in-line and background-color in CSS.

I got the new phone after my going-on-four-year-old Nokia was stolen in February. It was the only decent candybar phone being offered by any of the local providers, and I switched from Verizon to Cingular just to get it. In addition to accepting MP3's of P+B as ringtones, it has a camera on it that totally beats the pants off the Nokia N90 that I tried out last year.

I also recently came crawling back to Twitter, after leaving in a huff in four or five months ago. This time, I'm being less profligate with the friends feature and I'm posting mostly pictures instead of words. I like the idea of Twitter as a constrained medium for short bursts of communication, and the fact that a few of the people I know using it don't make an extra effort to page back into posts they've missed. It's a very in-the-moment style of update, and I think it's far more appropriate to camera phone snaps than Flickr. They give you a permalink for your "tweets", but it's not a focal point like on the photo-sharing sites. This makes Twitter a better home for throwaway shots, albeit one that has no built-in photo upload mechanism.

This is where twitter-pic.php comes in, a stupid-simple PHP script that accepts e-mails on STDIN and pushes their image contents to Twitter. Images too fleeting to post here belong there.

Technology aside, I very much like Twitter's page layout. Their default is a giant, statically-placed, user-defined background image with blocks of text-filled color in the foreground. It's quite elegant, and very CSS-appropriate. I keep noticing these little technology-driven design details being celebrated and even jumping media boundaries. Tom showed me a UK magazine the other day that's using text block backgrounds directly nicked from the default rendering of an in-line element with a defined background color. This particular detail has a cultural resonance as well, after six years' worth of popping up in the news in the form of redacted government documents (see New York Times and John Emerson).

This has really been a long way of saying that I just redesigned my website incorporating phonecam pictures, giant backgrounds, and blocky text backgrounds, and that you should let me know what you think.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on April 30, 2007 2:59 AM

... and in local news, a section of the 580 freeway collapsed early this Sunday morning in Oakland. Part of the "MacAuthur Maze" — the confluence of four large freeways right by the eastern entrance of the Bay Bridge — it's one of the busiest interchanges in the U.S.

The section collapsed after an oil truck crashed and burned. Fortunately, no one was killed, though the truck driver was badly burned. However, hundreds of thousands of people are going to be blowing hours more each day in what is already one of the worst commutes anywhere. 

   

As usual, Flickrstrs were on the scene and taking some fantastic photographs. These five from dpnowakowski, *New Adventures in Photography, pixieclipx, and S. Balcomb (2), respectively, are just a sampling.

Originally posted by Stewart Butterfield from FlickrBlog, on April 30, 2007 2:25 AM

Gamers in China are facing new limits on how much time they can spend playing their favourite online game. The government in Beijing is reported to be introducing the controls to deter people from playing for longer than three consecutive hours. The measures are designed to combat addiction to online role-playing games such as World of Warcraft and Lineage II.

More than 20 million Chinese play games regularly, mainly in net cafes...All the biggest online game operators in China have said they will adopt the new system...The operators face little choice as they need government approval to offer online gaming...Among the games affected in initial trials of the system is the MMORPG game, World of Warcraft, which has 1.5 million players in China alone.

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Technorati Tags: addictio , game, government, online, play, policy, limitation, world of warcraft, WoW

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Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on April 29, 2007 11:27 PM

I always love to read scaling discussions, especially about popular web apps, and there are loads of them out there. Here’s my overview of the best. By the way, the best book on scaling apps I’ve ever read is Building Scalable Websites, by Cal Henderson (the Flickr guy).

It’s dog-eared on my desk, and taught me about sharding (which I used extensively for mefeedia). Sharding is when you cut a really big table into pieces, so you can put those on separate servers. It means you have to make changes to your code, and your database isn’t so database-y anymore, but it works. For example, online games use sharding to grow their virtual worlds, because there’s no way they could serve all that information from 1 db cluster.

Scaling Twitter with Ruby.

Twitter is hot today, and they ran into some serious scaling problems, although the app itself is quite simple. It consists of messages of maximum 140 characters. Lessons are the same as most apps: Memcache like crazy, and optimize the database (the biggest bottleneck most of the time).

Also, Ruby on Rails scales pretty much the same way as PHP and other similar languages: shared nothing architecture. Shared nothing means that there is no 1 thing that is shared by all servers, since that would become a bottleneck.

PHP, for example, has shared nothing architecture out of the box, except perhaps for sessions, but that’s easily solved by storing sessions in a db (which then has it’s own scaling approach) and not in the filesystem. Here’s a talk by Rasmus Lerdorf that explain scaling with PHP5. (Here’s the mp3 audio recorded by Niall Kennedy).

Blain Cook made this presentation:

Scaling Flickr.

Cal Henderson wrote the above book, and also has a good presentation: Scaling Flickr slides as PDF’s.

One of the problems you get into when scaling something like Flickr where you store LOTS of stuff, is that you can’t just store that on a harddrive anymore: it’s not big enough. Apart from just using Amazon’s S3 service (which rocks - I used it for mefeedia and I know lots of startups who use it), there are other solutions. A good presentation of that by Cal is this one:

Cal (he’s a busy dude) also made this presenation about scaling web apps, generally:

John Allspaw (flickr plumbr) also has a good presentation about scaling Flickr:

Scaling LiveJournal.

LiveJournal was one of the first social networks, before that word meant anything, and they’ve partly invented how to scale standard php/mysql/apache apps. They developed memcached, which is now used by almost anyone who wants to scale their site.

Brad Fitzpatrick has a good set of slides on how they evolved the service, here’s a PDF version. And here’s the slideshow embedded:

Kevin Rose mentioned this was “the bible for scaling Digg” - and I think quite a few other web apps are based on this.

Six Apart.

The livejournal guys with all their scaling expertise were acquired by Six Apart, and they soon launched Vox. And of course, here’s a presentation on making Vox scalable:

Bloglines.

Bloglines’ scaling problems where slightly different from your average web app, since they are an aggregator of feeds. That means they have billions of blogposts they have to keep and serve to users, and that creates its own scaling problems. The Bloglines approach was to, instead of using a database, just store all that stuff in a special filesystem. Today it’d be easier to do this since there are a few filesystems that do that, or you could just go with S3 again. Mark Fletcher (who also sold Onelist to Yahoo which is now Yahoo Groups) has given a few talks on scaling Onelist and Bloglines: here’s the mp3 audio version, and here’s the PDF of that talk. And a text transcript.

Last.fm

Last.fm is one of the aggregation-type apps: they gather a lot of data about what music you listen to. Similarly to Bloglines, that causes it’s own scaling problems:

Slideshare.

All the slides in this post are hosted by Slideshare, an incredible service by my fellow information architect Rashmi Sinha and team. When I found out about the project, I emailed her: “brilliant and so obvious once you think of it”. Like many startups, they use S3 to serve their content, and they have the obligatory yet interesting slides to explain how:

I haven’t linked to lots of good thinking about scaling, or to technical resources and stuff. But the presentations should get you going in the world of memcached, perlbal, nothing shared and federation :) Enjoy!

Originally posted by yatta from unmediated, on April 29, 2007 11:20 PM

The New York Times examines the world of fixed-gear cyclists––riders whose bikes don't have multiple gears or often, not even brakes. There are no fenders of course, not on a bike that requires a skid to stop. And there's definitely no coasting, which fixed gears don't allow and seems antithetical to a subculture rooted in bike messengering. The attached audio slide show has some statements that are refreshingly honest by Gina Marie Scardino, a "fixie" who admits to some ambiguity over wanting to champion the fixed-gear style, yets still is protective of its subcultural exclusivity.

Riders of fixed-gear bikes are as diverse as bike riders in general. Messengers are big fixie aficionados, but more and more fixed-gear bikes are being ridden by nonmessengers, most conspicuously the kind of younger people to whom the term “hipster” applies and who emanate from certain neighborhoods in Brooklyn. You see these riders weaving in and out of traffic without stopping, balancing on the pedals at a stoplight and in the process infuriating pedestrians and drivers alike. In Williamsburg and points south of Grand Street, these bikes are legion. But they are fast gaining popularity, not just in those bastions of trend followers, and not just among 22-year-olds. Fixed-gear bikes are being ridden all over New York, by messengers, racers, lawyers, accountants and college professors — a diverse and not necessarily youthful cross section of the city’s population. They’re being ridden by people who work in sandwich shops and don’t know or care about gear ratios and bike history, and by people who have been racing these bikes for years in places like the Kissena Velodrome in Flushing, Queens, with its banked, elliptical track. They’re ridden by militant vegans who are virtual encyclopedias of arcane bicycle history, by thrill-seeking members of renegade bike gangs like Black Label, by shopgirls, street racers, Critical Mass riders, your aunt.

So while Scardino admits to a certain level of fixed-gear parachoialism, it's not a class of riders ready for quick pigeonholing. Author Jocko Weyland really does a nice job of profiling a population that stands out via its adherence to an ethos of stripped-down simplicity. They're like two-wheeled Amish, picking bikes over buggies. We wrote about a film festival dedicated to bicyclists last year, including a documentary on fixed-gear bikes.

Originally posted by nyc_daveh from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on April 29, 2007 10:19 PM

A female freelance writer who blogged about the pornography industry was threatened with rape. A single mother who blogged about "the daily ins and outs of being a mom" was threatened by a cyber-stalker who claimed that she beat her son and that he had her under surveillance. Kathy Sierra, who won a large following by blogging about designing software that makes people happy, became a target of anonymous online attacks that included photos of her with a noose around her neck and a muzzle over her mouth.

Originally posted by cmborodi from Most Huffed News, on April 29, 2007 10:14 PM

"The heat of a dramatic gasoline tanker fire destroyed an overpass and closed two major roadways in the MacArthur Maze at the East Bay access to the Bay Bridge early this morning." (37.827480;-122.292767)

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on April 29, 2007 1:39 PM

Thanks but no thanks?

Originally posted by dxwoods from Most Huffed News, on April 29, 2007 1:09 PM

Photos from Daniel Weisser, marmod and noug4t, and languisity.
See more photos in Diptychs - two is better than one!

Originally posted by Heather Champ from FlickrBlog, on April 29, 2007 10:17 AM

Originally posted by tom moody from Tom Moody, on April 29, 2007 10:04 AM

A delightful article by Mike Musgrove in The Washington Post how for the most part officials in Washington avoid ringtones.

"Please," offered political-thriller novelist Brad Meltzer by e-mail. "Only a fool isn't on vibrate at all times. Especially in D.C."

Musgrove conducted "a highly unscientific survey over the past few weeks and found that while image-conscious politicians generally follow Meltzer's line of thinking, plenty of other prominent Washingtonians do not.

... In lobbying circles, the chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, Mitch Bainwol, has a song by "American Idol" finalist Chris Daughtry: "It's Not Over."

... In the sports world, Nationals Manager Manny Acta has the "Law & Order" theme -- he's a fan of the show.

it turns out, chefs are big ringtones customers -- they have to stay in regular contact with their distributors, and having an unusual ringer helps them avoid wasting time by fumbling around for their phone every time."

Originally posted by emily from ringtonia.com, on April 29, 2007 7:36 AM

Dali Clock 2.24 out now for MacOS 10.4, PalmOS, and X11. This release includes a MacOS screen saver version of the clock, and there are a few minor display-glitch fixes to the PalmOS version. Also the PalmOS version has a color application icon now, ooooooh.

So, I tried to add a preference to the Mac version to let you hide the dock icon, but I couldn't make that work.

So, apparently there's no way for a running application to turn its dock icon off. But, you can configure the app to be one that doesn't have a dock icon when it is launched, and then after that, you can turn the dock icon back on. So the way you do this is, you put LSBackgroundOnly=1 in the Info.plist (LSUIElement=1 does not work) and then if you want to have a dock icon after all, you call TransformProcessType (&psn, kProcessTransformToForegroundApplication);. So far so good. Except, LSBackgroundOnly applications never get a menubar: when you select the window, the menubar stays the menubar of the previous application. So when the dock icon is hidden, there's no way to bring up the Preferences dialog so that you can say "actually I do want a dock icon after all." Keyboard shortcuts don't work either. So that's kinda lame.

Also, the way preferences and bindings work is still complete insanity. How can such a basic, fundamental part of the OS be so completely, incomprehensibly insane? And then screen savers take the baseline insanity of it and layer even more crazy on top, because of the moronic way that previewed screen savers run in the same process as the System Preferences application. Madness, I tell you.

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on April 29, 2007 1:59 AM

Great article about fixed-gear bikes. Sometimes I feel strange about being on an obvious trend trajectory, but then I remember how much more fun it is to ride this way.

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on April 29, 2007 12:18 AM