Paul Ford is making a difference. "That barbecue sizzle? Locally...
Paul Ford is making a difference. "That barbecue sizzle? Locally raised (ten miles from home), humanely slaughtered heirloom pandas."
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« August 26, 2007 - September 1, 2007 | Main
September 8, 2007
A Typographic Walking Tour
More than fonts, it's lettering that contributes the dominant flavor to New York City's typography. More often than not, these one-off inscriptions and signs, handmade by artisans in a variety of media, were rendered in styles unconnected with the business of typography, which refers only to the practice of creating alphabets for printing. But the advent of digital type has made it easier than ever to use a mere font for architectural lettering as well. Combined with the building boom that's transforming our city faster than ever, the grand inscriptions and humble signboards that constitute our alphabetic inheritance are vanishing fast.
In preparing the Gotham typeface, which celebrates just one of New York's unmistakable typographic themes, Tobias Frere-Jones assiduously photographed <a href="../fonts/font_history.php?historyItemID=1=100008" target="_blank"tens of thousands of signs/a throughout the metropolis. On Saturday, September 29 at 11:00, Tobias will be leading a typographic walking tour for a href="http://www.aigany.org/events/events_upcoming.php" target="_blank"AIGA/NY/a, which promises two and a half hours of the city's most unexamined — and imperiled — typographic treasures. Space is limited, so book early. Don't forget your camera, and a snack./p p class="download-link"Download the a href="http://www.typography.com/downloads/H"itinerary/a for Google Earth/p /p
Osama Bin Language Acquistion
Silent for three years, Osama Bin Laden just released a video tape in which he name drops academic Noam Chomsky, suggesting that while in hiding, he's become familiar with the American researcher's extensive work.
Exclusively, Mind Hacks publishes a deleted section from an earlier draft of Bin Laden's latest speech that lays out his demands for the science of linguistics:
People of America: while the cognitive revolution started within your own shores and changed the face of the world, it seems the lessons of the destruction of behaviourism have not been learnt.
Through the careful analysis of Chomsky, it was clear that language could not be entirely accounted for by the influence of environment and culture on a general learning mechanism. While some heeded the messages, some of your brethren remained unconvinced.
Now that the spector of connectionism has raised its ugly head and has been inappropriately glorified by the power of technological corporations, our understanding of the role of transformational grammars in language development is threatened.
And I tell you, artificial intelligence is a false god that provides correlative and not causal models of language acquisition. The infallible methodologies are the comparative study of world languages and lesion analyses of those who must be treated with mercy owing to their acquired dysphasias.
Those who stray from the path will be doomed to repeated the errors of the empty vessels of strict behaviourism and the Standard Social Science Model. Every just and intelligent one of you who reflect on this will be guided to the truth.
Rumours that Steven Pinker has been taken in for questioning have not been verified.
Rebar bench
Rebar bench
Originally uploaded by schickr.Cool
September 7, 2007
Cleaning up the CPAN Modules List
tsee writes "The PAUSE administrators are planning to do a little house keeping on the CPAN Modules List. We intend to remove old namespace reservations which have been registered with the modules mailing list but for which there never has been an actual implementation on CPAN. This will apply to all unused registrations from May 2007 and earlier. Since there are surprisingly many of these unclaimed registrations, we will send an email to every PAUSE author who has such an unused namespace asking her to contact the modules-at-perl-dot-org mailing list about the issue. Registrations for which we have not received any correspondence until December will then be made available again. If you are among those to receive such a reminder, please don't be offended. If you are still around, it is most likely a misunderstanding. For example, people have sometimes registered namespaces with the wrong capitalization. We intend to send the reminders within the next two weeks. Thank you for your understanding."Read more of this story at use Perl.
YouTube Jumping
Google has implemented their jumping feature into YouTube videos and it's really nice. As you know, with most flash videos, you can't scroll ahead until the video completely loads out beyond the point you want. With a YouTube video, now you can jump ahead and the video will start to load out from the new point foward, wasting no more time or energy loading any of the prior sections of the video.
Above, you can see I clicked the scoller to the middle of the video. It then began to play from the new point and started to load out ahead (and then behind next).
This is a very elegant feature that saves bandwidth and gives the audience way more flexibility for consuming information quickly.
Aw, man...Eliot is ceasing publication on slower.net, one of my...
Aw, man...Eliot is ceasing publication on slower.net, one of my favorite photoblogs. Ended on a great note though.
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iPhone Hacking Kit, the Next Generation
Ben Long updates his instructions for how to install and use third-party iPhone apps. (The iPhone screenshots are full resolution; that they look so big on your computer display shows how small the pixels are on the iPhone’s 160 ppi screen.)
The Family of Languages
From the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language has a delightful family tree of Indo-European languages, though I was kinda miffed at the omission of my parents' native tongue.
iToner 1.0.1
Updated for iTunes 7.4 compatibility. Given the aforelinked “use any AAC audio file as a ringtone just by changing the file extension” tip discovered today, though, I’m not sure there’s a market for iToner any more.
A 1993 New Yorker story by John Seabook called The...
A 1993 New Yorker story by John Seabook called The Flash of Genius is being made into a movie starring Greg Kinnear. The story revolves around Bob Kearns, the inventor of the intermittent windshield wiper and his struggle to get the US auto industry to pay him for infringing on his patent. "There's no question that Dr. Kearns' wiper circuit was interesting. He had a three-brush motor, with dynamic brake and intermittent on one speed only -- his system was a concatenation of a lot of different ideas. But we figured there was just no way in the world it was patentable. An electronic timing device was an obvious thing to try next. How can you patent something that is in the natural evolution of technology?"
BTW, the phrase "flash of genius" refers to a test of patentability enacted in 1941 saying that the act of invention had to be a "flash of creative genius" on the part of the inventor and not the result of tinkering. That standard was replaced in 1952 by the non-obviousness test.
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R.I.P Madeleine L'Engle
Via NYT, Author Madeleine L'Engle has passed away. The Wrinkle in Time trilogy had a profound impact on me as a young child- they got me interested in science and reading. I've tried to pass the books on to young relatives and friends' kids at every opportunity.
Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting sing sin in...
Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting sing sin in i. More of her typographic work here.
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Friday afternoon Apple links, iPod hangover edition
To get you over your iPod hangover, Friday links presents news on iPhone headphones, patent reform, Google ads, and a bottle opener.
In Private Letter, Howard Dean Pleads For Party Unity Over Primary Chaos
We've just obtained a private letter that DNC chair Howard Dean has sent out to DNC members in which he mounts a spirited defense of his party committee's position in the current jostling with rogue...
Joined for Life: Abby and Brittany Turn 16 is a...
Joined for Life: Abby and Brittany Turn 16 is a documentary about Abby and Brittany Hensel, conjoined twins who are essentially one physical person with two heads (as well as a few other body parts). From a review of the film by Kevin Kelly: "Endless questions ensue from this documentary about their suburban life. If each girl controls only one arm and one leg, how can they ride a bike? Hit a baseball? Swim? When they drive a car, how do they decide where to turn? And do they get one licence or two? That particular question is answered on their 16th birthday, as this film follows them to the driving test center, where they pass the driving test (both turning the wheel). Their local DMV decides to issue them each one licence."
A clip from a previous film on the girls is available on YouTube.
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burqas for everyone!
This outfit is too naughty to be allowed on Southwest Airlines:
Southwest explained its treatment of Ebbert in a letter to her mother, saying it could remove any passenger "whose clothing is lewd, obscene or patently offensive" to ensure the comfort of children and "adults with heightened sensitivities."They walked out onto the jet bridge, where Keith told Ebbert her clothing was inappropriate and asked her to change. She explained she was flying to Tucson for only a few hours and had brought no luggage. "I asked him what part of my outfit was offensive," she said. "The shirt? The skirt? And he said, 'The whole thing.'
Keith asked her to go home, change and take a later flight. She refused, citing her appointment. The plane was ready to leave, so Keith relented. He had her pull up her tank top a bit, pull down her skirt a bit, and return to her seat.
Steve Jobs Speaks the Truth
Saul Hansell, writing for The New York Times’s Bits weblog:
We are so used to cryptic and seemingly disingenuous communication out of Apple that we miss it when Mr. Jobs says crassly what most businessmen try to hide: Apple lowered the price of the iPhone because it wants to make lots more money by selling boatloads of them this Christmas.
I think Jobs speaks the plain truth far more often than many think. Or at least he says what he believes is the truth.
Another thought on why the price drop doesn’t mean sales have been slow. The central rule of technology is that the unit price drops sharply with volume. If Apple sold more than it hoped, then it would achieve scale faster and would be able to drop prices sooner. Apple’s introduction of the iPod Touch, using many of the same components as the iPhone, gives it an even bigger checkbook to brandish in Taiwan to secure good supplies at good prices.
Best iPhone pricing analysis of the week. Brilliant.
(This is why The Times is so well respected — they hire smart writers. That they’re putting their writers to work on weblogs such as Bits bodes well for their future. Most old media companies are hell-bent on the quixotic goal of keeping the world the way it was; The Times seems to be trying to adjust their business for the changing world.)
Blogging From Windows
News of MarsEdit 2.0 has spread like wildfire, thanks in no small part to people like you blogging about the news and sharing it with all of your friends. Please don’t stop!
One of the side-effects of this massive news-sharing is I am getting requests from people to release a version of MarsEdit for the PC (for Windows, that is). I addressed this in the comments on Guy Kawasaki’s blog, but I thought I’d reiterate and expand on that here.
I love writing software for the Mac. If I had to write software for another platform, I probably wouldn’t be nearly as interested in doing it. Heck, I might work more on becoming a musician, or a designer, or one of the other many trades that I have an interest in. For that reason, the chances of MarsEdit for Windows are almost nil. There would have to be an incredibly sweet deal, like “this technology makes it painless to deploy your Mac app on Windows!” Not likely.
Fortunately there are some brilliant developers on the Windows side who apparently do like developing for Windows. At least I assume as much because their products are fine-tuned in a way that only happens when somebody cares about and enjoys their work. In many ways, I see these guys as Mac developers who ended up programming for Windows. Lucky for Windows users!
Believe it or not one of the leading products for blogging on Windows is from none other than Microsoft itself. Windows Live Writer is the desktop blogging component of Windows Live. Or something. I don’t know what the heck all that junk means, but I know that when you launch Windows Live Writer, you will feel transferred to a magical place, free of the usual stereotypes against Microsoft products. (Some of Microsoft’s Mac software also achieves this).
Kudos to Microsoft for achieving excellence in a field near to my heart. Joe Cheng, one of the product’s developers, also stays in touch with myself and the Atom Publishing community, sharing his opinions about the ever-evolving client development world.
BlogJet is another excellent application, and is dear to my heart because it’s developed by indie developers. And look! It has a cute globe-oriented icon. We were bound to be app-buddies. The Coding Robots, Dmitry and Vladimir, are a couple guys running a (mostly) Windows software startup near Moscow in Russia. They have a very entertaining blog where you can catch glimpses of what it’s like to run a Russian indie software business. I especially like the toilet paper dispenser that looks like a robot!
I mentioned that the Coding Robots are “mostly” Windows developers, but it turns out that at least Dmitry is also a huge Mac fan. He does most of his development on a Mac, even though the flagship product of the company is Windows-only. I expect to see more offerings for the Mac from these guys, because I’m sure by now Dmitry has caught “Cocoa Fever,” big time. In fact, Dmitry just released a public beta of his upcoming Mac OS X application, Mémoires, which is about the simplest journal-keeping application you’ll ever see, but is very elegant and easy on the eyes.
In fact, the only glaring omission I see in Mémoires is a “Send to MarsEdit” option. Add that, and we’ll be cooking!
More on Batali and Food Network
ABCNews.com digs a little deeper into the story about Mario Batali's relationship with the Food Network. Serious Eats' own Ed Levine is quoted:
"Food Network has made a sharp turn away from celebrity chefs," he said. "They're not featuring great chefs; instead, they're creating their own stars out of good home cooks like Giatta De Laurentiis and Rachael Ray."
C-Store: A Column Oriented DBMS
nominally like GBigTable I think
bookmark this on del.icio.us - posted by fruminator to db opensource - more about this bookmark...
Cava
Spanish sparkling wine made by the traditional methode Champagnoise. The wine undergoes a secondary fermentation in bottle to give it its sparkle. And, in case you care…the word originated in Catalonia, where it means “cellar.” Ryan and Gabrielle, please correct us if we’re wrong on any of these counts!
● Bee space
Langstroth's crucial insight -- "I could scarcely refrain from shouting 'Eureka!' in the open streets," he wrote of the moment of revelation -- was the concept of "bee space." He realized that while honeybees will seal up passageways that are either too large or too small, they will leave open passages that are just the right size to allow a bee to pass through comfortably. Langstroth determined that if frames were placed at this "bee-space" interval of three-eighths of an inch, bees would build honeycomb that could be lifted from the hive, rather than, as was the practice up to that point, sliced or hacked out of it. He patented L. L. Langstroth's Movable Comb Hive in 1852. Today's version consists of a number of rectangular boxes-the number is supposed to grow during the season-open at the top and at the bottom. Each box is equipped with inner lips from which frames can be hung, like folders in a filing drawer, and each frame comes with special tabs to preserve bee space.
So says Elizabeth Kolbert in an article about colony-collapse disorder, a bee disease that's wreaking havoc on beehives and food production around the US. Bee space! I'm unsure whether similar research has been done to determine the proper "human space", although the placement of houses in a suburb, tables in a restaurant, blankets at the beach, or social space in elevators might provide some clues as to the proper measurement.
But returning to the bees, a coalition of scientists working on the problem has found a correlation between bee deaths and Israeli acute paralysis virus. An infusion of bees from Australia in 2004 may also have contributed to the disorder's development. Full details are available on EurekAlert.
An animated history of the NYC subway system
This is really, really cool: an animated NYC subway map, with the lines and stations appearing in the order in which they were built. It's amazing to me that the West Side IRT -- what are now known as the 1/2/3 lines -- were built way before lines in lower Manhattan, at a time when lower Manhattan probably had a crushingly greater need for a subway line; it wasn't until later that the IRT was extended down into the lower reaches of the island. (It's also cool that two lines in Brooklyn started it all.)
What's Your Go-To Weekday Breakfast?
Everyone, or just about everyone, has (or should have) and needs a go-to breakfast, the one they eat just about every weekday morning without thinking, a breakfast that is easy to prepare, can be eaten while reading the paper, and is a breeze to clean up. It should be reasonably filling, not too fattening, and nutritious according to some objective standard.
Your go-to breakfast can't be bacon and eggs or pancakes with sausage, because those are too unhealthy, fattening and time-consuming. Either of those could be your weekend go-to breakfast, but that's not what we are talking about here.
One of my most enduring memories of my dad, who died when I was 12, was watching him every morning eat his go-to breakfast of a Thomas' English muffin, farmer's cheese, and lingonberry jam. My wife's weekday go-to breakfast is currently a container of 2% Fage Greek Yogurt, and before that it was Brown Cow Maple Cream Top Yogurt. A little austere, a little too tart for my taste, and it has no crunch, but fine choices nonetheless.
Mine is a toasted Kossar's bialy, a schmear of cream cheese, and a glass of Minute Maid light limeade. Let me explain why.
What is a bialy? In her definitive book The Bialy Eaters, Mimi Sheraton describes a bialy as "the squashy, crusty, onion-topped bread roll eaten as an alternative to the bagel." She then goes on to say that "I cannot remember when I first ate one of these fragrant rolls, but surely it was addiction at first bite, starting with the mouthwatering scent of onions and yeast and the crisp bread's affinity for sweet butter and fluffy cream cheese."
Sheraton and I don't agree on much, but we both share a passion for these rolls that a cheeky waiter at New York's Barney Greengrass restaurant once described to an uninitiated friend of mine as the Jewish English muffin.
A toasted bialy (and you must toast a bialy, unless you get one fresh out of the oven) is the perfect vehicle for cream cheese or butter. It's light and substantial, crunchy and pliant, and just salty, yeasty, and oniony enough. Though many bagel bakeries across America sell holeless bagels they call bialys, in reality only a handful of bakeries in New York still make an authentic bialy, which is made with a completely different kind of dough than a bagel, and is simply baked—rather than boiled and then baked as a traditional bagel is. Bialys ship and freeze beautifully, and, thankfully, Kossar's on Grand Street in New York City, arguably the preeminent bialy baker in America, sends them all over the country.
My cream cheese of choice is Breakstone's whipped cream cheese. It's lighter than than those Philadelphia brand bricks. If your grocery store doesn't carry Breakstone's, buy Philadelphia brand whipped cream cheese. I have discovered another commercially available whipped cream cheese, Zausner's Original Amish Recipe , I like even more (it's slightly saltier), but I've only been able to buy it on Cape Cod. And my absolute favorite cream cheese in the world is Zingerman's farmstead cream cheese which is not whipped, but is wonderfully tart and creamy and has larger curds than commercial cream cheese. It has the rough-hewn texture of farmer's cheese.
I drink the Minute Maid Light Limeade with my bialy and cream cheese because it's simultaneously tart and sweet, has a nice spicy, citrusy tang, and very few calories. My first choice for a breakfast beverage to accompany my bialy would be fresh-squeezed orange juice, but I try to save the calories. Maybe I'm being silly here, as I believe an eight-ounce glass of orange juice has less than 100 calories.
So that's my weekday go-to breakfast. It has less than 250 calories, and is oh so satisfying.
I think there's a chance my dad would have switched to it if he could have seen this post.
Man Sues Bodega Over Alleged Cat Attack
Meow! The Post reports that a Long Island man is suing a West Village bodega Andy's Deli at Seventh and Grove Street because the bodega's cat attacked him - and wants $5 million. However, Andy's Deli owner Andy Singh says he doesn't even own a cat. Dunh dunh DUNH! The claim: Adalberto DeSousa says he went to Andy's to buy a sandwich when he "felt something strange on my shoes." It was a kitty at his feet. DeSousa said, "I didn't want to hit the cat, so I pushed him away with my hand," only for the cat to attack his hand and arm.
"A guy in the story came over and yelled at me to get off the cat," DeSousa said. "A lot of blood came out." He said that deli-store clerk gave him a bottle of rubbing alcohol and let him rinse the blood off his hand in the sink. DeSousa said he grabbed his drink and his Philly cheese steak and went home to Inwood, L.I. When he woke up the next day, he said, his hand was red, throbbing and swollen.DeSousa says he was in the hospital for a month and "says he still has not regained full use of his right hand." But Singh told the Post, "We don't have a cat. We've never had a cat." Though many bodegas have cats, bodega cats are actually against the health code. For some reason, the Health Department thinks that having cats means there are mice in an establishment, versus being a preemptive measure against mice. The only stores allowed to have cats wandering around are pet stores.
September 6, 2007
iphone refund logistics
Two potential options for iPhone "early adopter refund" logistics:
Require users to present their original purchase receipt for their iPhone (along with the phone itself) at the Apple Store by a certain date. Check receipt for validity, check iPhone serial number for valid date range, check the customer's photo identification. Have them fill out a form, and only after validating the purchase and collecting appropriate personal identification, present the user an Apple Store gift card for $100.
On iPhone sync, during a scheduled update, recognize that the device was activated before the price drop, or through the serial number that it was purchased before the price drop. Connect the phone to the user's iTunes store / Apple ID email address. Offer the customer $100 (or potentially even more, $110?) in iTunes store credits on the spot, or an emailed coupon with a custom code and potentially a custom generated bar code that can be printed and brought to the store.
Option 1 has the potential to maximize breakage. Option 2 has the potential to minimize breakage and provide more immediate data to Apple on redemption patterns. If they do something like option 2, in something approaching "real time" (like they pull that off in the next week or two), you have to wonder if the price drop and resulting letter from Steve was planned well in advance...
For all you Internet People
Today we launched our first original animated series from Next New Networks, Channel Frederator’s Meth Minute 39, by genius animator Dan Meth. The first episode — Internet People! — is a tribute to everyone who’s entertained all of us on the web the last couple of years. Here’s the whole story behind its birth, but what’s untold (for now) is the amazing support the NNN team gave Dan and company to make this thing internet-ubiquitous in less than 12 hours. We published at noon, and right now the video is already on the front of MySpace, YouTube, DailyMotion, climbing on Digg, and embedded on dozens of sites and blogs… and I feel like it’s just getting started.
Hope you like it, and stay tuned for more episodes of Meth Minute 39, coming soon. Believe me, they actually get better than this one.
iToner Disabled With iTunes 7.4 Update
Ambrosia’s Andrew Welch:
We’re on it. Here’s what is happening. iTunes 7.4 thinks it is the sole entity that puts custom ringtones on your iPhone. As such whenever you sync (even if you aren’t using any ringtones from iTunes), it just blindly writes over the database of user-installed ringtones.
MUJI Announces NYC Location in SoHo
Remember this March when we told you about MUJI opening up a location in the new New York Times building? Well apparently that location is delayed, because Japanese retailer MUJI is telling us that their first United States location will be at 455 Broadway in SoHo. The new space will be about 3,200 square feet and will open in November. People that are unhappy with just shopping for their plain-looking products at their MoMA store locations can rejoice. The new location will carry over 2,000 items including around 570 stationery items, 40 types of furniture, 590 housewares items, 30 electric appliances, and 330 apparel items amongst other things. MUJI, which was originally known as Mujirushi Ryohin, means "no brand quality goods."
Dinner Party Wine: guest edition…what to bring to your boss
We covered situation #1, the wine curious friend, ages ago. So we thought it was about time to get to…
Situation #2: dinner at your boss’s house
So, you’ve been invited over to have dinner with your boss. Perhaps this is the first time you’ve been asked to do something social on a weekend, even though you’ve done mid-week business dinners together before. You know your boss likes wine (perhaps even a little too much…) so it’s the perfect thing to bring. But how much to spend? What kind of wine will send the right message? You don’t want to seem too cheap, like you don’t appreciate the person you work for, as well as the extension of an invitation usually reserved for more senior colleagues. But you also don’t want to seem too flush with cash, since you’re hoping for a raise during your next performance review. What to do? (more…)
iPod Hi-Fi: We hardly knew ye
It's official! Apple has killed the iPod Hi-Fi.
Timelapse animation of the moon going through a full lunar...
Timelapse animation of the moon going through a full lunar cycle. Wobble wobble wobble wobble. More info here.
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[bit] Google Reader adds search
Google Reader adds search. Finally. The link also mentions the new 1000+ upper limit for unread item counts, which I noted a few days ago.
Apple may have announced their ringtone strategy for the iPhone...
Apple may have announced their ringtone strategy for the iPhone (30-second ringtones cost $1.98 to make and you must purchase songs through the iTunes Music Store), but Ambrosia Software's iToner utility lets you make ringtones from any mp3 or acc audio file with a simple drag/drop, all for $15 (free 30-day trial). iToner seems like the clear winner here.
Update: The just-released new version of iTunes (7.4) makes iToner ringtones invisible to the iPhone. Ambrosia is working on an iToner update. (thx, jim)
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taste test
Fresh news from deep within Tag Mountain: we just launched an early, limited Preview of the Delicious redesign we’ve been working on for the past few months. We’ve refreshed the UI, built an entirely new (and faster) search engine, and added numerous improvements based on your feedback. The goal of this Preview is to get feedback from our users about the design changes and also start to put our new platform through the paces.
The initial invite list is already full, but we will likely be adding more openings in the near future. Check your links for you to see if you’re in the first round (sorry to be so indirect about it, but our privacy policy doesn’t allow us to email users about this sort of thing and we take that very seriously). If you don’t see the invite link but are interested in taking a look and giving us some feedback, you can add your username to the list.
We’ll be posting updates to this blog throughout the Preview process to keep everyone informed of what we’re learning. Thanks for your feedback and support!
A Brief History of Ugly: Apple in the last 10 years
We have been inspired by the recent release of the new, third-generation iPod nano: here it is the ugliest of Apple products from the last 10 years.
Obama Introducing Bill to Require Reports On Bundlers
Barack Obama is proposing a new bill to require campaigns to track and report the activities of bundlers. From his Senate office's press release: Obama’s bill will require candidates for Congress to...
Damn You, Bruce Willis.
Last night in my rush to prepare dinner for my neighbors (that's right, we like our neighbors), I sliced my middle finger on my left hand at the cuticle edge. A good Kyocera 1/4" slice. Arm resting above my head...