« December 2, 2007 - December 8, 2007 | Main | December 16, 2007 - December 22, 2007 »
"Twitter recently added a Twitter Tracking feature that lets you track keywords and phrases that twitterers use while twittering. Just for kicks, I tracked the word library for 24 hours - every time someone entered the word library into twitter, I received the update. Here's what I got back from Twitter:"
This appears on my Examiner Blog.
This Monday's column will be part 3 of a meditation on the validity and limitations of the brand new U.S. News high school rankings. It's worth noting that, unlike Jay Mathews' "Challenge Index," updated this past week in the Washington Post, the U.S. News rankings bill themselves as rating the "best" high schools in America. Mathews never claims that; he simply ranks access to college-level AP/IB courses as an important criterion in looking at the quality of high schools.
The reaction to my last column, which called into question how literally we should take the ranking--and made the modest contention that we should look carefully at the criteria used to rate schools before we accept those rankings--was quite surprising. There was gratitude from some schools that had not made the "best" list, noting that I put a reality check on that loaded word BEST. But there was vitriol from some who had been ranked very high, accusing me of undercutting their glory.
Rating high schools is obviously a complicated issue, and I welcome the debate. On Monday I will attempt to wrap up a few thoughts on the issue, and return to a theme of part I, and a favorite subject for many years in my columns: the value of engaging students in real-world, interdisciplinary thought in high school. We'll see what my inbox brings after Part 3. Can't wait!
This video comes from Japan and, well… You just have to watch it yourself to appreciate it.
After watching it be sure to leave a comment telling us which one is your favorite.
I have heard rumors that someone created a patch (no idea how you would use it) to the Fire Red and Leaf Green Pokemon games that allows you to replace the sprites in the game with the ones in the video above.
All I can say is that some things go over real big in Japan that do not do so well outside of Japan.
The New York Times just released its 7th annual Year in Ideas round-up, and there are some interesting inclusions.
Amidst short articles on airborne wind turbines, Islam in outer space, UPS's ban on left-hand turns – all of which have been explored on BLDGBLOG before – and even so-called "marijuana mansions," we're asked to consider "whether full-scale lightning farms might one day become a meaningful source of electricity."Practically speaking, the NYTimes explains, building a lightning farm would entail the construction of an entire specialty landscape. You could probably even patent it.
There would be "a tower, an array of grounding wires to shunt off most of the incoming energy and a giant capacitor. Theoretically, if enough energy is delivered to the capacitor, it can be stored, converted to alternating current and transferred to the power grid."
Unfortunately, the article explains, lightning farms don't really work.
But no matter: BLDGBLOG would like to propose turning the entirety of Paris into a lightning farm. The Eiffel Tower would loom over a network of grounding wires. Groves of steel poles – orchards of power, virtually harnessing the sky – would stand amidst cobblestones, spiraling up hills, and the outermost streets of the city, connecting cafe to cafe down stairways, leading up to bars and scenic overlooks, glow every fortnight as that great central spike gets thrashed with aerial electricity. You can toast bread with all that power, draining the clouds, awaiting storms with videocameras in hand to film that apocalypse of alternating currents in the sky.Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, ReBlogged by Steve on Dec 14, 2007 at 11:58 PM
More thoughts on Eric Turkheimer's research:
The more I think about it, the more convinced I am Turkheimer's work is one of the keys to unraveling the Race-IQ debate. His argument goes something like this:
Right now, there are two conflicting pieces of evidence, each of which is seized upon by each side in the debate. On the one hand, there are twin studies. You look at twins, raised in very different adoptive families, and you find that their IQs are very similar. That suggests IQ is largely heritable, and that environment plays only a modest role.
On the other hand, there are studies showing that if a child of a very poor family, adopted at birth into a wealthy family, will have a much higher IQ than his or her siblings, or his or her parents, who remain in poverty.
This is, obviously, not a trivial disagreement. Someone like Charles Murray, who takes the former position, uses it as explanation for why he think social programs--like Head Start--are a waste of time and money. It is also why he thinks that the gap that presently exists between white and black average IQ scores will likely persist, regardless of what kind of steps we take as a society. Liberals, meanwhile, use the latter evidence to justify the idea of an aggressive social policy.
So who's right? Turkkeimer would say, both sides are.
He used a very large data set--the National Collaborative Perinatal Project--and found that the relationship between socio-economic status and IQ was non-linear. Children moving from poverty to the middle class see their IQ's jump: IQ at that end of the socio-economic scale is highly sensitive to environmental improvements. But the kinds of twins studies usually relied upon by IQ fundamentalists and that yield such high genetic effects, are much more likely to involve comparisons among middle and upper middle class environments--and that end of the scale, Turkheimer's data suggests, environment doesn't play a big role.
In other words, the lawyer who plays Mozart in the crib for his daughter, in order to raise her IQ, is wasting his time. But dramatically increasing the educational resources available to inner city kids makes a lot of sense.
This, I think, helps to clarify a lot of what drives so many of us crazy about Charles Murray and his ilk. We're not disputing the importance of IQ. And we're not disputing that genes play a huge role in determining IQ. We're just saying that it's hopelessly naive to assume that the same rules apply to suburban, middle-class whites as apply to, say, urban, inner-city black families.
Hottt Off the Press! Collective 2008 Toolkit Organizer $5 Philadelphia's Toolkit is a pocket-sized organizer that teaches a new skill or shares some knowledge over the course of every month. Topics range from making a pinhole camera to planning dance parties or bike trips to stencil tips to challenging gentrification. Artists include Eian Weissman, Beth Pulcinella (who did the Great Arizona Mine Strike People's History poster), Hilary from the Beehive Collective, & Erik Ruin. Plus it's a fundraiser for Hottt Offf the Press print collective! Cover colors vary wildly. pocket organizer 4.25"x5" approx.200 pages
Whoa, so Apple now officially supports free, custom ringtones for the iPhone? (Thanks to Paul Kafasis.)
This photo of lower Manhattan taken from the Statue of Liberty in 1901 is plenty interesting, especially what I believe is the beginnings of the Manhattan Bridge under construction behind the Brooklyn Bridge.
(link)
On Serious Eats I believe we're leading the nation in cool gift guides, and there are still more to come. That said, there are still a few items on my personal gift wish list that haven't been mentioned yet. Some I have found on other websites. And others just popped into my head at various times in the last couple of weeks. I'm sure other serious eaters find themselves in similar situations. So perhaps we can rectify this problem. I invite all of you to leave your food-centric gift wish list as a comment on this post. With any luck, the people in your life searching for a present for you will find their way to Serious Eats. Consider this post the world's biggest department store Santa lap.
Vicky, Will, if you're out there, read on.
On Slate Simon Hopkinson, author of Roast Chicken and Other Stories, the heralded book that according to my friend Sam is exceedingly hard to find this year, mentioned Cooking in 10 Minutes, a book by Edouard de Pomaire that was first published in 1948. Here's a sample recipe from the book along with a pithy comment from Hopkinson:
Oysters and Sausages
1. Fry some chipolata sausages. Serve them very hot on a dish and on a second dish a dozen oysters.
2. Alternate the sensations. Burn your mouth with a crackling sausage. Soothe your burns with a cool oyster. Continue until all the sausages and oysters have disappeared.
3. White wine, of course.
Look out, Mark Bittman.
I haven't been able to find this book on-line, so anyone interested in getting this book for me (are you listening, Vicky and Will) would be wise to call Nach Waxman at Kitchen Arts & Letters. Nach can locate a copy of just about any book if you give him a few days.
In the same Slate post Mollie Katzen, author of many books, including The Mousewood Cookbook, raves about another book I've never heard of, Salt & Pepper: 135 Perfectly Seasoned Recipes, by Michele Jordan. Mollie writes,
"Once in a great while, I'll have a transcendent food-book-reading experience. This happened when I first picked up a copy of Salt & Pepper: 135 Perfectly Seasoned Recipes by Michele Jordan. I was familiar with Michele's work—she is a friend of mine, and I admire her work. But inspired though I have been by everything she has done, this book has given me something beyond inspiration. It has given me permission."
I crave transcendent food-book-reading experiences, I love salt and pepper, and I especially like permission to put more salt in my food, so I definitely want this book.
I love a good tamale. Whether it's a Mississippi Delta tamale or a designer tamale or a more traditional Mexican tamale, I love them all. Don't you? And where I live, in New York City, a good tamale of any stripe is hard to find. So I would love for some most excellent tamales to find their way to my house this holiday season. There are many tamale purveyors that ship (I have googled mail-order tamales many times over the years), so if you are listening, Santa, please bring some tamales down my non-existent chimney.
So that's it. Three gifts, none obscenely expensive. They may take a little bit of work, but inspired gifts always do. What would you like to get this holiday season?
"USAspending.gov is pleased to announce the availability of its data in an Application Programming Interface (API). The API consists of two methods, fpds.php and faads.php, that allow access to the data to the Federal contracts and Federal assistance databases respectively. All data present on USAspending.gov is available through the API, except for pie charts and end-of-search totals."
This week's launch of the Movable Type Open Source project was huge news for our community. But as part of that announcement, we promised even more news to come. So today, we're introducing some of the next steps that will outline how we're going to fueling that community in the coming weeks and months.
- We're beginning the beta of Movable Type 4.1 today, with tons of new features.
- We're announcing the Professional Pack, the first of the extended benefits that paid users of MT will be receiving.
- We're launching the Movable Type reseller program designed to offer resellers a 30% discount that you can pass on to your customers or keep for yourself.
Each of these announcements on its own would be big news, but one of the things we wanted to demonstrate was how much we value our paying customers who've supported MT's development (the Professional Pack and MT 4.1 will be a free upgrade for all paying customers of MT 4.0), as well as how having an open platform will help benefit everyone who uses Movable Type.
Enough talk -- let's show you what's coming!
What's new in Movable Type 4.1?
Here's what you can look forward to in MT 4.1:
You can check out the full details about the MT 4.1 beta on the beta home page.
- It's Faster! We've made performance improvements across the board for everythign from publishing to reducing the size of the scripts that load when you want to write a post.
- User Interface Improvements. There are minor tweaks all over the application to make creating and managing your content easier.
- Global Templates. Now you can easily create templates or widgets that are shared across all the blogs in your system.
- Avatars/User Pictures. Authors and commenters can upload an image or icon for themselves that will show up next to their entries and comments.
- Asset Editing. Whether it's audio, photos, videos or uploaded files, you can view and edit information like the size of a file and its tags, and even see which entries or pages that asset appears in.
- Template Sets. You can create, share and use entire sets of templates between different Movable Type blogs, including all of the stylesheets and feeds for your site. For designers, it's a great way to deliver a design to your clients.
- Smart Template Tag Documentation. Just use any of Movable Type's template tags in designing a template, and the system will automatically provide you with a link to the documentation for that tag -- handy!
- Better API suport for Pages. Using tools like Windows Live Writer, you can now create and manage Movable Type's pages just as easily as you work with your entries.
- Tons more. There are lots of little improvements all over the platform -- like the ability to replicate published content across multiple servers, or to plug in your own rich text editor like FCKEdit.
What's in the Professional Pack?
We'll be revealing the full details of the Professional Pack as the official launch of MT 4.1 gets closer, but here's just some of the benefits for paid users of Movable Type:
- Professional help ticket support direct from the Movable Type team.
- New integrated Custom Fields for Movable Type:
- Customize the fields for all of your blog entries, with support for uploading images or assets, and creating text fields, pull-down menus, checkboxes, radio buttons, and more
- Define fields on a per-blog basis
- Change the order in which fields are displayed on any entry screen
- Define custom fields not just for entries, but for pages or even folders and categories
- Completely customize the fields used to describe users in your system -- build on MT4.1's Avatar support
- Easily embed any of your custom fields in your templates using template tags that the system provides for you
The first beta release of the paid commercial release of MT 4.1 with the Professional Pack is available now. This is an early beta -- upgrading from 4.0 isn't supported yet, and of course betas shouldn't be used in a production environment.
The Movable Type Reseller Program
And finally, we've completely revamped the Movable Type reseller program, and we've tripled the cut you get for selling MT. The Reseller Program is a way for all of you who design, develop and deploy Movable Type to get the most benefits from the buzz around MT4. The way it works is simple:
- You get a 30% discount off the retail price of Movable Type
- You choose whether to pass all of part of that discount on to your customers, and pocket the rest.
When you're accepted into the Reseller Program, here's some of what you'll get:
- A Free Movable Type Commercial 5-User License
- Listing on our MT Reseller Partner page
- Discounts on qualifying Movable Type products
- Direct Technical support from the MT team
- Downloadable product and sales sheets
- Exclusive use of the sexy new Movable Type Reseller logo
Signing up for the Reseller Program is easy -- just fill out the application form and we'll read over it and get you into the program as quick as we can. (If you'd worked with our affiliate program in the past, don't worry -- we're handling our resellers ourselves now, so you don't have to worry about a complicated third-party affiliate system.)
It's just getting started
So far, 2007 has been a momentous year for Movable Type: MT4 was released, the Enterprise and Community Solutions launched, MTOS was kicked off, and now we're off and running towards MT 4.1 with a kick-ass new reseller program backing it up. But we think 2008's going to be even more amazing, and we hope you'll be there with us because even after six years, we're just getting started!
Urban Rustic, the new Brooklyn grocery store whose shelves are almost exclusively stocked with food from within a 100-mile radius, opens tomorrow. Located on North 12th Street across from McCarren Park, the grocery is the brainchild of Aaron Woolf, a partner in the nearby faux-alpine Lodge restaurant/bar/general store. Woolf is also one of the producers of the indie documentary King Corn, which followed the misadventures of two neophyte corn farmers and their harrowing journey into the dark heart of American agribusiness.
Urban Rustic’s locavore angle seems a perfectly timed fit for the trendy location, what with all new condos lumbering toward completion in the Greenpoint/Williamsburg area. But Woolf and his partners Dan Cipriani, and Luis Illades say they’re determined to make sure the old neighborhood isn’t excluded – a big chalkboard above the deli boasts a wide variety of meaty sandwiches intended to lure “the guys playing handball across the street.” The salad bar and stocked produce will vary according to what local suppliers have fresh each week: the owners are promising a selection of vegetables that were in the ground two days prior. They’re also placing an emphasis on farmers who use electricity from wind-powered sources.
Breakfast and lunch can be ordered from the deli counter and eaten in the back dining area or, during better weather, in the small outdoor space behind the café. Items range from seitan stew to roast beef sandwiches, with smoothies, espresso and coffee. Dinner will feature table service and a variable menu dictated by the day’s fresh haul from their local suppliers. And on weekends Urban Rustic will serve as another neighborhood brunch option for those who can’t seem to make it to the Lodge before the rush.
Urban Rustic, 236 N. 12th St., 718-388-9444. Open seven days a week, 7am – 10pm. Weekend brunch served between 10am – 4pm.
More on this steroids nonsense.
The players names included in the report were based on uncorroborated evidence provided by 2 individuals who are under federal indictment. And ESPN is now reporting (on TV) that Roger Clemens is firing back hard, claiming both that he has never once tested positive and that they have no evidence that he has ever done anything wrong. If that's true, this is all very, very f'd up.
These are allegations that will define everything these people have done with their lives. If they don't have something more than the word of one or two people, they shouldn't have included their names. The standard of proof should have been much, much higher than this. Hearsay isn't enough in a court of law. Why should it be enough for this report?
Baseball is looking for scapegoats. They better be damn well sure they picked the right people. Because if they didn't, the falsely accused players will sure, and they will win. A false accusation here is as clear a case of defamation as you're ever likely to see.
Recently, legend became reality when a 10-story building in SoHo was being converted to a luxury condo. Unearthed in the walls was a large mural created by graffiti pioneers Fab Five Freddy and Futura 2000.
The artwork contains a variety of images and writing executed in spray paint, grease pencil, magic marker and whatever else was on hand — in silver, gold, pink and red. There are cartoonlike pictures of a bomber airplane, images of a heart and a cake, and several references to Quaaludes, a popular 1970s party drug.The mural was found in the eighth-floor loft owned by art critic Edit deAk in the late '70s and 1980s — a time when much of fringe art, including graffiti, was being validated. The wall is nearly intact, except for gaps where a dishwasher and plumbing were installed years later.And that's not all...one part of the mural is believed to be by Jean Michel Basquiat (his tag "SAMO" also appears in the stairwell). deAk even told the new owners of the building that "There is a Basquiat, and it's somewhere where you won't think it is." This being the beginning of a movement, many in the art world who were consulted agree it's "a critical piece of history," and the "Holy Grail" of graffiti.
So how does one preserve such a thing in the midst of a luxury condo conversion? Wall stabilization, tissue paper and cheesecloth were all involved until the graffiti could be "peeled off" and mounted to a movable panel. That panel is being unveiled for all to see tonight at an exhibit focusing on the graffiti art movement in the early '80s. The show will also include works from Keith Haring, Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Ero. Titled "The Wild Style Exhibit" will be on view through February 15th at Gallery 151 [151 Wooster St, 2nd Floor].
The New York Times has an interesting piece on Heather Kuzmich one of the recent contestants on reality TV show America’s Next Top Model who reportedly has Asperger's syndrome.
Asperger's syndrome is essentially High Functioning Autism (the difference in diagnosis lies in a fairly academic point about the age at which someone acquires language), meaning that the person is not impaired in terms of intelligence, but has difficulties understanding others' emotions, social interactions and can have 'special interests' or repetitive behaviours.
The stereotype of someone with Asperger's is that they're quite shy, withdrawn or socially unattractive.
In contrast, a video of Kuzmich on YouTube shows her to be an engaging and outgoing personality with a delightfully kooky edge that shines through.
It's always great to see when someone doesn't conform to a negative stereotype and the impact is all the more enhanced when it's someone high profile or in the public eye.
Link to NYT article 'Asperger’s Syndrome Gets a Very Public Face'.
Personally, I can't believe someone would be caught dead with one of these pieces of proletarian rubbish.At my law firm, Clifford Chance, a most prestigious English establishment, we use quill and ink, as other civilised professionals are most fond of using.
The very thought of using an injection-molded plastic instrument to draft earth-shaping corporate documents offends my professional sensibilities.
With Prestige and Honour,
H. Maxwell Harbinger VI, Esq.
- One of the many mischievous reviewers who have taken over Amazon.com's customer reviews for... a plain Bic pen
Billy Shaheen, the Hillary official who said Obama's past drug use would make him vulnerable to GOP attacks in a general election, steps down from the campaign with a statement:
“I would like to reiterate that I deeply regret my comments yesterday and say again that they were in no way authorized by Senator Clinton or the Clinton campaign. Senator Clinton has been running a positive campaign focused on the issues that matter to America’s families. She is the best qualified to be the next President of the United States because she can lead starting on day one. I made a mistake and in light of what happened, I have made the personal decision that I will step down as the Co-Chair of the Hillary for President campaign. This election is too important and we must all get back to electing the best qualified candidate who has the record of making change happen in this country. That candidate is Hillary Clinton.”
Lots and lots of people have asked how I’ve been making the maps I’ve posted here on the blog. The answer is simpler than one might think, and a whole lot less automated than one might assume. I use Adobe Illustrator and draw them by hand. It’s a labor of love that I’m making while on the road, and once I’m home, I plan to print it out and keep it as a memento of the trip.
The idea for doing it Illustrator came to me after I made the map for the first day. To make that map, I simply traced over a Google Map capture with the paintbrush tool in Photoshop. Here’s what that map looked like:
While informative, I didn’t really like the look of it. And, I didn’t want to have a separate map for each day. Instead, I wanted one big map to have at the end of the trip. So, I took a raster map into Illustrator and started tracing over it using the pen tool. While I’m working on filling in the state lines, National Parks, and route lines, this is what my screen looks like:
Then, when it’s time to place in the text labels, I turn off the raster base map and am left with this view:
It’s from this view that I export the maps you’ve been seeing on this blog, such as this view that I cropped from the full map and posted in my previous entry:
That’s it. That’s how it’s done. I have to say that making this map has been a lot of fun for me. It’s the first time I’ve attempted my hand at map making, but it does feel a lot like the kinds of drawings I used to do in architecture school. It feels good to work those parts of my brain again.
Posted by Susan Straccia, Google Zeitgeist Team
Every year we put out the Year-End Zeitgeist, a look at the most popular and fastest-rising search terms in hopes of telling us something about what's been on our (collective) mind. This was my first year working on this project, and I'm here to report I was pleasantly surprised by many of the findings. Yes, 2007 was a big year for U.S. politics, and, of course, there were several peaks coinciding with the indiscretions of a few starlets -- but what I found particularly interesting were some of the timeless themes that surfaced: what is love, who is god and how to kiss, to name a few. No matter how much changes over time, these questions seem to be constants. I don't know about you, but I hope we never get to the bottom of them. Searching for an answer is half the fun.
If you haven't already done so, be sure to check out our complete list for 2007.
Referrer-tracking shows where people come from when they look at your photos.
Former senator George Mitchell’s “Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation Into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball” implicates a slew of top players, including Yankee pitchers Roger Clemens and Andy Pettitte, and sluggers Barry Bonds and Sammy Sosa. Fucking cheaters. The full report runs 409 pages (PDF).
I'm asking honestly: Assuming that the league has not established a comprehensive ban backed up with a comprehensive testing policy, why is taking steroids cheating? Everyone acts as it this is obvious, but I don't see it.
Players drink Red Bull and Gatorade to alter their performance. They spend countless hours in the weight room to give themselves a competitive advantage. They train at night, on weekends, nearly 365 days each year to play better, run faster, hit harder, and entertain better. We ask them to hit more home runs, so they do it, and then we pay them more. We ask them to hit quarterbacks and running backs harder, and they do it, and then we pay them more. Why is this form of self improvement cheating but others are not?
Steroids didn't hit the home runs for Barry Bonds. They didn't throw the pitches for Roger Clemens. They might have helped each of them perform better, but if both the pitcher and the hitter are on the juice, who has the advantage? Aside from producing a more entreating and exciting game, what difference does it make? These are grown men. Unless you are going to do everything possible to prohibit this, let them put whatever they want into their bodies.
"Former commissioner Fay Vincent told me that the problem of performance-enhancing substances may be the most serious challenge that baseball has faced since the 1919 Black Sox scandal," Mitchell said in the 409-page report.
"The illegal use of anabolic steroids and similar substances, in Vincent's view, is 'cheating of the worst sort.' He believes that it is imperative for Major League Baseball to 'capture the moral high ground' on the issue and, by words and deeds, make it clear that baseball will not tolerate the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs."Eric Gagne, Troy Glaus, Gary Matthews Jr., Brian Roberts, Paul Lo Duca, Rick Ankiel and Jay Gibbons were among other current players named in the report. Some were linked to Human Growth Hormone, others to steroids.
"We identify some of the players who were caught up in this drive to gain a competitive advantage," the report said. "Other investigations will no doubt turn up more names and fill in more details, but that is unlikely to significantly alter the description of baseball's 'steroids era' as set forth in this report."
The Balck Sox scandal was about taking bribes to lose games. This is about players using substances to perform better on the field. They simply are not the same thing. They are not even close.
I don't get it. I honestly don't.
A woman shoved into the Brooklyn-bound Q train tracks at Union Square was saved by two bystanders on Monday night. Suzanne Trotman only suffered bruises as she was pulled from the tracks less than a minute before a train pulled in.
Two people, a man and a woman, jumped into the tracks to help Trotman out. Trotman told the Post she 'got up really quickly," adding, "Good thing I didn't get knocked out... I kept telling myself, 'I'm not going to die like this.'" When the train pulled in, others stopped the person who apparently pushed her from getting on board.
Police arrested 24-year-old Tenesha Thompson for reckless endangerment and assault. Witnesses say she seemed to be talking to herself, saying, "You don't know what she did to me," repeatedly. And Trotman wants to thank the two Good Samaritans who helped her out of the tracks safely, "You hear stories of things like this, but you don't think it can ever happen to you."
At the beginning of the year, a man jumped into the subway tracks when a young man had a seizure and fell. Wesley Autrey covered the man's body with his own as a train passed above them and turned into a hero for all of us.
According to their web site and TV Guide, last night's episode of Mythbusters was supposed to address the airplane on a treadmill question. They didn't and nerds everywhere are upset. According to an email from the executive producer of the show, the segment got rescheduled:
First up, for those concerned that this story has been cancelled, don't worry, planes on a conveyer belt has been filmed, is spectacular, and will be part of what us Mythbusters refer to as 'episode 97'. Currently that is due to air on January 30th.
Secondly, for those very aggrieved fans feeling "duped" into watching tonight's show, I can only apologise. I'm not sure why the listings / internet advertised that tonight's show contained POCB. I will endeavour to find out an answer but for those conspiracy theorists amongst you, I can assure you that it will have just been an honest mistake.
Not sure that's going to quench the nerdfury, but I'm glad the piece will air in January.
I'm not only a writer, I'm a GE shareholder! And I think GE's CEO Jeff Immelt deserves a lot of credit for telling the truth yesterday: The strike is hurting NBC. The negative buzz about NBC's fortunes had built for days, and Jeff Immelt faced it directly with a minimum of spin:While some media companies have denied the "Hollywood" writers' strike will hurt profits short-term, General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt said Tuesday that it's already having an impact at NBC Universal--and GE cut profit projections for the fourth quarter there. ... GE had projected a 10% to 15% growth in segment profit at its NBCU unit in the fourth quarter, but Tuesday Immelt said it will come in at the 10% low end, citing the "impact of the strike." ... GE's downgrade was striking, since NBCU competitors have denied the strike would have a negative impact for some time. News Corp. COO Peter Chernin even said: "My guess is that during fiscal '08, a strike is probably a positive for the company."Separately, this Reuters article claims that CBS and ABC are also in trouble, just not as much. Of course, come "Idol" season, the other networks' situation could become catastrophic. With minimal competition from original programming, "American Idol" seems poised to demolish the other networks as never before. The Reuters piece includes, finally, an assessment of the strike from Shari Anne Brill, The Most Quoted Woman in Media™! I can't believe I haven't seen her show up in strike coverage until now.Shari Anne Brill, senior vice president and director of programming for media buying agency Carat USA, said advertisers are growing increasingly worried about the ratings impact of a prolonged strike.
"Clients are in an upset state without knowing what's six weeks away. We have (programming) schedules through January, but nothing is really set for the month of February," [Aaron] Cohen said.
"Ad agencies have to negotiate with networks for revised schedules based on current strike replacement programming and get client approval for the revised schedule. We're working on a month-to-month basis," he added.
Brill said the advertisers placed their money on different expectations.
"If the networks are in this ratings under-delivery situation now, it could only worsen in the event of a prolonged strike," Brill said.
"Advertisers generally prefer to be in scripted content, and will not readily accept being put into lower-quality reality fare when their upfront dollars were spent on the expectation of being placed in quality scripted content," she said.
The arrival of a new year means it's time for a new Pentagram Calendar. We'll forever be partial to the 2006 edition, for which Pentagram commissioned us to design twelve new fonts of numbers; we subsequently added three additional styles, anticipating of course the post-revolutionary 15-month calendar under which all earthlings will unite in observance of Hoefluary, Frerember and Jonesember. (Reminder: font licenses must be paid in full by Tribute Day, Hoefluary 15.)
But until the revolution comes, enjoy your quaint 12-month ways with the stylish 2008 Pentagram Typography Calendar. 2008 looks like it's going to be a vintage year, for this year's edition is designed exclusively using the typefaces of Matthew Carter. Few things can make January more exhilarating than a brace of Galliard old-style figures, and the appearance of the scarce Walker typeface in February hints at many more treats throughout the months to come. —JH
Pentagram 2008 Typography Calendar. Large, $36.00; small, $22.00.
In less than 24 hours, the entire American media will be consumed with Roid Rage. Columnists and bloggers will never have had it so easy, with myriad angles to cover, so-called big names to out and moralizing to be done. But the question that probably won't be raised (because it doesn't sell papers) is: Does anybody actually care? Seriously. Do you really want to know if your favorite sports star has injected himself with more hormones than a Perdue chicken?
I mean, read any anecdotal baseball book and you'll see that ballplayers have been popping greenies since the Seventies. It's one of the things that ballplayers are all about: getting an edge, acting batshit crazy on the road, and winning the World Series. But you still like those players from the Good Ol' Days, right? You still collect their cards. Even if they were users.
And what about the Pittsburgh Drug Trials? Players were buying cocaine from the Pittsburgh Parrot, for chrissakes. Sure, it may have ruined Tim Raines's and Dave Parker's chances at making the Hall of Fame, but Keith Hernandez figured into that stuff as well, and well, he's still a well-liked baseball celebrity.
Baseball has probably weathered more vice charges than any other sport in America, and may rank second to soccer on the world stage in terms of public relations nightmare scandals and fuck ups.
Here's a handful of other good times: Hal Chase gambling on games while still on the field playing in them, Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb fixing a game in 1927, legends Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays banned for life for appearing at a casino, and who could forget Sammy Sosa losing his grasp on English before the Senate Committee? Yes, it's easy to make it through a whole post on baseball's storied scandals without even mentioning Pete Rose or the Black Sox. (Well, almost.)
So let's face facts. There will be hundreds if not thousands of articles written on the Mitchell Report. ESPN will launch special coverage and Pedro Gomez will go without sleep for six weeks as Barry Bonds will most certainly be named in the report.
Will card prices suffer? Cards of The Asterisk have had plenty o'time to have the bottom fall out, and if anything, it's been a slow decline. But what about others? I just don't see it happening. Well, unless Clemens is named...
The Taxi and Limousine Commission has made it official: Cabs purchased after October 1, 2008 must get at least 25 miles per gallon. Then, after fall of 2009, newly purchased cabs must get at least 30 miles per gallon.
As the AP puts it, this means "taxi fleet owners, who must replace their cabs every three to five years, will probably be forced to buy fuel-efficient hybrids, which run partly on electricity." The Taxicab Board of Trade isn't happy about that, noting that the old Crown Victoria's safety rating is higher than the Ford Escape (one of the hybrid models being used as a taxi now). The board's Joseph Giannetto told the Sun, "We don't know much about the safety or durability of these hybrid taxis. A New York taxi is on the road perhaps more than any other vehicle in the world and demands more attention of safety and durability."
Earlier this year, Mayor Bloomberg announced that more and more hybrid taxis would be rolled out, increasing the percentage of hybrid vehicles to 30% of the fleet by October 2009 and hitting 100% by October 2012. It was just two years ago that the TLC gave the okay to introduce hybrids into the taxi mix - for extra fun, check out this 2005 PDF cost/benefit comparison of hybrids from the TLC. These days, there's a luxury Lexus hybrid taxi somewhere, too.
Photograph of a Prius taxi by Triborough on Flickr
I saw a link on the internet last night that I really wish I wouldn't have clicked on. What I saw behind that link irked me on so many levels, I must write about it.
Let me begin by stating I don't particularly hate Fergie as a whole. I can understand her appeal, her talents, her fashion audacity, her struggle to the top or whatever. Fine.
But Fergie's voice has a chainsaw or dentist drill quality to it, especially when she's belting out a song. It is a truly disturbing sound. If this sound were to awaken you out of a peaceful slumber, you would instinctively hurl a heavy object at the source and the experience would likely leave you cross for the rest of the day.
It is not a pleasant sound, Fergie's full-on singing voice. When she's speak-singing a song like "London Bridge" I don't feel particularly assaulted. Or even "Big Girls Don't Cry" - she didn't bring out the buzzsaw timbre on that one really.
But she did bring it out, full force, to cover one of my least favorite songs ever: "Live and Let Die".
I have no idea why Fergie would cover this song. Is it for a movie soundtrack? Because it's been covered enough before, hasn't it? The occasion for the live performance of it was the televised Movies Rock event. I'm not going to waste my time or yours wondering why this event even happened.
If you haven't already seen it, please watch this YouTube clip of her performance.
And now I must rant.
How many thousands of dollars did they pay the wardrobe stylist? All the stylist could come up with is shiny black catsuits with holes cut out in the midriff, high ponytails and ankle booties? It's a fine line between edgy and tacky, isn't it?
And the choreographer, what were they thinking? "Dancers! Gather 'round Fergie now and point your thumb up and index finger out, yes, yes, like guns! That's it! Now point your guns, point them at the audience, now bend from the elbow and point your gun up, up to the sky! Up, out, up, out! Brilliant!" I know they're trying to conjure Bond imagery here, but these moves are kind of a cross between old-school Fosse jazz, the Charlie's Angels logo, and some dance me and my friends in 7th grade would have made up during a Friday night sleepover. (I've always thought there's something very 7th grade about Fergie, like she's one set of hairsprayed donut-bangs away from copping the style of a 13 year old girl in the 80's.)
As if the dancers' finger-guns weren't enough, Fergie's got a bedazzled pistol affixed to her microphone stand. And of course she, at one point, menacingly aims it at the audience.
The song itself is not my favorite. The most irritating part is this line:
"And in this ever-changing world in which we live in..."
The repetition of "in" is like a poke in the ribs every time I hear it. I know rock songs play fast and loose with grammar, I get that and I'm OK with it. I dig it. But this line wants it both ways, and I can't go for that. No can do.
Fergie herself plays fast and loose with the timing of the chorus too, waiting just a beat after the backing track kicks in to join in the "Live and let dieeeeee" part. I'm assuming this is a stylistic choice, and not the result of a malfunctioning of her in-ear monitors, but...stop it!!
Then she somehow manages to make the "when you got a job to do, you got to do it well" part sound dirty, by virtue of growling it with a stage full of women in spandex gyrating their hips in unison. I never thought if it that way before, but now I will, for the rest of my life. Thanks.
All the hair-flipping, pyrotechnics and Fergie's own smug delivery make me feel like they were expecting everyone to be blown away by this performance. I mean, I couldn't hold on to a rope with one arm and swing from the ceiling while singing, but why would anyone want to?
To the audience that gave a standing ovation for this performance: we'll just have to agree to disagree.
To my chagrin, I made an error in my New Yorker piece "None of the Above." In the "Bell Curve," Charles Murray and Richard Hernstein did not advocate a "high-tech Indian reservation" for low-IQ groups. Rather, they warned that if current welfare policies continued, we would end up having to build high-tech reservations for those with low IQs--which is a very different argument, obviously (although not, if you think about it, any less ridiculous). I regret the error. The New Yorker will be running a correction.
Today's Blog of the Year Picks: Some Bits: Nelson's Weblog and RC3.org.
These two are just for me, some real old-school-blogging nerd picks. Some Bits: Nelson's Weblog is the work of Nelson Minar. Formerly of Google (where he helped pioneer their API work), and lately assisting with Twitter, Nelson is a geek's geek, reveling in coding and gaming and exploring the edges of web culture. But honestly, there are lots of blogs that try to cover that territory. What I love is that there's a real humanity to the way Nelson presents his posts, and he frequently veers from the technical to the political or even the worlds of food and travel while retaining that characteristic warmth. Frankly, if you've been reading or writing blogs long enough, you can remember how blogging used to be, and Nelson's Weblog is old-fashioned in a great way, not least because he still calls it a "weblog". That the sidebar linkblog is so incredibly well-curated and consistently good is the icing on the cake.
In a similar vein, Rafe Colburn's rc3.org is a blog for people who appreciate code, sure. But it's also a rich discussion of politics, community, and culture. For those of you who are newcomers to the blogosphere (that means you showed up in this century), this is what most blogs used to be like. Now, neither Rafe nor I is posting 100 links a month like we used to 8 years ago, but the evolution into a more considered set of brief essays interspersed with interesting links is still satisfying to see done so well, and so consistently, for so long.
Pick of the Posts:
- I found Nelson's sympathetic look at Larry Craig from earlier this year to be particularly moving.
- There is nothing but good in Nelson's "bad" category of posts.
- Quality is the Killer Feature: Inspired by the shutdown of OINK, Rafe neatly sums up a key weakness of digital music marketing efforts thus far.
- And a must-read for anybody who deploys servers or server-based applications: When Deployments Go Wrong
If you like these, try: Hack the Planet. A full 30% of the time, I have no idea what the hell Wes Felter is talking about. Another 20% of the time he's either wrong or just infuriating. These are just two of the best things about his blog if you're a geek.
This is one in a series of posts about Blogs of the Year for 2007. They're my subjective picks about blogs that inspired or influenced me this year, and you can check out my introductory post to find more.
We've been monitoring how I am Legend, the big budget post-apocalyptic zombie movie set in New York, will be portraying the Big Apple ever since filming took place on the Brooklyn Bridge (it eventually gets blown up). Now, with reviews starting to pop up, we're hearing mixed things about the movie but raves about how a futuristic people-less New York City looks.
The Observer's Sara Vilkomerson was freaked out, noting how the city is "desolate with grass growing up and over Park Avenue sidewalks, deserted cars abandoned in the streets, the only sound of life is the flock of birds flying overhead or the herds of deer going for a romp up Lexington (until one gets eaten by a lion, sigh)."
Variety says "the opening minutes are breathtaking in their haunting imagery. The setting is a desolate Manhattan, parts of it unchanged but others in ruins, upholstered in part by grass and weeds and with abandoned vehicles jammed together. Billboards for 'Hairspray,' 'Rent' and 'Wicked' still adorn Times Square, but the only living beings in evidence are some flying birds, a herd of stampeding deer and a family of lions stealthily hunting its dinner." Hey, Mr. deMille, deer and lions are ready for their close-up!
The Hollywood Reporter, though, couldn't quite suspend its disbelief about apocalyptic NYC: "All utilities work perfectly, which might come as a shock to New Yorkers who experience problems with water, gas or electricity when a full work force mans those departments." Ha!
I am Legend opens this Friday - are you getting ready to see it? The website offers apocalyptic views of Union Square, plus wallpapers of destroyed NYC.
"Beanstalkd is a fast, distributed, in-memory workqueue service. Its interface is generic, but is intended for use in reducing the latency of page views in high-volume web applications by running most time-consuming tasks asynchronously."
• Paul Haggis: The Reality of Reality and Animation
• The First Delivery of Pencils2MediaMoguls. UPDATED with report from Jeffrey Berman.
• Laeta Kalogridis Weighs in on Reality and Animation
• David Milch: "The Idea of the Writer" Business Model Discussion
• A Reality Writer Responds to the AMPTP
• The War of Words: No Substitute for Real Negotiations
• AMPTP's Union Buster Fired
• Links: NBC Under Siege Edition! But don't worry about NBC's ailing fortunes too much. They have a plan:
What did Bill Murray whisper into Scarlett Johansson's ear at the end of Lost in Translation? Someone did a bit of audio analysis and posted their findings as a video. (via avenues)
(link)
NEW YORK–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Pokémon USA, Inc. today announced Akira Chiba, president, will resign at the end of this year. After years of dedicated service, Mr. Chiba is proud to leave Pokémon USA upon completing his mission to re-establish Pokémon as a successful global brand. Mr. Chiba joined Pokémon USA in 2002 when the company’s New York office was established, the brand’s first corporate headquarters outside of Japan. Upon stepping down, Mr. Chiba has plans to pursue other opportunities.
Mr. Chiba will be replaced by Mr. Kenji Okubo, previously executive vice president and head of Pokémon USA’s Seattle office, effective January 1, 2008. Mr. Okubo will manage Pokémon’s operations in New York, Seattle and London, and will oversee all Pokémon initiatives outside of Japan including the Pokémon Trading Card Game, the long-running animated TV series, North American and European licensing and the recently launched, Pokémon Trading Figure Game. Prior to joining Pokémon USA in 2004, Mr. Okubo worked at The Pokémon Company headquarters in Tokyo, Japan as director of international business.
“During Mr. Chiba’s tenure, Pokémon USA has greatly expanded,” said Okubo. “The brand is topping industry charts across all categories — including video games, toys, and trading card games — plus the Pokémon animated TV series is hugely successful on Cartoon Network. We thank Mr. Chiba for his efforts on behalf of Pokémon and wish him success in the future.”
I do not expect that this will result in much of a change at Pokemon USA HQ. I would like to take a moment to thank Mr. Chiba for his time at the helm and welcome Mr. Kenji Okubo on his promotion!
As of today, and forever forward, Movable Type is open source. This means you can freely modify, redistribute, and use Movable Type for any purpose you choose.
Just want the details and downloads? Skip to the bottom. But you might like the story of how we got here.
Like many of us on the team, some of you have been waiting for this moment for years. For a business, an open source license affects boring things like how a product is created, updated, and distributed. But the open source movement has always been about something more important: Freedom. With a name like "Movable Type", we've always been keenly aware of the importance of freedom, as that name echoes both the birth of the printing press and the creation of independent media that an individual can control.
Our goal has always been to create the best blogging platform in the world and to put that power in the hands of as many people as possible. And we want to honor a tradition of openness that Movable Type has embodied for over six years:
- From TrackBack to Atom to OpenID, we've always invented and popularized key technologies that were delivered with open source implementations, freely-available specs, and no patents.
- Movable Type has always had all of its source code freely available for review, from its first release.
- MT's license has always permitted users to modify the code for any reason.
- Every major release of Movable Type, from version 1.0, has included contributions or patches created by outside developers in the community.
- Many members of today's MT team began as contributors to the MT code or creators of MT plugins.
- There was a public code repository with nightly builds of Movable Type as far back as four years ago, though it lacked dedicated resources.
- There's always been a free (as in beer) version of Movable Type.
- We've always wanted people who pay for a Movable Type license to do so because they believe in what we're doing -- whether that's standing behind our work with professional support, or the new era of benefits like plugins and themes for paid users.
Fighting For Openness
And so, while this is a milestone for Movable Type and for our community, this is something of an evolution for the platform, not a revolution. In fact one story stands out from the earliest days of our company. I got to witness the conversations between our cofounders Ben and Mena Trott (who were then the entire staff of Six Apart) and Joi Ito, who would go on to lead the initial investment in Six Apart from his company Neoteny.
Back in late 2002 and early 2003, Ben and Mena had both been adamant about one particular point from the very beginning of the negotiations: That there would always be a free version of Movable Type with the source code freely available. To their credit, the team at Neoteny was always wholeheartedly behind the idea. Of course, Joi Ito's reputation in supporting and fighting for openness on the web since then is well-documented, from his work with Creative Commons to ICANN to the Mozilla Foundation to the Open Source Initiative itself.
But as a passionate MT user, it struck me that, even in those days when there were only a few thousand bloggers out there and the whole idea of starting a business around blogging was extremely risky, Ben and Mena were really committed to setting the standard that Movable Type would always be open, and would always be free, just as much as they were committed to making sure Six Apart would be a solid company that could hire passionate members of the community to stand behind its products.
That's the truth, but of course, that might not have always been our reputation. Ever since the changes with our version 3.0 launch three years ago, there have been those who are quick to judge or quick to question whether the intention of openness was ever there. And of course, we've since learned a lot about how to communicate better with our community, and how to build a sustainable business that we're proud of, so that we can ensure even greater investments in Movable Type. We hope that it's not just the launch of MTOS that demonstrates our commitment to openness -- from our community feedback process (which has already yielded a completely new MT wiki) to our creation and promotion of open standards for the web to our genuine interest in dialogue with the communities we serve, we truly believe Movable Type is the most open platform around.
Movable Type 4.0's release earlier this year has been the most successful launch of a new version of MT ever. It's been one of the milestones in the history of Six Apart, too, by re-establishing our flagship platform as an unquestioned leader in blogging, and demonstrating what the tool can do when we've worked with our community to invest a tremendous amount of resources in the platform.
And stay tuned: There's even more exciting news for MT coming soon! You'll want to subscribe to the movabletype.org XML feed for all the updates.
Thank You
The Movable Type Open Source project exists thanks to the passion, dedication, and inspiration of a community that has been incredibly generous for more than six years. We thank you for all the work leading up to this launch, and especially for the valuable contributions you'll be making in the future. Today, we're honoring the spirit of openness that's always been part of the Movable Type community and taking it to its logical conclusion: Please welcome Movable Type Open Source.
A few quick answers to questions you might have about MTOS:
- MTOS has every feature in Movable Type 4.0 along with several new minor improvements and bug fixes.
- All plugins, themes, templates, designs, and APIs that work with MT4 work with MTOS. MTOS also works with other Six Apart open source technologies such as memcached.
- MTOS is one of the only open source blogging tools with built-in support for an unlimited number of blogs, an unlimited number of authors, and sign-in with OpenID, with no plugins needed.
- We'll be adding additional paid benefits for people who've paid for commercial licenses for Movable Type, with benefits like improved technical support and custom add-ons such as plugins or themes.
- MTOS is complemented by the paid software products we sell on top of the MT platform, such as our Enterprise Solution, Community Solution and personal and commercial licenses which include support.
- There's a public Subversion repository for getting the MTOS code and nightly builds.
- Once there are stable public builds, those downloads will be on movabletype.org as well.
- You can find out how to contribute to the MTOS project and the MT community at movabletype.org.
- MTOS support is provided by other members of the community. (A great place to start is the new Movable Type Wiki.) You can buy a standard paid license for one of the existing Movable Type products if you'd like professional support directly from Six Apart.
- Movable Type Open Source is being released under the standard GPL license.
- We welcome and encourage the distribution and reuse of all or part of MTOS in other open source projects. Get in touch if you want to work together.
Be sure to check out the full MTOS details for more details on how MTOS works, a list of Frequently Asked Questions, and information about how you can contribute.
Movable Type is now available under a an open source license. Huge kudos to the entire team that's worked on this, especially Byrne Reese, Brad Choate, Chris Hall, Anil Dash, Chris Vail and Mark Simmons, who have done all the hard work in getting all the details right. And, of course, many thanks to Ben and Mena for doing their part since day zero "fighting for openness," as Anil puts it so well in the post on movabletype.org.
This is such a great way to bookend a tremendous year for Movable Type; I'm incredibly proud of the work we've done with MT4, and this just puts the icing on the cake. Onward!
There’s room in any dictionary for all parts of speech, and if the amount of mail sent by interested word buffs is any indication, woot—an interjection or exclamation of celebration or revelry—is a favorite.
It comes in a variety of spellings offline and on. The most common, woot, whoot, and w00t are, for our purposes, variations of the same lexical item, especially since the aspirated aitch is growing less common in American English. The latter variant, w00t, has two zeroes in place of ohs, a common characteristic of words originating from online entertainment, especially in multiplayer games, where goofy and ironic l33tspeak sometimes prevails. Other online variations are w00+ and w007.
As is the case for most words, the most popular question about woot is “Where did it come from?” Unfortunately, its origins are disputed and, also like most words, it’s impossible to say with any certainty what the true origins are. Trying to come close to the term’s roots is a game of odds, Occam’s razor, and believability.
After a couple of examples of “whoot” or “woot” as an onomatopoeic representation of video game sounds in news stories from 1982, the earliest clear-cut use of the word found so far is in the name of the Atlantic City, N.J., entertainment tabloid The Whoot! which shows up in 1988 as a sponsor of the ugliest bartender contest in Philadelphia. In 2003 The Whoot! changed its name to the Atlantic City Weekly. Current AC Weekly editor Michael Epifanio says that The Whoot was so-named by founder Lew Steiner after “night owls who would pull all-nighters to scout out the bars, clubs and restaurants and then send the publication out to print.”
Other unlikely origins for the term have been proposed. In discussing the web site of consumer-electronics retailer Woot.com, a 2004 story in Ad Age claimed that the word originated of the phrase “Wow! loot” in the role-playing board game Dungeons and Dragons. The game, created in 1973 and released to the public in 1974, is unlikely as a point of origin. The Ad Age article (besides other sources referring to it) is the only source so far found that connects the word to the term in more than 30 years of the game’s existence. Given the popularity of D&D in the Eighties, it should have, by all rights, showed up in connection with the term woot long before 2004.
A related claim is that it came from multiplayer online games like Everquest and Ultima Online where it is said to have been associated with the phrase “wondrous loot,” or even with the same “wow, loot!” as in D&D, when a player’s character came across gold or wealth in the game. It’s also been credited to the online game Quake, where it is said to have been associated with the sound a player’s avatar makes when it jumps. While it is entirely possible that these games, which had tens of thousands of registered users, could have helped popularize the term, the first written evidence for woot occurred well before these games existed. Quake, the oldest of the three, was first released in 1996.
Another—and, frankly, halfhearted—claim, is that it comes from the Scottish interjection “hoot!” There is indeed such an interjection, according to the Dictionary of the Scots Language, and in various forms it dates as far back as 1698, appearing in such notable works as Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novel Kidnapped. The problem here, though, is that the Scots hoot! is negative. It’s not a crowing comment of satisfaction and delight, it’s “an exclamation used to express annoyance, disgust, incredulity or remonstrance or in dismissal of an opinion expressed by someone else,” the same as tut! or fie! While such inversions of meaning are not unheard of—nice essentially reversed its meaning over 600 years, going from meaning “silly or foolish” to “pleasant, kind, or neat in appearance"—they are not common and, like nice, take a long time. From the first citation the DSL has in 1698 to the latest in 1933, the Scots hoot shows no signs of changing.
More implausible as the origin is the backronym We Own(ed) the Other Team, also said to come from use in unnamed multiplayer video games. A backronym is a word interpreted as an acronym after that word has already been around a while. We know the word existed before the phrase because the phrase doesn’t show up in online discussions groups until March 2003. The longer phrase easily could have existed in multiplayer game chatter before then, but in general, once a term is popular in game chatter, it quickly also shows up in web and Usenet discussions related to the game, which is not the case here.
Elsewhere woot is claimed to come from root, the user name given in Unix-based operating systems to the administrator’s account. This lacks any supporting evidence at all, except for dubious claims of “I remember,” and is rebuffed here for the sake of completeness.
The most likely explanation, as is usually the case, is far simpler. Woot is, with some caveats, probably derived from and most likely popularized by the dance catch phrase of 1993, “whoot, there it is!” In clubs and on dance floors across the country, in half-time shows and in baseball stadiums, “whoot, there it is” and plain old “woot!” were shouted long and loud by millions. It was used by hype men at hip-hop shows, dancers and cheerleaders at ball games, DJs at discos, and probably by ball-callers at bingos.
If woot had any kind of real presence before the songs—as something other than the name of the publication from Atlantic City—it has not yet been found. As a clear-cut term of celebration or revelry, it simply did not show up in the trillions of words published before 1993 and currently archived online and in periodical databases. Even if it did exist and for some reason did not show up in print, the “whoot, there it is” dance catch phrase certainly reinforced any pre-existing usage. That all relevant citations for the term appear after 1993 supports this.
The story of woot, as we know it, is simple. There were two similar songs on the charts that year. In April “Whoot There It Is” by 95 South (Ichiban Records) was the number seven best-selling song in Central Florida, according, to the Orlando Sentinel. “Whoomp! (There It Is),” by Tag Team (Life Records) out of Atlanta showed up at number 15 on Billboard’s R&B singles 27 May 1993 and stayed for 45 weeks on the Billboard top 100, where it reached number 2. It was the more popular of the two songs.
Both tunes came out of the dance music scene, where it was chanted by crowds, much like “the roof, the roof, the roof is on fire,” in the clubs. By June 1993 both songs were popular enough across the country that USA Today and other newspapers wrote about their similarities—they are strikingly alike, fuddy-duds were already complaining about overdosing on the new catch-phrase, and good-natured arguments took place about which was the canonical form, whoot or whoomp. “Whoops, there it is” was another, less-common variant. (The three variants, incidentally, are good evidence that the term was originally oral.)
Jay-Ski, who produced “Whoot, There It Is,” said in a 1997 interview, “There were eight versions of that going around. The idea came from the streets, and even though the 95 South one might have been recorded first, it was Tag Team who released it earlier. I sold three-and-a-half million of mine, though. And now I’ll be sitting at home watching a football game and hearing it played in the stadium—that’s a big thrill. We even were invited to perform it at the top of the fifth inning in the fifth game of the ’93 World Series between the Phillies and Toronto, and that was the best crowd that I’ve ever performed for.”
Cecil “DC” Glenn and Steve “Roll’n” Gibson, the two men in the musical act “Tag Team,” say in the book Colorado Rocks by G. Brown (Pruett Publishing Co., 2004, p. 128) that they picked up the “Whoomp” in their song from the Arsenio Hall show:
“People had been saying ‘There it is’ forever. Everybody in Arsenio Hall’s television audience used to the ‘Wooof’ chant. We put that together with the ‘There it is’ dance-floor chant we were hearing at the club.
Gibson recalled that DC said, “Oh, man, we need to do a song called, ‘Whoom, there it is.”
“All I said was, ‘How do you spell it?”
The claim that their “whoomp” came from Arsenio’s audience chant should not necessarily be taken at face value: memories are notoriously off-kilter when it comes to remembering such things. They are clouded by wishful thinking, cognitive dissonance, and a desire to be helpful.
But the show aired from 1989 to 1994 and there’s no doubt that the “woofing” of the Arsenio audience was much-imitated on television shows such as Saturday Night Live, that the similar-sounding chant “whoot whoot whoot” or “whoomp whoomp whoomp” was shouted across the country, and that, for a time, “whoot, there it is!” was an immensely popular catch phrase anywhere in America where people gathered to party or celebrate.
It was also used by Julia Roberts’s character in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman, where her low class use “whoo(f) whoo(f)” was contrasted to the refined setting she was using it in. She even does the hand-gesture of the Arsenio audience.
It’s my guess all that is left of that fad now is the neat little celebratory word “woot!” used mainly an exclamation of joy at minor victories and unexpected pleasures, with a slightly less common use as a flat sarcastic remark in responses to a minor disappointment or letdown. It’s enough.
Apple has all sorts of job openings; I just thought this one was pretty interesting.
The Award Season has begun and I am behind in my movie going. In no order, these are the movies I want/need to see:
Away from Her (Netflix)
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood
Waitress (Netflix)
Juno
Billy the Kid
Enchanted
La Vie En Rose
Into the Wild
Michael Clayton
4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days
I'm Not There
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
Starting Out In The Evening
The Savages
Sweeney Todd
No End in Sight (Netflix)
The Savages
The Diving Bell and the ButterflyWow, that's a long, long list. I have a lot of work to do (and money to spend). I'll keep you posted.
Have you seen the copper-toned glow emanating from Rockefeller Center? It's not The Tree...it's a penny harvest field! The installation is the first phase of Penny Harvest, and the copious coins came from students in NYC who have collected $1 million in change. The pennies will later go to different charities and towards improving the students communities.
New York first lady Silda Wall Spitzer joined hundreds of public school children on Monday to unveil a mass of $1 million in pennies collected for charity. The display, called the Penny Harvest Field, includes an estimated 100 million pennies -- plus a few nickels, dimes and quarters that slipped in by mistake.The cents are sprawled across an area the size of one city block, contained in a 30' x 165' display that was designed by architect James Polshek. More photos are here (here's one of the pennies arriving), and you can see it in person through the end of the year...when hopefully all of the pennies will still be accounted for. This sort of reminds us of that time Kevin Federline tried to save the penny and Ocean Spray made a cranberry bog in Rock Center.Photo via mihalis's flickr.
I totally did not see this one coming. Jessica Alba and her on-again boyfriend, Cash Warren, are having a baby! Her rep told People.com, "I confirm that Jessica and Cash are expecting a baby in late spring, early summer."
Wow! Totally blindsided by this.
Cash and Jessica broke up over the summer for a bit, after dating for two-and-a-half years, but were quickly back in each other's arms by the end of September. Maybe right around the time they found out they were having a baby?
Well, kudos for them for trying to make it work, but is anyone else as surprised as I am about this?
The first delivery of Pencils2MediaMoguls took place on Tuesday 12/11 in Burbank. Check out our photoset on Flickr. Full report on what went down to come tomorrow.
The Mitchell Report has been delivered to the Office of the Commissioner. That is in line with things that I’ve been hearing about the release of the document, which many are targeting for Thursday. I’m hearing from various independent sources that press conferences are being arranged for the release, but that these will come on Friday. We’ll wait for MLB to make official announcements on these.
The delivery of the final report can also start the clock on the leak of the document. Draft reports have been known to be in the hands of some writers for better than a month, with some versions focused on the ending recommendations and others as more of a chronology. It’s possible, even likely, that various versions will be ‘merged’ into the final document. Estimates on names - and let’s face it, the coverage and interest in this document is only in the names it will name, especially if they’re big names - go anywhere from a low of 40 to a high of 200. My guess? Just under 100. That number would indicate the the Mitchell Report did *not* have the Quest list that the government seized as part of the BALCO investigation, or at least did not publish it. (I’m told that Mitchell has called it “fruit of the poison tree” and argued against its inclusion.)
Howard Bryant has a great breakdown of the problems with the document at ESPN and is well worth reading. He’s absolutely right that trainers and conditioning coaches seemed to bear a stronger burden during the investigation, one that will likely be carried over to the final report. I’ll admit an affinity for them but they’re an easy target, one that many will wrongly think are replaceable.
It’s a day that many have been waiting for and now it’s at hand. How dark a day or how bright the disinfecting sunlight is will be known soon.
story links: Interview with Lauren Cornell on Rhizome.org and new New Museum of New York City
Led Zeppelin reunited for one concert last night in London with over 1 million people registering for the 20,000 available tickets. There are video clips available on Google Video and YouTube and two bootlegged songs have surfaced online so far.
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RCA Design Interactions: Taste the difference!, originally uploaded by blackbeltjones.
Today, Dopplr went v1.0 and open – but while the rest of the gang were over in Paris, I was at the RCA for the final presentations from students on the teaching project I’ve been visiting tutor for.
A very long day, but very exciting to see the fruits of six weeks wrestling with an enormous, wobbly jelly of a brief: the future of money.
I’ve lectured and been a visiting critic at design schools before, and also been industry sponsor for a couple of projects similar to the one we’ve been running (Intel’s People and Practices group were sponsoring this) but this was the first time I’ve really been stuck into a project all the way through.
Totally nerve-wracking, and totally satisfying. Thanks to all the first and second year students on the Design Interactions course for putting up with me.
Great promo from Justin: Darth Vader called out by a little George Lucas
Now I’m in Paris and yes, as always, it’s absolutely beautiful. This evening, a light rain brushed the city, leaving a gorgeous, cinematic glaze on every surface. They make everything look right here, even if it’s only as humble as a fleeting bout of precipitation.
Right: Right as rain. Newly slicked street in the 6e arrondisement.
This afternoon, I got a brief tutorial on how to use the city’s famous Vélib shared bicycle system, in which a credit card will get you access to any one of a fleet of readily available bikes stored in public racks all over the city. It’s ingeniously designed and, apparently, also massively successful.
Right: Caveat cyclist. The reversed seat indicates a faulty bike.My favorite part, though, is one user innovation that’s already become widely understood among the thousands of regular Vélib customers (or so I’m told): while parked at a rack, a seat turned backwards is an indication that that particular bicycle has a flat tire, a broken chain or some other fault, and other users should avoid it. Though the rental system itself is a modern marvel — GPS chips track all of the bikes constantly, and computerized help redirects customers returning bikes to nearby locations when a given rack is full — there’s still room for a simple hack like this for users to create added value for the community at large. That’s good design at work, because the system’s users are also, in part, the system’s designers. Awesome.
1. Cutie Patutie Paul Rudd is set to star in I Love You Man, as a bridegroom looking for a best man. Jason Segal (Freaks and Geeks, How I Met Your Mother, Knocked Up) is in final negotiations to play the best man. Rudd/Segal 2008! Also, doesn't the photo of him above just make you want to put him on some toasted whole wheat bread, slather on some mayo, sprinkle some salt and pepper and eat him right up? 2. We were amused by this photo of Nicole Richie with some of her Orthodox Jew fans. 3. Legendary Thrash Metalers Testament are in the studio working on a new album -- the first in over a decade with the original line-up. Testament!! 4. Take a listen to Lily Allen’s new cover of ELO’s "Mr. Blue Sky." 5. This is slightly old news, but we just read that iconic Finnish line Marimekko has licensed some of its patterns to H&M. They'll appear in H&M's spring '08 collection. Fun!
Jane Hamsher at FireDogLake reports that Fabiani & Lehane, the formerly-Democratic PR firm, has been canned by SEIU Local 99 and will have lost all of its union clients by week's end. From Jane's post:"By the end of the week, I believe Chris Lehane will have no union clients because of his work for the AMPTP," says SEIU President Andy Stern, who confirms that all Change to Win Unions are severing ties with Lehane. "His days are numbered in the labor movement." ... Change to Win unions include the Teamsters, Laborers, SEIU, Carpenters & Joiners, United Farm Workers, Food and Commercial Workers, and UNITE HERE.
There is a limit to what you can do and still work for progressive organizations. In contracting out as a strike buster for the AMPTP, Lehane has definitely crossed it.
AFP548 explains how to avoid the mixed-architecture Perl module blues.
Quick Post
A beautiful video portrait of men who fix high wire power lines. They climb on from the wing of a helicopter and wear conductive suits.
NBC FIRST NETWORK TO SHOW MAJOR CRACKING
The Peacock's feathers are starting to droop. Who will be next?NBC is quietly giving advertisers their money back. In all fairness, the CW is apparently tanking also. The real "ouch" quote is this one about NBC's new non-scripted efforts: “We’re trying to understand NBC’s recent moves,” said Laura Caraccioli-Davis, exec vp, Starcom Entertainment. “We are concerned that it might be thinking about adopting a programming strategy like some of its sister cable networks. American Gladiator and even some of the shows they have in development, like Knight Rider, are remakes, being dusted off rather than coming up with new creations.Like I said, ouch.
“NBC used to be the upscale, quality network,” she added. “We have come to expect quality, iconic programming. Maybe they are searching for the reality hit they don’t have, their own American Idol. But too much reality just doesn’t play well with advertisers.”Oh, and Hulu got hacked. But that's okay, there's always FanFare. You know, from SanDisk. Right? Guys? Um... NBC gets picketed in Second Life. Just watch out for virtual Tommy Short showing up and heckling: "Clown car! Clown car!"
MUST READS
Because we can't recommend them enough...Fans and writers supporting one another and joining the fight for a fair deal (Wall Street Journal) Patrick Goldstein in the LA Times: "Why have the studios walked away from the negotiating table? Although it seemed hard to believe at first, the evidence is overwhelming that they never had any serious intention of making a fair deal, at least the kind of deal that, as Lew Wasserman might have put it, would’ve allowed both sides to come away declaring victory." Robert J Elisberg in the Huffington Post: Why is the AMPTP allowed to gang up on each union one by one? How is that legal? (Answer: It should not be.) Competitors are not allowed to negotiate together, to even confer together. It's called collusion. When baseball owners merely created an "information bank" for offers being made to free agent players, they were fined $280 million. Two competitors cannot talk with one another if there's just a hint of agreement. Imagine ALL competitors in an industry getting together to set ALL wages and ALL labor conditions.Between this and the FCC nonsense going on, this strike could end up spilling over into the halls of Congress. And that's the last place the conglomerates want to find themselves.
It doesn't happen. Anywhere. Not "anywhere in the U.S." Anywhere in the free world.
Except Hollywood.
AROUND THE WEBFrom Variety.com: "If the Sundance Film Festival can figure out a new formula to pay for internet downloads, why not the AMPTP?" Local news from Minneapolis on picketers taking the writers' case to the public. Bravo to everyone who's picketing despite the chill in Minneapolis and, of course, NYC! Petrea Burchard writes about the why SAG and the WGA are are sticking together her column in NowCasting.com's ezine, ActorsInk.
FREMANTLE RALLYPhotos submitted by Athena007 on Picasa Jack Black rocks the crowd (Page Six) Tenacious D performance (YouTube)
This report was sent to us by a rally goer who requested anonymity:Fremantle Sr. VP David Johnson was seen with a picket sign and a WGA T-shirt, hanging out on the sidelines and then walking with it into his office building. A number of us noticed that and wondered "what for?" So someone asked, "You joining us with a picket sign?" He responded with a smile, "Sure, why not?"
Collecting stuff for his memorabilia collection?
With all the recent excitement over Oprahbama I must remind you of a little post I did in January 2006 - I am prescient!!
The answer is ... Jeopardy! host Alex Trebek. Ding! "Who has clogged arteries?"
Correct!
TMZ.com has learned that Alex has suffered a minor heart attack, but he is home and "resting comfortably." Which is the only reason why I made the little joke. Have no fear, he will be back in the studio for the show's next scheduled tapings in January.
He's going to be fine -- I'm well aware of how serious a heat attack is -- they don't have the expression, "I'm as serious as a heart attack" for nothing. So, please, don't start screaming at how insensitive I am. I'm really not. I was just joking around -- laughing is actually good for the heart. I wish Alex nothing but the speediest of recoveries.
New freeware “super-lightweight” to-do app by Tom Stoelwinder. Requires Leopard because it uses the new system-wide task system, just like Mail and iCal.
VH1’s Best Week Ever has a list of professions that are one step away from extinction. At number four is the job of “Acting and Being Indian - Kal Penn”
There’ll always be bit parts for Indian actors as doctors and goofy telephone operators, but Kal Penn has blazed a trail for the Indian lead actor, much as Sidney Poitier blazed a trail for nonthreatening, gentlemanly African-Americans that white adults could patronizingly tolerate. If Penn continues his Hollywood ascent (”Namesake II,” anyone?) we may be watching sparkly, four-hour Bollywood music videos in theaters by 2015, but when Penn dies, where is that going to leave the industry??
Eric Gill was a respected British artist and typographer -- Gill Sans is his most famous typeface -- but according to his diaries, he also regularly engaged in sexual relations with his sisters, his daughters, and the family dog.
For some of Gill's fans, even looking at his work became impossible. Most problematically, he was a Catholic convert who created some of the most popular devotional art of his era, such as the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, where worshippers pray at each panel depicting the suffering of Jesus.
These details of Gill's private life were revealed in a 1989 book by Fiona MacCarthy...here's a NY Times review of the book soon after it was published.
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Looks like Owen Wilson has found something -- or someone -- to lift his spirits. Owen and his buddy, Woody Harrelson, hung out with some ladies in Miami over the weekend. Owen even went in for a smooch at one point. If that bed (seemingly in the middle of nowhere) is rockin', don't come a-knockin'.
Hello readers. This is former New York Met Lastings Milledge, coming to tell you his side of the story. In case you’re living under a rock with some terrorists, or you were out shaking what your momma gave you with some fine men or women that are the same age as you, Lastings was traded to the Washington Nationals for two guys that Lastings’ mentor and personal hero Rickey Henderson would call “chumps.” Now, he understands that Ryan Church can hit a little bit. But Lastings has seven years on the guy, and Church is always getting hurt. If he had a choice between an old man that can rake but gets hurt, or a young kid that can rake and isn’t hurt, you can guess who’d get chosen.
Brian Schneider was the other guy in the deal. He’s a catcher, and Lastings’ former GM Omar Minaya makes it sound like he was the key to the deal, since he’s now going to start for the Mets as their full-time catcher. That’s great for Schneider, but I thought the Mets already had a catcher when they traded for Johnny Estrada. Lastings isn’t sure how many catchers you can have on one team, but the Mets seem to have a lot, and it’s not too clear what they’re going to do with them all. Maybe one of them can play in the field in Lastings’ place. That could be the big plan.
To be honest, he was hoping to stay with the Mets a long, long time. Lastings liked New York, and he liked playing in front of New York fans. They know what’s going on, and even if they’re too loud or too dumb, their heart’s in the right place. Lastings has some problem with people in the New York press, because they don’t seem to realize that it’s OK for people to listen to hip-hop and wear certain things, and that doing these things doesn’t automatically make you a bad person or someone that likes to shoot people in hip-hop radio stations. But Lastings understands that old white people don’t like it when young non-white people live their lives without checking in with white people to find out what’s OK and what’s not OK.
What Lastings doesn’t understand is why no one on the Mets seemed to like him. Maybe he made some mistakes (which Lastings already apologized for, by the way), but young people make mistakes. Lastings is only 22. If everyone in the world was a perfect mature person at 22, then we would have socialized medicine, no traffic on the highways, perfect DirecTV reception 24/7, and a Fantastic Four movie that didn’t suck. But people make mistakes - that’s what makes them people.
Lastings doesn’t know what he did to get former manager Willie Randolph so upset that he had to ride the pine all the time while guys like Marlon Anderson and Shawn Green played a lot of games down the stretch. Maybe Willie is jealous of Lastings’ youth and contagious exuberance. Maybe Willie learned how to hate his own people from his former coach, well-known racist Joe Torre. Or maybe he’s just dumb. Lastings heard stories about how Willie would play Jose Reyes in the leadoff spot in spite of a bad OBP, or bat David Wright low in the order because he was too young to be a real RBI guy (whatever that means), or bunt with Carlos Beltran early in games in order to move a runner along. Lastings just chalked those stories up to a rookie manager’s mistakes. Like he said in the last paragraph, people make mistakes. Lastings bought a Young Jeezy CD and that Outkast album where Andre 3000 tries to front like Prince. It happens. But now, with hindsight and first-hand experience in mind, it looks to Lastings like Willie’s just as dumb as those cracker-ass crackers (pardon Lastings’ inflammatory racially-tinged language) Billy Wagner and Paul LoDuca.
What those two guys Wagner & LoDuca ever did to think they know what they’re talking about is beyond Lastings. All Wagner ever seemed to do was blow leads late in the season, and all LoDuca seemed to do was ground into double plays in front of Wright and Beltran. And that’s when LoDuca wasn’t hurt - when he was hurt, he was too busy getting shot down by college girls and flapping his lips about being a teammate to really be a teammate. Lastings wished that more old white ballplayers would just shut their damn mouths.
It’s the same in Los Angeles, where a bunch of cranky old white dudes are mouthing off because younger players - some of them black, by the way - are taking away their playing time. Lastings believes that you gotta earn your time on the field, even if you’re an old-timer with lots of pals on the team. And old white folk that have to stick a tube of Ben Gay up their ass to pull on their stirrups, or need a walker with wheels to go 1st-to-3rd on a hit to right-center, shouldn’t say word one about losing playing time.
But what does Lastings know? He is just a 22-year-old phenom that could have anchored a young and potentially dominant Mets lineup for the next five years. Instead, Lastings is just a 22-year-old phenom that will anchor a young and potentially dominant Nationals lineup for the next five years. Lastings is looking forward to watching Wily Mo Pena hit lots of towering fly balls deep into that river in Washington. Ryan Zimmerman is a stone cold pimp. If Elijah Dukes is as good as folks say, he’ll be the Bun B to Lastings’ Pimp C (RIP). And if they ever get any pitchers that aren’t straight-up garbage, the Nationals could run wild all over the National League. Maybe they don’t even need pitching - if a bunch of slugger dudes like Colorado can make it to the World Series, then it’s not a long shot that Lastings and company could do the very same thing next year, even if they don’t have their own personal dragon slayer.
Anyway, in the few hours since this trade happened, all those bad feelings are now water under that bridge. Lastings is moving on, and he is looking forward to hanging out with Agent Zero and Sheriff Gonna Getcha in the city that will come to know and love him, even if he has to share a locker room with that cradle-robbing Soprano-wannabe LoDuca. If that guy has the sense God gave a chicken nugget, he’ll keep his damn mouth shut whenever he gets near me. Just saying.
Finally, Lastings just wants to say that the 350 at-bats he wasted in New York, for a team that can’t tell a good player from an overrated pale-ass hustle chump, will be treasured memories. And when the Nationals come to visit Shea next year, and Lastings goes deep against that redneck know-nothing hick Wagner to take the lead in the top of the 9th, and that stupid ass apple pops out of that stupid ass hat, Lastings hopes some fans near the foul line will be ready for an enthusiastic and totally respectful high five in the bottom of the 9th. Lastings wishes you a very safe and very Merry Christmas! And a safe Jewish holiday!
Today's Blog of the Year Pick: Serious Eats.
I love food, but I could never quite put my finger on what was wrong with the food blogs I'd tried to read until Serious Eats came along. As it turns out, I like cooking and I like learning about restaurants, but what it turns out I really love is simple: Eating.
Ed Levine's assembled a team of extraordinarily talented food lovers (which, it should be noted, includes my wife), and they stay true to the site's mantra of being passionate, discerning and inclusive. I feel like an old-timer in the way I look at blogs, because I still think of them as being fairly static affairs consisting largely of text. But Serious Eats features a formidable video section with original programming from Mario Batali, a burgeoning recipe section and a guide to eating out that all complement the site's own editorial blog posts. Wrap it all up in an incredibly well-designed, beautiful aesthetic that combines elegant details with frequent fun illustrations, and it's an unquestionable winner.
Pick of the Posts:
- Talk: This Q&A section is the heart of the Eats, for me. I'm mostly a lurker here, but I never cease to be amazed how often I'm saying, "I wish I'd asked that!"
- Serious Eats Thanksgiving: Sure, the holiday's passed, but if you want a look at how the site does well-trod topics in a unique way, this is it.
- Extended Meatloaf Coverage: From recipes to National Meatloaf Appreciation Day to photos of dozens of loaves, I discovered this staple of mashed meat this year thanks to the site.
If you like this, try: Elise Bauer's Simply Recipes gets me every time -- not because of the recipes, though they're great. It's the photography, which is simply beautiful.
Introduction Do you run on packed snow and ice? Are you tired of slipping and falling? The Screw Shoe is one solution to the problem! By inserting some screws into the bottom of your shoes you will be able to run in the worst of conditions. The process is quick, easy and costs next to nothing:-)
A new project I’ve been working on with Darrell Silver, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel launches today: CommandShift3.
It’s like Hot or Not, but for websites.
Started on a lark during a NYC Jelly session with Adam Varga, Darrell Silver, Dan Lurie, Erin Sparling, and Lee Semel, we’re really proud to open it up to the world today.
Much thanks to everyone who’s given us advice and support, including the celeb designers who recorded short videos we’ve hidden in the site for you to find. (Khoi Vinh, Matt Linderman, Taylor McKnight, Derek Powazek, Brad Smith, Ryan Sims, Dan Cederholm, Chris Messina, Ben Brown)
I'm leaving the Ovi team and shifting to the new Social Media relations group in Markets, Communications. The official start date has not been set since I have a few things I need to wrap up here on Oviland, but, barring any wild lightning strikes out of the blue, it will happen in January or February.
Just to be clear, I am not leaving because of any disappointment with the way Ovi.com has been developing. Indeed, the Ovi team is amazing, and I have done and learned quite a bit with them and have no problem working with them. Also, the direction of Ovi, and Ovi.com in particular (which I strongly influenced), is on the right track.
But, Ovi.com is a demanding mistress and she's worn me down. I just need a little life-work balance and this next gig, hopefully, is of a different scale and scope that should give me some more control over what and where and how I do things.
This is a good time to shift, too. Ovi.com has hit its first iteration (we're in internal beta). We've been well received by analysts and press and are looking to go before the real critics - the users. Also, the Ovi team is going through some new arrangements and some fresh blood is joining.
As for this new gig, this is very much in line with things I did before starting Ovi. I will be leading external social media activities, engaging with social media leaders and commentators. I will also be building and driving (as Editor-in-Chief, as it were) Nokia's social media 'hub' (for want of a better term).
Social media outreach was what I did in my Lifeblog days (the first team to do such in Nokia) and this is a great evolution from those days, this time with more resources, more support from the company, and from a higher perch. And the field has evolved in those years and I think there is potential for some innovation in this space, something my mix of publishing, social media, and service design might help me bring forth.
I am sure we will have some great discussions around this.
In the most recent issue of the Architect's Newspaper, Editor-in-Chief William Menking has some very enthusiastic things to say about the Grand Army Plaza Coalition's project, Rethinking Grand Army Plaza (download the proposal here) which was recently awarded a 2007-2008 Design Trust fellowship. Menking writes:
This past month I served as a juror on the Design Trust's latest funding round. We were presented with many well-crafted and smart proposals, and settled on two projects to fund: Closing the Gap: Rethinking Grand Army Plaza and Park Design for the 21st Century. The Grand Army Plaza Coalition's proposal to reroute the roads around the difficult and inaccessible traffic island-cum-monument is such a brilliantly obvious solution that one wonders why it hasn't been tried before. The roadbed between the plaza and Prospect Park will be closed and used on the weekends for a farmer's market, allowing pedestrians to actually access this beautiful space without having to cross many lanes of traffic. (This will all be accomplished without denying drivers access from Flatbush and Vanderbilt avenues and Eastern Parkway to Prospect Park West.)
You can download a PDF of the current issue of the Architect's Newspaper here.
I don’t think it’s that clear-cut.
If you have a graphically complex layout that depends on pixel-perfect alignment of images between different blocks, for example, it’s incredibly important that it looks exactly the same in every browser because it looks like a bug if it doesn’t.
But if IE renders your column 15 pixels wider than Firefox and Safari doesn’t support the background color on your drop-down select boxes, will anyone notice except you? Does anything else break? If not, who cares?
The best web designs aren’t huge, pixel-perfect monstrosities based on some insane PSD designed by someone who doesn’t know what implementation will require. They’re simple, flowing, and resilient. They won’t break if the content-length changes and the right column is longer than the left. They won’t break when someone over age 40 views the site and magnifies the text to 150% because they can’t read your trendy 11px Verdana. And they certainly won’t break if IE slips a few pixels into the margin somewhere.
Instead of wasting hours upon hours to hammer out every little browser difference in an overly complex design, just design it to accommodate browser differences in the first place.
It looks like the street redesign around the Manhattan entrance of the Manhattan Bridge is nearing completion. Considering that Transportation Alternatives has been pushing for these fixes for years, that was pretty fast. DOT presented its plan to the local Community Board, to unanimous approval, in July; sketched out the lines on the street in August; and here we are.
With the Manhattan side of the bridge squared away, attention now turns to the utterly pathetic state of bike access on the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. Former DOT Commissioner Iris Weinshall unveiled plans for the creation of a Sands Street bike ramp on June 14, 2005, shortly after T.A. Deputy Director Noah Budnick's life-threatening bike crash down there. Two and a half years later the Sands Street project is nowhere. Apparently, the Department of Design and Construction has completely dropped the ball on this one.
Thanks to Streetsblog reader Dave "Paco" Abraham for sending in these photos. You can find more detailed DOT plans for the Manhattan Bridge and other "complete streets" projects around the city here.
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Multimedia, Hacks, How-tos, iTunes, Apple
The thing about DRM is that there are always exceptions to the rules-- while Apple has released lots of DRM-free music, lots of it is still bogged down by DRM, and if you're like me, you disagree that any music you purchase should be limited in the ways that you use it.
Fortunately, as long as you can hear the music you buy, there'll always be a simple way around the DRM, and 5thirtyone has put together this simple writeup explaining how to break iTunes DRM with a tool you've already got on your Mac: iMovie. Essentially, you load the DRM-ed file as a soundtrack in iMovie, export it as an .aiff file back into iTunes, and then convert it in iTunes back to AAC. Simple enough.
This makes you question why DRM is there in the first place. Sure, the record companies might be pushing it on Apple, but if it's this easy and simple to do, exactly what leg are they standing on to justify it in the first place?Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Interesting article on Giuliani's tenure as mayor.
He was, to the popular eye, Eliot Ness reincarnated, an unsparing prosecutor for a crime-shadowed age. And when the United States attorney in Manhattan resigned in January 1989, he earned a tabloid salute:
“Good News for Bad Guys,” The Daily News proclaimed. “Crimebuster Giuliani Steps Down.”
Rudolph W. Giuliani waved his prosecutor’s scythe in the 1980s, and Wall Street barons, political bosses and Mafia dons seemed to fall in serried rows. He inspired cinematic characters, took ovations in restaurants and battled the Reagan administration officials who had appointed him.
Michael Dowd, a streetwise lawyer whose trial testimony about bribe-taking exposed the ethical rot afflicting New York politics, found shelter beneath Mr. Giuliani’s cloak. “No one was going to back him off,” Mr. Dowd said. “He was charismatic, relentless and endlessly loyal.”
There was, however, another side to the young prosecutor, a moralistic and carnivorously ambitious man who desired public office. Mr. Giuliani, who was 38 when he became United States attorney in 1983, threatened his targets with long prison sentences, and he infuriated judges with leaks of grand jury testimony to the press.
His agents handcuffed Wall Street arbitrageurs before prosecutors investigated them. Apology was weakness; skeptics were “jerks.”
Like a medieval crusader, he rarely flinched at hard tactics in pursuit of exalted goals. Continue reading...
Look at his pained little face...
"Crack your nuts I will."For some reason they have this listed at over 300 bucks, so you better have some serious nuts to crack if you're going to shell out for this little fella.
Some new CNN polling shows that while Mike Huckabee is surging around the country with Republican voters, he still lags far behind the top three Democrats in national polling, more so than the other Republicans. The numbers also show that John McCain is the most electable Republican, and that John Edwards is the strongest Democrat:
Clinton (D) 51%, Giuliani (R) 45%
Clinton (D) 54%, Romney (R) 43%
McCain (R) 50%, Clinton (D) 48%
Clinton (D) 54%, Huckabee (R) 44%
Obama (D) 52%, Giuliani (R) 45%
Obama (D) 54%, Romney (R) 41%
McCain (R) 48%, Obama (D) 48%
Obama (D) 55%, Huckabee (R) 40%
Edwards (D) 53%, Giuliani (R) 44%
Edwards (D) 59%, Romney (R) 37%
Edwards (D) 52%, McCain (R) 44%
Edwards (D) 60%, Huckabee (R) 35%
Here is a call for entries from the Center for the Study of Political Graphics, located in Los Angeles, California. "Reclaiming the F Word" Submissions Deadline: December 15, 2007 This show will open March 2008 at the Art Galleries, California State University, Northridge. The Center for the Study of Political Graphics (CSPG) is asking artists, organizations, and activists for poster submissions for our upcoming exhibition entitled Reclaiming the “F” Word--Posters on International Feminism. This exhibition will feature posters about the ongoing struggle for women’s rights showing us that feminism must not be treated like a dirty word. http://www.politicalgraphics.org/pdf/Call%20for%20F%20Posters.pdf
A Columbia grad student, Arun Wiita, and the New York Civil Liberties Union brought a lawsuit against the NYPD last Thursday. Over the summer, Wiita was photographing a subway station entrance and its surroundings at 207th Street and 10th Avenue as part of an ambitious 10-day photography project. He was detained by police, handcuffed and held for 30 minutes; now Wiita is "seeking compensatory damages and reimbursement of legal fees." He believes that his South Asian or Middle Eastern appearance made him a target.
According to Metro, "police sources said officers question people photographing the city’s rail infrastructure on rare occasions, citing instances in which law enforcement officials have identified men taking photographs of city bridges and subways as Iranian intelligence agents and suspected Pakistani terrorists who were stopped by police while taking pictures of the Brooklyn and Williamsburg bridges." We asked Wiita a few questions about the incident as well as his photography project (which sounds pretty amazing; he sent us the above shot which was taken just before he was handled by the long arm of the law).
Can you describe the photography project you were working on?
The project was designed as a way to document how the subway is an integral part of the fabric of life in the city. I love how it is the grand unifier across race, class, and geography in the city. I wanted to photograph both the inside of every subway station (predominantly decorative aspects, such as artwork and signage) as well as the immediate surroundings of each station in order to document the people, architecture, and general feel of the area. After the arrest, I greatly cut down on taking any photos inside of subway stations out of fear of further hassling by the cops. What did the police say when they approached you?
At first an uniformed officer approached me on the SW corner of 207th St. and 10th Ave. in Manhattan; he basically said, "Hey, what are you doing?". I explained I was a grad student at Columbia and my motivation for the photo project. He subsequently asked to see the photos and to see my ID, which I cooperated with. I gave him my NJ driver's license and my Columbia ID. He said that since I didn't have a NY State ID he couldn't run my information over the radio, and he would have to take me into the station at 145th St to check it out "in front of his peers". He then asked me to turn around and put my hands behind my back and then he handcuffed me.What outcome would you like to see from the Civil Liberties lawsuit?
From this incident it was clear to me that the NYPD has absolutely no idea how to handle photographers on the streets of New York. My main motivation for the lawsuit is for the police to change their policies and actually implement some type of training so that cops know what to do when they have suspicions about someone taking photos. This certainly includes not being able to just harass and handcuff anyone holding a camera.Wiita also pointed out to us that taking these photos was legal, point-and-shoot photos
are explicitly permitted in the MTA rules section 1050.9(c). In the end, he did end up documenting all 468 stations, but felt uncomfortable taking photos at 168 of them because he thought it looked "suspicious". In the future he'll be creating an interactive website which will include his photos and notes.
A friend who's baby is still a few months away from being born asked me for some suggestions for children's books because she wants to start building a library. Assuming she has the basic classics covered, here's a list of slightly less well known books that my sons and I love. Many of these books are out of print but can easily be found on Amazon, ebay, or on bookfinder.com. Here are a few to get you started...
The Birthday Party - Maurice Sendak
Little Blue and Little Yellow - Lionni
May I Bring A Friend - de Regniers
Where Everyday Things Come From - Aldren Watson
Tall Book of Nursery Tales - Feodor Rojankovsky
The Tall Book of Make Believe - Garth Williams
A Tail is a Tail - Katherine Mace
Rotten Island - William Steig
Doctor Desoto - William Steig
Today's Basic Science - Navarra and Zafforoni
Katy and the Big Snow - Virginia Lee Burton
Henri's Walk to Paris - Saul Bass
The Wonderful House - Margert Wise Brown
The Whispering Rabbit - Garth Williams Edition 1965
Choo Choo - Virginia Lee Burton
The Dead Bird - Margaret Wise Brown
The Line Up Book - Marisabina Russo
What Makes A Shadow?- Clyde Robert Bulla
Tiny Nonsense Stories
Goodnight Gorilla - Peggy RathmanMy general advice on buying kids books:
1. Always buy hardcover. A used hardcover is usually better than a new softcover. If your kids loves a book, he will read it hundreds of times. Softcover books just don't hold up.
2. As a general rule avoid celebrity authors.
3. Avoid modern "message" books.
4. Love the politically incorrect. The Tiny Nonsense Stories feature gun wielding kittens, cigarette smoking ducks, and pig families that sneak around scaring the daylights out of each other. Kids of course love these stories.
5. Never worry about finding a first edition if you plan on actually reading your children's books. Your kids will want to bring them to the dinner table, they will bend them, tear, them and so on. This is how children's books like to be read. Just find the cleanest cheapest copy you can find.
If you are looking for more book buying ideas, check out this japanese site which always has a well curated selection of vintage visually spectacular kid's books... (the little links that read A-C, D-F, and so on show thumbnails of the covers)
Filed under: lists
Tags: advice, children's books, suggestions
We’ve updated our blog to play nice with all the iPhone users out there. Now, you can visit http://adaptivepath.com/blog via your iPhone and view the content in a much more iPhone-like manner. While I laud Apple for making MobileSafari amazingly capable of displaying sites as they were intended, this change simply makes it easier to read our posts while you’re out and about.
This WordPress plug-in comes to us via ContentRobot. Here’s the rationale behind its development:
The iWPhone WordPress Plugin and Theme automatically reformats your blog’s content for optimized viewing on Apple’s iPhone and iPod touch. It detects the iPhone/iPod touch’s User Agent and serves up the content with the special theme only to iPhone and iPod touch visitors, all other browsers will view your WordPress blog with your current theme.
"On the occasion of the opening of the new, big New York Times building on 40th St and 8th Ave, I posted a journal/blog entry recently that raised some questions about print media. The post got passed around, and after a few days I received an invitation Ariel Kaminer at the Times to visit their new home. With a little trepidation and a lot of excitement, I went yesterday afternoon and got a little tour."
I’m currently paying Cablevision almost $80/month for, essentially, this:
- History Channel
- Food Network
- Discovery Channel
- That Bravo cooking reality show (not the one with the mean guy and a lot of fire)
- A handful of broadcast-network shows when they’re in season (freely available in HD over the air with bunny ears and an ATSC tuner)
This is stupid. I’m on the verge of canceling my cable service because it’s stupid to pay that much money for the little use I get out of it. Plus, the Cablevision DVR is buggy and awful, and I hate even being inconvenienced by fast-forwarding through commercials (yet alone watching them if I’m unfortunate enough to be watching a live show).
I’m happy to pay to receive your content - but not $80/month for the other 200 channels I never watch. I’m even willing to pay your slightly high $2/show iTunes pricing for the convenience of portable, commercial-free shows (although they’re not cross-platform, and the resolution could be better).
But the selection of cable-network shows available on iTunes is terrible. It costs nearly nothing to distribute an already-produced show on iTunes. You’d even make money from it. Probably more than if I watch it on cable.
Get some deals together with Apple and get your shows up there!
Moving back to Austin has me in the midst of embracing my Texas roots, so this weekend was the perfect time for me to be introduced to the Hacienda Brothers. Although they characterize their music as "western soul" and the band hails from Arizona (says their bio: "Who wouldve thought that Country Road and Soul Boulevard would intersect out in the Arizona desert?") there's a manner of fingerpickin', pedal steel and country crooning that reminds me much of the Texas roots music I grew up with.
Watching the Hacienda Brothers on Saturday night at the Continental Club really made me feel at home, and happy to the point that I found myself offering up two-step lessons to my friends who were listening with me. Alas, no one took me up on the offer. It's really easy though: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow, slow, quick-quick...
Here's a taste of the Hacienda Brothers - it's a live performance from SXSW this year.
I'm so in love with the sound of pedal steel, and the more I learn about how it's played the more respect I have for the people who do it. It seems that there aren't that many people in the world who play pedal steel, and have you ever seen a pedal steel player who sucked? Not likely! I figure it's probably so difficult to learn how to play the instrument (my friend likens it to "doing calculus while driving on ice") that the marginally talented players just give up, and (thankfully) all that's left are the good ones. I'm hoping to not be proven wrong on this theory.
Learn more about the Hacienda Brothers on Myspace or visit their website.
Listen to "What's Wrong With Right" and "Midnight Dream"
The New York Times seems to have been publishing loads of mind and brain articles recently and their end of 2007 round-up of 'hot ideas' contains no less than 11 articles on developments in psychology and neuroscience - including everything from Alzheimer's to Zygotes (via Lap Dancing).
I was alerted to the series by Matthew Hudson, who emailed to say he'd written the article on 'neurorealism' - the tendency for people to believe even quite outlandish claims if they think they're backed up by neuroscience.
In a blog post about his piece, he notes some of the sources and origins of his article, including some peer reviewed research and our own Tom Stafford, who coined the term 'neuroessentialism' (independently, as did two others!) to describe the same phenomenon.
The other psychology and neuroscience articles cover a whole range of topics, and are all two-minute write-ups of ingenious studies or theories (sort of like a behavioural science tapas selection):
* Alzheimer’s Telephone Screening
* Faces Decide Elections
* Lap-Dance Science
* The God Effect
* Hope Can Be Worse Than Hopelessness
* Mindful Exercise
* Quitting Can Be Good for You
* Starch Made Us Human
* Zygotic Social Networking
Infinite Jest once again proved finite, although it's taken me since August to get through it. This book was such a revelation the first time through that I was afraid of a reread letdown but I enjoyed it even more this time around...and got much more out of the experience too.
Right as I was finishing the book, I read a transcription of an interview with Wallace in which interviewer Michael Silverblatt asked him about the fractal-like structure of the novel:
MICHAEL SILVERBLATT: I don't know how, exactly, to talk about this book, so I'm going to be reliant upon you to kind of guide me. But something came into my head that may be entirely imaginary, which seemed to be that the book was written in fractals.
DAVID FOSTER WALLACE: Expand on that.
MS: It occurred to me that the way in which the material is presented allows for a subject to be announced in a small form, then there seems to be a fan of subject matter, other subjects, and then it comes back in a second form containing the other subjects in small, and then comes back again as if what were being described were -- and I don't know this kind of science, but it just -- I said to myself this must be fractals.
DFW: It's -- I've heard you were an acute reader. That's one of the things, structurally, that's going on. It's actually structured like something called a Sierpinski Gasket, which is a very primitive kind of pyramidical fractal, although what was structured as a Sierpinski Gasket was the first- was the draft that I delivered to Michael in '94, and it went through some I think 'mercy cuts', so it's probably kind of a lopsided Sierpinski Gasket now. But it's interesting, that's one of the structural ways that it's supposed to kind of come together.
MS: "Michael" is Michael Pietsche, the editor at Little, Brown. What is a Sierpinski Gasket?
DFW: It would be almost im- ... I would almost have to show you. It's kind of a design that a man named Sierpinski I believe developed -- it was quite a bit before the introduction of fractals and before any of the kind of technologies that fractals are a really useful metaphor for. But it looks basically like a pyramid on acid --
To answer Silverblatt's question, a Sierpinski Gasket is constructed by taking a triangle, removing a triangle-shaped piece out of the middle, then doing the same for the remaining pieces, and so on and so forth, like so:
The result is an object of infinite boundary and zero area -- almost literally everything and nothing at the same time. A Sierpinski Gasket is also self-similar...any smaller triangular portion is an exact replica of the whole gasket. You can see why Wallace would have wanted to structure his novel in this fashion.
(More about this book...)
Our good friends over at Magnatune are offering a sweet holiday deal–free music!
Create an elegantly merry mood with the Magnatune Christmas Compilation, featuring over 60 minutes of the most timeless and classic carols of the season, by ten of Magnatune’s best-selling artists.
When you download this album, you’ll be able to choose from one of five different audio formats including MP3s and CD quality WAV files. Our music downloads are 100 percent safe and free of DRM (Digital Rights Management) or any other intrusive contents.
Magnatune is a forward-thinking record label and online music store that offers music for sale in every genre. Magnatune is leading the fair trade music movement, so we split profits equally with artists and artists retain the copyright to their own work.
Get the free holiday music here.
IAC's Manhattan headquarters has an absolutely massive video wall in the lobby. ITP professor Daniel Shiffman took his class over to play around with it, projecting hundreds of frames of Run Lola Run on the wall at the same time in sequence. You can see the scene cuts racing along the wall, demonstrating the franticness of the movie.
(link)
This is pretty interesting: Despite the fact that the Obama campaign has been hitting Hillary pretty hard of late for her "attacks" on him, a new New York Times poll finds that more people think Hillary is running the most positive campaign of any of the Dem candidates:
About seven in 10 Democratic primary voters said she has spent more time explaining, four times the number who said she has spent more time attacking.Six in 10 Democrats said Barack Obama has been explaining, compared with 25 percent who said he has been attacking. Fewer, 45 percent, said John Edwards has spent more time explaining his positions, while 29 percent said he has spent more time being negative.
We'll bring you the full poll when it's available.
Matt Haughey demonstrates his unstoppable cupcake eating technique: Split the cupcake in half and sandwich the frosting to avoid a mess!
One of the best brain t-shirts to come along in a very long time has just arrived, and, unfortunately, it sold out within days.
At least, if you're after a male sizes that is. Luckily, there are still plenty in female sizes left.
It's a beautiful multi-coloured brain where the brain stem changes in a series of USB plugs so you can connect your cortex to the nearest computer.
It's a Threadless t-shirt, so despite the fact they're out of stock, you can click to register your interest in getting them to print some more, and they'll let you know when they're ready.
In the mean time, you may have to find your nearest female neuroscience enthusiast to admire the t-shirt in all its glory.
Link to Threadless 'Connect It' t-shirt.
Unbelievably cool: the LEGO Digital Designer is a free application (Windows or Mac) that let’s you play with LEGOs on your computer. I’ve just played with it a little, but it’s pretty awesome. You can rotate your models in 3D space, and the application features 762 unique bricks to build with.
Who needs friends… when you have pens.
London retailers enjoy a £100 million spending spree as Oxford, Bond and Regents Streets were pedestrianized for a dayAs New York City government issues its usual series of futile Holiday Season "Gridlock Alerts" (Warning to people stuck in traffic: You are stuck in traffic) while Manhattan shoppers have the life squeezed out of them on crowded sidewalks amidst honking, spewing, pissed off motorists, take a look at how London is handling the holiday crush.
Mayor Ken Livingstone declared Saturday, December 2 "Very Important Pedestrian Day," completely closing three of the city's most famous shopping strips, Oxford, Bond and Regent's Streets to automobile traffic from 10:30am to 8pm. Carol singers, artists, jugglers and other performers provided entertainment, and the day finished off with a massive fireworks display. As per the BBC:
"What it will create for the shoppers is a fantastic freedom to move," said Jace Tyrell, from the New West End Company -- which has organised the event. "Shoppers will be able to take over the streets and have a more festive fun atmosphere to enjoy Christmas shopping in the West End."
News reports say that up to a million people descended on the car-free streets to take part in what amounted to a £100 spending orgy (Said one retailer: "The increase in wealthy Russian, Chinese and Indian shoppers around Bond Street has been phenomenal").
As New York City's mayor struggles to explain to New Yorkers how less congested streets will make their lives better, Mayor Livingstone clearly framed the car-free event as a piece of his Administration's broader environmental, quality of life and economic development agenda. The Evening Standard reported:
Mayor Ken Livingstone, who opened the event, said: "It has become a major event in London's calendar in the run-up to Christmas [and] shows us all what the West End will be like in 2013 with traffic removed and the streets turned over to the pedestrian." The success of the event has strengthened the view of many analysts that the West End is heading for a record Christmas even if high streets elsewhere in Britain are experiencing lacklustre sales.
Mr Tyrrell said: "There were no problems with the roads closures, everything went really smoothly."
Columbia University professor and Streetsblog reader Steve Hammer happened to be in London during the event. Here is his report:
(more...)
Look at the CONTROLLER!
And only $25, says Geekologie, although Amazon has them on at a weeny stocking-filleresque $11.99
The current issue up for discusion in Business Week's Debate Room is GMO Crops: A Growing Concern (get it?). The debate about genetically modified food pits Gillian Madill and Ian Illuminato, of Friends of the Earth, against Jim Greenwood, of the Biotechnology Industry Organization. For me, though, the real debate here isn't about the pros and cons of genetically engineered food (at least not until long term studies on its effects have been completed), but about whether or not companies who use GM ingredients should be required to say so on their labels.
In any case, the thrust of the "pro" side (i.e., GMOs are a growing concern) centers around food safety, and the possibility for cross-contamination of GMOs into non-GM crops. Madill and Illuminato say:
One persistent danger lies in the prospect of crops unapproved for human consumption becoming mixed with the food supply. In 2000, Friends of the Earth and other groups discovered an unapproved strain of genetically modified corn on grocery store shelves. StarLink corn, which had been deemed safe only for animal consumption because of human allergen concerns, was showing up in Kraft (KFT) taco shells. The discovery led to recalls, mill closures, halts in exports, and buybacks of contaminated corn.On the con side, Greenwood argues that GMOs represent the best chance at feeding the world's ever increasing population:
While there is no easy and singular solution to starvation, we know that biotechnology can expand and enhance the global food supply. Over the past decade agricultural biotechnology has improved plant productivity and crop quality, increased farmer income, supported stewardship of the land, and contributed to a safe food supply. Biotech crops constitute part of the diet of billions of people around the world without one single documented health problem.Each is certainly a reasonable argument, and lacking any indication of what the long term effects of GMOS might or might not be, it's really hard for me to take a side here. But don't consumers have a right to know whether the product they are buying contains GMOs, thereby leaving the decision up to them as to whether they want to eat the stuff? As of now the U.S. has no law mandating GMO labeling, a fact that leads to even more skepticism and fear in consumers. What are these companies trying to hide?
About the author: Jamie Forrest publishes Curdnerds.com from his apartment in Brooklyn, New York, where he lives with his wife, his daughter, and his cheese.
Despite fierce and prevalent Amtrak hating, and although I have yet to hear any presidential candidate discuss it, nationally syndicated columnist Neal Peirce suggests that "the stars are finally coming into alignment" for improvements of America's passenger rail system. He writes:
Photo: stillsearching/FlickrAmerica's train advocates are mildly optimistic. And for some good reasons. Amtrak is reporting impressive ridership gains. Oil is pushing $100 a barrel, throwing a long shadow over affordability of travel on already congested highways. Airport delays hit an all-time high last summer. Global climate concerns are mounting.
Rail freight demands, meanwhile, are rising fast, suggesting joint improvements with passenger rail. Worries are rising about mobility gaps hindering the ability of America's "megaregions" -- the Northeast, Great Lakes, California and others - to match the performance of competitive regions worldwide.
Also positive for Amtrak: signs of a much friendlier reception in Congress. Add to that an array of states anxious to expand rail service, especially if they can get a federal "match" comparable to the 80 percent-20 percent federal-to-state match for highways.
For years, polls have shown Americans strongly in favor of Amtrak subsidies that would build a viable national rail system. But only slowly have legislators -- federal and state -- shown an openness to system expansion. And the Bush administration has been hostile; it's even tried to zero-fund Amtrak.
So here's the irony: Amtrak is able to report it carried 25.8 million passengers in the last fiscal year -- up 1.5 million from the year before. Ticket revenue rose 11 percent. Trains on the Northeast Corridor and other popular corridors are increasingly sold out.
And no one knows, notes Rick Harnish of the Midwest High Speed Rail Association, how expansive demand for Amtrak service would be if many more routes were opened, offering at least three or four trains daily for reasonable frequency. His bet is that millions of Americans would opt for the more convenient system, especially as oil soars in cost: "For 50 years we assumed we could do everything by car. It's now painfully clear that's not true."
You heard me right. Nintendo has just released Pokémon Snap on the Wii’s Virtual Console.
As one of the most unique games in a renowned series, Pokémon Snap was the first truly 3-D Pokémon game and introduced the phenomenon to the Nintendo 64. Travel to Pokémon Island and meet Professor Oak to begin a safari, taking the best possible photographs of 63 different Pokémon as they exist in the wild, undisturbed by humans. This is not as easy as it sounds—the island has many types of climates and environments to explore, along with secret activities and hidden passages to discover. Plus, some of the Pokémon can be a little shy and won’t pose for the camera unless you tease them with special items. After you’re done, submit one picture of each Pokémon to Professor Oak, and he’ll judge it based on size, pose, technique and number of Pokémon captured.
For a mere 1,000 points you can relive the days of Pokémon Snap on your Wii. You can either spend the $20 on a classic controler or use an old Game Cube controler.
I've yet to meet a designer that didn't have a thing for cartography. In any medium (to this day, maps are printed, engraved, drawn and painted) cartographers have to be excellent and inventive typographers, and mapmaking has given typography some of its most interesting styles. Some of the more exotic letters we've drawn certainly owe something to mapmaking, in this case the engraved maps of the very fertile Age of Enlightenment.
Equally interesting are the artists and designers who interpret maps. I hope to someday own one of Paula Scher's fantastic paintings (which incidentally are on display at New York's Maya Stendhal Gallery through January 26), but in the meantime I might outfit myself with one of the five City Neighborhood Posters from Ork Design. Chicago, San Francisco and Boston are represented, as well as Manhattan and Brooklyn; gift certificates are available for the itinerant among us. Hand screen printed, and signed and numbered, $22 each. —JH
City Neighborhood Posters from Ork Posters, $22.00.
Both New York Magazine and the New York Times Book Review just revealed their respective best books of 2007 lists. It's no big whoop that there's some overlap going on (both publications included The Rest Is Noise, The Savage Detectives and Then We Came in the End), but it was a little jolting when we were greeted this morning with almost identical photos when we woke up and wanted to get our year-end book lists on! Pictured above (from top to bottom), the New York Times list, the Neww York Magazine list 
Pleasure Web: Music Man Pts. 1 and 2
From 7" (Eastbound, 1973). Also on Super Breaks 3
Jurassic 5: Jayou
From Jurassic 5 EP (Interscope, 1997)
Jurassic 5: Concrete and Clay
From Quality Control (Interscope, 2000)
Similar to the last "Which flip is better?" post, this one features a single producer who has used the same sample source twice for two different songs.
The source here is one of the more obscure 45s on Eastbound: "Music Man Pt. 1 and 2" by Pleasure Web. Personally, I couldn't find much on the artist at all; if anyone knows some details, illuminate the rest of us.
Cut first used "Part 2" of the song for "Jayou," arguably the most distinctive cut off the first Jurassic 5 EP from '97. Then, he revisited the same 7" and flipped "Part 1" for "Concrete and Clay" which first appeared on the "Improvise" EP of 1999 (and was later released on the full-length Quality Control album). Personally, I was always more partial to "Concrete and Clay" myself though "Jayou" had more buzz going. It's hard to choose b/t the different parts of "Music Man" though given that they're practically two different songs. My inclination is to go with Part 1 simply b/c I like it with lyrics better but it's hard to front on the flute flavor of its sibling.
The NY Times Magazine is out with its annual Year in Ideas issue. 2007 was the year of green -- green energy, green manufacturing, and even a green Nobel Prize for Al Gore -- and environmentalism featured heavily on the Times' list. But I found some of the other items on the list more interesting.
Ambiguity Promotes Liking. Sometimes the more you learn about a person or a situation, the more likely you are to be disappointed:
Why? For starters, initial information is open to interpretation. "And people are so motivated to find somebody they like that they read things into the profiles," Norton says. If a man writes that he likes the outdoors, his would-be mate imagines her perfect skiing companion, but when she learns more, she discovers "the outdoors" refers to nude beaches. And "once you see one dissimilarity, everything you learn afterward gets colored by that," Norton says.
I'm an optimistic pessimist by nature; I believe everything in my life will eventually average out for the better but I assume the worst of individual situations for the reasons proposed in the article above. That way, when I assume something isn't going to work out, I'm rarely disappointed.
The Best Way to Deflect an Asteroid involves a technique called "mirror bees".
The best method, called "mirror bees," entails sending a group of small satellites equipped with mirrors 30 to 100 feet wide into space to "swarm" around an asteroid and trail it, Vasile explains. The mirrors would be tilted to reflect sunlight onto the asteroid, vaporizing one spot and releasing a stream of gases that would slowly move it off course. Vasile says this method is especially appealing because it could be scaled easily: 25 to 5,000 satellites could be used, depending on the size of the rock.
What an elegant and easily implemented solution. But Armageddon and Deep Impact would have been a whole lot less entertaining using Dr. Vasile's approach.
The Cat-Lady Conundrum. More than 60 million Americans are infected with Toxoplasma gondii, a parasite that most people get from their cats. And it's not exactly harmless:
Jaroslav Flegr, an evolutionary biologist at Charles University in the Czech Republic, is looking into it. He has spent years studying Toxo's impact on human behavior. (He found, for example, that people infected with Toxo have slower reflexes and are 2.5 times as likely to get into car accidents.)
This may explain why I can't seem to get past "Easy" on Guitar Hero.
The Honeycomb Vase is actually made by bees. One unintended consequence of having a vase made out of beeswax is that flowers last longer in it:
Libertiny is convinced that flowers last longer in them, because beeswax contains propolis, an antibacterial agent that protects against biological decay. "We found out by accident," he explains. "We had a bouquet, which was too big for the beeswax vase, so we put half of the flowers in a glass vase. We noticed the difference after a week or so.
Prison Poker. This is a flat out brilliantly simple idea:
[Officer Tommy Ray] made his own deck of cards, each bearing information about a different local criminal case that had gone cold. He distributed the decks in the Polk County jail. His hunch was that prisoners would gossip about the cases during card games, and somehow clues or breaks would emerge and make their way to the authorities. The plan worked. Two months in, as a result of a tip from a card-playing informant, two men were charged with a 2004 murder in a case that had gone cold.
The Gomboc is the world's first Self-Righting Object.
It leans off to one side, rocks to and fro as if gathering strength and then, presto, tips itself back into a "standing" position as if by magic. It doesn't have a hidden counterweight inside that helps it perform this trick, like an inflatable punching-bag doll that uses ballast to bob upright after you whack it. No, the Gomboc is something new: the world's first self-righting object.
More information is available on the Gomboc web site. You can order a Gomboc for €80 + S&H.
I needed this on a rotten Monday morning.
Just watch. Trust me on this one.
(thanks, Baseball Musings)
My contribution to the (endless) Race-IQ debate is out in this week's New Yorker. You can read it here. In the meantime, the psychologist Richard Nisbett has also published a rejoinder to the James Watson-Will Saletan foolishness in Sunday's New York Times. It is--characteristically--very good, and includes this:
The hereditarians begin with the assertion that 60 percent to 80 percent of variation in I.Q. is genetically determined. However, most estimates of heritability have been based almost exclusively on studies of middle-class groups. For the poor, a group that includes a substantial proportion of minorities, heritability of I.Q. is very low, in the range of 10 percent to 20 percent, according to recent research by Eric Turkheimer at the University of Virginia. This means that for the poor, improvements in environment have great potential to bring about increases in I.Q.
I confess that I haven't read Turkheimer's research. But take a look for yourself at the paper Nisbett is refering to here.
It's very persuasive. And it would be interesting to see what, if anything, die-hard hereditarians like Charles Murray have to say in response.
Alex Goldberg, 14-yo urban hustler, has parleyed his chutzpah into free clothes, celebrity friends, and courtside Knicks seats.
(link)Next up: Jamie Foxx. The actor was near the bar, giving a woman a massage, and saw the crowd now gathered around Alex. Foxx offered to buy him a drink. What do you want, little boy? "A pina colada," Alex said. The crowd laughed, and he got one, virgin.
Alex's adventure ended hours later, at Nobu, where the pool crowd had migrated to feast on junket sushi. He had been chatting up Venus and Serena Williams at a nearby table, and mugging for cameras with a cigar hanging from his lips while eating a bowl of ice cream. Then the faces at his table went blank. Alex looked up and saw what they saw. His mother.
In less than a decade since the Kyoto Protocol was adopted, renewable energy has evolved rapidly from an 'alternative' source of energy to a mainstream energy option, according to the REN21 Renewables Global Status Report 2007.Compared to a total global power capacity of 4,300 GW, the report finds renewable energy (without large hydro) now provides about 240 Gigawatts (GW) of clean power, avoiding some 5 gigatonnes per year (Gt/year) of carbon emissions.
Originally from ENN: Energy, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Dec 10, 2007 at 08:31 AM
I love this: Twitter / WiiMe: "I check Amazon every second so you don't have to. When they are in stock, I report it here."
Our friend Rachel Budde (formerly one of the most unique street artists in NYC who shall remain unnamed) has a show of new work opening up in Brooklyn on December 16th! If you are in the area, definitely check it out! Sunday, Dec 16th 7pm Tillies of Brooklyn 248 DeKalb Avenue Brooklyn, NY 11205-4101
Services in Mac OS X are often an overlooked but useful feature in Mac OS X. They provide small features that are offered up by an application or a bundle to be invoked by other applications. For example, a service could insert the current date at the insertion point, or it could take the selected paragraph and replace any standard quotation marks with smart quotes.
One of the reasons they're often overlooked is because a lot of the time when you go into the Services submenu of the current application's menu, everything is disabled. It's not obvious how one would use a service. The trick lies in selecting something before you go into the Services menu, because services are often (but not always) contextual — a service either depends on input or produces output, or both.
Services are supported by default by any Cocoa application, and Carbon applications can be set up to use services as well, so you should be able to use them from the vast majority of applications these days. It's worth a look to just fiddle around with them to see what you can do. And since many, many applications provide services, you'd be well-advised to use Service Scrubber to trim your Services menu down to just the ones you want.
Now what if you want to make a service? The easiest way is through ThisService. If you know how to create scripts in Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, bash, sh, csh, zsh, all you need to do is create a service that reads from STDIN, outputs to STDOUT, or both. You can even just create a regular UNIX executable that reads from STDIN and/or outputs to STDOUT. AppleScript works a little differently, but you can also use ThisService with AppleScripts. Once you've created your script or executable, you just feed it to ThisService, change a few options, and ThisService creates a service for you.
But that's no fun. Here's a walkthrough of creating a service using Xcode 3; I'm going to use Objective-C and Cocoa, but you could easily adapt this method to use Carbon or just plain C. We're going to create a service that transforms XML markup to indented, easily readable markup, which is something that's really useful for me when developing TuneTagger, since MusicBrainz lookups return ugly un-indented XML. This is a "filter": it both requires input and produces output.
1. Open up Xcode and create a new project. Use the "Foundation Tool" template under the "Command Line Utility" section. I'm naming my project "XMLPrettyPrintService". This will create a file named "XMLPrettyPrintService.m" which is the start of our app.
2. Now, you'll want to create the Objective-C class which actually does the gritty work, so choose [File --> New File…], and then select the "Objective-C class" template under the Cocoa section. Name the class whatever you want — for the purposes of this tutorial, I'll use "EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m". Make sure to add it to the right project and target, and create EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h as well.
3. Here we'll create the service method that gets called in response to an invocation of your service. Paste the following code into EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m, between "@implementation EPXMLPrettyPrinter" and "@end":- (void)prettyUpXML:(NSPasteboard *)pboard userData:(NSString *)userData error:(NSString **)error { NSString *pboardString; NSString *newString; NSArray *types; types = [pboard types]; if (![types containsObject:NSStringPboardType]) { *error = NSLocalizedString(@"Error: couldn't encrypt text.", @"pboard couldn't give string."); return; } pboardString = [pboard stringForType:NSStringPboardType]; if (!pboardString) { *error = NSLocalizedString(@"Error: couldn't encrypt text.", @"pboard couldn't give string."); return; } // do something with pboardString and have // newString be the result types = [NSArray arrayWithObject:NSStringPboardType]; [pboard declareTypes:types owner:nil]; [pboard setString:newString forType:NSStringPboardType]; return; }
This code is filched directly from Apple's System Services documentation for Cocoa.
Note the name of this method — prettyUpXML:userData:error: . That first part, "prettyUpXML", can be changed to anything you want, and this part'll be important later. The rest of the method name needs to be the same as above, however.
Remember, we're implementing a filter here. If you want to only produce output with your service, discard everything before the "do something with pboardString" comment: you won't need to access the pasteboard, you'll just want to place something on it. If, instead, you only want to use the input but not produce any output, discard everything after the "do something with pboardString" comment (except, of course, the "return" line).
4. The next step is to implement the meat of your service method. In this example, we want to take pboardString, the ugly XML markup, and transform it to nicely indented, readable markup and place that markup into newString. ssp noticed a great feature in Mac OS X Tiger and later: a native Cocoa call using an NSXMLDocument object that creates pretty XML markup. It takes very few lines to accomplish what we want.
So, first, replace the "do something with pboardString" comment in EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m with the following code:NSError *convertError = nil; newString = [self convertToPrettiedPrint:pboardString withError:&convertError]; if (! newString) { *error = [convertError localizedDescription]; return; }
Then add this code after the prettyUpXML:userData:error: but before "@end":- (NSString *)convertToPrettiedPrint:(NSString *)uglyString withError:(NSError **)error; { NSError *XMLReadError; NSXMLDocument *theXMLDocument = [[NSXMLDocument alloc] initWithXMLString:uglyString options:NSXMLDocumentTidyXML error:&XMLReadError]; if (XMLReadError) { *error = XMLReadError; return nil; } NSString *prettyXMLString = [theXMLDocument XMLStringWithOptions:NSXMLNodePrettyPrint]; [theXMLDocument release]; return prettyXMLString; }
This code is pretty straightforward: it assumes the input string is XML, reads it into an NSXMLDocument object, and then uses that object to create a string with the pretty markup, and returns that string.
Note how if our code encounters an error — the pasteboard does not contain a string, or it can't convert the input to a string, or (from our custom code) there was an error reading the input as XML — our code simply returns without placing anything back on the pasteboard., the application that invoked the service will just present an error saying that the input was not valid:
5. Of course, we need to change EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h to match the changes we just made to EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m, now. Paste in the following code between the closing curly brace and "@end" in EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h:- (void)prettyUpXML:(NSPasteboard *)pboard userData:(NSString *)userData error:(NSString **)error; - (NSString *)convertToPrettiedPrint:(NSString *)uglyString withError:(NSError **)error;
6. Go back to the file that contains the main() function where the app starts. It's going to be named your-project-name.m. Note how the project template already includes most of the framework of this file for you. (I'm amused that Leopard includes a new method called "drain" for NSAutoreleasePools. It's such an appropriate name.) What we need to do here is register your app as a service provider, and then you'll tell it to wait for input from the invoking application.
Services aren't running all the time. They're just apps or tools that quit when they're not being used. So when a different app invokes a service, it actually launches the executable for the service, performs the actions, and then quits the service. The way that Mac OS X knows that your app provides a service is through its Info.plist file, which we'll need to modify later.
Replace the comment and the hello world log line with the following code:EPXMLPrettyPrinter *prettyPrinterInstance = [[EPPrettyPrinter alloc] init]; NSRegisterServicesProvider(prettyPrinterInstance, @"XMLPrettyPrint"); [[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] acceptInputForMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate:[NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:30.0]]; [prettyPrinterInstance release];
The first line here creates the object that actually performs the actions on the input or produces output. That's from our EPXMLPrettyPrinter files that we just finished modifying. The second line registers our app as a service provider — the first argument is the object that we created in the first line, and the second is the name of the "port" for your service. You can choose whatever string you want for the port name, but it'll also be important later.
The third line tells your tool to run and wait for input. It also defines a timeout interval — if after 30 seconds, no input is provided to your tool, it'll quit. 30 seconds is the default timeout interval for services anyway, so it's a good number.
Lastly, the fourth line does memory cleanup.
7. Add the following line above the "#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>" line:#import "EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h"
This notifies the main function that EPXMLPrettyPrinter actually an object and to what methods it responds. Since it's a custom object we created, it doesn't automatically know this.
8. We're done modifying our source code files. But if you build your project right now, it gives you errors about the symbols _NSRegisterServicesProvider and _NSStringPboardType which couldn't be found. Oooops. We forgot to add in the Cocoa framework, which we need for the NSPasteboard object.
Select the "External Frameworks and Libraries" folder, and then select [Project --> Add to Project…]. Navigate to /System/Library/Frameworks/ in the open dialog, select "Cocoa.framework" and click the "Add" button. The defaults for the next sheet are good, so just click the "Add" button again.
9. Now your project will build successfully. But it's just a plain old executable, because that's what the "Foundation Tool" template gives us. We want to create a service bundle. So select [Project --> New Target…]. Choose "Loadable Bundle" under the Cocoa section, click the "Next" button, name your new target, and then click "Finish".
10. First we need to include all the appropriate files in this new target. Select [Project --> Set Active Target --> target name from step 9]. Control-click on the "Groups & Files" source list heading, and then select "Target Membership" if it isn't already enabled. Make sure that "EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m", "XMLPrettyPrintService.m", and both "Cocoa.framework" and "Foundation.framework" have their boxes checked. If they don't, you'll get the errors as in step 8.
11. Note how when you created the bundle target, Xcode automatically created a new file called "XMLPrettyPrintService-Info.plist"? We need to modify that so that Mac OS X knows we're providing a service. Select it, and then add the following lines immediately before the "</dict>" line:
<key>NSServices</key>
<dict>
<key>NSMenuItem</key>
<dict>
<key>default</key>
<string>Pretty Up XML</string>
</dict>
<key>NSMessage</key>
<string>prettyUpXML</string>
<key>NSPortName</key>
<string>XMLPrettyPrint</string>
<key>NSReturnTypes</key>
<string>NSStringPboardType</string>
</array>
<key>NSSendTypes</key>
<string>NSStringPboardType</string>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
The NSServices key/value pair tells Mac OS X how the service works. The NSUIElement key/value pair tells Mac OS X not to show our app in the Dock when it gets launched, which is super-annoying.
Inside the NSServices value array, we have NSMenuItem, whose value dict tells Mac OS X the title of our menu bar item. Change this string to whatever you want, but leave the key name as "default". The NSMessage value is the first part of the method name that is called in our custom object we created in step 3. If this string doesn't match up with our method name in EPXMLPrettyPrinter, the service will not work. Similarly, the NSPortName value is the second argument we provided to the NSRegisterServicesProvider() function in step 6. This port name also needs to match up or the service won't work.
Finally, we need to declare what kind of input our services accepts and what kind of output it produces. In our case, we want it to take a string as input and produce a string as output, so we'll use NSStringPboardType.
Note that if your service is a filter (i.e.: it requires input and produces output), you need to declare both the NSReturnTypes key as well as the NSSendTypes key. If your service only requires input, you only need to declare the NSSendTypes key. If your service only produces output, you only need to declare the NSReturnTypes key.ssp made a good point to me: because services are provided to every application, your keyboard shortcut will almost assuredly conflict with the keyboard shortcut from another application or even with keyboard shortcuts for other services. You also can't control whether apps or services down the line use your same keyboard shortcut or not. It's pretty much impossible to find a good shortcut because of this, so it's probably better not to provide one — if the user wants a keyboard shortcut for your service, they can define one for themselves in System Preferences.
(There are other keys that you can also include in your Info.plist file. In particular, NSUserData is an optional string that is provided to your method so you can know that input is coming from another application via your service. NSKeyEquivalent allows you to setup a keyboard shortcut for your service, and NSTimeout allows you to provide a timeout interval for your service other than the default of 30 seconds.)
12. One last thing to do before we build the final product. Right now, the bundle will have a ".bundle" extension, rather than the desired ".service" extension. This is easily fixed: select the bundle target (not the plain executable target), and get info on it. Switch to the "Build" tab and find "Wrapper Extension" under the Title column in the list. Double-click on this item, replace "bundle" with "service" in the sheet that pops down, and then press "OK".
13. Now we're ready to build your service. (Note that if you want your service to run on Tiger as well, you'll need to change the Target SDK to 10.4 as detailed in this entry.) Make sure the bundle target is still the active target, and build away!
There are three major annoyances that I ran into while creating this service. First off, the bundle doesn't actually work. Whenever the service is invoked, you'll get a message in the Console's system.log saying "cannot execute binary file". I have no idea why this happens. The workaround is to build the regular executable target (the original target that's created from the Xcode project template) as well as the bundle target. Then, in the Finder, reveal the contents of the bundle, and copy the built executable inside the "MacOS" folder of the bundle. (Delete the existing executable inside the "MacOS" folder first, and give the one you just copied the same name as the deleted one, of course.) This might be an Xcode 3-only issue, but if anyone has any insight into why this happens, I would greatly appreciate it.
Secondly, if you're fiddling around with your service, it can be a pain in the ass to make sure that the correct service is being invoked. That's because at least in Leopard, services can be advertised from anywhere — before, services either had to be in */Library/Services/, or provided from applications in */Applications/ . So when you build your service bundle and plop it in your ~/Library/Services/ folder and invoke it, you may actually be invoking an older version of your service if you've left them lying around.OK, I lied. You don't actually have to log out and log in again to reset the services menu. Create a Foundation tool, link it against the Cocoa framework (not just the Foundation framework), and have it simply call NSUpdateDynamicServices(), which takes no arguments. This still isn't ideal, though, because the service menu gets updated only for apps that are launched after you call this method. So you'll still need to at least quit and relaunch your apps to use the updated version of your service.
Finally, in order to re-register services (which is necessary if you want to test newer versions of your service), you'll have to log out and log in again to force the services menu to update. Your best bet is to use a different user to test your service — copy newer versions of your service to /Users/Shared/ , log in as your other user, copy the service to ~/Library/Services/, log out and log in with that user, and then test the service.
So that's how you create a service on Mac OS X. If you need more detailed documentation about services, refer to none other than Apple's System Services documentation for Cocoa, which I also referenced above.
Services in Mac OS X are often an overlooked but useful feature in Mac OS X. They provide small features that are offered up by an application or a bundle to be invoked by other applications. For example, a service could insert the current date at the insertion point, or it could take the selected paragraph and replace any standard quotation marks with smart quotes.
One of the reasons they're often overlooked is because a lot of the time when you go into the Services submenu of the current application's menu, everything is disabled. It's not obvious how one would use a service. The trick lies in selecting something before you go into the Services menu, because services are often (but not always) contextual — a service either depends on input or produces output, or both.
Services are supported by default by any Cocoa application, and Carbon applications can be set up to use services as well, so you should be able to use them from the vast majority of applications these days. It's worth a look to just fiddle around with them to see what you can do. And since many, many applications provide services, you'd be well-advised to use Service Scrubber to trim your Services menu down to just the ones you want.
Now what if you want to make a service? The easiest way is through ThisService. If you know how to create scripts in Ruby, Perl, Python, PHP, bash, sh, csh, zsh, all you need to do is create a service that reads from STDIN, outputs to STDOUT, or both. You can even just create a regular UNIX executable that reads from STDIN and/or outputs to STDOUT. AppleScript works a little differently, but you can also use ThisService with AppleScripts. Once you've created your script or executable, you just feed it to ThisService, change a few options, and ThisService creates a service for you.
But that's no fun. Here's a walkthrough of creating a service using Xcode 3; I'm going to use Objective-C and Cocoa, but you could easily adapt this method to use Carbon or just plain C. We're going to create a service that transforms XML markup to indented, easily readable markup, which is something that's really useful for me when developing TuneTagger, since MusicBrainz lookups return ugly un-indented XML. This is a "filter": it both requires input and produces output.
1. Open up Xcode and create a new project. Use the "Foundation Tool" template under the "Command Line Utility" section. I'm naming my project "XMLPrettyPrintService". This will create a file named "XMLPrettyPrintService.m" which is the start of our app.
2. Now, you'll want to create the Objective-C class which actually does the gritty work, so choose [File --> New File…], and then select the "Objective-C class" template under the Cocoa section. Name the class whatever you want — for the purposes of this tutorial, I'll use "EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m". Make sure to add it to the right project and target, and create EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h as well.
3. Here we'll create the service method that gets called in response to an invocation of your service. Paste the following code into EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m, between "@implementation EPXMLPrettyPrinter" and "@end":- (void)prettyUpXML:(NSPasteboard *)pboard userData:(NSString *)userData error:(NSString **)error { NSString *pboardString; NSString *newString; NSArray *types; types = [pboard types]; if (![types containsObject:NSStringPboardType]) { *error = NSLocalizedString(@"Error: couldn't encrypt text.", @"pboard couldn't give string."); return; } pboardString = [pboard stringForType:NSStringPboardType]; if (!pboardString) { *error = NSLocalizedString(@"Error: couldn't encrypt text.", @"pboard couldn't give string."); return; } // do something with pboardString and have // newString be the result types = [NSArray arrayWithObject:NSStringPboardType]; [pboard declareTypes:types owner:nil]; [pboard setString:newString forType:NSStringPboardType]; return; }
This code is filched directly from Apple's System Services documentation for Cocoa.
Note the name of this method — prettyUpXML:userData:error: . That first part, "prettyUpXML", can be changed to anything you want, and this part'll be important later. The rest of the method name needs to be the same as above, however.
Remember, we're implementing a filter here. If you want to only produce output with your service, discard everything before the "do something with pboardString" comment: you won't need to access the pasteboard, you'll just want to place something on it. If, instead, you only want to use the input but not produce any output, discard everything after the "do something with pboardString" comment (except, of course, the "return" line).
4. The next step is to implement the meat of your service method. In this example, we want to take pboardString, the ugly XML markup, and transform it to nicely indented, readable markup and place that markup into newString. ssp noticed a great feature in Mac OS X Tiger and later: a native Cocoa call using an NSXMLDocument object that creates pretty XML markup. It takes very few lines to accomplish what we want.
So, first, replace the "do something with pboardString" comment in EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m with the following code:NSError *convertError = nil; newString = [self convertToPrettiedPrint:pboardString withError:&convertError]; if (! newString) { *error = [convertError localizedDescription]; return; }
Then add this code after the prettyUpXML:userData:error: but before "@end":- (NSString *)convertToPrettiedPrint:(NSString *)uglyString withError:(NSError **)error; { NSError *XMLReadError; NSXMLDocument *theXMLDocument = [[NSXMLDocument alloc] initWithXMLString:uglyString options:NSXMLDocumentTidyXML error:&XMLReadError]; if (XMLReadError) { *error = XMLReadError; return nil; } NSString *prettyXMLString = [theXMLDocument XMLStringWithOptions:NSXMLNodePrettyPrint]; [theXMLDocument release]; return prettyXMLString; }
This code is pretty straightforward: it assumes the input string is XML, reads it into an NSXMLDocument object, and then uses that object to create a string with the pretty markup, and returns that string.
Note how if our code encounters an error — the pasteboard does not contain a string, or it can't convert the input to a string, or (from our custom code) there was an error reading the input as XML — our code simply returns without placing anything back on the pasteboard., the application that invoked the service will just present an error saying that the input was not valid:
5. Of course, we need to change EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h to match the changes we just made to EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m, now. Paste in the following code between the closing curly brace and "@end" in EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h:- (void)prettyUpXML:(NSPasteboard *)pboard userData:(NSString *)userData error:(NSString **)error; - (NSString *)convertToPrettiedPrint:(NSString *)uglyString withError:(NSError **)error;
6. Go back to the file that contains the main() function where the app starts. It's going to be named your-project-name.m. Note how the project template already includes most of the framework of this file for you. (I'm amused that Leopard includes a new method called "drain" for NSAutoreleasePools. It's such an appropriate name.) What we need to do here is register your app as a service provider, and then you'll tell it to wait for input from the invoking application.
Services aren't running all the time. They're just apps or tools that quit when they're not being used. So when a different app invokes a service, it actually launches the executable for the service, performs the actions, and then quits the service. The way that Mac OS X knows that your app provides a service is through its Info.plist file, which we'll need to modify later.
Replace the comment and the hello world log line with the following code:EPXMLPrettyPrinter *prettyPrinterInstance = [[EPPrettyPrinter alloc] init]; NSRegisterServicesProvider(prettyPrinterInstance, @"XMLPrettyPrint"); [[NSRunLoop currentRunLoop] acceptInputForMode:NSDefaultRunLoopMode beforeDate:[NSDate dateWithTimeIntervalSinceNow:30.0]]; [prettyPrinterInstance release];
The first line here creates the object that actually performs the actions on the input or produces output. That's from our EPXMLPrettyPrinter files that we just finished modifying. The second line registers our app as a service provider — the first argument is the object that we created in the first line, and the second is the name of the "port" for your service. You can choose whatever string you want for the port name, but it'll also be important later.
The third line tells your tool to run and wait for input. It also defines a timeout interval — if after 30 seconds, no input is provided to your tool, it'll quit. 30 seconds is the default timeout interval for services anyway, so it's a good number.
Lastly, the fourth line does memory cleanup.
7. Add the following line above the "#import <Foundation/Foundation.h>" line:#import "EPXMLPrettyPrinter.h"
This notifies the main function that EPXMLPrettyPrinter actually an object and to what methods it responds. Since it's a custom object we created, it doesn't automatically know this.
8. We're done modifying our source code files. But if you build your project right now, it gives you errors about the symbols _NSRegisterServicesProvider and _NSStringPboardType which couldn't be found. Oooops. We forgot to add in the Cocoa framework, which we need for the NSPasteboard object.
Select the "External Frameworks and Libraries" folder, and then select [Project --> Add to Project…]. Navigate to /System/Library/Frameworks/ in the open dialog, select "Cocoa.framework" and click the "Add" button. The defaults for the next sheet are good, so just click the "Add" button again.
9. Now your project will build successfully. But it's just a plain old executable, because that's what the "Foundation Tool" template gives us. We want to create a service bundle. So select [Project --> New Target…]. Choose "Loadable Bundle" under the Cocoa section, click the "Next" button, name your new target, and then click "Finish".
10. First we need to include all the appropriate files in this new target. Select [Project --> Set Active Target --> target name from step 9]. Control-click on the "Groups & Files" source list heading, and then select "Target Membership" if it isn't already enabled. Make sure that "EPXMLPrettyPrinter.m", "XMLPrettyPrintService.m", and both "Cocoa.framework" and "Foundation.framework" have their boxes checked. If they don't, you'll get the errors as in step 8.
11. Note how when you created the bundle target, Xcode automatically created a new file called "XMLPrettyPrintService-Info.plist"? We need to modify that so that Mac OS X knows we're providing a service. Select it, and then add the following lines immediately before the "</dict>" line:
<key>NSServices</key>
<dict>
<key>NSMenuItem</key>
<dict>
<key>default</key>
<string>Pretty Up XML</string>
</dict>
<key>NSMessage</key>
<string>prettyUpXML</string>
<key>NSPortName</key>
<string>XMLPrettyPrint</string>
<key>NSReturnTypes</key>
<string>NSStringPboardType</string>
</array>
<key>NSSendTypes</key>
<string>NSStringPboardType</string>
</array>
</dict>
</array>
<key>NSUIElement</key>
<string>1</string>
The NSServices key/value pair tells Mac OS X how the service works. The NSUIElement key/value pair tells Mac OS X not to show our app in the Dock when it gets launched, which is super-annoying.
Inside the NSServices value array, we have NSMenuItem, whose value dict tells Mac OS X the title of our menu bar item. Change this string to whatever you want, but leave the key name as "default". The NSMessage value is the first part of the method name that is called in our custom object we created in step 3. If this string doesn't match up with our method name in EPXMLPrettyPrinter, the service will not work. Similarly, the NSPortName value is the second argument we provided to the NSRegisterServicesProvider() function in step 6. This port name also needs to match up or the service won't work.
Finally, we need to declare what kind of input our services accepts and what kind of output it produces. In our case, we want it to take a string as input and produce a string as output, so we'll use NSStringPboardType.
Note that if your service is a filter (i.e.: it requires input and produces output), you need to declare both the NSReturnTypes key as well as the NSSendTypes key. If your service only requires input, you only need to declare the NSSendTypes key. If your service only produces output, you only need to declare the NSReturnTypes key.ssp made a good point to me: because services are provided to every application, your keyboard shortcut will almost assuredly conflict with the keyboard shortcut from another application or even with keyboard shortcuts for other services. You also can't control whether apps or services down the line use your same keyboard shortcut or not. It's pretty much impossible to find a good shortcut because of this, so it's probably better not to provide one — if the user wants a keyboard shortcut for your service, they can define one for themselves in System Preferences.
(There are other keys that you can also include in your Info.plist file. In particular, NSUserData is an optional string that is provided to your method so you can know that input is coming from another application via your service. NSKeyEquivalent allows you to setup a keyboard shortcut for your service, and NSTimeout allows you to provide a timeout interval for your service other than the default of 30 seconds.)
12. One last thing to do before we build the final product. Right now, the bundle will have a ".bundle" extension, rather than the desired ".service" extension. This is easily fixed: select the bundle target (not the plain executable target), and get info on it. Switch to the "Build" tab and find "Wrapper Extension" under the Title column in the list. Double-click on this item, replace "bundle" with "service" in the sheet that pops down, and then press "OK".
13. Now we're ready to build your service. (Note that if you want your service to run on Tiger as well, you'll need to change the Target SDK to 10.4 as detailed in this entry.) Make sure the bundle target is still the active target, and build away!
There are three major annoyances that I ran into while creating this service. First off, the bundle doesn't actually work. Whenever the service is invoked, you'll get a message in the Console's system.log saying "cannot execute binary file". I have no idea why this happens. The workaround is to build the regular executable target (the original target that's created from the Xcode project template) as well as the bundle target. Then, in the Finder, reveal the contents of the bundle, and copy the built executable inside the "MacOS" folder of the bundle. (Delete the existing executable inside the "MacOS" folder first, and give the one you just copied the same name as the deleted one, of course.) This might be an Xcode 3-only issue, but if anyone has any insight into why this happens, I would greatly appreciate it.
Secondly, if you're fiddling around with your service, it can be a pain in the ass to make sure that the correct service is being invoked. That's because at least in Leopard, services can be advertised from anywhere — before, services either had to be in */Library/Services/, or provided from applications in */Applications/ . So when you build your service bundle and plop it in your ~/Library/Services/ folder and invoke it, you may actually be invoking an older version of your service if you've left them lying around.OK, I lied. You don't actually have to log out and log in again to reset the services menu. Create a Foundation tool, link it against the Cocoa framework (not just the Foundation framework), and have it simply call NSUpdateDynamicServices(), which takes no arguments. This still isn't ideal, though, because the service menu gets updated only for apps that are launched after you call this method. So you'll still need to at least quit and relaunch your apps to use the updated version of your service.
Finally, in order to re-register services (which is necessary if you want to test newer versions of your service), you'll have to log out and log in again to force the services menu to update. Your best bet is to use a different user to test your service — copy newer versions of your service to /Users/Shared/ , log in as your other user, copy the service to ~/Library/Services/, log out and log in with that user, and then test the service.
So that's how you create a service on Mac OS X. If you need more detailed documentation about services, refer to none other than Apple's System Services documentation for Cocoa, which I also referenced above.
(image from The Beloved Woman)
Google Books (and Project Gutenberg, too) now has quite a few novels from one of my favorite guilty pleasures, Kathleen Norris. (Not the Kathleen Norris who is a poet and essayist, and who is still alive, but the Kathleen Norris who was the most popular women's novelist of the 1930s and 1940s (selling 10,000,000 books), peace activist, and early woman journalist.)
All her novels revolve around the same romantic linchpin: that marriage is sacred (she was a devout Catholic). I may snort at the plots that seem to tie up neatly with the convenient death of the bounder who is making the heroine unhappy (or, conversely, with the heroine's selfless realization that the bounder is her burden to bear and that her happiness will come, masochistically, from cooking that same burden hot dinners) but I really read them for her wonderful descriptions of the clothes and food of California society from the turn of the last century to the 1940s.Ella thought her handsome, in a rather bold, savage way. Victoria was dark and rosy, with flashing eyes and [a] vivacious, almost nervous manner. She wore a dress of dark blue cloth trimmed about the high collar and wide cuffs and about the thick panniers of the skirt with scallops of gray silk, and a high straw turban turned back sharply from the face with two triangles of brim and massed with roses. This somewhat elaborate dress was snugly fitted into a narrow waist line; Victoria wore tan kid gloves, and high scalloped boots of tan kid. Her forehead, like her mother's, was covered with curled hair, and bangles jangled on her wrists, about her neck was a long gold chain that held the little watch that was thrust into her bosom. She was twenty-one.
from Certain People of Importance"'Cucumbers, olives, salted nuts, currant jelly'", Mrs. Carew was
reading her list, "'ginger chutney, saltines, bar-le-duc, cream
cheese', those are for the salad, you know, 'dinner rolls, sandwich
bread, fancy cakes, Maraschino cherries, maple sugar,' that's to go
hot on the ice, I'm going to serve it in melons, and 'candy'--just
pink and green wafers, I think. All that before it comes to the
actual dinner at all, and it's all so fussy!"
from The Rich Mrs Burgoyne
Norris has a way of writing about dimity ruffles and oyster stew and silk "Chinese" pajamas that engender such a longing for you in those articles that it's hard not to book the first seat on the next train (not plane, mind you) to San Francisco, where, in her books, all these things are in such oversupply that it's the rare young woman who doesn't have at least two, if not all three, in her possession. If you have a little time (and don't mind reading on-screen) go ahead and click.
And, in fundraising news, a couple of folks have asked me to set up a Paypal button to donate; I don't mind doing so -- are there other people interested? If the widget below doesn't work for you, here's the link directly to the ChangingThePresent page ...we're up to $1000! Thank you!
NYT reporters tell their own stories in the comments
Scientists at the climate conference in Bali say seaweed and algae could be a potent weapon against global warming. Sea plants can suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere at rates comparable to the largest rain forests.
Originally posted by Associated Press from Wired Planet Earth, ReBlogged by Leah Gauthier on Dec 9, 2007 at 09:33 AM
