randomwalks/dj

Calling all Google Reader users...
Are you reading this in Google Reader? If so, I need your help on a science experiment.

Click the SHARE button and share this blog post out to your friends, like this:

Why do this?
This may be your first time reading my blog, and you might be asking "Why would I want to do that?" I'm guessing that when Google built this feature, they didn't think people would use it to propagate chain letter-like things, like this post ;-)

Take part in the first Viral Marketing "science experiment" inside of Google Reader! ;-) Let's answer the quesiton, "Can it be done??"

(This experiment originally inspired by Scoble, who linked to me and said, "How did I find it? My friends on Google Reader shared it with me. You can add me on Google Reader too")

Blogs can now easily jump from user-to-user with just one click, whereas before it was hard to "infect" another user virally. More on the viral marketing topic here. After this experiment runs its course, I'll post a longer analysis and explanation, depending on how successful it is.

In the meantime, don't forget to click on the SHARE button below! (Click here to go to Google Reader)

Originally posted by Andrew Chen from Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen

Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj, on December 22, 2007 7:19 PM

Sick of watching reruns? Nervous you'll only get 8 episodes of Lost next season? Well, The NY Times reports on the first break in the writers' strike.

David Letterman is pursuing a deal with the Writers Guild of America that would allow his late-night show on CBS to return to the air in early January with the usual complement of material from his writers, even if the strike is still continuing.

Executives from Mr. Letterman's company said Saturday that they are hopeful they will have an interim agreement in place with the guild as early as this week. That could potentially put Mr. Letterman at an enormous advantage over most of his late-night colleagues.This seems like a good compromise -- allowing the crew to get back to work, Letterman to edge out Leno, and of course the late night couch potatoes would be happy with some new episodes. Will anyone follow suit?

Jon Stewart of Comedy Central's "Daily Show" has also been urging an interim agreement and would begin working toward getting one in place the first thing Monday morning, according to a representative. But Mr. Letterman is in a stronger position because, unlike Mr. Stewart, his show is not owned by a network but by Mr. Letterman's independent production company, World Wide Pants. (So is the show that follows it on CBS, "The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson," which would return with writers under the proposed interim agreement.)

Meanwhile, tomorrow the writers plan to demand (within their legal rights) that the "studios and network production companies bargain with the guild individually rather than as a group." This would of course create an even bigger headache for the producers alliance (which does the bargaining for all companies involved). A letter to WGA members on Friday, that we received a copy of, stated: "We nonetheless continue to hope that the AMPTP will return in good faith to negotiate a fair contract with writers, as two television seasons and numerous feature projects are currently at great risk."

The late night writers haven't yet mentioned the possibility of a return on their blog. We wonder how other WGA members feel about this. Just last week we received a letter stating "the WGA filed charges with the National Labor Relations Board against the AMPTP for its refusal to bargain in good faith with the WGA. It is a clear violation of federal law for the AMPTP to issue an ultimatum and break off negotiations if we fail to cave to their illegal demands."

Photo via myserenity1's flickr.

Originally posted by Jen Carlson from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on December 22, 2007 4:42 PM

A cartogram showing the world's oil reserves: the larger the country, the more oil it has. Via Kottke....

Originally posted by Jonathan Crowe from The Map Room, on December 22, 2007 4:21 PM

As the owner of a fast-growing software business, my thoughts are turning increasingly to the question of whether I should hire help, and if so, how can I locate the right help. So many factors come into play. Personality. Ability. Style. And most important of all, passion for the products I’d be asking this person to work on.

Fortunately, the Mac software business mimics every other aspect of life, in the sense that unless you’re already the best at something, there’s always value in listening to others with more experience. In this instance, Wil Shipley comes through with what is quite possibly the best “Help Wanted” ad I’ve ever read.

If you wanna work for me, laddy
There's a price you pay
I'm a stickler for design
You gotta write code the right way
If you want an ADA
I can make your wish come true
You gotta make a big impression
I gotta like what you do

I couldn’t have put it any better myself. Instant classic.

Originally posted by Daniel Jalkut from Red Sweater Blog, on December 22, 2007 4:20 PM

How to Stop Receiving Phone Books and Yellow Pages — thanks Dru!

Originally posted by Adam from randomWalks, on December 22, 2007 3:31 PM

Calling all Google Reader users...
Are you reading this in Google Reader? If so, I need your help on a science experiment.

Click the SHARE button and share this blog post out to your friends, like this:

Why do this?
This may be your first time reading my blog, and you might be asking "Why would I want to do that?" I'm guessing that when Google built this feature, they didn't think people would use it to propagate chain letter-like things, like this post ;-)

Take part in the first Viral Marketing "science experiment" inside of Google Reader! ;-) Let's answer the quesiton, "Can it be done??"

(This experiment originally inspired by Scoble, who linked to me and said, "How did I find it? My friends on Google Reader shared it with me. You can add me on Google Reader too")

Blogs can now easily jump from user-to-user with just one click, whereas before it was hard to "infect" another user virally. More on the viral marketing topic here. After this experiment runs its course, I'll post a longer analysis and explanation, depending on how successful it is.

In the meantime, don't forget to click on the SHARE button below! (Click here to go to Google Reader)

Originally posted by Andrew Chen from Futuristic Play by Andrew Chen
Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj

Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj, on December 22, 2007 2:19 PM

Traveling for the holidays? It’s always disturbed me that U.S. hotel rooms always seem stock a Holy Bible. Nevermind any other tradition, or say... the Englightenment. This year, I’m packing something of my own to leave behind: atheism cards! Each of these cards has a quote I think might sow a few seeds of dissent, or perhaps start a long distance discourse. Click the image below to download a printable PDF. Or make your own. There are plenty choice quotes here and elsewhere.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on December 22, 2007 1:32 PM

Examiner column for December 24.

   

    It may not be a parent’s worst nightmare, but it was a bad moment. My son was applying to colleges and not consulting his English-teacher mother before mailing off his essays.

    When he did show me one just before it was due—too late for any revisions--I was horrified. It had typos and was spindled and mutilated in ways I was sure destined him for rejection.

    “What’s a mother to do?” crossed my mind, but he snatched the forms away from me and hurried out to make the postmark deadline. I only saw the typos; in my mind the fact that his idiosyncratic, irrepressible spirit shone through, despite errors, was secondary.

    College admission committees must have children of their own. How else to explain that he was admitted to most of the schools that received his far-from-perfect applications? Then and there I vowed that, as a teacher, I would try to give students an impartial, quick, editorial glance before they lick the stamp and mail their essays.

    And so my 24-hour folder was born. It sits on my desk, and whatever students put in the folder is returned, edited, within 24 hours. Students can put in an essay January 14 that needs to be postmarked the 15th and be certain no typos or other errors will remain.

    I never rewrite the essays; it’s important that a student’s own voice shines through—whether boring or scintillating. All I guarantee is that they won’t embarrass themselves by mailing off something sloppy.

    Thousands of essays have passed through the 24-hour folder. Some students submit 6 essays three times each, and others agonize over seven versions of a single essay. My vow is to give them my honest opinion and a few editorial suggestions.

    When parents hear about this service, they are so grateful their child has someone competent to proofread those important applications. They know for certain—just as I did—that few children want to share these essays with their parents.

    Students always tell other students about the 24-hour folder and strangers sometimes poke their heads into my class to ask if I can look at their essays. All English teachers are happy to read student essays, but no one else guarantees “Overnight Delivery.” It’s just FedEx and me.

    The only casualty is that during the fall I rarely get papers corrected during the day. Every time I look, five or ten new college essays appear.

    Mostly I am happy to be useful, but occasionally I am rewarded with a transcendent submission. Katie Goins’ essay appeared last week and begins:

    “I have always loved words. I love the ways they can be arranged in a poem, stacked tight or spread out. They can be spoken, or sung, or simply sit silently on a page.”

    She concludes: “I sit behind my computer screen, praying that the words I have long depended on don’t fail me now. I hope they find favor with some far away reader who loves words as much as I do. I hit spell check one last time, and imagine what my future will bring. After all, words can do anything.”

    I didn’t change a thing.

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on December 22, 2007 12:34 PM

"they have never heard of New Jack Swing, and think Living Colour was an R&B group. Now I can understand why they flamed the shit out of me for suggesting the site should have a white background. It would have been too redundant."

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

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/yatta, on December 22, 2007 9:38 AM

Before Maui rides, I’ll eat light, ride to a banana bread stand, and fuel up. Riding back from Hana, I went a little too far, and was bonking — I ate 1/2 a loaf in about two bites and that satisfied the hunger.

Getting that hungry reminded me of various bonks and eating whatever was in sight — that includes a burger once and I don’t eat beef. What’s your worst bonk? How do you satisfy the hunger after a long ride?

Originally posted by DL Byron from Bike Hugger, on December 22, 2007 9:37 AM

Alberto Simões posted up an interesting benchmark illustrating that ~~, the new smart match operator in 5.10, outperforms both grep and List::Util::first() in the "is X in this list" role. Here are my results:

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by schwern (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 22, 2007 9:09 AM

Beautiful movie poster for Taxi to the Dark Side, banned by the MPAA because it features a U.S. Army detainee in a hood. Which is something that actually happened and happens.

Someone needs to stand up and decry the MPAA for what it is: a censorship board. There’d be mass outrage in the mainstream media if there were an equivalent of the MPAA for books — imagine a book cover needing the approval of some mysterious board of conservative prudes, as movie posters do.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on December 22, 2007 7:51 AM

"If you were to design the ultimate system, you would have mass transit be free and charge an enormous amount for cars."

So said Mayor Michael Bloomberg last April, right about the time he unveiled his plan to charge motorists a fee to drive into Manhattan's central business district. Eight months later, as the mayor's original proposal mutates for better or worse, the MTA is hours away from raising transit fares. Neither idea has exactly caught fire with the public, and the fare hikes could actually end up a foil for congestion pricing -- a plan originally intended as a sustained financial boost for the transit system.

And then there's Theodore "Ted" Kheel. The environmentalist, philanthropist, and renowned labor attorney has lobbied for free transit in New York for over 40 years. Last February he commissioned a $100,000 study that, as it turns out, could put the city's money where the mayor's mouth is. A summary of findings released late last week shows that if the city were to impose a $16 congestion fee ($32 for trucks) below 60th Street in Manhattan, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, along with higher curbside parking fees and a taxi surcharge, the MTA could remove its turnstiles and fareboxes forever.

Share this

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, ReBlogged by Steve on Dec 22, 2007 at 10:05 AM

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Eyebeam reBlog, on December 22, 2007 5:05 AM

Attendees of the Chicago 2007 MLA conference are invited to join Mark and Jeremy on Fri. Dec 28 as they participate in the poster session/exhibition “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating”, as well as Jeremy’s presentation on the panel “New Reading Interfaces”. If you’d like to stop by and say hi during the conference, our sessions are a great place to do it.

Friday Dec. 28, 2007

250. New Reading Interfaces
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities
Presiding: Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara

317. Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating
3:30–4:45 p.m., Columbus Hall K and L, Hyatt Regency
Program sponsored by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Convention in conjunction with the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Susan Schreibman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

At New Reading Interfaces, Jeremy will be presenting on “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface.” At Electronic Literature, Mark Marino will be presenting on “Beta Writer: Portrait of the Author as Early Adopter,” while Jeremy will be demonstrating “Sculpting E-Poetry in Fractal Space: ConTextTree.” Our abstracts are included at the bottom of this post.

Beyond our own modest contributions, these sessions are also jam-packed with other great participants. In New Reading Interfaces, Joseph Tabbi will be presenting on “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories”, Elizabeth Swanstrom on “Reading Shaw’s Legible City”, Sarah Sloane on “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book”, and Victoria Szabo on “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D Environments”. In Electronic Literature, occasional WRT collaborator Jessica Pressman will be presenting with Helen DeVinney on “Exploring Electronic Literature”, Christopher Funkhouser on “Selections from Selections”, Davin Heckman on “Reading Unwritten Poems: Developing Critical Tools for Electronic Literature”, Elizabeth Swamstron on “Navigating Giselle Beiguelman’s ‘Esc for Escape’”, and Vika Zafrin on “RolandHT”.

For many MLA attendees, ’tis the season to stop celebrating the holidays and cram for presentations and interviews. Still beyond our own sessions there are a host of other exciting talks and events we are looking forward to, including the annual ELO meetup / happy hour. Below are presentations recommended by the Electronic Literature Organization, including an invitation to a happy hour:

Electronic Literature & Related Panels

This year’s convention features several panels (”New Reading Interfaces,” “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, and Navigating,” and “Electronic Literature: After Afternoon”) that are explicitly focused on electronic literature, and several that are more tangentially related to the subject. Below is a mini conference guide focused on e-lit.

Thursday, 27 December

79. Persuasive Games
5:15–6:30 p.m., Toronto, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Literary Criticism
Presiding: Rita M. Raley, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
1. “Introduction to Procedural Rhetoric,” Ian Bogost, Georgia Inst. of Tech.
2. “War Games,” Rita M. Raley
3. “Guy Debord’s ‘Kriegspiel’: Nostalgic Algorithms in Late Modernity,” Alexander Galloway, New York Univ.

Friday, 28 December

215. Novel History, Media History
10:15–11:30 a.m., Atlanta, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Media and Literature
Presiding: Ivan Kreilkamp, Indiana Univ., Bloomington
1. “Beyond Fashion: From the Nineteenth-Century Urban Mysteries Reader to the Cinema Spectator,” Sara Hackenberg, San Francisco State Univ.
2. “Ulysses Player Piano,” Paul K. Saint-Amour, Univ. of Pennsylvania
3. “Remediating the Modernist Novel: Judd Morrissey’s Digital Remix,” Jessica Pressman, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

250. New Reading Interfaces
12:00 noon–1:15 p.m., Missouri, Sheraton Chicago
Program arranged by the Association for Computers and the Humanities
Presiding: Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
1. “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy H. Douglass, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
2. “Toward a Semantic Literary Web: Three Case Histories,” Joseph Paul Tabbi, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago
3. “Reading Shaw’s Legible City,” Elizabeth Swanstrom
4. “Reading the Margins of The Magic Book,” Sarah Jane Sloane, Colorado State Univ., Fort Collins
5. “Texts in Virtual Contexts: Reading Scholarly Work in 3-D Environments,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.

256. Professionalization in a Digital Age
1:45–3:30 p.m., Columbus Hall C and D, Hyatt Regency
A forum arranged by the Committee on the Status of Graduate Students in the Profession
Presiding: William Erwin Orchard, Univ. of Chicago
1. “Rethinking the First Book: Dissertations as Bits and Bytes,” Jennifer Crewe, Columbia Univ. Press
2. “New Media Scholarship: Implications for Graduate Study,” N. Katherine Hayles, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
3. “Digital Pedagogy: Taming the Palatiri,” Ian Lancashire, Univ. of Toronto (abstract available)
Respondent: W. J. T. Mitchell, Univ. of Chicago
For coordinated workshops, see meetings 373 and 472.

317. Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating
3:30–4:45 p.m., Columbus Hall K and L, Hyatt Regency
Program sponsored by the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Structure of the Convention in conjunction with the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Susan Schreibman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
1. “Exploring Electronic Literature,” Helen DeVinney, Univ. of Maryland, College Park; Jessica Pressman, Univ. of California, Los Angeles
2. “Sculpting E-Poetry in Fractal Space: ConTextTree,” Jeremy H. Douglass, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
3. “Selections from Selections,” Christopher T. Funkhouser, New Jersey Inst. of Tech.
4. “Reading Unwritten Poems: Developing Critical Tools for Electronic Literature,” Davin Heckman, Siena Heights Univ.
5. “ Beta Writer: Portrait of the Author as Early Adopter,” Mark Marino, Univ. of Southern California
6. “No Exit in Sight: Navigating Giselle Beiguelman’s ‘Esc for Escape,’” Elizabeth Swanstrom, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara
7. “ RolandHT,” Vika Zafrin, Brown Univ.

373. Scholarship in New Media
7:15–8:30 p.m., Columbus Hall C and D, Hyatt Regency
A workshop arranged in conjunction with the forum Professionalization in a Digital Age (256)
Presiding: Markus Zisselsberger, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York
1. “On Scholarship,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park (abstract available)
2. “On Electric Editing,” Dino Franco Felluga, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette
3. “On Pedagogy,” Todd Samuel Presner, Univ. of California, Los Angeles (abstract available)
4. “On Collaboration,” McKenzie Wark, New School

Saturday, 29 December

541. Electronic Literature: After Afternoon
3:30–4:45 p.m., Mississippi, Sheraton Chicago
Program arranged by the Division on Methods of Literary Research
Presiding: Neil Fraistat, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
1. “Picture and Book Remain: After Two Decades of Hypertext Literature,” Michael Joyce, Vassar Coll.
2. “This Afternoon,” Matthew Gary Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park
3. “Play, Flow, and Mix: Paradigms for Electronic Literature,” N. Katherine Hayles, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

649. Sampling the Original: Rethinking Appropriation, Attribution, and Copyright
9:00–10:15 p.m., Plaza Ballroom A, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology
Presiding: Thomas C. Spear, Lehman Coll., City Univ. of New York
1. “Remixing Free Culture: Twentieth-Century Copyright in the Twenty-First-Century Classroom,” Kari M. Kraus, Univ. of Rochester
2. “Media-Enriched Critical Writing as Gray-Market Transgression,” Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.
3. “You Can, but You May Not: Copyright, Scholars, and the Temptations of New Media,” Jeffrey Ankrom, Bloomington, IN

Sunday, 30 December

670. Annotated Bibliography: New Work in Literature and Science
8:30–9:45 a.m., Water Tower, Hyatt Regency
Program arranged by the Division on Literature and Science
Presiding: Henry S. Turner, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison
Speakers: Mark B. N. Hansen, Univ. of Chicago; Ursula K. Heise, Stanford Univ.; Megan Massino, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison; Arielle Saiber, Bowdoin Coll.; Joseph Paul Tabbi, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago

ELO Meetup at the MLA

As we have for the past several years, we are planning an informal meet-up for people affiliated with or interested in the Electronic Literature Organization at this year’s MLA conference. This year, we are planning on meeting at the “Big Bar” at the conference hotel, the Hyatt Regency, after the “Electronic Literature: Reading, Writing, Navigating” panel, from 5-6 PM on Friday, December 28th. We plan to converge on the bar and have a drink or two. Afterwards, for those who would like to continue the conversation and take advantage of the world’s best deep-dish pizza, we’re reserving some tables at a nearby restaurant. If you’re only planning on joining us for a drink, just show up at the Big Bar at 5PM. If you want in on the pizza, please send an email to Stefanie Boese (sboese2 at uic dot edu), indicating how many people plan to attend and your preference for sausage, spinach, or mixed vegetarian pizza. We’ll put the order in ahead, so we won’t have to wait long in the restaurant to eat. We will “go dutch,” splitting the bill evenly and paying in cash.

WRT abstracts

Beta Writer: Portrait of the Author as Early Adopter,” Mark Marino, Univ. of Southern California

My presentation will focus on “Marginalia in the Library of Babel” and “a show of hands,” two in-progress electronic narratives I am working on. Adaptations of each are about to appear in New River and Hyperrhizome, respectively. This is a “poster” session with computers acting as the “posters.” These pieces emphasize questions of innovation and publication. Both stories were composed on new or nascent technologies. “Marginalia” uses Diigo. “a show of hands” uses Literatronica. In both systems, I was testing the limits and emailing the system designers with questions and concerns. At the same time, when I went to try to publish these stories in online venues, new obstacles constraints arose, particularly how to stabilize the systems reliably.

“Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy Douglass, Univ. California, San Diego

In “Tag Clouds: Reading the Poetic Interface,” Jeremy Douglass theorizes tag clouds: web reading interfaces formed from dense clusters ‘clouds’ of weighted keyword links, or ‘tags’. The poetics of tag clouds are best understood when situated in a history of spatially distributed text art, from contemporary visualization and net.art (e.g. “TextArc,” Legrady’s “Making the Visible Invisible,” Fischer’s “Word News,” Khan’s “Net Worth,” Jean Véronis’ “-ogue”) back through earlier typographic experiments (e.g. the concrete poetry of Augusto de Campos and the Vorticism of Wyndham Lewis). While interfaces have become emblamatic of the contemporary ‘web 2.0′ internet era, tag clouds have been fundamentally misunderstood in recent scholarship. Both the close association of tag clouds with ‘folksonomy’ website communities (e.g. del.icio.us, Flickr) and the popularity of the misleading term ‘cloud’ have created a stereotype of tag clouds as reflecting a kind of aesthetics of prolific chaos. Yet, as a special kind of list (the aggregately weighed dense list), tag cloud interfaces are both highly utilitarian (in the Tuftian sense of information richness) and deeply poetic (in their superimposition of constraining order over a set of evocative juxtapositions). In tag cloud poetry, the poetics of proliferation and the system of software meet at the reading interface.

ABSTRACT: “Sculpting E-Poetry in Fractal Space: ConTextTree,” Jeremy Douglass

On the border between authoring and visualization, what common ground can we find between digital poetries based on the continuous line and text-based computer visualizations based on the atomic word? ConTextTree is both a series of eliterature artworks and an authoring framework for visualizing eliterature as clouds, streams, and fractal spaces made of words. The ConTextTree framework is based on context free grammars as used in design, and explores how the “context free” paradigm affects authoring. As with the ‘freedoms’ afforded by other digital paradigms (such as the freedom of hypertext fiction or the freedom of games), context ‘freedom’ is a two-edged sword: it constrains the author to a radical discontinuity of language, but simultaneously opens up the radical possibilities of authoring fractal literature. There is a tradition of poetic experiments that have emphasized unit and form over sequence and series, including Concrete Poetry, Dada, Vorticism, and even the “flowerishes” of Kenneth Burke. Contemporary text-based computer visualization artworks such as “Making the Visible Invisible” and “Word News” have generally emphasized the role of the artist as architect in structuring the presentation of an external source of textually information. Related works like “TextArc” and “txtKit” have primarily emphasized their role as providers of readings and interpretations in relation to prior texts. ConTextTree continues in this tradition, but explores the idea of text visualization as an original authoring metaphor. In doing so, it engages some of the consequences of authoring with context free design: writing as containing its own exhaustive logic - writing as acts of arbitrary inscription rather than managing strings of symbols - writing as concern with individual letters and their representations - writing as the possibilities of low-level random behaviors such as variable handwriting, errata, etc. In a sense, the logics of text and context free design are antithetical: one is fundamentally sequential, the other fundamentally anti-sequential. ConTextTree is one attempt to synthesize this dialectic into new possibilities.

Recommendations?

Have any invitations you’d like to extend to electronic textualists and digital humanists? Let us know!

Originally posted by wrt@writerresponsetheory.org (Writer Response Theory) from WRT: Writer Response Theory, on December 21, 2007 5:11 PM

TECH NEWS

Yep, the conglomerates just don't know what the digital future will hold. Will there be more $500 million deals like this pact between Viacom and Microsoft in the future? Who knows?!

Andrew Baron, producer of the popular video blog Rocketboom, expalins Eight Reasons the TV Studios Will Die. Allow me to propose one way NOT to die: Make a fair deal with the creators of your content so you can work TOGETHER to preserve and grow your business. Seems simple enough.

Poll: More TV viewers turning to the web.

STRIKE ANALYSIS

Handel: Let's cross our fingers that the DGA has the power to get everyone back to work.

Robert Elisberg rockin' the house again on HuffPo.

"...If corporations only have to pay $250 for residuals on the Internet as opposed to $20,000 on TV -- where do you think all reruns will eventually be shown?

It gets worse. The corporations don't want original Internet content covered for the WGA. Where do you think the first-run "broadcast" of a series will be? After streaming once on the Internet, a company can simply "re-air" it on network TV. It's the same screen. The only difference is that General Electric-Sony-TimeWarner-Fox won't have had to pay more than a pittance for the material.

If you don't think this would happen, you haven't been watching the AMPTP offering zero and walking away from the table...

Roger Ebert: Thumbs down on studio greed.

AMUSEMENT

WGA vs AMPTP at Home

Cantinero sings his strike ballad "No Apologies" in Times Square. Yes, the Naked Cowboy inserts himself in the shot.

Christmas Carols!

- From the AMPTP Children's Choir of Truth
- From Peter Rader

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on December 21, 2007 3:00 PM

TECH NEWS Yep, the conglomerates just don't know what the digital future will hold. Will there be more $500 million deals like this pact between Viacom and Microsoft in the future? Who knows?!

Andrew Baron, producer of the popular video blog Rocketboom, expalins Eight Reasons the TV Studios Will Die. Allow me to propose one way NOT to die: Make a fair deal with the creators of your content so

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on December 21, 2007 3:00 PM

Poor Lady L
Originally uploaded by david.

-----
http://apperceptive.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on December 21, 2007 2:32 PM

The International Herald Tribune's Year in Pictures for 2007.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 12:39 PM

Long long list of the most overrated and underrated books, movies, tv shows, etc. for 2007. (via mr)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 10:55 AM

On May 10, 2008 -– Pangea Day -– we're throwing a worldwide film festival. Screens in Cairo, Dharamsala, Kigali, London, New York City, Ramallah, Rio de Janeiro and Tel Aviv will be videoconferenced live to produce a 4-hour program of powerful short films, visionary speakers, and uplifting music. Pangea Day grew out of the wish of 2006 TED Prize winner Jehane Noujaim, who made her wish to "unite the world through the power of film."

Watch the trailer now -- with subtitles in 20 languages! Working with dotSUB, a web-based translation tool, you can choose subtitles in Arabic, French, Chinese, German, Hindi, Korean ... and register on dotSUB to translate it into even more languages.

Pangea Day taps the power of film to strengthen tolerance and compassion, while uniting millions of people to build a better future. There are many ways to get involved:

Submit your own short film
If you had the world's attention for just a few minutes, what story would you tell? On May 10, 2008, the opportunity is yours. Submit a film. Share a story. The world will be watching. Deadline for submission: Feb. 15, 2008. Find out how to submit your short film >>

Host a screening
People are signing up to host screenings all over the world -- in homes, parks, schools, and more. More than 200 screenings in 46 countries are listed on our Google Map, and we've just begun! Sign up to host a screening >>

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on December 21, 2007 10:41 AM

Advice from a photo editor at a national magazine on how to talk about photography, particularly to those who know little about it.

I have a sweet technique I use for finding the great images from a shoot that really tends to piss-off the editors: I edit the film without reading the story. This helps me tune into which images have the most impact on me and which ones transcend subject matter and become forces in their own right.

His description of defending good photography applies to design as well.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 9:46 AM

I can imagine that it is easy for some to skip over a blog post announcing the availability of a beta thinking "oh, they just fixed some bugs." But to so with this most recent release of Movable Type would be a mistake. One of the things that makes Movable Type stand out as a product is an incredibly professional, yet agile development process that allows for constant innovation in additional to a steady improvement upon stability and quality, without putting our releases at risk.

So while Movable Type 4.1 Beta 2 contains a huge number of bug fixes as it should being a beta, the development team still found time to include a some significant new features and advancements to the platform as a whole. Most notably:

• AtomPub Support - Atom is something Six Apart has been very involved in since it first emerged as potentially the first Internet standard for syndication over four years ago. We released one of the first implementations of the fledgling protocol over 4 years ago and we were also among the first to support the Atom syndication format when it emerged as an official standard across all of our products. And while Movable Type has long supported the Atom Publishing Protocol in MT4.1 Beta 2 we introduce support for the official AtomPub standard, making it easier and more reliable then ever to use third party posting clients with your Movable Type installation.

• Redesigned Asset Listing and Editing Screens - Beau Smith took the lead on redesigning the asset listing screen to include thumbnails of the assets you have created in your system. In addition, he designed the Edit Asset screen which includes such valuable information as a list of posts/pages in which that asset it utilized, embed information for including that asset elsewhere on the web and additional meta data about the asset. Good work Beau!

• Turing Complete Templating Language - The development team checked in the last of many enhancements to our templating language that dramatically improves upon what one can possibly publish using Movable Type. MT4.1 introduces additional looping constructs, additional variable types (like hashes and arrays) and control flow structures like If-ElseIf-Else).

Beta 2 will be the last beta until the new year, but we will continue to blog through out the holidays to make sure people can continue to get their Movable Type fix. But in case you manage to tear yourself away from the computer for an extended period and you don't check in again for a while, everyone at Six Apart would like to wish you a great holiday season and a wonderful New Year.

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on December 21, 2007 9:44 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on December 21, 2007 9:31 AM

There's a story about me in The Economist, which is very flattering.

It has a couple misleading points, though, which I feel the need to clarify. Mostly about Google: I didn't "hate every minute" I was at Google (just some of them). I wasn't there "less than a year." (It was a year and eight months). I don't think Google tackles problems with "brute force." I think they're best at tackling known problems, but they do so very cleverly.

Originally posted by Ev. from evhead, on December 21, 2007 8:38 AM

big news
Originally uploaded by msippey

I don't think it was this piece, but some quick hit on Morning Edition covering some aspect of the new Pew research about online identity and self-Googling, where someone quoted finally made the point that one approach for managing your online identity is to actually post more and more content under your own name. Bloggers have known this for years -- you want to own the Google search results for your name -- and it's nice to hear this thinking finally make its way into the mass media.

But really, this is just an excuse to experiment with a new type of news blogging -- taking a quick picture of the story you find while leafing through the morning's paper...instead of going to the trouble finding the story and actually linking to it. Plus, it was a way to sneak Santa Claus on to the blog...so a big "ho ho ho" to all you Christmas celebrators out there.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on December 21, 2007 8:29 AM

The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) has rejected Taxi On the Dark Side’s poster as being “not suitable for all audiences.” … What’s offensive about this image? The detainee in the hood. Well, actually just the hood. An MPAA spokesman said: “We treat all films the same. Ads will be seen by all audiences, including children. If the advertising is not suitable for all audiences it will not be approved by the advertising administration.” Welcome to the new age of censorship kids, it makes McCarthyism seem almost quaint.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on December 21, 2007 7:30 AM

photos from two different stories showed the same man painting a storefront and stealing a wallet  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on December 21, 2007 7:28 AM

Filed under: Odds and ends, Internet Tools, iPhone

Christmas is approaching, and what better way to wile away a minute or two than with a virtual snow globe? The kind folks at Pop Art created this iPhone Snow Globe that one 'shakes' by changing the orientation of the iPhone (using this method, perhaps?).

It'll amuse you for a moment, and it is free so why not? That's what the holiday season is all about, right?

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Scott McNulty from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 21, 2007 7:00 AM

A list of controversial fashion advertisements. Can't believe the Calvin Klein stuff (the 1995 campaign especially) didn't make it on there.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 5:55 AM

Filed under: Cult of Mac, iPhone

You're standing in line when Bill Clinton, former US President, walks by with his Secret Service escort. Quick! What do you do? (1) Shake his hand. (2) Share a quick joke about Arkansas's night life. (3) Ask him to sign your iPhone.

If you're B. Ioffe, the answer is 3. He writes that President Clinton shared that he is an iPhone owner; Steve Jobs fixed him up with an iPhone for his personal use. This of course demands the question: If ex-Veep Al Gore is on Apple's Board of Directors, why didn't he snag his old buddy an iPhone himself? Or, as Ioffe writes, at least a prerelease 3G version.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 21, 2007 5:45 AM

story links: Know Your Meme, LOLCats, I can has cheeseburger, Make your own LOLCat Pics, LOLcode, History of according to Anil Dash, LOL reference links

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rocketboom, on December 21, 2007 5:30 AM

The Perl community just celebrated the 20th anniversary of Perl. Here are some stories from Perl hackers around the world about problems they've solved and memories they've made with the venerable, powerful, and still vital language.

Originally posted by chromatic from Perl.com, on December 21, 2007 4:45 AM

Non-profit writing organization 826NYC is holding a Scrabble for Cheaters competition on January 19th with the proceeds going to benefit their programs and students. The more money a team raises, the more they can cheat. Here are some of the cheats:

Flip a letter over and make it blank: $100
Add Q, Z, or X to any word, anywhere: $200
Passport: play a word in any language: $250
Reject another team's word: $450
Invent a word (must have a definition): $500

Entry information and rules available on the web site. Oh, and you'll be playing against John Hodgman.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 21, 2007 4:30 AM

John Maeda (watch his 2007 TEDTalk) has been named the next president of the Rhode Island School of Design. An artist and a coder, Maeda is an enthusiastic connector of art and technology. In his supercool announcement video, he gives a sense of where he hopes to lead the school, saying:

Technology has outpaced humanity, I wouldn't say tenfold, I'd say a millionfold. ... Meanwhile, we're still trying to figure out, what is this stuff for? I think that arts have to advance the culture of knowledge around technology. It hasn't happened yet, but it has to happen.

Maeda will take over in June 2008 from fellow TEDster Roger Mandle, who led the school for 15 years. Aside from growing the school and its endowment, and thus creating opportunities for more students around the world to get an arts and design education, Mandle worked to link RISD with the world, dovetailing with -- and driving -- the design boom of the past two decades. RISD's deep civic engagement with its hometown of Providence has led to both economic and artistic benefits -- showing a generation of students how design and the arts can be socially engaged.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on December 21, 2007 3:55 AM

The week after this year's LPW was my last LUG meeting of the year. I decided to give a small talk about using CPAN to get other people to write your code for you. Alas between the two meetings I went down with yet another cold, so it wasn't as well prepared or presented as I would have hoped for. Anyhow the talk is available from my LUG and the Internet Archive in several formats, Google Video will follow no doubt. Hants LUG 2007-12-08: Talks. (presentation and various video files) Internet Archive: Talk video. (video only, various formats)

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by ajt (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 21, 2007 2:48 AM

Pop quiz:

What f/stop will your flash give you through an umbrella at ISO 100 on 1/4 power at ten feet?

Not sure? Read on...

Guide numbers are basic, core, old-school flash photography knowledge. And I can all but hear the old-timers rolling their eyes and saying, "Gee, Dave, whaddya gonna tell us about next, bounce flash?"

But we have gotten so far from this kind of thinking, what with TTL everything, eTTL and CLS, that many people have never had occasion to think about guide numbers. Which is a shame, really, because a working knowledge of guide numbers (GN) can do something very cool: Get your exposures in the ballpark on the very first test shot.

Find out how helpful -- and easy -- using GN is after the jump.
____________________________


And Now, a Word From the Math Department

Okay, let's start with the definition. The guide number of a flash is the product of the f/stop of the exposure at a given distance at ISO 100. Wikipedia has a whole page on it here. But that's all pretty math-centered and kinda inverse-squarish. And you really do not need to know that stuff to use GN to zero in on a first exposure.

Here's how to use it. On just about any hot-shoe strobe capable of manual, there's a guide number calculator built in. The photo up top is from a Vivitar 285HV, which is a 70's-design manual-capable flash. Let's use this as an example.

The four variables are: F/stop, distance, power and ISO. You plug in any three, and the calculator spits out the fourth. For instance, click here to open the 285 GN dial in hi-res in a new window.

This GN calculator is set for full power manual at ISO 200. It is telling you that, at 30-40 feet, you would get about f/4 out of this flash. And if you set the flash to 1/2 power, you'd get f/2.8 out of it at that distance. Here's the cool thing: If you zoom the head -- even on this old-design flash -- it will move the dial and adjust the result.

Here is an example of more modern guide number calculators. Click here to see it big in a separate window. This display (from an SB-800) is typical of modern GN calculators. Every flash is a little different, but they all work pretty much the same way. One thing to remember: The GN calculator display will only pop up if the flash is at it's direct flash setting, i.e., no bounce. This, for instance, is telling me that I will get f/5.6 at ISO 400 on 1/4 power at 26 feet at the 50mm zoom setting.

Play around with your buttons a bit and you will see how yours works. What I like to do is to already know my ISO, my desired shooting aperture and an estimated flash-to-subject distance. Now, by setting up my GN calculator, I just dial in the different manual power settings until my desired f/stop lines up with my flash-to-subject distance.

So, this is pretty cumbersome and slow and why should you even bother, right?

Well, I'll tell you. The first five or six times you have to dial in your GN calculator and learn where you need to set your flash to get f/4 at, say 10 feet, you'll need the calculator to tell you. Then all of a sudden one day, you'll just know.

And if you learn a good anchor point, like say 1/8 power at 50mm zoom, 13-foot distance at ISO 400 = f/8 (exactly what an SB-800 will do at those settings) you'll quickly start interpolating around that to suit your given situation. And then, you really do not even need your GN calculator to get close on the first test.

"But wait," you say. "I'm a hot shot. I use snoots, grids, umbrellas and gels. Won't that screw it up?"

Yeah, maybe. But consistently so. A snoot will be dead-on with the expected aperture in the center of the beam. Your grid spot might knock it down half a stop. Your shoot-through umbrella might knock it down two stops -- but the difference will be the same, every time. Once you learn how much your umbrella knocks your bare flash down, just adjust for that. Ditto for the gels. A typical full color conversion gel knocks about 2/3 of a stop off of your flash.

If you are having trouble getting a handle on your early test pops -- you know, like getting first shots that are about 5 stops off -- this will zero you in real close, real fast. In fact, there is no faster way to save time on your first test pops than to learn to use your GN calculator.

Until you don't need it any more. Then, you'll be faster yet.

©2007 Strobist.com. If you are reading this content on another website, it was likely scraped by a spamsite bot. Please leave me a comment in the "TOS" section of www.strobist.blogspot.com.

Originally posted by David from Strobist, on December 20, 2007 9:19 PM

• Apperceptive's Blog
  Is one of my favorite things on the web right now, because they're showing off all the great work they're doing with Movable Type.
  (tags: movabletype sixapart apperceptive davidjacobs)

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on December 20, 2007 1:31 PM

The holiday season is upon us and nothing makes a better gift for a friend, colleague or loved one than offering a deeper insight and connection to the world. And there is no better way to experience these offerings than by viewing a well-made documentary. In the spirit of the season, the staff at Arts Engine is happy to share our Shortlist films - ones that express the strength of documentaries to change the world. So what films make the Arts Engine holiday gift guide Shortlist? Keep reading to find out.

American Dream

This 1990 Academy Award-winning documentary by Barbara Kopple is an even more poignant portrait of post-war labor strife than her earlier and more popular Harlan County, USA. The disparity in fanfare between the two films is partly because the story in American Dream, the protracted strike at Minnesota's Hormel meatpacking plant, poses more complex questions - about labor during the 1980's - that transcend the brutality documented in the gut-wrenching Harlan County, USA. American Dream might bring you a new perspective while you're bemoaning the halt of your favorite TV program during the WGA strike. I found it totally engrossing, very brave and a pitch-perfect use of the cinema verite style. — Katy Chevigny

Banished

Reparations for slavery in the USA has often seemed like an impossible victory, especially when you consider America's continuous struggle with racial tension and the perpetuation of global white dominance is it realistic to believe that our government would apologize to slave descendants for their hardships and redress the harm inflicted on living African Americans?

During the 1860s to the 1920s, American towns violently expelled their entire African American communities, forcefully displacing thousands of families from their homes. Banished tells the story of the black descendants and the white residents who struggle with their hidden history of forced migration. This film is a fascinating portrait of people trying to right past wrongs and the fall out that occurs along the way. It is moving and at moments, surprisingly hysterical. Banished really got me thinking about this subject matter in a new and different way. — Angela Tucker

Beyond The Steps

Beyond the Steps, a film about the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater is a beautifully shot portrait documenting the creation of the dance, "Love Stories" and its performance at the famed Mariinsky Theater in Russia.

The film not only allows you a closer view of the incredible dancers; it is difficult to pull your eyes away from their fantastic expression of human form, you also get a window into how this nearly 40 year old company has continued to stay at the forefront of modern dance. — Angela Tucker

The Birthday

I saw The Birthday during the summer at the New Festival. It follows the story of a young man who decides to become a woman in Iran.

This film is an amazing personal journey of balancing love with social acceptance and reveales complex attitudes towards sexuality in an Islamic Society. — Laimah Osman

Born into Brothels

The ability to see life through the artistic photographs of children often denied a platform to express their vision to the world is one of the most compelling aspects of this documentary. — Maia Ermita

Burden of Dreams

A perfect gift for the filmmaker friend, this 1982 documentary follows Werner Herzog as he struggles to realize his creative vision for his film Fitzcarraldo. Les Blank's non-intrusive style in directing Burden of Dreams permits the natural drama and turmoil of Herzog's Sisyphean task - making an epic film in the Amazon basin - to fully express itself. I love Burden of Dreams because it explores one more beautiful yet frightening, mandates of filmmaking: you have to be able to imagine the impossible. — Jolene Pinder

The Devil & Daniel Johnston

This film highlights the roots, development and the tragedy of a brilliant yet unstable mind. Daniel Johnston is a creative (musical and artistic) genius battling the demons of manic depression. — Leah Sapin

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

A film by definition is a moving image and when I watch any film, I appreciate the attention to the details that compose that image — colors, shapes and angles.

Errol Morris' The Fog of War elegantly weaves the composite details - interviews with Robert S. McNamara, archival footage and original footage to create a compelling visual. It is this narrative collage in conjunction with the somber score by composers Philip Glass and John Kusiak that sets the tone for this dark subject matter - lessons learned about the nature and conduct of modern war.

Morris enables McNamara to simply tell his story with very few interjections. In this way, he allows the audience to evaluate the moral fiber of the former Secretary of Defense instead of imposing his own judgment. — Jennifer Gallardo

Lost in La Mancha

Though Lost in La Mancha does not fall squarely in the social-issue category, it is a great film for anyone interested in why film projects fail, even when money is plentiful and everyone knows what they are doing. It's also great if you love folly as much as I do.

Terry Gilliam set out to make a feature based on the famous Cervantes novel. After ten years in preparation and millions of dollars spent, the film was never made. The problems are so numerous that they lend a surreal tone to the documentary, casting a life-is-stranger-than-fiction glow on the whole thing.

Filmmakers Keith Fulton and Louis Pepe do a great job capturing the frustration and the madness. In the process they reveal the peculiar frailty of production and set up the gratifying notion that films are very hard to make and anyone who completes one deserves a lot of credit. — Enrico Cullen

Mai's America

The story of a high school girl from Hanoi, Vietnam who spends a year in a small Mississippi town; Mai's America offers a fresh look at American culture including race, class, gender and identity through the eyes of a teenager living in the USA for the first time.

The film is humorous as it is insightful giving the viewer the opportunity to laugh with (and at) Mai and her American associates as they stumble over cultural differences and preconceptions of one another. — Kasmore Rhedrick

Me and Rubyfruit

Sadie Benning's Me and Rubyfruit is a personal documentary filmed in her bedroom with a Fisher-Price Pixelvision camera. It's inspiring to see that you don't need high-end tools and resources to create something beautiful and poignant. — Laimah Osman

Phantom India

When I watched all seven hours of Louis Malle's 1962 Phantom India in film school I didn't anticipate how much this documentary series would stay with me when I traveled to India for the first time more than five years later. Malle is the quintessential unreliable narrator, simultaneously striving for objectivism while offering an unending stream of provocative commentary on India's cultural, political and religious complexities. Phantom India was impossible to get a hold of for many years, but thanks to the Criterion Collection, it's now available on DVD with English subtitles. — Shira Golding

Roger & Me

This oldie but goodie should be a part of everyone's documentary collection. I personally like to watch it for Christmas. But, I am just that kind of person. Maybe you are too. — Ryann Scypion

Originally posted by (author unknown) from MediaRights: News, on December 20, 2007 1:16 PM

Instead of making traditional cutout cookies, try Elise Bauer's recipe for stained glass cookies whose centers are filled with melted hard candies.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on December 20, 2007 1:00 PM

There's something to be said for pausing in the fast-paced environment of New York to truly capture the essence of our city. On the other hand, speeding things up can really give one some perspective on the dynamics of New York. Below is a time-lapse video taken between September 1, 2006 and August 31, 2007. It's of Bryant Park in midtown Manhattan looking east to west, and the video features 4,385 individual photographs taken from a stationary elevated position once every two hours for 365 days.

For those interested in similar projects, Photojojo has a thorough tutorial on time-lapse photography. We briefly mentioned an alternate tutorial back in September here. The Simpsons paid a tribute to time-lapse photography this Sunday in an homage to Brooklyn's own Noah Kalina.

Originally posted by Dave Hogarty from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on December 20, 2007 11:31 AM

In 2006, filmmaker Daphne Zuniga came to TED and made an independent movie about it -- the talks, the hallway conversations, the connections and unmissable moments.

Her film, The Future We Will Create, was released on DVD exclusively via NetFlix, where it became a hit, with more than 12,000 reviews so far. "I've kept it altogether too long," one viewer wrote to us, "because I find myself watching it again and again ... "

This week, the DVD has been released for sale, in a package that also contains a DVD of 12 full-length TEDTalks. Which is great news for your queue, if you're a serial NetFlixer. And it's still available for rent on NetFlix, of course.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED | TEDBlog, on December 20, 2007 11:22 AM

Filed under: Developer, iPhone

Apple has posted sample code demonstrating how to handle iPhone or iPod touch orientation events through JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. Whenever an iPhone rotates, it triggers orientation events that you can catch in Mobile Safari. Apple provides a sample iPhoneOrientation.js file that implements a typical handler, window.onorientationchange. CSS attributes can dynamically change how the webpage appears.

I loaded a copy of the sample over at my website. If you'd like to give it a try on your iPhone, navigate here.

Thanks, syd

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 20, 2007 10:00 AM

Our friends at StrikeSwag.com have just gotten the official strike shirts back in stock (pictured at left).  And for those of you who're just a little bit late with your holiday cards, Simpsons writer Tom Gammill has a custom designed card that you can order.  Click over to pick up some swag and support the solidarity fund!  

Originally posted by United Hollywood from United Hollywood, on December 20, 2007 9:06 AM

Hot off the tipline, we have some juicy churning of the Yountville rumor mill, as it appears that Thomas Keller is making significant headway in his long-awaited burger project: "Finally opening his burger and half bottles restaurant. Will be a part of Ad Hoc. Is doing very well with the planning commission and design phase, just working on some small issues." [EaterWire via Eater SF]

Originally posted by BL from Eater, on December 20, 2007 8:45 AM

Mabe by RGB for PlayStation. Via FFFFound.

Originally posted by willprotein from Protein® OS -, on December 20, 2007 7:06 AM

By Michael Massing

One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer
by Nathaniel Fick

Generation Kill: Devil Dogs, Iceman, Captain America, and the New Face of American War
by Evan Wright

House to House: An Epic Memoir of War
by David Bellavia, with John R. Bruning

Chasing Ghosts: Failures and Facades in Iraq: A Soldier's Perspective
by Paul Rieckhoff

Love My Rifle More Than You: Young and Female in the US Army
by Kayla Williams, with Michael E. Staub

Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq
by Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor

In House to House: An Epic Memoir of War, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia--a gung-ho supporter of the Iraq war--casually recounts how in 2004, while his platoon was on just its second patrol in Iraq,

Originally posted by Michael Massing from The New York Review of Books, on December 20, 2007 7:00 AM

Gmail Greasemonkey API.

Semi-official GMail API from Mark Pilgrim for use in Greasemonkey. Used to build RTM + GMail

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on December 20, 2007 6:56 AM

It ain't the Velib, but yesterday it was announced that Dutch team West 8 would design a 40-acre park for Governors Island, which will include a fleet of 3,000 wooden bicycles free for use by island visitors.

The Times reports:

The design, commissioned by the Governors Island Preservation and Education Corporation, calls for transforming much of the flat, sober island, which is roughly a half-mile from Lower Manhattan, into green space. That includes a two-mile promenade at the water's edge, a new park on the southern flat expanse of landfill - where abandoned Coast Guard buildings are to be demolished - and an improved park in the island's northern historic district. The architects proposed using the detritus from the buildings that are to be destroyed to form hills that would exploit the island's views, which include the Statue of Liberty.

The Post, which says the Governors Island Gondola could also become reality, had a somewhat dispiriting quote from Mayor Bloomberg on the bike share feature, particularly when juxtaposed with designer Adriaan Geuze's comments.

Adriaan Geuze, founder of West 8, said the company's Dutch background made including bicycles in the plan a no-brainer.

"I am from Holland, where bicycles are an important part of street life, and everybody bikes," he said. "You could never walk the entire island, but the bikes will help get people to experience more of the island and go anywhere they want to."

Bloomberg said he was particularly impressed by the bike theme, joking "it's a great idea; you don't have to worry about them being stolen" because "you can't take them anyplace" off the island.

The Times says the park is expected to be completed by 2012.

Rendering: West 8/Rogers Marvel Architects/Diller Scofidio + Renfro/Quennell Rothschild/SMWM

Share this

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on December 20, 2007 6:54 AM

Nurture is really kicking ass these days....first the IQ thing and now this.

The offspring of expensive stallions owe their success more to how they are reared, trained and ridden than good genes, a study has found. Only 10% of a horse's lifetime winnings can be attributed to their bloodline, research in Biology Letters shows.

That suggests, a la Moneyball, that buying horses with so-so lineages and training them really well could make for a better return on investment.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 20, 2007 5:59 AM

Here are some from the selection.

A-:

A- for effort:

I always think pooches are cuter than humans so I am stunned that this girl's cuteness actually rivals her pooch's!

This is wrong:

Hail:

Cute:

The winners:

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on December 20, 2007 5:50 AM

Clever, inexpensive attachment makes your built-in flash infinitely more useful.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Elsewhere, on December 20, 2007 4:46 AM

The Smart Car is coming to the United States! And very soon too. The little car that could, manufactured by Daimler, is expected to join the ranks of available subcompact vehicles in the US in 2008, and hopefully, convince more people that when personal transportation is concerned, bigger is most certainly not better.

(more…)

Originally posted by Jorge from INHABITAT, ReBlogged by Steve on Dec 20, 2007 at 09:24 AM

Originally posted by Jorge from Eyebeam reBlog, on December 20, 2007 4:24 AM

a wonderfully addictive Flash game, it also acted as a trailhead for a month-long ARG for CBS's Numb3rs [via] 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on December 19, 2007 8:34 PM

Filed under: Apple Corporate, Rumors, Apple

Always provocative, sometimes right, often wrong, Think Secret was our scandalous favorite rumors site and now it is gone. According to the Settlement page listed at their site, Apple and Think Secret have ended their lawsuit and Nick Ciarelli has shut down the site.

Goodbye Think Secret, we'll miss you.

Thanks everyone who sent this in.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Erica Sadun from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 19, 2007 8:15 PM

running the free service to build up a corpus of voices? neat idea, but seems inefficient  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on December 19, 2007 4:49 PM

Reader JS wrote in: “Sandy Koufax did steroids. He was given them by the Dodgers doctors, it’s in Jane Leavy’s book. It wasn’t legal. That was forty years ago. I don’t have any idea what Mickey Mantle was on. People are flawed. Baseball is imperfect.”

Jane Leavy’s book, Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy, is a great read, but I don’t have a copy handy. After checking with Bob Timmerman who did, there is a reference to steroids in the book. I was able to get in touch with Jane Leavy to clarify.

I asked Ms. Leavy if she meant corticosteroids or if Koufax, a player of the same era that we know steroids and hGH made some small inroads into the game, now had to be lumped in with the “juicers.” Leavy states she meant corticosteroids, the same type of “cortisone injection” that we see performed so often in baseball to this day.

The use of the word “steroids” as a generic is often confusing. At least one hero remains safe for today.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on December 19, 2007 3:51 PM

The Hub is the newest initiative of WITNESS, a human rights organization that uses video and online technologies to open the eyes of the world to human rights violations. For the past 15 years, WITNESS has worked with hundreds of human rights groups in over 70 countries to turn compelling witness testimony and images into strategic campaigns that make a difference. Through the Hub, anyone can upload something they have filmed or recorded, and provide information and resources for viewers to learn more and to take action, or simply watch video that has been given sufficient context and background to enable you to understand what is happening. Organizations and groups can use their own or other users' videos to mobilize people online in support of actions to stop and prevent human rights abuses. Join WITNESS on the Hub today in bringing stories of human rights abuses to international attention!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from MediaRights: News, on December 19, 2007 3:16 PM

Vagabond Jan Chipchase spends most of the year traveling around remote parts of the globe figuring out how people actually use technology -- particularly phones. He has noticed a new behaivor among his native hosts. If they are young, they want to borrow his phone and mine if for goodies they can copy.  Here is Jan's first experience in Ulan Bator, Mongolia.

Wandering around UB and chance up disciples [monks] playing football in a temple complex. They invite me into the warmth for a reason - to mine the memory of my phone of all its value. Half a dozen files transferred from my device - particularly interested in obtaining photos of women from Japan.

Recently Jan was visiting Uzbekistan and noticed a similar trend:

Whilst taking breakfast in a roadside hut encounter a situation ... where a local kid takes my phone, switches on Bluetooth and data-mines it for music and pictures.

He adds as an aside:

[I] usually carry a pack of non-local gum to ease the way through customs and a myriad of social interactions. Its about time to create a decent travel pack of bluetoothable music and photos.

Not a bad idea.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Street Use, on December 19, 2007 3:08 PM

I'm still mystified by certain aspects of Major League Baseball's drug policy.

Consider the following:

An aging pitcher is suffering from a variety of persistent injuries. They are healing slowly. He is depressed and lethargic, and anxious about his career. He goes to see his doctor. The doctor finds that the patient's testosterone count is low. He prescribes the pitcher a small dose of testosterone, as part of  his rehab. The patient is desperate, and the doctor agrees to experiment with testosterone, and see if it speeds recovery.

Questions:

1. Has the pitcher violated MLB's drug policy? As far as I can tell, yes. Testosterone is on baseball's list of banned substances.

2. Has the patient violated the law? Of course not. Testosterone is an FDA approved medication.

3. Has the doctor done anything wrong? Not at all. The doctor could also have prescribed human growth hormone, if he wanted to.  Even though HGH is not approved for injury recovery, a physician is free to prescrbe virtually any drug he/she wants to, in an off-label manner.

4. Should the doctor and the athlete feel guilty about what they've done? I don't see why. The foundation of our medical system is that physicans have broad leeway to act in the best interests of their patients, and if the physician thinks that testosterone might help the athlete he's entirely within his rights to prescribe it. The pitcher is also entitled to take every step he can to regain his health. Surely it is wrong--if not unconstitutional-- for an employer to impede an employee from receiving the best medical attention.

5. Will Major League Baseball ever find out about the pitcher's testosterone use? Not unless the pitcher tells someone. The transaction between a patient and a doctor is, of course, covered by patient confidentiality laws.

6. Does this mean that lots of professional athletes may already be using substances like testosterone--and we have no way of finding out? Of course!

7. So why did Vina and Pettitte and Bennett get in trouble? Because, presumably, they obtained their HGH without an prescription--which is illegal.

8. So wait. The league's drug policy is an attempt to prevent the use of drugs without a prescription? No. Its supposed to prevent the use of a broad class of drugs. But since the league's policies  clearly can't govern drugs prescribed legally by a physican--particuarly if they are undetectable-- it has the effect of only preventing the use of drugs obtained illegally.

9. I'm confused. Aren't there already laws in place in America preventing the use of drugs without a prescription? Yes. (And I'm confused too.)

Will someone please tell me if I've got this right?

Originally posted by malcolmgladwell from gladwell.com, on December 19, 2007 1:06 PM

The kind folks at imeem.com asked us to make a list of our favorite songs of 2007 for their Year End Playlist Extravaganza... and we complied! Check out our faves, along with year-end lists by Tegan and Sarah, Ashley Tisdale, Aesop Rock, Girlie Action, etc...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on December 19, 2007 12:40 PM

How-To: Make a popcorn popper coffee roaster — Engadget shows how to modify a popcorn popper to control your coffee roasts better. You can roast without this mod, but you have less control.

See also: Coffee Roasting diaries, Colombia Tolima Planadas - El Jordan, Carmel Coffee Marketing, Peets in the deep south

Tagged as: coffee  roasting 

Originally posted by Adam Kalsey from Adam Kalsey, on December 19, 2007 12:30 PM

Filed under: Gaming, iPod Family, Software, Odds and ends, Universal Binary

Boy, it seems like everyone was waiting for me to write up my gift guide before releasing some interesting Mac games this year. First Horde of Orcs comes out, then Sonic of all things appears on the iPod, and now here's two more fun gaming experiences appearing on the Mac.

First, our sister gaming blog Joystiq reports that PopCap's crack casual game Peggle has appeared for OS X, and just like most of PopCap's games, it's so addictive it should probably be regulated by pharmacologists. It's a universal binary, too, and right now it's only $10 (50% off from a sale on PopCap's site). Be prepared to disappear from your relatives for long stretches of time over the holidays, though-- anyone who can only play one round of this at a time is either not human or just in serious trouble with their spouse.

And MacNN reports that Bomberman has now appeared on iTunes as well. Hudson Software has produced an official port that features an "intuitive control scheme" (that I'd be interested to see), an exclusive boss stage for the iPod, and the option to play the game's music or your own during gameplay. Wild. That game is $5 and available as a download from iTunes.

It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas for Mac gamers-- turns out there may be more underneath the tree than we hoped earlier in the year.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Mike Schramm from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 19, 2007 12:00 PM

Eyewitness account of pimply teen absolutely killing the most difficult song on Guitar Hero 3 in the midst of holiday shopping at Best Buy.

There is complete silence. Even my son is staring slackjawed, like he does in church during communion, not understanding the content of the ritual but understanding the tone and sacredness of the space. At just over 6 minutes, the song becomes even more ludicrous. While actually playing it will ever remain for me an uncrossable gap, I am enough a student of the form to recognize the crux. He is Lance Armstrong approaching the bottom of Alpe D'Huez: Will he attack? Kyle has yet to use the Star Power crutch he has carried throughout his meditation. He continues to ignore it.

Here's a video of someone else playing the same song. In. San. Ity.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 19, 2007 11:38 AM

New feature release of Perl, the world’s best programming language. Oh, yeah, that’s what I said, bitch. My regex-savant mind is immediately drawn to the new stuff in Perl’s regex engine, including recursive patterns (which PCRE has offered for years, but Perl 5.10’s allow backtracking) and, at last, named captures (which PCRE and a few other engines have offered for a while, too).

But there’s really a slew of new stuff, much of it back-ported from the long-in-development Perl 6 endeavor.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on December 19, 2007 10:08 AM

Opening at the IFC Center on Dec. 26th is Smiley Face, the ultimate stoner film from director Gregg Araki (Mysterious Skin). Anna Faris (former PAPER cover-girl) is delightful as Jane, who accidentally eats all the marijuana-laced cupcakes in her L.A. apartment fridge and has a series of calamitous and hilarious misadventures one day. The movie feels like one of those Preston Sturges “bender” movies like Mad Wednesday, as Jane’s pot-fueled paranoia sets her off and running on many madcap missions. Faris's slack-jawed stoner face is comic perfection -- her reactions at an acting audition, a dentist office, the home of an old teacher, or a meat plant will leave you helplessly laughing.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on December 19, 2007 8:13 AM

    

Photos from shotbart as suggested by lomokev in this Flickr Central discussion.
See more in My Lilliput.

Originally posted by Heather Champ from Flickr Blog, on December 19, 2007 7:53 AM

Filed under: Software, iPhone

The busy bees at Ambrosia Software have cranked out several updates this week, including the $15 iPhone ringtone tool iToner 1.0.5. (improved support for iPhone OS 1.1.1 + bug fixes); the free envelope printing utility EasyEnvelopes 1.0.6 (unspecified fixes and enhancements); the $15 menubar search enhancement iSeek (Leopard compatibility); and the $19 file transfer streamliner Dragster 1.0.5 (Leopard fixes). All can be demoloaded from Ambrosia directly.

Now that there's a blessed method for using GarageBand (not free, but bundled with new Macs) to create custom ringtones, it will be interesting to see how iToner continues to evolve and extend.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Michael Rose from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on December 19, 2007 7:45 AM

Not surprising at all that Britney Spears’s 16-year-old sister is pregnant. Depressing, yes, given that this is likely to garner more media attention than the entire U.S. presidential race, but surprising, no. What is surprising is that their mother had a deal for a parenting book, and only now has it been cancelled. I say go with it, and just change the title to Raising Skanks the Spears Way.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on December 19, 2007 7:13 AM

Some advice from Michael J. Fox.

No matter how much fame you have, it's not something that belongs to you. If I'm famous, that doesn't belong to me -- that belongs to you. If you can't remember who I am, I'm no longer famous.

And a bunch of other stuff that's surprisingly candid and good.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 19, 2007 5:17 AM

A doctor is facing disciplinary action after taking a picture of a patient's penis during his gallbladder surgery at a hospital in Phoenix.

The 37 year-old man whose penis bears the tatooed slogan 'Hot Rod' says he feels violated by having its image captured by a doc with a mobile phone.

The incident was reported by a member of surgical staff at the hospital. An investigation is underway. Dr Hansen has been placed on administrative leave.

[via metro]

Related, sort of: - Nurse fired for camera prank

Originally posted by emily from picturephoning.com, on December 19, 2007 5:09 AM

Today I published the Incomplete history of Perl as my birthday gift to Perl. Users of git or mercurial can perform the initial clone now and avoid the rush later: git clone git://utsl.gen.nz/perl (also available via HTTP at http://git.utsl.gen.nz/perl) Note that the preparation of this history has involved many long toiling hours of correlation of changelog information, searching for and attempting to apply literally thousands of patches from p5p archives and comparing them to the binary releases, c, etc. I believe it to be a significant achievement into the restoration of the early revisions of Perl. It certainly wouldn't have been possible without the support of my employer, Catalyst IT, and of course the wonderful revision toolkit that is Git.

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by mugwumpjism (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 19, 2007 5:06 AM

Pricing, a private beta, and whether you'll have to shell out to go pro—we got it all. Just don't ask us to get more right now; we're still not sure how we feel about what we had to do just to get these details.

Read More...

Originally posted by dchartier@arstechnica.com (David Chartier) from Infinite Loop, on December 19, 2007 4:38 AM

• Liu and de Blasio Announce Transit Bill of (Yeah,) Rights (Second Ave Sagas)
• Before a Fare Hike, MTA Should Control Project Costs (News)
  
• Fulton Transit Center Estimates Keep Growing (Metro) 
• Arrival Signs, Computer-Driven Trains Could Be Scrapped (NY1)
• MetroCards Considered for Cabs (Post)
• City Laying Groundwork for Post-Bloomberg PlaNYC (Sun)
• New Mets Stadium to Be Set in an Ocean of Parking (Curbed) 
• DOT Refuses Stoplight at Perilous School Intersection (Brooklyn Eagle) 
• Bush to Sign Weakened Energy Bill (NYT, Grist)
  
• What Happened in Bali? (NYT)
• Dear Car That Beeped at Me... (Bike Snob NYC)
  

Share this

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on December 19, 2007 3:52 AM

Rhizome affiliated with the New Museum of Contemporary Art in 2003, when the organizations identified a shared commitment to emerging art and ideas. Founded in 1977 by visionary curator Marcia Tucker, the New Museum is the first and only Museum in New York dedicated to contemporary art and has a tradition of innovative and risk-taking programs centered around a mission of 'new art, new ideas.' On December 1, the New Museum opened the doors to its new home, the Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa/SANAA-designed seven-story structure on the Bowery. Rhizome will play a significant role in the new building and partner in the presentation of new media art through co-presented exhibitions and a monthly event series. Our members receive a discount on programming and also on merchandise- books, artists limited editions- at the New Museum Store. One of our first co-presented exhibitions is BLACK ON WHITE, GREY ASCENDING, a new commission by internet art collective, YOUNG-HAE CHANG HEAVY INDUSTRIES. Installed in the lobby gallery of the Museum, the artists expanded their usual single-channel format to a seven-screen installation that, through their signature-style language-based Flash animations, narrates a chilling story of abduction and murder from seven points of view. The main, inaugural exhibition Unmonumental is a four-part show that examines the practice of collage in contemporary art and defines the current times as an age of crumbled symbols and broken icons. Starting as a survey of recent sculpture, Unmonumental will morph into an assemblage of objects, images, sounds, and internet-based works. Montage: Unmonumental online, the fourth and final addition to the show, is organized by Rhizome, and will be on view online starting February 15. Rhizome celebrates this important phase in the life of both institutions and looks forward to connecting new media art to broader audiences through this exciting new building. - Rhizome

http://www.newmuseum.org

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rhizome News, on December 18, 2007 7:00 PM

         

See more of Dave Gorman’s Three Part Polaroid Portraits.

Originally posted by Heather Champ from Flickr Blog, on December 18, 2007 4:06 PM

Good news: Alinea's Grant Achatz announces that his cancer is in remission. Achatz found out earlier this year that he had cancer of the mouth and instead of the traditional surgery route, he worked with his doctors on a treatment that would allow him to continue to cook, his profession and passion.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 18, 2007 3:07 PM

omg giant soup dumpling
Originally uploaded by yi.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, typepad, on December 18, 2007 2:12 PM

From an Associated Press press article today, on ex-major leaguer player Fernando Vina admitting to using Human Growth Hormone:

Slow to recover from knee and hamstring injuries, Vina played only 61 games for the Cardinals in 2003. He said he was under pressure from the team and himself to get back on the field, so he tried HGH.

''I tried everything rehabbing,'' Vina said. ''I came to a point that I was desperate.''

New York Yankees pitcher Andy Pettitte, also cited in the report, recently acknowledged using HGH for a similar reason -- to try to recover from a sore elbow in 2002.

Backup catcher Gary Bennett, also named by Mitchell, said he took HGH in 2003 because of a knee injury. He signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers on Monday.

At 5-foot-9, 170 pounds, Vina said he wasn't trying to bulk up -- his job was to slap the ball around and use his quickness to get on base. He said he turned to HGH hoping to get healthy.

''Was it right? No. Obviously, it was wrong,'' Vina said. ''I'm embarrassed by it.''

Can someone tell me why Vina said "obviously, it was wrong"?

Let's assume, for a moment, that what Vina said was true--that he only took HGH because he was trying to recover from an injury.  Let's assume the same of Pettitte and Bennett. I think we can also agree that there is reasonable evidence that Human Growth Hormone speeds recovery.

So what, exactly, is wrong with an athlete--someone who makes a living with their body--taking medication to speed their recovery from injury?  Is it wrong to take ibruprofen? Is it wrong to ice a sore elbow? For that matter, is it ethical or even legal for Major League Baseball--or indeed any employee or governing body--to deny an employee access to a potentially beneficial medical treatment?

The closest analogy I can think of here is to medical marijuana, which is another case where it seems difficult for some people in positions of power to understand that a drug can be used for more than one purpose.

Originally posted by malcolmgladwell from gladwell.com, on December 18, 2007 1:09 PM

Photograph from yi on Flickr

You know you're in for something special when your dumpling comes with its own straw. And caution label. And is the size of a kitten.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on December 18, 2007 1:00 PM

It appears from dozens of reports that supermodel-cum-singer Carla Bruni is dating France's top dog Nicholas Sarkozy! They were seen together this past weekend walking around Disneyland Paris together. Sarkozy is recently divorced and I thought he'd been dating a Parisian Television star but apparently he instead has fallen under the same spell that claimed Mick Jagger and Eric Clapton when they met the French beauty. I had the chance to have lunch with Carla at the Carlyle this summer to discuss her second album No Promises (she was featured in our September issue) and I too fell in love when she ordered the steak special for lunch! She told me that some blood types need red meat and potatoes more than others and I had to second that! She was so sweet, down to earth and unaffected I couldn't believe that she had been one of the women who broke up Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on December 18, 2007 12:16 PM

Rules of sidewalk conduct in winter:

1. Thou shalt not stop for no reason in the middle of morning foot traffic to look for something in your bag.

2. Thou should not even think of walking three-across with two friends, making everyone behind you go around and through icy snow banks to get ahead of your incredible slowness.

And now, we think we've found the ultimate sidewalk no-no: the Glover, a two-in-one mitten combination meant for cold-weather strolling lovers. So now you can have a whole new kind of sidewalk faux-pas to hate on with your friends.

Frankly, we don't understand how this could exist. Not only is it insane to think you actually need this instead of just holding hands with your own pairs like normal people, but what do you do when you reach your destination? Casually remove your love mitten and ask to see a menu?

We've seen it online, but thankfully, never in person (and yet it's sold out on several shopping sites...)

We really just don't understand this accessory. If we saw a couple walking 1mph because of this thing, we think we've have to bodycheck them into the nearest open store cellar. You?

--ALISON COOL

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on December 18, 2007 7:00 AM

Despite taking out full-page print ads touting their collusion unity, cracks are beginning to surface amongst the handful of major media corporations who make up the AMPTP's core decision makers.

Thanks to reporting by Nikki Finke and the Wall Street Journal, the disagreements and infighting between the moguls have become an open secret. With their businesses so different, some of them are angrily watching their bottom lines (and pipelines) suffer in service of the agendas of their competitors.

For the past two decades, the moguls have bought into the idea that they all save money if they negotiate as a group. And up until now, such a strategy has served them well. But present circumstances have changed the equation. Yet still the companies are hesitant (at least thus far) to negotiate individually.

Why?

Unfortunately for writers, Hollywood below-the-line workers, Los Angeles businesses and, yes, even the companies themselves, what’s driving the negotiations (or lack thereof) is Nick Counter’s agenda. And the bizarre part is, that agenda doesn’t necessarily line up with several of the congloms.

Compiled from sources close to the companies who are frustrated by the lack of progress, below is a brief primer on which company stands where at the moment:

Warner Brothers is well positioned to hold out for a long strike, and right now, it almost seems that’s what the company wants. They’re owned by Time Warner, a very diversified media conglomerate, and their television network (“The CW”) isn’t a big profit generator, so it doesn’t matter if their season tanks. Warner Brothers is the company most well-aligned with Nick Counter’s strategy because, for them, the numbers make sense.

There's also an interesting side plot for Warners: They've been quietly looking to acquire CBS, and so it's in their interest to see CBS's stock price fall. Warners and CBS are partners in The CW network, but while CBS is the reigning #1 network, The CW has dramatically underperformed at #5. Some question how much longer the network will exist. In the event of The CW's demise, Warners will need to own another network for their corporate portfolio.

CBS is a company primarily in the scripted TV business, and stands to see its season decimated by the strike without a juggernaut like "American Idol" to rely on. They’re also aware of Warner’s intentions, and seeing their season sink even further is not comforting. They have a lot to gain in seeing this settled quickly.

Sony is primarily in the film business, so they have felt less impact than the television-heavy companies. But it’s escalating as more movies fall apart due to script problems (like "Angels and Demons") and it’s starting to affect their pipeline. They’ve run the numbers and come to the conclusion that the strike is, from their perspective, “crazy.”

Paramount is primarily a movie studio, and is facing the same problems as Sony, with much the same attitude. And they're getting bolder about saying so.

Fox is rumored to see an opportunity to capitalize on the other networks' woes with "American Idol," which will massacre the repeats and reality shows of their competitors. Also, like Time Warner, News Corp has very deep pockets. Even if some of their competitors crash and burn, they know they’ll survive.

NBC/Universal, like Warners, has a well-diversified corporate parent in GE. Still, Universal has lost some movies and is facing a wave of cancelled/sub par projects if this lasts past January. Furthermore, NBC is givng back money to advertisers and seeing a migration away from its network that could be permanent. (Everyone’s nightmare about TV generally.)

GE can easily withstand the losses. But our leakers say Fairfield, CT realizes that the bottom-line economics of holding out make no sense, and Universal City, at least, is entirely in agreement.

Disney/ABC is taking a hit on the network side, although they’ll have more scripted programming than most with 8 episodes of Lost to air. In the negotiating room, Disney acts very unwilling to settle. However, it’s rumored that the attitude at the negotiating table does not always reflect the opinions of top management.

UA and MGM are not thrilled about any of this, especially since their share of the contract that the WGA is asking for currently comes to less than half a million dollars a year for each of them. The havoc that the strike is playing with their new business seems high when the cost of settling is so low.

So with all these differing corporate circumstances, what exactly is Nick Counter's agenda?

In a nutshell: His agenda is Nick Counter.

Counter is very proud to have made his reputation by screwing the unions on DVDs 20 years ago. And with the current negotiation his last, he’s obsessed with cementing his “legacy” by keeping everyone out of what he believes is the next frontier of big profits – the Internet.

He’s leading the charge, and the collateral damage to the studios and networks (or anyone else, for that matter) isn’t his concern. If this year’s TV season goes up in flames, or the 2009 theatrical schedule falls apart, it doesn’t affect him – he’s retiring.

Think about it: Nick Counter is the only one in this entire process - on any side - with absolutely nothing to lose.

So where are the CEOs in all of this? Why isn't somebody standing up?

Although he does not lead the CEOs in any real sense, sources say that in the absence of a real leader pushing for a deal, Nick's hawk position (and he is the real hawk, along with Warner Brothers) is the default.

Furthermore, the real problem is the one Nikki Finke points out – in a small company town, the CEO’s are all afraid to be the one who broke with the herd. Nobody wants to be ostracized from the Big Media Frat Club. Even, apparently, if it comes at the expense of their own business' financial health. Even if it gives their competitors the ability to drag out the strike and tank their own stock price.

And that's sad for us all - except Nick Counter - on so many levels.

Still, it's not too late for one of the moguls to step up. We hope, for everyone's sake, that they do.

Originally posted by Lew Wasserman's Plumber from United Hollywood, on December 18, 2007 7:00 AM

Woman with a Veil on Fifth Avenue, N.Y.C. © Diane Arbus

Today's NYT reports that the estate of Diane Arbus has gifted her massive personal and professional archive to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:

Now the photographer’s estate has presented this intimate chronicle of Arbus’s life — her complete archives — to the Met as a gift, along with hundreds of early and unique photographs; negatives and contract prints of 7,500 rolls of film; and hundreds of glassine print sleeves that she personally annotated before her death by suicide in 1971.

This is a huge coup for the Met whose contemporary photography offerings have been minimal to date. Congrats to Jeff Rosenheim, curator of the Met’s department of photographs (and my MFA thesis adviser), on this great gift.

Originally posted by Amy Stein from Amy Stein | Photography | Blog, on December 18, 2007 6:15 AM

[Image: Chartres Cathedral as rendered in Quake 3, via Quake 3 World, an image that has almost nothing to do with this post].

When Mark Twain visited Montreal in 1881, he said it was the first time he'd ever been in a city "where you couldn't throw a brick without breaking a church window." Montreal, you see, has lots of churches.
Twain was then told, however, that the city would soon build another church – and perhaps another, and another – and "I said the scheme is good," Twain responded, "but where are you going to find room? They said, we will build it on top of another church and use an elevator."
Church of God, Elevator.
Does this off-the-cuff remark from a 19th century novelist exhibit a more adventurous sense of space and structure than the buildings which pass for architectural design today?
In any case, all of this reminds me of a post here on BLDGBLOG last summer in which it was proposed that "elevators could be used as prayer chapels – vertically nomadic radial spaces in which the pious... could spend time alone and think."
Paraphrasing myself, then, a year later, could you construct an earthless Vatican made of nothing but elevators riding up and down throughout the atmosphere? Off in the urban distance you see what surely must be a mirage: a glass and steel cathedral hovering two miles off the surface of the earth, made of nothing but elevator-chapels, a metallic mist of lifts, a sky-cloud of holy space in western sunlight.
From earth to the moon, via the Sistine Elevator.

(Twain quotation found thanks to an anonymous commenter on this post this morning).

Originally posted by Geoff Manaugh from BLDGBLOG, on December 18, 2007 6:03 AM

A couple weeks back, on a blustery morning at the Union Square Greenmarket, I had a very interesting conversation with Karen Weinberg of 3-Corner Field Farm. A small dairy sheep farm on New York's border with Vermont, 3-Corner Field produces outstanding farmstead sheep's milk cheeses and yogurts. If you can get your hands on their luscious, showstopping bloomy-rind cheese called Shushan Snow, you will not be disappointed.

On this particular Wednesday, Weinberg was also selling a couple of aged Pyrénées-style cheeses, one of which was perfectly smoked by the Monks of New Skete. As we stood teeth-chattering among her hanging sheepskins, the topic of vegetarian cheese came up, and I discovered that Weinberg has some really interesting, if contrarian, ideas about the subject.

The term vegetarian cheese might sound redundant to you; after all, cheese is made with milk, which clearly can be obtained without killing an animal. What most people mean when they use the term vegetarian cheese is that the cheese was made with vegetarian rennet. (See below for a primer on vegetarian vs. animal rennets.) Some vegetarians are OK eating cheeses made with animal rennet, but many will seek out ones made with vegetarian rennet, especially since the latter are quite prevalent nowadays. But is vegetarian cheese really vegetarian? Weinberg doesn't think so, and after talking to her I have my doubts as well.

Granted, making cheese doesn't involve any direct slaughter, but what if we take a look at things from a higher vantage point? A dairy farm is part of a larger agricultural system, one that is often complicated by industrial agriculture, but one that is plain to see at the scale of a small farm like 3-Corner Field. Many people don't make this seemingly obvious connection, but in order for a sheep (or any mammal) to lactate, she has to give birth first. From this new generation, only half, at most, will be milkers (the ewes). What happens to all the little ram lambs? Well, sure, some of them can go on to satisfying careers as professional studs, but most will just end up on the plate. In addition, even many of the milkers end up as food, not so much in this country but in others where mutton is more readily consumed.

What's the alternative? For farmers to keep these animals as pets? Even in a small operation, this would be untenable. The point is that if you look at dairy farming with a wide-angle lens, all of a sudden what comes into focus is a whole lot of meat production. So, in a sense, cheese can never be vegetarian because it leads to the indirect slaughter of animals for their meat. Small-scale farmers like Weinberg, after all, need to exploit all available profit centers if they want to stay in business; if she didn't sell her lamb meat (or her sheepskins), she wouldn't be able to make ends meet with her wonderful cheeses alone.

This is a potentially controversial viewpoint, and I'm curious to hear your thoughts about it. Is it right to draw a distinction between foods that come directly from animal slaughter and those indirectly associated with it?

Rennet, the coagulant used to make many cheeses, is a combination of many different enzymes, and occurs naturally in the abomasum, or fourth stomach, of young ruminant animals (calves, lambs, kids, for example). True animal rennet can only be harvested by killing the animal and processing the stomach to extract the enzymes. Vegetarian rennet on the other hand can be made in a few different ways, but never involves killing an animal directly. There are vegetarian rennets derived from fungi, plants, as well as lab-created genetically engineered rennet that otherwise mimics the real thing.

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. | Photograph from Wikimedia Commons

Originally posted by Jamie Forrest from Serious Eats: Main, on December 18, 2007 6:00 AM

Thinking of buying a fancy rice cooker but don't know which kind to get? Over at Just Hungry Maki Itoh posted a great FAQ about rice cookers regarding size, features, and price.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats: Main, on December 18, 2007 4:30 AM

Stop reading this right now if you want to continue believing that Eminem is the bad-ass, troubled man he is today, due to his very tumultuous upbringing and the lack of love he got from his mama.

Okay, I warned you.

Em's mom, Debbie Nelson is releasing a tell-all book, My Son Marshall, My Son Eminem. In it, Deb insists that her "tortured" son made up a whole lot of the tough childhood stories he tells in his music, in order to succeed in rap. PageSix.com obtained the introduction of the book. Here's taste:

"After his first album, Infinite, flopped, he reinvented himself as white trailer trash with a crazy welfare mom. I was shocked when I first heard the lyrics... but he constantly reassured me it was all a big joke... I went along with it for Marshall's sake."

Debbie says now, after years of being attacked both verbally and physically by her son's fans, she is ready to shed some light on the "real story". "This book is my way of setting the record straight," she explains.

Some other interesting tidbits from Em's mom? The rapper was a total mama's boy "who was so jealous of his mother's new man, he wouldn't let him sleep with her on their wedding night (creepy); he beat his mother up on his 23rd birthday; and was 'so strung out,' he doesn't remember 1999."

Talk about a family throwing each other under the bus -- or, in this case, a trailer.

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from Daily Blabber, on December 18, 2007 2:38 AM

Last year, Netflix published 10 million movie rankings by 500,000 customers, as part of a challenge for people to come up with better recommendation systems than the one the company was using. The data was anonymized by removing personal details and replacing names with random numbers, to protect the privacy of the recommenders.

Arvind Narayanan and Vitaly Shmatikov, researchers at the University of Texas at Austin, de-anonymized some of the Netflix data by comparing rankings and timestamps with public information in the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb.

Their research (.pdf) illustrates some inherent security problems with anonymous data, but first it's important to explain what they did and did not do.

They did not reverse the anonymity of the entire Netflix dataset. What they did was reverse the anonymity of the Netflix dataset for those sampled users who also entered some movie rankings, under their own names, in the IMDb. (While IMDb's records are public, crawling the site to get them is against the IMDb's terms of service, so the researchers used a representative few to prove their algorithm.)

The point of the research was to demonstrate how little information is required to de-anonymize information in the Netflix dataset.

On one hand, isn't that sort of obvious? The risks of anonymous databases have been written about before, such as in this 2001 paper published in an IEEE journal. The researchers working with the anonymous Netflix data didn't painstakingly figure out people's identities -- as others did with the AOL search database last year -- they just compared it with an already identified subset of similar data: a standard data-mining technique.

But as opportunities for this kind of analysis pop up more frequently, lots of anonymous data could end up at risk.

Someone with access to an anonymous dataset of telephone records, for example, might partially de-anonymize it by correlating it with a catalog merchants' telephone order database. Or Amazon's online book reviews could be the key to partially de-anonymizing a public database of credit card purchases, or a larger database of anonymous book reviews.

Google, with its database of users' internet searches, could easily de-anonymize a public database of internet purchases, or zero in on searches of medical terms to de-anonymize a public health database. Merchants who maintain detailed customer and purchase information could use their data to partially de-anonymize any large search engine's data, if it were released in an anonymized form. A data broker holding databases of several companies might be able to de-anonymize most of the records in those databases.

What the University of Texas researchers demonstrate is that this process isn't hard, and doesn't require a lot of data. It turns out that if you eliminate the top 100 movies everyone watches, our movie-watching habits are all pretty individual. This would certainly hold true for our book reading habits, our internet shopping habits, our telephone habits and our web searching habits.

The obvious countermeasures for this are, sadly, inadequate. Netflix could have randomized its dataset by removing a subset of the data, changing the timestamps or adding deliberate errors into the unique ID numbers it used to replace the names. It turns out, though, that this only makes the problem slightly harder. Narayanan's and Shmatikov's de-anonymization algorithm is surprisingly robust, and works with partial data, data that has been perturbed, even data with errors in it.

With only eight movie ratings (of which two may be completely wrong), and dates that may be up to two weeks in error, they can uniquely identify 99 percent of the records in the dataset. After that, all they need is a little bit of identifiable data: from the IMDb, from your blog, from anywhere. The moral is that it takes only a small named database for someone to pry the anonymity off a much larger anonymous database.

Other research reaches the same conclusion. Using public anonymous data from the 1990 census, Latanya Sweeney found that 87 percent of the population in the United States, 216 million of 248 million, could likely be uniquely identified by their five-digit ZIP code, combined with their gender and date of birth. About half of the U.S. population is likely identifiable by gender, date of birth and the city, town or municipality in which the person resides. Expanding the geographic scope to an entire county reduces that to a still-significant 18 percent. "In general," the researchers wrote, "few characteristics are needed to uniquely identify a person."

Stanford University researchers reported similar results using 2000 census data. It turns out that date of birth, which (unlike birthday month and day alone) sorts people into thousands of different buckets, is incredibly valuable in disambiguating people.

This has profound implications for releasing anonymous data. On one hand, anonymous data is an enormous boon for researchers -- AOL did a good thing when it released its anonymous dataset for research purposes, and it's sad that the CTO resigned and an entire research team was fired after the public outcry. Large anonymous databases of medical data are enormously valuable to society: for large-scale pharmacology studies, long-term follow-up studies and so on. Even anonymous telephone data makes for fascinating research.

On the other hand, in the age of wholesale surveillance, where everyone collects data on us all the time, anonymization is very fragile and riskier than it initially seems.

Like everything else in security, anonymity systems shouldn't be fielded before being subjected to adversarial attacks. We all know that it's folly to implement a cryptographic system before it's rigorously attacked; why should we expect anonymity systems to be any different? And, like everything else in security, anonymity is a trade-off. There are benefits, and there are corresponding risks.

Narayanan and Shmatikov are currently working on developing algorithms and techniques that enable the secure release of anonymous datasets like Netflix's. That's a research result we can all benefit from.

This essay originally appeared on Wired.com.

Originally posted by schneier from Schneier on Security, on December 18, 2007 1:53 AM

This press release was just issued by the WGA, moments after the announcement was made in the general meeting (which at the time of this posting is still continuing).

Members will conduct black-tie pickets at the various awards shows; any nominee who wins an award but chooses not to cross the picket line will have the choice to accept that award on the line, with their acceptance broadcast live on the Internet.

SAG President Alan Rosenberg is present at the meeting, and applauded the announcement.

WRITERS GUILD DECIDES ON GOLDEN GLOBES AND ACADEMY AWARDS SHOW WAIVERS

LOS ANGELES – The Writers Guild has notified the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and dick clark productions that their requests for an agreement to allow writers to prepare material for the 65th Annual Golden Globe Awards show have been denied.

The Guild has also denied a request from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for a waiver in connection with the use of clips from motion pictures and past Academy Awards shows for use during the annual Academy Awards presentation.

In letters to the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, WGAW President Patric M. Verrone described the Guild’s respect and admiration for both organizations, explaining that:

“Writers are engaged in a crucial struggle to achieve a collective bargaining agreement that will protect their compensation and intellectual property rights now and in the future. We must do everything we can to bring our negotiations to a swift and fair conclusion for the benefit of writers and all those who are being harmed by the companies’ failure to engage in serious negotiations.”

The signatories producing the Golden Globes and the Oscars are West Coast signatories. The WGAW’s Board of Directors concluded, reluctantly, that granting exceptions for the Golden Globes or the Academy Awards would not advance that goal.

Originally posted by Laeta Kalogridis from United Hollywood, on December 17, 2007 6:05 PM

This is the first video in a new series hosted on aworkingwriter.com. -JA

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on December 17, 2007 5:15 PM

Signs of progress and setbacks in addressing climate change at the conclusion of Nobel Laureate Al Gore's annus mirabilis. From Al Gore's Nobel lecture:

However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world's leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler's threat: "They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent."

So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.

The full text of Gore's lecture is here.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 17, 2007 4:15 PM

Good Magazine is keeping track of Big Ideas!, one a day until all the letters of the alphabet are done. Did you know that coin flipping isn't exactly fair?

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 17, 2007 3:55 PM

Dozens of striking film and TV writers are negotiating with venture capitalists to set up companies that would bypass the Hollywood studio system and reach consumers with video entertainment on the Web.

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

Originally posted by yatta from del.icio.us/yatta, on December 17, 2007 1:48 PM

On December 18, 1987, Larry Wall released Perl 1 to the public. That means today is the end of Perl's 20th year. On Perl's 16th birthday, Richard Clamp gave us Perl 1. Rumor has it that this birthday, Perl5Porters is giving us Perl 5.10, the best Perl 5 yet. The Windy City Perl Mongers are getting together for a birthday party at Miller's Pub (134 S Wabash Ave, Chicago) at 6:30pm. Who else is hosting Perl birthday parties? Can we make it a 24 hour party rolling through all of the time zones?

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by brian_d_foy (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 17, 2007 11:06 AM

The New York Times recently dispatched no fewer than five reporters to the streets of the city in order to uncover the latest piece of breaking news: cab drivers can be rude and will attempt to take financial advantage of you if given the opportunity. The investigation uncovered a citywide fleet of yellow taxis in which just over half are compliant in installing credit card readers, and many that did have them falsely told passengers that using a credit card would result in additional charges.

Many cabbies, it seems, will use the card swipers only sullenly, and only after a resistance that can be as ingenious as it is misleading. Excuses range from, “There is a minimum cab fare for credit card use” to “The device doesn’t have to be activated until the new year” to “It’s too short a ride.” (Not true, not true, and not true, say city officials.)

Many cab drivers went on strike in September, in objection to the installation of credit card swipers, GPS tracking systems, and noisy video displays that can cost thousands of dollars. When the first strike proved unpersuasive, drivers went on strike for a second time in October. Neither effort proved successful and all cabs must be outfitted with the mandated equipment by the end of January. Still, the Taxi & Limousine Commission says that it has received hundreds of complaints from riders about drivers who refuse to let fares use credit cards or insist on a bounty for doing so.

Originally posted by Dave Hogarty from Gothamist Weekly Favorites, on December 17, 2007 11:03 AM

Blogger Buzz: OpenID Commenting.

Congrats to Eric, Pete, John, and the rest of the Blogger crew! OpenID commenting is out of Labs, and live across the entirety of Blogger. Nice to see more large RPs coming online.

Originally posted by kellan from Laughing Meme, on December 17, 2007 8:47 AM

I’m proud to live next door:

Gov. Jon S. Corzine signed into law a measure repealing New Jersey’s death penalty on Monday, making the state the first in a generation to abolish capital punishment.

Mr. Corzine also issued an order commuting the sentences of the eight men on New Jersey’ death row to life in prison with no possibility of parole, ensuring that they will stay behind bars for the rest of their lives.

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on December 17, 2007 8:23 AM

This animated comparison of how many nickels the conglomerates have made off of "new" media vs. how many nickels writers have made was sent to us by a mysterious supporter known as "Four Cent." Thanks for the hard work, FC.

Originally posted by John Aboud from United Hollywood, on December 17, 2007 7:27 AM

New York Magazine's third annual "Reasons to Love New York City" issue hits newsstands this week. Reason #35? "Because the Head of the Department of Transportation is a Cycling Radical." While I'm not so sure that's a completely accurate description of the Commish, Anthony Weiss nicely sums up the change underway at DOT:

Nobody in New York City controls as much public space as the Department of Transportation, and for the first five and a half years of the Bloomberg administration, the DOT was what it has always been-a large, dull bureaucracy dedicated to moving cars and trucks around town. Run mostly by engineers, the DOT treated streets as an engineering problem: How do you move as many motor vehicles as possible, as quickly as possible? The streets themselves have mostly remained grim, unattractive, and (ironically) jammed.

But recently, the DOT has been championing some very un-DOT ideas. It has replaced parking lots and traffic lanes with chairs and umbrellas in Dumbo and the meatpacking district and installed a new, physically separated bike lane on Ninth Avenue; it is pushing the mayor's controversial congestion- pricing plan; and, in a symbolic act, it has given over three parking spots by the Bedford Avenue L stop to bike racks. Taken together, it's as if the department has awakened to the idea that streets belong to people, not their vehicles.

The difference can be summed up in one name: Janette Sadik-Khan...

Photo: Randy Harris

Share this

Originally posted by Aaron Naparstek from Streetsblog, on December 17, 2007 6:32 AM

The happy marriage between Steven Sondheim’s grand guignol theatrical masterpiece Sweeney Todd adapted by the screen’s supreme gothic fantasist Tim Burton makes for a macabre feast for the holidays. Johnny Depp is just extraordinary as the vengeful barber Benjamin Barker who returns to London after being imprisoned for 15 years with murder on his mind against the evil Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) and his evil henchman Beadle Bamford (Timothy Spall) responsible for his false arrest. His homestead is now the residence of Mrs. Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter), the maker of the “worst meat pies in London” who has saved his razors in hopes of his return. Barker renames himself Sweeney Todd and sets up shop dispatching patrons with his trusty razor while Mrs. Lovett turns them into celebrated meat pies. Meanwhile Todd’s daughter Johanna (Jayne Wisener) is kept prisoner by the lascivious Judge and is being wooed by a young sailor (Jamie Campbell Bower) who rescued Sweeney from sea. This is possibly my favorite musical. Why wouldn’t it be? It’s got throat slashings, revenge, and cannibalism and those gorgeous, sublimely witty Sondheim songs. Burton streamlines the material perfectly and gives the production a grim fairy tale sheen that still crackles with the demonic wit of the original. Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter look perfect -- like a sardonic Edward Gorey drawing come to life. I was worried about the singing but it all works -- when they do the song “By The Sea” it’s funny and cinematic as it is tuneful. Sacha Baron Cohen makes a hilariously foppish Italian barber Pirelli and Edward Sanders is haunting as the young trusting Toby. The film is gruesome and glorious at the same time, like biting into a perfect chocolate filled with blood.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on December 17, 2007 6:21 AM

The last episode of Ricky Gervais' Extras has a message concerning celebrity and television:

"The Victorian freak show never went away," Millman rails in a soliloquy that serves as a climax of the "Extras" final episode and a moment of redemption for the character, whose life and friendships have been corrupted by fame. "Now it's called 'Big Brother' or 'American Idol,' where in the preliminary rounds we wheel out the bewildered to be sniggered at by multimillionaires."

To the networks, he says: "You can't wash your hands of this. You can't keep going, 'Oh, it's exploitation, but it's what the public wants.' No."

To the audience watching at home, he says: "Shame on you. And shame on me. I'm the worst of all. Cause I'm one of these people that goes, 'I'm an entertainer, it's in my blood.' Yeah, it's in my blood because a real job's too hard."

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 17, 2007 5:11 AM

With just a few commands and tweaks, a multitude of new screen sharing options can be unlocked in Leopard.

Read More...

Originally posted by justin.berka@gmail.com (Justin Berka) from Infinite Loop, on December 17, 2007 4:58 AM

God's Eye View presents four important Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, including The Crucifixion, Noah's Ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on December 17, 2007 3:42 AM

Last week, Carl Malamud had Shawn and I as guests at his Open Government Working Group meeting, held in O'Reilly's Sebastopol offices.

Ethan Zuckerman has one of the more comprehensive write-ups of this excellent event, as do John Geraci and Nat Torkington. Joseph Hall recorded Shawn's O.G. gang sign for posterity.

All I've got is this bag of links to mentioned projects and people, and the lasting conviction that Tom Steinberg's guruhood derives from him having tried everything.

• Open Source Homeland
• MAPLight
• MetaVid
• Greg Palmer
• UNDemocracy
• The meeting wiki
• Follow The Money
• FTM's PULSE charts
• The Django Book
• More MetaVid
• They Work For You
• Sunlight Labs
• Government Docs
• Reporters Committee For The Freedom Of The Press

Originally posted by (author unknown) from tecznotes, on December 16, 2007 10:16 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on December 16, 2007 9:24 PM

For those of you who missed this news, here is the announcement from Friday about bargaining with individual companies. Since the AMPTP has so many competing agendas and can't reach consensus, perhaps its individual members will consider their own self-interest and negotiate their own deals.

A Message to the WGA Membership from its Negotiating Committee

As you know, the AMPTP is currently unwilling to bargain with us. The internal dynamics of the AMPTP make it difficult for the conglomerates to reach consensus and negotiate with us on a give and take basis. We believe this multi-employer structure inhibits individual companies from pursuing their self-interest in negotiations. We nonetheless continue to hope that the AMPTP will return in good faith to negotiate a fair contract with writers, as two television seasons and numerous feature projects are currently at great risk.

We want to do everything in our power to move negotiations forward and end this devastating strike. We have therefore decided to reach out to major AMPTP companies and begin to negotiate with them individually.


As you may know, bargaining on a multi-employer basis through the AMPTP is an option for the WGA, not a legal requirement. Each signatory employer is required to bargain with us individually if we make a legal demand that it do so.

We will make this demand on Monday December 17th and hope that each company responds promptly, in accordance with the law.

In the meantime, we urge you to support us and our negotiations team and leadership during these difficult times. We look forward to a making a fair deal that will resolve this strike, protect our future and put us all back to work, for the good of the industry and all of its employees.

Signed,

John F. Bowman, Chair
John Auerbach
Neal Baer
Marc Cherry
Bill Condon
Carlton Cuse
Stephen Gaghan
Terry George
David A. Goodman
Carl Gottlieb
Susannah Grant
Carol Mendelsohn
Marc Norman
Shawn Ryan
Melissa Salmons
Robin Schiff
Ed Solomon

Originally posted by Laeta Kalogridis from United Hollywood, on December 16, 2007 1:46 PM

Hello fans of the Internet. It's been over a month since I last clicked post, and I'm way overdue. You'd think I'd be teeming with witty observations and insights after all this time, but no. I think my internal operating system is still in newborn mode, which means I can't even post 140 characters or less to twitter very often. It's my own personal kernel panic.

I mentioned last time that I was reading The Disappearance of Childhood by Neil Postman, and I recently finished it. Here's a quick summary. Postman argues that the idea of childhood as a distinct, protected time in a person's life is a social construction that came into being shortly after the printing press was invented. By locking information into the fairly inaccessible, abstract form of written language that requires years of study to master, a distinction was formed between young and old that didn't exist in oral cultures. He mentions the idea of shame makes childhood possible by making certain information taboo to children. Basically, literate adults had access to vital information that wasn't available to young people, and an elaborate system of education was invented to train children to read and write so they could eventually participate. Children could be brought into adulthood gradually with structured guidance. Postman then says that the invention of the telegraph was the beginning of the end for the concept of childhood. (And perhaps formalized education along with it.)

...the telegraph began the process of making information uncontrollable...News from nowhere means news from everywhere, about everything, and in no particular order. The telegraph created an audience and a market not only for news but for fragmented, discontinuous, and essentially irrelevant news, which to this day is the main commodity of the news industry.

What does this have to do with childhood? The telegraph, telephone, photography, and finally television have made literacy less important, and information available to everyone, everywhere. Today's children encounter—and are forced to process—the adult world throughout our visual culture.

...if we turn over to chidren a vast store of powerful adult material, childhood cannot survive. By definition adulthood means mysteries solved and secrets uncovered. If from the start the children know the mysteries and secrets, how shall we tell them apart from anyone else?

Postman goes on to lament the diminishing idea of adulthood as well, blaming electronic media. He feels that fully literate culture has "...tolerance for delayed gratification, a sophisticated ability to think conceptually and sequentially, a preoccupation with both historical continuity and the future, a high valuation of reason and hierarchical order." Postman calls the new period between infancy and senility the adult-child.

Throughout the book I couldn't help but think of Postman yelling, "you kids get my off my lawn!" But his history of communication technology is worthwhile, and while his arguments aren't scientific, they're fun to mull over. The question I can't shake after reading the book: what does it mean to be an adult? Postman wrote the book in 1982, before the Web. I think the Web has definitely helped the cause of literacy, if only briefly. Broadband is turning the Web into a video-delivery device, and sites like YouTube are an intermediate step back toward a visually-dominated culture. Maybe?

To counter Postman a bit, I'm currently reading Mindstorms by Seymour Papert. Papert also believes formalized education is on its way out, computers are responsible, and that's a good thing. I'm only 50 pages into the book, but I'm struck by Papert's metaphors for teaching. He believes the best type of learning is similar to how we learn spoken languages, and he blames some education problems such as mathophobia on parents not "speaking math" around the house. Just as an English-speaking child learns French easier if they're exposed to native speakers, so other skills such as reading literature and geometry are helped along by "native speakers" of those skills. He argues that children can learn to program computers, and in the process learn subjects "without being taught". Specifically, without being taught in the classic teacher/classroom sense. I'm also interested in his view of children as builders rather than consumers. This book is from 1993, also pre-Web, and some of the ideas are dated. But his prediction of computing ubiquity was correct, and his fears about how computers are used in the classroom as pre-programmed test-administers are also correct, I'm afraid. But I'm guessing there, and like I mentioned I'm just starting this book. It is comical to go from reading a Luddite to a Techno-Utopian so quickly. Papert's statement that, "what is good for professionals is good for children" would probably horrify Postman.

In personal news the Oregonian had a nice article that mentioned ORblogs the other day: Portland is No. 2 in blogging, and I was quoted going on and on about the local blogosphere. I don't have as much time as I'd like to work on the site right now, but I get a few hours here and there every once in a while. I'm glad people are still interested in it, and I think it's still valuable to have community aggregators even though personal feed-readers are ubiquitous.

Until January (I suppose), take care.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from onfocus.com, on December 16, 2007 1:23 PM

I’ve dug through the Mitchell Report for much of the weekend and have two simple questions that I feel should have been answered in the report:

1. While I agree with the principle of an independent tester, I’m curious how this should be handled. The recommendation in the report comes up empty on specifics, though everyone has interpreted this as a call to have WADA take over the testing program. However, the collectors are not MLB employees; they’re contractors, probably the same ones used by WADA, though I could not confirm this. The lab used (and noted in Selig’s response) is the WADA-certified Montreal lab run by Dr. Charlotte Ayotte. It’s likely the same one that would be used if WADA took over the system. Unless someone can explain to me why an “independent” system would be significantly better, I can’t get behind it.

2. It seems that the entire report is based on the testimony of and network marketing of Kirk Radomski and his secondary distributor, Brian McNamee. So where did Radomski get his supplies?

One final note: While I agree with Sen. Mitchell’s call for a blanket amnesty for all users, named and not named, prior to the testing agreement in 2004, I have a problem with several of the players in the report acting as salesmen and distributors for Radomski. Drug use is wrong, but drug trafficking is a far larger issue and one that I feel calls for not only suspensions, but the consideration of larger penalties.

***

We’ll continue to follow this issue on BPR this week with scheduled interviews with Jim Bouton and Don Hooton. Interviews with Dr. Gary Gaffney and Dr. Olivier Rabin are available at the Radio tab.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on December 16, 2007 12:17 PM

Things are finally moving over in CSS-land. On the positive side CSS column layouts are looking pretty nice, having dropped their dependency on the the janktastic “advanced” layout module and there’s some initial movement on improving the CSS-OM.

But all is not well, nor has it been for a long, long time. No work on hbox or vbox or mixins/inheritance. There’s no indication that the WG has taken stabs exposing the expressive power that Microsoft did with their CSS expressions implementation. Ugg.

More importantly, Andy Clarke is pretty disgusted by what he sees of the process and participants and so, apparently, is David Baron. Anyone who has met David in person will probably understand how much of a big deal this really is. It signals the effective end of the CSS WG as we (don’t) know it. Rebuilding credibility in the WG is going to be much, much harder now that Mozilla’s representative has effectively given up on the closed-door process. The working group’s secret cabal style of operation is imploding. It was inevitable, but the timing is still a surprise.

But why was it inevitable? And should we take Andy’s suggestion seriously and expect a re-chartered WG to do better? After thinking about it for a while, I think the answer is that we can’t expect any standards body to do what is being asked of the CSS WG, which is to find a way to invent the future by committee. Particularly not when current deployed user base provides so much momentum that the safest thing for any WG member to do is to find ways to solve the little problems and ignore the large ones. This is also a well-worn stalling tactic employed by vendors playing for time in the market to marginalize the standards process or solidify their implementation such that it becomes impossible to bless anything but their implementation. It’s a good reason to reject closed working groups, but we can note that the web standards to which standards advocates now cling were developed in those same closed systems. Closed clearly can’t be all bad nor can it be a primary cause for the lack of progress. We seem to be hugely confused and conflicted about the relationship between standards, vendors, and how we get to a better future.

Before I lay out all the forces involved, let me first say what everyone knows but few truly accept:

In order for the future to be better by a large amount, it must be different by a large amount.

I think that statement alone is enough to indict Opera’s anti-trust actions as stupid and ill-considered. But we should also recognize that it forms the basis of Opera’s grievances. We should all be pissed off that the discussion today hinges on how we will get MSIE to improve by slight degrees (or should we expect more?). Opera could have done better, though, by shipping Gears and working with Google to make it a host for pluggable renderers…like Opera. Too bad Opera has prioritized proving a point over actually improving the situation. But I digress.

So what was so different about the late 90’s that it allowed a closed process to make huge gains in a short order while we can’t even get basic architectural issues addressed in a timely fashion today?

The first major is that web developers in the 90’s were looking forward, not backward. I remember being excited about getting the chance to use new features and not caring who gave them to us. As a community, web developers hadn’t collectively “picked sides”. I think the market as a whole still has that essential optimism built in, it’s just that the more that self-identified web developers focus on how standards compliant things are (or aren’t), the more we loose the sense that it can get better. So platforms not tied to standards race ahead. Why is anyone surprised that Adobe has essentially kicked HTML’s ass with Flex or that Microsoft feels it can do the same with Silverlight in a couple of revs? If you buy either Adobe or MS’s lines about how these platforms aren’t there to replace HTML, I’d like to sell you some prime property in the Pacific.

But, I hear you yelling, it sucked to build things back then! It was hard! We didn’t know what bits of the technology we could use portably, and the W3C saved us from that mess!

Oh really?

Try teaching a good programmer without a web background to build anything reasonably sophisticated with web technologies today. Doing so will teach you painfully, embarrassingly that there are huge tracts of the HTML, CSS, and DOM spec’s that you simply can’t use. IE’s bugs combined with its market share conspire to ensure that’s true, and we wouldn’t get off the hook should IE 8 magically transform into a perfect reference implementation. Mozilla, Opera, and Safari all have their own warts as we get to the edges of what’s even theoretically possible w/ current specs. And that’s not even taking into account how utterly wrong, broken, and silent the specs are in several key areas. Even if the specs were great, we’d still be gated by the adoption of new renderers.

It’s clear then that vendors in the market are the ones who deploy new technologies which improve the situation. Put another way, the W3C has the authority to standardize things, but vendors have all the power when it comes to actually making those things available. Ten years ago, we counted on vendors introducing new and awesome things into the wild and then we yelled at them to go standardize. It mostly worked. Today, we yell at the standards bodies to introduce new and awesome things and yell at the browser vendors to implement them, regardless of how unrealistic they may be. It doesn’t work. See the problem?

Andy is probably wrong to suggest that a new working group (no matter the structure) can succeed in fixing the impasses of the existing CSS WG if only because no working group at the W3C has the power to effectively and definitively introduce new things into the market. Only browser vendors can do that and no ammount of buy-in at the W3C can force vendors to implement. The last decade is proof enough of that. We need to wise up to this key point: standards bodies are downstream of implementations, and that’s the only time when the work well.

Until we get some great new (non-standard) CSS features out Mozilla, Opera, and IE nothing will get better to the extent that we will again be optimistic about the future (Safari earns a pass). The size of the improvements they deliver in the future are directly tied to our expectations of how different the future will be. Only when there are large and divergent ideas of how to proceed expressed through competing, successful implementations will standardization really work to whatever extent that it can reasonably be expected to.

Let that sink in a bit. To get a better future, not only do we need a return to “the browser wars”, we need to applaud and use the hell out of “non-standard” features until such time as there’s a standard to cover equivalent functionality. Non-standard features are the future, and suggesting that they are somehow “bad” is to work against your own self-interest.

Web developers everywhere need to start burning their standards advocacy literature and start telling their browser vendors to give them the new shiny. Do we want things to work the same everywhere? Of course, but we’ve got plenty of proof to suggest that only healthy browser competition is going to get us there. Restructuring the CSS WG or expecting IE8 to be “fully standards compliant” is a fools game.

Put simply, Zeldman is hurting you and only you can make it stop. Neither the CSS WG nor the HTML 5 WG nor, indeed, any W3C working group can define the future. They can only round off the sharp edges once the future becomes the past and that’s all we should ever expect of them. As much as they tell us (and themselves) that they can, and as much as they really would like to, the W3C cannot save us.

Originally posted by alex from Continuing Intermittent Incoherency, on December 16, 2007 12:09 PM

My Catalyst book is out and is beginning to appear in the hands of fellow Catalyst users! You can buy it from Amazon and local book stores, but it looks like the publisher (Packt) has the best price right now. Basically, this book covers getting started with Catalyst. The goal is to take you from "what's MVC?" to being able to write complete web applications with Catalyst. We'll build a few complete applications including an address book, a mini-blog, and ChatStat (which is basically Ircxory but with a Template Toolkit interface instead of one built with Template::Declare). Along the way you'll learn all about Catalyst, DBIx::Class, and the Template Toolkit. I cover REST interfaces, AJAX (with Jemplate), RSS, testing, deployment, and more. The book is very hands-on oriented; I usually explain what sort of code I want to write, write the code, and then explain what the code does. If necessary, we look at theoretical examples of when related features would be useful, and then move on to the next piece of code. The full PR blurb is on the book's website, so please take a look.

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by jrockway (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on December 16, 2007 6:53 AM