randomwalks/dj

Artist Nina Katchadourian lists The Mended Spiderweb series as an uninvited collaboration with nature, and I don't know what is more impressive: that she tried to repair broken webs, or that the spiders rejected her mends and properly repaired them.

"The Mended Spiderweb series came about during a six-week period in June and July in 1998 which I spent on Pörtö. In the forest and around the house where I was living, I searched for broken spiderwebs which I repaired using red sewing thread. All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread. In the process, I often caused further damage when the tweezers got tangled in the web or when my hands brushed up against it by accident.

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned. The larger, more complicated patches where the threads were held together with glue often retained their form after being thrown out, although in a somewhat 'wilted' condition without the rest of the web to suspend and stretch them. Each 'Rejected Patch' is shown next to the photograph showing the web with the patch as it looked on site."

(via)

Originally posted by Anne from Purse Lip Square Jaw, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 22, 2008 at 12:28 AM

Originally posted by Anne from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:28 PM

Speaking of microcelebrities… a few weeks ago, Ze Frank put an open call out (via twitter) for individuals who were interested in giving up their Facebook profiles - and handing them over to him. Eager to rid myself of my growing addiction, I answered the call, wrote a page-long primer on how to be be “virtual Christine Huang,” and hoped he would find my Facebook identity appealing enough to want to appropriate. Amazingly, out of the hundreds of his followers who responded, Ze chose mine to be one of the two to overtake.

What resulted was an interesting experience/experiment on both his and my end. Having been relieved of handling one of my several internet identities for a week, I came to think a lot about the philosophical and ethical implications of giving up my identity to a complete stranger. How much of my real-life persona had become entangled with my virtual one? Was this experiment an implicit deceit of all my 550-some Facebook friends? And if so - would anyone notice? Or care? And if they did both notice and care - would they remember, or would it just become another buried blip on their Facebook friend feed? Ze’s status as a public figure seemed to be the only reason I trusted him with my identity - but what did I really know about Ze? I had never met the guy, and the only things I knew about him were the things I read online - what he presented to the world. And as his experiment pointed out, anyone’s virtual identity is as easily manipulated, forged, and eradicated as clicking a few buttons.

So for a week Ze was me, and I was… not on Facebook. He didn’t do anything too out of the ordinary; he tried to re-establish some long lost friendships through facebook messages and wall posts; he changed my profile picture to a very unflattering photo of me doing a handstand in purple spandex; and he exchanged somewhat suggestive messages with a Facebook friend I had told him was my crush-of-the-moment. And when it was all over, I can’t say I wasn’t a bit sad; a big part of me wanted Ze to take “me” away from myself for good. The sabbatical, though, did quell my addiction - I came to realize how much time I had gotten used to wasting on the site, uploading photos, making comments, writing people I could just as easily call - and decided I didn’t want to be thinking about that stuff anymore. All in all, no harm was done - and I was gifted with one of my most productive, creative weeks in recent memory.

Originally posted by Christine Huang from PSFK, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 22, 2008 at 12:25 AM

Originally posted by Christine Huang from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:25 PM

That pictogram ensemble is a project by german artist Ulrike Gruber. It actually re-uses urban signs targeted at pedestrian and project them on the building facade. As described on the public work authorization (only in french), this painting aims at using pedestrian pictograms to describe new elements added on the facade after the renovation (such as the elevator, new stairs, etc.). The painting shows the movement of the elevator, the rotation of the stairs and also the presence of recycling containers to induce new behavior (turn right, do not lean against the balcony) and suggest new uses (authorized swimming, belvedere altitude).

Why do I blog this? what looks intriguing here is how the space of flow is made explicit through the pictograms, and how new affordances can be created on a vertical plane using codes of the horizontal plane. The sort of things to ruminate on a sunday morning perhaps.

Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, on June 21, 2008 9:09 PM

pushups
Originally uploaded by freestone

Originally posted by Benjamin Trott from Stupidfool.org, on June 21, 2008 8:50 PM

Just a few weeks ago it seemed like Au Pied de Cochon's summer seafood extravaganza was still just getting off the ground. There were lobsters and shellfish of all sorts, but they and an outrageous roasted mahi-mahi* with fiddleheads and ramps combo were on offer strictly as off-menu specials.

fig. 1: Le Plateau PDC

Just last week, though, Au Pied de Cochon's seafood was back in full effect, as evidenced by the platter of coquillage you see above.

That's the "small," the "Plateau PDC." It runs just under $50. This year Au Pied de Cochon offers four more seafood platters, and each one gets more plentiful, and more intricate. They also get kinda tall--we passed one on our way in that looked like the Eiffel Tower. There was talk of lobsters and seared fish with some of the bigger platters. I can't even imagine what the biggest and baddest of the lot--"Le Gros Verrat"--entails. Its price tag? $350. Our "Plateau PDC" made for a very substantial appetizer for three (along with some cromesquis, of course), so I guess "Le Gros Verrat" would make a very substantial appetizer for you and twenty of your friends? Who knows? All I know is that the quality is unbeatable. So is the creativity.

Au Pied de Cochon has its novelty dishes, of course (Duck in a Can, Foie Gras Poutine), but it's not really a place you associate with molecular gastronomy. That said, the most pleasant surprise of the night came with one of our massive oysters (but not the one you see in the picture). This is one had a mysterious pale translucent cube nestled next to the oyster. I really had no idea what to expect. Could have been lychee jelly for all I knew. Turns out it was something way better, and way more clever: sea water. Eaten together, the sea water jelly just melted in your mouth and mingled with the oyster, taking the natural brininess of that lovely Atlantic oyster to a whole other delectable level.

Sure, we live along a Seaway, but sometimes the Atlantic seems awfully distant. If you've gotta be landlocked, this is definitely the way to do it.

aj

* Apparently it was Atlantic mahi-mahi and the Novia Scotia fishermen who landed it had never seen one before (they don't generally make it this far north [!]), so Picard & Co. got it for a good price.

ps--TY, Jr.!

Originally posted by aj kinik from ...an endless banquet, on June 21, 2008 5:55 PM

A small housekeeping change here at DF: each Linked List entry now has its own unique permalink URL. So, for example, yesterday’s link to Andy Baio’s interview with The Big Picture’s Alan Taylor has a permanent URL here:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/06/20/alan-tayler

Previously, the permanent URL for that entry would have been:

http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/june#fri-20-alan_tayler

The older month-based URLs still work and won’t change, but the new URLs are better, and, in hindsight, are the way things always should have been. You can also get listings by day and month by chopping the URL.

The only downside is that when the new URLs went live yesterday evening, the permalink URLs changed in the RSS feed. Depending on the behavior of your feed reader, this may have marked all previously read Linked List items as unread — an unfortunate, but one-time, inconvenience.

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on June 21, 2008 3:17 PM

From Required Eating

Only a few months after Starbucks replaced their "bolder" coffee with the Pike Place Roast featuring a "smooth and welcoming everyday blend," The Wall Street Journal reports that Starbucks has yielded to customer demand and will be once again brewing the "classic" bitter and burnt Starbucks coffee:

"Because of your many requests for a bolder coffee choice throughout the day at Starbucks, we are bringing it back in the afternoon to many of those stores that sell lots of freshly brewed coffee all day long," Starbucks said in a message posted on its customer feedback Web site Tuesday.

[via Consumerist]

Previously
Colbert Report on the Starbucks 3-Hour Closure
The History of the Starbucks Logos Through the Years

Originally posted by Raphael from Serious Eats, on June 21, 2008 2:00 PM

Explaining how TPM works can be daunting, especially if you're describing it to someone from a traditional journalism background or, say, older relatives for whom something as simple as email is still intimidating.

As most of you know, we have a bricks-and-mortar office in Manhattan. But that's just the anchor for our operation. We have a reporter in DC, another reporter who works most of the week from Connecticut, and I'm in Missouri. So a third of our staff of nine is not based in the NYC office.

For that model to work, we rely some on phones, a lot on email, but primarily on Skype. That means a whole series of Skype chats going on at any one time between and among editors, reporters, and interns. Even most of the internal office interactions are via Skype, so that those of us not in the office proper can be kept in the loop. Picture a staff of mostly 20-somethings squeezed into a 700-some-odd-square-foot newsroom, hunched over their computers, fingers flying across their keyboards as they IM with colleagues who may be sitting right next to them.

As I say, it's a hard arrangement to explain to the uninitiated. Spencer Ackerman, who used to work for us at TPMmuckraker, captured it pretty well in this blog post:

If you want to understand what it's like to work at TPM, spend a couple days with your ten smartest friends and constantly IM with them. Set up IM windows for multi-person conversation, and break out those discussions with individual participants. And make the substance of those conversations deep-in-the-weeds investigative journalism. Make sure you don't often go more than, say, two minutes without contributing to the discussion. And see if you can avoid being overwhelmed.

As odd as all that may sound, one of the most out-of-the-box things about TPM was that until Wednesday, I had never met any of our staff in person, including Josh, even though I've worked at TPM in one capacity or another for approaching two years now, the last 10 months as managing editor.

It had just worked out that way. Josh and I both have young kids. Travel is expensive. Whatever. A hundred reasons why it hadn't happened yet. But since I was flying from St. Louis to Serbia this week, it made perfect sense to stop off at the office for a couple of days on my way back through New York.

There were suspicions among staff that I might not really exist. Maybe I was just Josh's imaginary friend and that I would walk into the office, take off my sunglasses, and be revealed to be Josh himself. (When my kids were younger, their toddler-level understanding of my online work was that I had cleverly managed to squeeze the people I work with into my computer. It suggested that they thought I had superhero powers so I was content to let that misapprehension linger.)

I'm about to catch a flight out of JFK. After a week of Belgrade and NYC blogging, Missouri blogging doesn't have quite the same allure, especially after such a beautiful day in NYC.

I walked from Chelsea all the way down to Wall Street -- passing Philip Seymour Hoffman, or someone who bore a stunning resemblance to him, at a sidewalk cafe in Greenwich Village -- before making my way back up to West 23rd. Not only had I never met my TPM colleagues, but I had never been to NYC before, a point of personal embarrassment I cringe to admit. So I wanted to soak up as much of the city as I could in the short time I had and by foot seemed like the best way to go.

I hope it's not so long until my next visit.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on June 21, 2008 12:54 PM

languagehat writes "My wife and I were watching the author on Bill Moyers last night (did you see it too, and decide to post?), "

Yup. Though I was idly listening, not watching, so it wasn't until nea the end of the interview that I was paying attention.

Rangeboy writes "The Communist Party made a determined but mostly futile effort to create a genuinely biracial coalition of the working class in Alabama. "

And they weren't the first. Some time before the Civil War, a Southern pamphleteer proposed the same thing, asserting that slavery was a tool used by rich whites to keep poor whites down -- if you had slaves, you didn't need to offer decent wages to whites or blacks, and as long as only some whites had free labor, they'd continue to be on top economically. I can't recall the author or title. And, yes, historically the way the ruling class keeps on top is by creating or exacerbating divisions and inciting hatred of "inferiors", whether the target of that hate is black, Jew, Kulak, Hispanic, Muslim, or Emanuel Goldstein.

But why then, do we mock poor whites?

sonic meat machine writes "It's always the poor Southerner who is mocked.... Some people, even progressives, find it terrible to mock the first but acceptable to mock the second--without understanding that it wasn't primarily the poor of either race who made the South's problems what they are today."

Well, part of the reason is that Cletus swallowed the myth of Herrenvolk Democracy fed him by his social superiors, wiped his mouth, and asked for seconds.

That's the "beauty" of a race-based system, of Herrenvolk. As long as you're white, you're always intrinsically "better" than a nigger, and you can never lose that birthright and the black can never gain it. On the other hand, if race equality is achieved, you're at the bottom of the totem pole as a poor person. But as long as you support the your superiors, the rich whites, in their access to free labor, you too can exercise your superior social status by bullying, terrorizing, raping, or lynching a black whenever your self-esteem is threatened or your poverty is too depressing. And being white, there's always that distanct dream that you too (or your kids) can join the upper crust -- something no "nigger" can ever do.

So we mock Cletus, in part, because he enthusiastically fought against "Northern Aggression" and his own economic interests to try to protect a disgusting and dehumanizing system that didn't even economically benefit him (and indeed, hurt him economically and mired him in poverty for generations). We sneer at Cletus because he still today takes great pride in his ancestors' fight for the "Lost Cause". We sneer at Cletus because for decades he's reveled in his lack of education ansd ignorance, "'cause jus 'cause I ain't got no book-learnin', I's still better than any them niggers!"

We mock Cletus because decade after decade, when his ruling class has needed to hookwink and blind him to how he was being used, how his children's future was being robbed, Cletus could be distracted and whipped up into a frenzy by a simple "look, a nigger tryin' to get all uppity and use your water fountain!" or school or voting booth! (Not that Cletus voted all that much, poll taxes if not literacy tests applying as much to him as to any black.)

We mock Cletus because now once the ruling class had to allow blacks to vote, Cletus provided the essential counter-weight, a counter-weight that now drives the Republican Party's Southern Strategy, its overt racism masked by the efforts of Richard Nixon and Lee Atwater. And so even today, Cletus votes against his economic interests, content to live in squalor with his kids' teeth rotting out so long as he can clutch his Rebel flag and proudly announce that he don't abide with no niggers (or to make prejudice more socially acceptable today, no welfare, abortionists, and faggot marriage).

We mock Cletus, because he's happily traded his education, economic security, and his children's futures, and allowed himself to be used as a tool, all for the mess of pottage that allows him to sneer at (and maybe lynch) anyone, more matter how educated, wealthy, or competent, who has a black skin.

Originally posted by orthogonality from Popular Comments Across MetaFilter, on June 21, 2008 12:06 PM

Spotted on Newlaunches, a 1975 Volkswagen Beetle made into a phone car by Howard Davis. OK.

Likecool

Originally posted by emily from textually.org, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 21, 2008 at 12:52 PM

Originally posted by emily from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:52 AM

Today we checked out the “Telectroscope” a large, man-made tunnel that connects London, UK to Brooklyn, New York. The tunnel was built by Paul St. George and remains one of the wonders of the world. The tunnel works with an intricate assemblage of mirrors that reflect live images under the Atlantic in real-time between the two cities. Forget the Internet, this is all analog, all the time. If you don’t believe me, check out the link above.

Originally posted by jonah from coin-operated, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 21, 2008 at 12:51 PM

Originally posted by jonah from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 21, 2008 9:51 AM

"I feel sometimes it is as important for us to see our mistakes as it is for us to see ourselves at our best, it gives us direction and allows us to progress..." The scary thing about Parkour is that you have to start somewhere, and that somewhere is usually in public and involves lots of falling down.

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 21, 2008 9:01 AM

More people taking Amtrak, even though it's reaching capacity and can't meet demand. Amtrak only has *632 usable rail cars*?

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 21, 2008 8:51 AM

In a moment of brilliance (I suspect fuelled by gin), my guildmates Kuya and Tikker (a.k.a. Kim and Anno) sent the guild a postcard each ... from Azeroth.

The postcard was printed using Moo's postcard-maker...

... and it's a treasure!

(Thanks ladies!)

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on June 21, 2008 2:04 AM

Ok, well, actually Delicious Library 2 shipped like four weeks ago. Sorry I didn't tell you. It's not because I don't care. Honestly, I tried to tell the press, but I think they're pretty sick of me, so there wasn't much of a splash on the news sites.

Sales have been great, though, so I can't complain.

But, hey, enough about me... what's up with your life? (Use blank space provided.)

_______ ______ _______ _____ _____ _____ ____

Really? Wow. Well, you know, stuff changes. I think it'll work out.

Oh, also, I launched a new company down at WWDC last week, called Golden % Braeburn. I'm going to license out the store I wrote to sell Delicious Library, since it was a huge pain in the tush to write, and I actually would have licensed a store from someone else if there'd been a decent option back when we launched Delicious Monster.

I know, it seems kind of pretentious for one guy to have two companies. Even *I* blush a little at it. But, it kind of makes sense — Golden % Braeburn's only going to have customers in the dozens, and they'll all be Mac developers. I didn't want to confuse my Delicious Monster customers by saying, "Oh, hey, now that you've bought Delicious Library, would you maybe be interested in buying a store to sell software on the internet?" That doesn't pass the "mom" test. (Incidentally, as my mom gets battier I'm finding it harder and harder to write software that passes the "mom" test. I'll have to go back to using Matas' mom as the eponymous mom from the test.)

You can see how it kind of de-focuses my message, yes?

---

A lot of people have been asking about Pimp My Code... No, it's not dead, it's just that those entries take approximately a day to write, and when I was in the final months (and months and months) of Delicious Library 2 I really felt like I owed it more to my customers to actually write my dang software than to publish my vanity blog. (I know, I wrote about my cat and girls and stuff — those entries take like half an hour. I don't have to fact-check them or anything.)

So, we'll have some code pimping here soon... coming up first is the on-the-fly localization code that's part of what I'll be sharing with all Golden % Braeburn customers (one of the advantages of licensing the store is you also get all my helper code), and also the system I'm trying to get Apple to switch to. You can evaluate for yourself whether it's better than AppleGlot or FoobleBlot or whatever you are using.

---

On a personal note, recently my shrink said to me, "Hey, Wil, why don't you drop the pimp act? Nobody actually looks at show-offs and thinks, 'Oooh, I like him.' In fact, everyone resents them."

This made a lot of sense, so I'm officially renouncing my phony pimpitude. Honestly, I'm just a geek who stays up late and plays GTA and makes clumsy passes at pretty girls and tries to write software. That's me.

Originally posted by Wil Shipley from Call Me Fishmeal., on June 21, 2008 1:23 AM

one of the smartest guys I know, I'm keeping a close eye on this  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 20, 2008 11:24 PM

I hadn't realized this was the same guy behind Amazon Light, who's name-checked our work at conferences in the past. Big Picture is wildly awesome.

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 20, 2008 9:38 PM

With its vibrant oversized photographs and minimalist design, the Boston Globe's The Big Picture weblog launched on June 1 to instant global acclaim. It's designed, programmed, and written by Alan Taylor, an old-school web programmer and blogger, in his spare time while working on community features at Boston.com. (You might know Alan from his popular MegaPenny Project, Amazon Light, or his other projects.)

The idea's simple, but extremely effective. Spend a few minutes with the Iowa floods, the faces of Sudan, or the daily life in Sadr City, and you feel like you've opened a window to another world.

I interviewed Alan about the inspiration for the site, his methodology, and what it's like being a programmer in a journalist's world.

The Big Picture's become an essential read for me, and I totally agree with Jason Kottke when he called it "the best new blog of the year." What inspired it?

Alan Taylor: Lots of things — my parents used to always have Life and National Geographic magazines around the house, I fell in love with the visual storytelling way back then. When I was getting my feet wet in the online journalism world as a developer at msnbc.com, I had the good fortune of working alongside Brian Storm and a few others in MSNBC's photo department, who were just phenomenal as far as selection, editing and presentation.

I wondered why other sites didn't reach that level. Many have by now, but I was still frustrated by the presentation — either far too small, or trapped in click-after-click interfaces that were in Flash or just acted as ad farms.

How did you pitch it to the Boston Globe? Was there any resistance?

Not really any resistance, but a lot of "hmm, well, we need to check on it." Mostly things to do with licenses and contracts with image providers. I put together a few mockups that look almost exactly like the final product and shopped it around. A few people loved it, went crazy for it... Others weren't immediately sold, but I asked for a chance, and I got it.

I have an advantage in that my main role is as a developer here, so I could build all my own templates, format my own style, and so on. I sort of bullldozed some things through though, like extra width, few ads, and I made it simple internally by doing it mostly on my own, no requests for development time, marketing or promotion. After the legal questions were settled, I was free to try it out. It took off fast.

Isn't that unprecedented? For a web developer at a newspaper to get their own column?

I don't know. I guess the first thing that springs to mind is the New York Times' Open Blog — where it's mostly techno-focused, but still an interesting format. I did feel that I had to make some kickass mockups to show the editorial group that I had a good eye and decent judgement. That really helped them give the go-ahead.

Again, I got no pushback, just a lot of "Oh, well, this is new, um, okay, let's try it," you know. Plus, I didn't ask anyone else to do any extra work.

Were there any issues in getting permission to publish images that large from the wire photo services? The photos on the Big Picture must be twice the size of any other news site.

We looked at the contracts pretty well and couldn't identify anything that prevented this sort of thing. The general rule appears to be (my understanding of it) that the images should not be easily reproduced in print. Big Picture images max out at 990 pixels wide at 72dpi. If you scale that up to print resolution of 300dpi, you get an image that's only about 2 inches wide, so we'd appear to be within that limit.

I think it may just be conventional wisdom and some old one-size-fits-all templates that hem in other sites. Not every picture site needs to be gigantic, but a few should, considering what's available and what people are capable of viewing.

Tell me a little bit about your curation process. Are you browsing the wire randomly for amazing photos and building a post around it, or do you start with the story you want to tell?

A little of both. Browsing the wire is really fun, and leads to some incredible finds. If there's a specific story I want to tell, I'm at the mercy of what I can find. Sometimes there's a lot, other times, not. For instance, I'm dying to do some "daily life" entries about Iran, but the wire feeds I have available have almost no images from there at all, other than photos of Ahmadinejad — but that's not what I'm after. I try to stock up for a rainy day too. I have some stored searches, some favorite photographers, some perpetually interesting subjects, and so on. I'm trying to automate the gathering as much as possible.

What kind of tools?

I use Firefox to browse the wire on an internal site, wired up with Greasemonkey scripts to give me decent-sized thumbs, extract caption and photo ID from the IMG tags. When I find an image I like, I save it to a local folder until I get about 25 or so good ones to choose from. Then I open all 25 in Photoshop, arrange the windows in a horizontal tile and drag them around to get a rough ordering that makes sense. Then I start to edit out images that don't make the cut, run a couple of recorded Photoshop Actions to size the images, and do some hand-cropping if necessary.

I also wrote a Photoshop script in Javascript that will grab all the images in a given folder and generate HTML with proper heights and widths for the images — that's what I use as the body of the entry. Then I paste in captions (with some editing), grab some relevant links, write a short intro and post it.

Clever. I noticed that the Big Picture's wider than any other page on Boston.com, even wider than the navigation bar. How'd you pick the size?

After googling some design sites where they were talking about optimum size for a blog template and finding no great consensus, I just punted a bit. You take a typical 1024 pixel-wide screen, subtract 34 pixels (enough to cover most browser's scrollbars), and you get 990px. I wanted to go as big as I reasonably could without causing horizontal scrollbars on most screens.

Is Boston.com planning on integrating The Big Picture into the site at all? The only reference outside the registration-wall I could find was a single link on the Blogs page.

It's been featured on the "Inside Boston.com" sidebar a few times, has a semi-permanent link in the left column of the News page. I think they (we) are still working on the relationship between articles written for the Globe that are online, and content that is produced for our online property only. It's a tough nut to crack. Scott Karp really hit the nail on the head. Newspapers websites are still gelling into whatever it is they will become in a few years (or more).

It's funny, but not too surprising, that the biggest innovation in photojournalism right now is coming from a computer programmer. Browsing the major newspaper sites, it's rare to see more than a single small photo accompanying an article and the occasional slideshow. Is that a legacy of the newspapers' print origins?

Good question. Even some of my favorite photo sites are often limited to "Photo of the Day" or "24 Hours in Pictures" features. That's interesting, and you can find some mind-blowing images there, but I always felt like it lacked context, depth, story. When there is more to the story, it's often just a link to a news story, not more photos. I think msnbc.com and the Washington Post are doing quite well though.

It's interesting, you don't link to Boston Globe articles about the photos you're posting. In fact, one of the only external links I've seen is on your most recent Mars post, and you link to the primary sources instead of the Globe article. No pressure to link to other parts of the site?

Yeah, no pressure to link to anything in particular. I do try to keep it in the New York Times family when possible — if the links are good, I'll take them from anywhere.

How's the response been? I've seen the buzz in the blog world and the over-the-top positive comments in every one of your posts.

Yeah — totally unreal. Over-the-top positive response. More than I expected for sure. Internally, externally, everywhere, people are being really thankful to me. I need to make sure (with some link-love in my upcoming blogroll) that the response gets directed to the photographers as well. I'm just a web developer with access to their photos and a blog — they're the ones out there working hard to get these amazing images. "Photographers" here is a loose term, encompassing photojournalists, stringers, amateurs, scientific imaging teams and more.

The blog really launched on June 1st (I had a few earlier posts, but hadn't opened it up yet). In its first 20 days of existence, it's almost reached 1.5 million pageviews and over 1,500 comments for just 20 entries. It's also brought out a lot of emotion — commenters can really go crazy on some of these entries. It adds to the mix, that's for sure.

There's also a lot of international attention, relatively. Largely, I think, due to the visual nature of the blog.

How are you balancing your coding responsibilities of your job with this newfound editorial popularity?

Ha! The clock doesn't stop. Big Picture right now is a side project for sure, and I spend some off-work time compiling it. I just announced that I'm going to three postings a week instead of every weekday, just for sanity's sake. Each entry is about 2-3 hours of work. My main responsibility is helping add community features to the rest of Boston.com.

In journalism, the divide between salaries for engineers and journalists can be pretty wide. Often, a relatively junior programmer can make more than a senior writer. Are there any complications with getting paid a relatively high software developer's salary for doing a writer or editor's job?

I was a bit worried at first that I'd be stepping on toes — treading on other people's domain or doing someone else's job, but so far there doesn't seem to be anything but love for it. I think everyone know that what I'm doing is a side project, not what I'm mainly being paid for.

Programming expertise is rare in journalism, I think partly because of the lure of tech company salaries. Historically, I think there was a reluctance to pay enough to be competitive when it meant a programmer would be making as much as a senior editor
But I assume that's changing... The New York Times, for example, is getting incredibly talented people.

Yeah, I had a lot of friends who looked at me like i was crazy when I joined the Boston Globe a few years ago. But it's precisely this sort of opportunity I was hoping for. The access to great storytelling resources, a great platform, and the ability to contribute to that, albeit in a more technical role. I saw the opportunity and ran with it, with everyone's blessing. It's a very hard question — how to attract programmers to journalism roles. For me, it's just far more interesting than, say, working on a massive financial services backend system.

Finally, as someone obviously passionate about photojournalism, have you tried it yourself?

Yes, and I suck! When I was in college, I tried to get into a "Visual Communications" major but found that even though I knew what a good photo looked like, I could never make the damn camera do what I wanted. All my photos look like pedestrian snapshots or worse. I have a lot of respect for the skill of the pros.

John Gruber told me that when he saw the site, his first thought was, "I can't believe nobody has done this before."

Same thing my wife said, and many others. I know it's totally copy-able, I just hope it inspires good new stuff.

There have been photoblogs using similar formats with images just as large, but I can't recall any that did what you're doing, with multiple high-res photos on a single page around a theme. It would've had to come out in the last couple years, simply because of changing bandwidth and screen sizes.

Yeah, maybe right time, right place? Bandwidth concerns aren't huge, I'm just a blip in overall traffic. 1024 pixel screen sizes are more prevalent, more people have faster connections. When considering that, everyone seems to go right to thinking about video, but you can get so much quality from a good still image. So why not go that route as well?

I'm glad you did. Thanks, Alan!

 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 20, 2008 7:55 PM

all the memes are found, thanks to help from ChopShop  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 20, 2008 4:56 PM

It’s a toasty 105 degrees this evening in California — what better way to cool off (and celebrate the solstice) than to dive into the wild with some of the many YUI items that have caught our eye since the last post?

• Nicora.net’s YUI PhotoViewer: Can you ever have too many lightbox options? Check out nicora.net’s YUI-based PhotoViewer Control, with a variety of flavors and built-in support for Flickr APIs.
• Instant Shiny Forms with Rails and YUI: That’s the title of Enleitened’s new tutorial that "demonstrate[s] how to convert standalone Ruby on Rails forms to a YUI Dialog (hey, it’s one less page load) in only 4 easy steps."
• Javascript Framework Usage Among the Top 100 Websites: Royal Pingdom started some interesting discussions a few weeks back with its article exploring which JS frameworks were in use at the top 100 websites (based on Alexa and Webware data). They found Prototype, JQuery and YUI leading the way among these top sites (excluding most of Yahoo!’s own mainstream properties, which all rely on YUI to some degree). The authors were quick to point out that theirs was not a scientific survey, but they noted their surprise at what the research turned up — and what it failed to turn up. (Note: YUI’s popular CSS components were discluded from this survey; Mint, which also uses YUI extensively, was acknowledged for its use of MooTools.)
• Exploring YUI Custom Events: Speaking of Mint, Matt Snider is back with another YUI tutorial, this one using YUI Custom Events to create an "Object Subscription Pattern."
• Using YUI CSS with Django: Over on Sofeng’s Blog, Sofeng noticed that The Django Book uses YUI CSS; he worked up a tutorial to show you how to do the same in your own Django project.
• Learning YUI: Nathan Smith recently started work at one of my favorite alt-search-engines, Viewzi, which uses YUI. He picked up Dan Wellman’s book to learn the ropes, and then he posted a nice review of some of what he’s discovered as a new YUI user.
• Adam Moore + Douglas Crockford = Epiphany: Lenny Burdette writes on his Rule52 blog about "How YUI’s event listeners changed the way I write JavaScript", bringing together insights from the sample chapter of Douglas Crockford’s JavaScript: The Good Parts and the expressive power of Adam Moore’s YUI Event Utility.
• Richard Benson’s YUI Rich Text Editor Plugin for Movable Type: In Richard’s words: "YUI has become my new favourite Rich Text Editor and I have been implementing it left right and centre. Its extensibility, features and ease of use are unparalleled. It made sense for all these features to be available to me in Movable Type so why not package it up into a plugin too? … Options include stretching the editor to fit the content automatically and disbaling use of the MT assets selection tools in favour of a simpler URL-based image chooser." Check out the plugin in the Movable Type Plugin Directory.
• Adding Tabs to Your WordPress Blog: Adrian Diaconescu at Rubiqube went looking for a good tabbed-content solution for his WordPress sidebar, but he couldn’t find something that fully scratched the itch. His response was to deploy the YUI TabView Control, and he’s written up a detailed tutorial so you can leverage his work.
• YUI DataTable in Grails: Marcel Overdijk recently whipped up a nice example integrating YUI DataTable in Grails.

Did we miss something good? Probably so…if so, let us know in the comments.

Originally posted by Eric Miraglia from Yahoo! User Interface Blog, on June 20, 2008 4:03 PM

We leave you for the weekend with this wonderful mix from Braydon Givon Fuller. A great CC BY-SA licensed melange of freely licensed electro to listen to while you decompress from your week.

Originally posted by Cameron Parkins from Creative Commons » CC News, on June 20, 2008 4:00 PM

• Jim Romenesko’s Impact on Journalism - Media Column - Howell Raines - Portfolio.com
  Want a huge dose of self-important old lecturing in the guise of a prominent blogger?
  (tags: blogging journalism newspaper howell.raines romenesko portfolio poynter)
• Connecting The Dots Of The Web Revolution - Publishing 2.0
  Karp explains what’s so deeply wrong with the AP’s link/quote/copyright scheme.
  (tags: ap blogging copyright journalism new.media msm publishing2.0)
• Quoted: Tim Russert on Diversity in the Media at Racialicious - the intersection of race and pop culture
  Interesting.
  (tags: russert msm race gender inequality military)
• Huffington Post to expand into local news across the US | Media | guardian.co.uk
  V interesting
  (tags: blogging new.media journalism local huffpo chicago)
• Too Sense: The Vile Racism of Pat Oliphant
  Wow. Um. WOW.
  (tags: race inequality msm cartoons)
• Politico’s Advertising Pitch
  Want to know how Politico sells itself? ESPN for sports with a huge dose of insidery goodness.
  (tags: politico new.media finance beltway video)
• techPresident – Obama’s Organization, and the Future of American Politics
  Forgot to delicious this earlier. Summary: BHO’s is the biggest political operation put together in the history of the US, what happens next is a BIG DEAL.
  (tags: new.politics organizing politics transparency grassroots obama 08)
• The Twitter Hall of Shame: 50 Tweets That Will Echo in History - Inside CRM
  Learning from the mistakes of others.
  (tags: funny history twitter new.media)
• techPresident – BREAKING: PdF2008 Hosts Obama-McCain Twitter Debate
  Silly, hilarious, “groundbreaking.” Probably won’t be that interesting.
  (tags: twitter pdf new.politics new.media)
• Google Trends Comes To Web Sites: Trends For Web Sites
  Huh. Another bad public analytics measure to add to compete.com and alexa.com?
  (tags: statistics metrics new.media google search)
• SPIKE LEE + DAVID SIMON + KATRINA = AWESOME, IF IT ACTUALLY HAPPENS. - TAPPED Archive | The American Prospect
  DUDE.
  (tags: david.simon the.wire katrina spike.lee prospect)

Originally posted by agolis from andrew golis, on June 20, 2008 3:32 PM

From Required Eating

Photograph from Just Jared

In response to Jessica Simpson's meat-lovin' t-shirt—now available through the 23rd from Primehouse New York—PETA came up with "Top Five Reasons Only Stupid Girls Brag About Eating Meat." It's nothing we haven't heard from PETA before; the reasons are generally valid warnings about breast cancer and the environment, couched in PETA's typical propaganda rhetoric. But reason number four, "Meat will make you fat", is just plain offensive—especially since the post described Simpson as best known for "her ability to proportionately fill out daisy dukes" and expressed hope that "the upcoming 'Jessica Simpson's Intimates' line comes in plus sizes."

Excuse me, PETA, but whether we choose to eat a nice juicy steak or a big bowl of rice and beans, "real girls" don't all have to look like (rumored vegetarians) Kate Moss or Avril Lavigne. [via Grub Street]

Originally posted by Sarah Wolf from Serious Eats, on June 20, 2008 3:30 PM

Washington Post writer admits to having a fantasy of correcting typos in restaurant menus with "a distinctive purple pen". But sometimes the computer's spellchecker is no help.

Despite my attempts to stop it, my Microsoft Word program would always change the word for Italy's famous cured meat into what it assumed I meant to type. The night we closed an issue, I would have nightmares that when the magazine hit the stands, one of my reviews would describe "the delicate sweet and salty balance of melon and prostitute."

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 20, 2008 3:19 PM

For those who are all excited about Twitabit, the service that promises to queue up Twitter postings if the service is down, consider these two factlets:

1. Twitabit asks you to type in your Twitter password -- as in, you're on a page on twitabit.com and asked to type in your password to another site entirely;
2. Twitabit appears to have not one word of a privacy policy, or any other text that'll help you understand why on Earth you should trust them with your password to another site.

Ummmm, no thanks. No thanks at all.

(with comments)

Originally posted by Jason from Q Daily News, on June 20, 2008 2:51 PM

New Newsweek poll: Obama 51%, McCain 36%.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 20, 2008 1:17 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on June 20, 2008 1:07 PM

Cross posted from the announcement found at the Official Movable Type News blog:

Today we are releasing Movable Type 4.01b and Movable Type 4.12. These are free mandatory security updates for all Movable Type 4.x users. These updates resolve a vulnerability which has not been exploited, but was reported to us by a third party on June 16. We have addressed the issue with these updates, and are providing new, fully-tested versions for all affected versions of Movable Type in all supported configurations. A detailed description of the vulnerability can be found below, but in short a cross-site scripting (XSS) vulnerability has been found in Movable Type's built-in search feature, which could be exploited by malicious parties to execute javascript without permission.

We have no record of a user having been affected by this vulnerability, and there are no known public exploits. The release candidates of Movable Type 4.2, currently in testing, Movable Type 3.36 and Movable Type Enterprise 1.5 are all unaffected by this issue. Here's the Update Advisor, which summarizes the issues found and provides a guide for updating your installation of Movable Type.

Movable Type Update Advisor: Version 4.01b and 4.12:

• Release Type: Security Release. The potential vulnerability has not yet been exploited in the wild.
• Mandatory? This is a mandatory update for all users of Movable Type 4.0 and later.
• Performance Implications: None.
• Plugins Affected: None.
• Templates Affected: No changes in your templates are required.
• System Requirements: This release has no new or additional system requirements.
  
• Licensing considerations: None. MT 4.01b and MT 4.12 are free updates for users of any version of MT 4.
• Upgrade Fatigue: No planned updates are scheduled until the release of MT4.2, which is currently in the final stages of release. There will be no further releases before MT 4.2 unless significant security issues are found which require additional 4.x releases. It has been 152 days since the last recommended update to MT4.

Downloads are available in your account for current customers or through the download page for MTOS.

Downloads are available through the channel where you received Movable Type: Paying users can find the update by logging in to your Movable Type account, and users of Movable Type Open Source or the free personal license can get the update from the download page.

In addition to the updates to Movable Type 4.01b and 4.12 for MT4 users, we have issued updates to the Movable Type Community Solution and Enterprise Solution. If you are on one of these platforms, you should have already been contacted by your account representative about these updates.

A Commitment to Security

We take Movable Type's security very seriously, especially as we know many of you choose Movable Type for its security track record. In addition to issuing fixes to affected versions of Movable Type, we have also amended our development and testing processes internally to help better detect these types of vulnerabilities in the future. As InformationWeek just noted, Movable Type has "a fraction of the security incidents of its peers". That means we take this update, and all security concerns extremely seriously out of commitment to you as a Movable Type user, out of our desire to uphold our reputation, and out of responsibility to the entire web to try to ensure technology platforms are as secure as possible.

Detailed Description

When conducting a tag search in Movable Type, the application is not properly escaping the optional IncludeBlogs query string parameter. As a result, one could construct an exploit whereby a user could click on a link that conducts a tag search and unbeknownst to them also execute malicious javascript code embedded by the third party. Malicious javascript code could be used to transmit sensitive information about the user's active session.

Versions Affected

Only the following versions of Movable Type are affected by this issue.

• Movable Type 4.0, 4.01, 4.01a (Personal and Commercial)
• Movable Type 4.1 (Open Source, Personal and Commercial)
• Movable Type Community Solution 1.0, 1.0a
• Movable Type Community Solution 1.5
• Movable Type Enterprise Solution 1.0

All other versions of Movable Type, including the 4.2 release candidates, are not affected by this issue.

Applying the Fix

• Users of Movable Type 4.0, 4.01 and 4.01a can install the updated Movable Type 4.01b, or they can replace the file lib/MT/App/Search.pm file found in their distribution with an updated version.
• Users of Movable Type 4.1 and 4.1a can install the updated Movable Type 4.12, or they can replace the lib/MT/App/Search.pm file found in their distribution with an updated version.

Learn more about Upgrading Movable Type 4 in the MT documentation.

As always, thank you so much for choosing Movable Type and we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience of having to upgrade your software, and are committed to making such updates as infrequent as possible.

Originally posted by Byrne Reese from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on June 20, 2008 12:36 PM

For its July 2008 issue, Vogue Italia is featuring only black models and feature articles about black women in arts and entertainment.

Having worked at one time with nearly all the models he chose for the black issue -- Iman, [Naomi] Campbell, Tyra Banks, Jourdan Dunn, [Liya] Kebede, [Alek] Wek, Pat Cleveland, Karen Alexander -- [photographer Steven] Meisel had his own feelings. "I thought, it's ridiculous, this discrimination," said Mr. Meisel, speaking by phone from his home in Los Angeles. "It's so crazy to live in such a narrow, narrow place. Age, weight, sexuality, race -- every kind of prejudice."

Here's a slideshow of some of the images from the magazine. As I've said before, Vogue Italia is doing some interesting things with the editorial nature of the magazine's photography (see State of Emergency and Super Mods Enter Rehab, both by Steven Meisel).

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 20, 2008 12:22 PM

We got the chance to try the Curran Gewurztraminer at a winemaker dinner we attended in February, with Kris Curran and Bruno d’Alphonso. We’ve been bugging our sales rep for this wine ever since, and are thrilled that Curran has finally released a tiny amount to retailers. Yay! A perfect wine for the summer.Get some [...]

Originally posted by d547 from domaine547, on June 20, 2008 11:07 AM

In his article on ESPN.com today about the pathetic Seattle Mariners, Jim Caple pointed out that Willie Bloomquist has no extra base hits yet so far this year. Here are the leaders among non-pitchers since 1958, in terms of most ABs in a season with zero XHB. Bloomquist already ranks pretty high, although he of course could come off at any time if he hits one down the line.

  Cnt Player             **AB**  XB Year Age Tm  Lg  G   PA  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB IBB  SO HBP  SH  SF GDP  SB CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Positions
+—-+—————–+——-+—+—-+—+—+–+—+—+—+—+–+–+–+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+–+—–+—–+—–+—–+———+
    1 Dwain Anderson      124     0 1973  25 TOT NL  71 144  16  15  0  0  0   3  18   0  33   0   2   0   2   2  0  .121  .232  .121  .353 *6/58
    2 Dave Nelson         123     0 1969  25 CLE AL  52 137  11  25  0  0  0   6   9   1  26   1   2   2   2   4  3  .203  .259  .203  .462 *4/79
    3 Mike Gallego        120     0 1995  34 OAK AL  43 132  11  28  0  0  0   8   9   0  24   1   2   0   3   0  1  .233  .292  .233  .525 465
    4 Pat Corrales        120     0 1972  31 TOT NL  46 135   6  23  0  0  0   6  13   2  26   1   1   0   1   0  0  .192  .276  .192  .468 *2
    5 Paul Casanova       104     0 1974  32 ATL NL  42 113   5  21  0  0  0   8   5   2  17   0   1   3   2   0  0  .202  .232  .202  .434 *2
    6 Tom Egan             94     0 1974  28 CAL AL  43 109   4  11  0  0  0   4   8   0  40   1   6   0   3   1  0  .117  .194  .117  .311 *2
    7 Otis Nixon           91     0 1984  25 CLE AL  49 103  16  14  0  0  0   1   8   0  11   0   3   1   2  12  6  .154  .220  .154  .374 *7/8
    8 Juan Castillo        90     0 1988  26 MIL AL  54  94  10  20  0  0  0   2   3   0  14   0   1   0   1   2  0  .222  .247  .222  .469 456/7
    9 Ty Cline             88     0 1966  27 TOT NL  49  94  15  24  0  0  0   8   3   0  13   2   1   0   3   3  1  .273  .312  .273  .585 89/7
   10 Broderick Perkins    87     0 1979  24 SDP NL  57  97   8  23  0  0  0   8   8   2  12   0   1   1   3   0  0  .264  .323  .264  .587 3
   11 Orlando Ramirez      86     0 1974  22 CAL AL  31  97   4  14  0  0  0   7   6   0  23   0   4   1   1   2  1  .163  .215  .163  .378 *6
   12 Joe Millette         78     0 1992  25 PHI NL  33  87   5  16  0  0  0   2   5   2  10   2   2   0   8   1  0  .205  .271  .205  .476 *6/54
   13 Doc Edwards          78     0 1970  33 PHI NL  35  86   5  21  0  0  0   6   4   3  10   1   3   0   4   0  0  .269  .313  .269  .582 *2
   14 Greg Gross           75     0 1989  36 HOU NL  60  88   2  15  0  0  0   4  11   2   6   1   1   0   3   0  0  .200  .310  .200  .510 /9371
   15 Dal Maxvill          74     0 1974  35 TOT ML  68  90   6  14  0  0  0   2  10   0  14   0   6   0   2   0  0  .189  .286  .189  .475 *64/5
   16 Remy Hermoso         74     0 1969  22 MON NL  28  81   6  12  0  0  0   3   5   0  10   1   1   0   3   3  1  .162  .225  .162  .387 *4/6
   17 Jose Oquendo         73     0 1993  29 STL NL  46  89   7  15  0  0  0   4  12   1   8   0   3   1   5   0  0  .205  .314  .205  .519 64
   18 Walt Hriniak         73     0 1969  26 TOT NL  38  85   4  16  0  0  0   1  10   1  12   2   0   0   3   0  0  .219  .329  .219  .548 *2
   19 Rusty Torres         72     0 1980  31 KCR AL  51  80  10  12  0  0  0   3   8   0   7   0   0   0   1   1  3  .167  .250  .167  .417 97/8
   20 Chuck Scrivener      72     0 1977  29 DET AL  61  80  10   6  0  0  0   2   5   0   9   0   3   0   1   0  0  .083  .143  .083  .226 *6/45
   21 Luis Gomez           72     0 1975  23 MIN AL  89  81   7  10  0  0  0   5   4   0  12   0   4   1   1   0  2  .139  .182  .139  .321 *6/4
   22 Phil Gagliano        72     0 1970  28 TOT NL  44  79   5  12  0  0  0   7   6   0   8   0   1   0   1   0  1  .167  .231  .167  .398 4/53
   23 Cecil Espy           71     0 1990  27 TEX AL  52  82  10   9  0  0  0   1  10   0  20   0   1   0   1  11  5  .127  .235  .127  .362 *8/974D
   24 Orlando Gonzalez     70     0 1980  28 OAK AL  25  80  10  17  0  0  0   1   9   0   8   0   1   0   0   0  2  .243  .329  .243  .572 3/D7
   25 Tommy Dean           70     0 1971  25 SDP NL  41  80   2   8  0  0  0   1   4   0  13   0   6   0   2   1  0  .114  .162  .114  .276 *65/4
+—-+—————–+——-+—+—-+—+—+–+—+—+—+—+–+–+–+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+–+—–+—–+—–+—–+———+
  Cnt Player             **AB**  XB Year Age Tm  Lg  G   PA  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB IBB  SO HBP  SH  SF GDP  SB CS   BA   OBP   SLG   OPS  Positions
+—-+—————–+——-+—+—-+—+—+–+—+—+—+—+–+–+–+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+–+—–+—–+—–+—–+———+
   26 Rick Bosetti         69     0 1977  23 STL NL  41  76  12  16  0  0  0   3   6   0  11   1   0   0   0   4  4  .232  .303  .232  .535 *7/89
   27 Manny Alexander      68     0 1996  25 BAL AL  54  73   6   7  0  0  0   4   3   0  27   0   2   0   2   3  3  .103  .141  .103  .244 6/4571
   28 Felix Fermin         68     0 1987  23 PIT NL  23  75   6  17  0  0  0   4   4   1   9   1   2   0   3   0  0  .250  .301  .250  .551 *6
   29 Jimmy Stewart        68     0 1973  34 HOU NL  60  81   6  13  0  0  0   3   9   1  12   1   3   0   1   0  0  .191  .295  .191  .486 /574
   30 Ellie Rodriguez      66     0 1976  30 LAD NL  36  90  10  14  0  0  0   9  19   2  12   3   0   2   1   0  0  .212  .400  .212  .612 *2
   31 Ossie Blanco         66     0 1970  24 CHW AL  34  71   4  13  0  0  0   8   3   0  14   0   0   2   1   0  1  .197  .225  .197  .422 *3/7
   32 Art Gardner          65     0 1977  24 HOU NL  66  70   7  10  0  0  0   3   3   1  15   1   1   0   3   0  0  .154  .203  .154  .357 7/89
   33 Mike Squires         65     0 1975  23 CHW AL  20  74   5  15  0  0  0   4   8   2   5   0   0   1   2   3  0  .231  .311  .231  .542 *3
   34 Boots Day            65     0 1974  26 MON NL  52  72   8  12  0  0  0   2   5   0   8   0   1   1   2   0  0  .185  .239  .185  .424 7/9
   35 Billy Jo Robidoux    62     0 1987  23 MIL AL  23  70   9  12  0  0  0   4   8   1  17   0   0   0   0   0  1  .194  .286  .194  .480 D3
   36 John Moses           62     0 1985  27 SEA AL  33  65   4  12  0  0  0   3   2   0   8   0   1   0   3   5  2  .194  .219  .194  .413 *8/7
   37 Tom Nieto            60     0 1988  27 MIN AL  24  62   1   4  0  0  0   0   1   0  17   1   0   0   2   0  0  .067  .097  .067  .164 *2
   38 Mike Edwards         59     0 1980  27 OAK AL  46  63  10  14  0  0  0   3   1   0   5   0   3   0   1   1  1  .237  .250  .237  .487 *4/D9
   39 Jerry McNertney      59     0 1966  29 CHW AL  44  71   3  13  0  0  0   1   7   0   6   0   5   0   3   1  1  .220  .303  .220  .523 *2
   40 John Wojcik          59     0 1963  21 KCA AL  19  67   7  11  0  0  0   2   8   2   8   0   0   0   0   2  0  .186  .284  .186  .470 *7/98
   41 Willie Bloomquist    58     0 2008  30 SEA AL  34  67  12  13  0  0  0   3   9   0  15   0   0   0   1   7  2  .224  .328  .224  .552 9/8647D5
   42 Dale Sveum           58     0 1998  34 NYY AL  30  64   6   9  0  0  0   3   4   0  16   0   0   2   2   0  0  .155  .203  .155  .358 *3/5D
   43 Eric Owens           57     0 1997  26 CIN NL  27  61   8  15  0  0  0   3   4   0  11   0   0   0   2   3  2  .263  .311  .263  .574 /7849
   44 Benji Gil            57     0 1993  20 TEX AL  22  66   3   7  0  0  0   2   5   0  22   0   4   0   0   1  2  .123  .194  .123  .317 *6
   45 Jerry Dybzinski      57     0 1981  25 CLE AL  48  67  10  17  0  0  0   6   5   0   8   0   5   0   0   7  1  .298  .355  .298  .653 *6/45D
   46 Mick Kelleher        57     0 1974  26 HOU NL  19  62   4   9  0  0  0   2   5   0  10   0   0   0   1   1  1  .158  .226  .158  .384 *6
   47 Chris Heintz         56     0 2007  32 MIN AL  24  61   0  14  0  0  0   7   3   0  12   0   2   0   2   0  0  .250  .288  .250  .538 *2
   48 Vic Harris           56     0 1975  25 CHC NL  51  64   6  10  0  0  0   5   6   0   7   0   1   1   0   0  0  .179  .254  .179  .433 7/548
   49 Ron Brand            56     0 1971  31 MON NL  47  61   3  12  0  0  0   1   3   0   5   0   2   0   0   1  1  .214  .254  .214  .468 6/57842
   50 Keith Drumright      55     0 1978  23 HOU NL  17  59   5   9  0  0  0   2   3   0   4   0   1   0   2   0  1  .164  .207  .164  .371 *4        

Originally posted by Andy from Stat of the Day, on June 20, 2008 10:54 AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on June 20, 2008 10:11 AM

While East Village community activists protesting the Bowery's recent development screamed "Die hard yuppie scum!" at those unlucky enough to be sitting outside of Bowery Wine Company last Friday evening, the nearby, and recently resurrected, International Bar was open for its second weekend since closing in 2005. So maybe there's hope between Delancey and 14th Street after all. Things aren't quite as scuzzy as they once were at this snug spot on First Avenue. Proprietors Shawn Dahl and Molly Fitch have added sinks to the renovated bathrooms; the gold leaf lettering arched across the front window has been restored, and the worn formica counter, gutted by a landlord during the space's three-year vacancy, was replaced by a mahogany bar salvaged from an Upper East Side bar that changed ownership. But former regulars can count on some familiar scenery: A portrait of former owner Michael Petruno, who died in 2002, is still hung on the wall among new décor like velvet paintings and a vintage poster for a movie called Brides of Dracula. The jukebox selection is still as eclectic as its predecessor's. Dahl is a former Rolling Stone editor, Fitch is a musician, and although it was skipping the night we visited and a satellite radio station was piped in, discs include The Shaggs, The Carter Family Band, Howlin' Wolf, Nina Simone and Bad Brains with many, many, many, others to pick from. The menu also remains straightforward. Mixed drinks are split between a house and call list, ($4 and $6 respectively), Yuengling, Guinness, Stella, and Blue Moon drafts, all $4-$5, have been added to the former bottles-only lineup, and cans of Schaefer, the one beer to have when you're having more than one, are $2. You'll definitely want to stay for two. International Bar 120 First Ave., (212) 777-1643 Photo from Jeremoss' Flicker

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on June 20, 2008 9:59 AM

Yesterday's announcement by NASA of the discovery of water ice on Mars by its Phoenix Lander probe made big news everywhere. The discovery involved the observation of water ice sublimating into the air - that is, the water went from solid to vapor state without reaching the liquid stage. The Martian atmosphere has perfect conditions for sublimation - extremely thin, dry and cold. How cold? Well, you can check the Live Martian Weather Report, with data from a station on board the Phoenix Lander. Today will see a high temperature of a toasty -26 degrees F.

What more do we know about Mars' atmosphere? It's hundreds of times thinner than Earth's atmosphere and is made of 95% carbon dioxide, 3% nitrogen, 1.6% argon, and contains traces of oxygen, water, and methane. We also know, from observations that it can support dust storms, dust devils, clouds and gusty winds. With an amazing number of six current live probes exploring Mars (two rovers, a lander, and three orbiters), there are many thousands of images available. Only a few, however show atmospheric phenomena. Presented here are some of the best images of Martian atmosphere (and beyond) in action. (17 photos total)

High, wispy clouds cover a large portion of Mars, seen in this, the first true-colour image of Mars generated with the OSIRIS orange (red), green and blue color filters. The image was acquired by an instrument on the ESA's Rosetta probe on Feb. 24, 2007 from a distance of about 240,000 km. Image resolution is about 5 km/pixel. (Credits: ESA © 2007 MPS for OSIRIS Team MPS/UPD/LAM/IAA/RSSD/INTA/UPM/DASP/IDA)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on June 20, 2008 8:42 AM

TPM Election Central reports that MoveOn is shuttering its 527 outfit for 2008, in response to pressure from the Obama campaign.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on June 20, 2008 8:21 AM

As I said in my previous post, it has been a busy week for me. The highlight was an interview with Reid Hoffman for TechTicker upon closing his venture deal valuing LinkedIn at a (Outrageous? Conservative?) $1 billion valuation. Of course, if you read this blog regularly you know I think it’s easily worth that. And really, Reid just confirmed it for me. In this piece below, he discusses why all this talk of a Facebook-LinkedIn rivalry just misses the mark. One of his claims is that work and play will not collide, which is funny because in my BusinessWeek column this week I talked about the growing realization that our worlds are doing just that and posed the question of whether people would change their real-world behavior or abandon such heavy use of sites like Twitter, Facebook, et all.

But if you watch this video, you see a lot of clues to why I think LinkedIn is the sleeper big, standalone public company that emerges from Web 2.0. There are so many moments where Hoffman – and I should add Dan Nye the current CEO—have resisted cheap growth, from both users and revenues, in favor of building a sustainable business. The business side of LinkedIn has always made it a little different from the rest of the Web 2.0 crop, which is fitting since it started in 2003—a beyond bleak time for Web companies when VCs were demanding some sort of business model. Although Reid decisively rejected that—and stepped in to fund a good many early Web entrepreneurs who did too—you can still see that thinking in how quickly the company got to profitability and how quickly it began building it’s own salesforce, rather than, say, off-loaded ad sales to a third party.

I could go on, but just watch the clip. Two other pieces below it with Reid: One on the $1 billion valuation and the prospect of a LinkedIn IPO and the other on Reid’s thoughts about Web 2.0 and it’s twin growing pains of monetization and persistent outages. I was lucky enough to spend hours at a time talking business and the Valley with Reid while I was writing my book, but haven’t seen him in a while. I forgot how much I enjoy his willingness to answer nearly every question you put to him in a direct and honest way. I’m  trying to think now of a single time he’s said “no comment” to me and coming up blank! Anyway, enjoy:

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on June 20, 2008 8:20 AM

On Tuesday WNYC's Brian Lehrer asked listeners to send in their suggestions for future "Summer Streets" locations. Responses -- which included Flatbush Avenue, one tube of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, and the Henry Hudson Parkway -- were mapped here.

Other picks?

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog, on June 20, 2008 6:12 AM

Stainedglass
Uploaded by posterchild

You can see more of Posterchild's work here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on June 20, 2008 5:27 AM

A while back I found out via the Twitter site that the Mars Phoenix Lander had a Twitter channel. I don't know, but maybe at the time it didn't seem to be an interesting stream, what, but I didn't follow.

Well, seems like Alex is following the Lander and re-tweeted the big news below. So, I went to see the stream and am very pleased with how well they are using the stream. Not only is the person doing the tweeting very funny, but she has been responding to questions and such.

This is an excellent way of using Twitter in a corporate setting.

Did I say corporate? Indeed, this is NASA using Twitter to send out updates for one of their programs. Someone who represents the Lander is the one Tweeting, so that's marketing communications to me. And companies can learn a lot by just following this stream.

Way to go NASA!

Link: Twitter / MarsPhoenix:

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!! about 7 hours ago from web

Originally posted by charlie from Lifeblog, on June 19, 2008 11:35 PM

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

It's only fitting that the glorious news of water ice on Mars was broke over Twitter this evening, via the Mars Phoenix lander's own first-person ramblings. Apparently Mars Phoenix was keeping an eye on some white patches it uncovered the other day, only to discover they'd disappeared today. According to the scientist folk over at NASA, that means those white patches must've been ice, which dissipated once uncovered. Now Mars Phoenix still has the considerable task of uncovering more ice and sampling it, but the mission is ahead of schedule and NASA has already identified a hard patch of ground it wants to dig into. Congrats to Mars Phoenix and all the fine folks at NASA, now be sure to watch out for the cave-dwelling little green men!

[Via Wired Science]

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Originally posted by Paul Miller from Engadget, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 20, 2008 at 12:18 AM

Originally posted by Paul Miller from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 19, 2008 9:18 PM

About 2 hours ago, the Mars Phoenix rover twittered that it had found evidence of ice on Mars.

Are you ready to celebrate? Well, get ready: We have ICE!!!!! Yes, ICE, *WATER ICE* on Mars! w00t!!! Best day ever!!

The Mars rover said "w00t". Here's the w00t-less press release and the associated images that show the ice sublimating from the surface over the last four days.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 19, 2008 7:19 PM

Children in the mail!

After parcel post service was introduced in 1913, at least two children were sent by the service. With stamps attached to their clothing, the children rode with railway and city carriers to their destination. The Postmaster General quickly issued a regulation forbidding the sending of children in the mail after hearing of those examples.

That photo is part of the Smithsonian Institution's collection at Flickr.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 19, 2008 5:39 PM

Always amusing, Rosecrans Baldwin's dispatches from Paris. Unless (or perhaps especially) if you're French.

One afternoon a roving band of 30 teenagers stopped traffic on the Champs-Elysées, marching toward the Arc de Triomphe, followed by a battalion of 60 police officers in riot gear, marching in rows of two. I asked a French co-worker what the kids were celebrating. He squinted, looking into the sun. "That it's May," he said. "That they're French, that they're young. You will not understand."

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 19, 2008 4:40 PM

From Required Eating

From left: "Yasmin (Pepto Bismol)," "Philip (Coffee)." Photographs by Meg Wachter.

Brooklyn-based artist Meg Wachter's photos, which involve dumping or pouring food over her subects' heads, are both "ridiculous and sublime," says Jeremy on the blog Shape + Colour.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on June 19, 2008 2:45 PM

On a private conference call moments ago, Hillary urged her top fundraisers in no uncertain terms to throw their weight behind Barack Obama, and directly asked them in surprisingly candid terms to give or raise money to help her pay off her campaign's debt.

At the same time, in a move that took some participants on the call by surprise, she also clarified that she was not asking their help in paying off her personal loans to the campaign.

Interestingly, Hillary also suggested that she would soon be making public statements about the media coverage of the campaign, as well as the ways "women were discussed," saying that she would "be doing more on that as we go forward."

"I am going to do everything I can to ensure victory for Senator Obama," Hillary told her fundraisers on the call. "I am asking each of you to do the same. I really believe we've got to see a Democrat sworn into the White House this January."

The call, which I was able to listen to in its entirety, left little doubt that Hillary was unequivocally signaling to her top financial supporters -- who are being actively courted by Obama -- that the time had come for them to do their part in getting him elected President.

Hillary added that "the stakes are too high" to do anything but "do all we can to elect Barack Obama President," in order to "turn the economy around" and "protect a woman's right too choose."

On the topic of her debts, Hillary said: "Many of you also know that my campaign is facing debt. That happens when you're outspent...I have also loaned money to the campaign which I consider an investment...I'm not expecting anybody to help pay that back."

"But I am hoping to get your help in our efforts to pay off our vendors," she continued, adding that "any amount you can give or help raise would go a long way" towards doing that.

Hillary then suggested that she'd be making public statements soon about the media's treatment of her candidacy.

Speaking of the campaign, Hillary noted that "there were a lot of other aspects to it that people are asking about. A lot of real concerns about some of the ways we were portrayed in the media and the way women were discussed."

"I will be doing more on that as we go forward," Hillary said.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on June 19, 2008 2:42 PM

From Serious Eats: New York

"It's just food. Eat it." —David Chang, Momofuku Ko

It shouldn't surprise anyone who follows Serious Eats New York that we're big fans of the food porn. So you can imagine our shock and disappointment to read on Eater that Momofuku Ko is now prohibiting photography inside the restaurant [via eGullet].

We asked Ko's chef-owner, David Chang, for comment.

His response: "It's just food. Eat it."

(Chang did say that photography is not banned at his larger sister restaurants Momofuku Noodle Bar and Momofuku Ssäm Bar.)

It's not hard to relate to Chang's position on Ko; from the minute the place opened, it was overrun by camera-toting food-porn obsessives wanting to capture the joy of a meal at the best new restaurant in the city. But if you ask me, an outright ban is entirely unfair. No photos of the chefs? Sure. No photos of other people in the restaurant? Well, of course. Don't use a flash? Naturally, that's rude.

But flashless close-up photos of dishes that we're paying a lot of money for? Well it's my belief that it's our God-given right to capture our meal for posterity. On second thought, I guess it would only be God-given for those of us who consider Chang a god.

But that's just my opinion. To get a spectrum of views on the subject, we contacted other heavyweights in the restaurant industry. After the jump, their responses.

Mario Batali

Celebrity chef Mario Batali runs a thriving restaurant empire with his business partner, Joe Bastianich, that encompasses seven restaurants in New York City, one in L.A., and one in Las Vegas.

"Do you mean folks like bloggers? Our photo policy is that we do not allow lights or taking photos of other customers but do not stop joyous foodies clicking an occasional photo of the food on the table with a small camera. If it starts to feel like a photo shoot or they flash more than twice, we ask them to stop for the comfort of other guests. I pose with guests for hundreds of photos a year in the resto."

Daniel Boulud

We called up Daniel Boulud and ended up chatting with Georgette Farkas, director of public relations for the chef's empire, which streches from New York to Miami to Las Vegas.

"We don't have a policy," Farkas said. "We discourage it, but we're not going to ban it. It's good, when and if people have a reservation and they know they want to take pictures, that they tell us. We can seat them in a place that will be better for their purposes. We'll also send people photos of the dishes if they ask us as well. The problem comes in when the flash is going off and it affects other customers' experiences."

Drew Nieporent

Drew Nieporent is the founder of the Myriad Restaurant Group, which owns the various Nobu restaurants in New York and around the world, among other venues.

"No, we're not going to stop people from taking photos," Nieporent said. "We'd just like people to be considerate of the other people in the restaurant."

A House Divided

In the process of reporting this story, it became clear there were differing opinions within the Serious Eats office. Here's what everyone had to say.

Ed Levine: "In Chang's case, I can understand the policy at Momofuku Ko because the place is so small that it's virtually impossible for people to take photos of their food without intruding on their neighbors' experience."

Raphael Brion: "I feel like it's to the point that it should be like smoking and non-smoking—photos and non-photos. When you go to a restaurant to have a meal and four people bust out the SLRs, it takes away from the dining experience, especially in a fine-dining environment."

Alaina Browne: "As a food blogger, I used to feel the urge to compulsively document my meals, but—especially if you're dining with a group of people—it takes away from the overall dining experience. ... It's kind of antisocial."

Hannah Howard: "I work at a place where our food is beautiful and photogenic. We're always wanting to show it off for the camera. We ourselves snap photos of particularly pretty plates of cheese and other things with abandon. It's wonderful to have a visual chronicle of what we are producing, and I think it's cool when diners take it upon themselves to record our food on their cameras."

Adam Kuban: "I have mixed feelings on the subject. When I'm not the one taking the photos, I hate restaurant shutterbugs. But when I need a photo for a dispatch I'm doing, I totally want unencumbered photo access. It's tricky. I carry a very small camera, always suppress the flash, and try to make my 'photo shoot' as quick as possible. I always look for a spot with good lighting that's still far enough away from owners, servers, or other patrons that I can go about my business relatively unnoticed. When I first started food-blogging years ago, it was less a problem. People just assumed I was a weird tourist. Now, with so many other food bloggers out there, restaurateurs know the score, so I'm always afraid I'll be made as a 'reviewer' and kicked out."

Robyn Lee: "I'm kind of embarrassed when I do it, but I won't stop. I can totally understand why people wouldn't want food bloggers whipping out their huge-ass cameras during a meal, but in my selfish view, I just really want to take photos in case I want to write about something on my site. The obsessive food blogger part of me (internally) screams, 'DON'T EAT UNTIL YOU'VE TAKEN A GOOD PHOTO OF IT!' during most meals. Which is not normal. Thankfully, all my friends know not to eat something until I've taken a photo of it. Sweet Jesus, what's wrong with me?"

My Own Plea

On behalf of camera-wielding, food-porn obsessives all over the city , I humbly plead that the folks at Ko change their mind and revert to a more lenient policy like those of the restaurateurs above.

What do you think of people taking flashless photography of the food they've paid for, inside restaurants?

Originally posted by Zach Brooks from Serious Eats, on June 19, 2008 12:30 PM

“Looks like we’re in Egypt - but we’re really in Detroit!”

Hm. I suppose for someone who’s not particularly familiar with the area, Detroit does seem like a very foreign place.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Jessica Coen, on June 19, 2008 11:54 AM

From Required Eating

©iStockphoto.com/oriba

Why am I always dousing my eggs in hot sauce while my dad winces at the faintest chile heat? Why do I believe beets embody deliciousness while they rank at the top of your "utterly disgusting" list?

Gourmet weighs in on this question and a host of others in an article about the fast-changing science of taste. Established flavor chemist Terry Acree from Cornell University says, "Flavor chemistry is finished." He explains:

“Flavor chemistry is finding the chemical molecules that are important to aroma and taste. We spent decades doing this. But the other side of the equation is what’s been missing: how these chemicals interact with our bodies. That’s the part we’re getting to now.”

And they are getting there, thanks to big breakthroughs, many accelerated by the decoding of the human genome in 2003. By isolating the genome's individual taste receptors, scientists can begin to understand how we respond to every flavor known (and perhaps unknown) to humankind.

'There Are No Basic Tastes'

It is common knowledge that there are four basic tastes: bitter, sweet, sour, and salty. Recently, there has been buzz about taste number five: umami, which means something like savory or hearty.

But our common knowledge is wrong. Michael O’Mahony, a sensory scientist at the University of California, Davis, says "There are no basic tastes."

Taste happens when chemicals are dissolved in saliva. The chemicals collide with about 40 tiny receptors, grouped not just on the tongue but all over the inside of the mouth. The receptors convert the chemical into a nerve impulse, which is then transmitted to the brain. Since we all have different brains, we interpret the messages differently. Some think, "yum;" others think, "gross." Some, "moderately spicy;" others, "unbearably hot."

New Ways to Play with Food

But the implications go far beyond the realization that our four-flavor paradigm is woefully inadequate. More knowledge means more way to enhance, block, and play with how food tastes.

Certain chefs, including Ferran Adrià of Spain's El Bulli and Heston Blumenthal of England's The Fat Duck, use chemistry in the kitchen to play with their foods' flavors in unconventional ways. Chris Young, a chemist who worked as a food-research manager at The Fat Duck, gives a suggestion for how taste-blockers can be used:

“Savory ice cream. Sugar is inherently necessary to get the particular texture that ice cream has. You need it to depress the freezing point and give you enough solids. But for a true savory ice cream, you’d need to use sugar but block the sweet taste.”

It follows, then, that one day we might call for a reservation with the time we would like to dine and the 411 on our genome. The chef could use this information to cook up a meal we are genetically destined to love.

Getting a little sci-fi? Culture plays a roll, too. Although I might be genetically inclined to detest coffee, I could get used to a cup in the morning and find myself craving it. I could learn to love Brussels sprouts (mmm, Brussels sprouts...), a fine single-malt, or tofu, even though my DNA predisposes me to be more of a broccoli, beer, and burger girl.

There's still a lot to learn, but it seems as if the possibilities are vast.

Originally posted by Hannah Howard from Serious Eats, on June 19, 2008 11:15 AM

We like this one. To amplify its message that opting out of public financing was necessary to combat the onslaught of outside 527 ad spending that's likely to hit Obama in the months ahead, the Obama campaign has turned to the perfect messenger: John Kerry.

On a conference call with reporters moments ago, Kerry insisted that the decision was necessary if Obama is to avoid succumbing under a barrage of such spending, as he did.

"You know, the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth hadn't appeared in July of my year as a funded group," Kerry said. "And they were funded in August, which was the time I was tied to campaign finance reform and didn't have the money to respond. And it had an obvious, profound impact. So I think in order to control your campaign and your message, it is essential to be able to respond to those and be free to respond to them."

Kerry's fate at the hands of the Swift Boat Vets, of course, continues to haunt Dems. So he's just the person to make this case and to make John McCain's refusal to forcefully rein in the outside groups on his side look that much more ominous.

Late Update: Here's the audio from the call:

Click To Play

Originally posted by Greg Sargent and Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on June 19, 2008 11:05 AM

Last night, with two outs and the Mets down one run in the ninth inning, and the tying run on second base, David Wright ripped a single to left-center to push the game in to extra innings.

…wright remained patient, and hit what was a nasty curve ball from Angels closer Francisco Rodriguez…

According to ESPN’s Baseball Tonight, Wright is the second batter all season to get a hit against Rodriguez’s curve ball.

Also, Baseball Tonight points out that Wright had been just 1 for 20 in ninth-inning at bats prior to last night’s game.

ShareThis

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 19, 2008 10:52 AM

In a recent chat for ESPN.com, during which he discusses all sorts of issues relating to MLB, Keith Law had the following to say about John Maine:

“He threw a two-seamer for a while last year, but I don’t see him using it any more. That was a potential difference-maker in my opinion.”

…it can be rather grueling to watch him pitch lately, because the at bat just goes on and on and on…what’s weird is that, it feels like maine is pitching worse than he did last season, or, at least having less of an impact, but, according to his stats, he is essentially the exact same pitcher as he was one year ago….

Maine is on pace to win 14 games with a 3.87 ERA, while striking out 170 batters in 200 or so innings. 

Last season he won 15 games, had a 3.91 ERA and struck out 180 batters in 191 innings.

…thanks to John K for the link…

ShareThis

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 19, 2008 10:38 AM

From Required Eating

You can finally get some sleep tonight. Someone figured out how those popcorn kernels were mysteriously popping without a nearby microwave. Oh wait, there was a microwave involved! The magnetron, or the power-generator inside the machine, was hiding underneath the table.

According to the video's step-by-step instructions, the process seems fairly simple: just dismember the microwave, connect a few extension cords and hook up that magnetron. We're not necessarily endorsing this at home, but think of all the cool points you'd rake in from gullible friends. Watch the video after the jump.

Cell Phone Popcorn Hoax: How It Actually Worked

[via metacafe]

1. Open the back of your microwave.

2. Take off the magnetron.

3. Connect extension wire on magnetron.

4. Connect original wires in microwave.

5. Hide the magnetron under the table.

6. Hide the microwave far away from the magnetron.

7. Set the timer to 30 seconds...

8. Watch as friends go nuts!

Previously

Wired Debunks Popcorn Popping Cell Phone Trick
The Original Popcorn Popping Cell Phone Videos

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on June 19, 2008 10:30 AM

We hate to pile on more bad news today, but these tipster-submitted photos of the Brooklyn Ikea grand opening bear witness to the onslaught of traffic about to engulf Red Hook. Apparently, the cars queuing up for cheaply-constructed furniture are stretching the store's 1,400 parking spaces to the max (which would explain why Ikea thought it necessary to annex the old Revere Sugar refinery lot next door). Judging from this anecdotal evidence, Red Hook will not only be subject to the 17,000 car trips projected for peak days, but most of those vehicles will be of the huge, extra-cargo-hauling variety.

One shopper, at least, braved the trip on a bike, despite the fact that Ikea's website doesn't supply directions to cyclists. His picture comes after the jump.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 19, 2008 at 01:22 PM

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 19, 2008 10:22 AM

a fun hack, equal parts terrifying and irritating  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 19, 2008 9:15 AM

From Required Eating

Los Angeles residents can get their freshly roasted coffee fix at the recently opened Intelligentsia Coffee & Tea. How do you know it's good? The head of research and development at Intelligentsia, Kyle Glanville, won the 2008 US Barista Championship, if that means anything. Just watching this video tour of their coffee bean stash and roasting process may not be enough to keep you alert, but coffee lovers may drool a little. Check out the video after the jump.

Tour of Intelligentsia Coffee in Los Angeles

[via Boing Boing]

Related

Your Coffee Pot Just Got You Pwnd
Caffeine Hack
Coffee Roasting at Home, the Budget Way

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats, on June 19, 2008 8:00 AM

Yes, there've been some problems. But at least we're Exxon's getting their oil.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 19, 2008 5:51 AM

• America's Downward Trend in Miles Driven Continued in April (CNN)
• White House Pushes for More Domestic Offshore Drilling (NYT)
• NYT Explains Albany's Bus Camera Vote
• MTA Will Roll Out Fewer Service Enhancements Than Promised (NYT)
• Some MTA Board Members Insist They Should Keep Free E-ZPasses (News, NYT, Post)
• As the Real Estate Market Goes, So Goes the MTA (AMNY)
  
• Ikea Opens in Red Hook (Post, News)
• Prosecutors to Drop Traffic-Blocking And Other Charges Against Sean Bell Protesters (AP)
• Progressive Insurance Holding $10M Competition to Design 100MPG Car (News)
• A Traffic-Calming Proposal for Prospect Park (Hawthorne Street)
• NYC Livable Streets Team Tells Its Story at Carfree Conference (Bike Portland)
  

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on June 19, 2008 5:01 AM

Some words of wisdom to everyone out there who wants to be a manager.

Never.

Ever.

EVER.

sign up to be the manager of a New York baseball club as your first job as a "hot" managing prospect. You will be hailed as a savior for about 3 months, then the tabloids and the owners and the sports talk radio hosts will get bored and you will be meticulously torn down, slandered, beaten, vilified, chewed up, spit out, and panned in a New York Times dining review. The only managers who can survive in New York are baseball lifers, washed up bums with no place to go, the clinically insane, or all of the above. Very rarely will a wunderkind show up and be successful in New York, and even then they have veeeery short memories up there. Your best bet for maintaining your sanity is to find a nice mid-market team with a good front office and an owner too cheap to fire anyone in a multi-year contract and enjoy the rest of your life. In the meantime, watch this video and find out what kind of calls you're supposed to be taking at 3AM.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on June 19, 2008 4:41 AM

The Tribeca Film Institute (now merged with the former Renew Media) recently launched Reframe. Their site describes Reframe as, “an innovative project which will help individual filmmakers, broadcasters, distributors, public media organizations, archives, libraries and other media owners digitize, market and sell their classic and hard-to-find films and video content using the Internet.”

I was asked to curate a list of films to appear on the site. I was feeling nostalgic so I decided to make a Coming Of Age list. Honestly, I had the hardest time coming up with a clever assortment of films so I kept the title vague. Of course I included some docs (Hoop Dreams, E Minha Cara: That’s My Face), some films that reminded me of my teen years (Smooth Talk, Metropolitan) and some more recent films that I thought were amazingly innovative and just plain good (Me and You and Everyone We Know and Half Nelson).

All of the films I chose are not included here because either they had not been entered into their database yet or were not available. (Plus, though I had been bugging my co-workers for suggestions for weeks, I waited until the last possible second to submit my list.) Still, I think they are a diverse lot. Check it out and make a list of your own!

(Cross Posted on Engine Feed.)

Originally posted by Angela Tucker from tuckergurl, on June 18, 2008 9:44 PM

EXT. NEVADA DESERT

PRODUCER FRANK MARSHALL immediately proves his commitment to using CGI "only when necessary" by featuring completely necessary CGI prairie dogs in the first shot of the movie.

CATE BLANCHETT

Pryvet, Harrison. I am evil Soviet. You vill help me find Moose and Squirrel, yes?

HARRISON FORD

Holy Christ, you're not going to talk like that the whole movie are you?

CATE BLANCHETT

Da. You vill help locate MacKuffin now.

PREVIOUSLY.

Originally posted by jwz@jwz.org from jwz, on June 18, 2008 9:19 PM

Andrew 1: Knock knock.
New York: Who’s there?
Andrew 1: 9/11
New York: 9/11 who?
Andrew 1: You said you’d never forget.

See? It’s not too soon anymore. Great news.

[via]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Jessica Coen, on June 18, 2008 2:15 PM

I continue to be super excited for Jen Bekman and what she's doing with 20x200. I just clicked through on today's message about the latest piece from James Rajotte titled Auditorium, and the 200 run edition of the smaller piece had already sold out.  (Damn!)

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on June 18, 2008 1:58 PM

Cozy up with some capitalism with this logo-crazy American Comfort quilt designed by Bradley Price and Joel Yatscoff. It's way limited edition and costs $4,900 at citizen-citizen.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on June 18, 2008 1:44 PM

Just when we thought we'd seen the last of Rep. John Doolittle, the TPMmuckraker All-Star whose associations with Jack Abramoff have forced him into retirement, it turns out he may be set to hit the campaign trail all over again -- and there's a Republican out there who will actually be seen with him!

As it turns out, he's in talks with GOP nominee Tom McClintock's camp to appear together -- a development that could increase the Dems' chances of picking up this red district thanks to Doolittle's high negatives.

McClintock spokesman Stan Devereux told Election Central that the ongoing investigations against Doolittle would not render him a political liability: "Doolittle is still the congressman for the area, has served the district well."

Of course, the source of the problem here is the extent to which Doolittle served Abramoff well.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on June 18, 2008 12:14 PM

1. Perhaps the most playful art I've ever seen in a major museum is Olafur Eliasson's Ventilator, a fan hung on a long cord in the main atrium in the museum. Watching it blow around the huge room, chased by children, is hard-to-beat fun.

2. The rest of Eliasson's show on the third floor. His art seems so conceptually and constructurally simple yet, I dunno, I just wanted to hang out in the gallery all day, like I was required to remain part of the experience. Left me wishing I'd made it to London to see The Weather Project.

3. The typology photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Recommended if you like photography and multiples of things.

Irritated that I missed: van Gogh's Starry Night (out on loan to Yale until Sept...I've seen it 20 times at least but still like checking it out whenever I'm there), the exhibition of George Lois' Esquire covers, and lunch at Cafe 2.

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 18, 2008 11:57 AM

In the last 24 hours, I have heard from people and read a ton of text about how the Mets fired Willie Randolph, which has been described as a ‘massacre,’ as, ‘dishonest,’ and as, ‘disrespectful,’ complete with people comparing it to a mob hit.

According to Omar Minaya, during his press conference with reporters yesterday, he had no choice but to break the news to Randolph at midnight, after a game in the team hotel, because he feared that once the decision was made known to ownership, it would leak and reach Randolph through a ‘third-party source.’

And so, instead of sitting in judgment of how it happened, journalists and fans would be better served by asking why it happened the way it did.

Basically, from what can be inferred in his comments, Minaya believes there is a breach of communication within the organization, which is not good.

It is this sort of fear and behavior that causes dissent, deceit and disastrous decisions, like during the last regime.

Oddly, in the fall of 2006, several reports commented on how tight-lipped Minaya’s regime had been. Yet, here we are, just a year and a half later, and Minaya is making inferences to the contrary, in public, on television, and using it as an excuse for the way he confronted Randolph.

This morning, WFAN speculated that Tony Bernazard and Jeff Wilpon are most likely to blame. During his interview with Minaya on WFAN yesterday, host Mike Francesa said he heard Bernazard was ‘gloating’ on Monday suggesting he already knew and was telling people that Randolph would be fired.

In fact, from what I can gather, people who work in various departments for the Mets were already aware of Minaya’s decision as early as the seventh-inning stretch on Monday.

What’s more, Mets Fans Forever wrote the following on its blog at 11 pm EDT on Monday, long before the press release or before any mainstream media outlet broke the news: “Sources close to Willie Randolph reveal that he has been fired after the game, or tomorrow…This is not a rumor. This is fact.”

Additionally, earlier in the night, around 6:45 pm EDT at Baseball Prospectus, again, long before the press release, Will Carroll reported that Rick Peterson had been fired, later adding, “Sources tell me that the decision was made prior to the game, but that Randolph was not informed until after the game.”

In other words, not only are their ‘leaks,’ but they come fast and to all sorts of writers, be it mainstream columnists or bloggers.

To me, as a fan, who wants to see the Mets operate in the best possible way, this idea of loose-lips is far more significant than Willie Randolph’s ego.

ShareThis

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 18, 2008 11:57 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Monoscope, on June 18, 2008 11:57 AM

20x200: When Art Meets Commerce, An Industry Shifts

Here at Six Apart, we've always had one foot in the world of design and the other in technology, so it seems logical to us that a robust content management system like Movable Type can be used to create something beautiful - something that looks, well, nothing like a blog.

For those in an industry that prides itself on aesthetics and has long withstood digital innovation, that can be hard to imagine. Of the few industries that have resisted taking part in new media, none is more glamorous than Art. Long the province of whitewalled galleries and mysterious pricing schemes, art has historically been accessible only to a privileged few.

In 2006, when gallery owner and entrepreneur Jen Bekman had her middle-of-the night revelation that the Internet was a perfect vehicle for making art available to everyone, she was instrumental in ushering the art market into the digital age. Jen named the venture 20x200, and devised the following formula: each week, she would offer two limited-edition prints - an edition of 200 for $20, an edition of 20 for $200, and an edition of 2 for $2,000. The entire business would be conducted online.

To build out the 20x200 site, Jen enlisted the help of photographer and web consultant Raul Guiterrez. Both Jen and Raul had extensive backgrounds in technology; Jen's career included leadership roles and Netscape and Disney, while Raul, himself an accomplished photographer, had built and produced a number of successful websites.

When they decided to use Movable Type to build out the site, they agreed on one thing: it couldn't look like a blog. The entire 20x200 site was built in Movable Type, using multiple custom plug-ins and integrating Google Checkout to make buying simple. Every Tuesday and Wednesday, Jen sends a newsletter to the 20x200 mailing list, in which she announces that day's edition and discusses its context and relevancy within the art world. The newsletter acts not only as a sales tool, but also as a rich source of information for new and seasoned collectors alike.

The newsletter contains links that lead to the page on the 20x200 site where the edition is displayed. Next to each edition sits a real-time inventory number, indicating how many pieces remain.

Movable Type demonstrates its abilities as a flexible, powerful CMS, allowing 20x200 to easily manage their growing catalogue of artwork. The site uses many custom fields to enable administrators to enter data for each edition quickly and simply; fields such as artist name, artist statement and website URL are consistent across each entry, so that visitors to the site can browse artists and find facts with ease.

Less than a year after 20x200 launched, the site has been an unqualified success: over 14,000 prints have been sold to date, to a customer list that includes artists, celebrities and respected collectors from around the world. The site has become an important corollary to Jen's New York gallery, and a vital part of her ongoing mission to champion emerging artists.

When we talk about Movable Type, we often say: "you imagine it, we enable it" and 20x200 demonstrates that maxim - dare we say - artfully.

Originally posted by Ginger Tulley from Movable Type, on June 18, 2008 9:14 AM

One frequent request from users of my little Flash map is a way to map traffic to their website. So here it is. The map above displays a week of traffic to the map home page.

I adapted the geocounter PHP script to query the hostip.info API to convert IP address to latitude and longitude and store the location in a database.

There are a few tools that map traffic by adding dots to a PNG or markers to an embedded Google map, but I find these cluttered and cumbersome. My map does a few things differently:

• With a single click, zoom into a cluster of points to see a finer, more detailed view. No more bouncing to Google or fiddling with a lot of navigation buttons. You can also click-and-drag to zoom into a specific selection, or click on the edge of the frame to move around.
• Additional traffic increases the total area of the dots proportional to the number of hits you get, not just doubling diameter with each subsequent hit.
• Points fade over time as the traffic record ages.
• Traffic from the same location over multiple days is represented by concentric circles, older visits shown in outer rings that fade over time.
• You can customize colors of the points, background, countries and borders. For instance, see darker, analog-style version on the map home page.
• You can configure the how long you want to store traffic data, and the minimum size of the points.

The geocounter script is GPL’ed and the map is free for personal or non-profit use, but requires a license for commercial use. For more information visit http://backspace.com/mapapp/.

Download the PHP scripts and world map at http://backspace.com/mapapp/geocounter.zip.

It's been thrilling watching traffic show up from far-flung places. Sort of takes me back to the old web odometer days. Enjoy!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on June 18, 2008 8:49 AM

Matt Yglesias, former TPM Associate Editor and all-around blog star, has a new foreign policy book out, Heads in the Sand: How the Republicans Screw Up Foreign Policy and Foreign Policy Screws Up the Democrats. We caught up with him last week at The Strand bookstore here in lower Manhattan and asked him whether he thinks Democrats are ever going to get out of the fetal position when it comes to taking the fight to Republicans on their catastrophic foreign policy record ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 18, 2008 8:35 AM

Usually we skip the boring reunion specials. Dragging out non-conflicts and focusing on nobody reality stars who you've already forgotten about is no way to spend your Wednesday night. However, somehow we have trouble turning away from this clip. Troubles in paradise with Jen and Zoi? A bromance? Flirtations between Andrew and Gail? Two lesbians at a bar calling Lisa a bitch? It's the car wreck of a reunion we just have to take a short peek at.
· All Top Chef coverage [~E~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on June 18, 2008 8:33 AM

How can I accurately summarize such a cardinal set of events? It may take me years.

An intense era of personal sacrifice and accomplishment is about to give way to something new. After about four and a half years at Google working with amazing people and ground-breaking products, I've decided that this Friday, June 20th, will be my last day at Google.

Describing the decision as difficult would be weak understatement. Google has been the most fun and fulfilling work experience I've ever had. I'm grateful for the opportunity I have been given. I have loved being at Google and I'm lucky to have helped build things that seem to be useful and fun.

Mostly, I will miss working with people whose skills I'll only achieve as aspirations. People like the Google Reader team members (and I'm including those volunteering their help) who are each incredibly, jaw-droppingly talented. They deserve all of Google's support and help. They take considerable risks personally and professionally and without their leadership and effort, Reader wouldn't exist.

My Dad and I have been talking about posts like these as part of the obsequies of leaving a job and about how to talk about the obvious bits often un-spoken e.g. difficult personal decisions or financial windfalls or wanderlust and desire. Yes, all of those apply here, too. Mainly though, I've often been frustratingly more curious than careful and this decision is made in the hope that I find a better balance.

You know... I really struggled with making the title of this post "Unsubscribed" but I've apparently managed to quell that impulse.

Here's some answers to questions that I suspect might be common.

What will you do next?
For my next trick, I will be thinking about what to do next.

What will happen to Reader?
Fewer bugs will be created as a result of my not coding. :) Seriously though, Mihai Parparita and Ben Darnell have always been the technical leads for Reader and each is a genius. My only (slight) concern is that this leaves a team smaller that's already small for the scale that Reader requires. But Reader's future is likely to be intense and I'm really excited to follow its development knowing what's ahead. More importantly, the team is happy to await my inevitable bug reports! (Update: "Happy" is a not entirely accurate way to express their feelings about that.)

Man, this seems abrupt. Is there a problem at Google? Dork fights?
Heh. No. Everything's ok. Don't go looking for conflict where none exists. I'm grateful to have been at Google.

Are you going to travel?
Not right away.

Are you going to make a film?
...

Are you going to be present online?
Sure. I'm still actively involved in various sharing services. I wonder if I should spend time doing a few more posts about things I learned at Google, like the previous post about my musing about first principles for building a feed reader? If, by some crazy chance, someone has a suggestion about they'd like to know more about, please let me know.

Thanks for listening. Reminder: you may want to move my feed out of your "googler" folder now.

Originally posted by Chris Wetherell from massless, on June 18, 2008 6:32 AM

The most useful subway poster you'll never see. The story of Vignelli's subway map is fairly well known, but I hadn't seen this route poster before. The poster is an elegant, tabular list of every major station in the subway system and how to get there from your current station listing which line to take and where to transfer.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on June 18, 2008 6:26 AM

• McCain Lays Out Energy Plan, Calls for Offshore Drilling (Boston Globe)
• Blumenauer: Obama Meeting Was 'Coming of Age Moment' for Bike Advocates (Bike Portland)
• Assembly Dems to Push for Windfall Profits Tax on Oil Companies (Newsday)
  
• Short on Funds, MTA Expects Not to Go Forward With Service Enhancements (News)
• News: Sander's Raise Shows MTA Is 'Tone-Deaf'
• New York Metro Area Has America's Worst Traffic Bottlenecks (NY1, Newsday)
• NYPD Plans Ticket Blitz on Illegal Parking and Fake Placards Today (Post)
  
• 'South Bronx Initiative' to Add Bus Service and Invest in Commercial Districts (News, Sun, Post)
• Drivers Spurning Premium Grade Gas in Favor of Regular (NYT)
• A Useful Wayfinding Poster You'll Never See in the Subway (2nd Ave Sagas)
  

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on June 18, 2008 5:00 AM

Liam O'Donoghue an article online that continues the discussion/critque of Shepard Fairey thats been ongoing online over the past 6-9 months. He's posted his piece "Shepard Fairey's Image Problem" on multiple Indymedias (here's the link to the story on NYC Indymedia.) and I'm going to paste the whole thing below:

As if Wal-Mart didn’t have enough controversies to deal with, imagine the consternation in the PR war room when news hit that the retail giant was selling t-shirts bearing a Nazi SS skull. As the story unraveled, it turned out that Wal-Mart’s designer had ripped off the image from pop art superstar Shepard Fairey, whose reference for the Gestapo logo was 1960’s “biker culture.” Oops.

Using the international notoriety of his global “Andre the Giant has a posse” street art campaign as a platform, Shepard Fairey has leveraged his prolific output and iconic, anti-authoritarian style into a mini-empire. Through his ObeyGiant company (Motto: Manufacturing Quality Dissent Since 1989), he churns out screen-printed posters, clothing, and limited-run merchandise including skateboards and laser-engraved watches. His other design company, Studio Number One, specializes in branding, promotional campaigns and “identity systems” for corporate clients including Mountain Dew, Virgin, and Honda. He is also founder and creative director of Subliminal Projects art studio in Los Angeles and uber-hip Swindle magazine. His audience and the value of his work has surged in recent months on the popularity of his now-ubiquitous Obama posters.

Although Fairey “didn’t get bent out of shape” about Wal-Mart ripping him off, he originally launched his ObeyGiant clothing line because he saw that the Urban Outfitters chain was selling “bootlegged” shirts with his Giant logo. “To see it in there, just ripped off, knowing that somebody just made a bunch of money selling the t-shirts to Urban Outfitters, and here I am, just barely being able to pay my rent was definitely upsetting to me,” Fairey told me during an interview for Mother Jones. “The reason I get pissed off about stuff like that is because I didn’t build up the resonance for that image just to hand it off to someone to exploit.”

This irony is not lost on Lincoln Cushing, an art historian and author who recently brokered a royalty agreement between Fairey and the estate of deceased Cuban artist Rene Mederos over a design of Che Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos that Fairey essentially swiped and slapped his “Obey” logo onto. When confronted, Fairey was quick to cut a check to Mederos’s family, but Cushing described the Mederos episode as a common dynamic. “Many U.S. artists don’t seem to treat the intellectual property rights of third world artists the same as fellow U.S. artists,” Cushing said, and added that artists aren’t the only ones willing to steal from those still isolated from the U.S. economy. "For many years the web-based sales catalog of Barnes and Noble marketed over 30 unauthorized digitally-reproduced ‘Cuban posters.’ I contacted them many times about dealing with this properly, and they never responded.”

Cushing has since posted a list of ”Best Practices” for recycling art on his Web site, offering suggestions such as “admit that you are using preexisting art” and “ask for permission.” However, prior to the Mederos episode, Cushing had already begun working informally with a group of political artists and art historians including Favianna Rodriguez, Josh MacPhee, and Mark Vallen to catalogue Shepard Fairey’s many appropriations with hopes of bringing attention to the artists and social movements from which they originated and advancing the dialogue around the ethics of art appropriation.

Although Fairey has lifted designs from sources ranging from 19th century Austrian artist Koloman Moser to fellow “streetwear” designer Erik Brunetti (creator of the influential Fuct brand), his most common (and usually uncredited) “references” are taken from 20th century radical popular movements and communist governments, including: the Industrial Workers of the World, the Puerto Rican Young Lords, the Black Panthers, various “third world” solidarity movements, and, of course, the former Soviet Union, China and Cuba.

Far from denouncing all forms of art “sampling,” Josh MacPhee and Favianna Rodriguez have just published “Reproduce and Revolt,” a compilation of more than 600 copyright-free images from artists around the world. They hope the book will facilitate networking among artist activists and provide an inspiring cache of graphics for social justice groups. According to Rodriguez, “We want to build a support network, but also talk about accountability, because a lot of young artists want to be successful like Shepard, but they don’t realize he’s disconnecting images of important struggles from their roots.”

Through the Justseeds artist cooperative, MacPhee has also been “waging a war” against cultural amnesia since 1998 with an ongoing “Celebrate People's History” poster series, which he often uses in classroom presentations. “The People’s History posters are not about taking graphics from history, but producing new graphics about that history, and encouraging people to learn, to pique their interest,” said MacPhee, who recently posted a long analysis related to the Fairey controversy on his blog. “In some ways, Shepard’s project is the complete inverse of that. His is about stripping the historical context from actual graphics and using them to make money because they imply some sense of authenticity.”

Straddling the corporate world and the streets (which Fairey is still known to “bomb” with wheat-pasted posters occasionally), Fairey’s reputation is an incendiary topic in the blogosphere, with his fans and detractors in dispute over the legitimacy and implications of his work. Fairey, himself, makes no apologies. He said, “Knowing that I have an audience that’s younger, a lot of the stuff that I do is designed to try to circulate things that I think are awesome back into a new crowd. My desire to learn about Che Guevara was due to the massive perpetuation of the image.”

Realist painter and art activist Mark Vallen, whose “Obey Plagiarist” article provides a deep examination of Fairey’s specific “appropriations” doesn’t buy Shepard’s spiel. He said, “There is no more chance of learning about revolutionary art and politics through Fairey's self-promotional posters than there is in understanding Beethoven's music from hearing it used in advertising jingles.”

According to the Web site of Fairey’s Studio Number One company, “Our clients turn to us knowing that we possess the expertise to tap into the counterculture seamlessly.” Due to his undeniable knack for capturing the attention of the ever-fickle youth market, it’s no surprise that the recent flurry of attention regarding his plagiarism has not put a dent in Fairey’s burgeoning marketing and commercial design career. Fairey will undoubtedly continue to speak alongside creatives and “futurists” from Sony and Starbucks at conferences held by the likes of PSFK Consultancy & Trend Research Services, as he recently did in Los Angeles.

Regardless of originality or aesthetic preferences, it’s Fairey’s corporate relationships and business model that trigger the most resentment from some of his critics. “The people who pay Fairey are the corporate elite that have oppressed the very people he’s stolen from,” Rodriguez said.

“What is important to me is how Fairey exemplifies in many ways the operational model of capitalism,” MacPhee added. “He extracts resources largely from political struggles of Third World and working class people, and then simultaneously sells a slightly processed version of the resources to both wealthy elites in the North, but also cheaper mass-commodity versions to the very same people he is stealing from!”

Related Links:
The research that preceded this article was conducted for an interview I did with Shepard Fairey for Mother Jones magazine (March/April 2008. Here is a link to that interview:
http://www.motherjones.com/interview/2008/03/interview-shepard-fairey.html

Lincoln Cushing’s response to this interview was published in the following issue of Mother Jones (May/June 2008)
http://www.motherjones.com/letters/2008/05/backtalk.html

Journalist Aura Bogodo disputed Fairey’s version of a conversation between them that was mentioned in the Mother Jones interview. Here is a link to her powerful response:
http://tothecurb.wordpress.com/2008/05/29/i-have-a-name-an-open-letter-to-shepard-fairey/

Originally posted by Josh M. from Just Seeds: Blog, on June 18, 2008 4:02 AM

Blue Hill at Stone Barns: The Most Important Restaurant in America

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Tim Murtaugh’s Excuse for a Blog, on June 17, 2008 8:17 PM

From Serious Eats: New York

Clockwise from top: Stone Barns farm, face bacon, Dan Barber.

Blue Hill at Stone Barns

630 Bedford Road, Pocantico Hills NY 10591 (map); 914-366-9600; bluehillstonebarns.com
Must-Haves: Farmer's Feast, charcuterie
What You'll Spend: At least $185 a person with wine, tax, and tip (the Farmer's Feast alone is $125)
Grade: A

Reviewers and food writers like me often throw around words like gutsy, important, and groundbreaking with impunity, and the result is that these words have lost their impact. So at the risk of doing just that, I am hereby proclaiming that Blue Hill at Stone Barns, the combination working farm and restaurant presided over by chef and partner Dan Barber, might be, just might be, the most important and gutsiest restaurant in America right now.

Barber has taken the ideas of locavorism, nose-to-tail cooking, and farm-to-table to groundbreaking places, and in so doing he is laying the foundation for a truly different kind of restaurant-going experience with far-reaching implications. He's taken the Alice Waters–Michael Pollan ethos to a place no other chef has ever done, including Waters herself. And Barber has done so while elevating his food to an extraordinarily delicious plane. Barber has also elevated his game at Blue Hill in New York City, as SE:NY editor Zach Brooks pointed out recently, but if you want to get the full-on farm-to-table experience complete with squealing pigs and bleating sheep, you have to go to Stone Barns.

I say this after having eaten three meals at Blue Hill at Stone Barns in the last month, each one more exciting than the last. You know you're not in your garden-variety bastion of haute cuisine when you drive up to the restaurant and pass sheep, pigs, beehives, and fields of green on the Stone Barns property on your way to the valet parking. It's only later that you realize you had been looking at the sources of your meal.

Your expectations are further confounded by the menu. Don't look for conventional groupings of starters, main courses, and dessert. They're nowhere to be found on the Blue Hill at Stone Barns menu. Instead you are confronted by this:

List of ingredients on the menu.

On the left side is just a list of all the ingredients Barber and his cohorts have at their disposal in the kitchen that day. The right side has a list of prices that depend on how many courses you have. Your server will ask you if there are any ingredients you don't want the kitchen to use in your meal, and after that you are in the kitchen's hands. Eating this way adds elements of surprise and a even a little drama to your restaurant experience.

Clockwise from top left: shot of reisling, citrus juice, and sweet sicily piricada; baby heirloom broccoli, hakurei turnips, and baby bok choy; pancetta-wrapped asparagus stalk; mini-asparagus burgers.

The amuses bouche offer an immediate clue to what Barber is up to. A spritzer served in a tall shot glass has reisling, citrus juice, natural tonic water, sparkling water, and sweet sicily (an assertive chervil) tea. Its utterly refreshing flavor is filled with surprising twists and turns that wake up your palate in a fascinating way. Vegetables on a Fence are the best crudités I've ever had: impossibly fresh individual baby heirloom broccoli, hakurai turnips, and baby bok choy naked and unadorned. Then a single asparagus stalk arrives for each diner wrapped in pancetta and coated with crunchy white sesame seeds. The sesame seeds are another surprise for me, as I have always found that Barber's cooking lacked crunch. That is not a problem anymore. Mini asparagus burgers up the meal's cuteness quotient, but I have to admit they are sweetly delicious, thanks to the sweet pickles Barber mixes with the asparagus.

Charcuterie plate.

The charcuterie plate (it's optional but good enough to be required) features house-made (the charcutier is Stone Barns chef kitchen director Adam Kaye) coppa, prosciutto, kosher-style salami, creamy bologna, and a pork-heart-and-liver terrine that comes in a mini sandwich between chocolate wafers. It looks like a pork ice cream sandwich.

Face bacon.

Face bacon, two wafer-thin slices of bacon sliced directly from a Stone Barns pig's head, is a porky, salty, crisp interlude.

Charred snowpeas.

Charred grilled snowpeas are just smoky enough, come with a little sea salt, and are not so vaguely Spanish.

Salted butter, ricotta, and lardo; housemade asparagus and carrot salts.

A trio of spreads, salted butter and ricotta from made from milk from the Blue Hill Farm in the Berkshires and whipped lardo made from the pigs you passed on the way up to the restaurant, are ridiculously creamy and tangy. They are served with two housemade salts—asparagus- and carrot-flavored—that were the only off notes I experienced here. The asparagus salt tasted like a failed health food store experiment, and these spreads are so delicious that they don't need the embellishment.

Kampachi with pickled ramps.

A dish of kampachi with pickled ramps, pig's ears, and rhubarb gelée represents where Barber's cooking is at right now. It's sweet, porky, and silky smooth at the same time.

Crispino lettuce with spring vegetables in lettuce broth.

Crispino lettuce, iceberg's illegitimate grandfather, comes with spring vegetables in a lettuce broth. It sounds like rabbit food, but in fact is shockingly deeply flavored and satisfying. This dish had me considering vegetarianism.

Panko-breaded hard-boiled egg with pistachio and peas.

So did the next dish, what our server described as this morning's egg with pistachio and peas. The hard-boiled egg was meltingly creamy and dipped in panko, crushed almonds, and Parmigiano-Reggiano. By this time I have to acknowledge that Barber now knows crisp and crunchy.

You might end up with one or more of the following meat courses or not, depending on what's going on at the farm when you go.

Clockwise from top left: pork tasting platter; plated pig parts; Cornish Cross chicken breast; lamb's neck.

• A pork tasting featuring loin, pig's ears, snouts, pork belly, and housemade boudin blanc
• A chunk of lamb's neck that is tender and lamby with a top slightly crispy layer served with just salty enough asparagus and fiddlehead ferns
• Sous-vided ever-so-tender Cornish Cross chicken breast (raised on-site) with a crunchy layer of skin served on a bed of pea purée and earthy morels came with a chicken sauce that is so chickeny that I finally understand what chicken is supposed to taste like

The truly interesting thing about eating a meal here is that even without any of the above-mentioned meat courses, you won't feel deprived of flavor, substance, or satisfaction. My wife correctly noted that this was the largest amount of vegetables and salad I had ever eaten at one meal in my entire life without complaint.

Dessert in June is currently is a medley of deeply flavorful strawberry and rhubarb concoctions whipped up by pastry chef Alex Grunert. The strawberries poached in honey with zabaglione cream and creamy farmer's cheese ice cream was full of intense strawberry flavor and were my favorite. But elderberry-steamed strawberries with sour cream ice cream were a close second, and a rhubarb-meringue-asparagus-ice-cream combination was also pretty swell. Pates de fruits, chocolates, and petit fours complete the meal, with the cherry on top being house-made yogurt marshmallows.

Eating at Blue Hill at Stone Barns requires serious eaters to put their faith in Barber and company's hands. Trust me and trust them. They will deliver a meal so provocatively thoughtful and delicious you'll never look at fine dining the same way again.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on June 17, 2008 6:45 PM

Today Newtalk, a site dedicated to substantive political discussions, hosted a conversation asking "Is it possible to fix government?". In his response to host Philip Howard, NYC mayor Michael Bloomberg reveals that it's his first time responding to a conversation online:

Thanks for the opportunity to participate in this discussion, Philip. This is my first time participating in an online discussion, but I can assure you I am not at home wearing my pajamas. This is a great group, the kind of crowd I'd enjoy having over for dinner. So I'm just going to pretend that we're all sitting around a big table. I always learn something when I break bread with diverse groups of talented people, and I expect this conversation will be no different.

It's a little bit depressing that, more than ten years after blogging's taken off, even some of the most prominent politicians in the country still think bloggers are folks at home in their pajamas. But I will take it as a sign of at least a little progress that Newtalk is a Movable Type Community Solution site, so maybe indirectly my day job helped Mayor Mike make his first steps online.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on June 17, 2008 6:30 PM

Can you believe this dude was their dream candidate?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 17, 2008 4:56 PM

When the Space Shuttle Discovery glided home a few days ago, one of the electronic components which made it possible was the humble Intel 8086 processor.

Some of the chips powering support systems for the shuttle were purchased from a motley variety of suppliers including sellers on eBay. The New York Times told the story six years ago:

Civilian electronic markets now move so fast, and the shuttles are so old, that NASA and its contractors must scramble to find substitutes.

In the past, NASA procurement experts would go through old catalogs and call suppliers to try to find parts. Today, the hunt has become easier with Internet search engines and sites like eBay, which auctions nearly everything.

The 8086 processor just celebrated the 30th anniversary of its release. The space shuttle program just celebrated the 27th anniversary of the maiden shuttle launch.

Image of the 8088 processor, sibling to the 8086, courtesy of Intel's Microprocessor Hall of Fame.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on June 17, 2008 3:40 PM

I have to hold off linking to every single entry on Big Picture (best new blog of the year so far, hands down), but these photos of the flooding in Iowa are amazing. I went to college in Cedar Rapids and my mind is boggled seeing so much of downtown under so much water.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 17, 2008 12:59 PM

Robinson Cancel is back! Did you miss him? Did you realize he was gone? Did you know he had ever been there in the first place? Nine years ago, 23-year old Cancel made his big league debut with the Milwaukee Brewers. 13 stops later, he was back in the majors with the Mets on June 6. On Sunday, he hit a game-winning two-run pinch single that may well have saved manager Willie Randolph’s job. What’s that…? Oh…scratch that last part.
The question is: is a nine-year gap some kind of record? The answer? No, it is not. It’s not even close. Clay Davenport researched long gaps and discovered that there have been 699 players who were absent from the majors for at least five years. Of those, these are the 10-longest career gaps in major league history.
Years: Player – Year last played to year of return (age at time of return)
22: Paul Schreiber — 1923 to 1945 (42)
21: Charley O’Leary — 1913 to 1934 (51)
19: Gabby Street — 1912 to 1931 (48)
16: Harry O’Neill — 1923 to 1939 (42)
16: Clay Touchstone — 1929 to 1945 (42)
15: Fred Johnson — 1923 to 1938 (44)
15: Joe Cicero — 1930 to 1945 (34)
13: Jack McFetridge — 1890 to 1903 (33)
13: Ken Penner — 1916 to 1929 (33)
13: Ralph Winegarner — 1936 to 1949 (39)
Schreiber pitched in 10 games for Brooklyn at the ages of 19 and 20 and then made a wartime return with the Yankees in 1945, getting into two games. O’Leary played over 900 games with the Tigers and Cardinals before becoming a coach, most prominently with the dynastic Yankees of the ‘20s. He was coaching for the Browns in 1934 when he was called on to pinch hit and delivered a single. Fred Johnson played in 17 games on his comeback – and played again the next year. He has the longest gap followed by a 10-game comeback. Joe Cicero has a 12-game comeback.
Clay reports that four players who were away for 10 or more years played in over 100 games on their return. Roy Schalk was away for 12 years. Thanks to the war, he returned for two seasons as the White Sox second baseman in 1944-45. Schalk actually got some down-ballot MVP consideration in ’45. Merwin Jacobson (1916-26), Marty Krug (1912-22) and Don Lang (1938-48) all missed 10 years between appearances. For Krug and Lang, those were their only two seasons in the majors.
In all, 10 players have missed 12 years (including Minnie Minoso’s famous 1964 to 1976 gap), five missed 11 years and 18 missed 10 years. Cancel is one of 29 players to have missed nine years. All but three of the players who missed nine years or more made their returns in 1949 or before. Besides Cancel, Carlos Pulido (1994-2003) and Aaron Holbert (1996-2005) are the only other recent players with gaps that long.
Looking at gaps of five years or more, three-quarters of them happened before 1950. Only 33 happened in the 1970s and 1980s combined, the lowest ebb. There were 37 in the ‘90s and 32 so far in the 21st Century. Why are they making something of a comeback? As it once was, so it is again. Before World War II and immediately after it, there were plenty of places for a former major leaguer to play professionally. The minor leagues declined steadily until, by the 1970s, many teams only had five affiliates and some had as few as four. Looking at Cancel’s career, we find that he’s only played 200 games of Triple A baseball and that he’s made stops in both the Atlantic and United independent leagues. This was not a career path available to players in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
 

Originally posted by Jim Baker from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on June 17, 2008 12:55 PM

Back on the topic of using Jim Woolsey as your presidential surrogate to call your competitor "delusional" and "naive", I'd almost forgotten Woolsey's freelance James Bond mission to England back in 2001 to prove the crackpot theory of Laurie Mylroie who came up with the idea that Saddam wasn't just behind the 9/11 attacks but was actually behind the original attack on the Twin Towers back in 1993. For a wonderful article on Mylroie, her theories and expertise, see this wonderful article by Peter Bergen -- I guy who's actually interviewed bin Laden, not just had fever dreams about him.

Mylroie's theory was that Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 bombing who is now in the federal supermax facility serving a life sentence, was actually a covert Iraqi intelligence agent sent to America by Saddam to blow up the World Trade Center. Like other delusional fantasies, it's always difficult to know quite how deeply to delve into their internal logic. But in brief, Woolsey and Mylroie's idea was that the Iraq intelligence agent had stolen the identity of a man named Abdul Basit. In the weeks just after 9/11, Woolsey went to England to check fingerprints on documents Basit had handled in the UK back in 1988 and 1989 and the compare fingerprints of Basit and Yousef to see whether they were in fact the same person.

Like the guy who's not a doctor but plays one on TV, Woolsey didn't go in any official capacity representing the US government, but Doug Feith gave him the thumbs up on the idea. So he apparently thought that was good enough. And according to subsequent reports, Woolsey led the Brits on to believe that he actually was in the country on a secret mission from Washington.

We catch some of the antic detail in this October 2001 Knight-Ridder article by Warren Strobel ...

Woolsey, in an article in the New Republic magazine last month, said the only way to determine the truth is to "investigate the materials that Abdul Basit handled while in the United Kingdom in 1988 and 1989, which were taken into custody by Scotland Yard."

Woolsey went to England to determine whether Basit's fingerprints matched Yousef's, current and former officials said.

"It was implied that he was doing so on behalf of the U.S. government, but it doesn't appear it was coordinated through the U.S. Embassy" in London, one official said.

But another official said the former CIA chief "was careful not to hold himself out as representing the U.S. government in any way," but went "to look at some of the evidence that he thought had not been looked at carefully enough."

On at least one of the trips, Woolsey visited the Swansea Institute, a technical school in Wales where Basit studied, as well as the South Wales Constabulatory. The constabulatory contacted the legal attache at the U.S. Embassy in London to ask if Woolsey was acting in an official capacity, an official in Washington said.

The British "were intrigued" that a former CIA chief "was asking these questions," another official said.

Several of those with knowledge of the trips said they failed to produce any new evidence that Iraq was behind the attacks.

Anyway, this little excursion became what I think you'd have to generously call both sad and sympathetic eye-rolling by close-watchers of the Iraq story back in the early part of this decade. So I'm more than a little amused that this is the guy who's advising McCain today.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 17, 2008 12:20 PM

* via Animal Medical Center!

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on June 17, 2008 11:50 AM

Time reports on a group of folks who are trying to whittle down their possessions to 100 items.

Bruno keeps a running tally on his blog, guynameddave.com of what he has decided to hold on to and what he is preparing to sell or donate. For instance, as of early June, he was down to five dress shirts and one necktie but uncertain about parting with one of his three pairs of jeans. "Are two pairs of jeans enough?!," he asked in a recent posting.

That's not the only dilemma faced by this new wave of goal-oriented minimalists. One of the trickier questions is what counts as an item. Bruno considers a pair of shoes to be a single entity, which seems sensible but still pretty hard-core when you're trying to jettison all but 100 personal possessions. Cait Simmons, 27, a waitress in Chicago, takes a different approach. Although she has pared down her footwear collection from 35 to 20 pairs, she says, "All my shoes count as one item."

Bruno's site is currently inaccessible...here's the Google cache for his 100 Thing Challenge page.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 17, 2008 11:43 AM

lunchfood:

The Mason Dixon Wine: For all states West of the line, it is more carbon efficient to consume wine trucked from California. For all states East of the line, it is more efficient to consumer wine bottled from France.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on June 17, 2008 10:49 AM

johncarney:We’re currently engaged in a carbon footprint reduction offset program. Whenever...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on June 17, 2008 10:48 AM

Mark Simonson notes that the period typography in the Indiana Jones movies is pretty good, except for that used on Indy's travel maps.

In Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981) which is set in 1936, we see ITC Serif Gothic (designed in 1972). The wide spacing feels right, and it does have an art deco feel, but it's 1970s art deco.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 17, 2008 10:26 AM

Speaking to reporters a few moments ago outside the team hotel in Anaheim, while wearing a green hat and a green shirt, Willie Randolph told reporters that he is very disappointed that he will not be able to fulfill his dream of winning a championship for the Mets and for their fans, adding, “That’s what I’ve always been about.”

He said he’ll miss his players, and then he walked off leaving the hotel with no other words.

Rick Peterson then talked to reporters and, in standard fashion, used a ‘Mets are a House’ metaphor, equating himself to a hardwood floor that is being ripped out of a house in need of work, while Dan Warthen, his replacement, will be the Tuscan Tile of this new home.

…seriously…that’s what he said, and, still, six years later, i have no idea what he’s talking about…what a fascinating guy…i wish him well, and regret that i never had a chance to sit down and talk with him about cognitive linguistics…

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 17, 2008 10:08 AM

We noted yesterday that Barack Obama has promised to direct more federal funds to bike-ped infrastructure if elected. Now comes word that the Illinois Senator is going public with his support for a regional rail network linking midwestern cities, an idea he had floated quietly during the Democratic primary campaign.

In a major address on "American competitiveness," Obama pitched intercity rail as an antidote to faltering airlines. Via Matthew Iglesias:

We can invest in rail, so that cities like Detroit, Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Louis are connected by high-speed trains, and folks have alternatives to air travel.

To be sure, the speech -- delivered in Flint, Michigan -- was also heavy on promises to keep cars rolling off the assembly line. But the mention of rail and a proposal to fund a "National Infrastructure Reinvestment Bank" (reminiscent of Congressman Earl Blumenauer's stump speech) suggest that a President Obama may steer federal transportation funding, which has long given transit short shrift, in a different direction.

Photo of parlor car in the Illinois Central Railroad, which went defunct in 1999: Prairie Star / Flickr

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on June 17, 2008 9:39 AM

From Required Eating

theanticraft.com

Unlike Stonehenge, which mysteriously had no defined origins or intent, the Baconhenge is here for a reason. To celebrate the goodness of bacon-wrapped french toast "stone" sticks that surround a frittata of mushrooms, potato and onions.

Baconhenge is not yet a UNESCO World Heritage Site but has the potential to inspire sacrifices, like breakfast cereal.

Related

The Bacon Mat
The Bacon Mat: Reloaded
All Aboard the Meat Ship

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on June 17, 2008 9:15 AM

Posted by Bartholomew Furrow, 20% Tech Lead for Google Code Jam

If you're a great sprinter, you've probably been in a few races. And if you're a great chess player, you've probably had your share of matches. But what do you do if you're a great programmer?

Well, if you're looking for the rush of competition, the feeling of matching your mind up against the greatest in the world, you can't do better than Google Code Jam. The contests are intense: you'll have two short hours to solve some fiendish algorithmic challenges. You'll read a problem, write your code, download our test cases, and tell us what you think the right answers are. If you're right, it's time to move on to another problem -- but if you're wrong, it's time to make a decision. Debug, or look for an easier challenge...?

Registration is now open, so you can find out more about the contest, and practice on some sample problems. Practice hard! If you make it to the top 500, you'll travel to a nearby Google office for our semifinal round. If you're in the top 100, we'll fly you to our Mountain View headquarters to compete with the world's very best.

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on June 17, 2008 8:53 AM

Filed under: Gaming, Leopard

EA has made the Spore Creature Creator trial available for download on both Mac and PC. A while back EA promised simultaneous release for Mac and PC, and they seem to be on track with the Creature Creator which is available for purchase at $9.95.

The Spore Creature Creator is a preview and demo for the full Spore game, which is scheduled for release on September 7. As you might expect from the name the Creature Creator allows you to build and customize creatures which you'll later be able to use in gameplay once the full game is released. I've been playing with the trial this morning and it does look very promising.

The Spore Creature Creator is Leopard and Intel Mac only. It requires at least an ATI X1600 or NVidia 7300 GT with 128 MB of Video RAM, or Intel Integrated GMA X3100. It will apparently not run on computers with the GMA 950 integrated graphics chipset on OS X (though, it will on Windows). The trial version can be downloaded directly from the Spore trial site.

Thanks, Shiraz!

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Originally posted by Mat Lu from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on June 17, 2008 8:00 AM

You know, I totally missed this one at Interbike, and I don’t think I’ve seen much ink about this either. But I saw this Kona Kapu prominently featured in a Japanese bike mag. Japan seems to have a big retro steel road trend. What I find significant about this bike is that it is a full-on retro steel bike, chromed lugs and chainstay, from a mainstream bicycle manufacturer. I can’t help but wonder if this will be part of a wider trend that will also be visible in the US market.

Extra points to Kona for the rack mounts and fender clearance. Minus one for the vertical dropouts (no fixie mods for this frame).

Originally posted by Mark V from Bike Hugger, on June 17, 2008 7:00 AM

In the New York Post, Mike Vaccaro calls last night, ‘A midnight massacre,’ which he describes as, ‘Disgraceful,’ and ‘Unspeakable,’ while asking, “Is this the best the Mets can do? Is this really what they are about? Can they really consider themselves a professional operation when they do the simplest task in sports, firing the manager, this wretchedly?”

According to WFAN’s morning hosts, who are broadcasting from Anaheim today, claim that their host station’s producers were pointing to Vaccaro’s article and mocking New York City when they arrived at the studio.

In Newsday, Jim Baumbach categorizes the way the Mets handled the situation as being, ‘cowardly.’

To relive the entire experience, from last year’s collapse, to last night’s ‘massacre,’ read Bill Rhoden in the New York Times.

According to Joel Sherman in the New York Post, “The Mets have their own network and a new stadium is being built beyond center field in the parking lot. The ownership of this team is aghast at what a losing season might mean to revenues in these two ventures. So the management of this team decided to sacrifice Willie Randolph and two coaches as much to higher Nielsen ratings and luxury suites as to the poor record they feared would jeopardize the gravy train.”

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 17, 2008 6:47 AM

The Gore event yesterday gives Obama exactly the headlines he wanted today in the Detroit papers...

Obama has edged into a lead in polls of the crucial state, now that he's started to campaign there in earnest.

Originally posted by Greg Sargent from TPM Election Central, on June 17, 2008 6:06 AM

Barack Obama laid out some of his economic policies in an interview with the Wall St. Journal -- and the right-wing paper isn't impressed with his ideas about raising the top tax rates and increasing government spending on energy infrastructure, declaring that it "appears like a return to an older-style big-government Democratic platform skeptical of market forces."

Obama does seem to cover himself against the accusation that he'd be an across-the-board tax-hiker, though, with an openness to cutting the corporate tax rate. However, this would carry a tradeoff: Loopholes that help certain companies game the system would have to be closed, thus creating a more even playing field.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on June 17, 2008 5:17 AM

The Mets fired Willie Randolph last night following their 9-6 win over the Angels, and if that sentence reads strangely, it should.

Since 1996, 32 managers have been fired or resigned under pressure with a substantial portion of the season remaining. (I exclude resignations such as Mike Hargrove’s last season or Tommy Lasorda’s in 1996, as well as cases such as Cito Gaston–who quit with five games left in 1997.) Of those 32, just seven won their last game, and just three were let go with a winning streak intact. Randolph joins Bob Brenly (2004 Diamondbacks), Bob Boone (2003 Reds) and Buck Martinez (2002 Blue Jays) in going out this way. Martinez’s Jays had actually won three straight when he was canned.

The timing was even more peculiar given the schedule. The Mets were home all last week, played a rain-created doubleheader on Sunday, then flew to Anaheim Sunday night. To make Randolph, pitching coach Rick Peterson and first-base coach Tom Nieto fly to California for the privilege of working one more day and being let go is, at best, ham-handed. Moreover, firing Randolph after one of the team’s better wins-a road game against the team with the third-best record in baseball-is strange timing. It’s completely unclear to me why Randolph had to go last night, as opposed to Sunday before stepping on a plane, or while the team was on an, however brief, winning streak.

Of course, I’ve been the one arguing that Randolph deserves to keep his job, and I stand by that. He’s improved tactically, doing a better job of handling a high-maintenance bullpen. He’s played this season shorthanded from Day One, as the bets made by Omar Minaya on high-salaried, high-risk players, the ones that worked reasonably well in 2006 and less so in 2007, failed completely in 2008. Moises Alou has played in 15 games. Pedro Martinez has made four starts. Carlos Delgado has killed the team: .242/.321/.407 with poor defense. The Mets’ bench, loaded with veterans, is awful: Only Ramon Castro and the injured Angel Pagan have a .300 OBP or .350 SLG. The Mets have been in position to win a number of games over the past few weeks, only to see the bullpen, most notably Billy Wagner, cough up the game. Randolph, like any manager, bears responsibility for his team’s performance, but when you look at what he actually does, what he has had to work with and the performance of the roster core, it’s difficult to argue that he is the problem. A quarter of his payroll has no-showed; that’s hard to overcome.

I am not arguing that Minaya needs to be fired, either. I am saying that firing Randolph doesn’t change anything for this Mets team on the field, and what it does for them off the field reeks of letting the media make decisions for you. The best argument for firing Randolph is that the constant coverage of his job status was a distraction for the players. However, that has nothing to do with Randolph or the players-it has to do with a voracious media filling column inches and air time, a group that entered the 2008 season with its sights set on Randolph. The amount of time spent questioning Randolph’s ability, versus the amount focused on the absences of Alou and Martinez, or the collapse of Delgado, or the execrable bench, is a bad joke. There’s no analysis of baseball or the Mets or any thought process at all; it’s just creating a story and then beating it until something happens.

This isn’t quite the Dodgers of 2004-05, whose general manager, Paul DePodesta, was the target of media criticism from the day he was hired and who was let go largely because the Dodgers owner had no plan other than to pander to that media. (How’s that working for you, Frank?) No, this is something a bit less blatant, but no less insidious. Randolph is out of a job today because a storyline was created, the Mets weren’t savvy enough to get out in front of it, and the situation snowballed. Omar Minaya may have made the phone call, but it was the media that made this transaction.

Originally posted by Joe Sheehan from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on June 17, 2008 5:16 AM

• More on 'Summer Streets' (NYT, News, Post, NY1, Crain's, Gothamist)
• Bill McKibben Gets Behind Kheel Plan (Plenty)
  
• Transit Ridership -- and Costs -- Rise With Gas Prices (NPR)
  
• Sander's $10K Raise Draws Fire (News)
• Shelly Silver Funds Free Bike Rentals Downtown (Daily Politics)
• As End Nears for Columbia St. Reconstruction, Residents Ready to Return to Normal (Bklyn Paper)
  
• NYT: Good Riddance to SUVs
• Anheuser-Busch to Make Its Bronx Distribution Fleet Less Polluting (News)
  
• French Truckers Protest Fuel Prices (NYT)
• Segway Sales at All-Time High (Engadget)
  

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on June 17, 2008 4:57 AM

Hafez Mirazi, the former Washington bureau chief of Al-Jazeera, this afternoon in Belgrade, describing a T-shirt someone he knew was trying to promote just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq: Come to America -- Before America Comes to You.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on June 17, 2008 2:08 AM

The Mets have fired Willie Randolph, and named bench coach Jerry Manuel their interim manager.

Pitching coach Rick Peterson and first base coach Tom Nieto have also been relieved of their coaching duties.

Ken Oberkfell will be hired as the team’s new first base coach, Dan Warthen will be the new pitching coach, and Luis Aguayo will be Manuel’s bench coach.

Oberkfell had been the manager of the team’s Triple-A New Orleans affiliate, while Warthen had been the pitching coach, and Aguayo the team’s field coordinator.

According to an AP report, as of three hours after Monday’s game, Mets players hadn’t heard of Willie’s dismissal, and utility man Marlon Anderson opted not to comment until he “heard the news from a member of the team.”

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Originally posted by Ted Berg from MetsBlog.com, on June 17, 2008 1:00 AM

I won't bore our non-journalist readers by recounting in any great detail the shop talk from IPI Conference here in Belgrade. But a couple of points that might be interesting to the broader audience.

The hand-wringing about the future of newspapers is not limited to the States. The consensus seems to be that, while U.S. papers are in much worse shape than European papers, the newspaper business model is collapsing in Europe, too, largely but not exclusively because of pressures related to the explosion of the Internet.

One observation I've heard made more than once is that European papers were better positioned to meet the challenges of the Internet age because they had learned long ago how to survive in a fiercely competitive marketplace. American papers, on the other hand, enjoyed near monopolies in their respective local markets for decades.

There is so much turmoil in the industry on both sides of the Atlantic that it's not clear yet how things will ultimately shake out. A BBC reporter asked me to put a number on it: how many more years will newspapers survive? I hesitate to get into the predictions business, but it seems obvious that in another 20-25 years two full generations will have grown up consuming news exclusively online. Whatever print editions still survive then, at least in America, with which I am familiar, will not look anything like newspapers today. An old American newspaperman in attendance here remarked to me, archly, "I can't tell if the U.S. is a leading indicator or a lagging indicator."

Interestingly, the disconnect between publishers and journalists in their responses to the industry's shifting financial fortunes is just as pronounced here as in the States. In a provocatively titled panel, "Are Profits Killing the News?", William Green, the editor of Time Europe, was nearly at his wit's end, although diplomatically so, in trying to get two major European publishers to acknowledge and address the cutbacks in news and the effect of the industry's financial struggles on journalism itself.

Britain's David Montgomery, CEO of publicly traded Mecom Group PLC, and Switzerland's Michael Ringier, chairman of privately owned Ringier AG, would have none of it. They rejected outright the premise that journalism has suffered from declining news budgets, and argued to the contrary that the quality of journalism is better than ever before. Ringier was particularly pointed, dismissing some of the criticisms as "bullshit" and declaring that despite the hand-wringing about Rupert Murdoch taking over the Wall Street Journal, the quality of the paper had actually improved since his arrival.

Green, ever earnest, implored them, "Aren't you in denial?"

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on June 17, 2008 12:50 AM

• APOD: 2005 November 10 - Gravitational Tractor
  "20 ton nuclear-electric spacecraft tows a 200 meter diameter asteroid by simply hovering near the asteroid. The spacecraft's ion drive thrusters are canted away from the surface. The steady thrust would gradually and predictably alter the course of the t
• Lifeblog: Kevin Kelly and the New Rules of the New Biology
  "Digital electronics have distracted us from the analogue world, such that when we turn our attentions to biology, we've forgotten how to think in gradients, thresholds, probability, or chaotic flows in regulatory networks."

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Blackbeltjones/Work, on June 16, 2008 9:00 PM

37signals shocks me by posting about a bullshit word-of-mouth marketer's new book (I thought 37s were anti-bullshit), then the thread gets overrun with shills for BzzAgent that were directed there.

Originally posted by mathowie from A Whole Lotta Nothing, on June 16, 2008 8:43 PM

Mario Kart in JavaScript.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 16, 2008 5:13 PM

Mario Kart in JavaScript.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 16, 2008 5:13 PM

This chart on Cooking for Engineers totally startled me, but once I got over my need for everything to be in lists and paragraphs, it made perfect sense.

With some substitutions, I made a delicious ratatouille on my first try!

Originally posted by Sarah from Signal vs. Noise, on June 16, 2008 3:44 PM

The fact that Al Gore is campaigning for Barack Obama -- as the Obama campaign announced today -- could give Obama a big boost among undecided Dems, particularly people who are still embittered by the divisive primary.

That's because Gore is the man who suffered the ultimate electoral highway robbery when he was robbed in 2000. Furthermore, his presence will serve as a warning to any disgruntled Hillary supporters: Just as the Nader voters' obstinacy gave us Bush, a lack of party unity can hurt us all by helping to elect McCain.

Gore announced his endorsement of Obama in a post on his own blog, with a teaser about the Detroit rally tonight.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on June 16, 2008 12:25 PM

Friends and followers of my blog know that I've been pretty vocal and proactive in my support for Barack Obama. A couple weeks ago, a call went out for web geeks, and I threw my hat in the ring.

With the paperwork all sent in, this is just letting people know that I'll be heading out to Boston at the end of the month to work full-time on BarackObama.com and related shenanigans. I believe they're looking for more people, so if you have an interest in jumping on, drop an app. Also, I know that there are lots of friends that are enthusiastic but can't necessarily drop what they're doing... drop me a line, I have schemes.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from random($foo), on June 16, 2008 12:04 PM

From Required Eating

This morning, time.com, Time magazine's website, named Serious Eats one of the 50 best websites of 2008, saying, "Whether or not you're a gastronome, reading about Rome's bountiful organic markets and the hearty hot dogs of Santiago, Chile, will surprise and delight you."

And the site takes note of the vibrant discussions happening on the Serious Eats Talk boards: "Entertaining and heated discussions flare up about the most mundane food-related minutiae: the best thing to eat when you're lunching at your office desk; the pros and cons of Ruth's Chris Steak House."

Thanks for the props, Time. We appreciate it. And thanks to everyone who reads and comments and talks on Serious Eats. This site wouldn't be as entertaining or as heated without you!

Click through to tell everyone at time.com what you think of Serious Eats.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on June 16, 2008 10:30 AM

I'm really excited to report that we launched Radar today, the most significant addition to outside.in since we first put up our alpha site 20 months ago.

The list of cool things you can do with Radar is long, but I think the basic premise is pretty simple and intuitive. Tell us where you are, and Radar shows you what's happening around you, at increasing levels of zoom: the 1000-foot scale, the neighborhood scale, the city scale, and "Everywhere Else" in the U.S. (Those of you who have been reading this blog for a while will recognize the zooming concept.) Right now, we're tracking blog posts, news stories, outside.in discussions, and Twitter tweats, and organizing them all both around specific places and topics. You'll see more content -- and more kinds of content -- flowing through your Radar in the coming months.

One of the things I love about Radar is that you track can specific places: schools, real estate developments, playgrounds. We'll "star" any item that comes in about that particular place, and if you happen to to be zoomed in on a location far from that place, we'll make sure that the item shows up in the "Everywhere Else" zoom level.

You can see two key ideas at work here, both of which are central to our philosophy about what hyperlocal means. The first is that to date hyperlocal hasn't been local enough. Yes, it's nice to see news filtered by your zip code or your town, but there are more immediate zones that matter even more than that. A deli closing within five hundred feet of my house matters a lot to me; a deli closing ten blocks away is pretty much meaningless. (This is the Pothole Paradox I wrote about last year.) The thousand-foot-view lets you zoom in on precisely that zone of core interest. This is one of the concepts that drove us to create dedicated Place pages for hundreds of thousands of places around the country a year ago; Radar takes all that information and makes it immediately easy to parse.

The other big idea about local is that people care about specific places that are, in some cases, scattered all around the world. I'm fascinated by the Hudson Yards and High Line development projects in Manhattan, and so I've set up my Radar to track those specific places, even though I live in another borough. I don't see all the hyperlocal news from Manhattan's neighborhoods in my Radar, but I do see every mention of Hudson Yards and the High Line.

The underlying principle here is that hyperlocal is all about places that are geographically close to you and emotionally close to you. Radar lets you see it all. So go check it out...

Originally posted by stevenberlinjohnson from stevenberlinjohnson.com, on June 16, 2008 10:14 AM

Here are the guys to do it since 1956:

  Cnt Player            Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt App,Dec    IP   H  R ER BB **SO** HR Pit Str GmSc IR IS BF AB 2B 3B IBB HBP SH SF GDP SB CS Pk BK WP   ERA
+—-+—————–+————-+—+—-+——-+———+—-+–+–+–+–+——+–+—+—+—-+–+–+–+–+–+–+—+—+–+–+—+–+–+–+–+–+——+
    1 Jon Rauch         2006-04-26    WSN  CIN L  0-5   8-8       1    0  0  0  1    4    0  31  18       0  0  5  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
    2 Mike Stanton      2004-08-03    NYM @MIL W 12-3   8-8       1    0  0  0  1    4    0  21  14       0  0  5  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
    3 Octavio Dotel     2003-06-11    HOU @NYY W  8-0   8-8       1    0  0  0  0    4    0  20  15       0  0  4  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
    4 Kazuhiro Sasaki   2003-04-04    SEA @TEX W  6-4   9-9f ,S   1    0  0  0  0    4    0  21  14       0  0  4  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
    5 Jerry Spradlin    1999-07-22    SFG  SDP L  7-8   7-7       1    1  1  0  0    4    0  24  18       0  0  6  5  1  0   0   1  0  0   0  0  1  0  0  1   0.00
    6 Derek Wallace     1996-09-13    NYM  ATL W  6-4   9-9f ,S   1    1  0  0  0    4    0  21  14       0  0  5  5  1  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  0   0.00
    7 Bruce Ruffin      1996-07-25    COL  CHC L  8-10  9-9f ,L   1    3  2  2  1    4    0  32  22       0  0  8  7  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  2  18.00
    8 Mark Wohlers      1995-06-07    ATL  CHC W  4-3   9-9f ,S   1    0  0  0  0    4    0  17  12       0  0  4  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
    9 Paul Shuey        1994-05-14    CLE  DET W  9-3   9-9f      1    0  0  0  2    4    0  35  21       0  0  6  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
   10 Paul Assenmacher  1989-08-22    ATL  STL L  5-10  5-5       1    0  0  0  0    4    0  20  16       2  1  5  5  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  1   0.00
   11 Mike Stanton      1985-07-22    CHW  DET W  9-4   8-9       1    0  1  0  3    4    0               1  0  7  4  0  0   0   0  0  0   0  0  0  0  0  0   0.00

Note that this is 1 IP, 4 K’s. It doesn’t include any of the numerous cases where a guy pitched more than one inning and struck out four during one of the innings he pitched. There’s no way to search for that with the PI.

Originally posted by Andy from Stat of the Day, on June 16, 2008 8:22 AM

The idea of evolution did not begin with Darwin...he just (just!) explained how it happened and backed it up with evidence.

"The only novelty in my work is the attempt to explain how species become modified," Darwin later wrote. He did not mean to belittle his achievement. The how, backed up by an abundance of evidence, was crucial: nature throws up endless biological variations, and they either flourish or fade away in the face of disease, hunger, predation and other factors. Darwin's term for it was "natural selection"; Wallace called it the "struggle for existence." But we often act today as if Darwin invented the idea of evolution itself, including the theory that human beings developed from an ape ancestor. And Wallace we forget altogether.

In fact, scientists had been talking about our primate origins at least since 1699, after the London physician Edward Tyson dissected a chimpanzee and documented a disturbing likeness to human anatomy. And the idea of evolution had been around for generations.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 16, 2008 8:13 AM

With several cities in addition to New York exploring the idea of car-free events modeled after Bogotá's Ciclovía, Streetfilms produced this "express version" of their popular full-length video.

Last month we reported that DOT was planning a major car-free event this summer in the mold of Bogotá, Colombia's weekly Ciclovía. Details emerged on Friday in the Downtown Express:

On three Saturday mornings in August, the Department of Transportation will ban cars from nearly 5 miles of city streets to make way for cyclists, joggers and walkers. Starting at the beginning of Centre St. in Lower Manhattan, then moving north onto Lafayette St., Fourth Ave. and Park Ave., people will be able to travel all the way to 72nd St. and then to Central Park by walking down the middle of a street.

The streets will be closed to cars on August 9, 16 and 23 from 7 a.m. to 1 p.m. On 15 major east-west streets, like Canal, 14th St. and 42nd St., cars will be allowed to cross the car-free zone.

(more...)

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on June 16, 2008 7:50 AM

Whenever I need a good shot of righteous indignation, I like to search through Google Books on keywords like 'ridiculous dress' or 'ludicrous gown', because I'm never disappointed. I can always find some man who has decided that the only thing wrong with the world is women's dress, and that of course he, being far above the vagaries of fashion (and who is, of course, wearing that completely rational item of dress, the necktie) is ideally suited to pass criticism upon it.

This example is wonderful -- it's not that the streets of London are filthy, or that men should perhaps not throw their cigar butts in the gutter -- no, women's dresses are too long. (Why can't both things be true, I wonder?)

SOCIAL CATECHISM.
Q. WHAT is the dirtiest creature you know?
A. The English fine lady.
Q. What are your reasons for saying this ?
A. Her habits.
Q. Explain yourself more fully.
A. When she walks she drags behind her a receptacle for dust and dirt of every kind.
Q. What is this called?
A. A long dress, or train.
Q. What is its action?
A. It sweeps the ground, collects mud, dust, cigar-stumps, straws, leaves, and every other impurity.
Q. What happens next?
A. This accumulation rubs off to a certain extent upon other portions of her dress, or upon the legs of any person who may walk beside her, and when she gets into her carriage, the objectionable matter spoils the lining ; besides that, the dust is most offensive.
Q. Why does she wear such a ridiculous dress?
A. For one of two reasons. Either because she aims at a servile imitation of certain great folks, or because she owes money to her milliner, and dares not order any kind of dress except that which this tyrant sends home to her.
Q. Why does she not raise, or loop up her dress to keep it from the ground?
A. Because, being a lazy person, she has thick ancles [sic], or being a scraggy person, she has skinny ones, which her vanity forbids her to exhibit.
Q. Is there any other reason?
A. Yes; she has probably ugly feet, disfigured by corns or bunions caused by wearing tight boots.
Q. Is there any cure for such habits?
There is none, until her husband has been nearly ruined by her extravagance, when she is compelled by economical reasons to dress like a rational being, and at once becomes clean and charming as the British female was intended to be.
Q. What sensation is caused to man by the sight of these dresses ?
A. Contemptuous pity for the woman, and pity, without contempt, for her unfortunate husband.
Q. Does she know this ?
A. Yes, but as she dresses less to please men than to vex women, the knowledge has no effect upon her dirty habits.
Q. Where can the animal be seen?
A. At the Zoological Gardens on Sunday afternoons, in the Park and Kensington Gardens, and in most places where fine clothes can be successfully exhibited.
Q. What lesson should you deduce from this ?
A. That of thankfulness to Providence that, (if married at all) you are married to a sensible woman and not to a fine lady.
Q. What will you take to drink ?
A. Anything you like to put a name to.

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on June 16, 2008 4:26 AM

It's Monday morning here in Belgrade, where I am attending the International Press Institute's World Congress & 57th General Assembly, as Josh mentions below.

I staggered in late Sunday evening, after an eventful series of four flights that bounced me from the States to London and then to Munich, before finally arriving in Belgrade sans luggage. To give you some sense of what bad weather in Atlanta can do for air travel, my best available connection to Belgrade at one point appeared to be via Dubai, of all places. I talked the airline down off that ledge.

The big news in Europe is Euro 08, the soccer tournament. But George Bush is also here. In London Sunday he was greeted by protesters who scuffled with police.

The big news in Serbia is Kosovo. My arrival here coincided with a new constitution taking effect Sunday in recently independent Kosovo, which further aggrieved Serbia.

President Boris Tadić spoke at the opening of the IPI conference (before my belated arrival) and not surprisingly rejected the new constitution: "Serbia sees Kosovo as her southern province and defends her integrity by peaceful means, with diplomacy, and not force."

I hope to write more later on the Serbia-Kosovo tensions. In the meantime I must finish preparing for my panel this morning, New Media: New Opportunities, New Threats, moderated by Roy Greenslade who, among other endeavors, blogs for the UK's Guardian. Joining me on the panel will be Dejan Restak, the website director for B92 in Belgrade, and Christoph Schultheis, a founder of BILDblog in Berlin.

With my luggage en route from Paris, I'm afraid I'll do nothing today to dispel the stereotype of the grungy blogger.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on June 15, 2008 9:01 PM

I think Tiger Knee was a finishing move in Street Fighter or one of those old NES games. This week, it’s the big topic in the sports world. Tiger Woods had minor knee surgery on his left (front) leg nine weeks ago to correct an articular cartilage issue that was causing friction in his rotation. Rotation is very necessary for the explosive power in Woods’ downswing.

So why was Woods bothered by the knee so long after minor arthroscopic surgery? That’s the bigger question. Athletes have returned from worse to more demanding sports in a shorter period of time. Is Woods a slow healer, is this a chronic issue, or is there a special demand that Woods places on the knee?

Golf uses biomechanical analysis more than any sport and there’s often some overlap between golf and baseball. I spoke with one analyst, forced to speak off the record, and he said that while Woods’ biomechanics have never been publicly noted, he does seem to use more efficient force throughout the swing. That would put less, not more force on his knees. He did point to Tiger’s “drop and drive” on his long irons. If I could hit a long iron, I’d comment more here.

One surgeon I spoke with didn’t think Woods should be having any problems. I pointed out that it appeared that Woods was wearing a neoprene sleeves under his slacks and he was surprised. “He’s nine weeks post,” he stated. “There shouldn’t be swelling or rotational issues unless there’s still some grinding. He’s not going to be 100%, but 90%? What this sounds like is a minor clean up that showed bigger problems.”

Woods is hardly at the stage that Peter Jacobson is, playing with a replaced hip and knee (and playing well, too.) He’s likely to adjust his game, as he’s shown he can do time and again, to lessen the stress on the knee. He’s gone almost six years between issues and with his strong base should allow him to handle small problems. In the short term, Woods is probably spending the evening with physical therapists rather than his wife and family, a sacrifice that is understood only if you’ve ever seen his wife. 18 more holes - five rounds without rest - will tax the knee beyond expectations. However, Earl Woods once said that his son would never face someone as mentally strong as his son.

So far he hasn’t. A sore knee isn’t much of a challenge.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on June 15, 2008 6:23 PM

Telecom and technology policy virtually never get discussed in presidential elections. And a lot of otherwise politically-attuned folks don't have much of a sense one way or another what they think telecom policy should be. But in addition to its obvious importance in media, free speech and civic terms, telecom policy is hugely important to the future of the economy.

Here's video of a recent panel discussion between Michael Powell and and Reed Hundt, as surrogates for McCain and Obama.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 15, 2008 5:35 PM

Xcott Craver writes "The 2008 Underhanded C Contest has just opened. Every year, contestants are asked to write a simple, innocent, readable C program that appears to perform an innocent task — but implements some non-obvious evil behavior. This year's challenge: redact blocks from an image, but do it so that the excised pixels can somehow be retrieved. We also have listed the winners of last year's contest, which was to write a simple encryption utility that mysteriously and undetectably fails between 1 percent and 0.1 percent of the time. The winning entry is truly impressive." We discussed the first of these contests in 2005.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Originally posted by Soulskill from Slashdot, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 15, 2008 at 01:13 PM

Originally posted by Soulskill from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 15, 2008 10:13 AM

Meatpacking landmark Florent is closing June 29, just as the Highline is on its way and a new downtown Whitney Museum is coming to the same block, putting a seal on the neighborhood’s complete transformation that Florent first catalyzed 23 years ago.

We didn’t get to enjoy the restaurant enough these two years living close by in Chelsea, but we were always happy it was there — a favorite place and a refuge from the pretention all around it. I love this Florent / Fo’ Rent image, via the restaurant’s brilliant webmistress Alison Zack. See also her site for Florent, which I always liked for its recreation of the look of Florent’s bulletin board, and includes details on closing festivities. Go while you can — and make sure you try the couscous stew (with chicken and merguez sausage), which I’m going to miss intensely.

update:  I hadn’t seen it at the time, but Frank Bruni at the NY Times published an excellent oral history of Florent. 

Originally from shey.net, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 15, 2008 at 01:06 PM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Eyebeam reBlog, on June 15, 2008 10:06 AM

Examiner column for June 16.

    Test takers strike back. A funny thing happened at the annual mass grading of Advanced Placement English literature exams. The exclamation “This Is Sparta!” popped up daily in exam booklets.

    At first I ignored it, but then a reader who teaches at the University of California at Irvine asked that our table keep track of the numbers, and I knew there was something to this phenomenon.

    Lynda knew about the Facebook group, numbering more than 30,000, called “Everyone write ‘This is Sparta!’ on your AP tests.” Since we were reading nearly a million English Literature essays, “This is Sparta!” didn’t occur often, but all AP readers came to recognize it as the tag of a web-based network.

    Instructions on Facebook are explicit: “In the middle of an essay randomly write the words THIS IS SPARTA! Draw a single line through what you just wrote.” Kevin, who started the group, knew AP graders are instructed not to count anything crossed out.

    The goal was to cause graders to pause and chuckle at the cleverness of the prank. My observation of the AP Lit reading is that it did far more than that.

    The phrase comes from a line in “300,” a 2007 film based on a graphic novel penned by Frank Miller. It narrates, with dubious historical accuracy, the 480 B.C. battle between 300 Greek Spartans and a million Persian invaders.

    At the battle of Thermopylae, the Spartan king shouts, “This is Sparta!” as he rebuffs enemy threats and hurls Persian messengers into a pit of oblivion. Every last Spartan dies in the ensuing clash, but those defiant words have since become teen code for  “don’t tell us what to do.”

    Greece, home of the first democracy, battling Persia, clearly mirrors current West/East political tensions, but the Facebook group seems to have no political motive.  The students in my classes who participated did it for the chuckle: “LOL, hahaha,” as they phrased it.

    During the week of exam grading, readers exchanged sightings of the graffito; one table even erected a sign proclaiming, “This is Sparta!” But the most telling detail of this adolescent prank is the cautionary instruction to draw a single line through the sentence.

    How defiant can 30,000 test takers be when they ask the reader to discount what they’ve written? It’s quite endearing that these teen “rebels” want to be sure their AP scores aren’t jeopardized--hardly a dramatic statement on the state of the world.

    But as readers, we did adopt the Spartan spirit. In the Chief Reader’s last day speech, he encouraged 1100 teachers to grade the remaining hundred thousand essays by pumping his fist and shouting, “This is Sparta!”

    We cheered and cheered, and went to our tables that final day to grade the remaining tests, hurling them into a concrete pit of oblivion--or perhaps into a metal computer scanner.

    A Facebook prank with the modest goal of bringing a chuckle to the reading turned into a rallying cry to complete the daunting task on hand. We hundreds of Spartan readers tackled a million swarming essays and, unlike Spartans at Thermopylae, remained standing.

    “WE are Sparta!” LOL

      

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on June 15, 2008 7:11 AM

On this date, 25 years ago, the Mets acquired Keith Hernandez from the Cardinals for Neil Allen and Rick Ownby.

In the New York Post, Brian Costello does a fantastic job of recapping the trade, as well the legacy that Hernandez has established during his time in New York.

In the article, Costello asks Hernandez if he would consider being manager of the Mets, as was speculated about recently, to which Hernandez said:

“My name always comes up.  I’m not interested.  It did make me uncomfortable because I like Willie.  I think he’s a good field manager.  Managing entails so much more today than it did in my time [as a player].  I’m just not prepared to make that kind of commitment.”

in the article, Costello also talks with SNY’s Gary Cohen, and me, from MetsBlog.com.

For more on Hernandez, check out Newsday.

ShareThis

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 15, 2008 6:51 AM