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June 28, 2008
When You Talk To The Seaweed
While we were drawing monsters today, Raul Andres told me a story which I transcribed.
When You Talk To The Seaweed
A very long time ago when there were no dinasaurs there were people riding monsters. No, no, sitting on the monsters on their backs and they would help them with their arms. The people had no cars but a lot a lot of toys everywhere and they ate no monsters, just broccoli but when they were sick they ate vitamins. When they were hot they ate flies and dragonflies and when they were cold they ate bumblebees. When they were inside they ate straw but usually they ate food outside at nighttime like a picnic. But the monsters had no mouths and the people put food on their backs with their arms.
The end.
Filed under: on kids
Tags: 3years7months, broccoli, food, monsters, raul andres, the three year old mind
Wall-E's easter eggs and inside jokes
with more unconfirmed ones listed in the comments
Starting to Wonder
Following up on David's post below, why is McCain outspending Obama two-to-one in Missouri?
We had reader reports suggesting this last week. And in response to those reports readers from a number of other swing states reported seeing the same thing -- a flood of McCain ads and only a much smaller number of Obama ads.
When we checked in with Obama campaign, the impression we were given was that this was more a matter of viewer perception than reality. But the Post-Dispatch's reporting makes it clear that in Missouri at least it is very much the reality.
I've got my hand on only a small patch of a national campaign elephant. But voter preferences are much more malleable in these early summer months than in the Fall. So I am curious to know why what we're told is the heavily outfunded campaign is dominating the airwaves in at least some key areas.
New Volkswagen Ads Make Us Happy
In Brazil, Volkswagens no longer run on gas—they run on beer, milk, and tomatoes. Popular ad agency BBDO skipped the glossy pages and billboards for these cute storage units, as part of the German auto company's "for every kind of load" campaign.
After the jump, check out some Volkswagen ads of yesteryear. Spoiler: There are no milk cartons involved.
However, E-A-T is especially effective.
June 27, 2008
Unsung commuter wheel from Mavic
It’s easy to miss Mavic’s Speedcity wheelset among their road racing and mtn offerings; I think that Mavic missed a chance to jump on the commuter trend by not marketing this more. Mavic bills this as a way to road train on your mtb, but they should have said that this wheelset with their innovative spoking system and superb hub design is good to go in your disc-equipped 700C road/commuter bike. This would be a fine upgrade for many riders.
You must search Mavic’s mtn section for these wheels, wedged between their cross-country and freeride models. Because you can swap this 700C wheel into a disc-equipped offroad steed, Mavic says you can use road tires and train on the road. Even if you have rim brakes, Mavic sells an interesting adapter to mount the V-brakes at the appropriate height. But most serious mtn bikers are going to have a real road bike to train on. I mean, use the right tool for the task, right?
(I suppose you could use these wheels on your mtb as an intermediate way to make your mtb more cyclocross worthy… since you could then use 700x32 knobbies…. but I digress)
The rear hub is 135mm spaced, wider than the standard 130mm road standard. However, any bike made to take disc brakes is likely to have the wider spacing anyways. Bikes like the Salsa Casseroll. Speedcity are compatible with rim brakes, but the real value is linked to their disc mount (either ISO or Shimano’s “Center-lock” pattern). The relatively narrow rim makes it more appropriate to road 700C tires than big, fat “29-er” tires. Mavic’s proprietary “Fore” drilling, easily replaceable cartridge bearings, and straight-pull, steel spokes have given excellent service in wheels like the Ksyrium Elite. With a disc-brake, one should expect many seasons of use in rainy climates like Seattle.
Speedcity wheels carry over from Mavic’s 2008 catalog without any changes, including the price. At $450/pr retail, the Speedcity wheelset competes pretty well against custom built wheels on comparable quality hubs.
Note: Meet the Guys from BP
The crew from Baseball Prospectus, including Will Carroll, Joe Sheehan, Steven Goldman, Jay Jaffe and Derek Jacques, will all be at Foley’s in New York on Monday, June 30, along with special guests Will Leitch and MLB.com’s Fantasy 411 Crew, for a pizza feed and to talk baseball.
For more information on attending this event, click here.
Joanne Lucas knowing that Florent would remain open as some sort of diner but not telling anyone,...
Joanne Lucas knowing that Florent would remain open as some sort of diner but not telling anyone, allowing everyone to get all weepy, really pisses me off. I mean, she shut off the fucking gas this week — “I’m sorry, devoted patrons, but we cannot cook you one last plate of french fries! Sob!” — knowing fully well that she was going to reopen on Tuesday. Good show, lady. You’re no better than Barbra Streisand selling tickets for her farewell tour.
Ride the City
To those who enjoy their status as breathing, sentient beings, riding a bicycle in New York City can be daunting. Aggressive taxis, delivery trucks and carelessly opened doors create a minefield that makes casual cyclists want to hang up their Schwinn. But New York can be safely navigated. Though it's painfully inferior to European cities, it does have a growing network of relatively safe bike lanes (thanks largely in part to Mayor Bloomberg). Ride the City, currently in beta form, is a site launched earlier this month to help aid the process.
Much like Google Maps or HopStop, Ride the City takes two addresses and details the shortest route between them. But unlike the aforementioned sites, it zeroes in on existing bicycle lanes and ignores inhospitable roads like the Queens Midtown tunnel or the BQE. Users can choose between the most direct route, the "safe route" (as many bike lanes as are convenient) and the "safest route" (more bike lanes, especially designated "greenways"). RTC adds "caution" signs as well when the route traverses portions that have a history of accidents.
I used the site to map out a ride to work, and it was remarkably close to the route I've painstakingly devised over numerous trips back and forth. It did, however, faithfully abide by the direction of traffic on a couple portions where I usually go against the tide. Which isn't a bad thing. It's comforting to know that the site treasures my well-being even more than I do.
Originally posted by Doug Black from Cool Hunting, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 27, 2008 at 04:03 PM
Obama Campaign Manager's New Video Lays Out Strategy For Victory
This is pretty novel. Obama campaign manager David Plouffe has filmed a new Web video of himself, using a laptop in his office, in which he rallies the troops with a PowerPoint about the campaign's strategy to win the general election.
The Obama campaign is emailing out the video to supporters. Give it a watch:
In it, Plouffe makes points similar to the ones he made in a PowerPoint presentation to reporters the other day, but with a new PowerPoint. Now the Obama camp wants it to get out to its broader audience of supporters.
Plouffe optimistically tells viewers that John McCain doesn't have many opportunities to grab any of the 252 electoral votes that went to Kerry, while the Obama camp is going after 2004 red states like Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico, and Nevada, and even some "unusual" places like Alaska, Montana and North Dakota.
At the same time, Plouffe make sure to stress to supporters that they can't just take it easy. As he points out, the apparent cash different between Obama and McCain will be mediated by the RNC's $50 million lead over the DNC -- not an inconsiderable difference, considering that the McCain campaign will be relying on the RNC for a lot of heavy lifting.
"John McCain, the RNC, the shadowy outside groups, are not gonna let this election happen without a fight," Plouffe says. He adds a warning that Michelle, too, will be a target: "And so right around the corner we're gonna see millions of dollars attacking Barack, attacking Michelle Obama, and we have to have the ability to fight back."
WALL•E - Robot with the heart of a Mac
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple
Several TUAW readers have reported after seeing midnight showings of Disney-Pixar's new and highly-rated movie WALLo.E that when the robot boots up, he makes the standard Mac startup sound. That's not the only Apple connection with the movie.
Of course, Steve Jobs is the largest single shareholder of Disney after Pixar was purchased by the entertainment giant for $7.4 billion in 2006. He still serves on a steering committee for Pixar that oversees the Disney-Pixar animation businesses, and he's on the Disney Board of Directors. I'm not sure, but he may be tapped to be the first CEO of BuyNLarge...
WALLo.E's job is to wander around an abandoned Earth, pick up trash, and compact it into small blocks. However, when he finds something nostalgic that he likes, such as an iPod or Rubik's cube, he keeps it.
The object of WALLo.E's desire, EVE, was actually designed with the assistance of Apple Senior VP of Industrial Design Jonathan Ive, who apparently spent a day with the Pixar team in 2005 consulting on the ultra-sleek floating robot.
Thanks to Matt for the heads-up and inspiration for this post!Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
The tyranny of sourdough, AKA San Francisco's bread problem. It's...
The tyranny of sourdough, AKA San Francisco's bread problem.
It's sour because in the US, particularly in San Francisco, it's hard to buy good bread. About 75% of the decent bread in my grocery store, both fresh baked and industrial, is sourdough. Consumers think sourdough is shorthand for quality. It's not. In fact, sourdough is seldom the appropriate bread for a meal. It makes lousy sandwiches, lousy breakfast, it clashes with cheese. It's good with creamy soups, and it's good plain with butter. But the premium bakeries all push sourdough, and so sourdough becomes synonymous with "good", when it's not.
This is probably more than 50% of the reason why I left San Francisco.
(link)
Penmanship
By Alvin R. Dunton, B . Harrison, J. W. C . Gilman, John D . Williams, Silas Sadler Packard Published 1877 J.W.C. Gilman & Co.
The Shutter: Grand 275, Nicola Paone, and Dosa Hut
It's been a strange week in shutters. We had both the long planned closure of Cafe Grey and the last minute sale of Bette. Then there was of course the mysterious shutter/non shutter over at Savarona. As usual there are still a few stragglers left:
1) Clinton Hill: Clinton Hill Blog reports on the shuttering of a beloved bar: "I have received word from TWO different sources that Grand 275 (located at 275 Grands, obvs) is closing. Fear not — it doesn’t seem to be an issue with poor business or rent increases, but more that the owners are ready to do something new (hopefully in the same space?)." [ClintonHillBlog]
2) Murray Hill: Crain's brings the news that Murray Hill old timer Nicola Paone will close tomorrow: "Nicola Paone, the favorite Italian restaurant of a long line of mayors including Rudy Giuliani, celebrated its 50th anniversary in April. This Saturday evening, the Murray Hill stalwart—a victim of old age—will serve its last mealss..Mr. Auriana says he will either sell the building at 207 E. 34 St....or lease it to another restaurant." [Crain's]
3) Gramercy: Kosher-NY has some shuttering news from Lexington Ave: "Saravana Bhavan Dosa Hut, which was formerly located at 102 Lexington Avenue, between East 27th Street & East 28th Street, is now closed. It seems as though a non-kosher restaurant, Tamil, will be opening it its place." [Kosher-NY]
— photo
The Big Leagues
Robert Palmer:
We mentioned yesterday a rumor that Apple won’t cut a check for iPhone application developers until the dev’s share of the sales tops $250. A lot of commenters were upset about this, if it’s true: TomWBrowning said “So if you make an app that costs $1 you won’t see a penny even if 359 people buy it?”
From the (indie) developer’s perspective, this stinks.
If you’re thinking in terms of a couple hundred dollars, your app probably isn’t even going to get listed in the App Store. The App Store isn’t going to be like VersionTracker or MacUpdate, where every piece of junk gets listed as it’s submitted.
Props
Hillary Clinton.
Blogs to check out: Noble Pig
Blogs to check out: Noble Pig We're suckers for food sites with great photography. But there's a lot more going on at Noble Pig, which is why we read it religiously these days. In addition to great recipes with the aforementioned photographs, the site boasts wine tasting notes (with a shopping list handy via the sidebar), and observational pieces about everyday life outside of the culinary.
Roku + Netflix
Real movies the instant you want them have been expected for ... well... at least 100 years. You think of a movie, then you can watch it. This trick has been tried scores of times over the past decades, but never seemed to work. Clunky boxes. Expensive contracts. No choices. Weird constraints. Lousy pictures. But now, finally, the trick works.
The Roku box from Netflix allows you to watch movies on your TV whenever you want to, for no extra charge, in DVD quality. It is a tiny thing that sets up in a few minutes. If you have wi-fi in your household it will link up to that so you can put the box near your TV. For achieving such a complex task it has a remarkably simple interface and no-fuss approach, very similar to an iPod. We were watching a movie within ten minutes of opening the shipping box.
You use a small clicker to control your Netflix queue on your TV. Movies are streamed (no waiting beyond a few seconds at the start) in unexpected big-screen TV quality. I don't know how they do it. It is miles better than the streaming on those little YouTube boxes. There is no noticeable stutter, blobs, lags, or hiccups. But it ain't hi-def, either.
The service is a joy to use. You manage your queue -- adding and re-ording flicks -- on your computer, and the Roku box automatically syncs up. Back at the TV you click through the instant choices, pick one, and in a few seconds the movie starts. You can pause, change movies, and resume the first where you left off.
Here's the kicker: you can watch as many movies (no ads) as you care to. There is no extra charge beyond the basic Netflix monthly (and you can still get them mailed to you as DVDs if you prefer). Ten movies a month or a hundred. Anytime. This thing is dangerous.
Here's the only caveat: so far only about 10% of the total Netflix catalog is available for instant download. But that total is naturally swelling by the day.
The Roku box is cheap at $100. You can watch all the instant Netflix movies for free without it, if you want to hook your PC up to a large screen, or watch on your monitor. Since the Roku is so small and wireless we can move it to our projector and stream movies to the big wall.
It's a nicely done cool tool.
-- KK
Roku
$100
Available from Roku
Related items previously reviewed on Cool Tools:
10 Reasons Why Vista Isn’t That Bad
Written by Jason Chen
Of all the ware Microsoft churns out from its sweatshop of “lightning bolt, lightning bolt” nerds, Windows is the one most inexorably tied to the public image of the company. As Bill Gates leaves the building, we look back on the last baby birthed—if not fully gestated—under his watch, the swan song operating system that he himself has issues with. Although we agree that Vista could have used a bit more time shoved back into the silicon womb for some feature buffing and bug fixing, it’s not nearly as bad as most people are making it out to be. That’s right, I’m actually happy with Windows Vista, which I use about one-third of the time I spend at a computer.
This may be counterintuitive, seeing as our guy who defended Windows doesn’t even like Vista, but I’ve used Mac OS X and Vista side by side and simultaneously for over a year (and before that, Mac and XP) thanks to the dual-computer-controlling app Synergy. Here’s why Vista’s not that bad:
1. It’s more secure than Windows XP. After being implicitly responsible for botnets and security breaches through the incredible popularity of their Windows XP, Microsoft went back and made sure Vista is more secure than its predecessor. And it is. According to security firm PC Tools, Vista had 639 unique threats over a six-month period, whereas XP had 1021. This came from much internal restructuring under the hood, but there’s a chance that it might be due to Vista being a smaller target than XP for malware as well.
2. It’s the best looking Windows yet. Despite any complaints users may have about Aero hogging up too many CPU cycles or requiring a video card from this millennium to use, it’s still the best looking Windows yet. I mean really, do you remember what XP looked like out of the box? With that gigantic balloon of a task bar and the green Start button. Vista’s glass definitely trumps that. And then there’s the underlying graphical framework changes which allow new features like live thumbnails. All these visual effects may require more power, but you can’t deny that it’s pleasing to look at.
If you want to disable Aero for certain applications for performance or compatibility reasons, see here.
3. Games work just about as well as under XP. There’s a slight performance degradation under Vista when compared to Windows XP using the exact same hardware. Is it noticeable? Probably, but it’s somewhere around the level of 10%. There’s also the consideration of DirectX 10 and the visual improvements you’ll get in the future when more developers really take advantage of it. With a slightly better video card, you won’t even really notice that you’re going at 90FPS versus 100FPS.
4. Vista Media Center is a fantastic DVR. Microsoft integrates their fantastic Windows Media Center Edition into Home Premium and Ultimate, and it’s pretty much the best DVR you can get outside of getting a TiVo. Combine it with various Media Center Extenders, of which there are lots (such as the Xbox 360), you can get HDTV streamed to anywhere in your house from one computer in your office. Our only complaint is still that Cable Labs doesn’t allow you to stick a CableCARD tuner onto just any appropriately spec’d Vista PC—you actually have to buy a machine pre-made for CableCARD.
5. The sleep mode works. Sleep mode in Windows XP was essentially a shortcut for locking up your computer and forcing you to reboot. It actually does what it’s supposed to in Vista.
6. Built-in search is better and more useful. Vista’s searching feature relies on cataloging your hard drive, then searching the resulting database to quickly (and easily) find your files. By default it’s just limited to a couple user folders, but if you expand it to your entire hard drive, you’ll be able to find anything fast, much like the way Spotlight works on a Mac. The downside is that during the first day or two, everything slows down while Vista indexes your computer. Best to leave it on overnight or over a weekend while you’re away.
7. User Account Control is useful for some people. I have to admit that I’ve turned this off but UAC—the thing that pops up and asks you for your password whenever you do something on the system level—is useful in theory for many people, especially those who share a family computer. Hide the administrator password from your parents/grandparents/kids so they won’t be able to install any weird apps they’re not supposed to. In practice, it’s a bit annoying in that it pops up for mundane things that shouldn’t really need system-level clearance. It’s a step in the right direction; however, if you want to disable UAC for certain programs, see here.
8. Drivers support isn’t as bad as it’s made out to be. Although “Man gets Windows Vista to work with printer” may be an actual non-Onion headline, the root cause of his original woes was that the man installed a Windows XP printer driver instead of the correct Vista one. But there is a smaller percentage of users who—no matter how old or new their peripheral is—can’t get it to work with Windows Vista. The blame for this lies on peripheral manufacturers who either can’t or won’t update their drivers to support the new OS. There’s not much you or Microsoft can do here, but it’s rarer than you’d think from reading the internet.
9. It’s not any buggier than Windows XP. This is a bit of a corollary to #1, but out of the many, many Vista users we’ve seen, they almost all agree that the only times Vista has crashed or blue-screened on them was when they were doing something they usually don’t do. The OS by itself rarely crashes in everyday use, and compared to even OS X Leopard, it’s pretty damn sturdy. In a year’s worth of daily use, we think the OS has probably only crashed once, if that.
10. Vista is not slow if you have enough RAM. One of the main complaints that users have is that Vista is slow, but they either upgraded Vista from an old machine or they purchased a “Vista Ready” system with only 512MB to 1GB worth of RAM. You can run Vista with 1GB of RAM, but like OS X, you really want to have at least 2GB. Modern operating systems get fatter because they DO more stuff for you under the hood, such as optimizing your memory for the applications you run often so they load faster.
We’re not saying that Vista doesn’t have its faults or that Windows 7 won’t be better, we’re saying that Vista is just not as bad as people are making it out to be. If you’re on XP and you’re afraid to upgrade, don’t be. It’s no worse than Windows XP if you pay attention to the stuff I mentioned above. As long as you’ve got a reasonably decent machine—and if you’re reading Giz it’s likely that you do—you’re pretty safe in upgrading.
That said, we do have some major complaints:
1. Things aren’t where they used to be. Holy shit. This one is the worst. Various settings are hidden under levels of menus, and for some inexplicable reason, Add/Remove Programs is no longer Add/Remove programs. What’s the point of this? So people can use the hundreds of wizards more?
2. File transfers are slower than on XP, which is slightly fixed with Service Pack 1, but still has problems. Here’s the reason why. And if you’ve got problems with slow browsing, see here.
3. Wireless networking is a pain. Windows has never been great at presenting wireless networking with an intuitive UI, and Vista might be even worse than XP in this department. Stuff’s buried behind various weirdly-named menus, which you have to (at least the first few times) guess at to see.
4. Lots of balloon notifications pop up on the taskbar. Here’s how to shut them off.
5. Folder view in Windows Explorer doesn’t remember your settings. Here’s another huge pain users have run into when browsing a folder and all of a sudden having Explorer think that these are photos because there’s just one photo in the directory. Here’s how to turn that off.
Bonus Vista Tip: How to recover files from Vista’s built-in shadow copy here.
Wonderful news for liberal media.
The brilliant Mark Schmitt is taking the reigns of the Prospect. I know Mark (he wrote for me at TPMCafe), and can’t say enough good things about him as a writer, thinker, and all around great dude.
Mark, I hope, will shake up the often stale feeling labor/left editorial line at the magazine (stale not in ideology, which I basically am all for, but in tone and relevance). He’ll also hopefully help my fellow new media youngsters over there (Deputy Editor Ann Friedman, the essential Ezra Klein, etc.) keep pushing the Mag in a webby direction. He is, after all, a quite accomplished blogger.
Washington, D.C.—Mark Schmitt has been named Executive Editor of The American Prospect. Schmitt has been a contributor to the Prospect since 2001 and a columnist for the magazine since 2005, as well as a frequent contributor to its Web site and award-winning blog, TAPPED. He is currently a senior fellow at the New America Foundation where he helped to develop a new initiative on The Next Social Contract, a cross-cutting effort to find the underlying principles and policies appropriate to the emerging economy.
Before joining the New America Foundation in 2005, Mark was a program director at the Open Society Institute in New York for seven years. Previously, he served as policy director for Sen. Bill Bradley of New Jersey, as well as a senior adviser on Bradley’s 2000 presidential campaign. He is an expert on budget and tax policy, reform of the political process, and the history and role of ideas in politics.
In addition to appearing in The American Prospect, Mark’s writing has been published in The New York Times, The New Republic, Democracy, the Financial Times, and other publications, and he has contributed chapters to several books. His own blog, The Decembrist, was named one of the five best political blogs by Forbes magazine in 2003, and he has also been a regular contributor to TPM Café.
Prospect Board Chairman Benjamin Taylor said, “Mark is the right person at the right moment in the Prospect’s history and as the country appears ready to enter a new era of progressive politics. We’re thrilled to have someone with Mark’s extraordinary talents taking over the editorial reins at The American Prospect.”
“This is the moment for The American Prospect. TAP has seen the possibilities of a new progressive era since its first issue in 1990, and it will be central to the conversation in the years ahead. I’m thrilled at the opportunity to work with the current staff of the magazine, which includes some of the best young journalists anywhere, along with the brilliant founding editors, Bob Kuttner and Paul Starr, and Harold Meyerson,” Schmitt said.
Harold Meyerson will return to his role as editor-at-large to devote more time to writing features for the magazine. Schmitt will begin in his new role on July 14.
Martian Garden
[Image: Courtesy of NASA/JPL-Caltech/University of Arizona].
The soil chemistry on Mars is apparently just right for growing turnips. After digging up soil in a region of the Red Planet nicknamed Wonderland, the Phoenix rover "found trace levels of nutrients like magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride," which is "the same basic chemistry as garden soil." These soil samples are also "fairly alkaline," we read, "with a pH of 8 or 9. This level of alkalinity is common for many Earth soils, and myriad bacteria and plants, including vegetables like asparagus and turnips, can thrive at such a pH."
So could we develop Mars gardens in our landscape architecture classes – pre-emptive landscape grafts that we'll export off-world for future planting?
Obama Hires Top Hillary Policy Adviser
A key hire by the Obama camp: He reportedly signs up senior Hillary policy adviser Neera Tanden, one of her top loyalists, as his new Director of Domestic Policy.
Tanden, a fixture on many a Hillary campaign conference call, was a key architect of her health care plan, which was probably the one domestic policy proposal of hers that was most often compared favorably to Obama's.
Rave Reviews For Heath Ledger in Dark Knight
The first reviews are in for the new Batman flick, The Dark Knight, and critics are raving about, what would unfortunately be, Heath Ledger's final complete movie role.
"I can only speak superlatives of Ledger, who is mad-crazy-blazing brilliant as the Joker," Rolling Stone's resident movie guru Peter Travers wrote. "It's typical of Ledger's total commitment to films as diverse as Brokeback Mountain and I'm Not There that he does nothing out of vanity or the need to be liked.
"Ledger's Joker has no gray areas — he's all rampaging id," he continued. "He creates a Joker for the ages."
Pete also says that Heath's performance could, very well, put him in the Oscar race. "If there's a movement to get him the first posthumous Oscar since Peter Finch won for 1976's Network, sign me up," he writes.
Heath's death is also acknowledged in the credits of the flick, along with one of the film's special-effects technicians, who died in a stunt in September.
"In memory of our friends Heath Ledger & Conway Wickliffe," the tribute reads.
Heath was an amazing talent and his loss continues to be beyond sad.
Thinking Like a Cocoa Programmer
Being a great Mac or iPhone programmer means more than just knowing Objective-C and the Cocoa, it means thinking in a different way about designing and writing software. Understanding how experienced Cocoa programmers looks at things will help you get closer to becoming an expert...
June 26, 2008
Wall-E is getting excellent reviews so far...it's currently rated...
Wall-E is getting excellent reviews so far...it's currently rated a 92 on Metacritic.
(link)
Expression Engine vs. Textpattern
Jon Hicks:
Once people got wind that I’d been trying out Expression Engine, I’ve been badgered with the question “Which one should I use: Textpattern or Expression Engine?”. This post is to try and answer that […]
little rips in the urban fabric
Roberta Smith in the New York Times on Eliasson's water falls: "The experience of Mr. Eliasson’s artful addition to the urban landscape depends on everything around it — the city’s changing pace, light and (real) weather. And on you. The falls can be looked at from near or far, alone or in groups, on foot or bike, from boats and bridges, in snatched glimpses on the move or staying-in-place contemplation. They fake natural history with basic plumbing, making little rips in the urban fabric through which you glimpse hints of lost paradise and get a sharpened sense of Whitman’s, the one you already inhabit."
Photo of the Day: Gorgeous Oregon Strawberries
Last weekend I picked up some strawberries at my local farmers' market (McCarren Park in Brooklyn, New York), but they weren't nearly as beautiful as the ones Lelo picked on Sauvie Island outside of Portland, Oregon. Read more about her day of strawberry picking on her blog, Lelo in Nopo.
Related
The Great Strawberry Ice Cream Debate
Essentials: Strawberry Shortcake
Let's Talk Strawberries... What's your favorite recipe?
"yes we can" - the george carlin remix
Ill Doctrine recently remixed the Obama "Yes We Can" video as a tribute to George Carlin, and it is awesome. He mentions in his YouTube description post that Carlin's "7 dirty words" court case happened at his radio station.
liz phair on guyville
Liz Phair's made a new documentary about her 1993 landmark "Exile in Guyville," timed with a reissue of the album. New York Mag's Vulture has a great interview with her, and as the father of two daughters whom I'm doing my best to raise as strong, vocal and opinionated young girls (and me arguably being one of those "guys") I absolutely loved this particular bit...
It was interesting to learn from the documentary that you were pretty surrounded by guys on the making of Exile.
I really was in Guyville. When I went back to the documentary, the one unifying thing with the guys is, they all talk a really long time, and then I get a tiny little word in edgewise. They were all like, "This is what's good," "This is what you should like," and I was like, [sing-songy] "fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you fuck you."The documentary's bundled with the CD version of the reissue -- you can pick it up at Amazon and other fine retailers, I assume.
BLOCKBUSTER Exclusive: Florent to Re-Open as R & L Restaurant on Tuesday!!
Krieger, 6/11/08MEATPACKING DISTRICT— Though the MePa institution Florent will close this Sunday night, landlord Joanne Lucas has confirmed that she will reopen the space as R & L Restaurant, the restaurant that preceded Florent, just two days later. Lucas tells us that she initially shopped around the lease to a couple of retailers and eventually changed her mind: "We thought about having someone lease it but then I decided to just take it over myself. It used to be my father's diner before it was Florent."
And get this: she will be keeping pretty much the same menu as Florent and will keep on all the staff members that still work there. When asked why Florent isn't involved in the new evolution she responded, "Florent from what I understand is moving on to a new chapter in his life." Many will see this as a happy ending for the Florent saga. He may be gone, but the space will remain unchanged. Yet you still have to admit this was a clever move on Lucas' part, a way to rake in the revenue from an established restaurant at a time when even retailers aren't willing to pay the rent she was reportedly asking. This could be a temporary solution while she waits for a tenant.
· All Florent Coverage [~E~]
Trails Less Traveled - Interactive Graphic - NYTimes.com
entral Park was designed for refuge, discovery and communing with society. Not for running. Yet 150 years later, its 843 acres are a paradise for runners. Learn new trails inside Central Park and listen to experienced runners describe their favorites.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2008/06/26/style/20080626_FITNESS_MAP.html
Create your own Ira Glass narration with Radar's This American Life story generator
Create your own Ira Glass narration with Radar's This American Life story generator
Outsourcing the News: Not the Best Idea
A CNBC story reported today that in an effort to stand out amid the ever-struggling newspaper business, the Orange County Register will outsource some page layout and copyediting duties to India. Can I say that I think this is probably the most ungodly, exceptionally bad idea ever? Although it's reported that the outsourcing will start on a trial basis, why even do that? How does this make sense? How does this help? I have to be honest, I've never really understood the whole outsourcing business -- apart from it's crude and shameless reality: let's get other people to do it for cheaper. Journalism, hobbling along as it is on its one good (or somewhat good) remaining foot, is about work, good old fashioned get-your-hands-dirty work -- asking the questions, going the distance, following leads, cultivating authentic relationships and ideas. And of all things to outsource, copyediting? Have you ever spent 45 minutes on the phone with a Dell representative in India? At least outsource restaurant reviews or culture pages or art news -- something that might make sense to ask someone from India to contribute to a regional paper out of Orange County. Something that might actually make a regional paper stand out.
Internal AT&T Memo Indicates Groundbreaking iPhone 3G Feature: MMS
Check this out. New reports are coming in that a very interesting memo is currently circulating internally at AT&T. Said memo reportedly lists a variety of features that will supposedly be included on the upcoming iPhone 3G. Among them is an exciting new service that - get this - allows you to send SMS-like messages that include multimedia attachments. Imagine! The service, cleverly named Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) supposedly allows users to attach one or more image, audio file or even video and deliver the message along with text. The recipient of the message will then see and / or hear the multimedia on his or her mobile. Nutty. None of this is confirmed as of yet, but how sweet would it be if a mobile phone had functionality like this?! Oh Apple, you’ve done it again! Next thing you know we’ll find out that Apple has figured out a way to copy text from one place and paste it to another. Ok, that’s just crazy talk.
iPhone 2.0 firmware goes golden master
Filed under: iPod Family, Software Update, iPhone, App Store, SDK
Gizmodo and GearLive are reporting that the iPhone 2.0 firmware will go golden master (locked for shipping) this week. Golden master does not necessarily mean that Apple will ship the firmware this week (after all, Steve said that it would ship in "early July") but it does mean that the firmware and all the features are complete and ready to head out the door.
Both sites seem to agree with the build number on the new firmware: 345. Gizmodo is reporting that 2.0 will boast code signing and a new encryption feature. The iPhone firmware 2.0 is definitely something on every iPhone owner's wishlist, and here's mine (you have one of these, right?):
While we wait around the virtual campfire for the next version of the iPhone software, what are you most looking forward to in the new firmware? I think everyone can guess what my favorite feature will be; although I am still waiting for Final Cut Studio 2 for iPhone (we've been hearing rumors that it will be in the 10th generation device).Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
- Super Monkey Ball (AppStore)
- New Mail features
- iWork support in Mail
- Exchange support
- MobileMe support
- Super Monkey Ball (did I mention this one already?)
- Scientific Calculator (would it be too hard to add a graphing calculator? c'mon, Apple!)
Bill Gates and the Greatest Tech Hack Ever
Bill Gates has pulled off one of the greatest hacks in technology and business history, by turning Microsoft's success into a force for social responsibility. Imagine imposing a tax on every corporation in the developed world, collecting $100 per white-collar worker per year, and then directing one third of the proceeds to curing AIDS and malaria. That, effectively, is what Bill Gates has done.
On a day when everyone will be noting Gates' departure from day-to-day involvement in his work at Microsoft, it's worth noting the work he's done which will likely be seen as his greatest legacy.
The unofficial goal of Microsoft in its early years was to see a computer on every desk and in every home, presumably running Microsoft software. That sort of vision, put forth in a time when the conventional wisdom dictated that personal computers might disappear entirely, was astounding enough. But by the year 2000, just 25 years after its founding, Microsoft had achieved that improbable goal, at least in the developed world.
The story of the Gates Foundation is well-covered, but it's important to consider the context in which the Foundation was created. What would you do if you defined the most ambitious goal you could imagine, and then achieved it just 25 years later? And what if you had done so while still relatively young, not even fifty years old? That's the position Gates found himself in just a decade ago.
Most people, when faced with the realization of their greatest dreams, will respond at first with elation, and then later settle into melancholy or even depression. It can be overwhelming to think that there's nothing left to do. Instead, Gates upped the ante.
How high did he set his new goals? How about curing AIDS? Or ending the spread of malaria? What about improving life expectancy and quality of life for the poorest people in the world? After achieving a goal that seemed outlandish, it's clear that the only logical next step is to try to achieve a goal that seems nearly impossible. I have to point out that sense of thinking "Okay, we won -- what next?" is extremely unusual.
Plainly, I admire Bill Gates for this. I think there are few people who, instead of resting on their laurels, decide to stake their reputation and fortune on goals that are not only altruistic, but that conventional wisdom dictates may not be achievable in a single lifetime. There are many other ways to measure a man, and I'm not diminishing at all the fact that Microsoft as a corporation has made regrettable, unfortunate, and even illegal decisions during Bill Gates' tenure. But imagine if someone had defined an explicit goal of a "cure AIDS tax" for corporations, and then tried to get that enacted. The fact that, effectively, this has happened is remarkable.
And there are many who still want to think, despite the commitment of incredible resources and formidable talents to support the Gates Foundation's mission, that all of this philanthropic work is an attempt to simply generate good PR. But that simply doesn't follow the facts.
A Family Tradition
The truth is, Bill Gates doesn't just come from a family tradition of philanthropy: It's actually a significant part of the reason he got the single biggest opportunity of his professional career. You can see the family tradition today, with the founding chairman of the Gates Foundation being William Gates Sr., Bill's father. But you have to go back twenty years earlier, to Gates' mother Mary Maxwell Gates, to understand how philanthropic work opened doors for a fledgling Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Mary Maxwell Gates was deeply involved in the work of the United Way for many years before her passing in 1994, most notably as its first female chair. And one of the connections she made through that work back in 1980 was to John Opel, the chairman of IBM who was also a member of the United Way's executive committee.
It's become fairly clear in the years since that at least part of the reason IBM was willing to hire Microsoft to create an operating system for the initial release of the IBM PC was because of the introductions made through that connection. Taking a risk on an unproven small software company was a big leap to take, and it's one that ended up being the greatest turning point in the history of the biggest software company that's ever been created.
It's fitting, then, that that opportunity is honored by having the founder of the company return all of his efforts and the vast majority of his wealth to an even more ambitious new vision for philanthropic work. So, congratulations to Bill Gates on his new job, and I hope this hack is even more successful than all the ones that he's done in the past.
Essential Links
A few recommendations for those who want to understand more about Bill Gates and his legacy:
- Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews published Gates: How Mirosoft's Mogul Reinvented an Industry, back in 1992. I have been a big fan of this book since it came out. It was released before his period of greatest fame after Windows 95 launched, and perhaps as a result is more insightful than later efforts that tried to case Gates' entire life and career merely in the context of post-monopoly Microsoft. (I've shown the original, gloriously awful, cover photo above, but I think the paperback edition has less floppy-disk lunacy.)
- Fortune has a slideshow covering 30 years of Bill Gates' career, narrated by the man himself.
- Gates' 2003 rant about the shoddiness of the Windows user experience. Though this has prompted lots of "haw, haw, Windows sucks!" responses from geeks, I though it was interesting to look past the memo as merely a document of a typically dysfunctional large company. What struck me was a founder, nearly 30 years after starting the company, and decades after becoming wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, still obviously had both great passion and an enormous amount of technical knowledge.
- Those same themes of passion and technical competence are echoed in Joel Spolsky's essay about his first BillG review. Joel revisited this in a less-geeky version of the essay published in Inc. magazine.
Note: The Mets will be Dangerous, says Reyes
Last night, in a win against the Mariners, Jose Reyes led off the game with a walk and a run scored, he later hit a three-run home run, and stole base as well.
Reyes, talking to reporters after the game, said:
“There’s still plenty of baseball left. We haven’t played our best baseball so far. When we’re starting to play good baseball, watch out. As soon as we start playing consistent, we’re gong to be dangerous down the road.”
Reyes is hitting .292 on the season, and is on pace to score roughly 125 runs, which is more than he accumulated in 2006.
Note: Wright makes Manuel Look Good
Last night in a win against the M’s, David Wright hit two home runs and walked in three at bats.
Jerry Manuel held Wright out of the starting lineup on Tuesday, saying he looked ‘fatigued,’ and needed a day of rest.
Manuel, on Wright, while talking to reporters after the game, said:
“Well, he did some good things with the bat today…I was just trying to freshen him up. I think I have to be cognizant of when he is getting a little fatigued…He’s still a good player who can play tired, don’t get me wrong. But, if we’re to get a good year out of David, and he’s to be some what fresh down the stretch, we have to give him a day here and there to relax…It’s more mental fatigue than physical, but it manifests itself in to physical. And that happens to young players.”
Wright, on having the day off, and returning with two home runs, talking to reporters after the game:
“As much as I don’t like taking days off, I think it helped me…More important, mentally, taking a break mentally for 24 hours where I didn’t really think about anything baseball related I think helped out…I’m always trying to make Jerry look good (laughing).”
According to the Brooklyn Met Fan, the time has come for Wright to wear the captain’s C on his jersey.
Pokemon Farming: Ninetails
This time in Pokemon Farming: Ninetails, the fox pokemon!
During my years playing pokemon I have found fascinating parallels between the game Pokemon and the Japanese Shinto Faith. I have spent much time researching the two and have found that pokemon has definitely been influenced by the different Kami, Yokai, or spirits in the Shinto religion.For me the most amazing discovery was the Kitsune.
The Kitsune, kitsune translated means fox spirit. It is these Kistune of legend that are said to possess great magical powers. The more tails the Kitsune has the more powerful it is. With nine being near deity like status.
As you can see from the above woodblock print by Utagawa Kuniyoshi, Nintedo and Pokemon definitely have their creative inspirations.
The Kitsune also play a large role in shintoism in particular, they play an important part in worship at the Inari temple, or temple of rice. Over the centuries it is said that the Kitsune and Inari have developed a great bond. Where there is Inari there is Kitsune. Since foxes often have a playful nature it became common place to try and appease them to prevent any whimsy or tricks that may befall someone. While the foxes have not been directly worshipped there are shrines within Inari to pay them homage.
Within the temple of Inari there are two levels; an upper served by the male Kitsune Osusuki and the lower served by the female Kitsune Akomachi. As such each benevolent Kitsune I am giving will be named either by its male or female name.
Ninetails
nature: Modest
ability: flashfire
- Hypnosis to put your opponent to sleep.
- Dark Pulse to combat ghosts and psychics.
- Energy Ball counter ground and water pokemon.
- Fire Blast A high powered STAB attack.
hold item: Wide Lens
These Ninetails are ready to battle. In addition to the moves above you may teach them dream eater with a TM or use a heart scale to re-learn Nasty Plot. They have quite a diverse set of moves. The wide lens boosts the accuracy of all your moves, so both fire blast and hypnosis will have a much better chance of landing a hit.
To get one of these legendary pokemon (I only have 30) leave your name and friend code.
- Comment with your Name and Friend Code
- Even if we have traded before, I need your information again!
- Get a Pokemon to trade (If you happen to have any of these pokemon to spare (Hayley wants me to get them) I’d be very appreciative.Armaldo, Poliwrath, Hitmontop, Glailie, Manectric, Lairon, Agron, Larvitar, Tyranitar, Kabutops, Omastar, Lickilicky, Wartortle, Blastoise, Ampharos, Typhlosion, Bayleaf, Meganium, Sceptile, Grovyle, Swampert
Don’t have those? That’s ok I will take anything; please, no eggs!, items like Rare Candies and TMs are always appreciated! )- Be in the Wi-Fi zone at 11am EST (New York Time) on June 30 (Monday)
- Make yourself available to Trade (Invite–>Trade) I will come to you when I’m ready.
- If you are new to our site, your first comment will be moderated. Don’t worry if your post doesn’t show, we will get to it in time, and you will not miss out!
My Information:
Trainer name: Nikola
Friend Code: 3050-8616-6055
See you all then!
Magnets Kill the Cell Phone Speaker Buzz [Clever Uses]
Update: Several readers point out the ferrite beads are not necessarily magnets—just hunks of iron. Our apologies! Do your speakers buzz and crackle whenever a new text message or call is about to come in on your nearby cell phone? What has come to be known as "GSM Buzz" happens because the wire in poorly shielded speakers acts as an antenna for the frequency the cell phone operates on. Rather than shell out a lot of money for better shielded speakers, you cancel out the speaker buzz with pieces of metal—the tube-shaped ferrite beads commonly found on USB cables. Harvest them from the round block at the end of an old USB cable with a pair of scissors, or just buy a few on the cheap from an electronic supply store. Tape the ferrite bead to the cable of the offending speaker, and the magnet should provide enough passive frequency suppression to do away with the horrible buzzing and popping.
iPhone Buzz Kill [Mac Life]
June 25, 2008
Big Mo
From TPM Reader BD ...
The latest Survey USA poll shows McCain opening up a 7 point lead in Missouri, which seems to run counter to the bounce present elsewhere. The poll found that the big change occurred in St. Louis. I live in St. Louis, and have a potential explanation. For the past two weeks our TVs have been saturated with ads for McCain, ads that say that John McCain hates war and stood up to the President on global warming (if I didn't know better I would think that he is the Dem). Despite news reports that Obama is advertising in Missouri, I haven't seen a single ad. I wonder if this may be an indication that McCain's efforts to move to the center may be working in this swing state, especially when Obama has nothing up to counter the McCain message.Anyone in the state of my birth seeing the same thing?
The banana situation in Montreal
While trying to base my entire diet on food that is grown, raised, and produced close to where I live in Montreal, there are a few items that I have decided simply to eat regardless of their source. At the top of that list sits the banana.
I love bananas. Whether they are in my cereal, blended into my shakes, baked into my cakes (or what some people call “bread”, but we all know it’s really cake) or just eaten ‘a la carte’, bananas are great. I still feel guilty every time I eat one, but this week, for the first time, I found bananas that were not only labeled “organic” but also “fair trade.”
I now feel a little less guilty. I am growing some of my own food, getting a lot of the remainder of my food from my CSA and other area farmers, and making many other efforts to live a sustainable life. I just hope that after investigating the sources of these “organic” and “fair trade” labels, they are really what they say they are.
So, as they say on Sesame Street - or at least that’s where I know it from . . .
Bananana, doo doo, de doo doo
Bananana, doo doo doo doo
Bananana, doo doo, de doo doo
de doo doo doo doo doo
A list of predictions about the unthinkable future by Kevin...
A list of predictions about the unthinkable future by Kevin Kelly and Brian Eno, made in 1993. This one by Eno isn't half bad:
(link)A new type of artist arises: someone whose task is to gather together existing but overlooked pieces of amateur art, and, by directing attention onto them, to make them important. (This is part of a much larger theory of mine about the new role of curatorship, the big job of the next century.)
Can I Ask You a Favor?
Let me ask you a favor; and it's one I think you'll get a lot out of it too if you're into little clips of politicians stumbling into saying what they mean, talk show yakkers making fools of themselves or even the occasional instance of someone doing something admirable.
As some of you know we have a whole set up at TPM World Headquarters here in Lower Manhattan for monitoring and recording all the cable and broadcast news channels. So in addition to the stuff the staff catches on our bank of TVs, if you see something you can flag us by email. And if we hear from you within forty-eight hours of broadcast we can go back and grab it.
Starting this week, we're going to be posting these clips at our TPMtv youtube channel. So it would help us a great deal if you could go over to Youtube and if you're registered there just subscribe to our channel.
It doesn't take more than 30 seconds. Just click right here to get to our channel and then hit the 'subscribe' button just below the TPMtv logo on the upper left. We really appreciate it.
Wild About Wanted!
It’s hard to imagine a more sinfully enjoyable summer movie than Wanted, the high-octane, bullet ballet directed by Timur Bekmambetov (who made the visionary Russian sci-fi epics Night Watch and Day Watch), which opens Friday from Universal. Scottish dreamboat James McAvoy plays the put-upon accountant named Wesley who endures abuse from his coworkers and swallows anxiety pills by the handfuls. One night in a pharmacy he comes under attack by a sinister gun-toting man (Thomas Kretschmann) and is rescued by a mysterious agile triggerwoman named Fox (Angelina Jolie) who whisks Wesley to a remote castle-like fortress set-up and introduced to a secret society of assassins into which he is recruited. Why? because the father he never knew was one, and was targeted by the killer in the pharmacy, and now it’s Wesley’s turn to step up to the plate. Wesley’s training is incredibly brutal and what follows is so loony and outrageous, you're kind of bitch-slapped in your seat as the movie catapults along from one bullet-spraying adagio to the next. This movie reminded me of other kick ass, action-packed, cinematic excesses that have tickled me -- Shoot ‘Em Up, Crank Running Scared -- movies that seemed drunk on their power to dazzle with stylistic fury but also had a sardonic chuckle underlying the graphic-novel-come-to-life mayhem. Jolie is a perfect glove-like fit in the part, as she slyly smiles as Wesley bristles at his new role in life. During scenes when she's hanging through a windshield of a car and shooting upside down at her nemesis she is a sleek, gorgeous, tattooed, avenging angel.
Where Will the Republicans Go?
TPM Reader HW peels back the layers on Rove's comment about Obama being "the guy at the country club with the beautiful date":
I was watching Olbermann's coverage of the Karl Rove comments the other night, and I've read other accounts, and I have this sense that too many in the media and the blogging left have missed Rove's point. You touched on it "Uppity Watch," but I'm not sure you unpacked it the way it needs to be.The key to Rove's exposition about Obama at the country club isn't the silliness of placing an African-American at a country club because of the fact that so many country clubs largely or completely or just historically exclude African-Americans. That's the way its been picked up by most bloggers and the media, and its obvious, but its not the importance of the comment, and I don't believe Rove's juxtaposition of the African-American Obama at a country club was just a clumsy attempt to paint Obama as a type of elitist contrary to his background.
The key to the statement is that in the image he is with "a beautiful date." Not Michelle Obama or, in the abstract, his wife, i.e. a wife like Michelle Obama. When you think of a "beautiful date" specifically at a country club, do you picture an African-American woman? Would Rove's target audience? Or do you picture him there, a black man, smoking a cigarette indoors at a country club, with a white woman on his arm?
When I thought of this, I got a chill. When you think of Obama's vulnerability, I think the primaries showed that race remains a real and very serious obstacle, particularly with white Americans over 50. When you think of where we are with racism in this country, I think its a pretty safe bet that the final freak-out factor to overcome may be black men dating white women, in particular, one's daughter. If I were a completely amoral Republican operative, I'd try to find some white women that Obama dated before Michelle and get them into the public's stream of consciousness anyway I could. Its a tactic so vile I don't even like speculating about it, but if you want to be ready for the worst, I think Rove just tipped his hand at where they plan to go.
P.O.V.'s Traces of the Trade an honest discussion about race
Katrina Browne's P.O.V. documentary Traces of the Trade examines "what it might look like for whites to talk honestly with one another about racial history's implications for contemporary American lives and life chances," writes John L. Jackson, Jr., professor of communication and anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania, in his Chronicle of Higher Education blog. The film, which follows Browne and her nine relatives as they travel to Ghana and Cuba to learn about their ancestors' slave-trading past, "helps to demonstrate why many of the dialogues we have about race and racism in America are not robust enough..." (See the film's website here.)
Nader To Obama: You Want To Talk White?
Oh, boy. Ralph Nader is at it again, accusing Barack Obama of being too weak a Democratic candidate on the grounds that he's ... acting white.
In an interview with the Rocky Mountain News, Nader lambasted Obama for not discussing poverty enough. "What's keeping him from doing that?" Nader asked. "Is it because he wants to talk white? He doesn't want to appear like Jesse Jackson?"
Shake Shack UWS: A small update, but we'll take...
A small update, but we'll take whatever Shack news we can get: "Walked by the old Jacques Imos space this morning and noticed that work has finally resumed. Asked a construction worker what it was to be: Boom: October 1 opening, Shake Shack." And the countdown begins...now. [ShackWire]
Using Google Earth to Find Unguarded Houses
UK teens are using Google Earth to find swimming pools they can crash. How long before someone finds a more serious crime that can be aided by Google Earth.
Real-world Electroplankton
tables at the Royal Festival Hall
Originally uploaded by russelldavies
Very lovely.
Makes me want to take some video of spinning roundabouts in parks and dub electroplankton onto that…
June 24, 2008
AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR
Ed Wong at Sandbox Automatic is a huge reason why Soul Sides exists: back in the day, I need a place to park my websites and he graciously offered me his server and extra bandwidth and from that, Soul Sides was able to become a reality. So I am very, very grateful to Ed for that largesse and I recently sat down with him for a chat about the state of hip-hop retail, the death of vinyl (or perhaps not) and the fact that he's about to auction off a ton of deadstock rap records. All in all, they'll be 1000 put up on eBay (you can see the lists here). There could be some nice gems in the mix - Ed's blessed me over the years, including tracking down stuff like this and this. At the very least, those still needing to finish off their Rawkus collection will no doubt find the records you need.
Hint: if I were you, I'd be looking at this, this and this, for starters. They don't mention this but I'm pretty sure that last one (the Jurassic 5 EP) is the version with the full version of "Concrete Schoolyard" that includes Akil's verse (it had to be chopped from the Interscope version of the EP b/c of sample clearance). Rare, bro.
Here's my informal podcast with Ed where we talk about the threat to vinyl, the challenges in hip-hop retail and how the rap industry only has itself to blame for poor sales (he doesn't blame Souljah Boy though).
Blog all Open Tabs
Of course, the day I don't read the Internet is the day it gets good: My Mom is finishing her last year as a high school teacher: "All week long I have been carrying 23 years worth of high school teaching paraphernalia to the trash, to my car, to my house, and to the thrift store. I have carried books and papers, student notes and George Foreman grills, paper plates, cough drops, and post-its." Talking Points Memo is growing, and Josh says Don't Miss This: "At TPM, as you know, our core mission is news and reporting. But having a venue where we can host these kinds of more searching discussions -- less tied to the immediacy of the news cycle -- into politics, culture, foreign affairs, the arts, etc. has always been a goal of mine." Two TPM links! The site is that good: "President Clinton is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next President of the United States." Daniel Jalkut, who wrote the blogging software I'm using to publish this very post, considers remote clients and blog security: "If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has." Sarah Lacy - What LinkedIn Doubters Need to Know: "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." Siva Vaidhyanathan is a long time Google skeptic. As part of his ongoing analysis and coverage of Google, he often finds gaping holes in the mainstream coverage of teh GOOG: "I think it's pretty clear that Google is using Google News to collect information to improve the overall search experiment... Yet the incumbent industry can't imagine anything but zero-sum... This story in the Times proceeds from that zero-sum perspective: Google News is not dominant, not growing, not clubbing the competition; therefore something must be wrong with it. However, Google operates with different principles in mind. The more other content sites succeed, the more Google benefits from their success." There's a new definition for patience in software development: "After 15 long years of active development, Wine software which makes it possible to run native Windows applications [without Windows], has reached it's milestone 1.0 version. What are the features of this new stable release of Wine you ask ? Well, one of the prerequisites of the version 1.0 release, I am told, was that it should be able to run Adobe Photoshop CS2 flawlessly in Linux. And that has been achieved" Ever Lego set in history stored in "secret" vault.
Jennifer Chung Internet Crush: I've got it bad
I am pretty sure that if we met we would be BFFs and bandmates in Andrea & Jennifer's Cover Band.
assume vivid astro focus and Shoplifter Get Psychdelic and Hairy at the MoMA
Two of our favorite artists, and might we add psychedelia gurus, Eli Sudbrack (originally from Brazil) of assume vivid astro focus and Hrafnhildur Arnardottir aka Shoplifter (originally from Iceland) teamed up for a giant hallucinatory installation (above) at the MoMA. Eli did the the neon lights and Shoppy weaved some very colorful hair braids behind and around them. The piece is called "Aimez Vous Avec Ferveur" and it will be up for six months. It looks amazing. Everyone should go see this!
Signs of Summer: The Van Leeuwen Truck Has Arrived
A couple weeks ago it was reported that a new Slow Food ice cream truck would be hitting the streets of NYC. And lo and behold, we have our very first sighting, just a few days into the official summer season, of the Van Leeuwen ice cream mobile. It was just spotted moments ago at Greene & Prince Streets by a tipster by the Apple store. Remember, this is more on the caliber of a Treats Truck than a Mister Softee, as all of the ingredients are supposedly hormone free, organic, and "meticulously sourced." Of course, that means a small scoop is going to run you $3.50, a small price to pay for pistachios from the "slopes of Mount Etna" and Hazelnuts from Piedmont. [EaterWire]
Fortune Magazine: Possible Jobs Successors
Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple Corporate
Fortune on CNN/Money.com has a rogue's gallery of photos online today. The gallery features 11 executives at Apple, each of whom is considered in one way or another to be a possible candidate to replace Steve Jobs if he steps down. If you want to skip the gallery, the full story is on one page at Fortune's Apple 2.0 blog.
My personal favorites for "The Next Steve" are Ron Johnson (Senior VP, Retail) or Scott Forstall (Senior VP, iPhone Software, pictured at right). Why? Johnson is charismatic and has established Apple as a retail powerhouse. Forstall, because he is as anal as Jobs about interface design and kinda looks like "I'm a Mac" actor Justin Long.
After you take a look at the article, come back to TUAW and vote for your favorite candidate for the next Apple CEO.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments
Regarding last week's story about the Gloucester teen girl pregnancy...
Regarding last week's story about the Gloucester teen girl pregnancy pact...well, maybe there was a pact and maybe there wasn't.
But at a press conference today, Gloucester Mayor Carolyn Kirk emerged from a closed-door meeting with city, school and health officials to say that there had been no independent confirmation of any teen pregnancy pact. She also said that the principal, who was not present at the meeting, is now "foggy in his memory" of how he heard about the pact.
As Marco Carbone said, "TIME could have covered that story much more responsibly." And that goes for all the blogs too, kottke.org included.
(link)
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An interesting piece by Steven Heller on "Al Gore's New Logo" from a few months back.
WordPress To Disable Remote Access by Default
Red Sweater: “But in my opinion, there are also good arguments to be made for rejecting the change as a damaging and misguided solution.”
WordPress To Disable Remote Access
The WordPress developers have decided that, starting with WordPress 2.6, access to the XMLRPC and AtomPub-based remote publishing interfaces will be disabled by default. Users who wish to use a remote client such as MarsEdit will have to go out of their way to enable the required functionality in their blog’s settings.
There are good arguments for this, at least on the face of things. They can be packed into a nutshell: it may reduce the security risks of having these access points opened by default.
But in my opinion, there are also good arguments to be made for rejecting the change as a damaging and misguided solution.
First, and obviously near to my heart, is the fact that this marginalizes remote clients. For users who would find value in a remote client, this decision will put one more roadblock in their way. Historically, the remote editor interface is already compromised such that remote editors do not have access to all the same functionality as the web interface. With this change in place, things get even worse. While a screen-scraping application will easily log in and authenticate a fragile WordPress session via the web interface, the well-behaved API clients will be refused access by default. All in the name of improving security.
Second, and probably most important, is that this is not a fundamental security improvement. Consider a bank with two sets of automated cash machines: one for drive-through cars, and one for walk-up pedestrians. Two vastly different sets of customers are being served securely by different interfaces, yet the transactions are secure because they ultimately travel through the same bottlenecked safeguard. A fundamental design consideration on the part of the bank is that these two classes of customer are equally important, and each deserves unfettered access.
WordPress’s decision to shut off remote access by default is analogous to a bank offering unrestricted drive-through access to its cash machines, while requiring pedestrians to ring a bell and wait for a security guard to open the door to the machines.
Also worth considering: if a service is disabled by default for security considerations, what message does that send to people who choose to, or who are encouraged to turn the service back on? It sets up a perception of insecurity which may not even be warranted. If the remote publishing interfaces are insecure, they should be fixed, not merely disabled!
A Real Solution
If I’m so smart, what should WordPress be doing instead? A real security improvement would be bottlenecking all access to the blog’s vital authorized content, and making sure that the remote APIs and the web interface all go through the same interface.
In my opinion, an entire class of problems with WordPress (and other blogging systems) stems from this interface bifurcation. Establishing a single interface to WordPress would be comparable to the “pin code + card” interface at your bank. You pass through it by car, on foot, and even at the counter when they ask you to swipe before doing any transaction.
If you’ve only got one “real API” that touches the critically important data, then you’ve only got one door to secure. Furthermore, when all views into the blog are required to share the same API, suddenly none of them is deprived of functionality that the other has.
Imagine if the API that the web interface uses to access all features of a blog could be just as easily employed by MarsEdit or any other application you authorized. The end result would be lots less work “playing catch up” for the XMLRPC and Atom developers, and more time focusing on innovative and cool features for all blog users.
If this sounds like a pipe dream, it’s worth pointing out that one very popular web service is already employing this strategy, and it works brilliantly. Flickr, Yahoo’s incredibly popular photo sharing site, is built on the very same APIs it makes available to clients. This results in some truly incredible Flickr-enabled applications and web services. And you don’t see any sign of Flickr disabling access to their API, because there’s too much at stake.
If your web service only provides one, first-class API through which all access flows, then you’ve only got one point to secure, you’re likely to have feature parity across interfaces, and the risk of marginalizing one interface is dramatically decreased.
blog all open tabs II
Ugh, need to get these out before Safari utterly crashes...
- Journal of Indexes
- Cultural Anthropology: Geeks, Social Imaginaries, and Recursive Publics
- Iain Sinclair: The Olympics Scam
- 13 Ways to Quickly Improve Your Decision-Making
- Warping and resampling with gdal in python
- Two Legs, Thing Using and Talking: The Origins of the Creative Engineering Mind
- Virtual Machine Showdown: Stack Versus Registers
- http://www.tecgraf.puc-rio.br/~lhf/ftp/doc/jucs05.pdf
- What is it like to write a technical book?
- Stephen Fry: The BBC and the future of broadcasting
Read: Darling on Maine and Foul Balls
In the latest Ask the Booth for SNY.tv, Ron Darling is asked why John Maine gives up so many foul balls, which ultimately expedite his pitch count, to which Darling says:
“I don’t think there is anything that you can do about foul balls…I believe that since John throws a lot of high fastballs, those tend to be fouled back instead of being put into play. As John’s secondary pitches get better, so will his percentage of swings and misses.”
…i feel like this is a trend that started toward the end of last season, though…i don’t recall him letting up so many foul balls prior to that…
Among other things, Darling also answers questions about why he wore No. 12, his first day in the big leagues, and the difference between a cut fastball and a regular fastball.
Cybercity representations
In “The Cybercities Reader (Urban Reader)” (Steve Graham), there is a wonderful text by Anne Beamish called “The City in Cyberspace” which tackles the city metaphor in “virtual worlds” and how superficial the metaphor is often taken.
Some excerpts I found relevant to my interests:
““What do these digital worlds [Alphaworld represented above, Planet9, Le Deuxieme Monde, Virtual Los Angeles] tell us about the creators’ image of the city? When digital urban environments are designed, the downtown is often seen as the Holy Grailv - the vivid, exciting, teasing, tantalizing city is held up within sight, but out of reach. The image of the city is used to attract us and to draw us into the world, but it functions mainly as a decoration or marketing technique intended to get the customer in the door. The creators of these virtual worlds appear to take the image of the city literally but superficially, and they generally do not seem to have given much thought to what it is about a city that their visitors would find appealing. They use the image of the city liberally but strip it of meaning.
(…)
Too often, rather than mimicking the vitality and excitement of downtown, the digital environment is disconcertingly desolate and empty; the buildings are blandly modern; and it is common to travel around these worlds without meeting another soul.To be fair, though, the crude and simplistic environment is not always a reflection of the creator’s aesthetic taste; it is also a reflection and result of technology, economics and regulation.
Why do I blog this Working on both fields of video games and urban computing, I find interesting to observe the relationship between the image of the city and its physical counterpart. For that matter, it seems that some progress are attempted especially with games such as GTA IV. The representation of the city in entertainment is surely interesting as a sort of artifacts to depict “possible futures” which are of course very culturally-situated.
Originally posted by Nicolas Nova from Pasta&Vinegar, ReBlogged by Dan Torop on Jun 24, 2008 at 01:00 PM
● Remi Gaillard videos
In celebration of Euro 2008, public prankster and more-than-fair soccer striker Rémi Gaillard made the following video of himself using the urban landscape as a soccer pitch. Gaillard scores goals into police vans, trash cans, open windows, etc. to the annoyance of his oblivious goalies.
Something about the video seemed familiar and after a bit of searching, I discovered that the same fellow was also responsible for one of my favorite links from a few years ago, Rocky Recreated. There are tons of his videos on YouTube, most of them centered on Gaillard's brand of graffiti-esque performance art. I can't condone some of his actions but he's certainly amusing to watch. (via memeticians)
Florent Farewell: 8 PM
Krieger, 6/22/08
Beloved Meatpacking District staple Florent closes on Sunday night, and while media outlets scramble to eulogize the place, fans and friends make weekly, even daily, pilgrimages to say their goodbyes. To learn more about Florent the restaurant, Florent the man, and the famous friends to both, see the lengthy profiles in the New York Times, New York Magazine, and Gourmet. If you want to see the spirit of the place captured in images, check in for our weekly installment by photographer Daniel Krieger, who has already shown us the famed 24-hour restaurant in the morning and the afternoon, and today brings us the evening. Check in next week for the final late night goodbye in the wee hours of June 30.
· Florent Farewell: 2 PM [~E~]
· Florent Farewell: 9 AM [~E~]
Ko on Craigslist, Ladies' Choice: Finally the ladies are getting into...
Finally the ladies are getting into the Ko resy game. These two lasses need two "Manhattan gentlemen" to complete their four top: "Who we are: one blond gal, age 28, and one sassy brunette, age 32...Tell us a little about yourself and what you bring to the table, so to speak, and be sure to send a picture...Please don't be sleazy or creepy -- we just thought this would be a fun idea." [Craigslist]
Forms of Control
From Jan van Toorn, Introduction, Design beyond design: critical reflection and the practice of visual communication:
“Design has become the instrument par excellence for the achievement of social cohesion through form — form as surface, a casing in which an apparent social consensus is created that hides the reality of the cultural condition in a reassuring and entertaining manner.…
In the case of visual journalism and communication design, this means adaptation to the social relations of power, collaborating with and promoting the depoliticization of the media through the primacy of aesthetics as beauty, of visual and other rhetoric that erodes the promise of democracy and participation. The main consequence of all this is that we live in a world in which, to quote Rem Koolhaas, ‘the reality of the socio-economic condition is camoflaged by the decorative glorification of the inevitable.’”
Would You Rather Be a Best-Seller or Critically Acclaimed?
My hunch is we'd all say critically acclaimed until we're actually in the situation where we're trying to build a career. Then, it gets tricky. It's a subject close to home, because while my book is selling pretty well, the reviews, letters and feedback are much better. Like any metrics, I tend to get sucked in to looking to them for validation, and have to keep reminding myself why I wrote it: To tell an important story right and inspire and educate would be entrepreneurs. Not the ego of seeing my name on a best-seller list.
There's a legitimate reason to want best-seller instead of critically acclaimed that doesn't have to do with ego or money. Numbers are like votes, so when something is a mass hit, it's an quantitative analysis that you did something good. Reviews, letters, articles -- even effusive ones-- are all qualitative, and somehow hard to trust. Less scientific somehow.
That's thinking many a Web entreprenuer gets sucked into as well: You start it for the love, then the numbers get seductive. It's so easy to think of them as an objective, rational calculation of your worth...until they stagnate or fall.
But the truth is it can't be a rational calculation of worth, if we all know endless examples of indie hits-- be it movies, music, whatever-- that were better than blockbuster hits. I've been having a similar thoughts about this re: this blog. On the days I blog heavily, traffic goes way up. Especially if I weigh in on the Valley obsession of the day. It's seductive to just do that everyday. But is that really adding value and building something different? Maybe not. I recently read something from Michael Arrington addressing how TechCrunch's "community" had changed. (Sorry....can't find the link this second.) He essentially said as an audience grows it inevitably gets diluted and the trolls, spammers etc come in. I really love my blog audience. I get great comments from people I know and don't know. Occasional shocking comment from Fake Steve Jobs aside, my comments tend to be interesting, relevant conversations. I already write for two mass properties in BusinessWeek and TechTicker...suddenly I'm seeing the beauty in staying small. I'm not at a point where I'm trying to monetize this blog, but I wonder if a smaller community ever has an endemic value over sheer size of a mass community? I'm not talking about a niche-- because niches can still be mass when there are more than 1 billion people online.
And in my third random association of the day on this topic, my husband surprised me with tickets to see Liz Phair last night. She sang her one truly great album, Exile in Guyville, from start to finish. This was the absolute listen-to-after-every-bad-day-at-work-slash-bad-date anthem of my early 20s. Sadly, Ms. Phair never put out another album as good, and in a bid to become the big commercial hit she never was her last two (Or maybe one? I stopped paying attention after a while) just veered horribly off course, IMHO. So maybe she was never as commercially successful as she'd hoped. But judging by the room of swooning early-to-late women in their 30s who knew every word to Exile, she'd clearly created something people loved-- and still loved 15 years later.
Of course, that's no excuse for not blogging more, or for blogging lazily. But not having internet access in my new house for much of last week is.
Bill Clinton Endorses Obama
Bill Clinton's office, responding to lots of chatter in political circles about why he hasn't yet endorsed Barack Obama, releases a terse statement:
"President Clinton is obviously committed to doing whatever he can and is asked to do to ensure Senator Obama is the next President of the United States."It's not exactly an appearance with Obama at a rally in Unity, New Hampshire -- but it's an endorsement nonetheless.
What's Google News doing?
NYTimes.com:... Still, while news organizations continue to worry about what Google is doing to their business, the company is far from achieving the kind of dominant position in news that it has in other areas. Six years after its start, Google News appears to be stuck in neutral and struggling to keep up with rivals. Several online news experts say Google News has changed little, especially when compared with services like Google Maps and Gmail, which add new features at a rapid pace. Perhaps as a result, traffic growth is sluggish. With 11.4 million users in May, Google News ranked No. 8 among news sites, far behind Yahoo News, which was No. 1 with 35.8 million visitors, according to Nielsen Online. Its growth rate of 10 percent over the last two years is far slower than those of most other large news Web sites. In the last two years, second-ranked MSNBC.com grew by 42 percent, adding 10.4 million users. Traffic at CNN.com and nytimes.com grew even faster. ...I think it's pretty clear that Google is using Google News to collect information to improve the overall search experiment. This is one of those areas in which Google runs a service or initiative with no zero-sum game planned. Yet the incumbent industry can't imagine anything but zero-sum. This story in the Times proceeds from that zero-sum perspective: Google News is not dominant, not growing, not clubbing the competition; therefore something must be wrong with it. However, Google operates with different principles in mind. The more other content sites succeed, the more Google benefits from their success.
i recommend reading this profile of florent morellet if you...
i recommend reading this profile of florent morellet if you haven’t already.
June 23, 2008
George Carlin
I've been pretty quiet lately due to moving and work, but when I heard that George Carlin had died it reminded me of an observation of his that pops into my head a lot in life:
"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?"
I Can Hear The Rebel Hiss
Jubilee have been working with Topspin longer than I have.
Many months back my friend Travis Keller came to me asking how Jubilee should release their album digitally. He said they didn’t want to “just throw it up on iTunes”, they wanted to give people who were interested in what they were doing a chance to get the digital files, a 7″, and a leg up on the full-length album they were starting to make. I sent him to Shamal and Topspin. I was still at Yahoo! and didn’t know exactly what Topspin was up to yet, nor if they were even ready, but I had a hunch the two might be able to help each other out.
Turns out it was a good match. Jubilee was just the right band for Topspin to do some experimenting with, they were fresh, free of strings, full of ideas, and patient while the Topspin team worked out the bugs. Lucky for Topspin, Jubilee’s music was amazing, too, and they’ve been making fans out of pretty much anyone who takes a listen. But don’t take my word for it. Head over to Jubilee.la and stream the first EP for yourself and see if it’s your thing. If you like rock music, I’m guessing you’ll dig it. If you do, buy the $20 package, get yerself the 7″ and they’ll be emailing you the full album very soon.
When I was considering joining the Topspin team, Jubilee’s experience with Topspin had more weight than anyone realized. Just as I was deliberating on my decision Travis called me just to thank me for connecting them with Topspin. “Dude, your friends are going to change the world,” he told me. It’s one thing to listen to the pundits. It’s another to hear it from the artists to whom Topspin was cutting checks.
Aaron North (Jubilee’s founder, has played with NIN, Icarus Line, etc) wrote a very complimentary explanation of Topspin to his fans on their MySpace page this weekend (in that inimitable Aaron North style Buddyhead readers know so well). My favorite paragraph is the last one:
Corny as it sounds, reading that makes me tear up a bit. That’s what it’s all about, folks. At the Topspin party last Friday night Aaron and I spent some our short time together (when we weren’t geeking out over the live Theramin player) arguing over who was more honored to work with who. I still say it’s Topspin’s honor.
Get that new record up there, guys. The new mixes you played at the party on Friday were incredible. Bring it.
Eight Items or Less: Chris March Takes on San Fran, Donatella Supports Obama and Lily Allen Posts New Song
1. Kooky, hair-loving Project Runway finalist Chris March will show a "never seen before" limited edition collection on July 19 at the 5th Annual Fashion On The Square, in San Francisco's Union Square. 2. Brian Wilson is set to headline the Newport Folk Festival on August 1. He's playing alongside Jimmy Buffett, The Black Crowes, Levon Helm, Cat Power and many other folky and non-folky types. 3. Donatella Versace dedicated her Spring-Summer '09 collection presented this past Saturday in Milan to Barack Obama, whom she referred to as "the man of the moment." 4. Betsey Johnson sample sale alert! From Jun. 25-26. dresses and tops are marked down to $87 and $55, respectively! (Millennium Broadway Hotel, 145 W. 44th St., 7th Fl., 10 a.m.-7:30 p.m.) 5. Take a listen to Lily Allen's newest, "Guess Who Batman," which she recently posted to her MySpace page. 6. Apparently scientists believe that oxytocin -- a natural hormone produced by the body during sex and childbirth -- could become a "wonder drug" used for overcoming shyness.
New Features in Snow Leopard
Daniel Eran Dilger on some of the more significant changes in the WWDC seed of Snow Leopard. Interesting, but perhaps not surprising, is how much smaller (on disk) some of the standard apps are. Mail, for example, has shrunk from 287 to 91 MB. With the switch to solid-state drives, every megabyte once again counts.
Propaganda of the Deed
Today in 1892, Anarchist,Alexander Berkman, entered the office of Henry Clay Frick and attempted to assassinate him, holding him accountable for the deaths of strikers in the Homestead Massacre. This attentat was intended to avenge the murders, by Pinkerton Detectives, and inspire the working class to revolt.Frick survived, due to Berkman's poor marksmanship, and Berkman spent many years in prison.
I woke up today thinking about how can movements build power as opposed to taking it. While in an election year all anyone talks about is changing our elected officials. It doesn't feel much more than making another consumer choice, Coke or Pepsi (or some "natural" soda), to shop at Starbuck or Not, Obama or McCain?
On the ground it's not Presidents or congresspeople that are confronted with the reality of the economy, unemployment, foreclosures, or incarceration. It is a matter of some real progress in thinking, acting, and organizing ourselves that will wield "power"We can neither eliminate, or hold accountable, any one individual that will spark the revolution we need in the world today.
Mr Berkman had incredibly strong conviction to carry out his act. I wonder what he would do today?
What are we going to do today?
Chatting with Stamen Design.
A couple of weeks ago Sebastian Heycke interviewed Mike Migurski (Director of Technology) and Tom Garden (Interaction Designer) from Stamen Design about their upcoming workshop for Adapte Path’s UX Week.
Stamen has established a reputation for creating compelling interactive design and data visualization projects. Their most recent success was the Oakland Crimespotting Project, which is an interactive map of crimes in Oakland, and a better way of understanding crime in cities.Sebastian: Is there some sort of underlying principle that you try to convey with every Stamen project that you undertake?
Mike: I think there are definitely a few principles that connect everything; the idea of showing everything, I think is one. We try to just get it all out there; not to editorialize off the bat, but just put every single point on the map or put every single data in the display. We try to start from a position of great abundance and information, to show the vastness or the liveness. I think live, vast, and deep is some of the terminology that we’ve been using lately in a lot of our talks. I think that would probably be the most important sort of binding principle. A secondary one would a sense for choosing problems well.
Sebastian: I would like to talk a little bit more about the Oakland Crimespotting project. Could you explain how you came up with the idea, how you approached it, and what your intention was?
Mike: It came out of a degree of frustration with the way that the Oakland Police Department currently communicates their crime statistics information. I started the project as a personal experiment over winter break a year and half ago. Just kind of looking through their information. Trying to see whether it could be extracted or chopped or minced in some way. They have a fairly limited web presentation for the staff and it’s difficult to get a sense of what’s going on around your house. We started with the idea of trying to figure out whether that information could be turned into a more web friendly format. Later everybody else got involved and it became more of an information design and an interface design problem.
Tom: I came to the project really quite late on. Mike had been collecting that data, and it’s about his hometown. He knew a lot more about whether the data was relevant and what stories it was telling. There were also a series of experiments that Mike did on his blog to start teasing out particular stories from the data, thinking about metaphors for explaining the passages of events through time and how you might present crimes like serious assault or murder in a way that doesn’t take away from them but also doesn’t try and hide them behind layers and layers of interface. As a third party presenting that data we don’t have anything really to hide. Mike has some personal pride about Oakland. He doesn’t want to make it look bad but we don’t have any problem showing everything from the last month or all of the murders in one month. That’s what I found most interesting about the project.
Sebastian: What makes your information visualizations so successful and in what direction do you want to push it?
Tom: I think some of our most successful projects have tackled live data. It is about finding some structure to collect the different variations of the data over time and get a picture of what’s happening at that moment. I think that’s going to be the secret with live visualization. That’s what made the Digg Labs project successful. It is not just interactive, it’s live.
Mike: Things that would be considered really bizarre or adventurous a year or two ago are now becoming fairly commonplace as people get more accustomed to them. You get used to the idea that things can be moved and dragged. When you think about how mapping online changed when Google Maps was released. The main thing that they introduced wasn’t a particular technology, it was just the expectation that you could drag the thing. That’s something that we now use in almost all of our map-based projects, which we didn’t before.
Sebastian: What are you going to cover in your upcoming workshop for UX Week?
Mike: We’ve come up with a loose framework for how we deal with projects. We’re going to convey the chronology of that in the workshop. We’ve got three hours and what we’ve noticed in our work over the past couple of years is that our projects very frequently tend to fall in three phase processes so we’re dividing up the workshop into three chunks.
The first one is all about exploring information. That first portion of the project where you get a giant raw dump of information or you come into bucket loads of crime information or transit information. What are the tools, processes, and questions that we bring to just understand what it is that we have in front of us.
The second portion is about taking that exploration and figuring out what you actually want to do with it. During a project we did with a US residential real estate company, we decided that mapping the construction date of homes around the country was the particular thing we wanted to focus on. That second part is really about building the product.
There’s always this month at the end where you think you’re done but really you’re making some of the really important decisions concerning polish, detailing, and applying a veneer of believability and stability to the piece.
Sebastian: Thank you very much for this conversation!
Register for UX Week to see Mike’s and Tom’s workshop by June 30th to get the early bird price. And even better, use code BLOG when you register for an additional 10% off.
The Phaal Challenge at Brick Lane Curry House: Spiciest Curry Ever?
Spicy food lovers have a strangely unique ego about themselves. You certainly don't find self-professed sweet tooth fanatics boasting about how much sugar they can cram down their throat, nor do those who prefer the salty end of the spectrum parrot about how they're connoisseurs of umami.
No, the fans of spiciness are not just content with self-infliction of pain—they have to make sure everyone knows about how much heat they can handle. Make the mistake of mentioning how you had a spicy Thai dish the other night, and they will either scoff at you, or smile at you, patronizingly: "You think that's spicy?"
I mention all this, not because I'm hating on these people, but because I'm a shameless member of this club. The ominously dark wine-red promising a fiery punch to my tastebuds makes me excited. I've come to equate the biting, searing pain on my tongue with pleasure. And, yes, I'm admittedly pretty cocky about it. After all, you don't train a sweet tooth—that's something you're born with. High tolerance of spiciness? That takes skill! Years of training and experience of stripping away sensitivity on your tastebuds!
So when I heard that the phaal, "spiciest curry dish ever," was available as a challenge at Brick Lane Curry House I had to go. How could I pass up this chance to further destroy my stomach lining?
Phaal: The Taste of Pain
The phaal is ready for your belly.
The phaal is considered one of the hottest curries, if not the hottest, available at Indian restaurants, although it seems it's about as authentic an Indian dish as chicken tikka masala is. Made with at least 10 to 12 ground chillies, it's described on Brick Lane Curry House's menu as "an excruciatingly hot curry, more pain and sweat than flavor. For our customers who do this on a dare, we will require you to state a verbal disclaimer not holding us liable for any physical or emotional damage after eating this curry." Anyone who manages to finish the phaal gets a place on Brick Lane Curry House's P'hall of Fame, a certificate of honor, and a free beer.
Well, they are spot-on about the pain and sweat. There really is no other way to describe this dish other than scorchingly hot—the kind of spiciness that seems deceivingly tolerable at first, only to build up to a raging furnace in your throat and in every crevice of your mouth. I offered a taste to one of dining companions, who immediately got tears in her eyes after a spoonful, and even took a time-out for a few minutes from her own curry just to get over the heat.
My Eating Strategy
Buffer the phaal with other food.
The fact that it's more curry sauce than the meat you order with it makes it even harder to stomach. I tried to dampen the heat by padding it with my sesame naan, only to have the spiciness soak through and make it completely useless. Ditto for the biryani. Luckily, my waiter gave me a small dish of raita, a yogurt condiment with cucumber, carrots and spices, heavily hinting that I would probably need it. I grinned foolishly, saying I'd be fine and probably wouldn't need it. He insisted, and left it at my table. Smart man: water is completely useless in this challenge—the only thing that helped alleviate the burning in my mouth for a few moments was the coolness of the raita.
Oh Yes, I Finished It
All done!
In spite of the pitying glances from my dining companions (the staff was a bit more helpful with their amused but encouraging smiles every time they passed our table), I managed to finish my phaal, a little sweatier than I started out, along with a dull buzz reverberating in my ears. I got my free Kingfisher, although at this point I could barely drink a fourth of it.
Certificate for being a Phaal Curry Monster.
In addition, I was presented with a Certificate of Honor showing that I "demonstrated extraordinary courage (and rather dubious judgment) risking life, limb, and dignity against the insurmountable Phaal, earning a free beer and the coveted title of Phaal Curry Monster." Yes, monster, not master, as I mistakenly read at first. No matter. You probably have to be some kind of monster to be able scarf this baby down.
You Too Can Defeat the Phaal, But Proceed With Caution
My suggested strategy if you're gonna tackle the phaal: do not dawdle. Shovel it in. Speed and efficiency is necessary if you want to finish this in a timely manner with the least amount of difficulty. Is it impossible? No—it's completely do-able if you can handle most spicy dishes. The thing about the phaal that's tricky is that it's a slow, searing sensation that just gets stronger over time. Other than that, it's really no spicier than those dark capsicum peppers lurking in various Asian dishes—it's just that it's like you're eating a giant, creamy spoonful at once.
That said, this should only be done if you're feeling confident of your spiciness tolerance. I wouldn't go so far as to say the phaal is delicious—it tastes more of heat than anything else, with one person aptly describing it as having a smokey, "cigarette ash" taste. Memorable, sure. But for a more pleasurable dining experience, I would opt for one of the many other curries or vegetable specials on their menu. Or make the phaal pain a communal experience, and tackle it with a few of your friends, so you don't suffer all by your lonesome. Then all of you can scoff at others when they mention they ate something "super spicy" the other night. Psh.
Brick Lane Curry House
306-308 East 6th Street, New York NY 10003 (map)
(212) 979-8787 / (212) 979-2900
bricklanecurryhouse.com
Image Transformations in Canvas with Slicing
We’ve been obsessed with the
canvastag for a while now; we think it represents a huge opportunity for creative interfaces on the web, and current browser support for the tag is excellent (as long as you don’t mind using excanvas.js for IE6/7). That being said, there are some limitations. The only available built-in transformations are translation, rotationg and scale. Performing a complex transformation, such as keystoning an image so that it can be used in a faux 3D environment, has been difficult.
However, there is an easy way to simulate arbitrary transformations on images in canvas. If you cut the image into slices, you can redraw each slice with different dimensions. The code is simple: using the slicing variation of the
drawImagemethod, it’s possible to take a slice of a source image and draw it to the canvas. This slice can be scaled horizontally and vertically according to a formula. As the number of slices increases, the edges of the image become smoother and less jagged. It’s important to note that you only need one copy of the source image, and that drawing many slices doesn’t mean there are many copies of the image in the page. You are able to use one source image to draw multiple images on a destination canvas.Creating a keystone effect looks complex but is actually very straightforward:
function keystoneAndDisplayImage(ctx, img, x, y, pixelWidth, scalingFactor) { var h = img.height, w = img.width, // The number of slices to draw. numSlices = Math.abs(pixelWidth), // The width of each source slice. sliceWidth = w / numSlices, // Whether to draw the slices in reverse order or not. polarity = (pixelWidth > 0) ? 1 : -1, // How much should we scale the width of the slice // before drawing? widthScale = Math.abs(pixelWidth) / w, // How much should we scale the height of the slice // before drawing? heightScale = (1 - scalingFactor) / numSlices; for(var n = 0; n < numSlices; n++) { // Source: where to take the slice from. var sx = sliceWidth * n, sy = 0, sWidth = sliceWidth, sHeight = h; // Destination: where to draw the slice to // (the transformation happens here). var dx = x + (sliceWidth * n * widthScale * polarity), dy = y + ((h * heightScale * n) / 2), dWidth = sliceWidth * widthScale, dHeight = h * (1 - (heightScale * n)); ctx.drawImage(img, sx, sy, sWidth, sHeight, dx, dy, dWidth, dHeight); } }We take slices from the source image one at a time, apply a horizontal and vertical transformation, and then draw it in the correct order. This also allows us to do something interesting; if the slices are drawn in reverse order, we can reverse the image. The keystone demo page shows this code in action. The two sliders control the values entered into the function as
pixelWidthandscalingFactor. Keystoning has a lot of potential applications. For instance, If you animate both width and scaling, you can create a page turning effect for any image.
You can apply any transformation to the slices. If you were to scale the height of the slices based on a parabolic curve, you could create a cylindrical distortion that mimics a panorama view. We set up a Quicktime VR-style panorama using this technique. Be sure to view it with the rest of the canvas both shown and hidden to see how it works. It would also be possible to add an animating flag-ripple effect to any image, just by varying
dy. We believe that image slicing transformations have a lot of applications in mimicing 3D environments and creating image effects. All you have to do is apply a formula to change the slice dimensions or position.
Firefox PDF Plugin for Mac OS X
Free plugin for Firefox that “uses PDFKit to display PDFs in the browser.” Another one of my biggest complaints about Firefox vs. Safari is solved by a plugin.
“Don’t Block the Box” Bill Clears Albany
With 2800 agents able to enforce rules against blocking the box, drivers may soon take these signs seriously.A bill intended to step up enforcement against drivers who block the box made it through the state legislature last Thursday. While the measure is not expected to play a major role in traffic reduction, it should improve conditions for pedestrians and residents on some of New York's most congested streets, as long as agents follow through on strict enforcement.
The bill reclassifies blocking the box from a moving violation to a parking violation, a switch that enables all 2800 of the city's traffic agents to issue citations for the offense. Previously, only cops and a small number of agents had that ability. The bill also bumps up the penalty from $50 to $115.
In a 2006 study conducted by Borough President Scott Stringer's office [PDF], more than 3,000 blocking the box violations were observed at 10 locations in Manhattan during a single nine-hour period, but no driver received a ticket.
At the worst locations -- near the entrances to the Lincoln and Holland tunnels -- box-blocking vehicles clog the crosswalk constantly during peak hours. "That is a huge part of complaints on Varick Street and Broome Street, where pedestrians can't get across the intersection," said Ian Dutton of the Community Board 2 transportation committee, which passed a resolution in favor of the bill last Tuesday. "This is a beginning step to make the enforcement more comprehensive."
(more...)
Shocked, Shocked ...
I happened yesterday on this article in The Atlantic by Jonathan Rauch about the Chevy Volt. GM is throwing tons of resources into a breakneck schedule to produce an electric powered car that is dramatically more advanced than the hybrids currently on the market. The question is whether they can have the technology developed in time for release date.
It's sort of inspiring to see an American company try something so ambitious.
On a related note, I've been finding myself thinking more and more about alternative energy sources -- or more specifically non-fossil fuel energy sources. Politically, I've always been pretty progressive on environmental issues. I was reared to it in a way since my father was a marine botanist -- so these concerns and points of interest were some of the building blocks of my childhood. But for all that, as I got older and thought more about politics and began to write about it for a public audience, I cannot say it's ever been a real focus for me. But that's changed over the last several months: most of the key issues that face us today, from environmental issues proper, to our geostrategic position vs. other great powers and the future of our economy, all turn on our reliance on fossil fuels. Not just 'foreign' ones, all of them. It's not hard to imagine historians of 50 or 100 years from now writing the history of our period -- stretching back almost forty years now -- around that central focus.
● Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired
Now showing on HBO:
On March 11, 1977, Roman Polanski was arrested in Los Angeles and charged with the following counts: furnishing a controlled substance to a minor, committing a lewd or lascivious act on a child, unlawful sexual intercourse, rape by use of drugs, perversion and sodomy. Less than a year later, on February 1, 1978, Polanski drove to LAX, bought a one-way ticket to Europe, and never came back. Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired explores the implausible events that took place between these dates, along with details, before and after, that forever altered the life and career of Polanski, one of the world's most acclaimed directors.
This snippet of an interview with the filmmaker should give you a taste of what to expect from the film:
I felt it was my job to explain how people think they know the story, but they don't. That doesn't excuse Polanski in any way, but it shows what he went through. I think the best viewer for this film is someone who can't stand Roman Polanski and is disgusted by what happened. But if they allow themselves to watch the film, they usually come away from it feeling differently. If not about the crime, then at least about the aftermath. It's quite surprising.
The Smoking Gun has the grand jury testimony of then 13-year-old Samantha Gailey, taken two weeks after she had sex with Polanski. If you don't catch the movie on HBO, it'll be out in limited release in theaters on July 11.
Update: There's a post on the HBO bulletin board for the movie that looks like it was written by Samantha Geimer (formerly Gailey):
Rating: 4.0/5.0I hope you all watched and enjoyed the movie. I think Marina did an excellent job in uncovering the facts. Since my mother did not participate, let me clarify a few things for you all.
She did not travel in the same social circles with Roman. She met him once, that meeting had nothing to do with my getting the modeling job. She did not send me off to be raped, or have some blackmail plot in mind. Calling the police pretty much rules blackmail out from the get go. Roman was not known as a pedophile in March of 1977, he was a influential and respected director. Even his relationship with Natasha Kinski did not occur until after my meeting with him, as far as I know.
The sex was not consentual and I have never said it was.
And last, I was not supposed to be alone with him, a friend was to come along with with us, but he talked me into going alone with him as the last minute, my mother was unaware of that until I called her later to check in. Even so, she would never have dreamed he would do what he did to me, just because we were alone. This was a long time ago, when child molestation did not immediately leap to the front of everyone's mind as is does today. I do find it strange that some of his friends say he couldn't have done it, while others say of course he would.
My mother has carried alot of guilt about this for many years, so I would appreciate it if people would stop blaming her. There is alot of blame to go around.
Nathan Sawaya quit his job as a lawyer to build Lego sculpture: The day my site crashed from too many hits I realized there was a viable career here. I was like, wow - this is it. So in 2004 I left the firm.
Twisting Gender Stereotypes?
MoDo takes one on the chin from the NYT public editor.
Times Public Editor Hammers Maureen Dowd's Coverage Of Hillary
This blog took a fair amount of heat for suggesting during the primary that Maureen Dowd's nonstop catty columns about Hillary had an obsessive, even unhinged quality to them. So it was pretty gratifying to see that Times public editor Clark Hoyt weighed in yesterday with a piece aggressively attacking Dowd's coverage of the Dem primary.
The crux of Hoyt's case is that her columns on Hillary were "loaded with language painting her as a 50-foot woman with a suffocating embrace, a conniving film noir dame and a victim dependent on her husband." But take a look at Dowd's defense of herself...
"I've been twisting gender stereotypes around for 24 years," Dowd responded. She said nobody had objected to her use of similar images about men over seven presidential campaigns. She often refers to Barack Obama as "Obambi" and has said he has a "feminine" management style..."From the time I began writing about politics," Dowd said, "I have always played with gender stereotypes and mined them and twisted them to force the reader to be conscious of how differently we view the sexes." Now, she said, "you are asking me to treat Hillary differently than I've treated the male candidates all these years, with kid gloves."
This is false, and Dowd almost certainly knows it. As Media Matters notes today, many critics loudly objected to her ritual feminizing of male candidates -- her devotion of an entire column to John Edwards' $400 haircut, or her characterization of Obama as a "starlet" who "can make a three-course meal out of a Nicorette," to name only two examples.
More broadly, by pretending that people are asking her to treat Hillary differently than male candidates, Dowd is ducking the real case against her.
Dowd has a deeply depraved tendency to indulge in "twisting gender stereotypes around" far more often when writing about Dems than Republicans. And she often does so in a way that dovetails very neatly with GOP efforts to sow doubts about Dems' manhood. Remember John " Breck Girl" Edwards? This isn't about Hillary. It's about her treatment of all Dems.
Hoyt writes that Times edit page editor Andy Rosenthal defended her coverage by pointing out that she's supposed to have opinions. That's fine. It's the quality of these opinions that's at issue. No matter what Rosenthal says, it's very obvious that the utter predictability of Dowd's writing has become a liability that the august Times Op ed page is now forced to carry on a twice-weekly basis. Indeed, her predictability has turned that page into a point of mockery for well-placed Beltway insiders.
Dowd's constant treatment of politics as little more than Royal Court Entertainment really belongs to another time -- the Bush Sr. and Bill Clinton presidencies. It's thoroughly out of touch with what people want from their political commentary today. Can anyone remember the last time anyone praised a Dowd column for offering anything even remotely interesting in the way of reporting, context, knowledge, or genuine insight? We sure can't.
Late Update: A terrific take on this from Digby.
Andy Baio interviews Alan Taylor, the fellow behind The...
Andy Baio interviews Alan Taylor, the fellow behind The Big Picture, the journalistic photo blog that's taken the web by storm.
(link)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.
Today’s Headlines
- Rash of Curb-Jumping Injures 22 Pedestrians in Two Days (CBS, City Room)
- Launch of Summer Streets Renews Call to Bring Back Car-Free Sundays on Grand Concourse (Post)
- News Rips Brooklyn Judges for Parking on Ped Plaza
- MTA Board Perks Include Parking Placards; E-ZPass Giveaways Total $30K Per Year (News, NYT)
- Obama's Ties to Ethanol Industry Draw Scrutiny (NYT)
- Amtrak Ill-Equipped to Handle Record Ridership (NYT)
- Beijing to Ration License Plates During Olympics (NYT)
- MTA Expected to Approve Spending Cuts Today (AMNY)
- Bloomberg: Gas Tax Should Be Higher (Post)
- Block Party Rocks Newkirk Avenue (Sustainable Flatbush)
Fighting climate change: Food miles vs. food choices
If you want to fight global warming with your diet, it is better to change what you eat than where it comes from, according to a recently published article in the peer-reviewed journal Environmental Science and Technology.*
Analysis by Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, professors in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, found that the vast majority of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in the American food system occur during the production of food, not from transportation of the raw materials, inputs, or final product. They estimate that small changes in dietary habits — such as replacing 1/7 of the average person’s red meat and/or dairy consumption with chicken, fish, or eggs, or an all-vegetable diet — can lead to reductions equivalent to those that could be obtained through “maximum localization.”
People’s “foodprints” — the GHG emissions associated with their diet — are receiving attention in climate-change circles because dietary habits are (theoretically) far easier to change than the source of our electricity, how we get around, and so on. In other words, it could be easier for the population to eat less beef than to switch from coal-fired power plants to solar panels or dramatically revamp the built-up landscape so that more people could walk or bike to work.
“All Local” vs. Dietary Shifts
As a thought experiment, the authors examine how an “all local” diet — i.e., a diet that has zero emissions between producer and eater — compares to shifts in diet in terms of GHG emissions. Since that is nearly impossible to achieve, they found that one could achieve equivalent reductions through the following changes:
- Reduce red meat expenditures by 24% and spend the savings on chicken
- Reduce red meat expenditures by 21% and spend the savings on a nondairy vegetarian diet
- Reduce red meat and dairy expenditures by 13% and spend the savings on a nondairy vegetarian diet
The authors also use a automobile comparison to illustrate how changes in diet compare to changes in driving. Using a 25-mile per gallon car as their baseline, they provided the following estimates of mileage reduction through diet shifts:
- An “all local” diet is equivalent to driving 1,000 fewer miles per year
- Shifting one day per week’s calories from red meat to chicken/fish/eggs is equivalent to driving 760 fewer miles per year
- Shifting one day per week’s calories from red meat to a vegetable-based diet is equivalent to driving 1,160 fewer miles per year
- Giving up red meat and dairy in favor of chicken/fish/eggs is equivalent to driving 5,340 fewer miles per year
- Switching to a completely vegan diet is equivalent to driving 8,100 fewer miles per year
This is not the first time I’ve seen dietary choices compared to driving choices. The article “Diet, Energy, and Global Warming,” by Gidon Eshel and Pamela A. Martin in Earth Interactions (sub. req’d) compared various diets to various types of cars with similar results.
Get on the life cycle
The authors used a technique called “life cycle analysis” to dissect and examine the food system. Life cycle analysis (LCA) tries to quantify all of the environmental impacts (energy consumption, GHG emission, water pollution, etc.) from production to disposal of a product. An LCA of a glass of wine, for example, could consider production of the bottles, labels, and cork (including all necessary transportation); production and transport of fertilizer and other farm chemicals for the grapes; energy for irrigation; impacts of the actual wine-making process; bottling; climate control for the wine’s fermentation, aging, and transport; and transportation to the wholesaler, retailer, and consumer. (Basic overviews of LCA are available from the American Center for Life Cycle Assessment and the United Nations Environment Programme.)
To create the model, the authors used several collections of economic, transport, and food data from 1997. The age of the data is one of the shortcomings of the study because much has changed since then. The rapid increase in food imports — between 2001 and 2007 the value of food imports rose by 73% — is one of the biggest changes that would affect their calculations. The authors performed additional analysis to include the import increase and found that the longer supply chains increase the average distance traveled by food by about 25%, while increasing the overall GHG emissions associated with transportation by only 5%. The reason for the smaller GHG increase is the frequent use of oceangoing ships in international trade, which are far more efficient than trucks. The recent rapid rise in oil and fertilizer prices could also affect the food system in significant ways.
Final transportation accounts for only 4% of emissions
One of the most interesting results is the average amount of transportation required to produce food for an average household. Assuming that 11 pounds of food is required for the average 4-person household per day, they estimate that 4,200 miles of transportation is needed throughout the entire production and supply chain (the “average” household diet was obtained by the authors from the USDA Economic Research Service). The average “direct” distance — the final leg from farm or production facility to the consumer, the segment typically called “food miles” — is 1,020 miles. In terms of GHG, production accounts for 83% of the emissions, while transportation accounts for about 11%. The “direct” segment of transportation causes only 4% of the GHG emissions.
Another interesting result is the clear demonstration that different foods can have dramatically different “foodprints.” The figure below, which I created using some of the data from Figure 1-c of the paper, shows the source of GHG emissions for three food types: chicken/fish/eggs, fruit/vegetables, and red meat (the figure in the paper shows eight food types). The horizontal axis is the annual GHG emission per household from the food group in tons of CO2 equivalent**, with a longer bar corresponding to higher emissions. The colored sub-bars show the contributions from various parts of the food system: black is emissions from the “direct” leg, blue is carbon dioxide emissions, red is nitrous oxide emissions, and so on. The authors calculate that the average household’s diet causes an annual release of 8.1 tons of GHG, so red meat consumption is responsible for almost one-third of the total food-related emissions, whereas chicken/fish/eggs and fruit/vegetables contribute only about 10% each. Note that for each food group, the delivery and transport emissions are relatively small.
Emissions of methane (orange bar) and nitrous oxide (red bar) are the primary reasons that red meat has such a high “foodprint.” Methane is a natural byproduct of digestion in cattle and other ruminants (microorganisms in their gut create methane) and also is formed by decomposing manure. Nitrous oxide is emitted when nitrogen fertilizer breaks down in the soil, during various soil management processes, and when manure decomposes. Since the modern U.S. beef system relies so heavily on intensely fertilized corn and soybean fields for animal feed, the nitrous oxide emissions are relatively high. The far higher GHG emissions from red meat production can also seen in a Belgian study that compared the life-cycle GHG emissions of various animals.
The result in the figure above is for an average household, and therefore the emissions calculation is tied to the quantity of the foods in the diet. To separate the analysis from the average mix of product, the authors also calculated the relative GHG emissions on a per calorie and per kilogram basis. On a per-calorie basis, red meat has about three times the GHG emissions of fruit/vegetable or chicken/fish/eggs, and about twice the GHG emissions of dairy products. On a per-kilogram basis, the ratios are even higher, but that normalization is affected by the high concentration of water in dairy and fruits and vegetables.
Eating local and thinking global
Do the above results mean that locavoreanism has no role to play in fighting climate change? I don’t think so.
First, reducing our GHG emissions will require many discrete actions, not just one or two big shifts. The stabilization wedge concept of Socolow and Pacala is a good example of this thinking. If we were to create a wedge strategy for the food system, reducing the amount of transport would certainly be one of the wedges. Second, rebuilding local food networks can help to create stronger, more self-sufficient communities. Third, teaching people about where their food comes from can be a way of introducing them to concepts about the entire economy (like life cycle analysis). Fourth, much of the innovation in agriculture (or, perhaps “old-ovation,” since much of the new today is drawn from the old ways) is coming from small farms that serve local populations. Think, for example, of Joel Salatin’s operation in Virginia that was profiled in Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma.” Salatin is a “grass farmer” and uses his crop of grass to feed cattle and chickens, which then fertilize the land, leading to a high production of animal protein with a relatively low use of industrially derived inputs. Fifth, international trade has many other negative costs, like high levels of air pollution around large ports.
Energy conservation has never been at the top of my personal “why eat local” list. In my view, there are other more important reasons to choose locally-produced foods: the local produce has better flavor than imports, I can make a connection with the producer, local purchases can preserve nearby farmland, and it is one of the important parts of creating a more resilient food network. Considering these benefits, I see a theme that connects them, something that could be called “food mindfulness.” Practicing food mindfulness, I consider how and where my food was produced, and how those practices affect the big picture (ecosystems) and the smaller picture (my pleasure and health). With the huge number of challenges facing our food system and society, it is possible that food mindfulness is more important than either food miles or food choices.
Other resources
- A story on research about cattle feed and methane emissions from Living on Earth
- Agriculture’s Role in Greenhouse Gas Mitigation from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change
- The Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University has many reports on food miles
- Mark Bittman has suggestions on how to reduce meat consumption in the New York Times
- Livestock’s Long Shadow, from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, discusses the climate change impacts of food animals (and many other animal-agriculture topics)
Notes
The full citation of the paper discussed above is “Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States,” Christopher L. Weber and H. Scott Matthews, Environmental Science and Technology, 42 (10), 3508–3513, 2008. DOI: 10.1021/es702969f
* Subscription required, available in libraries of most academic institutions with a science program. If you really want the article, the authors might be able send you a copy, as they often retain limited rights to distribute their own articles.
** The term “CO2 equivalent” is used to express the climate changing power of a mixture of greenhouse gases in terms of the equivalent amount of CO2 that would cause the same effect. Methane (CH4), for example, is 25 times more potent than CO2, so one ton of methane would can be expressed as 25 tons of CO2 equivalent. Another food related greenhouse gas is nitrous oxide (N2O), with a relative potency of about 298 times that of CO2. (The methane and nitrous oxide climate factors are from the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.)
Photo of trucks from PhillipC’s flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License. Photo of the Alemany Farm in San Francisco by the author.
O, skateboarding!
21062008260, originally uploaded by antimega.
I’m far too old and creaky for it now, but as long-time readers will know I still have a fondness for those who skate the city.
This sign – captured by Chris, adapted liberally by another – is at the Brunswick Centre in London.
I especially like the way that perhaps the graphic designers or someone along the chain chose symbols that make the prohibited activities seem enormous fun…
This post is also a mental book mark for an idea I had while wandering the RCA show to adapt my long-neglected deck into something more useful for my sedentary, border-line geriatric self…
June 22, 2008
TimesOnline: Why you'll be paying a lot for iPhone 3G roaming
Filed under: iPhone
Remember when the first generation iPhone was released and people found themselves traveling overseas only to return to a large bill from AT&T? Well, TimesOnline is weighing in on the possible problems of data roaming and the iPhone 3G.
As it turns out, 3G bandwidth is, shall we say, expensive. TimesOnline said O2's (Apple's iPhone carrier in the UK) 3G data roaming charges go up to almost £3 (~ $6 US) per megabyte when downloaded from a country within the EU; worldwide roaming is almost £6 (~ $12 US) per Mb.
So, to put things into perspective, if you go overseas and download a 50MB file via your phone (such as audio or a short movie) then you will be spending over $600 US for that file. TUAW would like to take a moment and remind everyone about the Data Roaming Off switch in your settings. This can save you an expensive mistake (i.e. having to sell your kidney to pay your iPhone's roaming bill).
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I Heart Mad Men
If you feel the same way or even if you've never seen it before, you should check out this article about the show on the cover of the magazine of The New York Times. I got rid of my cable for the summer so I am going to have to figure out how I am going to handle not watching this show. I can't even think about it.
Here's an amusing excerpt from the article about the creator of the show Matthew Weiner (a Wesleyan alum btw, had to mention it):
I recently spent three days on the “Mad Men” set, watching the people who work there, along with auditioning actors, most of whom are desperate to please Weiner, catch his eye, engage him. Rarely have I seen so many people beam so insistently at a human who’s not a newborn. They’re all expert practitioners of the current flavor of show-biz persona: the down-to-earth, up-with-people next-door neighbor who soft-sells his or her obsession with stardust and self-interest with chitchat about, say, the kids, the brilliantine smile buttressed by the unspoken prayer, “Don’t write me out!”
book scanning for patrons
photo originally from akseabirdI’m pretty skeptical when people call anything for sale “revolutionary.” However, a friend sent me this photo which was up on Flickr. It’s a tool called the Bookeye book scanner. It’s a library digitzation product, but if you look at the photo, it’s being used as a tool for the public — or University of Alaska at Anchorage students — to scan documents to PDF, JPG, TIFF or PNG and then save to USB drive, burn them to a CD, ftp them, save them to a network drive or email them to themselves. Their website even has usage stats that shows what people did with the first million pages they scanned. Good data, and it’s broken down by library type which is even more interesting to me, to see the differences in usage patterns. [thanks manuel]
Shocking
From WaPo ...
Al-Hurra -- "the Free One" in Arabic -- is the centerpiece of a U.S. government campaign to spread democracy in the Middle East. Taxpayers have spent $350 million on the project. But more than four years after it began broadcasting, the station is widely regarded as a flop in the Arab world, where it has struggled to attract viewers and overcome skepticism about its mission.Beyond all the dingbat problems with Bush-era 'public diplomacy, this seems like the key point ...
According to critics, the U.S. government miscalculated in assuming that al-Hurra could repeat the success of Radio Free Europe during the Cold War, when information-starved listeners behind the Iron Curtain tuned in on their shortwave radios.Al-Hurra, by contrast, faces cutthroat competition. About 200 other stations beam Arabic-language programming to satellite dishes reaching even the poorest neighborhoods in the Middle East and North Africa. More rivals loom, including an Arabic-language news channel that the BBC is set to launch this year.
Symptomatic of a much broader and more profound failure of comprehension.
Late Update: It turns out that ProPublica, the new non-profit investigative journalism site that is among other things the new home of TPM alum Paul Kiel, also has an extensive new report on the al Hurra trainwreck. It would seem here too there's plenty of Bush administration failure to go around.
Perfect game of Peggle, 18 million points
the amount of planning in the how-to is staggering
Hungry For Change? Calories For Obama!
Eat something of high caloric content AND feel good about it. (I now can definitely recommend the baked goods on Broome between Crosby & Lafayette, especially the coconut chocolate chunk squares, OMG).via MoveOn.org :
This weekend, more than 12,000 (!) MoveOn members are organizing "Hungry for Change" bake sales to support our campaign to put Obama in the White House.
I hope you can stop by—it could be the most important (and delicious) cookie you ever eat.
Here are a few bakesales near you
Google Datastore
"...the standard way a developer writes out the table schema for a RDBMS should be dumped almost entirely when considering an app using Google Datastore. Storing data and using Google Datastore isn't difficult, but it is a pretty hefty paradigm shift, especially if you've never left RDBMS-land."
Summer of Krull
The House Next Door relives the Summer of ‘83 in movies, featuring Krull:
Some topics for inquiry:
That Dainty Fey Hero: Who Was That Guy? Whatever Happened to Him?
Lysette Anthony, The Cleavage, The Inexplicable Enduring Love For said Dainty Fey Hero. That thing she was running around in—what was that?
Is Tim Curry In This Movie, or That Other Fantasy Movie With the Same Plot?
Mentaiko!
Shin Hatakeyama, a chef who is the manager of Sunrise Mart, the Japanese food market in Manhattan (the one at 494 Broome Street), has made a commitment to importing top-quality, authentic ingredients from Japan. Yesterday he invited Daigo Irifune of Yamaya USA to showcase his company's mentaiko. Daigo was kind enough to talk to me about all things mentaiko:
First of all, what's mentaiko? Sometimes called "spicy cod roe," it's actually spicy pollock eggs. An import from Korea, it became popular in Japan after World War Two. Fukuoka, a big city in the southern island of Kyushu, is the mentaiko capital of Japan. (Kyushu is the closest part of Japan to Korea, so not surprising.). Daigo tells me that there are some three hundred mentaiko producers in the city.
Daigo explained that his mentaiko is produced by marinating pollock eggs in chili, sake, konbu and yuzu citrus, then letting it ferment lightly for several hours. The result is spicy, flavorful roe, tiny in size and red in color. Mentaiko is sold in its natural membrane, pictured above, or in jars, the membrane removed and ready to eat.
How do you use it? The most common way is as a filling for onigiri. But at Sunrise, Daigo offered tastes of mentaiko spaghetti, an extremely popular Japanese-style pasta, crossover dishes marrying Japanese flavors to Italian pasta. (Also called "wafu pasta" -- there are at least two places in New York that specialize in this cooking, Basta Pasta and Pasta Wafu.)
Daigo also told me about another dish, "mentaiko salad," which is composed of mentaiko, wakame seaweed, cucumbers and kuzukiri noodles (translucent arrowroot vermicelli that readily absorb flavors). Sounds tasty. If you try it, please let me know how it comes out!
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- June 11, 2006 - June 17, 2006
- June 4, 2006 - June 10, 2006
- May 28, 2006 - June 3, 2006
- May 21, 2006 - May 27, 2006
- May 14, 2006 - May 20, 2006
- May 7, 2006 - May 13, 2006
- April 30, 2006 - May 6, 2006
- April 23, 2006 - April 29, 2006
- April 16, 2006 - April 22, 2006
- April 9, 2006 - April 15, 2006
- April 2, 2006 - April 8, 2006
- March 26, 2006 - April 1, 2006
- March 19, 2006 - March 25, 2006
- March 12, 2006 - March 18, 2006
- March 5, 2006 - March 11, 2006
- February 26, 2006 - March 4, 2006
- February 19, 2006 - February 25, 2006
- February 12, 2006 - February 18, 2006
- February 5, 2006 - February 11, 2006
- January 29, 2006 - February 4, 2006
- January 22, 2006 - January 28, 2006
- January 8, 2006 - January 14, 2006