randomwalks/dj

Watching the Angels win last night, 1-0, at Yankee Stadium, got me wondering as to which team has won the most 1-0 road games in a season.    To find the answer, in terms of “Since 1956,” I set Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index Team Batting Game Finder to “Team Won, On the Road, (requiring R=1), sorted by greatest number of games matching selected criteria in a game” and this is what I found:

 Tm  Year Games Link to Individual Games
+—+—-+—–+————————-+
 NYM 1968     5 Ind. Games
 LAD 1984     5 Ind. Games
 CIN 1963     5 Ind. Games
 TOR 1991     4 Ind. Games
 STL 1968     4 Ind. Games
 STL 1996     4 Ind. Games
 SDP 1985     4 Ind. Games
 PHI 1971     4 Ind. Games
 NYM 1969     4 Ind. Games
 NYM 1965     4 Ind. Games
 NYM 1985     4 Ind. Games
 MIN 1966     4 Ind. Games
 MIL 1971     4 Ind. Games
 CLE 1989     4 Ind. Games
 ATL 1993     4 Ind. Games

It’s an interesting list.  Note the Mets teams of 1968 and 1969 here.  Thanks to Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index Team Batting Game Finder, we can also look at those nine wins for those Metsies.  Just set the controls for “From 1968 to 1969, Playing for NYM, Team Won, On the Road, (requiring R=1), sorted by most recent date in a game” and here are the results:

  Cnt Date          Tm   Opp GmReslt  PA  AB  R  H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF ROE GDP SB CS LOB Batrs
+—-+————-+—+—-+——-+—+—+–+–+–+–+–+—+–+—+–+—+–+–+—+—+–+–+—+—–+
    1 1969-09-27 NYM @PHI W  1-0   39  35  1  8  0  1  0   1  4   0  7   0  0  0   0   0  0  0  11    10
    2 1969-09-12 NYM @PIT W  1-0   36  32  1  6  0  0  0   1  3   0 10   1  0  0   1   1  0  0   8     9
    3 1969-09-12 NYM @PIT W  1-0   35  31  1  7  2  0  0   1  3   1 11   0  1  0   1   1  0  1   7    10
    4 1969-06-17 NYM @PHI W  1-0   35  28  1  5  0  0  0   1  5   0  5   0  2  0   0   0  1  0   7    11
    5 1968-09-11 NYM @CHC W  1-0   34  32  1  5  2  0  0   1  2   0  9   0  0  0   0   0  2  0   6    14
    6 1968-08-26 NYM @STL W  1-0   35  31  1  6  1  0  0   1  1   0  9   0  2  1   1   0  1  0   7    10
    7 1968-07-21 NYM @STL W  1-0   37  31  1  7  0  0  0   1  5   0  6   1  0  0   0   1  1  1   9    10
    8 1968-06-30 NYM @HOU W  1-0   32  31  1  5  0  0  0   1  1   0 11   0  0  0   0   0  0  1   4    10
    9 1968-06-10 NYM @LAD W  1-0   38  33  1  5  0  0  0   1  3   0 10   0  2  0   0   0  0  0   7     9
   
Games found: 9.

You expected to see Tom Seaver and Jerry Koosman winning some of these games for those Mets.  But, Jim McAndrew won two of them in 1968 as well.

Originally posted by Steve Lombardi from Stat of the Day, on August 2, 2008 4:32 AM

From Required Eating

As promised, we're giving away five (5) copies of Fuchsia Dunlop's new book Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. To learn more about her incredible journeys through China, read a recent conversation we had with her. We are very big fans.

To enter the contest, just post a comment here noting your favorite Chinese food dish. The five winners will be chosen at random among the commenters, and as always, standard Serious Eats contest rules apply.

Originally posted by Erin Zimmer from Serious Eats, on August 1, 2008 2:30 PM

The entirety of Hoop Dreams, which appeared at the top of the best documentaries list I posted yesterday, is available on Hulu to watch for free. Watch for Gates getting his pocket picked. (thx, skeets & david)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 1, 2008 1:08 PM

My collection of official and inofficial cygwin package patches and scripts is now also at google code: http://code.google.com/p/cygwin-rurban/ Browse the cygwin Perl build and patches (a custom build-system): http://code.google.com/p/cygwin-rurban/source/browse/#svn/trunk/release/perl Browse the cygwin Parrot patches: http://code.google.com/p/cygwin-rurban/source/browse/#svn/trunk/release/parrot

Read more of this story at use Perl.

Originally posted by rurban (posted by brian_d_foy) from use Perl, on August 1, 2008 1:07 PM

(via Some zine. More.)

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on August 1, 2008 12:49 PM

“Am I the only dork who color-coordinates his iPhone apps?”

- Scott Moschella

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on August 1, 2008 12:33 PM

Still from the movie
I saw Man on a Wire last week and the documentary has lingered with me. The film has several annoying elements: the main character is basically a mime (he's not actually a mime, but let's just say he has a mime-like personality, and who among us does not discriminate against the mimes), the film uses cheesy low-fi reenactments mixed with archival footage (a technique more suited to television than film), and the movie has been overpraised (always suspicious), but despite all that I can't deny the movie's resonance. It's a tale that touches on the act of creating art, mortality, creation, destruction, and ultimately vanity and betrayal which is more than I can say for most films I've seen recently. The filmmakers never mentioned 9/11 as the connection is implicit: the planning that went into this performance was the poetic inverse of the planning that went into the towers' destruction and perhaps this is why the film inspires such emotion in its audiences (many in our audience jumped to their feet and clapped at the end). A. O. Scott wrote in his New York Times review,

"It is easy to imagine that, in contemplating the scale and solidity of those brand-new towers, Mr. Petit saw them at least partly as the vehicle of his own immortality (whether or not he survived the crossing). No one looking up at the New York sky on a hazy morning 34 years ago and seeing a man on a wire could have suspected that the reverse would turn out to be true."

Go see this film if you have the chance.

Related: Philippe Petit's Wikipedia page which includes scans of the the famous New Yorker covers he inspired. Also read Paul Auster's Red Notebook which contains a great short story inspired by the walk.
. . .

While browsing around for this article I found a neat little homemade site called Walking Art with many examples of epic walks. The site fails to include the great walking artist Hamish Fulton who is an artistic inspiration and whose family has been very kind to my family.

Filed under: film
Tags: 9/11, art, film, walking, world trade center

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Heading East, on August 1, 2008 11:08 AM

The Shortlist article series is your opportunity to learn about the films that inspire intellectual, artistic and activist leaders -- leaders like Wendy Cohen. We asked Wendy to share her favorite films and her thoughts on the power of documentary to change the world. So what films make Wendy Cohen's Shortlist? Keep reading to find out. Who is Wendy Cohen?

Wendy Cohen

Wendy was born and raised in Montreal and moved to New York in 2003 for an internship with Women Make Movies. A few months later she joined the Arts Engine family as their Outreach Coordinator. While working there, she was a research and creative assistant for The Art of the Documentary (New Riders Press 2005) as well as co-founded and became the National Director of Screening Liberally. After an exciting year as the Community Manager at the Huffington Post, Wendy moved to Los Angeles in 2007 and is now the Manager of Community and Alliances at Participant Media. She produced her first short film Every Third Bite with the Meerkat Media Collective about bees and the problems of colony collapse disorder. Wendy Cohen on the Power of Film I love movies and I believe they can change the world. Seeing someone's face, hearing someone's voice brings you into a story and can inspire you in a way that no other media can. Films are transformative--you can briefly feel what is like in someone else's shoes. Films move someone from apathy to inspiration to action. In an era of conglomerates and ownership, we have to rely on documentarians to show the stories rarely seen in the mainstream. And with the Internet, documentaries are more easily available, and we can more easily take part in this issues raised in the film. Wendy Cohen's Film Picks Philadelphia: This fiction film was based on a true story and it's one of the first big budget, big star movies to address AIDS and homosexuality. I was 12 years old when I saw the film in theaters with my family and remember feeling so devastated and speechless afterward. I certainly didn't know very much about AIDS, and I remember so clearly leaving the theater and not being able to describe how amazed I was--not only at the story but that a film could have such an impact. That film had such a profound impact on me and, for me, exemplifies what a film can do. Promises: Filmmaker B.Z. Goldberg travels though the West Bank and Jerusalem to bring Israeli and Palestinian children together first through letters and phone calls and then in person. The film is such a personalized look at Middle East conflict and offers hope for resolution while showing how much hatred runs between both sides. There is remarkable scene of two soccer matches: one in a Palestinian refugee camp and one in Jerusalem. The boys are playing the same game and have the exact same excitement and emotion and then devastation when they lose. The games are cut together and it shows us how these boys are so similar but their worlds are completely disparate. My Left Breast: This is a film about Gerry Rogers' journey as she battles breast cancer and turns to a video camera for catharsis and comfort. Gerry takes us to chemotherapy and family gatherings, and speaks to us in the middle of the night about how scared she is to lose this fight with her body. It is such an honest and intimate film and with Gerry's wit and candor it left me with the most inspiring outlook on life. It is certainly one of the films I most return to. Murderball: This is such a mesmerizing and edge-of-your-seat sport documentary. Murderball is the non-commercial name for wheelchair rugby played by quadriplegic young men. It is a full contact, trilling game and this film shows us how the sport gives hope and meaning to the young men who have become disabled by tragic accidents. There is so much excitement and laughter throughout the film, and most amazingly, the film doesn't take the melodramatic, teary message route about living with a disability. These guys want to win medals; they are not looking for anyone's pity. And the thrill and suspense of the matches rival any fiction sport film out there. Something Other Than Other: This experimental short film is one of the most beautiful and powerful I have seen. Filmmakers Jerry A. Henry and Andrea J. Chi made a video diary as they were pregnant with their first child and they use Super 8mm to give it the look and feel of old home movies. But they add a gorgeous and slightly unsettling, disjointed feeling throughout--much like the experience they had when their child was first born. My little cousin is biracial and this film is such moving short about what it is like to grow up biracial in America. Some films I couldn't leave out... Four Little Girls Born into Brothels Street Fight Hotel Rwanda Network A Question of Silence

Originally posted by (author unknown) from MediaRights: News, on August 1, 2008 9:51 AM

Okay, everybody.  Do you remember way back in the beginning of April when I went to visit my daughter and stayed at that weird Bed & Breakfast and wrote this:

Emily was beautiful, brilliant, luminescent.  From the first sentence she had me, totally captivated, entranced, delighted.  I knew she was good.  I had no idea how good.  Her wit, her words, her impeccable delivery.  Everything so original, fresh, so Emily.  My God, I had no idea that poetry could be so entertaining.  I don’t know how she did it.  So sly and funny and heart-breakingly sad. 

I’m sorry if what I’m going to say sounds biased, because actually, I’m not.  I can see the work of people close to me, people I love, very clearly. 

My daughter, Emily, is a f___king genius.  Not an opinion.  Fact.

Now, you might have said to yourself, Ah yes, Meg, but you are her mother.  Well, that is true.  I am her mother.  I also happen to be right!

My clever, brilliant daughter, Emily Zinnemann and her friend Elizabeth Gramm, whose poetry I have never heard but am certain is spectacular as well because Emily has told me so on several occasions, are both finalists for a major poetry fellowship!  45 poets have been chosen out of around 900 applications and five lucky poets will be awarded a $15,000 Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship that is given by Poetry Magazine. 

I love Poetry Magazine!  I am so proud of Emily, and Elizabeth too.  Emily has asked me to keep my fingers crossed for both of them and of course I shall, but I figure, collective good thought sending is always helpful, so if all of you, my dear bloggers out there, could just for a second, cross your fingers and send good wishes their way as well, that would be great!

CONGRATULATIONS EMILY AND ELIZABETH!  I am so, so PROUD! xxxooo

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Meg's Blog, on August 1, 2008 9:30 AM

August is here, and while New Yorkers are enduring another summer of rush-hour traffic whipping through the city's flagship parks, some excellent advocacy is bolstering the case for going car-free. Look at the work being done by the Prospect Park Youth Advocates, high school students who are spending their summer vacations gathering data and putting together petitions. Here's youth advocate Michael Cheng describing a recent foray to the Prospect Park loop drive:

One person used our handy-dandy radar gun to clock the cars speeds, while a second person recorded the speeds, and a third person held up a sign a few feet away from the radar that read "You Are Speeding," while the fourth person stood on cyclist and pedestrian side of the Loop Drive to attract support from the joggers and bikers experiencing the wrath of cars invading their road space.

And here's what they found:

We surveyed over 570 automobiles and found that on the Loop Drive 9 out of 10 drivers were speeding! 90% of people who drive their cars through Prospect Park exceed the posted 25mph limit. We even clocked a school bus driving 42mph and some drivers going as fast as 50mph. How unsafe is that!

Unsafe, unlawful, and completely unnecessary. After the jump, some more choice observations from Michael.

(more...)

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on August 1, 2008 8:24 AM

From Slice

So you're visiting the Holy Land, huh? First thing you're gonna do is grab a slice, right? Of course you are—you're a Slice reader, after all. Well, if you need to know where the best places are, Jerusalemite runs through six of 'em. The best? Big Apple Pizza, wouldn't ya know?

At first glance, it appears that someone did a lot of shopping at one of the myriad of tschoky stores that litter Times Square. New York license plates and Statue of Liberty figurines ordain the walls and countertops. Back in they day they used to blast recordings of New York radio stations (Z100 if I remember correctly) to contribute to the "authentic" atmosphere. Their pizza is without question one of the best Jerusalem has to offer.

I love the idea of blasting Z100 for authenticity. But you'd run the risk of driving your customers batty.

Related
Milk, Honey, Pizza: Green Door Pizza, Jerusalem

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on August 1, 2008 6:00 AM

That is one startlingly impressive cake, made by these people. Rainbow Road ftw!

(via)

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on August 1, 2008 5:54 AM

Know Your Meme wiki, more Know Your Meme videos, Tina sings the Backstreet Boys, Tina Chen on PerezHilton.com, Tina strips [video removed], Tina on MySpace, Tina-SouljaBoy Remix, Tina-Angry German Kid Remix, Leave Kristina Alone, Kristina Chen on Stuff Ethnic People Like, Is This Tina in Jesus Camp?, Tina says it’s not her in Jesus Camp

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on August 1, 2008 5:00 AM

The recently satirical New Yorker cover depicting Obama and his wife as fist-bumping Islamic terrorists comes under fire in an article for The Chronicle by psychologist Mahzarin Banaji who argues that it irresponsibly creates an implicit association between "Obama and Osama". Banaji is almost certainly right, but neglects higher levels of cognition which can make this ineffectual.

Banaji is most known for her extensive work on the implicit association test (IAT), which we discussed only the other day. What this and other work has shown is that despite our conscious thoughts ("hair colour has no association with intelligence") we still might have an unconscious bias that associates certain concepts ('blonde' and 'dim').

Along these lines, Banaji suggests that the artist, Barry Blitt, who created the picture has harmed the political debate by unintentionally strengthening an inappropriate link:

The brain, Blitt would be advised to understand, is a complex machine whose operating principles we know something about. When presented with A and B in close spatial or temporal proximity, the mind naturally and effortlessly associates the two. Obama=Osama is an easy association to produce via simple transmogrification. Flag burning=unpatriotic=un-American=un-Christian=Muslim is child's play for the cortex. Learning by association is so basic a mechanism that living beings are jam-packed with it — ask any dog the next time you see it salivating to a tone of a bell. There is no getting around the fact that the very association Blitt helplessly confessed he didn't intend to create was made indelibly for us, by him.

It is not unreasonable, given the inquiring minds that read The New Yorker, to expect that an obvious caricature would be viewed as such. In fact, our conscious minds can, in theory, accomplish such a feat. But that doesn't mean that the manifest association (Obama=Osama lover) doesn't do its share of the work. To some part of the cognitive apparatus, that association is for real. Once made, it has a life of its own because of a simple rule of much ordinary thinking: Seeing is believing. Based on the research of my colleague, the psychologist Daniel Gilbert, on mental systems, one might say that the mind first believes, and only if it is relaxing in an Adirondack chair doing nothing better, does it question and refute. There is a power to all things we see and hear — exactly as they are presented to us.

It strikes me that Banaji is perhaps being a little disingenuous here. Certainly the advert does strengthen that unconscious association, but, as as the intention of most satire, it attempts to include another association into the mix - that of absurdity.

In other words, the idea of the cartoon is presumably to trigger the association Obama = terrorist, but also include another so it becomes Obama = terrorist = absurd. It's the humourists equivalent of the reductio ad absurdum argument.

Of course, this can rely as much on the same implicit associations as Banaji mentions, but it can be also seen to work very effectively through a process of reinterpretation that alters the impact of automatic connections through changing their meaning.

In fact, this process so can be so powerful that it is used to treat psychiatric problems.

In clinical work it is called 'cognitive restructuring'. For example, in panic disorder, people begin to interpret normal bodily reactions (increased heart rate, temperature etc) as a sign of impending heart attack or other danger, which leads to more anxiety, further interpretations and a spiral of terrifying anxiety.

Cognitive restructuring teaches people that these bodily changes and worried thoughts aren't signs of an impending heart attack, they're normal reactions, and the spiral of anxiety is not a risk to your health, just a pattern you've got into. In other words, they begin to believe something different about the significance of the link.

Humour also relies on a process of reinterpretation. Most theories of humour stress that it usually requires the reframing of a previously held association.

However, the key to good satire is that this reframing should be obvious and we might speculate that the reframing effect should be more powerful than the effect of simply reviving the old association.

We can perhaps wonder then, whether the controversy over the New Yorker cover is not that it made an association between Obama and terrorism, but that it was not effective enough in making it obviously absurd.

I suspect one of the difficulties is that the cartoon was actually attempting to satirise not Obama, but the media discussion of him. This is always a risky strategy because it requires so much cognitive abstraction that the automatic association is far more apparent.

Link to Banaji's article in The Chronicle.

Originally posted by vaughan from Mind Hacks, on August 1, 2008 3:00 AM

The other day, I visited Eddie's blog and found this post. I decided to leave a comment even though I never win anything and felt silly.

But then...I woke up one morning to a delightful email from Eddie that I won! Or, more accurately, Kurara, Eddie's cutie bunny, chose me! I'm really quite surprised! And I just love the way he carried out the drawing : )

p.s. notice how the font & color in my post looks exactly like that of Eddie's post? Um...I told Dav, when he was updating my template, that I wanted the font Eddie used ; )

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Kokochi, on July 31, 2008 8:53 PM

TPM Reader YF shares his thoughts ...

I think the whole "McCain's going negative" snit is a really defensive and weak position for the Obama camp. Sure- mention that McCain went negative, contrary to all his stated values- "All it take is a little dip in the polls for John McCain to cast aside his values." But it seems to me there is very simple way to turn this around on McCain, and be on the offensive: "How bad does John McCain want to avoid talking about real issues? He's running ads with Britney and Paris. Is that what American's are concerned about? Britney and Paris? Do you want to know how we are going to right the ship of our economy? Or do you want to hear about Britney and Paris? Want to talk about how we are going to extract our troops from Iraq? Or do you want to hear about Britney and Paris?" Just pound away at this. This is what John McCain wants to talk about. Point out how frivolous it is to even spend any time developing this ad when there are so many important issues to address. Bitching about it being unfair or over some imaginary line that Karl Rove can't even see is going to get them nowhere.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on July 31, 2008 7:01 PM

Congrats to the delicious team on the launch of the new delicious.com. As an active user, I've been looking forward to the refresh for a little while now, and I'm happy to have it live! Here are a few of the things I like...

• Date grouping! It's a simple thing, but it really makes it visually clear how much linking activity I've been doing lately.

• Top ten tags! I'm pretty sure I could have done that before with the controls that were there, but the new look of that right-hand module is clean, simple and straightforward.

• Tag intersection UI! While the visual look implies more of a category > subcategory model instead of a pure tag intersection model, the way they've implemented it will make me much more likely to go to my archives to find things like "small+software."

• Long notes! Yeah, I like them too.

• The launch video! Definitely worth watching, especially if you're one of those people (like me) who likes words moving around on a screen.

And since it wouldn't be fair and balanced without one thing I'm not a fan of, I'll share this:

• I'm not a fan of the new little "person" that's there. I've always loved the simple delicious identity of the blue, black and white favicon; I'm not sure that the bookmark needed to be anthropomorphized.

To date I've shared 1,254 bookmarks on delicious. Here's to the next 1,254!

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from this is sippey.typepad.com, on July 31, 2008 4:27 PM

For the past few years, Mark Bottrell has been tracking how many players who have appeared in RBI Baseball (from 1988) and Tecmo Super Bowl (from 1991) are still active in MLB and the NFL. Sad news this year...only one player is still active.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 31, 2008 3:41 PM

James Danziger notes that the issue of Vogue Italia following the acclaimed issue featuring only black models has zero black models in it.

How absolutely great, but now the August issue is out -- themed around a faux funeral photo tribute to Yves Saint Laurent -- and there's apparently not one black model to be found. This is especially ironic given the fact that Yves Saint Laurent was one of the first major designers to regularly feature black models in his runway shows. You would have thought they could have found room to at least fit Naomi Campbell in somewhere. Wouldn't she look chic in widow's weeds? This kind of tokenism ultimately seems a step backwards to me.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 31, 2008 12:18 PM

Filed under: iPhone, SDK

CrunchGear notes that a version of the iPhone Push Notification Service API has been released to "a handful" of developers, and, according to them, will "surely" be released to everyone when iPhone OS 2.1 is released.

If you remember our WWDC keynote coverage (around 11:05 a.m.), the Push Notification Service maintains a connection with third party servers to alert you via an icon badge, custom sounds, or text alerts.

An app that uses this feature isn't really running in the background, but instead sort of registering itself with a metaphorical "hotel operator" that lives in your phone. Once there's something new to tell you, the hotel operator notifies you.

Hopefully this has little effect on battery life, but without actual, real-world use, it's hard to say.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Originally posted by Robert Palmer from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on July 31, 2008 11:30 AM

Matthew Walker's cover is fantastic; Lucas Gonze contributed a MIDI score and guitar tab to work with [via] 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on July 31, 2008 9:36 AM

If Paris is getting quiet again, it must be the end of July, a nice set of photos from Rion Nakaya.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 31, 2008 8:27 AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on July 31, 2008 6:46 AM

From Required Eating

Nobody I know of in the West understands more about food in China than Fuchsia Dunlop. The author of two remarkable Chinese cookbooks, Land of Plenty (about Sichuan food), and The Revolutionary Cookbook (about Hunanese cooking), Dunlop was not only the first Westerner to attend the Sichuan Institute of Higher Cuisine, she spent the better part of the last 14 years traveling through China to explore the food culture. So when her newest book, Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China, was published a few months ago, I knew it was going to be good. I just wasn't prepared for how good.

The book is an evocative and emotionally resonant account of her visits to China, from the time she first went as a student in 1994 to the many trips she took after to research for her two cookbooks. In traveling around the country, Dunlop discovered just how much her feelings about Chinese food had evolved in tandem with how the cultural fabric of China had evolved in the post-Mao era.

As this go-go, free enterprise period unfolded, Dunlop became profoundly aware and disturbed by all the attendant environmental problems and food safety issues that accompanied all this "progress." She found herself questioning her love for and commitment to Chinese food culture. Dunlop's restless quest to make peace with a rapidly evolving China is at the heart of her journey and this book. I won't give away the ending, but sweet and sour is an apt description for the conclusion.

Starting this Friday through the weekend, we'll be giving away five copies of this terrific memoir. Stay tuned for details, and read more about my conversation with Dunlop a few months back over dinner at Momofuku Ssam Bar in New York—which she loved, for the record.

She begged me not to force her into a Sichuan restaurant like I did a few years ago when she was promoting Land of Plenty (we had an incredible meal at Grand Sichuan Eastern on 55th Street and Second Avenue in New York, where the chef was beside himself to speak about Sichuan cuisine in Chinese with a young Englishwoman).

Most recently, we did have a free-flowing discussion about the book and yesterday I sent her a few extra questions to learn even more:

What is the most important thing you learned about China and its food in the time you spent there? Never to underestimate it. Chinese food culture continues to amaze me with its diversity and sophistication, even after about fifteen years of culinary research. There always seems to be something else to explore, whether in terms of regional flavours, culinary techniques, ingredients, or different ways of eating. I could never have imagined how endlessly fascinating this journey of discovery would be!

Related to that, what's the one thing you'd like people to know about food in China? That it can be not only delicious, but also incredibly healthy. The Chinese know how to eat, perhaps more than people in any other culture, in the sense of both of enjoying their food and of nourishing their bodies and minds.

What would your ideal Chinese meal be composed of? I would have slow-cooked pork prepared by the Song Dynasty poet Su Dongpo, stir-fried bamboo shoots gathered from a hillside in northern Fujian, fish-fragrant aubergines from the former Bamboo Bar in Chengdu, stir-fried amaranth leaves with garlic, chicken soup made by the mother of my Hunanese friend Fan Qun, and a bowl of simple rice porridge made by the private cook of the famous eighteenth-century food writer Yuan Mei.

What is the biggest misconception people have about food in China and Chinese food in general? That Chinese food is unhealthy and junky. Most people I know in China eat, at home, a fantastically balanced diet dominated by grains and vegetables, with a little meat, fish or poultry. And the cooking at the finest restaurants (not to mention the décor and the service) is incredibly good.

If people are visiting Bar Shu, the restaurant you consult for in London, what should they order if they're an adventurous or unadventurous eater? Adventurous eaters tend to adore the man-and-wife offal slices, fire exploded kidney flowers, fragrant chicken in a pile of chillies and, if they want to splash out, the boiled sea bass with sizzling chili oil. Less adventurous people won’t be able to resist the Gong Bao prawns with cashews, dry-fried green beans or fish-fragrant aubergines.

Related

Video: Fuchsia Dunlop Prepares General Tso's Chicken
Fuchsia Dunlop's General Tso's Chicken Recipe
Serious Eats' Cookbook Interview with Fuchsia Dunlop
Joe DiStefano and Fuchsia Dunlop Take on Flushing's Golden Shopping Mall

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on July 31, 2008 5:00 AM

I apologize for interrupting the Mill for hard player analysis, but it’s after midnight and I feel compelled to write about Brad Ziegler.

Ziegler, as most of you know, has already set the all-time major-league record for most consecutive scoreless innings to start a career, with 27. This afternoon he threw three more. He entered the game in the sixth inning with two on and none out, and promptly got a strikeout and a double play. In the seventh, he allowed a one-out single, which just allowed him to rack up another double play. In the eighth, with two on and one out, he got another GIDP.

In his previous 27 innings of work, Ziegler had induced 7 groundball double plays; he now has coaxed 10 GIDPs in 30 scoreless innings. That is, in itself, a remarkable ratio – the average pitcher will see a double play turned behind him roughly every ten innings, whereas Ziegler has had one turned every three innings. But what makes this especially remarkable is that Ziegler – on account of his sublime pitching to date – rarely encounters a double-play situation in the first place. In his 30 innings, he has surrendered just 18 hits and 7 walks.

Granted, he has inherited a few baserunners as well, but prior to today’s game he had faced just 17 hitters in a double-play situation (man on first, less than two outs.) Yet he had 8 double plays turned in those 17 situations (7 GIDPs, and a line drive DP when the lead runner was doubled up.) In today’s game, he was 3-for-5 (and the two non-DP situations involved a strikeout and a sacrifice bunt), improving his ratio to 11-for-22, an even 50%.

Let me repeat that: when Brad Ziegler has pitched this season with a man on first base and less than two outs, the batter has hit into a double play 50% of the time.

In our database that extends back to the mid-50s, only one pitcher with 30 or more innings had a DP% of 50% or more: Frank Funk, who in 1960 pitched 31.2 innings and had 11 DPs turned in 21 opportunities, a DP% of 52.4%. If we raise the innings bar slightly, here’s the list of guys that Ziegler is gunning for:

Year Pitcher IP DP Opp. DP%

1991 Dave Eiland 72.2 15 42 35.7%
1981 Rick Reuschel 70.2 16 46 34.8%
1989 Tom Filer 72.1 17 49 34.7%
2003 Paul Quantrill 77.2 17 50 34.0%
2007 Takashi Saito 64.1 9 28 32.1%
2005 Carlos Silva 188.1 42 132 31.8%

(I made the list six deep to include Silva, the only guy in the top 20 to qualify for the ERA title. Given the number of double play opportunities he faced, Silva had a “net DP” of 24.83 – meaning he got 24.83 DPs more than expected, given his number of DP situations. That’s the highest single-season total in the last 50 years.)

I realize that in light of the fact that Ziegler has already set a major-league record in a fairly significant category, the fact that he’s on pace to set a record in a fairly obscure category may not seem all that interesting. But the former derives from the latter. Every year brings the emergence of one or more right-handed sidearmers with so-so velocity but tremendous sink – the Bradford Brothers, if you will, or the Quisenberry Clones. But just as none of these pitchers (or any others) have debuted with Ziegler’s success, none of them have shown the ability to keep the ball down as persistently and indomitably as Ziegler has.

Since converting to sidearm prior to the 2007 season, Ziegler has thrown 133 innings in the minors and majors – and has yet to allow a home run. In 30 innings in the majors, he has yet to allow an extra-base hit. He gives up singles, the occasional walk, and grounder after grounder.

Given his unique profile, Ziegler deserves a unique approach. Violating every sabermetric tenet known to man, I would argue that the best approach is this: bunt at every opportunity. If the leadoff batter gets aboard somehow – maybe he legs out an infield single – bunt him over, which keeps you out of a double play situation and allows you to drive the runner home with a single, which is the most you’ll get off Ziegler anyway.

That’s exactly what the Royals did today in the eighth inning. Mike Aviles beat out a grounder, Mitch Maier bunted him over. Ziegler abhors a vacuum at first base, so naturally, he intentionally walked Alex Gordon – and Jose Guillen complied with the 6-4-3. Back to the drawing board.

To keep with the season - I’m hearing that the Astros have offered their entire farm system for him.  (Be honest - would anything the Astros do surprise you?)

Originally posted by Rany Jazayerli from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on July 30, 2008 10:10 PM

Filed under: Hardware, Portables, iBook, PowerBook, PowerMac G5, Macbook Pro, MacBook, MacBook Air

Like virtually all mobile computer manufacturers, Apple recommends that users calibrate their laptop batteries every few months, as Scott pointed out a couple of years ago. Unlike many manufacturers, however, Apple does not include a utility to automatically perform a calibration. Given Apple's uncanny ability to make things user-friendly, this seems like a bit of a glaring oversight.

What are the benefits of calibration? Primarily the goal is to ensure that the microprocessor in your battery provides an accurate estimate of how much time you have left on the battery. Over time it can lose track of just how much juice your battery has in it, and calibration gives it a very accurate reading on the battery's health.

Older battery technologies also benefited from a process called conditioning, which was typically performed the same way as a current battery's calibration process. In a nutshell, you fully charge the battery, fully discharge it, then fully charge it again. It's unclear whether modern lithium batteries gain anything in an actual capacity perspective from this process, or if it is simply a calibration of the microprocessor for the purpose of providing accurate time estimates.

Continue reading Battery calibration recommended by Apple, why no utility?

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Originally posted by Jason Clarke from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on July 30, 2008 4:00 PM

From Required Eating

Can vegans who eats honey still call themselves vegan? In light of honey-eating becoming a bigger part of the vegan diet, Daniel Engber of Slate investigates the different beliefs and facts behind the great vegan honey debate. While one could argue that bees are exploited as industrial pollinators much more so than as honey producers, finding alternatives to honey is more reasonable than limiting one's diet to just wind-pollinated plants. It's safe to say that eating plants is also more important than consuming honey to maintain a healthy diet (or, you know, life).

Since honey is just a euphemism for bee regurgitation (or the alliterative "bee barf," as I prefer), it seems obvious that it fits under the non-vegan category. Should it be a major subject of debate within the vegan community?

"You either eat honey or you don't; to debate the question in public only makes the vegan movement seem silly and dogmatic," says Engber. If you're vegan and the "worst" thing you do is eat honey, I don't think it's something you should lose sleep over.

Originally posted by Robyn Lee from Serious Eats, on July 30, 2008 4:00 PM

Hilarious.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Elsewhere, on July 30, 2008 3:54 PM

The minions of Bowser get together for a little chat about their frustrations.

The Mario jumps over me every time. I don't know why Bowser put this goddamn chain on my body.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 30, 2008 3:24 PM

I am finding less time to blog these days, and my list of things to blog keeps getting bigger and bigger. From now on I will do a Pixelsumo digest at the end of each month, containing projects that didn’t make it into full posts in time.

So to start off, here are projects I wish I had written about recently…

The Image Fulgurator by Julius von Bismarck is a device for physically manipulating photographs. It intervenes when a photo is being taken, without the photographer being able to detect anything. The manipulation is only visible on the photo afterwards.

related project : the sms guerrilla projector

Playing the Building is an installation by David Byrne, on in New York until 24th August, go and see it. (thanks Andy)

Following on from Evoke, Usman Haque has created Primal Source for the Glow festival in California. “making use of a large-scale outdoor waterscreen projection system, Primal Source will appear like a mirage, glowing with colours and ebullient patterns generated by the competing or collaborative voices, music and screams of people nearby”. Coverage and video on Notcot

Golan Levin has created Double-Taker (Snout)… “orients itself towards passers-by, tracking their bodies and suggesting an intelligent awareness of their activities. The goal of this kinetic system is to perform convincing “double-takes” at its visitors, in which the sculpture appears to be continually surprised by the presence of its own viewers — communicating, without words, that there is something uniquely surprising about each of us.”

Jason Bruges Studio have created Applause, an array of computer controlled flags at the Goodwood Festival of Speed for Veuve Clicquot. The flags rotate to point at passing race cars or to watch polo matches. Concept render videos shown on Dezeen, documentation of project on main JBS site.

Karsten Schmidt (aka PostSpectacular) has been super busy with his Processing based works. These include generative book covers for Faber print on demand, a cover for Print magazine using genetic processes & 3d model printing, as well as a fiducial generator for use with Reactivision tracking software.

Snog is a new frozen yogurt shop in London. The branding concept & design by ico design, and lighting design, including a led video display ceiling with moving clouds by Cinimod Studio.

Theodore Watson, Emily Gobeille and Meredith Dittmar have a new show at teh Riviera gallery in New York until 10th August. Well worth a visit.

Originally posted by Chris OShea from Pixelsumo, on July 30, 2008 1:39 PM

Human activities can trigger natural disasters such as earthquakes and flooding.

"Dams are the most dangerous man-made structure likely to cause quake," says David Booth of the British Geological Survey. By artificially holding a large volume of water in one place, dams increase pressure on fractures beneath the surface of the earth. What's more, water has a lubricating effect, making it easier for the fractures -- or faults -- to slip.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 30, 2008 1:22 PM

Because I seem to inadvertently offend people I care about all the time. I didn't think my PR comment-- as covered on ValleyWag-- needed explanation because everyone standing around me (some in PR) found it just as offensive.

It's not that I don't want to be "mistaken" for a PR person or that I feel I am somehow "above" them. It's the idea that women's only possible place in the tech world is as a pretty face to charm male press into writing about them. It's not only offensive to me-- it's offensive to genuinely talented PR professionals who happen to be attractive women!!

My sincerest apologies to any PR friends I offended, but that bit of sexism has been almost a cliche joke in the Valley for a long time-- reviled by smart women in every aspect of the Valley, PR included. I'd be just as offended if someone said to me, "Oh, you must be an on camera repoter." I am an on camera reporter-- it's not a position I'm ashamed of-- but the implication is my only attribute is the way I look. Thought my meaning was understood.

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on July 30, 2008 1:17 PM

As we continue to refine our search algorithms to deliver more relevant results, we strive to be as open as possible about how we use data to improve your search experience. Today, we're rolling out a new feature in Google Web Search that will help you better understand how your search results are already customized. Over the next few days, you may start to see messages like this in the upper right corner of your search results page (click on the image to view larger):

You can click the "More details" link to get to a page like this:

You'll see these new messages whenever your search results have been customized based on one or more of the following types of information:

• Location. By default, we identify your approximate city location based on your computer's IP address and use it to customize your search results. If you'd like Google to use a different location, you can sign into or create a Google Account and provide a city or street address. Your specific location will be used not only for customizing search results, but also to improve your experience in Google Maps and other Google products.

• Recent searches. We take into account whether a particular query followed on the heels of another query. Because recent search activity provides such valuable context for understanding the meaning behind your searches, we use it to customize your results whenever possible, regardless of whether you're signed in or signed out. In order to customize your results and show you the customization details, we keep the most recent query on your browser for a limited time. After that, the information is removed from your browser and disappears immediately if you close your browser.

• Web History. If you're signed in and have Web History enabled, we customize your search results based on what you've searched for in the past on Google, and what web sites you've visited. One important note about Web History: it belongs to you and you have complete control over it. You can remove specific items or pause the service at any time. And if there's a particular search that you'd rather not have personalized based on your Web History, you can also just temporarily sign out of your Google Account.

This new feature doesn't change anything at all about how you search on Google and the results you get; it just gives you more of a behind-the-scenes look at how we customize your search experience. We consider this to be an important step in our commitment to transparency, and we hope you find it informative and useful.

Posted by Rachel Garb, Product Manager

Originally posted by Karen from The Official Google Blog, on July 30, 2008 12:31 PM

Google Base now offers more feedback on the performance of your items. Log in to your Google Base account and click on the new "Performance" tab.
You'll find information on how many items you have uploaded and how many of the items are active. You can also see how many clicks your items received on Google (e.g. on Product Search or on Real Estate search) and how many were retrieved through the Google Base Data API.

This new tool will allow you to spot trends with historical graphs of your account performance. You can also download detailed tables that show the performance of each of your top items.

We're excited about this new feature and hope you find it useful. More information can be found in our Help Center. And please share your feedback with us here.


Posted by Matthias Ernst, Software Engineer

Originally posted by Alyssa from Google Base Blog, on July 30, 2008 10:45 AM

On our last trip to New York we visited the Union Square Greenmarket. Within a minute of arriving a reporter and camera from the CBS Evening News asked if we could be interviewed on camera about babies and such. Actually one of them said "there's a cute baby" and ran over to us. Ben was interviewed since this was originally going to air on Father's Day (Tim Russert's death bumped the segment). 

For the record, we saw the original photograph of the reporter's son -- not the edited one -- and George was cute. Yes, sort of average cute, we agreed. But then when Steve Hartman (the reporter) said that George was only two months old, I exclaimed: "Oh, then he really *is* a cute baby. Babies that age are kind of meh. I mean, Penelope has always been cute in our eyes, but looking back at pictures we think 'this is cute?' Not throw-up ugly, but definitely not as cute as now." 

I wonder why that sound bite didn't make it. 

Watch for Pen and Ben right near the start of the video. And here's the story.

Here's also the email I sent to Steve Hartman -- after taping the interview:

Hi Steve,
You interviewed us at the Farmers Market -- we were the ones from San Francisco. As I was saying - the fact that your son is only 2-3 months and looks that cute is a good indicator that he really is cute. Attached are two photos of my daughter, Penelope -- one from 2 months and one from 7 months. She's a good-looking baby now, but at 2 months -- there was room for improvement. :)

Mena Trott

 

Originally posted by Mena from Dollarshort, on July 30, 2008 9:35 AM

The last time I ripped a player, it caused a bit of a firestorm. Somehow I think I’ll get less resistance this time.

Let me start off by saying that I have no reason to believe that Patterson is anything but a lovely human being, no reason to believe he used or uses performance enhancing drugs, and that I fully recognize that he has more baseball ability in his pinky than I have in my entire body.

But this guy is a bad baseball player and I don’t understand why any team plays him.

So far this year, lowest batting averages among players with at least 200 AB:

  Cnt Player              **BA**   AB Year Age Tm  Lg  G   PA  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB IBB  SO HBP  SH  SF GDP  SB CS  OBP   SLG   OPS  Positions
+—-+—————–+———+—+—-+—+—+–+—+—+—+—+–+–+–+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+–+—–+—–+—–+———+
    1 Corey Patterson      .183   208 2008  28 CIN NL  82 221  28  38  9  1  6  16   8   0  27   1   3   1   1  10  5  .216  .322  .538 *8
    2 Eric Byrnes          .209   206 2008  32 ARI NL  52 224  28  43 13  1  6  23  16   0  36   2   0   0   5   4  4  .272  .369  .641 *7/8
    3 Kenji Johjima        .209   268 2008  32 SEA AL  78 287  17  56 12  0  3  23  10   0  25   6   1   2   8   2  0  .252  .287  .539 *2/D
    4 Austin Kearns        .211   227 2008  28 WSN NL  62 261  25  48  8  0  5  27  27   0  43   6   0   1   7   1  2  .310  .313  .623 *9
    5 Carlos Ruiz          .211   213 2008  29 PHI NL  75 245  29  45  8  0  2  21  26   5  30   4   2   0  11   1  1  .309  .277  .586 *2
    6 Paul Konerko         .213   291 2008  32 CHW AL  78 335  33  62 11  1  9  35  37   2  58   5   0   2  12   1  0  .310  .351  .661 *3/D
    7 Khalil Greene        .215   386 2008  28 SDP NL 104 420  30  83 15  2 10  35  22   1  99   5   0   7   6   5  1  .262  .342  .604 *6
    8 Jason Varitek        .215   288 2008  36 BOS AL  87 324  21  62 16  0  8  31  32   1  82   3   0   1  10   0  0  .299  .354  .653 *2
    9 Franklin Gutierre    .216   245 2008  25 CLE AL  85 264  29  53 14  2  4  20  11   1  57   4   4   0   4   4  2  .262  .339  .601 *9/87D
   10 Gary Sheffield       .218   238 2008  39 DET AL  66 276  28  52 12  0  8  28  34   0  53   3   0   1  11   6  1  .322  .370  .692 *D/7      

And how about lowest OBP for the same criterion:

 Cnt Player             **OBP**   AB Year Age Tm  Lg  G   PA  R   H  2B 3B HR RBI  BB IBB  SO HBP  SH  SF GDP  SB CS   BA   SLG   OPS  Positions
 —-+—————–+———+—+—-+—+—+–+—+—+—+—+–+–+–+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+—+–+—–+—–+—–+———
    1 Corey Patterson      .216   208 2008  28 CIN NL  82 221  28  38  9  1  6  16   8   0  27   1   3   1   1  10  5  .183  .322  .538 *8
    2 Kenji Johjima        .252   268 2008  32 SEA AL  78 287  17  56 12  0  3  23  10   0  25   6   1   2   8   2  0  .209  .287  .539 *2/D
    3 Franklin Gutierre    .262   245 2008  25 CLE AL  85 264  29  53 14  2  4  20  11   1  57   4   4   0   4   4  2  .216  .339  .601 *9/87D
    4 Khalil Greene        .262   386 2008  28 SDP NL 104 420  30  83 15  2 10  35  22   1  99   5   0   7   6   5  1  .215  .342  .604 *6
    5 Mike Lamb            .263   219 2008  32 MIN AL  70 240  18  50 10  2  1  28  13   3  29   0   0   8   3   0  1  .228  .306  .569 *5/D3
    6 Freddy Sanchez       .267   399 2008  30 PIT NL  98 426  47  97 16  0  7  42  12   0  50   3   6   6  10   0  1  .243  .336  .603 *4/D
    7 Yuniesky Betancou    .267   365 2008  26 SEA AL 101 378  36  93 23  2  3  30   6   0  22   1   3   3  12   2  2  .255  .353  .620 *6
    8 Jose Vidro           .269   292 2008  33 SEA AL  80 314  27  66 11  0  7  45  18   2  36   0   2   2   4   1  1  .226  .336  .605 *D/3
    9 Eric Byrnes          .272   206 2008  32 ARI NL  52 224  28  43 13  1  6  23  16   0  36   2   0   0   5   4  4  .209  .369  .641 *7/8
   10 Miguel Olivo         .276   207 2008  29 KCR AL  58 217  18  51 15  0  9  29   7   2  56   2   0   1   4   2  0  .246  .449  .725 *2D       

Whoa! Nice lead for Patterson there. I’d say he’s got it locked up.

This is a guy who was paid $9.9 million over the last 3 years. That’s about average, but Patterson’s not even close to being an average player. On his main page, his defensive stats suggest that he is a slightly below-average defender. Taken on the whole, all of this suggests that he must be one of the very worst full-time players in the majors. Why not cut him loose?

Originally posted by Andy from Stat of the Day, on July 30, 2008 9:20 AM

The Observer reported last week that Extell Development wants to lease an underground chunk of its huge West Side project to big box retailer Costco. Included in the plan: 2,300 parking spaces. To put that in perspective, the Red Hook Ikea, projected to yield 17,000 car trips on peak days, makes do with a 1,400-car parking lot. The building where Extell wants to put the Costco and the garage will be mostly residential. No matter how many spaces are set aside for residents or shoppers, the inclusion of so much parking flies in the face of the city's stated goal to reduce traffic.

Nevertheless, Mayor Bloomberg has come out in favor of the Costco, the Sun reports:

At a press conference yesterday, Mr. Bloomberg said bringing the big-box warehouse chain to the city would help New Yorkers weather a difficult economic downturn. "Costco has a reputation of selling in bulk at very low prices, and given the economy today and the public's desire to buy things in bulk and buy them cheaper, it seems to me we should welcome any store that wants to come here," he said.

In light of the Mayor's own congestion reduction efforts, the endorsement makes little sense:

A spokesman for the Neighborhood Retail Alliance, Richard Lipsky, said the Costco store would run counter to another administration priority: reducing traffic.

"It is incongruous for the mayor, who supported congestion pricing, to support one of the most auto-dependent retailers in the country," Mr. Lipsky said.

Photo of Costco parking lot in Brooklyn: MaxKalehoff/Flickr

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog, on July 30, 2008 9:20 AM

Exformation is "explicitly discarded information".

Effective communication depends on a shared body of knowledge between the persons communicating. In using words, sounds and gestures the speaker has deliberately thrown away a huge body of information, though it remains implied. This shared context is called exformation. Exformation is everything we do not actually say but have in our heads when, or before, we say anything at all -- whereas information is the measurable, demonstrable utterance we actually come out with.

In my opinion, the more exformation you generate, the better your writing, design, art, photography, or blogging will be. (thx, ze)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 30, 2008 8:22 AM

"Words" used in this article about the season premiere of Mad Men:

skein
aud
preem
competish
skeds
spec
cabler

Here's a list of the other "words" used by Variety in their "articles".

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 30, 2008 7:09 AM

* via BuzzFeed!

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on July 30, 2008 6:38 AM

Web cam of the install through November 16, 2008

Originally posted by M.River from MTAA Reference Resource, on July 30, 2008 4:22 AM

I guess I should first admit I hate the show Punk’d. I mean, here’s a guy who is famous for lying about his age so he seems hipper, telling us that his show’s purpose it to deflate the big egos on other stars, and show them what truly matters in life. So he sets up situations where anyone would get upset, and then laughs when he upsets people. I call *cough*bullshit*cough*. (Also *cough*jerkface*cough*.)

So I have to admit I’m not predisposed to like The Mojave Experiment, where Microsoft took a bunch of “regular folks” XP users who were afraid of Vista, and told them Microsoft was going to show them a secret new operating system — which was actually Vista.

UNSURPRISINGLY, these people mostly said they liked Vista.

Now, if you read this blog, you know I pretty much hate Microsoft, because of their incredibly shady business practices (moreso in the early 1990s) and their shoddy products, most especially their operating systems, whose crappy user experience and programmer interfaces hold back the advance of technology. However, I’m not going to rail on Vista here. Seriously, I’m not.

What I am going to rail on is this “experiment.” (I use that word advisedly.)

--

I hate bad science. Hate it. Hate. So let’s look at not one, not two, but FOUR, yes FOUR (ah-ah-ah!) key flaws in this experiment, any single one of which would render its results meaningless:

• The Placebo Effect: Every time I do a software release, no matter how minor, even if I just change one word, in French, to another French word, someone will send me mail or post on a forum, “Thanks, this release seems a lot faster!” Do I make fun of them? Or videotape them and put it on a blog? No. Because it’s just human nature. If we are told something is new-and-improved, we prime ourselves to believe it (c.f. Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, which I’ll refer to again in a bit) and make it so in our minds.

This is why we have, for example, blind taste tests: because humans are proven to not be able make dispassionate judgments about subjects they already know about. So, if you say to someone, “Hey, I’m giving you a top-secret peek at a new operating system from Microsoft, you’re incredibly lucky and special, and I really value your opinion!” of COURSE they are going to like it. They almost can’t not like it.

• The Pepsi Challenge Effect: “The Pepsi Challenge” was a blind taste test that Pepsi overwhelmingly won (again, from Blink). Yet, most people still drink Coke. Why? Gladwell’s thesis is that a single sip of a soft drink is very different from drinking a whole can, which is the smallest unit most people imbibe. Pepsi usually wins the challenge because it's a sweeter drink, and initially people respond to this extra sweetness. But after drinking a can, Pepsi becomes cloying.

So, here I am, sat down in front of Mojave-err-Vista, and all I've ever used is XP. Well, look, nobody is doubting the graphics are prettier in Vista. It looks nice compare to XP (it should — they hired the guy who designed Aqua for Mac OS X).

I play with Mojave, and, yes, some system tasks are easier. Again, nobody doubts there are things that work much better. When I plug my iSight camera into Vista it shows up as a device and offers to let me take pictures in the Vista Explorer thingy. That’s kind of cool! Hey, I kind of like Mojave-nee-Vista!

Except, those glossy features aren’t why people downgrade from Vista to XP. Those are not the reason people hate on Vista!

Now, again, look — I don’t use Vista or XP for anything but games. I liked using Vista better, until the new UFO (X-Com) game that I had played great on XP, and wouldn’t launch at all on Vista. Then I bailed. That’s my story. There are apparently hundreds of others.

You, personally, may never have encountered a piece of hardware or an app that didn’t work on Vista, and you might be perfectly happy with it. I’m not going to try to argue you out of that happiness. My point is that the problems that Vista has become famous for are not the kinds of problems you encounter in a few minutes of playing with it in a controlled environment.

Vista is known for people initially liking it, then after a while discovering it’s not working for them, and “downgrading” to XP. This study has told us exactly what we already knew: that, initially, people like Vista. (Initially, people like having sex without condoms, too... it’s simply not a very good criterion all by itself.)

• The Perfectly Controlled Environment Effect: Microsoft set up the hardware. Microsoft brought the accessories. Microsoft picked the software. Microsoft sat people down with Vista experts driving the mouse, and walked people through Vista. What an INCREDIBLE SHOCKER that in this INCREDIBLY TIGHTLY CONTROLLED ENVIRONMENT Vista performed OK!

Microsoft had set up an environment with a philosophy similar to Apple’s: “Look, we work well with this hardware and software, and too bad if you want something different.” Unfortunately, that’s NOT why people choose Windows. They hack together their own machines, and they want their software to still run.

Did any of these customers bring in their favorite games and try to play them? Did they bring in their graphics tablets and discover they fail?

Did any of the test machines ever say, “Oh, I’m sorry, Windows Genuine Advantage has determined that you may be running an invalid copy of Windows, so please jump through these hoops or we’ll disable some of your hardware”? I’m going to guess no. But I’ve seen this message a lot. And I own three valid licenses to Windows.

• The Personal Tutor Effect: If you sit anyone down with an expert in a particular program, and the expert walks them through the features and answers their every question, chances are good that person is going to report that she had a good experience with the program. Very good, indeed.

Personal training is so important to customer experience that Apple thinks of it as a key asset of its Apple Stores. But Microsoft doesn’t have Apple Stores in real life. Or any analog. It’s you and a box with a holographic sticker on it. Good luck!

--

Microsoft has managed to prove that if you have a friendly expert on a controlled machine (with Vista pre-installed) showing a carefully selected subset of Vista features to an ignorant XP user for a few minutes, the XP user will often say he finds Vista acceptable. Wow.

This so-called experiment of Microsoft’s is an insult to science, and to our intelligence. And I am dying to see the out-takes from their shoot. I mean, how many people do you suppose like being told, “Hey, this giant, unpopular monopolistic software company just made an ass out of you! Ha ha! Our leading scienticians just PROVED that you LOVE VISTA and WANT TO MARRY IT. You are TOTALLY GAY for Vista! Haaaaaaa HAAAAAAA!”

Vista may or may not be an upgrade in user experience for most Windows customers. I personally prefer the feel of Vista over XP when the former works as well as the latter, but Vista has failed me on several occasions, and I also don’t enjoy running games MORE slowly than XP.

I've got to imagine that the Microsoft customers who took all the damn time to upgrade their machines to Vista, determined it was unworkable, and then had to take all the time to go BACK to XP, probably did so for a reason, possibly even a valid reason, and not because they had been swayed by bad word-of-mouth. I further imagine that these customers are completely livid at having Microsoft not say, “Oh, sorry, we’ll get right on those bugs,” but, instead, “You’re just stupidly following the crowd, and if you’d just free your mind up, you’ll discover you actually love Vista... hater.”

Is “Our Customers Are Stupid and Have No Idea What They Really Want” really Microsoft’s new mantra?

Again, wow.

Originally posted by Wil Shipley from Call Me Fishmeal., on July 29, 2008 8:10 PM

That's what I jokingly titled my column I just filed for BusinessWeek. (Late, again.) The column was about women in Silicon Valley, a topic my very benevolent, smart and good looking BW overlords asked me to tackle. (Can you tell I'm trying not to get fired for so many late columns?)

My first reaction was "Sure, I can write that in my sleep!" But it wound up being incredibly hard. For one thing, I think the position of women in the Valley is really at a crossroads and I wasn't initially sure how to wrap my head around a lot of conflicting data points. And contrary to popular opinion we don't all move in lock-step making sweeping generalizations pretty hard. Anyway, read the column later this week to see how I sorted it all out.

A woman's place in this industry has been heavy on my mind lately. First, there was that whole Playboy thing that so many people freaked out about, then this odd occurrence at the TechCrunch party (more funny in its textbook "what-you-don't-say" quality than truly offensive) and the most recent visit to the Valley from the girl no one can agree on: Miss Julia Allison. As you know from reading this blog, I like Julia. Is she any kind of serious tech or business journalist? No. But she's not trying to be. After having many a late night conversation with her about business and brand, I can say she's not just a fluke or a pretty face or a girl who had her career bestowed upon her by Nick Denton's magic wand. She's a savvy business woman and she's learned a lot in the last few years. I had her come by TechTicker to share her thoughts on why companies shouldn't be afraid to brand employees. Believe it or not, it's not too different from the advice Charlene Li gives companies in Groundswell. Clip below:

I get a lot of grief for being friends with Julia. But you know what? People also probably get grief for being friends with me. If there's one thing I've learned from my life on the Internet it's not to believe everything you read about people, but to meet them and judge for yourself.

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on July 29, 2008 3:31 PM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on July 29, 2008 2:49 PM

The Apple App Store has hit another milestone, but an even bigger one is fast approaching for the iPhone.

Read More...

Originally posted by cjade@arstechnica.com (Charles Jade) from Infinite Loop, on July 29, 2008 2:43 PM

My favorite part of the 2008 presidential campaign is watching normally sentient reporters tell me how John McCain is either reticent about talking about his POW experience, or ambivalent, or reluctant, or one of about a hundred other adjectives meant to tell me he doesn't talk about it very much and doesn't like doing so.

Five years as a POW involved a kind of suffering and terror I think very few of us can even comprehend. McCain has every right to talk about it constantly. But let's get real. He does talk about it constantly.

Where to start? Probably half of John McCain's ads contain photographs of either his time as a POW or his home-coming from Vietnam POW captivity. (That says quite a lot.) Those that don't refer to it explicitly refer to it implicitly by referencing sacrifice, heroism, etc. He and his campaign frequently talk about his days as a POW. The candidate frequently makes pseudo-self-deprecating jokes in campaign appearances about his time as a POW.

Beside his 2000 presidential run, it's been a very long time since McCain was in a competitive election race. And it's not too much to say that McCain's POW status -- both in explicit telling and in implicit references -- is the dominant theme of his entire campaign.

I understand why the campaign pushes this line: having McCain being 'reluctant' to talk about his heroism but then be a hero twice over by overcoming his reluctant to share the story with us is the ultimate spin twofer. But for the reporters, please don't treat us like we have the intelligence of field mice by trying to dump this nonsense on us.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on July 29, 2008 1:38 PM

A very interesting graph of the estimated ideological positions of US voters, senators, and representatives shows that members of Congress are much more liberal and conservative than are US voters, who fall somewhere in the middle. (via 3qd)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 29, 2008 1:08 PM

Nice & Smooth gets the Kanye Seal of Approval, and all those childhood hours I spent trying to memorize the lyrics to Sometimes I Rhyme Slow seem a little more justified. If only I’d been old enough at the time to understand that the song wasn’t literally about riding a white horse.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Jessica Coen, on July 29, 2008 12:40 PM

John Stauber weighs in on MoveOn.org: MoveOn's accomplishments are good, but its limitations are becoming more and more glaring and, in the case of the continued Democratic funding of the war in Iraq, problematic.

Originally posted by David Kurtz from Talking Points Memo, on July 29, 2008 12:20 PM

Well, some good news for Shia LaBeouf, I guess.

The police have told the Associated Press that the actor was not responsible for the car wreck he was involved in early Sunday morning. Sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore says detectives have determined that the other driver apparently ran a red light, and will be cited, even though Shia was totally wasted when he got behind the wheel.

News surfaced this morning that Shia's co-star Isabel Lucas was a passenger in the car.

So, it wasn't Shia's fault that he crashed into another car, but it's still his fault that he was an idiot.

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on July 29, 2008 12:05 PM

CASH Music, an acronym for ‘Coalition of Artists and Stakeholders’, has been an impressive member of the CC community since they debuted late last year. Part music label, part creative community, CASH Music has major plans to change the landscape of contemporary artistic output with a particular focus on the dialogue between content creators and consumers. They already have some amazing projects out under their moniker and with more on the way, we decided to catch up with CASH Music partner Jesse Von Doom to learn more about CASH’s goals, their business model, and what they have in store for the future.

Can you give our readers some background on CASH Music? How did it begin? Who is involved? On a broad level, what are you trying to accomplish?

CASH is an acronym for Coalition of Artists and Stake Holders. The name was chosen to reflect the goals and the people involved. The idea was born in a simple conversation between Kristin Hersh and Donita Sparks about achieving sustainability in the currently volatile music world. Their managers, Billy O’Connell and Robert Fagan respectively, continued the conversation and became the first two partners in what would be CASH. At the time I was running a graphic and web design firm with my business partner, Jack McKenna. A few business connections and friends-in-common later, Jack and I started working for CASH and quickly became partners ourselves. 

Since then we’ve won the support of seasoned advisors, organizations like Creative Commons, and some talented artists. But it still goes back to that first conversation between Kristin and Donita. We’re trying to help find healthy sustainability for artists while giving listeners more of a stake in the music for a new and better experience.

CASH is unsurprisingly identified with music. With that said, you have been working on a variety of projects that don’t have musical components. Why is that?

Really, we’re trying to show that remixing and sharing aren’t the only ways to get involved with music. It’s been so rewarding seeing the remixes generated at CASH, ccMixter, and in the wild; but I’ve also been thrilled to see people downloading and spending time with Adam Gnade’s Hymn California novel or flooding Jamie from Xiu Xiu with requests for haiku. People are forming real bonds with the music, the artists, and the communities they’re building around the releases. Music has always been a highly participatory art form — and we’re trying to harness that in new ways.

At CASH artists have been releasing full mix stems for remixing, tracks with community-added vocals, sheet music, writing that’s tied to the music — things that get an audience directly involved with the art. There are also elements of enhancing a release to the public. There are videos, interviews, photos, ebooks, and lyric sheets. Donita Sparks even opened up percentages of licensing for a track off her last album. Listeners could buy shares in a song, letting them participate in the profits from any TV or film licensing. 

The idea is that artists are exploring new ways to bring their music to an audience, with the ultimate goal being to strengthen both sides of that exchange.

Can you discuss CASH’s business model? There seems to be a combination between giving away things for free, selling collector goods, and asking for donations. How did you come up with this combination? How well has it worked so far?

That’s a fair summary of what’s up there now, but it’s more of an interim solution than a true business model. We’re committed to the idea of sustainability, both for the artists involved and for ourselves. That means finding the best model for each artist and helping them to move forward in that direction. When you see an artist offering a subscription, it’s because that’s what fits with their career, rather than it being something we’ve shoehorned them into. So our long-term model is based on the idea that if an artist succeeds at his or her goals, then we succeed. 

But to answer more directly, I’d say I’m very pleased so far. We’ve had over 4.5 million downloads, over 100,000 visitors, and hundreds of subscribers from all over the world. Virtually everything you see on the CASH Music site right now wouldn’t be possible without the support we’ve received from artists and their listeners. Our first project went live eight months ago, and we’ve been able to work on CASH for the better part of a year as a self-funded endeavor. While not all our projects involve commerce, the ones that do have made significant impact for the artists involved.

We’ve been especially happy to see people donating to artists. From the very beginning we were determined to provide direct access to music without placing artificial gateways in front of it. There are obvious questions about whether people would balk at giving money to an artist for content they could download for free, but we’ve seen numerous examples of people trying music and donating what they feel is a fair price. This is a pretty big deal to me. An artist spends time writing the music and money is spent on studio time, all to put out the best possible music. I like to think that people are genuinely considering all that, recognizing the effort, and helping it to continue. 

In every CASH project there is some level of CC licensing, be it large or small. Why did you decide to use CC licenses with CASH Music projects?

The real question is how could we have done it without Creative Commons. CC Licensing simplifies the process of community interaction, it pre-clears music for podcasting and sharing, and it lets the artist define what use of their work they see as fair while retaining their copyright and whatever level of commercial rights they choose to keep. I feel that the entire music industry, independents and majors, should be using Creative Commons licenses for shared music.

Have you seen any interesting cases of reuse as a result of using CC licenses?

Absolutely! There are two that jump to mind right away:

Kristin Hersh doing vocals for a Xiu Xiu track. This went basically unnoticed and I sort of love that. It was a gem hidden in plain sight, and something I could never see happening otherwise.

Lucas Gonze taking Deerhoof sheet music and cranking out midi and all sorts of helpful files. This is a great example. Deerhoof have released their first single off an upcoming album as sheet music, with the plea that artists record their own versions and submit them back to CASH. We’ve gotten some great examples of exactly that, but Lucas took the sheet music and created files that open up potential involvement to a much larger community. It was unexpected, impossible without CC licensing, and its proving an invaluable asset to the project.

In just skimming over the projects listed on CASH Music’s front page it is immediately obvious that CASH focuses on unique and engaging projects. Can you give us a hint of what may be coming in the future?

You can certainly count on more projects and more artist involvement. We’ll continue on in this invitation-only, highly custom way for a while; but there will be a greater role for the public with each new project. Ultimately we’re working towards a fully open-sourced, hosted platform that is available to all, and more details on that are forthcoming. We’re doing our best to be as open as possible, so fairly regular updates can be expected. In the coming months you’ll see new names, new ideas, and plenty of new music. 

photo by Taryn James | CC BY

Originally posted by Cameron Parkins from Creative Commons » CC News, on July 29, 2008 12:00 PM

The Marlins are looking to trade for a starting catcher, according to multiple reports over the last day or so.

In a post to MLB.com, Marlins reporter Joe Frisaro believes Giants C Benjie Molina is high on Florida’s shopping list, which also includes Nationals C Paul Lo Duca, Blue Jays C Gregg Zaun and Rangers C Gerald Laird.

…oh, man, can you imagine how excited lo duca would be to return to Miami and compete against the Mets in a pennant race…i like it…bring it on…

The Marlins have also shown interest in Pirates C Ryan Doumit and O’s C Ramon Hernandez, according to the Sun-Sentinel.

In a recent report for FoxSports.com, citing a team official, Ken Rosenthal wrote that there is a 50 percent chance that the Rangers end up trading Jarrod Saltalamacchia or Laird, who the Yankees are very interested in acquiring.

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on July 29, 2008 11:36 AM

At the Netroots Nation conference in Austin, TPMtv talked to former NATO Commander and retired General Wesley Clark and former Bush administration counter-terrorism chief Richard Clarke about what course America needs to take to save a darkening situation in Afghanistan ...

High-res version at Veracifier.com.

Originally posted by Ben Craw from Talking Points Memo, on July 29, 2008 10:53 AM

The last man to finish the Tour de France gets the unofficial title of winner of the Lanterne Rouge. Finishing last is not as easy as you might suppose.

The designation falls somewhere between insult and accolade. Mr. Vansevenant, who after Stage 18 sits in 150th place, some 3 hours and 45 minutes behind Mr. Sastre, is indeed the worst-placed rider in the Tour de France. But, in turn, he has outlasted those who abandoned the Tour through illness, injury or simple exhaustion; those who were eliminated for failing to finish within each day's time limit and are forced to withdraw; and those who were banned or withdrew for doping-related causes. From year to year, about 20% of the riders drop out. In other words, you can't simply coast to last place; you have to work for it.

Wim Vansevenant did hang on to become the first three-time winner of the Lanterne Rouge.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 29, 2008 10:48 AM

How accurately are sharks portrayed in popular culture?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Radar Online Features, on July 29, 2008 10:19 AM

Huge, huge news out of Alaska: In a major development that all but ensures that Dems will make a major Senate seat pickup in a state that hasn't elected a Dem to Congress since 1974, incumbent GOP Senator Ted Stevens has just been indicted.

Stevens, who was indicted on seven counts of public corruption, was already trailing his Democratic opponent Mark Begich, the mayor of Anchorage, by a decent margin in the polls. Begich's campaign has been founded on a commitment to public ethics, and this indictment will now give him even more ammunition.

The wild card here, of course, is whether Stevens steps aside and lets a stronger Republican take his place from the big GOP bench in this deep-red state, perhaps via a write-in bid for the upcoming primary. On the other hand, he might just be stubborn enough to stick around. Even if Stevens were to drop out, Begich is a strong candidate and would have a very good shot at winning.

In short, what was already a bad map for the Senate GOP just got a whole lot worse.

Late Update: It's worth pointing out that Stevens already had several primary challengers, and any one of them could end up being the new nominee. But none of them are big names, and Begich would start out as the favorite in a general election.

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on July 29, 2008 9:06 AM

Ask your users to email you with their thoughts, then never look at the App Store reviews with fewer than 4 stars.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on July 29, 2008 9:03 AM

Sen. Ted Stevens indicted on seven counts.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on July 29, 2008 8:45 AM

Merlin Mann:

Some days, the web feels like 5 people trying to make something; 5k people turning it into a list; and 500MM people saying, "FAIL."

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 29, 2008 8:24 AM

Eager to impress, the Chinese government is giving Beijing a made-for-TV face-lift

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Radar Online Features, on July 29, 2008 8:22 AM

In a recent report for SI.com, Jon Heyman notes that the Braves are most interested in trading 1B Mark Teixeira to the D’Backs.

However, according to the East Valley Tribune, a local Arizona newspaper, there is ‘no way’ the D’Backs will make such a move, since Atlanta is asking for Chad Tracy or Conor Jackson, Max Scherzer and Jarrod Parker.

In a report for FoxSports.com, Ken Rosenthal believes Tracy is available, but not Jackson, and that RHP Micah Owings could also be included in such a deal.

Meanwhile, Mark Bowman of MLB.com reports that the Yankees, Rays and Angels are more likely to acquire Teixeira than the D’Backs, while Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus also adds the O’s and Dodgers to the mix.

…the buzz around baseball continues to suggest that either tex stays in atlanta, or he goes to arizona…the Braves want jackson, or tracy, and that’s it…unless, of course, the Red Sox will part with Kevin Youklis, or the Angels will part with a Casey Kotchman, which they will not…

…my guess is that names like the Yankees, Rays and Angels get tossed out there to intimidate the D’Backs…

Nevertheless, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Braves GM Frank Wren admits to having a deal on the table, which could be why Heyman writes than Teixeira will be traded before the deadline.

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on July 29, 2008 6:57 AM

Photos: Left: Johan de Zoete, Stichting Museum Enschedé; Right: James Mosley

Four hundred years after his death, “metal type” was still being made the way Gutenberg made it. Using files and gravers, a steel rod was cajoled into the shape of a backwards letter; this steel ‘punch’ was struck into a brass blank, called a ‘matrix,’ which would serve as a mold for the casting of individual pieces of lead type. (The term ‘lead type’ is a convenience: the material of printing type is more accurately called ‘type metal,’ as it contains a special typefounders’ blend of lead, tin, and antimony.)

This elaborate pas de cinque requires five different materials, each chosen for a different metallurgical property. Steel’s tensile strength helps it hold small details and resist the blow of the hammer; the malleability of brass makes it a good candidate for receiving the steel; lead, cheap and abundant, has a low melting point; tin is more fluid than lead when molten (yet more durable than lead when it hardens); and antimony is highly crystalline, giving printing types more crisply defined edges.

The few typefaces that have departed from this process have done so for very good reason. Common were large typefaces that would have been impractical to cut in steel (and impossible to strike into brass) which were instead made as wood forms, which were pressed into sand molds from which metal type was cast. But a lingering mystery are the Chalcographia in the collection of the Enschedé foundry in Haarlem, said to have been made with ‘brass punches.’ James Mosley corrects the record on his Typefoundry blog, explaining the types’ unusual gestation through a convoluted five-part process. The photographs, like the types themselves, are marvelous. —JH

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, on July 29, 2008 6:51 AM

I don't know how many people share my views, but I feel that the trio of sets Topps released from 1976 to 1978 are three of the most underrated sets the company has ever produced.

The multitude of stars found in these sets is astounding. The year under review, 1976, featured second-year Brett, Yount, Rice, Carter, Hernandez, and Lynn, plus a third-year Winfield and a bevy of others not yet waist-deep in their respective All-Star careers. Guys like Mike Schmidt, Dwight Evans, Carlton Fisk, George Foster, David Concepcion, Greg Luzinski, JR Richard--each was getting really just their first true taste of success.

I haven't even mentioned the mid-to-late career stars like Jim Hunter, Carl Yastrzemski, Pete Rose, Joe Morgan, or Gaylord Perry. Or Hank Aaron, whose importance to the 1976 set is unmatched (though I'll never understand why Topps didn't checklist Aaron on card #660 in 1976, as he was in 1975).

Yet despite the concentration of established and nearly-established stars within the set, there are relatively few worthwhile rookies. I think you can even count them on one hand: Dennis Eckersley, Willie Randolph, Ron Guidry, Chet Lemon, and Mike Flanagan. That's not too many, especially for a decade that developed the great stars of the following decade.

The other reason I've listed this set this low is because of the photo quality and design. A lot of collectors are endeared towards the 1976 design, but it feels homemade and a little cheap to me, especially on those particular cards that feature airbrushing. And while we're talking about airbrushing (a truly lost art), were this a countdown of the greatest airbrushed sets, 1976 would come in at or near the top of the heap.

Best of the Set
With so many great stars from which to choose, I'm going to go with an obvious choice (at least it should be obvious if you my taste in cards): 1975 Joe Garagiola/Bazooka Bubble Gum Blowing Champ Kurt Bevacqua (#564). This card has got it all: a ridiculously large bubble gum bubble, a ridiculously terrible baseball player who saved his best performance for the World Series, top billing for Joe Garagiola, and something that looks like a bubble protractor or forceps. What's not to love?

Originally posted by Ben Henry from The Baseball Card Blog, on July 29, 2008 4:30 AM

A new study just published in PLoS One reports that learning to juggle alters the structure of motion detection areas in the brain within as little as 7 days.

Led by neuroscientist Joenna Driemeyer, the study builds on a previous research that also found juggling could alter brain structure, although this previous study waited three months before the brain was checked for alterations using high resolution structural MRI scans.

This new study also took 20 non-jugglers and asked them to learn to juggle, but scanned them after 7, 14 and 35 days.

After only 7 days, a motion specialised part of the occipital lobe known as V5 had increased in density. In both studies, the changes were maintained over the subsequent weeks of practice, but these areas returned to their pre-learning state after several weeks without juggling.

This is an interesting example of rapid 'neuroplasticity', the ability of the brain to adapt structurally to new situations.

However, the authors are careful to note that they can't tell whether the brains of the participants had generated more neurons, or whether existing cells grew in size, or additional glial cells were developed, or maybe there were just changes in how much blood or other brain fluids packed the area.

Also, the fact that changes seemed to occur at the beginning of the learning cycle but that further practice maintained but didn't cause additional changes led the researchers to speculate that learning a variety of new things, rather than simply practising old skills, may be most effective in terms of brain structure alterations.

Link to 'Changes in Gray Matter Induced by Learning — Revisited'.
Link to PubMed entry for paper.

Full disclosure: I'm an unpaid member of the PLoS One editorial board.

Originally posted by vaughan from Mind Hacks, on July 29, 2008 4:00 AM

It’s quite a binge. A treeshrew in Malaysia has subsisted on alcoholic nectar for millions of years, according to research published this week in PNAS.

And six other species also appear to pop in on the animal's local bar. According to the researchers behind the work this is the evidence for species other than humans having chronic alcohol intake.

“We discovered that seven mammalian species in a West Malaysian rainforest consume alcoholic nectar daily from flower buds of the bertam palm, which they pollinate,” write Frank Wiens and colleagues. “The 3.8% maximum alcohol concentration that we recorded is among the highest ever reported in a natural food.”

One of these species, the pentailed treeshrew, appears to handle its drink though. The researchers observed no wayward, intoxicated behaviour from the creatures even though their alcohol doses would make a human tipsy. What is not clear is whether the shrews benefit from the alcohol or how they deal with the risk from continuously high blood alcohol levels.

Other species drinking at the palms were the common treeshrew, the plantain squirrel, the gray tree rat, the Malayan wood rat, the chestnut rat, and the slow loris.

In Scientific American Robert Dudley of the University of California Berkeley says the study may support his theory that human fondness for alcohol comes from our past seeking of energy rich plants.

“Humans have an affinity for ethanol (plant-derived alcohol), and captive primates are well known to like to drink anthropogenically sourced ethanol,” he told Sciam.com. “Natural consumption of dietary ethanol deriving from fermenting fruits or nectar has never been studied previously, and this is a highly fruitful area for future investigation.”

Weins told the Daily Telegraph: “This discovery will probably not lead directly to a cure for human alcoholism in the sense that they have something that we can copy and are less vulnerable. In a general way, I think it likely that understanding the causes and consequences of treeshrew alcohol drinking in the natural environment will give new directions in the search for better therapies.”

Watch a video of the shrew here.

Image: Pentailed treeshrew / Annette Zitzmann
Video: National Academy of Sciences, PNAS (2008).

Originally posted by Daniel Cressey from The Great Beyond, on July 29, 2008 3:54 AM

The whole techie-bringing-San-Fran-to-its-knees story keeps getting better and better -- it turns out that the passwords that Terry Childs gave to San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom only allowed access to the network from a single hidden computer in the Hall of Justice. Better still, Childs locked well over a thousand modems in filing cabinets throughout various city agencies, all of which are connected to the system and which might be capable of allowing him (or others) access to the network to wreak more havoc. Was anyone overseeing the design and implementation of this network?

Originally posted by Jason from Q Daily News, on July 28, 2008 6:20 PM

Now at 7 and 1/2 weeks old! It's not going to be easy to choose one.
Another serious Cute Overload.  Please see the original post about Paw Paw's grandsons for more information. And don't forget to click below to continue reading and to see more photos.

Originally posted by mslo1 from The Martha Blog, on July 28, 2008 2:07 PM

Examiner column for July 30.

    “You teach English? I’d better watch what I say!” pops up frequently in the nonclassroom life of all English teachers. I used to complain silently, “As though all English teachers do is correct grammar!” yet there are limitations to what we can and can’t teach.

    What we can’t teach is exactly what parents would like their children to learn: how to write well, how to appreciate the English language, how to appreciate literature. We do teach writing and language and literature, but we can never teach how to love and appreciate the material we present. That we can only model.

    Modeling, though, can be a wonderful guide. We know, as parents, that what we model is exactly what our children are absorbing—even when we think they don’t notice. Teachers, likewise, convey their love for the subject they teach.

    Yet my students are always surprised when, in my Advanced Composition class, I inform them that I will not be able to teach them how to write well. They look even more skeptical when I tell them they will learn as much from one another as they will from me.

    No one can teach how to recognize the right “sound” of a sentence, yet repeated exposure to good sentences helps train the ear. No one can teach how to provide a satisfying and non-repetitive ending to an essay or short story, yet recognizing that certain endings are better than others conditions students to know when a piece of writing is finished.

    The workshop method in composition classes has the effect of facilitating better writing in students, but it is thanks to the continual reading and commenting on others’ writing that they learn to set the bar higher for their own writing. Good writing simply begins to sound good to many students; to those who are “tone deaf,” it remains all about grammatical mistakes.

    My favorite illustration of this concept comes from a writing text by William Zinnser, “On Writing Well.” Zinsser rewrites Thomas Paine’s first line from “Common Sense,” and shows that you can’t explain why one line sounds better than another, even when they say the same thing. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” sounds better than “Times like these try men’s souls” or “Soulwise, these are trying times.” A good writer hears the difference.

    One student asked me last week why, if a paper had “nothing wrong with it,” it wasn’t an A+. Like Zinsser, I had a hard time explaining why one piece of writing is better than another, even when they are both “correct.” Workshop groups help to guide students to the level where they recognize when language begins to soar. I try to model good writing, but ultimately their own ears teach them.

    Students recognize good writing when their eyes widen and they exclaim, “That’s REALLY good.” And then they go off to replicate that effect themselves—not through imitation, but by utilizing their own voices in prose.

    I still haven’t taught them how to write better, yet their writing has improved. Their ears know the difference; it isn’t about correctness, but about what sounds exactly right.

Originally posted by Erica Jacobs from TeacherTalk, on July 28, 2008 2:04 PM

I asked for more videos of people jumping off things and yelling the title of my book. Hillary Brown complied. And, I think, may have outdone Miss Allison. I'll be bringing Ms. Brown a free UGBT T-shirt when I hit Des Moines this weekend. You get one too if you send a video! Enjoy! (And sorry I can't seem to make this not take over the whole screen-- but it's just that good it should be viewed large!)

Originally posted by sarah lacy from SarahLacy.com, on July 28, 2008 12:37 PM

July 19, 2008 -- Apes and Androids perform at the Siren Music Festival After Party at the Music Hall of Williamsburg in Brooklyn, NY.

They've quickly become one of my favorite bands to shoot, especially because they bring the Foundling Circus Guild with them.

View the entire set.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from kathryn yu dot com, on July 28, 2008 11:40 AM

That's how a TV series gets under your skin. A movie, by its nature, affects you like a singular event, an adventure, an unforgettable first date. We fall in love with a TV series, however, by increments - it's a long-term relationship, with all the ups and downs that implies. The ritual of watching weekly can't help but weave a favorite show into the fabric of our lives.

...

When a long-running TV show ends, it doesn't just wrap up the story and sign off. There's more to it -- if you've been a faithful viewer, that show has seen you through highs and lows. There were plenty of nights when The X-Files lifted my spirits, weeks when it was as reassuring as an old friend, times when it blessedly distracted me from problems both large and small.

- From Kristi Turnquist's ode to The X-Files in this morning's Oregonian

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on July 28, 2008 11:27 AM

A pair of Levi's from the 1890s are up on eBay.

This old pair of LEVI'S were found in a mine in the Rand Mining District, on the Mojave Desert,. California. They are covered in candlewax from the candle's the miner was using to light the tunnel he was working in. They were found with and old paper bag with the name of a mercantile store which operated between 1895 and 1898 in the town or Randsburg. Their was also a gunny sack with the initials A.P.K. and Randsburg marked on it. A.P.K. is through to be Adam P. Kuffel who was a partner in the mercantile store.

These pants have the cloth label vice the leather label. The label (pictured) indicates that they are size W34 x L33, They are copper riveted with the rivets marked L.S. & Co. S.F. They are buckle back (pictured) with suspender buttons. Buttons are silver in color and are all marked LEVI STRAUSS & CO. S.F.CAL. Tthe pants were made with just one back pocket on the right hand side.

With 2 days to go, the current high bid stands at $7300. (via reference library)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 28, 2008 11:23 AM

Two nights ago, Canadian photographer (and Worldchanging Chairman Edward Burtynsky was speaking at the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, proposing a 10.000-year gallery to go along with the Clock of the Long Now, as part of their ongoing Seminars About Long term Thinking.

C. N. Track No. 1

For those not familiar with the project, among many other endeavors, the foundation is planning to build a mechanical clock in a remote mountain site, designed by Danny Hillis [Pati Hillis, Danny's partner, has served on Worldchanging's board - editor.], which will run for ten-thousand years along with a library. Practically all the foundation's projects aim to provide counterpoint to today's "faster/cheaper" mind set and promote "slower/better" thinking. The foundation's work is very intriguing in the way that they undertake seemingly vast projects which in turn force their creators to radically re-think many of the notions of today's processes as we are not used to long term thinking, when it's becoming increasingly clear that our survival might depend on foresight.

Burtynsky says the clock (which will most likely live at Mount Washington) reminds him of land-art projects like James Turrell's Roden Crater or Walter De Maria's Lightning field, in the way that it might almost become a site of pilgrimage once it will be finished. In order to give the future pilgrims an additional benefit, and also a sort of cultural context out of which the clock was coming from, he thus proposes a gallery of contemporary photography to go along with it, a Long Gallery. As he pointed out, most cave paintings and other archaeological findings like the pornography in Pompeii was simply a testament to that period's system of thinking, and -- being a photographer himself -- he proposes that we do the same. So what's the case for photography over contemporary art like painting? He says that photography essentially is an outcome of an industrial process, which has been shaped by us, but by which we're also shaped as well. We have personal memories, but often enough they refer to photos that have been taken of us on our way through time, and the very same applies-thinking of iconic historical photos- to humanity as a whole.

Mines 22

Finding a technology for creating ultra-durable photographic prints proved to be quite a challenge. Initially looking at inkjet-prints which might employ the same pigments as highly durable paints used in cars, he ended up with a process which was developed in 1855: the carbon transfer print. This time and money intensive process produces the most durable prints we know, but is somewhat of a dying technology which only a handful of companies in the world still employ. With this project, they also help to revive it a bit. The prints would be applied on special paper, which as opposed to the alternative porcelain, is unbreakable and less sensitive to fluctuations in atmospheric temperature and moisture. However, there's still hope for a much less expensive yet equally durable inkjet-technology to appear before the launch of the gallery in 5-10 years time.

So what to show? Burtynsky proposes a range of different exhibitions to be stored with the clock, each curated by another photographer and consisting of approximately 20+ images. He as gathered three proposals so far which are somewhat different approaches to representing the contemporary world:

Manufacturing #2

Canadian photographer Vid Ingelevics proposes a Museum of the Mundane, which would working with the elements of the banal, "stuff that we already feel archival about", as Stewart Brand later put it. The show would consist of images on two sides-side one shows photos of everyday objects taken from two big Canadian archives, one of which belongs to a major department store, mostly items from the past. Side two shows photos of items that will be bought in contemporary dollar-store, representing a more present and probably also more readily disposable world of things. It would be an unofficial poll of the the "true necessities of life", and as such anticipating a future archaeological dig, in most of which usually the mundane is discovered and often most intriguing (see Pompeii pornography) because it shows that people's needs and desires often change very little.

The second proposal is curated by Marcus Schubert and would be titled Observations from a Blue Planet. His approach is to collect images from the web, in a found-footage manner and present similarities and differences in the form of diptychs. For Schubert, planet Earth is an "experiment in diversification and consumption" and the juxtapositions (for instance well-fed American families from the sixties and starving families from East Africa, Manhattan and slums and the likes) serve to show us the range of lives that exist within the same environment.

Oil Fields No. 25

Finally, the third exhibition would be curated by Burtynsky himself, mostly talking photos from his series In the Wake of Progress which he has been working on for 25 years. Most of his work focuses on the notion of industrialization which was created in Europe and in the last centuries has changed our relationship to what we regard as nature as profoundly as probably nothing before. In the process, internal combustion engines have boosted human expansion to the point where in Burtynsky's lifetime, human population has so far more than tripled. His work, mostly landscapes which show how "the surface of the Earth is a skin and [how] we shape it in a certain way", are meant to be reflexions of these relationships.

For him, mines are especially iconic, since it has been natural resources like metals and especially oil (driving the engines) for which the Earth is being reshaped in many places. Burtynsky has taken many photos of mines, for instance the largest copper mine in the World in British Columbia, or more recently the oil sands of Northern Alberta where oil-soaked bitumen is being converted into oil in what is currently the largest surface-engineering project on the planet, and they've only touched 1% of the area. The forest that is standing on top (sometimes called "The right lung of the Earth") of the sand is being cleared and this and other reasons cause the oil to have a four times larger carbon footprint than even regular oil. For this reason, the state of California is refusing to import oil from this source.

Oxford Tire Pile No. 8

Other impressive examples include 40 million tires that had been dumped outside of Modesto, California in a field so massive that a power plant was built to turn the tires into energy, halfway through which the field caught fire and the project had to be abandoned. Or spaces in granite-mines in Vermont and the famous marble-quarries in Carrara, Italy, where the removal of giant cubes of stone has created an "inverted architecture" of sorts, just as copper and ore-mines often create inverted pyramids into the ground.

Carrara Marble Quarries

More recently, Burtynsky has focused on the notion of globalization and received a lot of acclaim for his large-scale images of Chinese factories (with a mobile workforce currently in the range of 100 million people) and Bangladeshi ship-breaking yards. This he argues, "is the export of ideas from the west, unbolted and transported to China" to become the world's factory. Which is consistent with the notion that his images are trying to connect us to the earlier ages of our industrial society -- a world that still exists, but has been moved out of sight for many Westerners, which is why these photos today serve a particular role.

Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!

(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 11:13 AM)

Originally posted by Regine Debatty from WorldChanging, on July 28, 2008 11:13 AM

This fantastic slo-mo video sequence, in which top skateboarders ride through a postindustrial landscape rigged with explosives, is the intro to a skateboarding DVD called Fully Flared, which Ty Evans, Spike Jonze, and Cory Weincheque directed for the footwear company Lakai. These people are reckless and crazy, and we get to watch! Make sure you stick around until the end, because you'll get to see an entire staircase get blown up with napalm. The music is M83's "Lower Your Eyelids to Die With the Sun." [via my pal Jonathan Hayes, again!]

Originally posted by Andrew Hearst from panopticist, on July 28, 2008 10:57 AM

Four-star chef Eric Ripert checked out the burgers at McDonald's and Burger King to use as a pattern for a burger at his new D.C. restaurant. Part of what he learned is proportion is everything.

Just looking at the basic burgers at each of these chains -- particularly the Big Mac -- showed me a couple of very key things: First of all, the burgers are a perfect size. You can grab them in both hands, and they're never too tall or too wide to hold on to. And the toppings are the perfect size, too -- all to scale, including the thickness of the tomatoes, the amount of lettuce, etc. In terms of the actual flavors, they taste okay, but you can count on them to be consistent; you always know what you're going to get.

Ripert's findings dovetail quite nicely with my theory of sandwichcraft.

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 28, 2008 10:08 AM

The 2008 Tour de France cycling race is now over, won by Spain's Carlos Sastre, with a time of 87h 52m 52s. Sastre beat second-place finisher Cadel Evans of Australia by only 58 seconds, over a 21 stage course that added up to over 3,500 kilometers (2,175 miles). This entry covers the second half (including mountain stages) of the Tour - for earlier coverage, see part I. (27 photos total)

The breakaway group Niki Terpstra (R) of the Netherlands and team Milram and Florent Brard of France and team Cofidis make their way during stage thirteen of the 2008 Tour de France from Narbonne to Nimes on July 18, 2008 in Narbonne, France. (Jasper Juinen/Getty Images)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on July 28, 2008 8:47 AM

While I'm not always a fan of Zaha Hadid, I am excited about the Chanel Mobile Art exhibit coming to NYC in September 2008. Having already made stops in Hong Kong and Tokyo, the 75,000 sq foot structure designed by Hadid will touch down in Central Park around 70th street before moving on to London, Moscow and Paris. Lagerfeld always thinks big.

Originally posted by Tyler Askew [New York] from M a blog / Tyler Askew, on July 28, 2008 8:17 AM

Yes, Babbo has incredible food, but it's hard to notice when mom is fainting in the corner due to heat exhaustion: "I didn't know how much longer we could last. We finally asked the waiter if he could turn up the air conditioner, but he said it hadn't been working properly...As the sixth and seventh dishes arrived, all we could talk about was the heat as my mom propped herself on the wall as if she was about to faint. At this point, the objective went from celebrating the birthdays over a nice savory meal to finishing as fast as we could..." [Mona's Apple]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on July 28, 2008 8:14 AM

At Peidmont High School in California, two coaches have devised an offense in which all 11 men are responsible for carrying the ball down the field Plays start with two quarterbacks and go from there.

Yes, per the rules of the game, only five players are eligible to catch a pass during a particular play and seven players have to set up on the line of scrimmage. But in the minds of Bryan and Humphries, you can develop an infinite number of plays with an infinite number of formations.

Talk about confusing a defense.

"It presents a different set of challenges for defenses because they have to account for which guys go out or might go out," Bryan said. "Those guys who are ineligible to go down the field and catch a pass, they can take a reverse pitch or a negative screen or a hitch behind the line of scrimmage.

This 4-minute video provides a good look at how the offense functions and there's lots more at a11offense.com. (via clusterflock)

(link)

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on July 28, 2008 7:12 AM

Sad news for the neighborhood: our beloved David's Bagels is closing at the end of August, no thanks to the Hot and Crusty that opened down the block. [via Eater]

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from A Full Belly, on July 28, 2008 6:42 AM

We carry things to a lot of decimal places here at BP, but the saddest is the five-place zero that indicates that mathematically, a team is completely hopeless in the playoff odds report. The Nats were the first team to hit the Alighieri Number in the 2008 season. The Mariners aren’t far behind, showing only .00005, or five playoff appearances in the million simulations Clay Davenport runs. Five? Wouldn’t you like to know the shape of those five seasons, those historical comebacks or collapses?

The Playoff Odds Report comes in three flavors and is updated every day at BP.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on July 28, 2008 5:46 AM

East Village: According to Jeremiah's Vanishing, the 21 year-old bagel shop and go-to spot for East Village residents, David's Bagels, is set to close at the end of August. It's not rising rents, and it's not slow business. Instead the shutter is all due to the new chain store Hot & Crusty: "I spoke with the owner, Vilai Wangkeo, and she told me that since the landlord opened a Hot & Crusty franchise next door, 'He doesn't want the competition,' so her lease will not be renewed." This comes as somewhat of a double blow to the locals who weren't jonesing for the upscale deli chain in the first place.
· David's Bagels [JVNY]
· Plywood Report: Hot & Crusty [~E~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on July 28, 2008 5:07 AM

Kristen is a very, very lucky person. First of all, she was lucky enough to find this fabric on eBay:




Then, she was lucky enough to go to Comic Con, which I have always wanted to do ... not just for the comics, but for the clothes. I mean costumes. Whatever.

And finally, she (naturally) decided that a trip to Comic Con needed a new dress, and made this one:



Hmm, perhaps now that I think about this, it might not be luck -- it's starting to look suspiciously like good planning and hard work ... which is even more impressive!

You should totally go check out Kristen's blog) to see the side and back views and the awesome red shoes she chose to go with the dress, too.

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on July 28, 2008 5:00 AM

Set on building the perfect burger, Eric Ripert did most of his research in unfamiliar territory: McDonald's and Burger King: "First of all, the burgers are a perfect size. You can grab them in both hands, and they’re never too tall or too wide to hold on to. And the toppings are the perfect size, too—all to scale, including the thickness of the tomatoes, the amount of lettuce, etc...you can count on them to be consistent; you always know what you’re going to get." [Gourmet]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on July 28, 2008 4:45 AM

Nas "Queens Get The Money" - As an album opener, "Queens Get The Money" feels deliberately tentative and uncomfortably candid. The music has the sound of a modern documentary score -- it's all atmosphere, beeps, and ticks; the sort of music you might use in a scene showing your protagonist feeling thoughtful and conflicted late at night. As a result, it feels as if Nas is sneaking you into his record in the wee hours of the night, and telling you very important things that you'll only half-remember at dawn. Though the majority of Nas' new album -- it is officially untitled, but you probably know its real name -- confronts anxiety about race and the media head on, the intimate, elliptical "Queens Get The Money" is more effective, mainly because it hits its points with a stealthy precision whereas other cuts on the record opt for an overblown, melodramatic seriousness that suits the subject matter, but feels far too obvious. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)

Originally posted by Matthew Perpetua from FLUXBLOG: You Must Be Supercool To Proceed - YOUR LIFE DEPENDS ON IT!, on July 28, 2008 4:44 AM

I realize we are all getting a bit sick of the bOINGbOING-esque repetition level of this topic, but I believe you’ll forgive me for bringing it up again by the end of this post. This morning on the train, there was this typical bedhead guy, and he’s wearing a effing Goo tshirt. As I’m thinking about how weird this is, I notice the shirt looks way too new to be an OG Goo tshirt, at least not one that was ever worn. So I’m thinking, is like Urban Outfitters reissuing classic 90s alt rock t’s (how good of an idea would that be btw?) So then the guy turns around. The back of the shirt says “MARC JACOBS 2008”. The Oracle at Mountain View reveals:

• Marc Jacobs had SY play a recent fashion show in NYC, maybe more than one?
• He put a Goo/Marc Jacobs T-Shirt on the back of each chair.
• He gave out some sort of gift box or bag with the Goo art on it. Thurston Moore was pissed he didn’t get one (what do you think was in it? Scharfen Berger chocolate bar and a Skulltones cassette?)

Who would have thought WFMU and Marc Jacobs would ever be so on the same wavelength?

Also, caution demands I remind you that he who makes a bride of the zeitgeist is soon widowed.

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on July 28, 2008 1:39 AM

I stopped by Bothell Ski & Bike today and met the owners Greg and John. Greg’s ride - a Scott Addict with SRAM Red all grammed out with Zipp cranks, Zero Gravity brakes, and all the greatest roadie bike porn. A hot bike for sure, but I think he was almost more excited to show me his single speed Tommasini.

The single speed was given just as much attention to detail as his road ride. Phil Wood track hubs, Campagnolo Chorus Ti post, Deda Zero stem, White Industries freewheel, Nitto B125 Steel track bars - the works. It was the first bike I’ve lifted in a while that actually listed forward because of the heavy steel bars. The lugs, the vibrant paint. That bike is art. I didn’t get a chance to ride it so I may have to stop by again when I have more time.

Originally posted by Andrew Martin from Bike Hugger, on July 27, 2008 9:45 PM

Members of my parents’ and grandparents’ generations were frequently able to afford vacation homes. They traveled there on the weekends, leaving their city homes for upstate/the mountains/the beach/the lake/wherever. Now, a combination of factors has eliminated this for my generation:

• Real-estate prices. We can’t even afford one home. When our parents and grandparents bought their homes, they cost 2-4 times their annual salaries. Now they cost 10 times our annual salaries.
• Overcrowded destinations. Those lakes and mountain towns are packed full now, and the quaint, less-dense places are much further away from where we live.
• Depressed destinations. Those small towns have been gutted and crushed by the departure of domestic industry and the Wal-Martization of small-town America. They’re ghost towns now.
• Gas prices. It’s harder for many families to justify driving 2 hours upstate frequently when it costs $50-100 each trip.

I can see this very clearly in what I know: upstate New York. But I don’t know if it’s universal. Does this apply to other metro areas?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on July 27, 2008 8:04 PM

(via retrofuturo set on flickr)

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on July 27, 2008 4:49 PM

Why are modern sneakers so ugly?

I’ve been asking the same question for years. Unless you want to look like you’re about to take the next flight to the Moon, or bike the Tour de France, you’re pretty much out of luck. Such is the reason I’ve stuck with the New Balance M992 for so long; if you count its direct predecessor, the M991, I’m on my 7th pair.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Justin Blanton, on July 27, 2008 3:32 PM

A grandson remembers the professor who inspired a generation of literary giants.

Originally posted by By ADAM VAN DOREN from NYT > Jack Kerouac, on July 27, 2008 1:55 PM

From Required Eating

If you didn't get yourself over to Serious Eats New York this week, here are some of the great things you may have missed.

Beat the Heat: We send Emily Koh, our resident spicy foods expert, to Sripraphai in Jackson Heights, Queens, where she discovers that heat and flavor can find a perfect balance.

Hot Doggin' It: In honor of Colombian Independence day, Joe DiStefano hits up Xtasis for a perro and cholado.

Filipino Pork Fat: Robyn Lee experiences the joy of crispy pork fat at Pistahan in the East Village.

Mmmmm, Korean Doughnut: Our resident sweets expert Kathy YL Chan heads to Koreatown to enjoy the nutty charm of a sweet rice twist from Koryodang.

Originally posted by Zach Brooks from Serious Eats, on July 27, 2008 12:00 PM

The Mets defeated the Cardinals by the score of 9 to 1 in Shea Stadium today.

For a recap, boxscore, stats, etc., from today’s game, go to SNY.tv.

The formula for this game was simple: Johan Santana turned in a dominant complete-game, six-hitter, during which he allowed just one run, while David Wright, Ramon Castro and Fernando Tatis spent time dropping fly balls in to the bleachers.  The result was a clean, confident, comfortable win.

Carlos Beltran made a fabulous catch, running, tracking, leaping and robbing a potential home run, going above and beyond the wall to snow-cone the fly ball.  Oustanding.  As Keith Hernandez repeatedly said, “It just doesn’t get any better than that.”

The crowd chanted ‘Johan (clap, clap), Johan (clap, clap),’ throughout the entire ninth inning, willing Santana on to the first complete game from a Met since 2006.

The Mets are a cohesive team right now, and I like it.

The Mets begin a three-game series with the Marlins tomorrow in Florida, with John Maine (9-7, 4.20 ERA) taking on Ricky Nolasco (10-6, 3.99 ERA).

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Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on July 27, 2008 11:54 AM

From Required Eating

Photo by clayirving on Flickr

Is there anything better than biting into a perfectly ripe, sweet, and juicy peach? Maybe a bite of warm peach cobbler served with a scope of vanilla ice cream! Peaches typically peak during late June through July in the South, and July and August in the North. Look for peaches that have a uniform yellow background color, (golden yellow on yellow peaches, creamy yellow on white peaches) with no green around the stem. A ripe peach will yield slightly to pressure. Once ripe, they'll keep in the refrigerator for a few days. Here are a few recipes we think are worth trying this peach season:

Peach Recipes

Paige Denison's Deep-Dish Peach Cobbler [SE]
Dorie Greenspan's Crunchy and Custardy Peach Tart [SE]
Peach Blueberry Cake [Simply Recipes]
Alton Brown's Individual Peach Upside-Down Cake [Food Network]
Grilled Peaches with Blue Cheese and Honey [Pinch My Salt]
Cumin-Crusted Monster Pork Chop With Peach Chipotle Salsa [Epicurious]

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Serious Eats, on July 27, 2008 11:00 AM

Last night we went to see The Dark Knight. I try not to get my hopes up for superhero flicks, but the buzz around this one was so strong, I was definitely looking forward to it.

Sigh.

I found one review that agrees with how I felt, and I shouldn’t have been surprised that it came from the man who is possibly America’s most insightful film critic, Michael Sragow (his thoughts on Indy 4 not withstanding).

My main complaint is that the movie simply goes on too long. My other complaint is that, even at 150 minutes, there’s so much plot that the narrative has no room to breathe… There’s no cadence or flow, it’s just one big thing after another.

As such, The Dark Knight suffers from the same mistake as Spider-Man 3 — too many stories for one film. In Spider-Man 3 you had three villains loosely connected (Venom, Sandman, and evil Spidey), and it felt like the writers were afraid to bet such a big film (and franchise) on any one story, and so spread it around. TDK has two movies packed into one — The Arrival of The Joker, and The Rise and Fall of Harvey Dent.

The Joker thread is the least engaging, as it simply revels in chaos and nihilism for its own sake. It might be valid social commentary, but it makes for lousy storytelling.

The Harvey Dent thread is more disappointing, because inside it there’s a legitimately good movie waiting to bust out. The love triangle between Dent, Batman, and Dawes, mixed with the origin of Two-Face at the hands of the corrupt cops that Dent attempted to ferret out… these are elements of strong drama.

But because that story is intertwined with the Joker’s, its heart gets lost. I so with Nolan had the guts to choose just one of the threads (I’d prefer the Dent thread, though a Joker thread with an actual narrative could have worked), and gone with that… But, again, I think there’s a fear of putting all your eggs in one narrative basket when dealing with a $150 million investment.

The thing I find most intriguing is the public perception of TDK. It will be the highest grossing movie of the year, and it also has remarkably high critical acclaim (95% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, 82 on Metacritic). All I can think is that this relentlessly dark and nihilistic film is tapping into the American Zeitgeist, confirming our society’s misery in the face of an endless war in Iraq, housing prices up, gas prices up, food prices up, economy stalled, health care a mess, having to face the reality that our government condones torture, etc. etc.) Americans feel like victims of forces far beyond their control, as do the citizens of Gotham at the hands of the Joker.

Originally posted by peterme from peterme.com, on July 27, 2008 8:04 AM

Jim sent me this old fabric ad -- and can we just all agree that it's awesome? Leaving aside the weird fringe trim? And possibly the color beige?

I am thinking I really need one of these multipocket skirts -- especially the "hopscotch" version. I would like to make all the pockets close with contrasting bright plastic zippers (for just a tinch more security and a bit of extra wtf? sauce).

My favorite part of these old ads are the guarantees. This one states "GUARANTEE: 'If any article made principally of an Indian Head brand cotton fails to give proper service because of the fading or running of Indian Head colors, or if the fabric shrinks more than 1%, we will make good the total cost of the article.' Make sure the name INDIAN HEAD is on the selvage or hang tag."

I can't believe, though, that Indian Head cotton comes in 39 colors and BEIGE is the one they decided to feature. Beige. You know how they say the opposite of love is indifference? The opposite of color is not colorlessness, it's beige. I mean, I AM largely beige and I hate that color.

I should apologize for the spottiness of the "A Day" part of "Dress A Day" lately -- lots of travel. (I'm typing this at 6 a.m. in an airport departure lounge, actually ...) I'm on my way to Tokyo and Sapporo! Expect more Japanese fabric pictures and the concomitant Japanese fabric BUYING.

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on July 27, 2008 3:10 AM

Last week in the Empire State, while on my way to visit Ryan McGinness' studio I ran into NYC-based French artist, Eddie aka WK Interact. It was like the old days, running into friends while running around downtown. We caught up as much as we could about current projects, the state of affairs, Michael Jackson, and how New York's changed so much since we last lived there.

WK's art once covered a lot of Manhattan's downtown real estate. If you paid attention, his distinctive motion blur style was easy to spot. I'm hoping he'll have another show in California soon as I'm anxious to check out his new work.

Here's a video interview of WK speaking in his native tongue (too bad for you non-speaking French folks). It's interesting to learn that he was born in Normandie, lived mainly in the South of France and then Paris, comes from a creative family and that he started illustrating when he was about eight years old. He loves films and has been living in New York City since he was 18. And then he goes on to explain his process and inspiration.

Originally posted by hustler of culture from hustler of culture, on July 27, 2008 2:19 AM

For my money, Christine Peterson offered the most important message I heard at OSCON. Way back when, she invented the term “Open Source” and, if we get behind it, which we should, the No Secret Software! rallying cry could be as big or bigger.

It’s simple: when data is gathered and used for the people as part of civic processes (voting is a good example), processing it using secret software, especially if it’s a private-sector secret, should be totally out of bounds.

This is very closely aligned to the struggle for the use of open-source software where appropriate, but “Open Source” is a term of art and is associated with ill-groomed inarticulate geeks who have odd opinions about lots of things. “Secret software” is a term that anyone can understand instantly, and it sounds creepy and dangerous; because secret software in the public sector is creepy and dangerous, and simply shouldn’t be allowed.

Ms Peterson gently chided the Open-Source community for having let the e-voting debacle happen in the first place; it was foreseeable and should have been headed off. I think she has a point.

Her aim in the OSCON talk (which is online at blip.tv) was to give warning of similar battles looming in the realm of security data, which is already vast and is growing fast. It will be gathered by our governments and will be put to lots of uses involving lots of software and storage.

We will get better security and simultaneously less potential for abuse if we rule out the use of secret software. So, let’s do that.

It’s not enough to be right about an important issue. It’s vital to frame our opinions and beliefs in language that’s simple and believable and whose meaning is clear and self-evident.

I think we’re in Ms Peterson’s debt for giving us this important rhetorical tool. I’m going to start putting it to use whenever these issues come up in the civic sector. I think if we all get behind this, we’ll strengthen our position in some debates that really matter, and we’ll be better citizens.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from ongoing, on July 27, 2008 1:00 AM