« August 24, 2008 - August 30, 2008 | Main | September 7, 2008 - September 13, 2008 »
Couldn't be less obscure. No points here for digging. Makes my blood retard and crystallize. So noisy, so beautiful. If I ever saw a band this good on stage, I would eat several hats and wire money to twelve...
Roger Ebert talks about how to read a movie.
This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago's Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. "You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?" he asked me. "You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class."
I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn't the teacher and my students weren't the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out "stop!" and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them.
This article also contains the most information-rich paragraph I've ever read online...it's like an entire film class in 12 lines. Fascinating stuff. One of the points is that, generally, the right side of the screen is more positive. In a later comment, Ebert adds:
In all the years with Siskel and on all the incarnations of the show, I always quietly made sure I was seated on the right. When Roeper came aboard, the producers insisted I "belonged" in "Gene's seat." Sentiment won over visual strategy. Did I really think it made a difference? Yes, I really did.Also, he should do this online...post film stills and let people leave comments, discuss, etc.
(link)
We made new patches, improved previous and want to announce new builds for 5.0.62, 5.0.67 and 5.1.26 versions. One of biggest changes we separated releases of 5.0 into two branches.
First, just "-percona" release is more stable and contains only stable and proven on many installation patches. Second is "-percona-highperf" release, which contains experimental patches that can improve performance significantly. On this stage "percona-highperf" contains patches from Yasufumi Kinoshita (more info on Maximum performance of OLTP benchmark is not so scalable on multi-cpu.
Most important patch "split_buf_pool_mutex" to separate InnoDB buffer->pool mutex into several, and it allows to get 1.5x - 2.5x improvements in DBT2 benchmarks on 8cores boxes (benchmark results is coming and will be published)For all three versions we added SHOW PATCHES command, which is based on Jeremy Cole's patch
SQL:
Next, we added tables USER_STATISTICS, INDEX_STATISTICS, TABLE_STATISTICS to INFORMATION_SCHEMA
SQL:
For 5.0-percona-highperf release we added:
- split_buf_pool_mutex_fixed_optimistic_safe.patch | InnoDB patch to fix buffer pool scalability
- control_io-threads.patch | InnoDB patch to control count of IO threads
- control_flush_and_merge_and_read.patch | InnoDB patch to control insert buffer and flushing
5.1 release
Contains build-in InnoDB plugin, so there is no more needs to download InnoDB separately, install it and run mysql with option --skip-innodb.
We think InnoDB plugin is stable enough to use it with MySQL 5.1 RC, at least stable to name whole MySQL-5.1-percona release as RC.Along with previously mentioned patches, to 5.1 we added new column TIME_MS to
INFORMATION_SCHEMA.PROCESSLIST which contains time of query execution with microseconds granularity.SQL:
On our release page
you can find links to RPMS for RedHat 4/5, binary tar.gz, source tar.gz (source contains source code with applied patches, so you can just download it and compile) and just raw patches.
Entry posted by Vadim | One comment
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via NYTimes, City Room blog, September 4, 2008,6:00 pm
Yet Again, Astroland Threatens to Close
By Sewell Chan
Following his bullpen session in Shea Stadium today, Billy Wagner told reporters that he feels good, and that he hopes to return from the disabled list on Tuesday - though the team may choose to take advantage of the two off days next week, and bring him back on Friday.
Wagner said he will throw a simulated game against live hitters on Sunday.
He said the muscles in his arm still feel stiff from time to time, but he is not sore.
According to Jerry Manuel, prior to the game, if Wagner does not end up pitching in a minor-league rehab game before his return, he’ll first be used by the Mets in a non-save situation.
In a recent chat for ESPN.com, Jerry Crasnick had the following to say when asked if Jerry Manuel could be a candidate to win National League Manager of the Year.
“Kevin, Interesting question. I was just thinking about that before the chat. At the risk of appearing inconsistent, yes, I think Manuel would be a strong Manager of the Year candidate if the Mets win the NL East. Tony La Russa looked like the early favorite. But with the Cardinals slipping, that doesn’t appear likely now.”
…thanks to long-time MetsBlog reader Kevin R, not only for the link, but for apparently asking the question of crasnick…nice work…
…if the mets put the Phillies away this weekend and then go on to win the division crown, i don’t see how anyone in the NL beats out manuel…he would have taken a team that was headed for disaster to a world series contender in three months time…he is one gangsta manager…
This article was written by Alex Steffen in September 2004. We're republishing it here as part of our month-long editorial retrospective.
One of the formative experiences in my life was covering the Kyoto round of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES). A cub reporter, I was frankly awed by the whole culture of major treaty negotiations: the diplomats and world leaders, the grizzled journalists and government flacks, the whirl of information and the party hordes. I was intimidated (for instance, at one point I was introduced to Prince Phillip. At 23, I didn't think my cocktail banter up to entertaining royalty, but he was very nice about it).
But what hit me harder than the event was the subject. For Kyoto was the first time I was forced, day after day, to come to grips with extinction. Day in, day out, I listened to speeches and interviewed experts who debated which species we'd already driven into extinction, which were going fast, which might still be saved, and which were, in E.O. Wilson's phrase, already the living dead. At one point someone gave me a document -- a rather thick document -- which turned out to be a listing of the known species believed to have vanished. Page after page after page, gone. And everyone -- everyone -- agreed the die-off was going to get much, much worse.
[[it gets better, below, sort of...]]
I left CITES feeling emotionally bludgeoned.
Since then, I've spent a few late nights thinking about what it means to be living in the midst of the Sixth Extinction -- what it means to have a part in causing the largest mass-extinction since the Death of the Dinosaurs.
I continue to struggle with it. The extinction crisis is one of the major problems humanity faces -- right up there with climate change, poverty and genocide -- yet it is little-mentioned outside of environmental and scientific circles. Why?
I think the reasons are cultural. To consider the extinction crisis is visit with death and guilt and horror. It's like living in a W.S. Merwin poem. It overwhelms you. It pulls you down like dark cold water. We are not culturally equipped to handle this stuff.
But cultures change. Cultures can be changed.
There's even an opportunity: the Threshold Foundation is offering a $50,000 grant "for projects to proactively address societal awareness of mass extinction and our responsibility in creating and reversing it."
"We are looking for new out-of-the-box approaches, which are at once creative, psychologically sophisticated and media-savvy. We see this issue as potentially analogous to the cultural taboo against discussing cancer a few decades ago, or to our collective attitudes toward smoking, drunk driving, firearms, asbestos, or most recently the health crisis of obesity due to fast food."Years ago, I thought we ought to build a Museum of Absent Nature, something the size of the American Museum of Natural History, where visitors could wander among the biologically-departed and point out the dodos, great apes and snow leopards to their kids. But honestly, who would go? It would just sit there, a giant intellectual mausoleum, dusty, empty and full of ghosts. Such a place would just entomb the extinct far out of our sight.
No, what we need is more immediate engagement with the Sixth Extinction, something that moves it onto the streets, brings it into people's homes, takes it to the bar and buys it drinks until we're forced to be comfortable enough with it to at least talk about it. Something like the red or yellow ribbons people wore to destigmatize HIV and breast cancer. Something that moves it from abstract issue to human concern. And, preferably, something beautiful and moving.
So, here's my modest proposal: I propose that we start wearing the dead on our skin.
Images exist of a great many extinct species, and I expect the proportion of well-documented extinctions to increase in the next couple decades. I propose that we assemble and maintain a database of names, pictures and information on species which have gone or are clearly soon to go extinct. I propose we make it possible for people to "adopt" a dead species, on one condition.
That condition? That you have an image of that species tattooed on your body in a visible place, with the Linnaean name underneath.
Style, size, color, location -- those are all your call. I'd think some tattoo artists would even do them for free, if asked. The main thing is that you agree to become someone who remembers, in a very personal way, that this plant or animal once existed, and no longer does, because we killed it; and who is willing to talk with others about it, to drag the taboo out of the closet and carry it around with you.
It'll hurt. It'll hurt, and then it'll heal, and then we'll start to talk about it. We might even begin to live differently. We might even begin to more widely celebrate and feel wonder at the species -- living and dead -- with whom we share the planet.
It's worth a try. Consider this a free idea -- if someone wants to put this into a grant application to Threshold and get it going, I'm totally behind you.
I'll even volunteer to be the first to put my hand under the needle.
This Culture of Extinction is a part of our month long retrospective leading up to our anniversary on Oct. 1. For the next four weeks, we'll celebrate five years of solutions-based, forward-thinking and innovative journalism by publishing the best of the Worldchanging archives.
Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by WorldChanging Team in Worldchanging Retro at 10:49 AM)
I love the linear version of the Word Clock. Completely impractical but lovely.
(link)
Before VP candidate Sarah Palin crystallized her views on the future of US energy policy in her "drill or do nothing" speech to the Republican National Convention, we only had a vague idea of her record on transportation and development, gleaned mostly from her time as mayor of the tiny town of Wasilla.
As news of Palin's past continues to surface, here's Slate with a Wasilla video postcard. Says reporter and narrator Alex Sheshunoff:
You read that Palin was the mayor of a small town, and you think of central squares and tree-lined sidewalks and neighbors who give pies to one another. Wasilla isn't that kind of place.
Video link. Thanks to Doc Barnett for the tip.
On Gourmet.com, Chris Cosentino demonstrates how to butcher a whole pig's head (via Serious Eats), and how to make porchetta di testa from the meat, skin, snout, tongue, &c. Not for the squeamish, I guess.
At the Whole Hog cooking class I went to a couple of months ago, the instructor butchered a pig's leg while we watched, but a pig's head is even more fascinating.
And, I have to say--the look on the pig's face in the photo to the right makes me laugh every time I see it.
Were you missing you some slime?
Have no fear, the green goopy stuff is on it's way back -- and so are Bill Murray and Dan Akyrod -- as Variety reports they are gearing up for a third Ghostbusters installment. Bill and Dan's spirit-wrecking cohorts, Harold Ramis and Ernie Hudson, will return as well.
The new film is being written by Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky, who both were responsible (and who we love), in part, for bringing the British hit The Office to TV here in the U.S.
I'm all for the guys strapping on their suits and being their silly selves, but I'm not sure I can handle a resurgence of Ray Parker Jr.'s theme song.
Something strange
In your neighborhood
Who you gonna call?
GHOSTBUSTERS!
If WordPress didn’t suck, I’d embed this. But you’ll have to click over to Obsidian Wings to watch. Well worth it.
Our NFL correspondent checks in: "For no apparent reason, S'mac got a 15-second editorial feature in the middle of the third quarter of the Giants/Redskins game, complete with Al Michaels voice over." We don't know what you had to do to pull off that coup Sarita, but well done. Someone in the Giants must be a fan (or owe a favor). [Eaterwire]
More worm.
Many people apparently don't realize that contributing to DoseNation is as easy as signing up for an account and then starting to write. It's true! Since we launched over a year and a half ago, some of our most interesting contributions have come from people who stumbled across our "Submit a Listing" link and just dived right in. Your posts will initially go into a moderation queue, but if you can put a few sentences together, pretty quickly we're likely to make you an editor - it's not too dissimilar from the Metafilter model in certain ways.
Anyhoo, in the age of Google News alerts and keyword-based news feeds, it's not at all difficult to stay abreast of breaking news about your favorite substances. The difficulty of course is sifting for the interesting bits and having something interesting to say - but we suspect there are quite a few of you who could handle that with aplomb. So by all means, jump right in - this blog has turned into a lovely little community, judging by the very active and interesting comment threads we get, and it'd be nice to see even more instigators helping us document the strange world of modern drug culture.
We've made the basic assumption that psychedelics, pharmaceuticals, caffeine, Modafinil & Ritalin, Viagra, heroin, cocaine, alcohol, heck - music, film, television, comics, and so on - are all a major part of a culture that seeks altered psychoactive states on a regular basis. Drug users are no longer the "counter"culture - drug use is ingrained in the fabric of mainstream culture at large. We're aggregating a particular slant on drug culture that few others are as focused on as we are. You could help!
From http://www.dosenation.com/listing_add.php. Posted by Scotto.
I wasn't sure what to expect from this speech tonight. But I was pretty sure, as high-stakes conventions speeches almost always end up being, that it would be good. But I really don't think it was. It certainly wasn't bad. He didn't say anything embarrassing or have any real flubs. But the truth is that John McCain does have, at least for a critical five years of his life, a compelling story. And for a relatively brief period of the speech, toward the end, he spoke about it powerfully. But there wasn't that much of it. The rest of the speech, when condensed to its essence, seemed to be that he'll turn the page on the Bush era by continuing all of Bush's policies.
Among the surprises, perhaps the biggest one was that it actually wasn't a very good speech. Not in the sense of delivery, but the speech itself, the speech-writing. There wasn't a clear theme, though it approached on toward the end. Most of it was a fairly tired recital of Republican boilerplate. Did they really devote like ten minutes to charter schools? It was much, much too long for the speaker. I really think they could have given him a much better speech.
Another surprise? What happened to the days when the Republicans were the masters of stagecraft and theatrics. They had him up with there with a set that on TV looked like the notorious green screen from the speech in New Orleans. Even Karl Rove, on Fox, pointed it out.
And when they panned out to see what the audience in the convention hall saw, it was some unidentified mansion. Like maybe a house they're putting in an offer on? Weird. No idea what that was about.
I'll have more thoughts tomorrow. But I thought the delivery was acceptable but tired. The speech itself let the candidate down. I can't imagine the folks at Obama HQ didn't look at each other and say, "Okay, we can deal with that."
Spin Magazine's piece covering the rise and fall, and perhaps second rise of D'Angelo has been lingering in my mind for weeks. As you might expect, I was a fan of D'Angelo's from the start.
And that's true even though I was clowning him when he got arrested. To tell the truth, I hadn't quite realized just how far the man had fallen. If you look at the comments on my post from three years ago, you can see that even then people were saying they just wanted the man to get well so they could hear more of his work. ?uestlove articulates the challenge here better than anyone, though: "The new minstrel movement in hip-hop doesn't allow the audience to believe the artist is smart."
It's a particularly striking observation given that Spin's look at D'Angelo mentions in passing how that tension between art and commerce has affected so many of the acts I love. The world of R&B success demands either heaven or hell -- you either become a preacher and lose all of the sexiness and swagger that made you compelling in the first place. Or worse, you succumb to the demons.
While D'Angelo grew increasingly isolated, the rocky path he was traveling was, ironically enough, quite crowded with like-minded compatriots. At least three of neo-soul's other late'90s leading lights — Maxwell, [Erykah] Badu, and [Lauryn] Hill — have spent much of the new millennium on the sidelines.
Hill's struggles have been well documented: She followed her 1998 breakthrough, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, with an MTV Unplugged set four years later that felt like the soundtrack to a real-time nervous breakdown. She's yet to offer a second studio album and, apart from some aborted Fugees reunions, occassional shows, and involvement with a shady guru, much of her time has apparently been devoted to her family.
Badu released her triple-platinum debut, Baduizm, in 1997 and a successful follow-up, Mama's Gun, three years later, and then said she had writer's block and went on what she dubbed "The Frustrated Artist Tour" in search of inspiration. She eked out a slight EP in 2003 but then was largely silent, until the well-received release of New AmErkykah (Pt. 1 4th World War) last February.
Maxwell's journey probably parallels D'Angelo's most closely. The Brooklyn-born singer released three platinum albums between 1996 and 2001, earning frequent comparisons to D'Angelo, then seemed to disappear entirely. A new album, Black Summers' Night, was originally slated for spring 2004 but has been delayed repeatedly. Some close to him suggest that, like D'Angelo, he's been wrestling with a rather ill-fitting public image as a sex god.
There's much, much more in the story, but it's almost impossible to overstate how much a lot of us had put our faith for the future of soul music in a small group of talented artists, centered around these talents. A decade later, it almost seems as if no one's even trying to carry the torch anymore.
We'll see how it goes; I've got tickets to see Maxwell in concert next month, and I'm still holding out for that new D'Angelo record.
- If you like music, you should own D'Angelo's Voodoo.
- Maxwell is active on MySpace.
- ?uestlove, the heart of The Roots and the standing leader of the neo-soul movement, is a born blogger.
- And Erykah's "Honey" is one of the best videos of the year:
We are very excited about our newest partner in the WordPress.com VIP program, the National Football League, with their launch of blogs.nfl.com.
The NFL has partnered with WordPress.com VIP for both a rapid-fire news blog at blogs.nfl.com, as well as an expert commentary / user feedback set of blogs which are incorporated into the NFL’s exciting new web video application Sunday Night Football Extra:
On blogs.nfl.com you’ll find news and commentary about the NFL as well as insights and reports from the great Adam Schefter.
Sunday Night Football Extra will feature NBC and NFL Network analysis from the likes of Jerome Bettis, who will be blogging in WordPress.com with his thoughts on the game. To see this in action head over to nfl.com during the game.
[ Visit blogs.nfl.com and Sunday Night Football Extra ]
From the Boston Globe blog ...
One of the most enduring taboos in American politics, the airing of graphic images from the September 11 attacks in a partisan context, died today. It was nearly seven years old.The informal prohibition, which had been occasionally threatened by political ads in recent years, was pronounced dead at approximately 7:40 CST, when a video aired before delegates at the Republican National Convention included slow-motion footage of a plane striking the World Trade Center, the towers' subsequent collapse, and smoke emerging from the Pentagon.
The September 11 precedent was one of the few surviving campaign-season taboos. It is survived by direct comparisons of one's opponents to Hitler.
Soul Sides's "word cloud."
Get your wordle on.
TAKE A GUESS AT THESE:
Take a guess at these:
(What's interesting to observe from this is that some of the great songs aren't very complicated, lyrically speaking. It's all in the performance, not the writing).
While I'm on the subject of musicians who use dance in their performances, I'd like to give some props to Kate Bush.
I find her to be marvelously unique and original. To my ears, her music spans from absolutely genius to utterly unlistenable, but I'm always impressed by someone who pushes their own creative boundaries and continues to try new things. She's been a pioneer and an inspiration to so many artists, and you have to respect that.
A few interesting facts about Kate:
- David Gilmour helped her record the demo that eventually got her signed to EMI at the age of 16
- She only toured once in her career
- She was the first female to top the UK charts with a song she wrote herself (with this unlistenable number)
- In the song "Π", she sings the number to its 137th decimal place
- She was the first singer to use a wireless headset radio microphone onstage
The reason she needed that wireless headset mic? To accommodate extensive dance routines into her shows. (You're welcome, Janet Jackson, et al.)
Now let's watch a perfect example of her musical genius and love for dance in this video for "Running Up That Hill":
Bonus video: Here's a live version of "Running Up That Hill" with David Gilmour, which I'm sharing mostly because I want you to check out the bassist's phenomenal hairstyle:
Among the challenging decisions new parents must make is the name of their child. It’s a lifetime commitment, and not something to be taken lightly.
We very quickly settled on his middle name, Joseph. It’s my dad and brothers’ middle name, and Stacy’s grandfather’s first name and brother’s middle name. So, a family name on both sides. Done.
The first name was trickier. Early on I proposed David, my middle name. I’ve always liked the name David (and when I was a little kid, wished it had been my first name). But I was concerned that giving him my middle name might be narcissistic, so we kept our eyes open for alternatives.
In July, I posted about The Naked City. It’s directed by Jules Dassin, and I turned to Stacy at some point, and said, “How about Jules?” Jules works for us on many levels. Most important: my mom’s name is Julie, so it’s a kind of family name. Also, well, I sincerely appreciate the director’s work, and, frankly, his left-leaning politics. The Beatles’ song “Hey Jude” was originally titled “Hey Jules,” and that makes for a good lullaby. And, of course, there’s the pun on “jewels”.
24 hours after his birth, we still hadn’t settled on a name. We like both David and Jules quite a lot, and I found myself vacillating between the two. Earlier I made a comment that “David Joseph,” while a good name, sounds like the name of somebody else’s child. “Jules Joseph” sounds like the name of our child (It helped that Jules is an anachronistic name, which both plays into our love of history, and allows us to own it more.”. As we’re staring at the birth certificate form, Stacy said, “It’s Jules,” and we were done.
So, there you have it. Jules Joseph Merholz.
An Alaskan delegate on the convention floor just now: “The caribou absolutely love the pipeline! When the pipeline was built 30 years ago there were 3,000 caribou, and now there are about 30,000 caribou out there. During the wintertime the caribou snuggle up to the pipeline because it gives off heat because the oil is warm; it pumps through there.” Keith Olbermann then correctly noted that Rampton “is to some degree full of canal water.”
The Star Wars empire has grown into one of the most fertile incubators of talent in the worlds of movies (Lucasfilm), visual effects (Industrial Light & Magic), sound (Skywalker Sound), and video games (LucasArts). Along the way, some of the original Lucas crew has gone on to become his biggest competitors.
The Flash interface is really annoying and not useful...the whole image is a better way to look at it. Very Mark Lombardi. (via vc)
(link)
Love this guy:
Look — I would argue that doing work in the community to try to create jobs, to bring people together, to rejuvenate communities that have fallen on hard times, to set up job training programs in areas that had been hard-hit when the steel plants close, that is relevant only in understanding where I’m coming from. Who I believe in. Who I am fighting for, and why I’m in this race.
The question I have for them is — why would that kind of work be ridiculous? Who are they fighting for? What are they advocating for? Do they think that the lives of those folks who are struggling each and every day, that working with them to try to improve their lives is somehow not relevant to the Presidency? I think that as part of problem, may be why they are out of touch and do not get it, because they haven’t spent a lot of time working on behalf of those folks.
Video shortly.
Update: Here’s the vid:
I could read about con men and tricksters all day.
"I could sell shit at an anti-scat party," he says, "you have to figure out someone's wants and needs and convince them what you have will fill their emotional void." A con man is essentially a salesman -- a remarkably good one -- who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim's desire to believe he has an edge on other people.
It requires avid study of psychology and body language. It's an amazing paradox--a con man has incredible emotional insight, but without the burden of compassion. He must take an intense interest in other people, complete strangers, and work to understand them, yet remain detached and uninvested. That the plan is to cheat these people and ultimately confirm many of their fears cannot be of concern.
The particular fellow profiled in that piece has also written a book called How to Cheat at Everything.
(link)
By Alec MacGillis Both Rudy Giuliani and Gov. Sarah Palin reserved some of their harshest lines last night to mock Barack Obama's years working as a community organizer in Chicago, with Palin saying that it resembled her work as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, except that as a mayor "you have actual responsibilities." The attacks may have been inevitable, given how much emphasis the Obama campaign has placed on that part of his resume. The campaign's...Please click on the title to continue reading this entry.
Confirmed: Rudy ran way long in his convention speech, forcing planners to nix a planned soft-focus bio video of Palin that was set to run before she spoke.
You can view the Palin vid here.
Summize, er Twitter Search, is no longer of much use to me because an Alaskan would-be "Sarahcuda" is taking over my Twitter stream. I'm increasingly annoyed by this. Sarahcuda has been my nickname on MySpace, Twitter and other sites for years, and Sarah Palin wasn't even CLEVER enough to come up with it! Her nickname was "Sarah the Barracuda," it has just been shortened by others for 140-char Twitter purposes. I mean, what if McCain was going by "Scobelizer"-- how would Robert feel???
So while I spent a lot of time last week defending her against knee-jerk reactions over her gender and lack of experience, now that I have heard her speak and am duly appalled by her full-on embrace of the Karl Rove style of politics, I am actively working to bring her DOWN and take my good name back. Starting with this clip. (And speaking of Karl Rove)
New Career Opportunities Daily: The best jobs in media
Say what you will about hockey moms and lipstick, but please do not bring sweet, obedient, attention loving pitbulls into the political debate. All you’re doing is reinforcing stereotypes. (photo by minak)
while the fashion world has no doubt moved on from the trends of 2006, we couldn’t help but highlight
this collection by american designer jeremy scott. while the designer is known for his sometimes
outrageous creations, this collection took it to a new level. the theme of the show was fast-food.
models walked the runway wearing chocolate bar inspired dresses and french fry print dresses.
his 2008, money inspired collection will perhaps be a little more slimming but equally as rich.
http://www.jeremyscott.com
via killing denouement
“I usually don’t feel uneasy when I put those filters on, but last night - during the Guiliani speech - I realized I was no longer filtering a speechwriter’s intentional manipulation; I was trying to look beyond real hate. These folks were gritting their teeth, shaking their fists, and smiling the way gladiators do when going into combat against barbarians. And this is the incumbent party. The ones currently in power.”
- Douglas Rushkoff explains how I felt last night better than I can.
I also have a hunch that Palin and Giuliani’s attacks on community organizers are also going to fire up a very important constituency on Obama’s behalf. A new Facebook group called “We are all community organizers” got launched last night, and its membership have been growing rapidly. The danger in stirring up this particular nest is that community organizers are network hubs, and while not all of them are involved in electoral work (often their jobs prevent direct partisan activity), this direct attack on their dignity may well push many of them into taking leaves of absence and going to work to help Obama.
The Obama campaign’s own email response was also interesting, in this respect. David Plouffe wrote:
I wasn’t planning on sending you something tonight. But if you saw what I saw from the Republican convention, you know that it demands a response.
I saw John McCain’s attack squad of negative, cynical politicians. They lied about Barack Obama and Joe Biden, and they attacked you for being a part of this campaign.
But worst of all — and this deserves to be noted — they insulted the very idea that ordinary people have a role to play in our political process.
You know that despite what John McCain and his attack squad say, everyday people have the power to build something extraordinary when we come together. Make a donation of $5 or more right now to remind them.
Both Rudy Giuliani and Sarah Palin specifically mocked Barack’s experience as a community organizer on the South Side of Chicago more than two decades ago, where he worked with people who had lost jobs and been left behind when the local steel plants closed.
Let’s clarify something for them right now.
Community organizing is how ordinary people respond to out-of-touch politicians and their failed policies. [Emphasis in original]
And it’s no surprise that, after eight years of George Bush, millions of people have found that by coming together in their local communities they can change the course of history. That promise is what our campaign has been about from the beginning.
Throughout our history, ordinary people have made good on America’s promise by organizing for change from the bottom up. Community organizing is the foundation of the civil rights movement, the women’s suffrage movement, labor rights, and the 40-hour workweek. And it’s happening today in church basements and community centers and living rooms across America.
Meanwhile, we still haven’t gotten a single idea during the entire Republican convention about the economy and how to lift a middle class so harmed by the Bush-McCain policies.
Etc. You get the idea. An old friend of mine, Janice Fine, is a veteran community organizer, and she uses the following role-play when she teaches other organizers how to organize. She pulls a person from the audience and then starts pushing them aggressively, while asking the person and the audience, “What do you do when you’re being pushed around by a bully? What do you do? Huh?” Sooner or later someone answers, “You get your friends to help fight back.” And a few people walk up to help push Janice back.
That’s what’s happening now. Sarah Palin’s elevation first generated a big response for McCain, but the Republican attacks on the heart of Obama’s campaign — community organizing — is going to foster a huge response. I predict Obama will raise $10 million online today and tomorrow.
Welcome to the Thunderdome.
Welcome indeed.
I love(d) Las Manitas as much as the next only-occasional Austin interloper, and last time I was there I ate breakfast there each and every day. Yum. And sure, as an only-occasional Austin interloper, it's depressing that the building's being replaced by a new Marriott hotel complex. But, as the Austinist points out, the story's complicated (city council, a proposal of forgivable loans, public outcry, etc.). And, as always, the comments are where it's at...including this gem from Grape Ape:
While having 8 or so Marriot's downtown isn't the best solution, tourism is nice. It does allow for new and existing businesses to grow. If only we could go back to just having all those 1 level dirt parking lots and empty buildings downtown - that would be awesome. Maybe then we could change our motto to "Keep Austin Mediocre and Unsuccessful"
Ouch.
SXSW will never be the same again: Las Manitas is closed forever to make way for a Marriott Hotel complex. The patio out back = good times.
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One of my favorite iPhone apps gets even better.
We all know we should be replacing our energy-sucking incandescent light bulbs with CFLs -- but, ugh. As part of its green design program, frog design has conceptualized this lovely light bulb around a high-output LED. The frogLight bulb fits in a standard socket and can be dimmed -- an important ability for both energy-saving and mood-setting that CFLs can't yet manage. And it's projected to last for 30 years.
It's a potential game-changer. Yanko Design, in a blog post this week, calls the frogLight a Trojan horse, "ready to make the transition to LED bulbs invisible and a reality." Frog design says, "We are currently in talks about how to bring it to market and make it available to consumers."
Learn more about the frogLight >>
In other green lighting news, Greentech Media reports on a revolutionary dimmer switch for sports stadiums, big-box stores and other megabuildings that use ultrabright high-intensity discharge (HID) lights. The new digital ballast from HID Laboratories allows building managers to dim their HID lights by an unnoticeable-to-the-human-eye 10 percent -- a move that could save megawatts of power, writer Michael Kanellos suggests:
Lighting consumes 22 percent of the power generated in the U.S., and the majority of the juice of that total goes to more than 100 million HID sockets in the country. Thus, if used universally, you’re talking a big whack in electricity consumption.Get more details on the big-box dimmer >>
Image: aphasiafilms
This just in from friends in Montreal:
DISSIDENT ART
September 5 - 28, 2008Opening: Friday, Sept. 5, 5 - 9 PM
55 Notre-Dame West (Metro Place D'Armes)Diana Arce, Mathieu Beauséjour, Caro Caron, Howard Chackowicz, Kathryn
Delaney, Ronen Eidelman, Freda Guttman, Gord Hill, Dayna McLeod, Jesse
Purcell, Michael Rakowitz, The Shining Mantis, Jackie Sumell / Herman
Wallace, Rick Trembles, Tania WillardThe Art + Anarchy Montreal 2008 collective is pleased to invite you to the
opening of a new exhibition in Montreal, Dissident Art, on September 5th
from 5 pm - 9 pm at 55 Notre-Dame West (in Old Montreal, metro Place
d'Armes). The vernissage will feature performances by Diana Arce (Berlin),
showcasing her political speech karaoke Politaoke in Montreal for this first
time, and The Shining Mantis (New York), engaging in a spontanteous
chalk-on-black-wall drawing war between the collective's two members.Returning after the success of the Art + Anarchy exhibition in 2007, which
saw 230 local and international artists exhibit their work, this year's
exhibition represents a more curated turn with fifteen artists. From Caro
Caron's (Montreal) excellent artistic musings on the gentrification of
Montreal's artist neighbourhoods to the pairing up of artist Jackie Sumell
(Brooklyn) and Herman Wallace, a Black Panther member whose life sentence is
currently up for review, the exhibition offers variety in concept, style and
contribution to the meaning of dissidence in art. In addition to the fifteen
chosen artists, the exhibition will be offering a room in which unsolicited
artists are invited to come hang their own political work.Schedule:
friday, september 5, 5 - 9pm: Vernissage
Featuring performances by Diana Arce and The Shining Mantiswednesday, september 10, 7 - 9pm: David Widgington on Ink on Paper on Poles
Montrealer David Widgington - author of the 2007 publication Picture This!, founder of the renowned yet now defunct Cumulus Press and member of the activist filmmaking collective Les Lucioles - joins guests in a discussion of the history of the poster as both political tool - ideal for its rapid, efficient and powerful dissemination of information - and visual culture object, artifact and evidence of Montreal’s historically rich cultural landscape.saturday, september 13, 2 - 4pm: The Writing on the Wall with Sterling Downing
Join Under Pressure founder, publisher and spokesperson Sterling Downing for a high colour, in gallery slide show and moderated discussion with Isa Tousignant about the legal ramifications and political quagmire of graffiti in Canada. Where does freedom of expression end?thursday, september 18, 7 - 9pm: Radical Cinema with Santiago Bertolino
This two-hour event will be a screening of short films followed by a discussion period with the filmmaker Santiago Bertolino and guests. Bertolino, who has produced and directed films on current social struggles and was one of the founders of filmmaking collective Les Lucioles, has run the video blog Parole Citizen for the last two years and recently co-founded Funambules Media, a co-operative with a mandate to produce, make and distribute radical films.thursday, september 25, 7 - 9pm: Puppets as Protest with Mark Sussman
An introduction to the community-based approach of Great Small Works and to the creation of political and socially-minded performances that animate public space, while renewing the spirits of participants and audiences alike, and promoting participation in public life. Mark Sussman is a theatre artist, scholar and co-founder of New York’s celebrated Great Small Works collective, producing giant community-based puppet shows, and miniature toy theatre spectacles.sunday, september 28, 12 - 8pm: Closing Reception
Featuring Dayna Mcleod’s performance HotBeaverWetPussy.com from 2-6pm
From the website:
In today’s highly charged political, economic, corporate and environmental climate, it is natural that there exist a variety of viewpoints on the world and its future. Quebec is a national cradle of revolutionary thought, especially in art (think of the Refus Global!), so it’s no surprise that every year, Montreal houses the largest anarchist event in North America: the Festival of Anarchy, which includes the renowned Anarchist Book Fair.The volunteer founding committee of Art + Anarchy Montreal was created in an effort to expand the presence of socially and politically engaged artwork within the Festival of Anarchy and the city, and to develop a yearly artistic event that would promote and encourage creators who crave change, propose fresh perspectives and tackle issues in their art. These issues run the gamut: gender equality, cultural policy, world politics, environmental strategies, basic human rights.
The first Art + Anarchy Montreal exhibition took place in a gargantuan loft in Park Extension for two weeks in May 2007, and presented the art of 230 local and international artists. Galvanized by its success, a new committee was formed to organize the 2008 edition, titled Dissident Art.
Our space is different this year – smaller and more central, located a few steps away from Notre-Dame Cathedral in Old Montreal – but representative of our basic belief that to remain as independent as possible from systemic assumptions, one must be located, physically, outside the system; in this case Montreal’s existing gallery network. Our artist selection is a fraction of last year’s, quantatively speaking, but perhaps more poignant qualitatively as well. The 15 artists we’ve invited hail from the four corners of the globe and span the breadth of the ideological spectrum. Essential to the exhibition is also the free wall, a section of the exhibition where unsolicited artists from near and far are invited to post their political art for the duration of the exhibition.
For the entire month of September, from the 5th to the 28th, we wish to transform 55 Notre-Dame West (an ex-currency exchange office) into a place of inspiration thanks to incredible art and weekly activities, covering everything from puppetry for public protest to the legal ramifications of graffiti, activist documentary making and the art of radical postering. Help us fill a void with this groundbreaking exhibition by giving activist artists a space to be seen and heard.
The left-o-sphere is getting fired up:
But this kind of hits me where I live, since my dad is a community organizer, so lemme spell this out: the difference between a community organizer and a politician is that a community organizer can’t tell anyone what to do. They have to listen. So they can’t order books banned from a library to indulge their own religious sensibilities. They can’t fire someone because they didn’t follow orders to fire an estranged family member. They can’t ram through a $15 million dollar sports complex that leaves their local town groaning underneath the debt. Unlike politicians, they don’t have any power other than the power of people who want to see something changed.
Decades ago, before the ADA and a raft of other legislation, schools had essentially no requirements to provide decent education for special needs children. Then a movement of parents, engaging in - gasp - community organizing changed that. And they continue to fight day in and day out for educational equity for children like Sarah Palin’s.
Too bad Sarah Palin just spit in their faces.
MacRumors has a story on Pull My Finger, an iPhone App that plays a variety of fart sounds. The demo video shows that the app is clearly well done for what it is — it even vibrates the phone while it toots — but Apple rejected it:
We’ve reviewed your application Pull My Finger. We have determined that this application is of limited utility to the broad iPhone and iPod touch user community, and will not be published to the App Store.
With all the absolute crap that has made it into the store, which includes apps based on nothing more than sample code from Apple’s SDK, it seems ridiculous for Pull My Finger to be rejected on these grounds. The current number one app in the store is Koi Pond, which is utterly useless but extremely well-done.
I’ve already heard from a top-tier developer this morning who, in response to this story, is dropping an idea for a very cool iPhone app out of fear that the work to create it would be for naught as Apple might reject it.
Wired is keeping a blog that details the process of writing an upcoming story on, appropriately, writer/director Charlie Kaufman.
An almost-real-time, behind-the-scenes look at the assigning, writing, editing, and designing of a Wired feature. You can see more about the design process on Wired creative director Scott Dadich's SPD blog, The Process. This is a one-time experiment, tied solely to the Charlie Kaufman profile scheduled to run in our November 08 issue.
We will post internal e-mails, audio, video, drafts, memos, and layouts. We reserve the right to edit our posts, out of sympathy for the reader or to protect our relationships with our sources. We will not post emails with sources or reproduce communications that take place outside of Wired.
Reading through, I'm not sure I want to know how the sausage is made. With the well-established processes and tropes that magazines follow in publishing each and ever month, stuff like this has a tendency to come off as cynical and overly mechanical (e.g. the piece is already mostly written...they just need Kaufman to fill in the details). I also keep thinking...what if Kaufman reads this before his interviews take place? Is it better or worse for the finished piece that he knows their whole angle going in? (via snarkmarket)
Update: Clarification from Jason Tanz (the author of the Kaufman piece) at Wired...most of the interviews with Kaufman have already been conducted and a rough draft of the story has been completed. They wanted to be at least this far along before they posted any of these materials so as to avoid complications with the interview process. Tanz says that they hope to be "pretty close to real time [on the storyboard blog] by the end of next week".
(link)
by David Golden
There have been some mega-email threads about CPAN Testers on the perl-qa mailing list that started with a question about the use of exit 0 in Makefile.PL.
I want to sum up a few things that I took away from the conversations and propose a series of major changes to CPAN Testers. Special thanks to an off-list (and very civil) conversation with chromatic for triggering some of these thoughts.
Type I and Type II errors
In statistics, a Type I error means a "false positive" or "false alarm". For CPAN Testers, that's a bogus FAIL report. A Type II error means a "false negative", e.g. a bogus PASS report. Often, there is a trade-off between these. If you think about spam filtering as an example, reducing the chance of spam getting through the filter (false negatives) tends to increase the odds that legitimate mail gets flagged as spam (false positives).
Generally, those involved in CPAN Testers have taken the view that it's better to have a false positives (false alarms) than false negatives (a bogus PASS report). Moreover, we've tended to believe -- without any real analysis -- that the false positive *ratio* (false FAILs divided by all FAILs) is low.
But I've never heard a single complaint about a bogus PASS report and I hear a lot of complaints about bogus FAILS, so it's reasonable to think that we've got the tradeoff wrong. Moreover, I think the downside to false positives is actually higher than for false negatives if we believe that CPAN Testers is primarily a tool to help authors improve quality rather than a tool to give users a guarantee about how distributions work on any given platform.
False positive ratios by author
Even if the aggregate false positive ratio is low, individual CPAN authors can experience extraordinarily high false positive ratios. What I suddenly realized is that the higher the quality of an author's distributions, the higher the false positive ratio.
Consider a "low quality" author -- one who is prone to portability errors, missing dependencies and so on. Most of the FAIL reports are legitimate problems with the distribution.
Now consider a "high quality" author -- one who is careful to write portable code, well-specified dependencies and so on. For this author, most of the FAIL reports only come when a tester has a broken or misconfigured toolchain The false positive ratio will approach 100%.
In other words, the *reward* that CPAN Testers has for high quality is increased annoyance from false FAIL reports with little benefit.
Repetition is desensitizing
From a statistical perspective, having lots of CPAN Testers reports for a distribution even on a common platform helps improve confidence in the aggregate result. Put differently, it helps weed out "outlier" reports from a tester who happens to have a broken toolchain.
However, from author's perspective, if a report is legitimate (and assuming they care), they really only need to hear it once. Having more and more testers sending the same FAIL report on platform X is overkill and gives yet more encouragement for authors to tune out.<\p>
So the more successful CPAN Testers is in attracting new testers, the more duplicate FAIL reports authors are likely to receive, which makes them less likely to pay attention to them.
When is a FAIL not a FAIL?
There are legitimate reasons that distributions could be broken such that they fail during PL or make in ways that are not the fault of the tester's toolchain, so it still seems like valuable information to know when distributions can't build as well as when they don't pass tests. So we should report on this and not just skip reporting. On the other hand, most of the false positives that provoke complaint are toolchain issues during PL or make/Build.
Right now there is no easy way to distinguish the phase of a FAIL report from the subject of an email. Removing PL and make/Build failures from the FAIL category would immediately eliminate a major source of false positives in the FAIL category and decrease the aggregate false positive ratio in the FAIL category. Though, as I've shown, while this may decrease the incidence of false positives for high quality authors, the false positive ratio is likely to remain high.
It almost doesn't matter whether we reclassify these as UNKNOWN or invent new grades. Either way partitions the FAIL space in a way that makes it easier for authors to focus on which ever part of the PL/make/test cycle they care about.
What we can fix now and what we can't
Some of these issues can be addressed fairly quickly.
First, we can lower our collective tolerance of false positives -- for example, stop telling authors to just ignore bogus reports if they don't like it and find ways to filter them. We have several places to do this -- just in the last day we've confirmed that the latest CPANPLUS dev version doesn't generate Makefile.PL's and some testers have upgraded. BinGOs has just put out CPANPLUS::YACSmoke 0.04 that filters out these cases anyway if testers aren't on the bleeding edge of CPANPLUS. We now need to push testers to upgrade. As we find new false positives, we need to find new ways to detect and suppress them.
Second, we can reclassify PL/make/Build fails to UNKNOWN. This won't break any of the existing reporting infrastructure the way that adding new grades would. I can make this change in CPAN::Reporter in a matter of minutes and it probably wouldn't be hard to do the same in CPANPLUS. Then we need another round of pushing testers to upgrade their tools. We could also take a decision as to whether UNKNOWN reports should be copied to authors by default or just sent to the mailing list.
However, as long as the CPAN Testers system has individual testers emailing authors, there is little we can do to address the problem of repetition. One option is to remove that feature from Test::Reporter and reports will only go to the central list. With the introduction of an RSS feed (even if not yet optimal), authors will have a way to monitor reports. And from that central source, work can be done to identify duplicative reports and start screening them out of notifications.
Once that is more or less reliable, we could restart email notifications from that central source if people felt that nagging is critical to improve quality. Personally, I'm coming around to the idea that it's not the right way to go culturally for the community. We should encourage people to use these tools, sign up for RSS or email alerts, whatever, because they think that quality is important. If the current nagging approach is alienating significant numbers of perl-qa members, how can we possibly expect that it's having a positive influence on everyone else?
Some of these proposal would be easier in CPAN Testers 2.0, which will provide reports as structured data instead of email text, but if "exit 0" is a straw that is breaking the Perl camel's back now, then we can't ignore 1.0 to work on 2.0 as I'm not sure anyone will care anymore by the time it's done.
What we can't do easily is get the testers community to upgrade to newer versions of the tools. That is still going to be a matter of announcements and proselytizing and so on. But I think we can make a good case for it, and if we can get the top 10 or so testers to upgrade across all their testing machines then I think we'll make a huge dent in the false positives that are undermining support for CPAN Testers as a tool for Perl software quality.
I'm interested in feedback on these ideas. In particular, I'm now convinced that the "success" of CPAN Testers now prompts the need to move PL/make fails to UNKNOWN and to discontinue copying authors by individual testers. I'm open to counter-arguments, but they'll need to convince me of a better long-run solution to the problems I identified.
David Golden is a CPAN Tester and prolific CPAN author with over two dozen modules released, including the groundbreaking CPAN::Reporter and Class::InsideOut. David was the release engineer for the alpha versions of Strawberry Perl. He has been a speaker at YAPC::NA, The New York Perl Seminar, and Boston.pm and has written articles for The Perl Review. David lives in New York City.
After spending a few months as beta software, VMware Fusion 2.0 is moving up in the world and has achieved Release Candidate status. Although there's no confirmed release date, the RC designation suggests that the final release of the software is fast approaching.
Something is wrong with this picture. Yes, there is no actual team depicted on this team card, but perhaps more importantly, there are no fountains beyond the outfield fence of Kauffman Stadium. It's one thing for a terrible team with no discernible national star (Mark Grudzielanek and Emil Brown, anyone?) to downplay a 100-loss season. But it's another thing entirely to rob a sure-to-be-boring card of its one potential highlight. When they don't even bother to turn on the fountains, you know they've given up.
It's almost like the Royals were trying to slip by undetected for the year. It's a bold move, one that I'm not sure I agree with, but an interesting tactic nonetheless. Let me see if I've got this right: if you don't put out a team photo, nobody will remember how much you sucked.
As per usual, Jay Smooth gets at the heart of the matter:
This recurring theme of turning the phrase “community organizer into some sort of epithet like “communist” or “homo” or something, that’s really despicable. The difference between a community organizer and a politician is that community organizers are the ones who take the responsibility upon themselves to help their fellow citizens without the benefit of a government budget behind them. And go out there every day doing the hard thankless work to make this country livable which is what allows you politicians to be able to go on TV and brag about how this is the greatest country in the world. And for you to go on that TV show and spit in those people’s faces for the sake of a rhetorical flourish is disgusting.
The left-o-sphere is getting fired up:
But this kind of hits me where I live, since my dad is a community organizer, so lemme spell this out: the difference between a community organizer and a politician is that a community organizer can’t tell anyone what to do. They have to listen. So they can’t order books banned from a library to indulge their own religious sensibilities. They can’t fire someone because they didn’t follow orders to fire an estranged family member. They can’t ram through a $15 million dollar sports complex that leaves their local town groaning underneath the debt. Unlike politicians, they don’t have any power other than the power of people who want to see something changed.
Decades ago, before the ADA and a raft of other legislation, schools had essentially no requirements to provide decent education for special needs children. Then a movement of parents, engaging in - gasp - community organizing changed that. And they continue to fight day in and day out for educational equity for children like Sarah Palin’s.
Too bad Sarah Palin just spit in their faces.
Originally posted by agolis from andrew golis
I started watching Sarah Palin's speech a few minutes into it last night, and my take is that she's a supremely confident speaker, and is clearly willing to go for the jugular, but didn't give us any reason to think that she has any grasp of the issues that matter at the national level.
The first chunk of the speech was about her family, and that's understandable -- the nation still has to really meet Sarah Palin, and that's what that was about. The next bit was about her accomplishments as mayor of Wasilla and governor of Alaska, and this is where my incredulity meter started jumping. Palin threw out a line or two about her strong ethics reform credentials... on the same day that she stopped cooperating into the Alaska legislature's ethics inquiry into her firing of the state public safety commissioner. She clearly implied that Alaska's current budget surplus was as a result of her vetoes of wasteful spending, but there's really no debate at this point that huge windfall taxes on the Alaskan oil and gas industry, taxes championed by Palin, are what's responsible for the surplus. (Of note, these same taxes were defeated in Congress by the GOP in the lower 48; also of note while we're talking about surplus and debt, when Palin started as mayor of Wasilla, the town had no debt, a number that ballooned to just under $20 million -- or $3,000 per person -- by the time she left.) And finally -- and most brazenly -- Palin claimed that she was against earmarks and the now-famous Bridge to Nowhere, claims that are now known to be so absolutely, positively false as to make you wonder if her press insulation was so effective this past week that she doesn't know that there's not a single thinking person who believes them anymore.
After all that, Palin then segued into the only bit of policy meat in her speech, a minute or two about energy; I won't proclaim to know a ton about energy policy, so it's hard for me to judge this. She then finished with an alternating string of attacks on Obama and honorifics about McCain, demonstrating the barracuda-like style that gave her her nickname back home.
For those so-inclined, The Washington Monthly did a nice fact-checking of the speech last night, as did the Obama campaign.
These days it seems like the interest in culinary schools outweighs the real demand for qualified chefs. Hence, ICE's new Center for Food Media: "From podcasting and blogging to cookbook writing and food history, this unique assortment of classes covers all aspects of media as they pertain to the culinary world. Classes also include food writing...becoming a publicist, culinary travel writing, working with an agent, creating a TV show, food styling and photography, primers in food economics..." You get the point. [EaterWire]
Well, I once again find myself posting from an airport. This time, it's Minneapolis-St. Paul International and I'm waiting on a flight to New York City. Obviously, I doubt that I will be posting anything more today, but you can watch me tonight on Comedy Central's The Colbert Report. Check your local listings to find the time.
See you all tonight, and I'll be back on the blog Friday (maybe sooner)
By Johanna Kolodny
I didn’t find out until the end of Polyface Farm’s Field Day last month that this gathering — set in the Blue Ridge Mountain town of Swoope (pronounced Swope), Virginia — was illegal. Polyface owner Joel Salatin, the farmer made famous in Michael Pollan’s “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” was answering a question at the final gathering in the barn when he explained that technically, the farm needed government permits to host a paid event for such a large group. Oh, and they should have gotten the health department involved, because they served lunch. But they didn’t.
It’s not so unusual for Salatin to partake in illegal activities. One need not look further than his most recent book, “Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal: War Stories From The Local Food Front.” For him, selling his meat out of a store on his farm (violation of food-safety laws and commercial regulations) or charging us to attend this event (violation of zoning laws — he runs a farm, not a theme park) is just part of everyday life. But I found it exhilarating. I have a clean record, you know.
Salatin explained that he purposefully only advertised through two farming magazines and the farm’s website in order to fly under the radar. Even so, people came from far and wide: from Oregon, Florida, and everywhere in between, plus Canada. Word in the crowd was that one attendee came from as far away as Africa. The final day’s count was 1,650 adults, and there were plenty more children. I’d estimate there were 2,000 people. For all those in attendance, this fun-filled farm day was a pilgrimage to what many might call farming’s Mecca. It was hard not to observe, though, that the majority of the attendees were Caucasian, which I believe speaks to the lack of diversity in both farming and the food movement in this country.
Though it was put on by law-breakers, this was a totally professional event. The day ran like a well-oiled tractor. The day’s schedule was followed precisely; a hundred volunteers — Salatin family members along with former and current apprentices, who stood out from the crowd with their bright red collared shirts — were on hand to answer questions throughout. About a dozen exhibitors, including poultry-processing equipment makers, mushroom cultivators, and representatives from the Farm-to-Consumer Legal Defense Fund, set up shop.
Here’s how the day unfolded:
Optional participation in “early bird chores” started at 6 a.m. I chose to arrive closer to registration time at 7:30, as there was a farmers’ market in nearby Staunton (pronounced Stanton) that opened at 7. I came away with some blueberries, homemade fruit leather, and walnuts and wheatberries grown by Mennonites.
And then I joined the morning farm tour with Salatin, which lasted from 8 to 10:30. I’ve heard Salatin speak before, so his sharp, politically-infused sense of humor was no surprise — but it was definitely still entertaining. He’s a pro at capturing his audience’s attention. A master communicator and orator, with a melodic, preacher-like speech pattern, he is thick with intelligence and wit, succinct and focused in his thoughts. He communicated by way of a portable microphone and amplifier system set atop a tractor.
It was a good thing he was well-versed in working with animals: He masterfully instructed the herd, including myself, to each destination, and hundreds of people proceeded ahead in an organized and calm fashion. Salatin brought up the rear with his tractor, pulling a hay-covered platform on wheels for those less mobile. It was quite a sight to behold. At one point, when I reached the top of a hill, I looked back at the long line of people marching up behind me like a trail of ants. It was a moving moment — to think that all of these people cared enough about the food movement to gather on this day, coming from far and wide.
The grass couldn’t have been a brighter or a more vibrant green, and never have animals looked healthier or happier. None of the intense, putrid smells that characterize factory farms emanated from the animals; no strong manure smell came up from the land. Livestock were spread out far enough across the farm that nature could take its course.
The farm tour included a veritable mouthful of sights, including visits to the gobbledygo feathernet (right), the pigaerator, the eggmobile (below), pastured turkeys and broilers, and salad bar beef. (Best look at his books for explanations!) Spread throughout other parts of the day were a talk on relationship marketing and a workshop on hay shed pigaerator composting held in the barn. Talks
on rabbit production using a raken house (rabbit and chicken cohabitation) and chicken brooding were also offered.
Lunch included barbecued pork, chicken and beef, sliced peaches and cucumbers, and chocolate cake with chocolate buttercream frosting. I walked by the smoker and barbecue area several times before lunch salivating with anticipation. The food was delicious and homemade, served to us buffet style. I plopped myself down on the grass under a tree to shade myself from the midday sun; some visitors took shelter under the same tree, while others took cover in the barns or endured the heat of the sun. An Amish or Mennonite family sat on one side of me, their young children eying the processed drinks, which were obviously not a regular component of their diets. And then we ate. Let’s just say that I didn’t need to have dinner later that night.
In the afternoon, the farm store opened and was flocked by attendees wanting to buy farm products. I came away with a dozen eggs and a broiler chicken. I can’t recall how much the eggs cost, but due to the high demand for broilers, Salatin set a flat rate regardless of size, and I paid seventeen dollars for my four pound chicken.
I fried up some eggs for breakfast the day after my return home and was thrilled to see bright orange yolks glowing in the pan.
Johanna Kolodny is dedicated to working to change the food system at multiple levels. She has worked with the NYC Greenmarket and Slow Food and taught undergraduate courses about the food system. A graduate of Williams College, she received her MA in Food Studies from New York University.
"Message to my future self.
You were at Silvercup Studios tonight. It had been a long shoot and nothing much was going according to plan. When the director wrapped you walked up onto the set, a beach scene, took off your shoes and built a sand castle when nobody was watching. In the car home you passed a bar and remembered they had a photobooth. The place was closing up, but you decided to tell the driver to stop. You got out and made this series of pictures.
At home you have three varieties of tomato plants on the fire escape (Green Zebras, Black Krims, and De Pintos); all are in full bloom. You will eat tomatoes like apples before you sleep.
Lately you have fallen into dreams in which your room falls away and you are out under starry mountain skies.
You see beauty all around. Maybe you will read this in 2004 and think it naive. Maybe you will forget it or lose it. Maybe you will read it and remember what it was to be alive on this day.
-September 4th 1994."
Filed under: personal history
Tags: 1994, paramount pictures, silvercup dreams, tomatoes
It sounds like getting down to the floor of the convention is a bit of an ordeal. So, I'm going to head down now instead of sitting here blogging from my perch above the stadium. So, Enjoy the convention, and I will try to get back to my computer after the speech to post photos and such. My plan is to camp out behind the Alaskan delegation once I'm down on the floor, I want to watch their reactions.
When my friends Robi Bear & Leanne Wright aren't making running Wadada, they are making fun art. The original "champions of naivate".
John Siracusa:
It’s not that any particular feature of Chrome is so wonderful, or even that the sum of those features puts Safari back on its heels in the browser wars. It’s the idea that someone other than Apple has taken such clear leadership in this area. Google Chrome makes Safari’s user interface look conservative; it makes Apple look timid.
Shared by Adam Rice
"sent from my iPhone"Christopher Hitchens is an expert on the tumbrel remark.
A tumbrel remark is an unguarded comment by an uncontrollably rich person, of such crass insensitivity that it makes the workers and peasants think of lampposts and guillotines. I can give you a few for flavor. The late queen mother, being driven in a Rolls-Royce through a stricken district of Manchester, England, said as she winced at the view, "I see no point at all in being poor." The Duke of St. Albans once told an interviewer that an ancestor of his had lost about 50 million pounds in a foolish speculation in South African goldfields, adding after a pause, "That was a lot of money in those days." The Duke of Devonshire, having been criticized in the London Times, announced in an annoyed and plaintive tone that he would no longer have the newspaper "in any of my houses."Someone please start a Tumblr of tumbrels. (via clusterflock)
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Here are a few of the photos I've been able to take during the convention. I will be doing my best to liveblog during the primetime speeches, but will NOT be posting during Gov. Palin's speech, as I will be down on the convention floor rather than in a press box perched high above the stands.Fred Thompson's speech last night...from blogger's row atop the stadium
Blogger's row (including Townhall's Matt Bower, Amanda Carpenter, and Chuck DeFeo)
Sen. Joe Lieberman
My press pass (Wow, I is O-FFICIAL!)
Lot's o' balloons (ready to drop on Thursday night)
Blogger brunch this morning with Congressman Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), Chairman of the convention's Platform Committee. He was great!
Blogger Brunch: Surprise appearance by pollster Frank Luntz.
HotAir's "Captain" Ed Morrissey hosts a lunch for bloggers.
Ed Morrissey being interviewed by Pajamas Media's "PJTV" at the blogger luncheon.
The Morrissey luncheon was at Babani's, a FANTASTIC Iraqi Kurdish restaurant here in St. Paul. If you are ever up here, you have GOT to find this place and have a meal. Kurdish food is great!
Some advance excerpts of Sarah Palin's big speech are now available, and they offer a glimpse of how she'll parry criticism of her lack of experience.
Palin plans to suggest that critics who have said her mayoralty of Wasilla hasn't prepared her for the presidency are snobby about small-town America. Here's the key excerpt:
I had the privilege of living most of my life in a small town. I was just your average hockey mom, and signed up for the PTA because I wanted to make my kids' public education better. When I ran for city council, I didn't need focus groups and voter profiles because I knew those voters, and knew their families, too.Before I became governor of the great state of Alaska, I was mayor of my hometown. And since our opponents in this presidential election seem to look down on that experience, let me explain to them what the job involves. I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a 'community organizer,' except that you have actual responsibilities.
Dems "look down" on Palin's small-town experience -- that's a good one. At least we know where this is headed. Suppose it's hardly surprising, really.
Palin will also keep up the McCain campaign's assault on the media with this crowd-pleaser:
But here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion -- I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country.More excerpts after the jump.
I'm not a member of the permanent political establishment. And I've learned quickly, these past few days, that if you're not a member in good standing of the Washington elite, then some in the media consider a candidate unqualified for that reason alone. But here's a little news flash for all those reporters and commentators: I'm not going to Washington to seek their good opinion - I'm going to Washington to serve the people of this country. * * *Our opponents say, again and again, that drilling will not solve all of America's energy problems -- as if we all didn't know that already. But the fact that drilling won't solve every problem is no excuse to do nothing at all. Starting in January, in a McCain-Palin administration, we're going to lay more pipelines...build more nuclear plants...create jobs with clean coal...and move forward on solar, wind, geothermal, and other alternative sources. We need American energy resources, brought to you by American ingenuity, and produced by American workers.
* * *Here's how I look at the choice Americans face in this election. In politics, there are some candidates who use change to promote their careers. And then there are those, like John McCain, who use their careers to promote change.
emails, pitches, assignment, design, editing, and production for a Charlie Kaufman profile in November's issue [via]
This is a stunning moment in economic history: At one time we worked hard so that someday we (or our children) wouldn't have to. Today, the more we earn, the more we work, since the opportunity cost of not working is all the greater (and since the higher we go, the more relatively deprived we feel).
In other words, when we get a raise, instead of using that hard-won money to buy "the good life," we feel even more pressure to work since the shadow costs of not working are all the greater.
The increasing income inequality in the US is partially to blame, says Conley. Those in the middle and upper middle classes are working harder and longer, trying to keep up with the Joneses who are growing more wealthy at an even faster pace. Conley's got a book coming out in January on the same topic called Elsewhere, USA. (via ah)
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Just a reminder: Serious Eats is Twittering. We have been for a while, but we were doing a zombie-ish feed that only pumped out RSS links to posts. That's no fun, right? Well, we stopped that nonsense, and there are now humans behind our tweets. So if you stopped following us before, maybe it's time to come back: twitter.com/seriouseats. What will we use our Twitter for? Who knows. Maybe as a glimpse behind the scenes here, as a way to get your feedback, or what have you. We'll see. (Don't know what Twitter is? Wiki up, pardner.)
Following up on my Previous Post I decided to do little test to see how accurate stats we can get for for Index Stats created by ANALYZE TABLE for MyISAM and Innodb.
But before we go into that I wanted to highlight about using ANALYZE TABLE in production as some people seems to be thinking I advice to use it.... a lot. In fact I should say I see more systems which have ANALYZE abused - run too frequently without much need than systems which do not run ANALYZE frequently enough.
First it is worth to note MySQL only saves very basic cardinality information for index prefixes for index stats and these rarely change. There is no histograms or any other skew metrics etc. MySQL optimizer also uses number of rows in the table for many decisions but this is computed live (maintained for MyISAM and estimated during query execution for Innodb). This basic information means it does not change whole that quickly at extent to affect optimizer plans.
If you look at the stats accuracy along running ANALYZE TABLE after initial table population and when there are significant changes makes sense. For Innodb as index stats are computed first time table is accessed after restart this often means "never" because MySQL servers are restarted frequently enough. Even once per 3 months is often enough for many workloads. Add to this Innodb stats are less accurate by nature which means you can allow more data change while your
index stats remain as good as new.Looking at stats accuracy is however a wrong way to look at the problem. Your index stats are a bit off, so what ? What really matters is not how accurate stats are but how good plans you're getting for your queries. If you're getting as good plans as with perfect stats why bother updating them ?
Also note many simple "queries" (using constants for index accesses) will not use index cardinality data at all but will estimate number of rows during query execution.I typically look at ANALYZE TABLE and adding it to the table if I see having it run helps to get good plans. If query plans are good or bad independently of it being run there is need to bother - for bad plans use FORCE INDEX or change the query and report MySQL Optimizer Bug
But now lets see in the difference of behavior of ANALYZE TABLE for MyISAM vs Innodb.
I used the following simple table for tests:
SQL:
I have populated it with data with following true cardinality:
SQL:
Lets see how stats look for MYISAM:
SQL:
Aha as you can see there is no cardinality stored with table as ANALYZE did not run yet.
SQL:
As you can see after running ANALYZE we have exact cardinality for i and c columns, with cardinality for the pair (c,i) looks a bit off but is within 0.5% of the correct value so we can count on MyISAM values as almost exact.
As you see ANALYZE table tool a little bit of time to run (even for this very small table) this is because ANALYZE does index scans to find number of exact values in the table.
Now let us populate antest_innodb table which is same but uses Innodb format:
SQL:
Very interesting result - after loading the data with INSERT in Innodb table we do not get NULL cardinality as with MyISAM but instead we get very wrong cardinality which shows us index prefix is unique (245900 is estimate for the row count in the table)
It is worth to note if you do ALTER TABLE Innodb, same as MyISAM will internally run analyze as soon as table is rebuilt and values will be more sensible:
SQL:
Note however how much are these values off from reality. The "i" key cardinality is overestimated 3 times, "c" key prefix cardinality is underestimated 5 times and the combined (c,i) key cardinality is overestimated 2 times. So Innodb stats are are very inexact. Fortunately for most queries which use these stats accuracy at the order of magnitude is enough. Sometimes it is not and you're thinking why a hell it could be picking this strange plan.
Let us run ANALYZE TABLE for Innodb couple of more times to see how values change:
SQL:
As we see subsequent runs change stats dramatically. For c prefix we got value changed to become 15 times larger. So Innodb stats are both inexact and unstable. So restarting server with Innodb may change stats dramatically and affect some query plans. You also may be getting different plans on different slaves with same data.
Another difference when it comes from handling the statistics comes from NULL handling.
MyISAM has a special variable which controls if NULLs should be considered equal when computing stats:SQL:
Too see the difference let me set column "c" to NULL in both tables and see how values change:
SQL:
As you can see MyISAM set cardinality for prefix (c) and key(c,i) approximately to number of rows in the table treating all nulls different values. Innodb on the contrary treats all NULL values the same so
cardinality for (c) and (c,i) dropped significantly.This means Innodb and MyISAM have different stats computation method by default.
Lets check how stats change for MyISAM if we change the stats computation method:
SQL:
oops. Little gotcha. MySQL considers table up to date even though stats stored were computed with different method. If your table is written to actively you should not have this problem; I just did couple of updates to refresh update time.
SQL:
So with nulls_equal method we see very different picture. It is considered we only have one distinct value for "c" and there are 101 distict values for (c,i) which is the same as value of distinct values in i column. These stats look much closer to what we get for Innodb table with same data though we can see Innodb stats are a bit off from reality too.
MySQL version note: This is from MySQL 5.0.62 if there are other versions which show different behavior.
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While I'm not at all suggesting that Google trends is a proxy for brand strength, search trends are good for hatchet-job comparisons like this one, plotting the two mega brands of 2008 against one another. Ladies and gentlemen, iPhone v. Obama:
Nate Anderson / Ars Technica:
Google on Chrome EULA controversy: our bad, we'll change it — Google's new web browser Chrome is fast, shiny, and requires users to sign their very lives over to Google before they can use it. Today's Internet outrage du jour has been Chrome's EULA, which appears to give Google …
"Everything was going well until we noticed the incredible amount of fat that was accumulating in the pan."
Nick Kindelsperger and Blake Royer of The Paupered Chef made quick-flipped fat burgers out of home-ground meat using Harold McGee's technique where the burgers are flipped every 30 seconds during cooking. The resulting burgers had an "unbelievable sear" on the outside and and were "moist and luscious" on the inside. But as awesome as fat is, there may have been too much in this burger:
And afterwards we all felt a completely nauseous and had to take an hour long walk to feel right again. Both the chuck and the short ribs were too fatty, and I'll probably try to trim a lot more of the fat off next time I make them.
Having never experienced eating a burger that tasted too fatty, I desperately want to try this version.
Related
The Blumenburger — The Most Labor-Intensive Hamburger Ever
The Best Homemade Burger, Paupered Chef–Style
Readers that follow us here and via Twitter, Flickr, Interbike, and our Link Blog, may wonder just how we do it or maybe even considering blogging themselves; well, here ya go, all the details.
- iPhone G3
- Post via email to Flickr
- Post by browser to Twitter
- Post by iPhone app to TypePad blog
- Post by browser to Movable Type
- Movable Type
- Bike Hugger 1.0 is published with MT 3.x.
- We’re launching 2.0 this Fall on MT 4.x — MT4 will offer us even more moblogging, reblogging, and feed features.
- Feedburner
- Burns our feeds
- Serves ads
- Splices Delicious and Flickr into our feed
- Reblogging
- Twitterfeed reblogs our posts to Twitter
- Feeds.app aggregates and publishes posts between our blogs.
- Gear
- Macbook Pros
- Macbook
- Casio Exilim Digial Camera
- Canon Vixia HF100 HD Camcorder
- SanDisk MobileMate
- Software
- iLife Suite
- Final Cut Express
- bbEdit
The Mojo & Secret Sauce
The pixie dust that makes a blog work is derived from lots of hard work. The technique is to find a niche, a topic you’re really into, and geek out on it — become a hugger of it. Don’t fret about SEO, links in/out, amd all that navel-gazing stuff you hear from Social Media pundits. Focus on the content and live it. As this presentation says, “Do Epic Shit.”
I wrote more about blogging in a book and will join my fellow bloggers on a panel at Interbike later this month. Textura Design Inc., the publisher of Bike Hugger, is speaking all about blogging and Social Media at various events this Fall.
Questions? Please comment and we’ll respond. Also check all the other bike blogs.
More blogging and moblogging
The moblogging (mobile blogging, on the go, like we did in Greenville) will continue with our Mobile Socials and upcoming trips to Vegas, Amsterdam, Rome, Taipei, and Boston.
Y’all, circumstances have induced me to put my hand in the toilet. Now I'm posting about politics.
I'm so disappointed in myself. :( So...
Recently (and especially tonight) there'll be a lot of voices saying the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee has more relevant experience than the Democratic Presidential nominee regarding the executive offices they seek. Is this true? I wouldn't have thought so, but I've been very wrong about so many things that I realized I should spend some time trying to diminish my ignorance.
(I know it might seem that discussing Obama's experience in the context of Palin's is false equivalency. But a lot of people out there really think their qualifications for executive office are nearly equal. They're not crazy, they're putting forth some effort here, so it seems worth a second to see what this is about.)
The debate about who has more experience has included checklists. I started to cobble one together. It definitely could use some improvement...it's just a start.
Barack Obama Sarah Palin Age 47 44 Religion Christianity.
(left Trinity United Church of Christ after condeming his pastor's inflammatory rhetoric, might now worship at Apostolic Church of God)Christianity.
(attends Juneau Christian Center, grew up attending Wasilla Assembly of God)Current job Senator of Illinois Governor of Alaska Previous jobs Director of the Developing Communities Project in Chicago (1985-1988);
Summer law associate at Sidley & Austin (1989);
Summer law associate at Hopkins & Sutter (1990);
Director of Illinois Project Vote (1992);
Associate at Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland (1993-1996);
Lecturer at University of Chicago Law School (1992-1996);
Senior Lecturer at University of Chicago Law School (1996-2004);
Illinois State Senator (1997-2004)Sports Reporter for KTUU-TV in Anchorage (?-1988);
City Council member of Wasilla, AK (1992-1996);
Mayor of Wasilla, AK (1996-2002)Foreign policy experience Has limited congressional work in foreign policy... He sponsored or introduced several bills with foreign policy implications, including:
109 S. 2125 - the Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act of 2005;
110 S. 433 - the Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007;
110 S.CON.RES. 25 - Condemning the recent violent actions of the Government of Zimbabwe against peaceful opposition party activists and members of civil society;
110S. 1430 - Iran Sanctions Enabling Act;
--- and he's held an assignment on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during which he made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia and Africa
-- and he became Chairman of the Senate's subcommittee on European Affairs, but this barely counts since he hasn't yet called it into session. (It's been stagnant a year!)Almost none... though she is the Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard. But according to Major General Craig E. Campbell, immediate commander of the Alaska National Guard, she hasn't yet played a role in any defense activities relating to the Guard but that she's "extremely responsive and smart" and in charge when it comes to in-state services, such as emergencies and natural disasters where the National Guard is the first responder... [Associate Press cite] Domestic policy experience Experienced.
Reformed ethics and health care laws in Chicago's South Side.
Increased tax credits for low-income voters.
Helped reform Chicago welfare.
Promoted city-wide childcare subsidies.
Supported loan reform before the mortgage meltdown.
He was Chairman of the Illinois Senate's Health and Human Services Committee.
Helped enact death penalty reforms for Illinois.
Sponsored 131 bills since 2005 and has co-sponsored 619 bills during that time.Experienced.
In charge of the Wasilla Police Department and Public Works.
Cut her own salary while cutting property taxes.
Secured $27 million in earmarked funds for Wasilla.
Chaired the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. (Resigned in protest over the ethics violations of colleagues.)
Helped pass a tax increase on oil company profits.
Signed into law the Alaska Gasline Inducement Act (AGIA).
Signed into law a $6.6 billion operating budget for Alaska. The largest in that state's history.Military experience Never served. Never served.
(But her son is in an infantry brigade in the Army. And, as mentioned above, she is nominally the Commander in Chief of the Alaska National Guard despite not doing any commanding yet.)Education College degree, law degree, and college professor and lecturer.
Occidental college (1979-1981).
Columbia University, B.A. in political science with a specialization in international relations (1981-1983).
Harvard Law, J.D. and he graduated magna cum laude (1988-1991). While there he was President of the Harvard Law Review (1990).
Taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago Law School for twelve years (1992-2004).College degree.
University of Idaho, degree in journalism, minor in political science (1987). (Previously attended Hawaii Pacific College for a semester and transferred in from North Idaho College.)Hobbies Basketball, teaching law, social work, writing (he published a memoir 3 years ago - cheeky!). Hunting (she's a lifetime member of the NRA), ice fishing, riding snowmobiles, she's also run a marathon and owns a floatplane. (I'm very jealous of the floatplane. Wicked awesome.)
I started with the following premises. I intended them to be non-partisan, however I'm sure a bias has crept in here or there. I'm often a lazy thinker. I've been assuming that...Sarah Palin has demonstrated that she can face management crises. To many, this is obvious. Just helping to raise five children (I assume Todd helps as well) is an amazing and inspiring feat of management, especially given that Mrs. Palin faced sexism in her professional life despite her talents, and given that one of her sons, Trig, is developmentally disabled. It is churlish and petty to argue that balancing motherhood and professional responsibilities as a public servant is a somehow meager task. How can we dismiss this honestly when viewing Ms. Palin's qualifications? You may disagree with some of her decisions, but she is definitely accomplished at being Governor and being a mother of a large family - which can suggest she has amazing personal discipline and that she could also possibly be excellent at managing other things.Both candidates seem to possess character traits suited to executive management based on the available evidence: they both can manage their time, their emotions, their employees, and their ambition. They both clearly have experience in delegating tasks and power. They both can argue and hold their own in political debates within government. They are both charismatic and attractive.
Barack Obama has also demonstrated that he can face management crises. To many, this is obvious. Just studying for and passing the state bar, becoming a professor, guiding students on complex issues of law, volunteering as a social worker, introducing and supporting national legislation, helping raise two children (I assume Michelle helps as well) while running successive state and national campaigns is an amazing feat of management, especially given that he also had to face racism on many occasions. It is churlish and petty to argue that balancing fatherhood, academia, and professional responsibilities as a public servant is a somehow meager task. How can we dismiss this honestly when viewing Mr. Obama's qualifications? You may disagree with some of his decisions, but he is definitely accomplished as a student, a lawyer, a professor, a Senator, a presidential campaigner, and a father - which can suggest he has amazing personal discipline and that he could also possibly be excellent at managing other things.
But there's this non-subtle difference in their pursuit of knowedge - I mean look at all that time Barack completely wasted (they might assume) in studying the law and in school and teaching advanced courses at the University of Chicago. What was that about?
This is the part where I get confused. Are we really doing this again as a country? Y'know, skimming the experience of people with advanced degrees and lifelong interests in academic study and snickering "they think they're so mighty pants" while concluding, well, their education is probably not important? Are we still highlighting skills in management and delegation while downplaying the totally different accomplishments of critical analysis and thinking?
The management experience is helpful stuff, but there's this difference that's compelling to me. Barack has had his ability to analyze critically rigorously tested and challenged for decades.
This isn't a subtle difference, is it? Really? Is experience in middle management all we're striving for in our potential Presidents? C'mon, everyone. Let's let some better light shine here.
To me the debate about experience weighs toward Mr. Obama not because Mrs. Palin is somehow incompetent (this is false and unfair) but because Mr. Obama has great (and greater) breadth and competency.
Just musing about political experience. Arguments about policy differences between them can go over there - you know - right over there, next door, on the many thousands of websites devoted to those arguments. That's not what this post was about. Don't argue about that shit here. I mean it.
On the eve of his inaguration as president of the Rhode Island School of Design, John Maeda gave a wide-ranging interview to Dominique Browning in yesterday's Wall Street Journal. Among the Maeda-isms:
"I want to reform technology. All the tools are the same; people make the same things with them. Everyone asks me, 'Are you bringing technology to RISD?' I tell them, no, I'm bringing RISD to technology."
"Companies know that they can't get any further with their left-brain processing; they are dying to engage the right brain. Artists change how we see the world -- and that can have value in the way people do business."
"A designer is someone who constructs while he thinks, someone for whom planning and making go together."
Check out the new RISD blog ... >>
Or follow John Maeda on Twitter >>
I love the internets:
New for the 2008 NFL season: the NFL TV distribution maps that tell you which football games are going to be broadcast is which parts of the country. They're using zoomable Google Maps this year...here's what a typical coverage map looks like:
During football season in a TV market like NYC, which is dominated by coverage of two local teams (Giants and Jets), this is an essential tool for determining if you're actually gonna get to watch the game you want to on Sunday.
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Today marks the launch of my second blog, and first new one in over four years: A House By The Park. Please head over and have a look-see! Why a second blog when I only post to Mike Industries a few times a month? Well, I’m building a house, together with Build LLC. The first thing I [...]
the design proposal by smith-miller + hawkinson architects for the new new york aquarium takes inspiration
from the animals iside and the environment outside. the aquarium is to be located on coney island and in
smith-miller + hawkinson proposal, has two parts ‘wavefence’, the aquarium’s surrounding wall and
‘sandscape’, an artificial dune concealing a parking lot below. ‘wavefence’ is based on beach fencing and will
have a vertical garden and also special photoluminescent paint which wills provide energy free signage.
the ‘sandscape’ will be made from a combination of sand and recycled material and be complemented by the
new boardwalk connecting the aquarium to the beach and transportation hubs.
http://www.smharch.com
via world architecture news
I’m a bad, guilty blogger these days. I spent Friday and Saturday of Slow Food Nation just taking it all in — the stupendous design of the Taste Pavilion, that glittering temple to good food constructed of recycled pallets, vegetable bins, and canning-jar lids; the crowded green bounty of the Victory Garden, which shamed me and my scraggly little sunburned backyard plants; the back-to-back panel discussions in airless Herbst Theater through which the fog of self-congratulation occasionally parted to let loose a shaft of genuinely inspiring rhetoric; the homespun Powerpoint presentations of Changemakers Day (I crashed it). On Saturday night, 25 writer/blogger friends and acquaintances from all around the country converged at Essencia, an organic Peruvian restaurant in the Civic Center, for a chaotic, crazy dinner of local halibut ceviche and Argentinian grassfed beef washed down with (mostly) California wine.
In short, I was too busy eating, listening, talking, and walking to blog. And now I am writing this on a plane to England, en route to a sorely needed two-week vacation in Hove (East Sussex, near Brighton), then London (Maida Vale), then York, for which I have barely packed, let alone planned. (I would love UK readers’ recommendations for restaurants, farmers markets, and farms in those areas.)
Yet I’m still thinking about Slow Food Nation. I’ve been to several sustainable food conferences in the past two years — WK Kellogg’s Food and Society (twice), Eco-Farm, the Sustainable Institute at Monterey Bay Aquarium — and SFN stands out in sheer scale and spectacle. Which is not to say I don’t have a few quibbles with it. I agree with Kerry over at Eating Liberally: there should have been more simple fruit and vegetables featured at Taste, given the season — why not a tomato pavilion? or a stone fruit, or a leafy greens one, in addition to the charcuterie and cheese? Pickled vegetables are wonderful, but so are fresh. And while it was heartening to see the ethnic and generational diversity of people touring the Victory Garden and the farmers’ market showcase, I was hard pressed to find a nonwhite face in the grazers at the $65 per ticket Taste Pavilion, except behind the food counters, or at any of the Food for Thought lectures I attended.
Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation,” made this point forcefully in the closing Food for Thought session, delivering a recap of his “rant” from an earlier session on labor (see Elanor’s post). Responding to Slow Food Nation’s slogan, “Come to the Table,” he pointed out that the people who picked and packed and processed all that lovely lovely food had not been invited, and that most conscious eaters in the audience were probably more concerned with animal rights than human. “Workers need to have a place at the table,” he said. “I don’t care if the tomato is heirloom, if it’s a product of slavery.”
A tension between the taste faction and the politics faction permeated Slow Food Nation. I will never forget a Slow Food leadership meeting I attended in 2006, in which one attendee said, “My biggest problem with the food-politics people is that the food they serve at their events is usually terrible.” As values, taste and ethics don’t have to be mutually exclusive — Stone Barns chef Dan Barber talked in one session, as he has elsewhere, about a foie-gras farmer in Spain whose naturally gavaging “field gras” flocks are so well-treated that wild geese voluntarily join them. Yet Slow Food’s reputation has mostly leaned toward privileging provenance and uniqueness over fighting for things like farmworkers’ rights, community food justice, and land reform.
But as Michael Pollan was quoted as saying in John Birdsall’s excellent, blunt discussion in this month’s San Francisco magazine of how Slow Food Nation came to be — or rather, almost didn’t — Slow Food USA is a gangly adolescent of a movement. It’s got a lot of growing up left to do. And Slow Food Nation was its first-ever big event. I’d hate for what it got right to get lost amongst enumerating what it didn’t.
Many of those things were articulated in the closing Food for Thought session, when speakers discussed the actions that we, the audience, need to take. My laptop battery’s dying, and my brain’s running on empty, so I apologize for the fragmented nature of these summaries of what they had to say:
Michael Pollan: We’ve been eating oil for 40 years but the era of cheap food is over. We need a “sun food agenda.” What would it look like? Farms would return to diversified agriculture (polycultures, with animals to close the nutrient cycle), and farmers would be rewarded for the number of days their fields are green, soaking up the sun. We also have to “resolarize” the farm economy — create places farmers can sell locally — and rebuild our food culture as a nation. But all of that depends on recruiting millions of new farmers, ennobling farming so more people want to do it, and making it possible for them to make a decent living at it. We can also help them out, and learn about what’s involved, by trying to grow some of our own food. “Planting a garden is a really important thing to do,” Pollan said. “If you do that, you will find that things change.” You will cook, you will share food with your neighbors, “and a whole long trail of wonderful things will follow.”
Vandana Shiva: Everything is connected, and America’s “eat local” solutions need more global consciousness. We must protect seeds, which belong as a public good, from being blockaded by intellectual property laws, and keep enough people on the land in the Global South (staving off land speculators) to allow those countries to feed themselves. “The Gates Foundation is the biggest problem for meeting our agenda. It’s doing everything wrong and crippling our efforts,” she said, speaking of the Foundation’s push to bring agrochemicals and GM seeds to Africa in a second green revolution. “I think they are being criminal and they need to be stopped if we are to get this movement of the ground.” We also need a real politics of antitrust in this country, stopping U.S. corporations like Monsanto and Cargill from squelching real competition.
Eric Schlosser: He would add ADM and Exxon Mobile to Shiva’s list. We cannot underestimate the power of the forces resisting the changes she is talking about. “I don’t want to be a broken record, but my solution is to create a real movement by broadening this one.” Change will only come when Slow Food Nation is held in Des Moines, Iowa, and when farmworkers are at the table. And if we can change things in America, the ripple effect will be felt worldwide.
Wendell Berry: All of those issues are the byproducts of a system built on competition rather than cooperation. “I’m not enthusiastic about any presidential candidate…on principle, because there’s too little we can expect from them. If we get a large enough voice, they’ll do the right thing because they have to,” said the poet-philosopher-farmer who “started this whole [movement] thing,” as Schlosser teased him on stage. We should seek out things that rely on the cooperative principle instead, like farmers markets and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) programs. “If you trade with your local hardware store rather than going to Wal-Mart, you’ll be saying, ‘I want you to exist. You and I are neighbors, and I accept responsibility for that connection.’”
Alice Waters: Quoting Gandhi, we need to be the change we want to see in the world. And that Victory Garden out in front of the Civic Center has expressed what we believe in. Americans are very disconnected from the experience of growing and cooking food that our parents had, at least the ones born before World War II. “That’s the reason I think we need to feed our politicians.…we need a garden on the White House lawn.…I am rushing in the pursuit of hopefulness.”
Carlo Petrini: We have to revolutionize our own actions. “Let’s get rid of this heavy coat of being a consumer. Because it’s destroying our lives…We need to be ‘coproducers,’ in an active way.” Corporations are always creating new needs for us, we have to run behind them. Let’s think about what we actually need and consume a little less of it. Let’s all start wasting less as well. “Our refrigerators are like tombs…let’s free us ourselves from this consumptive disease.”
The thing I had been most looking forward to about Slow Food Nation was the chance to hear my hero Wendell Berry speak. He did not disappoint. Now I’ve been feeling pretty tired and sorry for myself lately, and I’ve only been doing this writing-activist stuff for a couple of years! I can’t imagine how Berry, who’s been farming as well as documenting what’s wrong with agriculture (and other culture) in this country since the ’70s, has managed to stay engaged despite the steadily downward spiral of our food system.
Well, it turns out he’s had his dark moments too. “I gave up on this movement about 1990,” he said. He figured he, his brother, and a few other mavericks like Gene Logsdon would just keep on doing that they did, isolated voices in the wilderness as America shopped itself into a stupor. “But then about about 1994, 1995 I began to look at myself in the mirror and say, ‘Wendell, there are people out there doing what you want them to do! You better go and help them.’” And by “people” he meant regular folks, people “who are farming well, or purchasing intelligently and cooperatively.” While the people on stage with him had acted as catalysts, it’s been virtually a leaderless movement, he pointed out approvingly.
Berry refers often to his Christian faith when he writes, but usually in pragmatic rather than dogmatic terms. He ended with his “favorite joke from the Sermon on the Mount — I always love the Gospels for their humor,” the idea that “to love thy neighbor as thyself” is an act of selflessness. Rather, he said, a person becomes a “neighbor” not just because they live next to you, but because they can help you and you them.
While he meant this to apply to individual actions — or as he put it, “people asking each other, ‘What can I do for you today?’” — I think it applies equally well to the food movement. Slow Food Nation was an extraordinary four-day festival of cooperation. It was months in the making and of course, some people were asked for too much help and others for none, hurting feelings on both sides. Next time Slow Food Nation happens — and I really hope there will be a next time — the table must get bigger and more inclusive. To reach critical mass as a movement that can really begin to affect policies for climate change, energy, workers’ rights, farm livelihoods, and public health, we need to find away to bring everyone from Slow Food to school food to pesticide action to policy groups together.
But all in all, I for one enjoyed the meal at America’s first-ever Slow Food Nation. Here’s to the “chefs” who cooked up the menu — and the thousands of volunteers, farmers, vendors, designers, architects, event planners, and nonprofit groups who got it to the table in one piece.
An NASA ASTER satellite image of crops in Kansas watered from the Ogallala aquifer. The circle motif is due to the use of center pivot irrigation.
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A profile of Alec Baldwin by Ian Parker for the New Yorker.
He recalled a day, a few years ago, when he was driving through L.A., saw a car run a red light, smash into another car, and keep moving. Baldwin gave chase and, eventually, blocked the culprit in a cul-de-sac. Before the police arrived, the driver got out of his car -- "Typical drug-addict, alcoholic, fuckhead look on his face. He was, 'O.K., what? What? You're chasing me. What?' This nineteen-year-old kid, his eyes blazing. I'm thinking, I'm going to come over there and knock your teeth down your fucking throat just because you're asking me 'What?' You know what, you little fuck? I saw you. I'm a pretty liberal person, but my liberalness comes from what the government should be doing with its excess of wealth. That doesn't mean I'm not a law-and-order person. I'm the kind of person -- you catch the kid who's drunk and high and he almost killed a girl, let's take him in and beat the shit out of him for a couple of hours. Then he'll learn." He laughed. "I believe that!"
Things I have enjoyed Alec Baldwin in:
The Hunt for Red October
Glengarry Glen Ross
The Departed
The Royal Tenenbaums
The AviatorBut what firmly installs Baldwin onto my list of favorite actors of all time is his many Saturday Night Live appearances. Watching Schweddy Balls and Inside the Actors Studio (with Baldwin as Charles Nelson Reilly) still brings tears of howling laughter to my eyes. I gotta bump 30 Rock to the top of my viewing queue.
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Over five years since it began, the war in Iraq continues, but with some recent notable progress. On Monday this week, American forces formally returned responsibility for the security of Anbar Province, at one time, the center of the Sunni insurgency, to the Iraqi Army and police force. Violence in the region has decreased dramatically - attacks down by 90% over the past two years. The continuing relative peace and order in the region remains a fragile scenario, with many former insurgents now acting as police, or as gunmen allied with American-backed "Awakening Councils". Here are some scenes from around Iraq (and a couple from here in the U.S.) over the past several months. (28 photos total)U.S. Air Force 1st Lt. Matheew Lundeen (left) and Maj. Mark Thompson, both pilots from the 817th Expeditionary Airlift Squadron, Mildenhall Air Base, England, walk around their C-17 Globemaster III aircraft while it is parked on the flight line at Sather Air Base, Iraq, during a dust storm on April 17, 2008. The dust storm reduced visibility to 100 meters and stopped all air traffic from landing at Sather Air Base. (Tech. Sgt. Jeffrey Allen, U.S. Air Force)
The Hidden Radio has no obvious controls...unless you count that the radio *is* the controls...it "has either no user interface...or...is all user interface".
The volume is controlled by lifting the lid of the radio (which also reveals the speaker). Tuning is done by twisting the lid. Absurdly clever. (via monoscope)
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Julie here...
Well, Adam actually made it to the convention arountd 9:00 p.m. last night and, as you can see, was happily seated at the Townhall.com spot on the Press Level . He wanted me to let everyone know that he hasn't forgotten all the supporters and will be blogging in an hour or so. He'si n a press "brunch" with guest speaker "Morning Joe" Scarborough of MSNBC.com right now and will be blogging as soon as he's done eating.
More is more. 750,000 images is a lot of images, each nestled in a rich bed of additional data. So when it came time to build an internal application to search all of these images (published to our public gallery or not), it was obvious: Somewhere, we were going to need an index.
Since the application was being written in Ruby on Rails, I looked for a Rails gem or plugin that could do what I needed. What I ultimately chose was Ferret and the acts_as_ferret gem (a plugin is available, but I am now using ‘acts_as_ferret’ for multiple applications) written by Jens Kraemer, Kasper Weibel, and Thomas Lockney.
Following instructions found at the above link for the ‘acts_as_ferret’ gem, I was able to pretty easily incorporate Ferret and ‘acts_as_ferret’ into my development environment. Two gem install commands and inserting ‘require ‘acts_as_ferret” into my config/environment.rb file, and it was up and running.
Plot the Pork. What would you like to add to Sheldon Silver's Google map?With New York City's mostly uncontested primary elections less than a week away, attention turns to the 64th State Assembly district in Lower Manhattan where New York Times-endorsed insurgent Paul Newell is running a long-shot campaign against Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver. Facing his first Democratic challenge since the coining of the word "cyberspace," the decidedly analog Speaker has joined us here in the Information Age with a fancy new campaign web site, ShellySilver.org. It features an eye-catching Google map illustrating "What Shelly's Doing Near You" with some of the $3 to $7 million in member items he distributes annually.
Apparently, Silver hasn't caught on to the whole web 2.0 user-generated content thing because there's no way to drop your own pins on his Google map. If, for example, you wanted to stick a pin on Canal Street to make note of Silver's complicity in maintaining that street's never-ending traffic jam and Chinatown's third world-level childhood asthma rates, you'd be unable to do that. If you wanted to point out that Lower Manhattan enjoys some of the city's slowest buses and most dangerous streets, thanks, in part, to Silver allowing Rochester Assemblyman David Gantt to deny New York City the use of red light and bus lane enforcement cameras, you wouldn't be able to do that either. And given that the Speaker is known more for the projects and policies that he's stalled and killed (the commuter tax, New York City's Olympic bid, congestion pricing...) than the projects he's made happen, it seems like there ought to be a map showing all the things that don't exist in New York City thanks to Sheldon Silver's handiwork.
So, here it is. To help create a more complete picture of Shelly Silver's citywide footprint, Streetsblog went ahead and built a more interactive "What Shelly's Doing Near You" map. If you've got a contribution, go ahead and add it to the comments section here on Streetsblog. Pin it on Shelly.
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The Repubs really do need to get their message straight about the allegedly vicious and destructive media assault -- otherwise known as "journalism" -- on Sarah Palin.
As you've heard already, McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt wailed and beat his breast about the coverage of Palin in an interview in this morning's Washington Post.
Schmidt, one of the most hard-boiled operatives out there, a man who lived through the Clinton impeachment circus, a fellow who worked for Bush in 2004 and encouraged the media's savaging of John Kerry, actually accused the press of being "on a mission to destroy" Palin, adding that his campaign feels "under siege."
But now former GOP House Majority Leader Tom DeLay is sounding a decidedly different message: The coverage is actually good for Palin!
"The media has done more for John McCain in the last two days than he's done for himself in the last year and a half," DeLay said."Trashing her is waking up the sleeping giant, and the sleeping giant is Republican women," he claimed.
DeLay, of course, hints here at the cynicism at the core of Schmidt's crocodile tears about the media and about the alleged sexism GOPers have been claiming is behind coverage of Palin. Beyond being an obvious bid to stir up the base, it's an effort to corral female support by building up the emotional payoff of tonight's speech and spinning it into a narrative of trial-by-sexism followed by triumph.
If anyone doubts whether Sarah Palin is cut from the same cloth as our current Bush Administration, the fact that she is now refusing to testify in her state ethics inquiry should answer that question. Remember, the day that Palin was picked as the vice presidential nominee, she was "happy to help out in the investigation of this matter, because she was never directly involved"; two days later, she lawyered up and began making noise that she was done cooperating, and now she's trying to shunt the investigation over to a state ethics board made up solely of folks she appointed. It's a transparent-enough move that it stuns me she's willing to take it, but at some point, I need to stop being stunned by how ridiculous this is becoming.
I guess that since the nation has allowed countless Bush administration folks to get away with refusing to participate in investigations into various abuses of power (Alberto Gonzales, John Bolton, Monica Goodling, Harriet Miers, David Addington, Dick Cheney, etc.), either Sarah Palin or the McCain/Palin campaign feel that erecting this new blockade is a good gamble to take. That's disheartening on so many levels, the worst of which is that they're probably right -- why would the public take a mere vice presidential nominee to task over her non-participation in an ethics investigation when we didn't manage to take the highest American law-enforcement officer to task for doing the same thing?
All Macs come bundled with a handful of dingbat fonts that most people never use, including Apple Symbols, Webdings, and Wingdings 1, 2, and 3. These collections contain a lot of versatile glyphs that are useful in all kinds of everyday graphical situations. But they also include dozens of mystifying icons whose origins and meaning are totally opaque. Like the one below: What the hell does it signify? Is it a bulb-rest for a tired apostrophe? A whistle seat? A logo for a secret society? I bet Jonathan Hoefler would know.
According to Bob Klapisch, in the Bergen Record, citing ‘club officials,’ “Jerry Manuel is well-positioned to get at least a two-year contract extension.”
As Klapisch points out, the Mets have a .623 winning percentage since Manuel replaced Willie Randolph on June 17.
MetsBlog reader Greg L sent in the following e-mail:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.“What makes Manuel’s current .623 winning percentage so extraordinary is that, not only would it be the highest first-year winning percentage in the history of baseball, but he took over a team that was under .500 after it’s first 69 games.”
I just finished listening to this amazing episode of This American Life about two babies who were switched at birth and didn't find out FOR MORE THAN FORTY YEARS even though one of the mothers knew all along.
On a summer day in 1951, two baby girls were born in a hospital in small-town Wisconsin. The infants were accidentally switched, and went home with the wrong families. One of the mothers realized the mistake but chose to keep quiet. Until the day, more than 40 years later, when she decided to tell both daughters what happened. How the truth changed two families' lives -- and how it didn't.The worst part about the whole thing is that the mother that knew, Mrs. Miller, always treated her non-biological daughter differently, like she wasn't really a full part of the family. The Millers sound like awful people.
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John McCain may not be big on public transportation, but as mayor of a small town in Alaska, his running mate Sarah Palin secured millions in federal earmarks for rail and bus projects.
The Washington Post reports that during Palin's two terms as mayor of Wasilla, when it had a population of 6,700, the town enjoyed a number of transportation-related funding successes, including:
- $1.9 million for the Wasilla Intermodal Transit Project, to realign rail and bus routes to increase use of public transit in the region.
- $15 million for a rail project to connect Wasilla with Girdwood, the home town of Sen. Ted Stevens (R).
- $600,000 to upgrade bus stations.
The story contrasts Palin's skill at lining up earmarks -- with the aid of a lobbyist law firm now tainted by federal corruption charges -- against McCain's professed distaste for "pork barrel" spending. The Post says Palin once supported the infamous "Bridge to Nowhere," a $223 million structure that was to replace ferry service between the town of Ketchikan and Gravina Island, but that she later "reversed course."
Despite her accomplishments for public transit in Wasilla, Grist says Palin has "developed an anti-environmental reputation" since she was elected governor of Alaska less than two years ago. Palin has proposed eliminating the state's gas tax, and in June told a national TV audience that McCain was "wrong" to oppose drilling for oil in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge:
"I think he's going to evolve into eventually supporting ANWR opening ... I'd like the opportunity to change his mind about ANWR."
Here is Grist's summary of Palin's environmental record.
Photo: Wikipedia Commons
[they might be giants: “ana ng”]
Reverend Jeremiah Wright said this:
And they will not only attack you if you try to point out what's going on in white America, U.S. of K.K.K.A....and this:
"The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing 'God Bless America.' No, no, no, God damn America, that's in the Bible for killing innocent people," he said in a 2003 sermon. "God damn America for treating our citizens as less than human. God damn America for as long as she acts like she is God and she is supreme."And Joe Vogler, the founder of the Alaskan Independence Party, said this:
"The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. And I won't be buried under their damn flag. I'll be buried in Dawson. And when Alaska is an independent nation they can bring my bones home."Why isn't Vogler's quote just as controversial? Wright called America the "U.S. of K.K.K.A." Vogler professed his "hatred for the American government. Wright said "God damn America." Vogler referred to our "damn flag."
You can argue that the parallels aren't perfect. Sarah Palin supposedly wasn't a member of the AIP. But she courted the group repeatedly over the years, and her husband was a member for around seven years. You could argue that the AIP isn't really a fringe party in Alaska. But Wright's church isn't really fringe on the south side of Chicago, either. And Vogler said what he said.
Just to reiterate: The Republican vice presidential candidate repeatedly courted -- and her husband belonged to -- a secessionist group founded by someone who professed hatred for the American government and cursed the flag.
I had intended to do some “man in the garden” interviews while I hung around the Victory Garden watching the crowds come through. But my first set of victims were so interesting I talked to them for the entire half hour I had in between lectures.
Maestra Macuilxochitl, Luz Alvarez-Martinez, and Carlos Ruiz-Martinez turned out to be members of a Native American dance troupe, Danza Xitlalli, invited to perform a blessing of Slow Food Nation. If I understood the soft-spoken Carlos correctly, Xitlalli is an ancient Aztec form of dance whose name means star. They are descended from the Aztecs and related to the Hopis and the Ute tribes.
They wanted me to take their picture in front of the Three Sisters planting of blue corn, pole beans, and giant squash. “This kind of planting is thousands of years old, it comes from our ancestors the Aztecs,” Carlos told me with pride. Not only do the three crops “offer the body complete nutrition,” but they grow well in concert: the corn stalks provide a natural trellis for the beans, while the broad leaves of the squash plants shade the ground and conserve moisture.
“It is so great to see it like this,” he said, “and for the young to be able to see it.”
Carlos led me over to the chest-high stand of amaranth across the path, a plant which I know only as a whole grain I buy occasionally to add to the multigrain porridge I make. “This was very important to our ancestors,” he said. The seeds were used to make figurines that decorated the altars in prayer ceremonies; the Aztecs danced around them and then when the ceremony was complete, they passed around the figurines and ate them. The Spanish conquerors had banned amaranth for many years, he said. “They were trying to get rid of our way of life.”
I could not help but think of how history repeats itself. But now the assault is coming from the dumping of cheap corn on Mexican growers and the spread of genetically modified maize.
Great small piece in the Times today from Michael Lewis on the day after Gustav. Worth reading in full, but I'll snip this bit for you:
Just now this would be a terrifying place to be a looter — and the troops and police are really only the first line of defense. Before Katrina the only thing stopping the not insignificant sub-population of well-to-do New Orleans men who enjoy the idea of sitting behind their front door with an AK-47 propped on their laps, waiting to shoot the first looter who walks through the door, was the fear of spending the night without air conditioning. After Katrina these people all went out and bought state-of-the art-power generators and so are holed up in their houses, longing for an excuse to fire a rapid burst from their automatic weapons.
Michael Ruhlman has some photos of the Alinea book in the wild. Though possibly biased, he says it's a beaut.
Grant and his partner Nick Kokonas, along with designer Martin Kastner and his wife, photographer Lara Kastner, wanted to do it on their own and so they have. Kastner, I believe a sculptor by trade, had never designed a book. His wife had never photographed a book, food or otherwise. Grant and Nick had never done a book either. And they were told by numerous publishers (in a nasally dismissive tone, Kokonas suggested) that they just didn't have the skill or experience to do what they wanted to ("Gray pages?! You can't do gray pages!" "You can't sell a book like this at that price.")As mentioned in the post, the Alinea book is only $31.50 if you order through Amazon.
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There comes a time when you can try a version of a food for the thousandth time and still cannot decide if this is actually the way you like it the most. When you try this new take on it, it seems like you can always compare it or find somewhere where it was just as good. For me, I am always in search of the best version of the foods I love and when I find it, I become addicted and find myself coming back again and again to see if it holds up to the first time and leaves me with that same "wow" feeling.
To me, pizza is one of those foods that can be tweaked and contorted too many ways and be messed up on appearance and taste. A good slice of pizza starts with its looks. If it is a jumbled slice that does not have evenly spread toppings and cheese with grease pooling in certain spots, than the rendezvous ends abruptly. Also, I am a thin-crust guy (I know, I know, but the argument ends there with me. There will be no discussions or persuading me on this. I just don't see the point to overwhelm a slice with all that bread). Anyway, carbs are out people! Get with it...thin's in. The battle on this topic will rage on, but I won't hear it!
When I first arrived in LA and began my restaraunt search, I heard hoots and hollerings about this certain pizza joint that serves up a great slice. Well, not just great but "the best in LA." I knew I had to try this just because of the claim alone. I began to collect my info on this place and soon found out that it was one of the tougher reservations to get for lunch or dinner. This only led me to believe that this might be one of those "in" places where celebrities and so-called celebs have shown up and caused this reputation. Not the food though...at least that's what I thought.
I had carefully planned out my method for getting a seat at this place (hint: I showed up between lunch and dinner...I am sneaky, I know, but you guys can have that tid bit. Just don't everyone use it all at once or we we'll create the same problem as lunch and dinner).
As I pulled up to the corner of Melrose and Highland (around 3 o'clock), I was pleased to see no line outside, so I decided to go for it and pulled up to the valet. He asked if I was here for Pizzeria Mozza and of course, I said that I was. I walked in and was pleased to see many open spots and was given a choice between a table or sitting at one of two bars. I chose the bar that surrounded the kitchen, as I wanted to see this operation up close. I was presented a menu and began my inspection of the place.
The menu has 15 or so pizzas ranging from squash blossom tomato sauce and burrata cheese (below) to the typical meatlovers of sausage, salami and prosciutto. I picked the one most resembling my favorite - the Fresno chili, salumi salami and mozzarella.
This isn't your typical pizzeria...the apps are to die for and don't disappoint.
But first up was the fried squash blossom stuffed with ricotta...one word - UNBELIEVABLE! This is one of those addicting foods that is a favorite of mine now. I will have to avoid this place in the offseason because of this dish alone!
Next up was Mussel al forno with Calabrian sauce and if you're a mussel lover like me, then come for these. They rank up there in my top two spots to get mussels -- the other being Tomaso's in Phoenix but that's another review.
Now to the pizza. It comes out of that oven piping hot and picture perfect. I could still hear the sizziling as it sat in front of me - that oh so good popping and crackling that teases you to try a bite. But, an experienced diner knows this will only ruin your meal because your taste buds and tongue will burn and make it a bittersweet meal.
So I finally sank my teeth in and I began to analyze -- it's really good. Bite after bite, I experienced and discovered a new taste. The expectations that I had built up had gotten me wary but at the end of devouring the entire pizza, I was impressed by every bite, especially the crust which is very crunchy on the outside but chewy on the inside.Well, if you can't tell, I have really grown to love this place...like they say, love at first bite! It is not only a great pizza they serve up, but I have tried almost every appetizer and they are all great. It is definitely a must-visit when looking at your dining options in LA, so take my advice on this one and give it a try. Who knows, you might see me there...that's how often I eat there now!
Taking a page (or is it a post?) from Brad DeLong’s long-running laments on the state of journalism in general, I have been reading the coverage of the Chrome announcement and keep asking myself “why, oh why, can’t we have better tech journalism?”
Take, for example, ZDNet’s gutter-to-gutter coverage which, I’m afraid, simply ends in the intellectual gutter. Larry Dignan’s piece does the profession no favors by simply recycling the tried-and-true blogger formula for traffic generation:
I know about X, Google did Y, which is clearly *all about* XThe best of this flavor of “story” approaches the quality level of a plausible but objectively outlandish conspiracy theory, often pulling together bits of fact with a healthy dose of wild speculation (journalistically couched as someone “credible”’s unfounded and unquestioned opinion).
ZDNet piles all aboard onto the loony-bin express with Paula Rooney’s “analysis” piece, helpfully asking the non-question “is this a prelude to Google acquiring Mozilla?”. In what twisted alternate universe would this wild, hair-brained straw-man garner a full ‘graf in a legit online publication, let alone a respected print daily? A small, tiny dig into the strategy of Google’s Mozilla search placement deal and the infrastructure of the Chrome browser would lead anyone (and everyone) to conclude that Google’s interest here is in keeping the browser a viable platform by any means necessary, not that they would ever gain anything by “acquiring” MoCo or MoFo (an even more daunting idea, since it would be difficult for a 501(c)3 organization to transfer resources and assets to a for-profit entity anyway).
The strategic and tactical incoherence continues with the dauntingly dumb quote:
Larry Dignan of ZDnet suggests that perhaps Google and Mozilla are working together as a tag team to defeat Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, and that Google may perhaps purchase the Mozilla Firefox crew and integrate the two code bases to deliver a kock out punch to Microsoft’s IE. Will Mozilla become Google browser labs? Given the close cooperation of the two projects, it’s more than possible.
Ignoring the incestuous and dubious use of a fellow reporter’s speculation as a source for an article, the idea that the Google would want much (if any) of the Firefox team (or vice versa) after shunning their rendering engine, replacing their adopted code base’s JavaScript engine, and re-doing the entire visual and end-user experience from-scratch with completely different technology (i.e., not XUL) is deeply un-credible. Good sourcing might have fleshed out the idea, but alas, that seems far too much for ZDNet to produce on deadline. I mean, it’s not like they cover technology for a living…gosh, I bet they’d be embarrassed then. Quick tip for the next time they want to write this story: Google just became “Google’s browser labs” after giving Mozilla a good long run at it.
The coupe-de-disgrace belongs to PC World, though. After laying out 7 sensible, but “we’re just cribbing this from the press release, really” reasons to like Chrome they proceed to indulge in 7 forehead-slappingly idiotic reasons why you might consider something announced as a Beta to be…well…a beta. It feels kinda dirty just linking to it. Luckily, the PC World crew was able to get it together enough to publish a scoop-free “I played with it for 5 minutes” piece that WaPo wasn’t embarrassed to run, although the “like being there!” aspect really looses it’s punch when anyone can download the beta and, well, be there.
At least with Wired you know you’ll be getting fawning access journalism without the pretense of objectivity, but damnit, it’ll be well written and vaguely cogent.
I won’t even start on the blags. It’s to depressing. I’ll except Ajaxian and Philipp Lenssen here as they added some useful background from the inside perspective and scooped the story (respectively). “Citizen journalism” has a loooong way to go before it earns a place in the 4th estate, though.
Why, oh why, can’t we have better tech journalists?
Shared by mathowie
totally and completely FUCKED UP.Time magazine reports on Sarah Palin’s tenure as mayor of Wasilla, Alaska:
Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.
Shared by mathowie
"This is a complete operating system disguised as a Web browser."This blog posting was created with Google Chrome, which seems to support all of the fancy Javascript interface for Wordpress. Chrome also works with all of the sites that have failed to load on friends’ Macintosh Safari browsers.
In one day, Google’s programmers have conquered almost every obstacle on the Web… but not every obstacle. The FAA used to have a paper form, the 8710, that one filled out to get a pilot’s certificate. You’d spend 10 minutes filling it out and then the examiner would sign it after your checkride. To replace this simple paper form they spend millions of dollars on a Web application called “IACRA”. IACRA works only with certain versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer and only on XP and Vista. What happens on Google Chrome? You type your username and password into IACRA, hit return, and are confronted with a greyed-out screen.
Note to Microsoft and Apple: Google Chrome has its own Task Manager. This is a complete operating system disguised as a Web browser. A person who was a serious user of Chrome probably wouldn’t notice if the underlying OS were replaced with something free, e.g., Linux.
Although all his examples are commercial and I worry about the limits of his method, Augie Ray makes an excellent point when he looks at a series of online marketing techniques and asks of each one: How can I improve this by making it social? The overall message is a useful one: Don't be too worried about having some overall "Social Media Strategy". Instead, look at everything as an opportunity for social dimensions.
One of the fun things about running TPM is that over time we're building a cadre of TPM alums out reporting for other news organizations. And this week, TPM alum Laura McGann, who broke the Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) house deal story for TPMmuckraker last year, is up on location in Alaska reporting on Sarah Palin. You can see her running series of posts here.
I promise I didn't intend for things here to become all-election-the-time; between work ramping up and having the World's Most Awesome Five-Month-Old at home, it seems that all my other free time over the past week and a half has been spent watching the DNC and reading news coverage about the election. Alas, this will all be over soon.
For a bit of only-partially-election-related linkage, though, you have to read this week's New Republic Q&A with Charles Barkley. It's entertaining as hell, much like Sir Charles.
It's even more sweet when the last card you needed was the Mantle. I was absolutely convinced that I wouldn't find the Mick until late 2009, which is pretty much how long I chased the Mantle for my 2006 Bowman Heritage set. I've got 6 of these pages down, only 33 more to go...
Last night, in the face of trying to be spun by McCain campaign spokesperson Tucker Bounds, CNN's Campbell Brown did something incredibly out-of-the-ordinary for today's journalists: she called him on his rank bullshit. (This clip is really worth seeing.)
After that, in what shouldn't be as shocking to me as it is, McCain decided that this was punishment-worthy behavior and backed out of an interview on Larry King Live tonight. The campaign's official statement was:
After a relentless refusal by certain on-air reporters to come to terms with John McCain's selection of Alaska's sitting governor as our party's nominee for vice president, we decided John McCain's time would be better served elsewhere.Sad.
Looks like Anthony Bourdain's daughter has a more advanced palette than I do:
My one and half year old baby daughter loves olives. And caper berries. And salty parmigiano reggiano cheese. Her love of rabbits (as food) is already well established. But I discovered today that she adores polenta--served with the hot, rendered fat of roasted game birds. And that she goes absolutely bat shit over risotto made with wild nettles.
Gone are the days of apple juice and milk for toddlers, since his daughter also prefers "[a dipped] finger in the local red wine" to juice. No doubt about it, Bourdain is raising a foodie's dream child.
A little over two years ago, we launched Picasa Web Albums to make publishing photos online easy. Now Picasa Web Albums hosts billions of online photos from around the globe, with users adding millions of new snapshots every day. Each of these photos records a different moment, or a different perspective, but one thing they all have in common is that in each case, the person behind the camera wanted to share their experience with a friend, their extended family, or maybe the world.
Today, we're rolling out major technology upgrades to both Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. As you might have guessed, these are largely focused on how we share and enjoy our photos with others.
For starters, there's a brand-new feature called "name tags" in Picasa Web Albums that helps you quickly label all the people in your photos, so you can organize and share your photos based on who's in the picture. Name tags uses advanced technology to automatically group similar faces together. That way, you can quickly label all the people you care about in your photo collection. Once you've labeled your photos, it's then a snap to do things like create a slideshow with every picture of you and your best friend, or easily share party photos with everybody who appears in that photo album. This demo video shows you what you can do with name tags:
There's more to Picasa Web Albums. The site now has a fresh, clean look that makes photos look great, and a new "Explore" page that allows you to browse some of the most interesting public content on our site, including "Recent Photos," a near-real-time view of public photos uploaded to Picasa Web Albums. You can now also email photos directly to Picasa Web Albums.
Of course, Picasa Web Albums is only half the story. The great advantage of Picasa Web Albums has always been its integration with Picasa, Google's free photo management software for your PC. And today we're making public the beta version of Picasa 3 at picasa.google.com.
Sharing photos with Picasa has always been remarkably simple, but in Picasa 3, we've made sharing so simple you don't even have to lift a finger. A new 'sync to web' button allows you to sync specified albums on your PC to the web. If you edit or add photos to the album on your PC, those changes will be automatically reflected on Picasa Web Albums. You can even specify who you'd like to share your web albums with from the Picasa software itself.
We've packed many other new features into Picasa 3. There's a slew of powerful new editing tools to retouch and restore photos, automatically detect and fix red-eye, or attractively add text to your images. Plus, there's plenty of the fun stuff -- we completely overhauled things like photo collages and slideshows, giving you more creative freedom over composition and layout. Not to mention a brand-new movie maker that can blend photos, video, webcam capture, and music to create customized movies that you can easily share on YouTube.
You can learn more about Picasa 3 and the new Picasa Web Albums on the Google Photos blog, or by watching the overview video below. Please give both a try -- and give us feedback!
Posted by Mike Horowitz, Product Manager
Caissa, a chess application, is my favorite iPhone app so far. It has human vs. computer, or human vs. human mode. But unfortunately no network play. However the board and pieces look nice, and it's a great time killer.
There are a couple of little bugs in Caissa, but none that affect game play.
Also, I apparently suck at chess.
Poland is a country unhappy with too little attention. Many simple people get angry when "the perfidious West" doesn't remember that the Second World War started with an attack on Poland, that Polish scientists broke the Enigma code, that the downfall of communism began in Poland... So John Paul II was a great source of self-esteem for Poles and became a cult object, overshadowing any religious aspect of the nation's admiration for him.
So, how does the Pope cult look on its lowest level? An artist hiding under the pseudonym Peter Fuss collected the weirdest souvenirs in his exhibition "Santo Subito": bracelets for children, a "snowing" plastic ball, even a lighter. And this picture.
This is where folk religiosity meets psychedelia... and doesn't even know it?
From deser.gazeta.pl. Posted by Nowhere Girl.
I got this card holder that said “rookie card†on it and my friend Adam came over and said I should do something with it. So, yeah. I did a bunch of these and exhibited three in New York and gave the rest to my friend, Joe.
A chart for the previous link. ObamaTaxCut.com
Happy birthday GNU! 25 years ago, Richard Stallman started the GNU project.
Watch the great Stephen Fry "Freedom Fry" video and spread the word.
While Republicans tried to take advantage of the potential destruction by Hurricane Gustav, and the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, stencil artist Banksy visited New Orleans to paint his own pointed messages. It appeared like the GOP, and the current administration, wanted to seem caring and prepared for Gustav's believed force, with photo-ops and "promises" of support. Thankfully for the Gulf Coast residents the storm caused no severe damage, and the Bush has to live with his poll ratings.More popular than ever, Banksy commemorated the 3 year anniversary with jabs at military "security" and the "Grey Ghost", with other pieces that celebrated New Orleans culture and Second lines
.Again using his cleverness and wit to raise some poignant and necessary issues.
Like why, 3 years later, hasn't the necessary infrastructure been created to protect ALL its citizens from another storm?Photos courtesy of Dingler1109
Thanks to NOLA Rising for raising consciousness of whats goin on!
Thanks, Donna
Only it's not really a cookbook. I received a copy last week and am posting now about it to say that it is real and that it is extraordinary. I wrote the introduction, which is not why it's extraordinary, and Jeffrey Steingarten wrote an essay on what it's like to dine at Alinea, and Michael Nagrant and Mark McClusky (Wired editor who wrote about Achatz here) also contributed essays, good stuff all, but that's to be expected.
Alinea is a big fat book weighing more than 6 1/2 pounds (3 kilos), exquisitely photographed, designed and packaged. Again, to be expected, all of which it excels at, and the book will surely hold it's own against this season's big books from the most innovative chefs working today.
What makes Alinea extraordinary—beyond the difficult task it set out to accomplish, which was to create a sense of the restaurant in book form and which it, in my not-unbiasesd opinion, achieves—is the nature of its creation. Grant and his partner Nick Kokonas, along with designer Martin Kastner and his wife, photographer Lara Kastner, wanted to do it on their own and so they have. Kastner, I believe a sculptor by trade, had never designed a book. His wife had never photographed a book, food or otherwise. Grant and Nick had never done a book either. And they were told by numerous publishers (in a nasally dismissive tone, Kokonas suggested) that they just didn't have the skill or experience to do what they wanted to ("Gray pages?! You can't do gray pages!" "You can't sell a book like this at that price.") And yet here they have excelled at every level. And they've created a website that works in tandem with the book, eventually to be available to all. Not least of the group's accomplishments may not be visible when you see the book—the publishing model Kokonas created, which allows the publisher 10 Speed Press, to sell it at a competitive price (Kokonas discusses it here). How competitive a price?
Donna, mouth open at the beauty of it, leafing through my early copy asked, "How much is this? Like a hundred and fifty?"
"Fifty," I said. She couldn't believe it. I showed Symon my copy and when I told him the price he said, "That, is sick."
Kokonas puts it even more bluntly. "Thirty-one fifty at Amazon."
It's a big heavy art food documentary book. $31.50.
Will it be criticized? No doubt many will take pot shots at it for the difficulty of the recipes, but that would be a little silly. This is not a home-cook book. This is a document of the exact recipes the Alinea brigade uses. It's very complex stuff and some of the techniques are difficult to pull off, requiring a good deal of skill and delicacy. I am really eager to hear what critics, and the market, have to say about this ambitious book and it's innovative publishing strategy.
Kokonas ordered a first printing of 50,000 books. Half, Kokonsas said, have been presold.
Wow. The traffic to this site has been tremendous since Friday and the comments section active to say none the least. While we've gotten hundreds, if not thousands of comments and emails in support of Gov. Palin, we've also gotten resumes, spams, people plugging their businesses, and of course, an enormous amount of vile, ugly, vicious, slanderous comments. So, at least for now, the comments are going to "moderated". I know this will slow down the chatter a bit, but it might also keep tempers in check. Everyone should be "slow to anger, and slow to speak".
For those of you who are just dying to have conversation, PalinforAmerica has a discussion forum available.
Adam will be posting in a few hours. Exciting things are happening and you'll be hearing from him a bit more often. But I'll save that for him
Julie
Just saw this HYSTERICAL video by Sarah Benincasa who I LOVE for doing this.
25 years ago Richard Stallman started the GNU (”Gnu’s Not Unix”) project to create a computer operating system like Unix (then ascendant in computer labs like the one Stallman worked in), but with source code free for programmers to run, study, share, and improve.
Free software from the GNU project now powers in the range of billions of computers, from microcontrollers and mobile phones to the Googleplex. Even software at the core of notoriously proprietary Apple’s OS X comes directly from the GNU project. Often, software from the GNU project is paired with the Linux kernel to form the base of a free operating system. The software that runs the Internet, including the domain name system and most web, email, and other network servers, all run on or at least are compiled by GNU project software. While not similarly dominant on the desktop, there is little question that free software such as Firefox, again running on or at least compiled by GNU project software, has tremendously benefitted the web by spurring competition and innovation.
The GNU project has done much more than build software. It fueled the free software movement, also started by Stallman, and in turn inspired and enabled countless projects and movements. Over the long term (it will take much longer than 25 years for this to play out), it will make us rethink the contours of what is possible in the space of social cooperation and invidual autonomy, social justice and freedom.
Heady and heavy stuff, but ultimately unsurprising — consider that computers are now the driving force of change in the world today — movements concerning the production and control of software must become increasingly central.
One of the movements and projects directly inspired by GNU is Creative Commons. We’re still learning from the free software movement. On a practical level, all servers run by Creative Commons are powered by GNU/Linux and all of the software we develop is free software.
So please join us in wishing the GNU project a happy 25th birthday by spreading a happy birthday video from comedian Stephen Fry. The video, Freedom Fry, is released under a CC Attribution-NoDerivatives license.
If you’re a fan of free culture and Creative Commons, Freedom Fry is a great introduction to free software. If you’re already a free software know it all, please share Freedom Fry with your friends.
Thank GNU!
The earliest of the three is a winged death's head, with blank eyes and a grinning visage. Earlier versions are quite ornate, but as time passes, they become less elaborate. Sometime during the eighteenth century -- the time varies according to location -- the grim death's head designs are replaced, more or less quickly, by winged cherubs. This design also goes through a gradual simplification of form with time. By the late 1700's or early 1800's, again depending on where you are observing, the cherubs are replaced by stones decorated with a willow tree overhanging a pedestaled urn.Pay special attention to the graph of the popularity of each motif and the slideshow of example gravestones. (thx, peterme)
(link)
This Sarah Palin nomination is going great! And now she's laid out her geopolitical philosophy in the new issue of Foreign Affairs.(Yes, I made this. Go
