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Technically only going by Doom now, at least for the moment..not his strongest beat IMO but on the mic he's still the most murderous nerd with the turbulent herbalist services: NEW AUDIO: MF Doom "That's That" zshare NEW AUDIO: MF...
It'd be awesome to be able to mark up OpenStreetMap on paper, while walking around, and still have the benefit of something that others could trace when you're done. Right now, you can throw a GPS in your bag and upload your traces for others to turn into actual road data. If you mark your notes on paper, though, it's a more tedious and lonely process to get that data into the system. For U.S. users, most of the raw roads are in the system already. Largely, what's left to be done consists of repositioning sloppy TIGER/Line roads and adding local detail like parks, schools, zoning, and soon addresses.
It'd be interesting for generated printouts of OSM data to encode enough source information to reconnect the scanned, scribbled-on result back with its point of origin, and use it as an online base map just like GPS traces and Yahoo aerial imagery.
A round trip through the papernet.
You might print out something that looks like this:
Maybe you'd print out a bunch of them, one for each neighborhood where you'll be walking and making local notes. You could fold them up and stick them in your pocket, photocopy them for other people, whatever. When you were done, you'd scan them in and a web service would figure out where the map came from, and make it available as a traceable base layer in Potlatch or JOSM.
How would the service know where the map came from?
I've been looking at SIFT (Scale Invariant Feature Transform), a computer vision technique from UBC professor David Lowe. The idea behind SIFT is that it's possible to find "features" in an image and describe them independently of how big they are, or whether they've been rotated.
That's why the picture above has gargoyles in the corner.
They don't have to be gargoyles, they just have to look unique enough so you could tell them apart and recognize them separately from the map. SIFT can look at an original image, and find features in it like this:
Check out the examples in Lowe's paper - he describes how detected features can be used to reconstruct entire objects.
When a new scan is uploaded, SIFT finds all three gargoyles and then it knows exactly where the corners of the original image are, even if the person scanning it did it upside or sideways. It also knows where to find the QR barcode, the square thing that looks like static in the top left corner. Aaron's been thinking about QR codes for at least two years now, and he's got a simple decoder ring webserver that he banged together out of Java. The code would say something simple like "this map came from 37d48'N, 122d16'W", and that would be just about enough to make the scan into a base map that people could trace in an OpenStreetMap editor.
I got an implementation of SIFT from Andrea Vedaldi and Brian Fulkserson, computer vision students at UCLA. Their implementation makes .sift files like this one or this one. The code to read them isn't over complicated once you know what all the numbers mean - here's a short script, markup.py, that reads the first four values from each line of a .sift file (x, y, scale, rotation) and draws a little circle on the source image. Easy. The remaining 128 numbers on each line are like a signature, you can determine whether features from two different images are the same thing by looking at a simple squared, summed distance between the two.
Of course, it's also possible to forego SIFT entirely and pay random strangers a tenth of a penny to find gargoyles for you, or just have the people uploading the scanned maps point them out.
All that's left is to build the thing to do the stuff. =)
Li Wei is a Chinese photographer born in Inner Mongolia (part of China). He documents the region of his birth in a project titled simply The Earth. I've travelled through the region several times and have a great affection for the harsh emptiness of the land and the warmth of the people. His photos bring some of that back to me.
Filed under: photographers
How timely. We were just arguing in the office yesterday about the word restaurateur and that "doesn't it have an n in it?" Dave Cook of Eating in Translation must have read our minds, as he posted a link to an explanation of where the n went:
Restaurateur is the noun created from the verb restaurer by replacing the -er ending of the verb with the -ateur ending for for a man (its female equivalent, restauratrice, only appeared in 1767) who carries out the action. Hence, no n. At first, he was an artisan who restored or repaired objects. In the seventeenth century, he was an assistant who set broken bones for a surgeon. In the 1770s he became a man skilled in creating this special soup called a restaurant.
See, [name redacted]? Told ya, so!
kenyatta: Know Your Meme: The Game Show! Pwn, Win, or Fail! Live in NYC!
On Monday, February 23, 2009 at 7:30 pm, at Santos Party House on Lafayette near Walker, just *before* the O’Reilly IgniteNYC event, the Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies will conduct its next exercise in its continuing study of this thing called ‘Internet’. Chief Internet Scientists Jamiedubs, Elspethjane, and Yatta will lead two teams in a test of their knowledge of all things internet including memes, internet phenomena, and the occasional geeky computer history question.
At the end of the competition the winrars will be crowned ‘Kings of All Things’ for the evening.
Teams will be scored on the accuracy of their responses as well as the enthusiasm of all of their team members.
Contestants include Rex Sorgatz (Fimoculous), Gavin Purcell (Attack of the Show / Jimmy Fallon Show), Peter Rojas (Engadget / RCRD LBL), Nate Westheimer (Innonate), and Kelly Reeves (URLesque) vs Michelle DeForest (Next New Networks), Bre Pettis (NYC Resistor), Caroline McCarthy (CNET), Irene Polnyi (Internetfamo.us), and Tim Shey (Next New Networks).
Can’t make it to New York? Well subscribe to the feed at KnowYourMeme.com as we launch the Know Your Meme weekly series on Rocketboom!
Doors open at 6:30 pm with happy hour ($2 Buds and $5 mixed drink special.) Space is limited so RSVP now and arrive early!
via rocketboom
Hip-Hop mogul Diddy has revealed details on his forthcoming album Last Train to Paris announcing the release date and the list of producers which includes T-Pain, The-Dream and more.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
Philadelphia rap group The Roots recently addressed the workload they inherited as the new house band for upcoming weekly series "Late Night With Jimmy Fallon," claiming their "whole life is this show."
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
Alongside historians Jerry García and Benjamin Smith, I have been working on the curation of a small exhibition called 'In the Name of the Blood Shed.' Focusing on photographs, street art, and installation work from Oaxaca, the exhibition includes works by Lapiztola, Zzierra Rrezzia, Edith Morales Sánchez, and Antonio Turok.
If you happen to be in Three Fires Territory any time soon, stop by the show at LookOut! Gallery. Turok and Morales Sánchez will be at the opening, while the members of Lapiztola and Zzierra Rrezzia should be at the closing.
Opening Reception
02 March 2009
6:30-9:00 with a panel at 7:00Closing Reception
27 March 2009
6:30-9:00 with workshops at 7:00
Some photos have been popping up of various art covered billboards in Boston by Shepard Fairey, but it was unclear if they were paid for, liberated or otherwise. When contacted by email, the artist explained that it was the Institute of Contemporary Art who hooked up the spots via their "relationship with Clear Channel." Initially he had reservations about working with the outdoor billboard company. "At first I was hesitant because of what I know about Clear Channel," wrote Fairey. "But several variables made me change my mind." He went onto to describe why the media conglomerate isn't as evil as it used to be:
"First, Clear Channel recently changed ownership and is no longer in the hands of right wing Christians. Secondly, I was offered the billboards as part of a promotion to test a new environmentally friendly image material they want to switch over to. I am very into environmental conservation, so I was down with that. The billboards through Clear Channel actually cost less than it would cost me to make the materials at Kinkos. Plus, they could just be art billboards which I thought was great to infiltrate the ad domain."Not only that, but he also gets to flaunt his art legally in the public domain after just getting arrested by Boston police weeks prior for putting up illegal work while in town for his major exhibit at the ICA.
|Photo: Shepard Fairey|
With the help of the Talk community and some other friends, we've put together a menu of foods word-playing off the Academy Award categories. Yeah, some of them are pretty bad.
Films
- Frosted Flakes/Nixon
- Mr. Frosty/Nixon
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Mutton
- The Curious Case of Beignet Button
- Corndog (or Chili Dog, or just plain Hot Dog) Millionaire
- Grand Panino
- Flan Torino
- GuacaWall-E
- Revolutionary Rolls
- The Reader.. (uh, this one is too hard; ergo, should not win award)
- Milk (go crazy here)
Actors/Directors
- Kate Wing-lets
- Ann Hath-fillet
- Frank Lan-jello
- Gus Van Sant-wiches
- Marisa Tomei-to Soup
- Frieda Pinto Beans
- Amy Adams Apple
- Mickey Pork
- Brad Pitted Prunes
- Eggplant Parma-Sean Penn
Related: The Brooklyn Kitchen's Oscars Menu
The Big Picture collected a bunch of photos of people at work, spinning silk yarn, on a shoe assembly line, sanding and buffing an Oscar statue, checking flour-making equipment, inspecting cigars, assembling model trains, and making toilet bowls.
Tags: photography working
In November 2006, Manhattan CB3 voiced support for "a comprehensive, community-inclusive initiative to study, identify and build consensus around strategies to improve the safety and connectivity of walking, bicycling and public transportation."Since 1997, three pedestrians have been killed and dozens more injured in collisions near Chatham Square.
Now there's a plan on the table that would put safety strategies into practice at Chatham Square, where the convergence of several streets forces pedestrians to contend with dangerous and chaotic traffic patterns. The re-design would double the amount of pedestrian space and significantly reduce crossing distances, exactly the type of project that Chinatown's hazardous streets are begging for. Despite these safety benefits, consensus has been hard to come by.
Monday night, CB3's Chatham Square Task Force will hold its final
meeting to present comments to DOT about the Chatham Square proposal, and opposition is expected to be intense. (If you can't make the meeting -- 6:30 p.m. at PS 124, 40 Division Street -- Transportation Alternatives has an e-petition to show your support.)Since the last major public meeting about the project, City Council members Alan Gerson and John Liu have condemned the re-design and accused DOT of pushing a plan that does not enjoy public support. Because the Chatham Square proposal is closely associated with the closing of Park Row to private cars -- a policy adopted by NYPD post-9/11 -- businesses convinced that their livelihood depends on auto traffic are up in arms about the proposal.
The loud opposition may have drowned out other voices, but the need for safer streets hasn't diminished. "The paramount importance is making it safe for people to walk, especially for the kids who are walking from schools and libraries," said Jane Ryan Beck, a long-time Chinatown resident who takes her four-year-old son through Chatham Square on the way to school. "I think the plan goes a long way toward addressing those issues."
After her son witnessed the horrific collision on East Broadway that claimed the lives of two classmates, Beck and her husband started a website, ShareTheStreet.org, to raise awareness about child pedestrian safety in Lower Manhattan. "We're hoping to give a voice to a whole group of people who are shocked and horrified, but not taking any action, because they don't even know these projects are on the board," she said, noting that it can be tough for parents to participate in public workshops. "There are lots of obstacles to even just getting there, like getting someone to watch your kid while you go to a Community Board meeting."
Check after the jump for plans depicting the Chatham Square proposal and the current condition.
Please stop talking.
You have very effectively established your argument that you did actually desperately want to end your career with the Braves, but the heartless and unfeeling Braves front office physically threw you out the door and forced you at threat to your own bodily person to sign a more lucrative contract with the Red Sox than was being offered by the Braves at the time. The fact that at the time of your signing the Braves still had not signed a single pitcher to bolster the rotation and that you are injured and will not play until at least June had nothing to do with it, it was all Frank Wren being wantonly cruel to you despite all you've done for this franchise. You have made your version of the account abundantly clear, and due to the several negative incidents that have occurred to the Braves this offseason, your version of the story does seem quite plausible.
However, consistently repeating these allegations of unfairness and abuse at the hands of the cold and calculating Atlanta front office every single day to whoever will listen since you signed the dotted line is beginning to undermine your claims. Instead of a bold assertion of your loyalty and disappointment, these constant criticisms are beginning to make you instead sound whiny, guilty and desperate. Your point has been made, any further reiteration of the matter in question will only serve to characterize you as petty and vindictive toward the organization. If you are truly angry at the way you have been treated, please focus that energy into your rehabilitation. Then when you are ready to pitch once again, go out and contribute to a Red Sox playoff berth and World Series Championship. That way you truly will have revenge against the Braves for their ill deeds.
I ask this because there are still millions of Braves fans out there who look up to you as a player, and I do not wish for them to become as disillusioned with you and your childish antics as I have become. While sadly I will never again see you as anything but a greedy, bitter, egotistical, whiny, full of himself, lying, blowhard, turncoat, two faced son of a motherless goat, I would not want your despicable behavior to spoil the joyful memories of all the people who still love you and the Braves. So please John, for the sake of all the fans you have not already completely and utterly alienated, just shut the hell up.
Sincerely,
some jackhole on the internet.
Words fail to express the depth of my disappointment that, because of the shortness of time and our mounting page count, we could not make space for an index in Baseball Prospectus 2009. Happily, we figured at the time that we’d be able to provide one to people online, right here on BP.com, and here it is.
PDF format
Excel format
Text formatSo, pick your poison, and have fun navigating this year’s big beastie. Rest assured that we’ve heard what people have to say on the subject, and agree entirely. My sincere hope is that all future editions of the annual have an index.
Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com runs the numbers and finds something completely unprecedented in all the time the Bureau of Economic Analysis has been tracking at-home alcohol sales: beer is no longer recession-proof.
Since 1953, when the bureau first started keeping track, the sales of alcohol have never shown any correlation between changes in consumption and changes in the nation's GDP. Alcohol sales for the fourth quarter of 2008, however, were down 9.3 percent—with beer representing almost the entire decline. An interesting bit:
Now, there are several plausible explanations for this. Alcohol sales—but particularly beer—had been on something of a hot streak prior to the 4Q, so perhaps there was some reversion to the mean. Perhaps people are substituting Michelob and Coors for more expensive microbrews like Alpha King and Dogfish Head. (This is unpatriotic, by the way, since all the macrobrews are now owned by foreign-based multinational conglomerates. Stimulate your country—and your tastebuds!).
I'll drink to that.
While most of the free world is checking on Alex Rodriguez, trying to find any holes in his story, I’m wondering why the rest of baseball is getting a pass. Now, I’m about to pick a team at random — literally pointing at a page — and I come up with the Minnesota Twins. Ok, that’s fair. I’m looking at their roster and see who they have that played in 2003.
Mike Redmond. There’s someone who you wouldn’t suspect, but Mike, are you on the list of 2003 survey positives?
Joe Nathan. You were a teammate of Barry Bonds and several other players who have tested positive or had involvement with BALCO. Are you on the list?
Michael Cuddyer. You’ve had injury problems and have probably wondered if there was some way to stay healthier. Are you on the list?
Luis Ayala. You were in Montreal as a rookie in 2003 and you’re from Mexico, where some steroids are available over the counter. Are you on the list?
Justin Morneau. You came up in 2003 and have been one of the best hitters in baseball since then. When you were in the minors, you had a ton of injuries, but almost no problems in the majors. Are you on that list?
I’ll agree with you. None of these players deserves to be asked the question, but the fact is that if we’re going to cover this story smartly, the question about who is and who isn’t on that list — one that was intended to be anonymous, but not only wasn’t, but is being selectively leaked, exists.
If journalists are going to admit that they were asleep at the wheel throughout much of the steroid era, it’s time to start asking the hard questions. I’ve seen, so far, only one instance of this, with Ivan Rodriguez. Credit to whoever it was that asked, though I can’t find it online.
Finally, we need to take a look at players who have played their entire minor and major league career under a testing program and decide whether or not we believe in professional sports’ strongest testing program. I’m pretty sure that it’s done baseball no good, because no one seems to believe that it’s stopping things, despite positive results going from 96 to 2 in five years. I was at the NFL Combine today, watching 350 pound men running sub-5.0 dashes, lifting cars … and being called undersized.
We can continue to cover this story as if we’re the sports section of TMZ or we can do the hard work it takes to try educate and enlighten the story. If I were Dinn Mann, the editor of MLB.com, or any sports editor across the country, I’d have my beat writer asking the question.
Peter Miller has done a number of projects that involve directly exposing Polaroid instant film. Static Fields:
These Polaroids were illuminated by their own electrocution. They are cameraless images, which are immediate records of the bolts of electricity that passed through them.
My brother helped me catch these, we let them loose on the Polaroids in the basement. Polaroids are positives. This is a record of lightning bug dance-steps. Look closely and you can see the shadows of their legs.
Tags: photography polaroid petermillerPolaroids are removed from their case in a darkroom, laid flat and exposed as a single, light sensitive array. After they are exposed, they are reinserted into the pack and -with the lens now covered- can be processed by simply pressing the camera's shutter and processing the film by ejecting it from the camera.
Huffington Post: "John Gibson Did Not Compare Eric Holder To Monkey With Bright Blue Scrotum."
Waferbaby is running a fabulous interview series with various netizens who describe their current hardware and software setup, then what their ideal setup would be. I got to run down mine today, and had a lot of fun with that last question. A taste:
My ideal computer would be self-upgrading–that is, it would start with at least a terabyte of hard drive storage and 10GB of RAM, but it would organically grow more memory and drive space over time as I needed it. I would be able to fold this ideal computer into a wallet-sized square that fits in my pocket (like the car on the Jetsons), but also unfold it into a 50-inch touchscreen to watch movies or use it as a whiteboard. This computer would stay cool even when I left it in a car on a 90-degree day–in fact, it would keep the car cool for me. This device would barely use any electricity, and when it did it would wirelessly charge its batteries whenever we were within 20 feet of an outlet automatically. This computer would back itself up securely online over an ever-present superfast internet connection, and firmly but gently prod me when I’m working too much or on the wrong thing. It would read my mind and transcribe my thoughts onto my hard drive whenever I think, “I’ve got to remember that.”
See my full setup at Waferbaby. Thanks, Daniel!
What would your fantasy computer be like?
* Thanks to Jaime Fazzone for the daffodils!!
Here is a animated .gif of Luis Castillo fielding a ground ball:
Here are some other photographs from my day in camp so far.
To keep an eye on my entire photo album from Tradition Field, including hi-res versions of the pictures in this post, click here.
Enough! I fucking get it! You like bacon!
After meeting Six Apart CEO Chris Alden yesterday, I'm a bigger Movable Type fan than ever. They really listens to customer feedback!
Great meeting with Six Apart yesterday. Imagine: a CMS vendor that *LISTENS*!
Joshua Silver makes low-cost eyeglasses ($19) with self-adjusting lenses.
The glasses work on the principle that the more liquid pumped into a thin sac in the plastic lenses, the stronger the correction. Silver has attached plastic syringes filled with silicone oil on each bow of the glasses; the wearer adds or subtracts the clear liquid with a little dial on the pump until the focus is right. After that adjustment, the syringes are removed and the "adaptive glasses" are ready to go.
Silver hopes that his glasses will help those in developing countries who cannot afford glasses with ground lenses. (thx, owen)
Tags: joshuasilver
Shared by Eve
Scroll to the last picture. Look at Ross. Cast Bruce Camppbell to play him in Bay To Breakers: The Motion Picture. UNCANNY.So, here’s another go-around with the proposed “new improvements” to the ING Bay to Breakers. Today’s rally at City Hall attracted about 100 souls, plus a lot of speakers and media. But changes started coming a day or two ago when PR man Sam Singer, the “master of disaster,” started singing, thus ending the denial of the organizers of the historic footrace.
[UPDATE: Read a new Race Director Angela Fang interview from a viscous, attack-dog journalist here. And see a branding critique here. And finally, just who is "K.H., Manager, Sales, Production, Communications, B2B"? S/he is feisty no? So we hear from K.H. that B2B is "privately owned." O rly, by whom? Is it the Anschutz Entertainment Group, aka AEG, which is owned by The Anschutz Corporation, which is owned by noted marathon-running billionaire, Bush Cheney "Pioneer," and "intelligent design" fan Philip Anschutz? That's not my final answer, but signs point to "yes." Is this the same Philip Anschutz who supported the anti-gay Prop 2 in Colorado back in the day?]
This fellow looked like he liked what he heard this morn. Many attendees were encouraged by the fact that the take-it-or-leave-it approach from last week doesn’t appear to be written in stone. Even San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom is “not against some kind of compromise.” Click to expand:
The sum of the crowd, a fair turnout, considering.
The United Hipsters of Benetton, representing the no-to-new-improvements side. You’d need an expanded Facial Hair Types chart to keep all the different grooming styles sorted out:
This graphic is somewhat damning of the organizers, some might feel. The ING people are saying the more people that register for the race, the more portable toilets we’ll get - but isn’t that a little backwards? Shouldn’t they put in a sufficient number, whatever that is, regardless? (Of course ING is just the primary sponsor and their contract with B2B runs out next year, but that’s what people call the organizers - the ING people.)
“Freaky” attorney Alix Rosenthal and San Francisco Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi would like to work things out:
Can’t we all get along? As of this afternoon, it looks like we can.
Should you start working on this year’s B2B float? It’s still too soon to say…
Shared by EveI was up at the Little Chihuahua the other night and had three great things happen:
krissy turned me on to this place. I love it!Those guys are really hitting a stride. Good on 'em.
- The pollo en chile verde was quite good.
- Beer is $2 per pint.
- Their chipotle salsa is good enough to inspire me to write bad poetry about it. Now, I'm not going to actually write bad poetry, but...wow.
Shared by EveAdd Mayor Gavin Newsom to the list of "celebrities" sharing the minutia of their life on Twitter . Well, except Newsom's not writing so much -- or at all -- about his personal life, but rather topics from City Hall or the campaign trail. (However, he did share the pregnancy news via Twitter...
No, bloggers have blogs. Twitter users are just that: Twitter users. It's no big deal, but illustrates how sloppy and out of touch the Chronicle is getting.
The team will report to camp early today, around 8 am, for a meeting and workshop on how best to deal with the media.
From what I understand, the players are expected to take the field around 10 am.
According to Adam Rubin of the Daily News, Darryl Strawberry has arrived to Mets camp, and is in the clubhouse.
Steve Popper of the Bergen Record says Strawberry, as well as John Franco and Tim Teufel are in camp to speak with the players during today’s workshop – also on his blog, Popper provides a long quote from Jerry Manuel about his much-talked-about hitting drill.
…i was under the impression that franco and the team had a bit of a falling out, so it’s nice to hear he may be in camp…
By the way, go to Rubin’s blog to see Howard Simmons’s always-impressive photographs from yesterday’s camp.
Hissssssss GRAAAAAAAAARR ARGH hissssssssss Snarl GRAAAARGH hack hissssssss *bonk* ugh HISSSSSSS RAAAAAAAAAR GAAAARGH hissssssss UNH GRRRRRRRRRRR hisssssssssss *thud* UUUGH hisssssssssssssss grrrrrrrr uuuunh hisssssss *throw* hiiiiiiiissssssssss GRAAAAAAAARRRRR hack
I'm happy to see that the AV Club has included Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut in their New Cult Canon, which includes such films as Donnie Darko, Babe: Pig in the City, Primer, and Reservoir Dogs. EWS is under-appreciated in my book and Scott Tobias nails exactly why I find the movie compelling.
Critics pilloried the anti-erotic ridiculousness of the orgy, with its funereal organ music and self-sacrificing hookers and mass-like rituals involving cloaked high priests and great plumes of incense. But the orgy is more about power than sex; in that respect, it's the opposite of some free-love hippie bacchanal, where the fucking is more democratic. Here, the rituals are about affirming the elite, and Bill doesn't belong to this exclusionary country club, whose members are intent on subjugating their inferiors. For Bill, it's the peak of a humiliating journey, and Kubrick accomplishes the remarkable feat of making Cruise, the brashly confident movie star, look small and scared behind that mask.
Overall, 1999 is still my favorite movie year. I saw more than 50 movies in the theater that year, including EWS, Rushmore, Princess Mononoke, Election, Run Lola Run, Being John Malkovich, Iron Giant, The Matrix, Magnolia, American Beauty, Toy Story 2, and Three Kings. Quite a year.
Tags: eyeswideshut movies scotttobias movies
Yeah, I didn't expect to see a Pokemon card on this blog either. I'm not even sure where the heck this thing came from. I sure don't know what that weird fish? bird? looking critter is or why it has holofoil stars twinkling all around it. I do know this though: I would have never bought, played, or otherwise looked at Pokemon Snap ever if I had lived a thousand lifetimes, had I not gotten it free. I did get it free though and now I have beaten the game. How pathetic is that?
Hey, you can't shoot zombies in the face with a shotgun all the time can you?
Examiner column for March 4.
If “a chicken in every pot” aimed to end hunger, the ending of rote learning in high school could be achieved with Advanced Placement in every curriculum. Michelle Rhee and other superintendents looking to upgrade the level of critical thinking in their schools could achieve that goal by adopting AP throughout the school system.
That means that not only would a wealth of AP classes be offered to high school students, but that elementary and middle school students would be taught with the assumption that they would soon be AP students. Interesting reading and writing—plus the vocabulary used to analyze it—would be a fixture in classes at every level.
(My focus here is on English instruction, which is important, but not the only AP subject students should take. Similar innovations could be made in all subjects as students pursue a “pre-AP” path.)
The first step would be to make all AP classes open enrollment. Teachers and schools often cling to the notion that only a particular type of student is “AP material,” and sometimes they even impose a minimum GPA or an entry test on prospective students. Cathleen cured me of any longing for elite AP students when she told me her 10th grade teacher’s comment, “You don’t write well enough to take AP,” crippled her for two years. (She received the maximum score of 5 on both the English Language and English Literature AP tests.)
Teachers make mistakes and often don’t realize the damage such comments cause. So all students should be allowed to take AP courses if they want to, and should also be allowed to switch into a non-AP class after several weeks if they find AP too challenging.
And preparation for AP can’t come too soon. Even in elementary school, students could write about point of view by creating “characters” who view a particular event from different angles. Think how much fun kids would have had becoming Malia or Michelle Obama, or George Bush, or an usher on inauguration day. Reading aloud all those different perspectives would have shown students how different points of view are expressed in different language and a range of tones.
Or a middle school student could study Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech alongside a clumsier, repetitive speech. Figuring out why King repeats “I Have a Dream,” and what the effect is each new time it’s repeated would be a valuable lesson on the power of repetition used properly.
Analyzing the effects of point of view, tone, and rhetorical techniques such as repetition are at the heart of the AP method. If students have for years been looking at the effect these techniques have on the reader, then entering an AP classroom will not be like navigating foreign waters. And wouldn’t it be nice if our youth became more sensitive to tone and accuracy in their words and emails? A student who understands the power of words put together skillfully is a person who’s ready to enter college, ready to write memos in the workplace, and even ready to read a contract carefully. The AP program includes lessons for life, not just for the test.
Examiner column for February 25.
Improving the education of our youth is a task far more complicated than sending a few teachers off to summer Advanced Placement training, and buying good books for students to read. But AP English Literature is the ideal place to start a school’s intellectual renovation because students have been reading and writing since first grade.
The difference is that the AP work connected with these two “Rs” is on a new level of difficulty—a level that will spill over into student work in social studies and science as well. Logic and the ability to read closely are skills used in all aspects of education.
Where should a prospective AP teacher or school principal begin? Renovating student minds starts with reading they will enjoy. Usually that means students need to be offered a variety of modern plays and novels that are about them in some way. I always gave AP students a choice reading of mostly modern literature, and the sight of them swarming all over those books and asking one another’s advice is my fondest AP memory. Almost by definition, any book required by the school or teacher is worse than any book they choose from among a list of ten or twelve.
On my “Choice Cart,” which wheeled around the room and held several of each title, were Albert Camus’ “The Stranger,” Cormac McCarthy’s “All the Pretty Horses,” Maxine Hong Kingman’s “Woman Warrior,” Gish Gen’s “Mona in the Promised Land,” and some books that had enough “adult” language or sexual content that I felt more comfortable introducing them as a choice—one they should make in consultation with their parents. (Included in this category were “Beloved,” by Toni Morrison, “Catcher in the Rye,” by J.D. Salinger, and “The Things They Carried,” by Tim O’Brien.)
The books they knew they needed to ask their parents about always became big hits.
The bottom line was simple: my students wanted to read these books. They became ideal teaching tools because few relied on Sparks’ Notes in lieu of flipping the pages. Many of my students finished their books within a few days and came back for a second one.
AP is flexible enough to allow students to learn the technique of logical analysis of language from any book at all, so letting students choose has the huge benefit of encouraging them to look closely at language and why its use of particular images, or repetition, or its narrative pace create the desired effect on the reader. It’s that analysis—as distinct from the summarizing common in most English classes—that constitutes the AP method.
After teachers have gathered together many good books and choices for students, they need to ensure a range of genres (poetry, plays, novels, essays) are included in the curriculum, written in a range of centuries. Once students learn how to analyze modern novels or poems, it won’t be so hard to apply that technique to Shakespeare or Thomas Hardy—authors they might not choose to read on their own.
My last column on the AP “solution” will show why the AP method of reading and thinking can benefit every high school student, no matter what their background or ability level.
the work of pablo picasso, vincent van gogh, charles eames, cindy sherman and andy warhol may be
commonplace in a gallery, but definitely not on the subway, until now. from february 10 to march 15,
brooklyn’s atlantic avenue/pacific street subway station, is being filled with reproductions of over
50 works of art thanks to the MoMA. for 24 hours a day seven days a week, images of work from the
MoMA collection will be on display inside the subway station. the special promotion hopes to raise
awareness of the new york museum’s collection of artwork and design.
http://atlanticpacific.moma.org
photogprahy by jeff baxter (via flickr)
Talk about life imitating art imitating life. Scott Siegel, the actor who played the steroids and painkillers dealer in Darren Aronofsky’s The Wrestler has been arrested and charged with attempting to distribute steroids and assaulting a federal agent after leading police on a high-speed chase. According to NBC New York, Siegel was under surveillance by DEA agents who caught him picking up a package in New Rochelle on Wednesday. Siegel as previously arrested in 1999 for distributing steroids, ecstasy and animal tranquilizer.
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Update, 4:10 pm:
Here is the official press release from the team:
“The Mets will wear a new cap for the entirety of the 2009 season featuring a patch on the left side commemorating the opening of CitiField. The team will wear the new caps on Monday for team photos, and then the caps will debut officially on Opening Day. Designed by MLB and the Mets last year and manufactured by New Era, the caps will be available for purchase beginning next week (week of 2/23). The caps, available in blue, black and black/blue (blue attached and below), will have a one-week exclusive at MLB.com, Modell’s, Mets Clubhouse Stores and at Tradition Field in Port St. Lucie, the Mets’ Spring Training camp.”
Original Post:
My email box is being flooded with questions about the new, nicely designed, Citi Field patch that has been seen on the Mets hats today and are being sold on Mets.com.
From what I can gather, this is the official Citi Field logo for the building, which will appear on team-issued items, such as hats, t-shirts, etc., at Citi Field, and sold on their website, Modells, etc., and will appear in the building, on the walls, in documents and so on.
The old, controversal, dare I say boring, “pizza patch,” will still be on the jersey they wear on field and will sell online.
Lately Git is really the latest "Cool" SCM, a lot of its appeal is coming from GitHub. I like a lot the features that GitHub is providing on top of git. The other day I was hearing a colleague mentioning: "Isn't that ironic for a decentralized scm to take off once you start centralizing projects on GitHub?".
While this is certainly amusing, this is not exactly true, github is nothing like a centralized place, I see it has a rally point (especially for opensource stuff), a convenient hub from where you can share stuff, but thanks to git, it's in no way an obligatory gateway to the code. You can clone / mirror all the stuff from github in a snap, painlessly.Back to subversion... This is what we use at Six Apart, internally but also externally (for the numerous opensource repository we maintain), and on daily basis I find it painful especially when you compare to git.
Part of the pain comes from merging and branching (some of the pain apparently could go away with the latest subversion I heard), and this pain is amplified by the fact that we have tons of svn:externals So MAKING a release at Six Apart, is not easy (Would you believe me If I told you that tectonic was involved in that process? (no, not tectonik, at least not yet))... I'm still unclear how we would replace, or better, work with a subversion repository with that many externals.
So these difficulties set aside, I was wondering how other big software shops are dealing with such transition or how they have changed (improved) their release management using git?
Another pain right now is that our dedicated QA team is dependent on engineers to do merges and don't really own the release. With git I was musing that ideally QA people would be actually signing off a release by actually branching and tagging in their "Golden QA repo". I kind of like the idea that QA would pull from engineering repository, merging all of the different feature/bug branches that they want to see in a release.
Conceptually, their work should consist in, pull from one bug-branch from one engineer, build, verify. If it's not good communicate the problems to the engineer, and if it's good merge in the "signed-off repo".
In realily I don't know if its doable. Anyone knows a big software shop working with Git, what are the obstacles, best practices?
Loren Brichter:
I have a tendency to think of things that have already been thought of, so I apologize if this has already been discussed and rejected. I also have a tendency not to think things entirely through, though I’m hoping this post is a starting point, not a complete solution. In any event, I think there may be a way to fix OAuth and you’d only have to change 4 words of the spec.
Roger Ebert offers a loving remembrance of his friend and colleague Gene Siskel on the 10th anniversary of his death.
Tags: rogerebert genesiskel moviesWe both thought of ourselves as full-service, one-stop film critics. We didn't see why the other one was quite necessary. We had been linked in a Faustian television format that brought us success at the price of autonomy. No sooner had I expressed a verdict on a movie, my verdict, than here came Siskel with the arrogance to say I was wrong, or, for that matter, the condescension to agree with me. It really felt like that. It was not an act. When we disagreed, there was incredulity; when we agreed, there was a kind of relief. In the television biz, they talk about "chemistry." Not a thought was given to our chemistry. We just had it, because from the day the Chicago Tribune made Gene its film critic, we were professional enemies. We never had a single meaningful conversation before we started to work on our TV program. Alone together in an elevator, we would study the numbers changing above the door.
I found a bunch of old Simpsons TCG boosters cheap and felt obligated to pick them up. I was torn between Krusty and Bumblebee Man as the most accurate Simpsons character reflection of my current mood, so I went with the shiny card. Krusty does a better strung out and despondant too which helped push him over the top. HooHooHaHaHa!!
I know I keep harping on and on about how tired I am of winter, but one of the reasons for said fatigue is that I have been wearing basically the EXACT SAME THING for several months: a circle skirt (with a waistband), tights, t-shirt, and cardigan sweater. This is fine, mostly: it's comfortable, you can have lots of fun with skirt prints and bright tights, it's warm and layerable, and so and so forth. BUT I AM TIRED OF SKIRTS AND WANT TO WEAR SOME DRESSES PLS OK?
I have a few dresses that are good for winter, nice wool, corduroy, heavy cotton and so on, but my favorite kind of dress is in a nice light cotton, preferably in a conversation print. Something with short sleeves, and a little collar, and which does not require any more accessorizing than finding a pair of shoes.
A dress like, say, this one, which I was DESPONDENT to find is not in my size, at Lanetz Living (click on the image to visit the site):
So. I NEED this. I've started a search for it, and with any luck (and/or bribery, if you have a copy of this one you don't need) someday I WILL MAKE THIS. YES. I WILL.
(And what's with ALL THE CAPS? I think I am falling under the influence of THIS.)
Also -- I'm a little worried about the expressions on the faces of the women in this picture. I think that Blue-Stripe Woman has just announced her intention of going over and slapping the bedickens out of someone, and White-Dress Woman is both worried about the emergent crazy of Blue-Stripe Woman and really, really hoping that the slapping will actually happen.
I'm coming off reading the first hands-on critique of a newly developed espresso machine, and my mind is racing with thoughts... mostly frustrations.
Having had the opportunities to talk to many designers and engineers who have developed espresso machines in the past, I've observed a recurring issue where people seemed to be trying to build machines around a few key ideas that they had that they wanted to see realized, rather than really setting out to analyze how the resulting taste experience happens "in the puck," and then working backwards to design a machine to achieve 'perfection.' Frankly, this seems to ring true with every machine I can think of.
Since the temperature-stable P.I.D. controlled machines debuted in 2004, all we've seen are solutions that are looking for problems. Except, perhaps, for the teflon-type application to steam wands and portafilter innards, we're on our 5th year without anything I can think of that's truly helping to improve the taste experience.
What we really need is real work and development in portafilter baskets: geometry, hole patterns, hole sizes, etc. We need more attention paid to the ways that the showerhead delivers water to the puck, as well as overall group-head/shower-head design improvements. We need grinders that work with the baristas, not against them. We need better grind-profile development through burr designs. We need dosing mechanisms that provide (or help provide) a truly lateral-density-level dose. We need ways to help us measure things by mass, not by time or volume. We need group-head designs that keep the brewing-water-contact surfaces clean. Grind delivery mechanisms that leave little to no grinds behind. Grinder burr carriers that are designed to help keep the burrs cool (heat sinks or some other passive or active cooling), rather than keep the heat in (heat soak). The list goes on and on.
A fairly well-known espresso guru once told me many years ago that he believed that the obsession with brew water temperature stability stemmed from the fact that brew water temperature is something that is relatively easily measured and corrected. Much more difficult are things like managing the migration of fines (the finest grind particles) during extraction, which is a more significant variable than a couple of degrees of water temp, he told me. I think he's right.
It's time to start thinking outside the box. It's time to start attacking the difficult problems that have significant outcomes.
All said, the good news is that since 2004, rather than complaining about our brew water temperatures, baristas have been focusing on the coffees, getting to know the coffee itself and how everything relates to taste. Obviously, there's still a ton more to learn, but it's time for the espresso equipment industry (both big and small) to attack the real problems.
Oh yeah... dosers for lefties too. That's one for my favorite left-handed barista, Mr. Barack Obama.
This is interesting...Someone named "DigitalMan99" in Japan made Famicom versions of Super Mario Clouds and F1 Racer.
I am sick of baseball right now. I'm sick of Hot Stove League, I'm sick of rumors, I'm sick of free agent signings, I'm sick of arbitration hearings, I'm sick of steroids, I'm sick of preseason rankings, I'm sick of WBC whining, I'm sick of everything. I don't want to hear another damn word about baseball unless it's a live spring training game being broadcasted. To hammer in the point about how freaking sick and tired I am, there will be no baseball cards today. Period. Maybe not tomorrow either. I got enough not-baseball cards to last 'till I have my box of Heritage in my hands so don't be surprised if the next baseball card you see has a 1960 Topps design on it. But no matter what THERE'S NO DAMN BASEBALL TODAY.
BASEBALL NEWS MAKE ME ANGRY!
YOU WOULDN'T LIKE ME WHEN I'M ANGRY!
GRRRAAAAAAAARRRR!!!!!
Four newspapers from Europe and one from Mexico take prizes in this prestigious, thirtieth annual creative competition. Some of the sample layouts from the winners (seen most easily in the embedded slideshow at the bottom of this page) are gorgeous; most are highly illustrative, and many are so visually ornate that they’re almost indistinguishable from magazine design. For me, they make for such interesting — and enjoyable — contrasts with the relatively austere aesthetic of The New York Times.
In other news, this year’s best designed horse-and-buggies should be announced soon. Kidding! Oof, I’m in trouble.
For many coffee roasting companies, there is a need to have a variety of roast levels and a variety of coffees from different coffee growing regions. The regions are Latin America, Indonesia and Africa (the major ones anyway, I am NOT touching the Jamaica Blue Mountain one). The photograph above demonstrates Java at two different roast levels. Our pursuit of perfection is endless, and our obsession with coffee profiling is somewhat, well, obsessive.Alongside coffee regions, there are coffee roast profiles. This means that we tailor the roast according to what best suits that particular coffee. We don't just dump the beans in the roaster and hit go until it looks dark enough. If it were that easy, I would have left coffee a long time ago! We take the altitude of the coffee (how high up the coffee was grown) which relates directly to density, then we take moisture content into account, and general knowledge/reference of past coffee profiles and how the coffee is being used (espresso vs. drip).
With said information we run 3-5 (and sometimes more) roast profiles on a coffee before we decide on a "perfect" profile. Some coffees can take the heat and a darker profile (usually low grown coffees) and other coffees really shine with lighter roasts that require more heat in the overall profile but shorter roasting times (like highly grown Africans).
Lighter roasts for the most part impart higher harmony notes, more acidity and a brighter cup profile. Medium roasts are a little denser in body (sometime but not always), and most coffees do very well with a medium roast since it preserves some acidity (highly desirable for some folks) and retains a soft heaviness in the body. The darker the roast profile, the less acidity (not PH content but acidic profile such as citrus notes also called brightness) and the heavier body and the more oily texturewe get in the cup.
Basically, profiling all comes down to the roasters idea/interpretation of what the coffee should taste like. We try to coax the natural origin nuance for each coffee, meaning we want to exploit the best flavors intrinsic in the bean but with the reference point of the brewing method.
If you love poppy, clean, crisp and bright coffees, you would probably really dig our Panama Hartmann Honey or our Kenya AA. If you like balanced acidity with soft body and pleasant mouthfeel with a solid finish, you would dig our Bolivia or our beautiful and juicy Colombia Las Mingas. For the straight forward, hefty "coffee's coffee" connoisseurs you might want to go with our darker roasts which impart more cocoa notes, heavier mouthfeels and smoked confections like our Iskandar or Java Blawan. The heavy cocoa notes, and sometime burnt caramel type notes are mosre often than not related to the actual roast and not the coffee bean itself. Much like cooking, depending on your style and methodology, you can impart flavors by the mere process rather than the intrinsic nuances in ingredients. Something to think about no?
Everyone's tastes are different, and everyone's preferences are different which is why it's very nice to have the entire spectrum on our menu. Dark roasts should never taste ashy, or carbony. A proper dark roast should simply highlight the coffees potential, while adding some body to the coffee. The dark roasts are the ones that can really take the cream, and the lighter roasts are fantastic on their own. Coffee is more complex than wine in an organic chemistry sense, so the possibilities of profiling are endless.
Enjoy!
February 18, 2009 - 9:55 p.m. - Santa Monica, CA
Just before I left Sydney, I gave one last talk at the revived [Sydney Cocoaheads](http://groups.google.com/group/sydney-cocoaheads) user group about [Objective-C Internals](/downloads/talks/objective-c-internals/objective-c-internals.pdf). It's similar to the presentation that I gave at [fp-syd](http://groups.google.com/group/fp-syd) a few months ago about [Objective-C and Mac OS X programming](/downloads/talks/mac-os-x-linguistics/mac-os-x-linguistics.pdf), but was tailored for a Mac audience rather than a functional programming audience. As a result, the Cocoaheads talk has a lot more detail on the object model, memory layout, and how message-sending works, and less info on higher-order messaging and language features (e.g. I didn't talk about categories at all.)If you're a Mac coder, hopefully you'll find something new in there. As always, drop me an email if you have any questions!P.S. For all the voyeurs out there, the San Francisco move & Pixar are both going great! More news on that soon, too.
Shared by EveThe mayor and Mrs. Newsom are pregnant! Rumors began circulating the Internet -- and City Hall -- Wednesday afternoon after a gossip blog said friends of Jennifer Siebel Newsom had revealed she was pregnant. After an emergency pow-wow, Gavin Newsom's handlers confirmed the happy news a little...
"a gossip blog"? GOD, Chronicle, would it kill you to fucking link?
Shared by EveIt's Thursday night, and Karen Leibowitz is frantic. "This really isn't a good time to talk," she says while clutching a couple of water bottles in her hands. The UC Berkeley doctoral student/comparative literature instructor and her husband, Anthony Myint,...
I know it seems like bag on the Chron day in my shared list, but, are you kidding me, three months in???? REALLY? IS THE CHRON LATE TO EVERYTHING?
I’m reading The Yankee Years by Joe Torre and Tom Verducci now. I love reading baseball books, as you’ve probably guessed by now.
Very early on, there’s a mention of the first time a guy ever grounded into 4 double plays in a game. Guess who?
Cnt Player Date Tm Opp GmReslt PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF ROE GDP SB CS BOr Positions +----+-----------------+-------------+---+----+-------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+---------+ 1 Joe Torre 1975-07-21 NYM HOU L 2-6 4 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 0 0 3rd 3BI’m sort of amazed that nobody has done it since.
Here are the most recent occurrences of 3 GIDPs in a game:
Cnt Player Date Tm Opp GmReslt PA AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB IBB SO HBP SH SF ROE GDP SB CS BOr Positions +----+-----------------+-------------+---+----+-------+--+--+--+--+--+--+--+---+--+---+--+---+--+--+---+---+--+--+---+---------+ 1 Yunel Escobar 2008-08-29 ATL @WSN L 3-7 4 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 5th SS 2 A.J. Pierzynski 2008-08-09 CHW BOS L 2-6 4 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 2nd C 3 Alexis Rios 2008-05-29 TOR @OAK W 12-0 6 6 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 1 3 1 0 3rd CF 4 Gary Matthews 2008-04-12 LAA @SEA L 3-8 5 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 2nd CF 5 Jeff Baker 2007-06-02 COL CIN W 4-1 3 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 7th 3B 6 Joe Crede 2006-09-20 CHW DET L 2-6 4 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 7th 3B 7 Todd Greene 2004-09-29 COL @LAD W 4-1 4 3 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 7th C 8 Milton Bradley 2004-05-05 LAD @FLA L 0-2 4 4 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 3rd CF 9 Jody Gerut 2004-04-09 CLE @KCR L 1-3 4 4 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 3rd RF 10 Carlos Lee 2003-06-19 CHW BOS L 3-4 5 5 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 6th LF 11 Javier Valentin 2003-06-17(1) TBD @NYY W 11-2 5 5 1 2 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 8th C 12 Juan Rivera 2003-06-01 NYY @DET W 10-9 7 6 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 8th LF 13 Omar Vizquel 2003-04-20 CLE @CHW W 7-4 5 4 1 1 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 0 0 2nd SSAnd the only guys to do it more than once since 1956:
Games Link to Individual Games +-----------------+-----+-------------------------+ Billy Conigliaro 2 Ind. Games Dave Concepcion 2 Ind. Games
Filed under: Software, iPhone, iPod touch
reddit, an open source social news aggregator which has garnered a loyal following, has come out with a very slick, very handy little iPhone app for their service. Actually, it's the third one -- according to their blog -- but this one's "official." iReddit brings you the news ... you don't even have to join reddit, your iPhone will start spewing stories of all caliber and ilk at you the moment you launch the app (fortunately, a free account will let you start filtering the stream).
Don't tell the rest of the TUAW team -- many of whom were clamoring to post about iReddit -- but I'd never used reddit.com in any serious fashion until I got in on the iReddit beta. I'm now a frequent reader ... at least on my iPhone. The app itself is much like the website in layout. It's also elegant, responsive and heart-warmingly cute, the cuteness due in large part to the reddit mascot checking the time and tapping its toes while pages load. I'm quite serious when I say that it's one of the best "loading screens" I've ever had the pleasure of using. Articles open in the built-in browser, where you can read them, send them to Safari, e-mail a link, or save them to your reddit account.
The team behind the app is none other than our friends from WWDC, 280 North. You may remember (or be using) their online presentation app, 280Slides. iReddit is another fine accomplishment on the 280 resume. Check it out at the App Store for $1.99US.
Continue reading It's true, iReddit on the iPhone
TUAWIt's true, iReddit on the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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This photo by Bobby Yip of Reuters captures the current zeitgeist pretty well.
Unused shipping containers were piled up at a storage depot in Hong Kong Wednesday. The government is looking for places to store hundreds of thousands of unused containers expected to flood Hong Kong in the coming months due to China's slow exports.
The world has so much stuff we don't need that we don't know where to put it all. Perhaps people will be living in those stacks of containers before too long. (via wsj)
Tags: photography hongkong 2008recession
A series of visualizations [flickr.com] that represent the top organizations and people mentioned in the news articles of the New York Times for a given year of news between 1984 and 2009. Connections between these entities are drawn, so that relationships can be found and followed. These circular graphs are based on the faceted searching abilities of the NYTimes Article Search API, that were released a short while ago.More information on the blog entry of the author, Jer Thorp.
Reminds me of the circular graph of the Eigenfactor project, although some subtle differences in "bundling" the edges for visual clarity exist.
UPDATE
Via datavisualization.ch.
In My Own Way, I Am Core
Is the DBI any less essential because Tim Bunce maintains it outside of the Perl core? It's the official database interface for Perl 5. It's well-maintained. It's comprehensive. It's stable. It has copious documentation, including at least one book. It's code no one's crazy enough to compete with.
It's not a core module, and no one cares that it's not a core module. It's still the way to access databases from Perl, regardless of any official or blessed or core status. It's just great code -- stable code -- that's been around for a while and does what it does very, very well.
It's still not a core module. If you use it, you've installed it yourself, your operating system vendor has included it, or the Perl distribution you've installed has included it.
Good. Bad. I'm the Guy with the Core.
A persistent difficulty of language designers is that we can't predict what users will want to do. We want to give them power and flexibility, but we also want to make languages that will fit in their heads and get out of the way when they don't need all of the features we've invented. The balancing act between "small is beautiful" and "complexity has to go somewhere" is difficult. So is finding the right balance between "Let's make it easy for the users!" and "Someone has to implement this beast!"
One rule I've tried to express here recently is "Someone has to maintain this beast!" For "beast", read "the core language", "the core libraries", or "the dependencies of my application." Here trouble begins.
If nothing ever changed in your application besides the changes you had to make, life would be peachy keen. Bacon would fall from the sky, and you'd get thinner and your cholesterol would improve when you ate it. You would not need to worry about operating system upgrades, or security patches, or new versions of dependencies, or what users had installed versus what you have installed. You would work a very comfortable 35 hour week and go home and sleep the sleep of the just.
You'd ride a magic pony to and from work, too. They eat bacon, but their breath is sweet. The world doesn't work that way.
Change is not the enemy though. Poorly managed change is the enemy.
The Book Awoke Something Dark in the Core. Something Evil.
Larry Wall and the rest of the Perl 6 design team like to talk about the Waterbed Theory of Complexity. You can take the Lisp or Forth approach of defining a very simple, easily understood core and building everything else in terms of that. "It's simple!" people say, until they start building real applications in that. One of the deepest lessons of computer science in The Little Schemer is that you can implement multiplication recursively with guard clauses and subtraction. One of the best lessons of software development is don't do that. Scheme is simple. Lisp is simple. Forth is simple. The SK calculus is simple. All of these are simple in theory, but doing practical programs may not be simple. There is an essential complexity in certain tasks that you cannot sweep under a rug. It will come out messy.
Put another way, Larry says that the Perl language can be messy because the problems it tries to solve are messy.
I suspect there's a similar theory of change. You can try to hide change, but mostly you just move it around. That's certainly true in the Perl core.
I'm Afraid I'm Gonna Have to Ask You to Leave the Core
The discussion I started with Sacrificing the Future on the Past's Golden Altar spread to p5p the other day. The question of replacing or enhancing
File::Findcame up, and someone raised the idea of adding an alternative toFile::Findto the core.I replied that that would make the problem worse, not better.
If I had my way, the Perl 5 core would contain the language itself and only those libraries absolutely necessary to download and install other libraries from the CPAN. That's it. There is no more. There's no Switch, or Class::Struct, or Search::Dict, or File::DosGlob, or
File::Findin that core.There'd be no ExtUtils::MakeMaker either, but that's aesthetics, not function or flourish.
I'll Swallow Your Core!
Clearly the core zeitgeist has gone in another direction. You don't swallow the core. It swallows you. There's no better explanation than Nicholas Clark's description of why people want modules to enter the core:
The Perl core is already installed. But they can't get approval to install other modules from CPAN.
[Bad programmer. You're trying to burden someone else with a long term technical problem because you've failed to address your local political problems]
They perceive modules in core as being "blessed" - if it's there it must be better than all the competitors on CPAN]
[Bad programmer. Historically things have only ever been added to the core. Reasons for its addition at the time may not be as clear cut as you infer, and there may now be a better solution. You're trying to burden someone else with a long term technical problem because you're falsely lazy, excessively inpatient and insufficiently hubristic to devise your own criteria for selecting the right module for the job]
They perceive modules in core as being "supported" - if it's there, it will be looked after for ever.
[Bad programmer. You appear to think that the mere mortals volunteering to maintain the core are of a difference species than the mere mortals volunteering their code to CPAN]
In other words, "please maintain my dependencies for me!"
I agree that change can be painful, and that arbitrary changes are unpleasant and not useful. No one's arguing for those (at least no one who isn't a violent time-traveling sociopath with a chainsaw for a hand).
However.
We Are But Sixty Men
This is not your rug, and you are not welcome to sweep your change management problems under it.
The core developers can provide you with a great language -- a modern language -- designed to help you solve problems that no one can forsee now. They can provide you with mechanisms to extend the language in reusable and shareable ways. They can encourage experimentation with new features and ideas with the intent of pulling those ideas into the core in future versions if they prove useful. They can even maintain well-defined backwards compatibility and keep promises not to break thing arbitrarily.
They cannot do so and take on an ever-increasing maintenence load. Coordinating the release cycles of the core language and dual-lived modules and version numbers and multiple authors with their own time schedules and multiple queues and venues for bug reports and feature requests and patches... well, that's madness.
The DarkPAN is and shall remain impenetrable. That's fine -- but that means the DarkPAN has to take responsibility for its own code. It's just not possible for the core to do so any longer.
It’s that time of year when team kits (describes matching team gear: shorts, jerseys, socks, arm warmers) have arrived or are arriving and I’m reminded of Kits of Old. Like the year we had smurf blue legs warmers shown here in this flattering photo.
One year we had arm coolers that actually made your arms colder. There was a curiously hot and cold jacket. Good and warm, but didn’t wick the sweat and would get freezing cold when the wind whipped up.
Worst ever was the Blik skin suit that was like a sauna suit — you sweated profusely in it. Good for losing weight, bad for staying hydrated. To add to the suffering, the pad was little more than a sponge.
I think we’ve all probably had clear rain coats that were wetter inside than out.
What’s been your worst kit or gear that sucked?
The Chicago-based independent music distributor is said to be cutting back operations drastically -- but not closing doors, as previously reported. Snip from Chicago Trib article:Touch and Go Records, a pillar of the Chicago music scene and independent music worldwide, announced Wednesday that it is drastically shrinking its business, cutting ties with 20 independent labels and laying off an unspecified number of employees.Chicago indie powerhouse Touch and Go cuts distribution service, staff (Chicago Tribune via Glen E. Friedman)"The current state of the economy has reached the point where we can no longer afford" to provide manufacturing and distribution services for the labels, including stalwarts such as Chicago-based Drag City, All Natural, Overcoat. Flameshovel and Atavistic Records; Delaware's Jade Tree; and Kill Rock Stars in the Pacific Northwest, said Touch and Go founder Corey Rusk.
The move could drastically hamper the ability of these labels to get their new releases into retail outlets in a timely manner, and could affect their ability to stay solvent during the current economic downturn.
(...) Among the revered bands who have recorded for the label are Big Black, the Jesus Lizard, the Butthole Surfers, the Mekons, Slint, Calexico and TV on the Radio – virtually a Who’s Who of underground, punk and postpunk of the last three decades. "It’s not coming to an end," Rusk said, "but it won’t be the same company it has been for the last 20 years."
A simple concept, really. The project Experience [nikkichung.com] quantifies the collective experience of leisure travel by visually representing global tourist movements during one year by a series of guidebooks, one guidebook for each country in the world. The number of pages in each book corresponds to the number of tourist arrivals in that country in 2005. When viewed on a shelf, one year's worth of 'experience' is presented in a condensed physical model that can be shifted and rearranged to visualize where tourists travel and where they don't.Via Swissmiss.
The CPAN has improved Perl in many ways, but it's exposed other problems.
If you know how to use the CPAN, you can install and upgrade modules and distributions. This is great for users. You get new features and new capabilities, and sometimes you can even change how Perl works internally, without having to upgrade Perl itself. That's great for the core developers, because people can experiment with new features and ideas and even syntaxes and dialects without changing the core.
Everything is great... except for the unforeseen repercussions.
Someone discovered a bug in a core library, and wanted to release a new version without forcing people to upgrade all of Perl and all of their libraries at the same time. In general, that's a good policy.
Someone decided that a CPAN module was so widely-used that it belonged in the core. I can see how that argument works. It's certainly worked on lots of modules in the past.
Someone said "That's great that this is in the core, but someone's paying me to use it with an older version of Perl, so I refuse to tie its syntax or feature set or capabilities to only those which the current development version of Perl provides." I can understand that desire.
None of these are bad ideas in and of themselves, but the consequences are poisonous together. The chosen solution to one problem was to maintain a core module somewhere outside of the core, where the Perl 5 porters weren't the people responsible for day-to-day maintenance, and to release new versions to the CPAN as they were ready, and to juggle the release schedule with the release schedule for new versions of the Perl core, which should always contain the newest versions of core modules available, even if those modules live elsewhere and have already had releases elsewhere.
Imagine trying to coordinate the release of the core language and half a dozen dual-lived modules. Now imagine trying to coordinate the release of the core language and several dozen dual-lived modules.
Now there's a big snarled shoelaces problem and we don't know anybody named Alexander.
Did I mention that some of these modules have to run on various versions of Perl, unmodified? (I spent a summer and fall writing tests for some of these modules, hearing from some maintainers that I couldn't use core modules in those tests because those core modules hadn't been in core long enough that they were available on older versions of Perl long enough for people to have them installed, nevermind that if they were capable of installing newer versions of these modules, they were fully capable of installing dependencies, and suddenly I wonder if I've had a persistent pounding in the back of my skull since about June of 2001, because sometimes it sure feels that way.)
Several modules are in this situation, and we don't have good answers to several questions:
- Who maintains this code?
- Which version of this code is authoritative?
- Which release of this code should supersede other releases?
- When will the next release take place?
- What are the dependencies of this code?
- What is the support and deprecation policy for this code?
- What are the requirements for dependencies in language or supporting libraries for this code?
Good software developers and project managers ask and answer these questions regularly. Your answers are critical to the long-term success and maintainability of your project.
I'll talk about p5p's answers in my next entry.
(If you hate the pun in the title, trust me: all of the other candidates were worse.)
Details at Cyclelicious.
Uploaded by richardmasoner | more from the Bike Hugger Photostream.
Longtime SE reader Jeff S. alerts us to an "awful seafood display" he snapped a picture of at the Whole Foods on Houston Street in New York City—the one where they filmed parts of Top Chef this season.
Jeff calls it awful; I call it brilliant. After all, it's a dog(fish) eat dog(fish)* world out there. You have to wonder if the fishmonger was crafting a subtle tableaux that illustrates evolution in action or if he or she was just having fun.
Jeff was kind enough to bury photo as link-text in his blog post about it, but we're more brazen and show just part of it here. Click through to see the entire thing. Hope you've eaten already!
*Yes, I know it's a monkfish, not a dogfish. Poetic license invoked.
It was a squeaker, but Team GOP prevailed over the Democratic squad in last year's installment of the annual Congressional Baseball Game.
As Politico reported in 2007, lawmakers found that corporate solicitations for the annual ballgame became a heavier lift than usual after the passage of new lobbying and ethics laws. But several brave businesses were willing to step up for '08 -- including the Stanford Financial Group, owned by accused bilion-dollar fraudster Allen Stanford, he of the Caribbean junkets and crusade to block anti-money-laundering rules.
Stanford's company political action committee contributed $10,000 to cover expenses for last year's Congressional game, according to disclosures filed with the Clerk of the House. Overall 2006 fundraising for the game totaled $120,000, according to the Politico report.
Visit Andy Smith’s Flickr stream for all manner of typographic goodies. Don’t miss his collection of book jacket designs.
(via Delicious Industries)
MetsBlog.com: Shea Is Gone.David Lennon of Newsday reports, Mets COO Jeff Wilpon says the pitchers mound and the bases, including home plate, will be ‘immortalized in the parking lot.’
Robert Moses would be proud!
Shea Stadium, the blue and orange concrete coliseum that played host to Mets and Yankees, Beatles and Stones, Popes and wrestlers, Jets and Giants, the World Series and Ice Capades passed away today in Flushing, Queens. Shea was 44 years old.
No official cause of death was given. Shea had been noticeably thin in recent months and experts worried Shea was suffering from luxuryboxitis, a rare condition that attacks perfectly good baseball stadiums and their fans' wallets.
A wake was already held January 31, 2009. Shea Stadium is survived by millions of fans and their memories.
See photos of Shea Stadium's final moments in NY Times slide show.
LONG LIVE SHEA STADIUM
The car I’m in that is driving to JFK airport just went by Citi Field, and, as you know, there was no Shea Stadium.
There was nothing but Citi Field.
Very, very weird.
As a kid, I remember being all excited to drive by Shea on the highway, seeing it empty in the distance. It as comforting. Sort of like this special place full of potential great moments, just waiting to pull me from reality.
So, to drive by today, despite seeing the impressive new stadium standing tall, I was a tad sad and lonely to see Shea missing from the horizon.
I was away traveling for the past few weeks, and upon my return, I asked my Twitter followers a simple question:
"I've been completely offline for all of Feburary (no internet, TV, news) -- what one thing should I read up on? @ msg me your suggestions."The overwhelming consensus? I didn't miss anything.. There were some funny and/or amusing replies in there, of course, (you're a clever bunch!) but for the most part, I was kind of disturbed at how few things that are truly significant happen in any given two-week period. There were the usual bevy of internet memes, some fussing over, of all things, a policy change at Facebook, and a couple of pop-culture items of note.
But if I hadn't been on vacation, I assume I would have been doing what I always do, reading up constantly on new email in my inbox and checking RSS feeds and pursuing all the other sources of news that I usually follow.
So, it's not exactly the most profound observation, and I'm far from the first to make it, but it's worth noting again: There isn't that much going on. While the constant flow of information is entertaining and addictive, it is, by overwhelming consensus, primarily filled with bits that are of little to no value. I'm recording this as much for my own future reference as for anyone else's.
To those who are visiting for the first time,
welcome, いらっしゃい！
I've been blogging since 2002, and although my blogging style has changed over the years, I've recorded tons of fantastic memories and experiences. My archives are such a treasure for me. But more interestingly, I've met quite a few people via my blog who have become friends, and that's been very rewarding. My favorite series of posts still are from my old Tokyo blog: this, this, and this.
The PECOTA Hitter cards for 2009 have been published, with pitchers coming along soon.
We’ve added the player comments from Baseball Prospectus 2008 (whose younger sibling, Baseball Prospectus 2009, is now shipping) and re-instated the hitter comparables to the hitter cards.
There are a few issues with the current build of the cards which we’ll address as soon as we can. You’ll notice some zeroes and other bad data in the 2014 and 2015 lines of the cards, and some of the seven-year WARP graphs are showing up with “2…” on the year axis. If you notice anything else, please drop us a line in the comments section and we’ll get it fixed.
If you are a Premium or Fantasy subscriber, all cards are available to you. If not, take a look at Ryan Howard’s card for an idea of what you’ll see on a PECOTA card. Thanks again for your patience, and we’ll be back with more soon.
Hip-Hop mogul Jay-Z has spoken on the time-consuming process of crafting his highly-anticipated album The Blueprint 3 admitting the delays have become frustrating.
[Visit SOHH.com for more information]
I agree with Duncan Davidson — screencasts are an extremely productive way to learn how to use software. Mike Clark’s new series of screencasts on Xcode seems like a winner.
Within the $27.5 billion allocated for "highways" in the stimulus bill signed by President Obama yesterday, there is some good news for pedestrians, cyclists and cities.
I spoke with Michelle Ernst, staff analyst at the Tri-State Transportation Campaign, to get a sense of how the new legislation compares to the 2005 federal transportation bill, known as SAFETEA-LU. Ernst points out that federal highway money flows through the Surface Transportation Program, which is more flexible than the "highway" label lets on. Compared to SAFETEA-LU, the stimulus bill will nearly double the portion of "highway" funds going to bike and pedestrian projects while sending more money to cities.
Here are the changes Ernst spotted after crunching the numbers:
- Double the money to bike and pedestrian projects: Under SAFETEA-LU, roughly 1.7 percent of total highway funding was authorized for the Transportation Enhancements program, most of which goes toward bicycle and pedestrian projects. In the stimulus package, that figure has nearly doubled to 3 percent. The new bill also requires states to spend the money on actual Transportation Enhancements, whereas previous transportation bills gave them wiggle room to shift it around to other programs.
- More money going to cities: Under SAFETEA-LU, 6.5 percent of highway funding was "sub-allocated" directly to large urban areas, defined as metro regions with a population greater than 200,000. In the stimulus bill, large urban areas get 16 percent. This funding will go to agencies that, compared to state DOTs, are more likely to invest in progressive transportation projects.
While these changes represent improvements, even more money should be going to cities. As Brookings notes, the nation's 100 largest metro areas produce 75 percent of the nation's GDP. And the glaring omission of any "fix-it-first" language in the final bill will make it easier for some of those sub-allocated funds to be spent on road expansion.
But overall the revised formulas in the stimulus bill mean more money for transit, bike and pedestrian projects and more funds piped directly to cities. The guaranteed funding for Transportation Enhancements is something that bicycle advocates, especially, fought to include in the final bill. Mayors and green transportation experts championed a bigger slice for urban areas, which frees up money for progressive projects. The final stimulus bill reflects these efforts and gives advocates something to build on as Congress gears up for the big transportation re-authorization coming later this year.
someone needs to do Two Solitudes for the Twitter era with @replies
By Scott Butterworth Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (R) owes income taxes on thousands of dollars she received as expense money while living in her own home, the Anchorage Daily News reported today. Palin received $16,951 in per diem payments, which are intended to cover meals and incidental expenses while traveling on state business, The Washington Post reported in September. Even though she was staying in her home in Wasilla, Alaska, she claimed the expense money because she was away from her official "duty station" in Juneau, the state capital. "The governor is entitled to a per diem, and she claims it," gubernatorial spokeswoman Sharon Leighow said at the time. The Post reported on the payments after Palin was named as Sen. John McCain's running mate on the Republican presidential ticket. Liberal groups challenged the payments and asked whether she owed tax obligations on them. That answer, according to state administration
Images from Signs of Change Winter Harvest Reception, January 23, 2009Join local printmakers and activists at a special Activist Print Open Studio, this Thursday, 5-8pm, at the Signs of Change exhibition at the Miller Gallery in Pittsburgh.
ACTIVIST PRINT OPEN STUDIO >>>
Thursday, Feb. 19, 5-8pm
@ Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University
5000 Forbes Avenue
Pittsburgh
Free and open to the publicScreenprinting open studio provided by Artists Image Resource + The Andy Warhol Museum. Observe printers in action, roll up your sleeves and print posters promoting local issues, or bring $5 and create a screenprint from images that you provide.
Update, 11:45 am:
David Lennon of Newsday reports, Mets COO Jeff Wilpon says the pitchers mound and the bases, including home plate, will be ‘immortalized in the parking lot.’
Update, 11:34 am:
According to William Valderrama, the last piece of Shea Stadium came down at 11:26 am EST.
Original Post:
In case you missed it, according to people on the job site, the last remaining piece of Shea Stadium may come down around noon today.
Twitter user, William Valderrama, aka Bluenautica, is at the site providing up to the minute photos, including the one below.
Now that the president has signed the stimulus bill, members of the Streetsblog Network have thrown themselves into the task of trying to figure out where all that money is going.
To that end, we're featuring Transportation for America's "Full Summary of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009", a handy roundup of the act's transportation funding provisions. T4A is calling the act "a significant departure from the status quo [that] ought to represent the leading edge of a major new thrust in our national infrastructure policy."
They also offers an a peek at US DOT Secretary Ray LaHood's statement about the act:
[H]e’s saying many of the right things. Of course, the true test will come when the states start deciding where to spend the flexible transportation dollars in the stimulus package.
As many around the network reported yesterday, tracking that spending is supposed to be made easier by the launch of Recovery.gov, the administration's newest website:
Recovery.gov is a website that lets you, the taxpayer, figure out where the money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act is going… This is your money. You have a right to know where it's going and how it's being spent. Learn what steps we're taking to ensure you can track our progress every step of the way.
The Transport Politic has a brief analysis of the site.
We'll be taking a closer look at Recovery.gov in the days to come, but we're interested in hearing your reaction in the comments. Do you think such a website has a chance of delivering the "transparency and accountability" it promises?
From elsewhere in the network, grim news as the reality of cuts in transit operating budgets -- which were pointedly left out of the recovery bill -- kick in. Seattle Transit Blog reports on the possibility of 20 percent cuts in that city's system, despite strong voter support for increased service in the 2007 election. And at PBS's Blueprint America's blog, you'll find an excellent report on the nation's mass transit crisis that aired yesterday on The Take Away.
The wonderfully-named Chronically Uncool blog owner Jenny documents her story in making this completely special Tetris fabric:
I requested that the pieces be made up of 1/2" blocks, with some empty black space at the top, an increasingly heavy distribution of falling pieces toward the bottom, and about 6" of stacked blocks along the bottom edge.
Of course, the stacked blocks at the bottom couldn't be completely solid, otherwise the lines would clear! (Yes, I'm a big dork. I know.)
Big dork = super extra points, lovely Jenny! This fabric is fantastic.She's also released the print under a Creative Commons license (how awesome), but hasn't yet posted any details of what she's going to make with it...
(via Craftzine)
Sen. Roland Burris' political position is becoming increasingly untenable: state criminal investigation, Senate ethics probe, and calls to resign, including from the Chicago Tribune.
Maybe Blago's spectacular fall has skewed our sense of what a political flameout looks like. But by any usual standard, Burris is in deep, deep trouble.
I wanted to announce the release of a new Celebrate People's History poster! The Cherokee Writing System was designed by Frank Brannon, Jr., who runs his own letterpress studio SpeakEasy Press in Dillsboro, NC.The Cherokee Writing System was developed in 1821 by Sequoyah. Frank was interested in doing a poster about Sequoyah's syllabary after researching the Cherokee Pheonix, the first newspaper that used the writing system, as well as the first Native American newspaper. After studying and giving talks on the subject, Frank realized how few knew about Sequoyah and his work. Frank says, "I felt the Celebrate People's History poster series was the perfect way to get out the word to the people on his story. That's what compelled me to write." He also says letterpress printing normally means a small audience. Making a CPH poster was a way to translate few copies of a poster on Sequoyah to a larger audience.
You can learn more about Frank and SpeakEasy Press at www.speakeasypress.com.
I was just reading an interesting paper on the interaction between antipsychotic drugs, caffeine and smoking and I found this interesting snippet on how smokers need to take in three to four times more caffeine than non-smokers to get the same effect, owing to the fact that by products of increases enzymes in the liver which break-down caffeine.
Byproducts of tobacco smoking, particularly the polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are metabolic inducers. These byproducts are inducers of the [liver enzyme] cytochrome P450 isoenzyme 1A2 (CYP1A2) and of the less understood UDP-glucuronosyltransferases (UGTs).The metabolic inductive effects are not specific to tobacco smoking; they can also be expected from marijuana smoking.
Because inducers require the synthesis of new enzymes, several weeks are usually needed before the maximum effects of inducers are seen. Inducers' effects may take a few weeks to disappear as well....
Additional pharmacologic support of the relevance of smoking's inductive effects comes from caffeine intake studies. Caffeine, a drug that is more than 90 percent dependent on CYP1A2 for its metabolism and that is widely used in the United States, can exemplify smoking's effects on drug metabolism.
The C/D [concentration-dose ratio] of caffeine appears to be threefold to fourfold as high among nonsmokers compared with smokers. This higher ratio means that smokers need three to four times the caffeine "dosage" as nonsmokers on average to get the same plasma caffeine levels.
It turns out that two antipsychotic drugs, olanzapine and clozapine, are also broken down by the same enzyme, so smoking will reduce the effect of these drugs.
Hence smokers need larger doses to have the same effect, and patients on these drugs who give up smoking might find a sudden increase in side effects if the dose isn't dropped.
We tend to think of the effect of psychotropic drugs as happening in the brain but drug metabolism happens all over the body with the liver and kidneys being particularly important and having a profound impact on the effect of the compound.
Link to 'Atypical Antipsychotic Dosing: The Effect of Smoking and Caffeine'.
Walking home from work today, while crossing the street, I found myself pulling a good old-fashioned double take. For I beheld, driving by, my dead grandmother, driving a shiny silver sedan. She was craning her neck to see better, in that grandmotherly way that says, "I'd better get a good look at who I'm about to run over." It was eerie. I'm turning into Hunter Thompson, I thought. I checked myself for ether.
I really gave her the eyeball, too; she was just a damn ringer. It was so stop-in-my-tracks obvious that it wouldn't surprise me. In fact, I hope she noticed; it might have thrown a charge into the old broad's day. Say! she'd think. That ugly little fellow is, as the kids say, checking me out! I've still got it! Then, if she really was like my grandmother, she would go on to distractedly say something really racist.
(It would always kill me when I'd visit my grandmother in LA when I was a kid. Driving around the Valley, every time she saw any graffiti, she'd mutter darkly, "Mexicans," and shake her head.)
Then, last night, one of our dining room lights blew.
Bear with me here, people!
So, yeah, when the wife turned on the dining room lights for dinner, a bulb--though, I found out later, not a bulb at all, but some ridiculously tiny little transistory-looking thing that frankly never had any business putting out that kind of candlepower in the first place--went pop! and scared the shit out of us, as it always does to everyone in the history of light bulbs. Well, whatever; nothing to do about it now. I wasn't about to climb up and fuck with removing the glass shade and all that, especially since we likely didn't have any extra bulbs around (and as we know now, we also don't have any alien technology in the house to replace the not-bulbs-at-all). We ate in the semi-dark and pretended to be cavemen.
Later, around 12:30, the wife was preparing for bed, and she began to turn out some lights. The dining room light refused to turn off.
"Okay, the light isn't turning off," she said. I turned and saw her poking at the light switch. Being an excellent example of the purposefully ineffectual husband, I immediately strode over to the recalcitrant light switch and poked at it authoritatively a few dozen times. The light remained on.
"God fucking damn it," I said, and stared at the fixture with a familiar blend of determination and hopelessness. You're going to climb up and fuck with that stupid ceiling light, and you're going to fail, and then you're going to get even more pissed off, I thought.
Which I did, in the process discovering the bizarre little not-bulbs that were clearly made by Thai children who bend wires with their teeth. The not-bulb continued burning furiously, and was too hot for me to remove, even when I tried wearing my very handyman-ish black leather gloves. The wife at this point had retired to the kitchen, where she rooted around for the little fire extinguisher that we keep handy in a bottom cupboard behind a Dutch oven and a stockpot. The nonresponsive light switch was on a dimmer; when the not-bulb went, it apparently took the rheostat with it. Our electrician Josh came out this morning to take care of it.
Why are you on a first-name basis with your electrician, you ask? WELL, I'M NOT. My wife is, and not only because she is fucking him on the side.
We met Josh about a month ago when on of our track lighting units croaked. Josh came over, briefly fucked my wife, and explained. A summary:
Prior to Josh's visit, one of our six-halogen tracks had a few dead bulbs. Being incredibly sedentary, we just sort of lived with the squinting half-lit existence until one of us broke (the wife) and went and bought some new bulbs. We had noticed on each bulb housing the label informing us that the max was 50W. Sweet! So finally one night we loaded the track unit with a bunch of shiny new 50W bulbs and basked in the shocking illumination suddenly brightening every corner of our living room.
"You can really see the cobwebs!" we cried. Then the lights began to flutter and wow in a kind of disco sequence, and then they all went out together.
We found out later that while each housing was definitely up to snuff for 50W bulbs, the transformer for the track was good for only 150W total, and we had tried ramming nearly twice that through the miserable little beast, and it kicked its electromagnetic legs up in the air as it died.
"Probably ought to put 20W bulbs in this track from now on," said Josh laconically. "See you Thursday," he said to my wife as he left. This was a month after the actual unit died, which was how long it took Josh to locate a replacement transformer sufficiently underpowered and puny to fit within the housing unit; Josh magnanimously took 15% off the bill total, which the wife later noticed actually turned out to be 10% when calculated. "No more front-butt for that guy," she said sourly, and I stood a little taller in the once-more illuminated room, angling myself so that the repaired lights fell most flatteringly upon my goiter, but I don't think she noticed.
So what does any of this have to do with anything else? How is this all supposed to hang together? Why are you reading yet another interminable blog entry? These things, while all stupid, have nothing to do with each other.
So you say. I have a better explanation. Poltergeists. Go ahead, call me crazy. I don't care. I'm clearly being haunted by malign spirits; I offer these vignettes as proof. You need more, you say? Fine. It lies in what I haven't seen, and here's what I haven't seen:
I haven't seen Josh fucking my dead grandmother. That would be crazy.
So it's got to be poltergeists. Nothing to do now but call Tangina. Great--another professional.
Man, she's going to fuck my wife, isn't she?
From TPM Reader DB ...
I haven't seen this mentioned yet in any articles but what about the big banks (or any others receiving bailout money) lobbying while taking tax payer money. They are using public funds to pay for lobbying to increase their own interests and not necessarily those of the general public. Seems at least as bad if not worse than bonuses and executive pay.Just a thought/question
Gene Siskel and I were like tuning forks. Strike one, and the other would pick up the same frequency. When we were in a group together, we were always intensely aware of one another. Sometimes this took the form of camaraderie, sometimes shared opinions, sometimes hostility. But we were aware. If something happened that we both thought was funny but weren't supposed to, God help us if one caught the other's eye. We almost always thought the same things were funny. That may be the best sign of intellectual communion.
Gene died ten years ago on February 20, 1999. He is in my mind almost every day. I don't want to rehearse the old stories about how we had a love/hate relationship, and how we dealt with television, and how we were both so scared the first time we went on Johnny Carson that, backstage, we couldn't think of the name of a single movie, although that story is absolutely true. Those stories have been told. I want to write about our friendship. The public image was that we were in a state of permanent feud, but nothing we felt had anything to do with image. We both knew the buttons to push on the other one, and we both made little effort to hide our feelings, warm or cold. In 1977 we were on a talk show with Buddy Rogers, once Mary Pickford's husband, and he said, "You guys have a sibling rivalry, but you both think you're the older brother."
Once Gene and I were involved in a joint appearance with another Chicago media couple, Steve Dahl and Garry Meier. It was a tribute to us or a tribute to them, I can't remember. They were pioneers of free-form radio. Gene and I were known for our rages against each other, and Steve and Garry were remarkable for their accord. They gave us advice about how to work together as a successful team. The reason I remember that is because soon afterward Steve and Garry had an angry public falling-out that has lasted until this day.
Gene, Thea Flaum and I during an early taping
Gene and I would never, ever, have had that happen to us. Unthinkable. In my darkest and moodiest hours, when all my competitiveness and resentment and indignation were at a roiling boil, I never considered it. I know Gene never did either. We were linked in a bond beyond all disputing. "You may be an asshole," Gene would say, "but you're my asshole." If we were fighting--get out of the room. But if we were teamed up against a common target, we were fatal. The first time we were on his show, Howard Stern never knew what hit him. He picked on one of us, and we were both at his throat.
We both thought of ourselves as full-service, one-stop film critics. We didn't see why the other one was quite necessary. We had been linked in a Faustian television format that brought us success at the price of autonomy. No sooner had I expressed a verdict on a movie, my verdict, than here came Siskel with the arrogance to say I was wrong, or, for that matter, the condescension to agree with me. It really felt like that. It was not an act. When we disagreed, there was incredulity; when we agreed, there was a kind of relief. In the television biz, they talk about "chemistry." Not a thought was given to our chemistry. We just had it, because from the day the Chicago Tribune made Gene its film critic, we were professional enemies. We never had a single meaningful conversation before we started to work on our TV program. Alone together in an elevator, we would study the numbers changing above the door.
Making this rivalry even worse was the tension of our early tapings. It would take eight hours to get one show in the can, with breaks for lunch, dinner and fights. I would break down, or he would break down, or one of us would do something different and throw the other off, or the accumulating angst would make our exchanges seem simply bizarre. There are many witnesses to the terror of those days. Only when we threw away our clipboards and 3x5 cards did we get anything done; we finally started ad-libbing and the show begin to work. We found we could tape a show in under an hour.
Our first "Sneak Previews" set: Not a very wide screen, and the fake rail supports are painted pop bottles (All photos clickable)
People started recognizing us when we went out of town. "Life is going to change," Gene said. Joe Antelo, the producer who brought us into syndication, took us to NATPE, the convention of syndicated TV shows, and forbade us to walk around the floor unless we were together. "Together, you're an advertisement," he explained. "Apart, you're tourists." People would ask, "Aren't you those two guys?" Once when we were on an elevator, some ladies started whispering to each other and when we got off, Gene looked back and said, "We're those two guys."
Both of us were obsessed with our newspaper jobs. That was our identity. TV was part-time. We were competitive, but not equally competitive. Gene was the most competitive man I have ever met. Everything was an opportunity. At PBS, the camera crew played with one of those toy gambling games where you threw little metal pigs on the floor and bet on how many of them landed on their feet. Something like that. I never understood it. They gambled for nickel stakes.
One day Gene said, "Let's make it more interesting," and suggested raising the stakes to a quarter. Then he started to win. There was no way he was cheating. Gene had taken the pigs home with him and mastered the game. Another time on an airline flight, we were sitting next to each other playing gin rummy, and for once I succeeded in making the right play and Gene threw his cards down on his tray table so hard they flew all over the aisle. We never played gin again.
Gene had only scorn for games of chance. We went to Vegas a lot and I never saw him play a single one. He would gamble in only two ways: Poker and horse racing, where it didn't have to be blind luck. He said he was a net winner. I found that unlikely. His horse-betting buddy was Johnny Morris, the Chicago Bears star who worked with him at Channel 2. Morris was also said to be a gifted bettor. I was told by a third party that they were both, in truth, successful. I reported this to Gene and asked him what his rules were. "Roger," he said, "there is only one rule: Never play a hunch."
We win a Chicago Emmy award
In Vegas, I played the $5 poker tables but Gene was over in the more talented section of the room. At his bachelor party, he swept the tables with his winnings. At my bachelor party, he was a big loser. I asked him what went wrong. "What went wrong," he said, "is that your friends don't know how to play poker. A good player can never win against someone who makes a bet just for fun."
He had season tickets for the Bulls going back to the 1970s, and told me they were a "good young team." When Michael Jordan joined the team in 1984, Gene began to follow Jordan and the Bulls with a passionate intensity. He and Marlene even bought front row tickets--not cheap, but more important to Gene than a car. He was a fan, but not a mindless fan. He became a student of the game. He looked in basketball for the kinds of "tells" a poker player looks for. He said Jordan was better at reading another player's tells than anybody else in the game.
He asked the coach, Phil Jackson, "Why does Dennis Rodman almost always miss the first free throw?"
Jackson said, "Why do you think?"
Gene said, "For some reason, he thinks he has to."
Jackson nodded thoughtfully.
"He didn't tell me what he thought," Gene said. "A good coach would never do that."
We kept leaving titles behind: "At the Movies" stayed at Tribune when we went to Buena Vista
Gene was formidably well-informed. It was a sort of armor. He made it his business. He knew the best restaurants, but that was child's play. He knew fine art and antiques. He knew things like the best tuna-salad sandwich in Los Angeles (the Apple Pan) or the best Italian beef sandwich in Chicago (Mr. Beef). We agreed that Father & Son made the best thin-crust pizza in Chicago. We agreed that deep-pan "Chicago style" pizza wasn't worth the time of day. Gene knew the safest family cars, and those were the only ones he drove. He knew the best school for his children. I never thought of buying a place to live without asking his advice. When Chaz and I were looking at a house, we asked him to check it out.
He walked through the house briefly and said, too quickly I thought, "Don't buy it."
We asked why not. "I don't like the skylight," he said.
What's wrong with it? "From their windows," he said, "your neighbors can see you walking to the bathroom."
He was a bachelor when I first met him, living in an apartment that was said to resemble a bachelor's nightmare. I never saw it. Few did. When he got serious about Marlene and realized he would sooner or later have to take her there, he asked his sister to clean it up "just enough so I can have a cleaning person come in." I gather it wasn't filled with rotting Kentucky Fried Chicken or anything. It was simply filled with everything he had ever brought home and put down, still there wherever it landed, and had never been dusted. He and Johnny Morris made a bet once with a TV set as the wager. When Johnny lost, he got a giant old console set and had it delivered to Gene's apartment. The delivery guys dumped it inside the door. It was never moved, and from then on the door never opened all the way.
The Gene Siskel Film Center has wonderful programming here
There was always a little of the Yale undergraduate in Gene. Tim Wiegel, his roommate there, later a sportscaster, told me Gene was famous for wearing a Batman costume and dropping out of trees. He studied philosophy, considered law school, decided to take some time off first. "I told my dad I thought I'd like to try a job in newspapers," Gene said. "He said he'd give me a ride downtown. We had always been a Sun-Times family. For some reason, I never knew why, he dropped me off in front of Tribune Tower." Less than a year after walking in the door, he was the Tribune's film critic.
He got his second job, as the movie critic of the CBS Chicago news, because the newscast was bring reformatted to resemble a newspaper city room. Van Gordon Sauter, the executive producer, recruited Gene on the theory, "Don't hire someone because they look good on TV; hire them because they cover a beat and are the masters of it." Gene speculated that was the reason for the success of our show: We didn't look great on TV, but we sounded as if we might know what we were talking about.
Gene met Marlene Iglitzen when she was producing the CBS news in Chicago. "We fought like cats and dogs," she told me. She moved to CBS in New York. He started to see her in New York, and when she was visiting her family in Chicago he would bring her to screenings. I don't recall him ever bringing any other dates to screenings. She was the one. I remember once we were all in a car in New York, and Gene said he wanted to show me the holy place where he had proposed marriage to Marlene. I think this was on Second Avenue.
"There it is, right on the corner," Gene said, taking Marlene's hand.
"The Pizza-Fotomat?" I said.
"My darling Gene," Marlene said.
He had discovered the right woman. I am going to violate a confidence. Thea Flaum was the person who formed our show on PBS and guided us through our rocky first years. She said to me not so long ago, "You know Gene could sometimes he difficult to deal with. Well, you both were. Marlene is a smart woman, she worked in TV news, I wondered how it would work for her being married to Gene. Rog, after I saw them together for awhile, I came to the realization that in the most important ways they were the same person."
Across State Street from the Siskel Center: I am with Will Siskel, Chaz, Mayor Richard M. Daley, Marlene, and Maggie Daley (Sun-Times photo: Jean Lachat)
Marlene kept her name. "When I introduced Marlene Iglitzen to Mel Brooks," Gene said, "Mel asked her, 'What was it before you changed it?'" They had two daughters, Cate and Callie, and a son, Will. The girls were flower girls at our wedding. They followed Gene to Yale, and Will seems to be headed there. The Siskels threw a party for us before Chaz and I were married. I remember the party before Gene was married. There was a mentalist who told me everything in my own wallet. This was astonishing; I knew my wallet had been in my pants during the whole party.
"How does he do that?" I asked Gene.
"I don't know, but I'll tell you one thing," Gene said. "He couldn't tell me what was in my wallet."
Once we were invited to speak to the Harvard Law School Film Society. We walked into their Mock Trial courtroom armed with all sorts of notes, but somehow got started on a funny note, and the whole appearance became stand-up comedy. Separately or together, we were never funnier. Even the audience questions were funny. Roars of laughter for 90 minutes. I'm not making this up. I don't know what happened. Afterwards Gene said, "We could do this in Vegas. No, I'm serious." He was always serious about things like that.
That night we had dinner together in a hotel in Cambridge, and had our longest and deepest philosophical discussion. We talked about life and death, the cosmos, our place in the grand scheme of things, the meaning of it all. There was a reason Gene studied philosophy: He was a natural.
He spoke about his Judaism, which he took very seriously. His parents had started the first synagogue on the North Shore after World War II. "I had a lot of long talks with my father about our religion," Gene told me. "He said it wasn't necessary to think too much about an afterlife. What was important was this life, how we live it, what we contribute, our families, and the memories we leave." Gene said, "The importance of Judaism isn't simply theological, or, in the minds of some Jews, necessarily theological at all. It is that we have stayed together and respected these things for thousands of years, and so it is important that we continue." In a few words, this was one of the most touching descriptions of Judaism I had ever heard.
Marlene with Cate and Callie
In early 1998, I began to notice that Gene sometimes got things out of order; strange, for a man who was always alert and precise. We emceed an awards show with a dozen categories, and Gene asked me to brief him every time we went onstage. In April of that year, we were the guests of honor at a benefit gala for Chicago's Museum of Broadcasting. It marked the 23rd anniversary of the show. "Why the 23rd?" I asked Chaz. "Why not the 25th?" We decided maybe the museum needed the money.
That night, Gene addressed a lot of his remarks to his family, seated at a table right in front of the stage. He told them things they should be sure to tell Will when he grew older. He mentioned some of his values. He spoke of their education, and the importance of finding a job you love. I took quiet notice of that. Not long after, Jay Leno brought his show to Chicago. In the limo going out to the Rosemont Horizon, Gene said he had an unbelievable headache. Backstage, they found a darkened room and a cool cloth for his eyes, and gave him some Advil.
We were supposed to judge a contest of Jay lookalikes. "My headache is too bad to focus on it," he told me. "You do it and I'll agree with everything you say. You can looked amazed. We can make it a shtick."
After the show, Stuart Cleland, our executive producer, said, "Gene, I'm taking you to a hospital." Gene refused. "Nothing doing. I'm going to the Bulls game." His team was in the playoffs. Chaz and I watched the game on TV, and saw Gene in his usual seat on the floor. A day or two later, we heard that Gene had gone into Northwestern Hospital for some tests. We flew to the Cannes festival, and Stuart called us in France: "Gene is having surgery." We wanted to call and send him flowers. "I don't know where he is," Stuart said. "He didn't tell me."
Gene with Spike Lee on the Bulls sidelines during a 1996 game against the Knicks
We later found out it was Sloan-Kettering in New York. There was a statement that Gene had undergone tests and was recovering after a procedure. Gene took some time off (together we chose Tom Shales of the Washington Post to sit in for him). When he returned to the show, he was obviously ill, but we never discussed his health, except to agree that he was recovering--recovering from what, was never said.
I understood this at the time, and understand it better now. Gene was a competitor. He knew all about odds, and they were against him. But from that summer through the following February, he continued to attend screenings and do the show. He was often in his seat at Bulls games. What he went through, only Marlene knew. He spoke to his family about his illness, but to no one else, not even his best friends. He was unhappy when the Tribune ran an item saying his recovery was "on schedule." He asked, "What schedule? Whose schedule?"
Before his final shows, the studio was cleared so that his nephew could help him walk onto the set and take his seat. No mention was made of his illness. He taped his last program a week or two before his death. His pain must have been unimaginable. But he continued to do his job, and I never admired him more. Our eyes would meet, unspoken words were between us, but we never spoke openly about his problems or his prognosis. That's how he wanted it, and that was his right. In a way, we had that our talk on that night in Cambridge. We talked about what mattered.
We once spoke with Disney and CBS about a sitcom to be titled, "Best Enemies." It would be about two movie critics joined in a love/hate relationship. It never went anywhere, but we both believed it was a good idea. Maybe the problem was that no one else could possibly understand how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love.
¶Remembering Gene, Part One:
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Remembering Gene, Part Two:
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Remembering Gene, Part Three:
¶
Peter Merholz of Adaptive Path was nice enough to invite us over for a presentation at Adaptive Path HQ last Friday. Brent and I presented Siftables to the team, and we had a stimulating and wide-ranging discussion.
I want to pull out one thread from that conversation that has been woven into our thinking about Siftables - and that is the notion of multi-object gesture. There has been lots of work in UX and interaction design that attempts to map user gestures onto actions executed by a device - for example, “swipe fingers horizontally across the screen to move between items in a list.”
The goal of this work is to find mappings that are somehow “intuitive,” which to me means finding mappings that take advantage of cultural or innate (take your pick) knowledge about how our movements and gestures affect the things in the physical world - objects, materials, and even living things. So swiping a touchscreen to scoot through pages in a list is a pretty good gesture, since it mimics (but does not replicate) the way we might swipe pieces of paper stacked on our desk as we scan through them.
Siftables allows us to think about new classes of gestures - those that occur across groups of objects in 3D space. What kinds of gestures are uniquely suited to such a system? More important, what kind of mappings from gesture to action are now possible? What sort of gesture:action mappings would hold across different applications?
We put together an “interaction language primer” some time ago that tries to explore this space; we are eager to revisit it and see how insightful or dumb or both we were. In the meantime, what are your thoughts about this interaction space?
On a semi-related note, thanks to all those who have been sending us enthusiastic and thoughful mail regarding Siftables - we have been inundated with requests for more information on Siftables since the TED talk, and we appreciate all the support! We are trying to collect everyone’s input; look for a FAQ to emerge here on the blog.
David and I are off to China tonight; Brent is holding down the fort til we’re back, Davie Crockett-style.
Courtesy of the school’s Masters in Interaction Design program, an interview with the well-known creative mind behind The Feltron Annual Report. In this dialogue, he touches on the problem of the designer as an author: “In a larger sense, the Annual Reports are an outgrowth of a search for content to use as a source for design. As long as I’ve been a designer, I’ve searched for ways to design personal content.”
On 11 Mar, Felton will be appearing on a blockbuster bill of fellow speakers — Jen Bekman, Rebekah Hodgson and Jason Kottke are the others — at one of the program’s well-attended Dot Dot Dot lectures in New York. If you’re looking to go back to school or to deepen your expertise in interaction design and you’re not already considering this program, you should be.
Releasing the TimesPeople API (now available) is a big step for us. Back when we first came up with TimesPeople, we were trying to answer the question, "How can we give back to the social Web?"
Tom Kaminski’s Chopper 880 took pictures of the final remains of Shea Stadium which you can see at WCBS880.com.
A rumor has it that the stadium will be completely down by tomorrow, but this has not yet been confirmed.
40 Key Articles in Radical Geography. Apropos of yesterday’s post, Antipode, a radical journal of geography, celebrates 40 years of publication by posting 40 favorite articles from their archives online. Since 1969, Antipode has published: “dissenting scholarship that explores and utilizes key geographical ideas like space, scale, place, borders and landscape. It aims to challenge dominant and orthodox views of the world through debate, scholarship and politically-committed research, creating new spaces and envisioning new futures.”
From WCBS's site:
Vendr.tv, a podcast and website "covering the best of the best curbside cuisine the the world has to offer," launched on Sunday. The premiere episode has host Daniel Delaney visiting the Treats Truck in New York City. Delaney says that he and the crew are about to travel to Philly and Boston to highlight street vendors there, followed by a trip to the West Coast.
The premiere episode is well produced, if a smidge too long at 6:43 (my attention span for web video is two to three minutes). But Delaney seems like an affable-enough host, and street food is a topic that ignites fierce debate, so he and his team have plenty of material to work through. You can catch the debut episode after the jump.
VendrTV: The Treats Truck
Related
The Treats Truck, on SENY
A Typical Day on L.A.'s Kogi BBQ Taco Truck
The Hot Truck at Cornell
attention new yorkers
Jason Kottke speaks for a wondering nation:
The brief author bio at the end of the article continues the recent game of “next book” Whack-A-Mole from Lewis. Since the publication of The Blind Side in 2006, Lewis’ next book has been listed in various outlets as being about New Orleans/Katrina, financial panics (which turned out to be an anthology edited by Lewis), his sequel to Liar’s Poker about the current financial crisis, and now is listed as “Home Game, a memoir about fatherhood”. I give up.
Moneyball, The Blind Side, the Shane Battier piece … it’s about time hockey got a look. Hey Michael, I used to be an intrepid arena reporter (spoiler alert: Yale lost)! Call me! You can edit my anthology anytime.
My guess is he actually has separate book deals for all of these things and plans on writing all of them. From what I understand about Demand for Michael Lewis, the guy types a word and someone automatically hands him a twenty.
New Stadium Insider has a photo up of a section of seats in Citi Field that have an obstructed view.
To me, it looks like it’s just those last few rows – but, still, it appears any one sitting in these seats will lose the ball on a high pop up.
By the way, I have been told by a few people that the New York Post will soon release a story exposing all sorts of flaws in Citi Field, which, considering the source, is not at all surprising.
To check out the latest photos from inside Citi Field, check out Island Extreme’s photo gallery, here, on Webshots.
The image in this post is of the giant Pepsi Cola sign that has been installed above the right-field porch.
My friends at Pepsi tell me the entire right-field porch will actually be sponsored and called The Pepsi Porch. The sign in this picture is inspired by the one in Long Island City. The area will have tables and chairs above the seated section and will serve antique Pepsi products, whatever that means.
Speaking of Island Extreme, who I’m starting to think lives inside Citi Field, he took the following pictures, here, and video, here, from inside the cement cannister that will house the new Home Run Apple.
Lastly, I keep getting questions about where the original Home Run Apple will be. According to the team, eyewitnesses and pictures, the original Apple has been installed in the Bullpen Plaza, which is open to the public behind the bullpens, at Citi Field.
I can't say it's a surprise to learn that Salsa on the Go, the Goya concession, isn't making it to the New Yankee Stadium.
Readers of this site know I was a huge fan of the juice and a small fan of the nachos at this left field-level concession (small because I don't really like nachos; these were the best in the ballpark).
And you also know that the main patrons of Salsa on the Go were beer drinkers who didnot wish to stand in line elsewhere.But now those of us who liked to mix Guayaba and ice and water (in the excellent Goya cups) are out of luck. Or are we? Will there be juice in the New Yankee Stadium? Two months to find out.
Well, two in a row make a set, yes? Check out this atomic-print dress that's up on eBay right now (from seller MemphisVintage).
Here are some more pictures, click on them to check out the auction:
Teri gave me the heads-up on this one, and I'm grateful, even though I don't think I'll be bidding. Lately I can't seem to get excited about buying vintage dresses off eBay. Vintage coats, vintage sweaters, vintage shoes, vintage jackets -- for sure -- but I seem to want to MAKE all my dresses. Go figure. (Although the longer I look at this one, from the same seller, the more I want to make an exception! Pockets!)
Every time you mess up, your boss will remember it as three times that number. If the total number of actual mess-ups is greater than 3, your boss will remember it as "always." Submitted by: Evan Christensen, Bum, Glendale, CA, USA
February 16, 2009 - 9:16 p.m. - Los Angeles, CAAfter several weeks of planning we caught up with gallerist Fette and her artist-husband, Matthew over dinner on Sawtelle. We found out that they would be moving to Berlin this Spring and although that makes us very sad, gives us another reason to visit the reigning art capital of Europe. Not to be forgotten, Fette will be guest curating at various Los Angeles galleries in the near future. We are already looking forward to supporting those shows. Good luck, guys! Our loss is Berlin's gain!
I got errors on my Mac today complaining about IO.pm. I had just installed Parrot on the way to building up a Rakudo to work on, so I figured something in the still-not-ironed-out Parrot install had caused the problem. It looked like this:
% perl -MIO IO object version 1.22 does not match bootstrap parameter 1.23 at /System/Library/Perl/5.8.8/....I just figured I'd reinstall the module.I tried to update IO.pm, but the CPAN shell uses IO, and so barfed. Had to install it manually by downloading a tarball (gasp!) and doing it manually. And then everything was fine.
And then my old colleague Ed Silva IMs me asking if I knew anything about it. I had to confess I was surprised to see he had the same problem.
And now Miyagawa, bless his heart, lays it all out for you in this blog post about the Mac OS X security update. Ooopsie!
Thanks to Miyagawa for explaining the problem.
It's Presidents Day so let's bust open a couple blasters of President cards. As always, before we go partisan here's some goodies for everyone on the right side of the aisle.
This is the Grover Cleveland card from 2008 Mayo. He was president back when the orginal set was released or something. Too lazy to look it up right now. I want to like this set so bad...And the Presidents song from Animaniacs!
Ok, getting into the Obama stuff now. Dittoheads can go elsewhere if they choose or stay here and join the fun. It won't hurt my feelings either way.
If you want to build the 2009 Topps Obama set, you should really try to track down blasters. For one, there are 6 packs in the box for $9.99 so you get a free pack. The other reason is because packs in the box cannot be molested by human hands before you rip that plastic off. Now, in a set with no relics or autos for searchers to swipe, this might not seem like a big deal. Where I live, it is. Check out this loose pack I picked up at Target:Notice anything about the cards? Click on it and look close. Every one of them is bent in half with a big crease going through the middle. Apparently a sore loser bent the pack in half and put it back in the middle of the rest of the packs. I've found about a half-dozen similarly trashed packs since I opened this one. Obviously I've stuck to blasters after that. I've put this pack in my binder in a page at the back. It's a good reminder of the partisanship that's prevalent in this country. I'm pretty sure if W got his own set I would have found some wrecked packs of them too if I looked in the right places. Follow whatever political ideology you want folks, just don't be dicks about it.
Here's blaster #1:
Pack 1:
Base: 4 63 33 21 52
Sticker 16
Foil stamp 56For brevity's sake, I'm not listing out the content of every pack other than the card numbers. As a set builder I'm often far more interested with the number than anything else on the card anyway. They've pretty much all got Obama on 'em except for a couple with Joe or Michelle, so who cares if it's smiling Obama or debating Obama or serious Obama. I'm tempted to lolcat this card and have it say SERIOUS OBAMA IS SERIOUS.
Pack 2:
Base: 56 1 10 69 77 2
Sticker 17Here's the base set basketball card. If you want the short printed insert version you're looking at one in thirty-two odds of finding one in a blaster. If you think that's really tough odds, consider that the odds of finding the insert card may be 1:192 packs, but the odds of finding any specific foil Inauguration Date stamp card is 1:270. So the foil stamp version of this base card is actually harder to find than the '70s retro card.
Pack 3:
Base: 25 38 19 49 68 86
Sticker 18Yay! A baseball card! Boooo! They airbrushed the Sox logos off! Dammit Topps! 47 cards with this photo on it and the one I actually pull is airbrushed! @#$^%!!
Pack 4:
Base: 55 47 15 88 81
Foil sticker 12
Foil stamp 1There are unnanounced foil stickers in the set for all you parallel lovers. It would have been nice to put the odds on the pack, but they look good at least. I think they fall somewhere around one on four to one on six packs. This was the only one in this box.
Pack 5:
Base: 26 9 53 12 3 31
Sticker 1This is a pretty neat photo of Obama with Bishop Desmond Tutu. I'll be the photographer made damn sure they were standing in front of that 44 address.
Pack 6:
Base: 34 27 13 22 43
Sticker 3
Foil stamp 6Aww, cute. One day someone my age will be elected President and there will be a picture of them hauling ass on a Big Wheel. Or maybe vegging out in front of the Atari 2600 playing Pitfall.
Totals:
33 base cards
3 foil stamps
5 stickers
1 foil sticker
For 10 bucks you can count on getting about a third of the set, 6 stickers and a few foil parallels. If you want a set, you're looking at at least 4 blasters due to the notoriously bad collation in non-sports sets. If you want a set and are smart, you'll get one off eBay. But what fun is that? The inserts fall 1:32 boxes for the retro basketball card and 1: 64 boxes for the puppy redemption card. You'd be better off just buying them individually. The scary thing is a full master set of all the inserts and stickers and foils would probably be doable if you wanted to blow a pile of dough and chase foil cards for a couple months. I'm not that nuts, I want a set to give to my grandkids and then I'm done.
So you guys stuck around this long? You get a bonus! Another card, another video and another blaster!
Here's a Topps World Series Program card with a lot of Presidents on it.And of course, I couldn't let Presidents' day pass without The Presidents of the United States of America.
Here's a second blaster, just the bare bones totals this time.34 base
2 gold foil stamp
4 stickers
2 foil stickers
0 doubles in the box
12 doubles between the two boxes
I actually did pretty good here with only 12 dupes between the two blasters. 55/90 cards isn't shabby. One less foil stamp card was countered with one extra foil sticker. No inserts though. If anyone is collecting this thing or just want some let me know, I've got doubles to share.
"As people scramble for the exits in Dubai, there is no 'key mail', like in America, where people can often mail back their house keys and walk away from a mortgage without the immediate threat of jail. People are literally fleeing this place, to date leaving 3000 cars stranded at the airport with keys still in the ignition. And the reason for this is that if you default on your Dubai mortgage, you can end up in a debtors prison. Perhaps Dubai will at least create a new Dickens?"
If Facebook thinks they can repackage my claim to have interest in “ninjas, epileptic chihuahuas, and silence” as a book, article, or film adaptation, they are more than welcome to try.Hey Zuckerberg, gimme a call, I’ve got an idea for ya.
Great. Someone at Disney is probably rubbing their hands together and cackling maniacally right now.
It’s all fun and games till Tyler Perry gets cast as the lead. Thanks, Balk.
What language community has a greater reputation for being obsessed with TDD?
Obie: NO, Giles Bowkett (discussing Ruby)
Perl has had a canonical test suite in the core repository and shipped those tests with every source distribution since 1987. As of at least Ruby 1.8.7 (May 2008), this was not true of Ruby.
The third edition of Programming Perl, released in 2000, had a short (less than a page) discussion of Perl's testing modules and the CPAN testing system. The first edition of Programming Ruby, released in 2001, has no mention of testing that I can find.
Test::Builder, written in 2002, allows the existence of hundreds of Perl testing modules which can all work together in the same program to improve testing and the reusability, abstraction, and clarity of test programs. To my knowledge, Ruby has nothing like this.
The CPAN Testers project is nearly 11 years old (May 1998). Every distribution uploaded to the CPAN receives test reports for myriad combinations of operating system and version. The Perl CPAN culture encourages a testing culture, and has done so since before anyone in the US had even heard of Ruby. (Ruby has nothing quite like the CPAN.)
The Perl 6 specification includes a comprehensive test suite; every implementation of Perl 6 must pass this test suite to earn the label of "A conforming Perl 6 implementation". While the Rubinius project has done great work trying to create something similar for Ruby -- and while projects such as JRuby and IronRuby use this suite -- I'm not aware that the MRI developers have the same degree of interest in a comprehensive test suite.
This, then, is one of my persistent gripes with certain vocal members of the Ruby community. While it may be technically correct (the best kind of correct) that the Ruby community has the greatest reputation for testing of any other language community, the facts as I see them seem to contradict such a strong assertion.
Jerry Manuel talked to reporters today from the podium at Tradition Field in Port St. Lucie.
Manuel said he projects Sean Green to be used in the sixth and seventh innings, depending on match ups, while pitching him mostly in situations when the team has a lead. Though Manuel has not yet seen Green pitch, he has heard a lot of good things about him.
Manuel said Luis Castillo was delayed yesterday in getting to St.Lucie, though he is expected to report to camp tomorrow. Manuel said he plans to spend a lot of time with Castillo this spring. He says he hopes to change the way people view Castillo, noting it will be a good project.
Manuel said he wants to elevate Jose Reyes to another level of play, and
he believes Reyes is ready to take that step. He would like to get him to a point where he can bat lead-off, second or third in the batting order, because he is only technically a lead-off hitter in that first at bat of the game.
Manuel is not concerned with Reyes’s reaction to this approach, because the whole idea this spring training is that players put the team first. If it benefits the overall team, Manuel explained, the players must make the necessary adjustments.
Asked about decreasing Reyes’s at bat total by lowering him in the batting order, Manuel pointed out that the Mets have not won a championship the way things have been, adding, “Once we win, we’ll have a template of what we should do.”
That said, where Castillo hits will depend mostly on the rest of the lineup. Batting second would be the ideal spot for him, but lead-off will work well too.
Lastly, Manuel said the fifth starter’s spot is wide open, saying no one pitcher is leading the race at this date in camp.
By the way, tonight on SNY, Kevin Burkhardt will talk with John Maine, while showing video of Manuel’s Q&A and the days workout in St. Lucie.
To watch Manuel talk about Reyes during today’s Q&A, click play below:
Interesting stuff on the new Braves Beat blog. Dave O'Brien has Kelly Johnson and Matt Diaz answer questions from fans. Of course the critical question of the day is answered: What music introduction at the plate does each player want to use this year?
Kelly Johnson:
Matt Diaz:
Unfortunately Kelly doesn't think the Deftones are commercial enough and Matt is ashamed of his love for Billy Joel so I doubt either song will be heard at Turner Field this year. Too bad. I have a new found respect for KJ now that I know that he is VERY METAL.
'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by 11 international architectural firms
in 2008, MAD organized and invited 11 young international architects to carry
out an urban experiment: to design the huaxi city centre of guiyang, in south
western china. the architects invited by MAD included: atelier manferdini,
BIG, dieguez fridman, emergent/tom wiscombe, houliang architecture,
JDS, MAD, mass studies, rojkind arquitectos, serie, sou fujimoto architects.
the masterplan was developed by shanghai tongji urban planning and design institute,
studio 6, together with MAD.
the site of huaxi is famous for its dramatic and beautiful landscape, as well as a diverse
mix of minority cultural inhabitants during its history. its future is defined by the local
government’s urban planning as a new urban centre for finance, cultural activities
and tourism. MAD brought the young architects together here in the summer of 2008,
for a 3-day workshop to create an experimental urban vision for huaxi.
each architect provided a design for a single part of the masterplan,
based on their own understanding and interpretation of the local natural and
cultural elements. the result is a series of individual buildings, growing from
the natural environment, and working together to produce a
compound of diverse urban activities.
http://www.i-mad.com
'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by 11 international architectural firms
'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by 11 international architectural firms
'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by 11 international architectural firms
'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by 11 international architectural firms
'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by 11 international architectural firms
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by MAD
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang'- elevation plan by MAD
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by BIG
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by BIG
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by BIG
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by atelier manferdini
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by atelier manferdini
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by dieguez fridman
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by dieguez fridman
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by rojkind architects
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by rojkind architects
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by houliang
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by houliang
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by JDS
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by JDS
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by emergent
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by emergent
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by emergent
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by serie
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by serie
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' by mass studies
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by mass studies
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - by mass studies
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by sou fujimoto
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by sou fujimoto
design for 'huaxi city centre of guiyang' - model by sou fujimoto
all architectural firms at the 'huaxi' site of guiyang
-Photo by Getty Images-
I'm just surprised this kid wasn't born on stage at the Grammys.Rapper M.I.A. gave birth to a baby boy on Wednesday, she wrote on her MySpace blog.
"My early stage labor kicked in around 2 AM" after the Grammys, she wrote. "He is healthy, fine, beautiful and the most amazing thing ever on this planet, of course I'm his mum!"
I was losing my mind watching the "Paper Planes" singer dance around on stage, while performing "Swagga Like Us" with T.I., Kanye West, and Jay-Z, thinking the baby was just going to drop to the floor.
Congrats to the singer and her new baby boy, who, no doubt, will be grooving his way through life.
From Seije in Amsterdam:
"The image above is an oldie. It was done in the 1990s, but it suddenly occurred to me that you guys at Wooster might like to see it. This is an old water storage facility from the 1950s in Oostburg, the Netherlands. In the 1990s local artist Johnny Beerens decorated it with a 'crack' and some drops of water. I think it's awesome"
Not a whole lot of feature changes, but a definite jump in style, I've re-launched Listable with a design provided by Mule Design.
Some lists I like:
- Most Commonly Used Passwords — Stick that in a local database and clean against your users logging into your site.
- Airport Code Country Airport
- HTML Tag List — Nice if you're building some kind of HTML parsing script and need a list.
- Chinese Zodiac — Again, what I built this site for. If someone needs a list, here it is in a myriad of formats.
- Words Containing The Letter X — So good.
- Common XSS Vectors — Eep.
As we roar into a 2009 that is filled with major Labs projects, we have a constant need to get as much input from our users as possible. This need is fulfilled in many ways, from statistical analysis to focus groups to in-depth personal interviews to online surveys. Over the last month, however, it has become apparent that we needed a tool in our kit that would allow us to get simple usability questions in front of users with a minimum of fuss.
To be sure, there are strategic questions that require a lot of setup and deep knowledge about the respondents. We have a lot of those questions, and we are asking them in all their properly-sampled, audience-segmented glory, often with the assistance of consultants and our Strategy department. But often, what is needed is just a sanity check– a reassurance to our team that we are on the right track.
Our design sessions frequently result in debate about which of two words is more compelling or accurate for our users, or whether a particular button is noticeable in a particular location. When we can, we test designs on real people using paper or digital prototypes, but it is impractical to test every day; sitting down with real people is not always as simple as you’d expect, what with the schedules of busy New Yorkers.
Given that we have a large amount of traffic on our web sites, and an audience willing to help us where they can, we’ve naturally been drawn to web-based usability tests to fill this gap in our testing regimen. After all, once a web-based test is set up, we can go about our jobs while data points quietly accumulate in the background. We’ve used SurveyMonkey in the past for full-fledged traditional surveys, and we’ve also evaluated OptimalSort for online card sorting, and been inspired by the Five Second Test. But none of them were a perfect fit, for reasons including complicated interfaces, inflexible setup, privacy policy hassles, and/or lack of a way to embed a link back to our site when the test is completed.
So, we set out to create our own rapid-testing usability laboratory from scratch, and last Tuesday we launched it, in rough beta form. Nicknamed Infomaki*, it’s showing a lot of potential even in its first 48 hours.
It’s not groundbreaking technology. Built on a Rails back-end (my rapid-prototyping framework of choice), it currently supports two kinds of tests: standard multiple choice (with optional “Other:” box) and a “Where would you click…?” screenshot (see image above) that records click locations. But it’s a bit different from the other tools mentioned above in that:
1. Each question is free-standing
2. The user can answer as many or as few questions as they want
3. It’s incredibly easy for the team to insert questions immediatelyThe main idea is to have a pool of dozens of independent questions available at any given time, from which a respondent will see a random selection.
The pitch we’re using (in a thin 12px-high banner at the top of our site header) is “Answer a single question and help us improve our web site!” It’s simple, it’s a breeze. Then immediately after the easy question is answered, we ask politely if they’d like to answer another. As such, we’re finding that even with the “one question” pitch, the average number of questions answered is around 8, and an astonishing 90% of users answered more than one question. It’s the potato chip of surveys: can’t eat just one.
So far, this “no commitment” approach seems to be outpacing our traditional surveys. As a point of comparison, the last time we ran a survey off of the NYPL site (using the same banner at the top of the site), it was a regular, please-answer-these-questions pitch leading to a 8-page, 19 question SurveyMonkey-powered survey. That survey received 7,341 individual answers to questions from 520 respondents, 60% of whom completed the whole survey. This totaled 7,341 individual answers over 14 days. Infomaki, on the other hand, garnered over 6,900 answers from 840 respondents in its initial 48-hour maiden voyage.
This makes a difference in the way these survey questions can be approached: rapid feedback leads to rapid turnover. We’re mining the vast middle ground between putting a full survey in the field with full protocols and methodologies, and asking people in the office “Does this look right to you?” Designers can post a question in the morning and have several dozen responses by the afternoon. Ideally, we’d like to work out a way that this tool can be “baked in” to the new NYPL.org so that user feedback becomes an ongoing, always-on process.
Granted, there are issues with this approach. For starters, we don’t get a rounded profile of all Library users. It’s safe to assume that Infomaki respondents are among our more web-savvy patrons. But as long as we’re aware of that limitation, it might not be such a bad thing when posting questions directly related to the web site. And future releases will include the ability to add demographic questions into the mix, to build a richer profile of the users who are answering multiple questions.
We’ve already received a lot of feedback, despite not even blogging the launch (one little post on Twitter was the only announcement made). Most seriously, there appears to be a database-related bug where certain users are seeing repeated questions (no visitor is supposed to see the same question more than once), and we’ve taken down the link to the app while we work this out (though you can still feel free to click around). Some have also complained about the lack of a “I have no idea where to click” button in the screenshot questions, but I like forcing the respondent to make their best guess in these circumstances. We’ll probably address the issue with language to this effect rather than a change in the logic.
Internally, the application is optimized to store all results from varied types of questions in a single common database table, which makes it extremely easy to analyze response statistics. Our plan is to release the findings to any interested parties (any grad students out there want some raw statistical data?).
This is a brand-new, “zero-point” release of this application, and we’ll be making LOTS of changes in the upcoming weeks, including support for a wider variety of questions, cleanup to interfaces, and possibly some interstitial entertainment (Library trivia questions, anyone?) to keep people engaged with the application as long as possible.
More significantly, we plan a full Open Source release of the application very soon, so you can download and tinker with your own copy. Stay tuned to this blog for release details.
* Oh, and in case you’re wondering, the name Infomaki is a pun on Japanese food (a not-insignificant amount of which fuels the Digital Experience Group daily). “Maki” are those hand rolls of rice, seaweed and tasty treats, rolled up together and chopped into bite-sized cross-sections. Seemed somehow appropriate to what this tool does to user feedback.
Kim's Video once represented everything that I loved about New York - its diversity, its culture (both high and low), its ability to accommodate (and thus encourage) all sorts of interests. It was the first video store I knew of to organize their titles by director, and their library seemed vast and overwhelming, but in the most pleasurable way.
It seems that Kim's has fallen prey to the Netflix phenomenon (our own Videorama itself just closed for good on Friday), so it's had to close, but there's an interesting twist to the story. According to the NY Times, Kim himself offered to donate the entire collection to someone who could: "Keep the collection intact, continue to update it and make it accessible to Kim’s members and others."
So where is the Kim's collection ending up? In a small town in Italy called Salemi, where "an art critic and onetime anarchist" is mayor, a Benetto photographer is the "alderman of creativity", a prince was put in charge of town planning, and a "performance artist was officially declared alderman to nothing." Follow the NY Times link above to read this crazy story.
This has always been a rather passive-aggressive website, technologically speaking. You could read recent things, and you could read certain older things, but God help you if you wanted to poke around in the archives. The site was assembled by a script I wrote one night after two bottles of wine in 2002, and was afraid to ever look at again, let alone touch.
This past week I finally decided to do some long-overdue blog gardening, and now the site should be navigable back to its origins in the summer of 2002. It might even grow to have exciting features like a comments area, or actual new writing.
There are two joys that come with doing this kind of cleanup. The first is the discovery that, although writing regularly for seven years may not make you a good writer, it will certainly make you a less terrible writer than when you started. The second is the ability to go Orwell on the past.
As a form of moral penance, however, I have preserved the fact that my very first article on this site was about attending a Renaissance Faire.
Without droning on about the gears and levers that now drive this website, I would like to ask readers to email me if some link that used to work is now broken, or if something that works now would be better off being broken again.
Still don't want to get too deep into this without all the facts coming out, but I'm not sure going to family and friends really counts as "counseling"? That's kinda like saying "I just checked into rehab, at my cousin's house."Chris Brown Statement: Seeking Counseling, Apology source Chris Brown’s publicist Michael Sitrick has finally released a statement from Brown, in relation to the alleged incident that occurred Feb. 8 between Brown and his girlfriend, R&B star Rihanna. Brown has hired PR firm Sitrick And Company, Inc. who specializes in crises management, to issue the statement, where Brown says that he is "sorry and saddened" by what occurred and that he is seeking counseling from family and friends. "Words cannot begin to express how sorry and saddened I am over what transpired," the statement from the 19-year-old R&B star read. "I am seeking the counseling of my pastor, my mother and other loved ones and I am committed, with God's help, to emerging a better person. Much of what has been speculated or reported on blogs and/or reported in the media is wrong. While I would like to be able to talk about this more, until the legal issues are resolved, this is all I can say except that I have not written any messages or made any posts to Facebook, on blogs or any place else. Those posts or writings under my name are frauds." Chris Brown Statement: Seeking Counseling, ApologyAlso note, Chris Brown doesn't take any responsibility or admit to doing anything, he talks about things that "transpired,/i>" not anything he did. But again, not drawing any particular conclusions at this point.
paul and sort of met through dodgeball. not really, because we more or less met through dens, in “real life” and all, but it was definitely an icebreaker. i introduced myself one night at barcade and asked if he was “paul k.” we’ve been together 3 years this week.
This quote of the day is also one of my favorite quotes of all times. Alec Baldwin on 30 Rock.
Andre Balazs' latest venture The Standard New York has been open(ish) for a few weeks now. To celebrate Fashion Week, they're hosting a series of nights in the bar. We'll be playing some records on Wednesday, February 18 from 8-12pm. Please come by.
Check out the latest issue of Arkitip, curated by Mr. Balazs.
airing in HD for the first time tonight [via]
Drinks and Film
Originally uploaded by Alaina B..
I just celebrated my 40th birthday by taking my two sons to see Sesame Street Live at Madison Square Garden. Seemed fitting somehow. But definitely different from 20 and 30.
Originally posted by migurski from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE, ReBlogged by justin.s.ross on Feb 15, 2009 at 11:37 AM
