randomwalks/dj

Over the past two years, posts on this blog have slowed to just a trickle, and a number of TextMate users have asked about TextMate’s status, or publicly worried about its future. This blog post, the first I’ve written here in a long time, is an attempt to assuage those concerns and answer some of the most frequent questions.

In short, TextMate development is going strong: TextMate 2 isn’t done yet, but progress is steady, it is starting to take shape, and the end is in sight. The rewrite has been a slow and careful process, but the ideas behind it are exciting. I hope to publicly describe some new abstractions in the coming weeks and months. Moreover, the community continues to churn out new bundles and features for TextMate 1.5, and I’ve been building up a backlog of posts describing them. While I am not writing to announce a release date for TextMate 2, I do hope that this post will be the first in a series showing a bit more transparency.

The requests for TextMate 1 have mostly been incremental additions such as split views, chunked undo, and editing over SFTP. But TextMate 2 is about more than new surface features. Every part has been completely rewritten to take advantage of the lessons learned from the years of version 1. Not only are the low-level data structures chosen for increased flexibility, but the abstractions on which TextMate is built—snippets, scope-based language grammars, context-dependent settings—have been rethought and are more powerful than ever. In the coming months, I’ll try to describe some of these new abstractions, but for now, know that I am excited about the new ideas involved.

So where does development stand for 2.0? It feels to me like most of the modules are getting close, say 90%. But as they say, on the horizon, mountains look small. While I use 2.0 for my own work, day-to-day, and the basic infrastructure is pretty solid, much of the front-end still needs work, and for now it’s all lacking the spit and polish of a finished app. Hopefully an alpha version will be ready before too long, but I can’t make any promises about dates.

And why haven’t I been better about keeping the world informed? It is a combination of many things really, but the main issue is that I am not good at writing for a large audience. I am more into informal conversations, for instance over mailing lists or on IRC. So while I started a lot of posts, I end up unhappy with them halfway through, and they don’t get finished or published. I am taking measures: I have enlisted a technical writer to help bring this blog back to life, and I’ll try to communicate more of TextMate’s status and direction through him.

Bigger than either of those problems though, as I mentioned, is that TextMate 2 is no minor facelift. It’s a major undertaking with a long timeline and its final form isn’t fully settled. I don’t want to hype vaporware, and I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up before I know I can meet their expectations.

Furthermore, I haven’t wanted to throw ideas onto the internet without having a chance to implement them myself. I’m humbled that TextMate has served as inspiration for many other products, and I hope that it continues to be a model for other developers in the future, but I want to see my ideas done my way first, before I feed them to the competition.

I am trying to slowly turn this boat. With this post, I hopefully am showing that a hand is at the wheel. I know I’ve been quiet too long about my plans. I can’t make up for that, but going forward, I aim to do better.

Originally posted by Allan Odgaard from TextMate Blog, on June 13, 2009 11:31 PM

Laura Secor, who's done a great deal of reporting on Iran, has a piece up on The New Yorker's website. And she has little doubt the election was stolen.

Actually, make that no doubt ...

There can be no question that the June 12, 2009 Iranian presidential election was stolen. Dissident employees of the Interior Ministry, which is under the control of President Ahmadinejad and is responsible for the mechanics of the polling and counting of votes, have reportedly issued an open letter saying as much. Government polls (one conducted by the Revolutionary Guards, the other by the state broadcasting company) that were leaked to the campaigns allegedly showed ten- to twenty-point leads for Mousavi a week before the election; earlier polls had them neck and neck, with Mousavi leading by one per cent, and Karroubi just behind.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 13, 2009 5:27 PM

Last Sunday I wrote about how I acted on an urge to make a batch of Tuscan style salami. The post outlined the process up to the beginning of the fermentation of the meat. Today's post picks up the process on Wednesday when I retrieved the meat from the refrigerator in my garage and ground it.
It was my intention to stuff it at home too. But I decided against it when I realized that the stuffing attachment for my Kitchenaid stand mixer would ruin the texture by pulverizing the fat -which I wanted to remain in ~1/4" chunks- as it worked along the worm gear. So I took the forcemeat to the farm and expressed it into hog casing with the piston stuffer then brought it home to age.

Salami Stuffing Process

At the farm I always age the meat in the cheese aging room which is well controlled for humidity, temperature and air flow. But whenever I've aged meat at home in the past, I've winged it by hanging it in the basement and crossing my fingers. Well, I've decided not to do that anymore and build an aging room. But before I start shooting nails into the foundation and putting up studs I'm going to tinker around with different prototypes by way of determining how big the room needs to be, how often the air needs to turn over etc.

Here is my first prototype aging room. I put it up on Saturday in about an hour. Humidity is controlled by a vaopirizer hooked up to a timer. The air is turn over twice a day by a small fan (also on a timer). I expect that future versions of this will include a larger humidifer with a humdistat and a larger much slower turning fan.

Aging Room

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Originally posted by Bob del Grosso from A Hunger Artist, on June 13, 2009 1:04 PM

From the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ...

An outspoken anti-immigration activist from Everett has been arrested in Arizona in connection to a deadly home invasion robbery.

Shawna Forde, the executive director of the Minutemen American Defense, is one of three accused in the shooting deaths of 29-year-old Raul Flores and his daughter, 9-year-old Brisenia Flores, at their home in Arivaca, Ariz., a town 10 miles north of the Mexican border.

Two others - 34-year-old Jason Bush and 42-year-old Albert Gaxiola - were arrested. All three have been charged with two counts of first-degree murder, one count of first-degree burglary and one count of aggravated assault.

According to the Pima County Sheriff's Office, two men and a woman posing as police officers forced their way into the Flores ' home in the middle of the night on May 30.

Late Update: TPM Reader CE notes that the MAD website has a post up categorically denouncing the actions of the killers, one of the whom is allegedly the executive director of the organization and pledging fealty to the rule of the law and humanity in general. But I guess it's a tad belied by headlines down the page like this one: "Subhuman Mexicans (God's Children?) Prey on Countrymen." With sentiments like that, who could have imagined things could escalate to violence, right?

Later Right Wing Terror Update: TPM Reader JW notes that this article in the Arizona Republic identifies one of the three accused murderers is Jason Eugene Bush, who goes by the nickname "gunny". And a recent post on the group's website announced his appointment as the group's 'operations director' ...

We are honored to have Gunny aboard. He served 6 tours over seas, where he has several medals. He received a Purple heart, Silver and Bronze star, Combat Infantry Badge and a Presidential citation for his actions in the Special Forces. He will be in charge of all operations along the Southern Border, assisting in command decisions, Recon and Tactical training. Gunny will be permanently located at MAD'S new 40 acre Base Camp, located somewhere on the Southern Border.

The man killed in the home invasion was a suspected drug dealer. And police say the invaders' plan was to kill the entire family and steal money and drugs which would later be sold for cash. The Arizona Republic has some more detail on MAD's connection with the better-known (I can't quite manage to call them 'mainstream') Minutemen groups ...

Forde is executive director of Minutemen American Defense, a border watch group that claims to secure the U.S. Border from human and drug trafficking, according to its Web site.

The Minutemen American Defense group is not associated with the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps, said Al Garza, vice president of the Minutemen Civil Defense Corps.

Forde was a leader with the Civil Defense Corps a few years ago but was dismissed after a few months because of leadership issues, he said.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 13, 2009 8:44 AM

Bloody hell.

So I've been working on a big project for a while now. Almost four years. This past Monday I transformed it into three single-sided, 1½-spaced, cheaply bound 210-page books, signed them all and handed them in to the College office where they didn't give me a bell to ring.

What was the project? A dissertation in programming languages. I helped create a new language, the ill-christened Links. And wrote up my contributions, formalized them mathematically, threw in some explanatory diagrams. And allowed my life to be governed by the cruelties of the academic system.

It was awful. Don't ever do this.

One day I will write about the awfulness—the boredom, the abuse, the hypocrisy, the never-ending spiral, the inability to walk away. The trapped feeling, of solitary confinement.

But now is not the time for such tears (take the rag away from your face).

Now I'm on to the next thing. I've been slightly out of it for a while & I hope to get back in it real soon now.

I learned a hell of a lot about a lot of things: about computer science, about logic, mathematical proof, about technical writing, about programming languages. About rigor and criticism. Moreso I learned about how not to run a research group, or any kind of team. I learned about Scotland, England, Europe, and living abroad. I met some great people, played a lot of Ultimate Frisbee and drank a lot of beer.

Monday I begin closing my Edinburgh life; the next Monday I'll start a life in another place. I've worked hard and survived punishment. I can do more things than before. At last I'll progress to something new, perhaps even something better. Tonight let me raise my glass to Edinburgh, to the science of information process, and to survival, ultimately survival.

Originally posted by ezra from Letters to an Unknown Audience, on June 13, 2009 8:24 AM

Inset from a killer wedding invitation (click through to see the whole thing) that’s making the rounds on Twitter and Tumblr, for obvious reasons. The Matt in question is Matt Dorfman who does amazing design at Metalmother.  (via gesteves and caterina)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from shey.net, on June 13, 2009 8:08 AM

It's a beautiful day in Mountain View, California, where today at Shoreline Amphitheatre, the first-ever Great American Food & Music Fest will take off.

Three generations of the Bracewell family drove their Southside Market smoker truck all the way from Elgin, "the Sausage Capitol of Texas." Half a ton of Barney Greengrass smoked salmon arrived from New York, and Gary Greengrass is slicing it up. Katz's Deli, Anchor Bar Buffalo Wings, Tony Luke's Cheesesteaks and Roast Pork, Pink's Hot Dogs—the list goes on and on. Plus appearances from Bobby Flay, Guy Fieri, and a number of Bay Area chefs. The Chronicle called us "The United States of Yum"—and that's just about right.

The Serious Eats team will be out in force, and we hope you'll come join us. Tickets are still available at the Shoreline box office. We hope to see you there!

Originally posted by Carey Jones from Serious Eats, on June 13, 2009 8:00 AM

TextMate comes with an "Open Terminal" (⌃⇧O) command, in the Shell Script bundle.

This command will open a new Terminal window in the directory of the active TextMate file. Quite handy.

I made an "Open Finder" (⌃⇧O) command to go with it. The command goes into the "TextMate" bundle.

If you have a file open or selected in the project drawer, its containing directory is opened in Finder with the file selected (the OS X term is "revealed"). With a directory, it's just plain opened in Finder. With an unsaved file, your home directory is opened.

Both commands intentionally have the same shortcut, so TextMate presents you with a disambiguation menu. "Open Terminal" can be triggered with ⌃⇧O, then 1 or T, then ↩ and "Open Finder" with ⌃⇧O, then 2 or F, then ↩.

The command is available as a Gist. Download it, unpack it and double-click Open Finder.tmCommand to install.

I think I've written a command for this before, but I couldn't find it, so I made a new one. If you have my old command, it would be interesting to see.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Pug Automatic, on June 13, 2009 1:55 AM

I've had this in my head over the past couple of days. So, so great.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on June 12, 2009 8:43 PM

Five discoveries made while dreaming. A Hindu goddess delivered formulas to mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan while Jack Nicklaus practiced some dreamful attraction.

Wednesday night I had a dream and it was about my golf swing. I was hitting them pretty good in the dream and all at once I realized I wasn't holding the club the way I've actually been holding it lately. [...] So when I came to the course yesterday morning I tried it the way I did in my dream and it worked. I shot a 68 yesterday and a 65 today.

Tags: dreams   lists

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 12, 2009 6:53 PM

Today, this may seem like gibberish, but our children will consider this the moment in which language changed course and a new breed of linguists was born.

If others can smell you, u gotta be able to smell yourself
Pfffffffffffff
I farted
Aggggh
Can u smell dat
Lol

THE_REAL_SHAQ, 12 minutes ago from TwitterBerry

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on June 12, 2009 2:17 PM

There was a time when we wanted to do a segment that pitted the Mets against their opponents in terms of plate music. We ended up abandoning this idea for two reasons--1) we don't attend enough home games to really keep tabs on what songs the Mets players are currently using, and 2) after attending a number of Giants games, it became clear that the Mets would get their asses handed to them by a large majority of NL teams in any sort of competition involving plate music.

So we were very excited when we discovered this video from 2007 in which the Mets explain their choices of plate music. And our theory about them being on the bottom end of the league in this category still holds up.



Observations:
• Metallica has to easily be the most popular band among white baseball players.
• Jeff Conine is actually pretty funny.
• David Newhan must have the worst taste on the team. Favorites include Tupac, Dre, Alice In Chains and Pearl Jam. So basically he likes two of the worst genres in existence--bad pop-rap and grunge.
• I take that last one back. Shawn green has the worst taste on the team. His favorites--Song 2 (now I love Blur as much as the next guy, but the last thing any North American sporting event needs is another round of this clunker), Audioslave, Metallica, Dave Matthews Band, and John Mayer. This reads like a set list for my own personal hell. But Shawn does win points for being the only player who will sing a song.
• Moises Alou is a badass--no batting gloves, no plate music.
• Rickey Henderson is an "MC Hammer guy," "2 Legit 2 Quit" to be specific. This is completely awesome. He still sticking by that guy.
• HoJo still rules.

Originally posted by nick from Mandatory Mustache, on June 12, 2009 1:34 PM

In an interview with the New Yorker about basketball and his new book, The Book of Basketball, Bill Simmons offers up his take on how players skipping college impoverishes the NBA.

The lack of college experience also means that you probably have less of a chance to have a conversation with a Finals player about English lit or political science. For instance, if you're a reporter, maybe you don't ask for thoughts from modern players on the Gaza Strip or Abdul Nasser, or whether they read Chuck Pahlaniuk's new book. These guys lead sheltered lives that really aren't that interesting. Back in the seventies, you could go out to dinner with three of the Knicks -- let's say, Phil Jackson, Bill Bradley, and Walt Frazier -- and actually have a fascinating night. Which three guys would you pick on the Magic or Lakers? I guess Fisher would be interesting, and I always heard Odom was surprisingly thoughtful. I can't come up with a third. So I'd say that the effects are more in the "didn't really have any experiences outside being a basketball player" sense.

Tags: basketball   Bill Simmons   books   interviews   NBA   sports   The Book of Basketball

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 12, 2009 12:54 PM

Website visitor generates a series of browser windows, each with a randomly assigned color based upon parameters established for each piece.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rhizome.org Artwork, on June 12, 2009 10:30 AM

In this week's Pulse Report the streets are buzzing about 50 Cent whining about the state of hip-hop, Rick Ross taking subtle shots at Eminem and Lil Jon, Jay-Z taking heat from hip-hop youngsters for his Auto-Tunes attack, Mos Def proposing a grand MC...

[Visit SOHH.com for more information]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SOHH.com Dailies, on June 12, 2009 10:00 AM

Iranians went to the voting booth today, Friday, June 12th, for their 10th presidential election since the 1979 Islamic Revolution. Their decision today is largely whether to keep hard-line president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in power for four more years, or to replace him with a reformist more open to loosening the country's Islamic restrictions and improving ties with the United States. Ahmadinejad's leading opponent is Mir Hossein Mousavi, a former Prime Minister of Iran. Mousavi's campaign was propelled in recent weeks by young voters using high-tech campaign tactics (over 66% of Iranians are under the age of 30). Iran's presidential elections are tightly controlled, and, once elected, the office holder has limited power, but it remains the highest position determined by popular vote. Collected here are several photos from the past few weeks in Iran. (35 photos total)

A supporter of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad displays her hand painted with the Iranian flag, also used as a sign for his party, at his final election campaign rally, on Azadi street in western Tehran, Iran, Wednesday, June 10, 2009. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Big Picture, on June 12, 2009 9:13 AM

John Franco has been working with the Mets this season, reporting to Dan Warthen and management on how pitchers are performing in the minor leagues and on rehab assignments in St. Lucie.

This morning on WFAN’s Boomer and Carton, Franco said Billy Wagner is pitching from a mound and throwing over 90 mph.

…i am sure he’s not ready, because, if he was, we’d all know about it by now… however, i can’t help but wonder if even a 50 percent wagner, throwing 90 mph, would be a better option in the current bullpen than, say, Ken Takahashi, especially since the Mets need at least one other person to be capable of retiring left-handed hitters…

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 12, 2009 9:03 AM

I really really love this: on Wednesday, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz sent its regular staff home and had some of Israel's notable poets and authors cover the news. From author Avri Herling, here is the most accurate financial report you're ever likely to read in the paper:

"Everything's okay. Everything's like usual. Yesterday trading ended. Everything's okay. The economists went to their homes, the laundry is drying on the lines, dinners are waiting in place... Dow Jones traded steadily and closed with 8,761 points, Nasdaq added 0.9% to a level of 1,860 points.... The guy from the shakshuka [an Israeli egg-and-tomato dish] shop raised his prices again...."

There's a real "emperor has no clothes" vibe to this. (via snarkmarket)

Tags: haaretz   Israel   journalism

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 12, 2009 8:36 AM

Krugman:

Back in April, there was a huge fuss over an internal report by the Department of Homeland Security warning that current conditions resemble those in the early 1990s — a time marked by an upsurge of right-wing extremism that culminated in the Oklahoma City bombing.

Conservatives were outraged. The chairman of the Republican National Committee denounced the report as an attempt to “segment out conservatives in this country who have a different philosophy or view from this administration” and label them as terrorists.

But with the murder of Dr. George Tiller by an anti-abortion fanatic, closely followed by a shooting by a white supremacist at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the analysis looks prescient.

There is, however, one important thing that the D.H.S. report didn’t say: Today, as in the early years of the Clinton administration but to an even greater extent, right-wing extremism is being systematically fed by the conservative media and political establishment.

Now, for the most part, the likes of Fox News and the R.N.C. haven’t directly incited violence, despite Bill O’Reilly’s declarations that “some” called Dr. Tiller “Tiller the Baby Killer,” that he had “blood on his hands,” and that he was a “guy operating a death mill.” But they have gone out of their way to provide a platform for conspiracy theories and apocalyptic rhetoric, just as they did the last time a Democrat held the White House.

And at this point, whatever dividing line there was between mainstream conservatism and the black-helicopter crowd seems to have been virtually erased.

Exhibit A for the mainstreaming of right-wing extremism is Fox News’s new star, Glenn Beck. Here we have a network where, like it or not, millions of Americans get their news — and it gives daily airtime to a commentator who, among other things, warned viewers that the Federal Emergency Management Agency might be building concentration camps as part of the Obama administration’s “totalitarian” agenda (although he eventually conceded that nothing of the kind was happening).

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on June 12, 2009 7:12 AM

Here's a new wrinkle in the ongoing battle with people that inline other people's images: I stole your images, put them back or I will call a lawyer.

Why is business so hard? (thx, jillian)

Tags: legal   www

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 12, 2009 6:34 AM

I’ve been thinking a bit about the David Letterman/Sarah Palin kerfuffle that’s kept both of them in the news this week, and I had sort of come to the conclusion that, you know what, Letterman was wrong.

Believe me, I am the absolute last person to make judgments about what’s in good taste or which subjects you are not allowed to joke about, but on a personal level I found the whole thing a little distasteful. My bottom line—today— is, hey, people get pregnant. Accidents happen. Especially for teens. I understand that there are all sorts of side issues which you can use as a foundation for your comedic outrage, but, at its base, this is essentially Letterman making fun of a teenage girl who got pregnant. (Also, the joke itself was pretty lazy and obvious, but if you’ve read anything I’ve written over the last five years you can see how I’m more inclined to be sympathetic about that.) It’s a little uncomfortable. You could actually make a case that it represents the kind of prudery and disgust with the idea of sexuality of which liberals are always confusing conservatives of being afflicted. Unfortunately, Sarah Palin had to go on the “Today Show” this morning and discuss it, and now I’m like, you know what? Screw everybody. The idea that this woman—the logical conclusion of the forty years of anti-intellectual boob bait Republican strategists have been throwing at the public with phenomenally successful results—is somehow the defender of teen girls and their self-image is more insulting than any joke Letterman could have told. Unless it was about the Holocaust. You just don’t go there.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on June 12, 2009 6:08 AM

my new crush(es)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on June 12, 2009 5:30 AM

There are more than 6,000 bars in New York City. About 200 of them get regular press. This column is about the other ones. Robert Simonson, a journalist and blogger of the drinking life, takes a peek inside Gotham’s more anonymous watering holes, one by one.

[Krieger, 6/11/09]

The décor of roughly 80 percent of the bars in NYC is dictated by two things: the promotional crap that liquor companies throw at them; and the trite Irish knickknacks picked up by the owner. The Shannon Port, at the corner of Jackson Avenue and Davis Street in Long Island City, follows this model of accidental interior design. Framed map of Ireland, check. Display “Champagne” bottle of Budweiser, check. Plastic leprechaun figures, check. Mock “kangaroo crossing” sign from Cooper’s Brewery, check. “God Made the Irish #1” license plate, check.

Despite all this, Shannon’s manages to eek out a personality all its own, starting with the visually impressive, unintentional collage of 11 neon beer signs in its Tudoresque, paned front windows—something that one of the artists over at nearby P.S.1 might had wished they’d come up with. An old scythe, mounted on the wall, is a bit of a non sequitur. The parody of a baseball shirt that reads “Werksux,” on sale for $12, was designed by the owner, who likes to hold down a stool at the far end of the old, battered, wooden bar, where he conducts expletive-laden, Cliff-Clavin-like arguments about the nature of the Franco-Prussian War, and when Napoleon died.

The Shannon Pot was opened only a decade ago, but it feels like it has been rooted to its corner, directly under the rumbling tracks of the 7 train, for much longer. The presence of elevated trains seems to make anything nearby feel ancient, I guess. Anyway, shows like “The Third Watch” and “Law & Order” seem to think so. They come here sometimes when they need a backdrop for died-in-the-wool, blue-collar New York. The high ceilings are covered in dingy tin and there’s a funny room in back that look’s like somebody’s pantry.

You can eat here. (Shannon Pot is officially a “bar & grille.”) The usual Ould Sod suspects are on the menu: bangers and mash, Irish potato soup, shepherd’s pie, and the requisite “signature” burger. You can get a bucket of five different beers for $20 if you’re so inclined. The left-hand portion of the room, up a step and separated by a wooden partition and a brass railing, is reserved to dining, giving the joint a slightly more genteel air. Things get busy at lunch. On weeknights, the bar is sparsely populated, the quiet domain of regulars.

I’m told that, on weekends, the hipster art crowd invades and completely alters the vibe of the place. A sign of this mild cultural war can perhaps be seen in the bathroom, where the owner has taped up a sign saying, “Do not add any tags to this door. Please respect my party.” We should all respect one another’s parties.
—Robert Simonson

Originally posted by Eater Staff from Eater, on June 12, 2009 5:18 AM

Josh MacPhee Wounded Knees $12 I originally created this poster for the Wounded Knees show at the 2008 All Tomorrow's Parties Festival. It's a reworking of the record cover I did for their 10", All Rise, playing off 19th century labor themes. Wounded Knees is a great band, made up of Suzanne Thorpe and Jimmy Shields. They've both been in a ton of great rock and experimental bands... Full color digital print 18"x24" signed & stamped on back/unnumbered edition (but only a small number were made)

Originally posted by Josh M. from Just Seeds, on June 12, 2009 4:22 AM

If I owe Smith ten dollars and God forgives me, that doesn’t pay Smith.

Robert Green Ingersoll

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on June 12, 2009 4:20 AM

And Art says, fight the power.

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on June 11, 2009 7:34 PM

Dear community,

We are pleased to announce the build16 of MySQL server® with Percona patches.

Since the build13 there was a couple of customer specific releases, which explains cutover in numbering and a pause between the builds. Also we prepared build for both 5.0.77 and 5.0.82 versions.

Since that time new patches were added:

• profiling_slow.patch

This patch adds information from SHOW PROFILE to query information in slow.log output.
profiling_server. This variable ( ON / OFF ) enables profiling of all queries (in all connections).
profiling_use_getrusage. This variable ( ON / OFF ) enables usage of getrusage function in profiling.
Be careful, enabling profiling_server may cause performance degradation, especially with profiling_use_getrusage.

• innodb_extra_rseg.patch

innodb_extra_rsegments. The number of extra user rollback segments created when new db is created.
New information_schema table innodb_rseg shows information about all rollback segments

• innodb_thread_concurrency_timer_based.patch

This patch provides the configuration variable backport from MySQL 5.4.

Fixed bugs:

• Bug #382778: mysql-test variables fails on 5.0.77 with –with-debug
• Bug #381430: mysql-test profiling fails on 5.0.77
• Bug #375494: log_slow_rate_limit logs all queries on a connection after a >1s query
• Bug #378761: compilation fails on 5.0.77
• Bug #381900: mysql-test information_schema fails on 5.0.77 with –with-debug
• Bug #382783: compilation fails on 5.0.82

You can download binaries (RPMS x86_64) and sources with patches here
http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.77-b16/
http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.82-b16/

The Percona patches live on Launchpad : https://launchpad.net/percona-patches and you can report bug to Launchpad bug system:
https://launchpad.net/percona-patches/+filebug. The documentation is available on our Wiki

For general questions use our Pecona-discussions group, and for development question Percona-dev group.

For support, commercial and sponsorship inquiries contact Percona

---

Entry posted by Aleksandr Kuzminsky | No comment

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Originally posted by Aleksandr Kuzminsky from MySQL Performance Blog, on June 11, 2009 2:34 PM

. . .  and at the Scuola di, he is turning from the E 61, shot in hand:  "You have an example of another variation, which will point out yet another surprising twist of blending.  Remember the epiphany of Gimme's French Roast and an addition of Rwanda Bufcafe Epiphanie, a marvel of balance, depth, strength, and character.  But, first, try this", says il Professore, as I stand in the sun-bathed lab of the Scuola.  Lake Cuomo, out of the window, today is azure blue, calm, the temp outside is beehive warm, the air is dripping with volatiles--almond blossoms.  I'm ready for anything. . . .
The shot is creamy and glossy to look at with a fair amount of butter-burnt wood aroma.  But the taste is blah bland-bland, little dimension, like being left in the parking lot by your buddies, to walk home alone.   

"In this case", continues the Professore, the variation is an example of a weakened outcome, one in which the best of the blending art is masked, probably by incompatibles or because one element overcomes and subdues.  I chose strong components that stand very well alone, and this is the result--a washout.  One was the stunning by itself, Bolivian, D'Montana, and then mis-coupled with the ultra-blend you just cupped last, French and Rwanda.  Now a mis-chance; it is a lesson to remember, yes"

The Professore then proposed another trial:  assuming the better of the blends above, then at which temperature are the shots the best?  "For instance Scott Rao, in 'The Professional Barista's Handbook', confirms that the range must be within 185 to 204 degrees F.  I am finding that dark roasts prefer to come out at the top end, say even 205 degrees", il Professore states, offering that I do the test myself.

We go for it; results came out like this:

We're using a clever two boiler, PID, machine, small capacity, with easy setting and reasonably quick response-to-temp change, E 61 head design, supported by a fresh Mazzer Robur grinder.

195:  start with temp set at 195 degrees.  Scace designed portafilter, both temp and pressure in the handle gauges, read 196 degrees and psi of 152.  

The shot:  lacked some darkening in color from the very start, taste was broad, mild, without syrupy feel, some sharpness and overall watery.

200:  next at 200 degrees.  Scace read 200.3, psi again at 152.

The shot:  striped and good mottle on top, nice, thicker flow down the side of the cup and throughout the volume, perfect 30 sec, 30 mil, having dimension, chocolate, nice bittering, strength throughout and residuals after.

205:  finally, at 205 degrees.  Scace was 205.8 degrees, psi still 152.

The shot:  slower start out of the gate, more color difference throughout the pour, and a very broad stream, viscous, the cup perhaps even richer, more texture, more, more intense aftertaste.

205 wins.  The venerable Professore scores again.    

So he concludes, as he pulls one at the proven 205:  "Someone should test it going the opposite direction, with a light roast and three temps, right?'

I say that I like the idea, Professore, not so complex to grasp as the chemistry thing he threw out last time.  He replies:  "It is all basically fundamental to the point I am reaching that there is a right regime for sweetness based on that chemistry, and evident in the shot, which we will pull over my concluding Part III of 'Pulling Shots Through the Roaster', next time."

Okay Professore, until the conclusion next time, ciao.

Originally posted by John Gant from Gimme! Coffee News, on June 11, 2009 1:51 PM

Control freaks should steer clear of Dominick's. You have no power here, cannot make substitutions or ask for sauce on the side. There is no menu or wine list, no private tables (all communal seating) and they don't take reservations or credit cards. Welcome to the Bronx, circa-1950's. It's not easy to get here, but it is worth the effort. Say you're going to be in the area for a Yankees game or a visit to the Bronx Zoo. Or maybe want a take a day trip by subway and bus (B, D, 4 to Fordham Road, then Bx12 bus to Arthur Avenue) and shop at the neighborhood's acclaimed Italian food purveyors. Dominick's is a trip of its own. The pinewood dining room is raucous and old school, full of characters straight out of Chazz Palminteri's A Bronx Tale. Get whatever the waiter tells you is good tonight. He knows -- he's been here all his life. Four of us went way overboard, we were so excited, and ended up with enough food for us all to have again for dinner the next night or two. Juicy baked clams topped with browned breadcrumbs and doused in butter and garlic were amazing -- and we sopped up every last drop of the sauce with excellent, irresistible bread. Then came an overflowing antipasti platter of salad, roasted peppers, salami, tangy cheese, pepperoni, tomatoes and olives. Chicken parm, eggplant parm, linguine with shrimp and red sauce, more linguine with abundant seafood, a giant plate of garlicky broccoli rabe -- we ate ourselves into food stupors. It's a good thing Dominick's doesn't serve dessert or that would have been the end of us. For everything, including sparkling water and two bottles of Montepulciano, plus one extra glass of wine, the bill was $200. Next time we'll order half as much. Or maybe a third. Dominick's 2335 Arthur Ave. (718) 733-2807 Photo by Jim Knapp

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on June 11, 2009 12:04 PM

Here is the latest New York Baseball Today, during which Ted Berg and Matt Cerrone talk about the stat of the day, stolen bases, and how it pertains to tonight’s Mets and Yankees games:

Originally posted by Jon Schneider from MetsBlog.com, on June 11, 2009 11:38 AM

Remember that unauthorized sequel to a classic piece of literature we talked about earlier? The Smoking Gun has discovered the responsible party. Turns out this isn’t his first book!

The anonymous author of the purported sequel to “The Catcher in the Rye,” which has triggered a lawsuit by J.D. Salinger, is a Swedish man whose previous published works include “The Macho Man’s (Bad) Joke Book,” “The Erotic A-Z,” and a volume listing the 100 best heavy metal albums.

Ironically, one reviewer of “The Macho Man’s (Bad) Joke Book” referred to it as “the ‘Franny & Zooey’ of the genre,” so this might actually be a good fit.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on June 11, 2009 11:20 AM

Dollhouse: Why Dollhouse Really Is Joss Whedon’s Greatest Work. Bold! [via]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on June 11, 2009 10:54 AM

Many Fifth Avenue merchants do see cyclists as customers, not obstacles. Photo: Ben Fried.

Tuesday's post about the Fifth Avenue bike lane in Park Slope gave me the chance to talk to several retail merchants about how they receive their deliveries, and whether the Class 2 bike lane is causing them any trouble. According to Fifth Avenue BID director Irene LoRe, the bike lane makes it tougher for delivery drivers to do their job and adds to the cost of doing business. But based on my conversations with other restaurant owners and retailers, there is little support for this view among merchants on the strip.

Basically, I heard many variations on the theme voiced by Bonnie's Grill proprietor Mike Naber: Delivery drivers were getting lots of tickets and fines "before the bike lane." In the interest of providing some measure of balance to local press reports that blame dips in retail sales on bike infrastructure or bus lanes, here's a sampling of what people told me.

Emily Isaac, owner of Trois Pommes Patisserie, receives about 10 deliveries per week. If the bike lane is causing her suppliers problems, they're keeping quiet about it. "I haven't heard a word or noticed anything," she said. When I asked if she'd be willing to adjust her schedule if it meant she could receive deliveries at the curb during specific times, she said "Yes." She also said that replacing one on-street car-parking spot on her block with space for bike parking would suit her just fine.

At 'Snice, a cafe at the corner of 3rd Street, owner Mike Walter gets three deliveries per day, on average. He thinks the suppliers have given up on trying to find curbside spots, and he has other concerns besides the bike lane. "I'm sure the double-parked trucks hurt bus service," he said. (The B63, which runs on Fifth Avenue, is the slowest bus line in Brooklyn.) "As far as the delivery guys, no one's complained to me that because of the bike riders they're getting tickets."

Between Carroll Street and Flatbush Avenue, Fifth Avenue is too narrow to accommodate a striped bike lane. It has sharrows instead. Revealingly, the merchants on this part of the strip also report that their suppliers receive parking tickets with regularity. So turning Fifth Avenue's Class 2 bike facility into sharrows, as CB6 district manager Craig Hammerman has suggested [PDF], would not accomplish much besides making the street more dangerous.

It's pretty clear that what's going on here is not a bike lane problem, but a delivery problem. Muslh Alomri, a manager at the Associated market on Fifth and Union (he's got sharrows, not a bike lane), would like nothing more than to have a bigger delivery zone in front of his store. The space he has now is equivalent to two parking spots. When the big rigs come to deliver milk, about five or six times a week, the back of the truck sticks out into the bus stop, and the truck driver gets a ticket. Alomri wants to expand the delivery zone to occupy three car parking spaces, but says he's been rebuffed by the city.

You may be asking: Don't his customers have to carry stuff away? Doesn't he need car parking nearby? In fact, said Alomri: "Most of my customers are walking customers. Maybe one out of a hundred comes in a car."

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on June 11, 2009 10:46 AM

The whole shebang

 Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by stamen to everything stamen - More about this bookmark

Originally posted by stamen from Delicious/stamen, on June 11, 2009 10:22 AM

With the Democratic primary for Governor of Virginia over and done with, the state now proceeds to the general election and a question that will be heavily examined by national media: Is this one-time Republican stronghold now going to continue being a state that is up for grabs or perhaps even leaning to the Democrats -- or could it snap back to the GOP?

Democratic Gov. Tim Kaine is unable to run for re-election (this is the only state left where governors are limited to a single term at a time) and the nominees now are Democratic state Sen. Creigh Deeds and Republican former Attorney General Bob McDonnell. This is in fact a rematch from 2005, when McDonnell defeated Deeds for Attorney General by 323 votes out of about 1.9 million. (McDonnell resigned as Attorney General this year to become a full-time candidate for governor.)

For now at least, immediately post-primary, the new Rasmussen poll gives Deeds a lead over McDonnell of 47%-41% -- a number that seems broadly in line with the trend of high-profile contests in Virginia since mid-decade.

The state has become much friendlier to Democrats since 2005, giving them three additional House seats, both Senate seats, and of course delivering their 13 electoral votes to Barack Obama after continuously voting Republican since 1968. Democrats will be trying to consolidate those gains and nail down this state as blue territory. Republicans will be trying to win the crowd back and rebuild their party at both the state level, and as a sign of a national comeback. In the background, the race is likely to be seen as proxy for President Obama's continued popularity or lack thereof, almost a year into his presidency.

Asked yesterday about the overall playing field in Virginia, state party leaders focused on setting expectations in favor of their candidates.

"Well, Virginians are a pretty independent breed. We're sure that they tend to be more conservative than not," Virginia GOP communications director Tim Murtaugh told TPM. "And I think you'll see, regarding what happened in Virginia over the last few election cycles, sort of reflected the national trend." So how can the Republicans win this crowd back? "I think we have to still be true to what we always really have been," said Murtaugh, "and I'm not sure we've always made the argument successfully, but we've got to do it again this year -- we've got to convince people what we're for."

Jared Leopold, communications director for the Virginia Democrats, told TPM that they very much see the state as still being a toss-up. "I think the state has voted more Democratic because Democrats are the ones who have provided more solutions over the last few years," he said. "Obviously there have been some demographic shifts, you've seen some growth with tech and the government sector. And obviously that's helped accelerate the process of Virginia becoming a very purple state. But we don't see it as a Democratic state, we see it as a deep-purple state."

In his victory speech Tuesday night, Deeds indicated in part that his campaign will go after McDonnell as a George W. Bush Republican -- continuing the pattern also seen in this year's New Jersey gubernatorial race, where the Dems will also be going after the GOP on the Bush legacy. "Tonight, Virginia, we move into the general election," he said, "where there's a very stark choice of whether Virginia continues to move forward in the tradition of Mark Warner and Tim Kaine, or whether we move backwards with the disastrous economic and social agenda of Bob McDonnell and George W. Bush."

On a conference call with reporters yesterday, I asked McDonnell's campaign chairman Ed Gillespie, who was also chairman of the Republican National Committee for a period during the Bush years, to respond to the Democrats' decision to tie McDonnell to Bush. Gillespie said that McDonnell's campaign is focused on positive issues like education, transportation and jobs. "Folks can try to distract from that all they want," he said. "From a political and tactical perspective, I think I can understand why they want to, but that doesn't give much credit to the voters here in Virginia."

State Republican chairman Pat Mullins closed the conference call by asking reporters to cover the race as a referendum on the Obama presidency: "The whole country is watching to see whether Virginia's gonna be the first state that says no to the policies going on in Washington and Richmond, or whether it's an affirmation on the Democrat side of what they're doing."

Originally posted by Eric Kleefeld from TPM Election Central, on June 11, 2009 10:21 AM

Originally posted by Andrea from Andrea Harner, on June 11, 2009 10:14 AM

ostensibly to remove porn, but it also monitors activity and allows full government control over Internet usage  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 11, 2009 9:46 AM

From our inbox, an invite to a party that you can attend in the Hamptons this weekend, with Whitney Port and Pepsi! Oh, you’re what? Stabbing yourself in the eyes with your own toenails instead?

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 11, 2009 9:35 AM

“It really is like a prom. The rich football players won with their billions of page views.”

- I just noticed the NY Press published their Webudetente (or whatever) story. That’s actually my quote at the end there.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on June 11, 2009 8:46 AM

The internet cloud is actually "giant buildings full of computers and diesel generators".

Yet as data centers increasingly become the nerve centers of business and society -- even the storehouses of our fleeting cultural memory (that dancing cockatoo on YouTube!) -- the demand for bigger and better ones increases: there is a growing need to produce the most computing power per square foot at the lowest possible cost in energy and resources. All of which is bringing a new level of attention, and challenges, to a once rather hidden phenomenon. Call it the architecture of search: the tens of thousands of square feet of machinery, humming away 24/7, 365 days a year -- often built on, say, a former bean field -- that lie behind your Internet queries.

Tags: architecture   Tom Vanderbilt   www

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 11, 2009 8:23 AM

Though it will be far from a panacea for all the troubles facing the region, we should all hope that Mr. Mousavi manages to defeat President Ahmadinejad in tomorrow's presidential election in Iran -- or at least force him into a run-off later this month. But if that doesn't happen and Ahmadinejad is reelected, there's a second chance we'll have to move Iran on the course toward reform and peaceful relations with its neighbors. And former Bush administration official and would-be warlord John Bolton explains it in today's Wall Street Journal.

All that's necessary is a major aerial military assault. As Bolton explains ...

Many argue that Israeli military action will cause Iranians to rally in support of the mullahs' regime and plunge the region into political chaos. To the contrary, a strike accompanied by effective public diplomacy could well turn Iran's diverse population against an oppressive regime.

So if things don't go well tomorrow, at tleast there's a back up plan.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 11, 2009 6:31 AM

Red Beans Road Show:

Pableaux Johnson just launched a delicious new rolling bean tour of the country.   As he travels, he’ll be serving giant vats of Cajun red beans and rice to families and friends along the way, and documenting the phenomenon on his site.   We were lucky enough to host a pre-tour SXSW preview, and I am still recovering from the delicious.

Pableaux carries all the necessary ingredients and tools with him in his car, so when he pulls into your driveway, he’s already got beans a’soakin’ and spicy sausage ready to be mixed in.   It is really an amazing thing to witness.  And delicious.  Did I mention, delicious?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from I Love Ben Brown, on June 11, 2009 6:28 AM

From Flickr:

I didn’t take these, but this was the cake for my wedding a few weeks ago. The cake was the clock tower and was red velvet. It was done by Caryn’s Cakes in Atlanta.

(via Boing Boing)

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on June 11, 2009 5:52 AM

California is spiraling down the crapper rapidly! The state will entirely run out of money next month, and will then close up shop and call it a day, leaving citizens to eat each other for sustenance and travel solely by foot and bicycle and on the back of the weak who become slaves to the strong. The governor’s plan is to suspend healthcare for nearly a million children and to take all the money from the schools. (No, really, that’s his plan! Yes!) Unfortunately, the Democrats’ plan is just to spend the little remaining reserve money left and hope everything works out. Gah! The good choice, which is not good at all, is to take out a high-interest loan that will keep California in poverty for years. Wow. So long!

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 11, 2009 5:39 AM

There's been a lot of talk about how Prime Minister Netanyahu will respond to President Obama's insistence on a settlement freeze and whether he'll announce a new position in his upcoming security speech. This article in today's Ha'aretz says Netanyahu has come up with his answer. And it's basically to tell Obama to go screw himself, though it's couched in a lot of bilateral happy talk. He's embracing the 'road map' but with a description that doesn't sound like the actuall road map that everyone else is talking about and no freeze on settlements. Here's an article which gives some sense of the pressures within his coalition which likely make it impossible to do anything else.

Netanyahu's hope seems to be that he can square the circle by working out 'informal understandings' which will satisfy Obama while refusing a formal settlement freeze, and probably any settlement freeze at all.

Meanwhile Israel President Peres (largely a ceremonial position -- but of some consequence in this case because of who Peres is) is saying the parties should move immediately to stage two of the road map which would mean agreeing on the declaration of a Palestinian state with provisional borders.

With Netanyahu, I doubt he has the skills or vision to manage this. And it's hard to see how his government survives long.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 11, 2009 4:59 AM

Quick Post

The NYT has an awesome audio clip of Michelle Larcher de Brito and her ridiculous screaming during her tennis matches. I think Jori thought I was listening to porn.

http://straightsets.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/29/when-does-a-shriek-go-too-far/

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on June 10, 2009 8:37 PM

Via Baseball-Reference.com’s Play Index Pitching Game Finder, there have only been 2 pitchers, since 1954, to enter a game out of the bullpen and then commit 4+ balks in the game:

                   Games Link to Individual Games
+-----------------+-----+-------------------------+
 Gene Walter           1 Ind. Games
 Rick Honeycutt        1 Ind. Games

And, both of these games happened in 1988.  Then again, that was the year of the balk.

Originally posted by Steve Lombardi from Stat of the Day, on June 10, 2009 8:13 PM

These are lean times in social bookmarking. The staff at del.icio.us has been eviscerated by layoffs, and the project is now being run by a skeleton crew. Magnolia, the other useful bookmarking site, has gone offline for the summer while it implements a new "don't irretrievably lose everyone's data" feature.

I was never able to make my peace with the delicious redesign, and like many other people ended up building my own little bookmark management tool. I would like to try and turn it into a public site that's a little less about the social and more about the bookmarks. Here's a representative sampling of feature ideas:

• searchable, cached content
• better bulk operations through a gmail-like 'star' interface
• a lightweight 'to read' status for stuff you want to get to later
• better support for private bookmarks and tags
• integration with twitter, facebook, IRC, the usual stuff
• retro interface (no tag chevrons, fewer than three toolbars per page, etc)
• don't irretrievably lose everyone's data

You can find a longer feature list here.

I am looking for volunteers to help me alpha test the service while it is still full of bugs. The ideal alpha tester is someone who does a lot of bookmarking, pines for the days before the del.icio.us redesign, and has endless reserves of patience. Please send me an email (maciej@ceglowski.com) if you are interested and I will send you an invite.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Idle Words, on June 10, 2009 7:00 PM

New version of WordPress is out! Version 2.8 “Baker,” named in honor of noted trumpeter Chet Baker, has been released with improvements to themes, widgets, taxonomies, and overall speed. Over 790 bugs has been fixed and major new improvements include:

• Way faster to use because of changes in the way WordPress does style and scripting;
• One click theme install;
• CodePress editor;
• Redesigned widgets interface;
• New Screen Options on every page.

For more information about version 2.8, read Matt’s blog post or take a look on the Codex.

Originally posted by Artur Kim from WP Themes Gallery, on June 10, 2009 6:58 PM

Days in transit: 1

Modes of transportation and personal conveyance utilized:

1. Taxi
2. Acela high-speed train
   
3. D.C. Metro subway system
4. Airport shuttle bus
5. Private automobile
6. MTA New York City subway system
7. Escalators
8. Elevators
9. People-mover walkways
10. Exterior stairs

Transportation structures visited:

• Two train stations
• One airport
• One parking garage
• One outdoor parking lot
• Seven subway/metro stations

Clients visited: 1

Originally posted by David Wertheimer from aiaio - the Alexander Interactive blog, on June 10, 2009 6:52 PM

Milk Thistle Farm, which makes great organic milk that can be had at NYC greenmarkets or at Whole Foods, is asking small investors to finance their expansion.

While many organic dairy farmers who supply big producers have been suffering in the recession, Mr. Hesse says demand for their milk and cream has been growing and that they'd like to start selling in more markets. He's also thinking about producing yogurt and ice cream.

The minimum investment is $1000 and the notes offer 5-7% interest.

Tags: food   Milk Thistle Farms   NYC

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 10, 2009 5:51 PM

Hampus Jakobsson presented a fantastic talk at this year’s MEX conference about the “wild west” gold rush mentality surrounding mobile app stores. Hampus warned most players in the mobile space are merely mimicking Apple’s model, leaving many user experience challenges that hinder the app store experience unaddressed. This talk inspired a host of great discussions about many of the fundamental user experience issues that plague app stores and ways to fundamentally improve the process through design.

However, Hampus’ talk brought focus to a question that’s been lingering on my mind for a while now. As the once innovative app store strategy quickly becomes “hygiene” for many in mobile, I can’t help but wonder if all this fast follower behavior is an incremental step to something much bigger.

What if the real problem with app stores doesn’t stem Apple’s ridiculous application approval process, scalability problems, or mediocre social recommendation functionality? What if the real problem with app stores is what they are selling?

What if the real problem is the notion of applications on mobile phones?

Applications as a means for both expressing and manipulating information in a mobile context is an interaction model we’ve borrowed wholesale from the PC. While application stores have solved many issues - ease in application development, downloading applications to a device, payment - it’s easy to forget the application model was originally developed for a fundamentally different context. A static context.

What if we haven’t figured out how to accurately express information in a mobile context and we are simply borrowing the wrong model?

I’ve been thinking a lot these days about the notion expression - how artists, engineers and designers have used creative models and methods to express information, points of view, and the possibilities of their time - and moments when breakthroughs around creative expression have occurred.

The web is a great example of inventing new models and methods to express information.

Back in the days of “Web 1.0″ the internet was a vast and unexplored frontier, ripe with untapped potential. While the internet provided an entirely new way for people to access, distribute, and experience information, in 1996 nobody really knew how to create “web experiences” that unlocked that potential.

Legions of print designers applied their knowledge of graphic design and print design to the Internet, giving rise to the phenomenon of brochureware. Some designers applied immersive spatial metaphors to the web, like the famed SouthWest Airlines homepage circa 1996. And who can forget those web sites where pages had the look and feel of pages from a book. Regardless of the model, the strategy was similar; borrowing. We first borrowed models we understood, found our footing and were then able to invent new and more sophisticated ways to express information in a this new context of the web.

Art movements have followed a similar arc. A favorite example was the transition between Medieval and Renaissance Art.

A defining characteristic of Medieval art was it’s lack of dimensionality. Artisans from the Middle Ages hadn’t figured out how to represent form in perspective. Subsequently the work was highly symbolic and representational. It remains valuable and interesting work. However, from an art-making perspective, Medieval art is a study in abstraction. Artisans from the Medieval period lacked the art making methods to represent form in the way humans visually perceive it.

In contrast, Renaissance art celebrated the discovery of perspective techniques such as foreshortening, chiaroscuro and the use of balance and proportion in the art-making process. Artists like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo and Raphael became masters of depicting form in a way that closely mirrored how humans perceive it. Humans were always able to perceive volume and spatial relationships, but it wasn’t until artists of the Renaissance discovered and honed perspective techniques that artwork reflected these qualities.

Data is similar to physical form in that it has perspective. We think about it along lines of place, time, and social dimensions… yet mobile applications rarely allow us to truly experience the multi-dimensional aspects of information. Instead, similar to Medieval art, mobile applications flatten data. Users are forced to either burrow deeply into single application or pogo stick across a host of lightweight applications, often with no through lines for the data. As we begin to prism data through more and more devices - televisions, car dashboards, screens in public space - the application model becomes brittle. It locks us into a way of thinking about information that doesn’t accurately represent the multi-dimensional ways we perceive and use it.

What if the app stores and “wild west” application development we’re seeing today in the mobile space is a re-enactment of the evolution of the web? What if mobile applications we download through Apple’s app store are the “brochureware” of what we will experience five years from now? What if applications are a borrowed and broken model we’ll ride out until the “perspective techniques” of data representation and manipulation in a mobile context are discovered and celebrated.

If applications go away, what will replace them? Compelling data visualizations? Adaptive interfaces? I’m not sure, but I’m curious to hear your thoughts…

Originally posted by Rachel Hinman from Adaptive Path, on June 10, 2009 5:35 PM

frighteningly realistic predictions  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on June 10, 2009 5:27 PM

The latest MeiGray Group auction ends Thursday night. Among the more collectible of the collectibles - an original lighted Men's Bathroom sign from 1964.

The listing describes it as "An original Shea artifact that spans Shea Stadium's 45 seasons. This original bathroom sign hung in Shea's Upper Level throughout the stadium's history. (Size 8" x "12)."

It can be yours for only $250. Amazingly no one has bid on either this or the Women's Bathroom sign. Man if only I had been born rich. Every bathroom in my house would have a lit sign. On second thought, I wouldn't need the Women's sign because my wife would have left me after spending money on bathroom signs.

Originally posted by Kingman from Loge 13, on June 10, 2009 5:09 PM

Build Your Own New York offers instructions and free models to help you build cardboard replicas of many of NYC's famous landmarks. See also Build Your Own Chicago. (via @zigged)

Tags: architecture   chicago   nyc

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 10, 2009 4:50 PM

Anil Dash: Exclusive: The Future of Facebook Usernames. Damn kids; get off my lawn.

Originally posted by Wes Felter from Hack the Planet, on June 10, 2009 4:38 PM

Joel Spolsky: Platform vendors."Filling little gaps in another company’s product lineup is snatching nickels from the path of an oncoming steam roller." You can predict the likelihood of getting steamrolled by the kludginess of the product. 1. If your app can only work on a jailbroken iPhone, that's a pretty good sign that you're working against the platform and will eventually be obsoleted. 2. There was a certain amount of "OMG they killed PersistentFS" when Amazon launched EBS, but it was obvious to everyone that PersistentFS is a kludge and EBS isn't; therefore we knew all along which one would win (and should win). 3. If you're patching the Windows kernel it's a good sign that either you shouldn't build that product in the first place or you should ask for proper APIs.

Originally posted by Wes Felter from Hack the Planet, on June 10, 2009 4:38 PM

Would you buy a "2GHz processor" with no make or model specified? Then why buy a "128GB SSD"? Until there's an industry-wide metric for SSD performance, buyers need to know what controller they're getting.

Originally posted by Wes Felter from Hack the Planet, on June 10, 2009 4:38 PM

Interesting find by Cabel Sasser: Remember the photos from the last few months purporting to show a new iPhone with a rubbery matte finish? The actual 3G S doesn’t look like that, but, the FCC device number visible on those photos is in fact the FCC device number of the 3G S.

So were they an abandoned design? Or a trap planted to identify leakers?

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on June 10, 2009 4:12 PM

We just announced the availability of MT 4.26 on the MovableType.com blog. This optional performance release includes bug fixes and feature improvements. No new features have been added.

MT 4.26 provides dramatically better search performance for large datasets and improves performance and reliability around TheSchwartz. More details can be found on the release notes, or you can just use the following direct download links to get MTOS 4.26:

• MTOS-4.26-en.tar.gz
• MTOS-4.26-en.zip

We want to thank everyone in the community for your ongoing feedback and suggestions for improving Movable Type. While this release doesn't address every bug report and potential performance enhancement, we are continually working to improve your experience and satisfaction with Movable Type.

Originally posted by Matt Jacobs from MovableType.org - Home for the MT Community, on June 10, 2009 3:30 PM

I keep meaning to draw your attention to this book, but I keep forgetting. Last night I took it off the shelf to use as reference, and was reminded of what a great book it was. Anyone familiar with GigPosters.com knows it’s the site for modern music posters. And with the CD going the way of the LP, and its cover art with it, these posters are fast becoming some bands and artists’ primary means of representing their music visually.

The Gig Posters book features over 700 posters, 101 of which are full-page. And it’s a true poster book; each page is perforated and ready to be torn out and hung on your wall.

But I’m keeping mine intact; it’s far too useful as a reference volume for creative typography and combining design with illustration. And since most of these posters were originally screen printed, it’s a great resource for working with limited colour palettes, too.

Previously: GigPosters playing cards

Originally posted by Johnny from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on June 10, 2009 3:16 PM

The iPhone framework we’ve been working on now has a teaser/sign-up page.

The idea behind TapLynx is that you can take a collection of feeds and some artwork, make choices about colors and gradients and behavior (all in a configuration file you edit), then create an iPhone app. Without doing any programming.

But you can do programming if you want to — use TapLynx as the base and add more features. (In fact, that’s what I’m doing with NetNewsWire 2.0 for iPhone — it’s a custom app built on TapLynx.)

If you’re interested in getting an early version of the SDK when it’s ready, just sign up on the site.

Originally posted by admin from ranchero.com, on June 10, 2009 2:56 PM

by Ilya Repin

(via wpedia)

Originally posted by finn from Modcult, on June 10, 2009 2:49 PM

Scottish popsters Belle & Sebastian delve into the subject of sport more often than one might think, and the results are usually quite good. This Mets-inspired number is one of my favorite B&S sports tracks despite its association with my least favorite Belle & Sebastian album, Dear Catastrophe Waitress, and my least favorite movie of the last two decades, Juno.

I know the Mets have many great pop songs associated with them, but with the help of some great lyrics, this one has got to be up near the top. Here are a couple of the better verses:

San Francisco’s calling us, the Giants and Mets will play
Piazza, New York catcher, are you straight or are you gay?
We hung about the stadium, we’ve got no place to stay
We hung about the Tenderloin and tenderly you tell
About the saddest ending of a book you ever had to read
The statue’s crying too and well he may

The catcher hits for .318 and catches every day
The pitcher puts religion first and rests on holidays
He goes into cathedrals and lies prostrate on the floor
He knows the drink affects his speed he’s praying for
a doorway
Back into the life he wants and the confession of the bench
Life outside the diamond is a wrench

Listen to a live version of the song here.

Originally posted by nick from Mandatory Mustache, on June 10, 2009 2:35 PM

This is a nice change of pace from all those evening news segments about how to beat parking tickets (some of which may have been written by this road-raging sociopath).

Howard Thompson, of "Help Me Howard" fame, filed an item on last night's PIX news about how hard it is to get the police to take bike theft seriously. The victim he profiles, Tadree Coppedge, was able to get security cam footage of the theft after cops at the 9th Precinct rebuffed her request for help. Now, Thompson reports, two detectives are looking into it.

Good to know those cams are trained at the right angle, since it seems no one on the street notices this stuff.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on June 10, 2009 2:00 PM

Paupered Chef Nick discovers the thrill of 90-minute, no soak beans: "The beans were cooked. Every single one was tender and ready to go. . . How could this be? This question drove me mad, because I have been cooking beans nearly every week for the past year, and now I realize I've been doing it all wrong."

Originally posted by Alaina Browne from Serious Eats, on June 10, 2009 2:00 PM

Shared by alaina
[this is good]

The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.

June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

June 12, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.

June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.

June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a think, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".

June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.

June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.

June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.

June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.

June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.

June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.

June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.

June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.

July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.

February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.

October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.

I hope you find this overview of the future timeline oif Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of innovation becomes mainstream in the years to come.

And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Anil Dash, on June 10, 2009 12:53 PM

Herein, Errol Morris names his favorite films—and you literally cannot predict what his number one film is. You CANNOT, I SAY.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 10, 2009 12:20 PM

nymetsfans:

New York Mets shortstop Alex Cora(notes) leaps to avoid the sliding Philadelphia Phillies’ Jimmy Rollins(notes) (11) after a Ryan Howard(notes) grounder in the eighth inning of the Mets’ 6-5 win in a baseball game at Citi Field in New York, Tuesday, June 9, 2009. Howard was safe at first.

up in the air, junior birdman…

Originally posted by (author unknown) from metsgrrl.com's tumblr, on June 10, 2009 11:24 AM

First off, congratulations to the kid who attempts to pull this sucker off next Halloween because this is just about the ugliest darn thing I've ever seen. Yup, they've done it -- Jabba the Hut costumes were so in demand ever since kids and adults decided it was cool to dress up as fat, nasty, slimy creatures, and so now you can buy this piece of you know what for -- wait for it -- seventy freakin' dollars (or $70.90)! Or you can just paint some lines on those giant black leaf bags, cut a few holes and wham! -- you've got yourself a convincing Jabba the Hut costume for all your friends and neighbors to be jealous of.

From the website selling this ... thing: "Become one of the richest gangsters of a Galaxy Far, Far Away with the Jabba the Hutt Supreme Edition Costume! This full-body costume will transform you into the famous Hutt with a body piece (complete with tail), headpiece, and a battery-operated fan to keep you cool." The battery-operated fan just sells it, am I right? Feel free to pre-order this sucker now, though they won't start shipping until September. Check out a larger image below.

So who's buying one? (Go ahead, admit it -- we'll only make fun of you, like, a little bit ...)

Gallery: Jabba the Hut Costume

[via Gizmodo]

Filed under: Fandom

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Originally posted by Erik Davis from Cinematical, on June 10, 2009 11:15 AM

Last week, we posted Jonathan Drori's fascinating short talk about the Millennium Seed Bank -- a massive effort to preserve the world's threatened plant life within a global network of seed archives. It's a big topic to cover in 3 minutes, so the TED Blog asked Drori if he had time to answer a few more questions -- like, How do seeds die? He happily obliged. (In the photo above, Drori is on a collecting trip looking for rare bamboo.)

Where's the Millennium Seed Bank, and what happens there?

The Millennium Seed Bank is part of the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, spread across two sites in southeast England. We have a large group of scientists researching botany, plant biodiversity and restoration ecology, as well as operating the enormous and internationally known gardens themselves, which are of course, living scientific collections.

And what do you do there?

My role is as a main-Board Trustee. There are 12 of us, responsible to the nation for ensuring that the strategy and operations of the organization are excellent. My own particular interests are in our use of technology and the web, in public understanding of our scientific work and in education, outreach and marketing. I also spend some time fundraising; though Kew itself is about half-funded by the UK government, the Millennium Seed Bank is financed from other sources, including philanthropic organizations and business sponsors.

You mention in your talk that the seed bank does some high-tech things with the seeds. What are a few examples?

Kew has a project that uses gas chromatography-mass spectrometry to analyze the air just above the stored seeds. The aim is to identify and quantify the volatile organic compounds that are released by dry seeds during long-term storage. Seed species that can be stored successfully long-term will be compared with some species that suffer damage during storage ("recalcitrant" seeds) and are less able to germinate as a result. The aim is to see if there are volatile marker compounds that could be used as non-invasive real-time monitors of the long-term viability of seeds in seed banks. The results from the project could additionally have implications for horticulture, in terms of a non-invasive method for rapidly assessing the health of seeds.

Can you talk a little bit about the search for viability markers? What are some of the possible genetic and molecular clues that a seed might be viable?

Ilse Kranner is one of our experts on seed viability. She and her colleagues are looking for chemical or other indicators of cell death. Her detection methods look for these indicators either directly or through the switching on or off of genes. The Holy Grail is to find a universal, non-destructive, rapid technique -- a tall order!

Seeds do give us some molecular clues that allow us to diagnose their viability. We use methods of gas chromatography-mass spectrometry and HPLC (high-performance liquid chromatography) to analyse what goes wrong when a seed dies. An example is Kranner and her colleagues’ work on antioxidants in seeds. Antioxidants mop up "free radicals" (these are the villains that can destroy big molecules such as DNA, RNA, lipids and proteins). Some of these antioxidants used by plants turn out to be important vitamins for humans, e.g. vitamins C and E. The team has found that antioxidants help the seed to survive stress, but when aging conditions (high temperatures at high seed water-content) persist, the antioxidant system eventually breaks down. Calculating how powerful these antioxidants need to be to counteract the seeds’ stress allows us to predict whether or not a seed will die upon water uptake, or if it will germinate and form a new seedling.

There are also indicators of "programmed cell death." This is a program of cellular suicide at the end of which a cell cuts up its own DNA into very small fragments that cannot be re-assembled again. Programmed cell death has evolved because it is better for an organism to destroy a cell that is damaged beyond repair rather than putting energy into sustaining it. Also, cell division must be balanced by such processes, otherwise there would be tumor-like growth. The team has found such DNA fragments in dead seeds, and these fragments tell us that many (or all) cells in a seed have undergone programmed cell death as the seed aged. So these fragments may lead us to a useful indicator of seed viability.

How long do the seeds last?

Seed longevity is extraordinarily variable -- by at least four orders of magnitude. Seeds from plants that grow in cold, wet places tend to have shorter lives -- just a few years in some cases, such as the wood anemone. At the other extreme, plants that have evolved in hot, dry places such as eucalypts and some grains tend to have the greatest longevity –- probably thousands of years.

Can you grow plants from the stored seeds just by warming them up and adding water?

In some cases, yes. Many seeds, though, are very fussy. They need special combinations of temperature, moisture and the right timing to get them to germinate. Sometimes they need a particular cycle of conditions before they’ll sprout. One of the very worrying aspects of climate change is that these precise conditions may not occur, which would mean that whole populations of plants could die out if they cannot adapt quickly enough. Our research gives us germination protocols, sets of rules and methods for storing and germinating every species, and we make these freely available. These germination protocols are already being used by farmers to increase the yields they get on cultivated crops.

In the seed bank's work in the field, how often do the collection teams discover unknown plant species or variants?

In places like Madagascar, fairly frequently -- we probably have 20 or so species thought to be completely new to science, collected over the past five years. Elsewhere, the species may be well known and documented, though not collected or preserved. About 1,000 of our seed collections have not yet been identified -- many of these will be new to science, but we won't know for sure until the relevant experts have a look at them.

READ MORE: Jonathan Drori talks about how hard it is to choose a favorite plant, collecting seeds in the Andes, and remembering exactly how important plants are.

Does the collection involve just seeds, or do the collection teams also preserve whole plants?

We collect seeds (average of 32,000 seeds per collection), herbarium (dried, pressed) specimens for identification purposes and lots and lots of data (geology, soils, location etc.).

After the germination tests every 10 years, what do you do with the little plants? The gardeners among us want to know.

We carry out germination tests on all the collections that come in to the Seed Bank -- more than 10,000 germination tests per year -- and we test for viability every 10 years. Many of the resultant seedlings are destroyed. We wouldn't have the space to grow them, and letting them all loose in the UK could distort our own ecosystem. Rare plants are grown on to maturity to produce more seeds and for reintroduction. Other seeds are grown on for identification purposes, for research and even for public display.

Do you have some favorite plants in the seed bank? Or some favorite seed-collecting stories?

That’s a bit like asking a parent which is their favorite child! Personally, I revel in the sheer diversity, not just of the plants to which the seeds will give rise, but the sheer, crazy variety of the seeds themselves. Every possible shape and color. They’re amazing things. Having said all that, I’m pretty keen on the Adansonia family (baobabs). Fantastic seeds and fabulous, incredibly important trees with so many uses. I also asked Dr. Paul Smith, director of the Millennium Seed Bank and he responded, “Too many to mention! Cylindrophyllum hallii -- down to six plants left in the wild in South Africa. Banksia brownii, reintroduced to Western Australia from the seed bank. Wollemi pine (NSW, Australia). Bromus interruptus -- European grass extinct in the wild, recently reintroduced. Leucospermum sp.: 200-year-old seed germinated in 2007 from seeds in an old wallet, and now a healthy shrub.”

During a seed-collecting trip to the Andes last year, I saw the most amazing bird I’ve ever seen in my life, which I now know to be one of the world’s largest hummingbirds –- a truly remarkable creature. Almost speechless, and keeping my voice low, I pointed at it and asked one of the Chilean plant-scientists with us what we were looking at. He appeared puzzled for a moment, then brightened, “That’s a fantastic plant -– quite rare though it’s not much to look at -- it’ll be easier to see once that distracting bird gets out of the way."

If you'd had another 2 minutes onstage, what would you have said?

I want to thank the people all over the world who’ve been part of this amazing project, which has been led by Dr. Paul Smith and his team: The network of botanists and volunteers all over the world who are painstakingly collecting seeds, preparing them, storing some locally and sending some to us for safekeeping and research. Then there are the people who work in the (rather chilly!) Millennium Seed Bank itself and partner seed banks around the world. Then there are the researchers who use the seeds and the increasing number of scientists and ecologists all over the world who are using seeds for research and restoration. I’d like to thank the government ministers, politicians of every persuasion, all over the world who have had the wisdom, foresight and imagination to sign the treaties that have made the work of the Millennium Seed Bank possible. And I desperately want to thank our funders, the philanthropic organizations and commercial sponsors who have had the foresight and sense of global responsibility to believe in the project, not only to preserve key crop species but plants that have, so many, many uses for the future -– for all our futures.

That’s a very positive message. What’s the limiting factor to the Seed Collecting and restoration work?

Money, I’m afraid. We need about $10m/year, which seems so little to pay for such a very valuable thing, yet so hard to raise in this (economic) climate! I know that human beings are emotional animals and that people respond best to stories. I’m constantly trying to persuade my scientific colleagues occasionally to drop scientific Latin names (which are important because they properly define and classify a species) in favor of common names which capture the imagination and give us clues to uses that might otherwise be forgotten. Actually, we have a whole other project collecting the folk-tales around plants, some of which have led to remarkable scientific discoveries, but that’s a whole other story, maybe for another TED ...

A final word?

Just remember what plants do. Plants use sunlight to photosynthesize. They remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to make the solid stuff of which trees and greenery are made. Only plants do this. They make structures and chemicals that give us shelter, provide clothing, food and medicines, stabilize the environment and even give us spiritual sustenance. All human life depends on plants. Don’t ever forget that.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED Blog, on June 10, 2009 11:00 AM

Mos Def recently clarified the lyrical battle challenge he issued to Lil Wayne and Jay-Z and questioned Jigga's "Greatest Rapper Alive" title.

[Visit SOHH.com for more information]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SOHH.com Dailies, on June 10, 2009 9:33 AM

Welcome to First Word, wherein Eater and its correspondents sit for hours at steamy community board meetings to bring back the first word of new establishments and what they're up to. Your reports from the field always encouraged to tips@eater.com.

Last night we sat in on CB4’s business licenses and permits committee meeting for an evening of approbation, tabling, no shows, rejection, and of course, noise complaints.

1) The owners of Westville appeared to gain approval for a third location at 246 West 18th St., which was passed unanimously and quickly. The owner hopes to open what sounds like a carbon copy of the other Westville spots within “3 or 4 months.” The board stipulated only that he must do soundproofing to protect the residents living above the space.

2) The board surprisingly didn’t give a hard time to the owners of 532 W. 27th St, the new project in the former Club Home space. At the helm of the project are bartender John Fiore and a chef formerly of Sunset Boulevard restaurant Empress; they hope to create a place reminiscent of “Tao or Buddha Bar,” with “no dedicated dance floor” and “65 percent of the space used as a restaurant.” The board settled on several stipulations: a detailed security plan, dinner service until at least 2:00 AM, no promoters (event and PR are OK), no outdoor use, and sound limiters.

3) Like Westville, the app for the new Grand Sichuan at 368 W. 46th passed unanimously in a matter of two minutes. Stipulations: the owners must have an organized bike rack that doesn’t block the sidewalk, there must be proper ventilation, and there cannot be French doors or outdoor seating.

4) The owner of Concrete at 320 W. 37th came in to address a complaint about noise and odor control. While he insisted that “65 percent of the business” is dedicated to foodservice and tapas, a community member, speaking on behalf of the building across the street, insisted that the place is nothing more than a bar: they play amplified music and stay open till the wee hours, which is less than forthcoming considering that there was no mention of such plans in the restaurant’s 2007 app. Concrete must return on July 14 to report on progress addressing these complaints.

5) It isn’t exactly saying much, as only three people showed, but the Broadway Comedy Club was the biggest community draw of the night. The owner came in to apply for what the committee deemed a “sensible and reasonable” alteration to change an existing service bar to a stand up bar. However, it soon got heated as the board and community began to call attention to the space’s long history of issues: a lack of security, an inability to deal with crowding on the sidewalk, a failure to address sound complaints by hiring an acoustical engineer, and a less than stellar garbage pickup system. The community members insisted that for the last few years the owner has been “more reactive than proactive,” but the board was in the end generous in tabling the application and allowing the owner to return on July 14 to report on progress.

6) The transfer app for Italian restaurant Ralph’s, from the owner of Strada 57, went smoothly. The board members seemed to be very happy with the operator, although his overtures at the meeting to use the rooftop at another one of his locations, Terrazza Toscana, were pretty much shot down. Because he and his lawyer were only responding to a complaint against Terrazza Toscana, the rooftop proposal did not go for a vote. The owner insists that he will “get creative” to make the rooftop work in a way that won’t disturb neighbors.

7) The board applauded the owner of Hell’s Kitchen Café for the improvements he’s made to what used to be a “horrible”operation, but they ultimately unanimously rejected his app to use the location’s rooftop. The Board Chair, who once lived at 523 9th Avenue, the building that houses the restaurant, quipped that the HKC folks are running a nightclub without a license. While the owner has claimed consistently that he does not use promoters, several board members comically asked him why they were receiving emails from the likes of Acid Betty and “all of her pals.”
—Gabe Ulla
· Previous Community Board Coverage [~E~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on June 10, 2009 9:03 AM

The whole world A small number of super-geeky obsessives is abuzz over the upcoming launch of Facebook Usernames, an exciting new feature that will let you put some parts of your name into a web address.

Since its announcement yesterday, there's been a lot of excited discussion of the feature, but in a dashes.com exclusive I can exclusively report this exclusive look at the future of the feature. We'll also cover how the feature's rollout will be covered by the technology trade press and the mainstream press.

June 13, 12:01am: Facebook launches Facebook Usernames. The gold rush is on!

June 13, 12:01:45am: The first completely irrational, highly unlikely theory about how Google indexes Facebook Usernames is emitted from the ass-end of the SEO industry.

June 13, 12:02am: An enterprising and mischevious nerd who is definitely not me squats on the username of a notable tech trade reporter like Michael Arrington.

June 13, 12:06am: The Facebook username system starts getting overloaded with new registrations, but their tech team clears it up in 20 or 30 minutes, for a total period of slowness of about 35 minutes.

June 13, 12:15am: A first wave of "It's alive! Go get your name!" posts go up on various technology blogs, noting that the service is running a little bit slow. None of these posts mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can't get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can't get to the feature at all. The phrase "The Facebook Username debacle" is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that "Facebook Username" can be abbreviated "FU", and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

June 13, 1:00am: #FUFacebook becomes a Trending Topic on Twitter. People who are presently whining about how expensive it is to buy a new iPhone because they bought a new iPhone last year will have the chance to see how obnoxious and overprivileged they look, but will not take the opportunity.

June 13, 9:00am: The first mainstream coverage of the feature happens in the New York Times, which includes a one-line mention of the launch in a lengthy feature about Twitter's Verified Accounts. The story includes a colorful illustration of Kanye West, but omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 13, 12:01pm: Twelve hours after launch, a passionate and vitriol-filled flame war erupts amongst web protocol nazis about exacly which 300-series HTTP header should be used to redirect from the old /profile.php?id=500012896 URLs to the new system. Mark Pilgrim writes an overwrought essay on the topic, and 300 Ubuntu users on netbooks use their free hand to Digg the post. For these nerds, "The Facebook Debacle" refers to the improper headers used on the redirects, instead of the few minutes of difficulty in registering names.

June 13, 12:01pm: Within twelve hours of launch, the OpenID community will quietly reach out to Facebook, asking about their plans to have Facebook Usernames become an OpenID provider. Facebook will decline to comment, Simon Willison will write a thoughtful and persuasive essay about the benefits to Facebook if they were to embrace such a thing, and Andy Baio will politely link to it on Waxy Links. Months later, Facebook will actually implement the feature. For this community, this cordial and fruitful exchange will be referred to "The Facebook Debacle".

June 13, 3:00pm: I tweet a link to my post about owning your identity online. The few folks who read it seven years ago nod in agreement, and everyone else considers reading the short bit.ly URL to be equivalent to reading the post.

June 13, 4:04pm: A white guy named David discovers every variation of his name on Facebook is already taken, and finally reconsiders the condescending contempt he's always had for black people who give their kids unique names. This tiny bit of racial reconsideration is the only unequivocally good news to come out of the Facebook Usernames launch.

June 15, 8:00am: A short and punchy Monday morning story about Facebook Usernames appears on USA Today's website, omitting any mention of the word "debacle", but dwelling heavily on the preponderance of URLs with "Hussein" in them. This vestige of the Presidential elections, which briefly convinced college kids that changing their middle name on a website was a form of political activism, is promptly interpreted as an Al Qaeda sleeper cell movement by most of the paper's print readers.

June 15, 9:00am: In its opening weekend, between four and five million people (or between two and three percent of Facebook's ostensible population) will have registered Usernames for themselves. Tech pundits will say "everyone has a Facebook Username now" and refer to that assertion as an article of faith in future posts about identity. It will not be until 2012 that Facebook supports the full range of diacritical marks and international characters that let the other 5.5 billion residents of Earth use their name as a username, but this fact will go unreported.

June 15, 11:00am: In response to the growing buzz on TechMeme about "The Facebook Debacle", Mark Zuckerberg posts on Facebook's blog with the news that the company has created the Facebook Username Dispute Resolution Community. This group is tasked with creating a policy for arbitrating who can get what names, how conflicts between different people's usernames are resolved, and how to report squatting of usernames. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook. Over the course of its 18-month existence, the FUDR Community will attract thousands of comments, 80% of which ask for The Old News Feed back, and 85% of which contain one or more typos or deviations from standard spellings of English words.

June 15, 1:00pm: LinkedIn posts a thinly-veiled but very smart update on their company blog that happens to mention in passing that they've had friendly usernames as an option for URLs for years, and that it's more likely you want to show your professional profile to the world as the first Google result for your name. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on LinkedIn.

June 15, 1:30pm: The Google Profiles team will write a post that features a bad pun in the headline, ostensibly serving to announce some minor recent feature update, but in reality just trying to remind people that hey, you can get a Google URL. The post omits any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Google.

June 15, 2:00pm: An enterprising young web hacker will realize that there are 24 items in this list, which means that if you add in a free space, you can very easily turn this post into a 5×5 Facebook Username Bingo Card. Combined with the Creative Commons license on this blog, it makes for a fun idea and a Flickr Pool pops up for people to show the FU Bingo cards they've generated.

June 15, 4:00pm: The first web-savvy celebrity in Hollywood will hold a meeting with their marketing team about what it will take to get their preferred username. During this meeting, the smartest person in the room will try to explain the difference between a profile page and a fan page, why there are different processes for getting vanity URLs for each, and why a person or brand doesn't have control over all the fan pages that can be created about them. That person will be ignored by everyone else for the duration of the meeting. The issue will be ignored by Facebook for nearly a year.

June 16, 10:00pm: The Domai.nr guys release a service that lets you sign in with your Facebook Connect account and automatically find what variations of your name are available as real domain names. While the feature is cool and works well, the team struggles to get press coverage for the launch, since it's predicated on the idea that you can register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Facebook.

June 19, 9:00am: The Bureau of Labor Statistics will announce the unemployment numbers for May, showing a loss of 660,000 jobs, with 1/3 of them being white-collar jobs. Coincidentally, 220,000 unemployed professionals will realize to their horror that their Facebook profile now ranks above their LinkedIn profile if a prospective employer googles them, and that they have no idea how to use Facebook's privacy settings.

July 31, 2009: MySpace announces MyAddress, a feature for providing more control over the URL where your MySpace profile appears. Instead of constraining users to a few choices as Facebook does, MySpace gives users very broad control over what kind of address they can have. As a result, users pick web addresses that exactly match their obscure handles on the service, instead of using their real names.

February 15, 2010: Microsoft launches a similar URL service for usernames, providing friendly URLs for millions of people on Windows Live and XBox Live, and providing the feature to more people in one day than Facebook has succeeded in delivering usernames to in eight months. Because the announcement goes out on President's day, and because it's Microsoft, nobody really notices except for a two-line mention on Mashable, half of which is a joke about Bing. Both Microsoft's own announcement and the Mashable post omit any mention that you can also register a real domain name that you can own, instead of just having another URL on Live.com.

October 31, 2010: AOL has an internal meeting about providing friendly URLs to users of AIM and Bebo, and make a bold decision to put it on their 18-month roadmap.

I hope you find this overview of the future timeline of Facebook Usernames useful to understand where this exciting feature is going in the future, how our industry will adapt and respond to this sort of innovation, and how our tech trade press will hold the powerful company's feet to the fire as this sort of capability becomes mainstream in the years to come.

And oh hey, add me as a friend on Facebook! Or become a fan of mine! Or something.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on June 10, 2009 8:54 AM

For the past several weeks I've been working with an old friend to roll out some products focused on local markets. The first one we are launching is called decisionads it is a service for realtors and publishers that creates very fast self-serve listings widgets/ads. I made one below. The ads contain automatic filters, photo slideshows, lead generation with a built-in CRM system, inventory management (this one is loaded with some sample data) and an embed code (optional). Our idea is that real estate agents could create them and add them to their blogs, fb pages etc. They can also be displayed via openx, ad sense and other ad networks, and publishers can offer the units to their local real estate advertisers. Real estate is just the first focus and quickly alter the form factor and sorting options for other verticals. They lie somewhere between classifieds and display very easy and inexpensive to make and maintain.  Next up are other verticals, a directory product with great detail pages which have a lot of functionality and seo which could be used for listings on a local, national, or subject specific focus. If you want to know more please get in touch.

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on June 10, 2009 8:33 AM

From Associated Press (via Yahoo! Finance)

The Globe, citing two potential buyers it did not name, said Goldman Sachs would request bids for the 137-year-old newspaper in the next couple of weeks. The Times Co. previously announced it had hired the investment bank to sell its 17.5 percent stake in the Boston Red Sox and related sports properties.

Originally posted by Andrew Anker from compart.mentalize, on June 10, 2009 8:25 AM

If you're interested in the future of news and newspapers, read Craig Stolz's article Washington Post's Masterful Failure of Online Journalism. It gives no prescription for creating revenue streams online -- it's simply one of the smartest pieces I've seen about journalism on the Web. The key question is this: what does the Web do best, and how can I exploit that to create compelling stories? (thanks, jjg!)

Originally posted by Rebecca Blood from Rebecca's Pocket, on June 10, 2009 8:21 AM

Two movies from now, after Toy Story 3 and Newt, Pixar is *finally* releasing a movie with a female main character. The only problem? She's a princess.

I have nothing against princesses. I have nothing against movies with princesses. But don't the Disney princesses pretty much have us covered? If we had to wait for your thirteenth movie for you to make one with a girl at the center, couldn't you have chosen something -- something -- for her to be that could compete with plucky robots and adventurous space toys?

Disney's princesses do have us covered.

Tags: gender  movies  pixar

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 10, 2009 7:45 AM

Via About Colon Blank

Originally posted by Mark Frauenfelder from Boing Boing, on June 10, 2009 7:44 AM

The major league baseball amateur draft occurred yesterday, the forty-first such draft I’ve lived through, not that I’ve ever paid much attention to any of them. Certainly I was least equipped to fathom the one that occurred in June 1968, when I was a two-month-old blob, so I didn’t understand then or for many years afterward that 1968 first round draft pick Bobby Valentine was, for a while at least, a superstar in the making.

From what I have read about him not only as a baseball player but as an all-around athlete (I think he was particularly good at basketball), the player from baseball history he seems to have most resembled in his golden early years was Pete Reiser, the legendary ambidextrous line-drive smashing speedsteer from the 1940s, whose probable Hall of Fame career was derailed by his penchant for smashing into outfield walls. Like Reiser, Valentine’s athletic ability seemed to suggest he was capable of playing any position on the diamond. Also as in the case of Reiser, it seems in retrospect that it would have been wise to confine Valentine to a position that would keep him away from walls—in 1973, while still in the formative stage of his career, Valentine wrecked his leg in a collision and entanglement with a chain-link fence while trying to catch a ball hit by Dick Green.

After that, Valentine settled into benchwarming utility-man duty for the rest of his career as he drifted from the Angels (who had acquired him from his first team, the Dodgers) to the Padres to the Mets. By the time this 1979 card came out, his playing days were numbered, a fact he seems to be grappling with in a moment that seems emblematic of the general somber tone of the 1979 card set. In 1979, everything was ending. The Three Mile Island nuclear plant melted down, Skylab fell out of the sky, Americans were taken hostage in Iran, disco died a fiery ridiculous death, Jimmy Carter looked weary, and Bobby Valentine wondered who, if not a superstar, he could possibly be. The putrid 1979 Mets let him go in the spring, and he joined the laughably bad Seattle Mariners, for whom he completed his comprehensive career tour of all the fielding positions on the diamond by catching in two games, among other things, none of which ended up staving off the end of his playing days.

In the 1960s he had been a Young Superstar To Be, a perfect representative of the youth-driven, hope-laced times. In the 1970s he was damaged goods, a dream coming up short, a perfect representative of the sullen decade of aftermath. And so in the 1980s, he was reborn a brash, driven yuppie renegade bent on success by any means necessary, his quick rise to managerial success on the major league level like some baseball version of Wall Street meets Top Gun. Such a movie would have to have been called Top Step, after the name by which Valentine was known throughout baseball, a disparaging moniker referring to his gung ho habit of managing games while perched as conspicuously close to the action as he could be while still being nominally within the confines of the dugout.

I don’t feel capable of characterizing the muddy 1990s, but I suppose Valentine could be said to have been in synch with that decade as well as he experienced spotty employment, losing his job in the early 1990s and regaining one in the late 1990s. And if I had to choose an emblematic moment for that era I could do worse than picking the time, ten years ago yesterday, that Bobby Valentine was tossed out of a game and then returned, in disguise, with a blatantly fake mustache and shades, one of the most hilarious baseball moments I’ve ever lived to see.

What is your face before you were born? If any Cardboard God knows the answer to that Zen koan, it would be Bobby Valentine, and not just because he has become a beloved figure in Japan, where perhaps he has begun dabbling in Zen. All his life, Bobby Valentine has put on and taken off face after face. The exile, the iconoclast, the journeyman, the golden boy. The one who keeps getting cast out of the game. The one who keeps finding new ways to come back.

Originally posted by Josh Wilker from Cardboard Gods, on June 10, 2009 7:26 AM

Images Courtesy of Lincoln Cushing

'Hasta la Victoria (Deportista) Siempre: Sports Imagery in Revolutionary Cuba.'
Unlike many of my artist and activist friends, I grew up as a jock. My dad was a gym teacher (physical education, sorry) and I was raised playing football/soccer, basketball, and running track. When I became involved in hardcore, I was shocked when a punk friend of mine told me that the politics of sport did not intersect with those of athletics. Who knew that sports and punk were so separate? I guess my ex-friend did not realize that Kevin Seconds was a huge b-ball fan and the 7 Seconds song 'I Hate Sports' was written tongue in cheek. Remember the basketball on the inside of the Drop Acid album?

Artist and activist circles don't fair much better in regards to our position of sport. Notwithstanding the writing of folks such as Dave Zirin and CLR James, very little has been written about the relationship between art and radicalism. This weekend I will be in Bristol, UK lecturing on Cuban sports posters. Although many of us our familiar with the silkscreened posters from socialist Cuba, little is written about the role of sports images within the larger domain of Cuban poster history. Hopefully the paper I present this weekend, as well as the article and book chapter that will emerge from it, will begin to lay the groundwork for what we know about revolutionary Cuban sports posters.

If you are in Bristol, stop by Burwals at 4:00pm-6:0pm Sunday evening. I will be presenting on 'Hasta la Victoria (Deportista) Siempre: Sports Imagery in Revolutionary Cuba.'

The Visual in Sport
13-14 June 2009
A Two-Day International Conference at Burwalls
University of Bristol, UK

Download the poster or the program.

Originally posted by Dylan Miner from Just Seeds: Blog, on June 10, 2009 7:14 AM

hotfoot:

brooklynmutt:

So as I pointed out earlier there were some insipid fools at the Mets game… Needless to say they weren’t pleasant to sit near, however the antics that came from this situation were simply priceless…

I could write a really long post explaining them all and ruin your dashboard but instead I’ll cut to the chase and tell you about my favorite…

During the whole game these idiots were waving 2008 flags and making sure we were all aware that they won the World Series last year…Yeah yeah great that was last year no one cares anymore…So a Mets fan a few rows in front of us, we’ll call him Stan started arguing with the whole section of Phillies fan, it was quite sad as Stan seemed to be a little out of his league…I look up at the Phillies section and see one of them grab his friends flag…He started running down with the flag waving it like an idiot making a b-line for poor Stan when all of a sudden this guy stops, pulls off his sweatshirt, and turns around revealing his New York Mets shirt. The whole section jumped up and went nuts. Turns out this guy was a Mets fan the whole time sitting up there for the past inning blending in with the Phillies fans when in reality he was in cahoots with the wonderful Stan…They threw the flag on the ground and started stomping on it…

The crowd went crazy…

All the Phillies fans couldn’t help but stand there in shock and applaud what could only be described as a Trojan Horse like epic move… This probably made me more proud to be a Mets fan than the Mets actually winning… - nymetsfans bryanwashere via mattedits

I imagine while all of this nonsense was being carried out, that an actual interesting, exciting, important baseball game was being played on the field below?

Originally posted by (author unknown) from metsgrrl.com's tumblr, on June 10, 2009 7:10 AM

From A Hamburger Today

From GraphJam.com:

[via Thayer C.]

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on June 10, 2009 6:30 AM

The High Line park, ten years in the making, officially opened yesterday. What’s striking on the High Line, apart from its delightfully uneven poured walkways (the arguments and code-wrangling there must have been!) and benches on wheels, is what you can see not on but from the narrow strip of railway. It presents an idealized, bizarre version of New York City, a west side skyline you haven’t seen before. Disorienting! Where are we?

It’s like one of those movies set in New York City but clearly filmed in Canada, except this is better than Canada. Also, donating millions of dollars to the park was the smartest thing Barry Diller ever did, because the High Line is the only vantage point onto his Frank Gehry-designed headquarters building that makes it look actually exciting.

There were no poor people there yet. There were many homosexuals.

Here’s what you can see: the personal trainer teaching a man boxing in the Equinox; lots of New Jersey; luxury construction both in progress and abandoned; billboards; the General Theological Seminary; the Andy Warhols and Tom Wesselmans inside Phillips auction house; double-tiered parking structures; the exercise yard atop the womens’ prison on 20th Street.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 10, 2009 6:20 AM

The High Line park, ten years in the making, officially opened yesterday. What’s striking on the High Line, apart from its delightfully uneven poured walkways (the arguments and code-wrangling there must have been!) and benches on wheels, is what you can see not on but from the narrow strip of railway. It presents an idealized, bizarre version of New York City, a west side skyline you haven’t seen before. Disorienting! Where are we?

It’s like one of those movies set in New York City but clearly filmed in Canada, except this is better than Canada. Also, donating millions of dollars to the park was the smartest thing Barry Diller ever did, because the High Line is the only vantage point onto his Frank Gehry-designed headquarters building that makes it look actually exciting.

There were no poor people there yet. There were many homosexuals.

Here’s what you can see: the personal trainer teaching a man boxing in the Equinox; lots of New Jersey; luxury construction both in progress and abandoned; billboards; the General Theological Seminary; the Andy Warhols and Tom Wesselmans inside Phillips auction house; double-tiered parking structures; the exercise yard atop the womens’ prison on 20th Street.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 10, 2009 6:20 AM

redsoxinny:

BecKKKKKKKKett shuts down the Yanks, wins 7-0.  Red Sox first shutout, Yanks first time being shutout.

randomsox:

Fuck. Yeah.

imagine that, a team giving fans a place to hang k cards! on precious fenway park! oh no, won’t the duct tape DESTROY the wall????!??

Originally posted by (author unknown) from metsgrrl.com's tumblr, on June 10, 2009 6:13 AM

AMC Christina Hendricks as Joan Holloway in "Mad Men."AMC has announced that the third season of "Mad Men" will debut Sunday, August 16 at 10 p.m., with the premiere airing with limited commercial interruption. If you've been waiting for a...

Originally posted by Alan Sepinwall/The Star-Ledger from NJ.com: Ent. TV & Film - Impact: Alan Sepinwall, on June 10, 2009 6:09 AM

In the ninth inning last night, with one out, the Phillies down one run and Jimmy Rollins on first base, Matt Stairs hit a ground ball to second, which Luis Castillo picked up and threw to Alex Cora at second, who made the catch then tried to turn what could have been a game-ending double play.

However, Rollins did a barrel-roll slide in to Cora, took him out at the knees, and so his throw died a few feet from his hand.

If was the NFL, Rollins might have been called for clipping.

The thing is, I have no problem with Rollins doing this: it’s a smart play, it worked, and he kept the inning alive for his team.

However, I do have a problem with the Mets, who a) never do this themselves, and b) when it’s done to them, they do nothing to retaliate and help to make it stop.  Because, while I think it’s a legit play, from the Mets perspective, 1) it kept the inning alive, which is never the goal, but, 2) it’s dangerous, and could injure someone some day.

So, it would be nice to see the Mets use this tough-type of play for themselves, while also sending a message to other teams that they can’t be bullied around, so that someone doesn’t one day take it too far and injure yet another player on the Mets.

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 10, 2009 5:51 AM

Jennifer Maiser writes about locally and sustainably grown food. The Cooking with a Friend series chronicles her cooking and menu planning adventures with her neighbor, J.

A week in Southern California turned into nearly two. By the time I returned to San Francisco I was worried that J. had moved on and was ready to break-up with our little cooking project. After discussing this over drinks the night I returned, we realized that we were both as excited as ever to continue cooking together.

I drove the majority of the menu plan this week. I'm desperately waiting for tomatoes to get to the market (it will be about another month before I start purchasing them), and expect our menu to become much more summer vegetable-driven pretty quickly. In the meantime, we had a fairly basic menu this week:

Final Menu, Week 9

• Grilled chicken salad with spinach, feta and green beans
• Oil and vinegar potato salad
• Roasted duck fried rice
• Hot cranberry beans with green garlic
• Corned beef and fresh bread

Cost: $26 each

Both of us remarked on the inexpensive week. Part of this is the magic of making this a long-term project. The cranberry beans and bread ingredients had all been purchased a few weeks back and didn't go into this week's cost. Of the $52 spent, approximately $30 of it was spent on meats: chicken, duck and corned beef.

The menu this week took some prep, but once we began actively cooking it was relatively quick to put together. On Saturday, I prepped the bread to rise overnight, cooked the white rice, and soaked the dry cranberry beans. We had purchased a prepared corned beef from a local butcher and that went into the slow cooker on Sunday morning. I baked the bread right before J. got to my apartment, and we were well on our way to a quick cooking day.

This week I'm including a recipe for roasted duck fried rice. We purchased the duck from a Chinese market in San Francisco, and having a pre-roasted duck adds to the simplicity of the dish. It tastes delicious and I've been eating it for breakfast all week.

Check out the recipe: Roasted Duck Fried Rice

About the author: About the author: Jennifer Maiser is the founder and editor of the Eat Local Challenge website and writes at Life Begins at 30, her personal weblog.

Originally posted by Jen Maiser from Serious Eats, on June 10, 2009 5:00 AM

The future of the music industry is hard.  No one does it for you.  No limos, no fancy dinners, and (almost) no million dollar marketing budgets after a bidding war over your 3-song demo tape.  So what next?  Will Topspin ride into LA, London, Nashville, and New York to save this industry?   No – we won’t, but some of you will.  Topspin’s direct-to-fan marketing, management, and distribution technology just sits there until someone uses it.  For the last year or so, the Topspin Artist Service team have been the expert pilots.  As of Wednesday, June 3rd 2009, that begins to change after our first class of Topspin Certified marketers and web designers left the building after an intense residency with expert Topspin trainer Adam Bates (Thanks, Adam!).

So yes – the future is hard – but fortunately we are lucky enough to have some amazing (and hearty) managers, marketers, and web designers helping us all grind our way forward.   Our goal is to find and train as many of you as we can both via our residency programs and through the Berklee.com certification course “Marketing your Music with Topspin” starting 9/28/2009.  As the first crew of Topspin certified users trained last week will tell you, 75% of our training had nothing to do with using the app.  It’s marketing in this new world that is hard.  Topspin’s app simply makes executing easy and efficient.  So many thanks to all of you early believers.  We will keep writing code, testing new ways to create demand for your music, and educating in every way we can.  You need to do the rest or, if you need help with marketing or web development, hire one of the Topspin’s certified marketers and developers.

The Topspin Class of June 2009 is
(Top Row Left to Right)
Justin Travis, Topspin Intern from Berklee College of Music, Marketer
Patrick Woodward, Topspin Intern from Pepperdine MBA Program, Marketer
Bob Cahill, Partner, Bigger Picture Group Nashville, Management
Parker Todd Brooks, Principal, We Are Everywhere LA, Web Developer
Jay Coyle, Principal, Music Geek Management Nashville, Marketer
Kami Knake, Topspin Artist Relations Nashville, Marketer
“La Professora” Adam Bates phD2F, Director, Topspin Artist Services NY
(Bottom Row Left to Right)
James Lamberti, Vice President, Topspin Artist Services San Francisco
Nicole Fields,Topspin Artist Relations Boston/NYC, Marketer
Jason Feinberg, President, On Target Media Group LA, Marketer
Mike Nelson, Two Minutes for Music Nashville, Management

Originally posted by JLamberti from Topspin, on June 9, 2009 8:58 PM

At TPMCafe Book Club this week we're hosting a discussion of Richard Haass's new book War of Necessity, War of Choice: A Memoir of Two Iraq Wars. Click here to read Haass's introduction to the discussion.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 9, 2009 7:17 PM

I've never seen 30 Rock (I KNOW, I KNOW) so I can't attest to the correctness of this, but supposedly the show is a rip-off of The Muppet Show.

EXHIBIT B: LIZ LEMON VS. KERMIT THE FROG
Both are the most normal characters on their respective shows. Both are unlucky at love. Both are neurotic worrywarts and type-a personalities who slow burn into a crazy breakdown once per episode. AND both have some kind of flirtation with the guest stars that ultimately goes nowhere. There is absolutely no difference between Liz Lemon and Kermit the Frog save for genitalia (Liz is a lady, Kermit has none).

Make up your mind, internet. Is Kermit Liz Lemon or Christian Bale?

Tags: 30rock  muppets  themuppetshow  tv

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 9, 2009 2:41 PM

Maybe you've decided to take our advice. You're standing in your kitchen with a bag of sweet Hartmann Honey. Maybe you read Jeremy's (RIP) awesome post about grinding and decided to go ahead and purchase a modest burr grinder for home. You've chosen Moka Pot as your method of extraction, and have the grind size and dose exacted to your taste preference. But what about your water?
Coffee is some crazy high percentage (98.5%) water. Amazing that it's sometimes an afterthought in home coffee brewing, huh? There are several options for improving coffee quality at home.

1. Get Tested!

• Your city or county may have a water testing plant; they usually charge.
  
• They will test for potability - ecoli, lead, nitrates and nitrites (extra charge), fecal coloform. 

• In Tompkins County, where we roast our beans, we have Yaws Environmental Laboratory.
• OR, if you live in a college/university town, try calling their Horticulture Department to find out if they have an analytical lab - they may do the testing for free!
  

2. Use Cotton and Carbon Filters

• Both filter out particulates - sand and dirt.
• Cotton ones are cheaper, and the carbon ones will filter more out.
  
• In our cafes, we use two cotton filters first to filter out the bigger particles, then a carbon filter.

3. Know the Total Dissolved Solids value (hardness) of your water.

• You can buy a water kit, such as this one.
  
• Send your water to a testing facility, like Cirqua Customized Water.
  
• TDS are inorganic and organic substances contained in your water and are commonly measured in parts per million (PPM).

A good TDS value for coffee brewing equipment is 100-200 PPM, but for the small parts of an espreso machine, this number drops to a recommended 50 PPM. Why would you want softer water in an espresso machine? Thom had a great picture along with his post about water filtration a couple of months ago - limescale buildup inside an espresso machine.

What if you don't have enough hardness? Some mineral content is needed to brew a good cup of coffee. As David Beeman of Cirqua Customized Water says, "You want to add minerals back into create flavor. Without minerals, there's no chemical reaction with coffee, tea or bread." Now here's where it gets tricky - if you happen to have soft water at home, the more economical choice may be bottled water, as adding mineral content back into water is pretty involved and expensive.

I've heard that the water is NYC (where our Mott Street and Lorimer Street stores are) is excellent, but the problem is that the pipes are old and dirty. That means they need a good filtration system to make sure that none of that dirt gets into brewing water - and brewing equipment. At home in NYC, you'd have to pay to get your water tested. The most economical way to go would be to purchase a Brita or Pur filter, which uses a carbon filter to remove the particulates.

Originally posted by Erin McCarthy from Gimme! Coffee News, on June 9, 2009 2:16 PM

Martin Wilson remarkably creates images of words and symbols using every frame in a roll of film sequentially. He explains his process:

My pictures are painstakingly created frame by frame on 35mm film. I get the whole film developed, scan it, then piece the final image together on the computer, making a large contact sheet. It’s only when the completed film strips are laid out side by side in the contact sheets that the final image appear.

Each work usually takes months to complete, as each frame is obsessively taken in sequence. No pasting together after the event, no cheating in Photoshop!
If I make a mistake or take a frame out of place I start the film again from the beginning.

Originally posted by Johnny from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on June 9, 2009 1:51 PM

So I was walking up 1st Avenue this afternoon…and OH MY GOD IT IS DISGUSTING OUT THERE. I don’t know what it’s like wherever you are, but here in New York the humidity sticks to you like a mouse sticks to a glue trap. This is a serious problem if you are, say, a particularly hirsute gentleman who refuses to wear shorts and is carrying too many extra pounds around with him. My back hair is soaked and mottled, and there’s a huge stain of sweat on the top of my pants from my overhanging gut. It made me think of all the terrible things that happen to people in the world, which made me reflective and sad, because no one suffers like I do. Anyway, seriously, it is gross outside. I am camping out in front of the A/C with a mess of bourbon and a tube of Pringles for the rest of the day.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on June 9, 2009 1:13 PM

-Photo by Getty Images-
Jessica Alba may have just gotten herself into some major trouble, after going on some sort of crusade in Oklahoma to save great white sharks.

According to TMZ.com, Wendell Whisenhunt, Oklahoma City's Director of Parks and Recreation, filed a police report against the actress after seeing photos of Jessica defacing electrical boxes, a bridge and a United Way billboard. She allegedly had glued shark posters all over them, as part of a campaign to save the great whites -- and now the posters won't come off.

Police say they plan to question Jessica about the incident. TMZ claims that Jess is a little nervous now, and that her rep has already called the United Way and offered to replace the billboard.

Jess wants to be such an activist. It's getting on my nerves.

Originally posted by Tracy Pepey from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on June 9, 2009 1:12 PM

Photo: Don Maxwell/Flickr

The rider went down -- Boom! -- just as she turned to see if the streetcar was getting close to her. Turning to look was her undoing, because her wheel got caught in the big gap between rail and street, toppling her hard. The big blue streetcar was only ten feet or so behind her, but luckily was slowing down and did not run her over. Scary though.

Shaken but apparently not badly hurt, the rider, a young woman in a light blouse and wearing a helmet, stood up to be greeted by the streetcar conductor, who offered not sympathy but angry hectoring. Didn’t she know that cyclists were not supposed to cycle in the streetcar lane?

Standing by and watching all this while preparing to board the streetcar in Seattle, I could only shake my head in sadness. We have such a hard time doing mass transit right in this country, particularly outside New York City. Seattle's shiny new streetcar “system” was essentially brand new, but its flaws were already readily apparent.

Let’s start with the tracks. Isn’t there some system possible that does not leave what looked like a three or four inch gap between the track and the street it is imbedded in? I’m sure loyal Streetblog readers will supply me with the make and model of something. I remember seeing that old footage from Barcelona that showed all those cyclists swerving this way and that in front of the streetcar, with apparently no fear of getting caught in the track gap. Can’t we do that today? It certainly doesn’t make sense to exclude cyclists from a whole lane of a street, one that could actually double as a bike lane if built correctly.

Then there are the other problems.

The streetcar line itself is only a little more than a mile long. (The website says the line is 2.6 miles, but I think they are counting both directions.) And it’s pretty expensive -- two dollars for what can be a very short ride. I boarded for what turned out to be only half a mile or so, in part because I’m still on a cane from my scooter accident. Otherwise I would have walked. No sooner had I boarded and paid my two dollars than we were there. I felt cheated. Minimal payment (or even no fare) would be better, which of course would require better government funding.

I feel guilty complaining about something that obviously took a lot of effort. The streetcars themselves are quite nice. I’m sure the organization is trying to do things well.

The central problem, as an official with a California transit agency recently told me, is that American cities and states tend to pursue transit in a fragmented and uncoordinated fashion. Different agencies representing different cities or states build different lines that often connect to each other badly, if at all. Imagine if highways were built as incoherently as rail systems. Somehow, the federal, state and local highway agencies manage to work with each other at least enough to have their projects connect.

Seattle has battled and warred over its transit systems. The city often supports transit in general but not in the particulars. Voters have approved a monorail system several times, only to see the transit establishment and political establishment help kill it. The city is nearing completion of an extensive light rail system, but it is one of the most expensive in the world. Downtown has this enormous bus tunnel -- the product of one compromise between various interests. And now there’s the tiny new streetcar system, which, to be fair, may expand and become much more comprehensive. You have to start somewhere. Maybe they will figure out a way to make it more compatible with biking, which certainly should be the friend and not the enemy.

Originally posted by Alex Marshall from Streetsblog New York City, on June 9, 2009 12:58 PM

Audio slideshow from designers Prem Krishnamurthy and Rob Giampietro explains the ideas behind the design of this sort of new magazine focusing on Jewish life. They’ve done a very nice job, but Tablet’s inadvertent similarities with various other online magazines, for instance The New Yorker, underscore how difficult it can be to create a distinctive online presentation for published content.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Subtraction.com, on June 9, 2009 11:46 AM

Shared by Dan Dickinson
Pretty much my thoughts exactly.

So you bought your heavily subsidised iPhone 3G with a two-year contract and now you are upset because AT&T wants to charge you full price for the new iPhone 3GS, right? Well, stop whining. You have no arguments.

I have the iPhone 3G—by the way, I paid an extra $500 deposit on top of the price tag because I didn't have US credit history back then—and I don't qualify for a subsidised upgrade. I have to finish my contract first, then renew to qualify for the subsidy. If I was in Spain or anywhere else in the world, it will be the same.

But I am not whining. Not because I am a fanboy—I hate AT&T with a passion—but because there are no logical arguments to support the whining.

Sure, it sucks to be me and pay almost-full price for the iPhone 3GS, but that's how life is. You don't get a reduced price on your new notebook just because you bought the old model a year ago. You don't get reduced price on cars, or anything else.

The fact is that the $199/$299 price tag for the iPhone is the result of AT&T's—or any other carrier, since the situation is the same all around the world—subsidy. Without subsidy—and tying you to a new two year contract—the iPhone is not different from something like the Nokia N97, which is $700 unlocked. Or the contract-free, unsubsidized iPhone 3G itself: The iPhone 3G costs $770 and $877 unlocked for the 8 and 16GB versions.

I hate to defend AT&T or any other carrier. I hate their guts. All of them. Their monthly fees are highway robbery, yes. Their roaming charges are unjustified and just outrageous. And while you—and I—may think that you are entitled to a discount because of those fees, that doesn't make much sense. I'm afraid that, this time, they are right. And on top of that, your carrier is actually giving you a discount already. Tiny, but compared to the full price of the unsubsidized iPhone, it's there.

You better get used to this too. These smart phones are really computers. And as applications get more and more complex—especially games—you will want to have the latest and fastest, whether is iPhone, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, or Blackberry. Just like you upgrade your notebook or desktop computer or video game console.

With all of those brands, the situation will be exactly the same. Without a subsidy, you will keep paying full price for these tiny and wonderful computers. All of them. And that price will stay at around $600 for a long time to come. It happened before, and it's not going to change.

In other words: Drive through, people. Nothing to see here. If you are not happy, get a Pre. And when Pre 2 appears, jump back to the iPhone. If you must have something new because your ADD has got you tired of last year technology, then get Android, Pre, or whatever. But don't expect any company to give you discounted hardware when the next generation of Smartypantsphone X comes.

Or better yet: Don't buy a new phone. Who cares about "new." Does your iPhone 3G work now? Yes? Then get the free iPhone OS 3.0 and enjoy the speed boost from optimization and the rest of the apps. In this economy, you will do yourself a favor.

In the meantime, do the rest of the world a favor and stop whining about what you are entitled to. We don't live in your pretty me me me ME world.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Gizmodo, on June 9, 2009 9:57 AM

Photograph from Foodistablog on Flickr

Food writer Michael Ruhlman has thrown down the gauntlet on his blog, where he's challenging readers to make a BLT from scratch. Don't worry, you don't have to raise the pig:

From scratch means you grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.

This sounds like a great idea. I think we're going to have to buy one of those upside-down tomato buckets and try growing some plants in the SE office window.

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on June 9, 2009 9:55 AM

Dave Eggers has a new book out soon called Zeitoun.

When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans, Abdulrahman Zeitoun, a prosperous 47-year-old Syrian-American and father of four, chose to stay through the storm to protect his house and contracting business. In the days after the storm, he traveled the flooded streets in a secondhand canoe, passing on supplies and helping those he could. A week later, on September 6, 2005, Zeitoun abruptly disappeared. Eggers's riveting nonfiction book, three years in the making, explores Zeitoun's roots in Syria, his marriage to Kathy -- an American who converted to Islam -- and their children, and the surreal atmosphere (in New Orleans and the United States generally) in which what happened to Abdulrahman Zeitoun was possible. Like What Is the What, Zeitoun was written in close collaboration with its subjects and involved vast research -- in this case, in the United States, Spain, and Syria.

The Rumpus has a long interview with Eggers about the book.

The book took about three years, and the Zeitouns were deeply involved in every step of the process. So we spent a lot of time together in New Orleans, and over the phone, and via email. And I was able to go to Syria and meet Abdulrahman's family there, and spent some time with his brother Ahmad, a ship captain in Spain. Ahmad was a wealth of information and is a meticulous record-keeper. I had to get to know the whole extended family, because Abdulrahman's life before New Orleans figures into the story, too. I had to go to Syria and see where he grew up, and visit the ancestral home of the family, on this island off the coast, Arwad Island.

Eggers also talks a little bit about the newspaper prototype that McSweeney's is doing this fall.

Tags: books  daveeggers  zeitoun

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 9, 2009 9:31 AM

Homemade, from scratch, is in the air.

Ruhlman announces his BLT from Scratch challenge:

From scratch means: You grow your tomato, you grow your lettuce, you cure your own bacon or pancetta, you bake your own bread (wild yeast preferred and gets higher marks but is not required), you make your own mayo. All other embellishments, creative interpretations of the BLT welcome.

And in the June 2009 Gourmet, a burger with homemade everything: homemade buns, ketchup, mustard, and pickle relish, with a burger made from ground skirt steak.

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on June 9, 2009 8:37 AM

Squarespace.com started in the dorm room of Anthony Casalena and has grown into a sizable company and a formidable service that serves the needs of tens of thousands of customers every day — including Mark Ecko and Kevin Rose. Squarespace allows its customers to create and manage their web sites using a polished interface without having to install software — it’s all done through the browser. Squarespace is defined by our insistence on software that provides an unparalleled user experience from a robust core. Every pixel of Squarespace’s software is engineered and animated to be flawless.

Members of the Squarespace team: (From left to right) Paolo DeDios, Erica Reitman, Dane Atkinson, Jonathan Snook, Anthony Casalena, Tyler Thompson, Davin Chew, Rolando Berrios.

Can you provide a background of projects where you’ve used YUI? What problems are you trying to solve for users?

Squarespace has two different audiences that have to be served in different ways. We have Squarespace customers who use the tools that we provide and we have the people who visit the sites that our customers create. YUI is used to drive a lot of the functionality that we provide to our customers and do that in a way that works reliably cross-browser. If we don’t provide a reliable in-browser experience, we’ll hear about it with support requests.

We also have YUI available for our customers to use on the sites that they build (although it’s never been a requirement). Our customers get to rely on a stable and reliable library for any of their own site-building needs.

You chose YUI’s JavaScript library to help drive the UI. What led you to make that choice?

At the time the decision was made, YUI was the best choice. YUI is a well-designed library that considered the requirements of multiple scenarios, not limiting itself to one or two use cases. It was also one of the few libraries that had an integrated and supported set of widgets.

Also, the fact that YUI is actively maintained and tested so extensively with the Yahoo! homepage is a massive win. No other library we looked at was receiving that sort of extensive testing and coverage. When we have run into speed issues, it’s turned out to be cross-browser issues unrelated to our use of YUI.

What YUI components are in use on which projects?

Of course the standard DOM and Event stuff along with Drag and Drop, Animation, and Connection Manager. On the widget side of things, we take advantage of Calendar, ColorPicker, and Slider.

Design and interface quality are huge differentiators for startups. What are the features you have prioritized in your interfaces and what have you build on top of YUI?

For Squarespace, design and interface quality is a big part of our success. We really work to create a polished in-browser experience so that customers can design and manage their sites all from one place.
We’re trying to replace desktop tools. The browser and YUI have allowed us to do that.

We pull in dynamic overlays allowing our customers to move content around, edit content on the spot, or add new content without requiring a page refresh. Squarespace also allows them to edit the look and feel of their sites dynamically. Change colours, images, or other CSS properties from the interface or have direct access to specify whatever CSS you want. It’s really quite flexible, and we’re very proud of how well it has been received.

What are the next interface challenges you are tackling for upcoming releases?

We have some great features that we’re working on right now that will increase the flexibility that our customers will have to modify their content and design right from the browser but the challenge with doing more stuff within the browser is ensuring that you’re creating a snappy and responsive interface. We definitely don’t want them to be sitting there while we load up large assets. We want them to be able to jump in and play with their sites as quickly and easily as possible.

We plan to stick with YUI and will be watching the progress of YUI 3 very closely to see how it’ll fit into our future plans.

Originally posted by Jenny Han Donnelly from Yahoo! User Interface Blog, on June 9, 2009 8:08 AM

Rocketboom Talent Search: If your self-esteem is down today, why don’t you try perusing Rocketboom’s Talent Search, where they are trying to find pick a new host. Hire her!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on June 9, 2009 7:54 AM

Apple had a brilliant, NYU-ITP-worthy display up at the Moscone Center (captured by TechCrunch): a grid of 20 Cinema Display monitors loaded with icons for iPhone apps available at the app store. The cool part: Every time an app was purchased, it pulsated on-screen, leading to a pebbles-dropped-in-water effect:

The new iPhone 3G S is on the way in a couple of weeks. The differences between this generation and the last are subtle and mostly internal: More RAM and storage, faster processor, better camera with video and touchscreen manual focus, voice control, digital compass neatly linked to map app.

As the blogosphere gets flooded with (mostly repetitive) iPhone news, these are the few bits we found of the most interest:

Cult of Mac theorizes on "Why Apple Stuck With the Same iPhone Hardware Design." (Short answer: They feel the ID teams are focusing all of their efforts on the rumored-to-be-forthcoming iTablet.)

TUAW pontificates on AT&T screwing loyal iPhone 3G users with high upgrade prices. This piece (and countless others like it) seems to be stirring up the most online vitriol; expect there to soon be a rash of "oh stop whining" backlash pieces.

Gizmodo reports on the (3G) $99 iPhone, which ought to lead to a wave of carrier conversions and some serious market dominance.

(more...)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Core77, on June 9, 2009 7:42 AM

Since I am getting very lightly raked over some very minor coals on the charges of SEXISM AGAINST LADIES here and there on the Internet (although not raked very hard because I am a man and men get treated 1000 times better than women on the Internet), because I called some lady “stupid” yesterday, I thought maybe I could make clear my official position on which major gender is totally better than the other major gender.

Once upon a time, there was a poster in the kitchen of one of the houses I grew up in that said something tortuously-worded about how feminism will have been achieved when women can be considered as big an asshole as men are and how you have to do twice the work for half the pay while you are hugging children with nuclear arms. Oh yes, I was part of the generation that never uttered the word “bitch” (and, semi-relatedly, never ate a Twinkie) until I was like an adult, because it was considered as bad as what they used to call “the n-word.” (I didn’t say the c-word until I was like 21 or something! It was such a forbidden thrill when I first did it, too.)

So I grew up believing that women are so clearly demonstrably better, overall, than men; and I haven’t found much if any evidence to the contrary yet. (This makes being a dude who dates dudes REALLY DIFFICULT sometimes, though that is a story for another day.)

And all this is why when I meet stupid bitches, which I do with some regularity, I hold them to a higher standard. (And, uh oh, I think I sound like Lizz Winstead right now! Except unlike Lizz Winstead, I like sluts. And bitches. But not stupid sluts. Or stupid bitches.) But it’s like when priests molest children. Priests should be the last people molesting children! It’s extra-gross! And yet apparently they do it constantly. Similarly, shocking or dim lady behaviors are twice as shocking.

This may just mean, yes, that I have low expectations of men, believing as I do that essentially they are all rapists and sex harassers and probably for the most part dim and bad at communicating, which, when you hang out alone with straight men, you women might not be surprised to find out, you learn that they basically all are! Seriously, when you go out with a bunch of guys, and there are no women around, like Eddie Murphy on the white people bus, literally they will start talking about “pussy.” I AM NOT JOKING. I have been out to lunch with bosses or other professional people, and they have told me about how they are getting laid, and which lady gives the best head in Manhattan (I AM QUOTING HERE.)* Um, yes, quite unsolicited! Maybe I just have one of those faces? Where people want to express their sexism to me? That seems unlikely; instead, I suspect it is rampant. (Also I don’t think straight men could possibly be good judges of what makes for good fellatio, but that is ALSO another story for another time, and, also, as with other complicated concepts, it’s hard to explain that to men.)

Anyhoo. Does that clear things up? Feminism won. Now we get to recognize that stupid bitches are stupid bitches.

*For your information, none of these men were my co-worker Alex Balk.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 9, 2009 7:39 AM

If you’re not already on our mailing list, go here and get on.

Originally posted by Andy Cruz from House Industries Show and Tell, on June 9, 2009 7:25 AM

Matt Jones on products-to-services and services-to-products: "Every thing that participates radiates infrastructure and service. Designing from the start so that as a far as possible, every thing in the system radiates infrastructure and service to every other thing."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on June 9, 2009 7:17 AM

Currently enjoying: Wordnik, the new website devoted to providing “as much information as possible, just as fast as we can find it, for every word in English, and to give you a place where you can make your own opinions about words known.” Obviously it needs a few tweaks yet, and some parts are more functional and successful than others, but I’ve definitely lost a couple of hours playing around with it. Why not start here and see what you think?

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on June 9, 2009 6:54 AM

He's Reading Infinite Jest: As JJ Abrams recently pointed out in Wired, it’s easy to forget that J. D. Salinger is still alive. The nonagenarian (that’s 90!) popped up in the news last week when he filed a lawsuit against some moron writing a “follow-up” book called 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye (“moron” because he’s doing it; I suspect it might actually be legal). Anyway, Rosenbaum at Slate runs through the conspiracy theories about just what the hell J.D. has been up to all these years. He hasn’t published a story since 1965, in The New Yorker.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on June 9, 2009 6:54 AM

A tipster reports and a call to the restaurant confirms that Momofuku Ssam Bar and Momofuku Milk Bar were closed yesterday and will remain closed until 5 p.m. today due to a confirmed case of Hepatitis A. We await the official press release from the restaurant and further information from the Department of Health, but reps tell us that they closed the restaurant and have been working to get every single employee tested and vaccinated after a worker came back from the hospital with a positive case.

They tell us that although it is DOH policy to wait a week to take any action, the restaurant wanted to make sure all possible steps were taken. Once every employee is vaccinated, whether they contracted the virus or not, they've been told it will be safe to reopen the restaurant tonight. And, if no one else on the 60-person staff tests positive, it's likely that no one at Ssam was at risk.

However, and this is a big however, Hep A is transferable (though non-fatal), and the small risk remains that previous customers could have contracted the virus during this worker's incubation period. Team Momo has sent the worker's schedule to the DOH, which will decide determine who, if anyone, was at risk, how to make the info available to the public, and if need be, whether or not to give out vaccinations (as they did with the Socialista scare). For more info on Hep A, the CDC's fact sheet.
DEVELOPING
· All Momofuku Coverage [~E~]
· DICEY: Hepatitis A Scare at Socialista [~E~]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on June 9, 2009 6:39 AM

Via TechCrunch

View more Microsoft Word documents from vcobserver.

Originally posted by Andrew Anker from compart.mentalize, on June 9, 2009 6:31 AM

As a blogger I bring my computer with me to many many places and with that I have to put my computer in a laptop sleeve in order to protect it.   Which is why I was so excited to pick RumahKampung’s Kara Recycled Laptop Sleeve as my Etsy Pick of the Day

The sleeve comes from various parts of a woolen jacket and its lower pocket making for a beautiful, sturdy and eco-friendly way to carry ones laptop.

RumahKampung also has other recycled items in the store, including The Recycled Suits TOTE, The Recycled Suits iPod/iPhone/iTouch Cozy, The Recycled Suits LARGE TOTE and The Organised Cable Cozy (how awesome to have a recycled way to keep ones cords together!?)

Originally posted by blair@takepart.com from TakePart Social Action Network™, on June 9, 2009 6:09 AM

The AP runs a story about the world's obsession with where the Obama's are eating, noting a little known pizza place now has two hour waits after a presidential visit. And of course, more on Blue Hill date night: "'Everyone gave them space and was too cool to bother them,' says Marion Nestle...'When they got up, the whole place broke out into spontaneous applause," says Eva Fleischer..." Of course they ate an "off-the-menu feast." [AP]

Originally posted by Amanda from Eater, on June 9, 2009 4:57 AM

"On Saturday, June 6th in Chicago, local artists partnered with the Tamms Year Ten coalition to protest state-sanctioned torture at the supermax prison in Southern Illinois. And they did it with mud.

Jesse Graves, a Milwaukee artist, developed the technique and on Saturday more than 30 volunteers stenciled the message “End Torture in Illinois” on walls and sidewalks around the city, offering fact-sheets about TAMMS supermax prison to curious pedestrians.

City governments and law enforcement agencies have little precedence in dealing with mud stencils so there is a gray area on whether it is legal or not. For if it is illegal, is it also illegal for kids to write with chalk on the sidewalk? Is it illegal to build a snowman in a park or for dirt from ones garden to touch the sidewalk? And, is it illegal to stencil with mud when the rain will wash it off?

That said, none of the 30 volunteers who mud stenciled on June 6th in Chicago were arrested or even questioned by the police."

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Wooster Collective, on June 9, 2009 4:55 AM

On one hand, this is clever:

We offer a wide array of corrupted Word files that are guaranteed not to open on a Mac or PC. A corrupted file is a file that contains scrambled and unrecoverable data due to hardware or software failure. Files may become corrupted when something goes wrong while a file is being saved e.g. the program saving the file might crash. Files may also become corrupted when being sent via email. The perfect excuse to buy you that extra time!

This download includes a 2, 5, 10, 20, 30 and 40 page corrupted Word file. Use the appropriate file size to match each assignment. Who's to say your 10 page paper didn't get corrupted? Exactly! No one can! Its the perfect excuse to buy yourself extra time and not hand in a garbage paper.

Only $3.95. Cheap. Although for added verisimilitude, they should have an additional service where you send them a file -- a draft of your paper, for example -- and they corrupt it and send it back.

But on the other hand, it's services like these that will force professors to treat corrupted attachments as work not yet turned in, and harm innocent homework submitters.

Originally posted by schneier from Schneier on Security, on June 9, 2009 3:46 AM

Another entry in the “For Guys Only” file. (This is a real candy i saw for sale at Marlow)

[Update] Since I’ve posted this, I’ve googled this candy bar. It sounds like Nestle is really trying to pioneer some exclusionary candy marketing with this bar:

‘The original concept was to market this as a man’s chocolate bar, due to its size and volume. The tag line in the ad was “men don’t have much to claim for themselves anymore” and the candy is “too big for a woman to handle.’

“In 2006 a special edition that was for girls was sold, wrapped in pink.”

“Special versions for use in Ministry of Defence ration packs read ‘It’s not for civvies’.”

The ad company wanted to “own the gender debate”. They had street teams that would only give the bars to men.

Not to endorse this whole idea, but like…if you were going to sell a candy bar thats SPECIALLY FOR MEN, don’t you think you would like, not name it after a tiny little cute yapper of a dog? I mean, look at this little fella. I’d call it like the “THE BULLOCK’S BOLLOCKS” or “THE COXSWAIN” or something.

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on June 9, 2009 3:37 AM

Under construction architecture studio. Its like architects are setting themselves up for their own Sokal Affair. Also, beautiful concrete work. Not.

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on June 9, 2009 3:22 AM

Time to trade in that Gatorade for a Heineken. Amazingly, researchers have found that beer actually hydrates the body better than water after a tough workout. Will someone please award the Nobel Prize to these courageous scientists immediately?

As reported in the current issue of Science magazine, researchers at Granada University in Spain tested 25 students who ran on a treadmill at a high temperature until they were exhausted. After the workout, half the subjects drank water while the other half were given two pints of lager.

Lo and behold, the researchers found that the beer drinkers had “slightly better” hydration, motor skills and ability to concentrate. The scientists speculate that the sugar, salt and bubbles found in beer help the body to absorb fluids. Beer’s carbohydrates also replenish the calories you’ve burned off.

So crack open a cold one and toast this wonderful piece of news.

photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar

Beer Hydrates Better Than Water (Really!)

Related posts:

1. Coffee Could Help Ease Muscle Pain from Workouts
2. It’s Time for Beer Shampoo!
3. Love at First Sight Takes Just 8.2 Seconds

Originally posted by James from Just A Guy Thing, on June 9, 2009 2:35 AM

To call out just one change, note that Snow Leopard now defaults to the same display gamma as Windows — 2.2 instead of 1.8

Thank the fucking lord.

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on June 9, 2009 2:04 AM

Hunch, a new website co-founded by former Flickrista Caterina Fake, is a flowchartlike tool designed to help you come to a decision after asking you a series of questions. Hunch is in beta now, but you can sign up for an invitation to check it out. The first thing I did once I got my account (my invitation arrived within a day) was check out the food-related topics on the site (after the jump).

Those topics range from the truly useful (Is it OK to send my food back? and Which artisan food producer would I like?) to the wacky (Is this really food or just an edible substance? and Which weird & creepy food might I like?).

As more people use the tool and give feedback, it's supposed to become more accurate. While a mobile version would be helpful (the "sending food back" topic is one that is best answered in the field), it looks like the creators are concentrating their resources on the site itself for now.

Any vexing questions you would ask Hunch? [via Michele]

Originally posted by Adam Kuban from Serious Eats, on June 9, 2009 2:00 AM

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on June 9, 2009 1:56 AM

OK, in July 2005 New York Times architecture critic Nicolai Ouroussoff enthused that Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards plan "may be the most important urban development plan proposed in New York City in decades." (I thought he missed a few things.)In June 2006, he wrote a more pensive if hardly tough assessment of the project,In March 2008, he wrote something of an elegy, urging Gehry to leave the

Originally posted by Norman Oder from Atlantic Yards Report, on June 8, 2009 10:15 PM

I can't think of a much better card to choose for Card of the Week when the Pirates

are playing the Braves.

Larry's holding his 1981 Fleer card in the photo for his 1984 Fleer card. And it's autographed as well! This does lead me to a serious question... Do I now need one more card to complete my 1984 Fleer Team set? What about my 1981 Fleer team set? Fleer really opened up a can of worms with this card.

Originally posted by dayf from Cardboard Junkie, on June 8, 2009 5:57 PM

ZFS never existed. These aren't the filesystems you're looking for. Move along. Noooo...

Originally posted by Wes Felter from Hack the Planet, on June 8, 2009 5:56 PM

Reich: How hard will Obama push back against the opponents of health care reform?

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 8, 2009 4:41 PM

Rickshaw Dumpling Truck at 86St, could be a lovely but not cheap post or pre Yankees eat, assuming they come back

Originally posted by Sara Pepitone from Scoreboard Gourmet, on June 8, 2009 3:16 PM

fish story by Jean-Francois Chenier, flickr Creative Commons

Many of us spent countless summer hours frolicking at the sandy shores of our local beach. Perhaps you have memories of loading into your family car, weighted down with beach chairs, umbrellas and rafts stacked high to the sky for countless hours of relaxation, sand-castle building and exploration at the beach.   I was born a fish out of water and despite a couple of hairy escapades with seemingly gigantic waves, I eagerly enjoyed being in the ocean from dawn to dusk.

Unfortunately, my picturesque childhood memories of oceans are perhaps a bit unrealistic. Living in Southern California, I’ve had the fortune of glorious early morning ocean swims with dolphins and seals.  While out on these long swims, I’m less worried about marine life lurking below the surface and more concerned with more serious threats to our oceans.

Our oceans have become our toilets, our landfills and our grocery stores. The toxins, garbage and other pollutants in our oceans are more imminent and realistic threats than sharks. It’s sad but true that we dump countless millions of pounds of trash and sewage into the seemingly endless deep blue, without acknowledging the serious environmental consequences of our actions. In fact, this summer you might be more apt to wade through countless plastic bags and other pieces of trash than a school of fish. And, in a seemingly contradictory practice, we mine the depths of our polluted oceans for food.

We’re fishing and consuming unsustainable amounts of seafood using irresponsible practices. Much of the fish are caught using miles of metal chain nets that scoop up everything in their path, including marine mammals, turtles, coral and endangered fish.  Bottom trawling is the mountain-top mining removal of our oceans, destroying everything in its path to feed our palates and economies. Because of our behaviors, the United Nations reports that 70% of the world’s fisheries are fully exploited, over-exploited or deleted, which means that they if we continue with current unsustainable fishing quotas, we will be at the point of no return for many species. Tuna, commonly found in both the lacquer bento-boxes of high end restaurants and the generic plastic sushi trays in the refrigerator section at your local supermarket, is on the brink of no return.  It’s hard for many people, kids and adults alike to imagine life without tuna salad, tuna sashimi or tuna tartare but it’s a real possibility.

We’ve created the mess we’re in.  We have the answers to clean up our oceans and return fish stocks to healthy, sustainable numbers.  You can learn more about over-fishing and sustainable seafood choices with Monterey Bay Aquarium’s Seafood Guide. These handy guides fold neatly into wallet size cards for you to carry around or you can go paper-less with the phone application.  When you’re out at your favorite restaurant, make sure you tell them that you prefer they serve only sustainable fish with the aquarium’s friendly leave-behind cards. Anything else is unappetizing.

I look forward to a day when  I’m swimming with schools of fish rather than schools of garbage. It’s a realistic vision but one that requires all of us to be sensitive to our food choices and consumer habits.  A world without fish is rather sad; let’s brighten up World Oceans Day today by doing our part to protect our seas.

Originally posted by blair@takepart.com from TakePart Social Action Network™, on June 8, 2009 2:19 PM

Today, Erin McKean realized the idea behind her 2007 TEDTalk with the launch of Wordnik.com, a dictionary that evolves as language does. On Wordnik, users can add new words and meanings, tag words with related expressions, see real-time search results for words from Twitter and Flickr, discover how many Scrabble points each word is worth -- all on one page.

Here's what it looks like when we search the word "blog":

To further understand this amazing project and its implications, the TEDBlog talked with Erin this afternoon. In the middle of a hectic launch day, she gave the following excited interview:

We love Wordnik here at the TED office. Some of us may have spent the majority of the morning playing with it.

That’s great! We’ve been joking that we’d like to be so addictive that IP managers ban us.

So, how long has this been in the making? You talked about a similar concept in your TEDTalk from 2007, but when did it start concretely?

We consider Leap Day of 2008 our real start date. It was almost a year after the TEDTalk that we got together the money and the team.

We’ve heard that Wordnik.com may have had its beginnings at TED? Can you confirm this rumor?

Yes, yes! It was after the talk at TED that Roger McNamee said, “Let’s have lunch.” I had lunch with him and his wife Ann. We started with the idea that we could use language analysis techniques to help other companies. But as we were discussing it, we realized that it wouldn’t be all that different to start this as a stand-alone being.

Then Roger brought in Steve Anderson of Baseline Ventures. Steve gave a lot of advice on the practical end, which was great, because my career as a dictionary editor did not completely prepare me for my new role as a start-up CEO. I found Grant Barrett and Orion Montoya who I worked with at Oxford University Press. Steve and Roger then found Tony Tam, who became our head of engineering. And that was the beginning of our staff.

Without TED this would not have happened. There’s zero chance that I would have met Roger McNamee, and even less of a chance that I would have had 20 minutes to speak at him. The TED video was also a great recruiting tool because when I needed to explain my idea I could just email the link. You know, for when people ask, “Who’s Erin? What does she want to do?” I could just direct them to the talk.

Everyone at TED has been so helpful. Tom Rielly has given me so much support. And I had a conversation with June (Cohen) this morning where she offered to add the transcripts for the TEDTalks to our text examples. So when you look up a word like “synecdochically,” which I mention in my talk and probably isn’t found in many other places, there will be a reference. And, because the transcripts link to the actual video, people can hear the words for which we didn’t have a link to the pronunciation.

That’s another thing about this system -- people who are contributing don’t even know they are. If you tweet a word, we’ll link to your tweet on Wordnik, so you don’t even have to go out of your way.

We love that you included Twitter and Flickr elements. How did you decide on pulling these in? It doesn’t seem to be an immediately intuitive decision, but is so helpful to understanding a word’s use and meaning.

It’s funny because it’s completely intuitive to dictionary editors. How can we show how a word is really used? The other day I tried to find out if “pants” was being used as a suffix and I found a tweet for “awesomepants.” Twitter is like overhearing people’s conversations, which is exactly what dictionary editors have been wishing we could do for years.

Flickr -- well, if you’ve looked at dictionary illustrations you know that they tend to be uninteresting, and so small. With Flickr, you get a lot of abstractions too. What dictionary would have pictures of “honor”? When you look “honor” up on Wordnik, you get pictures of women named Honor, which tells you that it’s also used as a proper noun. You also get images of flags and different symbols of the military. Now you can see what feelings words evoke.

READ MORE: Erin McKean on sourcing text examples, swine flu tags and coming to your own conclusions on words

Interesting. We were also wondering what the source was for the text examples of words ...

Right now the majority are from the Gutenberg e-text -- these are books that all out of copyright. But we’re working with partners on getting bigger feeds. We’re not really worried. There’s a 400-year-old tradition of example sentences in dictionaries being treated as fair use. Also, if we use somebody’s work and they’re not happy, they can call us and we’ll take them out of the history of the English language.

What words are you looking forward to people adding?

I’m really looking forward to seeing Twitter used to invent new words. I’m more interested in seeing how people deepen and expand the network of words than seeing any words in particular. I really can’t wait to see what will happen with the tagging function. Already, if you look up the swine flu tag, you find words like “aporkalypse” and “hamdemic.” You would never find these in a regular dictionary! We’re trying to make the ephemeral more permanent. And, again, it’s less about the individual word and really about expanding how words are connected. After all, we don’t speak in one-word exchanges.

As a last question, I’d like to ask how you came to your theory on words -- that, as a dictionary editor, you would rather be someone who gathers all words than someone who keeps “bad” words out of the dictionary?

I guess I was thinking about it as a lapse in critical thinking. Brilliant people would come to me and say, “Is this right, or this?” And then I’d give them the evidence on both sides and say, “Now, make up your own mind.” And they’d say, “No, I want the answer.”

Now, these were people who would never consider doing this in any other area of life. For anything else, they would use the evidence to come to their own conclusions. These were people who probably wouldn’t take my recommendation on a restaurant. But in this respect, they were willing to accept whatever answer I gave them. Instead of this, we want to give everybody access to the words, to make up their own minds.

Also, whether words are right or wrong can vary according to use. I might say to a friend , “That movie was awesomepants!” But I would not lead into a movie review in The New York Times with the word awesomepants. That would be inappropriate. People expect that one size fits all with words, when that doesn’t work in any other area of their lives. I hope that we can change that view.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from TED Blog, on June 8, 2009 2:14 PM

Filed under: OS, Software Update, Apple, Snow Leopard

For the ultra low price of $29 (for existing Leopard users), Apple gave a deeper look into the upcoming Snow Leopard release -- slated for some time in September.

"We've built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of Software Engineering. "Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before."

Here's more highlights of the Snow Leopard release...

Continue reading Snow Leopard is out of the bag

TUAWSnow Leopard is out of the bag originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Megan Lavey from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on June 8, 2009 1:45 PM

Shared by Eve
"I thought all the obtrusive Apple product placement was hilarious, and I spent much of the movie expecting them to give the button to John Hodgman."

Usually the problem with horror movie trailers is that they give too much away. The advertising for Drag Me to Hell (which is here but I don’t recommend watching it until after you’ve seen the movie) was particularly bad, because it both gives too much away and doesn’t tell you anything you need to know about the movie.

Except for “From the director of [...] the Evil Dead trilogy.” Because Drag Me to Hell is fully, gloriously, 100% a Sam Raimi movie. You wouldn’t know from the 15-second version of the trailer, which makes it look like another bland, uninspired summer horror movie franchise or remake, with a big name tangentially attached. That’s what I’d assumed it was, until the reviews started coming in describing it as a horror comedy and pointing out how funny it was.

“Well, duh,” you may be saying, “it’s Sam Raimi.” But when was the last time one of Raimi’s movies didn’t feel like something of a compromise? There are familiar flashes of brilliance — the hospital scene with Doc Ock in Spider-Man 2, Peter Parker’s hilariously goofy “emo evil” transformation in Spider-Man 3, some terrific transition shots in the beginning of Darkman — and a few movies that are fine but feel as if they’re made by someone else, like A Simple Plan. But I’ve never gotten the sense that he’s been free to make exactly the movie that’s in his head. The movie that you can kind of sense is waiting to be made next while you’re watching Evil Dead 2.

Whether it’s actually the case or not, I don’t know, but Drag Me to Hell feels like that movie. Completely free of Hollywood interference, and also free of budgetary constraints and the limitations of early 90s make-up and CGI. The movie effortlessly jumps around from horror to action to comedy to gore to slapstick and back again, often in the same scene, and with never any sense that any part of it is suffering. These things shouldn’t work well together, but they do. It shouldn’t be possible to be scared and laughing out loud and grossed out and tense at the same time, but this movie does that over and over again. Even the Evil Dead movies don’t do it as well as this one: you never really care what happens to Ash as a character, and once a scene devolves completely into slapstick, it’s still entertaining but no longer at all tense or scary. But Drag Me to Hell is the first movie I’ve seen in a long time where I really didn’t know what was going to happen next: it establishes pretty quickly that all bets are off, and you keep thinking, Sure, I’m laughing now. But I might not be 20 seconds from now.

Spoilers follow, in case you want to go in knowing absolutely nothing about the movie:

I kept thinking it must’ve been a blast to come up with some of the sequences. The attack in the car was pure genius, and it was like hitting the top of a roller coaster’s lift hill and plunging down into the rest of the ride. But most of the scenes seemed to take the formula: what’s the worst possible thing that could happen in this situation? And now, what’s even worse than that? How do you go over “over the top?” I kept thinking I’d love to see how Raimi would’ve handled the recent CBS sitcom “Worst Week,” since several scenes felt like they started with the same premise but were then given the freedom to go completely off the rails.

The other (more pretentious) observation is that I get a real sense Sam Raimi doesn’t think in terms of genres, but just “pure movie.” Like how they say you’re never truly fluent in a foreign language until you’re no longer translating back and forth into your native language. Because showing a woman having to meet her boyfriend’s uptight and disapproving parents has the same tension as showing a woman being stalked by an evil home-invading spirit. And ending a scene with an old woman vomiting maggots isn’t really all that different from delivering the punchline to a joke. I can imagine any number of “dark” comedians writing a scene where an outsider accidentally knocks over the coffin at a wake, but it takes real genius to realize the natural conclusion of that slapstick: having the corpse fall out and vomit embalming fluid directly into someone’s mouth. When you’ve seen so many scenes that artfully and gleefully jump across boundaries, you just take it in stride when the whole thing briefly turns into a ghost story, complete with CG evil goat speaking in a human voice. And there’s no sense of Are other people going to get this? You can’t not get it.

And major spoiler territory, in case you’ve made it this far:

I thought all the obtrusive Apple product placement was hilarious, and I spent much of the movie expecting them to give the button to John Hodgman. I did predict the “obvious” ending to the movie (giving the button to evil bank guy) as soon as they mentioned that you could give it away. I’m glad they acknowledged that but didn’t stick with it, as satisfying as it would’ve been. Because the story as it is kept it in the realm of classic urban legends-style horror: a sequence of really horrible things happening to a basically good person. We like to think that we all prefer stories where everybody ends up getting the outcome they deserve, but the genuinely memorable and haunting horror stories are the ones that leave you thinking, “That could so easily have been me, but thank God it wasn’t.” And of course, they slam the last title card at you immediately to remind you not to take it too seriously: it’s just a fun horror movie.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spectre Collie, on June 8, 2009 1:32 PM

I just heard that the SF Giants and A's are doing "bring your own food days." I'm not sure how that's different from other days. I'll be back.

Originally posted by Sara Pepitone from Scoreboard Gourmet, on June 8, 2009 1:26 PM

Our Mustache Great #8, Bobby Valentine, recounts the famous fake mustache incident from 1999. Watch the video below. This is classic Valentine. This is why he edges out Wally Backman atop our Mets Managerial Wish List.

Originally posted by nick from Mandatory Mustache, on June 8, 2009 1:23 PM

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Hardware, Macbook Pro, MacBook

Once again, Gruber called it (aside, I wish I had his sources); the naming distinctions between the unibody 13" MacBook and the 15" MacBook Pro are now gone: say hello to the 13" MacBook Pro. Complete with a lower price (starts at $1199 and goes to $1499 in stock configurations), and more features (SD card slot, FireWire 800, 7-hour battery), the 13" MacBook Pro will likely continue to be Apple's best selling laptop.

This is an interesting reversal of branding. When the unibody MacBooks were released last fall, they appeared nearly identical to the larger, "Pro" labeled companion. The two big differences (aside from screen size) were the video card configurations (integrated for the MacBook, as opposed to integrated and discrete in the MBP) and the lack of a FireWire on the "amateur" edition. Many of us speculated that the removal of FireWire was done primarily to distinguish between the two lines and try to move consumers up to a pricier model.

There was a lively debate in the posts about FireWire's exodus from the unibody MacBook about what constitutes a "pro" machine from something that shares the same design but is smaller in size. Without rehashing the whole debate, it pretty much mirrored those "my dad is richer than your dad" fights that always seemed to break out at high school parties in my district. In my experience, when arguments essentially become "you're only a pro if the label says so," the real-world distinction is gone.

Continue reading Re-defining "Pro": The 13" MacBook Pro

TUAWRe-defining "Pro": The 13" MacBook Pro originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 08 Jun 2009 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Originally posted by Christina Warren from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on June 8, 2009 1:00 PM

New York’s coffee explosion has been noticed as far away as Australia.  La Colombe, Jack’s, Joe, Think, Gimme, Abraco, and 71 Irving all got shoutouts in The Sydney Morning Herald yesterday.  They should have emailed me.  I could have doubled their list pretty quickly.   Check out the article below to read the accompanying reviews.

New York’s best coffee and cafes: baristas worth every bean.

Posted in cafes, coffee, espresso, NYC Tagged: 71 irving, abraco, brewing, cafe, coffee, espresso, jacks, joe, la colombe, NYC, think

Originally posted by Mike White from ShotZombies, on June 8, 2009 12:52 PM

The High Line is Open!. After 10 years of lobbying, fundraising, design and development, the first phase of the High Line is now officially open to the public. The High Line is an elevated railway along the west side of Manhattan being converted into a unique public park. I’ve written about the role of design in their advocacy work here and here.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Social Design Notes, on June 8, 2009 12:04 PM

11:41: Nelson bricks both freebies, followed by a great "What the eff was that?" face from Hedo Turkoglu. Hedo might have the best "What the eff was that?" face in sports right now. And really, that's the only time you will ever see the words "best" and "face" in the same sentence as "Hedo."

- ESPN's Bill Simmons on Game Two of the NBA Finals.  Simmons also had some interesting things to say after Hedo's sweet block on Kobe at the end of regulation:

Important note: Kobe's reputation as a "killer" at the end of games remains overblown. The site www.82games.com just posted a study of game-winning shots from the last five-plus seasons (regular seasons and playoffs since the 2003-04 season) that revealed Kobe was shooting 14-for-56 (25 percent) with one assist and five turnovers, and made 12 of 15 free throws. So let's say that was 70 possessions total, including Sunday night ... he only had one assist in nearly six years??? That's why Orlando quadruple-teamed him in that spot. Kobe is a phenomenal streak shooter, and he has a real talent for catching fire with a lead and closing games out ... but you can stop him in one-shot situations simply because he's his own worst enemy. He wants to be a hero, he's shooting it, and that's that.

0:00.6: Funniest moment of the game: Kobe storms back to the bench, whacks the chair in disgust and sits down as Phil Jackson (already sitting) looks at him with a bemused, "Should I point out to him that MJ absolutely would have passed there?" smile on his face. Classic.

Originally posted by Valarie Smith from Crazed Teacups, on June 8, 2009 11:58 AM

“The West Village townhouse at 555 Hudson Street where the late Jane Jacobs wrote her iconic The Death and Life of Great American Cities nearly 50 years ago is now on the market through Prudential Douglas Elliman, offering spacious rooms and a rich history for a bargain price: $3.5 million.”

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 8, 2009 11:47 AM

The High Line, New York City’s newest and thinnest park, has opened, with its lord and lady leading the way. More pictures here and here.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 8, 2009 11:27 AM

(via otis archives)

Originally posted by ry from Modcult, on June 8, 2009 11:24 AM

Last week, Randy Johnson won the 300th game of his career.

In a report for Baseball Prospectus, Joe Sheehan lists Oliver Perez among six players who, if everything goes according to plan, could eventually win 300 games.

…i hope for the best for perez, and wish him the best of luck, and would love nothing more than to see him win 300 games, especially for the Mets… but, i feel pretty confident saying it will never happen… i mean, i’d say he has a slightly better chance of winning 300 games than i do, and i have no chance…

According to Sheehan, the 27-year-old Perez is not much different from the 27-year-old Randy Johnson, in that both pitchers struggled with control, while having an ‘electric arm.’

…this may be true, and i too see the similarities, but johnson may be the greatest left-handed pitcher of his generation… and perez’s biggest problem isn’t his talent, it’s his inability to focus and think through adjustments from batter to batter…

Through his first 180 games, Perez has 56 wins, 1,047 strike outs and a 4.50 ERA, while Johnson had won 81 games, had 1,330 strike outs and a 3.70 ERA.

Perez is still sidelined in St. Lucie, as he works to rehab from tendinitis in his knee.

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on June 8, 2009 11:13 AM

It defies any sensible economic policy that any of us ever learned through college.

- Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, on the federal government's Keynesian spending plans. In 1987, Mrs Palin graduated from the University of Idaho—the fifth college she attended—with a degree in journalism.

Originally posted by Economist.com l WASHINGTON from Democracy in America, on June 8, 2009 10:54 AM

This week's installment of summer reading suggestions. Click the link in the right sidebar for the entire list.

For Adults:
NPR: Celebrating Summer By Opening The Books
NPR: Books Reveal Theater's Behind-The-Scenes Secrets
NYT: Summer Cookbooks
NYT: Gardening Books
NYT: Travel Books
NYT: Visuals: Cover to Cover
NY Magazine: What to read this summer
NYT Magazine: A Summer Reading List for Parents
Boston Herald: Hub notables share their summer reading picks
What's On Your Summer Reading List? Lists of children's and young adult authors and illustrators
Salon: Summer reading: Killer thrillers
Salon: Authors recommend great summer reading Neil Gaiman and others, although the recs are annoyingly in video, not text
Salon: Chick lit
Salon: True confessions
Finding pleasure in summer reading with fiction, fun Corvallis booksellers' recommendations
Musical Cheers A music-themed summer reading list
Superstar librarian Nancy Pearl's 2009 Summer reading list
Lake County News-Sun: Summer reading preview
Early Summer Cocktail Book Reading List books about bartending
Bill O'Reilly: More summer reading choices
Cal State San Marcos' Creative Writing Community: Summer reading list
Amazon: Summer Reading List
AskMen: Top 5: 2009 Summer Reading Picks For Guys
Charlie Gibson's Summer Reading Recommendations
Cleveland Plain Dealer: Summer books: Paperbooks for sizzling, mesmerizing reading
Relevant: Summer Reading Guide
USA Today: 2009 Summer Books
Ottawa Citizen: Great summer reading Alice Munro goes kinky, Canada's youngest multiple killer, and much more
Daily Herald: Summer reading: Feeds your soul, sparks a laugh, or maybe tears
Pittsburgh Post Gazette: Hot summer of reading
U.S. Army Center of Military History Recommended Professional Reading List
QSR: Summer Reading List suggestions for restaurant operators
The New Criterion: Summer reading
Zenpundit: Summer Reading List
Examiner: Summer reading
OMG Girl: Summer reading list
Between Two Worlds: Mohler's Summer Reading Recommendations
Apologetics 315: 3 Apologetics Books for Summer Reading
Oncofertility Consortium: Summer Reading List: Global Perspectives on Reproduction

For Children and Young adults:
Examiner: Baltimore County summer reading lists for high schoolers
The Herald Bulletin: At the Library: Summer reading for children
Florida Department of Education Summer Reading List for Families
Tri-Cities Prep: High School Summer Reading List

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Rebecca's Pocket, on June 8, 2009 10:29 AM

youngmanhattanite:

See, this is my peeve in using “I” without saying who you are on YM. Only one person gets to do that - ME. This example is perfect because my issue is not just about talking shit. I really don’t know who has this Dock Ellis obsession. I only know that *I* don’t. I did enjoy the link though.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on June 8, 2009 10:13 AM

On a Sunday afternoon, lounging around my apartment watching "Terms of Endearment" on HBO, inspiration suddenly strikes and I am compelled to make ginger ale from scratch.

It would take a team of behavior specialists and Debra Winger fans to analyze this phenomenon, but suffice it to say: I was hot and I had ginger. I recalled a recipe for homemade Ginger Ale in Jean-George's book "Cooking At Home with a Four-Star Chef", so I tore myself away from Aurora Greenway and studied the recipe.

The recipe is pretty specific: it calls for one pound of fresh ginger, two stalks of lemongrass, and two small fresh chiles ("stems removed.") I didn't have much of that: I just had a big knob of ginger leftover from something gingery.

There are two types of cooks in this world: those who won't do a recipe unless they have everything the recipe calls for, down to the smallest detail (a pinch of salt measured by approximating the cookbook author's finger size and pinch-grasp) and those who use a recipe as a launching pad, throwing things together willy-nilly* and hoping for the best.

[* Note: This is the first time I've used the phrase "willy-nilly" on this blog and I wanted to point that out. Thank you!]

I used to be in the former category, a recipe purist, until I saw Julia Child say on TV that "anyone who doesn't do a recipe because they're missing an ingredient or two, will never be a cook." The more and more I get into cooking, the more I realize that Julia's right. And such was the case with this ginger ale.

For example, in the recipe proper, it tells you to chop the ginger (skin-on), the lemongrass and the chiles and then puree them in a food processor. My food processor hasn't been working lately, so I just grated the ginger into a little pot and when i got tired of grating, I chopped up the rest. I took one dried red chile and crumbled it in:

I added about 2 cups of water (maybe a little less), 1/2 cup of sugar, and put it on the boil. When it came to the boil, I reduced to a simmer and let it simmer for 15 minutes. Pretty quickly I tasted to make sure I liked the balance and, indeed, I did.

Once it's syrupy, and 15 minutes have passed, let it cool and then strain it (I strained into a measuring glass to make it easier to pour later):

Chill it in the fridge until you just can't wait anymore, and then get yourself a glass with some ice in it (we don't have any glasses! Just mugs!) and some soda water and set it all out with the syrup:

Pour 1/4 cup of syrup into the glass then stir in the soda water. Taste! Add more syrup if you think it needs more. Isn't it refreshing?

Seriously: this is one refreshing summer drink. And it has a real kick to it with those chiles (or, in my case, that one chile). It's a heat that sneaks up on you, you take a gulp, you smile, and then the back of your throat starts to burn. You'll love it.

For those recipe purists, though, who want to know Jean-George's exact recipe: here it is. Skip the lemongrass if you can't find it, though next time I make this, I'm going to include it. I'm also going to make the full recipe next time because the small amount I made will hardly make three drinks and I have a feeling I'm going to be drinking this a lot this summer. It's a perfect summer drink.

Homemade Ginger Ale
recipe by Jean-Georges Vongerichten
from "Cooking at Home with a Four-Star Chef"

Ingredients:

1 pound fresh ginger, unpeeled and cut into small dice
2 stalks lemongrass, trimmed and roughly chopped
2 small fresh chiles, stems removed
1 1/2 cups sugar
Soda water
Lime wedges

1. Combine the ginger, lemongrass and chiles in food processor and process until minced, stopping the machine periodically and scraping down the sides.

2. Place the puree in a saucepan with the sugar and 1 quart water (that's four cups). Bring to a boil over high heat, then reduce to medium and simmer for 15 minutes. Turn off the heat. Cool, then strain and chill.

3. To serve, place 1/4 cup of the syrup in a glass full of ice. Fill with soda water, taste and add more syrup if you like. Garnish with a lime wedge, then serve.

Originally posted by Adam Roberts from The Amateur Gourmet, on June 8, 2009 9:53 AM

From 2005: then Rocketboom field correspondent Zadi Diaz interviewed Current TV journalist Laura Ling. This past weekend, Laura Ling and fellow journalist Euna Lee were sentenced to 12 years in a North Korean hard labor camp for attempting to report on Korean refugees along the North Korea-China border. More coverage: American reporters get “very severe” 12-year sentences designed to scare all foreign journalists, US ‘concern’ for jailed reporters, Laura Ling, Euna Lee, US Journalists, Sentenced To 12 Years In North Korea, Twitter search for Laura Ling, Twitter search for Euna Lee

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on June 8, 2009 9:00 AM

I’m not sure what Matt Drudge is trying to say by running this photo of Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni without a link or caption. Is he making a comment on the state of Franco-American relations? Is he thinking, “Man, these are two smokin’ babes?” Is there some larger truth in the picture that he’s trying to wordlessly impart? It is truly a mystery.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on June 8, 2009 8:55 AM

Nick Popovich, "the Ernest Hemingway of super repo men", has a rule about firearms when doing repossessions:

The man who tells you he's going to shoot you will not shoot you.

If there isn't already, there will likely be a movie based on Popovich's exploits released someday.

Tags: nickpopovich

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 8, 2009 8:53 AM

It’s official:

DETROIT (AP) - A judge has lifted Tiger Stadium’s stay of execution.

Wayne County Circuit Judge Prentis Edwards rejected a request Monday by a nonprofit group to issue an injunction preventing further demolition of the historic Detroit ballpark…

Detroit Economic Growth Corp. executive vice president Waymon Guillebeaux said around 10:40 a.m. that demolition would resume immediately.

A four-word email arrived from Rod Nelson a few minutes ago: “Sorry, friends. We failed.”

Originally posted by Neil deMause from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on June 8, 2009 8:16 AM

Years with Mets: 1989-91

I was pretty excited when the Mets acquired Frank Viola from the Twins in 1989. He had won the AL Cy Young the previous year, he was a local boy (not sure why that really matters, but it sounds good), and of course...the mustache.

It's not like I was obsessed with mustaches in the late 80s or anything. I mean, every boy has an autographed 8x10 of Gene Shalit on their dresser, right? It's just that in my young mind it was a trait I associated with baseball success. The 86 Mets boasted numerous mustaches. Result? World Series champions. My Benson Little League under-12 Goodrich Dairy Orioles? Zero mustaches. Zero success.

Anyway...what was I talking about? Oh yeah, Frank Viola. The point of my story was that I knew that the arrival of Frankie (people call him Frankie, right?) and his 24-win mustache would bring an unparalleled level of success to the early 90s Mets. Well, I was right about Frankie, at least. Viola went 20-12 with a 2.67 ERA in 1990 and finished 3rd in NL Cy Young voting (which he should have won). Not too shabby.

Originally posted by nick from Mandatory Mustache, on June 8, 2009 8:03 AM

I saw The Hangover among its target demo. This was in Murray Hill, last night, a Sunday, and it was 9 p.m. and that stadium was sold out. I was older by at least a decade than everyone there, and I am not exaggerating. What struck me the most were their clothes. The men, in particular, seemed not even dressed, in their baggy, below-the-knee silvery gym clothing, and synthetic t-shirts and cheap flip-flops from China. These were clothes that were worn without any intention; these were the clothes they wore when they did not have to wear clothes. They were ugly and thoughtless. These are what the men wear when they are not wearing blue button-down shirts, which they are wearing today in their offices, for those who are not sitting at home, watching their button-down shirts droop and grow dusty.

Watching all these young people in line reminded me of something in Neal Stephenson’s Anathem. In that enormous scifi book, the young narrator, who has lived cloistered for much of his life, finally ventures into the outside world, which looks in many ways like our real world here. He finds that with the social structure of the capitalist working world, where people are divorced from the fruits of their endeavors and labor, it’s not so much that they suffer economically, or suffer intellectually, though these of course can happen, but that they suffer due to lack of “story.”

How much story do you get to have in your tamed life, when you are doing the opposite of hunting buffalo on the plains, say, when you are sitting in an office for eight hours a day, with no interest or input in the corporate super-structures whose machinations control your working life?

And so movies like The Hangover, which is about four men having an outlandish adventure, just seem so obviously constructed to give people with little narrative in their lives some huge outsize narrative. Nothing this exciting will ever happen to the audience.

The movie opens with scenery of a wedding being assembled. There are white flowers. “So pretty,” said the girl behind me.

There is a shot of a wedding dress. “So pretty,” said the girl behind me.

Later in the film, there appears a very young baby. “So cuuuute,” said the girl behind me.

Who was that girl? I could not bear to look behind me. She was clearly either unbelievably stupid, or so deep in thrall to her uterus, that, either way, I wonder how she can put on shoes in the morning. Except she needs the shoes to find the man, to have the wedding, to have that baby, that baby that is just so cute, which actually really has nothing to do with the movie, and in fact the baby was not that cute.

It was just a baby. It was a generic white baby. It was mostly a joke prop baby, and I laughed when the men in the movie abused the baby.

There are a number of other things that are important about this movie—such as that bearded chunky weirdo comedian Zack Galifianakis is really amazingly weird and funny in it, and that there is an arch-villain who is the most delightful mash-up of stereotypes, so much so that it actually frightened and/or confused this audience, I think. It was really beyond. But mostly I am thinking about that girl, and what she is doing now, and whose advertising account she is working on, or what yoga class she is taking, or whose baby she is about to steal.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on June 8, 2009 8:00 AM

Death of Autotune (Robot's Revenge Mix) MP3 download

Now that Jay-Z shook up the world with his new single Death of Autotune, I started wondering what will happen when the music industry's army of evil robots decide to fight back? This is my vision of that apocalyptic future. Footage taken from this cool homemade video and a few other places.. NOTE: this video is by no means meant as an endorsement of autotune usage (or of Jamie Foxx's creepy borderline date rape lyrics).

Originally posted by jsmooth@hiphopmusic.com (Jay Smooth) from Ill Doctrine, on June 8, 2009 7:44 AM

Jay-Z hates Auto-Tune, and he doesn’t care if T-Pain knows it. I actually think this song is pretty great, but I’m an old man. Younger rappers are less impressed.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on June 8, 2009 7:19 AM

Regarding the game of Who Can Name the Bigger Number?, Scott Aaronson shows that while 9^9^9^9 might cut the mustard in the first couple of rounds, the numbers and the notation used to express them get much more complicated.

Exponentials are familiar, relevant, intimately connected to the physical world and to human hopes and fears. Using the notational systems I'll discuss next, we can concisely name numbers that make exponentials picayune by comparison, that subjectively speaking exceed 9^9^9^9 as much as the latter exceeds 9.

See also the Wikipedia entry for large numbers.

Tags: mathematics  scottaaronson

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 8, 2009 7:16 AM

Apple's developers conference begins today and we're all fairly confident they'll be a new iPhone and a release date for Snow Leopard. They'll probably be some speed bumps to hardware and some exciting new iPhone apps, but I'm not expecting a "One more thing..." Still, I think there's a "One more thing..." right around the corner — I'm convinced Apple's building a tablet.

There have been rumors floating around for a while, but I think everyone's got it a little wrong. Instead of a tablet, I'm envisioning a tablet-sized iPod. Something with a 5-7" screen that's focused on playing video and games. Instead of bringing your laptop on planes to watch movies, you'll bring the tablet. And despite Apple's insistence that people don't want to read books on their computer, it'll be the perfect size to compete with the Kindle. I also imagine they'll be a fancy dock that will charge and service as a USB hub.

It'd be great if Steve Jobs rode in on a unicorn holding this new iProduct above his head, screaming "Kneel before me, peons!" but I think this will get its own event. Anyway, if this comes to pass today or if any tablet is ever released by Apple from this point forward, be sure to credit Matt Jacobs, creator and proprietor of Capn Design.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Capn Design, on June 8, 2009 6:51 AM

Teaching your kids how to argue doesn't make them quarrelous; it makes them consider other points of view, particularly those held by others.

Let's face it: Our culture has lost the ability to usefully disagree. Most Americans seem to avoid argument. But this has produced passive aggression and groupthink in the office, red and blue states, and families unable to discuss things as simple as what to watch on television. Rhetoric doesn't turn kids into back-sassers; it makes them think about other points of view.

I had long equated arguing with fighting, but in rhetoric they are very different things. An argument is good; a fight is not. Whereas the goal of a fight is to dominate your opponent, in an argument you succeed when you bring your audience over to your side. A dispute over territory in the backseat of a car qualifies as an argument, for example, in the unlikely event that one child attempts to persuade his audience rather than slug it.

(via siege)

Tags: parenting

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on June 8, 2009 6:01 AM

The panel at the 92nd St. Y is tonight, please come if you can!  I would love to see you there, if we know each other, and if we don’t you should introduce yourself (”Hi! I’m the one who commented that you should throw yourself in front of a bus in June ‘08!”  Yeah, or not.)   “A Fortunate Age” author Joanna Smith Rakoff will be there.  Here is a link to the post where I say something kind of obliquely mean about her book, which I actually devoured in one sitting, but I still have some questions for her mostly about magical marriage plots and the idea of “women’s fiction.”   Sheila Weller will be there and here is a post I wrote about Carole King, inspired by her genius book about Carole, Joni Mitchell, and Carly Simon.  Judith Warner will be there — she wrote a book about how crazy her generation of American women are about parenting — and here is a post where I obliquely called her out for being so mean to Meghan McCain and saying the word “snarky.”  Patricia Bosworth will be there and I have never written anything about her on my blog, so we’re cool!

So, yeah, come if you can. It is expensive but I am assured that it will be short.

Originally posted by emily from Emily Magazine, on June 8, 2009 5:56 AM

Originally posted by Ceci Moss from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on June 8, 2009 5:54 AM

Joyent is excited to announce the launch of our Summer Sale. The concept of this Sale is very straightforward. Buy any size Accelerator for one year and get the second year at no charge**.

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Originally posted by Bryan Bogensberger from Joyeur, on June 8, 2009 5:21 AM

After a crazy Friday afternoon that featured a preservationist running onto the field at Tiger Stadium to serve a restraining order against the stadium’s demolition — too late to stop a backhoe from taking several bites out of the upper deck — Wayne County Circuit Judge Prentice Edwards is expected today to rule on whether the stadium will stand or fall. If Edwards issues a permanent stay of execution, the Old Tiger Stadium Conservancy, which includes SABR stalwarts Gary Gillette and Rod Nelson, gets to keep plugging away at its plan to save the remaining “Navin Field” section of the grandstand, roughly corresponding to the stadium’s original 1912 dimensions, and convert it into a community ballfield with some of the interior converted to office space and a museum. If not, expect the seat-munching to resume immediately.

The loss to baseball history and potential tourism aside (can you imagine what people would pay now to visit even a sliver of Ebbets Field or the Polo Grounds?) there’s something else at risk here: Tiger Stadium is now the last surviving example of an old-style upper deck overhang. Yankee Stadium will be gone shortly; Fenway Park doesn’t have an upper deck to speak of; and Wrigley Field, for all its charms, has a top deck set way back from the action. That leaves the sliver of stands still standing in Detroit as the only place in the world where baseball fans will be able to experience what was once commonplace: cheap seats that, thanks the miracle of cantilevering and the willingness to make some field-level patrons sit in the shade, are closer to the field of play than all but the priciest field-level seats at modern stadia — stunningly close at Tiger, where Tom Boswell famously wrote that sitting in the upper deck behind home plate and watching Jack Morris pitch enabled him to truly learn the importance of changing speeds.

Not that all that many future baseball fans are likely to trek up to a community ballfield in Detroit to get this experience — more likely, most will just come to think of upper decks as a place to bring binoculars, or watch the ubiquitous video screen. But if Navin Field survives, at least the experience still be possible — and just maybe, some budding architect will one day pay a visit and figure out how to recreate the classic overhang while still placating luxury-seat buyers. Judge Edwards’ ruling, then, isn’t about just one half-demolished ballpark; it’s about preserving a piece of baseball’s architectural gene pool, one that otherwise will be known only through history books. That seems more valuable than creating another vacant lot.

Originally posted by Neil deMause from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on June 8, 2009 5:10 AM

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Originally posted by Bryan Bogensberger from Joyeur, on June 8, 2009 4:26 AM

Blue: My doctor gave me this brochure, girls, and guess what?

Plaid: What? What? You're killing me here.

Blue: It tells you HOW PEOPLE GET BABIES!

Red: No! Really? Really and truly?

Blue: You are SO not going to believe this.

Plaid: Look at me, I'd believe anything at this point. I'm beginning to give some credence to that "swallowed a watermelon seed" theory.

Blue: (whispers)

Red: You mean, that's it? No storks? No cabbages? I feel ... disillusioned.

Plaid: Huh. Well, I'll be damned.

Blue: That's what the preacher said. But wait until I show him THIS! It's all just science!

Red: I wonder if Jimmy knows? Won't he be surprised when I tell him!

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on June 8, 2009 4:00 AM

This is what I've been doing: Wordnik, an info-rich online dictionary that plans to show as much information as possible about all the words in English. The login requirement has been removed as of this morning, so the beta site is open!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The Lexicographer's Rules, on June 8, 2009 2:24 AM

My recent entries here hit a nerve in fellow p5per Steffen Müller. In a comment on 's Guide to CPAN Needed, Steffen claims that my arguments are "pie-in-the-sky fantasies" from someone who "has done nothing but finger-pointing".

That's a dangerous line of thought when addressing criticism of a software project.

I can imagine a fair few people wondering when the Perl 5.10 performance regression when assigning a list from @_, patched in January 2008 will ever be present in a release version of Perl.

(It's doubly amusing, in a very sad way, when one of the excuses for avoiding regular releases of Perl 5 is that "We just can't cause regressions!" and when Red Hat gets pilloried for a somewhat rarer Perl 5 performance regression.)

Is pointing out that a patch for a known performance regression languishing, unreleased, in bleadperl for 17 months a problem? Is that criticism dismissible from everyone who isn't currently a Perl 5 committer or the maintainer of a core module?

Perl 5.10.1 could have come out on 07 January 2008 with only that patch and been an improvement over Perl 5.10. There is no shortage of minor version numbers. There are no API changes. There are no backwards compatibility concerns. (I don't know if the smokes were clean on all target release platforms, but given that the patch is very simple; most of it is moving code a few lines, I believe that's a low risk.)

Yet Perl 5.10.1 still hasn't come out, seventeen months later -- and imagine the furor if a downstream Perl distributor applied the patch and something went wrong. In what universe is it a good thing that a trivially fixable performance regression affects more and more people every day when it could have been fixed three weeks after Perl 5.10's release -- before it had affected anyone besides early adopters.

Imagine applying the same line of reasoning ("Your criticism is wrongheaded and useless") to anyone who said "If the Switch module is dangerous and not recommended, why not remove it from the core?" (Fortunately, it is on the docket for deprecation and eventual removal.)

Imagine applying the same line of reasoning to everyone who says "You know, Perl 5 really could use optional function signatures, or Perl 5 could use a declarative syntax for classes.

That's what bothers me most about Steffan's comment; it elevates "plain old hackers" above people with ideas, questions, concerns, and the desire to improve the efficacy of other plain old hackers.

Yet if it takes a core hacker to make these arguments, permit me a biblical allusion to Philippians 3:5 to answer the silly charges of "Philosophy and project management and advocacy and education and writing documentation are all worthless; you should write code!"

• As of last Friday, I owned more of bleadperl than Steffan. (Yes, this is a stupid comparison, because....)
• I wrote a huge amount of tests for the core and standard library in the early 2000s when we quadrupled the number of tests between Perl 5.6 and 5.8. (A lot of that work doesn't show up in the silly line-number Internet measuring contest link in the previous item because I wrote those tests for many other people who have taken over maintenance -- this is exactly what you expect when you write tests.)
• I wrote the original version of Test::Builder upon which nearly all modern Perl testing exists -- including the testing used to demonstrate the core's stability.
• I co-wrote the book on Perl Testing.
• As linked earlier, I grew tired of suggesting that someone add the class keyword to Perl 5 and added it myself (though sadly, the patch was rejected).
• I backported the yadda-yadda-yadda operators from Perl 6 to Perl 5 and implemented DOES.
• I can predict, to the day, the next 25 stable releases of Parrot, including the releases where we will have removed deprecated features and the releases we expect downstream distributions to package and distribute. (I believe -- and I believe most, if not all Parrot committers also believe -- that the policy of stable monthly releases saved the project from almost certain irrelevance.)

I don't mean to disparage anyone else's contributions -- far from that, I believe that everyone who's reported a bug, suggested a change to the wording of the documentation, or posted the results of a test run has just as much right to voice concerns about a project as a core developer.

That doesn't mean my critcisms or concerns are accurate or correct or useful. They could be wrong. I welcome corrections, if so.

Yet there's something deeply wrong with a release process that lets known and fixed problems that almost every Perl 5.10 program will encounter linger for years, especially when fixing them is trivial.

You shouldn't have to be a pumpking to be able to say that.

Originally posted by chromatic from Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog, on June 7, 2009 7:20 PM

New research suggests that coffee after exercise is good for you.  But  coffee before exercise is good for you too.  Why would anyone even question this?

Read more - Coffee cuts exercise-induced asthma. (via Press TV)

Posted in coffee Tagged: coffee, health, science

Originally posted by Mike White from ShotZombies, on June 7, 2009 2:26 PM

“Wikipedia” by artist Rob Matthews is a brilliant way to materialize the Internet back into old media. The “book” features prints of 5,000 pages of Wikipedia’s “Featured Articles”. If Rob were to have the entire Wikipedia printed out, he might have to cut down a few forests just to make the paper. According to his description: “[The project reproduces] Wikipedia in a dysfunctional physical form that helps to question its use as an internet resource.” Excellent project that definitely makes me happy that the web is a immaterial format. Next up, I would like to see the physical version of Amazon.com. Very cool indeed.

Originally posted by jonah from coin-operated, on June 7, 2009 7:52 AM

Last week we discussed the latest polling data out of Israel responding to Obama's policy push, the settlements question and a two-state solution. Now Bernie Avishai has a much more fine-grained look at the data -- both the bad news and the good.

Whatever your political persuasion on this issue, I strongly recommend you give this a read. Among the many things it shows is how deeply divided Israel is today (much like the Palestinian community in the territories) and the simple reality that neither side of this conflict can resolve this on their own -- outside pressure is necessary.

It is frequently said that Israel's chaotic low-bar-to-entry parliamentary system makes the country hostage to single-interest splinter parties which obstruct the popular will.

But though he doesn't say it explicitly, Avishai's analysis makes clear that this isn't really true. It is probably fair to say that while a majority doesn't support the settlement project and would like a two-state solution eventually -- that a consistent majority favors not facing up to the hard choices and perpetuating the unsustainable status quo as long as possible.

Which is essentially what the political system has provided.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on June 7, 2009 6:14 AM