Mirror Image [Flickr]
Hugger Industries posted a photo:
Just noticed this -- 138 in Washington 831 in Oregon.
--
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June 27, 2009
Gmail Increases Maximum Attachment Size to 25 MB
Now you can send bigger attachments in Gmail, as Google increased the maximum attachment size from 20 MB to 25 MB.
"With Gmail, you can send and receive messages up to 25 megabytes (MB) in size. Please note that you may not be able to send larger attachments to contacts who use other email services with smaller attachment limits. If your attachment bounces, you should invite them to Gmail," suggests Google.
For some reason, Gmail's Flash uploader doesn't allow me to upload files that are larger than 10 MB. The error message is "attachment failed" and Google's suggestions aren't very helpful. Switching to the basic uploader in the settings solves the problem, but it's more tedious to upload multiple files.
{ Thanks, Ben. }
St. Vincent - "Marrow"
St. Vincent performed "Marrow" on Letterman this past week:
Actor
is one of my favorite albums this year, and this is a killer performance.
RCA's Design Interactions Thesis Show 2009 opens today!
The annual Royal College of Art Thesis Show opens today, and, as usual, the projects are awesome. Ranging from a system that creates clouds that snow ice cream to archival burial vessels, each project takes a close look at the cultural potential for technology now, in the future and in the fictional pas.
You already saw Thomas Thwaites' Toaster Project, but pictured above are Hayeon Yoo's Compass Phone, which indicates the direction and proximity of the person you are trying to reach instead of letting you talk to them, and Will Carey's Gifted, a series of objects and scenarios that allow children to imagine and work towards abilities they may want in the future. Finally, the process behind the development of Dot Samsen's Coin Flipper (a decision making device) is illustrated in the following below:
If you can't make it to the show, you can check it all out on the website.
Design Interactions Thesis Show
Royal College of Art
June 26th to July 5th 2009
11am - 8pm
(closed 3 July; exhibition will close at 5pm on 30 June, 1 July and 5 July)More projects after the jump.
(more...)
Photos - Meet Your Barista: Matt Menzenski
An Ithaca native, we met Matt at the 2008 NERBC (where he won 7th place).
Everyone do the moonwalk and say "mamasay mamasa mamakusa!" Michael Jackson is dead and the entire world is collectively grieving.
Michael Jackson is dead and the entire world has something to say. MJ broke race barriers without a doubt. "He broke race barriers in the pop world which opened doors in the political world - he crossed over and back. He morphed. When the signs started to become clear, that the boy wasn’t right, that he was too isolated, underdeveloped, imperfect - we laughed, we stared, we assumed. He was our first boyfriend before he became our crazy cousin - always family," writes Adrienne Maria Brown, of the Ruckus Society.
Since yesterday, I have felt like that I am a part of a huge collective grieving process, watching folks gather FlashMob-style in London to dance to Billie Jean, watching people sing Rock With You at the Apollo Theater in unison, checking out folks post their favorite MJ songs and talk about their cheesy MJ childhood moments, even seeing folks in the markets breaking out with some 80s dance moves! It made me feel good to be alive, it made me stop and wish I could go dance Thriller in the streets, made me want to sing out with some MaMaSeMaMaSaMaMaCuSa! I have only felt once like this for a musician, and that was for the Chicana music pioneer, Selena!
Michael Jackson is dead at 50. My mother called me yesterday at 330pm to say, "Hijita did you hear? Michael murio!" The 31-year gap between us didn't matter at that moment, both of us were quiet on the phone, thinking of the many times we danced to the Thriller album when I was a girl.
At this moment I'm chilling in my home in East Oakland, still watching videos of Michael Jackson, listening to P.Y.T., Human Nature, reading the blogs, searching the internet to see what my fellow activists have to say about how MJ touched all of us. I'm 30 - I grew up with Michael's music - I remember Thriller was one of the first album's my parents bought that was in English, prior to that, it was mostly salsa albums in our home. At that time my folks didn't speak English too well, but MJ's music crossed that boundary.
What most amazes me about these past few days, since hearing of Michael's death, is how the entire world has reacted. People stopped what they were doing, to grieve for an artist who touched them deeply, breaking out with their favorite MJ song or moment. I mean almost EVERYONE, from here to Hong Kong to Mexico City to London to Thailand - folks felt a moment of loss. Michael died and almost took the internet with him! (read more) The moment of his death even topped Obama's inauguration in terms of web traffic.
Since 330 pm yesterday, I felt like I was part of a huge collective grieving process, watching folks gather FlashMob-style in London singing Thriller, watching people sing Rock With You at the Apollo Theater in unison, checking out folks post their favorite MJ songs and talk about their cheesy MJ childhood moments, even seeing folks in the markets breaking out with some 80s dance moves! My friend tweeted that she seen "woman in a wheelchair and a sports bra having her own private MJ church moment." It made me feel good to be alive, it made me stop and wish I could go dance Thriller in the streets, made me want to sing out with some MaMaSeMaMaSaMaMaCuSa! I have only felt once like this for a musician, and that was for the Chicana music pioneer, Selena!
Michael Jackson broke race barriers without a doubt. My good friend Adrienne Maria Brown, ED of Ruckus Society, writes in her blog:
He broke race barriers in the pop world which opened doors in the political world - he crossed over and back. He morphed. When the signs started to become clear, that the boy wasn’t right, that he was too isolated, underdeveloped, imperfect - we laughed, we stared, we assumed. He was our first boyfriend before he became our crazy cousin - always family.
Davey D, journalist and Hip Hop activist that runs one of the oldest and largest Hip Hop websites, wrote:
We keep forgetting the important role Jackson played in the We are the World Project in 1985...That was the jump off record for artists to come together and try and make big statements...I’ll never forget that Michael Jackson had the gumption to do his Remember the Time video set in Egypt and showed the ancient Egyptians as Black. That was big and the height of irony because so many of us always were annoyed that Egypt was always associated with Elizabeth Taylor who was one of Michael Jackson’s best friends. Instead of casting her in a return role of Cleopatra he put in Magic Johnson who played the Pharaoh. Sadly Jackson caught heat for it, but he never changed that video and many of us loved him for it...I recall Michael Jackson holding a press conference and calling Sony record executive Tommy Mottola out who at the time was one of the most powerful label executives in the world. Jackson called him a racist and a devilish person who was ripping off Black artists...At the time it was a bold move by Jackson. Not a whole lot of artists were willing to stand up and be counted.
Tammy Johnson, of RaceWire/Colorlines, describes, in her video blog, "he made it ok for white girls to scream at a black man, he made it ok for white boys to do the moonwalk." But it was not ok for Michael Jackson to be his black self.Michael's passing reminds me about the power of art and creativity - a tool that truly has no limits.
June 26, 2009
Ramping Up
We'll do more formal job announcements next week. But for our regular readers and for those who might be interested in joining our team, I wanted to let you know that we're going to be adding eight new editorial positions to our team. Most of those slots will be new reporter-bloggers in New York and Washington. But there will also be new junior editorial positions.
We plan to hire for six of those positions this summer. And then two more in early fall. Together, that will more than double the size of our editorial staff.
Not Pretty
When the first sentence of the article reads like this, you know it's gonna be good.
A former mayor found sitting naked and holding a beer at a Rabun County campsite told police he wasn't the same naked man seen walking around earlier.Thanks to TPM Reader JB for the heads up.
Bits: Improving Netflix for a $1 Million Prize
A multinational team has developed powerful algorithms that beat the accuracy of Netflix's movie-recommendation engine by more than 10 percent, qualifying for a $1 million prize.
Rendered fashion
The clothes from Irina Shaposhnikova's Crystallographica show look as though they were created with 3-D rendering software but haven't quite finished rendering yet.
(via today and tomorrow)
Tags: fashion Irina Shaposhnikova
Outpouring of searches for the late Michael Jackson
At Google, we are moved by the life and untimely passing of Michael Jackson. As word spread of his death, millions and millions of people from all over the world began searching for information about the pop icon. The following chart shows the meteoric rise in related searches around 3:00pm PDT:
Search volume began to increase around 2:00pm, skyrocketed by 3:00pm, and stabilized by about 8:00pm. As you can see in Google Hot Trends, many of the fastest rising search queries from yesterday and today have been about Michael Jackson's passing (others pertained to the death of another cultural icon, Farrah Fawcett). People who weren't near a computer yesterday turned to their mobile phones to check on breaking news. We saw one of the largest mobile search spikes we've ever seen, with 5 of the top 20 searches about the Moonwalker.
The spike in searches related to Michael Jackson was so big that Google News initially mistook it for an automated attack. As a result, for about 25 minutes yesterday, when some people searched Google News they saw a "We're sorry" page before finding the articles they were looking for.
Michael Jackson led an amazing and controversial life in the public eye. Many of us have a "Michael Jackson story." Mine is that he actually taught me how to moonwalk — thanks to many an hour I spent in front of the television trying to mimic his performances. Regardless of your story or personal opinions about this astounding performer, global interest in the King of Pop is undeniable.
Posted by R.J. Pittman, Director, Product Management
Promote Perl 6 by saying "Perl 5"
Perl 6 is hurtling toward completion. The specification is nearly complete, and Rakudo now passes 68% of the specification tests. Applications like November are being written in Perl 6. Perl 6 is no vaporware, and the day when Perl 6 is ready for widespread use is coming quickly.
Perl 6 has been in development since 2000, and in that time many people may have forgotten about the plans we've had for Perl 6. There may be those who have never even heard about the plans for Perl 6. Those of us who live in the Perl world are aware of the great changes afoot, but there are plenty of people who are not.
I think that the time is right to help make those people aware of Perl 6, and to remind them constantly of what's coming. My proposed technique is simple and it takes advantage of the key elements of time and repetition to help remind everyone about Perl 6.
We need to stop referring to Perl 5 as "Perl" and start calling it "Perl 5."
Specifying the "5" in "Perl 5" calls attention to the fact that there is more than one Perl. It makes the listener or reader who is unaware of Perl 6 wonder why the 5 is specified. For the reader who knows about Perl 6, hearing "Perl 5" reminds her that Perl 6 also exists.
I don't think it will be too tough. All I ask is that, at the very least, when writing about Perl 5 in your blogs or mailing lists that you specify the version you're talking about. It doesn't even need to be every instance. I'm guessing we'll find that repeatedly saying "Perl 5" in a long message will get tedious both for writer and reader.
I think the way to look at it is that "Perl 5" is the formal name for the language, and later references can refer to it as "Perl," almost like a nickname. Just that first reminder of "Perl 5" will be enough to help lodge in the reader's brain.
With enough time & repetition, it will get to be habit in our minds. With enough time & repetition, the computing world will be reminded of Perl 6 coming soon.
New Yorkers Taxed (Again) for Not Owning Cars
MetroCard machines aren't the only place where the price of transit is going up. Reader Steven O'Neill points out that New Yorkers who sometimes rely on rental cars are now being hit with an additional five percent "bailout" tax, bringing the total tax for renting close to 20 percent. Says Steven:
This means that I, a very occasional driver who basically only ever rents a car if I'm going somewhere outside of the city, am being forced to pay exorbitant taxes so that daily car commuters can be allowed to continue to drive into Manhattan for free. And it feels like a kick in the teeth.
Eric Adams, I'm pissed off at you personally about this because you are my Senator. If the Senate still exists by the next time you are up for election, I plan to help give you the boot.
Bravo to Steven for channeling his frustration in the right direction. Any daily reporters out there care to talk to an informed MTA customer?
Carl Masak: Reading up on MVC, part 1: Ruby on Rails
Hello, don't mind me. I'm just going through a few MVC frameworks to see how they differ and how they're alike. I need the knowhow to create an MVC for Web.pm. Right now, my plan is to examine Rails, Catalyst, Django and Jifty. I'll write down my impressions of each of the in some kind of list, for future reference. Basically the only way you'd want to read this is if you want to laugh at how little I know about MVC frameworks.
Here's the list I got from watching this screencast:
- Man, the Ruby folks sure can make a beatuiful screencast!
- Rails uses scaffolding. I've heard not all people like scaffolding, but it does look kinda convenient to my untrained eye.
- Partial templates are called, logically, "partials". They bind smartly with variable names somehow.
- Different output formats are really easy to add. XML, JSON, Atom...
- A blog is a really nice example for an MVC framework screencast, because it's just a list of posts, each with a list of comments.
- Rails can add authentication through before_filter.
- Hm, clearly the strength of Rails comes largely through the keywords it introduces. Wonder if it uses monkey typing for that?
- Rails has Routes! Maybe this is my chance to finally understand ihrd++'s Routes, which I never really grokked.
- Controllers do things like index, show, new, update and delete. Probably related to CRUD somehow.
- That 'debugger' trick is fantastic! One of those features which you feel can't be just hot air.
- AJAX is fairly well integrated, though I'll be danged if I understand exactly how. Looks like magic to me.
- Did I hear that right? "rjs is just a way to generate JavaScript using Ruby." Wow.
- There's graceful fallback from JS to non-JS.
- There's built-in automated testing.
- The console seems like the debugger again, but without the breakpoint. Yes, I can see how that might be very useful.
- Never once do they explicitly say 'the database' in the screencast. They say the word 'database-agnostic' once, and 'table' and 'column' a few times, but most of the time it's just 'model', 'view', 'controller'. Seems like the abstraction is largely intact.
Um. Well, in summary, that cool-aid sure seems to have an effect on me. I'll leave the comments open so that you people can tell me how Rails, despite all appearances, is really bad for your teeth and leaves skid marks on your puppy.
Next up: Catalyst.
Gentleman of Leisure: "Off the Wall"
Gentleman of Leisure is writer, erstwhile lecturer and notionally overeducated Martin Marks's PAPERMAG column on the things he likes and why. When questioned about the identities of my favorite musicians, I’ve always said that Levon Helm (and Robbie Robertson, Rick Danko, Richard Manuel, and Garth Hudson of the Band) and Diana Ross (along with Florence Ballard, Mary Wilson, and Betty McGlown of the Supremes) formed the Holy Trinity of American Popular Music. This has been my strongly held belief for many years, and I’d only concede two points in the matter: that The Band was four-fifths Canadian, and that, as per its name, a Trinity usually suggests a triad of something. For some reason, I was never willing to reveal who I thought should join Mr. Helm and Ms. Ross at the top of America’s musical pantheon. Sadly, the third member of this Trinity passed away yesterday. And so, I thought I’d spend some time talking about what this humble columnist believes to be one of the greatest records of all time, Michael Jackson’s Off the Wall. Off the Wall was Jackson’s first solo album, and the first of its kind. As a toddler, the album’s title track was my second favorite song, my favorite being Wham!’s “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” (Sometimes, I cannot adjudicate for my infantile tastes). “Off the Wall” –- along with the rest of the album –- transcended disco, pop, Motown, and funk to create an eminently danceable mix of riffs and beats. I speak, of course, from experience, having first danced to Off the Wall’s “Don’t Stop ‘til You Get Enough” when I could barely stand. In college –- arguably, on other occasions when I could barely stand -– friends used to hold Jackson dance parties in their dorm rooms. And so grew my enamourment with most of Jackson’s catalogue. During his later years, we began to see Jackson as an amalgamation of characters right out of Grimm’s Fairy Tales –- the Evil Prince, the Good Prince, the Imprisoned Princess, the Ugly Duckling, and the Frog. (As Neil Young once told us, perhaps it’s better to burn out than it is to rust.) In large part, this MJ was a reaction to his own sense of isolation, and to us. All at once, we forgot is the “We are the World” Michael Jackson, who did, in fact, help millions of children, none of whom ever spent a nanosecond at the Neverland Ranch. Perhaps I am alone in saying that I will miss that lone sequined glove, the white socks peeking out from the cuffs of tuxedo pants. Now that the King of Pop is gone, we are thankfully left with his very great music. Next week, I'll go back to my regularly scheduled column, filled with the usual rants and raves about hair care products and discontinued brands of tonic water. But for now, I want to rock with you.
Michael Died Today
“Michael died today.” That was James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem, paraphrasing the opening of Camus’s “The Stranger”—“Mother died yesterday. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.” I was in Laurel Canyon yesterday, sitting with Murphy, his personal assistant, his publicist, and the musician Al Doyle, who also plays in Hot Chip. We were in the living room of a large, dark wooden Gothic house where LCD Soundsystem is recording its new record. Rick Rubin owns the building, which functions largely as a studio and a residence for whoever is recording there. (Rubin was not with us; he lives mostly in Malibu.)
I am here in Los Angeles to see Murphy, but from the moment Michael Jackson died, I’ve been unable to talk or think about anything else. Professionally and environmentally, the world is saying: react, react, react.
Fifteen minutes before I arrived at the house in Laurel Canyon, a friend texted me, “Michael is dead.” My radio was tuned to KCRW and I was listening to Matthew Dickman read a poem about flirting, called “Slow Dance,” on
Michael Silverblatt’s literary radio show, “Bookworm.” Traffic slowed to the pace of molasses, and—without thinking about what it meant—I turned the radio off and started checking Twitter on my phone. Every post had switched over to rumor, shock, one-liners. Michael had stopped breathing, but was he already dead? Was TMZ trying to one-up the mainstream media? Did the stress of the upcoming concerts at the 02 Arena get to Jackson?At the Laurel Canyon house, we sat facing an enormous TV. Nobody even suggested turning it on. Everyone had laptops open, cells in hand. Murphy went for a quick swim and returned to say, “It’s like the Butthole Surfers song—‘Strangers Die Every Day.’ That sounds callous, man, but I really only know the music. Who knows which of these eight billion stories are true?”
And that is the challenge of facing Michael Jackson’s death: what haven’t we already heard and what do we really know? In many ways, we know everything. He was possibly the most perfect pop entertainer of all time. In 1975, Vince Aletti wrote about seeing The Jackson Five perform at Radio City Music Hall. He closed with a paragraph that goes beyond prescient:
But no matter how much I love the others, it is Michael who is the group’s aesthetic focus. His stylized show-biz posing (the bends and turns arm out-stretched and sweeping the air in front of him; little self-hugs with his head thrown back) is becoming a little disturbing, at moments even grotesque for a boy who’s still a very skinny sixteen. But when he isn’t being Engelbert Huperdinck, he’s supreme and so controlled it’s almost frightening. In his hotel room, when he tells you he’s in eleventh grade, it might seem strange but it’s believable; seeing him on stage, dancing and striding confidently out to the edge (where a girl in a leopard-print cost springs up and gives him a note), you just know he had to be lying. I want to be Michael Jackson when I grow up.Twitter, not for the first time, served as the fastest, thickest, and most unruly news feed, and not for the first time, suffered from technical problems. But once Jackson’s death became a miserable, concrete fact, Twitter became the gates to a palace, and people laid their digital bouquets against the rails. The New York Times reporter Greg Mitchell posted a memory of a teen-aged Michael with musical tastes I defy you to predict: “Reading ‘72 interview w/ Michael Jackson for Crawdaddy that I edited—he says he’d like to do an album w/ his favorite group: Jethro Tull.”
Others had personal memories, so multiple and different that I will be sifting and collecting for days yet. The musicologist and blogger Wayne Marshall posted this on his Twitter account: “wore a MJ pin on my jean jacket back when i was 8. i remember wearing to the polls during 84 election. was asked if i wanted MJ for prez.” The Brooklyn singer-songwriter Jennifer O’Connor wrote, “When I was little, I had the Beat It zipper jacket. I had a Thriller hat and all the boys with Def Leppard hats made fun of me. I didn’t care. He was magic. Goodbye Michael.”
The eulogies are coming quickly, and some are unusually good—Danyel Smith at CNN.com, Roger Ebert at his Chicago Sun-Times blog, our own Ben Greenman.
What did he mean to me? I couldn’t pull off a red, multi-zippered leather “Beat It” jacket, but my little Onkyo boombox in high school was red, and my laces were red and the one breakdancing move I ever mastered was his moonwalk. He was the Jackie Robinson of MTV and, in many ways, the Google of pop dancing. No male pop star who wants to dance on stage has any chance of avoiding Jackson’s choreography, not that many of them try. (See Usher, Ne-Yo, Justin Timberlake, any boy band.) Two albums he made with Quincy Jones—“Off The Wall” (my favorite), and “Thriller”—redefined so many different kinds of music. Why couldn’t a pop song also contain an enormous, barn-burning guitar solo? Why couldn’t a dance hit verge on Afropop? Why did a creamy ballad about human nature have to sound like humans were singing it? Pop has in no way exhausted all the questions he and Quincy posed.
For the moment, I leave the life aside. It made me nothing but sad—no change of venue, no new home, no new friends could anchor or comfort the most important musical ghost of the twentieth century. I often thought of a veal calf when I saw him—he had been raised to perform under extreme pressure before he had any idea of what life could be beyond performing for others. Then he spent decades trying to build a life without ever having seen one. He had the best ear in the world but he had no apparent idea of how people experienced everyday comfort, or even boredom.
(I’ll be talking about Jackson on BBC World News America, which airs at 7 P.M. and 10 P.M. Eastern time today.)
Potter, Stars Trek and Wars, Matrix all the same movie
You've likely seen this comparison of Harry Potter and the first Star Wars movie but that comparison has recently been expanded to include not only Potter and Star Wars but also The Matrix and Abrams' Star Trek.
Tags: Harry Potter movies Star Trek Star Wars thematrixOnce upon a time, Luke | Kirk | Neo | Harry was living a miserable life. Feeling disconnected from his friends and family, he dreams about how his life could be different. One day, he is greeted by Obi Wan | Captain Pike | Trinity | Hagrid and told that his life is not what it seems, and that due to some circumstances surrounding his birth | birth | birth | infancy he was meant for something greater.
for pk
for pk
The Bad Tour
In April 1988, I went to my first, honest-to-goodness rock show. Yes, I'd seen some other live music, but never anything like this. For my birthday, my Uncle Steve took me to see Michael Jackson perform on his Bad tour at Rosemont Horizon (now Allstate Arena) in Chicago. I remember my dad dropping me off with him during dinner at a restaurant that let you throw peanuts on the floor. I also remember being phenomenally excited.
We were sitting in our seats, waiting patiently for the show to start. The crowd was already chanting and I was getting giddy. If you've been to Rosemont, you know it can get incredibly loud. It wasn't as loud as Chicago Stadium, but it was loud. So when Michael took the stage and every single person screamed at the top of their lungs, it was deafening.
Being just barely 8 years old, unable to hear anything and having a huge LED display flashing 'BAD' at me over and over, I immediately started to cry. My uncle noticed relatively quickly and tried to smooth it over as Michael started to moonwalk. Seeing I was completely freaked, he took me outside and got me a 7-Up. The hallway was completely desolate as the world was inside watching Michael and I managed to calm down. We went back in.
The rest of the show was mostly a blur, but I distinctly remember him being in a human-sized, backlit tent doing 30-second costume changes. I'm also positive that the show was life-altering.
The photo above is from the string of Rosemont shows and the video is from the a stop in Japan
Michael Jackson 1958-2009
I suppose everyone was surprised, even stunned yesterday afternoon to hear the news of Michael Jackson's death, a terribly sad moment for his family, friends and fans. Like the rest of you I've seen a lot of famous people die and even a lot of young famous people die unexpectedly. But for some reason, yesterday in our newsroom, as we tried to follow and figure out what was happening and confirm Jackson's death, I found myself more shocked than I usually am by these things.
Not sadder or more upset. I don't think I really felt either of these things more than I have seeing other relatively young people die or seeing their family's and loved ones' grief. And please let me say clearly that is not meant with any disrespect. While I liked Jackson's music and had great respect for his talent, I just didn't have a strong emotional connection to him.
So, not sadder or more upset, but more shocked. And I was thinking last night, what feels different about this?
I think it's because so much of Michael Jackson's life seemed like make believe. Sometimes farcical. But always like play acting, somehow. So much theatrics. So many costumes. And on various levels the desire -- often frighteningly realized -- to deny or defy his physical self, his age and much more. Even the things that seemed terribly serious, perhaps especially those -- the trials for child molestation which could have landed him in jail for years or decades -- never seemed to stick. Whether he was truly guilty of these accusations or not, it always blew over. All together it conditioned me to think of Jackson as someone whose drama was always just drama -- whether it was the threat of prison or vast debts or bizarre physical tribulations -- all of it would pass or blow over, perhaps not even have been real, leaving him more or less in place, as weird or surreal as ever, but basically unchanged.
In the span of time between when news first broke that Jackson had been rushed to the hospital and when it was reported that he'd died, I actually saw some people speculating on the web that the whole thing might be a stunt to get out of his tour dates or perhaps some health emergency that was not quite as serious as it was being described. And even though these speculations turned out to be tragically, embarrassingly off base, I wasn't sure if they might not turn out to be accurate since it seemed somehow more in character, at least more in keeping with the never ending drama.
In the end death just seemed more out of character for Michael Jackson than for most people. Because through most of his life he and reality seemed at best on parallel but seldom overlapping courses. And death is reality, full stop.
Ghostbusters III
Over on BLDGBLOG, Geoff Manaugh shares his idea for a Ghostbusters III screenplay based on NYNEX, the telephone company that served New York and New England from 1984 through 1997.
Tags: geoffmanaugh Ghostbusters III moviesPay phones ring for no reason, and they don't stop. Dead relatives call their families in the middle of the night. People, horrifically, even call themselves-- but it's the person they used to be, phoning out of the blue, warning them about future misdirection.
Every once in a while, though, something genuinely bad happens: someone answers the phone... and they go a little crazy.
Thing is -- spoiler alert -- halfway through the film, the Ghostbusters realize that NYNEX isn't a phone system at all: it's the embedded nervous system of an angel -- a fallen angel -- and all those phone calls and dial-up modems in college dorm rooms and public pay phones are actually connected into the fiber-optic anatomy of a vast, ethereal organism that preceded the architectural build-up of Manhattan.
Manhattan came afterwards, that is: NYNEX was here first.
Is It a 'Plain' Slice, a 'Regular' Slice, or Something Else Entirely?
I received this interesting query a couple weeks ago and thought I'd share it with you. It involves word nerdery, which is a small interest of mine. Also—sorry for the slowness here this week. I've been on vacation this week. I'm in Wildwood, New Jersey. Haven't eaten much pizza—just did Sam's Pizza a couple times. OK. Back to the show. —The Mgmt.
From Sabella Pizza in Park Slope.
Adam,
Barry Popik (barrypopik.com) referred me to you after I sent him this inquiry:
> Any sense of what the more common [term] is in the NYC area to describe a slice of pizza with no toppings (other than cheese): a "regular" slice or a "plain" slice? I checked the 4 relevant take-out menus I have, and saw two uses of each.
Mr. Popik's replied:
> PLAIN SLICE + PIZZA--13,300 Google hits
> REGULAR SLICE + PIZZA--7.060 Google hits
> CHEESE SLICE + PIZZA--25,200 Google hits
> PLAIN SLICE + PIZZA + BROOKLYN--710 Google hits
> REGULAR SLICE + PIZZA + BROOKLYN--864 Google hits
> CHEESE SLICE + PIZZA + BROOKLYN--1,101 Google hits
> ...
> I haven't studied this. Maybe you should ask the guy at the "Slice" pizza blog (slice.seriouseats.com).
> ...
> "Slice" (or "cheese slice") implies a plain/regular slice. That's what most people say.
> ...
> I prefer saying "plain" over "regular" -- "regular" is for the size of a pizza pie (regular, large, extra large). However, many restaurants use the word "regular" instead of "plain" because "plain" sounds drab for a slice. For a whole pie, "Pizza Margherita" is substituted for "plain pie."Note: I thought I was leaning towards "plain slice" -- but now, after thinking too much, I'm not sure.
Any thoughts appreciated -- because, surely, this is important stuff.
—David D.
Williamsburg, Bkln
From the original Ray's Pizza at 27 Prince Street in Manhattan.
------------------------------------------------------------
Dear David,Interesting question. I've only lived here in NYC since 2000, but I picked up "plain slice" pretty soon after moving here.
Definitely not "cheese slice," as I think Barry's dead on—"plain slice" or "regular slice" or just plain "slice" implies crust-sauce-cheese.
I've never thought about "regular" as a modifier for the size of the pizza. I've heard it used most often when someone is ordering a square (Sicilian) slice and *then* a "regular" triangular-shaped slice—most often at places that are renown for squares:
"Yeah, lemme get two a those squares—corners—and ... a couple regular slices."
In that case, the "regular" refers to the round pie—the more commonly consumed type—and the assumption is that those "regular" slices are "plain slices."
If you will allow me further musings on language in ordering food in New York City, I've noticed that native New Yorkers often use the phrase "Lemme get XYZ."
Granted, I never really paid attention to ordering lingo while growing up in Kansas City or when I lived in the Northwest for a few years, but I had always learned to use phrases that were a bit more soft—"Yes, I'd like XYZ, please." Then again, I also use "Could I get XYZ"—but even that is a bit softer than "Lemme get...."
David, may I ask why you're researching this? Are you writing something about it or just curious?
If you'd like additional insight, with your permission I'd like to publish your query on Slice as a "Dear Slice" letter. Maybe the pizza gallery would have something interesting to say. But if you're working on some sort of article on it, I can sit on it.
Hasta la pizza,
Adam
------------------------------------------------------------
From Tomato & Basil in Park Slope.
Hi again, Adam,
I beg your pardon for this very belated reply!
Not research for a book, rather a blog about rhyming-nyc-things, including lots of NY food items...
Wasn't sure it would happen, but it just went up: http://NYCRhymology.com ...and I just posted "plain slice/Italian ice" and thought of you.
Myself, I'm also a "plain slice" guy, which is why I used that term in my post. But please feel free to inquire further to see what folks say. (For the purposes of my blog, I do rather care what is the more common usage.)
Also, I totally agree re: that expression "lemme get a" that NY'ers (and now I) use in stores... I have occasionally found myself using that expression when I'm home in my native St Louis, MO and it always sounds harsh!
(But I reckon a lot of my Missouri-flavored utterances sound quaint to NY'ers... e.g., an African cabbie once scolded me for calling him "sir"--he seemed to think it was a *colonial* thing! -- not that that will stop me from saying "yes ma'am", "yes sir", "please" and "thank you" like my parents taught me to do!)
Best wishes & thanks for the reply--as I said, pardon the delay, wasn't sure I had a reason to be asking my pizza question!
—David D.
Michael Jackson Link Roundup
The online catalog of what was auctioned from Neverland.
The King is Dead: Lefsetz on the passing of Michael Jackson:
He missed his childhood and now he’s gonna miss his old age.
How fucked up is that?
Michael Jackson never had a chance. He had to succeed for his family, his parents’ dreams were dependent upon him.
And a boy with that much pressure delivers. He works truly hard, so he will be loved. That’s all Michael Jackson was looking for, love.
He wanted to be accepted. Wanted to be so good that he couldn’t be denied. But you can’t change family history, and the public no longer treats you as human, as an equal, once you break through. People want to rip you off or tear you down, or shower you in faux love that’s more about their unfulfilled desires than yours. It gets so confusing that you retreat.
Slog: The Last Time I saw Michael Jackson:
His art will not redeem him. He’s a one-of-a-kind musical genius who went crazy, played with morphing his race and gender, slept with children, was repeatedly acquitted of child-molestation charges, and then died, alone and broke.
It’s enough to make you cry.
“My Twitter search script sees roughly 15 percent of all posts on Twitter mentioning Michael Jackson. Never saw Iran or swine flu reach over 5 percent,” observed Ethan Zuckerman, a fellow at Harvard’s Beckman Center for Internet & Society.
Marco.org takes a look at Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for Sega Genesis.
It’s weird. It’s creepy. It’s comically absurd. It really doesn’t seem like kids belong there. Yet, I can’t see anything malicious about it — I’m not even sure that anything here is inappropriate. But it seems like something about it should be, which maps eerily to the tragic battle that Michael Jackson had fought against society for nearly two decades.
(via justinday) Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for Sega Genesis. ...
(via justinday)
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker for Sega Genesis. This was actually kind of a fun game, decent visuals for the time too.I was hoping someone would post this. It has quite a history — it was a bestseller for the Genesis, then during his first child-weirdness scandal in the early 90s, it was permanently pulled from the shelves.
The point of the game is for Michael Jackson to kill bad guys and zombies by dancing and kicking magic dust at them in order to rescue young children who are inexplicably hidden in closets in nightclubs and graveyards and are suddenly very happy to see him (“Michael!”) before his monkey comes and sits on his head and points him to the boss which is actually just a large collection of bad guys or zombies who can all be simultaneously killed by engaging in a brief coordinated dance routine with Michael Jackson.
It’s weird. It’s creepy. It’s comically absurd. It really doesn’t seem like kids belong there. Yet, I can’t see anything malicious about it — I’m not even sure that anything here is inappropriate. But it seems like something about it should be, which maps eerily to the tragic battle that Michael Jackson had fought against society for nearly two decades.
I won’t remember Michael Jackson for most of his music, directly — but it will always be fun to load Moonwalker into a Genesis emulator every five years and remember this odd game that depicted, with probably unintentional accuracy, this odd person.
A few links for Friday
(Let's just say that when I *started* this post, it was called "A few links for Wednesday". This week just DISAPPEARED. If you see my Tuesday running around, will you tell it to come home NOW? It's grounded until further notice.)
Check out this fascinating interview with Harry Berzack, a sewing-machine collector. (That's one of his machines above.)
Mary Beth is having another Chicago Fabric Swap! I will definitely be there, with another laundry basket of fabric that needs a new home.
And Oh! The day we have been waiting for has arrived, because Gothic Charm School: An Essential Guide for Goths and Those Who Love Them
is out! Hooray for Jilli (and her intrepid illustrator/husband Pete!) If you have not yet encountered the magic that is Our Lady of the Manners, you should check out this video.
I think that's all I have forWednesdaytoday. Well, except for this. What can I say? I'm a sucker for old gold. Although I think it would be cooler if they showed pictures of the raw materials as well as the finished dress. Preferably in a Pretty in Pink-style montage, except without ending up as that awful actual Pretty in Pink dress.
I promise a return to a more regular blogging schedule next week. I think. Wish me luck!
Anti-Abuse Bus Stop Ad Only Batters Women When Nobody's Looking [Advertising]
Amnesty International has installed a new anti-domestic-abuse ad fixture in Hamburg, Germany which is equal parts clever and shocking: when you look at the photo, it's a smiling couple; when you look away, it's a dude punchin' a lady.
The billboard works by scanning its proximity with an eye-tracking camera, which triggers an image switch on the display panel when it senses someone looking at it. The change only occurs after a brief delay, so that observers understand what's going on, and get the message.
It's a fantastically effective concept, and a brilliant use of technology. Kind of sad, then, that it's probably award bait, and doomed to be a lone installation, according to Copyranter. [Copyranter via Dvice]
Freeload: DJ Ayres' Michael Jackson Mix MP3
Since you are now concurrently overwhelmed by and fiending for a refresher course/memory wax on the dearly departed King of Pop, you should revisit the Michael Jackson mix DJ Ayres made for Brooklyn radio last year. It spans Jackson's whole musical life, which essentially began when he was a little badass baby. Literally no kid star will ever be that talented. It's chronological, from "I Wanna Be Where You Are" to "I Can't Help It," "Say Say Say" to "Remember the Time" to "Butterflies." Rest in peace to a genius.
Download: DJ Ayres' Michael Jackson Mix
The growing hypocrisy of Major League Baseball
I'm sure there's a way to blame Bud Selig for this, and I fully intend to do so. Because he's a terrible commissioner, you see.
Exhibit A: Geovanny Soto and his friendly herb.Chicago Cubs catcher Geovany Soto will not be suspended by Major League Baseball or his team after testing positive for marijuana at this year’s World Baseball Classic. Soto, last season’s NL Rookie of the Year, drew a two-year ban from international competition by the International Baseball Federation. “I am embarrassed by my lapse in judgment,” he said in a statement released during Thursday’s 6-5 loss to Detroit. “While I fully acknowledge my inappropriate behavior, I want to assure my fans and my family that this was an isolated incident.” “I fully understand the ramifications of my actions,” Soto said. “I have and will accept any and all consequences.”Really? So even though he used a substance that was just as illegal as steroids, Soto is not going to be punished? What kind of double standard is that? What if he had been caught smoking the reefer during the MLB season and not the WBC? Would he be suspended then? Or do the substances in question have to be performance-enhancing to create a blip on the radar?
The fact that these questions even exist in the first place is a sharp testament to some of the nonsensical human beings in the brain trust of America's pastime.
But wait, there's more!
Exhibit B: Manny Ramirez in the Minor Leagues
Why the hell is Manny allowed to warm up in the minors after being caught using a drug that is banned at all levels in the sport?
Would you let a convicted child molester, on work release from prison, take his first job at a daycare center before he's allowed to rejoin the rest of working society? Fuck and no you wouldn't.
Hmm, that was a surprisingly good metaphor. The point is that Manny's suspension isn't really a suspension if he's still allowed to play baseball. In the cases of both Soto and Ramirez, MLB is contorting the situations such that punishment for misdeeds is openly mocked. The notion that either of these guys is getting away with their current course of action is despicable. What is the danger in having cut and dried rules in situations like this?
Can you imagine if Roger Goodell was running the show? He'd probably need to be revived after swooning at the lack of hammer dropping.
Michael Jackson Appreciation in Crafts
For many of us Michael Jackson’s music was very much a part of our lives at one stage of his career or perhaps at every stage of this career. I know his body of work encompasses much more than Thriller, but that was the album that hit me at the right age. I can still probably recite every word on the album forwards and maybe even backwards — even the whole monologue by Vincent Price. There’s nothing more I can say that hasn’t already been said much more eloquently by someone else so I think I’ll stop here and just say that all our lives are richer thanks to MJ’s music and for that we are so appreciative. Check out the Michael Jackson tag for more MJ-themed projects.
What If? online
What If? A Journal of Radical Possibilities was a short running journal that started coming out soon after the WTO protests in Seattle 1999, and ran for a number of years, putting out 3 or 4 issues. I was always generally impressed with it, in terms of being well put together, well designed, using quality artwork (Rini Templeton, Erik Drooker) and featuring the intersection of art and politics. What If? founder/editor Christy Rodgers has put the journal online, and plans on using this new web version to continue the goals of the print edition. Check it out here. (It also looks like Justseeds artist Fernando Marti will soon have a nice image gallery up on the site as well.)
Baseball Statistics Minimal Infographics
Baseball Infographics and other Visual Treats [flipflopflyin.com] consists of a small collection of infographic illustrations of mainly baseball-related statistics. The collection includes sports facts such as a projection of when the Yankees might run out of double-digit numbers, a size comparison of lot of sporty balls, the highest and lowest price for individual game tickets, a map of all MLB locations and their ballpark orientations, basketball shorts then and now, the total length of 716,083 pitches and the performance of Mike Morgan, plus some demographic facts such as relative amount of native Americans in Cleveland Ohio, and many more.See also Sports Statplot, Basketball Heat Maps and Emo + Beer.
Thnkx Nick.
June 25, 2009
Michael Jackson's Sunglasses
My kid was looking through my iPhone photos, came upon this picture and asked me who were all those people in sunglasses. I'd taken the photo at the on again-off again auction of Michael Jackson's stuff that had been assembled in L.A. I remember thinking at the time how my impression of Michael Jackson had been totally changed by seeing his amazing collection of toy cars, vintage video games, Disney memorabilia and custom made furniture. He was no longer just the King of Pop and a pedophile. He was a man of substance who had devoted his life to amassing an amazing assortment of objets d'art that defied categorization. This collection should never be broken up, I thought. It was so singular. And so wonderful as to demand serious exegesis. I tried to explain to my kid about this amazing, talented man, but he was really wondering more about the sunglasses and what they were all doing in this photo.
Michael Jackson is a test. He is only a test of the emergency broadcast system
The Internet was built to withstand nuclear attack. That was why it was built in the ’60s in the first place, as a communications system with redundancy built in so that the military could communicate even if one of the nodes went down.
We saw some of that happen today, as news of Michael Jackson’s death spread like wildfire through the Internet. TMZ.com got the scoop about Jackson being sent to the hospital. But the site went down from the surge of traffic. The LA Times reported he was in a coma, but then that site went down too. The LA Times managed to report that Jackson was dead, and then everyone else started buzzing about it. Twitter went down. Keynote Systems, which measures web site performance, said that the following sites all slowed significantly: ABC, AOL, LA Times, CNN Money and CBS. Starting at 230 pm PST, the average load time for a news site slowed from 4 seconds to 9 seconds.
This is not supposed to happen. More than a decade ago, when I was writing about computer servers and Sun Microsystems was advertising itself as “We’re the dot in dotcom,” the hardware vendors were all talking about “utility computing.” Carly Fiorina, then the chief executive of HP, touted “adaptive computing,” where software would automatically route traffic from one overloaded server to another. Sun called its version of utility computing “N1,” after the code name for a project that aimed at rebalancing server loads on the fly. IBM, meanwhile, operated on a vision that it called “on demand.”
These visions were great and they all made sense based on an understanding of traffic as a flow of data. Companies such as Akamai set up networks to deliver video in real time for events, such as Victoria’s Secret’s annual lingerie show on the web. In years past, Victoria’s Secret had lots of trouble keeping a site up. But now it’s not as hard. Akamai sets up server centers around the country to feed video to users as needed. But now we’re talking the need to update in micro-seconds.
Servers have gotten better at being multi-headed beasts, especially with the arrival of hardware innovations such as low-power processors and chips with multiple cores, or processing engines, on a single chip. Virtualization software from VMware and others has arrived. That allows a server to split itself into two or three or more machines, just like the old mainframe computers, which had to do tasks in batches by necessity. Each instance of the server can handle a computing task, like fetching a web page from memory and sending it back to the user that requested it. Servers have become like hydras, doing all sorts of these trivial computing tasks at the same time.
And yet networks still buckle under the weight of traffic when something like today’s events shakes the whole world. Mobile networks are particularly weak, as AT&T’s activation problems related to the launch of the iPhone 3G S showed. In some ways, the servers worked today. As one site went down, another picked up the torch. But the transitions were rocky. The promise of utility computing is that you will be able to switch on and off server capacity as if you were switching on and off your lights.
And that leads me to consider the future. As tragic as Michael Jackson’s death is, it’s only a small taste of what would happen in a true calamity. If the servers go down, how are we going to get our Gmail or Yahoo Mail? Who will be there to listen when we collectively Tweet for help? What will we do if the emergency plan is stored on the network?
It’s a wake-up call for the web, and for those who are building its infrastructure and plumbing for it.
Michael Jackson dead at 50
L.A. Times Reports Jackson Is Dead | 6:24 p.m. The newspaper cited "city and law enforcement sources." The networks and CNN are also broadcasting the news, citing the Times story.
The LA Times story is here but isn't loading right now. Twitter is melting down a little. RIP, King of Pop.
Update: The LA Times story is loading now. Here's what it says:
Pop star Michael Jackson was pronounced dead by doctors this afternoon after arriving at a hospital in a deep coma, city and law enforcement sources told The Times.
Update: My favorite Michael Jackson performance is from the MTV Awards in 1995.
It's not a groundbreaking performance or anything -- it's like a greatest hits package -- but I had it taped on VHS and watched it many many times, wondering how a person could move like that.
Tags: Michael Jackson
It's strawberry time again
Three years later, strawberries are going strong and we're headed up for some picking, eating, and jamming. Ollie can't wait, and neither can I!
soupsoup: Sorry Elizabeth, I should have been more clear. It...
Sorry Elizabeth, I should have been more clear. It really is an ad, and it’s a big fat sponsored post too.That’s true, but I fail to see the contradiction. I’m not sure why the two would be mutually exclusive. The “advertisement” tag up top indicates that it’s an advertisement and not editorial opinion. As does the “sponsored post” label at the bottom, though that particular term is used less as an identifier for readers (the much more obvious “ADVERTISEMENT” label does that) than for potential media buyers. The phrase exists primarily in media kits to delineate the difference between display and anything involving actual copy in the feature well, the same way real estate inserts in NY Mag, travel inserts in the Times magazine and airline inserts in biz mags all have “ADVERTISEMENT” or “SPONSORED SECTION” printed across the top of the page. It’s the same thing, either way.
HP Releases iPhone Versions of Classic Calculators
Interesting foray into iPhone development for HP. Check out the comments for raves and requests from calculator nerds.
Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings “Take Me With U (Prince Cover)”
It’s been twenty-five years since we were first introduced to the greatness that is Prince’s film and album Purple Rain, and in honor of this event, the folks over at Spin Magazine have cooked up an entire track-by-track cover set of the classic album (entitled Purplish Rain) and are offering it for free (well, almost free, as you must deal with answering a trivia question correctly in order to receive the download).
But as much as we dig “The Kid”, it was a little hard trying to muster up much excitement over this thing, given that tribute records rarely ever sustain much interest beyond a single curious listen and we’ve probably heard each of Rain’s nine entries covered over a million times over the years (with some being amazing, but most being…well, yeah).
To our non-surprise, Purplish Rain lands as a decent listen that’ll mostly leave you with a desire to re-check out the original; but if you do snatch up the free-load, the tracks you should most look out for include The Twilight Singers somber “When Doves Cry” (featuring the one and only Apollonia), a festive mariachi-styled run-through of “I Would Die 4 U” by Cali punk force The Bronx‘ alter ego Mariachi El Bronx, and the always-impressive Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings doing “Take Me With U”.
The final single stripped from Rain, the original “Take Me With U” paired Prince and Apollonia for a breezy duet celebrating their unbridled devotion to each other (”I dont care where we go/ I dont care what we do/ I dont care pretty baby/ Just take me with u”). Jones and the Kings relieve it of any pop stateliness (and, in a sense, familiarity) in their sassy rendition though, constructing this big band soul tour-de-force that sits comfortably in unison with the rest of their spirited old school-soaked output.
Today In Iran
After yesterday’s brutal crackdown on protesters in Iran—and with opposition presidential candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi, reportedly under house arrest, continuing to issue defiant statements on his website—this New Republic piece on the history of popular protest in the country makes for sobering reading.
Movable Type fork Melody is an opportunity to harness CPAN
Reposted from a blog entry by Mark Stosberg
Today Melody was announced as a fork of the Perl-based Movable Type platform. I helped the Melody project as it prepared to launch, in part advising on how to best to relate to the Perl community. One of the stated interests of Melody is to refactor the project to use CGI::Application, which I maintain. Tim Appnel has already spelled out a vision of what a "CPANization" of Movable Type might look like, and I've looked in depth at what the initial steps towards using CGI::Application could be.
My own vision for Melody is a code base that's very focused on publishing and content management, with all the infrastructure outsourced to CPAN modules that are well-written, well-documented, and well-tested. The collaboration between Melody and CPAN would be a two-way code flow. While there are more CPAN modules that Melody could make use of, there are number of pieces of Melody which should be packaged as independent modules on their own and released to CPAN.
One example is the great "dirification" that already exists in Movable Type. This is the functionality that turns any given string of words into a reasonable representation in URLs. It seems like an easy problem on the surface, but Movable Type has a sophisticated solution that takes into account what it means to do this well across many different languages. I also couldn't find any existing CPAN module which already takes on this problem space, so I started to extract this out of Movable Type myself and published a draft of String::Dirify. For that initial release, I ripped out all the fancy multi-language support, and there is still more significant work to be done to untangle this layer from from Movable Type. (If you want to pick up that project and work on it, there's also some discussion of testing String::Dirify).
While Movable Type already had an open source release, I expect Melody to have a more adventurous evolution, and I look forward to it becoming a shining star in the Perl community, not just for the exterior functionality, but also because internals have an opportunity to become an example of best practices.
Mark Stosberg has been using programming Perl for the web for over a decade. He is the Principal Developer at Summersault and maintains several CPAN modules including Titanium and Data::FormValidator.
Like an Episode of The Wire
Did top political appointees in the Bush Justice Department leak about an investigation of then-Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ) to swing the 2006 election in Renzi's favor and blow up a wiretap on Renzi in the process? Murray Waas reports.
Social A’s: How To Deal With Blog Comments From Yo Auntie
Dear Answer Lady,
Tell me you deal with shit like this:
“A new comment on the post #1 “Clip from [my recent standup performance that I posted on my website, which is intended primarily to get me more comedy gigs]” is waiting for your approval.
Author: Auntie [redacted] (IP: [redacted])
Comment: Well sweetie, Umm I know things are different in the big city but let me tell you….people are the same everywhere. They are going to read into what you are saying [about bikini waxing] and think you are talking about things you were raised better than to talk about. Which, we know, isn’t the case. I’m just telling you this because I am older and have more experience and you are just an innocent lamb living in a wolve’s [sic] den (NYC). That aside, you are cute as a button! And, btw, when did you go to Brazil? That must have been a fun trip. Love you bunches- Auntie [redacted]”Signed,
Naughty Niece
Dear Naughty,
First go register the domain for Postcardsfromyoauntie.com. J/k. (But still, the part about Brazil… she KNOWS, right? Doesn’t she know? She has to know. What, they don’t have TBS reruns of Sex and the City in the wolfless land where she lives?)
I think that obviously you should not approve this comment. I say “obviously” but actually, maybe it’s not obvious? For example! I used to think it was somehow my ethical responsibility to approve any comment that anyone left on my blog, no matter how deranged or stalkerish or misguidedly left by a befuddled older relative. That philosophy was self-flagellating and dumb. If you maintain a website, you implicitly endorse all its content, even the comments—so you have every right to exercise discretion about what gets posted. “Approving” a comment doesn’t means you “approve” of its content, but it does mean that you feel it is a sentiment worthy, for whatever reason, of inclusion in the discourse around Tarkovsky or LOLcats or whatever your post was about.
For example, I refrain from deleting comments solely because they’re insulting to me, but when people use my comments as a forum to insult other people, I delete their comments and, if possible, I email them and tell them why. I also delete comments that are personal, like the one you received, simply because the comments aren’t an appropriate venue for one-on-one correspondence.
So all you have to do is contact Auntie [Redacted] and tell her, “Dear Auntie [Redacted], I am so tickled that you read my blog! It’s nice to hear from you. But next time you want to get in touch, I’d like it much better if you emailed me directly than if you left your thoughts in the comments. When you write in the comments, you’re talking to everyone who reads my website, so it doesn’t make sense for you to say something there that you really only want to say to me.”
That’s all! Problem solved. Also, leave your pubic hair alone! God put it there for a reason.
Have you a problem? Consult our answer lady, who is sensitive to all issues. Write her private email here!Previously: Do I Have To Go Visit Those Babies?
Serious Heat: Padma Spices Things Up With Chili Honey Butter
Editor's note: On Thursdays, Andrea Lynn, associate editor of Chile Pepper Magazine, drops by with Serious Heat.
Chile Honey Butter on toast
In the beginning (back before it was one GladWare commercial after another), I was a raging Top Chef fan. When you don’t have cable, this requires hunting for an equally dedicated friend, so you can come over to watch.
In 2007, to promote the release of her new book, Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet, Padma Lakshmi was speaking at a local bookstore. My friend and I went, vowing not to be pressured to buy the cookbook and just enjoy the talk. We weren’t prepared to be dazzled so much by Padma's charm. We both left with a photo of us and Padma, as well as a signed copy of the $34.95 book. “How did this even happen?” we asked each other outside the store, still semi-giddy from our meeting.
While I still haven’t made enough recipes from the book to justify the $35 expenditure, one of my favorites is Chile Honey Butter. Yes, yes. It’s just soft butter swirled with honey and spiked with cayenne—one of those simple recipes that you wonder how you didn’t come up with it yourself. I spread it onto toast, dot it onto my fried eggs, and use it as a garnish for fish. I’ve even been known to eat it straight-up, licked off a spoon Paula Deen-style. Whether it's chile honey butter or chipotle purée and sour cream, what are some of your favorite kicked-up easy concoctions? Padma's recipe, after the jump.
Chile Honey Butter
Zest Factor: Medium
- makes about 1 cup -
Recipe adapted from Tangy Tart Hot & Sweet: A World of Recipes for Every Day by Padma Lakshmi. She recommends using it to sauté green beans and carrots or to baste a whole chicken.
Ingredients
8 tablespoons (1 stick) butter, at room temperature
1 1/2 tablespoons honey
1 teaspoon cayenne
SaltProcedure
Combine all ingredients, and whip in a blender or processor, or just by hand with a fork, until they form a smooth sauce. Spoon into a rigid plastic container, and keep covered in the fridge.
Shit We're Diggin': Picasso's Light Graffiti from 1949
Today and Tomorrow points to a terrific set of photos found in the LIFE archive of Picasso doing light graffiti. They were shot in 1949 by LIFE photographer Gjon Mili when he visited Picasso in Vallauris, France. You can see more of the series here.
Stop Hating On The Mark Sanford Emails, Loveless Haters!
I am totally disappointed in everyone making fun of the Mark Sanford emails! Everyone on the TV last night was giggling and shouting about them. I think that none of them have ever received a proper love letter. Loveless TV heathens! And I think it is wonderful that the governor of South Carolina, who could have been some stuffy fuddy-duddy jerkface, has poetry in his heart, and actually has the language to express it! When was the last time you got an email that began: “I am most jealous of your salad under the palm tree.” HOW WONDERFUL IS THAT? THAT IS GREAT STUFF. In the age of the text message that mostly says “What R U Up 2?,” I would totally do him.
Authenticating Paperwork
It's a sad, horrific story. Homeowner returns to find his house demolished. The demolition company was hired legitimately but there was a mistake and it demolished the wrong house. The demolition company relied on GPS co-ordinates, but requiring street addresses isn't a solution. A typo in the address is just as likely, and it would have demolished the house just as quickly.
The problem is less how the demolishers knew which house to knock down, and more how they confirmed that knowledge. They trusted the paperwork, and the paperwork was wrong. Informality works when everybody knows everybody else. When merchants and customers know each other, government officials and citizens know each other, and people know their neighbours, people know what's going on. In that sort of milieu, if something goes wrong, people notice.
In our modern anonymous world, paperwork is how things get done. Traditionally, signatures, forms, and watermarks all made paperwork official. Forgeries were possible but difficult. Today, there's still paperwork, but for the most part it only exists until the information makes its way into a computer database. Meanwhile, modern technology -- computers, fax machines and desktop publishing software -- has made it easy to forge paperwork. Every case of identity theft has, at its core, a paperwork failure. Fake work orders, purchase orders, and other documents are used to steal computers, equipment, and stock. Occasionally, fake faxes result in people being sprung from prison. Fake boarding passes can get you through airport security. This month hackers officially changed the name of a Swedish man.
A reporter even changed the ownership of the Empire State Building. Sure, it was a stunt, but this is a growing form of crime. Someone pretends to be you -- preferably when you're away on holiday -- and sells your home to someone else, forging your name on the paperwork. You return to find someone else living in your house, someone who thinks he legitimately bought it. In some senses, this isn't new. Paperwork mistakes and fraud have happened ever since there was paperwork. And the problem hasn't been fixed yet for several reasons.
One, our sloppy systems generally work fine, and it's how we get things done with minimum hassle. Most people's houses don't get demolished and most people's names don't get maliciously changed. As common as identity theft is, it doesn't happen to most of us. These stories are news because they are so rare. And in many cases, it's cheaper to pay for the occasional blunder than ensure it never happens.
Two, sometimes the incentives aren't in place for paperwork to be properly authenticated. The people who demolished that family home were just trying to get a job done. The same is true for government officials processing title and name changes. Banks get paid when money is transferred from one account to another, not when they find a paperwork problem. We're all irritated by forms stamped 17 times, and other mysterious bureaucratic processes, but these are actually designed to detect problems.
And three, there's a psychological mismatch: it is easy to fake paperwork, yet for the most part we act as if it has magical properties of authenticity.
What's changed is scale. Fraud can be perpetrated against hundreds of thousands, automatically. Mistakes can affect that many people, too. What we need are laws that penalise people or companies -- criminally or civilly -- who make paperwork errors. This raises the cost of mistakes, making authenticating paperwork more attractive, which changes the incentives of those on the receiving end of the paperwork. And that will cause the market to devise technologies to verify the providence, accuracy, and integrity of information: telephone verification, addresses and GPS co-ordinates, cryptographic authentication, systems that double- and triple-check, and so on.
We can't reduce society's reliance on paperwork, and we can't eliminate errors based on it. But we can put Âeconomic incentives in place for people and companies to authenticate paperwork more.
This essay originally appeared in The Guardian.
June 24, 2009
What I would want a "cloud" to do for me: a functional view
I was on a panel at Enterprise 2.0 yesterday about “Cloud Computing” providers and wanted to take the entire definite of “what is cloud computing?” from a different perspective.
As a consumer, I fundamentally want the entire technology stack for an application to
- Just work
- Just scale
- Just tell me everything
Just works means that I tell an infrastructure that I want my application to have user experience X 99.99% of the time to 99.99% of the my users, and what I want back from that query is a dollar amount. I’ll then make a decision about what I can afford.
Just scales means that I can go from zero to millions of users, one geographical site to twenty geographical sites, and one continent to four continents without a rewrite/rearchitecting.
Just tells me everything means that an API and data source is not only about provisioning machine images or the like, it can be queried for real time and time series data about everything. It let’s me make decisions around latencies and nothing ever just happened for no reason.
When you think about what it would take for these things to come to fruition, it starts to feel like a real step forward in the industry. It’s the collection of these things (in existence or development) that I don’t mind giving a new term to.
Nate Silver On Health Care
"What Will's position reflects instead is ideology: who cares that the federal government could build a better mousetrap? They're the government and that's bad. His argument is really no more sophisticated than that. If a libertarian conservative wants to make this argument, more power to them, but they absolutely should not be turning around and suggesting that a public option would raise health care costs. They're saying, rather, that they're morally opposed to the cost savings that would ensue."
Think Galactic this weekend!
I'll be at Think Galactic this weekend in Chicago! I'm looking forward to it, the schedule is packed with cool stuff. I'll be co-running a stenciling workshop, as well as on a panel about the continuing appeal of the apocalypse story in sci-fi/fantasy literature. I'll also be moderating panels on DIY and Climate Change, and having a small Justseeds table.Here's the info:
Think Galacticon 2009
June 26-28
Roosevelt University
downtown ChicagoA full schedule, registration, directions, etc. can be found here.
Language shapes thought
Lera Boroditsky shares some recent studies which show that language shapes the way we think.
How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
One of my favorite examples of this is something that Meg told me about years ago. In English, you might say something like, "I lost the keys" whereas in Spanish you could use a reflexive verb and say something more like "the keys lost themselves". Her guess was that difference makes Spanish speakers somewhat less likely to take responsibility for their actions...e.g. I didn't knock that vase over, it knocked itself over. (thx, david)
Update: Boy, the old inbox is humming on this one. People, including several linguists wrote in objecting to two main points. First, some said that it is far from certain that the research shows that language shapes thought; a couple people even went so far as to say that what Boroditsky wrote was just plain wrong. So there's certainly some debate there.
The second batch of posts took issue with what my wife Meg said about Spanish speakers. Let me try to clarify and explain what she was getting at without sounding like I'm a racist who thinks the Spanish and Mexicans are irresponsible klutzes (which I don't, if it wasn't COMPLETELY FUCKING OBVIOUS from the subject and tone of everything else I've ever written on this site, but thanks for going there anyway). Instead of what I wrote above, let's try this instead:
In my wife's experience as a fluent speaker of Mexican Spanish and who lived in Mexico for a year, she observed that when people misplaced their keys (and this is just one of many possible examples), they are far more likely to say something like "the keys lost themselves" than "I lost the keys" whereas in American English, you would never say "the keys lost themselves". In fact, she says that this sort of formulation is one of the quick ways to tell who speaks Mexican Spanish as a native and who doesn't. A reader says this is called the accidental se (scroll to the bottom). So with Spanish, there's a sense that these inanimate objects have some say in their actions, that they are "alive" and the speaker is in fact the victim. Those michevious keys lost themselves and now I'm late for work, that crazy glass tipped itself over and now I need to clean it up, etc.
In English, you could certainly say "the keys are lost" when deflecting responsibility for their loss (something everyone does, regardless of race or culture or language) but that's clearly not the same as the keys losing themselves...that's the real difference. I'll let Boroditsky explain what effects this difference might have on how Spanish speakers think, if any, lest I get any more angry emails. (thx, everyone, esp. kyle)
Tags: language Lera Boroditsky
Why We Need Steve Jobs
Dan Lyons nails it:
Cook is a great manager, a whiz when it comes to managing supply chains and keeping the trains running on time. He is vital to Apple. Jobs cannot do what he does. But neither can Cook do what Jobs does. The fact is, Apple needs both of them. Forgive me for the analogy I am about to make — but if you’ve seen the latest Star Trek movie, then you might understand how Cook and Jobs work together. Cook is Spock: low-key, cerebral, methodical. He’s the Apollonian counterpart to Kirk, the Dionysian hothead. Kirk is impulsive—but nobody would deny that he, not Spock, should be captain of the ship.
Weekend Cook and Tell Round Up: Make a Meal for $10
Beautiful deviled eggs by Cassaendra.
Welcome to the Weekend Cook and Tell Round Up. Last week's challenge to prepare a meal for four by spending only $10 was a difficult one. Although I have a very well-stocked pantry, I love to go grocery shopping, especially if there are people coming over. This week's topic was an exercise in frugality for me and I learned something very valuable from it: You don't always need to break out the foie gras; sometimes vegetables from the farmers' market and some pasta are just as decadent. Everyone who participated in this week's Weekend Cook and Tell came up with some really creative and inexpensive meal ideas. Take a look:
Somehow Huneybumper made 100 tamales for just over $11. Please share the recipe with us!
Cassaendra went all out by making a four course meal plus a tasty sounding blueberry tea to serve with the meal. She went a little over budget, but who's complaining when you are serving three different kinds of deviled eggs? Take a look at Casssaendra's photos and recipes at her blog.
JeSuisJuba used her well-stocked pantry to make a Mexican-influenced quiche with corn, chiles, and jalapeño. She served it with honey-lime dressed salad for a wonderful Sunday dinner.
Deep dish pizza is one of my favorite foods, yet something that I've never tried to make at home. Eloflin did it and for under $10.
Marinelm fed six for well under $10 with a healthy chickpea stew.
Whoot made a clean-out-the-fridge version of pasta primavera.
Thepirateking used Father's Day as an opportunity to feed a crowd for $10 with cottage pie.
My favorite response came from schmonsequences who needs only a steak and a bottle of rye for an entirely satisfying meal for $10.
Thanks to everyone who participated in this week's Weekend Cook and Tell. It is wonderful to see what all of you are cooking up at home. Be sure to head over to Talk for this week's challenge: Play Sommelier.
Melody
Interesting: Melody is a new open source CMS/weblog system forked from Movable Type. The project was started and is driven by a group of top Movable Type developers.
And There Are Emails ...
... very private, personal emails between Sanford and a woman in Buenos Aires named Maria.
EaterWire: La Bonne Soupe Back on Tues, More on Gansevoort Cafe
MEATPACKING DISTRICT— The Feedbag reports that the Gansevoort Cafe in the old Florent space will be owned by major operators The New York City Restaurant Group. Says a rep, “...the place will look the same from the outside, but will be completely redone inside. We’re keeping the chef, though, so there will be continuity in terms of the menu.” [TFB]
MIDTOWN— Bret Thorn shares the good news that Midtown French gem La Bonne Soupe will be up and running soon, three months after a devastating fire: "They’ll be cooking over the weekend and hope to start selling brandade de morou, croques madames and other homestyle French dishes by Tuesday." [NRN]
SOHO— A sad irony. The long shuttered icon Vesuvio Bakery had a brief revival of sorts in a Morgan Stanley Smith Barney ad. Lost City is not pleased: "Independent businesses of long standing...tumble one after another...Meanwhile large, rapacious economy-despoiling money machines like Morgan Stanley prop up the corpses of the same indy shops to push forward further confidence schemes, trading on the integrity and purity of stores like Vesuvio—an integrity a Wall Street brokerage couldn't begin to approach." [GS; LC]
Bridge Flea's on a (Lobster) Roll
The Flea under the Brooklyn Bridge has hit the ground running, with 100+ vendors dealing mostly in nice vintage and antique items, plus your favorite handmade and jewelry folks from Fort Greene. It has a different feel somehow, you kinda have to see it to know it.
Anyhoo, starting this Sunday you'll have a foolproof reason to stroll down to the waterfront this summer. Namely, lobster rolls. Fresh from Maine. Mayo or butter. Grilled Nissen buns.
The folks from the new Red Hook Lobster Pound (284 Van Brunt St. at Verona Pl.) truck up to Maine every week and bring back tons of fresh lobsters for Brooklynites to steam, suck, butter, etc. Now, they're bringing lobster rolls to the masses at the Bridge Flea--and after Senor and Mr. B's office tasting last month we know you're in for a treat. The real deal as they say.
Prices will be based on the market that week, but will likely hover in the $13-15 range. They'll also be slingin' Jonah crab claws, ready for your cracking and snacking pleasure.
And--why not?--we're re-introducing Fort Greene faves Choice Market (doing sushi in addition to their perfect pastries) and, well, pupusas. Plus ya got yer Stumptown Coffee, People's Pops, McClure's Pickles, Rick's Picks, Fine + Raw Chocolate, and Blue Marble Ice Cream.
Um, yum!
Web 3.0 - The semantic web - It all makes sense now
There has been a lot of talk about Microformats, RDFa (Resource Description Framework - in - attributes) and Web Ontology Language (OWL). These naming conventions, although not widely used yet, present a solution that narrows down relevant search results and data correlation on websites.
As some of you may know, our favorite web pioneer has recently announced Google Search Options.
This refined view of data exploits semantic markup conventions making it easy for people to find the data they want. They also have some good documentation on structured data in their Webmasters guidelines section.
So far, it seems like the three most common implementations for rich snippets are reviews, people and products. When coding, property association for data can be added either by naming the element class or adding a property attribute. These two Firefox addons, Operator and Semantic Radar, will display this information.
Here is the recording from the webinar we attended today on the Semantic Web.
Google Profiles has XFN now
Google Profiles just launched a new feature that's too dorky and obscure to warrant an official "Google blog" blog post, so the product manager on it said, "Brad, you're dorky... you should post it. You do Social Graph API stuff. The right people would read your blog, right?" (roughly)
So sure, I'll blawg it here.
Google Profiles now have XFN
rel="me"attributes on links. Again. (It had them briefly for awhile but it was done grossly so they were removed...)Why is this important?
rel="me"links are the glue of your social identity online. They tie together all your sites & accounts, letting other sites know where to find you. (Of course, if you don't want to be found, or have different personas: don't make links between them!). But if you're reading this post you already know all this, so I'll shut up.How does it work in Google Profiles now? While I don't work directly on Profiles, I sit near them and like to voice opinions on things. So here's the new design, which you can blame me for parts of if you hate it:
- assume users don't care about
rel="me"and it's super dorky.- do the best possible right thing by default, but let dorks override it.
- assume users will use products in ways you didn't imagine (aka "wrong")
- assume users will add Profiles links to their favorite websites, bands, friends, etc., not just "their" pages on the web.
- hide the
rel="me"choice by default when adding a link- show the
rel="me"choice if they go back and press "edit" on it- track two new bits per-link:
- does the user care about
rel="me"? (i.e. are they dorky?)- if so, does the user want this link to be
rel="me"?- when rendering the Profiles page HTML, consider those two bits:
- if the dork bit is on, use the value of the second bit (whether they chose
rel="me"on this link)- if the bit is off, just guess. But guess somewhat conservatively. We can adjust these heuristics over time (a lot of which are based on sgnodemapper), as most the links will be in do-not-care mode.
So, my dorky friends, you can now fix the
rel="me"state on your links by going to the editor and pressing "Edit" on the links and checking their state. Be sure to hit "Save" at the bottom.Enjoy.
(And keep in mind that the real utility of all this comes later. Consider yourself a dorky earlier adopter.)
Editions at 20x200
We released 4 editions today from yours truly on 20x200... All are from my project Travels Without Maps. Many of you have asked for small affordable prints, and now they are yours for the taking.
Additionally, I've seriously revamped my portfolio site and have now made it easier to grab big prints there. I have several new projects waiting in the wings will be putting them online in the coming weeks, so stay tuned, things are afoot!
Filed under: photography
Tags: 20x200, inside baseball, prints, travels without maps
Sponsor:
TWO BLUE CARS: Your kid's favorite shirt.
Fake Steve on The New York Times’s Coverage of Real Steve
The New York Times published a second piece on Steve Jobs yesterday, implying strongly that Steve Jobs somehow jumped the line and obtained a liver that should have gone to someone else. This article presents no evidence, and no quotes from anyone with knowledge of Jobs’s case. Is it any wonder that Jobs gave the scoop to The Wall Street Journal? This story is so scurrilous it has me thinking that the Times is coming apart at the seams.
After a long hiatus, Dan Lyons has turned the Fake Steve blog back on, and he has a terrific piece about the Times’s coverage:
“Whenever someone rich and famous receives a transplant, suspicions inevitably arise about whether that person managed to jump to the head of the waiting list and take an organ that might have saved the life of somebody just as desperate but less glamorous,” they say — only to assert, a paragraph later, that every doctor they talked to says there is no reason to cheat because these days anyone can pretty much sign up for a liver and get one.
There’s no evidence suggesting I cheated. Nobody is quoted in the story saying I cheated. There’s not a shred of anything in the actual story about that.
Lyons is ruthless on Brad Stone, as well. Deservedly so — if John Markoff were still on the Times’s Silicon Valley beat, it’s a good bet Jobs would have given him the scoop. And at the very least Markoff would have gotten his own version of the story the next day.
What Was Next
Most of the talks that we've given are lost to the sands of time, but this afternoon I was happy to discover that one of our favorite presentations lives on. For the AIGA Design Conference in Denver, we were asked to meditate on the topic of “What’s Next,” for which we presented a study of typographic history — and why the ‘historical revival’ might be a twentieth century idea whose time has passed.
The AIGA has posted the audio of our talk, which tracks with the images above; it runs about 45 minutes, including some questions from the audience, in which Tobias reveals some of the unpublished developmental names of Gotham. Also keep an ear out for two provocative concepts: a French wine scholar offers a pithy gloss on experimentalism, and a certain type designer defines “the underpants-on-the-head school of revivalism.” —JH
What's Next in Typography (audio)
Fashionista v. Recessionista
Rumor has it that Patricia Field might part ways with the Sex and the City sequel, over creative differences with Sarah Jessica Parker.
SJP wants Carrie's wardrobe to be reflective of the recession, which Field is apparently not so into. The flame-haired style maven told Grazia, "I don't use the recession as a reference for my creativity."
Whose side are you on?
In these times, we have all had to struggle with balancing our lust for fashion and cautious saving, or just outright lack of funds. And it's nice that SJP is considering realism. But do we, as viewers, actually want Carrie Bradshaw to cut down on her fabulous and outrageous outfits? Is this one of those times when art doesn't have to imitate life?
Personally, this strikes us as exactly the right time and place for fashion escapism.
--AMANDA JEAN BOYLE
Sponsored Topics: Sarah Jessica Parker - Carrie Bradshaw - Sex and the City - Fashion - Patricia Field
A sweet deal for old computers
Image source: Laptop.org (OLPC)An article in MIT's Technology Review reports on a surprising new use for One Laptop Per Child's user interface, Sugar. From the article:
The open-source education software developed for the "$100 laptop" can now be loaded onto a $5 USB stick to run aging PCs and Macs with a new interface and custom educational software.
"What we are doing is taking a bunch of old machines that barely run Windows 2000, and turning them into something interesting and useful for essentially zero cost," says Walter Bender [...] "It becomes a whole new computer running off the USB key; we can breathe new life into millions of decrepit old machines."
Nicholas Negroponte, who has given many TEDTalks, says "Putting Sugar on a stick is absolutely the right thing to do."
Bike Hugger Hub launches
Finally, a place to bitch about Lance's black socks: Bike Hugger Hub launches -- moments ago
Our Hub isn't fixed, singled, flip-flop or even internal. Instead, it's a place for Huggas and fans of the race to talk about the Tour de France. We've got daily topics and a live chat for kvetching, applauding, cheering, and your pithy observations.
Read more about the Hub in our introduction post and joins us. We're starting to talk about the Tour today.
exhausted just reading this
I have a profound sense of respect for David Hudson, blogger for IFC, who does a tremendous job rounding up reviews of new movie releases. Go read this one just to marvel at scale of this task: Transformers: The Binge is Appallin'.
Worst Excuse Ever ... Pretty Much
TPM Reader BC ...
On the BA 'coastline': As someone who has been to Buenos Aires many times, just returned from BA and is in the process of moving there later this year, I can tell you unequivocally that someone who goes to Buenos Aires to 'see the coastline' is akin to someone going to New York City or Boston to see the Atlantic Ocean. As for getting away to clear his head, the greater Buenos Aires area is home to 30% of Argentina's 40 million people. While Sanford is trying to paint a picture of a peaceful drive along a beautiful coast, in fact he was crammed into a land-locked city of 15 million people. Worst excuse ever.
The High-Speed Rail Numbers Game: Is $13 Billion and 110 MPH Enough?
High-speed rail is one of the Obama administration's most prized policy goals, with $13 billion getting earmarked in the coming year alone to help break ground on up to 11 proposed regional corridors. But what will the U.S. get for its money? A lively Senate hearing yesterday attempted to answer that question.
Will all 11 high-speed rail plans end up getting a piece of the action? (Photo: WSJ)
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), the co-chairman of Building America's Future and an unabashed high-speed rail evangelist, urged senators to shrug off their post-bailout reluctance to approve large spending projects. The White House's $13 billion commitment, Rendell argued, is only a down payment on a workable system.
"We can't do infrastructure on the cheap," Rendell said. "We have to find the political courage to find a way to pay for it."Building high-speed rail along the California coast, he added, is estimated to cost as much as $40 billion. A northwestern network is projected to cost $25 billion. Similar long-term funding problems, as it happens, are also haunting lawmakers who aim to overhaul federal transportation policy.
Rendell suggested that a national infrastructure bank, independent of the government, should be tapped to direct money to high-speed rail proposals without political concerns influencing the process. "The public wants that," he said. "The public doesn’t want transportation dollars authorized through [the existing] system."
That outcome is highly unlikely, however, given that the federal DOT already has released its guidelines for an internal ranking of regional rail plans. And Federal Railroad Administrator Joseph Szabo was on hand to defend the administration's methods.
"Our vision matches, frankly, what they've done in Europe," Szabo told senators. Meanwhile, Rendell kept imploring the lawmakers to reconsider the Obama administration's 110-mph ballpark for defining what constitutes "high-speed".
With high-speed trains topping 200 mph in China and 160 in France, the governor said, "we're absolutely consigning ourselves to second-class citizenship" by setting the benchmark at 110 mph.
Tom Skancke, a member of the transportation revenue panel that last year called for a major gas-tax hike to fund system-wide reform, echoed Rendell's concerns with a call to publicly promote broad reform:
I don't think the nation as a whole has a plan for high-speed rail. ... The way we get there is, we have to sell the American public, particularly on rail, as we get people out of their horse and buggy. It is a cultural shift. We have to convince the American people that high-speed rail is going to be predictable, going to be on time, going to be affordable. ... We know what the alignment should look like. I just believe we need to step up and do it.Amtrak CEO Joseph Boardman also sought to bring Rendell and Skancke's ambitions down to earth.
Citing the Acela train's moderate progress in taking over market share in the northeast corridor, Boardman said the U.S. is "not a train-riding culture" -- an eyebrow-raising admission from the chief of the nation's largest passenger rail service. "With high-speed rail, speed is not the issue," he said. "Convenience and trip times are."
Boardman also did his part to guard Amtrak's turf, suggesting that high-speed rail planners "build a culture of riding the train" by ensuring that the projects receiving funding are easily connectable to the network he runs. "People want to be seamless," he said.
As for the senators in attendance, most put in palpable plugs for their own home-state proposals. Texan Kay Bailey Hutchison, the commerce committee's senior GOPer, was abuzz with the possibilities of the Texas "T-Bone." Sen. Mark Udall (D-NM) spoke of a western corridor linking Albuquerque and Texas.
But with Rendell warning that his fellow governors are equally convinced of the merits of their own local rail plans, the task of separating the wheat from the chaff was rarely discussed.
Should We Believe Him Now?
The AP showing some skepticism:
Sanford told The State he was alone on the trip to Argentina. He declined to give any additional details about what he did other than to say he drove along the coastline.Trying to make such a drive could frustrate a weekend visitor to Argentina. In Buenos Aires, the Avenida Costanera is the only coastal road, and it's less than two miles long. Reaching coastal resorts to the south requires a drive of nearly four hours on an inland highway with views of endless cattle ranches. To the north is a river delta of islands reached only by boat.
TPM Reader GK concurs:
Know that the "coastline" in BA is completely featureless and incredibly boring -- it's on a slow-moving, broad river. When residents of BA "go to the beach" they drive many hours away to Mar del Plata, which is on the Atlantic coast (or they hop on a boat to Montevideo, Uruguay.) But right now it's in the low 50's during the day and the mid 30's at night on the coast.
Going To Buenos Aires In His Mind...
Check out this line from Gov. Mark Sanford's (R-SC) second inaugural address in 2007, paying tribute to the march of technological progress and South Carolina's part in it:
Think for one second about the rate of change in the world around us.
The Pan Am Clipper Class used to be the envy of airline travel. One of their planes would fly 32 passengers at 150 miles per hour from point A to point B. The Miami to Buenos Aires flight took 6 days with numerous crew stops along the way.
The new Boeing 787, being in large part produced here in South Carolina, will soon take 300 passengers at 560 miles an hour on a 9 hour trip straight from Miami to Buenos Aires.Apparently he's been thinking about traveling to Buenos Aires for quite a while.
Also, Stephen Colbert last night flashed back to an interview he did a year ago with Sanford, asking the governor to tell him about the Mark Sanford nobody knows about. "Well, I guess it would be the degree to which I love solitude," said Sanford. "I love to be out in the woods with my boys."
NYC Zine Fest '09
Justseeds will be tabling this weekend at the New York City Zine Fest '09. For a number of years successful zine fests have been held all over the country; they're a place for zine makers to talk shop, people to find the coolest new self-published projects, and an introduction to zines and DIY publishing for the uninitiated. This is the first zine fest in NYC, so if you are in town, come up and take part in the fun.
NYC Zine Fest '09
Brooklyn Lyceum
Sat and Sun June 27 and 28
12 - 7pm
FREE admissionThe mission of the NYC Zine Fest is to circulate and promote self-published, homemade, independent, and small publications called zines. The Fest aims to support and expand the network of creators who self-publish these zines, as well as independent publishers and distributors in and around the NYC metro area.
There will be more than 70 zinemakers, publishers and institutions participating in the Fest, including Printed Matter, World War 3 Illustrated and the Barnard Zine Library. There will be workshops, discussion groups and a screening of zine documentary '$100 & a T-Shirt' - the latter which will run at 5pm both days. As zines gain popularity and clamor, this fest welcomes a wide audience to attend, meet the artists, participate in the free workshops, and buy and learn about zines. There will be food, beer, coffee, and music!
The Fest will also include a raffle with prizes consisting of rare zines, books, gift certificates, art, and more. Raffle donors include Spoonbill & Sugartown, Printed Matter, Melissa Staiger, Picturebox Inc., Opal Massage, Microcosm, 92YTribeca and Trong Nguyen.
For info and programming schedule: http://www.nyczinefest.org
June 23, 2009
language shapes the way we think
One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is “Where are you going?” and the answer should be something like “Southsoutheast, in the middle distance.”
Edge: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK? By Lera Boroditsky, my new hero. I’ve long been fascinated by the question, but I had no idea there was a history of debate about this — I was plain shocked to learn that most people thought language does not affect the way we think. It just seems so obvious to me, and I love the research Lera Boroditsky has done to demonstrate the many ways it’s true. See also: NPR: Shakespeare Had Roses All Wrong.
a little google in my spotlight?
Shared by mathowie
+1
I'm very much enjoying iPhone 3.0 and my new 3GS. The new hardware is a great upgrade (faster, smoother, more directionally correct), and there are small details in the new software that are useful and delightful (like locations in the missed call screen).
I haven't built a habit of searching on the phone, though, despite the very clever swipe-to-go-left UI placement of Spotlight. I don't have enough content on the phone to make search worthwhile, and the "normal" mode of navigation through each of the individual apps (Contacts, Mail, iPod, etc.) works well enough (for me). I think I'd be swiping left a lot more if they included a little Google in my Spotlight.
Spotlight should still search my phone first of course. But then it should kick off a Google query, pulling in suggest results in as close to real time as a wifi or 3G connection can allow. And then let me preview small snippets of results (optimized in a mobile / "local" context -- phone numbers, links to locations, definitions, etc.) before launching either a full search (or the result itself) in Safari.
I don't think this was a "whoops, we just didn't think about it" omission from Apple...after all, this is something both the T-Mobile G1 and the Palm Pre feature prominently in their UIs. Instead, I wonder if there were business and/or UI reasons holding back the feature. On the business side, there's not an insignificant revenue opportunity associated with occupying the default search slot on the iPhone. And from a user experience perspective, you can bet that Apple will want to make the results from the web feel as natural as results from your phone. Google, of course, is already the default in Safari, so if I were Apple I'd be negotiating for a combination of equal or better terms and a more integrated user experience (richer search API set) for Spotlight.
I'm hoping something like this shows up in a 3.x release. I'd use it all the time.
things i didn't want to hear today
"Mama, what's for breakfast?"
"My armpits have kind of an odor. I'm starting to smell like Mama."
"Mama, what's for lunch?"
"Actually, Mama, I just remembered I don't like zucchini."
"Mama, why is the tube of toothpaste in the toilet?"
"Mama, what's for dinner?"
Apparent Plagiarism in Chris Anderson's Free
Chris Anderson's new book, Free, will be out early next month (you can order it for $17.81 on Amazon). Over on the VQR blog, Waldo Jaquith discovered that several passages in the book were lifted directly from Wikipedia and other sources without attribution.
These instances were identified after a cursory investigation, after I checked by hand several dozen suspect passages in the whole of the 274-page book. This was not an exhaustive search, since I don't have access to an electronic version of the book. Most of the passages, but not all, come from Wikipedia.
In response to a query by Jaquith -- bloggers take note -- sent *before* the publication of the piece, Anderson took responsibility for the copied passages, saying that they were "notes" that were originally footnoted:
This all came about once we collapsed the notes into the copy. I had the original sources footnoted, but once we lost the footnotes at the 11th hour, I went through the document and redid all the attributions [...] Obviously in my rush at the end I missed a few of that last category, which is bad. As you'll note, these are mostly on the margins of the book's focus, mostly on historical asides, but that's no excuse. I should have had a better process to make sure the write-through covered all the text that we not directly sourced.
Anderson's publisher, Hyperion, considers his response to be satisfactory and will correct the errors in future editions.
Tags: books Chris Anderson free Free (book) plagiarism Waldo Jaquith
Let's make the web faster
From building data centers in different parts of the world to designing highly efficient user interfaces, we at Google always strive to make our services faster. We focus on speed as a key requirement in product and infrastructure development, because our research indicates that people prefer faster, more responsive apps. Over the years, through continuous experimentation, we've identified some performance best practices that we'd like to share with the web community on code.google.com/speed, a new site for web developers, with tutorials, tips and performance tools.
We are excited to discuss what we've learned about web performance with the Internet community. However, to optimize the speed of web applications and make browsing the web as fast as turning the pages of a magazine, we need to work together as a community, to tackle some larger challenges that keep the web slow and prevent it from delivering its full potential:
- Many protocols that power the Internet and the web were developed when broadband and rich interactive web apps were in their infancy. Networks have become much faster in the past 20 years, and by collaborating to update protocols such as HTML and TCP/IP we can create a better web experience for everyone. A great example of the community working together is the HTML5 protocol. With HTML5 features such as AppCache, developers are now able to write JavaScript-heavy web apps that run instantly and work and feel like desktop applications.
- In the last decade, we have seen close to a 100x improvement in JavaScript speed. Browser developers and the communities around them need to maintain this recent focus on performance improvement in order for the browser to become the platform of choice for more feature-rich and computationally-complex applications.
- Many websites can become faster with little effort, and collective attention to performance can speed up the entire web. Tools such as Yahoo!'s YSlow and our own recently launched Page Speed help web developers create faster, more responsive web apps. As a community, we need to invest further in developing a new generation of tools for performance measurement, diagnostics, and optimization that work at the click of a button.
To find out what Googlers think about making the web faster, see the video below. If you have ideas on how to speed up the web, please share them with the rest of the community. Let's all work together to make the web faster!
- While there are now more than 400 million broadband subscribers worldwide, broadband penetration is still relatively low in many areas of the world. Steps have been taken to bring the benefits of broadband to more people, such as the FCC's decision to open up the white spaces spectrum, for which the Internet community, including Google, was a strong champion. Bringing the benefits of cheap reliable broadband access around the world should be one of the primary goals of our industry.
Posted by Urs Hoelzle, SVP, Operations and Bill Coughran, SVP, Engineering
Deep Thought
Could 'hiking the Appalachian Trail' become a new metaphor in politics?
Harvard Grads “Relieved” There Are No Wall Street Jobs
“At Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, undergraduates are relieved that they no longer have to fight the temptation of high-paying Wall Street jobs, President Drew Faust said.” Oh are they! The fuck you say! [via]
Been At This for a While
I just stopped by our TPM page on Facebook. And Andrew Golis just posted that today apparently TPM (i.e., this front page blog -- not Muckraker or DC) just posted its 25,000th post. Apparently an average of about 8 posts per day for eight and a half years. Sheesh. That's a lot of posts.
It's Nice That
Respect to the boys Alec and Will on a really nice book.
The Ladies Of Fifth Avenue
For many obvious reasons, this is maybe my favorite photo series in the world.
Exploring the real world Busy Town
One of the most unanticipated effects of having Ollie's been the change in my relationship with our neighborhood and the city's streets. Ollie's big enough that he walks around holding my hand, so we spend a lot of time just strolling around, looking at things. Today on the way home from our swim class, we stopped to investigate some Con Ed workers around an open manhole. One day we walked along slowly as the garbage truck collected trash on the block, making just the right time so we'd catch it at each stop, it would speed ahead, and we'd meet again at the next collection point. Ollie loves watching all this activity and narrating it.
After we saw the Con Ed men, we stopped to watch a guy getting his car battery replaced on Fifth Avenue. Then we swung by our local fire house, a huge favorite. Alas the doors were down and the truck was out, so we peered in the window identifying coats and boots and spare hoses. What's really neat is how friendly all the guys are. The firemen invite Ollie inside to sit in the truck. The Con Ed man showed Ollie the frayed and burned section of electrical cable they were replacing. The car guy narrated as he installed the new battery.
It's making me feel so connected to the city in an entirely new way. I just worry that it all seems so male, so stereotypically boyish to see and visit these things. I've realized that there aren't a lot of female jobs on the street that we come across, aside from the rare policewoman or mail carrier. We do stop and look at babies in strollers, and chat with nice grandmotherly women who say hello. But somehow it's not the same. I'm beginning to realize a lot of "nurture" happens outside the house, beyond my control.
How to announce an event, or, awesome is not always self-evident
Which of these two events sounds more interesting?
Joe Celko is going to be giving talks at YAPC this summer.
Or, in an announcement entitled "Learn Mad Database Skillz at YAPC::NA 2009"
It really, truly pays to learn the ins and outs of SQL, just like any other language. And if you’re a Perl hacker, you have a great opportunity to do just that at YAPC::NA 10 this summer. Famed SQL expert Joe Celko, author of numerous volumes on SQL syntax and techniques, will be offering two classes on SQL at YAPC:
- Introduction to RDBMS and SQL for the Totally Ignorant. Well, okay, the name of the course is a bit unfortunate, but the material covered is not. If you know little or nothing about SQL, this course should be a terrific introduction.
- The New Stuff in SQL You Don’t Know About. So much great stuff has been added to SQL over the years, and ORMs know virtually none of it. Learn how to put that stuff to work in your apps!
That first announcement is usually what I get when people ask me to announce something in Perlbuzz. "Hey, we're having the East Podunk Perlapalooza next week." Yeah, so? Who cares? Why will Perlbuzz readers care?
David Wheeler, author of the latter text, understands what most geeks seem not to grasp: The mere existence of your Foo is not enough for people to be interested. Look at all the topics that David covers, to encourage interest from as wide a range of people as possible.
- What YAPC is.
- Who Joe Celko is.
- Joe Celko's body of work.
- Why we still need to know SQL in the age of ORMs.
I was reminded of this while going through Chad Fowler's excellent The Passionate Programmer in preparation for our webcast "Radical Career Success in a Down Economy" next week. One of Chad's big points is "Your skills are not self-evident." It's not enough to do great work at work, but you must also let people know about what you've done, specifically your boss. The same is true of your open source projects.
Why do people use ack? It's useful, but how do people know about it? I talk about it, and I tell people why they should use it on its home page, in a section called "Top 10 reasons you should use ack."
If someone asks you about your project, can you explain its awesomeness, and why he should use it? If not, why are you bothering? And if you can, are telling everyone you can about it? If not, why are you bothering?
For more on writing interesting announcements, please see the Perlbuzz How to contribute page.
Branded! With Lasers!
My fancy work machine. Matt had it laser-etched in NYC. Here's the making of.
Alex Cora on the Metropolitans
“We can deal with this. We’re not as bad as people think we are. Don’t feel sorry for the Metropolitans.” -Alex Cora
The Metropolitans. I love it.
[via MetsBlog]
Note: The $60 Million Roster
The Mets current 25–man roster will earn roughly $60 million this season, or around the same level as the Rays, Orioles and Twins.
“We can deal with this. We’re not as bad as people think we are,” Alex Cora said last night, according to MLB.com. “Don’t feel sorry for the Metropolitans.”
…i love that he called them the Metropolitans… that’s awesome…
…last night, on MetsBlog.com, i wrote, “I was afraid the Mets might collectively mope around, shrug their shoulders and drop their heads, all in light of today’s news that Carlos Beltran would be joining Jose Reyes, Carlos Delgado, John Maine, Oliver Perez and J.J. Putz on the disabled list.”…
MetsBlog reader Music Man Phil sent in e-mail saying:
“The Mets team you are referring to barely exists, and so with all the usual ‘mopers and shoulder shruggers’ on the DL, we might not have All-Stars on the field, but maybe this is the gritty and resilient team we’ve all been hoping for.”
…like i’ve been saying, i prefer to root for this type of team, i.e., the scrappy, over-achieving hustlers, so long as they’re winning… i mean, if these guys lose, the scrappy, underdog thing will only go so far… in the end, i want to win… but, all results being equal, i like this kind of successful team most… why… because i can detach myself from expectations, and just enjoy the show… and, any success will be a bonus… plus, i think, the thrill of seeing a team like this win, beat out the odds and over-achieve, is more special and exciting, than the overpaid team who wins and is expected to win…
Meet Melody
When Mena and I started working on Movable Type almost 8 years ago, one of the most delightful surprises in the project was how a passionate and creative community sprung up around the platform almost immediately. They even seemed to like the default name "Melody Nelson" we gave to the sample user that came with the application.1
Just a year and a half after the happy news of Movable Type's release under the GPL license, Melody makes another appearance as we mark an exciting milestone for the community. Today, a number of long-time Movable Type community leaders, including some who supported MT right from that first release 8 years ago, are announcing Melody. In short, Melody is a project to catalyze the core community of developers who want to evolve the open source core of Movable Type.Where our official Six Apart releases of Movable Type focus on great professional support, rock-solid stability, backwards compatibility, and broad platform support as core principles, we see the Melody community focusing on the equally-valuable ideas of bleeding-edge community-driven ideas, rapid iteration, and integration with the code of other open source projects.
It's great news for the entire Movable Type community, as this new project uses the same themes, the same templates, the same plugins and the same publishing engine as Movable Type. And since it shares the GPL license with MT, it's even a great way for these new developments to work their way back into the official versions of Movable Type itself.
The truth is, some of the greatest innovations in MT's history have come from developers that make their own distributions of Movable Type, bundled with their own plugins or templates. Our own Six Apart Services team has done that in the past when it was the independent company Apperceptive, and continues the tradition today by releasing much of its best work as a series of Open Source plugins. (You can follow Six Apart on Github to keep up with the latest.) Maybe some of that code will find its way into the Melody project in the future as well, completing the circle.
I can't wait to see what the independent community members who are the driving force behind Melody bring to the greater MT community in the future. While there aren't regular downloads for end-users yet, there's some promising first bits of code for developers to look at, and we'll watching the project closely. Six Apart is also proud to have our own Anil Dash join the board of the Open Melody Software Group, to play our part in helping contribute to this new effort from our community.
1 A reference to Serge Gainsbourg's album "Histoire de Melody Nelson".
Let Airline Passengers and Parents Know the Score
Examiner column for June 24.
As an English teacher, I believe in the usefulness of metaphors. Students always perk up when I say before a test, “Psych yourself up—pretend you can hear a coach cheering you on!” Or I might encourage them to judge a difficult poem the way they judge a new rap song: “You can’t catch all the words, but you think it’s good, so you listen again and again until you understand it.”
I have spent the last two days in airports, waiting on tarmacs in planes that never left the ground, and then waiting in lines to be rescheduled. The waits were unreasonably long—three hours in one line where a single agent was assigned to rebook more than 200 passengers.
I therefore had plenty of time to think: Do schools also keep clients in the dark about what’s happening, and ask them to wait interminably while a ludicrously small number of people attempt to meet their needs? I have heard from quite a few frustrated parents whose requests on behalf of their children have become like an airport line: Too few people in a position to meet their needs, and no helpful information forthcoming.
In Fairfax County Public Schools, parents can petition principals or counselors to changes a child’s curriculum or class assignment, but staffing is not sufficient to meet everyone’s requests. The first response is “it can’t be done,” but persistence often pays off.
School rules are often merely guidelines. “Any child with more than three unexcused absences will fail a course” has as many exceptions as there are parents to appeal it. Attendance is important, and there must be rules to enforce that, but teachers know that failing a student for unexcused absences is unenforceable upon parent appeal.
Similarly, rules may state that a student can’t drop an Advanced Placement class until the end of the quarter, or can’t take an AP class until certain conditions are met. However in the three high schools where I taught, exceptions were made all the time.
Yet there are too few counselors to accommodate all individual requests--much like airline counters are not staffed for rebooking an airplane full of frustrated passengers. As we wait and wait, is there anything that would make the situation better?
If only someone would speak the truth. If someone had said to the long passenger line, “There are 200 of you waiting to be rebooked; go home or call from cell phones. This line will take 3 hours, and you probably won’t get a flight out today,” we would have known the score.
Similarly, parents could be told, “You are welcome to request a change, but we might not be able to accommodate it. We hire teachers based on numbers the first day of school, and can’t hire and lay off based on shifts of students from one class to the next. Give the situation some time, and we can revisit your request later, if necessary.” Hearing the truth from someone in authority would give the situation honesty and even dignity. It might not change the wait time, but we would no longer feel that no one is listening!
Take Advantage of Modern Perl (Links from the YAPC Talk)
I just gave a talk at YAPC::NA 2009 entitled Take Advantage of Modern Perl. I use an extemporaneous style with terse slides, but I mentioned several modules and links worth exploring. I plan to explain some of those modules in more detail in the future. Until then, here are terse explanations and recommendations.
- Enlightened Perl is a great organization exploring similar issues. If you don't read or participate in Planet Perl Iron Man, please do.
- The SUPER module works around a problem in method dispatch to overridden methods.
- The UNIVERSAL::ref module makes the
ref()builtin more reliable and allows objects to override whatref()reports for them (good for overloading).- The Time::y2038 module makes your lexical scope in Perl -- regardless of compilation settings for 32/64 bitness and IV size -- safe for calculating dates and times past 2038. If you don't know what that subordinate clause means, you need this module. The Time::y2038::Everywhere module makes these functions safe globally.
- The CLASS module lets you replace ugly
__PACKAGE__with prettyCLASS.- The autobox and autobox::Core modules turn primitives into objects so that you can call methods on them. This is difficult to explain; play with it.
- The Moose distribution provides a powerful, extensible, usable object system for Perl 5.
- The signatures and Method::Signatures modules provide usable function and method signatures to Perl without source filtering (but with a bit of black magic).
- The Exception::Class module lets you throw exceptions based on objects in a clear and maintainable way.
- The Modern::Perl module lets you enable several important but optional features in Perl 5.10 and newer with a single command.
- The Why of Perl Roles gives several links to explain what roles are and why they're important in OO programming
- The Module::Build is a core module that's much easier to work with (and cleaner and better maintained) than ExtUtils::MakeMaker.
- The autodie module replaces fatal to provide better error messages, remove boilerplate code, and allow extensibility for error reporting on builtins.
- The Devel::Declare module provides the black magic necessary for wonderful modules such as
Method::Signaturesto extend Perl 5 without using Filter::Simple.- The MooseX::Declare module extends Perl's syntax to make Moose code prettier and easier and more declarative.
- The Devel::NYTProf module is a working Perl profiler that doesn't randomly crash like the core profilers sometimes do.
- The Perl::Critic module provides a framework for static code analysis of Perl 5 code. This means you can identify problems and poor style, tailoring your analysis to your local style.
- The MooseX::MultiMethods module provides a nice syntax for multiply-dispatch methods. This is another feature easier to understand if you play with it than if I write about it.
- The perl5i project pulls together these modules and more to work together nicely to provide better defaults for Perl 5.
By Anonymous Iran
Tech savvy anti-authoritarians have set up a cluster of servers for anonymous testimony and coverage of the demonstrations in Iran from inside and outside of the country, Anonymous Iran. This looks similar to the kind of tech people have been working on to allow Chinese labor organizers to communicate with each other outside China's internet control mechanisms.
Note: Brian Stokes vs. Albert Pujols
Last night, Brian Stokes entered the game specifically to face Albert Pujols in the eighth inning, with a man on first and the Mets leading 5-4.
…stokes was breaking me out, flirting with two weak breaking ball inside… turns out, he was setting up his hard slider on the outside of the plate, which pujols hit on the ground for an inning-ending double play…
…like i said last night, the best part of the play was Daniel Murphy’s aggressive fist pump, after making the catch for the final out… i like it…
According to the Elias Sports Bureau,
courtesy of ESPN.com, last night was only the second time in the last three seasons in which Pujols hit in to a double play with a runner on first and less than two outs.
…i get lots and lots of e-mails, and hear from fans i talk with, all of whom wonder why stokes does not pitch more… i always assume it’s because Jerry Manuel is keeping him on hold to use in long relief… yesterday, however, manuel said before the game he would turn to stokes in the eighth inning, while giving rest to Pedro Feliciano, Bobby Parnell and Sean Green… now, with yesterday’s addition of Elmer Dessens and Pat Misch, i hope stokes can be freed up to pitch more in situations like last night, because he’s throwing too well right now to sit on the sidelines…
Stokes is 1–2 with a 3.38 ERA in 26 innings pitched, during which opponents are batting .279 against him.
He has not allowed a run in 22 of his 25 appearances this season.
By the way, click here to watch SNY.TV’s Post Game Extra from last night’s win against the Cardinals, featuring clips from the game; quotes from Jerry Manuel, Brian Stokes and Tim Redding; and analysis from Ron, Keith and Gary.
Megan Fox Apologizes For Dissing Kid
Tranformers hottie Megan Fox unintentionally broke a little boy's heart last week, when she passed him by without a glance as he held out a rose for the actress.Megan talked to Collider.com and addressed the sad photo that has been running rampant on the internet. After explaining that she had no idea that the young fan was there, she looked into the camera and apologized to the "sweet boy."
Check it out - it kinda made me like her.
Art Front
Marc Moscato just sent me a link to a great post he put up on his blog Whittlin' Away. It's on Art Front, a 1930s radical art publication from the US. Check it out (and go to Marc's blog to see more images and read other good stuff!):
In my research for the Art for the Millions bike ride, I came across an amazing little-remembered publication, Art Front (1934-1937). This magazine provided a fantastic resource and community sounding board for issues surrounding art and politics during the Works Progress Administration (WPA) period. Based in New York City, the magazine was the official organ of the Artists’ Union and served as a main organizing tool. Contributors included Fernand Leger, Harold Rosenberg, Louis Bunin, and Stuart Davis, among numerous others.Art Front’s mission was “as wide as art itself.” Stated its editor, H.S. Baron, “Many art magazines are being published in America today. Without one exception, however, these periodicals support outworn economic concepts as a basis for the support of art which victimize and destroy art. The urgent need for a publication which speaks for the artist, battles for his economic security and guides him in his artistic efforts is self-evident.”
Within the pages of Art Front are things you would expect from a union paper — arguments for higher wages and more jobs in the arts. But also found are a marvelous assortment of manifestos for the creation of public art centers, tracts on revolutionary art vs. art for the bourgeoisie, reviews of (then) contemporary artists and reports on censorship and red-baiting (many WPA artists came under attack for political activity and leftist organizing).
One interview with Thomas Benton struck me as particularly insightful. How would we answer these questions today?
1. Is provincial isolation compatible with modern civilization?
2. Is your art free of foreign influence?
3. What American art influences are manifest in your work?
4. Was any art form created without meaning or purpose?
5. What is the social function of a mural?
6. Can art be created without direct personal contact with the subject?
7. What is your political viewpoint?
8. Is the manifestation of social understanding in art detrimental to it?
9. Is there any revolutionary tradition for the American artist?
10. Do you believe that the future of American Art lies in the Midwest?Fascinating read if you can track it down (I inter-library loaned a microfilm copy).
June 22, 2009
But is it Better Than Swine Flu?
I saw this on the street today.
It says, "More refreshing than open fire hydrants to the face." That's quite a high bar to set there, McDonald's. I'd like to pitch some of my own slogan ideas to you.
"More fun than a day in the cancer ward."
"Less chunky than raw sewage."
"Fewer calories than some of our extra value meals."
"Not (very) poisonous."I'm sure I could come up with ideas for some of your other products, if these get you jazzed.
See also: Now you're eating
NASA Volcano Image Shows Atmospheric Shockwave [Geophysical Porn]
On June 12th, Saychev Peak on Matua Island erupted, hurling ash and steam into the air. Luckily, NASA's International Space Station was watching. This stunning image, from the Earth Observatory, reveals some rare details about this eruption.
In this image, you can see the volcanic plume extending into the sky. But you can also see the atmospheric shock wave from the eruption, which pushed the clouds back into a ring in the sky. Also visible is a smooth, fluffy white cloud on top of the rapidly rising ash column. This is likely a result of rapidly rising water vapor condensing on top of the plume.
A detail of the image also reveals what is known as the pyroclastic flow. This is a mixture of super hot gas and ash that can travel at up to 130 miles per hour. It's similar to the kind of rapidly moving pyroclastic surge that supposedly wiped out Pompeii so quickly, killing everyone in its path. It's a beautiful image, dense with interesting quirks that demonstrate just how powerful, dangerous and complex volcanoes are.
Rain Gutters as Cable Management Tools
Shared by mathowie
Ok, that's brilliant
We're all about creative cable management here at Lifehacker, so we were instantly drawn to reader Seandavid010's rain-gutter cable management setup.
Granted, you can find other cord-wrangling solutions, like the one I used when I made my cordless workspace, but the rain gutter approach yields impressive results. Sean was nice enough to send in his entire step-by-step, so here goes (everything below was written by Sean):
I recently purchased a new table from IKEA to use as a computer desk. I liked it because it was really long and narrow (78"x23") and would work perfectly for my wife and I. The problem I ran into was that I didn't want a bunch of cords and cables hanging down behind the table. Having that would ruin the new 'clean' aesthetic I was going for.
So I decided that I needed to find some solution to this cable-clutter problem. I looked at some of the commercial solutions available, but they all either seemed rather expensive, or they didn't really fit my needs very well. I had remembered reading somewhere about somebody using ordinary vinyl rain gutters in some way (I think they used bungee cords to suspend them from the underside of the table) but I couldn't really find anything to help me out, so I decided to try to solve it myself.
So I went out and purchased a 10 foot length of vinyl rain gutter and cut it to size. I also bought two end caps and four hangars (used to nail the gutter to the side of your house) and some fasteners. I figured I'd drill up into the bottom of the table, and drive in the lag screws. Then I'd attach them to the threaded hooks with joiner nuts, and hang the rain gutters from those. Easy. Job one, however, was to cut a notch in the gutter so it would fit around the middle leg of the table. Job two was to drill a hole in the hangars to attach the hooks. I also fitted the holes with rubber grommets to cut down on any excess noise they might produce.
After that, it was just a simple matter of doing a dry-fit:
Using the hangars to suspend the length of gutter turned out to be a good idea, since they can slide back and forth, meaning fitting it together was really easy.
Here's my workspace before I began the project. It's not really terrible, but it just all felt really pieced together. A flimsy computer desk and a plastic folding table shoved together with all those cables hanging down there. Besides not looking great, it was actually a pain to clean down there, and dust tended to accumulate.
And here's the after shot:
Notice: no cables hanging down. Everything - my power strips, wireless router, cable modem, usb cables and chargers for two Macbooks is all tucked away nice and clean underneath. The best part is that you can't even see it unless you're looking for it.
Nice and tidy. The table is also really great. It came unfinished, and I liked the color and texture so much that I just had a big piece of glass cut to go on top. The only problem is that now my mouse won't work anymore. Any good tips on making my own (visually appealing) mousepad? I'd appreciate it.
Anyways, the total cost for the project came in at just over $30 and only took about two hours to complete.
Vinyl Rain Gutter Cable Management [Flickr]
Obama Betrayed Them ... In Advance!
I've been keeping my eyes out for the most strained and risible anti-Obama arguments on Iran. And I think we've got a possible winner. GOP operative Rich Galen went on CNN this afternoon to argue that when President Obama taped his special message to the Iranian people back in March (it was actually timed to the Persian New Year, but was part of Obama's general outreach) that he got young people to think that if they took to the streets against their government that "help would be on the way" from Obama. Like if they just hit the streets we'd take care of bringing in the commandos or something.
VIDEO: Beyonce & Jay-Z at MSG 6/21/09
VIDEO: Beyonce & Jay-Z at MSG 6/21/09 Description of the show from dajaz1: "She comes out performing Crazy In Love. Right when Jay Z's verse is supposed to come on, he walks out & does his verse to "Give It To Me". Crowd loses their mind as expected. He exits the stage & she finishes the song. She then goes into Naughty Girl & Freakum Dress. She stops the music & talks to the crowd for a few minutes checking to see what side of the audicene is the loudest. After everyone loses their voice, she goes into Get Me Bodied as the chicks in front of me were doing the Running Man. She slides off stage as she leaves the dancers dancing as she prepares for the next song. As the dancers exit, the stairs rise in the middle of the stage as a video of waves flowing on a beach play in the background as she appears in all white at the top of the stage. She sings Ava Maria, Angel (by Sarah McLachlan), Broken Hearted Girl & If I Were A Boy, (I like r&b but this was too many ballads for me at once). She then runs off the stage." VIDEO: Beyonce & Jay-Z at MSG 6/21/09
Why Do People Desire Walls?
The Ceuta-Morocco border fence (image)Wanted to share with you a couple of links that have deeply interested and distressed me today and yesterday. The first one is a lecture that Wendy Brown, a professor of political science at the University of California, gave at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her recent research focuses on the concept of political sovereignty as it is connected to globalization and other transnational forces. Archived by Resist, a project i am involved in, the lecture explains how the building of walls around the world today is so starkly at odds with images of a world that is ever more connected & unbordered. Whether they aim to deter poor people, illegal workers, asylum seekers, drugs, weapons and other contraband, enslaved youth, ethnic or religious mixing, walls and fences basically do not work.
An Iraqi boy walks near a blast wall in the Karrada neighborhood. US troops are building a wall around the Adhamiya Sunni neighborhood, which is surrounded by Shia areas, north of Baghdad (photo)The list of walls she gave is absolutely alarming, especially considered that she focused on the ones that have risen since the much celebrated fall of the Berlin Wall: the U.S. border with Mexico and the Israeli West Bank barrier (these two share high technology, sub-contracting and they also reference each other for legitimation), Post-Apartheid South Africa's internal maze of walls and check point, Saudi Arabia concrete structure along its border with Yemen, India's reinforced border with Pakistan and Bengladesh, Botswana's electric fence along the border with Zimbabwe, the wall between Egypt and Gaza, etc. But also walls within walls: gated communities so popular in the U.S. (in particular in Southern Californian communities living closer to the Mexico border), walls around Israel settlements in West Bank, walls around the Museum of Tolerance in Jerusalem and the walls that partition the city itself, the triple layer of walls around Spanish enclaves in Morocco, the wall of Via Anelli inside the Italian city of Padua that separate white middle class with immigrants living in an "African ghetto" (i'd recommend Italian readers the documentary Stato di Paura, you can find the trailer here), the Baghdad wall built by the U.S. military, etc. The list goes on and on and the analysis Brown makes of the phenomenon is thought-provoking. I can't recommend enough the audio file of Prof. Brown's lecture.
A Palestinian carries a wheelchair bought in Egypt across the border back to Gaza after militants exploded the border wall between Gaza Strip and Egypt, in Rafah, on Jan. 24, 2008 (image)The second video depicts in a particularly moving way a project which might not be new to most of you but i had never heard about it so far. Israeli NGO B'Tselem has given Palestinian families across the West Bank video cameras to document how they are treated by Israeli soldiers and settlers. Simple, smart and apparently effective.
Here's two interviews with Oren Yakobovich, Director of Video at B'Tselem: a video and an audio.
The blog Subtopia covers this kind of topic in a very documented and intelligent way.
This piece originally appeared in Regine Debatty's blog, We Make Money Not Art.
Help us change the world - DONATE NOW!
(Posted by Regine Debatty in Arts at 9:39 AM)
David Pogue’s Personal Database
New York Times technology writer David Pogue offers a few of his biggest productivity tips, from working at home (thus avoiding a time-intensive commute) to using voice-to-text transcription software, text expansion, and keyboard macros. What caught my eye is how he uses a personal database to store and find information he needs. Pogue writes:
Years ago, I started using an address-book program that’s now called iData 3. It’s a freeform database, meaning that the “cards” in this database don’t have separate fields for Name, Street, City and so on; instead, you can type or paste whatever you want into each freeform card.
This program doesn’t play well with field-based contact managers like Google’s or the iPhone’s, but the beauty is that it holds whatever you want: recipes, brainstorms, article fragments, driving directions, lists, Web addresses and so on. And you can find anything in a fraction of a second. (Actually, iData now lets you create field-based databases as well, but my freeform database has been growing since about 1988 and I’m not about to convert it.)
An iData screenshot is included here; it’s $70 for the Mac, with a Windows version also available. For awhile I did the same as Pogue does with a personal wiki. Tired of hosting my own installation, eventually I switched over to Evernote, and I use KeePass for sensitive stuff like passwords, PIN numbers, and software serial numbers which I want encrypted and saved only on my own hard drive.
When you’re choosing your own personal database software, the question of structured (fields) versus unstructured (freeform) data is an important one. Both wiki pages and Evernote are pretty unstructured documents, though wikis do offer inter-page linking. KeePass is a structured database (it comes with username, password, URL and other fields) but it also offers a freeform comments field for each record, which you can use how you like. No software application is perfect, but as Pogue says, it is a time-saver to have that one place where you know you can store and find everything you need quickly. Pogue’s Productivity Secrets Revealed [NYT]
Where There's Smoke...
Today President Obama signed new legislation that will heavily restrict the nicotine content and marketing of cigarettes, including the requirement that colorful ads and displays be replaced with black-and-white-only text. For a piece in its Sunday Perspectives section, the St. Petersburg Times asked DJ Stout what cigarette manufacturers like Marlboro might do to follow the new marketing rules. (The full article is print only; we've posted it here.) Stout suggests that to comply with the crackdown, tobacco companies should embrace the restrictions and make cigarettes look truly dangerous. This, of course, will still appeal to a core group of smokers.
"Over the years there has been an onslaught of public awareness messaging about the evils of smoking," says Stout. "Unless you've been living in a cave for the last 50 years you are very aware that smoking is not only bad for you, it could very likely kill you. All smokers know this for sure but it doesn't deter them. "Our marketing advice to cigarette companies in the new heavily regulated era is to fully accept the new aggressive anti-smoking restrictions and wallow in the government’s apocalyptic health warnings. Don’t make excuses or dance around the stepped-up marketing regulations, just transform the whole cigarette pack into a three dimensional warning label."
A new landmark in computer vision
Science fiction books and movies have long imagined that computers will someday be able to see and interpret the world. At Google, we think computer vision has tremendous potential benefits for consumers, which is why we're dedicated to research in this area. And today, a Google team is presenting a paper on landmark recognition (think: Statue of Liberty, Eiffel Tower) at the Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Miami, Florida. In the paper, we present a new technology that enables computers to quickly and efficiently identify images of more than 50,000 landmarks from all over the world with 80% accuracy.
To be clear up front, this is a research paper, not a new Google product, but we still think it's cool. For our demonstration, we begin with an unnamed, untagged picture of a landmark, enter its web address into the recognition engine, and poof — the computer identifies and names it: "Recognized Landmark: Acropolis, Athens, Greece." Thanks computer.
How did we do it? It wasn't easy. For starters, where do you find a good list of thousands of landmarks? Even if you have that list, where do you get the pictures to develop visual representations of the locations? And how do you pull that source material together in a coherent model that actually works, is fast, and can process an enormous corpus of data? Think about all the different photographs of the Golden Gate Bridge you've seen — the different perspectives, lighting conditions and image qualities. Recognizing a landmark can be difficult for a human, let alone a computer.
Our research builds on the vast number of images on the web, the ability to search those images, and advances in object recognition and clustering techniques. First, we generated a list of landmarks relying on two sources: 40 million GPS-tagged photos (from Picasa and Panoramio) and online tour guide webpages. Next, we found candidate images for each landmark using these sources and Google Image Search, which we then "pruned" using efficient image matching and unsupervised clustering techniques. Finally, we developed a highly efficient indexing system for fast image recognition. The following image provides a visual representation of the resulting clustered recognition model:In the above image, related views of the Acropolis are "clustered" together, allowing for a more efficient image matching system.
While we've gone a long way towards unlocking the information stored in text on the web, there's still much work to be done unlocking the information stored in pixels. This research demonstrates the feasibility of efficient computer vision techniques based on large, noisy datasets. We expect the insights we've gained will lay a useful foundation for future research in computer vision.
If you're interested to learn more about this research, check out the paper.
Posted by Jay Yagnik, Head of Computer Vision Research
Big Changes!
Most of you probably know this by now, but we're packing up and moving to St. Louis on July 2nd! Preparations for the move have kept us busy, and we haven't been able to update the blog as much as we'd like. Here are a bunch of photos taken over the last month (in chronological order) to help you catch up with this Boelter family and friends!
A history of Macintosh gaming
Filed under: Gaming, Blast From the Past
Feeling nostalgic? Applemctom has posted a great video detailing the evolution of Mac gaming from Dark Tower, released in 1986, right up to the resurgence and explosion of gaming on the iPhone.
Take a look and see if your favorites are covered. My vote for inclusion in the sequel is Wolfenstein 3D.Continue reading A history of Macintosh gaming
TUAWA history of Macintosh gaming originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Bizarre Object Seen In Clouds
Spotted, just now, in the sky above The Awl offices: a brightish spherical object that appears to be emitting some sort of heat and perhaps light. UFO? Bizarre promotional stunt? Or… something more sinister? It’s impossible to tell at this early stage, but we will continue to monitor the situation and update you if things change.
Morning Bog: About Those Fake Umps at Nats Park
(Photo by Cathy Taylor) * Multiple e-mailers asked me about the fake umps behind home plate for the Blue Jays-Nats games this weekend. They had legitimate star power. Miss Chatter has the complete collection of photo art, noting that the umps both brushed the netting in front of them and handed new balls to fans after fouls, in some sort of replacement-ball solidarity with the real men in blue. And FanHouse has actual names and quotes, including this, from Tim Williams: "There are 7 billion people on the planet. Do you know how many of them travel to another city to fake umpire a game? You're looking at 'em." Bless you, Tim Williams. Turns out Tim and his buddy are stock traders from Toronto who posed for several million photos with Nats fans over the weekend, have an intense grasp of the official MLB rulebook, shook hands with Stan
Egg in Toast: What Do You Call It?
At Blue Bottle in San Francisco, this dish is called Popeyes. Photograph by Alaina Browne.
An egg fried in the center of a piece of bread—a simple preparation that elevates the union of my two favorite breakfast food groups, eggs and toast, to a whole new level. I've seen this delicious combination referred to as: Popeye, egg in a basket, toad in the hole, and the more literal eggs-in-toast. Wikipedia lists even more that I haven't encountered: Kibbee Egg, hen in a nest, moon egg, cowboy egg, and one-eyed jack. What do you call an egg fried in a hole of a slice of bread?
June 21, 2009
walking papers: end of week two
Right, so two weeks ago I pushed Walking Papers out of the nest, and it seems to have avoided the ground so far. This is a progress report.
The reason I chose June 4th to make it live was the OpenStreetMap mapping party on June 6th, up in the Presidio Sports Basement store "big room". The event was the first public use of Walking Papers, and we presented it as a basic alternative to the usual GPS method of collecting map data. Several attendees jumped in, and we got a few excellent submissions including a survey of the marshy land east of Crissy Field and absurdly high detail of businesses along Chestnut St. These two scans were such a thrill: the technology worked and we got legitimately street-level data from enthusiastic participants!
The most common piece of feedback I saw from users was to allow for landscape orientation in scans, so I added that feature this weekend. It's now possible to print maps in either landscape or portrait orientation, and the image recognition code distinguishes between the two based on aspect ratio. Users immediately started using the new orientation, including one German collecting house numbers:
Generally speaking, we are seeing loads of prints and not very many scans. It's incredibly easy to hit the "make" button on the front page, less so to actually collect some useful information, so I'm not surprised by the disparity. I am looking forward to seeing more activity though, starting with a scheduled mapping party on June 27th and 28th at RPS.
We've seen some very welcome feedback as well.
Austria's ORF Futurezone published an article devoted solely to Walking Papers on the 10th, which explains the disproportionate presence of many Austrian prints and resulted in a huge traffic bump.
Stefan Knecht of Germany's United Maps said the project was "just lovely", which was very nice to hear from someone whose work is so vital and excellent for online mapping:
Despite or even because of this "post-digital, medieval technology"- it's simply lovely. The reduce-to-the-max, crispy clear website is why I deeply adore Stamen for.OpenStreetMap superhero Andy Allan pointed out that "even if you don't want to scan back in, it's actually a good interface for just printing maps for annotation."
Jason Kottke also sent some link love our way, in a post also highlighting The Incidental, the post-digital newspaper project Schulze and Webb (and Jones and Davies) at Milan's Salone di Mobile.
So that, in a nutshell, is what is happening with the project. It's nicely steaming along with regular prints, we're starting to see scans from users, we're playing with some ideas on how to more effectively foreground the idea of annotations and scanning on the site, the code continues to be freely available on Github, and I'm actively trying to boost real on-the-ground use of the system for actual mapping.
UNSC/R: Visualizing the United Nations Security Council Resolutions
The project UNSC/R [pierozagami.com] is the abbreviation for the United Nations Security Council Resolutions, which represent the decisions of the UN's executive body, captured in more than 1700 documents. The purpose of this data visualization project is to apply information design strategies to create visual maps of the Resolutions to help students in politics approach the subject of the UN.Most graphs seem to be circular, with each ring representing the resolutions for each year (from 1946 inside to 2007 outwards) and the colored squares standing for the number of resolutions (per year).
Via Computer Love and datavisualization.ch.
Slave Labor: The New, New-Media Profit Model
Slave Labor: The New, New-Media Profit Model:fek:
Enjoy. I worked hard on it.Two curious omissions: 1) Gothamist was an early torchbearer for the no-pay contributor model, which certainly made sense at the time and when revenue eventually reached appreciable levels, Jake and Jen instituted staff pay. 2) Are Balk (an early torchbearer for no-holds-barred Gothamist criticism) and Choire compensating Awl contributors with free DVDs at least?
1) This doesn’t excuse the time interim prior to staff pay when they made contributors sign away all legal rights to work without any compensation model (a big arrogant mistake) … 2) Like all things we don’t like about that site, it’s all Cho’s fault.
Ah, memories! This reminds me of when Gothamist’s Jake Dobkin made some noise circa-2003 about suing anyone who used “ist” at the end of their URL (presumably for some sort of trademark infringement, even though you can’t trademark a widely-used suffix.) I was still writing Gawker at the time and considered doing a post with a list of things that might violate said non-existent trademark. Thing number one: any sort of LIST.
If I did the post, I can’t find it on Gawker now. Probably just as well, since Dobkin would have undoubtedly sent me a cease-and-des***.
Kottke’s ‘Forward’ for Infinite Summer
Jason Kottke on Infinite Summer, a group guided tour to read David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest over the course of the next three months:
But what I am qualified to tell you — as a two-time reader and lover of Infinite Jest — is that you don’t need to be an expert in much of anything to read and enjoy this novel. It isn’t just for English majors or people who love fiction or tennis players or recovering drug addicts or those with astronomical IQs. Don’t sweat all the Hamlet stuff; you can worry about those references on the second time through if you actually like it enough to read it a second time. Leave your dictionary at home; let Wallace’s grammatical gymnastics and extensive vocabulary wash right over you; you’ll get the gist and the gist is more than enough. Is the novel postmodern or not? Who f’ing cares… the story stands on its own. You’re likely to miss at least 50% of what’s going on in IJ the first time though and it doesn’t matter.
I’ll simply state that Infinite Jest is my favorite novel ever.
Here’s a Q&A with Lauren Conrad, wherein she mentions that she’s reading my pal...
Here’s a Q&A with Lauren Conrad, wherein she mentions that she’s reading my pal Sloane’s book (good!) but weirdly fails to explicate the death of her new Kindle:
A. What am I reading? I am reading — actually, I just started re-reading my own book, which is a little weird. I am between books at the moment. … I’m actually going to get one today. It’s called “I Was Told There’d Be Cake” [by Sloane Crosley]. I do like Chelsea Handler’s books. Have you read “I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell?” Funny, right? I like funny books. I got a Kindle, you can buy them off Amazon. But it broke.
Q. You broke it?
A. I didn’t get to use it, actually. It was in my beach bag. It broke.
My theory: Unexpectedly sentient Kindle realized it was now in the possession of Lauren Conrad and initiated rapid self-destruction protocols.
Or maybe it just broke.
Infinite Summer is a go
Infinite Summer kicks off today and while I'm not the world's foremost Wallace scholar, I was happy to provide a foreward to get it rolling.
Tags: books David Foster Wallace Infinite JestSo sure, it's a lengthy book that's heavy to carry and impossible to read in bed, but Christ, how many hours of American Idol have you sat through on your uncomfortable POS couch? The entire run of The West Wing was 111 hours and 56 minutes; ER was twice as long, and in the later seasons, twice as painful. I guarantee you that getting through Infinite Jest with a good understanding of what happened will take you a lot less time and energy than you expended getting your Mage to level 60 in World of Warcraft.
Anna Faris Honeymoon Bikini Photos
Nice way to avoid all the wedding drama, celebrity or otherwiseAnna Faris Bikini Photos (From Honeymoon) source "Here's Anna Faris and her new husband Chris Pratt in Maui where the they eloped this weekend. Yeah, these two are not only together but married. I swear I will spend every minute of every day trying to win her heart away from this man. And fortunately it looks like she's attracted to unbridled sloth, so beers and Xbox it is which is pretty much what I was going to do anyway. For you, my love, for you." "The House Bunny actress Anna Faris, who is set to tie the knot with Chris Pratt this summer, revealed she would spare her family the trouble of showing up at the occasion. “We made the best decision that I could ever think of - we are just going to slip off and elope,” Contactmusic quoted her as telling Us magazine. “We aren’t going to involve the family at all. Then we will go on a honeymoon,” she added. Aand as we see in these photos, she carried out the plan!" Anna Faris Bikini Photos (From Honeymoon)
Change is a gonna come.
Gonna be rebooting this here blog, and soon. Keep your eyes peeled.
Ice Cream Bowl Day Yankee Stadium
Ice Cream Bowl Day Yankee Stadium
Instapaper Pro now on sale at $4.99
Instapaper Pro now on sale at $4.99:I have to clear out all of this old 1.3 inventory in case Apple approves 2.0 this week!
Seriously, this is to celebrate the amazing iPhone 3G S, the new $99 3G, and iPhone OS 3.0, all of which improve the experience for developers and users and will significantly expand the iPhone’s installed base.
To clear up a common question: Instapaper Pro 1.3 owners will get the 2.0 upgrade at no additional charge. Developers currently have no way to charge for iPhone-app updates, but even if we did, I’d still make 2.0 a free upgrade once Apple approves it. (And on the approval front, I’m sorry, but I haven’t heard anything yet.)
The sale price is now less than most good sandwiches. And even the best sandwich only provides a few minutes of enjoyment. What are you waiting for?
NYC - "Arcangel, Pinard, Routson" (06.25.09 - 07.31.09)
Cory Arcangel, Guillaume Pinard, Jon Routson
Arcangel, Pinard, Routson
25 June through 31 July 2009Team is pleased to present a three-person exhibition of new work by Cory Arcangel, Guillaume Pinard and Jon Routson. The exhibition will run from the 25th of June through the 31st of July 2009. Team Gallery is located at 83 Grand Street, between Wooster and Greene Streets, on the ground floor.
This past January Team hosted a three-person show of abstract painting by artists culled from its roster. This summer the gallery will present what is ostensibly a three-person show of video - made up of new works by Cory Arcangel, Guillaume Pinard, and Jon Routson, three Team artists.
Cory Arcangel will be represented by a new video, Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11, which debuted last month at the Kunstmuseum in Graz. Arcangel painstakingly edited YouTube footage of cats playing on pianos into an arrangement of Schoenberg's Three Piano Pieces, a pioneering work of 'atonal' music. Thusly, the artist creates the illusion that the cats are playing the composition note by note. Cory pairs a resistant and withholding piece of music with coyly ingratiating images of cats in order to make the music more digestible to a less-classically minded audience. In doing so, Arcangel explores one assist that technology can offer the avant-garde. Alongside the video, Arcangel will show two new Photoshop Gradients, large abstract photographs created to highlight a very artificial tool for bending colors. Both the photographs and the video continue the artist's explorations into the possibility that the sublime can be invoked by rapidly outdating technologies.
Guillaume Pinard, based in Marseille, creates darkly funny videos using Flash animation to draw bleak, flat realms populated by animals and insects. The acts of violent aggression and images of grotesque decomposition are softened by the manner in which they are rendered - bold color and fascinating geometric compositions belie cruel slaughter and conniving betrayals. Pinard dexterously exploits the different tools of computer animation to effectively control the shifting moods and environments of his short films, three of which will be on view.
Jon Routson, working in Baltimore, is best known for his bootleg movies - clumsy recordings of entire films made in movie theaters and shown in art galleries. For this exhibition, Routson will show work from his Spinners series, digital projections of circular images that rotate on the wall, creating a somewhat sickening feeling for the spectator. Part of the queasiness also arises from the subjects, among them Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney. Routson also built a sculpture that broadcasts books on tape for listeners. In choosing which books to record, Routson makes no distinction between literature and drugstore paperbacks, simply choosing books that some portion of the public wants to read. In an era where music, books, and movies are all instantly available on the internet, his sculpture pushes that gratification to an extreme. Visitors are here able to listen to the entirety of a book if only it were possible to stand in an art gallery for the duration of a work of fiction.
Team is open from Tuesday through Saturday, 10am to 6pm. Beginning on the 4th of July, the gallery will switch to summer hours, opening from Monday through Friday, 10am to 6pm. For further information and/or photographs, please call 212.279.9219.
The Parsimonious Language
Rafael Garcia-Suarez's The Future of Perl 5 is worth your time to read. If you think I'm crazy, you might find him sane. If you think I'm sane, you should consider his arguments seriously. (I think Hegel refuted himself, but he may have had a point.)
Rafael is completely right on some points:
The big advantages of outsourcing syntax experiments to CPAN is that the community can run many experiments in parallel, and have those experiments reach a larger public (because installing a CPAN module is easier than compiling a new perl); that enables also to prune more quickly the failed approaches. This is a way to optimize and dynamize innovation.The cost of the average Perl programmer experimenting with a new form of syntax is low. There's little risk to push that code to production servers. (It happens, though; my company had Ingy and Schwern on one project back in the Spiffy days.) Of course, this keeps feedback low, but the risk of backwards-incompatible changes for experimental code is minimal.
Given sufficient experimentation and testing, it's possible to revise and refine these experiments into something more stable and workable which addresses the necessary uses effectively. That doesn't happen enough, but I believe the CPAN ecosystem can and should encourage it. See also Schwern's perl5i.
I believe Rafael is absolutely wrong to write, however:
a patch to add a form of subroutine parameter declaration, or to add some syntactic sugar for declaring classes, are probably not going to be included in Perl 5 today. Those would extend the syntax, but not help extensibility -- actually they would hinder it, imposing and freezing a single core way to do things. And saying that there is only one way to do it is a bit unperlish. It's basically for the same reason that we don't add an XML parser or a template preprocessor in the core: no single, one-size-fits-all solution has emerged.It's true that there's plenty of debate over advanced forms of subroutine signatures -- slurpy arguments, named versus positional arguments, default values, et cetera, but when most existing Perl subroutines look something like:
sub foo { my ($bar, $baz, $quux) = @_; ... }... it seems silly to suggest that supporting something as simple as:
sub foo ($bar, $baz, $quux) { ... }... won't be common to every potential serious signature declaration form.
Likewise can you imagine a class declared in Perl 5 that didn't immediately start something like:
class Foo { ... }Given that Perl 6 has already blazed a (stable) trail through these syntactic weeds, and given that a goal of modern Perl 5 is to provide a smooth transition path between Perl 5 and Perl 6, I have trouble imagining the kind of seismic shift necessary to render this syntax unsupportable.
Perhaps there's no single syntax that provides every potential feature necessary -- but a default that works effectively for 90% of code and offers an improvement for 98% of existing programs seems like a useful use of time.
A stronger argument is that the steadfast refusal of the core to provide anything other than the roll-your-own-object-system tinkertoys first conceived in 1994 is responsible for the explosion of modules in
Class::*on the CPAN in the past several years -- and that's only from the top 2% of Perl programmers worldwide with the stubbornness, will, and permission to make their improvements over stubborn and parsimonious defaults available to the world at large.I suspect that if the defaults were really as good as some people might like us to believe, the
Class::*namespace wouldn't be so crowded.I don't want to misrepresent Rafael's arguments. He's a thoughtful man and a good programmer; he can represent his own arguments. You should read them. You should think about them. He may be right.
However:
But large-scale experimentation on CPAN enabled the community to make Moose much better than whatever a handful of P5Pers could have designed by themselves.... what prevents the Perl community from doing the same and improving core syntax? Certainly that's how Perl 6 works. Certainly that seems what pumpkings would like to see -- motivated volunteers doing some work, getting some feedback, and refining new ideas and enhancements to existing ideas.
Perhaps I don't understand why a modest improvement (such as parent over base, with the corresponding subtleties that many people will just ignore) is okay in the core in a module but a modest improvement that could clarify and simplify and shrink almost every existing program is not.
... unless the fragmentation in
Class::*is somehow a good thing.
iLounge releases speed test videos of iPhone 3G S
Filed under: iPhone
Testing how speedy the iPhone 3G S "S for speed" really is has become de rigueur. iLounge has put together two videos comparing the facility of the 3G S to the 3G, last year's iteration of the iPhone, and to the second generation iPod touch.
The operator tests four applications: Edge, Peggle, Real Racing, and Star Defense. They are all graphically heavy games with initial load times, and likely where the difference will be most exaggerated. As is to be expected from a phone named for its swiftness, the 3G S outstrips both the 3G and the iPod touch by a fair margin, though the iPod touch counters the 3G S a bit more easily than the 3G does.
The videos don't offer any quantitative analysis, nor are they exact by any stretch of the imagination (you'll just have to trust the device operator to touch the application icons simultaneously), but it's comforting to know you that if dropped at least two bills, it was for a reason. Because the videos don't offer any guidance as to which device is where, I'll clue you in: in both videos, the 3G S is on the right.Continue reading iLounge releases speed test videos of iPhone 3G S
TUAWiLounge releases speed test videos of iPhone 3G S originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Sun, 21 Jun 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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the last thing he said to me
When I was seventeen years old I killed my father without a second thought. The little girl I was babysitting asked me where my father was, and rather than go into the whole story about how my parents were separated, and in the past five years I had only seen my father a handful of times, I said, "He's dead."
At the time it was easier to just be done with him; no possibility of complicated intrusions. Now, I'd happily embrace such complexities if it were possible to resuscitate him with an off-hand comment. "Oh, my father? He lives in Florida; fishes all day, dances all night."
The truth was that he lived four hundred miles away and thought of me probably as often as I thought of him. I spent my adolescence learning how to live without him; erasing him from my life. I forgot about the way light danced in his eyes when he smiled. I forgot about how he liked to sing old songs like, “Chances Are,” and “Blue Moon.” I forgot about how when he fried onions and green peppers, the smell reached into every corner of the house and made me feel safe and loved. I forgot all of these things until one day, years later, my mother called to say, “Your father is in the hospital. He has cancer.”
I was twenty then, and in the middle of the worst summer of my life. I was working two jobs and still broke. I was stranded in the middle of nowhere without a car. I was struggling to finish coursework that was months overdue. And to top it all off, I was recovering from a mess I’d made with this guy, who, in hindsight, was so much like my father that it scares me now to think about it.
I felt like I’d already died a little bit that summer, but for some reason I dropped everything—at a time when I was desperately trying to hold on— and flew to the side of a dying man; a man I’d already killed in my memory. After all that time it was the threat of losing him for good that reminded me he was still there. If my mother had said, “Your father is frying onions and peppers. He misses you,” would I have gone?
What will he think of me? I wondered on my way to the hospital. I hope he doesn’t comment on the weight I gained in college. Will he even notice? Will he tell me how proud he is of me? Please don’t let him see what I’ve been through this summer. Will he even notice? It didn’t occur to me to prepare myself for what I might see. I never considered the visibility of his illness; never considered that he might have changed.
He was surprisingly small, and I somehow matched his size, even threatened to surpass it. My body automatically pulled in on itself, shrinking from its newfound stature. I watched him puff himself up to fill in the space I had created. Then, exhausted by his posturing, he relaxed into the bed, propped up by pillows and that glimpse of his reflection in my eyes.
The television blared in that comforting way that it does in hospital rooms. Its presence meant to create a false sense of normalcy. Just another sunny afternoon with a rerun of “Hee-Haw” playing in the background. My mother, my sisters and I obliged by periodically fixing our gaze on it, as we sat and stood around his bed. I welcomed the distraction from the IV poles, the beeping of machines, the ill-fitting, unattractive bedclothes; anything to keep my mind off of what was in front of me? Or was it the past I avoided? Of course, I couldn’t even think about the future.
He couldn’t speak because of the hole in his neck. He scratched out words on one of those magnetic doodling boards in purposeful, child-like strokes befitting the toy. I watched him as he wrote. Lips pursed, brow furrowed, he had the look of someone either deep in concentration or working through pain. He always looked like that when he wrote; the emotional intent visible on his face. A face that changed quickly and without warning.
His whole body, his mood, was like that—violently mutable. Even as the cancer cells multiplied with an aggression that decimated his body, he lunged at my mother from across the bed. She flew backwards in her chair, forcing herself against and up the wall, in a familiar attempt to escape whatever was about to happen. She had a piece of hard candy in her hand and a look of terror on her face.
We all froze, even the nurse who’d come to check his vitals. My father’s entire body, the thin frame of a young man shrouded in the wrinkles of an old one, pointed forward in a straight line. His arm stretched to its limit, reached towards my mother, fingers poised to grab but managing only a handful of air. For the briefest of moments I was back in some other place that neither looked nor smelled like dying, but felt like it all the same. And so time paused allowing me to catch up.
“He’s just crazy for a piece a hard candy,” said the nurse, a middle-aged white woman with a strong southern drawl. I liked the way she meandered through the “ar” in hard. “Begs for it more than he does a cigarette.”
She fiddled with the IV bags, grinning at my father, who had fallen back against his pillows, the smile on his face deepening with each labored breath. I imagined the trouble he must have caused daily, despite his weakness, his inability to go off on angry tirades or to do his best Johnny Mathis impersonation.
The nurse said his feet could use some attention and handed my sister a small bottle of lotion. She removed his socks, and I was hit head-on with the truth. He is dying, I thought. His feet are already dead.
One of my strongest memories from childhood is watching my father’s foot-care rituals. He babied his feet more than his children. They served him every day as he stood for hours in the little grocery, butchering meat, sorting vegetables, stocking shelves, working the register, and he repaid them with a tender attentiveness that made me ache.
And I ached as my sister revealed shriveled, twisted bones thinly covered by yellowed skin. Streams and branches of blue and white were everywhere, leading nowhere. The nails, like brittle talons grayed by time and neglect. The soles were a desert landscape, parched and cracked by infinitesimal fissures of thirst.
Don’t cry, don’t cry, I told myself. I sat beside him, small in my chair, matching his silence and waiting, as I’d done so many times before. I waited for his stories about his childhood, his misspent youth. I waited for his musings on life and the universe. I waited to hear his observations of the people in his life, which, though colored by his own fears and insecurities, were always astute. I waited for him to tell me how much he had missed me, and to remind me of how much I would miss him.
He pushed himself up and turned to face me. He tried to speak, to manipulate the hole in his throat in order to get the words out. There was a gurgled sound, like a whisper underwater. His eyes searched mine for understanding. I shook my head. He reached for the doodling board and scratched the letters out with visible deliberateness.
“DADDY’S HOME,” he wrote.
I wanted to believe him; wanted desperately for his words to be true, and that desperation surprised me. It did a number on me, really—more than seeing him so changed, or even being pulled back to a life I’d left behind. Two words that pulled me back just as he was on his way out.
Carl Masak: Asking #perl about Modern Perl
This is my first Perl 5 post ever. 哈哈
<masak> while I'm here, I'd like to talk about Modern Perl.
<masak> in y'all's opinion, what are the modules a Modern Perl 5 user should be aware of?
<masak> I'm thinking of things like Moose, List::Util, maybe Catalyst...
<claes> it all depends on what the task is
<lucs> masak: 5.10 in general maybe
<claes> using warnings, strict and perhaps indirect pragmas
<masak> I think things that we take for granted as good time-savers all qualify.
<masak> so maybe stuff like Getopt::Long too.
<claes> personaly I don't use Moose because I haven't had any use for it yet
<masak> for me as a Perl 6 user, it's not that difficult to see the use for Moose.
<masak> I saw a blog post recently that said that Moose even helped the blogger document things more succinctly.
<masak> that is, even when he wasn't using Moose, he was using habits gained from it to write better documentation.
<Hinrik> Perl::Critic, definitely
<claes> Devel::NYTProf
<Hinrik> some of the eventy things (AnyEvent, Coro, POE) too, if that's what your app requires
<Hinrik> and the various Test::* modules, of course
<masak> Hinrik: which ones, more exactly?
<Hinrik> Test::More usually works for me, along with some other specialized ones depending on the typo of app
<Hinrik> e.g. Test::Script to test if scripts compile
<Hinrik> masak: oh, and Devel::Cover is also quite helpful in determining test coverage
<cfedde> see also Modern::Perl
<cfedde> I think that the standard template will become 'use Modern::Perl; use Moose'Feel the need to add something to the list? The comments are open.
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Counter Culture Coffee Bags
Is Starbucks copying Counter Culture? Or is this just a coincidence?
The sincerest form of flattery: Coffee and Conservation. (via coffeehabitat.com)
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