randomwalks/dj

In the continuing vein of Spiers Obviously Hasn’t Read the Times All Week And Is Just Now Catching Up On The World Outside of Her Apartment, I just noticed that my all-time favorite Spanish wine producer got a review by Eric Asimov this week.

Lopez de Heredia’s ‘64 Vina Tondonia red is probably the best aged Rioja you can possibly buy. But they also do really great white riojas that are all the more unique because they age well. (If you haven’t had aged white wines before, you might not like it. It’s oxidized and smoky and nothing like the lemony California chardonnays so popular here.) You can get them at Astor Wines, which also carries several old vintages.

And the winery, which I visited a couple of years ago, is unique. They don’t really use modern techniques at all and their idea of temperature control is opening doors and windows. (That said, their traditionalism has its limits. They added a funky modern store/tasting room to the winery a while back. It was designed by Zaha Hadid.) From Asimov’s piece:

ABUNDANT wreaths of ghostly mold hang from the ceiling like sentinels, guarding thousands of bottles of gran reserva wine deep in the cellars of the R. López de Heredia winery here in the heart of Rioja. More mold and copious cobwebs are draped over the bottles, some of which have been aging in their bins for decades.

Both the mold and the cobwebs are intentional. The mold (penicillin) helps with maturation and they keep the spiders around to eat cork flies. (When I was there, the owner mentioned that a collector in New York once ordered a case and then complained that the bottles were moldy. The owner retorted that if he didn’t know why the bottles had mold on them and didn’t appreciate it, he didn’t deserve to own the wine.) The cellar has a pleasantly creepy Cask of Amontillado ambiance that’s pretty much the opposite of a Napa winery.  Worth visiting if you get the opportunity.

(Honorable mention in the Rioja department: Muga. Very different, but good. If you’re still suffering from last year’s Jay McInerney-induced mass brainwashing that everyone should be drinking rosé and feel that you must, try this. It’s excellent and inexpensive.)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on August 15, 2009 9:19 PM

To start out, read Scott's wrap up of the current criticisms of the film here: Filmmaker Magazine Blog: District 9

I left my thoughts in the comments to that article. To rework them a bit here, I liked the movie as a goofy-yet-richly-backdropped action flick, but if you'll check my earlier post, the trailers, and some of the director's shorts, really highlighted the use of non-professional, naturalistic performances (I refuse to use the belittling term 'non-actor') in a way that made the SF elements much more immediate and believable. I am always on the lookout for this; Some of my favorite films are Science Fiction by suggestion alone, leaving out sets and special effects, and using narratives solely to transform the world and the people already around us into strange-but believable- new frontiers. Found worlds are obviously more 'real' than fabricated ones, and it generally just takes a few tiny tweaks to turn the familiar into the surreal.

District 9 seemed to lose sight of its biggest asset, those performances, (and that feeling of Jamais vu they create), and fell into a more easily sustainable, standard-SF/action-movie rhythm (that's not to say that there are anything wrong with the performances. Sharlto Copley is very good in the film). District 9 was very competent as the action film it ended up being- But I felt like Blomkamp could have landed some really heavy blows, maybe even while retaining the film's unexpected sense of humor, if he had focused on the immediate realism of non-professional actors, like in his shorter works, instead of letting them clash against his narrative as nothing but scenery.

Originally posted by weevil@wileywiggins.com (Wiley Wiggins) from It's not for Everyone., on August 15, 2009 6:46 PM

Instapaper now supports Google Reader: …including bookmarklet integration.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on August 15, 2009 5:51 PM

"An immense, relatively slow-moving spacecraft, also known as an interstellar ark, aboard which many generations would live and die on a voyage between stars. The generation ship has been offered as an alternative to spacecraft that travel at much higher speeds carrying conventional-sized crews. ... The AAAS held a session on interstellar travel in 2002 where the anthropologist John Moore estimated that a population of 150-180 was just big enough to allow normal reproduction for 60-80 generations."

Originally posted by Michal Migurski from tecznotes links, on August 15, 2009 4:03 PM

An Assist For Nick Van Exel: How An NBA Scorekeeper Cooked The Books - Nba - Deadspin:

Last month, someone on the APBRmetrics forum — an APBRmetrician, for the uninitiated, is a sabermetrician in a Wes Unseld throwback jersey — posted a friend’s account of life as an NBA scorekeeper, mostly as an illustration of all the bias and sanctioned bullshit afflicting even the most straightforward basketball statistics. It’s fascinating. This fellow says he was formerly the Grizzlies’ head “stats accumulation guy,” and, to hear him tell it, the teams and the league see their official statisticians almost as an arm of their marketing departments. Plump up some numbers, and SportsCenter might just bring itself to show a Grizzlies highlight.

At one point, the guy reviewed his colleagues around the league. He found that the typical NBA stat crew averaged about 20 unintentional errors per game — “missing events, wrong players getting credit unintentionally.”

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on August 15, 2009 2:58 PM

One of the most highly-respected managers in the game, Jim Leyland can be both deadly serious and tongue-in-cheek funny, sometimes in the same setting. The Detroit skipper shared each quality when addressing the media prior to a game at Fenway Park last week, waxing philosophic on hitting approach, Rick Porcello‘s start that evening, and the foibles of travel.

On throwing strikes and working pitchers:  “He’ll be fine if he throws strikes and mixes his pitches. If he just goes out and pumps fastballs, they’ll knock the shit out of him. And you better be around the plate, because [the Red Sox] are a patient team. Hopefully you can get some quick outs. They’re a very professional-hitting team, but like I’ve told you guys for a thousand years: everybody talks about just working the pitcher, but they’re full of shit. You can’t work a pitcher who throws strikes. It’s impossible. It doesn’t happen. The guys who get pitch counts up are the guys that foul better stuff off. Like Verlander — when guys foul his pitches off, or like Jackson the one game [against] Cleveland. They get his pitch count up because they’re fouling. They’re not working. They’re trying to hit it; they’re just not centering it; they’re fouling it off. So, there’s no such thing as working a pitcher who throws strikes. I hope that Porcello is throwing strikes tonight, and I hope they take the first two. I’ll be happy as shit. But I don‘t think that‘s going to happen. They didn‘t work Jackson last night, so that‘s all bullshit. Trust me when I tell you that. You can‘t work a pitcher who throws strikes. You want to go up there and make him work, so you take, take, take. Well, I hope they have strike two on them all night long. It doesn‘t happen. But these guys are good at recognizing, out of the hand, a ball or a strike. If it‘s a ball, they take it. They‘re good. Younger teams, with younger kids, with younger players, they swing at those pitches a lot more. That‘s why teams like the Yankees, and Boston, with these veteran players, these smart players, are tremendous. They‘re very good. But if you throw strikes, you can throw that theory out the window.”

On bus travel in the minor leagues as a young player:  “I did take a bus trip to Lakeland, my first time. I did. But I’d rather not talk about it. It was amazing, because I was a real hayseed. I didn’t have a clue as to what was going on. Some of those towns we stopped in down south — it was unbelievable. I wasn’t used to that. I was a hayseed kid and didn’t know shit about what was going on.”

On train travel:  “I took the train once from the All-Star game, back from Perrsyville, Ohio to Chicago. I loved it. It’s like playing golf. It’s who you’re with, really. If you’re on the train, playing cards with guys you like, it’s a lot of fun. If you’re sitting there by yourself, it gives you time to think. That’s just the way it is. That’s life.”

On flying:  “I’m not a good flyer. I mean, you always have a few of them. I remember one where the plane was landing, and all of sudden the plane took off again. We had one this year where the light in the cabin came on — the landing gear wasn’t down, so all of a sudden we went up again. I remember one time we went in to land and there was a small plane underneath us. That’s not a good feeling. But that’s the way it is, and I don’t think any of us are crazy about it when you start bouncing around. But that’s life. Sometimes when you have a bad week, you really have a bad week…It scares you a little bit when the guy says, “You’re landing on runway 47,” and the pilot says “OK“, but then gets back on and says, “Wait a minute. 47? You just told that other guy to land on 47.” So he says, “Yeah, you’ve got to be careful.” That‘s not a good feeling. When you get up in the air, who knows. But we have a good time. We play cards — us coaches. If it gets bumpy, we get scared. If it gets real bumpy, we get drunk.”

Originally posted by David Laurila from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on August 15, 2009 1:42 PM

In April of this year, I was walking into a market and glanced down at my phone to see two new emails. I read them only to find out that two really weird looking purchases were made on a credit card sitting in my pocket. I thought "aw crap, someone ran my numbers on some purchases" and I called the credit card company immediately to cancel the card and investigate the two most recent purchases.

Back in 1996, someone ran my ATM/VISA's card numbers halfway around the world for some jewelery purchases that emptied my bank account. Luckily, my bank noticed immediately and refunded the money and canceled the card. In this new case, it looked like someone bought two get-rich-quick ebooks online, but refunds were on their way. It felt like a problem solved enough that I continued my day.

A couple weeks later and I started getting phone calls from people on my private cellphone number and they knew my name. They were selling get-rich-quick systems and they were calling to "set everything up to start making money" because I had "purchased their wealth creation system". I started to freak out a little because running random numbers in credit card scanners is one thing, but knowing my name, credit card number, and private phone number is a heck of a lot worse. I began to freak out a bit. I ordered credit reports and started tracking my credit profile at various agencies. I changed every password on every online service I use and I began to be very cautious about signing up with new services.

I wracked my brain for months trying to figure out how and who might have access to this sensitive information. I spent the last couple years weeding out get-rich-quick scammers from MetaFilter and had sometimes publicly mocked cash gifting scammers in my twitter stream. Perhaps one of the people I banned from my site for spamming had somehow gotten my information?

An epiphany came when I read this news item at Bike Portland about Bike Nashbar's customer database being compromised (which Bike Nashbar did not inform customers of for SEVEN months while the security hole was open). I rarely shop there because they are obnoxious about advertising and send endless home mailers to you. Then I remembered that a set of very specific tires I couldn't find anywhere online for sale I ended up buying through bikenashbar.com late last year. I wondered if maybe I was one of the compromised customers, so I looked up my old credit card records to find the transaction. I looked at the card, and it was the one that emails me on new purchases.

A temporary wave of relief washed over as I finally figured out who my faceless hacker/stalker was that had my personal details: it was some website cracker that broke into Bike Nashbar's webservers and since I canceled the card within minutes of its first use, the nightmare was over.

Or so I thought -- It turns out the moment my chargebacks were credited to my account four months later (it's a very long process), it appears each company in the get-rich-quick e-business game sold my information along to try and recoup some of their lost income. As a result, I've been getting 2-3 calls per day from people with various important sounding company names saying they just picked up a card I submitted saying I was interested in the exciting world of work-at-home business. Every time I tell these people it's a mistake and to please remove me, I only hear one thing: a dial tone.

It turns out people in the business of scamming people into thinking they can make thousands of dollars at home doing virtually nothing aren't big on customer service or helping people out.

To make a long story short: Bike Nashbar's poor programming resulted in thousands of credit card, address, name, and phone details getting into the wrong hands and they took months to acknowledge, fix, and notifiy customers (in my case I was never notified). I will never do business with them again, but I hope anyone reading this heeds the warning as well. Several months later, I'm still living with the daily headaches caused by Bike Nashbar's fuckup over a single purchase made last year and there are thousands of others like me.

Don't ever shop at Bike Nashbar.

Originally posted by Matt Haughey from A Whole Lotta Nothing, on August 15, 2009 11:30 AM

Brad Fitzpatrick has been dropping some interesting mind bombs since starting at Google. First it was the Social Graph API recently followed by PubSubHubbub (which I need to write about one of these days) and most recently the WebFinger protocol. The underlying theme in all of these ideas is creating an open infrastructure for simplifying the tasks that are common to social networking media sites and thus improving the user experience.

The core idea behind WebFinger is excerpted below from the project site

If I give you my email address today, you can't do anything with it except email me. I can't attach public metadata to my email address to give you more information. WebFinger is about making email addresses more valuable, by letting people attach public metadata to them. That metadata might include:

• public profile data
• pointer to identity provider (e.g. OpenID server)
• a public key
• other services used by that email address (e.g. Flickr, Picasa, Smugmug, Twitter, Facebook, and usernames for each)
• a URL to an avatar
• profile data (nickname, full name, etc)
• whether the email address is also a JID, or explicitly declare that it's NOT an email, and ONLY a JID, or any combination to disambiguate all the addresses that look like something@somewhere.com
• or even a public declaration that the email address doesn't have public metadata, but has a pointer to an endpoint that, provided authentication, will tell you some protected metadata, depending on who you authenticate as.

... but rather than fight about the exact contents

The way this is written makes it sound like this would be a useful service for end users but I think that is misleading. If you want to find out about someone you’re best of plugging their name into a search decision engine like Bing or the people search of a site like Facebook which should give you a similar or better experience today without deploying any new infrastructure on the Web.

Where I find WebFinger to be interesting is in simplifying a lot of the common workflows that exist on the Social Web today. For example, I’ve often criticized Twitter for using the hand picked Suggested User’s List as the primary way of suggesting who you should follow instead of your social graph from a social networking site like Facebook or MySpace. However when you look at their Find People on Other Networks page it is clear that this would end up being an intimidating user experience if they listed all of the potential sources of social graphs on that page (i.e. IM services, email address books, social networking sites, etc) then asked the user to pick which ones they use.

On the other hand, if there was a way for Twitter to know which sites I belong to just from the email address I used to signup, then there is a much smoother user experience that is possible.   

This is a fairly boring and mundane piece of Social Web plumbing when you think about it but the ramifications if it takes off could be very powerful. Imagine what direction Twitter would have taken if it used your real social graph to suggest friends to you instead of the S.U.L. as one example. 

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Dare Obasanjo aka Carnage4Life, on August 15, 2009 7:57 AM

via http://kanardo.wordpress.com/

Originally posted by mccrazy1881 from FFFFOUND! / EVERYONE, on August 15, 2009 7:40 AM

Tetris Returns.

Advertising Agency: Daehong Communications, Seoul, S.Korea

Creative Director: Haewon Chung
Art Director: Keunhye Lee
Copywriter: Kikwan Lee, Joohye Yoon, Heejin Park
Illustrator: Juhno Ahn
Account Executive: Sunyoung Lee
Published: December 2008

Originally posted by ivan from Ads of the World: Creative Advertising Archive & Community, on August 15, 2009 6:39 AM

"Are you aware that you have a towel on your head?"

"Racist."

Originally posted by redfox from Adventures in the Pointless Forest, on August 14, 2009 4:00 PM

I am kind of in love with this photo.

Tags: fashion   Game Boy

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 14, 2009 3:49 PM

via www.typepad.com

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on August 14, 2009 2:43 PM

Adam Lisagor notices that the iPhone 3GS camera might always be buffering images so that when you press that shutter button, you get the photo that you wanted, not the one delayed by slow software or a slow shutter. Adam's observation gives me the opportunity to trot out one of my recent favorite informational factoids about the super high-speed cameras used to capture jumping great white sharks:

In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering...that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

Tags: Adam Lisagor   iPhone   photography

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 14, 2009 1:52 PM

Hat tip to @zacfrank for this shot of the new CityRack, the first of its kind to be mass-produced and installed on a New York City sidewalk. After the "hoop" won the CityRack design competition last fall, DOT announced that it will install 5,000 of them in the next three years. Where is this one exactly? After a bit of sleuthing, I still don't know. The sleuthing was pretty cursory, I admit. If you're heading out for Summer Streets tomorrow (forecast: totally gorgeous), perhaps you'll stumble across it.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on August 14, 2009 1:46 PM

Has it really come to this?

Watching the current "debate" over healthcare reform, I find myself in the strange position of giving thanks for John McCain. His behavior during the election was anything but classy, but he did refuse to take that final step of endorsing the fully crazy wingut memes (Obama is a Kenyan Muslim terrorist, etc.) even though certain folks were urging him to go there. When I see how easily the "death panel" and other completly-divorced-from-reality memes have taken hold of the public and the media, I can't help but wonder if such crap would have propelled McCain to victory, if he had chosen to embrace it. Oh, the irony: McCain's last shred of integrity saved us from a McCain presidency.

Even if this isn't true, you can bet this is the lesson the GOP will take into 2012. What we're seeing right now is a preview of the election (God help us).

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on August 14, 2009 1:27 PM

If you've searched Google for programming questions in thee past few months you've probably found links to Stack Overflow, the question and answer community for programmers. Best charts in Python? Next/Prev links in Rails? jQuery array operations? Stack Overflow's got answers.

I've always liked community question sites. Ask Metafilter is my favourite, it's a good community and the questions are eclectic. Most other question sites have failed. Yahoo Answers is a cesspool, Experts Exchange is downright deceptive, and Google Answers with its paid researchers is sadly gone. Stack Overflow and its sister sites for sysadmins and users have a strong community of experts with a good attitude.

Two key features of Stack Overflow are Digg-style voting on questions and answers and an Advogato-style reputation score for users. Voting helps good answers rise to the top, often augmented by comments from other experts. And reputation serves as a surprisingly compelling incentive to answer questions quickly. I'm surprised how often I check the site to see if there's a question I can answer, and how quickly I jump to help someone if I think I'll get up votes and increased reputation out of my contribution. The reputation game does encourage some unfortunate behavior, but in general it seems to work.

The folks behind Stack Overflow are understated and quite modest. But they may be crafty; I think the site they're building could be really valuable. There's already some modest advertising on the site, but the real value may well be in a jobs board. An active community of programmers, everyone annotated with their areas of expertise and ranked by helpfulness? That's gold.

Originally posted by Nelson Minar from Nelson's Weblog, on August 14, 2009 1:14 PM

The readers and writers of The Morning News share their stories of the 2003 blackout, which occurred six years ago today.

In Lower Manhattan, my computer screen fizzled and the air conditioner cut off. While walking back to Brooklyn over the Manhattan Bridge I heard the following rumors: 1) The power's out in the entire country; 2) The power's out in the entire country and all of Canada; 3) There was an explosion and somebody's definitely behind this but I don't know who. (The last one was from a cop.)

I wrote about my blackout experience the day after.

I reach 18th Street. Some shops are open, most are not. The ice cream shop is doing good business. The owner of a bodega has barricaded the door with shelves of food and stands watch with his employees.

Tags: NYC

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 14, 2009 12:48 PM

CereProc's computer generated voices are impressive...scroll down the page for a passable Obama and a downright convincing Schwarzenegger. (via ebert)

Tags: arnoldschwarzenegger   audio   Barack Obama

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 14, 2009 11:39 AM

The Mets today will unveil several enhancements to Citi Field highlighted by new HD video boards in Right Field and on the Promenade Level, as well as another in Left Field and down the third base line, among others.

…i.e., they’re finally turning them on…

Also, they have begun installing photographic imagery of famous Mets and historic moments in team history on the Field and Promenade Levels. 

For instance, the image in this post, of Darryl Strawberry, Keith Hernandez and Dwight Gooden, will cover the side of the Empire Suites by section 106 in the Right Field corner on the Field Level, while another celebrating the 1969 World Series championship will cover the other end of the Empire Suite Level on the third base side near section 126 on the Field Level, among others.

…i appreciate the effort… i do… but, is it me, or do the Mets seem to be shying away from their traditional blue and orange… first, these pictures and the ones outside are all black and white, muting the vivid uniform we’ve come to know and love… second, if you notice, the blue and orange they do incorporate around the ballpark is actually the dark navy-blue and red-orange from the Citigroup color scheme… anyway, it’s just something i have noticed the last few times i was there, then reminded of when seeing these new photos…

Additionally, championship banners are now on display on the wall in left field.

…nice… no brainer… as opposed to sticking them out back, under the bridge, where they had been hiding… thanks…

According to the release, “The Mets will announce plans for additional recognition of club history in the weeks ahead.”

Originally posted by Matthew Cerrone from MetsBlog.com, on August 14, 2009 11:19 AM

From Recipes

"I don’t like to play favorites because all of my miso tubs fill specific needs, but I'm a sucker for the Saikyo miso."

Though we live in modern times, some of our best foods are echoes of bygone days, when refrigeration was not readily accessible. Confit. Pickles and jams. Cured hams and salami. Dried jerky. Preservation techniques still abound in our age of technology because food that has been altered to last longer usually tastes really good.

Case in point? Miso marination, a technique that was traditionally used to preserve fish for its long journey inland. Preservative properties aside, when food is marinated in a mixture of miso and alcohol, the items assume the unique flavor of the miso itself.

Miso marination is my solution to a busy workday or a tough cut of beef. In the morning I’ll take my choice of protein, be it seafood or meat, and smother it with a mixture of miso, sake, and mirin. In the evening, I'll wipe the item dry and plop it onto the grill or frying pan. The results are delicious every time because miso is an omnipotent ingredient, enhancing whatever it touches.

A miso marinade only ever needs three components: miso, alcohol, and some saccharine form such as mirin or sugar. The sugar content in the mirin guarantees a crisp and nicely-charred surface; the miso and sake contribute to a tender and flavorful interior. Best of all, miso-marination can be applied to a variety of meats and fatty fish, from steak to salmon and sablefish.

So many miso options. Photograph from shindohd on Flickr

Miso is becoming increasingly available at grocery stores, yet we may not think to use it much beyond soup. In the simplest terms, miso is an aged paste made from a fermented rice starter, coupled later with soybeans. Sometimes barley or soybeans alone are used for the fermenting agent but in the United States, we are usually dealing with rice fermentation. Production starts by steaming or roasting the rice; soybeans are then added to the grains and everything is mashed together and fermented to produce the paste.

From that elementary procedure comes a gamut of miso types. Like all artisanal products, the methods for different kinds of miso can vary in fascinating ways.

I own miso in all the colors of the soybean rainbow; my spectrum starts with shiromiso, the palest and sweetest of all miso, and ends with a nutty brown miso, robust in taste and pebbly in texture. In between there's akamiso, a subtle dark-yellow miso that's a combination of its white and brown counterparts, and a dashi miso, which contains a bit of bonito seasoning.

I don’t like to play favorites because all of my miso tubs fill specific needs, but I’m a sucker for the Saikyo miso, a particular type of shiromiso that is powerfully sweet and winey. Made in Kyoto Prefecture, the salt content of Saikyo miso is not much higher than five percent. (Compare that to the brown or red types of miso, which possess a salt content of thirteen percent or so). Whenever I take home a new package of Saikyo miso, I stick my chopstick into its smooth, pale paste and swipe a nub to eat. This miso is perfect. Buttery-smooth in texture, it really smacks of the bean.

While I use Saikyo miso to marinate different types of fish and seafood, beef requires a stronger and darker miso. In this week’s experiments with miso marination, I selected beef short ribs, a cheap and flavorful cut that can sometimes be too chewy. After marinating and getting a quick pan-fry in my trusty cast iron, the meat was juicy and tender with a clear note of miso in the backdrop. The presence of the miso lent an aged taste to the beef, a desirable quality sought after in more expensive cuts of steak. (Miso marination, by the way, works well on cuts like ribeye, though the better the quality of the meat, the less I want to tamper with it.)

On the seafood front, I smothered scallops from my local fishmongers into a miso mixture. Seared quickly on the cast iron, the scallops were sweet and velvety—the perfect canvas for a mixture of Saikyo miso and red miso. The scallops were delicious, served both hot and tepid. Once they cooled slightly, I diagonally sliced them, marveling at their resemblance to sashimi.

Finally, miso marination is commonly employed with Chilean sea bass. Buying sustainably caught Chilean sea bass can be difficult and expensive. Not to worry! There is a fish that is just as fatty, just as buttery and flaky, but with a sweeter and more intense taste of the ocean. It goes by "Black Cod" and "Butterfish" but it's actually the Sablefish, a homey-looking bottom dweller that swims about in the murky depths of the sea preying on crustaceans, worms, and other small fish. Sablefish marinated in miso is delicious and awe-inspiring enough to be on your list of "last meals ever."

If you do not yet have a collection of miso tubs, drop by your nearest Asian market or Whole Foods to have a look-see at the dizzying array of choices. Experiment with different types of miso and different forms of protein. The sophistication of your end result belies the ease of this essential preparation.

Miso Marination

Adapted from The Japanese Kitchen by Hiroko Shimbo.

Ingredients

Approximately 1 1/2 pounds of your choice of seafood or meat
1/3 cup miso
1/4 cup mirin
3 tablespoons sake

Procedure

1. Miso Marination is such versatile technique that you have several options at each stage. First, the protein: Try it with salmon, Chilean sea bass, Sablefish, scallops, or beef. A pound and a half of whatever you choose should feed approximately four people.

2. Prepare the marinade. Use a combination of sweet white miso and darker miso pastes, adjusting the proportions according to taste and the type of protein you are using. Mix the miso, mirin, and sake into a smooth paste. If you are running short on sake and mirin, you may replace the sake with white wine or vermouth, and the mirin with sugar. Use about 4 tablespoons of sugar.

3. Generously lather your fish or meat with the miso marinade, making sure that it clings to the meat or seafood.

4. Refrigerate for at least five hours and up to two days! This is a handy step in the process, because you can prepare the ingredients well in advance. However, do not leave the items marinating for too long, or else they will dry out and become too salty.

5. Before cooking, wipe all of the marinade from the seafood or meat. Do not rinse, but blot dry with paper towels.

6. Pan-fry, broil, or grill the miso-marinated item. If using fish, seek out a slab with the skin still attached. Heat a skillet and add a tablespoon of oil. Place the fish, skin side down, on the skillet and cook until the skin is crisp, about two to three minutes. Pan-fry the other sides until golden brown. Proceed similarly with steak, adjusting the cooking times to how well-done you like your beef. For scallops, cook until the center is barely done (or, for sashimi-grade scallops, leave the center raw). Be aware when cooking that the sugar content in the mirin will cause the food to brown very easily, so you do not need to preheat your skillet for a long time. Serve with a high-quality Japanese short-grain rice.

Originally posted by Chichi Wang from Serious Eats, on August 14, 2009 11:00 AM

Interview Project features David Lynch traveling around the country and interviewing normal folks. (thx, youngna)

Update: David Lynch isn't travelling around...his son Austin and Jason S. are co-directing. (thx, eric)

Tags: David Lynch   interviews   video

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 14, 2009 10:53 AM

Originally posted by (author unknown) from the real janelle, on August 14, 2009 10:45 AM

asked about Associated Repress, the AP's lawyer said that I'm "wonderful"  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on August 14, 2009 10:23 AM

Last night Bill Clinton was in Pittsburgh delivering an address to the attendees of the Blognerd Convention, when a rude gentleman interrupted him and demanded he justify “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” and the Defense of Marriage Act. After a humorous remark about health care town halls, the former President launched into a passionate defense of the actions he took on both those issues. It’s amazing: I had never really understood until now what a firm supporter of the gay community Bill Clinton really was. If only all those terrible people hadn’t prevented him from acting upon his convictions, we’d be living in a very different world right now.

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on August 14, 2009 10:20 AM

Art Fag City's IMG MGMT series is on a roll! This week they posted "The Nine Eyes of Google Street View" by Jon Rafman, a meditative photo essay on Google Street View, culled from the artist's personal collection of screen captures. See below for a teaser, full essay here.

One year ago, I started collecting screen captures of Google Street Views from a range of Street View blogs and through my own hunting. This essay illustrates how my Street View collections reflect the excitement of exploring this new, virtual world. The world captured by Google appears to be more truthful and more transparent because of the weight accorded to external reality, the perception of a neutral, unbiased recording, and even the vastness of the project. At the same time, I acknowledge that this way of photographing creates a cultural text like any other, a structured and structuring space whose codes and meaning the artist and the curator of the images can assist in constructing or deciphering.

Originally posted by Ceci Moss from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on August 14, 2009 10:00 AM

It's no secret that we here at PAPERMAG love us some Mad Men! To get you guys all riled up for this Sunday's season three premiere, we decided to revisit some of our Mad Men-ly coverage throughout the past couple years. THE COCKTAILS OF MAD MEN It's hard to miss the five-martini lunches and constant scotch drinking on Mad Men, but plenty of classic cocktails, from the Old Fashioned to the Brandy Alexander, have also made cameos. To honor these hidden stars, Elizabeth Thompson chatted with various in-the-know New York cocktailers to analyze what each character's poison reveals about him or her. MOSS APPEAL: ELISABETH MOSS HANGS WITH THE BOYS 
 Whitney Spaner interviewed Ms. Moss about her role on Mad Men and her turn on Broadway in Speed the Plow. VINCENT KARTHEISER: BEAUTIFUL PERSON 2008 We made one of the show's sleaziest characters a BP back in 2008. Photos of Elisabeth and Vincent by Jacqueline Di Milia

Originally posted by (author unknown) from PAPERMAG: WORD UP!, on August 14, 2009 9:08 AM

I love seeing people start new companies, especially in the tech world. But I've probably gotten a little bit jaded about new startups, especially when the story seems to be more about who's funding the effort than about the product itself. To me the distinction that makes a startup interesting is not just whether their own product or service is cool, but whether it's broad and ambitious enough that others can build interesting things on top of it.

So, after taking a pretty careful look at the tech scene (and of course with a number of my recent posts being focused on Facebook, Google, Apple and other giants of the tech industry), I think the most promising new startup of 2009 is one of the least likely: The executive branch of the federal government of the United States.

Now, .gov websites have historically been backwaters at best, a bunch of awkwardly-designed, poorly defined sites that only met the bare requirements of a web presence. But of course the current administration is comprised in great part of digital natives, and it's remarkable how quickly they've remade the .gov world into not just a number of compelling websites, but into a broad set of platforms that are going to inspire as much technological innovation as Twitter, Facebook or the iPhone did when they unveiled their technology platforms.

Need proof? Well, let's take a look at some of the most compelling new sites that have launched in just the few short months since President Obama took office:

• Data.gov, providing open access to feeds of valuable facts and figures generated by the executive branch.
• USAspending.gov, allowing any of us to drill down into the details of spending from various federal agencies.
• Recovery.gov, perhaps one of the best-known of the new sites, offering up details of how resources from the Recovery Act are being allocated.
• And of course, there's WhiteHouse.gov. You know about that one.

What's remarkable about these sites is not merely that they exist; There had been some efforts to provide this kind of information in the past. Rather, what stands out is that they exhibit a lot of the traits of some of the best tech startups in Silicon Valley or New York City. Each site has remarkably consistent branding elements, leading to a predictable and trustworthy sense of place when you visit the sites. There is clear attention to design, both from the cosmetic elements of these pages, and from the thoughtfulness of the information architecture on each site. (The clear, focused promotional areas on each homepage feel just like the "Sign up now!" links on the site of most Web 2.0 companies.) And increasingly, these services are being accompanied by new APIs and data sources that can be used by others to build interesting applications.

That last point is perhaps most significant. We've seen the remarkable innovation that sprung up years ago around the API for services like Flickr, and that continues full-force today around apps like Twitter. But who could have predicted just a year or two ago that we might have something like Apps for America, the effort being led by the Sunlight Foundation, Google, O'Reilly Media and TechWeb to reward applications built around datasets provided by Data.gov. The tools that have already been built are fascinating. And, frankly, they're a lot more compelling than most of the sample apps that a typical startup can wring out of its community with a developer contest.

More importantly, there's a different attitude about the web and leveraging online communities to help make our government work more effectively. I learned a bit about this first hand when I saw U.S. CIO Vivek Kundra speak at Wired's "Disruptive By Design" conference a few weeks ago:

One of the highlights of that clip happens at just 1:45 into the video, where Kundra outlines a vision where the default setting for information created by the government should be public, not secret. This is the same kind of "default openness" that turned ordinary collecting behaviors on sites like Flickr and Delicious into the foundation for remarkable communities that display phenomenally valuable emergent behaviors. We're seeing this right now, with an organization like Twitter looking to build the feature of retweeting into their own platform, after it having been pioneered by their community.

And it's just as essential to note the way in which these changes have happened. Something like the USA Spending dashboard would have taken half a year or more to deploy in any large-sized corporation; Our government got it done in just a few months. How did they do it? Well, the team in the CIO's office was working nights and weekends, borrowing time and resources as they were able in order to get something useful shipping as quickly as possible. In short, they were working startup hours, with a startup's level of intensity, because they knew they were making something cool and useful.

So What's Next?

While it's exciting to see the remarkable embrace of new technologies that's coming from inside the beltway, there are still some serious challenges that face the new startup-minded tech community within our government. In many ways, they echo the classic challenges that all startups face, but with a unique twist:

• Defining a startup's culture is extraordinarily difficult, since there have to be clear values that are expressed in the way people act both in public and behind the scenes. In the case of the executive branch, this is doubly hard because it's redefining a culture which has been well-established for decades. Bringing organizational change and new technologies to an established way of working requires partners and suppliers to change the way they do business, as well.
• Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience. And of course, nobody works in government for the salaries. Fortunately, all of us who are citizens already have equity in this startup.
• Marketing has never been the strong suit of those doing the most interesting work in the government sphere. Even some of the smarter folks I know in the tech world had never even heard of the sites I mentioned above, or had never bothered to check them out in much detail. It's going to take concerted effort to get the word out beyond the usual circle of those who were already interested in technology and government.

Of course, these efforts just represent a small start towards the incredible amount of work that remains to be done in making an entity like the U.S. government as responsive and interactive as today's web demands. There will be mistakes, and worse, there will be those who try to politicize this good work, even though our government making smarter use of the web benefits us all whether you agree or disagree with the policies of the present administration.

But I am hopeful, because I've seen a couple of cool applications come out, and more importantly I've seen every indication that, after literally decades of ignoring and neglecting the technology industry that defines so much of our culture, those in political power are eager to embrace those with technological ability. I personally can daydream about Pushbutton-enabling feeds from Data.gov to let us build realtime apps with government data, or deploying blogging tools at the FCC so that we find out about interesting filings from the organization that actually gets the filings. I can imagine all sorts of applications that could be built if we could find "all publicly-available government data on this neighborhood I'm considering moving to".

And while I'm sure that all of these things will get built, as someone who's paying for this stuff with my tax dollars, I am fundamentally most happy about the fact that data generated by my government can be created in a format that fits the way I consume and share information, instead of merely being printed on paper and filed away in a warehouse somewhere. For the way I live, and the way that all of my peers and friends live, the executive branch's new embrace of a startup mentality and the promise of the web means that its work is, for the first time, truly public.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 14, 2009 8:45 AM

Which Version Of Madden Should Take Over Your Life?

I want to know what's its like to be Tom Brady; I don't want to know what it would be like if I was quarterbacking the Patriots.

The Wii version is more fun, the XBox version is too hard but more realistic.

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello, nintendo, on August 14, 2009 7:26 AM

The other night I was on the F train, which was running as the E train, annoyingly. I was on my way back from a long hot night of Rock Band in Brooklyn, and I desperately needed something to read. But the only newspaper on the train was a copy of Desi Talk. And? What a wonderful newspaper!

Although I didn’t have any idea about what most of it was about, because there was lots of extremely well-informed coverage of religious festivals in New Jersey and the like, and I don’t know anything about either of those things, I was very impressed that A) they are like 40+ pages and B) they have seemingly robust advertising.

In particular I was impressed with their classified ads. Because Craigslist killed the classifieds—but not in the specialty markets! Particularly the matrimonials, which are just really sweet and also I wish my mom had taken one of these out for me years ago. I’m totally serious. Why did I have to date random people for like 20 years? I would have done much better with parental orchestration. Such as:

“Parents invite correspondence from well-educated professionals for my slim, beautiful, very accomplished and professionally successful daughter, 30, software consultant, born/raised in Canada/USA, now living in CHICAGO.”

Um, she sounds awesome? But. You know this other girl right now is totally pissed off at mom and dad though:

“Gujarati Vaishnav parents visiting with their Good looking Mumbai born daughter, 1977 born, Yoga Teacher / I. T Programmer, Ht 5′ 1″, 50 Kg. Never Married, Well to do Family, Visiting Chicago, Kansas, New York & Other States.”

She is totally like “OH MY GOD, MOM!!” at this very moment.

And:

“Looking for professional match for software engineer boy, 29 yrs / 5′ 7″. Girl should be USA/Canada citizen. Caste no bar.”

I think that is extra-sweet; that is a phrase that pops up a lot! (Including as “caste/previous marriage no bar.”)

The last newspaper I found and read on the train was the Final Call. I didn’t enjoy that as much, though I appreciated their perspective on how the pharmaceutical companies and the right-wing arm of the secret government is conspiring to keep the poor in poverty. (TRUTH!) Also I did like their long health editorial about how the white man was always trying to trick the black man into eating swine. (And also how pork gives you pork worms!) Also though? AMAZING HEADLINES.

In conclusion, my ideal newspaper would be if the staff of Desi Talk and the Final Call switched newspapers for a week. That would be the best solution for all of us. Thank you.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on August 14, 2009 7:20 AM

Adrian Beltre is going to have his name be synonymous with pain for a while, the way Michael Barrett, Chris Snyder, and Josias Manzanillo were for a time before him. Men everywhere will watch the video — though MLB.com has elected not to show it — and cringe. Beltre injured himself on a grounder and no, he was not wearing a cup, according to manager Don Wakamatsu. He continued to play and “felt it” on two plays, including one where he dove into first base.

Ouch.

While Beltre will miss at least a week, more if surgery is required, the question is “Why the bleep wasn’t he wearing a cup?” While we can talk about new helmets, gloves, pitcher protection, and other advances, is there any excuse for a player not wearing the most basic of devices?

No. No there’s not.

It’s a “comfort thing,” said one MLB Trainer. A player said “some guys do, some guys don’t.” When asked how many don’t, he quickly said “I don’t check,” but neither does anyone. These players are grown men, making their own choices. However, there’s no rule against a team requiring them, or any other safety device.

I’ll propose a rule change: MLB will certify equipment as “state of the art.” They’ll take the very best and fund research into making that even better. Once certified, that becomes the baseball standard. Every player is required to wear it, but they can elect to opt out. Don’t want to wear the new helmet or padded glove? Fine, but if you’re injured and the equipment would have prevented the injury, there’s no DL for you.

I’m always concerned with protecting players, especially when it might trickle down. It’s one thing if Jeff Francouer is too vain to wear a helmet that could help prevent injuries and quite another if a high school sophomore doesn’t. Let’s hope when kids were looking up to Adrian Beltre, they weren’t looking down.

Originally posted by Will Carroll from Baseball Prospectus: Unfiltered, on August 14, 2009 7:15 AM

Are You wondering if I"m ever going to stop talking about Toronto? Well, forgive me, but the Blue Jays were just here right after I was up there so they're in my mind. Plus, I have all these lovely pictures to share, and all my new knowledge of Rogers Centre. How do You feel about my inability to rotate that left photo of the frozen sliders on the grill? I'm not trying to be artsy or interesting here; I just a moron. Look at how big those hot dogs are. The $13-for-3 sliders shrink down to near-quarter-size (that's in both Canada and the US, of course) while the $7.75 hot dogs stay toobig. 

Originally posted by Sara Pepitone from Scoreboard Gourmet, on August 14, 2009 6:35 AM

David Treuer, an American Indian, is writing a series of dispatches for Slate in which he visits Indian casinos. I'd never heard the story of how casinos on Indian lands came to be. It seems a state tax bill on a mobile home led to a lawsuit which led to a legal precedent that state and federal governments have no regulatory jurisdiction on Indian lands.

The Supreme Court ruling in the Bryan case was expansive. More than just a ruling on taxation, it declared that states and the feds had the right to police the reservation only in the interest of "law and order" and had no civil or regulatory jurisdiction over sovereign Indian nations. Until this time, tribes and states more or less assumed that states had civil and regulatory power on reservations. But the Supreme Court maintained that as sovereign nations, Indian tribes had always had the right to govern themselves (including civil and regulatory powers), just as all nations do, and that tribes should deal with the U.S. federal government, not with states. Kansas, for example, has no power to levy taxes in Luxembourg -- and not only because Luxembourg is far away.

Tags: David Treuer   gambling   legal   nativeamericans

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 14, 2009 6:22 AM

I have been sitting on my stoop in the East Village this morning like an old Polish woman and I have counted exactly zero guys with pot bellies, even though this is the hot new trend, according to the elitist New York Times. Here is the thing: Manhattan is an incredibly trim place, on the most part. Last night I was walking by Gramercy Park and I was behind a large group of people who were clearly from out of town, and I could tell only because of two things: they were wearing amazingly cheap clothing and they were, well, a large group of people! That is a fine choice for them! I am not here to judge. For one thing, the food in America is terrible, horrible, disgusting “food” and really there is nothing for them to eat that is healthy. The problem is that we are kind of not allowed to even mention it. And so writer Cintra Wilson, who is well-known as a TOTALLY CRAZY person, is in big trouble now.

This week she wrote in the Times about JC Penney coming to Manhattan.

AND herein lies the genius of J. C. Penney: It has made a point of providing clothing for people of all sizes (a strategy, company officials have said, to snatch business from nearby Macy’s). To this end, it has the most obese mannequins I have ever seen. They probably need special insulin-based epoxy injections just to make their limbs stay on. It’s like a headless wax museum devoted entirely to the cast of “Roseanne.”

Hey now: both New and Old Beckies were STICK FIGURES. This is somewhat nicer?

No matter how many Grand Slam breakfasts you’ve knocked out of the park, Penney’s has a size for you. Ladies will find kicky little numbers that fit no matter how bountiful the good Lord made them.

She apologized. Twice. And deleted one apology. (The second (or third?) apology: “Because of my personal beliefs as a Buddhist, I very much regret that my JC Penney article in the Times caused any wounded feelings whatsoever, particularly to people who already feel they take more than their share of abuse from our very shallow and ridiculous society.” WEIRD. Buddhist what?) And unapologized at least once. (Which is the mark of, yes, a CRAZY PERSON.)

She is getting roasted in her own comments at her website: “You truly are a hack and your article makes you sound like a bitter little rich c*nt.”

OH AND: “If I had seen what you looked like before I called you a snob, I would have felt pity for you instead. I didn’t realize you were so ugly!!”

OH AND! “Maybe JC Penny will do you a kindness and design a Cintra hat for the fall season that helps eliminate the glare off your pasty face and that huge forehead.” OH IT GOES ON: “Boo you whore! I mean boo you classist whore!”

And uh… “NO ON E LIKES U. NOW GO EAT A PIZZA AND BARF IT OUT AGAIN BULIMIC HO!”

Oh okay: “And before you go insulting people go and get some surgery. you look like a man.”

And my fave: “I will never read the NYT is this is TRIPE they print and try to pass as journalism. I wrote to the editors and the president of NYT telling them the lack of integrity this has brought this paper down too.” Oh good, you’re never going to read the New York Times again? Good call. Drama queen!

Basically everyone is a nasty person. But guess what? Some of us are fat nasty people, and some of us are thin nasty people. Can’t we all get unified by our nastiness and ignore the meaningless question of size on the Internet, where no one knows what we look like, but knows just that we are really awful in general?

And can’t we get behind the idea that no one should have to shop at JC Penney, which is fucking disgusting?

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on August 14, 2009 5:28 AM

"The only thing that stopped him from opening the fridge was his lack of an opposable thumb."

We had to put our 15 year-old beagle Brass to sleep yesterday. He was getting sicker and sicker, and weaker and weaker, and when Will, Vicky, and I arrived at our vet's office yesterday, she told us that it was time. The three of us had already arrived at that conclusion as a family even before we arrived at Dr. Brown's office.

Why? Because Brass, a serious eater if there ever was one, had stopped eating and drinking. He hadn't eaten anything for three days. The only way Vicky and Will could get some liquid into him was by spoon-feeding him water.

How could this be? How much of a serious eater was Brass? Well, some of you might remember this photo of Brass doing the dishes at our friends' house in Connecticut. Brass obviously hated to see one single morsel of seriously delicious food go to waste, so he became the first dog we had ever seen volunteer to do the dishes. Now that's what I call a considerate and well-trained dog-cum-house-guest. But Brass had exhibited serious eater tendencies long before he started doing the dishes, like when he visited the Serious Eats offices.

Brass should have performed some of his food-oriented stupid pet tricks on Letterman to show the world just what kind of serious eater he was.

He could go up and over like a dolphin in pursuit of something seriously delicious. No matter what kitchen counter we put food on, it was not safe from Brass. Only the closed oven and the top of the fridge were Brass-free zones, and the only thing that stopped him from opening the fridge was his lack of an opposable thumb.

Though Brass was a wonderfully gentle, child-friendly dog (one sweet little boy in our building would sometimes visit him thrice-weekly after school for play dates) no food a child was clutching was safe from Brass. When Brass was three or four—in his serious eating prime—Vicky was walking him to the bank. She and Brass passed a little boy in a stroller chomping contentedly on a bagel. In a flash, without making a sound, Brass took the bagel out of the little boy's hands with his teeth. He did this so quickly the little boy's mother didn't see it.

The little boy started crying, and his mom couldn't figure out why. Vicky had to explain to her what had happened and offered to repay her for the bagel.

Brass loved pizza as well, as Adam Kuban found out a few years ago during a Serious Eats planning session at our house:

When I first encountered Ed Levine's beagle, Brass, he had lumbered from the kitchen of Ed's apartment into the living room, drawn by the scent of pizza dinner at an early Serious Eats planning session. Ed immediately warned us all to watch that dog like a hawk. As far as Brass is concerned, that slice of pizza on your plate is his. Brass's strategy: Disarm with a deceptively slow pace, bide time until victim's guard is down, strike like lightning to take what's rightfully his. The night I met him, someone (no, not me) ignored Ed's warning, and Brass scored a prime corner slice of a grandma pizza from New Pizza Town.

Thanksgiving is of course any serious eaters' favorite holiday, and Brass was no exception. Most Thanksgivings in our house ended with Brass leaping up onto the center of the dining room table and devouring one of the many pies I had carefully gathered from around the city. At that moment he became the ultimate Thanksgiving table centerpiece. Who needs flowers? I'm not sure our guests appreciated Brass' skill and prowess, but I for one was incredibly proud. Brass was one hell of a serious eater.

It's going to be a lot easier seriously eating in our house now that Brass is no longer with us, but that doesn't make losing him any less difficult. Big-hearted Brass was a constant, joyous, life-affirming presence in our lives for fifteen years. We loved him madly and he loved us right back every single moment he was with us.

The Weigh-In

As all serious eaters can well imagine, we've been consumed with Brass this past week, so much so that I forgot to weigh myself one day. Let's see where I ended up. 213. Same as last week. I'm still going to have a piece of pie this weekend, in honor of Brass the serious-eating beagle.

Originally posted by Ed Levine from Serious Eats, on August 14, 2009 4:45 AM

Hello

Originally posted by (author unknown) from (title unknown), on August 14, 2009 4:44 AM

Originally posted by mr tibbles from lady upgrade project, on August 14, 2009 1:21 AM

An amazing gallery of rare Star Wars images posted by Australian based Life Lounge. A culturally valid Friday time waster, these are nothing short of AWESOME.

Originally posted by Cakehead Loves Evil from Cakehead Loves Evil, on August 14, 2009 1:13 AM

The History of the Australian Web [interactionconsortium.com] is a permanent public record of the major trends in the most popular online properties and services of the Australian Internet as they have evolved, and continue to evolve, from 2001 to 2008.

This project is a first attempt to address the gap existing in keeping a public record of the larger and longer-term trends in the Australian online economy, and is a first step toward creating an ongoing picture of the broader landscape and longer-term trends in Australian Internet usage.

The bubble color denotes the category of the websites. Bubble sizes and X and Y-axes of the scatterplot can be configured by the user, ranging from Page Views and Audience Size to Site Name and Time Spent. A timeline allows for animating the graphs according to time.

Thnkx Andrea.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from information aesthetics, on August 14, 2009 1:12 AM

Aaron Hillegass’ last post on initializers for UIViewController was spot-on. In fact, when you come to our iPhone Bootcamp, you’ll learn all about it. However, the extra typing every time we create a file is a nuisance. When you create a subclass of a UIViewController, chances are you really want to get to work on the [...]

Originally posted by Joe Conway from Big Nerd Ranch Weblog, on August 13, 2009 5:46 PM

Google gotta eat.

(via Gizmodo)

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on August 13, 2009 5:36 PM

A relatively short article on the mathematics of gambling.

Let's say, for example, you want to bet on one of the highlights of the British sporting calendar, the annual university boat race between old rivals Oxford and Cambridge. One bookie is offering 3 to 1 on Cambridge to win and 1 to 4 on Oxford. But a second bookie disagrees and has Cambridge evens (1 to 1) and Oxford at 1 to 2.

Each bookie has looked after his own back, ensuring that it is impossible for you to bet on both Oxford and Cambridge with him and make a profit regardless of the result. However, if you spread your bets between the two bookies, it is possible to guarantee success (see diagram, for details). Having done the calculations, you place £37.50 on Cambridge with bookie 1 and £100 on Oxford with bookie 2. Whatever the result you make a profit of £12.50.

I say relatively because there are literally millions of pages on the web just about blackjack statistics. For instance, it's easy to see how you'll lose money playing blackjack in the long run -- card counting aside -- by looking at this house edge calculator. The only real advantage to the player occurs with a one-deck shoe and a bunch of other pro-player rules, which I imagine are difficult to find at the casinos. (via big contrarian)

Tags: blackjack   gambling   mathematics

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 13, 2009 2:42 PM

The view from the end of Huron Street in Greenpoint. (John Del Signore/Gothamist)

Anyone who strolls along Greenpoint's desolate West Street—just one tantalizing block from the East River—is familiar with the frustration of finding many streets leading to the water gated off. It's not as if there's some waterside idyll waiting on the other end of the block, but there's still something refreshing about being able to stand by the river and watch the sunset or fish (shudder).

Some assumed that these blocks have been gated off because they're part of private property, but it turns out companies illegally privatized the streets during the 1970s and ’80s to deter trespassers. Now the Open Space Alliance has joined Councilman David Yassky to get these riverfront access points open again. In a letter to Robert Lieber, the city’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development, Yassky wrote:

No one at present appears willing to actually remove the fences for fear of incurring potential liabilities. I insist … that the removal of these street-end fences and gates be addressed immediately. Greenpoint continues to have virtually no access to its waterfront and the promised parks are still years away from completion. These street ends, once fully open, accessible, and clean, will provide the community with three desperately needed waterfront havens.

Brooklyn Paper reports that two weeks ago, city workers tore down a chain-link fence that had long closed the riverside foot of Kent Street, but other blocks remain gated, including Java Street, which has become popular with transients in recent months. Huron Street has been open for some time now, and though it's a trash-strewn dead end, it's still something of an urban oasis. Now there's talk of adding benches and other amenities, but let's hope not—the streets would probably get closed again for years while the city "worked" on them!

Originally posted by John Del Signore from Gothamist, on August 13, 2009 2:12 PM

Joyent was one of the first companies to offer storage as Strongspace (Summer, 2005). Strongspace was a multi-user SFTP drive in the sky. A piece of trivia: Strongspace was the first product to use ZFS in production (ouside of Sun). We introduced Bingodisk in the Fall of 2006 to provide ...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Blog Joyent, on August 13, 2009 1:49 PM

I’ve always wanted to visit Iceland. For several years earlier this decade, I had an extra reason to make a trip: Bobby Fischer, who moved to Iceland in 2005 after a series of international incidents. As I mentioned in a post a couple of years ago, Fischer and my father were friends and colleagues on the U.S. chess circuit in the 1950s and ’60s.

Bobby wasn’t exactly known for being a friendly guy. But I still imagined visiting Reykjavik, spotting him on a park bench, and walking up to him to say, “Bobby, I’m Eliot Hearst’s son.” He’s a major figure in the mythology of my family, so of course I always wanted to meet him.

It was not to be: Fischer died in Reykjavik on January 17, 2008.

Fischer is buried in Selfoss, a small town about 40 miles from Reyjavik. I have an Internet pal in Reykjavik named Halldor, and he passed along these photos of Bobby’s grave. They were taken by an American friend of his named Judith Gans, a singer and Icelandic music expert:

Originally posted by Andrew Hearst from Panopticist, on August 13, 2009 1:20 PM

• DefinitiveInk
  just redesigned my blog with the click of a button with the new typepad

Originally posted by joshua mack from DefinitiveInk, on August 13, 2009 12:05 PM

Atul Gawande and some colleagues searched the US for healthcare successes -- hospitals and clinics where costs are relatively low and quality of care is high -- and came up with a few lessons.

If the rest of America could achieve the performances of regions like these, our health care cost crisis would be over. Their quality scores are well above average. Yet they spend more than $1,500 (16 percent) less per Medicare patient than the national average and have a slower real annual growth rate (3 percent versus 3.5 percent nationwide).

I wanted this article to be much longer than it was with breakouts of each of the ten lessons with lengthy explanations.

Tags: Atul Gawande   healthcare   USA

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 13, 2009 11:36 AM

In a concession to penury I’ve refrained from making any wardrobe-related purchases over the last six months or so. This is not necessarily much of a sacrifice, since I am in no way a sartorialist, and, excepting a few stains, my clothes aren’t that much worse for the wear for being, well, worse for the wear. I am, however, at a point where the elastic on many of my undergarments has begun to fray, playing havoc with my bits: Big Al and The Boys are undergoing a wave of confusion and discomfort as a series of spontaneous adjustments occurs throughout the day. In any event, I would like to take this opportunity to apologize to anyone whom I’ve ever objectified for wearing a thong. I had no idea just how uncomfortable it must be. It’s a jarring experience which leaves you with discordant sensation akin to what you felt the first time you saw a Hasid using a cell phone. It’s just not right.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Alex Balk, on August 13, 2009 11:33 AM

From Slice

Continuing the 50-part series that is The United States of Pizza, here's Jenn Sit makin' like a cheechako in the Last Frontier. —The Mgmt.

Although I worry that a pizza oven would threaten the structural integrity of an igloo, Spencer Shroyer (editor of the Anchorage Daily News's Play Magazine), my invaluable source of Alaskan pizza intel, showed me that wood-fired ovens do indeed exist in the Land of the Midnight Sun. All Alaska jokes aside, we in the Lower 48 must overcome our Rudolph-ladened imaginings of Meat Lover pies strewn with caribou, moose, and reindeer sausage (a topping option at the Great Alaska Pizza Company) dipped in Eskimo ice cream instead of ranch.

Due to the difficulty of growing year-round in Alaska (the state does experience a very short but intense growing season that produces world-record-setting crops like a 19-pound carrot and a 106-pound cabbage), there aren’t as many specialized regional ingredients aside from fish. According to Spencer, reindeer sausage (“not spicy like its Italian counterpart, it’s more like kielbasa”) and moose meat (“not readily available commercially”) really don’t show up on pizzas as often as Lower 48 residents would think. Though Spencer says, “Our state motto could be: 'We complain about the Lower 48 and then copy whatever they do five years later'”—it seems that mimicry is not always a bad thing: “The taste for gourmet-style pizzas and microbrewed beers cruised up the Alcan Highway from the Lower 48 and into Alaska, and the state hasn’t been the same since.”

Anchorage

Moose’s Tooth Pub and Pizzeria

View Larger Map

Throughout my findings, the Moose’s Tooth Pub and Pizzeria (3300 Old Seward Highway, 
Anchorage AK 99503 (map); 907-258-2537) was by far the most well-known and referenced pizza joint. With belly-busting, nontraditional pies like the Avalanche (pepperoni, blackened chicken, bacon, red onions, parsley, cheddar, mozzarella, provolone, and barbecue sauce) and Santa’s Little Helper (pepperoni, blackened chicken, steak, bacon, red peppers, cilantro, mozzarella, provolone, and marinara) and its house-brewed drafts, the Moose’s Tooth has been helping Alaskans survive through many a dark winter.

Local seafood finds its way onto pies like the Shrimp Fiesta (shrimp, red onions, jalapenos, red peppers, diced Roma tomatoes, cilantro, chili flakes, shake cheese (Parmesan in a can), Parmesan, mozzarella, provolone, and garlic oil), the Blackened Halibut (Cajun-seasoned halibut, diced red onions, diced Roma tomatoes, spicy sour cream sauce, parsley, mozzarella, provolone, garlic and olive oil), and the Smoked Salmon.

No matter if pies like the Kodiak Ranch (mushrooms, red onions, broccoli, black olives, diced Roma tomatoes, green peppers, cheddar, mozzarella, provolone, and ranch dressing) and toppings like Denali Sauce (puréed spinach, ricotta, herbs, and spices) are Alaskan in name alone, the Tooth has built a strong local following and success that’s spawned two sister spin-offs: The Bear Tooth Grill and the Bear Tooth Theatre Pub for all your filmic pizza hankerings. Spencer’s take on The Tooth: "The Tooth's 
reputation was built on standout pies like the Blackened Halibut, its beer (more than ten taps of house-brewed suds), and its laid-back vibe (employees rock tie-dyed T-shirts for uniforms). The parking lot is always packed and every year it’s a lopsided winner of best-pizza-in-town awards.”

Capri Halal Pizza

View Larger Map

Although Moose's Tooth gets all the hype, Erin Zimmer's friend and Anchorage resident Andrew C. has this to say about Capri Pizza (4505 Spenard Rd
Anchorage AK 99517 (map); 907-243-3333), a Pakistani-owned halal pizza joint that's only been open for a year now: "They're becoming known for their shish-kebab pizza and their salmon pizza—the latter being the best pie I've ever had on my world travels. It's owned by a family of Pakistani bakers, so the crust is fluffy and chewy and has hints of olive oil and spices. Their best pizza is the smoked salmon edition; the salmon is flaked and mixed into the cheese toppings. It's amazing. I wouldn't say Capri's is better than Moose's overall, just that Capri's smoked salmon pizza is better than any one item the former has."

Homer

If you find yourself "at the end of the road," in Homer, Alaska (where the town's first traffic light went up in 2005), you’ll find not one but two notable wood-fired pizzerias: Fat Olives and Finn’s Pizza.

Fat Olives

View Larger Map

Homer may be lacking a plethora of traffic lights, but wood-fired Italian brick ovens? Fat Olives has one that churns out thin-crust pizzas, with giant slices to-go that run about $3 a pop. According to Spencer: “If you drive south from Anchorage until you can’t go any farther (around 220 miles), you’ll reach Homer: 'A quaint drinking village with a fishing problem,' according to a popular bumper sticker. The place for pie at the end of that road is Fat Olives Restaurant (276 Olson Lane, Homer AK 99603 (map); 907-235-8488). There’s usually a cheese, a vegetarian, and two types of meat pizzas cut into long, thin slices and ready for pick up. The toppings are at the discretion of the kitchen, but on a recent trip I had a tasty veggie slice made with pesto sauce, black olives, onions, garlic, red peppers, and mozzarella cheese. And, yes, local libations from Homer Brew are on tap.”

Finn’s Pizza

View Larger Map

A New York Times Reader’s Pick, Finn’s Pizza (Cannery Road Boardwalk, Homer Spit Road, Homer AK 99603) has owners Sasha Raupp and Bjorn Larsen serving up wood-fired pizzas made with organic and local ingredients. Serious eater Gaffer touts it as not only the best pizza in Alaska but as good as the pizza he’s had in New York. Depending on the slice, that’s a pretty big claim, but these photos may take a little edge off that New Yorker skepticism.

And lastly, other notable mentions from pizza maven Spencer:

"The Last Frontier’s pizza spots don’t all boast fancy-pants pesto and in-house IPA—there are also plenty built on regular ol’ red sauce and a bottle of Bud. At Muldoon Pizza (450 Muldoon Road, 
Anchorage AK 99504 (map) 907-333-8111), an East-side institution since 1975, diners can slide into tall-backed booths and get a house special (mozzarella, pepperoni, mushrooms, hamburger, black olives, Canadian bacon, sausage, and onions) with a frosty mug of beer.



"There’s also Greek eatery Pizza Olympia (2809 Spenard Road, Anchorage AK 99503 (map); 907-561-5264), where, in addition to a mean pasticcio and moussaka, they roll out pies such as the Athena’s Delight (garlic, green peppers, feta, kalamata olives, artichoke hearts, onions, tomatoes, and Greek oregano). Feeling romantic? For an additional $4, the folks at Olympia will turn any pizza into a heart-shaped symbol of your affection.”

But if you’re really sick of the reindeer and caribou and jonesing for a Lower 48 slice, there’s always Nome's Airport Pizza, which delivers pies by plane.

Special Thanks To

Spencer Shroyer for all his invaluable pizza knowledge. Spencer is the editor of Play, the Anchorage Daily News's weekly entertainment section; he writes about food and pop culture on its blog. Also a DJ, his ramblings about music can be found at djencyclopediabrown.blogspot.com.

Andrew C., of Anchorage, for the Capri Pizza tip.

Originally posted by Jenn Sit from Serious Eats, on August 13, 2009 11:30 AM

On the heels of this tacky Nia Long ad, the Onion News Network has produced a so-realistic-it's-almost-not-funny-but-still-funny video (embedded after the jump), in which a "women's rights group" protests PETA's treatment of women. One protester says:

"They make women strip down, put vegetables over their genitals, and subject them to hours of photoshoots. No living creature should be treated like that!" Oh, it's satire, but the root of the joke rings true, when you think about the fact that, in the ad above, Nia Long's Photoshop Of Horrors is so severe she is missing a belly button (Plus: Have you seen this?!?!) In the video, "PETA" makes this statement: "We have no intention of changing our tactics until every last animal on the planet is given more respect than woman." At least the animals don't get Photoshopped?

Advocacy Group Decries PETA's Inhumane Treatment Of Women [ONN]
Nia Long Goes Nude On The Subway For PETA [EcoRazzi]
PETA Takes the Cake With ‘Save The Whales' Billboard [Deceiver]

Earlier: PETA Disgusts Americans With Adolescent Advertising
PETA's Ingrid Newkirk
Do More Men Really Go Vegan Because Of Pamela Anderson's Boobs?

Originally posted by Dodai from Jezebel, on August 13, 2009 10:20 AM

The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to GOD.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from GOD and nearer to the Dust.

-- T.S. Eliot, "The Rock"

Originally posted by caterina from Caterina.net, on August 13, 2009 9:51 AM

The all new TypePad has tons of great new features. One such feature is the stream of recent activity from the people you follow on TypePad. Right from your dashboard you can see the latest updates from your friends, community, and some of the world's best bloggers. But what if you're away from your computer?

Today, we're happy to announce that the activity stream is now available on the TypePad Mobile web app. To try it out, simply sign in at i.typepad.com on your iPhone or iPod touch and tap the new "Activity" button on the dashboard.

In addition, these cool mobile features are now also available for Palm Pre and Android phones, as well as the iPhone and iPod touch that we originally supported. On any of these devices, you can get a great, streamlined version of the TypePad experience, including:

• Creating and editing posts
• Managing comments
• Checking your stats
• Posting photos via email
• Seeing your friends' activity on TypePad

We hope you enjoy the new features and look forward to your feedback. Thanks!

Originally posted by Walt Dickinson from Everything TypePad, on August 13, 2009 8:30 AM

The editors of Dazed & Confused are obsessed with blogs, so much so that they've set up their own blog awards with G-Star to honor the most prolific, most eloquent and most beautiful blogs in fashion, music, photography and arts & culture.

There are fifteen blogs in each category and the winner walks away with £500 of G-star product and more importantly, a feature in the October issue of Dazed.

Who made the fashion list? One of our favorite blogs to look at, Jak&Jil, and Sabine Pieper whose illustrations we're kind of obsessed with. Also on there is The Business of Fashion, an intellectual look at the business side of the industry that even the creatives can understand and our choice alternative to the business section of our newspaper.

Voting's open until August 31st so start clicking.

Sponsored Topics: Fashion - Photography - Dazed & Confused - Blog - Newspaper

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fashionista, on August 13, 2009 8:27 AM

What's harder than planning next week's meals for your family? Planning meals that will be appetizing, lightly packaged, and will be safe to eat for 5 years - on the way to Mars and back.

Originally posted by Rebecca Blood from Rebecca's Pocket, on August 13, 2009 7:38 AM

Photo: Michael Moran. Typeface: Gotham Bold

In Fast Company, Ellen Lupton writes:

The graphic designer Michael Bierut, a partner working in the New York office of the firm Pentagram, designed a 21-foot sign for the new U.S.-Canada border crossing at Massena, New York. The sign, as well as the building, which was designed by architects Smith-Miller & Hawkinson, has received substantial praise as a bold and daring piece of federal design. Too daring, perhaps. The sign is being dismantled by the Customs and Border Protection Agency for fear that it will be a target for terrorists.

I share Michael Bierut’s hesitation in second-guessing the seasoned professionals at the Department of Homeland Security, who surely know more about armed extremists than I would ever want to. Still, I think there’s a compromise to be struck: if the goal is to create a typographic fig leaf that disguises one’s arrival at our 9,161,923 square kilometer nation, why not change the inscription to “Bienvenidos a México?” —JH

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, on August 13, 2009 7:30 AM

Photographer’s Dilemma by Tatsuro Kiuchi

Photographer’s Dilemma by Tatsuro Kiuchi is utterly charming, like all of his work. It’s also the perfect characterization of the dozens of diehard photographers I know. I found him via the current issue of Poetry Magazine — the cover of its July/August 2009 issue is illustrated with Kiuchi’s equally charming On the Beach.

Speaking of Poetry Magazine — source of my most recent Paired post’s poem Blowing the Fluff Away — you should subscribe. It’s super.

Digg This    Save to Del.icio.us

Originally posted by Jen Bekman from Personism, on August 13, 2009 7:17 AM

Note: This post is part 2 of 4 on building our training workshop.

Last week I talked about why you don’t want to shard. This week I’m following up with the top 10 enhancements that XtraDB has over the built-in InnoDB included in MySQL 5.0 and 5.1.  Building this list was not really a scientific process – It’s always difficult to say which feature is better than another, because a lot of it depends on the individual workload.  My ranking method was to pick the features that have the highest impact and are most applicable to all workloads first:

1. CPU scalability fixes – XtraDB improves performance on systems with multi-cpus (see docs 1, 2).
2. Import/Export Tables – XtraDB allows you to import an arbitrary  table from one server to another, by backing up the .ibd file with Xtrabackup (see docs).
3. IO scalability fixes – A lot of the internal algorithms of InnoDB are based on the non-configurable assumption that the server has only a single disk installed (100 iops).  One problem in particular that this causes, is that InnoDB the algorithm which chooses if InnoDB is too busy to flush dirty pages can consider it’s self busy very easily.  Keeping a large percentage of pages dirty increases recovery time, and will lead to more work when checkpoints are eventually forced at the end of a log file.  XtraDB improves this with innodb_io_capacity, as well as configuration items for innodb_read_threads, innodb_write_threads (see docs).
4. Better Diagnostics – The SHOW ENGINE INNODB STATUS command in XtraDB shows a lot more information than the standard InnoDB status (see docs).  The built-in InnoDB status also has some problems with the placement of items (a long transaction list will prevent the rest of the information shown).  In addition to this, XtraDB diagnostics include the ability to see the contents of the buffer pool (see docs), and InnoDB row statistics are inserted into the slow query log (see docs).
5. Fast Crash Recovery – In the built-in InnoDB, the crash recovery process is sometimes best measured in hours and days – this restricts users to using very small transaction log files (innodb_log_file_size), which is worse for performance.  In a simple test, XtraDB recovered ten times faster (see docs).
6. InnoDB Plugin Features – XtraDB is derived from the InnoDB plugin, which has fast index creation (as opposed to recreating the whole table!) and page compression.
7. Adaptive Checkpointing – The built-in InnoDB can have erratic dips in performance as it approaches the end of a log file and needs to checkpoint – which can cause a denial of service to your application (this can be seen in any benchmark – such as this one).  In XtraDB, adaptive checkpointing can smooth out the load, and checkpoint data more aggressively as you approach the end of a log file (see docs).
8. Insert Buffer control – The insert buffer is a great feature of InnoDB that is not often discussed.  It allows you to delay the writing of non-unique secondary index pages, which can often lead to a lot of merged requests and reduced IO.  The  problem with the insert buffer in the built-in InnoDB, is that there are no options to tweak it.  It can grow to 1/2 the size of your buffer pool, and when it does, it doesn’t try to aggressively free entries (a full buffer provides no use) or reduce its size (see docs).
9. Data dictionary control – Once an InnoDB table is opened it is never freed from the in-memory data dictionary (which is unlimited in size).  XtraDB introduces a patch to be able to control this, which is useful in cases where users have a large number of tables. (see docs).
10. Additional undo slots – In the built-in InnoDB, the number of open transactions is limited to 1023 (see bug report).  XtraDB allows this to be expanded to 4072 (Warning: Incompatible change!).  (see docs).

All of these 10 items will be covered in our Training workshops for InnoDB and XtraDB.  In Santa Clara / San Francisco between 14-16 September?  Come along!

My next post in this series will be on XtraDB: The Top 10 Configuration Parameters.

---

Entry posted by morgan | No comment

Add to: | | | |

Originally posted by morgan from MySQL Performance Blog, on August 13, 2009 6:04 AM

I was at The Museum of Flight and was waiting my turn at the Space Shuttle landing simulator. A six-year-old settled into the control seat, and as the simulation began I heard him ask his father, "Where are the bad guys?"

I'm pretty sure the Space Shuttle doesn't come with onboard missiles.

That didn't stop the kid from pressing the trigger on the joystick a lot, though.

By the way, I cratered the Space Shuttle.

Originally posted by oldnewthing from The Old New Thing, on August 13, 2009 6:00 AM

From the series "About The Field Of Statistics"

Originally posted by Ceci Moss from Rhizome Inclusive: News, Blog, and Digest, on August 13, 2009 6:00 AM

Shane Victorino Batting Statistics and History - Baseball-Reference.com

People want to share what they find and we want them to as well. We have added an option to the list of options above all of the stats tables (not sitewide until we re-run the entire site) after CSV (comma-separated values) and PRE (pre-formatted text) called LINK. Clicking this updates the URL address bar (where you type www.baseball-reference.com) and brings up a popup that gives a url (the http: thingie) that will automatically guide another user to that particular table with the same sorting that you are presently looking at. So for example if you want to show a user that Victorino had a ton of infield hits last year. Sort on infield hits, click the LINK option and send them the link that shows up.

This happens with a bit of javascript, so you’ll need that enabled (it probably already is) for it to work.

A couple of gotchas that we are still working out:

IE is a little funky in the url it presents in the popup, but if you use right click save shortcut it works.
The styling of the popup needs work and it should be shifted left if possible.
The use of the hash value puts you below the table header in Firefox, so the table header is not visible when sent via a direct link. This is not an issue in IE.

Originally posted by Sean Forman from Baseball-Reference Blog, on August 13, 2009 5:56 AM

Photos by Donna

Summertime barbecues, hamburgers and chips and corn on the cob—I'm always always happy to be eating this.  Yes, I still buy ground beef occasionally but when I make a really good burger, I always grind the meat myself.  Why go to the trouble?  For a half a dozen reasons, all of them important.

First and foremost: taste and texture.  When you grind your own, you can regulate the amount of fat you include; your hamburger should contain 20 to 30 percent fat for a juicy succulent burger.  I can season the diced meat before grinding it so that the burger is seasoned uniformly throughout.  And I can use the large die so that it's got real bite to it.

Importantly to me, when I grind my own, I know it hasn't been contaminated by any of the bad bugs that can get into ground meat these days at big processing facilities, or even through carelessness in the meat department of my grocery store.  Provided I give the whole muscle a thorough rinse and pat it dry, I can eat the ground meat as tartare or serve it to my kids as rare as they want it.

Big question: Is the cut critical to the final burger?  Not as critical as the ratio of beef to fat.  Beef is beef and, unlike pork, beef tastes like beef no matter where it comes from on the animal. I know people will disagree.  I'm a co-author on two cookbooks coming out this fall, Ad Hoc At Home and Michael Symon's Live to Cook, and both include hamburger recipes that recommend specific cuts. The chefs involved have tasted various blends and insist there are marked differences.  I believe the only critical ratio is the meat to fat, so I buy a nice fatty relatively inexpensive chuck steak, and that gives me a great burger every time.  Short ribs will give you a great burger as well. So will sirloin and brisket if you've got the right amount of fat.  

The large die is critical to good texture and bite.  I want to be able to chew my burger, not have it fall apart in my mouth or be too dense.  I send the meat through the grinder twice. Why? To make it sticky. The second grind develops the myosin protein which helps the meat stick together without your having to overwork the meat.  I want a light burger, not a heavy one that's been kneaded and squeezed to death. 

One last point: Just as with sausage, it's very important to keep the meat very cold all the way through shaping, which helps to ensure juiciness and a good texture.

After that, the only thing left to do is cook it right.  I think they're best over very hot coals, a few minutes per side, then removed to the cool side of the grill and covered for a couple minutes more, then rested for about five minutes. Serve with with fresh tomatoes and lettuce, with melted onions, with a fried egg on top.  Put some homemade potato chips beside it and a freshly grilled burger you ground yourself is a fantastic, simple, satisfying meal.

Originally posted by michael ruhlman from ruhlman.com, on August 13, 2009 5:43 AM

A good writer is an expert on nothing except himself. And on that subject, if he is wise, he holds his tongue. Some of you may wonder why I am reluctant to submit to interviews on television and radio and in the press. The answer is that nothing that I write is authentic. It is the stuff of dreams, not reality. Yet I am treated by the media as though I wrote espionage handbooks.

And to a point I am flattered that my fabulations are taken so seriously. Yet I also despise myself in the fake role of guru, since it bears no relation to who I am or what I do. Artists, in my experience, have very little centre. They fake. They are not the real thing. They are spies. I am no exception.

--–John le Carré, on himself

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on August 13, 2009 5:29 AM

This morning (8.13.09) at 5:00 I checked the bread starter samples and took a bunch of photos. Unfortunately, I cannot post the pictures because the camera's battery fizzled out before I could download them to my computer (When is someone going to build a high quality camera that can do direct uploads?). So until the battery is recharged words will have to suffice.

Here is the skinny

• After 35 hours of incubation, all of the samples are showing signs of fermentation.
• No one sample appears to be any gassier than any other. Even the control (flour and water only, no cabbage) is fermenting
• None of the samples stink, which I take as an indication that although there is probably leuconostoc bacteria in all of the samples with cabbage, the bacteria, which is naturally present on cabbage and is responsible for sauerkraut fermentation requires anaerobic conditions to grow well, is not thriving in the open sample glasses.

While it is too early in the game to draw any conclusions, I think that it is pretty obvious that the cabbage is not introducing large numbers of yeast cells into the starter. If the cabbage was adding yeast, the samples with cabbage should be fermenting more rapidly.

I think that if from hereon, we see any increase in the rate of fermentation in the samples with cabbage it is likely that it will be caused by the breakdown of the leaves into sugars to be consumed by the yeast and bacteria. Or it is the partial result of wild yeast introduced by the cabbage undergoing a growth spurt following a reduction in pH (many types of yeast require acidic conditions for optimum growth).

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Originally posted by Bob del Grosso from A Hunger Artist, on August 13, 2009 1:26 AM

Originally posted by David Jacobs from hello typepad, on August 12, 2009 8:02 PM

Seeking. You can't stop doing it. Sometimes it feels as if the basic drives for food, sex, and sleep have been overridden by a new need for endless nuggets of electronic information. We are so insatiably curious that we gather data even if it gets us in trouble. Google searches are becoming a cause of mistrials as jurors, after hearing testimony, ignore judges' instructions and go look up facts for themselves. We search for information we don't even care about. Nina Shen Rastogi confessed in Double X, "My boyfriend has threatened to break up with me if I keep whipping out my iPhone to look up random facts about celebrities when we're out to dinner." We reach the point that we wonder about our sanity. Virginia Heffernan in the New York Times said she became so obsessed with Twitter posts about the Henry Louis Gates Jr. arrest that she spent days "refreshing my search like a drugged monkey."

[more ...]

Originally posted by Emily Yoffe from Slate Magazine, on August 12, 2009 5:40 PM

In a video at the end of this post, Film Freak explores the cinematography of Mad Men. (via house next door)

Tags: Mad Men   TV

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 12, 2009 3:21 PM

“It’s perhaps easier now, than ever before, to make a good living. It’s perhaps harder, than ever before, to stay calm, to be free of career anxiety.”

Alain de Botton at TED, speaking about career crisis. (My favorite author, incidentally. Thanks Brian!)

Originally posted by Sarah from Signal vs. Noise, on August 12, 2009 2:59 PM

I've made some little tweaks to kottke.org here and there. One little tweak was to the RSS feed...I've shored it up and moved to an Atom format. Aside from 40 unread duplicate entries flooding your feed reader (sorry, it's a one time thing¹), you shouldn't notice a thing. Bug reports and feedback welcome.

[1] Oddly, Google Reader hiccuped this morning and spit out 40 unread duplicate entries for the kottke.org feed...before I even modified anything (i.e. not my fault). So a double apology to GR users. I hope this is the end of our Long National Unread Duplicate Entries Nightmare. ↩

Tags: kottke.org

Originally posted by Jason Kottke from kottke.org, on August 12, 2009 2:07 PM

One of the suggested objectives in Gabor Szabo's Measurable objectives for the Perl ecosystem is "Increase the number of Perl book sales". I like most of the objectives in Gabor's post, but I must caution against taking the numbers presented too seriously. At best, they're incomplete. At worse, they're completely misleading.

Gabor refers to State of the Computer Book Market - Mid-Year 2009, written by Mike Hendrickson. Mike's company publishes similar analyses a few times a year, based on sales data from Nielsen Bookscan. (For more on the culture of Bookscan rankings in the publishing world, see Why writers never reveal how many books their buddies have sold.)

This data sounds wonderful and the pretty graphs and charts give you the impression that you're getting useful information. Yet this is only a picture of the market. As Mike writes later in the piece:

Many publishers report that more than 50% of their revenue is achieved as direct sales, and those numbers do not get reported into Bookscan. Sales at traditional college bookstores are typically not reported into Bookscan as well. Again this is US Retail Sales data recorded at the point of sale to a consumer.

These numbers reflect less than half of revenue. Throw out half of sales by dollar and hope that the results are stochastic.

Yet there's a deeper flaw behind these numbers.

How Book Sales Work

If you plot the sales curve of multiple books, you'll notice that they tend to follow the ubiquitous power law. A book sells as many copies in its first three months as it will the rest of the first year. A book sells half as many copies in the second year as it did in the first. This model is so accurate that the publishing industry calls titles "frontlist" titles if they're in their first year of publishing and "backlist" titles if they're not.

While a few titles have strong backlist sales, they're rare. They're the Bibles and Harry Potters and How to Win Friends and Influence Peoples. The publishing industry's san greal is to find a new strong backlist bestseller.

They tend to exhibit strong frontlist behavior as well.

The retailer's point of view is different. Limited shelf space means that new books still in their three-six-twelve month short snout sales levels often get priority over older books in the long tail sales levels. If you're going to see 3000 copies of a book in the first three months and 1000 copies in the next three years, stock up early.

This is especially true in technical book publishing, where I have trouble giving away Python 2.3 and Oracle 7 and Red Hat Linux 6 books. Publishing dates are expiration dates: best by a year after the copyright date.

Why does this matter? It's a simple matter of economics: people won't buy books you don't publish.

The Freshness Factor

2005 was a good year for Perl book sales. Why? Four strong Perl books came out in 2005. The Perl book sales numbers for that year reflected the short snout of Perl book sales.

Four years later, is PBP selling as many copies? Is the Perl Testing book? Is HOP? Is APP 2e?

Those are rhetorical questions. You already know the answer. You can even answer that question for the Camel 3e. A book published in 2000 may still be useful nine years later, but Camel 3e predates almost every part of the Perl Renaissance. Besides that, the 250k or 300k units already sold have reached a fair amount of the Perl 5 programming market.

Compare that with the Ruby book market in 2006, where you couldn't leave an editorial board meeting without an assignment to publish a new Ruby or Rails book. Initial sales numbers looked great; the growth in that market segment was huge!

Did any Ruby book sell 250k copies, though? That number's missing from the year-by-year analysis.

Look at this year's numbers. Objective-C is huge! It's 1999 all over again! Except that, yet again, the comparison is to an emerging market segment without analysis of historical trends.

The Missing Data

The biggest piece of data obviously missing from these State of the Computer Book Market entries is historical context. Six months or a year of appositional data comparing different market segment maturities is misleading, at beast. Should you go learn Objective-C just because Bookscan reported more Objective-C titles sold than SQL?

No -- but to be fair, Mike doesn't suggest this directly.

Other missing data is more subtle, and perhaps more meaningful. Where's the breakdown of frontlist/backlist for these sales figures? More than nine out of ten books follow the power law I described earlier. If the Objective-C books have all come out in the past year, they're in their short snout period. Of course they're selling more units now than books in the long tail period.

How many total units does the market represent? If the number of books sold in 2009 is half the number sold in 2008, it's difficult to compare the performance of books against each other year-over-year. There are too many other factors to consider. (You can still get interesting information, but you can't compare technologies against each other in meaningful appositive ways.)

How many books are in each category? Title efficiency (average number of unit sales per title and standard deviation) can tell other interesting stories. Is one language category hit driven (iPhone Programming, Ruby on Rails)? Are there niche subjects intended as modest sales targets and not bestsellers? Is every book a moderate success, with no breakout quintessential must-have tome? Is there a gold rush of publishing with 40 new titles produced in a year and each of them selling a dismal 1000 copies apiece?

How many new books are in a market segment this year compared to last year? This is the biggest question that matters to Perl books, especially with regard to Gabor's suggestion. Again, this should be obvious: no one can buy Camel 4e right now.

A Completely Hypothetical Fictional Example I Made Up Completely From Whole Cloth

If that didn't convince you, consider a short fable about oyster farming.

Suppose you own a publishing company. Suppose you discover a new topic area: oyster farming. No one's published on this topic before, but hundreds of thousands of people are doing it. There's a lot of institutional knowledge, but there's a ripe opportunity for documenting best practices and nuanced techniques -- especially given that you have found the person who invented modern oyster farming and convinced him to write a book about it.

You publish the book. It takes off. Its short snout is wide. (My metaphor is awkward.) You've discovered a new market segment; you've invented a new market segment. Life is grand.

You branch out. You publish More Oyster Farming and Learn to Farm Oysters and Pteriidae, Reefs, Bivalves, and Mollusks. You even write a cookbook for Oysters.

Then a catastrophic triploid spawning accident removes the long-beloved MSX resistance in most commercial oyster farms, ruining the market for a year -- maybe longer -- and in a panic you cancel all of your upcoming frontlist titles.

A few other publishers publish one- or two-off titles in the market segment. They sell a few copies. You had a corner on the market though. You were the publishing world's China of oyster farming. Over the next four years, you look at your sales numbers and congratulate yourself for getting out of the oyster farming publishing market segment when you did, because no one's buying oyster farming books anymore.

After all, publishing one frontlist title per year is obviously a sign you take the oyster farming market seriously and want to see it continue.

Originally posted by chromatic from Modern Perl Books, a Modern Perl Blog, on August 12, 2009 1:32 PM

There was an interesting query at today’s White House press briefing!

Q If you look at the protests that we saw outside of the building yesterday as a kind of a continuum from the tea parties and then the controversy over the birth certificate, and then some of the anger over the Gates/Crowley episode — you look back at that, I’m wondering what –

MR. GIBBS: Jonathan, let me just — I didn’t go in the front door, so I don’t know — I did not –

Q There were –

MR. GIBBS: Oh, I don’t doubt that, but I’m saying I don’t know — I didn’t see a representative sample of the signs.

Q Well, what I was going to say is, this is a President who campaigned on the notion that we could get beyond the partisan — the ugly partisan warfare of the last 16 years, and that there could be rational discussion that could bring parties together. And I wonder what happened to that. Why did the post-partisan presidency not materialize?

You ever think sometimes Robert Gibbs wants to just look these guys right in the eye and go, “You’re fucking kidding, right? You are seriously fucking around with me, right?”

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on August 12, 2009 12:15 PM

Ghostface Killah has confirmed recent reports of a possible Method Man and Raekwon collaboration album coming together by the end of 2009.

[Visit SOHH.com for more information]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SOHH.com Dailies, on August 12, 2009 12:15 PM

Dear Jon Hamm,

I’m glad things are going so well for you! It’s terrific that you’re super-funny and everyone’s new crush and that you do such a great job of playing a bad boy in your show “Mad Men” but then turn out to be a regular nice guy in real life, offering up both the fantasy of a man who will treat you like dirt and the comfort of knowing that you’re really kind and gentle. But, seriously, “I used to teach little kids and I loved it so much“? STOP. You are no longer playing fair.

Best, etc.,
Dudes

Originally posted by Balk from The Awl, on August 12, 2009 11:50 AM

I wasn’t really paying attention to the U.S. CIO, Vivek Kundra, who handles, um, I dunno, the IRS blogs and stuff? Oh wait… he is the one building the government a website that costs $18 million. Is it made of Internet platinum, and does it shoot rainbows? And so now folks are wondering who he is and does he know what he’s talking about at all.

John Dvorak writes:

But, to be honest about it, and despite the possible fraudulent bios and non-existent degrees, the kicker for me was that even if he was squeaky clean he has no business being the USA CIO controlling billions and billions of dollars in government contracts.

He hasn’t done anything to warrant this appointment. There are no great policy papers. There are no books. There is no invention. There is nothing but vague tech positions in city and state governments. How does this make him a “techno-whiz” as he was portrayed by the New York Times? It took him six years to get a simple undergrad degree in psychology! Was it just because he uses Facebook and likes Twitter?

So what have we got so far from this person? Well, for starters we are looking at the Recovery.gov website that will cost the taxpayers around $18 million.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on August 12, 2009 11:10 AM

So I don't have anything special planned for my birthday today but THE UNIVERSE had other ideas, because I got several completely random super-nice "you rock!" emails from strangers this morning. So thank you, Universe, and thank you, random people who woke up this morning and decided to send me a nice email!

If you wanted to do something nice in celebration of me having been alive a whole 'nother year, I would love it if you decided to pay someone (someone ELSE, not me, I'm over quota on compliments-receiving already and it's only lunchtime) a compliment today.

Go ahead and tell your barista you like their piercings, or stop someone in the grocery store and comment favorably on their shoes. Tell a parent "Your child is so cute, and so well-behaved!" Tell a dog-owner "Your dog is so cute, and so well-behaved!" Tell someone you work with how you've noticed Cool Thing X they've done lately. Go on, be creative! Be profligate, even, with your compliments, because Compliment Someone Because Erin Said So Day comes but once a year.

(Once you've complimented someone, you also have my permission to treat yourself to a cupcake, or other frosted baked good. Have fun!)

Originally posted by Erin from A Dress A Day, on August 12, 2009 10:43 AM

The city may never sleep, but there are significantly less people in it during the witching hours. This neat illustration shows just how many people commute in for work only to go enjoy their nights in... Jersey? If you look closely you'll also see that Roosevelt Island's population doubles at night; what exactly is going on over there?

Originally posted by Jen Carlson from Gothamist, on August 12, 2009 8:38 AM

It is 1953, and you are a graduate student at the Yale University School of Art. Alvin Eisenman has just established a new discipline called "graphic arts," in which you are studying — under the legendary Josef Albers, Herbert Matter, and Alvin Lustig — a new approach to design, which will come to be known as Modernism. Five years from now, the world will witness the birth of Helvetica and Univers, typographic milestones that will forever affirm the ascendancy of the Swiss International Style. It is amidst this visual culture, with its disciplined sans serifs, rationalized grid systems, and asymmetric layouts, that you discover your deep love of typography. So you dedicate yourself to the study of its most unfashionable, shadowy, and anarchic tributary: nineteenth century American wood type. You are Rob Roy Kelly.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Hoefler & Frere-Jones, on August 12, 2009 8:30 AM

Way back in July (7/21 to be precise) Michael Ruhlman posted about a method of kick starting sourdough starter. The method, which he learned from Carri Thurman of Two Sisters Bakery in Homer, Alaska called for the addition of a red cabbage leaf to a mixture of flour and water.

Both Ruhlman and Thurman, as well as several of the former's readers, reported remarkable results. Yet no one could explain why the cabbage had the reported effects.

Some speculated that the cabbage was loaded with wild yeast, while others (myself included) thought that bacteria might be responsible for the uptick in microbial activity and signs of fermentation (gas bubbles). Since no one could provide a plausible explanation for what might be occurring, I decided to test the idea with a series of tests.

Last night I conducted the first test. The purpose of this particular test was to answer the question "Will adding rinsed and un-rinsed organic red cabbage to a mixture of flour and water make any difference in the rate at which the mixtures ferment?"

Test Design

I made up 7 samples. Each sample contained 20 g of unbleached non-organic bread flour (I wanted as little as possible yeast in the flour) and 50 g of unchlorinated tap water.

• In three of the glasses I put 5 g each of red cabbage that had been rinsed (as per Carri's method) under luke warm water.
• In three glasses I put 5 g each of red cabbage that had not been rinsed
  
• In one (Control) glass I put only flour and water

Each sample was mixed with a spoon which was washed with hot water and soap to avoid cross-contamination of the samples. The I left the samples uncovered on the counter in my (68 degree F) kitchen overnight before checking them 13 hours later.

By 7 Am this morning, none of the samples, not even the control have shown any signs of fermentation. Even now (almost 14 hours after mixing) there are no obvious signs of fermentation.

Ruhlman and Thurman suggest that additional flour (a "feeding") and 48 hours of incubation is required to produce vigorous bubbling. I will let my sample go at least that long before drawing any conclusions. (I will not add more flour.) If after 48 hours, two or more of the samples with cabbage appear to be fermenting more rapidly than the control, I will assume that the cabbage is contributing something to the process and move to the next phase of the testing which will be designed to answer the question

"Will limiting the supply of oxygen have an effect on how the flour cabbage mixture ferments?"

This question is designed to begin to get a handle on what (if any) microbe on the cabbage is responsible for the enhanced fermentation reported by Ruhlman, Thurman and others.

The best sauce in the world is hunger.

Originally posted by Bob del Grosso from A Hunger Artist, on August 12, 2009 7:05 AM

As a kid, I read many of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books so I was interested to read that Laura's daughter Rose may have co-authored them.

Wilder scholarship is a flourishing industry, particularly at universities in the Midwest, and much of it seeks to sift fiction from history. The best book among many good, if more pedestrian, ones, "The Ghost in the Little House," by William Holtz, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, explores a controversy that first arose after Wilder bequeathed her original manuscripts to libraries in Detroit and California. It is the work of a fastidious stylist, and, in its way, a minor masterpiece of insight and research. Holtz's subject, however, isn't Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is her daughter and, he argues, her unacknowledged "ghost," Rose Wilder Lane.

Rose was an interesting character; she escaped the prairie life of her parents and transformed into a "a stylish cosmopolite who acquired several languages, enjoyed smoking and fornication, and dined at La Rotonde when she wasn't motoring around Europe in her Model T".

Tags: books   Laura Ingalls Wilder   Little House on the Prairie   Rose Wilder

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 12, 2009 6:54 AM

As a kid, I read many of Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books so I was interested to read that Laura's daughter Rose may have co-authored them.

Wilder scholarship is a flourishing industry, particularly at universities in the Midwest, and much of it seeks to sift fiction from history. The best book among many good, if more pedestrian, ones, "The Ghost in the Little House," by William Holtz, a professor emeritus of English at the University of Missouri, explores a controversy that first arose after Wilder bequeathed her original manuscripts to libraries in Detroit and California. It is the work of a fastidious stylist, and, in its way, a minor masterpiece of insight and research. Holtz's subject, however, isn't Laura Ingalls Wilder. It is her daughter and, he argues, her unacknowledged "ghost," Rose Wilder Lane.

Rose was an interesting character; she escaped the prairie life of her parents and transformed into a "a stylish cosmopolite who acquired several languages, enjoyed smoking and fornication, and dined at La Rotonde when she wasn't motoring around Europe in her Model T".

Tags: books   Laura Ingalls Wilder   Little House on the Prairie   Rose Wilder

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 12, 2009 6:54 AM

Continued from here, here, here and here on Gerhard Richter, Uncle Rudi and a quiet confrontation. These posts are informed by Gerhard Richter Portraits from the Yale University Press and Art of Two Germanys: Cold War Culture from Abrams.

Gerhard Richter painted Uncle Rudi in 1965, 20 years after the Russians took Berlin. For a variety of reasons, including the sheer magnitude of Germany's shame, it took German artists about that long to begin to examine their nation and its responsibility for the Nazi years.

The crimes of the Bush-Cheney torture regime are not as horrific, and while the United States is still coming to grips with them -- some on the right such as Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) even argue that 'it's in the past, so who cares?' -- artists have already begun to address questions of national responsibility for torture committed in America's name.

Yesterday I detailed how Richter's dry, confrontational-whisper approach to Germany's past in Uncle Rudi (and, in a different way, in Aunt Marianne) created a new, influential, just-the-facts-ma'am way for artists to address controversial topics, particularly when an artist spotlights a nation's shared responsibility for terrible acts. Today I want to talk about how several artists have adopted Richter's deadpan in addressing Bush-Cheney-era torture.

Take Israeli artist Jan Tichy, whose 1391 (2007, at right) was exhibited last year at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. (At the top of this post is a 2007 Tichy video installation also titled 1391.) 1391 is a paper architectural model of Camp 1391, a once-secret Israeli military base, a Bagram-like secret installation used by the Israelis in a manner similar to how the United States used its black sites. According to journalist Jane Meyer, the United States' torture regime was informed by Israeli practices, including those likely used at Camp 1391. In her book The Dark Side, Mayer reports that a former CIA officer told her: "The Israelis taught us that you can put a towel around a guy's neck and use it like a collar, to propel him headfirst into a wall."

Camp 1391's existence was revealed in 2003, five months before America's abuses at Abu Ghraib became public. Three years later Tichy created an artwork that imagines the physical structure of the Camp 1391 as simply as possible -- what's simpler than white paper on the floor? -- puts it in a dark gallery and blasts it with intense white light. Tichy's approach both emphasizes that a secret site used for state-sanctioned illegal detention and, probably, torture has been revealed, but the darkness in the rest of the gallery emphasizes how the place was once hidden from the world. It is confrontational revelation as artwork, an installation every bit as dry and matter-of-fact as Richter's Uncle Rudi.

The best-known American art about the torture era are Richard Serra's three 2004 works featuring Serra's take on the most iconic of the Abu Ghraib photographs. The work at right, as well as this piece, are prints produced by Gemini G.E.L. Serra exhibited a lithocrayon-on-mylar version (below) at the 2006 Whitney Biennial. All three feature a straightforward sketch of the central figure in the horrible photograph from Abu Ghraib, an approach right out of the Richter playbook.

However, for the Whitney Biennial version, Richter included an extra element: The hooded torturee was surrounded by the phrase "STOP BUSH." Serra exhibited his Uncle Rudi-influenced Stop Bush just after he had borrowed from another artist, Goya, for an artwork that was reproduced on the back cover of The Nation. That Serra was a cheap, one-off Photoshop trick, so reactionary as to be cringe-worthy.

No surprise then that when I saw Stop Bush at the Whitney I thought of it in the context of Serra's Goya-plus-Bush. Stop Bush seemed like a similar grimace-causing one-note. I thought it was too pointed, too specific, too immediate and time-sensitive to be the kind of art work that lasts. I was pretty sure that once the biennial was over that I'd never think about the piece again. (I wasn't alone in shrugging at Stop Bush: In Michael Kimmelman's review of the show, he mentions the Serra only enough to note that conservatives would dismiss it.)

In the three years since the Serra was installed at the Whitney, we've learned more about the Bush-Cheney torture regime. Stop Bush has come to seem less an exhortation and more of a plea. Given the art work that has come since -- work referenced here and plenty more -- Stop Bush seems like something else: Permission from a venerable, successful figure to younger, less institutionally-sanctioned artists. More and more it seems like Serra's way of saying to other artists: Go confidently where your heart tells you that you must go. Uncle Rudi may have provided us with one way for an artist to address a calamity of his own nation's doing... but you know what? It's good to learn from the past, but you don't need to be too careful. Look at how I signed Stop Bush in the lower-right -- it's mine and I'm proud to take responsibility for it. Go ahead and bring passion and urgency into your work. Be explicit again.

Related: Kathryn Hixson interviews Jan Tichy.

Related examination of art and torture on MAN: George Grosz at the Hirshhorn; the Abu Ghraib photos part one, part two; the Hirshhorn acquires Martha Rosler's 'The Gray Drape;' Bruce Nauman at the Venice Biennale: Double Steel Cage Piece (1974) and America's torture of Abu Zubaydeh, Nauman's hanging chair sculptures, part one, part two.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Modern Art Notes, on August 12, 2009 6:44 AM

"character street"

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Pixdaus: Popular Today Pics, on August 12, 2009 6:26 AM

What this latest rap drama portends for the future of our nation.

Originally posted by jsmooth@hiphopmusic.com (Jay Smooth) from Ill Doctrine, on August 12, 2009 5:53 AM

From Serious Eats: New York

For foods whose reputation is tied to a certain place—New York bagels, New York (or, depending on loyalties, Neapolitan) pizza—it's often said that the secret is in the water. With so few ingredients, many of which can be replicated exactly, the critical difference must be in that area's water supply, whose composition couldn't be quite the same anywhere else.

Or could it? Taking this theory perhaps a bit too literally, one Florida bagel maker decided to go after that theory for himself: He's recreating Brooklyn water in his own kitchen. Steve Fassberg of Original Brooklyn Water Bagel Co. in Delray Beach, Florida, analyzed the exact chemical composition of Brooklyn tap water and replicated its mineral content, for water that, he claims, makes all the difference in his bagels. "We took this myth and proved the science," he told the Miami Herald. No reported taste-tests yet.

Originally posted by Carey Jones from Serious Eats, on August 12, 2009 5:45 AM

The fire extinguishers in the Lincoln Tunnel are numbered. You can read them in the ambient light as your bus moves sloth-ly through the morning rush hour bubble of congestion. Or in the slow parade of buses on your way...

Originally posted by Anthony Buccino from New Jersey Transit Blog, on August 12, 2009 4:25 AM

Anil did one of those Big Think things. I recommend The Philology of LOL Cats.

Originally posted by rex@fimoculous.com (Rex Sorgatz) from Fimoculous.com, on August 11, 2009 10:00 PM

Shared by fryingpanda
overrated, but i guess worth knowing about

the world and customs of india through the eyes of the english raj

Originally posted by (author unknown) from www.ralphmag.org, on August 11, 2009 9:23 PM

I have a favorite drunkard. He was an athlete--a professional wrestler in fact--but he was also a gifted entertainer and a true artist. His parents named him Andre Rene Roussimoff, but we knew him as The Eighth Wonder of the World, Andre the Giant.

via www.drunkard.com

I found this article re: Andre the Giant's drunken escapades utterly charming. (Maybe that's bad?)

It reminded me of this Entertainment Weekly article about Rob Reiner that I read (!), which had this quote about M. Roussimoff:

Andre the Giant weighed 500 pounds, so we couldn't figure out how to get him on the horse. So we hooked up a pulley system with wires. Now, this is the day the Beaujolais nouveau has come out, and he starts drinking at 9 a.m. By the end of the day, he's literally drunk 20 bottles of [wine]. I'm finishing shooting in the Fire Swamp. [A crew member] said, 'Governor, do you want to take a look at this rig?' So I go to the other end of the studio. They open the doors of the soundstage, and there's this semi-drunken giant being lowered from the ceiling onto this horse, and he's going, 'Hullo, boss!' And I'm thinking, 'What do I do for a living? What is this job I have?'''

Originally posted by btrott from Stupidfool.org, on August 11, 2009 9:20 PM

Foster’s post about my Gawker-era conjectures that Si Newhouse’s aversion to garlic might indicate that he’s a vampire reminded me of this, which seems sort of hilarious in light of John Koblin’s story today about the McKinsey aftermath at Conde Nast. From the Gawker archives, a reader submission of a Si Newhouse sighting:

I’m at Film Forum during their Samuel Fuller retrospective checking out a double feature of ‘The Steel Helmet’ and ‘Fixed Bayonets.’ There’s this little dude in a Lacoste shirt in the row behind me talking to a taller, rather brassy woman of a certain age. He’s bemoaning to her the fact that the costs at his business are too high. It’s kind of funny, so I look closer and realize that the guy is in fact Si Newhouse. I’m thinking, what the fuck is Si Newhouse doing here? Is he an auteurist? Did he serve in the Korean war? (Both of the films that afternoon were set therein.) Anyway, the woman starts giving him money-saving advice. ‘Why don’t you just get rid of messenger service? I mean why do you need it anyway? What with fax and e-mail there’s just no point.’ Si mulls this over for a little bit, thinking that maybe the broad’s on to something. But no.. A few seconds of chewing on the idea and he shakes his head, saying, ‘No, you still need messenger, for when you’ve got to send out tchochkes and all that…’ At which point the lights went down.

(Emphasis mine.)

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Spiersblr, on August 11, 2009 9:14 PM

Last weekend, Dav bought a sleeveless shirt. I liked it but didn't see him wear it.

On the days I don't take T to Karla's and Granny comes to our house, I ride on the back of his motorcycle to work. Very practical. After work, we IM to ascertain time - as in "I'm leaving now" or "in 5 minutes", and I meet him. We work a block away from each other so it's not complicated.

Anyway, the other day, the day that was luxuriously hot in SF which is oh so rare, he rode up a bit ahead of me so I could see him waiting for me. He was wearing his new sleeveless shirt. There he was all cool on his motorcycle with his hot sleeveless shirt so I could see his big arms, with his gloves, and waiting for me. I wish I had a picture of the image, but I guess it clicks mostly for me. In other words, my heard fluttered. I seriously thought to myself, "Am I married to this awesome guy?" Why yes, I get to hop on the back and ride home together ( while I had my laptop bag and some groceries in tow...sorta crashed the image).

I love feeling my heart flutter for my husband.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Kokochi, on August 11, 2009 9:12 PM

J.M. Coetzee, the novelist and 2003 Nobel laureate, reads from his new novel, 'Summertime,' forthcoming from Viking in December. To read the excerpts from the novel that appeared in our July 16 and August 13 issues, please visit nybooks.com

Originally posted by (author unknown) from The New York Review of Books, on August 11, 2009 9:01 PM

Go ahead and insult my taste if you must but damn it, I love Fleer’s bright, yellow, ‘91 design. Tonight while brain storming on a post I made a truly shocking discovery regarding two of my favorite brands from the early-90’s. It really doesn’t matter now that Donruss Panini is out of baseball and Fleer is in retirement but it’s news to me.

Take a look at the 1990 Donruss (left) Jose Canseco card. Now, take a look at the 1991 Fleer Jose Canseco card and tell me if you notice any similarities. For starters, the size of the actual photograph is almost identical. Fine, just a coincidence, right? What about the oddly placed two black lines running through the top of the card on both cards? What the heck is that about?

Am I the last person on the planet to discover this? Considering that Topps sued Upper Deck a few months ago regarding Upper Deck O-Pee-Chee, one has to wonder if Donruss ever made any fuss about what is essentially ‘90 Donruss 2.0 back in 1991. For the record, 1991 Donruss had a very unique and memorable design.

When was the last time you said that about a recent Donruss product?

(put your hand down, Tracy Hackler)

Originally posted by Mario A. from Wax Heaven, on August 11, 2009 7:30 PM

Rocketboom NYC Correspondent Ella Morton meets up with Manhattan Borough Historian, Michael Miscione, to talk about the changing landscapes of New York City.

Originally posted by hello@rocketboom.com (Rocketboom) from Rocketboom, on August 11, 2009 7:00 PM

There are some fine ideas among the finalists in the ReBurbia competition.

Calling all future-forward architects, urban designers, renegade planners and imaginative engineers: Show us how you would re-invent the suburbs! What would a McMansion become if it weren't a single-family dwelling? How could a vacant big box store be retrofitted for agriculture? What sort of design solutions can you come up with to facilitate car-free mobility, 'burb-grown food, and local, renewable energy generation? We want to see how you'd design future-proof spaces and systems using the suburban structures of the present, from small-scale retrofits to large-scale restoration--the wilder the better!

Tags: architecture

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 11, 2009 3:51 PM

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

 Bookmark this on Delicious - Saved by stamen to mikefrumin nyc parking transportation - More about this bookmark

Originally posted by stamen from Delicious/stamen, on August 11, 2009 2:40 PM

Today we launched the Joyent Virtual Appliance for MySQL. They come with MySQL pre-installed and optimized to take full advantage of all the local RAM available. We worked directly with the team at MySQL to develop a MySQL solution that could get you up and running as fast as possible, with ...

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Blog Joyent, on August 11, 2009 2:23 PM

Apple is finally offering the 15" MacBook Pro with an anti-glare screen. I bought a new MBP about a week before Marco but don't want to pay $250 for the exchange even though the glossy screen bugs the shit out of me and ranks right up there with Apple's worst design decisions ever (e.g. the Mighty Mouse and the puck mouse). Irritating.

Tags: Apple   macbookpro

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 11, 2009 1:41 PM

The older I get, the less I understand the desire for extravagant weddings. I was barely in my twenties when I got married and even then it was fairly low-key by most standards. For us, we wanted to things to be really good: the food and the music. That's why we decided to have a smallish reception -- about 50 people -- at a restaurant and brought in a small standards/swing band. Still, when I think about the things I would do differently, it's always about downsizing not upsizing.

A few weeks ago we attended my sister-in-law's wedding and were delighted to see that she got so many things just right. Every time we'd talk about the wedding prior to the event (which was pretty rarely), she always played it down and questioned whether they were doing too much. For example, after booking the caterer she said that she should have just got her brother (my husband) to make the food. I joked with her at the wedding that I half-expected to see people in flip-flops just wandering around eating Lunchables.

The reality of the wedding is that it was very DIY and creative (much like the bride herself). Friends and family were very involved in pulling things together and yet it had a totally polished touch. It was held at her parents' house -- her childhood home -- so everyone felt comfortable and, I would say, truly happy to be there. Here's a few shots of the day.

 Buttons made and provided for the guests by a friend of the bride and groom.

 
 The bride and groom are married by the bride's former roommate and newly-ordained "minister."

 

A Polaroid camera and a sheet backdrop were on hand for guests to snap photos of themselves and hang on a nearby raffia clothesline.

 
Our daughter, Penelope, poses for the camera.

Mason jars provided by the mother-of-the-bride (she cans her own jam) held the flowers.

Originally posted by Nested, Mena Trott from Nested, on August 11, 2009 1:35 PM

More great responses to some recent posts to recap, along with an interview I did a few weeks ago that seems to be pretty timely.

• eWeek's Clint Boulton offered a lengthy look at my post about The Web Way vs. The Wave Way. I think the story does a fair job of representing not just my argument, but the counterarguments from those who disagree. One highlight:

EWEEK brought the post to Google's attention August 10, looking for comment from Wave creators Lars Rasmussen and Jens Rasmussen, who built the platform in secret in their home country of Australia before unveiling it to a room of applause at Google I/O in May. However, Google declined to challenge Dash's points.

• My piece on Google Wave also marked the first time I had my work syndicated on Lifehacker. There was a really smart and lively discussion in response, with the highlight for me being the comment, "What a great article and discussion. It's feeling like old school LH in here today!" I also earned my second mention on the excellent "This Week in Google" podcast, which goes beyond just talking about the big GOOG and covers the evolution of cloud computing as well.

• J Aaron Farr posted Wave's Web of Protocols, and Eric Smith wrote PubSubHubBub Hullabaloo, both offering helpful diagrams to help explain the architecture of Google Wave and PubSubHubBub, respectively. I found both to be useful starting points for understanding these technologies if you're more of a visual thinker.

• I'd meant to include a link in my original Wave post to A Google Wave reality check, where Tom Krazit at CNET provided some interesting glimpses behind the scenes of the making of Wave. A key quote:

Google believes developer feedback is crucial to [Wave's] evolution as a product. "We wanted to get people thinking about how we're going to use it and what people are going to use it for," [Wave co-creator Lars Rasmussen] said.

• As Daniel Graversen mentioned in my own comments, he wrote a nice response called Is Wave too complicated?

• Finally, Scott Rosenberg, author of the recent blogging history "Say Everything" (which is so far very enjoyable, though I haven't finished reading it yet), answered a question about bloggers who aren't household names by responding "Is Anil Dash a household name? He’s been writing some amazing stuff lately." Thanks, Scott! There's nothing more motivating than being appreciated by smart, thoughtful people.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 11, 2009 1:27 PM

Schiller emailed Steven Frank, too:

In response to Steven Frank’s boycott of the iPhone ecosystem until key problems are fixed, Phil Shiller emailed him with what amounts to “We hear you and we’re working on it”. In Steven’s words:

What I do have is a comment from Phil that Apple has read what I (and others) have written recently, and that they’re taking it very seriously. Realistically, what more could I hope to achieve from my puny blog posts and arm-flailing?

Sounds good to me. Any communication from Apple — any sign of life, of a desire to improve, of caring about these issues — is a step forward.

So, what do I do now, dear readers? Stick pedantically to my guns? Or take this new information at face value?

The boycott was an impressive display of willpower, but I wouldn’t wish the Pre or G1 on even my worst enemies.

I hereby promise not to give Steven Frank any shit if he comes back to the iPhone now. Mission accomplished. Terms tentatively met. Will you, fellow Mac geeks, join me in this promise?

We want the iPhone and its ecosystem to be great because we love it and because it’s already the best of what’s out there, despite its policy flaws, and we want to see it continually improve. Apple has never stopped at “good enough”, even when they’re already far ahead of their competitors, but they take a lot of risks and brave a lot of unproven paths that don’t always work out perfectly. They need a kick in the ass from us every now and then to stay on the right track.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on August 11, 2009 1:08 PM

208 lines of Python on Google App Engine  

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Waxy.org Links, on August 11, 2009 12:30 PM

Ahhh, I like this.

BlockChalk is the voice of your neighborhood.  You can use it to talk to anyone, about anything.  It’s like a virtual graffiti wall, a community bulletin board, and a poster-covered lightpost, all rolled into one.  Using the GPS in your iPhone, it shows you messages that other people have left at the place you’re standing, and it lets you leave your own messages, too.  It’s anonymous unless you decide to share more.  You can even privately reply to other users while still remaining anonymous.

Simple.

Originally posted by Michael Sippey from sippey.com, on August 11, 2009 12:30 PM

Karl Rove directly tied to the firing of US Attorney David Iglesias.

Originally posted by Josh Marshall from Talking Points Memo, on August 11, 2009 11:45 AM

From Recipes

Shopping List

1 bottle Charles Shaw merlot: $1.99 to $2.99
6 pieces dark-meat chicken: $2.19
1 large yellow onion: $0.38
1 large carrot: $0.28
Bunch parsley: $0.69
3 strips unsmoked bacon (pro-rated): $0.99

Pantry items:
Garlic, bay leaf, flour

Total: $6.52 to $7.52

I spent much of my junior year of college in Dijon, a mustard town in the heart of wine country.

In this part of France, treating college students as though they were pyromaniacs is a time-honored tradition. Rather than see their property go up in flames, Burgundian landlords furnish the kitchens of their short-term rentals with nothing more than a plug-in hot plate. So it was on this sorry excuse for a heat source that I learned to make another regional tradition: coq au vin, or chicken braised in red wine.

When I arrived in Dijon, feeling lonely and flush, I had treated myself to a rich rendition of the dish at Brasserie La Concorde. It was tender, intensely flavored, and, on a student's allowance, completely unaffordable. So, back home in my little studio, I hacked vegetables into pieces with a utility knife and cooked chicken in the wine I could afford—that is, €1 bottles of the local vin de table, wine so rough that producers are barred by law from calling it Burgundy. Some pretty sorry stews resulted from my early experiments, but I persevered—with more diligence, I am no longer ashamed to admit, than I pursued my studies.

Don't Cook with a Wine You Wouldn't Drink?

When those studies ended and I returned to my former life, I was dismayed to learn that, without even knowing it, I'd been flouting one of the golden rules of epicurism: Don't cook with a wine you wouldn't drink. I felt instinctively that this was a false commandment—if you're not going to drink it, what else are you supposed to do with it?—but I could hardly argue with conventional wisdom, let alone Julia Child's:

If you do not have a good wine to use, it is far better to omit it, for a poor one can spoil a simple dish and utterly debase a noble one.

I was to remain dismayed for several years, until my instincts were vindicated by Julia Moskin in the New York Times. In a piece remarkable for its offbeat tasting notes—"hints of Skittles and off-brand caramels," "a perfume of Club Med piña coladas"—and the degree to which the author Keeps It Real, Moskin debunks the living daylights out of the axiom. In one of several taste tests, risottos made with a $70 Barolo and mid-range dolcetto d'Alba are easily defeated by a version simmered in Trader Joe's very own Charles Shaw cabernet.

This past weekend, with Moskin's findings in mind, I revisited the coq au vin of my college days. I have a gas stove now, and all the equipment I could need. But that bottle of Two-Buck Merlot (Three-Buck, here on the East Coast) was even worse than the vin de table I used to cook with in France.

In the stew, though, it was great.

Coq au Two-Buck Chuck

- serves 2 -

Ingredients

3 strips unsmoked bacon, cut in 1/2-inch strips
6 pieces skin-on, dark-meat chicken (mix of thighs and drumsticks)
Salt and freshly-ground black pepper
Large yellow onion, finely sliced
Large carrot, cut in 1/2-inch rounds
Garlic clove, minced
1 tablespoon flour
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons Charles Shaw merlot
Bay leaf
Parsley, leaves only, minced

Procedure

1. Place the bacon in a large, heavy pot and cook over low heat until fat is rendered and bacon is crisp. Remove bacon from pan and set aside.

2. Increase heat to medium-high. Sear chicken pieces in bacon fat until golden brown, 3-4 minutes per side. Remove chicken pieces and set aside.

3. Pour off fat, reserving 1 tablespoon in pan. Add carrots, onions and garlic and sauté until onions are soft and just beginning to brown, about 5 minutes. Sprinkle with flour, stir to distribute, and sauté for an additional minute. Deglaze pan with 2 tablespoons of wine, scraping up all the sucs, or brown bits, with a wooden spoon.

4. Return chicken and bacon to the pan. Add bay leaf and remaining red wine and bring to a boil. Reduce heat to low and simmer, covered, for 45 minutes to 1 hour, or until the sauce is mellow and thickened, and the carrots tender but not disintegrating. Check and adjust seasoning.

5. Serve with your favorite potato dish, or thick egg noodles. Sprinkle with minced parsley before serving.

Originally posted by Michele Humes from Serious Eats, on August 11, 2009 11:45 AM

Ad-man Andrew Essex has recalled his New Yorker piece of June 24, 1996, in which members of the band Lotion (what?) made a claim about Thomas Pynchon’s fan status. Now the former members of Lotion claim that they met Pynchon through one of their moms. (I don’t know!) But it is true that the voice narrating the book trailer above is Pynchon. We do not know what is on his t-shirt however.

Originally posted by Choire from The Awl, on August 11, 2009 11:40 AM

Sure, Lonely Island may have made flip flops the height of summer fashion fun (they didn't) with their catchy lyric: "I got my swim trunks, and my flippie-floppies"—but whether you're on or off a boat, this staple is the latest subject of a slow news summer scaremonger report! The Daily News warns that many New Yorkers just love their flip floppy footwear, but make no mistake: THEY WILL KILL YOU. Are you wearing open toe shoes right now? Read on.

Here's how it works: The "film of grime that coats your feet at the end of a day of flopping around town is some dangerous dirt. Lab tests of two reporters' flip-flops, worn for four days, revealed a potentially deadly germ—Staphylococcus aureus—lurking on the rubber" (that's what she said). If you have an open wound, the bacteria enters the bloodstream, and when left untreated, some bacteria will kill you after attacking your internal organs. You've been previously warned about the dangers of foot exposure to sand, grass, and Crocs. Maybe those girls who wear Uggs in the summer are on to something?

After the two brave reporters wore their flip flops on various subways, in Prospect Park, bars in the West Village, a Cyclones game and a public restroom, the flops were covered with nearly 18,100 bacteria varieties (the paper notes that the pair that went to Coney Island and and the public restroom had roughly 13,900 more!). On top of picking up some fecal bacteria, E. coli, and random things from people's spit... researchers note there's also "garbage and rat-doo. This city is strewn with rats, and rats are harbingers of all sorts of germs. The same is true with cockroaches. It is all potentially harmful." No one's laughing now, Samberg.

Originally posted by Jen Carlson from Gothamist, on August 11, 2009 11:07 AM

When I wrote about bands like Radiohead abandoning albums in favor of shorter formats like EPs and singles, I received several panicked defenses of the album. Let me clarify. I like the idea of people releasing smaller clumps of material, more often, but I don’t necessarily have anything against somebody arranging ten or twelve songs in a specific order. My experience as a musician, though, has demonstrated that the album is often a hurdle that artists vault simply because their record company needs a widget of a certain size to make a certain kind of profit.

Only a crazybones would deny the magic of “London Calling” hitting the Earth. But that kind of perfect chain comes along only once in a while, and even when it does, how often do you listen to it in the original order, without interruption? Unless you’ve got lots of free afternoons or long rides, you probably don’t. And most people with more than a few albums like to mix those public documents into private orders that reflect preferences and personal associations.

Serialized work is a tradition that often results in the unified whole that album enthusiasts are so keen on. Dickens’s novels were released in installments; only later did they became those delightful bricks. If Radiohead finishes four EPs and decides a larger shape has emerged, there’s nothing to stop them from recognizing that shape, calling it an album, and packaging it as such. Future audiences may never know how the material was first released, but it hardly matters. The work will be there.

Enough with the deep thoughts. Go look at some dumb rap lyrics.

Originally posted by Sasha Frere-Jones from Sasha Frere-Jones, on August 11, 2009 9:55 AM

Shared by Bud
Is tech what matters? I think getting results is what matters, particularly with search engines.

While the launch of Microsoft’s Bing and its deal to acquire Yahoo’s search business temporarily put the focus on “market share” and “user experience,” in search, what really matters are great search algorithms and the infrastructure to support them. And to remind us all of that, Google yesterday evening rolled out a preview version of its new search technology, Caffeine.

“For the last several months, a large team of Googlers has been working on a secret project: a next-generation architecture for Google’s web search,” the company wrote on its blog. “It’s the first step in a process that will let us push the envelope on size, indexing speed, accuracy, comprehensiveness and other dimensions.”

I don’t have much to say about this new effort: Matt Cutts, a Google evangelist, does a pretty good job explaining it. What I do want to point out is that sometimes it’s easy to focus — and I, too, am guilty of this — only on Google’s front end, and to forget that it really is a technology company that hides most of its achievements under a plain-Jane interface.

A casual observer might not find any huge “visual” difference in this new preview version of Google Search. And Google doesn’t want us to. After all, the single biggest asset for Google is the simplicity and familiarity of its interface.

---

Mobile Startups, Meet The VCs @ Mobilize 09 Join 500 others at GigaOM's Mobilize 2009, led by Om Malik. Register now!

Originally posted by (author unknown) from GigaOM, on August 11, 2009 9:28 AM

Paper folder Won Park makes seemingly impossible works of origami out of American dollar bills. Check out the koi; not only is it shaped perfectly, but Park managed to even give it eyes and scales.

What’s more, he offers up downloadable instructions (PDF) and a series of instructional videos on how to fold your own dollar koi.

Originally posted by John Martz from Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog, on August 11, 2009 9:04 AM

You thought the pan-and-scan vs. letterboxing wars were over with the move to 16:9 HD TVs? Wrong. Steven Soderbergh, in the DGA Quarterly:

Television operators, the people who buy and produce things for people to watch on TV, are taking the position that films photographed in the 2.40:1 ratio should be blown up or chopped up to fit a 16:9 (1.78:1) ratio. They are taking the position that the viewers of television do not like watching 2.40 films letterboxed to fit their 16:9 screens, and that a film insisting on this is worth significantly less—or even nothing—to them. They are taking the position that no one will dare challenge them and risk losing revenue.

(Via Nat Irons.)

 ★ 

Originally posted by John Gruber from Daring Fireball, on August 11, 2009 9:01 AM

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Odds and ends, iPhone, App Store, iPod touch

Fortunately, World of Warcraft didn't exist while I was in school, otherwise I might not have finished my venerable BS degree at the storied Ithaca College at all. But if there was one game that almost kept me from finishing all of those essays and homework... well, it was Civ. But if there were two games, the second was Snood. And now that game is due in iPhone form soon as well.

It features the same creature-matching gameplay (with both new and old graphics, as you can see above), which means it probably has the same addictive quality that kept me playing long after I was supposed to have read those excerpts the professor gave to us in English class, and three gameplay modes, including Story, Classic, and even a Time Attack mode. "Coming soon" is the word on when it'll be out, though the main webpage actually says "play now," so it probably isn't that far off. It's not the only "Bust a Move" style game out on the App Store, but it is Snood, and that itself is enough to take me back to the days of pizza and beer in the dorm room.

TUAWSnood Redood coming to the iPhone originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Tue, 11 Aug 2009 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments



Sponsored Topics: AppStore - iPhone - Apple - IpodTouch - TUAW

Originally posted by Mike Schramm from The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW), on August 11, 2009 9:00 AM

Attention people who make movies: Movies are done now, you can find something else to do.

Originally posted by jeb from Modcult, on August 11, 2009 8:05 AM

9:15 AM: AAAAAAAARRRRRRRGGGGGHHHHHHHH

9:16 AM: My present goes back into its box and I head to the Apple Store, fully expecting them to tell me I’m stuck with it. (But at least I know they’ll tell me in a very nice, calm way in powerful air conditioning while surrounded by metal and glass.)

9:55 AM: I explain to the Apple salesman that I know I’m out of the return period, and I’ll gladly pay the restocking fee, and I just really hate the glass screen, and now that there’s another option, I’d like to take it if he’d accept the return. I luck out — in addition to the usual niceness and reasonability that I’ve come to expect from Apple employees, this guy’s a non-glossy enthusiast, too, and was very excited for this morning’s new option for himself. He gladly takes mine back with no hassle (the restocking fee, in this case, was worth every cent) and apologizes that he doesn’t have the matte models in stock yet.

10:01 AM: Laptop’s gone and the money’s back on my card.

10:20 AM: New laptop with “antiglare widescreen display” ordered from Apple.com. Net cost of the swap: $250.

31 days after I bought one, and after waiting for two revisions and 10 months for it to become an option, Apple finally offers the 15” unibody MacBook Pro with a matte-screen option.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on August 11, 2009 6:56 AM

-Photo by Getty Images-
I don't really know what to make of this one.

In the middle of Michael Jackson's estate hearing on Monday at the Los Angeles Superior Court, two women--Billie Jean Jackson and Claire Elisabeth Fields Cruise--stood up in the courtroom and made some interesting claims.

"I'm Blanket's mother," Billie Jean announced, referring to Michael's youngest son, Prince Michael II. "I would like all proceedings in the estate to be halted until a forensic scientist looks at signatures on the will because I believe they were forged," she said.

Claire Elisabeth made a similar claim when she told reporters that she filed paperwork last Friday declaring that she was the biological mother of Michael's three children, Prince Michael, 12, Paris Michael, 11, and Prince Michael II, 7. She also said she was married to Michael in 1983 for "business purposes."

Oh, and just in case we weren't already convinced that this woman is insane, she also mentioned that she and Michael are the biological parents of Tom Cruise's son, Connor Cruise. Because that makes sense.

Billie Jean's claims will be addressed in court on September 10. So ridiculous.

Originally posted by Jaclyn Garfinkel from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on August 11, 2009 6:41 AM

Dear Community,

The 18-th build of MySQL server with Percona patches is available now.

Comparing to the previous release it has following new features:

• The build is based on MySQL-5.0.84
• Fixed the issue with CLIENT_STATISTICS
• New patch innodb_recovery_patches.patch greatly improves recovery time

Fixed bugs in the build:

• Bug #407117 in Percona patches: “any mysql-test fails with a warning “master.err: ctype_ucs2_def: InnoDB: Warning: some resources were not cleaned up in shutdown:”"
• Bug #352840 in Percona patches: “INNODB_BUFFER_POOL_CONTENT privacy issue”

You can download binaries and sources with the patches here

http://www.percona.com/mysql/5.0.84-b18/

The Percona patches live on Launchpad : https://launchpad.net/percona-patches and you can report bug to Launchpad bug system:

https://launchpad.net/percona-patches/+filebug. The documentation is available on our Wiki

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

For support, commercial and sponsorship inquiries contact Percona.

---

Entry posted by Aleksandr Kuzminsky | No comment

Add to: | | | |

Originally posted by Aleksandr Kuzminsky from MySQL Performance Blog, on August 11, 2009 5:50 AM

Everyone knows that Scoreboard Gourmet is a huge fan of bistro tables. But I do have to wonder what the Blue Jays were thinking when they put these out for fans? If I could find the picture I'd show you how they do it in Milwaukee at Miller Park: You can actually see the field from your table. Damn geniuses in Wisconsin with their cheese curds and beer. I'm being serious. To be fair, beer is far and away the best thing to consume at Rogers Centre.

Originally posted by Sara Pepitone from Scoreboard Gourmet, on August 11, 2009 5:50 AM

-Photo by Getty Images-
Sad news to report that actress Emmy Rossum has split from beau Justin Spiegel... or should we say husband?

E! New reports that the 22-year-old Phantom of the Opera star and her music business boyfriend were actually married and no one knew about it.  Twist! 

No other info is available because the couple paid to keep the marriage license confidential.  How secretive, Emmy.

Originally posted by Patrick Sandora from iVillage - Daily Blabber, on August 11, 2009 5:47 AM

It was a happy ending for a baby elephant in Thailand that fell in a manhole.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from San Francisco Bay Area Breaking News for San Francisco, Oakland, and San Jose, on August 11, 2009 5:31 AM

Neuroscientists are mapping out a complete atlas of connectivity in the human brain, but what’s emerging is a battle of scales.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from SEEDMAGAZINE.COM, on August 11, 2009 3:30 AM

Jamie went into labor on Friday afternoon. I called Dave Groeschner, the Giant's head athletic trainer, to ask him to tell Boch I had to miss the game. (I had a new phone and didn't have Boch's cell phone number.) After we got Jamie settled in the hospital, we turned on the game. It was in the second inning with Jonathan Sanchez pitching and Eli Whiteside catching. All I was thinking about - at least as far as anything beyond Jamie and the delivery - was pulling for the guys to win. Then along about the seventh inning, I started to think, "Hey, he might throw a no-hitter.''

via Bengie Molina's blog

Baseball players blogging never gets old to me.

Originally posted by Andrew Anker from quid.pro, on August 11, 2009 12:23 AM

I had switched to a Google G1 "Dream" phone for a month. I felt like writing about it.

I give up. I thought it'd be fun to see what life was like on a different platform but I think I've seen more than enough on this hardware. The device is definitely too slow to get anything done and I have found myself not going to the phone when in a situation where I used to check my mail and catch up on Twitter. I stood in line at the ATM and just didn't bother.

On Saturday my family was here to visit and I found myself reaching for the iPhone to check on a restaurant, map some directions, and to check on an order. Given a choice between the two I just could not keep flipping that thing open knowing there were other perfectly good computers nearby.

I took the G1 into work today but I came home knowing what I had to do. I switched the SIM back to the iPhone. I'm going to keep installing apps and carrying it with me, but the SIM stays in the iPhone. When I get my hands on a Hero I can really put Android to the test. I think the G1 was just not ready to be the hardware for Android. And I'm not ready to interact with people when presented with opportunities to tune them out.

Some Links And Other Items You Might Be Interested In

• Alex Payne wrote something that just nails what drives me to want to see what else is out there. In 1999 I switched from Windows to Linux on my desktop for a year while I contracted. The fallout from that was horrendous. Lost files, corrupted Word docs, one dumb weekend where I worked in 640x480 because I hit "Okay" instead of "NO, NO, NO, GOD, NO" on an update and was clueless about how to fix it without wiping and re-installing. I switched to OS X in 2001.
• Ed Chang wrote in and told me about TouchPal which does some really good stuff as a replacement keyboard. I used it for a bit while i searched for a podcast manager (BeyondPod seemed to be the best but did not actually work when I tried subscribing to feeds).
• There is a Foursquare App for Android that looks very promising! I will definitely be testing it out.
• Buzz writes from experience what it takes to ship a well polished app and why he does it. Coincidentally I bought Birdfeed on Sunday.

Originally posted by torrez from Andre's Notes, on August 10, 2009 9:48 PM

A thread on Ubuntu Forums included the absurd assertion that Perl 6 has missed the boat.

This cannot be true, simply because there is no boat.

Perl 6 is not, and never has been, about capturing market share, or fitting a given niche, or becoming the pre-eminent tool of choice for a given problem area.

Larry says "Perl 6 isn't about missing boats, but about inventing airplanes."

I'm finally working on my "handy responses for Perl 6 sniping" cheat sheet. I'll post it soon!

Originally posted by Andy Lester from Perlbuzz, on August 10, 2009 9:11 PM

We’re going to try something new today. Yahoo! Answers Jeopardy. I’m going to take an answer from Yahoo! Answers and I need you to figure out what was the original question. Here is your clue:

The Pinhole god, maker of leaks and illegitimate Babies!

Answers must be in the form of a question. The first person who gets it right wins…. nothing because I haven’t ironed out the kinks yet. Good Luck.

Update:

Here were some of my favorite guesses:

MacCrocodile:

“I jus found out my girlfrend iz pregnate but we used a comdom. she says she didn’t poke a hole in it, but who else could of?”

Stuart:

What in the book Cider House Rules by John Irving keeps the good doctor in business ?

David:

I need a reason to not use condoms. Can you give me one?

ZM:

Which god should I pray to so I can keep my man?

And the correct question is:

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on August 10, 2009 8:02 PM

If you (like me) bothered reading Jason’s entire post, please click through to read this guy Marco’s reply. It will make your time reading Jason’s post seem worth it. Otherwise, I’ve clipped the important part here:

I am absolutely stunned at how awful of an idea this is.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on August 10, 2009 5:35 PM

Narrate Your Work (Scripting News):

As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY

I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different… I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don’t know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others’ posts, I don’t know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn’t work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.

Now why do I think this is so important? Because it’s a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today’s reporters don’t think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that.

it started with the idea of news. It’s not history or analysis, it’s what’s happening now. Think about how the Iran Hostage Crisis spawned Nightline and how the networks covered the Nixon resignation, or the moon landing or the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK.

Good stuff. Click through for the rest.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on August 10, 2009 5:15 PM

Just got off the phone with Robert Scoble.

I've known him for a long time. He's not so much a Natural Born Blogger as he is a Natural Born Evangelist.

For the last couple of years he's committed himself to the success of FriendFeed. It's really been awful to see how much he promotes it. All the time, as I watch, I'm thinking -- "Those guys are going to screw him."

Today it happened.

All the effort he poured into FriendFeed is for naught. They sold to Facebook. In the announcements, no mention of the users, and certainly no mention of Scoble. Now would have been the time for them to tip him, throw him a few thousand. Or if not money, how about at least a hat-tip -- an acknowledgement of the help they received from users, esp Robert Scoble. Nothing. They didn't even give him the first interview.

Scoble it's time to use the web again to store our ideas, and instead of relying on Silicon Valley companies to link our stuff together, let's just use the Internet. That's what it was designed for.

And I told him I'd write a blog post about him, and that he'd like the title.

Our blogs are still there, as is the web and the Internet. They never went away just because we foolishly flirted with something fast and easy and seductive. Our blogs never went away, they're still ready to share our ideas and connect us with others.

We'll go back to basics now, take what we learned from this round of innovation, and build it for real this time.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Scripting News, on August 10, 2009 4:34 PM

As a stay-at-home mom I've had almost two years to discover which of my passions mesh best with my role as a mother. During this time I've done more crafting, more sewing, and to a large extent, more living outside of my comfort zone than any other time in my life. But for the most part I haven't documented any of this. Nested was always about finding things online and, to be honest, I just don't have the time to that any more. Stepping away from my computer and doing things for myself and my daughter is really my newest passion.

via nested.typepad.com

That's from a post I wrote today regarding the relaunch of Nested -- an old parenting lifestyle blog of mine. Looking at the last couple posts here at dollarshort.org, I realized that a lot of the stuff I do now really should be documented. I debated whether to change dollarshort's focus or simply relaunch Nested. Ultimately I decided that I want Nested to be bigger than just me and dollarshort.org will always just be my personal site.

Originally posted by Mena from Dollarshort, on August 10, 2009 4:14 PM

    

    

Photos and video from Sjaek, Little Bay Poo, Mondkaninchen, rabbitier, unaerica, elenakulikova, and fukusuke-pon 福助ぽん. View more photos tagged with rabbit or bunny.

Originally posted by Heather Champ from Flickr Blog, on August 10, 2009 3:57 PM

Shared by voidfiles
awesome

Melissa Brandts wasn’t trying to take a photo of this ground squirrel at Banff National Park.  She’d set up the camera’s timer so that she’d have a nice picture of herself and her husband, with spectacular Lake Minnewanka in the background.

She hadn’t counted on this ground squirrel hogging the foreground.

Photo by Melissa Brandt, from the Your Shot Daily Dozen at National Geographic magazine

Link - via ngm

From the Upcoming ueue, submitted by Marilyn Terrell.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Neatorama, on August 10, 2009 3:34 PM

http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32208


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209


http://twitter.com/RickWebb/status/32209

msg: I really enjoyed @rickwebb’s twitter rant last night in response to jason calacanis’ apple rant

tedr: that’s some top notch snark-back right here. It’s pretty amazing how demanding people are of things that we’re sci-fi only 15 years ago. Scare me a bit.

rafer sez:
@rickwebb Amen.

This is pretty funny as is but presenting it as a slideshow makes it hilarious.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Final Boss Form, on August 10, 2009 2:03 PM

Back from the dead, Nested has returned with a new focus and a new outlook on life.

As a stay-at-home mom I've had almost two years to discover which of my passions mesh best with my role as a mother. During this time I've done more crafting, more sewing, and to a large extent, more living outside of my comfort zone than any other time in my life. But for the most part I haven't documented any of this. Nested was always about finding things online and, to be honest, I just don't have the time to that any more. Stepping away from my computer and doing things for myself and my daughter is really my newest passion.

While so much of the original Nested was about making nurseries and babies look beautiful, the new Nested will be much more about discovering parenting secrets, enabling a fun way of life for both adults and kids and finding new creative outlets . More importantly Nested is certainly not only a blog for parents anymore.

Take, for instance, Outfitting Gatsby. This multi-part feature will document our attempts to prepare for and attend The Art Deco Society's Gatsby Summer Afternoon. The Gatsby event is about DIY, sewing, history, music, food and, most importantly, living differently. I think that could also be said about the new Nested. 

Originally posted by Nested, Mena Trott from Nested, on August 10, 2009 1:29 PM

New Scientist has a series of articles about aspects of humanity that scientists don't quite have a handle on...like pubic hair, art, dreams, and teenagers.

Even our closest relatives, the great apes, move smoothly from their juvenile to adult life phases -- so why do humans spend an agonising decade skulking around in hoodies?

Tags: lists   science

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 10, 2009 1:01 PM

Amount of space that would be needed for cars if subway-riding New Yorkers thought like, say, a certain assemblyman from Westchester.

Sure, knocking the MTA is a favorite local past time, particularly for the politicians and press who are practically guaranteed a "Hallelujah!" chorus for every barb (today's scandal: fat cat transit workers poised to rake in cost-of-living allowance!!). But despite the MTA's problems, as Michael Frumin points out on his Frumination blog, the city's streets and highways can't hold a candle to the subways when it comes to moving commuters into and out of Manhattan's Central Business District.

Parsing data derived from 2008 subway passenger counts and the NYMTC 2007 Hub Bound Report [PDF], Frumin writes:

Just to get warmed up, chew on this -- from 8:00AM to 8:59 AM on an average Fall day in 2007 the NYC Subway carried 388,802 passengers into the CBD on 370 trains over 22 tracks. In other words, a train carrying 1,050 people crossed into the CBD every 6 seconds. Breathtaking if you ask me.

Over this same period, the average number of passengers in a vehicle crossing any of the East River crossings was 1.20. This means that, lacking the subway, we would need to move 324,000 additional vehicles into the CBD (never mind where they would all park).

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 84 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Take a gander at the map above to get an idea of the real estate that would be taken up by all those cars. Think such a proposition would lead John Liu to base his stances on congestion pricing and bridge tolls on principle, rather than wind direction? Could Deborah Glick overlook her personal hatred for the billionaire mayor long enough to save her constituents from carmaggedon? Would the prospect of seeing his district literally transformed into a parking lot prompt Sheldon Silver to finally take an unequivocal stand favoring transit over car commuting?

Right. Probably not.

Originally posted by Brad Aaron from Streetsblog New York City, on August 10, 2009 12:04 PM

Earlier this year, we launched Google Services for Websites, a program that helps partners, e.g., web hoster and access providers, offer useful and powerful tools to their customers. By making services, such as Webmaster Tools, Custom Search, Site Search and AdSense, easily accessible via the hoster control panel, hosters can easily enable these services for their webmasters. The tools help website owners understand search performance, improve user retention and monetize their content — in other words, run more effective websites.

Since we launched the program, several hosting platforms have enhanced their offerings by integrating with the appropriate APIs. Webmasters can configure accounts, submit Sitemaps with Webmaster Tools, create Custom Search Boxes for their sites and monetize their content with AdSense, all with a few clicks at their hoster control panel. More partners are in the process of implementing these enhancements.

We've just added new tools to the suite:

• Web Elements allows your customers to enhance their websites with the ease of cut-and-paste. Webmasters can provide maps, real-time news, calendars, presentations, spreadsheets and YouTube videos on their sites. With the Conversation Element, websites can create more engagement with their communities. The Custom Search Element provides inline search over your own site (or others you specify) without having to write any code and various options to customize further.
• Page Speed allows webmasters to measure the performance of their websites. Snappier websites help users find things faster; the recommendations from these latency tools allow hosters and webmasters to optimize website speed. These techniques can help hosters reduce resource use and optimize network bandwidth.
• The Tips for Hosters page offers a set of tips for hosters for creating a richer website hosting platform. Hosters can improve the convenience and accessibility of tools, while at the same time saving platform costs and earning referral fees. Tips include the use of analytics tools such as Google Analytics to help webmasters understand their traffic and linguistic tools such as Google Translate to help websites reach a broader audience.

If you're a hoster and would like to participate in the Google Services for Websites program, please apply here. You'll have to integrate with the service APIs before these services can be made available to your customers, so the earlier you start that process, the better.

As always, we'd love to get feedback on how the program is working for you, and what improvements you'd like to see.

Posted by Rajat Mukherjee, Group Product Manager

Originally posted by A Googler from The Official Google Blog, on August 10, 2009 11:30 AM

My tip on the latest episode of This Week in Google is how to enable real-time updates of your site’s feed to FriendFeed (right now), and more services like Google Reader as they release support for PubSubHubbub in the future. If you missed the instructions on the podcast, here they are in bookmarkable text. It’s very simple for blogs which use Feedburner for their feeds.

In Feedburner, click on the feed name you want to PSHB-enable. From the Publicize tab, click on PingShot in the left hand column of available services. Click on “activate” (see screenshot). Once this is done and your feed refreshes, you can view its source and see rel="hub" href="http://pubsubhubbub.appspot.com" attributes. This means that when you publish a new post, Feedburner will let the hub know, which will in turn notify subscribers in real-time. Here are these same instructions from the horse’s mouth. If Feedburner’s not your thing, there’s also a WordPress plug-in which will do this for you.

Originally posted by Gina Trapani from Smarterware, on August 10, 2009 10:24 AM

Well you feed and nurture your cat (and not to mention pay for expensive eye care) for years only to find him two-timing you on somebody else’s blog.

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on August 10, 2009 9:34 AM

An evening commuter enters the Sands Street bike path at Jay Street, after descending from the Manhattan Bridge.

Last month, the long-awaited Sands Street bike path officially opened, giving cyclists a much safer connection to the Brooklyn side of the Manhattan Bridge. From what I can tell so far, everyone loves the new protected space between Jay and Gold, which separates bike traffic from all the trucks and cars accelerating onto the BQE. If you bike over the bridge from Fort Greene or points east and south, it's a huge improvement. And once the Carlton Avenue Bridge reopens, this path should be an attractive approach to an even bigger swath of Brooklyn bike commuters.

We've received a few emails from readers who think the path would be safer with a few not-so-dramatic changes, and it will be interesting to see if DOT tweaks the Sands Street approach to address these concerns. One trouble spot: At the intersection where the Sands Street path meets the entrance to the Manhattan Bridge, cyclists have to cross against southbound traffic on Jay Street and eastbound traffic on Sands. Many are doing it in one fell swoop, making a diagonal movement that can be pretty dangerous.

Here's my attempt at a triptych showing what this looks like as a cyclist exits the bridge. The curb cut you see in the third frame is the entrance to the Sands Street protected path:

Some readers might get on the cyclist's case here for crossing against one of the lights, but I think this behavior is going to be pretty common as long as cyclists are asked to wait through two signal phases and make two separate crossings.

Here's a short video clip where you can see a few other ways people are handling this condition (apologies for the amateurish camera-work). 

One step that might encourage safer crossings would be to add an exclusive bike/pedestrian phase at this intersection. Another would be to cut a hole in that black fence on the bridge side of the street and install a direct crosswalk, giving cyclists a straight shot between the two paths. We have a query in with DOT to see if some tweaks might be on the table.

Another question is whether the block between Gold and Navy Street is adequately protected and delineated as space for bike traffic.

Photo: brooklynbybike/Flickr.

The bike lanes here are raised slightly above the level of car traffic and set off with a painted buffer. A fence was originally planned to separate bike traffic, but that would have formed a block-long barrier for pedestrians between sections of Farragut Houses. One proposed alternative -- bollards -- hasn't made it into the built project. I'd say the jury is still out on this one, but a coat of green paint might provide some additional reassurance for cyclists.

Originally posted by Ben Fried from Streetsblog New York City, on August 10, 2009 9:34 AM

So when I started watching this, which is one of those hokey Sports Science comparisons between a pro athlete and some rather arbitrary metric, I thought there was no way that Drew Brees was more accurate than a world-class archer. Well, I was very, very wrong. Watch below. (Brees's throwing picks up at about the 4:10 mark.)

Originally posted by Chris from Smart Football, on August 10, 2009 9:28 AM

The NY Times' Lens blog has a visual look back at the blackout of 2003.

Tags: NYC   photography

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 10, 2009 8:58 AM

More Star Wars bookends. We have the Greedo ones, and they're great.

 

Luke looks a teeny bit weird (the nose!) but these things happen.

Originally posted by Alice from Wonderland, on August 10, 2009 7:23 AM

“Someone name Marco”

- (sic) The opening of Jason Calacanis’ non-response to my post. Damn. He really got me! I’m just “someone name[d] Marco”. It’s obviously not worth the courtesy of figuring out who I am or giving my last name, since I make that information so difficult to find on my site. I’m just some guy who’s not nearly as important or well-known as Jason Calacanis. Classy.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Marco.org, on August 10, 2009 6:21 AM

You'd need the equivalent of 228-lane Brooklyn Bridge to move all those people into Manhattan during Monday morning rush hour.

At best, it would take 167 inbound lanes, or 42 copies of the Queens Midtown Tunnel, to carry what the NYC Subway carries over 22 inbound tracks through 12 tunnels and 2 (partial) bridges. At worst, 200 new copies of 5th Avenue. Somewhere in the middle would be 67 West Side Highways or 76 Brooklyn Bridges. And this neglects the Long Island Railroad, Metro North, NJ Transit, and PATH systems entirely.

Kinda puts the subway in perspective, doesn't it? And don't miss the map at the bottom that shows the size of the parking lots needed for all those cars.

Tags: cities   michaelfrumin   NYC   subway

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 10, 2009 5:33 AM

In one hilly area in the rainforest of northeastern India, they build bridges out of living trees. Specifically the roots.

The root bridges, some of which are over a hundred feet long, take ten to fifteen years to become fully functional, but they're extraordinarily strong -- strong enough that some of them can support the weight of fifty or more people at a time. In fact, because they are alive and still growing, the bridges actually gain strength over time -- and some of the ancient root bridges used daily by the people of the villages around Cherrapunjee may be well over five hundred years old.

Tags: architecture   India

Originally posted by jason@kottke.org from kottke.org, on August 10, 2009 4:54 AM

I've just come back from New York, where as always I had a wonderful time. It is difficult not to have a wonderful time there, given that I spend my visits swanning around pretending to be a woman of leisure.

What I prefer to do with my time is to eat a lot, shop a bit, and sit in public places and read. New York is a superior place in which to do these things, and I did them with a vigorous lack of vigor, which is just what I like best.

The routine is that Snark goes there every now and then for his job, and works very hard while he is there. Schedule permitting, I tag along for a day and a half at one end of a week, cavalierly leaving all work behind and doing absolutely nothing of any use whatsoever, not even trying to make plans with people because I am so lazy and will be there so briefly.

This is lovely, though I sometimes forget, wishful-thinkingly, that it is not really sustainable, subsidized as it is by the less glamorous wage-paying responsibilities and low rent that characterize my ordinary life here in Assuredly Not New York. I would miss having a kitchen that was not the size of a postage stamp in any case, I suppose.

I wanted very much to steal this menu:

But there was only one. They have it on their website, anyway.

Originally posted by redfox from Adventures in the Pointless Forest, on August 9, 2009 1:10 PM

On Fail: On Language: FAIL. Not as good as Know Your Meme: FAIL. [via]

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Fimoculous, on August 9, 2009 10:21 AM

Over the years I've seen ideas that show up over and over in various different forms, and when we discover one, we give it a name. Examples. Jay Rosen came up with Atomization. Doc Searls said Markets Are Conversations. David Weinberger has so many -- including Small Pieces Loosely Joined and Transparency is the New Objectivity. Clay Shirky says Here Comes Everybody. Jay and I together came up with Rebooting The News. Some of mine are Sources Go Direct, River of News, We Make Shitty Software, Checkbox News, People Come Back to Places that Send Them Away, Ask Not What the Internet Can Do For You, The Platform with No Platform Vendor, It's Even Worse Than It Appears.

Now I'm going to add one, and provide a fantastic example. It's the title of this piece -- Narrate Your Work.

Narrate Your Work is something I used to tell my team at UserLand Software, because we were a virtual team, with people in Seattle, Boston, Vancouver, Germany and California. But it would have applied even if we were all working in the same office. As a manager, I wanted to know where my people were, because if they were completing a project I needed to be thinking about their next steps and how their deliverables fit in with other stuff that was coming online. And if they were late I needed to understand why. We even developed technology for this, and Hutch Carpenter discovered the docs for it, and was excited about the discovery, and I was excited for his excitement.

Brent Simmons, who was on our team at UserLand, went on to write NetNewsWire and other gems after leaving the company. Brent uses Twitter, to this day, to narrate his work. You'd have to ask Brent why he does it, but I'm glad he does. I like how his mind works, I learn from him. He's also a friend and a guy I respect, so I like to stay in touch, and this is one way to do it.

Twitter is very much a Narrate Your Work environment, in addition to the many other things it is. In a way its question What Are You Doing? is what Narrate Your Work asks of you too.

So that's what Narrate Your Work means. I wouldn't waste your time with all this theory unless I could show you how all this fits in with Rebooted News and the News System of the Future. Here's a recital of what happened.

1. As you may know, at roughly noon Eastern time yesterday a plane crashed into a helicopter over the Hudson River in NY, killing all nine people aboard both.

2. I was away from my computer when it happened, didn't check in until about an hour later, and on Twitter there was a mess of conflicting stories, and lots of individuals "breaking" the news even though it happened over an hour ago.

3. I clicked on the page of NYT editorial people on Twitter that I keep and I saw something very different, and this is the point of this story. I saw a news organization at work. Careful to say what they do and don't know. Informing each other on experience with similar stories in the past. Whether they were all reading all of the others' posts, I don't know. They were reading and passing on reports from other Twitter users, even those that didn't work at the Times. They were coordinating the work of a larger community than just people who work at the Times.

4. I took a snapshot of the page at that time so we could all look at this.

Now why do I think this is so important? Because it's a big part of the future Rebooted News system, imho. Today's reporters don't think the public wants to see inside their process, but they are wrong about that. Many of us totally want to look inside and watch them at work for a variety of reasons:

1. We thirst for instantaneous real-time news. The cable networks have been simulating it for decades, but not delivering very often. Go back to the Gulf War, and how we were all glued to CNN watching for any hint of new information. It became an obsession that was repeated in the 2000 election and in the aftermath of 9-11. Now we try to grab for that sense of immediacy whenever possible, and they market to us on that basis even naming their show The Situation Room, when it is nothing of the sort.

2. But cable news isn't where it started, it started with the idea of news. It's not history or analysis, it's what's happening now. Think about how the Iran Hostage Crisis spawned Nightline and how the networks covered the Nixon resignation, or the moon landing or the assassinations of JFK, RFK and MLK. (In the recent spate of bios of Walter Cronkite I learned that he broadcast from the room he worked in at CBS News, not from a set on a stage. It's as if he was prepared to go on the air at any time and it wasn't appearances that mattered. At that time, to CBS, news was a functional thing.)

3. We also want to feel to be a part of the news process. Again this is something the networks are playing lip service to. But the Times people on Twitter aren't just pretending to use sources outside their own newsroom, they are actually doing it. And you can see it.

4. Weinberger says we should seek transparency, and of course I agree -- it's my theme song too. You can see real reporters dealing with a true breaking story not just a simulation of a breaking story, let their hair down and share everything they know with the world. This is the impulse of news, it's not about hiding things until they're ready, but when you know something for a fact, you want it out there as quickly as possible. And as long as something is clearly labeled as speculation it's every bit as true as a fully vetted fact.

5. Twitter is at least a dress rehearsal for the news system of the future. A key component of this system is that it is used both as the back room for narrating news work and for the finished delivered news product. It's this duality that makes electronic news vital. I first saw this in the LBBS and MORE software I did in the 80s, then in Manila in the 90s, and I believe we will see it in the news system that comes out of Twitter. You have two modes of viewing the content, the editorial view and the finished product view -- but it's important that the are just views on the same data, so when a change is made to one, it automatically appears in the other. This was the key concept in Manila's Edit This Page function.

6. Lenn Pryor at Microsoft figured this out a few years back when he started the Channel 9 website. Channel 9 is the audio channel on airplanes that allows you to listen to the cockpit conversation. Pryor set out to create that kind of experience for users of Microsoft products. Lenn is a creative guy who went on to work at Skype. He also coined the term unconference for the format we were using at BloggerCon.

Update: The Times stays with the story.

Originally posted by (author unknown) from Scripting News, on August 9, 2009 10:17 AM

Alex Queral:

My fascination with heads began as an art student. For me, the human head was a natural choice of subject matter because of its inherent expressiveness. I carve the faces out of phone books because I like the three-dimensional quality that results and because of the unexpected results that occur working in this medium. The three-dimensional quality enhances the feeling of the pieces as an object as opposed to a picture.

In carving and painting a head from a phone directory, I’m celebrating the individual lost in the anonymous list of thousands of names that describe the size of the community. In addition, I like the idea of creating something that is normally discarded every year into an object of longevity.

(via Dangerous Minds)

Originally posted by Chris from Cynical-C Blog, on August 9, 2009 8:54 AM

I've had the privilege of being quoted or mentioned in a lot of newspapers and magazines over the years, but as an minor-league word nerd, this one ranks as among the most gratifying: This week's "On Language" column in the Sunday New York Times magazine quotes from my post "The End of Fail":

The fail phenomenon has its naysayers, most prominently Anil Dash, an influential tech-culture blogger, who wrote a strongly worded post titled “The End of Fail.” For Dash, politicized fail has not moved far from its snarky roots. “ ‘FAIL’ isn’t advocacy; it’s the tool of those who don’t know how to be advocates, who don’t know how to persuade,” Dash argues. “It puts the ego of the complainers ahead of the cause they’re trying to advocate.”

In reviewing the etymology of "fail", Ben Zimmer makes a few really interesting observations, most notably that the term has forked a bit, reflecting both the mindless non-critiques I railed against, as well as the harmless, even charming, use of "fail" on sites like Fail Dogs. Zimmer also elides any mention of ubiquitous meme-starter 4chan playing a role in the development of "fail", which is probably just as well.

I'm actually so pleased with this one I'll probably run out and grab a print copy of the magazine shortly after I post this.

Originally posted by Anil from Anil Dash, on August 9, 2009 6:20 AM

John Fekner just sent me a link to a great photo collection he recently put up of his stenciled car husks. John started painting slogans such as "Decay" on the side of abandoned cars in Queens and the South Bronx in the early 80s. This simple act de-naturalized the collapse of these neighborhoods, reminding everyone that this was not some foregone conclusion, but the results of specific policies and actions of city officials. Check out all the images HERE.

Originally posted by Josh M. from Just Seeds: Blog, on August 9, 2009 5:22 AM