Jules and Vincent
Weebles wobble but they don't... go to Burger King! Courtesy of shirtoid.
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August 22, 2009
How to Make Pizza Bianca at Home
A recent poll on Slice posed the question "Crust, Sauce, or Toppings?"
After much deliberation, I came to my own conclusion that crust is the defining component of pizza. Fitting, then, that my next pizza culinary adventure would be making "Pizza Bianca." In its traditional form, this popular Roman flatbread has no toppings other than oil and salt—just six feet of crisp, chewy, flavorsome CRUST!
Now, I'll confess I have never visited the legendary Antico Forno Campo de'Firori in Rome, or such New York bakeries as Grandaisy or Sullivan Street—or even Spianata & Co. in London. However, if Jeffrey Steingarten's pursuit of the perfect pizza bianca is anything to go by, the results would be worth it. In his book It Must Have Been Something I Ate there are details of his obsessive quest, including measuring oven temperature with an infrared thermometer, laboratory analysis of flour samples, and traveling to Rome to observe bakers practicing their craft before returning to New York to consult with baker Jim Lahey at Sullivan Street Bakery.
My far humbler efforts, on the other hand, consisted of 2 weeks researching drooling over Flickr pictures of prime specimens of pizza bianca and getting covered in flour while trying to stretch insanely wet dough in my home kitchen.
I did look at a few published recipes from bakers such as Daniel Leader and Lahey, but all these sources described a method of intensive (machine) kneading. This posed a problem, since I didn't have a mixer (not part of a luddite philosophy, I've just never used one).
Additionally I had reservations about the possible negative impact on flavor that excessive dough oxidation might have due to the intensive mixing process. Being the lazy efficient person that I am, the solution was simple: stretch and fold, a technique which I often use to make ciabatta or focaccia.
I'll leave it to baking guru Peter Reinhart to demonstrate the magic of "stretch and fold." Please note that in the video, Reinhart uses an oiled work surface. You can use either oil or flour, but I prefer to use flour for this particular recipe.
With this simple but remarkably effective technique, working with the incredibly wet dough becomes relatively easy.
The result? Pizza bianca can be made with hardly any kneading at all!
Pizza Bianca
- makes two 16-by-10-inch pizzas -
Equipment and Tools
- Baking stone (I used a 16-by-11-inch granite slab)
- Baking parchment
- Bench and dough scrapers also come in handy when handling the dough
Ingredients
- 550 grams strong bread flour (all-purpose or high-gluten)
- 505 grams water
- 1/2 teaspoon instant dry yeast
- 16 grams salt (crush coarser salt crystals into a finer powder)
For finishing:
- Extra virgin olive oil
- Coarse sea salt
- Fresh rosemary orgrated pecorino cheese and breadcrumbs
You'll also need additional flour for work surfaces and olive oil for greasing bowls and dough containers.
Procedure
1. Pour all the water into a mixing bowl.
2. Mix flour and yeast in a separate bowl.
3. Beat the flour-yeast mixture into the water, a half cup at a time.
4. Rest for 30 minutes.
5. Sprinkle the salt over the rested dough and mix evenly. The dough is still very loose at this stage and I recommend mixing by continually lifting the dough from the side of the bowl and folding across the center. Rotate the bowl as you continue to lift and fold for about 3 minutes. Try to squeeze out or remove any remaining lumps of flour.
6. Transfer the folded dough to an oiled bowl to rest for a further 10 minutes.
7. Empty the dough on to a well-floured surface, and perform the first stretch and fold.
8. Rest the dough for another 10 minutes in an oiled bowl.
9. Perform one more stretch and fold.
10. Rest the dough in a bowl for a final 20 minutes.
11. Empty the dough on to a well-floured surface and divide into two equal portions.
12. Stretch and fold each piece of divided dough as before.
13. Transfer each portion of dough to a separate oiled container, cover and leave to rise in the refrigerator (about 40°F) for about 12 hours or until roughly tripled in bulk.
14. During refrigeration, stretch and fold the dough 2 more times at regular intervals (remove from fridge, stretch and fold, return to fridge). If you're making the pecorino version, sprinkle grated pecorino cheese over the dough during the last stretch-and-fold.
15. Gently empty each dough portion on to a piece of floured baking parchment (16-by-10-inch).
16. Drizzle about 1 tablespoon of olive oil over the top of each piece of dough.
17. Use your fingers to create dimples and gently stretch the dough to cover most of the baking parchment. By carefully sliding your (floured) hands under the dough you can also carefully stretch from underneath.
18. Proof the stretched dough for 2 hours (1 hour if not using refrigerated dough). Preheat the oven (with baking stone) to 480F for at least one hour towards the end of the proofing time.
Proofed dough dressed with breadcrumbs and grated pecorino.
19. Dress the proofed dough with a sprinkle coarse sea salt and fresh rosemary (or breadcrumbs and grated pecorino) and another drizzle of olive oil.
20. Using the back of a large baking sheet or pan, transfer the proofed dough, parchment and all, on to the baking stone to bake for about 10 minutes or until the top starts turning golden brown.
Other Notes
- I've included a 12-hour refrigerated rise in the recipe. If you are in a rush and don't mind compromising a little on flavor, you can leave the dough to rise at room temperature for about 2 hours. Don't forget to include the stretch-and-fold process in this accelerated fermentation
- The leavening in this recipe is instant dry yeast but you can use sourdough starter instead. However, this can result in a very chewy pizza (pizza jerky, anyone?) I recommend using a relatively small amount of (very active) starter and a long fermentation time (about 12 hours at room temperature)
- I may be stating the bleeding obvious but domestic ovens aren't usually 6 ft deep.The pizzas in this recipe should measure just over a foot in length
Related Recipes
Sicilican-Style Pizza Pie Recipe
Learning How to Make Neapolitan Pizza from Keste's Roberto Caporuscio
Grilling: Pizza
A Rekindled Interest in At-Home Pizzamaking
August 21, 2009
unicode heaven
With apologies to Rex, here's your new favorite site for the next five minutes: Unicode table for you, from Paul Ford.
There may already be something like it out there, but I couldn't find anything quite like it, and I keep spending time poking around Unicode on Wikipedia and various other sites and finding it hard to get a sense of the whole range of options available.
This is my favorite, "heavy teardrop-spoked pinwheel":
❃
In exchange for the gift Paul gave the web with this page, you should go vote up his panel (well, Zeldman's panel, actually) at SxSW. The gift economy at work!
Art & Yoshi, my favorite subjects!!
* early August 2009
The importance of first aid
My wife recently got re-certified in first aid and CPR and was able to use those skills the other day on the street.
Tags: Meg HourihanWalking home, I realized being certified isn't necessarily about providing the aid. I didn't stop the bleeding, though it subsided on its own. I didn't try to examine her. This was in part because she refused my help initially but also because I knew the ambulance would be along soon. Mostly it was about providing comfort to someone in a difficult situation, helping them feel ok, and letting them know they weren't alone. The certification gave me the confidence to do that: to kneel on the sidewalk, holding an old woman's hand, and to help make those scary few minutes hopefully just a little bit better.
My #blogpostfriday post
I've had a non-productive week, I've been fighting a cold -- but I made a commitment to the web to write at least one post every Friday, so here I am keeping my promise.
I'm worried about the web.
We pour so much passion into dynamic web apps hosted by companies we know very little about. We do it without retaining a copy of our data. We have no idea how much it costs them to keep hosting what we create, so even if they're public companies, it's very hard to form an opinion of how likely they are to continue hosting our work.
A few weeks ago an entrepreneur said to my face that he was the one who made the money and I was the one who worked for free. My chin dropped. I knew most if not all of them secretly believed this, but I had never heard one say it out loud.
I know others who told me their business model was to patent my work.
Shaking my head. This can't work.
This system is terrible. It's a bubble, like the real estate bubble. It's going to burst, and when it does, it will take a lot of our history with it.
But not this blog post if I have any say about it. It's stored as a static file on a Windows XP server running Apache. It could just as easily be stored on a Linux machine running anything. Or even an iPod or iPhone. Text files are the ultimate in stability. The same text file you could read on a mainframe 40 years ago could be read on a netbook today.
I'll post a link to this piece on Twitter, that probably won't last very long. But -- the backup I'm making of it is being stored as a static text file on Apache. So it may well be around for a while.
I'm really obsessed with creating a historic record. I want to feel that our writing has a future. I also don't want to work for people who are as openly greedy as the typical entrepreneur of 2009.
Anyway -- time to go to lunch. I've taken my vitamins on behalf of the web.
Look Who's Talkin': Comments, Quips, and Tips We Have Known and Loved
There's so much going on in Talk week to week that we almost can't keep up. If you're in the same boat, here's a small selection of topics and responses that have piqued our interest this week.
What All Can You Flambé?
"Your kitchen, if you're not careful." —Lorenzo
Gourmet Marshmallows: What to Do?
The ultimate marshmallow roast. Is the Stay Puft man "gourmet"? Screen cap from X-Entertainment.com
"Roast them over a fire and eat them on their own. Or make them into a s'more, but go easy on the chocolate so as not to overwhelm the flavors. Use them as toppings for brownies. Melt the chocolate ones and put them into a peanut butter sandwich for a Fluffernutter. Use the caramel ones in a sweet potato casserole. Make a marshmallow fondant. Put them in a fruit salad or ambrosia salad (I know some people hate this, but they're gourmet marshmallows!)." —cycorider
Favorite Stoned Snack
"Grilled cheese and tomato sandwich, followed by the rest of the fridge." —htims23x
Do You Put Toppings on Corn on the Cob?
Photograph from yomi995 on Flickr
"Mayo, chili powder, and lime. That or I eat it naked—the corn, not me." —ag3208
Tailgating ... Oh Yeah, Baby
"Bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, beer, bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, beer, bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, beer, bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, beer, bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, beer, bratwurst, bratwurst bratwurst, beer." —MarvinDog
Pattern Recognition
Themes seem to surface in any given week. In the last seven days:
Holidays in August
"Thanksgiving dinner" sandwich in NYC »
Poultry-less Holiday Menus »More Road Trips
Route: Portland to SF »
Route: I-87, the Adirondacks »What to Do With...
A bison tongue »
A new tagine »
Bing cherries »
4 pounds of drumsticks »
Hatch green chiles »
Sesame seeds »
Roasted beets »Equipment and Appliances...
Need new cookie sheets »
FoodSaver rolls in NYC? »
Foodsavers--worth the investment? »
French Fry Slicer »Where to Eat or Shop ("O, Canada" Edition):
Toronto »
Vancouver »
Montreal »
Albuquerque and Santa Fe »
Martha's Vineyard »
Sonoma, California »
Anything new in SF? »
Portugal? »Hottest Food Network Chick?
"My husband calls her 'Giada with the big head,' teeny tiny body with a big head. He is as distracted by her big head as he is with her big rack." —mrsmoosie
For the Ladies: Hottest Food Network Dude?
"I want to be between a sandwich of Michael Simon and Bobby Flay, Bald and sexy on the right, Red and Fiesty on the left. " —CATERPILLARGIRL
Cupcake Alternative That Doesn't Involve the Oven?
"I used to make pretzel joys. Grab some decent chocolate chips of your choice. Some Bachman butter pretzels and rice cripsies. Melt the chocolate and stir in some crushed up butter pretzels and Rice Krispies. Use a tablespoon and drop them into cupcake papers. These are huge hits. You only have to use the microwave and they dry on their own. I make them in 3 flavors dark chocolate, milk chocolate and white. People love them the salt and sweet and crunchy huge hit. I also made them with potato chips and pretzels and they were well received." —JerzeeTomato
Picnic at the Beach: What Should I Bring?
"BEER!" —AyeEat
Hospital Food
"Lawsy me, how things have changed. I've been eating hospital food and serving it to folks since the Johnson Administration, and nobody knows the Jello I've seen." —lemons
What Would Brian Boitano Make? Seriously?
"Now, OMG, is Brian skating on ice made with filtered water, branch water city water, natural water, creek water, ocean water, rainwater, Perez Hilton's bath water? Eeeeee, what will he cook with? I'm so excited." —jfitz
General Wine Question
"There's only one way to find out ...... hmmm.... where's the wine opener?" —pooch
Funeral Food
"@moibec: Your last contention on always accepting offered food is totally reliable advce. My stepdad died at the beginning of the summer, and of course my house was filled with out-of-town company (family), and we very, very readily accepted any goodies that arrived at the door. [the outpourings & generosity was astonishingly great; he was well known and loved]. we opted out of an actual funeral, though--too overwhelming for my mother at the time, and ill-fitting to his legacy-- but plan to have an extremely festive 'celebration of life' party at some point. I'm sure the food and booze will be killer.
"Really at everyone: These are all very heartwarming discussions on the topic. I'm from the South as well, and of course, we do in fact put on the food glitz big-time for funerals. like a reunion, as someone said." —emilytaylor
Tiki-themed Hors D'oeuvres for the Vegetarian?
"Vietnamese Spring Rolls: http://allrecipes.com/Recipe/Vietnamese-Fresh-Spring-Rolls/Detail.aspx. Eliminate the shrimp, add juliened carrot and sliced avocado. Also, I use the Sweet Chili Sauce from Trader Joe's. It's in the bottled sauce/marinade section and is a bright orangish red color." —biankat
What Would You Eat If You Couldn't Chew for a Week?
After a near-fatal car wreck, Kanye West spent time with his broken jaw wired shut. It inspired his breakthrough hit "Through the Wire."
"...Here's what I missed: RAW VEGETABLES!!!! Crunchy salads and things like that. Also, food made by someone other than me. For six whole weeks it was basically impossible to get takeaway or go to a restaurant. I don't normally do those things much, but I really missed it when I couldn't. Also, chocolate. Sigh."
My first non liquid meal after six weeks was a Thai red curry with tofu at my local Thai place. It was delicious but terrifying after such a long time eating pastes through a straw and with a tiny child-sized spoon. It was also not helped by the fact that two seconds in I ate a very hot chili and spent the entire time coughing desperately. Still, it was nice to get back in the saddle, food-wise. And I can assure you that in the intervening months, my immersion blender has been gathering dust in the cupboard under the sink!" —Caley
New Super Mario Bros. Wii
Might have to dust off the Wii for this one: New Super Mario Bros. Wii.
Features include four-player collaborative play (!!) and something called "demo play".
The game will also be the first game on the Wii to feature "demo play", where players will be able to pause the game, let the game complete the level for them, and resume play at any time by unpausing.
In my house, this was called the "give the controller to my 11-year-old cousin and let him show you how it's done" feature. I both hated and loved that feature. (via object of my obsession)
Tags: Nintendo Super Mario Bros video games Wii
What Exactly Do 1.6 Billion Retweet Buttons Get You? About 6 Million Actual Retweets.
If you look at the top right hand corner of any blog post on TechCrunch, you will see both the number of comments on it and the number of times it’s been retweeted (linked to and passed around on Twitter). Usually the retweet number is bigger than the number of comments because it is much easier to do. It counts as a vote for that post inasmuch as a passed link can be construed as a reader recommendation. Everyone who retweets a link is in effect recommending it to all of their followers, and it can help to drive traffic back to the original post. At least that is the theory.
But how many retweet buttons are actually out there and how many people click on them? When it comes to the spread of the buttons themselves, TweetMeme offered some stats today showing that its retweet buttons are now getting 1.6 billion impressions a month. That number has quadrupled in the past two months alone. New retweet market entrants have a lot of catching up to do. And Just wait until retweet buttons start appearing on individual comments as well.
What that means, however, is just that the buttons are appearing on blog posts and articles which collectively are viewed 1.6 billion times a month, not that they are clicked on that many times. I asked Tweetmeme founder Nick Halstead how many actual retweets do those buttons produce. He doesn’t have exact numbers for that yet, but his best guesstimate is 200,000 a day, or 6 million a month. That translates into a paltry 0.375 percent click-through rate.
There are a few caveats about this number. It doesn’t count people who click on the retweet button who are not members of Twitter. It only counts the overlap. So the actual number of clicks is no doubt higher. In fact, on the retweet button in RSS feeds and for people who are already logged into Twitter (which TweetMeme can measure), the click-through rate is 1 percent. But the vast majority of impressions are for people who are not logged in. So the real click-through rate is somewhere in between 0.375 percent and 1 percent.
The other thing to remember is that it can take fewer retweets to make an article go viral than, say, Diggs. Depending on how many followers each retweeter has and how many actually click on the link, a few retweets can be all it takes to drive a ton of people to that blog post. Twitter certainly drives a lot of traffic to TechCrunch, but we don’t really know how much of that is due to retweets.
TweetMeme is working on giving Websites who use its retweet button better insight into downstream traffic. Halstead also revealed that it is going to release an analytics service which measures traffic coming from retweets. He’d better hurry up with that before Twitter itself beats him to the punch.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Forks
Design Sponge makes cutlery nerds very happy with this in-depth look at the fork.
The $1 million book
A book listing the top 100 wineries in the world will retail for $1,000,000. To be fair, the purchase price also includes 600 bottles of wine from said wineries. (via eat me daily)
Tags: books wine
Le illusion
Sara Paretsky, in an article in the NYT entitled Le Treatment, described an emergency room in France and observes that rude bureaucrats in the French health system are worth putting...
User Friendly Heuristics
Wil Shipley writes about the compromised perfection we must strive for in order to provide users an experience that meets their human expectations:
“Classic computer programming has largely failed, because it failed to copy nature. Nothing in nature works 100% of the time, but it sure works well MOST of the time – and when it fails, well, you die and get replaced. A human being, for instance, is an absolutely amazing machine, and is provably NOT provably correct.”
I particularly like the example in the second half, having to do with smartly interpreting a typed ISBN numbers for product search. How do you strip the meaningless dashes from a search term, except when they’re utterly meaningful? This kind of thinking is important to fine-tuning an application. Nobody will appreciate the hours you spent laboring over the question, but for some reason they’ll just think your product is particularly awesome.
It’s interesting that the pursuit of perfection in an application has to involve the pursuit of compromise. By solving a problem in a way that degrades gracefully to unsolvable, you offer a happy, possibly even surprise solution to many people who would not otherwise expect one.
Acela Club Prices
A favorite question of readers about to be answered: How much does it cost to eat dinner in the Acela Club at Citi Field? Well, we've already discussed the base $48 ($25 for kids 10 and under). So that's your starting point.
On the summer menu two entrees have $5 supplements (grilled kobe fkat iron steak, rosemary rubbed prime rib). Vegetables and Sides are also $5 (fries, cornbread, pierogie, haricots).
And then there's the beverages. Specialty cocktails $11 (le grand orange: grand marnier, tanqueray, tonic, muddled orange, great word for the team, eh?), Beer $6.25-7.50 (Bud, Brooklyn, Hennepin, others), Wine $9-14 by the glass, $34+ bottles.
What does that mean for Scoreboard Gourmet and company? We got out for $100 each including tip (first round of drinks bought at bar). I believe that included a $10 per person Patio fee, but don't have the receipt to confirm.
Buzz: Rays and Marlins like Billy Wagner
Last night, Billy Wagner threw 14 pitches, nine for strikes, and set down the middle of the Braves lineup in order, while hitting 95 mph on the radar gun.
Following the game, Wagner told reporters:
“To know that I was pretty much written off, that I wasn’t going to be able to make it back, and to be
able to get back quick, it was very enjoyable… I didn’t want to go out there and be wild. Once I got the first out that was a big relief.”
…i was out in center field, so i could not see who was warming up… but, i knew wagner would get in the game eventually… i got chills when the beginning of Enter Sandman started to blare through the ballpark… it was bittersweet, reminding me of better days at Shea Stadium… the best part, though, is that they played it again when he walked off the field, knowing it could be the final time we see him in a Mets uniform…
…the buzz around Citi Field suggests it will be just a matter of time before wagner is traded… and good for him… last year at this time he was in tears, embarrassed, and worried he might never throw another pitch again…
…he’s worked hard to get back, he’s clearly healthy and i hope he can go someplace to get a ring… in fact, wherever he ends up is probably the team i will end up pulling for in the post season…
Jayson Stark of ESPN.com believes the Rays and Marlins have interest in acquiring Wagner. However, he says, if the Mets want to get a decent prospect in return, they will likely need to pay most of the $3.5 million left on his contract.
…i have no idea what to expect from the Mets, and especially Omar Minaya, when it comes to making this sort of deal… i mean, when was the last time the Mets had a quality veteran to trade… seriously, when was the last time they were in this situation… usually, they just wait it out and let people leave as a free agent…
test
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Pimp My Code, Part 16: On Heuristics and Human Factors
First off, I should mention that I don't think I use the word "heuristic" correctly – although in computer science it's grown to replace the word "algorithm" as just a general term for a way to solve a problem, traditionally it has a more narrow definition:Heuristic (/hjʊˈrɪs.tɪk/) is an adjective for experience-based techniques that help in problem solving, learning and discovery.(Yay, it's fun to copy and paste from Wikipedia!)
When I use it, I usually am talking about an algorithm that won't always give the correct solution, but does so often enough that the algorithm is useful. This differs from a classic algorithm, where we struggle mightily to make it provably correct in every instance.
But classic computer programming has largely failed, because it failed to copy nature. Nothing in nature works 100% of the time, but it sure works well MOST of the time – and when it fails, well, you die and get replaced. A human being, for instance, is an absolutely amazing machine, and is provably NOT provably correct.
--
To talk about computer heuristics, we'll need to get concrete. Could I get a "for instance?" Heck, yes.
For instance: NSDateFormatter has the following method:
NSDateFormatter (NSDateFormatterCompatibility) - (id)initWithDateFormat:(NSString *)format allowNaturalLanguage:(BOOL)flag;
Ignoring for a second that 'flag' should be really be renamed 'allowNaturalLanguage' (I mean, honestly, if your method body refers to a variable named 'flag' it's not at ALL obvious what you mean, is it? You'd have to look at the method definition every time you saw this 'flag' variable, and that's just poor coding.) uh I lost my train of thought.
Oh! Yes. 'allowNaturalLanguage.' It's really cool! In most places you can enter a textual date in Cocoa (but not those fiddly NSDatePicker widgets where each number is in its own field), you can enter dates like, "Next Tuesday at noon" or "yesterday at 5:23PM" and Cocoa will magically turn that into a valid NSDate.
Possibly more importantly, you can type "Oct 16, 1969" or "10/16/69" or "10.16.1969" and it'll figure out what you meant my birthday in each case. (You cannot just type "Wil Shipley's Birthday" but that would be a great extension of their existing heuristic, if you ask me.)
This frees users up from having to figure out what magic combination of digits, dashes, slashes, words, and/or abbreviations comprise a valid date. Without this flag the programmer specifies exactly what format dates must take, like, "mm/dd/yyyy", and if the user doesn't type exactly that information, she gets an ugly error panel. With the flag, the user doesn't have to learn what the computer wants: she can continue to do things the way she has done them and the computer will understand her.
The latter is the touchstone of great design: we must strive to make our programs require as little learning as possible on the user's part. Each little thing they have to learn about our program is another obstacle to them using it fully, another tiny chunk of enjoyment stripped from their experience.
Now, a few releases of OS X ago (I believe 10.4), 'allowNaturalLanguage' was marked as deprecated; soon to be removed from the APIs. "What what what‽" said I. I filed a bug: "Why?"
The response was, essentially, the current heuristic doesn't work perfectly even in English, and fails badly in foreign languages.
That may seem like a logical reason to remove a piece of API, if you are a programmer. If you're a user, you're probably thinking, as I did: this is the worst reasoning in the world.
Let's say 65% of Mac OS X users speak English primarily. They were all enjoying not having to type dates and times the way the computer wanted. 65% percent of the users were just a little bit more happy with their experience on Mac OS X. And, crucially, the other 35% who didn't speak English had no idea what they were missing. It didn't hurt them at all to not have this functionality, it just didn't help them, either.
--
Life isn't fair, and programming is even less fair. Programming is all about picking a certain class of users with a certain specific class of problems, and making their lives much MUCH better. Like, if I didn't listen to music, I wouldn't care about iTunes. If I didn't take photos of my girlfriends naked, iPhoto would add nothing to my life... but that would be OK by me. iTunes and iPhoto don't have to please everyone in order to be good. They just have to please some people, and should please those people a lot.
We talk a lot about the 80% solution, which can be summarized thusly: Will 80% of your users think this feature / heuristic / bug fix is good? Then do it.
That rule seems obvious, really; the value of this rule is in remembering its obverse: if a feature / heuristic / bug fix is only going to help, say, 20% of your customers, you need to prioritize it lower.
It's easy when programming to get seduced into doing something really super-duper-cool no matter how obscure, but we have to remember our time is finite: spend your time where your users are going to see it. Do a GREAT job on those areas. (Don't do a shitty job on the other areas - skip them entirely.)
--
In Leopard, '-[NSDateFormatter allowNaturalLanguage]' is no longer marked as deprecated – I won that battle. But there's also a new date widget that makes entering dates a much more graphical affair, which democratizes the happiness. Clear graphics trump heuristic input methods – I use the widget now in my programs, unless I'm parsing text files, in which case I use 'allowNaturalLanguage.'
Everyone wins, now.
--
So, we switch to another heuristic, which requires a bit of background:
Amazon recently started requiring that all requests to their product catalog API be digitally signed with the secret password of a registered Amazon associate – one might assume they discovered stealing other people's associate codes is rampant, and they want to crack down on programs and websites that are violating their rules and using their APIs with stolen identities. A reasonable thing.
I rewrote the lookup code for both Delicious Library 1.7 and Delicious Library 2.2 so they will digitally sign requests, so my customers could keep looking up books and DVDs and stuff. (I don't think there are a lot of 1.x users still out there, but even so I didn't want to force them to pay upgrade to 2.x just to keep using my program.)
Now, since I've changed how I look up items, immediately after the release of I asked my support team to immediately prioritize all bugs reporting lookup problems, since you modify some area of code you want to alert your support people to actively look for failures in that particular area, so you can fix them immediately instead of waiting until they become a huge issue.
It turns out there was a tiny issue (searching for a book by title fails if its title has an apostrophe in it - fixed in 2.2.1) but while looking at user's bugs I discovered something more interesting: a number of users were reporting lookup failures because they were typing in ISBNs the way they see them on the boxes, eg: 978-0-316-01876-0, and they were getting no results, because Amazon stores ISBNs without dashes, eg: 97803780316018760.
Hrm. Now, my first response to this problem (a year ago when I'd just finished 2.0 and was exhausted) was, "Dammit, just don't type the damn dashes. Who looks up things manually by ISBN anyways? There's like twenty easier input methods, including dragging URLs in from Amazon or scanning with the iSight or typing the author's name... Geez." There was actually a lot more cussing than that, actually, but luckily I have Terry as a buffer layer between me and the customers, so it comes out as, "I'm sorry, we don't accept dashes in ISBNs or EANs right now..."
But after seeing bug reported again, I realized I'm violating my cardinal rule: I'm making users learn some picky input method that only exists because of Amazon's particular database formatting. And, worse, there's no good way for them to learn this rule unless they write us.
I should mention that there's only one search field: the user can type in numbers, author names, titles, or even keywords, and we just hand that stuff off to Amazon and let it do a fuzzy search.
So, how do we solve the dashes issue? Let's run through the solutions we think of, until we hit the best one.
Possible Solution 1: Document it Add text near the search field: "Omit dashesWhen entering ISBNs or EANS"
Advantages of this method: • It's easy for us to add a field to the NIB. • The user can actually learn from this without having to write us.
Disadvantages: • We're teaching the user something that's not generally useful, instead of learning from her. • There's another damn text box on or page, which is one more graphical thing calling for the user's attention, and we've learned from bitter experience that every widget you add to a window is like killing a kitten. • This field requires localization.
Possible Solution 2: Remove all dashes from input - (IBAction)findMatchingItems:(id)sender;
{
self.keywordsString = [self.keywordsString stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"-"
withString:@""];
[...search...]
}
Advantages of this method: • One line of code, sweet. • User doesn't have to learn anything: ISBNs and EANs can be entered with or without dashes, work either way.
Disadvantages: • User has lost the ability to search for titles where dashes are meaningful. Eg, "The Mythical Man-Month" would be turned into "The Mythical Manmonth," and Amazon may fail to find THAT, now (actually it does in this instance, but let's not rely on THEIR heuristic working in all cases.).
Possible Solution 3: Remove all dashes from input if input is of only digits and dashes - (IBAction)findMatchingItems:(id)sender;
{
NSString *noDashesString = [self.keywordsString
stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"-" withString:@""];
BOOL containsOnlyDigits = YES;
for (NSUInteger characterIndex = 0; characterIndex <
noDashesString.length; characterIndex++) {
containsOnlyDigits &= [[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet]
characterIsMember:[noDashesString characterAtIndex:characterIndex]];
if (!containsOnlyDigits)
break;
}
if (containsOnlyDigits)
self.keywordsString = noDashesString;
[...search...]
}
Advantages of this method: • User doesn't have to learn anything: ISBNs and EANs can be entered with or without dashes, work either way. • User can still search for titles with dashes in them.
Disadvantages: • User has lost the ability to search for titles that are ONLY digits and dashes, for example, if a user were searching for a book about the latestquackdiet, "10-10-10," she'd end up searching for "101010," and maybe not finding it.
Possible Solution 4: Remove all dashes from input if input is of only digits and dashes, and the number of digits is right for EANs or ISBNs - (IBAction)findMatchingItems:(id)sender;
{
NSString * noSpacesOrDashesString = [[self.keywordsString
stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@"-" withString:@""]
stringByReplacingOccurrencesOfString:@" " withString:@""];
BOOL containsOnlyDigits = YES;
BOOL containsOnlyDigits = YES;
for (NSUInteger characterIndex = 0; characterIndex <
noSpacesOrDashesString.length; characterIndex++) {
containsOnlyDigits &= [[NSCharacterSet decimalDigitCharacterSet]
characterIsMember:[noSpacesOrDashesString characterAtIndex:characterIndex]];
if (!containsOnlyDigits)
break;
}
if (containsOnlyDigits) {
switch (noSpacesOrDashesString.length) {
case LIISBNDigitCount: case LIUPCDigitCount: case LIEANDigitCount:
self.keywordsString = noSpacesOrDashesString;
default:
break;
}
}
[...search...]
}
(While I was in there, I decided to remove extra spaces if I pass the tests to remove extra dashes, so users can now also type "978 0 316 01876 0" and that will work, as well. It seemed like it might be as common, and it cost me almost nothing to add.)
Advantages of this method: • User doesn't have to learn anything: ISBNs and EANs can be entered with or without dashes, work either way. • User can still search for titles with dashes in them. • User can still search for titles with only decimal digits and dashes in them, as long as the number of digits doesn't happen to form a valid EAN, UPC, or ISBN.
Disadvantages: • Kind of reveals that I am a crazy person.
--
So, that is the algorithm I went with. Let's evaluate this in terms of our goals for any good heuristic (like the one from NSDateFormatter):--
- It has to help some class of users – it helps users who type the dashes in ISBNs, UPCs, and EANS, and it helps them a lot, because before they had no clues how to proceed when lookups failed.
- It has to not harm other users – it almost never will, because it won't change the input at all unless the user happens to be searching for an author or title that is all numbers and dashes AND has exactly 10, 12, or 13 digits it.
- It shows the user what it's doing, so if the heuristic does fail the user will understand why – in this case, we replace the contents of the text field in which the user just typed her number with our new (dashless) number, and so if she really WERE searching for a book whose title was, say, "1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11," she'd see that was replaced by "1234567891011" when she did the search, and at least have a clue why the search failed.
Heuristics are the key to designing programs that work well with humans, that make humans smile. In college computer science classes, we learn all about b*trees and linked lists and sorting algorithms and a ton of crap that I honestly have never, ever used, in 25 years of professional programming. (Except hash tables. Learn those. You'll use them!)
What I do write – every day, every hour – are heuristics that try to understand and intuit what the user is telling me, without her having to learn my language.
The field of computer interaction is still in its infancy. Computers are too hard to use, they require us to waste our brains learning too many things that aren't REAL knowledge, they're just stupid computer conventions.
It's up to us to fix this.
felissimo’s 500 colored pencil set by social designer
designed by social designer for felissimo this complete set of 500 colored pencils consists
of 20 units, each pencil telling its own story with a unique name. buy the complete set now
or subscribe and receive 4 units every month for 5 months. four different display methods
let you keep your pencils hand, while being displayed either as an artwork,
or kept aside as a special collection. the cases have been designed especially for the
500 colored pencils and are available in a limited edition.
social designer promotes crowdsourced design for good causes.
'orchestra' display of 500 colored pencils
image courtesy of social designer
'orchestra' is a wall-mounted display which allows you to snap and swap pencils, giving you control over how to orchestrate colors on your wall.
the pencils are displayed in groups of 25
image courtesy of social designer
'orchestra' easily allows you to swap and snap pencils into place
image courtesy of social designer
the wall-mounted elements
image courtesy of social designer
the visual impact of 'aurora'
image courtesy of social designer
'aurora' is mostly for display. the 500 pencils become their own piece of artwork,
showcasing the range colors in their entirety.
displayed according to color
image courtesy of social designer
if you do decide to use the pencils, they slide out easily
image courtesy of social designer
the wall-mounted parts
image courtesy of social designer
'color wave' can be moved and curved to create a sculptural display
image courtesy of social designer
your pencils can be arranged in one long 'fence' that can be rolled up or manipulated
to create a wave, with 'color wave'.
all rolled-up
image courtesy of social designer
you can determine how to group the pencils with the individual components
image courtesy of social designer
single piece of 'color wave'
image courtesy of social designer
the 'color wave' parts snap together easily, letting you determine how long you want your wave to be
image courtesy of social designer
August 20, 2009
The Craigslist Penis Effect
Every woman who has used Craigslist knows that it is a veritable jungle of unexpected penises. In other words, if you’ve ever posted a nice, g-rated “women seeking men” post, you will immediately and inexplicably have 50-80 pictures of men’s penises in your inbox.
After this happened to a number of my friends, I started thinking.
Not just about how horrible men are at online dating, but how to use this to my advantage.
Introducing The Craigslist Penis Effect
The Craigslist Penis Effect describes situations where everyone else is so horrible that, by being even half-decent, you can dominate everyone else and win.
These moron men on Craigslist would be better served writing 5 half-decent responses, testing to see which got the best response, and then sending it out instead of a picture of their generally mediocre manhood. I did exactly that for my friend on JDate and ended up getting very good at introducing girls to him. (Jewish women, beware of my Ashkenazi skills.)
Let’s take some examples where everyone else is so terrible that you can dominate by being even somewhat competent.
- Negotiations. Most people are awful negotiators (especially for jobs and especially in America). That’s because nobody teaches us how to negotiate — indeed, we’re actively taught that it’s “weird” and “awkward” to negotiate. By contrast, I find it “weird” to lose $10,000 because you didn’t take 5 hours to practice your negotiating pitch beforehand, like my friend Rachel did. By simply starting a negotiation, you stand out from 80% of other applicants.
- Writing effective emails. Most people send out dozens of emails per day. Yet when was the last time they studied the best emailers to learn techniques to (1) get busy people to respond to them, (2) cut down on back-and-forth emails, and (3) get what they wanted via email? (I’m working on a product with 50 email scripts you can use today. Newsletter subscribers get first crack.)
- Conferences. Most conferences are boring and bad. But so are most conference go-ers, who don’t do their homework beforehand, eat with their co-worker, and miss the prime benefits of networking. (The book Never Eat Alone has a magical chapter on how to be a master networker at conferences.)
- Exercise. Go for a 30-minute run every day and you’ll be in better shape than 90% of adult Americans. Stop debating minutiae about health and get off your ass.
- Holding onto expensive purchases for years (even decades). We love to buy expensive things like houses and cars, then turn around and sell them 5 years later. This is literally one of the most poisonous financial decisions you can make: Not only do you incur huge transaction costs, but you condition yourself to think that buying and selling expensive goods every few years is normal. Instead, if you can use the Tripod of Stability to make major purchases, you can spend that money on things that you love — rather than transaction fees.
- Earning money online. As Erica Douglass recently said, “If you earn $1 online, you’re doing better than 90% of people.”
There are thousands of other examples: Writing winning scholarship applications that secure over $100,000 in funding. Or creating blog posts that drive hundreds of thousands of views. Or simply learning about the basics of social psychology for every day use.
The examples go back to my post about Big Wins, including why trying to save money on lattes is pointless for many people.
As you can see, many Big Wins are actually easily within reach — if you choose the right targets and differentiate yourself from others. While you’ll have a few areas of life where you’ll have to go up against formidable competition, many other areas of life are wide open.
For those, don’t waste your time competing with lame Craigslist penis guys in a race to mediocrity. Instead, think about areas where your competition is mediocre (where everyone is doing the same thing, and doing it poorly) and carefully test multiple strategies to dominate. The Craigslist Penis Effect is a guide to standing out from others when being even half-competent can get you superb results. There are literally thousands of these opportunities.
* * * See me in San Francisco: I’ll be speaking at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco this Monday, 8/24. Considering the background — they frequently host Presidents, military leaders, authors, and scientists — I probably won’t be mentioning the Craigslist Penis Effect. Event details.
Links for 2009-08-20
Rapping Paper
So... it's been a little while since I've posted. I'll have to do some catch-up. There are a bunch of things from Noisy Decent Graphics recently that I wanted to post. First up - create your own 'rapping' paper! Find out more here.
Who Is The NYC Scout Impostor??
I’m speechless…
I wish I could say that this is the new “SCOUTING NY” official website car, but it’s not. It was sent to me today by frequent reader Jack, who noticed it in Williamsburg.
Who is this impostor, and how could he be so insidious as to steal my monicker for his car doors?? And frankly, is this the best we can do for a Scoutmobile? I mean, it’s certainly fuel efficient and bio-friendly, but it’s sort of a far cry from, say, the Batmobile.
As it turns out, New York has its own street monitoring division known as SCOUT, or “Street Condition Observation UniT,” and this is part of its fleet. From the NYC website:
The Street Condition Observation Unit (SCOUT) is comprised of 15 inspectors who report to the Mayor’s Office of Operations. The inspectors are charged with driving every New York City street every month of the year. While surveying city streets, inspectors report visually-identifiable street conditions into a hand-held device that wirelessly transmits the data to the Mayor’s Office.
Well, that’s that. So if you see a NYC Scout car driving around, it’s not me behind the wheel…yet…
-THE REAL NYC SCOUT
test
Shared by Eve
I just felt mad that I couldn't add an image to this share note. SPOILDShared by Eve
because you punched them all and they leftShared by Eve
best ever
Originally posted by (author unknown) from San Francisco Bay Guardian: News and Culture
Originally posted by (author unknown) from randomwalks/dj
Twitalytic Alpha Preview–Archiving, Curating, and Threading Tweets
Been hacking away at a personal programming project, tentatively named Twitalytic, a web application that archives your tweets and mentions and gives you useful data about your friends and followers on Twitter. (Here’s some background on why the heck I’d ever want to archive the ephemeral chatter that is on the Twitter.)
Anyway, after a few months I’ve collected a teensy bit of data, so I wanted to make sharing replies to my lazyweb tweets easier. To that end, today I added a public face to the app. Here’s the Twitalytic public timeline, which lists my most recent tweets and the number of replies each has. Click on the reply total to drill down into the responses to a particular tweet, like my tweet asking what people eat first thing in the morning. (Ha, I made over 200 people Twitter about breakfast!)
That listing is the most basic thing Twitalytic can do. When you set it up and log into the app, you can curate replies and see other views of your data, like your least likely followers, your least and most active friends, your most replied-to tweets and more. For each of your friends or followers, you can see mutual friends, conversations you’ve had, and even what Twitter client that person uses most. If you’re approaching the 3,200 tweet mark, Twitalytic will also back up your tweets and let you export them into a simple text file. Here are some screenshots of the internal, logged-in only views.
List your tweets by most recent, most replied-to, or back-and-forth conversations.
Here’s the conversation view.
File replies as “standalone”–i.e., someone just said something to you out of the blue, or associate mentions with a specific tweet (if the user didn’t use the “reply” button in their Twitter client).
Your “least likely” followers are those who have the largest follower to followee ratio.
See which of your friends are most active and least active.
Click on any tweet’s reply count to view its responses, “likely” reponses that happened around the time of that tweet, and public/republishable replies (those from users’s whose tweets are not protected).
Click on a username to see recent tweets, conversations, mutual friends, and what client that person uses.
I realize there are ten dozen Twitter applications out there that do much of this, and possibly better. Creating yet another Twitter app is probably the most cliché development undertaking of the year, but I’ve had a ball using this little thing to teach myself a few things about the Twitter API, OAuth, and jQuery and brush up on my PHP and MySQL skills.
To use Twitalytic you’ve got to install it on your own server and run the crawler to start gathering your data. As far as I know, only one other brave soul beside me has done this; I don’t recommend it unless you’re well-versed in PHP development and LAMP environments. This is still very alpha stuff–and I haven’t built in any easy way to update an installation either, which means as the code changes, manual re-installation will be required. That said, I welcome PHP hackers to check out the GitHub repository and start tooling with the code. It’s been a very long time since I’ve developed a webapp of this size, and the code is full of
//TODO’s and//Must be a better way to do this’s, too.At some point I’ll set up some sort of dedicated web page and perhaps a mailing list for the app. Until then, post your questions and thoughts here.
Update: Wow, I didn’t ever think this little spare-time data-wanking PHP thing would be TechCrunch-worthy. Thanks for the post, TC!
Who You Gonna Call? Who? [Image Cache]
If Jayzeus appears in your house, you better have a Proton Pack, wand, and trap ready. Or you can invite him for drinks, and He'll multiply your caipirinhas for free, all night long. [The Chive]
I'm safe on board. Pull up the life rope
Having read through some 600 comments about universal health care, I now realize I took the wrong approach in my previous blog entry. I discussed the Obama health plan in political, literal, logical terms. Most of my readers replied in the same vein. The comments, as always, have been helpful, informative and for the most part civil. My mistake was writing from the pragmatic side. I should have followed my heart and gone with a more emotional approach. I believe universal health care is, quite simply, right.
It is a moral imperative. I cannot enjoy health coverage and turn to my neighbor and tell him he doesn't deserve it. A nation is a mutual undertaking. In a democracy, we set out together to do what we believe is good for the commonwealth. That means voluntarily subjecting ourselves to the rule of law, taxation, military service, the guaranteeing of rights to minorities, and so on. That is a cheap price to pay.
As I've read through of those comments (and I've posted all but two I received), one thing jumped from the page at me: The unusually high number of comments from other countries. Canadians were particularly well-represented. Although we're assured by opponents of the Obama legislation that Canada's system of universal care is a failure, all of these Canadians, without exception, reported their enthusiasm for their nation's system. One reader said her mother choose to fly to California to get a knee replacement more quickly, but even she praised the Canadian system.
They said reports of waiting times may be true with semi-elective surgeries, like hip or knee replacement, especially in more populous areas. But they're able to see a physician with a minimal wait in cases of need. They are treated quickly and competently, at very little cost other than personal expenses and the graduated scale of quarterly premium payments. Similar messages came from the UK, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, Holland, Brazil, Argentina, Australia, South Korea, Japan, Greece and Germany. Everyone is pleased.But that, too, is an argument to reason. What so many of these messages also made was an argument to morality. They were astonished that the United State is alone among all developed nations in refusing such coverage to its citizens. A Canadian wrote that it benefits his entire society that its citizens have access to universal care. By making preventative medicine freely available, it lowers the cost of chronic illness. By making early diagnosis possible, it prevents many diseases from reaching a fatal stage. By making mental health care and medication available to those who need it (and who are often unemployable), it avoids the American system where many such people are abandoned to the streets or to the care of their overtaxed families.
Many of my readers opposed the Obama plan, some of them in great detail. I will not try to simplify their arguments; you can read them for yourself. But here, in broad outline, are some of their most common statements, and my responses:¶ It is "socialized medicine." Yes, it is. The entire society shares the cost. It does not replace private medicine. Just as in the UK and Canada, for example, we would remain free to choose our own insurance policies and private physicians. But it is the safety net for everyone.
¶ It is "socialism." Again, yes. The word socialism, however, has lost its usefulness in this debate. It has been tainted, perhaps forever, by the malevolent Sen. Joseph McCarthy, who succeeded somehow in linking it with the godless Commies. America is the only nation in the free world in which "socialism" is generally thought of in negative terms. The only nation in which that word, in and of itself, is thought to bring the discussion to a close.
¶ It is wrong for ideological or philosophical reasons. Readers have written about their belief in Federalism, Free Market Capitalism, strict Constitutionalism, personal liberty, Libertarianism, and so on. To one of these readers I wrote something like: "Do you think your views on federalism will be of much interest to unemployed wage-earners unable to obtain coverage for their families?" To another, I wrote: "I hope your philosophy will be of comfort if you develop a serious illness."
One reader said that the only things the Constitution guarantees us are "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," and Congress should enact no laws about anything else. Actually, it's the Declaration of independence that mentions "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness," but never mind. Some might believe universal health care would be of great assistance in enjoying life and the pursuit of happiness. It is a peculiarity that some of those happiest to cite the Constitution are the least interested in its Bill of Rights.¶ Good health is a responsibility of the individual, not the state. One reader wrote that he doesn't smoke, drinks in moderation, watches his diet, and exercises regularly. I applaud him. Statistically, this promises him an extended life span. I have never smoked, haven't had a drink in 30 years, and walked an average of 10,000 steps a day for the five years before I underwent my first cancer surgery. A doctor once told me: "If you never get any other disease, sooner or later you will die of cancer."
My reader says he neither has nor desires insurance coverage. He will bank his premiums in a savings account dedicated to his own health care, instead of spending them on the care of anyone else. He must have no idea what it costs to have a serious illness in this country. It will take a lot of savings. I've been assured by some readers, however, that I'm a rich man and have no financial worries.
A guy gets run over by a bus.
Another guy runs over and says, "Oh my God! Are you comfortable?"First guy: "I make a living."
True enough, I've earned some nice money in my life--all by paycheck, which is no way to get really rich. Also, I had group health insurance plans through my unions at both jobs. They were good plans. But during the course four major surgeries--no, make that five--I maxed out one, and so much for that policy. I'm approaching the cap on the second. Most policies aren't unlimited, you know. Luckily, I now qualify for Medicare.
¶ Federal Death panels would decide who lives or dies. This, very frankly, is a lie. The nearest thing we have to a death panel in the United States is an insurance company claims adjuster. Some readers wrote that they or their loved ones were denied tests or treatment by their insurance companies, especially in the case of "pre-existing conditions." One, who had a brain tumor, says he was denied coverage of the treatment by an adjuster, as if he'd known about the tumor at the time he took out his policy some time earlier. Think about this. Unless we die violently or in an accident, we all die of a pre-existing condition. The condition is called "life."
The Obama plan, in simplified terms, would make Medicare available to everyone. Yes, even the senior citizen at that Arizona town hall meeting who screamed at his congressman: "Keep the government's hands off my Medicare!" He didn't know Medicare is a federal program, and he didn't want to know.
When I wrote my original entry, I thought there were 40 million uninsured Americans. I'm informed the number is around 47 million. Some readers have informed me: "That number is inflated!" What would be an acceptable number? Thirty million? Twenty million? How many uninsured Americans are you comfortable with?
It seems to me that universal health care is a win-win proposition. It provides an umbrella of protection for those who cannot afford or qualify for health insurance. This helps us all. Every time you learn from the news about our latest jobless statistics, consider this: A newly jobless person who was insured through an employee health plan is about to become a newly uninsured person. It's for our mutual good that we live in a healthier society. To provide universal coverage is the moral thing to do.¶ I was informed that my entry was "typical liberalism." This is correct. I am a liberal. If you are a conservative, this appears to be a difference between us: I think you should have guaranteed health insurance.
¶
Matthew 25: 31-46
31 When the Son of man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, then he will sit on his glorious throne.32 Before him will be gathered all the nations, and he will separate them one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats,
33 and he will place the sheep at his right hand, but the goats at the left.
34 Then the King will say to those at his right hand, "Come, O blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world;
35 for I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me,
36 I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me."
37 Then the righteous will answer him, "Lord, when did we see thee hungry and feed thee, or thirsty and give thee drink?
38 And when did we see thee a stranger and welcome thee, or naked and clothe thee?
39 And when did we see thee sick or in prison and visit thee?"
40 And the King will answer them, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me."
41 Then he will say to those at his left hand, "Depart from me, you cursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels;
42 for I was hungry and you gave me no food, I was thirsty and you gave me no drink,
43 I was a stranger and you did not welcome me, naked and you did not clothe me, sick and in prison and you did not visit me."
44 Then they also will answer, "Lord, when did we see thee hungry or thirsty or a stranger or naked or sick or in prison, and did not minister to thee?"
45 Then he will answer them, "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."
46 And they will go away into eternal punishment, but the righteous into eternal life.
¶
"Whatever you do for the least of these..."¶
i am sad about this, too
From Sasha Frere-Jones at the New Yorker, on the sentiment analysis of tweets re. the death of the Michael Jackson.
It is reassuring that people are using “sad” correctly, though the paper reveals a less felicitous trend: thousands of people think that Michael is spelled “Micheal.” A study reveals that my degree of sadness surrounding this misspelling is 98.9%. (This was a double-blind study using an n of 1.)In my own personal experience, I've discovered that many many people spell Michael "S-I-P-P-E-Y", which is weird.
Peter Davis' Status Update: Pink Power
Get ready to bookmark the NYC edition of PinkMemo.com, which E!'s chic and sexy The Daily Ten correspondent Katrina Szish is now re-vamping as the site's new Editor in Chief. "If it's fashionable, fabulous and worth knowing about, you'll find it in PinkMemo New York," Szish promises me. "PinkMemo is a virtual playground filled with all things luxe; even better, subscribers receive free weekly memos with style news, exclusive invitations and shopping perks." Szish has already tapped Schooled author Anisha Lakhani to cover the Manhattan social swirl. The Szish-ified NYC PinkMemo launches officially this September.
Jay-Z featuring Rihanna & Kanye West “Run This Town”
After letting Jigga’s A-list-assisted “Run This Town” marinate in our brains for nearly a month now, and after finally seeing the entirety of it’s long-teased, “What in the ‘California Love’/ ‘We Don’t Need Another Hero’ Hell?”-themed accompanying video clip, we have now decided to officially stick with our initial reaction of the record: It’s…just…okay.
Since busting out of his retirement all those years ago, Jay has built a steadily growing catalogue of records (both as lead and as guest star) that puff up a lot of hype simply via his attached name, but just as soon fail to merit much long-lasting appeal beyond their highly-anticipated release. We should have gotten used to this anti-climactic routine long ago, but what can we say, he’s arguably the G (Living Emcee). O. A. T. and we long to hear him justify that honor over and over.
More so than a lot of other material in recent memory though, high hopes had fallen on “Run This Town” (who could deny that exciting title, or the sheer collective weight of the top-of-the-game artists upon it?), so it’s only more of a shame that, in the end, it lands as just another meh notch in Jay’s increasingly dissapointing belt.
Atop producers Kanye and No I.D.’s dramatically buzzing electric guitar sting and heavy-thudding drum march rumble, Jay and Ri-Ri commit performances that remain boringly on par with their previously well-established artistic angles. His raps are admittedly slick but carrying little “hip hop head” value, offering more eye-roll-inducing references to his bulging bank account and knowledge of high fashion folk; she continues to be the fiercest dead-eyed yodeller around in a chorus that feels twice as long with all of it’s non-catchy, street-anthem self-seriousness.
Kanye is the only one to really make this cut worthwhile, which comes as no surprise given the fact that well…he’s Kanye, and that he’s proven to be good at making these joyless, un-dance-able hip hop arrangements crackle like any other major Hot 97 banger in the past (remember “Diamonds From Sierra Leone”?). His ending verse overflows with the wit and imagination severely lacking everywhere else here, from the opening “Joe Blow/ no homo” couplet on down, which, in our heads, brings about many burning questions, like:
A) Wouldn’t it have been smarter if his verse have been placed second, to help keep cats from switching this one off early, as we assume most have by now since “Town” began infiltrating radio?
B) After hearing West’s portion, didn’t Jay feel a need to upgrade his own parts?
C) Why couldn’t Kanye have just kept this one for himself, given us an added entertaining verse and just reduced Jigga’s role to a single sixteen?
Like everyone else, we’ll still be first in line (or, more likely in 2009, on-line) to cop The Blueprint 3 when it arrives (besides, we can’t miss that Drake feature!!!), but, and we SWEAR by this, if this ends up another “one-listen-than-quit-and-wait-for-all-the-other-rappers-to-rock-it’s-instrumentals-right” affair, we’ll have to…have to…hell, sit around and wait for the next Jay-Z project to drop so we can get all overly excited all over again. Damn you Jay!!!
Pre-order Blueprint 3 here.
"Eliminating web offerings would save precious dollars now being spent on a product that does little..."
“Eliminating web offerings would save precious dollars now being spent on a product that does little more than undercut the printed paper.”
-Paul Farhi of the Washington Post, American Journalism Review (via soupsoup) (via mikehudack)
The thing is, he’s right and obviously so. Digital has done nothing to staunch the demise of newspapers like WaPo (NYT the verdict is still out), but it has cost them a lot of money. Pulling the plug, stopping all reinvestment and disbursing cash to shareholders is the proper strategy for these companies. But management ego and paid-up consultants who preach digital-digital-digital make that impossible.
(via josephweisenthal)
I disagree. If you’re not making the money you’re spending back off your digital assets at a decent ROI, UR DOIN IT WRONG. Failure to monetize your specific web assets is not a failure of digital media. It’s your failure to monetize your web assets. Because plenty of people do.
Update: See also: Peter Feld, re: the (mostly) myth of cannibalization.
About Last Night... The September Issue Premiere at MoMA
Billed as one of the most exclusive fashion events of the year with a veritable who's who of ''chicsters'' to attend, the premiere of the Vogue documentary The September Issue was held last night at the MoMA. While New York was still busy cleaning up the ''war zone'' of downed trees in Central Park from the storm on Tuesday, Wednesday was all about summery frills and florals and cheery colored frocks. When "the" limo pulled up, Bee Shaffer, Anna Wintour's lovely daughter, was the first to step out, and knowingly posed perfectly for a few seconds before moving on in careful choreography NOT to spoil the thunder that belonged to MOM! That took place when Sienna Miller arrived simultaneously with Anna. Responding to the screams of adoring papparazzi and gathered fans, Sienna flitted about, posing with Anna amid many a request to pose alone. Her fear was visible. P. Diddy arrived in a Lamborghini, and even paused to pose sitting provocatively on its hood. His rumored squeeze Cassie arrived separately with a partially shaved head reminiscent and looking like of Annabelle Lwin, the lead singer of Bow Wow Wow (that's a good thing!).
Migraine Typing
I type pretty well, and I sometimes get migraine headaches. They seem unrelated, but they weren't a few weeks ago when I had a neurological event I'd never experienced before. I've been thinking about it a lot since then, and since I'm a fan of science writing about neurology, I thought I'd make a contribution to the genre. But I'm not a scientist, so it's more of a personal anecdote than a science essay. This case study is more case than study.
I can go for years without a migraine, and then get one out of the blue. Sometimes I get a cluster of migraines spread out over a few weeks, and then nothing for several years. I have yet to figure out what triggers my migraines. None of the common triggers -- caffeine, stress, cheese, etc -- seem to affect me. When the headaches come, they last about 6 to 8 hours. From what I hear about other migraine sufferers, I'm lucky they only last that long.
My migraines are almost always preceded by about 30 minutes of visual phenomena that neurologists call "auras." I've never liked the word because saying that I see auras is too loaded with supernatural suggestions. But I know it's the accepted medical term, so I've taken to using it.
Auras are not atypical for migraine sufferers. In fact, migraines with auras are referred to as "classic" migraines. For me, an aura usually starts out as a tiny shimmering spot in the center of my vision. It looks a bit like the after-image you see when someone takes a flash photo of you. Instead of fading like the after-image from a flash would, the spot slowly grows. As it gets bigger, I can see that it has details: it is a colorful shimmering crescent wrapped around a white circle. Gradually, over the course of 20 minutes or so, it grows until the white center fills my entire field of vision. I'm temporarily blind. And then, over the next few minutes it slowly fades away until my vision is back to normal.
I try to consider these auras as early warning systems. If I take medicine as soon as they begin (in my case Excedrin Migraine can do the trick) the headache might be mild or even abort altogether. But if it doesn't work, then awful pain and sensory hyper-sensitivity kick in for the next 6 to 8 hours.
Before the particular migraine episode that this story is about, I don't think I'd had a migraine in about five years. Sometimes I would accidentally glance at a bright light and confuse the after-image for the beginning of a migraine, but happily those incidents all turned out to be false alarms. So I certainly wasn't expecting a migraine on this particular morning when I was sitting in the living room typing a business e-mail on the laptop computer.
I've been touch typing for the past 20 years in a manner that would please Mavis Beacon, with my fingers resting on the home row and my eyes on the screen. I don't think about what my fingers are doing. They move quickly across the keys on their own, tapping out words like it's second nature as I merely think about what I want to write. When I mistype something, I can feel it in my fingers before I notice it on screen, and sometimes I instinctively backspace to correct it before I even realize I've made the mistake.
On the morning in question, I was a few words into a sentence several paragraphs into the email when I realized that nothing I intended to type in that sentence actually made it to the screen. Instead there was just a stream of gibberish. Sometimes this can happen when my fingers accidentally start out in the wrong position; I might type a few words before realizing that my fingers are positioned one key to the right. So I erased the sentence, repositioned my fingers, and started over.
Again, my fingers were typing nonsense. Could I have made the same mistake twice? No, I was definitely starting out in the correct position. I watched my fingers move as I typed. Nothing looked wrong. The sensation was just as familiar as any other time I typed. My fingers moved with the same confidence, as though they knew exactly where they were going to reach the letters they needed to hit. And yet: gibberish on the screen.
I concentrated on typing just one word correctly. Nope. Gibberish.
In the space of a few seconds, I wondered several things. It seemed to me that something neurological was happening. Was it a stroke? I began to see the beginning of a visual aura, and concluded with relief that a migraine was affecting my typing. But I'd never had any early warning other than the visual auras before. Why was I having this now? Is it possible that I would have experienced this if I had been typing during the onset of previous migraines, or was this migraine just manifesting itself differently?
If my fingers were just typing gibberish, how did they know what particular gibberish to type? For example, why did my left middle finger, which only types the letters e, d, and c, know that it was its turn to type the wrong letter instead of another finger's turn? Were the correct signals still being sent, but to the wrong finger? In retrospect I wonder, if I had kept the gibberish instead of erasing it, would it turn out to be a simple substitution cipher for whatever I meant to type, or was it truly complete gibberish?
The famous neurologist Oliver Sacks, himself a migraineur, wrote a book called Migraine
in which he describes a variety of interesting symptoms of migraine sufferers. It's not unheard of for some people to experience language disorders during their auras, a condition known as aphasia.. They may be unable to speak even though they understand people clearly. Or they may have trouble understanding what people are saying, as though they are hearing a foreign language. I wonder if this extends to written language. Is it possible that I was actually typing correctly all along, but the words were simply unrecognizable to my brain?
I had planned on writing about this last week, but I didn't get a chance. Life intervened in the form of another neurological event totally new to me and with which I'm now equally fascinated: amnesia. On Tuesday afternoon, I was lying on the couch in my living room, surfing the web with my iPhone. That's the last memory I have before waking up in the bathtub, dry and clothed, with my glasses broken and my head bleeding, and no idea how I got there.
Don't worry. I'm fine now. But that's a story for another time.
Further reading:
• An article by Oliver Sacks about migraine auras in the New York Times.
• A slideshow of migraine art that accompanied the article.
• migraine-aura.org's web page about migraine aphasia.
• The Daily Headache, the blog of a migraine sufferer who has headaches much worse than I do, and links to other migraineurs who blog about their symptoms.
The importance of first aid
A little over half an hour ago, I was walking home down Seventh Avenue after doing some errands. As I neared the supermarket, I saw a small crowd gathered around what appeared to be a person lying face down on the sidewalk in a pool of blood. I stopped and asked if I could help out. Someone was on the phone to 911, another told me the elderly woman had just tripped on the sidewalk and fallen face first down to the ground. I told her I was certified in first aid and asked if I could assist her. I sent someone into the supermarket for a first aid kid. I asked her name, her age, her address. She didn't want help, she said, she wanted to walk home. She said she was fine.
But she wasn't. Emily was 81 and she was alone. She was bleeding all over the place, but from where? A cut on her head? Her nose? I asked her to stay with me and we talked about her routine of getting groceries, about what she'd bought. Anytime she realized we were waiting for the ambulance, she tried to get up and said she just wanted to go home. So I asked her to sit with me and tell me about her weekend, and how she was managing in the hot weather. People brought out ice packs from the gym, water and paper towels from the market. I'd put on the gloves from the first aid kit, and cleaned her up a bit, but mostly I just talked to her and held her hand.
Two doctors happened by which made her nervous again. They tried to check her out a bit and we got her sitting up and then moved to a bench, only because she kept trying to stand on her own. We really wanted her to stay where she was. Finally after ten minutes the ambulance arrived (outrageous really, as St. Vincent's is only two blocks north!) and I was able to talk to the EMTs and they took over. I picked up my bags and walked home, hoping that Emily would accept their help, wondering if I should have stayed to take her home.
It's kind of crazy, I was certified in first aid and CPR for years back in the eighties and early nineties and never used it once. I got re-certified a little over a month ago and it sounds weird to say, but I'm happy I was able to use it. I'm happy I was able to arrive in the crowd and know what to do. Walking home, I realized being certified isn't necessarily about providing the aid. I didn't stop the bleeding, though it subsided on its own. I didn't try to examine her. This was in part because she refused my help initially but also because I knew the ambulance would be along soon. Mostly it was about providing comfort to someone in a difficult situation, helping them feel ok, and letting them know they weren't alone. The certification gave me the confidence to do that: to kneel on the sidewalk, holding an old woman's hand, and to help make those scary few minutes hopefully just a little bit better.
If you're not certified in first aid, I can't recommend it strongly enough. It takes four hours of your time at your local Red Cross and with what you'll learn, maybe you'll be able to assist someone like Emily one day.
Spike Lee Plans Brooklyn Block Party For Michael Jackson’s...
Spike Lee Plans Brooklyn Block Party For Michael Jackson’s Birthday
Fort Greene Park, 8/29.
Creative Wine Labels
When I think of a wine label, I imagine an illustration of a French château with cursive lettering. Nothing wrong with that sort of label, of course—but it's not that interesting. Weburbanist shows the versatility of wine labels with their feature of 61 creative wine labels, from traditional to typography-centric to pop art. I'm a fan of the stylish Shefa Wine label made by Nine99 Design.
Related
Mad Manatee Beer from Bold City Brewery
Cartons' Chemical Properties May Actually Improve Wine
Don't Want a Whole Bottle of Wine? Try a Can
Read: Mets Fans are Sabotaging Themselves
In an interesting column for the New York Post, Mike Vaccaro explains why Mets fans may be sabotaging themselves by delivering such strong attendance numbers this season in Citi Field.
In short, Vaccaro says, “As long as you come, even if it’s more for Shake Shack than Sheff, you run the risk of all of this being misinterpreted.”
…it’s an interesting take… i will say this, i hope ownership does not misinterpret the attendance to mean acceptance for mediocrity… because, the reality is, Citi Field, right now, is a novelty… every new stadium seems to go through this phase, just as Toronto, Baltimore, San Diego and Cleveland, among others – all of whom did not have to compete for tickets with the Yankees…
…if the Mets keep losing, and collapsing, even the best chicken tacos will not be enough to sustain serious attendance… eventually, as always, it will need to be about winning…
For more on the ‘Million Dollar Question,’ read NY Baseball Digest.
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Dance, Pete Campbell, dance!
I could watch Pete Campbell dance all the day long. Pitch perfect acting by Vincent Kartheiser. (via this recording)
Tags: Mad Men TV Vincent Kartheiser
How Race Is Lived In America
So last night I was meeting a couple of friends for drinks in Brooklyn, which is always a dicey situation because I have no idea where the hell anything is in that borough and am reliant on cab drivers or bad directions from the subway to get to my destination. (Those of you from out of town should know that Brooklyn is laid out completely illogically, with bizarre and unpronounceable road names rather than an orderly set of numbered streets and avenues. There is also, excepting for a couple of bridges and a place that is famous for cheesecake, a distinct lack of local landmarks by which one might orient oneself.) Because of the sweltering heat and a recent bounty that fell into my lap via the good offices of the New York State Lottery Commission, Scratch-Off Card division, I felt both sweaty and flush enough to take a taxi. This was my first mistake.
As I’ve said, I have no clue about where things are in Brooklyn, but it soon became clear that my driver was even more clueless. Once we reached a point where even I knew that we had completely overshot my destination, I told him to let me off on the corner, tipped him more than charitably considering his ineptitude, and ventured out into the darkness of Kings County.
Undaunted, I wandered through the streets, seeking the aid of anyone who might help me reach my meeting place. Normally I’m disinclined to ask for directions, but I am from New York, and there was no way I was going to let Brooklyn defeat me. I came upon an African-American woman in her late forties who was walking a large dog. With a big, friendly smile on my face, I inquired if she might help point me toward where I needed to go. She did not respond. I politely repeated myself.
“Don’t approach me and don’t address me,” she said. “You’re not welcome in this neighborhood.”
I was a little stunned, but I did my best to be understanding. Perhaps I was out of place. I mean, I guess if that were where I lived and I saw some fat, sweaty WOP walking around aimlessly, I might suspect that he was looking for drugs or something.
Which was an ironic supposition on my part, because not two seconds later, I saw a gentleman who was actually selling them. He passed a glassine envelope through the window of a car and was handed a large stack of bills. I waited the appropriate amount of time after the transaction had been completed and asked if he could direct me.
“I don’t know this part of town at all,” he said. “That motherfucker over there,” he said, indicating the motherfucker in question by pointing to an SUV idling on the corner, “is supposed to be the one who knows where we are, but he doesn’t know anything.”
I commiserated on the difficulties of being disoriented in an unfamiliar part of the city and moved along. I finally came upon some sort of manufacturing establishment and asked the gentleman sitting outside on an overturned milk crate if he knew where the location I was already late in arriving to might be. He indicated the he did not habla, but beckoned to a co-worker who was right inside. This fellow was indeed familiar with the neighborhood, and gave me some rather helpful guidance.
“You want to go down four blocks and over three. But go down the four first. You go over three you’re gonna go through the projects. White boy like you? They’d eat you alive.”
I thanked him and did as he said, but the whole experience rankled and still does. (And God knows I am never going back to Cobble Hill again.) Now, look, I understand that no matter what some wish to believe we still have not reached any sort of racial harmony in this country. I am very familiar with the troubling issues of gentrification and class stratification that plague the city and play out on both municipal and personal levels each day. I could not be more sympathetic about these issues. But here’s the thing: I’m Alex Balk. Not only did I vote for Barack Obama, I wrote very compelling blog posts on several different websites encouraging others to do so as well. I read both of Ralph Wiley’s collections of essays on race, even though the second one felt kind of phoned in. I sided with Henry Louis Gates over that white cop! Seriously, black people, what else does a guy gotta do to get over with you all? The problem of the 21st Century, thus far, has been the problem of the color line, specifically as it relates to Alex Balk not being able to get directions from black folks. And until we solve that problem, I don’t think any of us can honestly say that the promises made by Abraham Lincoln have been kept or that the dreams of our great civil rights leaders have gone undeferred. I think we all need to work a little more closely for the hope and change for which we’ve been waiting so long. Thank you.
Report: Cloud services can't handle the pressure
Commercial cloud providers have a lot of work to do in order to make their service robust and reliable, according to a new research report.
Rentrée
Home, at last, in Brussels after one of those epic family car journeys featuring at least four service station stops of increasing weirdness and desperate purchases. This trip has a slightly odd finality to it that makes it easier to endure (apart from the bit where I have to drive, and find myself lurching around a packed M25 whimpering feebly) but leaves a dead weight in my chest that only shifts when I'm allowed to put The Strokes on at a million decibels.
On arrival, the weepette greets us with the slightly awkward, bland bonhomie you adopt when someone comes up to you in the street and greets you by name and you have NO IDEA who they are. The CFO's parents, confused by memories of their own, long-deceased dog, have been calling him 'Tom', which has only deepened his perplexity. Poor weepette. Soon all that is visible of it is a small patch of sunburnt nose, as Lashes envelops it in an expansive, bone crushing hug and Fingers sits on its back, poking its ears affectionately. Ha, I bet you remember THAT don't you, you bony twerp?
It's not exactly exciting to be back in Brussels - I can't say my pulse races when I see the giant cooling tower that signals our exit from the E40 - but it is a very gentle landing. Damien the corner shop groper waves hello as he pokes the green, sprouting potatoes to the bottom of the display and the hairdresser has his summer window display of raffia plate holders and parasols out. The mouldy pair of cats that sit on our front windowsill are in residence and the parc du caca is as insalubrious as ever.
Back on the Corridor of Ennui today, all the blinds are down and a desultory fan is making the piles of yellowing directives quiver. There is a thick layer of dust over everything but the chocolate plate, which has been dilgently emptied in my absence. I rescue our new assistant from under a pile of documents called things like "Questions and answers on the invitation to tender: 'State aid assessment of valuations of impaired assets and of asset relief measures'" and "Italian digital cinema tax credit consultation" and dust her down apologetically, removing several medium sized spiders from her hair.
"Has it been really REALLY awful?" I ask anxiously. She just laughs, dustily. I run away and spend a couple of hours pursuing a sold out dress I quite like the look of but neither need nor can afford purely for the thrill of the chase.
After that, the day falls into one of those worm holes in the fabric of space and time that the Corridor of Ennui specialises in and when I regain consciousness it's 2pm. I have no idea what I have done thus far and I have no idea what I will do with the rest of the day. The holidays are definitely over. Shackass.
Scuba Diving Beneath Hagia Sophia
[Image: Inside Hagia Sophia; via].
While scuba diving beneath Hagia Sophia, an exploratory team led by filmmaker Goksel Gülensoy has "managed to reach areas that until now, no one had ever managed to reach," down there in the flooded basins 1000 feet beneath Istanbul's ancient religious structure. In the process, they have discovered 800-year old submerged graves containing the remains of "canonized children."
This was part of a larger, underwater archaeo-spatial survey:The divers and specialists explored the connection of the basins underneath Aghia Sophia with the aqueduct and the palace of Top Kapi. In addition they attempted to locate the secret tunnels from Tekfour Palace to the Islands.
Those "secret tunnels" are presumably the rumored subterranean extensions of the Anemas Dungeons – but who knows.
Either way, I have long been fascinated by the idea of scuba diving beneath – if not actually through – architectural structures, so I am definitely looking forward to watching Gülensoy's forthcoming documentary about these discoveries. That film, appropriately enough entitled In the Depths of Hagia Sophia, will begin screening at film festivals this autumn.
"I believe what is beneath Hagia Sophia is much more exciting than what is above the surface," Gülensoy explained to the Hürriyet Daily News and Economic Review. There, we read about the flooded basins in more detail:Years ago, Erdem Yücer, one of the former directors of the museum, had shown Gülensoy a photograph that was taken of the foundations of Hagia Sophia. The photo showed researchers in a boat in a place filled with water, resembling the Yerebatan Cisterns. Seismic research had also demonstrated that the area underneath the big hall was empty. The team, which had previously lowered a camera down from the second door during the first exploration, was thrilled to see two passages extending to the center of the building and to the exit door – passages that might extend to Yerebatan and Topkapi.
For somewhat obvious reasons, I'm reminded of the "huge underground lake" discovered underneath Budapest late last year. "Budapest is built above a maze of unexplored underground caves," The Sun reported at the time.
In any case, the Hürriyet article includes short descriptions of the actual tunnels beneath Hagia Sophia, and it mentions plans for these otherwise archaeologically unknown spaces to be scanned for later study. This latter detail reminds me of the Bill Stone video that I linked a few days back.
(With thanks to John Maas! Vaguely related: recreational fishing in the basements of Manhattan).
DataSF.org and SF Crimespotting: San Francisco City Opening its Data
DataSF [datasf.org] is an online repository of datasets available from the City & County of San Francisco. Similar to the goals of the data.gov and USASpending.gov initiatives, DataSF aims to improve access to data, help the community create innovative apps, understand what datasets the public likes to see, and receive feedback on the quality of the data. Included data ranges from all the trees located in the San Francisco streets (planting date, species, and location) to all its building permits or complaints.Almost simultaneously, Stamen launched San Francisco CrimeSpotting [sanfrancisco.crimespotting.org]. Using the same engine that still drives the ground-breaking Oakland Crimespotting project, it shows an interactive map of all reported crimes in San Francisco. The icons are deliberately kept minimal to avoid visual cluttering, while hovering the mouse over a particular icon will highlight similar crimes on the map. All map views as well as individual crime reports have unique URLs, and thus can be easily bookmarked. A small interface in the left corner allows users to filter for date and time of day ranges. Some data variables seem still to be missing (or maybe San Francisco is indeed safe from prostitution, murder, alcohol and "disturbing the peace" offenses?)
Those interested in the geomapping of crimes should not miss Every Block (recently acquired by MSNBC.com) or the Los Angeles alternative, LAPD Crime Maps [lapdcrimemaps.org]. It might be the limited date range, but somehow LA "looks" more secure. Do you agree?
Via Boing Boing.
August 19, 2009
I was a sixth grade communist
A cute story about my 6th grade class.
My girlfriend in sixth grade, Gail Schneider, who I still see from time to time, will tell you that I haven't changed in the 42 years since I was a 12-year-old boy growing up in Queens. I always thought it's funny how women, even when they are little girls, think they can peer into your soul and see the real you, but in this case I think Gail is right. (BTW, that might be a picture of Gail, a few years later, at Woodstock.)
My mother accumulates things, it's her curse. She wishes she traveled lighter, in the George Carlin sense, with less baggage. She keeps shedding stuff, but then a relative dies and she ends up with another closet full of stuff that's too precious to throw out. Anyway, she had been holding on to my sixth grade autograph book, and gave it to me on my last trip to NY, and I've been reading it. This one was worth keeping!
Some observations. Well, men never know what women are thinking. There were a couple of girls who had a crush on me, all the girls knew it, but I was clueless at the time. The trail is right there in the book.
And (finally I get to the point) along with a couple of friends, Clifford Hable and John Monterisi, I was part of a club of sixth grade communists. Of course we weren't really communists, we were just kids, but we read the news and knew the adults were freaked out by the commies, and we thought they were silly (don't all 12-year-olds think adults are silly). So we had a club, and in that club we were communists. That's all over the autograph book too. Hammers and sickles, comrade this and comrade that. It still makes me laugh how we adopted the symbolism and language of our most feared enemy.
I wrote to the Chinese mission to the UN asking for literature about their country, and boy did they send stuff. Color magazines and posters mostly in English, a copy of Mao's Little Red Book, a huge wall-size poster of Chairman Mao. I loved reading the stuff the way I loved District 9. It was science fiction, but it also bore some semblance to reality. It was forbidden and terrorized the adults. I liked it!
So today when a Republican Twitterer from the Deep South called me a commisar and said I should communicate with the Kremlin and said dasvidaniya, I smiled, and almost thanked him. As if it were Clifford or John, complimenting me on some daring or noble revolutionary act in defiance of Mrs. Dori, our sixth grade teacher.
On reflection, I realized this is the new Republican macho. Call anyone who criticizes a Republican a Nazi or a Commie. Can't call me a Nazi (I have relatives who died in Hitler's camps) so go for commie. Except the Cold War has been over for almost 20 years. It's really sad that it has come to this.
BTW, another woman who could peer into my soul was Mrs. Dori, who was one of my two favorite teachers. She wrote in my autograph book: "To David, a boy who really cares." I don't know if she wrote that for everyone, maybe she did. But in my case, it was true.
Main Street USA on Roosevelt Island
Did you ever play with the Fisher Price Little People when you were a kid? Or Lego village sets? Did you ever notice how every store was simply named for its purpose, and there was zero competition? For example, the market was called “Market,” the barber shop was called “Barber Shop,” and the pet store was called “Pet Store”? Apparently, Roosevelt Island is modeled after this revolutionary idea!
Though Roosevelt Island has its share of interesting sights, its Main Street has to be one of the most depressing places in New York City. Lined with ugly, box-shaped brown buildings that block out the sun, it seems to exist in perpetual darkness.
Main Street is the commercial district for the island, and consists of about ten or fifteen shops, all of which seem to be named like the Fisher Price Main Street. Want your nails done? Go to “Nail Salon” at #570!
Looking to brighten your girlfriend’s day? Perhaps a trip to the “Flower Shop” is in order!
Of course, it’s nice to get a discount once in a while, and for that you need go no farther than “The Thrift Store.”
Need a new hammer? Looking to rent that silly mall cop movie that recently came out? You’re in luck - on Roosevelt Island, you can do both at the same establishment.
Sure, most churches are named after a particular saint or martyr…but not on Roosevelt Island!
Finally, when you need to send your children to school…well, you get the idea.
The most creatively named place is the “Cards ‘n’ Gifts” shop across the street, the quirky yet satisfying reduction of the word “and” to a single letter suggesting a level of creativity far superior to that of their neighbors:
And lest you think these are ancient holdovers from a bygone era, I happened upon an island sign putter-upper hanging a brand new “Senior Citizens Center” sign.
I’m being a bit facetious - some of these stores sort of have actual names hidden in the shadows of Main Street’s alleyways. But I get the sense that, with such little space available, perhaps the island designated each storefront for a particular purpose, and regardless of the current tenant, say, #570 will always be “Nail Salon.” Ha, I always liked the idea of the perfect archetypal Lego Main Street, but now I’m not so sure…
-SCOUT
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Leftovers: The Day's Stray Links
- What Would Brian Boitano Wear? Sadly, it won't be the red sequined skating outfit on his new cooking show. [WSJ]
- Greek Yogurt Obsessed: 14 things to do with it. [Epi-Log]
- Pixilated Bacon: Virtual cooking is huge on Facebook. [LAT]
- Cheap Vino: If you won't drink it, would you still cook with it? [CST]
- Beyond Sniffing Lavender: It's great in tea cakes and tarts too. [NPR]
- Victory Quack! Heston Blumenthal's Fat Duck restaurant earned a perfect ten in the new Good Food Guide 2010. [Independent]
Use Memcache?
Upgrade to the 1.4.0 server and, if you’re PHP-based, the 3.x PECL module.
The server is much faster (I didn’t think that was possible), and the consistent hashing support in the PECL client’s new
MemcachePoolclass makes server-pool management very easy. The biggest gain from consistent hashing is that you can add or remove servers from the pool without invalidating all of your existing keys — the more cache servers you have, the more important this becomes.Oh, and if you want to test it with a bunch of servers without buying them, there’s a convenient Amazon EC2 system image with 1.4.0.
Encylopedia of Tie Knots
The definitive catalogue of tie knots including knots of note and a comprehensive list of knots.
Tarantino's dialogue
Matt Zoller Seitz has put together a selection of scenes from Quentin Tarantino's movies to illustrate what Seitz calls "the filmmaker's Socrates-in-a-dive-bar mindset" with regard to dialogue.
Tags: Matt Zoller Seitz movies Quentin TarantinoTarantino doesn't just explore language's capacity to reveal and conceal motives and personality, he shows how people pick words and phrases (consciously or subconsciously) in order to define themselves and others, and describe the reality they inhabit (or would like to inhabit). Even low-key and seemingly unimportant exchanges are as carefully choreographed as boxing matches. Clever flurries of interrogatory jabs are often blocked by witty responses; the course of conflict can be shifted by deft rhetorical footwork that re-frames the terms of debate.
I'm quite taken with this image
I'm quite taken with this image, we've all been places where the best image we can capture is quite useless for conveying the essence of the situation. Well done Mr Surtees.
Ricky Jay
Can you resist reading an article that starts off with an anecdote this interesting? I couldn't.
The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:
Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.
"Three of clubs," Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.
He turned over the three of clubs.
Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, "Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card."
After an interval of silence, Jay said, "That's interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time."
Mosher persisted: "Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card."
Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, "This is a distinct change of procedure." A longer pause. "All right-what was the card?"
"Two of spades."
Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.
The deuce of spades.
A small riot ensued.
That's from a 1993 profile of Ricky Jay, who is probably more well known now for his acting (Magnolia, Boogie Nights, Deadwood, The Spanish Prisoner, The Prestige) than his magic scholarship. Check out a couple of Jay's tricks on YouTube: Four Queens and Sword of Vengence. (via df)
Tags: magic movies Ricky Jay
A Big Hmmm
Not sure quite what to make of this. Steve Clemons points out that Israel's Deputy Prime Minister appears to be twittering about possibly being left in the dark about a settlement freeze Netanyahu and Mitchell are negotiating. It's not a 'verified' Twitter account. So I'm a touch skeptical. But Steve knows folks in these circles pretty well. So worth a look.
How Upper Deck Can Thrive in 2010 - Part 2
So how the heck is Upper Deck going to sell cards without an MLB license anyway?Ok, I've thrown out the obvious Retro idea already and I still have no clue how they can ceep their bease Upper Deck set together without it looking like garbage. It doesn't mean I'm out of ideas on how UD can make a splash in 2010. And with all good ideas, there's a little bit of borrowing involved.
Upper Deck has a license with the Players' Union so they can print up as many cards of Major League players as their heart desires. But they can't show any logos or the Laywers Shall Feast. Now how do you put together a good card set featuring players but where logos are not necessary. Something distinctive and attractive and unique in the market. I can think of a brand of cards that did that. A brand from loong loong time ago. This brand:Upper Deck: STEAL STUDIO.Donruss sure ain't doing anything with it. Hell, I don't think the ham-fisted designers over at Playoffnini could even pull off a set like Studio anymore. It's the perfect concept for cards that has to focus on people and not embroidered uniform adornments.See? A couple of logos snuck through there, but you could kick 'em out and noone would notice. Of course, some Studio sets have logos as a central theme but Upper Deck doesn't need tostealmimicborrowpay homage to the exect design of one of those Studio sets, they can just use the concept of a well done artsy set that focuses on the player. Upper Deck hasn't had much luck borrowing designs lately anyway.Upper Deck doesn't really need to steal the concept anyway, they had a pretty good set in '07 and '08 that was kind of artsy fartsy. Masterpieces, maybe you've heard of it? Turn it into a base set from of, ahem, studio portrait cards and then add in a subset/SP/insert set of art cards like the good 'ol Masterpieces we love so well and Upper Deck might just have a winner there. It's not like they haven't done this before...Remember the Iooss Collection?Perhaps the V.J Lovero showcase?Upper Deck can do the exact same thing for a 2010 set. Hire a big shot photographer or even a bunch of 'em and feature their logoless photographs in a set. I hear Annie Leibovitz is looking to make some quick cash....Note - I haven't had any time to check all the other blogs out there lately so if anyone else proposed this.... HAHA!!! I JUST STOLE IT!!! See how easy that is, Upper Deck?
Incredible: Apple responsible for 25% of US music sales
Filed under: Apple Corporate, iTS, iTunes
The NPD Group has released amazing numbers this week: Apple is generating one quarter of all US music sales. Equally impressive, but less surprising, is that Apple is also responsible for 69% of all online music sales.
Wal-Mart is #2 for US music sales at 14% (that's a combination of both their online and CD sales) and Best Buy is third. Speaking of CDs, the aging format is still the overall top seller in the US and Wal-Mart is the top CD distributor. However, NPD expects that Apple's sales will equal that of CDs by 2010.
I know it's impossible to say what I'm about to without sounding like a grumpy old man, but here it comes anyway. For me, the tremendous thing isn't that Apple has commandeered the market so handily, it is the rate at which the distribution model has evolved. I'm only 38 years old, but as a kid I had a box of records. By the time I was in junior high school I was buying cassettes and in college I bought CDs.
Today, I can't remember the exact last time I bought music in a format I could physically hold in my hands. I'm glad the big wigs in the music industry are starting to get it. Now if only the TV execs would follow suit.TUAWIncredible: Apple responsible for 25% of US music sales originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: Apple - NPD Group - Wal-Mart - ITunes Store - US
“This is less like a football team and more like the premise for an Aaron Sorkin show about...
“This is less like a football team and more like the premise for an Aaron Sorkin show about football.” -Scaletta on Favre/Vikings
There's still some summer left ...
Holly at Lucite Box Vintage tipped me off that she is having a sale ... 15% off any item on the site using the coupon code madmen. The sale started today and runs through Saturday 8/22.
I am such a sucker for large-scale plaids and this dress is a doozy. Plus, it's B40/W29, which is a forgiving size ... especially for some of our more well-endowed friends. And only $60, or just $51 on sale!
I would wear this with little flat shoes and a white or pink cardigan, and an ice-cream cone. The ice-cream cone is the essential accessory for this dress. I recommend mint-chocolate-chip, the bright green chemical kind, for contrast, or maybe even rainbow sherbet, if you want to be all matchy-matchy. And a bicycle. I would definitely add a bicycle. A Schwinn "Breeze" by preference, but that's really up to you. (They come in yellow ...)
The Top Three NYC Wonks: It’s Lonely at the Top
This is a very sad story about the top three wonks in New York City: Jefrey Pollock, Howard Wolfson and Josh Isay, all campaign ops super-spooks. Oh, they were friends, and then not friends, and then friends again, and sometimes their wives worked out together, and they were very young and now less young, and some of them got weird and now only eat salads and don’t talk to people much, and some of them were already weird and phobic and just got weirder and more phobic, and sometimes Howard was making $40,000 a month (like right now!) to manage the talking points for the hotly-contested (kidding!) Bloomberg mayoral campaign. (Note to all of you with your sub-$40K a month income: you’re doing it wrong.) This is the perfect primer for those looking to understand how New York City politics works now, but you are warned, you won’t feel happy when you know.
Build your iPhone a dock from its own box
Filed under: Accessories, Hacks, Mods, iPhone, iPod touch
As the product of frugal New England Yankees, I like items that multi-task. If said item is something that could typically get thrown away, even better. Check out this awesome iPhone 3GS dock made from its retail box.
Since the 3GS does not ship with a dock (bummer), enterprising owner Vince Tang used the included USB cable, the docking "plate," which is that tiny piece of plastic meant to seat the phone correctly, and the sturdy box to create a dock. Specifically, he cut a hole in the box's lid, crammed the plate and cable inside and glued the daylights out of it. We think it looks pretty good (from the top at least).
In fact, if I hadn't sent my old iPhone to NextWorth in my 3GS box, I'd be making one of these right now. Well done, Vince!TUAWBuild your iPhone a dock from its own box originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 19 Aug 2009 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Sponsored Topics: iPhone - IpodTouch - Apple - TUAW - Unofficial Apple Weblog
New Kiarostami Film Banned in Iran
One of Kiarostami’s newest films Certified Copy has been banned in his native country of Iran. Interestingly enough the film is the first Kiarostami has shot outside of Iran. Certified Copy takes place in Italy and stars the always wonderful Juliette Binoche as a French art dealer who meets a British author in Italy when he is at a conference to discuss art and copies of art. The two travel and explore love.
Apparently THR is reporting that the Iranian Cultural Ministry aren’t allowing Certified Copy to show in theaters - meaning that Iranians will have to go the underground route if they desire to see the latest from their country’s master.
Also of note when it comes to Kiarostami is that another new film of his is set to hit the world at the Venice Film Festival. Shirin, which will premiere this September, features “112 Iranian actresses and Juliette Binoche are shot watching a 12th-century Persian play, with the play’s performance itself kept entirely offscreen.”
And while this might not sound exciting to most, I don’t think it is possible for me to be more excited.
*photo by ledoux.david (CC)
Björk Moving to Brooklyn Heights
We first caught wind of this rumor last week and have finally gotten enough confirmation that we feel comfortable posting it: Avant-garde pop star Bjork and artist husband Matthew Barney are in contract on a rather phat pad in Brooklyn Heights. In the name of privacy, that's all we're gonna say and ask that commenters refrain from posting the address if they know it. Stick to welcoming two more world-class artists to Brooklyn.
How babies and preschoolers really learn
NYT: Your Baby Is Smarter Than You Think.When we say that preschoolers can't pay attention, we really mean that they can't not pay attention: they have trouble focusing on just one event and shutting out all the rest. This has led us to underestimate babies in the past. But the new research tells us that babies can be rational without being goal-oriented.
More on Marcus Thames (yes, he’s good)
Here is a list of all 128 currently acive players with at least 100 career HR. I got that list from the PI then I reordered them based on fewest plate appearances per HR (meaning that guys who hit HR more often are at the top of the list.)
Check it out:
(sorry again about the awful formatting)
PA/HR AB/HR career HR Ryan Howard 14.23 12.13 51 Marcus Thames 16.21 14.75 128 Alex Rodriguez 16.46 14.23 2 Albert Pujols 16.51 13.98 12 Jim Thome 16.71 13.59 3 Adam Dunn 16.97 13.82 18 Manny Ramirez 17.19 14.51 4 Russell Branyan 17.36 14.94 71 Ken Griffey 17.81 15.44 1 Prince Fielder 18.07 15.37 77 Carlos Delgado 18.30 15.40 6 Richie Sexson 18.31 16.10 21 Carlos Pena 18.73 15.82 60 Mark Teixeira 19.12 16.58 42 Vlad Guerrero 19.13 17.09 9 Troy Glaus 19.21 16.35 22 David Ortiz 19.23 16.42 20 Jason Giambi 19.91 16.22 8 Andruw Jones 20.10 17.67 10 Alfonso Soriano 20.16 18.61 25 Jim Edmonds 20.18 17.31 11 Lance Berkman 20.21 16.72 19 Tony Clark 20.40 18.06 38 Travis Hafner 20.58 17.34 73 Paul Konerko 21.12 18.68 17 Miguel Cabrera 21.31 18.82 57 Adrian Gonzalez 21.40 18.86 90 Gary Sheffield 21.44 18.05 5 Jason Bay 21.46 18.23 65 Chipper Jones 21.53 18.18 7 Pat Burrell 21.87 18.44 33 Justin Morneau 21.89 19.39 70 Aramis Ramirez 21.96 19.85 34 Jermaine Dye 21.99 19.80 15 Carlos Lee 22.31 20.26 24 Tony Batista 22.44 20.67 48 Matt Stairs 22.51 19.45 35 Dan Uggla 22.64 19.63 109 Eric Chavez 23.07 20.40 44 Morgan Ensberg 23.45 20.04 113 Preston Wilson 23.47 21.18 63 Chase Utley 23.56 20.46 75 Todd Helton 23.63 19.84 16 Geoff Jenkins 23.77 21.27 47 Nick Swisher 23.79 19.88 97 Derrek Lee 23.80 20.76 28 Moises Alou 23.83 21.20 14 Joe Crede 23.94 21.99 81 Adam LaRoche 23.96 21.32 94 Matt Holliday 24.06 21.44 78 Magglio Ordonez 25.01 22.56 31 Jay Gibbons 25.08 23.03 99 Carlos Beltran 25.09 21.99 32 Hank Blalock 25.09 22.80 76 J.D. Drew 25.32 21.16 53 Torii Hunter 25.36 23.19 43 Craig Monroe 25.43 23.40 104 Brad Hawpe 25.56 22.06 124 David Wright 25.68 22.29 83 Scott Rolen 25.75 22.27 29 Cliff Floyd 26.02 22.83 41 Jorge Posada 26.28 22.33 40 Aubrey Huff 26.50 24.03 56 N Garciaparra 26.64 24.32 45 Jose Cruz 26.71 23.16 54 Vernon Wells 27.13 24.92 62 Raul Ibanez 27.28 24.65 50 Brian Giles 27.30 22.74 26 Adrian Beltre 27.35 25.00 39 Mike Sweeney 27.53 24.40 55 Grady Sizemore 27.66 23.99 92 Miguel Tejada 27.91 25.47 30 Ty Wigginton 27.93 25.39 102 Hideki Matsui 27.95 24.52 88 Mike Cameron 28.29 24.46 36 Mike Lowell 28.56 25.54 49 Bill Hall 28.90 26.24 126 Rondell White 29.56 27.06 58 Casey Blake 29.57 26.21 80 Luis Gonzalez 29.75 25.87 13 Pedro Feliz 29.84 27.87 87 Jose Guillen 29.92 27.49 59 Fernando Tatis 30.04 26.39 115 Jacque Jones 30.24 27.84 69 Dmitri Young 30.71 27.85 67 Brad Wilkerson 30.76 26.12 98 Trot Nixon 30.83 26.47 84 Jason Varitek 31.01 27.02 66 Eric Hinske 31.23 27.48 108 Garret Anderson 31.37 29.55 27 Kevin Millar 31.46 27.41 68 Ivan Rodriguez 31.71 29.61 23 Austin Kearns 31.79 27.42 123 David Dellucci 32.34 28.45 127 Eric Byrnes 32.49 29.48 120 J Encarnacion 32.66 30.03 74 Bobby Abreu 32.67 27.38 37 Milton Bradley 33.07 28.47 107 Victor Martinez 33.18 29.21 121 Ramon Hernandez 33.49 29.92 79 Rich Aurilia 33.68 30.69 64 Aaron Boone 34.25 30.62 95 Aaron Rowand 34.48 31.15 105 Brandon Inge 34.51 30.70 100 Juan Uribe 34.55 31.73 103 Bengie Molina 34.59 32.34 86 Melvin Mora 34.77 30.51 72 S Hillenbrand 35.33 33.06 117 Corey Patterson 35.99 33.47 125 Jay Payton 37.42 34.61 101 A.J. Pierzynski 41.40 38.55 112 Gary Matthews 41.89 37.28 118 Alex Gonzalez 42.43 39.02 114 Sean Casey 43.42 38.97 89 Derek Jeter 43.53 38.45 46 Michael Young 43.70 40.13 85 Ray Durham 43.87 38.58 61 Carlos Guillen 44.19 39.08 116 Jose Vidro 44.59 39.95 93 Jimmy Rollins 45.03 41.05 82 Johnny Damon 45.28 40.38 52 Ron Belliard 50.42 45.08 119 Darin Erstad 53.12 48.36 96 Shannon Stewart 53.96 48.47 106 Mark Kotsay 55.22 50.20 111 Randy Winn 61.41 55.31 122 Orlando Cabrera 64.07 58.54 110 Edgar Renteria 64.84 58.19 91The last column is where each guy ranks among the 128 active players with 100 homers.
How crazy is it that the 128th and last guy, Thames, is second overall in fewest PA per HR?
To Each According to Need
Josh MacPhee To Each According to Need $50 Another experiment for me, this is my first 8 color silkscreen. I also tried to move away from my usual big blocks of color, and try out more subtle textures and organic lines. This is definitely the biggest, most labor intensive poster I've printed yet, and wouldn't have happened without the help and studio of our Montreal member Jesse Purcell. The slogan, "From each according to ability, to each according to need," was first popularized by Marx in the 1870s, but quickly became the rallying cry for real world attempts at liberatory and anarchist communism, from the British Diggers movement to the revolution in Spain in the 1930s. As a simple maxim to keep in mind when envisioning a new world, it holds as true today as it did 150 years ago. 8 color silkscreen print 23"x35" signed, stamped & numbered edition of 47
August 18, 2009
Urban Omnibus on EveryBlock
Adam Greenfield, uncharacteristically attending to the regular everyday interweb: "The genius of Everyblock isn't simply that it automates the onerous process of collecting the traces of urban experience. It's that everything, regardless of source or type, gets rolled up and presented in the easily comprehensible form of a precisely-placed dot on a neighborhood map. In a detail that speaks particularly well of Everyblock and its desire to serve its users, these are not the off-the-rack Google Maps most other sites make do with, but bespoke cartography of unusual clarity and refinement. The result renders the heretofore-obscure workings of neighborhood life explicitly, in something not too far off of real time, and in unprecedentedly high resolution."
Garamond - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Garamond is the name given to a group of old style serif typefaces named for the punch-cutter Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561). A majority of the typefaces named Garamond are more closely related to the work of a later punch-cutter Jean Jannon. A direct relationship between Garamond’s letterforms and contemporary type can be found in the Roman versions of the typefaces Sabon, Granjon, Stempel Garamond, and Adobe Garamond. Garamond’s letterforms convey a sense of fluidity and consistency. Some unique characteristics in his letters are the small bowl of the a and the small eye of the e. Long extenders and top serifs have a downward slope. via en.wikipedia.org
Inside the H&FJ Drawing Office
A View of the Drawing-Office of Hoefler & Frere-Jones, Manufacturers of Phonograms & Allophones. Special Designs & Estimates Submitted on Enquiry. Write: H. & F.J., Houston-Street, New York.
Just kidding. Thanks, Eric Baker, for the photo! —JH
The Glamorous Life 3
- Eleven & Ayres - The Glamorous Intro
- Stephanie Mills - Putting A Rush On Me
- New Edition - A Little Bit of Love (Is All It Takes)
- Fatback - I Found Loving
- Starpoint - Bring Your Sweet Lovin' Back
- Steve Arrington's Hall of Fame - Nobody Can Be You
- NY Citi Peech Boys - Don't Make Me Wait
- Zapp - Dancefloor
- Roger - So Ruff, So Tuff
- Ronnie Hudson & The Street People- West Coast Poplock
- Chaka Khan - I Know You, I Live You
- The Time - Get It Up
- Midnight Star - The Midas Touch
- Teena Marie - Behind The Groove
- Pebbles - Mercedes Boy
- Ollie and Jerry - Breakin'...There's No Stopping Us
- Apollonia 6 - Sex Shooter
- Klymaxx - Meeting in the Ladies Room
- The Time - The Bird
- Tom Browne - Thighs High (Grip Your Hips And Move)
- "D" Train - Keep On
- Billy Ocean - Night (Feel Like Getting Down)
- Atlantic Starr - Circles
- I Level - Minefield
- Gwen Guthrie - Padlock
- Fat Larry's Band - Act Like You Know
- Gap Band - I Found My Baby
- Stephanie Mills - Something In The Way (You Make Me Feel)
- Al B Sure! - Nite and Day
- Collage - Get In Touch with Me
- Roger - I Want to Be Your Man
- The Time - Gigolos Get Lonely Too
- Prince & The New Power Generation - Diamonds and Pearls
- Michael Jackson - The Lady In My Life
MetsBlog.com » Post Game: Mets 9, Braves 4.The fourth inning reminded me of the ten-run eighth inning the Mets put together against the Braves on June 30, 2000…those were the days…I was at that game, I think about it all the time.
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After 67 Years, Archie Chooses Veronica
In the first of a six-issue series, the longest-running love triangle in comics history appears to come to an end: Archie Andrews proposes — not to Betty, the blond girl next door, but to Veronica, the dark-haired beauty and Riverdale's rich girl.
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Originally posted by (author unknown) from randomwalks/dj
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Technology for the Dead
Emerson said, “There is properly no History; only Biography.” I would extend that to autobiography too, but video obituaries; that’s something I need to think about, yet it seems like a natural progression, technologically.
Since 2005 the online version of The New York Times has been producing video obituaries in collaboration with influential artists, politicians and newsmakers. The series called “The Last Word” are elegantly produced affairs where subjects get the last word on their life. 30 videos have been shot, but only a few have actually had their run. Last Thursday, virtuoso guitarist and inventor Les Paul got The Last Word.
Sillage
The following links have stayed open in my browser for a week. Their persistence must be noted:
"Some mother hawks and owls are practical optimists, not only halving their brood when necessary but also eating them."
M.A. Sillage de La Reine perhaps like no other fragrances seems to contain and exhibit the perfumery paradox of life contained in death, that of the flowers used to make a perfume. I have never felt so genuinely this impresssion of wearing on my skin the last breath of a flower, its very soul. There is also an inkling of putridity or carnal decomposition in the beautiful aromas that slowly leave their cage and slowly expire on your skin. M.A. Sillage de La Reine can be borderline foul at times evoking the bears' pit at a zoo but from this sublime foulness are also born splendid flowers and complexity.
The Scented Salamander had the opportunity to try M.A. Sillage de La Reine (The Queen's Wake), a very limited recreation of a perfume worn by Marie-Antoinette. The recipe was uncovered by historian Elisabeth de Freydeau, in her research for a biography of Jean Louis Fargeon, one of the queen's perfumers. Created by Francis Kurkdjian, and unveiled in 2005, the fragrance contains notes of rose, jasmine, tuberose, iris, lavender, musk, cedar, vanilla, ambergris and sandalwood. For a time, visitors to Versailles could get a whiff of it in one of the queen's rooms.Before Marie-Antoinette moved in, life at Versailles was apparently malodorous:Versailles, still more than the streets of Paris, was notorious for its stench, born of unwashed bodies, rotting food and festering human and animal excrement. An inveterate bather when the custom continued to arouse mistrust, Marie Antoinette maintained the Austrian standards of hygiene she had been brought up with; her entourage was known by the epithet “the perfumed court”. Years later, ailing, imprisoned, and awaiting judgment, a simple posy would cause her to recall her “real passion” for flowers (a luxury that was immediately withdrawn). At her prime, not least in the gardens of her pastoral retreat, the Petit Trianon, the queen indulged her love of fragrant blooms. “Flowers reigned everywhere,” as de Feydeau remarks. ("Secrets of the Boudoir")
On July 21, 1791, as the Revolution closed around them, the royal family left Paris undercover but was promptly captured in Varennes. One story, which Feydeau considers, claims that the queen's sillage gave them away.
Paul Krugman vs. Niall Ferguson
Since at least late spring, economist Paul Krugman and historian Niall Ferguson have been embroiled in a bitter feud, which today boiled over into name-calling. Herein, a brief history:
April 30: A panel sponsored by The New York Review of Books/PEN at the Museum of Metropolitan Art devolved into an argument between the pair over the government's issuing of Treasury bonds: Ferguson thought flooding the market with them would force interest rates upwards, Krugman said that it wouldn't. “If you wanna try the Soviet model, fine ” Ferguson said.
May 2: A couple of days later, Krugman blogs about "what I found the most depressing aspect of the whole thing: further confirmation that we’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics," using as an example Niall Ferguson.
“explaining” that fiscal expansion will actually be contractionary, because it will drive up interest rates. At least that’s what I think he said; there were so many flourishes that it’s hard to tell. But in any case, this is really sad: John Hicks knew far more about this in 1937 than people who think they’re sophisticates know now.
May 29: Ferguson follows up with an op-ed in the Financial Times, calling Krugman "patronising." "I do not need lessons about the General Theory," he wrote. "But I think perhaps Mr. Krugman would benefit from a refresher course about that work’s historical context."August 10: Ferguson writes an op-ed for the FT in which he compares President Obama to Felix the Cat. "Felix was not only black," he wrote. "He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US." Furor ensues over perceived racist undertones.
August 12: Krugman writes on his blog that he is flabbergasted by the comparison: "What I really can’t fathom is how any editor could think this was a good thing to appear in the FT’s pages," he writes, somewhat gleefully.
I cannot fathom the state of mind that led Ferguson to think this was a good way to introduce a column; admittedly, it doesn’t really distract from his larger point, since as far as I can tell he doesn’t have one.
When Ferguson attempts to explain himself on the Huffington Post, Krugman calls him a "whiner."August 17: Ferguson demands Krugman print a response to his item on his blog, in which he quotes Henry Louis Gates Jr., of all people, saying he wasn't being racist. Krugman does. Then he adds:
For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.
I think he’s a poseur.
I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.
And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.
We do wish they'd stop bickering like this — it just looks bad. Ferguson should really just get on a plane, come over here, and finish this thing like a man — by which we mean give Krugman a massive wedgie.
Read more posts by Jessica Pressler
Filed Under: business, embarrassing things, internet fights, nerd fights, niall ferguson, paul krugman, web wedgies
Why Am I So Angry These Days?
I've always been a pretty happy-go-lucky, glass-half-full kind of person, which I've long attributed to my upbringing. I grew up the youngest of five kids with parents who were teachers. I had no business "connections" or nepotism to take advantage of, and with four older siblings, I was well aware nothing revolved around me. I always had to work incredibly hard for everything, but on the flip side, when I did work incredibly hard I was always rewarded, which is a nice feeling. When something didn't go my way, I'd be upset but I'd also remind myself that things happen for a reason and trust there was some reason.
Fast-forward to today. I have more than I ever thought I would achievement-wise, materially and personally. And yet, increasingly I'm more irritable, more demanding, and feel more entitled -- and hence angrier when things don't work out the way I'd like.
That's had me wondering all week: What has happened to me? I've come up with a few culprits:
1. Success. Doing well in a competitive industry often means you possess qualities that don't make you a very content, easy-to-be-around person. In short, to convince people you deserve things over others, you have to believe it-- hence the entitlement thing. And once you've had any measure of success the balance between having nothing/everything to lose tips in the wrong direction. You're on a treadmill that's moving faster and faster and the pressure to keep up is harder.
2. I'm Just a Jerk. Maybe I've just turned into more of an entitled jerk as I've aged? My mom always said people's true natures emerge more the older they get and the more fatigued they get with putting up a polite filter. Wow. I hope this isn't it or I'm really going to suck in another decade or so.
3. Instant-Gratification of Technology. The Web and gadgets like BlackBerries, iPods, iPhones, laptops and Kindles have spoiled us. We can now have anything we want at any moment we want it: The etymology of a word, that actor you saw and can't quite place, that song you want to hear this second, etc. When you live a super-digital lifestyle you get seduced by that kind of master-of-the-universe control, which of course doesn't exist in the real world even for moguls.
4. The Economy/Mass Uncertainty of Media. I've been pretty lucky not to lose any income or jobs during the downturn. But new opportunities aren't flying through the door at the rate they were. Since I'm self-employed and my industry is crumbling all around me, maybe that self-preservation insecurity is seeping into my subconscious in ways I don't realize.
5. The August Doldrums. I have no clue if there is such a thing. But somehow as my schedule has slowed down, I'm both crankier and accomplishing less. WTF?
Anyone else experiencing any of these?
Here's my plan to turn things around and end August in a better mood:
1. Start running again. An hour of hardcore cardio is the best cure I know for handling stress and anxiety.
2. Saying no. This month has been tough because it's the first time I've been in town for a long stretch and I want to see everyone. But it only stresses me out more because I'm not getting my to-do list done.
3. Work harder. I've been trying to take it a bit easy this month, as 2009 has been pretty hardcore. But the reality is, I'm happier when I'm accomplishing more, even if I'm exhausted. That sucks because I'd rather just go shopping or see a movie.
Washington Post scrapping 'hyperlocal' Web site
In its latest cost-cutting move, The Washington Post's owner is scrapping an experimental Web site that provided more news coverage about events happening around the neighborhoods of a Virginia suburb. LoudounExtra.com will be shut down as an independent Web...
Sponsored Topics: Washington Post - Virginia - Local news - United States - Website
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Shared by Eve
best everShared by Eve
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Originally posted by (author unknown) from San Francisco Bay Guardian: News and Culture
Originally posted by (author unknown) from randomwalks/dj
Originally posted by David Jacobs from randomwalks/dj
Case Studies Of The New York Media Elite:
I once saw Ninety9 eating arugula salad at Tom & Jerrys. True story.How dare you call my boyfriend a media person! How would you like it if I called you a media person?
New Bookmark
asynctools – Project Hosting on Google Code – Allows parallel API calls within App Engine (specifically, parallel DB queries.)
the $24 million question
Now in the Instapaper queue: New York Magazine's promise to answer the unanswerable: How Could This Happen to Annie Leibovitz?
Caffeine and Calories Chart
The Buzz vs The Bulge from data visualization blog Information is Beautiful plots the calorie content of beverages against their caffeine content, along with a few common non-caffeinated foods to use for comparison.
Related
An Illustrated Graph on Tasty Desserts
Funny Pie Chart
A Pie Chart of Pies
remember when every family's first stop was online?
So you know that piece in the New York Times earlier this month that claimed that more and more families are waking up and immediately jumping online? The one that posited that...
After six to eight hours of network deprivation — also known as sleep — people are increasingly waking up and lunging for cellphones and laptops, sometimes even before swinging their legs to the floor and tending to more biologically urgent activities.
Um, not so much. The NYTPicker (subscribed!) called out Brad Stone for using a shallow set of well-connected sources, and now Clark Hoyt, the Times' own public editor is taking Stone to task.
The Gudes’ story was fascinating, but the reporter, Brad Stone, did not find them by chance. Stone and Karl Gude used to work together at Newsweek, though both said they had not talked in 10 years. Then there was a source identified only as “Gabrielle Glaser of Montclair, N.J.” She is a freelance writer who has been published 54 times in The Times and is married to Stephen Engelberg, a former Times reporter and editor.
Three other sources were all media-savvy veterans. Naomi Baron, a professor at American University, has been quoted seven times in other Times articles and has written once for the Op-Ed page. James Steyer has been quoted 13 times and is the co-founder of Common Sense Media, a nonprofit that deals with children and entertainment issues. Liz Perle, identified only as “a mother in San Francisco,” is the other co-founder of Common Sense Media and is its editor in chief.
Something tells me Mr. Hoyt isn't the most popular guy around the newsroom.
Poll Watch: “The More Bikes the Better”
Here are the results of a wholly un-scientific web poll conducted by the Daily News as part of their recent "special investigation" into the state of cycling in New York City. I don't have much to add, except that the top bar would look even better if it were a little longer, and I believe the poll is still open.Image: Daily News.
Statistics of the Prospectus
You may have noticed by now that a trip to the main statistics page here at Baseball Prospectus yields a slightly different result than similar trips in the past. The page now houses a wide array of links that serve either as more informative combinations of previously condensed reports or new reports altogether. These new reports are generally comprised of the more generic, yet in demand data that used to be available solely through the utilization of our custom reports feature.
Everything now available is a direct result of several of us working diligently behind the scenes to improve not only the statistical content offered here but also the layout, presentation and availability. Though the new reports are a solid start, there is still more work to be done in this regard in order to make the BP data experience as enjoyable as possible and I wanted to issue an assurance that we will be doing whatever it takes to reach this goal. With that in mind, let’s go over the relatively revamped page to provide a sense of what can now be found.
The Offense section features several of the previously active reports such as Baserunning and Batter Translations but now provides housing to three new reports: Batter-Standard, Batter-BIP, and Batter-Value. Batter-Standard offers exactly what its name portends–basic offensive statistics like PA, AB, the various hit types, the triple slash line and more, but with a BP twist, as DPs sit right next to NetDP, OBI% sits next to raw RBIs, and EqA can be found at the far right, next to the slash line. If you just want to sort the league in standard categories, Batter-Standard is the place to go.
Batter-BIP includes anything related to balls put in play, such as the raw totals and rates for the various types of balls in play. BABIP will be added to the report shortly, and we are also working on incorporating the BA and SLG on each type of batted ball in order to set forth a comprehensive batted ball report capable of explaining not only the breakdown of a hitters balls in play but also how he performed on each. The same goes for pitchers.
Batter-Value consists of various offensive production metrics with counting stats like VORP, EqR, RAR, RAP and RARP and their respective rates: VORPr, MLVr, PMLVr and RPMLVr. The various differences in these metrics primarily deal with evaluations above average or replacement level, and whether or not they are adjusted for position.
The same three reports can be found in the Pitching section as well, with slight differences. For instance, the Pitcher-BIP report includes their BABIP and Defensive Efficiency in addition to the raw totals and rates of batted balls. The Pitcher-Standard includes those box score statistics but ends with ERA, RA, URA and QERA. The Pitcher-Value report might look similar in scope and content to the Expected W-L report previously active on the site, but the name change should diffuse any confusion as to its contents–much more useful data can be found other than E(W)-E(L).
Additionally, the Pitchers section now features a Pitchers-Rates report, which is where you can find a combination of the per nine innings metrics and the per plate appearances metrics, conveniently located alongside the ERA/RA/URA/QERA and the opposing slash line. Speaking of the opposing slash line, the Pitchers Quality of Batters Faced report has been altered to factor in what hitters have actually done against the pitchers listed. This is arguably my favorite addition as it affords the opportunity to compare what a pitcher actually gave up to the levels of the opposing hitters.
As an example, look at lefty specialist Pedro Feliciano, usually brought in to face the best lefties of the opposition; Feliciano has faced, on average, a line of .269/.350/.449, the highest opponents OPS of anyone with 45+ innings, yet he has allowed a line of just .220/.265/.370. Taken apart, each slash line lacks an appropriate context, but this altered report now exudes context.
The Standard and BIP reports can also be found in the Teams section for both batting and pitching if you so choose to sort all of the teams by a variety of metrics. Lastly, the custom reports require a bit more explanation as ample confusion has been evident recently. When you click on the drop down menu, pick a report to customize, choose the desired categories, and view the created report, the URL features a CID number at its tail. This number is saved forever and will always correspond with the created report, so if you’re a fantasy enthusiast or an analyst who lives by a specific combination of stats not offered on the statistics page, all you would need to do is bookmark the report or record the CID number, and it will always update automatically.
This is a great start and there is much more on the horizon with regards to improving the data experience here at BP. There are also certain stats that will be added to reports in the very near future, issues arising from certain data being available in a Batter-Team-Year report but not a Batter-Season and so forth, but we are working hard to eradicate any and all such issues. Since the ultimate goal is of course to make the experience more enjoyable for the readers and users, please use this as a forum to make suggestions and provide feedback.
Know Your Meme: Bubb Rubb
The Rocketboom Institute for Internet Studies investigates why the whistles go whoo whoo with Bubb Rubb. Links to all your Bubb Rubb resources matt-d, Ghost Ride It, Gas Break Dip, Kron.com, archive.org, socalevo.net, whistle tips, Bubb Rubb everywhere, Bubb Rubb sound board, whistle tips banned, Blur feat. Bubb Rubb, woo WOO, the whistles go whoo, Bubb Rubb art, gimme a woowoo, Bubb Rubbon buzolich, Bubb Rubb group, Bubb Rubb on Know Your Meme, Bubb Rubb Sound Board, Bubb Rubb YTMND, BubbRubb.com, Bubb Rubb trailer, Purple Drank, Sippin on some syrup, Shatner vs. Bubb Rubb, Bubb Rubb vs. the leprechaun, Saturday Remix, 300 Bubb Rubb Style, the whistles go woo woo
DNA Dangers
Well that’s just great: “Scientists in Israel have demonstrated that it is possible to fabricate DNA evidence, undermining the credibility of what has been considered the gold standard of proof in criminal cases.” Even better, DNA scavengers could potentially lift someone’s genetic code from a stray hair or coffee cup and then get it tested, creating a whole new breed of what this article refers to as “genetic paparazzi,” and Harvey Levin thinks of as “the game changer.” And we haven’t even talked about the terrifying possibility that someone could clone Hitler or Robert Novak using this information. It’s scary times ahead!
Poll: Palin Still Loved By Republicans -- And Would Lose To Obama In Landslide
A new Marist poll has a mix of good news and bad news for Sarah Palin -- and unmitigated good news for Democrats. On the one hand, she remains a plausible candidate for the GOP nomination in 2012, but in a general election she would lose to President Obama in a landslide.
Among Republicans and GOP-leaning independents, the 2012 field stands at Mitt Romney 21%, Sarah Palin 20%, Mike Huckabee 19%, Newt Gingrich 10%, Bobby Jindal 5%, and Tim Pawlenty 1%. But in a general election, it's Obama 56%, Palin 33%.
Also, Palin's overall favorable rating is only 37%, with 43% unfavorable. But among Republicans, it's a whopping 73% favorable, to only 16% unfavorable.
From the pollster's analysis:
Is the GOP nomination within her sights? You betcha! Palin could carry her intense following into key caucus and primary states. But, herein lies the rub. Palin trails President Obama by 23 percentage points nationwide in this same Marist Poll.
Cause for GOP worry? Absolutely.
American Prospect article on the death of Geocities
Phoebe Connolly quotes me in an excellent American Prospect article about the death of Geocities:
Other online platforms began to spring up, and soon GeoCities became a fond memory for most users. Blogger was introduced in 1999 (and purchased by Google in 2003), making it easy for anyone to start a blog. MetaFilter, a community blog, was launched in 1999. The social networking site My-Space was founded in 2003. These services also marked the entrance of a very public form of socializing–where, unlike email or listservs, the conversation, and content, was accessible to those not part of the conversation. In offering a platform for creating online identities, GeoCities started a trend that has been replicated by companies ever since.
But once those online identities are created, are they the property of the users or the corporations that host them? David Bollier, author of Viral Spiral: How the Commoners Built a Digital Republic of Their Own, calls corporate-controlled spaces like GeoCities and Facebook, “faux commons.” For him, true online community spaces are defined by users having control over the terms of their interaction and owning the software or infrastructure. Corporate spaces come with “terms of service” agreements that lay out the rules users must abide by and what control they agree to surrender in exchange for using the product. “Oftentimes corporate-controlled communities are benign, functional, and perfectly OK,” Bollier says. “It’s just that the terms of services those companies have or the competitive pressures of business may compel them to take steps that are not in the interest of the community.”
I really enjoy internet history and although Geocities was something we all made fun of at its peak, it was a useful free hosting solution, and it certainly has a place that should be remembered. It’s sad to think of all those Backstreet Boys fan pages and web diaries disappearing for good.
My Snoring Is Going To Kill Me?
I don’t know if it’s my advancing years or my expanding waistline, but stories like this one are starting to scare the crap out of me.
Severe nightly episodes of interrupted breathing during sleep - commonly known as sleep apnea - double the risk of death for middle-age men, according to a new study being called the largest ever conducted on the disorder.Even men with moderate sleep apnea - anywhere from 15 to 30 instances of oxygen deprivation per hour - appear to be 45 percent more likely to die from any cause than those who have no nighttime breathing problems.
I for sure have sleep apnea—I literally lurch forward several times a night gasping for air or choking on drool—but as my typical procedure on health related matters is the time-tested method of ignoring it and hoping it will self-correct, this is more than a little alarming. On the other hand, “It’s a chronic exposure… One night’s exposure in itself is not a health risk. … It happens hundreds of times a night and it goes on for decades.” Decades? I can probably handle that!
More of What You Want From Mint
By popular demand, we’ve come out with a new release of Mint.com that provides you with even more insights into how you manage your money. We’ve completely revamped our budgeting features and added additional graph types so that you can see see how your finances are tracking over time and even look into the future to see how your current spending decisions will affect you. No matter what your budgeting style, you’ll be able to use Mint.com to keep yourself on track. We’re constantly adding to the financial institutions we support and we’ve got some major ones in this release.
Budgets that work like you do
Now our budgeting features let you plan for the future like never before.
Look ahead to see how your current spending decisions will affect your ability to save. Move from just creating a budget to taking a comprehensive look at your financial health. You’ll know immediately what you can do today to save even more tomorrow. Now you can:• Budget on income as well as expenses
• Budget for infrequent expenses (like paying taxes or annual vacation)
• Roll over unspent funds from one month to next
• Budget over different time periodsImproved graphs and trends
We’ve added more options for tracking spending, income, net worth and account balances over time. You’ll make smarter decisions when you start comparing your spending year-to-year or month-to-month. 16 interactive graphs give you the real-time insights you need. Now you can:
• Graph net worth over time and net income over time
• Compare your data across different time periods
• Compare your data to other demographic or geographic groups
• Enter more granular demographic data for future comparison options
• Easily export all reports to a CSV fileBetter filters
Mint.com lets you see things your way, whether you are managing your household finances or running a small business. You can now filter trends and budgets by either account type or tag, giving you more ways to manage your finances. Now you can:
• Select which accounts or tags are included in budgets or trends
• Easily separate out spending by household member, or business from personal spendingNew ways to save
We’ve added IRA Rollovers to Ways to Save making it easier than ever to save thousands of dollars toward your retirement.
My Guest Curator Stint at 20×200
Being a purveyor of technology links and a coder feels like the furthest thing from a museum curator, but my friend and gallery owner Jen Bekman asked me to choose eight of my favorite images from her online art gallery 20×200 this week.
20×200 is a treasure trove of eye candy. Be prepared to spend some time there, and maybe even a little money–you want to buy and hang this stuff in your home and office. I had a ball making my picks, which will appear in
tomorrow’snext week’s edition of the 20×200 email newsletter. In the meantime, I get to share my favorite of all the pieces: the one pictured here, a photo called “The Office” by Rebecca Loyche. Here’s an excerpt of a chat transcript between Jen and I about the photo.
Jen: I think it’s hilarious that Rebecca Loyche’s photo is your favorite btw.
Gina: I *love* that photo. It made me laugh out loud. That is totally me, on many days of the week.
Jen: It’s a really great photo and it gets better and better as you dig into the details.
Gina: It’s true, all the gadgets and computers everywhere, her outfit, the shoes.
Jen: I’m actually particularly fond of the newsletter that I wrote for that one.
Gina: Love the wicked witch death hint. Your newsletter is great, I love that the photo was about an irrational fear of fiscal management for you.
Jen: I honed in on the accounting software myself since that kind of operational/administrative thing is my entrepreneurial nemesis. I have gotten MUCH better for the record. The other thing I like about it is the really discordant color palette.
Gina: The pink window sills are so great!
The rest of our chat and my picks, which are predictably geeky (but beautiful), will go out in
tomorrow’snext week’s 20×200 newsletter. Thanks so much to Jen for giving me a break from looking at software interfaces for a day!
New Werner Herzog Trailer
Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans isn’t the only new movie from Werner Herzog. (And, really, I’d want to have another in the can once that first one came out too.) Here’s the trailer for My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done , a based-on-a-true-story thriller produced by David Lynch, which might explain the presence of the dwarf and Grace Zabriske. Anyway, this clip actually uses the line “the more you learn, the less you know,” and reminds us that Chloe Sevigny was nominated for an Academy Award at some point. There’s just so much going on!
Slim Thug Status Bot (2005) - Cory Arcangel
Slim Thug Status Bot was a bot RSG and I wrote that would let you know if Slim Thug's album "Already Platinum" had gone platinum yet.......It was located on AIM as "SlimThugPlatinum". I eventually had to take it offline cause it was burning up server and taking up like 99% of the processor. I think it cause got in a bot loop with another bot. (ps - also special thx to michael bell smith)
-- FROM THE ARTIST'S DESCRIPTION
Early Anna Wintour work
Fashionologie has a bunch of New York magazine spreads that Anna Wintour (currently editor of Vogue and subject of The September Issue) did when she was a fashion editor there in the early 1980s.
Tags: annawintour magazines New York magazine
FiDi/Chinatown/LES Waterfront Ready For Its Makeover
[Remade vision for Pier 35 on the Lower East Side. Courtesy SHoP]Downtown, it's groundbreaking day for a new portion of the East River Waterfront that's ready for its makeover. What that means for us: hot renderings (above) from those genius architects at SHoP of a distant future in which a now totally inaccessible waterfront transforms into a home for yachts, happy children, and bikinis.
The first phase of the project centers on the two-mile stretch from the Battery Maritime Building near the tip of Manhattan to Pier 35 at the edge of the Lower East Side and is focused on improving the existing esplanade. But they're also planning on building a tripped-out new Pier 15 at Maiden Lane (to replace the Pier 15 demolished earlier this decade), and renovating Pier 35 into "an innovative habitat restoration park," which, per the renderings, looks pretty damn awesome. Oh, and there will be waterfront steps at select locations, "to provide visitors the opportunity to get closer to the water’s edge." Good times.
[The brand new Pier 15 down in the FiDi. Courtesy SHoP]Here's a more detailed rundown from the press materials:
The first phase of the project will improve the existing esplanade from the Battery Maritime Building to Pier 35 to safely accommodate both pedestrians and cyclists. It will feature new plantings, seating and lighting, a dedicated bikeway and visitor-friendly designs.The esplanade between the Battery Maritime Building and Old Slip will be extended out over the water, allowing for safe passage along a widened sidewalk and bikeway. Pier 15 at Maiden Lane, which was demolished in 2001, will be reconstructed as a two-level pier reminiscent of the two-level piers that used to line the East River in the late 19th century. It will feature maritime uses on the lower level with boat docking facilities on three sides and a maritime educational component. The upper level will feature lawns and seating for passive recreation. Pier 35 at Rutgers Slip will be renovated and open to the public to provide much-needed landscaped space along the waterfront. Pier 35 will also an innovative habitat restoration park, funded by a grant from the New York State Department of State Division of Coastal Resources, which will recreate the native plants and wildlife of the East River. Waterfront steps will be created at Wall Street, Pike Slip, and Rutgers Slip to provide visitors the opportunity to get closer to the water’s edge...
The second phase of the plan calls for the construction of the Battery Maritime Plaza, conversion of Pier 42 at Montgomery Street to public use as an urban beach and boat launch, and completion of the widening of the esplanade from Peck Slip to Pike Slip. When complete, the East River Esplanade will be a critical link in the continuation of the Manhattan Greenway.
We're hoping to chat SHoP up about all this shortly, so if you've got any questions, drop 'em in the comments.
· East River Waterfront Images [nyc.gov]
· East River Waterfront Esplanade [SHoP]
· East River Waterfront Coverage [Curbed]
Mailsmith Now Freeware, Under New Ownership
From the Bare Bones press release:
Bare Bones Software today announced it has transferred ownership of Mailsmith to Stickshift Software LLC, who in turn are releasing Mailsmith 2.2 today as freeware.
“Like many others, I use and rely on Mailsmith on a daily basis,” said Rich Siegel, founder and CEO of Bare Bones Software, Inc. and owner of Stickshift Software. “However, at this point it is strictly a labor of love for me. Since I’m in the unique position of being able to support it for others who also use and rely on Mailsmith, I have created a new company whose sole purpose is to provide a home for Mailsmith, while allowing me to focus on my work at Bare Bones Software, which remains my first and highest priority.”
The Awl, The Song
We recently got in touch with a popular recording artist who happens to be an admirer of The Awl. This musician expressed an interest in contributing to the site, and we’re happy to announce that the result of our conversations is a regular column that should start up in the very near future. That’s exciting enough, but there’s a bonus! During the period where we were discussing potential topics for the series, our friend was struck by the muse, and entered a secret subterranean studio to record a theme song organized around the principles which underpin our project and the philosophies we hope to impart here every day. The result, “The Awl, The Song (Hair Metal Version)” is ready to be thrust upon a waiting world. We hope you enjoy it as much as we do. And keep an eye out for the column; it’s going to change your life. [WARNING: There is a bad word in this track, so if you're listening at work, turn the volume down.]
The Awl, The Song (Hair Metal Version)
Get Adobe Flash Player to play audio from this site.0:00 / 0:00
Continuing the Conversation
Phew! Seems like there are a ton of people talking about the topics we've all been discussing here lately. Here's some highlights:
Startup.gov
After I posited that the U.S. executive branch is the most interesting startup of 2009, there have been some amazing responses. Craig Newmark (you love his list!) very kindly gave a nod towards my post, adding "In some results, it's run like a really good Silicon Valley startup", and spreading the word on The Huffington Post as well. Mike Masnick at Techdirt chiimed in as well:
For plenty of reasons that you can guess, I'm pretty jaded by people in government, and it's rare to come across people who seem to be doing things for anything other than "political" purposes. But I have to admit that the amazing thing that came through in both [Federal CTO Aneesh] Chopra's talks was that they were both entirely about actually getting stuff done, with a focus on openness and data sharing. Chopra talked, repeatedly, about figuring out what could be done both short- and long-term, and never once struck me as someone looking to hoard power or focus on a partisan or political reason for doing things. It was never about positioning things to figure out how to increase his budget. In fact, many of the ideas he was discussing was looking at ways to just get stuff done now without any need for extra budget. Needless to say, this is not the sort of thing you hear regularly from folks involved in the government.
Towards the end of my essay, I'd pointed out one particular challenge that faces this new startup-minded government effort: "Acquiring and retaining talent is hard, especially in a city that doesn't have as deep a well of people with tech startup experience." Amazingly, the latest perfect example of the type of talent that are heading to D.C. these days just popped up, with Christopher Soghoian's announcement that he is joining the FTC. I only know Christopher's work by reputation at Harvard's Berkman Center, but I think the fact that the government is looking for talented people in academia (a talent pool that typical tech startups often overlook) is a great sign.
Of course, there are skeptics. Gautham Nagesh covers the government for Nextgov and Atlantic Media, and he thinks I'm believing the hype". Of course, I think Gautham and I just disagree about government's role in general, and that I'll take small signs of progress as successes, even if there is a lot of work left to do yet.
In fact, I'll be talking about this a bit later today on Federal News Radio's Daily Debrief show. If you're in D.C., tune in to 1500 AM at 4:05 EDT and one idea I'll be discussing is how the recent web achievements by the executive branch are a lot like Microsoft's recent success with Bing; It doesn't mean that the whole giant organization is on the right track, it just means that it's still possible for these behemoths to do the right thing.
The potential is also hinted at in Brady Forrest's post about EveryBlock's acquisition over on O'Reilly Radar. I'm ecstatic to see Adrian and his team at EveryBlock get even more resources for their work, but just as pleased to see the government's work being discussed as a peer to even the most cutting-edge startups in the private sector.
Google's Wave Moment
After my recent posts about The Wave Way and Google's Microsoft Moment, I was very graciously invited to join Leo Laporte, Gina Trapani and Jeff Jarvis on their awesome podcast about Google and cloud computing, This Week in Google. If you have an hour or so to spare for listening to a podcast, I am very proud of how it came out, and especially that I got to participate with such pros on a show like this. TWiG is available on iTunes and Boxee and all of those usual services as well.
The idea that Google is facing a reckoning as it grows in size and influence seems to have caught on, and comparing the company to Microsoft has gone from seeming a bit radical at the time I posted to becoming much more popular when Wired covered the idea to finally having become something approaching conventional wisdom in just a few weeks. Take, for example, New Google is the old Microsoft, by Galen Ward, which lists the ways that Google ties its nascent (or even unsuccessful) efforts to the results of its dominant search engine.
Apple Blinks on Secrecy?
Less than three weeks ago, I was arguing that Apple's culture of secrecy can't scale. Fortunately, we may never know if I'm right. Astoundingly, Apple has opened up to some degree, most notably via VP Phil Schiller reaching out personally to bloggers John Gruber and Steven Frank. Of course, that's not a complete course change for Apple, but it is still significantly more human, personal and open than any recent communications they've made about their efforts.
Meanwhile, the idea that Apple's traditional secrecy is untenable has gotten an even larger audience with The Times' lengthy look at Steve Jobs and Apple:
[A]long with computers, iPhones and iPods, secrecy is one of Apple’s signature products. A cult of corporate omerta — the mafia code of silence — is ruthlessly enforced, with employees sacked for leaks and careless talk. Executives feed deliberate misinformation into one part of the company so that any leak can be traced back to its source. Workers on sensitive projects have to pass through many layers of security. Once at their desks or benches, they are monitored by cameras and they must cover up devices with black cloaks and turn on red warning lights when they are uncovered. “The secrecy is beyond fastidious and is in fact insultingly petty and political,” says one employee on the anonymous corporate reporting site Glassdoor.com, “and often is an impediment to actually getting one’s work done.”
But employees are one thing; shareholders are another. Should Jobs (who, as far as the world is concerned, is Apple) have been allowed to conceal the seriousness of his illness? Warren Buffett, the greatest investor alive, doesn’t think so. “Whether [Steve Jobs] is facing serious surgery or not is a material fact.”
Some say another sign that Apple omerta has gone too far was the death of Sun Danyong, a 25-year-old employee of Foxconn, a Chinese manufacturer of Apple machines. He was given 16 prototypes of new iPhones. One disappeared. Facts beyond that get hazy, but it is clear that Sun committed suicide by jumping from a 12th-storey apartment. Internet babble says he killed himself because of the vanished prototype and, therefore, because of Apple’s obsessive secrecy.
Pushing the Right Buttons
Finally, the idea of the Pushbutton Web seems to be gaining steam. I am delighted to point out Om Malik's The Evolution of Blogging, which Om uses as an example of a longer-form blog post he's enjoyed recently, but which I also hope will be a catalyst for the evolution of blogging that he's calling for in the post overall.
That point is taken even further with Farhad Manjoo's ruminations in Slate, which reference my Pushbutton post:
[A]s technologies like PubSubHubbub proliferate around the Web, with companies like Google, Facebook, and others embracing them, real-time Web updates will become the norm. It won't be hard to build competitors to Twitter—systems that do as much as it does but whose decentralized design ensures that they're not a single point of failure. Winer envisions these systems coming up alongside Twitter—when you post a status update, it could get sent to both Twitter and whatever decentralized, next-gen Twitter gets created. If these new systems take off, Twitter would be just one of many status-updating hubs—and if it went down, there'd be other servers to take its place.
Seeing so many great conversations pop up recently around the topics I've been obsessing over has been very inspiring; Right after I made offhand mention of one of my Big Think interviews being about the Philology of LOLcats, my original piece on LOLcat language, Cats Can Has Grammar, was indirectly cited in Time's profile of "I Can Has Cheeseburger", through a reference to "kitty pidgin". It might seem like a minor mention, but the idea that a random dude like me can write a post that results in a phrase showing up in Time or The New York Times is still very exciting to me, after all of these years.
Best of all, there have been a spate of amazing comments on all of these posts lately, both on this site and in some of the responses I've linked to above. I'm having more fun than ever in watching the conversation across the blogosphere.
In the meantime, two to consider:
- Slow Web: "There's a web that well-considered and worth savoring. We'll show you where."
- Every Friday, Rain or Shine: "When you see an interesting idea expressed in 140 chars that you think could use elaboration, ask them to do a longer-form post to explain. Especially on Fridays."
The Roots' Questlove Interview
A new interview with the always insightful Questlove, drummer for the Roots and now co-star of Jimmy Fallon's late night show.
Robert Novak, 1931-2009
Journalist, columnist, and CIA-employee identifier Robert Novak has died at the age of 78. What a rich legacy he leaves behind! Back in 2007, Novak identified former Senator Thomas Eagleton of Missouri as the anonymous politician who gave Novak a quote about George McGovern being the candidate of “amnesty, abortion, and acid.” Eagleton had never given Novak permission to name him as the source, which caused some hard feelings.
Eagleton died March 4, 2007, “relieving me of the need to conceal his identity,” Novak writes. At the time he gave Novak the quote, Eagleton was 42 and in his fourth year as a senator.Not surprisingly, some of Eagleton’s former aides are livid. They say Eagleton never authorized his name to be attached to a quote that makes him look duplicitous.
“Reprehensible,” barked Woody Overton, who spent 10 years with Eagleton as his state director. Eagleton, Overton said, isn’t around to defend himself.
Asked about the story at a recent breakfast with journalists, Novak acknowledged that attaching Eagleton’s name to the quote was “a judgment on my part.”
If there’s any disagreement, Novak said, Eagleton could settle it with him in heaven “or wherever we end up.”
I guess now they can!
this machine will make you want a cup of wilkins coffee
Courtesy of The Footnotes of Mad Men (via kottke) comes this wickedly disturbing set of commercials directed by Jim Henson for Wilkins Coffee.
Lots of info about the spots at the Muppet Wiki[1], including this great quote from Senator John Marshall Butler (R-MD) from a 1959 press release criticizing the quality of broadcast television...
About the only clever advertising on the air today is 'Wilkins and Wontkins'. It pleases rather than irritates television audiences, and I am happy to learn that this series is bringing increased sales to the sponsor.
The gun to the head is a nice touch.
[1] Seriously, I love the web.
The 2000s, summed up
Momus is first out of the gate with a summary of the 00s, what he calls a "mister narrative of the decade"...a one-man master narrative.
Other things that looked dead or dying this decade: I personally stopped going to the cinema. Why sit behind someone's head in a fleapit when you can download all you need to see and project it at home? Copyright effectively died, overtaken, de facto, by events on the internet. Magazines and newspapers ended the decade looking very unhealthy indeed, although books seemed strong. Young people got a lot less interested in cars, leading some to label Japan a post-car society. Detroit pretty much collapsed. The polar ice caps melted rapidly; climate change is a fact. Banks -- having invented what they thought were clever ways to spread risk around, and play with planet-sized sums of entirely fictional money -- looked pretty shaky.
Embedded in Momus's post is a video called Rise of the Rest, the title of which was borrowed from Fareed Zakaria.
From the video:
Tags: Fareed Zakaria Momus The 2000s videoIn ten years, the number one English speaking country in the world will be
USAIndiaChina.
meta!
Maybe I should write a column for theAwl that just deconstructs humor on theAwl:
And here Mr. Sicha artfully juxtaposes high and low diction to comic effect: Further considerations on cowardice, sloth and vanity; vices which do small harm to other people but which prevent one from doing any good and which poison and enfeeble all the virtues? Sloth rots the intelligence, cowardice destroys all power at the source, while vanity inhibits us from facing any fact which might teach us something; it dulls all other sensation? AND THIS IS MAYBE WHY DENBY IS SUCH A MOTHERFUCKER?
(Most of that was Connolly, not Choire.)
broadhong design: rolling band-aid
the seoul design studio broadhong design redesigned the traditional band-aid packaging, reducing waste
and transportation costs. their new design does away with the regular individual wrappers and places the
band-aids on a circular form like a roll of tape. the user simply peals of the band-aid and applies it to their
skin. the only waste is the box and the roll, saving all those wasted paper pieces. the new design is also
more compact and lighter making the product easier to ship.
http://www.broadhong.com
Is Baseball Back To Normal?
Maybe it’s just me but didn’t it seem not too long ago that everyone who could hit the ball to the outfield eventually reached 500 career home runs? What was once a prestigious accomplishment back during my childhood had become a common sight to baseball fans.
The most recent member of the 500 Home Run Club was Gary Sheffield a couple of months back. That truly speaks volumes about the feat considering he now joins players like Babe Ruth & Mickey Mantle. Luckily, after him it appears that it will be quite sometime before anyone else can join the club. Carlos Delgado is close with 473 but he’s played in just 26 games this season and at 37 years old it might be too late.
Chipper Jones is next up on the list with 423 but he’s on pace for a career low in home runs this season and is also 37 years old. Still, even at his age I’d put my money on Chipper reaching 500 before Delgado. 90’s superstars Jason Giambi and Vladimir Guererro, 37 & 34 have little chance with 407 & 402 career home runs. Giambi was recently released by the Oakland A’s and remains unemployed.
After all those guys flame out (or make the club), the only legitimate star left is Albert Pujols who is 29 and has 358 blasts. Barring any sort of Steroid and/or age controversy, he will likely have the best shot to unseat baseball’s all-time home run king, Barry Bonds, in the near future.
It seems the days of every other player reaching 500 home runs in their career is slowly coming to an end and I love it. Hate Jose Canseco all you want but without his books, we’d likely see even more players reaching 500, 600, and even 700 career home runs each and every year.
Question: Which member of the 500 Home Run Club had the least impressive career?
Twenty Year Anniversary Of F.B.I. F’ing Itself
Twenty years ago this month, N.W.A. were doing good. Songs like “Fuck the Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta” had traveled from the inner-city streets of Southern California to backyard barbecues in white suburban towns. While the group was on a nationwide tour, their album Straight Outta Compton sold its millionth copy. They were making it. But it took the promotional touch of the F.B.I. to really blow them up into megastars.
“A song recorded by the rap group N.W.A. on their album Straight Outta Compton encourages violence against and disrespect for the law enforcement officer and has been brought to my attention,” wrote the agency’s assistant director Milt Ahlerich, in a soon-to-be-famous August 1989 letter. “I understand your company recorded and distributed this album and I am writing to share my thoughts and concerns with you.”
Ruthless Records publicist Phyllis Pollack forwarded the letter to every journalist on her rolodex. The Village Voice ran a cover story. The group’s signature L.A. Raiders caps became a nationwide fashion phenomenon. N.W.A. was the biggest thing in music.
“I knew the letter would be pure gold for N.W.A.” said Ruthless Records cofounder Jerry Heller, in his 2007 memoir, Ruthless. “What better imprimatur could a rap group have than hate mail from the F.B.I.?”
The footnotes of Mad Men
This may be my favorite new blog of the year: The Footnotes of Mad Men. Sample footnote: The Dream of the Fisherman's Wife, the tentacle porn hanging in Bert Cooper's office. (via sandwich)
Tags: Mad Men TV weblogs
Shout-out to My Peeps
Lots of stuff going on in the blogosphere and elsewhere:
Lisa of Miss Helene's was featured in an article in the Indianapolis Star (and she didn't even tell me -- Rachael did)!
Cherie of Shrimpton Couture was interviewed at Collector's Weekly!
The fabulous founder of Spoonflower was interviewed on the APM podcast The Story. (Thanks to Kay for the link, and you should also know that the first part of the podcast is about a man who at the age of 17 parachuted into a forest fire with a group of fire fighters. Nothing about fabric, unless it's Kevlar.)
And our own fabulous Cookie was a featured blogger at Holly's Lucite Box blog! (And Holly's starting a BIG sale tomorrow ... check this space later for more details!)
Giant Fish Was Not Murdered: Taxidermist
Finally, a bit of closure: “Benson, the giant carp whose death in Britain this month sparked an international outpouring, was probably not a victim of foul play, the taxidermist charged with examining her sudden death said on Monday. Instead, the fish likely died from reproductive complications.”
Farewell, then, sweet Benson. We will never forget your sacrifice.
The Historical Truth Behind Mad Men
It seems like all anyone can talk since Sunday is Mad Men. Not only did the show lay the groundwork for what I’m sure will be an amazing season but it also did amazing in the ratings game and was up 33% from where it started last year.
One of the reasons that I love the show is how accurately it portrays the time in which it is set - the research that goes into each episode must be really intense. It makes the show not only entertaining but also educational in a sense - which is awesome. And is why I was glad to come across a tumblr called The Footnotes of Mad Men.
The tumblr basically looks at Mad Men episodes and gives you the historical context to various aspects of the show. For example in connection to Sunday’s episode there is a post about what it meant to be a stewardess back in the day, one about the painting in Cooper’s office and finally one about the real ad campaigns for London Fog.
I reccomend giving the site a read if you are Mad Men fan. It makes for an even richer viewing experience and gives you some food for thoughts, especially when it comes to thinking about how advertising has changed.
Also - what did you think of Sunday night’s episode?
Note: Bobby V, Manager & Front-Office Guy
In a recent report for FoxSports.com, Tracy Ringolsby writes, “Don’t be surprised if Bobby Valentine returns to manage the Mets in a setup that allows him to be active in front office activities, too.”
…fascinating… i have no idea what this means…
however, i have heard, from people who know valentine, he has no interest in coming to a team to just manage, that he wants a say is the type of talent being acquired… i don’t know if he means simply having a seat at the table, or if he’s talking in more of an official capacity, though… more and more, he sounds like the perfect fit for the Nationals… the thing is, is DC a big enough spotlight…
In addition to providing other notes from around MLB, Ringolsby also writes about the future of Omar Minaya, John Ricco, and Jeff Wilpon’s involvement in day-to-day decisions.
Bad company alert: Fiji Water
Bottled water is bad but Fiji bottled water is particularly odious. For starters, the country's military regime monitors internet usage at internet cafes in real-time for information about the popular bottled water brand:
I sat down and sent out a few emails -- filling friends in on my visit to the Fiji Water bottling plant, forwarding a story about foreign journalists being kicked off the island. Then my connection died. "It will just be a few minutes," one of the clerks said. Moments later, a pair of police officers walked in. They headed for a woman at another terminal; I turned to my screen to compose a note about how cops were even showing up in the Internet cafes. Then I saw them coming toward me. "We're going to take you in for questioning about the emails you've been writing," they said.
Then the cops threatened the reporter with prison rape. The rest of the story isn't much better.
Tags: business Fiji Fiji Water water
Big Trouble
(via the av club)
Phone That Shames The Weather Bureau
I don’t know about your city, but the weather bureau of my hometown is often sniggered at, for their in-accurate predictions. When they say it will rain (like they predicted a couple of days ago) you can be sure it will be bright and sunny. I would like to gift them this “Window Phone”, that makes accurate predictions and even changes its display to reflect the climatic conditions outdoors. Maybe I should keep the phone for myself and bug the bureau with my updates.
Designer: Seunghan Song
Tilt
Tilt is very nice series of photos by Romain Laurent, these are my favorites.
'waterpod' docks in new york
waterpod, 2009
photograph by mary mattingly
all images courtesy waterpod.org
earlier this year we published an article on the 'waterpod', a self sufficient island.
the 'waterpod' has since been completed, beginning its journey from newtown creek
between brooklyn and queens, slowly navigating down the east river, exploring
the waters of new york harbor. last week it docked at several manhattan piers along
the hudson river and is continuing onward until october, 2009.
the 'waterpod' demonstrates future pathways for nomadic, mobile shelters and water-based
communities, docked and roaming. it intends to prepare, inform, and provide an alternative
to current and future living spaces. the 'waterpod' residents, new york artists grow their
own vegetables, raise chickens, compost, recycle greywater, generate electricity with
solar power, and when they have a spare minute, continue with their art work.
you can check the docking schedule here.
waterpod docked at the south street seaport, 2009
photograph by mira hunter
waterpod at sheepshead bay marina, 2009
photograph by mary mattingly
sunfrost composter fully installed and growing buck wheat and lettuce
photograph by mira henter
view from the dome at the south street seaport, manhattan, 2009
photograph by mira hanter
waterpod in sheepshead bay, 2009
photograph by mary mattingly
waterpod, 2009
photograph by eve k. tremblay
August 17, 2009
Fort Greene Park is the nation’s first ever prisoner of war...
Fort Greene Park is the nation’s first ever prisoner of war monument.
After the Battle of Brooklyn on Aug. 27, 1776, which, Mr. Maher noted, “we lost big,” New York was essentially under siege for the next seven years, occupied by the British. Merchant vessels would raid British ships coming into port from England and loaded with supplies for the British troops. The American raiders would split the booty between themselves and the American revolutionary cause.
The Brits called these guys “privateers,” aka our very own pirates!
(via You Asked: Arrr!! - The Local - Fort-Greene Blog - NYTimes.com)
How a Perl 5 Program Works
In the discussions which prompted me to write On Parsing Perl 5, I've read many misconceptions of how Perl 5 works.
The strangest example is a comment on Lambda the Ultimate which contains an incorrect suggestion that Perl 5 subroutines take the source code of the program as an argument to resolve ambiguous parsing.
Someone elsewhere gave the example that Perl gurus preface answers to the question "Is Perl 5 interpreted or compiled?" with "It depends." (Part of the reason for that is that Larry himself often prefaces his answers to all sorts of questions with "It depends.")
Perl 5's execution model isn't quite the same as a traditional compiler (whatever that means) and it's definitely not the same as the traditional notion of an interpreter. There are two distinct phases of execution of a Perl 5 program: compile time and runtime. You must understand the difference to take full advantage of Perl 5.
Compile Time
The compilation stage of a Perl 5 program resembles the compilation stage as you may have learned it in a compilers class. A lexer analyses source code, producing individual tokens. A parser analyses patterns of tokens to build a tree structure representing the operations of the program and to produce syntax errors and warnings. An optimizer prunes and rebuilds the tree for efficiency and consistency.
Unlike the compilation model you may expect from a language implementation which produces a serialized compilation artifact (think of a C compiler producing a .o file, for example, or
javacemitting a .class file), Perl 5 stores this data structure in memory only. That's one way in which Perl 5 differs from other language implementations; it manages the artifacts of compilation itself.Certain operations happen only at compilation time -- looking up function names where possible, binding lexical (
my) variables to lexical pads, entering global symbols into symbol tables. One common error which confuses novices is not realizing thatmydeclarations have compile time effects while assignments have runtime effects.Runtime
After Perl 5 has produced its tree -- the optree -- it begins executing the program by traversing the optree in execution order. Even though the tree structure is a tree for ease of representing operations, execution does not start at the root of the tree and proceed leafward. At this point in the program, the source code is gone.
Of course, certain runtime operations such as the
eval STRINGoperator orrequirecan begin a new, limited compilation time -- but they have no effect on source code already parsed into the optree. This is important.Executing Code During Compile Time
One of the difficulties in parsing Perl 5 code statically is that one Perl 5 linguistic construct executes code during compile time. The
BEGINblock executes as soon as Perl 5 has successfully parsed it. (See perldoc perlmod for more information.)Because
BEGINtemporarily suspends compilation, it can manipulate the environment used by the parser to affect how the parser will treat subsequent source code. An easy example is the case of importing symbols from an external module:use strict;The Perl 5 parser treats
usestatements as if you'd written something like:BEGIN { require 'strict.pm'; strict->import(); }As soon as the parser reaches the semicolon, it executes this code. This causes
perlto try to load strict.pm, compile it, and then call itsimport()method. Within that method, thestrictmodule modifies lexically scoped hints, some of which cause the parser to require declarations of variables and barewords.Other modules can insert subroutines and variables into the calling package's symbol table; the vars pragma does this for package global variable declarations.
When the
BEGINblock ends successfully, the parser resumes at the point where it left off. If the environment of the parse has changed, subsequent parsing may behave differently. This is why this program gives a syntax error at compile time:use Modern::Perl; $undeclared_variable = 'Hello, world!'; say $undeclared_variable;... but works with a minor change:
use Modern::Perl; use vars '$undeclared_variable'; $undeclared_variable = 'Hello, world!'; say $undeclared_variable;The equivalent code might be:
use Modern::Perl; BEGIN { require 'vars.pm'; vars->import( '$undeclared_variable' ); } $undeclared_variable = 'Hello, world!'; say $undeclared_variable;
BEGINblocks don't have to do this; they can execute arbitrary code.usestatements are the primary (if implicit) source ofBEGINblocks, however.The Optree
A Perl 5 optree is a tree of C data structures all deriving from a structure called
OP. Each op has a name, some flags, and zero or more children. Ops correspond to Perl 5 operations (called ppcodes) or Perl 5 data structures (scalars, arrays, hashes, et cetera).You don't have to know any of this to write good Perl 5 code. You can inspect the optree produced by the parser with the B::Concise module:
$ perl -MO=Concise hello.pl 6 <g@> leave[1 ref] vKP/REFC ->(end) 1 <g0> enter ->2 2 <g;> nextstate(main 61 declorder.pl:5) v:%,*,&,{,$ ->3 5 <g@> say vK ->6 3 <g0> pushmark s ->4 4 <g$> const[PV "Hello, world!"] s ->5There's a lot of detail in this output, but you can ignore most of it; what matters is that it uses nesting to represent the tree structure. Thus the top item (
leave) represents the root of the tree. The numbers in the leftmost column represent the execution order of the program. The first op executed is theenterop. The numbers in the rightmost columns identify where execution will proceed;enterleads directly tonextstate.As you may expect, when Perl 5 has finished parsing a
BEGINblock, it begins the execution of the code in that block at the entry point and resumes parsing at the exit point.On Bytecode
Language implementations such as Rakudo Perl 6 (or anything else built on Parrot, for that matter) also build up tree structures representing the program, but they don't execute the tree structure directly. They produce bytecode, which is a stream of instructions.
The effect is similar, but instead of serializing and restoring C data structures, the bytecode format has a design conducive to serialization and restoration. You can execute bytecode one set of instructions at a time rather than inflating the whole structure into memory. (I lie a little bit here; some bytecode strategies require building some data structures before execution, but you get the point.)
Perl 5 has an experimental compiler backend in the form of the
B::*modules intended to give access to the compiler and optree from Perl programs themselves. There have been attempts to serialize the optree and restore it later, but it's never worked well. Perl 5's execution model makes this difficult.Infrequently Asked Questions
Wait, so Perl 5 doesn't interpret every statement as it parses it?
Not at all, unless you're running a Perl 5 REPL or the debugger.
How does Perl 5 handle ambiguous syntactic constructs then, if it doesn't resolve them at runtime?
The example given in "Perl 5 is not Deterministically and Statically Parseable in All Cases" has unambiguous parses -- if you can execute code in
BEGINblocks. Don't get hung up on the word "statically". The Perl 5 parser as a wealth of information available.If it really can't make sense of an ambiguous syntactic construct, it'll give a warning and try to continue or give a syntax error, depending on the serverity.
How much work would it take to make Perl 5 use bytecode instead of an optree?
Lots -- many developer-years of refactoring (and likely a few deprecation cycles to migrate Perl 5 extensions to a better-encapsulated API) might do it.
But Python 2.x always produces the same parse tree for cases where it doesn't know if a symbol is a function name or a variable!
That's because Python's bytecode doesn't distinguish between the two at compile time; it prefers to try an operation at run time and give an error there. (Before you write angry comments saying "Python is strongly typed and Perl 5 is weakly typed and your lawn is ugly, you big ninny!", let me give a few disclaimers. First, I don't know what Python 3.x does. I've only checked Python 2.6.2. Second, "strong typing" doesn't mean much of anything. Third, sigils give syntactic hints even to static parsers. Fourth, language designers and implementers prioritize different things. Perl tries to give really good error messages; improving error messsages is a priority for Perl 6. That's not to say that Python doesn't care about error messages, but that distinguishing between container types at compile time gives Perl certain advantages here.)
When does the Modern Perl book come out?
I hope to publish it in November 2009. Please join the fun by reviewing it and making suggestions.
So this happened.
So this happened.:I think everyone can acknowledge that this has not been the most calm or respectful debate. There is no question that piling on is occuring here. I am not angry. But I think the condescension in the comment Choire left is clear. The proper, expected response from me is contrition or embarrassment. But I’m simply expressing a point, and I am confused by the level of enmity it seems to have generated (perhaps not from you, if that’s what you’re saying, but it’s out there). He didn’t say “this post is not representative of my work.” He said he doesn’t expect that I’m well-versed in his work, and I don’t think I’m being pedantic by pointing out a difference between those two statements. There is no genuine attempt at engagement there.
I think there’s some tonal misreading here. I don’t think for one second that Choire literally only read a third of a sentence of Denby’s review. It was an exaggeration for comic purposes, and I think the humor just isn’t your cup of tea. “I skimmed Denby’s review and realized it was going to be as bad as his previous ones” is not quite as effective “I couldn’t even make it through a full sentence”—and definitely not as funny. I agree with the choice stylistically.
And I don’t think Choire was being condescending. His “are you not familiar with my entire body of work?” comment was self-deprecating humor—the implication being that it would be ludicrous to expect that you would be. Choire would never say that sincerely. (And frankly, if you ever meet anyone who does, the answer they deserve is “You know, I wish I was, but the truth is, you’re so thinly published that I can’t find your writing anywhere.”)
No one expects contrition on your part; they just expect debate on the points they’re making. And the way Internet debates usually happen, no one really even expects that you might actually change your mind. Or that they might. Debate has value beyond just getting people on the same page.
(And with that, I’m afraid my part of the debate will have to end—at least for now—because I have to go to sleep. And the Internet will still be here tomorrow.)
So, How Does It Work on the Bus?
David Byrne talks about the mechanics of being on tour. Great piece, although I couldn't imagine doing that for a living.
I went for a walk in a sheep pasture this afternoon and wondered to myself why it is that friends and acquaintances ALWAYS, without fail, marvel at how we get around by bus, while journalists NEVER ask about such pragmatic or mundane matters. Maybe the journalists already know how such things work, maybe they think their readers don’t care, or maybe it’s the fact that it’s all somewhat the same for many touring groups, so there must be nothing special about us. Maybe our friends are interested because they are completely unaware of how musical acts get around, or they think we all travel by private jets — like their image of rock stars of yore, or bands like U2 and Rolling Stones today.
Anyway, here’s how it works:
So this happened.
So this happened.:(You’ll have to scroll.) I’m attempting to keep Soren K. in my mind at this moment.Is she really surprised that bloggers respond to criticism of their writing online? Or is it just that she thinks Choire is so famous and occupied with his status as an established writer that he wouldn’t deign to comment?
Because, uh, that’s how blogging started. Party A wrote something in response to Party B, and Party B, realizing that Party A existed and wrote something about Party B, responded in kind. And so on and so on.
I met Choire at a Metafilter party sometime in ‘00 or ‘01, I can’t remember. He was doing a joint blog with Philo Hagen, and writing original material, responding to other people’s writing and he had a regular byline at The Morning News. What he’s doing now is exactly what he was doing then, so I’m not sure why it would be so unexpected to find him commenting on a blog that’s addressing his writing directly, and I don’t understand why someone would be offended by it. (If you don’t want the people you’re critiquing to talk to you, it helps not to put those critiques on the modern electronic version of a Times Square billboard that we call the Internet. They will find it, inevitably—even if you’re not getting the traffic of Gawker or theAwl.) Or why she would have the notion that he wouldn’t comment because she’s a total stranger. That’s how bloggers met each other in the old days, youngun! You responded to someone you didn’t know on the Internet and if you had a positive interaction online you sometimes met those people in real life. I only met Balk because I liked his writing at TMFTML and asked a friend who knew him to put me in touch with him.
Also—and this was the most baffling part of nerdshare’s response to Choire—if Denby commented on all 16 of the posts Choire wrote about him, it wouldn’t be objectionable at all. It would be awesome (though it might make Denby look a bit unhinged.) Maybe he could explain the sheer laziness of his Snark book and his very un-New Yorker-like failure to fact check it?
Bad Idea 101 – Umpire Trading Cards
We’ve been witness to a lot of interesting concepts in The Hobby in the last twenty five years. One of those that is perhaps in the top three worst ideas has to be T & M Sports’ 1988 Umpire set. Yes, a full set of trading cards featuring baseball’s umpires.
The original 64-card set featured a basic, black-bordered design. Apparently it was popular enough to warrant two more releases up until 1990 when the set was finally laid to rest. I mean really, just how many different Eric Gregg cards do you need in your collection?
As for the John McSherry pictured below, it comes with a tragic story. John was in his 25th year of Major League service when he suffered a heart attack during the Opening Day game between the Cincinnati Reds and Montreal Expos. He was pronounced dead an hour later at University of Cincinnati Hospital.
T & M Sports’ other big release was the doomed ‘89 Senior League.
This is actually an option on Dell’s dual-Nehalem...
This is actually an option on Dell’s dual-Nehalem servers.
It would make a hell of a Memcache machine.
Or you could buy several cars.
oopsie daisy: Vote for My SXSW Panels. Pretty Please?Now, I never went to Spring Break when I was in college because, let’s be honest, I didn’t need to prance around a crowded beach in a skimpy bikini in order to rationalize getting drunk and making out with four different guys in two days. However, just because I was never lucky enough to lose a wet t-shirt contest in Cabo doesn’t mean I’ll be trying to make up for it by attending 2010’s SXSW Interactive conference. Don’t get me wrong, though…. This doesn’t mean it’s not one of my absolute favorite events… because it is. Right after Burning Man. After all, there are only two times a year in SF you can count on getting some peace, quiet and freedom from the geeks, hipsters and hippies: September (Burning Man) and March (SXSWi). The streets are free of bitter cyclists, the coffee shops are free of laptops, and you can go to Dolores Park without wanting to kill yourself (and by "yourself," I mean "everyone else")… It’s glorious. Truly glorious.
Where This is Going
A tweet from SEIU's Andy Stern: "We should not lower our expectations on health care. We won the election and a bad plan could lose the next one-America needs real reform."
‘Kind Of Blue’ At Fifty
Historic moment alert: It was exactly fifty years ago today to the minute that the first member of the general public tried to use Miles Davis’ jazz classic Kind of Blue to get laid. “It was right as ‘Freddie Freeloader’ segued into ‘Blue In Green’ that I made my move,” says Arnold Woltz, currently residing in Boca Raton, FL, but a broker in Chicago at the time. “She was an artsy broad, I figured she’d be into it.” How did he do? “A gentleman never tells,” he responds politely, before tilting his head and making the universal symbol for handjob. Anyway, Happy Anniversary, Kind of Blue! Here’s to another fifty more.
The Most Powerful Force in the World
Originally posted in The TechniumEven counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.
From the moment Sapiens emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, their inventions began to alter their environment. Sapien's hunting tools and techniques had far reaching affects: their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of people shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick — burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains — disrupted vast regions of the continents.
Later the repeated inventions and spread of agriculture around the planet affected not only the surface of the Earth, but its 100 km (60-mile) wide atmosphere as well. Farming disturbed the soil and increased CO2. Some climatologists believe that this early anthropogenic warming, starting 8,000 years ago, kept the next ice age at bay. Widespread adoption of farming disrupted a natural climate cycle which would have ordinarily refrozen the northern most portions of the planet by now. In other words, agriculture made (and still makes) the world safe for more agriculture. Like most complex technologies, agriculture — the integrated system of domesticated crops and animals, irrigation infrastructure and soil management — is self-sustaining and will alter its environment to further its own benefit.
Long before the industrial age, humans were altering the Earth's climate.Of course, once humans invented machines that ate concentrated old plants (coal) instead of fresh plants, the mechanical exhalations of CO2 furthered altered the balance of the atmosphere as the number of machines multiplied. The technium bloomed as machines harnessed this source of abundant energy. Petroleum eating machines not only transformed the ease, productivity, and spread of agriculture (accelerating an old trend), machines also drilled for more oil faster (a new trend), accelerating the rate of acceleration. Today the CO2 exhalation of all machines greatly exceeds the exhalation of all animals, and even approaches the volume generated by geological forces. Alan Weisman, writing in the World Without Us, suggest that the modern technium is the geological equivalent to a series of ceaseless volcanoes: "by tapping the [fuels of the] Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we've become a volcano that hasn't stopped erupting since the 1700s." And this impact is not only global, but extremely persistent: "Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we're gone is our redesigned atmosphere." Climatologist Tyler Volk estimates that a natural geological cycle — with no technological mitigation — would take 100,000 years to return the agricultural and industrial induced CO2 atmosphere to pre-technium levels.
Each year the technium consumes more than 40 trillion pounds of coal, 1.6 trillion pounds of iron, 200 billion pounds of gypsum, and 1.2 trillion pounds of wheat, just four inputs among thousands of others needed to appease its appetite, and all those totals grow more than 5% per year. On average the technium must process twenty tons of atoms per year to support each man, women and child in the modern world.
The technium gains its immense power not from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, like books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet. Each step adds further powers while retaining most of the virtues of the previous inventions. Someone has an idea (a spinning wheel!) which can hop to other minds, mutate into a derivative idea (place the spinning wheel beneath a sled to make it easy to haul) which disrupts the prevailing balance, causing a shift. That shift will often suggest another idea to someone else (use a cow to pull the wheeled sled), which in turn produces yet another disturbance, another rebalancing, another shift. Once started the teetering continues for many generations. As one ideas sparks two new ones and two ideas spark four, and four eight, this chain reaction of technology reverberates through the society, always gaining in accumulating energy and ceaseless movement. Efficient machines enable industry to make even more efficient machines. Smart chips assist humans in making even smarter chips. These virtuous circles are like rubbing the genie's lamp and getting three more wishes for the last wish. Magical self-amplification is a story retold in every domain of technology.
But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.
On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it's overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.
All change in society can be traced back to the products of our minds. The history of civilization is an ever up-cascading sequence of social organization that we invent. Societies begin as leaderless bands of hunter-gatherers, and over generational time acquire chiefs, put down roots (literally) with farms, land and water rights adjudicated by authorities, hatch cities, and eventually become states and nations. Each step in civilization is characterized by more social organization, more different kinds connections between people (beyond family relations), more webs of interdependence, producing more of what Robert Wright, author of Non Zero, calls "non-zero-sumness," that is, self-reinforcing mutual benefit. Each emergent organization in the evolution of society serves as a platform for citizens to birth yet more new ways to organize. This self-improving recursive "3-more-wishes" loop goes round and round, amplifying its original force.
The power of cooperation is not new, but this virtuous circle is more than ordinary altruism, because participants are often not consciously cooperating, and may in fact compete, or even be parasitic. A merchant in Athens selling a barrel of raisins is not cooperating with the grower of grapes in Macedonia, or the speculator in Corinth hoarding stock, but the three form a system (an emergent market) that expands all their interests. It's a win-win condition. This kind of accumulating social organization exhibits an almost mathematical flavor that transcends neighborly kindness. Rather than happy camaraderie, this increasing structure is built on information flows that tighten both trust and rivalries into a web of interdependence. As these links increase, so does the power of amplification and acceleration.
Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that evenly applied laws, rather than nepotic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions and as much products of our minds as light bulbs and telegraphs.
The larger point is that this cyclotron of social betterment is not propelled by ethics or religion, but by technology. Society is evolved by injecting it with incremental doses of that most powerful force in the world; each rise in social organization throughout history is driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty. Historian Lynn White notes, "Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history." In White's view the adoption of the foot stirrup for horse saddles enabled riders to use weapons on horseback, which gave an advantage to the cavalry over infantry, and to the lords who could afford horses, and so nurtured the rise of aristocratic feudalism in Europe. The stirrup was not the only technological cause blamed for feudalism. As Karl Marx famously claimed, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."
Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time steer complex business. Double-entry accounting unleashed the banking industry in Venice, and launched a global economy. The invention of the contraception pill in 1960 aided the blossoming of feminism. The invention of moveable type printing in Europe encouraged Christians to read their religion's founding text themselves, make their own interpretations, and launched the very idea of "protest" within and against religion. Way back in 1620 Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science, realized how powerful technology was becoming. He listed three "practical arts" — the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass — that had changed the world. He declared that "no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." Bacon help launch the scientific method which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium.
Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divvied up an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science, and all it's many cultural descendents. He says, "The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began."
It's never a good idea to assign a single cause to any large scale cultural change. The greater the number of people a change effects the more likely numerous factors are behind it. A web of complex conditions must converge to produce the hallmark transitions in a complex society. But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.
That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents. The technologies of ultrasound fetal inspection and routine abortion enabled sexual selection of children so that now males outnumber females in the youth of China and India. This imbalance will leave an immense surplus of unmarried males in society, an excess which in the past has been a source of unrest, crime, and war. Still young, their story has not fully played out yet, but because of the sheer numbers involved (hundreds of millions in Asia) its concluding effect will be global. Whatever the consequences of this sex-ratio excess are — an increase in international prostitution, a surge of ambitious entrepreneurs and military recruits, or a massive outward migration to places like Africa — the effects will be broader, and less technological that what might be expected from the invention of ultrasound equipment.
Name a disruption in culture today, either positive or negative, and if you press far enough back you'll find an tangible invention that sets off the imbalance. Globalism? Cheap, ubiquitous global communications. Social Security overhang? Medical advances for increasing longevity and decreasing fertility. Obesity epidemic? Cheap monoculture food system combined with passive entertainment technology. Gay rights? Emboldened by science showing gender preferences are biological. Celebrity obsessions? Broadcast media. Militant jihadism? Islam has been around 1500 years. But an imbalance between a medically enabled population explosion without a corresponding explosion in economic or political progress disrupts the former social equilibrium.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both realized from reading Malthus's work on population that natural selection is propelled by the difference between two growth patterns in the wild: population versus food. The greater propulsion of population growth could not be contained in the lesser geometric gains of its food production. This tension between the overwhelming multiplication of population and the slower expansion of its material container is the drive behind evolution.
The evolution of the technium likewise gains its unmatched power from the difference between two growth rates. The number of ideas and their transmission via computers, books, telephone lines, patents, and so on increases in an exponential fashion. Information is, in fact, the fastest growing thing on this planet. Information is especially conducive to amplification and compounding. As the number of facts increase, the connections between facts increases exponentially faster. Because the mathematical law of combinations, the number of links between pages explodes faster than the number of pages increases. New inventions in certain fields like communication, which are powered by increasing combinations of connections, can increase the speed of invention overall, revving the engines of creation. Everywhere we look, the technium is wired with self-amplifying loops ballooning up the scale of change. Fundamentally, discoveries in the science of how to discover, and inventions in how to invent (the genie process we call science) accelerate the rate of discovery and invention everywhere.
But our human ability to absorb or process this explosion of ideas increases only linearly at best. Despite years spent in education, or bathed in the best nutrition, our brains are not doubling in speed, memory, and insight every 18 months, as computers do. In fact, biologically speaking, our brains are remarkably similar to the brains of the first Sapiens 50,000 years ago. The smartest humans are not exponentially smarter than the average ones, and the average IQ of a human is only slowly increasing over time by the most minute amount (a few percent per decade in modern times). Even collectively, unaided human intelligence is only growing in tandem with the number of humans. The gap between the escalating growth of information generated by us and our machines, and our tiny marginal improvements in being able to understand the oceans of information and make meaning from it is the driver behind the rapid evolution of the technium.
The work of understanding all this information is migrating from humans to the technium. We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an apparatus to structure what we think, in the same manner that we first used writing on paper to extend our memory. Now we are offloading other mental functions. The technium contains an elaborate knowledge processing system consisting of encyclopedias, classification indexes, cross references, search engines, footnotes, citations, hypertext, and the web. These technologies organize the output of our collective minds — both intangible ideas and tangible inventions — into a semantic structure, much like an ecosystem. This incredibly complicated mesh of connections, interdependencies, associations, and emergent structure gives the technium a "meaning" that is outside our of understanding.
It's reasonable to figure that since the technium is simply "that which the mind produces" then at its root the most powerful force in the world must not be technology but the human mind. If this were so we'd have to recalibrate the equation above to state that the origin of all change in our lives lays in the mysterious force of intelligence and consciousness hiding between our ears. (That assertion reminds me of a joke I heard from a friend who said "whenever I get the idea that human mind is the most powerful thing in world I just remember what it is that is telling me this.") But the claim that the human mind is foremost power is not valid. No matter how much we use our biological mind's awareness to reflect upon our mind's workings, this type of mental introspection and self-improvement leads to extremely limited improvement at best, and usually none at all. Contemplation (even in a zen position) to optimize our own mind just doesn't scale up. Unaided, the mind makes very little headway in amplifying itself.
However, the technium, which is a product of our brain, can alter the circuits that produced it. People who grow up immersed in the technologies of writing and reading think differently. I don't mean humans think differently while reading. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain memorizes facts and conceptualizes ideas, and these changes stimulate abstract thinking. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences in how their brains work whether or not they are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and "the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age." Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that "the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general… not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking." Literacy — a human invention — rewires the human mind.
It is not just writing. Music, another invention, also alters the brain in a sustainable way. Many studies have shown how listening to music strengthens the communication wiring between brain hemispheres. Beside fostering an expected growth in auditory regions of the brain, regularly playing musical instruments significantly strengthens the thickness of the corpus callosum fibers and activates the cerebral cortex. Our mind makes a drum and flute, and the drum and flute remakes our mind.
Certainly, other tools that we devote lots of attention to should also alter our brain to a similar degree. How could a brain which spends 7 hours per day (!!) watching the fine flickering lines of television not find its perception circuits permanently rewired? The average adult American spends one hour per day driving a car. Cruising through terrain at 60 mph is not a skill the Sapien brain was evolved for. So the technology of the automobile must reshape our plastic brains, too.
Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a 2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.
Progress of any type, especially literacies such as reading and writing, or web surfing, are not inherited in our genes (so far), nor re-invented each generation. Rather literacies are carried forwarded by the technium. Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don't quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.
Technology may not only be the most powerful force in the world; it may the most powerful force in the universe. If an embryonic amount of technology can so affect a planet, unintentionally, the same force applied intentionally several centuries from now could be aimed a star, and with time, at a galaxy. The libraries of science fiction are filled with plausible schemes by which advanced civilizations terraform planets, tame stars into generators, reroute stellar orbits, and re-arrange matter and energy on astronomical scales. Vast space colonies, death stars, ring worlds, and Dyson Spheres are some of the imagined projects that indicate the cosmic power of technology. If these ambitions are at all possible, they would be direct extensions of the same compounding circuits operating in the technium today. To manage these galactic-scale manipulations, our minds would have to amplify themselves by creating artificial minds smarter than us, just as we have amplified our bodies by creating artificial machines stronger than us, machines such as cranes, trucks, and robot arms. A technium populated with machines capable of their own indefinite upcreation could keep progressing way beyond our current understanding. This complex system would invent a system superior to itself in an infinite loop until the whole cycle reached its natural limits (which all real things have). Many believe that a technium like this is already operating at galactic scale somewhere else in the universe; this speculation is to only point out the technium is not solely an Earth-bound, human phenomenon.
Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds. In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child.
The force of this uroborous is incomparable. There is no nuclear energy, fusion, plasma bolt, black hole, white dwarf, cosmic nebula anywhere in the universe that can uplift itself in the way that technology can. For certain there will be further evolutions of the technium. The great story that begins with the big bang and bootstraps itself up into persistent evolving systems that keep building up more complex systems will certainly keep going. First persistently dynamic planets hatch life, which uplifts itself to make minds, which then uplifts itself to make technology. Technology will uplift itself to create the next level of extropy. But it will continue the same arc. The same big history. Whatever technology evolves into, it will carry on in the direction it has been headed so far for the past 14 billion years: towards greater complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, socialization, consilience, energy density, and sentience. A future meta-technology will be unrecognizable on its face, but fundamentally continue these trends.
As far as we can see, for at least a hundred light years in all directions, there appears to be only the bleak unbending forces of physics at work: radiation, heat, gravity, momentum, and always, entropy. But we are lucky. We live on a membrane of floating sphere that is infected with a rampant case of the most powerful force in the universe, a force that is curiously more potent that the immense powers governing the stars around us. Unlike the eternal constancy delivered by the universal laws, this most powerful force is in constant change. The technium is in fact, changing the nature of change, an ongoing process of becoming, and we are, to a statistical approximation, right in the middle of it.
As a biological species born of life, we embrace our origins in life. And as a thinking species, we embrace our mindfulness. But now in the middle of this long evolution it has become clear that we are a technological species as well. Our self image says that we are a thinking animal that reluctantly produces the most powerful force in the world. That is true. But actually something more wondrous is going on. In reality we human beings are the product of the most powerful force in the universe. We are technology. The self-manufactured uroborous.
So far, humanity is our greatest invention, and we aren't done yet.
The Most Powerful Force in the World
Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.
From the moment Sapiens emerged from Africa to colonize every inhabitable watershed on this planet, their inventions began to alter their environment. Sapien's hunting tools and techniques had far reaching affects: their technology enabled them to kill off key herbivores (mammoths, giant elk, etc.) whose extinctions altered the ecology of entire grassland biomes forever. Once dominant grazers were eliminated, their absence cascaded through the ecosystem, enabling the rise of new predators, new plant species, and all their competitors and allies, surfacing a modified ecosystem. Thus a few clans of people shifted the destiny of thousands of other species. When Sapiens gained control of fire, this technology further modified the natural terrain on a massive scale. Such a tiny trick — burning grasslands, controlling it with backfires, and summoning flames to cook grains — disrupted vast regions of the continents.
Later the repeated inventions and spread of agriculture around the planet affected not only the surface of the Earth, but its 100 km (60-mile) wide atmosphere as well. Farming disturbed the soil and increased CO2. Some climatologists believe that this early anthropogenic warming, starting 8,000 years ago, kept the next ice age at bay. Widespread adoption of farming disrupted a natural climate cycle which would have ordinarily refrozen the northern most portions of the planet by now. In other words, agriculture made (and still makes) the world safe for more agriculture. Like most complex technologies, agriculture — the integrated system of domesticated crops and animals, irrigation infrastructure and soil management — is self-sustaining and will alter its environment to further its own benefit.
Long before the industrial age, humans were altering the Earth's climate.Of course, once humans invented machines that ate concentrated old plants (coal) instead of fresh plants, the mechanical exhalations of CO2 furthered altered the balance of the atmosphere as the number of machines multiplied. The technium bloomed as machines harnessed this source of abundant energy. Petroleum eating machines not only transformed the ease, productivity, and spread of agriculture (accelerating an old trend), machines also drilled for more oil faster (a new trend), accelerating the rate of acceleration. Today the CO2 exhalation of all machines greatly exceeds the exhalation of all animals, and even approaches the volume generated by geological forces. Alan Weisman, writing in the World Without Us, suggest that the modern technium is the geological equivalent to a series of ceaseless volcanoes: "by tapping the [fuels of the] Carboniferous Formation and spewing it up into the sky, we've become a volcano that hasn't stopped erupting since the 1700s." And this impact is not only global, but extremely persistent: "Among the human-crafted artifacts that will last the longest after we're gone is our redesigned atmosphere." Climatologist Tyler Volk estimates that a natural geological cycle — with no technological mitigation — would take 100,000 years to return the agricultural and industrial induced CO2 atmosphere to pre-technium levels.
Each year the technium consumes more than 40 trillion pounds of coal, 1.6 trillion pounds of iron, 200 billion pounds of gypsum, and 1.2 trillion pounds of wheat, just four inputs among thousands of others needed to appease its appetite, and all those totals grow more than 5% per year. On average the technium must process twenty tons of atoms per year to support each man, women and child in the modern world.
The technium gains its immense power not from its scale but from its self-amplifying nature. One breakthrough invention, such as the alphabet, the steam pump, or electricity, can lead to further breakthrough inventions, like books, coal mines, and telephones. These advances in turn lead to other breakthrough inventions, such as libraries, power generators, and the internet. Each step adds further powers while retaining most of the virtues of the previous inventions. Someone has an idea (a spinning wheel!) which can hop to other minds, mutate into a derivative idea (place the spinning wheel beneath a sled to make it easy to haul) which disrupts the prevailing balance, causing a shift. That shift will often suggest another idea to someone else (use a cow to pull the wheeled sled), which in turn produces yet another disturbance, another rebalancing, another shift. Once started the teetering continues for many generations. As one ideas sparks two new ones and two ideas spark four, and four eight, this chain reaction of technology reverberates through the society, always gaining in accumulating energy and ceaseless movement. Efficient machines enable industry to make even more efficient machines. Smart chips assist humans in making even smarter chips. These virtuous circles are like rubbing the genie's lamp and getting three more wishes for the last wish. Magical self-amplification is a story retold in every domain of technology.
But not all changes induced by technology are magically positive. Industrial scale slavery, like that imposed upon Africa, was enabled by sailing ships which transported captives across oceans, and encouraged by the mechanical cotton gin which could cheaply process the fibers the slaves planted and harvested. Without technology, slavery at this massive scale would have been unknown. Thousands of synthetic persistent toxins have caused mass disruptions of natural cycles in both humans and other species, a huge unwanted downside from small inventions. War is a particularly serious amplifier of the great negative powers brought by technology. Horrific weapons of destruction, capable of inflicting entirely new atrocities upon society, spring directly from the most powerful force in the world.
On the other hand, the remedies and offsets to the negative consequences also stem from this most powerful force. Local ethnic slavery was practiced by most earlier civilizations, and probably in prehistoric times as well, and still continues in sporadic remote areas; it's overall diminishment globally is due to the technological tools of communication, law, and education. Technologies of detection, and substitution, can remove the routine use of synthetic toxins. The technologies of monitoring, law, treaties, policing, courts, citizen media and economic globalism can temper, dampen, and in the long run diminish the vicious cycles of war.
All change in society can be traced back to the products of our minds. The history of civilization is an ever up-cascading sequence of social organization that we invent. Societies begin as leaderless bands of hunter-gatherers, and over generational time acquire chiefs, put down roots (literally) with farms, land and water rights adjudicated by authorities, hatch cities, and eventually become states and nations. Each step in civilization is characterized by more social organization, more different kinds connections between people (beyond family relations), more webs of interdependence, producing more of what Robert Wright, author of Non Zero, calls "non-zero-sumness," that is, self-reinforcing mutual benefit. Each emergent organization in the evolution of society serves as a platform for citizens to birth yet more new ways to organize. This self-improving recursive "3-more-wishes" loop goes round and round, amplifying its original force.
The power of cooperation is not new, but this virtuous circle is more than ordinary altruism, because participants are often not consciously cooperating, and may in fact compete, or even be parasitic. A merchant in Athens selling a barrel of raisins is not cooperating with the grower of grapes in Macedonia, or the speculator in Corinth hoarding stock, but the three form a system (an emergent market) that expands all their interests. It's a win-win condition. This kind of accumulating social organization exhibits an almost mathematical flavor that transcends neighborly kindness. Rather than happy camaraderie, this increasing structure is built on information flows that tighten both trust and rivalries into a web of interdependence. As these links increase, so does the power of amplification and acceleration.
Progress, even moral progress, is ultimately a human invention. It is a product of our wills and minds, and thus a technology. We can decide slavery is not a good idea. We can decide that evenly applied laws, rather than nepotic favoritism, is a good idea. We can outlaw certain punishments with treaties. We can encourage accountability with the invention of writing. We can consciously expand our circle of empathy. These are all inventions and as much products of our minds as light bulbs and telegraphs.
The larger point is that this cyclotron of social betterment is not propelled by ethics or religion, but by technology. Society is evolved by injecting it with incremental doses of that most powerful force in the world; each rise in social organization throughout history is driven by an insertion of a new technology. The invention of writing unleashed the leveling fairness of laws. The invention of standard minted coins made trade more universal, encouraged entrepreneurship, and hastened the idea of liberty. Historian Lynn White notes, "Few inventions have been so simple as the stirrup, but few have had so catalytic an influence on history." In White's view the adoption of the foot stirrup for horse saddles enabled riders to use weapons on horseback, which gave an advantage to the cavalry over infantry, and to the lords who could afford horses, and so nurtured the rise of aristocratic feudalism in Europe. The stirrup was not the only technological cause blamed for feudalism. As Karl Marx famously claimed, "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist."
Double-entry bookkeeping, invented in 1494 by a Franciscan monk, enabled companies to monitor their cash flow and for the first time steer complex business. Double-entry accounting unleashed the banking industry in Venice, and launched a global economy. The invention of the contraception pill in 1960 aided the blossoming of feminism. The invention of moveable type printing in Europe encouraged Christians to read their religion's founding text themselves, make their own interpretations, and launched the very idea of "protest" within and against religion. Way back in 1620 Francis Bacon, the godfather of modern science, realized how powerful technology was becoming. He listed three "practical arts" — the printing press, gunpowder, and the magnetic compass — that had changed the world. He declared that "no empire, no sect, no start seems to have exerted greater power and influence in human affairs than these mechanical discoveries." Bacon help launch the scientific method which accelerated the speed of invention; thereafter society was in constant flux as one conceptual seed after another disrupted social equilibrium.
Seemingly simple inventions like the clock had profound social consequences. The clock divvied up an unbroken stream of time into measurable units, and once it had a face, time became a tyrant, ordering our lives. Danny Hillis, computer scientist, believes the gears of the clock spun out science, and all it's many cultural descendents. He says, "The mechanism of the clock gave us a metaphor for self-governed operation of natural law. (The computer, with its mechanistic playing out of predetermined rules, is the direct descendant of the clock.) Once we were able to imagine the solar system as a clockwork automaton, the generalization to other aspects of nature was almost inevitable, and the process of Science began."
It's never a good idea to assign a single cause to any large scale cultural change. The greater the number of people a change effects the more likely numerous factors are behind it. A web of complex conditions must converge to produce the hallmark transitions in a complex society. But when we trace back the origins for each agent in a field of causes, we find that each strand leads to a newly introduced technology, a new idea.
That means that new technologies today will cast a long shadow into the future and shape the lives of our descendents. The technologies of ultrasound fetal inspection and routine abortion enabled sexual selection of children so that now males outnumber females in the youth of China and India. This imbalance will leave an immense surplus of unmarried males in society, an excess which in the past has been a source of unrest, crime, and war. Still young, their story has not fully played out yet, but because of the sheer numbers involved (hundreds of millions in Asia) its concluding effect will be global. Whatever the consequences of this sex-ratio excess are — an increase in international prostitution, a surge of ambitious entrepreneurs and military recruits, or a massive outward migration to places like Africa — the effects will be broader, and less technological that what might be expected from the invention of ultrasound equipment.
Name a disruption in culture today, either positive or negative, and if you press far enough back you'll find an tangible invention that sets off the imbalance. Globalism? Cheap, ubiquitous global communications. Social Security overhang? Medical advances for increasing longevity and decreasing fertility. Obesity epidemic? Cheap monoculture food system combined with passive entertainment technology. Gay rights? Emboldened by science showing gender preferences are biological. Celebrity obsessions? Broadcast media. Militant jihadism? Islam has been around 1500 years. But an imbalance between a medically enabled population explosion without a corresponding explosion in economic or political progress disrupts the former social equilibrium.
Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace both realized from reading Malthus's work on population that natural selection is propelled by the difference between two growth patterns in the wild: population versus food. The greater propulsion of population growth could not be contained in the lesser geometric gains of its food production. This tension between the overwhelming multiplication of population and the slower expansion of its material container is the drive behind evolution.
The evolution of the technium likewise gains its unmatched power from the difference between two growth rates. The number of ideas and their transmission via computers, books, telephone lines, patents, and so on increases in an exponential fashion. Information is, in fact, the fastest growing thing on this planet. Information is especially conducive to amplification and compounding. As the number of facts increase, the connections between facts increases exponentially faster. Because the mathematical law of combinations, the number of links between pages explodes faster than the number of pages increases. New inventions in certain fields like communication, which are powered by increasing combinations of connections, can increase the speed of invention overall, revving the engines of creation. Everywhere we look, the technium is wired with self-amplifying loops ballooning up the scale of change. Fundamentally, discoveries in the science of how to discover, and inventions in how to invent (the genie process we call science) accelerate the rate of discovery and invention everywhere.
But our human ability to absorb or process this explosion of ideas increases only linearly at best. Despite years spent in education, or bathed in the best nutrition, our brains are not doubling in speed, memory, and insight every 18 months, as computers do. In fact, biologically speaking, our brains are remarkably similar to the brains of the first Sapiens 50,000 years ago. The smartest humans are not exponentially smarter than the average ones, and the average IQ of a human is only slowly increasing over time by the most minute amount (a few percent per decade in modern times). Even collectively, unaided human intelligence is only growing in tandem with the number of humans. The gap between the escalating growth of information generated by us and our machines, and our tiny marginal improvements in being able to understand the oceans of information and make meaning from it is the driver behind the rapid evolution of the technium.
The work of understanding all this information is migrating from humans to the technium. We can no longer keep up with our own creations, and so we are constructing an apparatus to structure what we think, in the same manner that we first used writing on paper to extend our memory. Now we are offloading other mental functions. The technium contains an elaborate knowledge processing system consisting of encyclopedias, classification indexes, cross references, search engines, footnotes, citations, hypertext, and the web. These technologies organize the output of our collective minds — both intangible ideas and tangible inventions — into a semantic structure, much like an ecosystem. This incredibly complicated mesh of connections, interdependencies, associations, and emergent structure gives the technium a "meaning" that is outside our of understanding.
It's reasonable to figure that since the technium is simply "that which the mind produces" then at its root the most powerful force in the world must not be technology but the human mind. If this were so we'd have to recalibrate the equation above to state that the origin of all change in our lives lays in the mysterious force of intelligence and consciousness hiding between our ears. (That assertion reminds me of a joke I heard from a friend who said "whenever I get the idea that human mind is the most powerful thing in world I just remember what it is that is telling me this.") But the claim that the human mind is foremost power is not valid. No matter how much we use our biological mind's awareness to reflect upon our mind's workings, this type of mental introspection and self-improvement leads to extremely limited improvement at best, and usually none at all. Contemplation (even in a zen position) to optimize our own mind just doesn't scale up. Unaided, the mind makes very little headway in amplifying itself.
However, the technium, which is a product of our brain, can alter the circuits that produced it. People who grow up immersed in the technologies of writing and reading think differently. I don't mean humans think differently while reading. Reading and writing are cognitive tools that, once acquired, change the way in which the brain memorizes facts and conceptualizes ideas, and these changes stimulate abstract thinking. When psychologists use neuroimaging technology, like MRI, to compare the brains of literates and illiterates working on a task, they find many differences in how their brains work whether or not they are reading. Researcher Alexandre Castro-Caldas discovered that processing between the hemispheres of the brain was different between those who could read and those who could not. A key part of the corpus callosum was thicker in literates, and "the occipital lobe processed information more slowly in individuals who learned to read as adults compared to those who learned at the usual age." Psychologists Ostrosky-Solis, Garcia and Perez tested literates and illiterates with a battery of cognitive tests while measuring their brain waves and concluded that "the acquisition of reading and writing skills has changed the brain organization of cognitive activity in general… not only in language but also in visual perception, logical reasoning, remembering strategies, and formal operational thinking." Literacy — a human invention — rewires the human mind.
It is not just writing. Music, another invention, also alters the brain in a sustainable way. Many studies have shown how listening to music strengthens the communication wiring between brain hemispheres. Beside fostering an expected growth in auditory regions of the brain, regularly playing musical instruments significantly strengthens the thickness of the corpus callosum fibers and activates the cerebral cortex. Our mind makes a drum and flute, and the drum and flute remakes our mind.
Certainly, other tools that we devote lots of attention to should also alter our brain to a similar degree. How could a brain which spends 7 hours per day (!!) watching the fine flickering lines of television not find its perception circuits permanently rewired? The average adult American spends one hour per day driving a car. Cruising through terrain at 60 mph is not a skill the Sapien brain was evolved for. So the technology of the automobile must reshape our plastic brains, too.
Now we have the net. While some alarmists claim that Google is making us stupid, in fact Google is making us smarter by again retraining our brains. In a 2009 study Gary Small used MRI scans to demonstrate that sustained internet searching among older adults bestowed their brains with a two-fold increase in activation in several major brain regions compared to non-internet users. Experience web surfers had a significant increase in activity in controlling decision making, complex reasoning, and vision, including the frontal pole, anterior temporal region, and the hippocampus regions of the brain.
Progress of any type, especially literacies such as reading and writing, or web surfing, are not inherited in our genes (so far), nor re-invented each generation. Rather literacies are carried forwarded by the technium. Whatever progress there is in the world, is passed down generationally via the mechanism of our culture. Whatever changes that literacies ignite in the human brain must be carried forward not in our genes, but in the continuum of technium. This gives the technium incredible power. We don't quite appreciate it yet, but our child, technology, is more powerful than we its parents are.
Technology may not only be the most powerful force in the world; it may the most powerful force in the universe. If an embryonic amount of technology can so affect a planet, unintentionally, the same force applied intentionally several centuries from now could be aimed a star, and with time, at a galaxy. The libraries of science fiction are filled with plausible schemes by which advanced civilizations terraform planets, tame stars into generators, reroute stellar orbits, and re-arrange matter and energy on astronomical scales. Vast space colonies, death stars, ring worlds, and Dyson Spheres are some of the imagined projects that indicate the cosmic power of technology. If these ambitions are at all possible, they would be direct extensions of the same compounding circuits operating in the technium today. To manage these galactic-scale manipulations, our minds would have to amplify themselves by creating artificial minds smarter than us, just as we have amplified our bodies by creating artificial machines stronger than us, machines such as cranes, trucks, and robot arms. A technium populated with machines capable of their own indefinite upcreation could keep progressing way beyond our current understanding. This complex system would invent a system superior to itself in an infinite loop until the whole cycle reached its natural limits (which all real things have). Many believe that a technium like this is already operating at galactic scale somewhere else in the universe; this speculation is to only point out the technium is not solely an Earth-bound, human phenomenon.
Technology is that which is produced by a mind — any mind: animal, machine or alien. When we created the technology of writing, we gladly extended our memory onto paper, making ourselves smarter. But in turn the alphabets we invented changed how our minds worked. Because our inventions can reach back into our brains, and essentially transform our minds into another one of our inventions, our inventions are more powerful than our minds. In this way technology can circle back into its origins, becoming its own child.
The force of this uroborous is incomparable. There is no nuclear energy, fusion, plasma bolt, black hole, white dwarf, cosmic nebula anywhere in the universe that can uplift itself in the way that technology can. For certain there will be further evolutions of the technium. The great story that begins with the big bang and bootstraps itself up into persistent evolving systems that keep building up more complex systems will certainly keep going. First persistently dynamic planets hatch life, which uplifts itself to make minds, which then uplifts itself to make technology. Technology will uplift itself to create the next level of extropy. But it will continue the same arc. The same big history. Whatever technology evolves into, it will carry on in the direction it has been headed so far for the past 14 billion years: towards greater complexity, diversity, specialization, ubiquity, socialization, consilience, energy density, and sentience. A future meta-technology will be unrecognizable on its face, but fundamentally continue these trends.
As far as we can see, for at least a hundred light years in all directions, there appears to be only the bleak unbending forces of physics at work: radiation, heat, gravity, momentum, and always, entropy. But we are lucky. We live on a membrane of floating sphere that is infected with a rampant case of the most powerful force in the universe, a force that is curiously more potent that the immense powers governing the stars around us. Unlike the eternal constancy delivered by the universal laws, this most powerful force is in constant change. The technium is in fact, changing the nature of change, an ongoing process of becoming, and we are, to a statistical approximation, right in the middle of it.
As a biological species born of life, we embrace our origins in life. And as a thinking species, we embrace our mindfulness. But now in the middle of this long evolution it has become clear that we are a technological species as well. Our self image says that we are a thinking animal that reluctantly produces the most powerful force in the world. That is true. But actually something more wondrous is going on. In reality we human beings are the product of the most powerful force in the universe. We are technology. The self-manufactured uroborous.
So far, humanity is our greatest invention, and we aren't done yet.
Ebert on Health Care and Death Panels
From his blog:
The notion of “universal health care” does not mean “socialized medicine.” It means just what it seems to mean. America is the only developed nation on earth that does not provide it. Why does it inspire such virulent opposition? Who is behind it? It is opposed mostly from the far right, whose enthusiasm seems to be encouraged by financial support from some (not all) insurance companies. Those companies have priced American insurance out of the reach of millions.
One result has been that our national life expectancy ranks 42nd among all developed nations. We spend more on medical care that any other nation, and get less than 41 of them. These figures are pretty clear.
I don’t pretend to know if this information is available to the angry people who have shouted down their representatives at town hall meetings. I think I do know where their anger is fed. The drumbeat of far-right commentators fuels it. Their agenda is not health care, but opposition to the Obama administration. It takes the form of demonizing Obama. It uses the tactic of the Big Lie to defame him him. An example of this is the fiction, “he wants to kill your grandmother.” Another is the outrageous statement that he is a racist who hates white people. A person capable of saying that is clearly unhinged and in the grip of unconditional hatred.
Do you know what the “public option” is? It would be the establishment of a federal fund to provide health insurance for those who cannot afford it. I have the feeling that if Jay Leno went Jaywalking among the protesters at a town hall meeting, even those holding signs opposing the public option, he would find few able to define the term.
OMG, a Bunny Licking Ice Cream
Where do we even begin with this. The little bunny tongue? The regular squinting pattern? His right paw's ability to support not only ice cream and a cone, but the wafer too?! How his thoughts are probably filled with unicorns and rainbows? If you are not squealing audibly or at least mentally right now, there is something wrong with you. [via J-Walk Blog]
Related
Cute Paintings of Animals Eating Food
Video: Squirrel Gets Head Stuck in Yogurt Cup
Photo of the Day: Rabbits Eating Lettuce
Video gamers 'older than thought'
A US study suggests the average adult video game enthusiast is 35 years old and more overweight and less healthy than average.
awwwwww poor ugly kitteh scout: (via homecoming)
awwwwww poor ugly kitteh
(via homecoming)
that's a technical term
From Cult of Mac comes this nugget about Apple's cloud computing plans.
"Apple is planning about 500,000 square feet of data center space in a single building," says Rich Miller, editor of Data Center Knowledge. "That would place it among the largest data centers in the world... This would qualify as a big-ass data center."Emphasis mine.
Shut Up About ‘Mad Men’ Already
You know, for a show you all will not shut the hell up about? Not that many of you actually watch it, given it only pulled in 2.8 million viewers last night for the season three premiere. (I’m not really sneezing at that. I’d take 2.8 million viewers, if I were a cable exec! Or: 4 million, if you count the rebroadcasts that night.) But you know, that makes it, what, the 40th most-watched show on TV? Shut up already! (Also I’m only on season 2, stop spoiling things for me!)
Also: RE: TheAwl
I think Choire and Alex are two of the best—if not the best—writers to come out of Gawker Media. (I’d add Pareene, but he hasn’t graduated to blissful post-Gawkerdom yet.)
That said, if Choire continues to end declarative sentences with question marks, I may have to viciously beat him with a copy of Strunk & White? Or absent a copy of Strunk & White, the cat? (Valley girl punctuation isn’t flattering on anyone, really.)
Actually, I have to disagree. I really like it? The daily emails from the Awl really brighten up my late mornings/early afternoons. Or whenever they arrive in my inbox?
Yeah, I like the emails, too? It’s just, like, the punctuation that bugs me?
O RLY Shirt? Ya Rly. We just got our personal shipment of the O...
O RLY Shirt? Ya Rly.
We just got our personal shipment of the O RLY meme tees at the office and they look rly good.
Designed by Olivia and printed by Mammoth Print Shop. Get yours here.
via knowyourmeme
Werner Herzog Waxes Poetic About Bad Lieutenant
Earlier this summer I blogged about the new Werner Herzog film Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans and earlier than that I wrote a lot about his amazing documentary from last year Encounters at the End of the World–one of my top 10 films of the year and one that makes a strong case about the harms of global warming.
Well, today I am going to post a little video interview with Herzog himself about his latest film and the things that made him interested in remaking Abel Ferrara’s original Bad Lieutenant and exploring the darker side of cinema. It’s Herzog, so it is, as per usual, super interesting and full of wonderful and strange tidbits about the art of filmmaking and cinema.
Data Is Journalism: MSNBC.com Acquires Everyblock
Everyblock, Adrian Holovaty's local data aggregator, has been acquired by MSNBC.com. Many are hailing it as local news acquisition. For 15 major US cities Everyblock aggregates crime data, restaurant reviews, health inspections, local news and more. This is data that is only of interest to people within a certain area. I care much less about crime ten blocks away than I do about crime two blocks away. Everyblock lets me know what is happening within three blocks of my home and filters everything out (on the web and iPhone). So Everyblock is a hyperlocalnews acquisition, but that is only half of the story (maybe less).
The future of news is data and Everyblock is the premier startup in this area. As Adrian phrased it on his site this past May in a post entitled The definitive, two-part answer to "is data journalism?":
It's a hot topic among journalists right now: Is data journalism? Is it journalism to publish a raw database? Here, at last, is the definitive, two-part answer:
1. Who cares?
2. I hope my competitors waste their time arguing about this as long as possible.MSNBC.com stopped wasting time just in time.
There is a coming deluge of data from the new administration. Sites like Data.gov, USASpending.gov and Recovery.gov are hopefully just the beginning of new data sources. It's already too much for many organizations to make sense of. Without the proper tools many stories will never be covered. People will not get the info they need. Everyblock has proven that by taking free local government data sources and making them readily available to interested citizens you can create value. Now it's time to turn those tools and thinking onto a problem of a national scale. (If you'd like to learn more about the Obama administrations efforts to release data check out Anil Dash's latest piece The Most Interesting New Tech Startup of 2009.)
It's important to note that Everyblock recently open-sourced the code to their site and as Techcrunch pointed out their traffic is not that high. So MSNBC could have easily duplicated Everyblock and just turned their traffic hose at the new property. Instead MSNBC.com realized that they are facing a new problem and they needed a new team to tackle it head on. Enter Adrian and Everyblock.
Of course many people know Adrian as one of the co-creators of DJango. In his acquisition blog post he states that he will have more time to work on Django, that Everyblock will stay Python (and presumably continue to roll their own maps) and that this does not effect ebcode, the open-sourced version of Everyblock (Radar post).
Congrats Adrian it looks like you solved the dilemma (Radar site) of what to do once you've open-sourced your site; you tackle a bigger problem.
Post updated to reflect that it was MSNBC.com, not MSNBC, that bought Everyblock.
Jeff Jarvis Tries To Save Local News (With Spreadsheets!)
Local news always seems to get the short end of the stick, both in terms of coverage and advertising dollars. And as the entire newspaper industry continues to struggle for survival, the prospects for local news looks particularly bleak. It just doesn’t pay to have a reporter cover a neighborhood farmer’s market when she could be covering the Mayor’s office or something with broader appeal. And so traditional news organizations are abandoning local and hyperlocal news.
Don’t worry, though. Media consultant, blogger, and CUNY professor Jeff Jarvis has a few ideas for how to replace the local newspaper with new business models for news at the hyperlocal level. He just gave a presentation at an Aspen Institute forum on journalism today (live stream).
His answer is to organize local bloggers and citizens into a metro-wide network in each of the top 25 markets, and sell local ads across their sites. Each hyperlocal site would remain independent but join a loose federation for ad sales, distribution, and shared costs. Jarvis sketches out what a new news organization might look like at the local level, and goes out on a limb by offering actual spreadsheets showing some assumptions about audience size and how the business model would work. There is also a spreadsheet for doing this through a non-profit.
As everyone from Esther Dyson to Michael Kinsley and Marissa Mayer pointed out at the forum, the numbers don’t look very realistic. The model assumes in a metro market of 5 million people, the hyperlocal network will be able to get 1.75 million readers (35 percent penetration) in Year 1, growing to 3 million readers (60 percent penetration) in Year 3. The corresponding revenues for each market go from $5 million in Year 1 to $20 million in Year 3.
For a large local blog, that could translate into total revenues of $126,976 in Year 1, going to $331,640 in Year 2, with corresponding income for the blogger of $42,777 in the first year, going to $148, 269 in the third (see table below).
These numbers are way too optimistic. In order to get to those revenue numbers, the model had to be pumped up with SMS alerts, Twitter coupons, a “donation system for watchdog journalism,” and other lines of revenue which may never an out. Most people are just not that interested in what is going on in their neighborhoods. A local blog network would be lucky to get 20 percent of a metro area’s population as regular readers across multiple sites.
Former Slate editor Michael Kinsley asked Jarvis, “If it is as easy as you make it sound, why aren’t you off doing it?.” Google product chief Marissa Mayer was a little more diplomatic, but suggested the numbers need a “sanity check.”
To be fair, Jarvis and CUNY are presenting the models for discussion and to show how an alternative, semi-distributed local news organization might emerge that can pay for itself. The numbers are wrong, but that hardly matters. They are a starting point for a reconception of how local news can be organized.
“Aren’t you reinventing the wheel?” Kinsley asked him. “I think it needs some reinvention,” responded Jarvis. “We wanted to see if there is a vision for the future of journalism.”
When Jarvis was asked who the dominant species would be in this new ecosystem, he answered: “No one owns the whole thing anymore. No one can afford to own it anymore. So the key thing is how do you take part in the network.” His numbers might be way off, but at least he is trying to rethink the news.
Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.
Chopping widescreen movies
Steven Soderbergh on the new pan-and-scan: the cropping of 2.40:1 films to fit the HD TV screen.
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.
He has particular contempt for AMC and HBO:
[HBO wants] everything pan/scanned. On the Ocean's films I had to get somebody VERY HIGH UP WITH WAY BETTER SHIT TO DO to call them and make an exception. Their influence means they could make this problem go away single-handedly, but since they won't, they get to be the poster child for stupidity. Not that they're uninterested in hypocrisy too; while their PR caters to the most adventurous TV watchers, their actions indicate they think their viewers are very, very afraid of anything actually different.
I watched The Darjeeling Limited on Starz a few months ago. This is a movie where the wider aspect ratio is almost another character and the knuckeheads at Starz chopped the hell out of it. Blech.
Tags: movies Steven Soderbergh TV
West End Boys
A d.j. at a Bedouin wedding in Israel was allegedly beaten up after playing a song by Pet Shop Boys. The first question: Which song?
Further questions: What was the d.j. there for, if not the instigation of dancing? What “tradition” was being invoked when this poor d.j. was assaulted? Are women not allowed to do any kind of dancing at Bedouin weddings? Was it the Western music that crossed the line, or the reaction to it? Was this a rogue incident and not at all representative of the byways of Bedouin weddings? I would love to hear from an informed reader; please email me if you have any answers. When it comes to religion and tradition, the Internet gets a little shouty.
(For the record, I don’t think d.j.s should be beaten up, or hanged. In fact, I endorse dancing in almost any form. One of the best possible forms would be the one where the d.j. is playing nothing but Deee-Lite. If you are in New York, go to Eastern Bloc this Wednesday night and that is exactly what will happen.)
Mark Wentzel's Fat Eames Chairs
Mark Wentzel, an Atlanta-based sculptor, has modified the classic Eames lounge, "super-sizing" its cushions with foam and automotive upholstery, "alluding to topics of global obesity and consumption, and the potential cooperation among artists, designers, scientists and manufacturers to address such issues."
Wentzel's use of the Eames lounge as a basis for this statement not only emphasizes its status as a classic (even when overstuffed, the combination of materials and silhouette remain recognizable) but also represents a fruitful overlap between art and design works: in order to make his sculptural statement, Wentzel borrowed directly from the historical and cultural narrative of the Eames lounge as a designed object, evoking its particular typification of enduring, desirable, and mass-produced products.
The lounges are on view now through September 11th at the Global Health Odyssey Museum in Atlanta, GA.
More shots after the jump!
(more...)
MSNBC acquires EveryBlock
wow, congrats to the team
The Spoils of Free Apples
Last weekend, while walking home from the Noe Valley Farmers Market, we stumbled upon a couple (and children in tow) giving away apples from their Healdsburg orchard and rental, The Harvest House. Bonus points to these folks for giving them away in adorable little baskets.
Penelope was determined to carry them all the way home.
My husband made a apple crostata from the apples. As he described it, it's an apple pie without the fussy crust. The crust is more like a sugar cookie than a traditional pie crust.
The crostata, ready to eat.
pick us for sxsw 2010
It's panel picker season again. Here's us:
Maps, Books, Spimes, Paper: Post-Digital Media DesignThe Internet is situated in the real world, and interesting experiences have to blend physical and digital. Mixing new technology - Arduinos, GPS, RFID, QRcodes - and old (web, paper), we present examples of the recently possible future, and the lessons we've learnt. And we'll make something along the way.
- Chris Heathcote (meta loca)
- Aaron Straup Cope (Flickr)
- Michal Migurski (Stamen)
- Ben Terrett/Russell Davies (RIG)
- James Bridle (Bookkake)
Create a SXSW account if you haven't already and give us a thumbs-up. Here's another good one to vote for while you're there: God / Admin Interfaces with Gavin Bell, Matt Biddulph, and Kellan Elliott-McCrea. Now to go look through the remaining 2K+ panel ideas for interesting ones that haven't been specifically brought to my attention by friends...
Msnbc.com Acquires EveryBlock… Welcome Brother!
News that has been brewing secretly for the last several months finally broke this morning: Msnbc.com has acquired EveryBlock, the most interesting (in my opinion) startup in the hyperlocal news space. It is with great joy that I welcome my colleagues Adrian Holovaty, Wilson Miner, and the rest of the EveryBlock crew to the msnbc.com family to help re-imagine, re-invent, and re-volutionize local news online. You can read several other accounts and descriptions of the acquisition here (msnbc.com, New York Times, EveryBlock, Lost Remote) but I thought I’d provide some color from the standpoint of a founder whose company, Newsvine, was acquired almost two years ago by the same company.
First let me say that the acquisition of EveryBlock is an excellent fit for both companies. Msnbc.com’s focus has always been on national news, a concentration that has made them the most visited news site in the United States for over a year now; more than CNN, more than Yahoo News, and more than most local news sites combined. Leading the national news race is a great accomplishment to anchor your company around, but local news is where most of the disruption is occurring these days, and thus it is fertile ground for innovation. Local newspapers find themselves rich with great journalism, but crippled by legacy distribution and operational costs. Community news blogs enjoy tremendous grassroots energy but very little means to monetize their content. There are a million gusts swirling around in the local news tornado right now, and when the dust finally settles, the landscape will be much different than anyone could have imagined even five years ago.
The organizations that succeed in local news will be the ones who respect all of the great journalism and increasingly available data in cities and neighborhoods across the world while creating better ways for people to consume it. If you’re a organization in the local news space — big or small — and you’d like to be a partner in this future, we’d love to work with you.
Another reason I’m excited to welcome EveryBlock into the family is that I think it’s a great family to join if you’re an entrepreneur. When we signed on with msnbc.com almost two years, it was a leap of faith considering that other suitors would have provided different experiences. We knew msnbc.com was the closest to us geographically, so that part couldn’t have been matched, but you never know how you’ll be respected, used, or abused until you’re part of the family. When I read about incredibly smart and likable people like Joshua Schachter selling a great service like Del.icio.us to Yahoo, only to see Yahoo marginalize the product and send Josh fleeing the company like a burning building, it saddens me.
In addition to things going horribly wrong between acquirers and entrepreneurs, a perhaps even more common case is when entrepreneurs leave on good terms the day their contract period is up. For background, when you sell your company, you are usually required to stick around for some period of time until you receive all of the acquisition proceeds. This happens all the time, the most recent of which (that I can recall) being Dick Costolo at Feedburner. Dick’s a great guy, he sold a great service in Feedburner to Google, but he left more or less when his contract was over. There’s nothing wrong with this all… he made a truckload of money and probably wants to blow some of it on gold chains and petrified walrus testicles.
I think when you’re an acquirer though, your real hope is that the employees you are welcoming into the family *want* to work for you after they no longer have to… and that is the situation we find ourselves in right now.
Things, for the most part, are going swimmingly. Although building technologies and services for msnbc.com has slowed our development efforts on newsvine.com a bit, for the time being, Newsvine now serves over 4 million uniques a month; almost four times the traffic we did, pre-acquisition. We’re also distributing more revenue to our great community of writers than ever before. Additionally, there has been some nice cross-media collaboration in the form of Newsvine members appearing on national television and gaining press access the political conventions in 2008. We also have people like Retired Colonel Jack Jacobs and NBC Correspondent Chuck Todd popping in to write articles and answer questions during important events. All of this and we feel like we haven’t even scratched the surface yet.
There’s plenty of unfinished business to do when it comes to building out the Newsvine, msnbc.com, and now EveryBlock communities, and we’re just thrilled to be around to do it. I look forward to working closely with the EveryBlock team in the coming months and welcoming another passionate group of people into the company.
On Benchmarking Databases: MySQL on Joyent versus AWS (part 1)
Last week we announced the MySQL accelerators and scalable architecture offerings. Like the Zeus Accelerators, this is a continuation of our goal to offer individual servers and entire architectures of known performance. What one really wants from an entire infrastructure is for it to simply do what you need it ...
Suck it, Brian Eno.
(via lincoln)
Doors, Thirds, Bridges, and Pools
[Images: Six photographs by Danny Wills, from the often awe-inspiring sets of 475 and 194 images that he has uploaded within the past 48 hours, all taken during his recent travels through Spain; there is some great work up there].
August 16, 2009
Summer Streets
Rocketboom NYC correspondent Ella Morton explores New York City’s Summer Streets program.
Fastest ever
Lately, I get more excited by watching Usain Bolt run than by pretty much any other sporting event. Granted, I'm watching mostly the historic races, but that he's making history like this, right now--and that I can watch it in HD only a couple of hours later--is just incredible.
One day Usain Bolt is going to do something that a normal human being might do. He'll spill his tea, or drop his chicken nuggets, or trip over his shoelaces. ... For now, he astonishes and astounds with everything he does. Maurice Greene, a former 100m world champion and world record holder, summed it up beautifully: "The Earth stopped for a second, and he went to Mars."
Rguesdat. That’s iPhone for ‘Thursday’ I...
Rguesdat. That’s iPhone for ‘Thursday’
I cannot explain to you how consistently funny Sheila is.
Surrenderous
Earn, Andy and the boys at Surrender in Singapore have a new blog worth checking.
Usain Bolt: 9.58
At the track and field world championships in Germany this evening, Usain Bolt set another world record in the 100-meters: 9.58 seconds, besting his previous record of 9.69. Can he go under 9.5?
Update: Here's the race in HD. It's a lot closer than the Olympic final...Gay was really hauling as well. The Times reports that the 0.11 seconds Bolt shaved off the record was the largest difference since the advent of electronic timing in 1977.
Tags: sports track and field Usain Bolt
Google Reader now supports Instapaper natively, and the Instapaper bookmarklet now supports Google Reader natively
Google Reader’s new “send to” feature now has built-in support for Instapaper. When the “send to” feature launched a few days ago, native Instapaper support wasn’t there, but it was possible to add the service via the “create a custom link” button.
While these solutions are better than nothing (just barely), neither of them is optimal. The native solution pops up a new window, and you have to click on the “add” button to actually add the link (that said, it is nice that the window auto-closes after you hit “add”). The “custom link” solution is as annoying as it too pops up a useless window that does not auto-close.
Luckily however, the Instapaper bookmarklet has been updated to support Google Reader, and this approach works wonderfully. Indeed, it works exactly the same as it does for any other link (i.e., a status “window” displays inline with the web page as the link is being saved, and then disappears once the link has been saved successfully).
In light of the new Google Reader functionality, I now keep two Instapaper bookmarklets in my bookmarks bar: this new one to save links from within Google Reader, and my modified version to save pages that are loaded in their own tabs/windows (the modification automatically closes the tab/window when the bookmarklet is activated).
Wine Store Design Part 5: Lighting Installation
Way back when I posted a conceptual drawing of the store showing some pendant lampshades, as well as a reflected ceiling plan. Finally, the concept has been turned into reality, with the 48 custom light fixtures having been installed. Here are a few photos capturing the installation process and the finished product, along with a [...]
Type Radio
Now we’re Talking
It’s been quite some time since I mentioned the brilliant Type Radio. It’s a podcast I’ve been listening to for ages, and they now have a huge archive of type-related interviews.
Thanks to Paul Hunt and Mark Simonson, I came across this wonderful little video, that I hope will have you racing over to Type Radio to listen to everything they have.
Click here to view the embedded video.
You can list podcasts by interviewee or even by font. You can also subscribe to Type Radio via iTunes. I’ve downloaded most of the archive to my iPhone, so now I have Type Radio any time, any place, any where.
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Related: Read Between the Leading podcast.
Up next: A gargantuan week in type.
Finally, The Best Use For Lego Is Revealed [Lego Awesome]
Lego Voltron. I'm not even sure I need to say anything other than that. Lego Voltron, people. You can thank Grand Admiral for his months of work, and click through the gallery to see the evidence of greatness. Voltron [Flickr]
GALLERY
Obama NYT Op-Ed
Katie's doing an awesome job with the Whitehouse's Twitter feed:Obama NYT op-ed: “We are bound to disagree, but let’s disagree over issues that are real.” http://bit.ly/iF8kr #healthcare
Never Can Say Goodbye (Neptunes Remix) - Michael Jackson
I really wish I could’ve heard a MJ album with Neptunes’ productionNever Can Say Goodbye (Neptunes Remix) by Michael Jackson
Download now or listen on posterous Never Can Say Goodbye (Neptunes Remix).mp3 (4594 KB)
Interseting listen.
the face of individuality. via...
the face of individuality.
via diablocodyisnotevenherrealname:bonerparty:soupsoup:theduty:itsurfave
We will help you express your funky personality based on our established ability to understand our customers and connect with them creating an emotional bond with the 18 to 30 year old target customer we serve. And by the way, while it’s not necessarily contradictory for some of you, we’re funneling your money to conservative causes.
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