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A rather useless and boring “interview,” save the following two excerpts.
What do you say to Kindle users who like to read in the bathtub? I’ll tell you what I do. I take a one-gallon Ziploc bag, and I put my Kindle in my one-gallon Ziploc bag, and it works beautifully. […]
Of all the books that Amazon sells, what percentage are digital books? For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition.
“For every 100 copies of a physical book we sell, where we have the Kindle edition, we will sell 48 copies of the Kindle edition. It won’t be too long before we’re selling more electronic books than we are physical books.”
- Jeff Bezos
Embezzle a bit more of your building’s heat.
Here’s a useful trick to unfairly get more heat into your apartment than the others in your building: Use a box fan to convert your passive radiator — in effect, a giant heatsink — into an active heatsink-with-fan combo.
As most computer-assembling geeks know, a passive heatsink transfers heat from its source to the air very slowly. Even adding a small amount of direct airflow significantly increases the rate at which heat is transferred into the air.
Aim a box fan through your radiator when it’s actively heating (not just sitting there, freezing, as they tend to do for hours), and the room will very quickly fill with heat.
Q: A fan? It’s cold in here! Won’t that make it colder?
No. Moving the air doesn’t make it colder. Blowing the air over the radiator can only result in an air temperature between what it already was (the room’s air temperature) and the temperature of the surface of the radiator. (So if your radiator has been off for a while and is colder than the air in the room, leave the fan off. When the radiator is warmer than the air, turn the fan on.)Q: Can anything go wrong?
Probably. Please don’t sue me if your fan blade flies off during operation and bisects your cat. I’ve never seen it happen, but I know from my experience diagnosing computer problems that “I’ve never seen that before” isn’t a guarantee that something won’t happen. One common risk is that there’s probably a lot of dust under, in, and behind your radiator. Vacuum it before attempting this maneuver, and start with a low fan speed the first time in case a lot of dust flies out that you weren’t expecting.Q: Why does it work?
All you’re doing is increasing the amount of heat that gets transferred from the radiator to the air in your apartment. You’re cooling the steam a bit more than usual before it enters the next apartment on the pipeline. In effect, you’re embezzling heat from everyone else in your building, but in an amount that’s miniscule when averaged over everyone else. Like in Office Space. (And if your heat is thermostat-controlled, like most tend to be, you’re probably just causing the heat to stay on slightly longer rather than making anyone else colder.)It’s up to you whether you’re OK with that. But when most of your neighbors are out of town for the weekend and you’re in an old brownstone with “conservative” heat and very drafty windows that you’ve already foamed and plasticked but still manage to let freezing air (and even the occasional insect) through, you may be inclined to take whatever advantages you can get.
I've spent the last several years working in the web and Ajax world, with most of my programming first in Perl and then later in JavaScript. The browser has been my target. With the release of SocialCalc I feel pretty comfortable that I have a good understanding of those computing mediums. I've been involved in the Open Source world, and also in the sell-direct-to-enterprise world. There are other new areas, though, that I'd like to learn about, too. I'm continuing to work on SocialCalc, but it's doesn't need me full-time.
Over the last couple of months I've been working on learning a different medium and a different business environment. In mid-September I purchased a shiny new 24" Apple iMac and an iPhone 3GS. I signed up for the Apple iPhone Developer Program. I bought some books and started doing the tutorials, step by step. I came up with the idea for an app I needed and built a prototype, then plunged in and started creating a full app that would be good for others, too.
A few days before Thanksgiving I submitted my completed app for inclusion in the App Store. It's now just been approved and you can try it. 30 years after VisiCalc shipped: Another app from me that starts out on Apple hardware.
What is it? People who know my history won't be surprised: It's for taking notes by writing on the screen with your finger. An "ink" app. Here's a screen shot:
[Photo of Dan Bricklin's Note Taker in use in the original blog post on Dan Bricklin's Log]
I found the iPhone keyboard (and even physical keyboards on other phones) too cumbersome in many cases for quickly jotting down telephone numbers, addresses, and lists -- especially when someone else is dictating them to me or when it's too limiting being restricted to single-font characters on a keyboard word-wrapped as paragraphs. I hate having to say "wait...wait -- what was that again?" as I try to correct errors with a keyboard. Looking carefully at a touch keyboard and the data entry line takes up too much of my attention while trying to interact with someone else.
Other people are more used to watching you take written notes. Written notes have many nice properties: You can use layout and special (to you) lines, marks, and symbols to give extra meaning. Minor errors made by movement mistakes are less likely to result in data loss or incorrect data -- pressing a "6" instead of a "5" on a keyboard gives you a not-obviously wrong phone number, but writing an "S" instead of a "5" in a phone number is less of a problem.
The best way to learn about my app is to use it. If you have an iPhone or iPod touch, you can install the Lite version for free. The "full" version ($1.99 in the USA) adds some very useful features. (It eliminates the 4 page limit, and gives you a nice way to transcribe what you wrote at a later time using the on-screen keyboard and then create address book entries -- a key request from early testers.) Both versions can email a JPEG image of the page. (Emailing the image is very useful, and adds that needed viral aspect -- the free version includes a watermark with attribution.) Just search on the iTunes App Store for "Dan Bricklin". The product page on the Software Garden web site is "Dan Bricklin's Note Taker App".
I had to figure out how to deal with some major issues when I decided to create this app. The screen is very small, and the input from finger motion is too coarse to write much text in the small space of the touch screen. I decided to have you write in large letters and have my app shrink what you write into smaller ink on the page. I also had to come up with a simple way to let you write continuously yet add new ink automatically to the right of old. The editing controls I provide are pretty simple, and if you experiment with them you should be able to figure out what they do. However, with an iPhone app, many people aren't willing to spend the time to experiment. If it doesn't work the way they expect at once, they abandon the app. After all, it was either free or only a couple of dollars and they have other things to try. I decided to build a "Try It" mode into the product, so that when you first use it you get led quickly through simple versions of the interface and are introduced to the major features without throwing the whole interface at you at once. After lots of user testing I think that this mode should make it more likely that people will figure things out.
For those of you without an iPhone or iPod touch (or that hate using tutorials), you can watch a YouTube video I made that shows the product in action.
An Android version is in the works, but it's not ready yet.
So, I've learned a lot of new stuff. After having so much fun with JavaScript I had to go back to the old days of programming in verbose C-derived languages and no garbage collection (Apple's Objective-C). I had to learn a whole new API (I've never programmed the Mac except some simple HyperCard decades ago and some Perl). I've had to learn the iPhone User Interface conventions. I've also had to become quite acquainted with the App Store and the world of one and two dollar software packages in (hopefully) high volume. I've benefited a lot from the advice of others available on lots of web sites, and Apple's voluminous documentation.
When I do my consulting and providing analysis here on the web, I like to have as much hands-on experience as possible. Note Taker is giving me the opportunity to extend my experience into this new and very important world. In the process, I hope I'm also bringing a truly useful app to market, too.
Almost a year ago, I wrote a post about my favorite building in midtown, this chopped-in-half brownstone at 19 W 46th Street.
The other day, I got a note that a Lego fan had built a Lego version of the building based on my pictures!
Great job! Most of the time, a building this quirky would be the imaginative creation of a Lego designer. I love that this is a rare instance in which it’s real.
Even got the old Radio City Deli sign in there, a deli that has been gone since the 80’s.
And of course, the roof:
Awesome work. Check out more pictures and the CAD file over here.
-SCOUT
I just added a bunch of new prints to my online shop. The above print (of the Mile End neighbourhood in Montreal) was originally commissioned as a bookbag for Drawn & Quarterly. And below is another one that a lot of people like. Check out my shop to see more prints.
All the pieces are printed with super-expensive Epson inks on archival watercolour paper. Each print is titled, numbered, and signed and shipped in a protective sleeve and shipped priority mail. You can also buy the prints from my Etsy shop if that’s how you roll.
Posted by Matt Forsythe on Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog | Permalink | No comments
Tags: art prints, giclees, Matt Forsythe, prints
Neat. The current Google Maps aerial view of London features nice crisp silhouettes of the buildings along the south bank of the Thames.
Close up of the area around the OXO Building and Tate Modern here.
Update: Another close up, showing the HMS Belfast and Tower Bridge here.
Check out the evolution of the Incredible !ndia campaign from 2002-2009.
Related: The Delhi office of Wieden & Kennedy
My thanks to VMware Fusion for sponsoring this week’s DF RSS feed. VMware Fusion 3 is a great update to what was already the best virtualization software for Mac OS X. It lets you run over 140 different x86 operating systems — including everything from DOS to Windows 7 to Google Chrome OS — within Mac OS X, alongside all your usual Mac apps.
VMware Fusion 3 has a great Mac interface and a new 64-bit engine. It works great on both Mac OS X 10.5 and 10.6. New licenses are $79.99; upgrades from VMware Fusion 1 or 2 are only $39.99.
The tablet form factor could be a revolutionary medium for delivering compelling media experiences. But if publishers like Sports Illustrated view this as just another channel for delivering one-way content, they're going to get knocked out* by the folks who figure out how to combine the best of both worlds -- high-quality editorial content and a compelling social experience. sippey.com: what was missing from the sports illustrated tablet concept I wish I had written this post.
I favorited a YouTube video: CCTV: footage of a meteor spotted over the skies of Gauteng, South Africa on the 21st of November 2009 Local news story: Johannesburg and Pretoria residents have come forward, claiming they spotted a meteor in the skies on Saturday night. People in Gauteng saw the bright light at around 11pm on Saturday night, heading towards the north of Pretoria. We saw this big green ball of fire. More..More..it kind of came out of the sky, out of the blue, one resident said. There was sudden flash. Like an orange stripe in the sky, followed by a very bright explosion where the sky lit up as if it was daytime, another explained. Astronomers and scientists are still trying to find out where the meteor landed. Ronnie McKenzie collects meteorites and said something like this is very rare. I would say it probably happens around two or three times a year around the world, he said. Less..
The following is from Will Carroll of Baseball Prospectus:
…well, i’m intrigued, to say the least…
By the way, to follow me on Twitter, click here.
This has been bubbling among tech types and civil liberty advocates for a few days, but once we looked into it decided it was worth a bit more attention.
The big revelation is that one wireless telecom company in a single year processed 8 million law enforcement requests for GPS data on the company's wireless users. And that's just one company.
For non-techies, law enforcement isn't tapping into the GPS interface you might use to get directions from the airport. Rather, it's the GPS capability that all phones manufactured today are required by federal regulations to have so that if you dial 911 from the phone, first responders can find you.
It's a fascinating (and, yes, alarming) story. Justin Elliott has talked to the company, Sprint, and fills out the picture of how your cell phone can be used to track your whereabouts, with what appears to be minimal, if any, judicial oversight.
A Nov. 26 article in the District edition of Local Living incorrectly said a Public Enemy song declared 9/11 a joke. The song refers to 911, the emergency phone number.
Although it has not officially come full circle, it appears that Oakland is moving on from Jack Cust with the acquisition of Jake Fox from the Chicago Cubs last evening. Fox is built in the same mold as Cust, a hitter who has been showed some remarkably good hitting skills in the minors, is past prospect age status, has yet to get an extended Major League shot and is not well regarded for his glove. With Cust about to get expensive, there were already rumors that Oakland would be non-tendering him.
Coming along with Fox to Oakland is Aaron Miles and $1 million, making Miles cost to Oakland $1.7 million in 2010. Aaron Miles went four years being a replacement-level player with the Rockies and Cardinals before having a breakout, for him, season in 2008 with a BABIP-fueled .317 batting average. Signed by the Cubs, he immediately plunged into his worst offensive season to date and a poor defensive showing in a small sample as well. Just as a lucky high BABIP inflated Miles’ 2008 average, an unlucky low BABIP depressed his 2009 average. Expect a small bounce back if given the chance, though moving to pitcher-friendly Oakland and the AL probably will not be doing him any favors.
Heading back Chicago’s way are three players: Jeff Gray, Ronny Morla and Matt Spencer. Gray is a useful relief pitcher. He generates ground balls, misses some bats and keeps his walks under control. He can bring a mid-90s fastball and a mid-80s slider and with little service time accrued can make for a decent and cheap bullpen option for the next few seasons.
Morla, 21, also has some good velocity and has been in Oakland’s short-season program the last two seasons working as a starter for the majority of the time with some success. Spender, 23 and originally a Phillies draft pick who came to Oakland by way of Joe Blanton, reached Double-A last year and has shown some decent hitting skills but his defensive position is currently up in the air.
Previously: Away We Go In AirportsYou should hire Amy Jean Porter. She is the greatest drawer ever.
From several months ago but still worth a read. The magazine’s music critic Sasha Frere-Jones interviews Greenwood on the quality limitations of today’s dominant music delivery format.
“I’d feel frustrated if we couldn’t release CDs as a band, but then, it only costs us a slight shaving of sound quality to get to the convenience of the MP3. It’s like putting up with tape hiss on a cassette. I was happy using cassettes when I was fifteen, but I’m sure they were sneered at in their day by audiophiles. If I’m on a train, with headphones, MP3s are great. At home, I prefer CD or vinyl, partly because they sound a little better in a quiet room and partly because they’re finite in length and separate things, unlike the endless days and days of music stored on my laptop.”
Though he’s talking specifically about the esoteric world of high-fidelity sound, Greenwood is effectively casting a critical eye on the whole idea of high definition.
“I find this sound quality stuff both fascinating and ridiculous. It’s like the pixel resolution of digital cameras: higher numbers are better, but that discussion always pushes the actual photography to one side, somehow.”
The essence of his argument is dead on: superior fidelity and resolution is terrific but overrated in comparison to convenience. As a parallel example, I couldn’t be happier with my HD-TV and I wouldn’t mind owning a Blu-Ray player one day when the prices are more reasonable. Meanwhile, I’m consuming tons of not particularly high-resolution content via streaming media. It’s the convenience of media formats that matters so much more. And you could re-interpret the idea of convenience as a format’s interface — if it’s easy to use, if it provides affordances commensurate to the needs of real users in actual use cases, then it will win over higher resolution. Actually, it’s the content that really matters.
poor detroit
Remember the Canabalt Scoreboard I built a while ago? I decided to add a couple things. Semisecret, the game's creator, is going to be adding a global leaderboard in the next update, so I thought I'd some things that will remain useful and parse some of the data.
Historical Data
Since I started tracking data on October 4th, I've captured 25k scores. As of today, the average score is 3965m. When you break it down by the type of death, it's 3728m (fine mist), 4082m (hit wall) and 3686m (fell). I think it does a decent job of showing what obstacle is hardest to avoid (hitting a building above or below the window).
If you go to the site and click on the stats tab, you can also see a list of the highest score for each day since I've tracked scores and a pretty graph of how people are dying, broken down by day (seen to the right). It's also an interesting look into how often people are posting their scores to Twitter which I imagine correlates closely to total usage.
User Scores
You can also now look at all of the scores you've submitted. For example, here are mine and here's iSpacemanSpiff, who has the highest score right now. If you want to look up the scores of anyone else, just go to the main page and do a search.
More Information
I have other data I'd like to get up there, specifically the average score per day, to see if people are improving overall. And if any of you like the graph, I built it using the Javascript library, Bluff. I like it a lot and have also been interested in using High Charts, but that's fodder for another post.
The more I build this out, the more I think this would be a useful tool for developers. I know many collaborative FPS and MMPORG games use stats to change how the game works and I think iPhone developers with global leaderboards could learn from this data too.
This is the last m-word post for a while, I promise.
In Lack of Ceremony and the Marketing Gap, I talked about how Perl 5's deliberate refusal to force people to arrange their problems in any particular style helps good programmers write programs effectively and lazy programmers write poorly-structured code. One Perl perception problem is that there are a lot more lazy programmers than disciplined programmers.
In Whipuptitude and the Marketing Gap, I discussed Perl's suitability as a glue language for projects great and small and how the same ability to arrange effective large programs quickly lets people write awful small programs quickly... and there are a lot more small programs available for people to see than large programs.
The third aspect of Perl which I believe contributes to the perception that Perl is difficult to manage is its DWIMminess -- its tendency to work very hard to intuit what the programmer meant to do and do it. Often this DWIMminess goes unnoticed; it's when Perl does the wrong thing that people realize that Perl's heuristics do not match their expectations.
Consider the polymorphic
.reprmethod on that object and produce some intelligible form of output. Whatever the case, you expectThe same goes for simple arithmetic operators. Imagine the hassle of requiring different infix operators for adding an integer to a float versus a float to an integer versus two floats versus two integers. There are, admittedly, still complications regarding the result of such operations, but the potential combinations there make the problem worse.
It's much simpler for the compiler writer to lie a little bit and make these operators polymorphic even if the rest of the language does not allow such behavior.
Perl takes DWIM further.
Because Perl's type system cares more about context and container type than value type, it does provide separate operators to indicate the type of operation the programmer intended. In a sense, values aren't typed; operations are typed. (You can argue that this is the same behavior as forcing casting or conversions, with less boilerplate and ceremony. The real questions are how much caching you need to do to improve performance and how much type safety your type system can provide. C loses on both counts.)
In other words, it's no surprise when you want to compare two strings with the
eqoperator. It's little surprise when comparing two numbers with theeqoperator works in many cases, but it's a big surprise when comparing two strings with the==operator doesn't work the way you expect.The question is whether your expectations come from other languages which provide some DWIM (even if the implementation is inconsistent with the rest of the language) or from understanding how Perl works.
If you understand how operators and other grammatic components of Perl enforce context of number and type, you can take advantage of DWIM. It's obvious why C<0 but true> is true in a boolean but zero in a numeric context.
If you don't understand operators and context but you're fortunate enough to enable
strictandwarningsor run Perl::Critic, you'll have the opportunity to learn what's happening when one of those tools identifies a situation where you might have done the wrong thing.Sadly, far too much code exists without the benefits of either conceptual understanding of Perl's typing and contexts or the assistance of good tools which point out likely mistakes and recommend corrections.
For whatever reason, the Perl community hasn't done well enough explaining Perl's underlying concepts. People can still solve their problems with a minimum of ceremony and boilerplate by joining together multiple, interesting small pieces -- but until they understand Perl's philosophy and its strengths, they condemn themselves to writing verbose, clunky code that works against Perl's natural DWIMmery.
It's a good problem to have that novices to Perl and to programming can accomplish productive things without having to become Perl experts. Yet we also need to find ways to encourage them to greater understanding before they find themselves maintaining (or sharing or documenting or cursing) a big pile of spaghetti code.
No language can prevent that in and of itself. That leaves the community to fix technical concerns and these Perl marketing problems. How do we do it?
Webcomic Buttersafe shows five situations depicting what the world might be like if certain objects were replaced with burritos. No more Gatorade; just burritos.
Related
Burrito Tape
'Let It Burrito'
'Alien' with Apples
A Comic About a World of Peanut Butter and Chocolate
Sphinx 0.9.9 is finally released to General Availability. The previous version 0.9.9-rc2 was released back in April so there was quite a gap. This release fixes about 40 bugs which are mostly rare or insignificant. Fixing bugs in 0.9.9 was smaller portion of work done in Sphinx during last half a year – 0.9.9-rc2 was quite scale and in fact a lot of users were using 0.9.9-x branch instead of old 0.9.8 branch in production. Most of work was done on new features in 0.9.10 as well as live updates.
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I have to confess, I am crazy about narwhals. Maybe it’s the way they resemble fantasy creatures like unicorns. Maybe it’s their dolphin-like smiles. Maybe it’s the friendly narwhal in Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer? These rare and mysterious creatures live in icy Northern waters, and seem almost magical. They also make a great crafting subject! Here are some narwhals as created by our members. I love knowing I am not the only narwhal fan around. What unusual creatures do you love to craft?
Surely there’s some good reason why Google is providing free DNS servers. Why? I say Jason Kottke nailed it: it’s about speed speed speed. Every tenth of a second matters. Faster DNS makes for a faster web experience. The faster your web experience, the more you use Google web services. The more you use Google web services, the more money Google generates from ads.
I totally understand why people are wary of trusting too much to Google. But their DNS privacy policy strikes me as utterly reasonable. It is not in any way tied to your Google web accounts.
I'm glad for the costumery (as pop-star uniform goes, it beats bellybutton rings), and I like some of the choruses, but I am still unsmitten with the whole cloth of Lady Gaga's songs.
That's Said the Gramophone about Lady Gaga (in the context of the inclusion of Kid Cudi's "Make Her Say" on their best songs of 2009 list). I'm in the same camp: I like Lady Gaga as an idea, and I think she's good (or, at least, interesting) for pop music, but I can't really get behind the songs.
The KLF, on the other hand...
- Frank Miller's Barney Miller
- Indiana Jones and the Lost City of Golden Who Gives A Damn Just Buy Your Ticket And Shut Up
- Apocalypse Now 2: Apocalypse Again
- The Breakfast Club starring Hannah Montana, all three Jonas Brothers, Raven Simone, and Dennis Haskins as the principal
- Bernanke!
- Kiera Knightley in We Couldn't Afford Natalie Portman
- 2022: The Next Scary Number
- Will Ferrell is A Rugby Player This Time But Check It Out It's Totally In The '70s!
- Pixar's Pinworms
- M. Night Shyamalan's Last Movie Ever. Please.
- Chitty Chitty Kiss Kiss Bang Bang
- Hotel Rwanda for Dogs
- Shaft in Mordor
- James Cameron's Small Wonder
- As-Yet-Untitled "Katherine Heigl Finds Love Where She Least Expects It" Project
- Hairspray, the computer-animated feature film based on the stage play based on the movie musical based on the Broadway musical based on the cult classic film
- A Promising Little Whorehouse In Texas: The Prequel
- X-Men Origins: Thunderbird
- Kramer vs. Kramer vs. Zombies
- Uwe Boll's Bubble Bobble
People buy things they don't necessarily need or want, sometimes in obscene quantities because they think they're getting a deal...without taking into account the fact that this just encourages the making of unnecessary consumer products that are cheap, won't last, and will eventually get dumped.
Read this "article" and the accompanying slideshow captions and try not to picture this being published in a high school newspaper. There is no way that this was written by someone old enough to legally drink -- or even vote. Not to be too nasty, but don't make assumptions that us old people don't need three pairs of reading glasses.
From a nonfiction workshop taught by David Foster Wallace at Pomona College, a 10-question grammar worksheet that is titled:
IF NO ONE HAS YET TAUGHT YOU HOW TO AVOID OR REPAIR CLAUSES LIKE THE FOLLOWING, YOU SHOULD, IN MY OPINION, THINK SERIOUSLY ABOUT SUING SOMEBODY, PERHAPS AS CO-PLAINTIFF WITH WHOEVER'S PAID YOUR TUITION
Here are the answers and explanations. I think I got 0/10 and am preparing my lawsuit.
Tags: David Foster Wallace language
Stocking stuffer alert! Two new clothbound handbooks, Movies: The Ultimate Insider's Guide and Books: The Essential Insider's Guide, are page-turning compendiums of overlooked great works, the latest from the coveted City Secrets series of guidebooks. Curated by architect Robert Kahn, whose clients include Wes Anderson, Daniel Day-Lewis and Rebecca Miller, Mary-Louise Parker, Gwyneth Paltrow, Frank Stella and David Mamet, his books are indispensable road maps to obscure masterpieces. Each guide is packed with essays by filmmakers, writers, actors, musicians, architects and historians who plead the case for their favorites. In Movies, Martin Scorsese is passionate about Frank Borzage's largely forgotten Living on Velvet while Mario Batali rhapsodizes over Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900. In Books, I was pleased to see that two of my own little-known favorites were singled out. Graydon Carter and I have the same taste when it comes to the captivating Act One: An Autobiography, by Moss Hart, and Patricia Marx and I share an affection for The Big Love, a crazy tale by Mrs. Florence Aadland, who gleefully chronicles her 15-year-old daughter's "love" affair with the 48-year-old Errol Flynn. Even though Mrs. Aadland was later convicted of contributing to the delinquency of a minor and lost custody of her daughter, she swore she'd do the same all over again. Both books are $19.95 and are published by Fang Duff Kahn Publishers.
Rumor has it, and by rumor we mean WWD so we'll err on the side of reality, that David Lynch, the legendary director of not-so-straightforward films like Mulholland Drive and Blue Velvet, is directing the next installment of John Galliano's highly stylized Dior commercials.
Or "short films."
Olivier Dahan's The Lady Noire Affair left off with a man in distress and the promise of Marion Cotillard's return for The Lady Rouge. Lynch, Cotillard and Galliano are apparently in Shanghai this week filming the next segment in which we hope she's wearing this. You can catch up on the first film at left.
Meanwhile, visions of a Stefano Pilati directed YSL meets Strawberry Shortcake 'short film' are dancing in our heads.
David Lynch - Mulholland Drive - Blue Velvet - Marion Cotillard - Arts
It's time for another round of The Food Lab. Got a suggestion for an upcoming topic? Email Kenji here, and he'll do his best to answer your queries in a future post.
[Photographs: J. Kenji Lopez-Alt]
Pan-seared Steaks with Red Wine Pan Sauce
Want to see resting in action?
Here's the recipe »Instructions on how to be a man: Start large fire. Cook large steaks over large fire. Rip steaks from fire with bare hands, bite down, and allow succulent juices to dribble down chin.
Instructions on how to be a smart man: Start large fire. Cook large steaks over large fire. Rip steaks from fire with bare hands, allow steaks to rest in a warm place undisturbed for 10 minutes. Bite down, and allow succulent juices to dribble down throat.
This week at The Food Lab, we're going to explore the importance of resting meat. Asides from over/under-cooking/seasoning, not resting meat properly is probably the cooking blunder that we are all most guilty of.
You mean I have to wait before I can tuck into that perfectly charred ribeye? Unfortunately, yes.
Here's why:
This is a picture of a steak that was cooked in a skillet to medium rare (an internal temperature of 125°F or 51.7°C). The steak was then immediately placed on a cutting board and sliced in half, whereupon a deluge of juices started flooding out and onto the board.
The result? Steak that is less than optimally juicy and flavorful. This tragedy can be easily avoided by allowing your steak to rest before slicing.
I've always been told that this happens because as one surface of the meat hits the hot pan (or grill), the juices in that surface are forced away towards the center, increasing the concentration of moisture in the middle of the steak. Once the steak gets flipped over, the same thing happens on the other side. The center of the steak becomes supersaturated with liquid—there's more liquid in there than it can hold on to—so when you slice it open, all that extra liquid pours out. By resting the steaks, you allow all that liquid that was forced out of the edges and into the center time to migrate back out to the edges.
Sort of makes sense, right? Imagine a steak as a big bundle of straws, each straw filled with liquid, and representing the muscle fibers. As the meat cooks, these straws start to change shape, becoming narrower, and putting pressure on the liquid inside. Since the meat cooks from the outside in, the straws are pinched most tightly at their edges, and slightly less tightly in their center. So far so good. Logically, if the edges are pinched more tightly than the center, liquid should get forced towards the middle, right?
Well here's the problem: water is not compressible. In other words, if you have a two-liter bottle filled to the brim with water, it is (nearly) physically impossible to force more water into that bottle without changing the size of that bottle. Same thing with a steak.
Unless we are somehow stretching the centers of the muscle fibers to make them physically wider, there is no way to force more liquid into them. You can easily prove that the muscle fibers are not getting wider by measuring the circumference around the center of a raw steak vs. a cooked one. If liquid were being forced into the center, the circumference should grow. It doesn't—it may appear to bulge, but that is only because the edges shrink, giving the illusion of a wider center.
In fact, the exact opposite is the case. Since the center of a medium-rare steak comes up to 125°F, it too is shrinking, and forcing liquid out. Where does all that liquid go?
The only place it can: out of the end of the straws—or, the surface of the steak. That sizzling noise you hear as a steak cooks? That's the sound of moisture escaping and evaporating*.
* There are ways to minimize the shrinkage of muscle fibers, thus minimizing moisture loss, but that topic will be covered in a future Food Lab installment.
Give That Theory a Rest
So why does an un-rested steak expel more juices than a rested one? Turns out that it all has to do with temperature.
We already know that the width of the muscle fibers is directly related to the temperature to which it is cooked, and to a degree, this change in shape is irreversible. A piece of meat that is cooked to 180°F (82.2°C) will never be able to hold on to as much liquid as it could in its raw state. But once that meat has cooled slightly, its structure relaxes—the muscle fibers widen up slightly again, and it's this small change in shape that makes all the difference.
This image shows six steaks of identical thickness that were all cooked to an internal temperature of 125°F. I sliced one steak open every 2.5 minutes and placed it on a plate to collect any juices that leaked out.
Here's what's going on:
- After No Resting: The meat around the exterior of the steak (the parts that were closest to the pan) are well over 200°F (93.3°C). At this temperature range, they are pinched tightly shut, preventing them from holding on to any moisture. The center of the steak is at 125°F. While it can hold on to some of its juices at this temperature, cutting the meat fibers open is like slitting the side of a soda bottle: some juice might stay in there (mostly through surface tension), but liquid is going to spill.
- After 5 Minutes of Resting: The outermost layers of meat are down to around 145°F (62.8°C) and the center of the steak is still at 125°F. At this stage, the muscle fibers have relaxed a bit, stretching open a little wider. This stretching motion creates a pressure differential between the center of the muscle fiber and the ends, pulling some of the liquid out from the middle towards the edges. As a result, there is less liquid in the center of the steak. Cut it open now, and some of the liquid will still spill out, but far less than before.
- After 10 Minutes of Resting: The edges of the steak have cooled all the way down to around 125°F, allowing them to suck up even more liquid from the center of the steak. What's more, the center of the steak has by this time cooled down to around 120°F, causing it to widen slightly. Cut the meat open at this stage, and the liquid will be so evenly and thinly distributed throughout the steak that surface tension is enough to keep it from spilling out on the plate.
The difference is dramatic. Just take a look at these two steaks:
In the steak on the left, all those delicious succulent juices are all over the plate. In the steak on the right, everything stays inside, right where it belongs.
But wait a minute—how do we know that those juices really are staying inside the rested steaks? Is it not possible that in the ten minutes that I've allowed it to rest that the liquid hasn't simply evaporated, leaving me with a steak that is equally un-moist?
To prove this is not the case, all you need to do is weigh the steaks before and after cooking. Aside from a minimal amount of weight loss due to rendered fat, the vast majority of weight loss comes from juices that are forced out of the meat.
The steak loses around 13 percent of its weight just during cooking. Cut it open immediately, and you lose an additional nine percent. But allow it to rest, and you can minimize this weight loss down to around an additional two percent.
Larger Meats
So that's all well and good for steaks, but what about for larger cuts of meat, say a whole roasted pork loin, or a prime rib? Well, the same principles apply here too. the main difference is they need to rest for longer. How long? Well there are various rules of thumb: five minutes per inch of thickness, ten minutes per pound, half of the total cooking time, etc.
By far the easiest and most foolproof way to test if your meat has rested long enough is the same way you can tell if your meat is cooked properly: with a thermometer.
Ideally, no matter how well-done you've cooked your meat, you want to allow it to cool down until the very center has reached 120°F (49°C). At this stage, the muscle fibers have relaxed enough that you should have no problem with losing juices. As shown in the graph, In a 1.5-inch-thick steak, this translates to around 10 minutes. For a prime rib, this may take as long as 45 minutes.
Congratulations: Your meat is now seven percent more delicious!
Continue here for Pan-seared Steaks with Red Wine Pan Sauce »
About the author: After graduating from MIT, J. Kenji Lopez-Alt spent many years as a chef, recipe developer, writer, and editor in Boston. He now lives in New York with his wife, where he runs a private chef business, KA Cuisine, and co-writes the blog GoodEater.org about sustainable food enjoyment.
With all the occupations and protests going on in University of California system, particularly at UC Berkeley, I thought it would be interesting to throw up a couple of posters from a part Berkeley movement, the anti-war student occupations in 1970. Soon after students were killed by the National Guard at Kent State and Jackson State, and Nixon began bombing Cambodia, there was a national student uprising and a call to strike. At UC Berkeley, the faculty at the College of Environmental Design encouraged the use of their department as a screenprint workshop, which created an estimated 50,000 copies of hundreds of works. For more info on the workshop, go HERE. To see the whole collection of posters from that era, go HERE.
In Esquire, Chuck Klosterman wrote:
Friday Night Lights is such a brilliant, effective TV show that — sometimes — I don’t enjoy watching it. Very often, I will feel on the verge of tears throughout an entire episode; it is the most emotionally manipulative show ever made. Part of it has to do with its brilliant use of music; if you play Explosions in the Sky loud enough, the process of hanging drywall can be a life-altering experience. But the larger reason Friday Night Lights is so moving is the way it taps into all the conservative impulses most mediacentric intellectuals try to ignore. The show’s moral code is so traditional and pure that it borders on cliché. It’s reactionary in the best possible way. Whenever I watch it, I find myself thinking, I bet my parents would love this.Yeah, I bought the DVDs for my parents. In Walking the Dinosaur (pretty fun read!), Klosterman wrote:
Here is a show about a high school football team in Texas, packaged as a melodramatic soap opera. While certain aspects of the program are legitimately well done by any standard (most notably the relationship between the head coach and his wife), much of the action involves implausible characters doing unbelievable things... But even when the on-screen action is ridiculous, it always has a physical impact on me — the combination of the music and the imagery consistently makes me feel like I'm on the verge of tears. Friday Night Lights can make my stomach hurt, even when my mind says "This is silly."You can read more by Klosterman at ESPN. But the point is that the above was written before the most recent run of episodes, which are incredible. Here's Sepinwall, with minor spoilers
Most dramas, even the really good ones, will take you so close to the characters' emotions and no closer, as if they fear the audience will grow uncomfortable if there isn't some distance between themselves and the characters. (Based on the show's microscopic ratings, those other shows are probably, sadly, correct.) But the improvisational, documentary-style aesthetic that Peter Berg created in the film and the series pilot, and that Jason Katims, Jeffrey Reiner and company have continued over the last three-plus seasons, shatters any kind of barrier between viewer and viewee. The actors are encouraged to let everything hang out, to let us feel the fear that Tami might be feeling as she has the sex talk with her daughter, the anticipation and joy that Smash has when he gets the call from Texas A&M, the heartsickness that Eric feels when he tends to his shell-shocked troops at halftime of the Lions' first game.
Most of the actors on the show are great at this (it's no doubt part of why they were cast), but few are better at it than Zach Gilford, who owns every minute of his greatest spotlight to date.I also recommend the FNL podcast, which is possibly my favorite examplar of the medium. Blake and his cohort may as well be residents of Dillon, they analyze the show without a hint of skepticism or suspicion of subtext. Applebee's, a sponsor in earlier seasons, does not (yet) feature in Season 4. "I assume it's still there," Blake informs. Other lines of inquiry: "What were your favorite one liners from the episode?" "I anticipate many battles between Tami and Joe McCoy. How do you see that playing out?" and "Red just looks funny on Coach Taylor. What do you think?" It's either the most in character analysis of any television show, ever, or it suggests that perhaps Friday Night Lights may find a wider audience yet.
For Adriana and I, the show is instant waterworks, uncommon for us. All time, we're not quite in The Wire territory yet, but we're well past Sopranos and Mad Men, and sneaking up on Twin Peaks.
"I have two young daughters; one of them wants to be a scientist, and the other one wants to be the editor of Scientific American," she told FishbowlNY. "I think anybody who is a position of leadership should feel a sense of responsibility. And I don't know if mine is any greater or less because I'm a first for the magazine. I know I'm very honored and grateful."
Le Web
in Paris is next week, and it’s one of the best lineup of speakers I’ve seen at a conference in a long time. This isn’t just Europe’s most important tech event any more. Le Web is turning into a must-attend event for people around the world.
obviousment zhat iz becauze dj DJ is speaking on a panel zhere
Google announced their public DNS server today. I'm using it right now. There's been a bunch of speculation as to why Google is offering this service for free but the reason is pretty simple: they want to speed up people's Google search results. In 2006, Google VP Marissa Mayer told the audience at the Web 2.0 conference that slowing a user's search experience down even a fraction of a second results in fewer searches and less customer satisfaction.
Marissa ran an experiment where Google increased the number of search results to thirty. Traffic and revenue from Google searchers in the experimental group dropped by 20%.
Ouch. Why? Why, when users had asked for this, did they seem to hate it?
After a bit of looking, Marissa explained that they found an uncontrolled variable. The page with 10 results took .4 seconds to generate. The page with 30 results took .9 seconds.
Half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic. Half a second delay killed user satisfaction.
Former Amazon employee Greg Linden backs up Mayer's claim:
Tags: Google Greg Linden marissamayer searchThis conclusion may be surprising -- people notice a half second delay? -- but we had a similar experience at Amazon.com. In A/B tests, we tried delaying the page in increments of 100 milliseconds and found that even very small delays would result in substantial and costly drops in revenue.
I mentioned it before, but my wife has resurrected her site We &heart; Prints. It's a great resource for finding affordable art for yourself or someone else.
Us Weekly:
EXCLUSIVE: Tiger “Was Very Insecure” About His Small Calves, Says Mistress — Tiger Woods is a 33 year-old billionaire and widely considered the greatest golfer in history, but there's something that he hates about himself: his calves! — Jaimee Grubbs — who says she had 20 sexual encounters …
Starting a blog changed my life. Before Red Sweater Blog, nobody knew who I was, nobody cared what I was working on, and nobody (relatively speaking) bought any of my products.
I’m not saying the blog changed everything overnight, but my first post, on June 24, 2005, set the stage for what has been an exciting 4 year adventure. At the time, I was fresh from graduating with my second BA degree (in Music!), and was scraping by doing freelance development for an assortment of clients. Today, I spend every day working on my own software, which sustains me and my small family.
So what changed? The moment I started blogging, I became part of a community. Sure, the community was just myself and a few readers at first, but as my readership grew, it merged with other readerships, and connected me to other bloggers and readers, many of whom have become good friends. Every opportunity I’ve had the privilege to take advantage of over these years can be traced back to the reputation I earned and the friends I made by blogging.
Dan Wood wrote about the value of blogging on his excellent marketing blog. The Importance of Blogging discusses the benefits of writing a blog in more concrete terms than I have here. Check it out!
Some of you consider yourself more adept at reading than at writing. I know you’re with me, because you’re the type of person who had no problem digesting the content of this post, and you’re still reading five paragraphs later. You might be tempted to think you can’t start a blog because you’re not the world’s best writer. Think again. I covered this a couple years ago in another post: No More Excuses. I stand by those thoughts today.
If starting a blog is so great for your reputation, and will make you lots of friends, and bring you fame and fortune, why should I share the secret with you? Why not keep it to myself? Because I write blog editing software? Well, sure, more blogging is good for me. But much more importantly, it’s good for you. Helping others has always been a mission of this blog. It’s one of the things that led to its success, and it is one of the aspects of my work that gives me the biggest charge.
So start a blog intent on helping others. You’ll reap personal benefits and feel good all at the same time. Furthermore, everybody who ever helped me over the years holds a special place in my heart and they’ll always have my deep respect. If this post gets you to start blogging and achieve the level of success you deserve, maybe I’ll earn a similar spot in your heart. Bonus!
Lawsuits, bad management, and knockoffs, oh my! From Fast Company:
Tags: business designwithinreachDiscontent has steadily grown among formerly stalwart DWR supporters. New York-based textile designer Sandy Chilewich, whose rugs and mats are stocked by DWR ($280 to $600), says she's considering pulling her business and has been talking with other DWR designers about banding together to "tell them we don't approve." Eames Demetrios, grandson of Charles and Ray Eames and the guardian of their legacy, says, "DWR has been a great ambassador for the Eames story and DWR hasn't carried knockoff Eames product, but I think one needs to look beyond that. In the long run, we don't see our authentic product being sold next to knockoff products of any kind."
David Jacobs points to OpenDNS founder David Ulevitch's post on Google DNS. (Thanks, David!) The graf that DJ pulled is interesting, but so is this one:
it means that Google is bringing awareness to a wide audience that there is a choice when it comes to DNS and that users don’t have to settle for what their ISP provides. And we believe that having choice is a good thing — just as Internet users have unbundled their email to services like Gmail, Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail people have been unbundling their DNS and switching to OpenDNS in huge numbers for the last 3+ years because we’re better.This is absolutely the case. I'd never even considered switching my DNS service on my laptop or home machines until today. And now I'll probably try Google and/or OpenDNS. But users abandoned their ISP-provided email to the webmail services because of a radically better user experience, and I'm not sure that a DNS service provides that much opportunity for differentiation to even the mildly sophisticated Internet user (i.e. "one that even knows what DNS is").
… as being reported at present by Bruce Levine over on ESPN-Chicago. But at what price?
Jeff Gray? Sure, no problem. Strong arm, interesting, about as ready as he’ll ever be, and replaceable. Matt Spencer? He’ll be 24, an organizational bat from the left side, isn’t even a tweener, and doesn’t really have the power for a corner by the look of it. Ronny Morla? Skinny Dominican, sweet strikeout rate in Vancouver this year (73 Ks in 63 IP), but he got knocked around (70 hits, 24 walks, 42 runs).
And Aaron Miles. As in, the A’s have to take him in this deal. Bobby Crosby, all’s forgi… well, no, no it isn’t. But why? This must be how Rany Jazayerli felt when Pat Tabler became a Royal. Or something like it. I’m sure people have their own hate/love stories like this.
I’ll write about this trade at more length tomorrow, along with the Phillies stocking up their infield and giving Carlos Ruiz a nice caddy, the Mets fleshing out their bench, and more. Right now, I’m trying to get used to a sweet-and-sour mix where the contrasts might just fry my taste buds.
Google claims that this service is better because it has no ads or redirection. But you have to remember they are also the largest advertising and redirection company on the Internet. To think that Google’s DNS service is for the benefit of the Internet would be naive. They know there is value in controlling more of your Internet experience and I would expect them to explore that fully. via blog.opendns.com OpenDNS.com's founder responds to Google's DNS service. I wouldn't count out OpenDNS, since it's a niche business, and since Enterprises are as likely to keep their infrastructure from Google as they are to trust them.
Everybody's looking pretty snug here.
The fork says “Keep your distance,” but the eyes shout “Proceed!”
So I am putting this horrifying picture of myself, taken by Ms. Mary HK Choi, online here before someone else finds it on Flickr and uses it against me when I’m not expecting it.
Nice concept for a Sports Illustrated e-reader interface.
Tags: magazines sports video
In high school, I — like many — was taught that the Heisenberg uncertainty principle refers to changes that the act of observing can have on the phenomenon being observed. So, for example, if I (for some unknown reason) were attempting to observe a particle and was using some sort of device that would bounce a photon off of said particle, I would inevitably change the particle’s position or momentum. Thus, in attempting to measure it, I would’ve have actually changed it. To measure it au naturale would, in this incredibly hypothetical scenario, be impossible.
Despite the fact that my high school was impossibly prestigious and reputable, it turns out my teacher only had it sorta right. The actual definition of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle (per Wikipedia, which is always right) is that “certain pairs of physical properties, like position and momentum, cannot both be known to arbitrary precision. That is, the more precisely one property is known, the less precisely the other can be known.”
What my physics teacher was describing is actually known as the Observer Effect. And while (again, per Wikipedia) the two are related — Heisenberg was integral in defining the Observer Effect, too — it’s usually the Observer Effect that people are meaning when they say Heisenberg uncertainty principle.
And it was the possible influence of the Observer Effect that I considered when FanGraphs Overlord David Appelman announced the arrival of Fan Projections this past weekend.
As as been noted in these electronic pages — most recently by Dave Cameron — the idea of Fan Projections/Community Forecasting relies on the Wisdom of the Crowd, a concept ably explored by James Surowiecki in a book of the same name. That book begins with an anecdote about Statistical Wunderkind and Pretty Racist Francis Galton. The story (dramatized by Radio Lab here) goes like this: Galton visits a country fair. At the fair, he comes across a weight-judging competition, where fair-goers are encouraged to guess the weight of an ox. No one guesses the weight of the ox exactly, but Galton, gaining permission from the organizers to do so, collects all 787 entries and finds that the “average” guess comes out to 1,197 pounds. The actual weight of the ox? 1,198 pounds — i.e. closer than every single one of the entries.
That’s an exciting discovery. But the difference between Galton’s experiment and the one we’re conducting here is that the Crowd (read: you and you and you) can see the results in real time. If each of the fair-goers from the Galton anecdote had been able to see the guesses that had preceded their own, would that have affected the results? If you and you and you can see Derek Jeter’s current projection before making your own, how will that affect your own assessment of Jeter?
In other words: Will the Observer Effect come into play here?
The answer is: I don’t know. Of course, there’s a big emphasis on the “I” there. Here are some subjects in which I have little in the way of expertise: physics, statistics, personal hygiene. (The last of these, I recognize, isn’t wholly relevant to the present conversation; still, it’s the truth.) But you know who might know? People who are smarter than me. People like Tom Tango and Dave Cameron. So I asked them. Below are their respective responses.
Here’s Tom Tango:
No, I don’t think there will be a bias caused by seeing other fans’ forecasts. You will note that David shows the selections a bit differently from the standard line. Furthermore, fans are notoriously stubborn.
Having said that, it’s a simple matter to look at the forecasts early on and later on and seeing if the standard deviations of the selections are tighter the later the selections. I’d be shocked if you find anything.
Personally, I’d be shocked if I found anything, too — but only because that would mean that I’d checked.
And now Dave Cameron:
I think it’ a legitimate issue, but David has designed the inputs in such a way that limit the opportunity to just repeat what has already been done. Since most of the rate stats are calculations based on the raw inputs, the fans aren’t going in and just projecting players for the .360 wOBA that everyone else already concluded was likely. Instead, they are projecting the components, which are less likely to be observed. I know that I can tell you what the wOBA/WAR projections are currently at for a few players, but I have no idea how many doubles and triples anyone is projected to hit.
I think that will mitigate some of the problems the observer effect raises. We can’t eliminate it, of course, but it shouldn’t be a big enough problem to ruin the projections.
So the consensus here seems to be that no, mostly likely the Observer Effect will not influence (or noticeably influence) the Fan Projections. Consensus is different than fact, of course, but it’s good enough for now.
the grass is always greener. (the skies are always darker?)
I started a bit of stupid fun on Twitter: #webappcelebs. Some of my favorites so far:
Pablo Picasa
Favrd Flav
Eddie Van Hahlo
Bit.ly Houston
daniel craigslist
Paul Reubens on Rails
Keira Writely
Google Lou Reader
Gwyneth Paypaltrow
Sid Del.ico.us (also: Benicio Del.ico.us)
Opera Winfrey
AIM Judy Dench
Wilford Brizzly
Eartha TypekittAnd I can't find it, but I swear I saw someone do Lucy Hululiu, which seems so much funnier that just Lucy HuLiu for some reason.
Tags: celebrity Twitter
We're releasing another pair of Jane Mount's Ideal Bookshelves today over at 20x200. One is a shelf of Tina Roth's (aka Swissmiss') daughter's books, the other is of chef George Weld's cookbooks. Both are supergreat and I recommend snapping one or both of them up.
Because Jane is part of the 20x200 family, I was lucky enough to have my kid's bookshelf painted (see below). Makes me happy every time I look at it. You can have your own bookshelf painted if you are a bit lucky (details on the 20x200 newsletter).
Note: Every time I post anything about children's books I get parents asking me for lists of book names. I've named most of the books in previous posts. I've also put most of them up together on an Heading East's Amazon Page.
Filed under: art
Tags: 20x200, art, children's books
Sponsor:
TWO BLUE CARS: Your kid's favorite shirt.
You have questions about MT5, we have answers...
Six Apart will host two half-hour calls this Friday to answer all your questions about MT5.
These times may change slightly, but they're currently scheduled for:
- 11:30 AM PST
- 1:00 PM PST
The format is TBD based upon how many people attend.
We know many of your questions and are putting them into an official FAQ to be released with MT5.
To add questions to the agenda, add your questions as comments on this entry.
Yesterday when I was looking at Joe Mauer’s numbers I noticed he sees a lot of fastballs. Generally the better the hitter the fewer the fastballs he sees, but Mauer, the second best hitter in baseball last year, saw more fastballs than anyone else in the top twenty. (Todd Helton, with the 21st best wOBA, is the player with the best wOBA who saw more fastballs than Mauer).
Part of this has to do with the fact that the true relationship is between power and fastballs seen. So it is not that good hitters see fewer fastballs, but that power hitters see fewer fastballs and good hitters are often power hitters. Dave Cameron showed us this relationship last year. Compared to other top hitters, Mauer is not as much of a power hitter, which explains, somewhat, why he sees more fastballs. Here is the relationship for 2009 with Mauer indicated with the filled circle.
He is not the farthest from the trend line, but pretty far, meaning he sees more fastballs than you expect for a hitter with his power. Part of this is because Mauer’s power is so new, and pitchers have not changed their strategy. But pitchers rapidly changed their pitch usage against Ben Zobrist, who busted out this year and saw just 53% fastballs after seeing over 64% every previous year.The excess of fastballs to Mauer is particularly interesting because he was the second best fastball hitter in baseball in 2009 (only Albert Pujols was better) and 25 of his 28 HRs were off fastballs. (That is based on the pitchf/x pitch classifications. The BIS classifications backs this up, saying he hit 24 HRs off of fastballs).
My guess is next year Mauer will not see 60%+ fastballs like he has so far in his career. Do you think that will have any effect on his game? Head over and project his 2010 performance.
So how come it’s happening again? How come a big media merger can happen even at this point, when the evidence of failure is so explicit and so expertly chronicled, when so many of even the most deluded media executives are now, to say the least, sheepish and chastened? How come those geniuses at Comcast and GE (which will still be stuck with 49% of this pig in a poke) aren’t being carted off?via www.newser.com
The Rotating Kitchen by Dutch artist Zeger Reyers is a model of a kitchen—complete with appliances, kitchenware, and food—that slowly turns on its horizontal axis and lets gravity do its thing. Result: lots of clanking, and a big mess. The kitchen can be viewed at art museum Kunsthalle Düsseldorf as part of their Eating the Universe. Food in Art exhibit, and will continue rotating until February 28, 2010. Watch the video after the jump.
The Rotating Kitchen
[via Boing Boing]
This description of Reyer's work seems especially applicable here: "He mostly uses 'nature' as a driving power, which in its slowness can be surprisingly fast."
Related
Video: Room Covered in Melted Cheese
How To Kill a Chocolate Bunny in Three Exciting Ways!
Exploding Banana Head Performance Art
There was a raging debate on Twitter yesterday about punctuation and quotations. Most people came down on the side of putting punctuation inside the closing quotation mark and that's how American English does it. Quoth Wikipedia:
American English places commas and periods inside the quotation almost all of the time, making exceptions only for parenthetical citation and cases in which the addition of a period or comma would create confusion, such as when quoting a keyboard entry or a web address.I get that, but I respectfully disagree. I prefer the British style:
The British style places them inside or outside the quotation marks according to whether or not the punctuation is part of the quoted material.Maybe it's from reading Eats, Shoots & Leaves or maybe it's from my life as a programmer, but I think only the quoted material should be inside the marks.
We could debate this at length (and I'm happy to hear your thoughts in the comments), but I think if we just choose a style and stick to it, that should do the trick. Of course, if I got a gig writing for a publication, I'd happily comply with whatever style guide they prefer.
Is the idea of the celebrity memoir as publishing cash cow in decline? In Britain, at least, evidence is mixed. (Link includes some Martin Amis misogyny, if that’s your thing.)
Off to Chocolate City guys. I'll be back blogging tomorrow. In parting, here's something from the days before Jarobi left Tribe, and came to Mecca. People talk about hip-hop and forget how cool it could be to be a goofball.
I live in New York ~ visit Paris 2-3 times a year ~ love to look in Paris pastry windows ~ love to look in ALL Paris shop windows ~ take millions of photos whilst in Paris and eat a few macarons ~ will follow a Parisien dog down any street ~ I paint everyone else's dogs and cats via parisbreakfasts.blogspot.com
"Encroachment"
The New York Times doesn't even try to hide their Googly jealousy anymore. On Monday it was David Carr comparing Google to Al Qaeda with his 9/11 metaphor, and today it's TV critic David Genzlinger laying it on thick with his review of Maria Bartiromo's CNBC program "Inside the Mind of Google."
Here's my favorite snippet:
Ms. Bartiromo begins with an exceedingly gushy tour of Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., sounding as if she’s on the payroll of the company’s public-relations department. Such amazing cafeterias! Such wonderful employee perks! Such incredibly smart people everywhere!
It’s the kind of mush that makes you go channel surfing, especially the endless prattle about how smart everyone at Google is. Lots of businesses are full of smart people. Some of them are laying those smart people off because their business models have been undercut by Google. Newspapers, for instance.
That second graf is just begging to be slashed by the red pen. Aren't there any editors over there anymore? Or were they all slain by the business model-destroying googlebot?
George Drapeau recently wrote about his experience Installing and running Movable Type on OpenSolaris. Though George seems to be technially savvy, installation of MT is not always easy because each server environment in which it is installed is different.
A few months ago (with the help of a few Perl hackers at Six Apart), I wrote a step-by-step guide to Install Movbale Type on a Mac which required the installation of a foundation of software commonly pre-installed by most web hosting companies. This included Xcode Tools (specific to MacOS), MySQL, PHP5, Perl modules, Image Magick and common image libraries.
While I can install Movable Type without assistance, I needed guidance to install the system software which is commonly installed by most web hosting providers. When a web host meets the system requirements for Movable Type, installation is as easy as installing any of today’s self-hosted CMS products.
I’ve rewritten the install and upgrade guides with a progressive disclosure of detail such that those already comfortable with performing such installations have access to simple guides.
These guides will work for both MT4 and MT5.
Quick Install Guides
- Install via FTP using the Configuration Wizard
- Install via SSH with manual configuration of the
mt-config.cgiFor those who may be installing for the first time or need more details:
Because ungrading is esentially installation + backup, the new upgrade guide is similar to the detailed installation guide, but adds backup steps and tips for general administration of Movable Type:
To support these installation and upgrade guides, the following reference guides were created:
These guides have been inspired by many previous Movable Type installation guides, messages on the mailing lists, comments in the Movable Type Documentation, and installation guides from other sites and software products.
So check out the new Installation Guides and provide any feedback you have such these documents can be a resource for the whole community. Some documents are still in a draft state. Please leave any comments on the individual docs if you have questions or comments.
A few other documentation-related notes:
- An index template aggregating MT5 documentation will continue to list new docs as they become available. Documentation will continue to be produced through the release date.
- The Recently Updated Documentation page lists the last 300 documentation pages that have been updated.
Enjoy!
If I've said it once, I've said it a hundred times: Every good logo must be kid-friendly and a bit edgy. So here's to the Richmond Flying Squirrels -- Mission accomplished! via espn.go.com
From Google Quick Search Box, my new favorite preferences dialog.*
A new approach for "progressive disclosure," hiding all the "way under the hood" stuff down below the fold where users won't see it unless they scroll. (Then again, if you've installed QSB, you're probably a user who'd scroll.)
* What, you don't have one of those?
The day after the n+1 feminism panel I had lunch with my friend L. L is a student at Columbia, among other things, and so she lives up in the Columbia neck of the woods with two dude roommates. They aren’t students, though, just recent-grad-types, I forget what they actually do, I think one of them works in P.R. and the other works in finance. Just your basic mid-20s Manhattan-dwelling dudes. According to L they are good roommates, very clean and considerate. Anyway, I was telling her about the panel and she said, in a tone of bemusement, that they’d been scandalized to hear her casually call herself a “feminist.” “But you wear a bra!” one of them had said.
I thought about Ariel Levy’s recent review of two books, one of them the new Gail Collins book about the history of feminism, which began by debunking the myth of bra-burning and went on to detail what Levy called a “false-memory syndrome” that has plagued the feminist movement — its habit of taking the gains of each previous generation for granted before the paint had even dried on them, to the point where high-powered executives like Cindy McCain and (former) elected officials like Sarah Palin can describe themselves as “traditional.” The review also contained the shocking information that “thirty-seven per cent of women describe themselves as conservative, and three out of four women abjure the label ‘feminist.’”
Jesus, I thought. How can we even start to talk about “the unfinished work of feminism” when college-educated professional men living in one of the most liberal and cosmopolitan cities in this country, like L’s roommates, are still genuinely confused about what the word “feminist” means? “They thought it meant I was a radical who thought women were superior to men,” she told me. “I told them it just means someone who thinks men and women should be equal.”
We were eating spinach crepes in a generic Midtown bistro, sitting in the window. L, in addition to being a college student, is a ballerina, and she looks like a little girl’s drawing of one, all defined neck muscles and high cheekbones and classic Gibson-girl features. The waiters were being nicer to us than I am used to.
L told me about a moment late in high school when she had been encouraged to go to college (she wasn’t planning to right away, because of her dance career) by a respected male teacher who told her that it was important for her to get a higher education because college would be where she’d meet a smart man who’d enable her to have smart children.
I told L about how the panelists the night before had talked a lot about how beneficial a utopian socialist future would be for the aims of feminism — how if we all didn’t have to work as much and if the state interceded at times in our lives when we need care — babyhood, childhood, and old age — then the need for care at these times would no longer fall almost exclusively to unpaid women, and that this would make women’s lives better. I told L that it had been nice to hear these thoughts articulated but that few of them had been unfamiliar; I’d wanted to hear more about the panel’s declared theme which was “The unfinished work of feminism is love.”
Why was this theme interesting to me? Well, I am nosy about people’s “personal lives,” for one thing. But I also think that love — which despite various efforts to do so can’t be controlled by public policy – and the different ways women have historically structured their domestic lives around love, reconciling themselves to the pull towards it and the equally strong pull towards autonomy — well, this is a realm where the personal really is unquestionably, meaningfully political. I’ve read tons of interesting writing around this theme lately, and I have felt inspired and intrigued and disappointed by all of it.
One thing L and I talked about that no one on the panel talked about and that people rarely say is that domestic power — like, being in charge in your household — is a very satisfying kind of power, one that I think women are loathe to give up. And it makes sense to me that women think they’d have to give up their control of the domestic sphere in order to take on more power in the larger world, and because of the way that world is structured, that seems like it would be a bad bargain for most women. You have so much power over people when they depend on you for care! This is kind of a dirty secret. I think this — and not because they’re dumb, or amnesiac — is why women are so quick to disavow “feminism,” and to agree with the men, and some women, who theorize that women are intrinsically better suited for traditionally feminine domestic tasks like cooking, cleaning and childcare. I mean, okay, I’ll give you “childcare” to some small extent, maybe, MAYBE, but “women” as a whole are not better cooks and let’s face it, no one is “better” at cleaning (I myself hugely suck at it.)
But I am a good cook. That is actually the one area that I feel completely comfortable in saying that I excel. And when I have a boyfriend I delight in cooking all the time, for myself — I only cook things I like to eat — but also for him. I can kind of justify this behavior to myself by acknowledging that it’s easier to cook for two than one, just in terms of the proportions and mechanics of cooking, and that it’s hard to justify making real multicourse meals for one, though of course I do so and I advocate doing so. But none of this explains why I have been known to pack bag lunches, unbidden. I see myself doing that kind of thing sometimes and feel strange. Why am I trying to make another person rely on me for food? Why am I sacrificing big swathes of time — which (in theory!) could be given over to some other kind of labor, something more meaningful or creative or at the very least remunerative — to shopping for and cooking good meals? It has to do with loving to cook and eat, sure, but mostly for me at least it has to do with control. I was talking to a woman recently, okay it was Amy Sohn, whose husband does all the cooking for their family, and I had the initial response of “Wow, that sounds great, what a dream,” but then I realized that my honest response is that I would never want to be with someone who could cook at all, because then I wouldn’t be in charge of cooking. And while I can see how the charm of being in charge of cooking might wear thin when what you’re cooking is box mac’n'cheese for some little creature who demands it three times a day, somehow I still think I’d want to be in charge of that, too.
I guess the sort-of-crass term for what women are doing — well, what I am doing, and what I think at least some other women are doing — when we refuse to relinquish control of domestic tasks is “topping from the bottom.” My big post-panel revelation is that possibly women need to ease out of these patterns of thinking and behavior if we ever want to stand a chance of topping from the top.
Mad (food) scientist Dave Arnold, who pushes the limits of cooking technology at the French Culinary Institute shares the best parts of Bacon and Hams, a long out-of-print book, on FCI's Cooking Issues blog.
... the frontispiece of the book had a spectacular fold-out. At the time the book was written, fold-out anatomical charts were a popular feature in medical books. [Author George J.] Nicholls decided to do one of the pig. Brilliant. I've scanned it and converted it to a Flash animation for your enjoyment.
As detailed in Arnold's post, Bacon and Hams author Nicholls also included a photo of himself "in Fancy Dress as a Side of Bacon, designed by himself, which took First Prize of Forty Guineas at the Covent Garden Fancy Dress Ball, April 1894."
As this is the season of lists and of gift giving, I thought I would put together the top ten books I thought every designer of interactive products should have in their library. I’ve also seen some reading lists floating around that leave out what are, to me, essential texts, or include books that are too focused on a particular medium (web, mobile). (For reasons of impartiality, I excluded my own book, Designing for Interaction, although I certainly hope it sits alongside these on the bookshelf.)
10. Shaping Things
. The one book on this list that is specifically about the future. Sterling shows us the future of the objects we’ll design.
9. Designing Interactions
. A history (albeit an IDEO-centric one) of the discipline, although woefully poor about the web. Still, worth it for some of the interviews.
8. Designing Interfaces
. One of the reference books. Captures some really critical patterns.
7. Designing for People
. Dreyfuss is of the giants of industrial design, and this book is one of the origins of user-centered design.
6. The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems
. The late Jef Raskin evangelized a new way of thinking of our computers. Although dated, the principles still ring true.
5. The Art of Human-Computer Interface Design
. A seminal collection of essays on everything from metaphors to task analysis from people like Alan Kay and Ted Nelson.
4. About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design
. The best and most-readable edition of About Face. Personas, goal-directed design, and stances. All in here.
3. Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age
. An excellent history of why our computers are they way they are.
2. Universal Principles of Design
. So much great stuff in here. Every page is a reminder of something valuable and long-lasting.
1. The Design of Everyday Things
. There’s no getting around it: this is the book. Affordances, mental models, and other bits that have all become part of the general lexicon all started with The Don’s book. A must read.
After this, of course, there are many great books that delve into particular types of interaction design, design theory, information and communication design, physical computing, and many other topics. But I think these ten books form the center of any interaction designer’s library. Feel free to add more in the comments!
Sasha Frere-Jones unpacks Susan Boyle's hit record, emphasis mine: "One reason that Boyle’s success might not have much to do with popular music is that, compared with television, popular music isn’t that popular."
85. The Father Who Must Be Killed
84. Let me Kiss You
83. Life is a Pigsty
82. Friday Mourning
81. I Knew I was Next
80. I Am Two People
79. Ganglord
78. Sing Your Life
77. There’s a Place in Hell for Me and My Friends
76. I’m the End of the Family Line
75. The Ordinary Boys
74. Because of my Poor Education
73. He Cried
72. Sunny
71. Mexico
70. Will Never Marry
69. First of the Gang to Die
68. Mute Witness
67. Alma Maters
66. Seasick, Yet Still Docked
65. Driving Your Girlfriend Home
64. I Am Hated for Loving
63. Nobody Loves Us
62. My Life is a Succession of People Saying Goodbye
61. I’ll Never Be Anybody’s Hero Now
60. Come Back to Camden
59. Tomorrow
58. It’s Not Your Birthday Any More
57. King Leer
56. Angel, Angel Down We Go Together
55. I Just Want to See the Boy Happy
54. Billy Budd
53. Best Friend on the Payroll
52. Southpaw
51. Christian Dior
50. If You Don’t Like Me, Don’t Look At Me
49. The Loop
48. Don’t Make Fun of Daddy’s Voice
47. Interesting Drug
46. At Amber
45. Hold on to Your Friends
44. Certain People I Know
43. He Knows I’d Love to See Him
42. Hairdresser on Fire
41. The Harsh Truth of the Camera Eye
40. Satan Rejected my Soul
39. I’ve Changed my Plea to Guilty
38. Mama Lay Softly on the Riverbed
37. Why Don’t You Find Out For Yourself?
36. I Have Forgiven Jesus
35. In the Future When All’s Well
34. I Like You
33. Found Found Found
32. Good Looking Man About Town
31. TIE: I Don’t Mind if You Forget Me and I Know It’s Going to Happen Someday
30. Will Never Marry
29. The National Front Disco
28. All the Lazy Dykes
27. Such a Little Thing Makes Such a Big Difference
26. I Know Very Well How I Got My Name
25. The World is Full of Crashing Bores
24. Picadilly Palare
23. We Hate It When Our Friends Become Successful
22. Now My Heart is Full
21. Munich Air Disaster 1958
20. When Last I Spoke To Carol
19. Late Night, Maudlin Street
18. Our Frank
17. I Will See You in Far Off Places
16. Irish Blood, English Heart
15. Disappointed
14. Asian Rut
13. Black Cloud
12. Sister I’m a Poet
11. November Spawned a Monster
10. Every Day Is Like Sunday
9. Yes, I Am Blind
8. That’s How People Grow Up
7. All You Need Is Me
6. You’re the One for Me, Fatty
5. Something is Squeezing My Skull
4. Jack the Ripper
3. The Last of the Famous International Playboys
2. Spring-Heeled Jim
1. You’re Gonna Need Someone on Your Side
Google Analytics goes async. This is excellent news—the latest version of the Google Analytics JavaScript is designed to allow for asynchronous loading, so it won’t hold up the rendering of your page. Analytics and banner ads are the two worst offenders when it comes to slowing down page loads. Now if only a banner ad vendor would follow suit...
one of the latest devices making buzz in the electronic book reader category is the iriver reader.
the new device is currently only available in the UK and mimics many of the design features of
other popular players such as the amazon kindle. what sets the iriver e-reader apart is its easy to
use keyboard with ample buttons that make text input fast and efficient. the device also comes
with a cover that has a small zippered pouch at the back for storing documents. it also has voice
recoding capability, a built in mp3 player and a daily agenda.
http://www.iriver.com
via reghardware
Shared by rickRemember that story about how a gang in Peru was murdering people to sell their fat? Well, it was all a lie. Peru's police chief ordered a top organized-crime investigator suspended from the force for claiming that four suspects had confessed to killing up to 60 people. In a news conference, police showed two bottles of what they purported to be human fat and a photo of a decapitated head. But the story quickly fell apart when local police said they had never heard of anything like it, no sales in the black market could be confirmed, and medical experts insisted human fat doesn't have any real market value.
Fish tacos are safe again!
I tried the messy, tiring, and time-consuming kneading method and the not quite effective leave-it-damp-in-the-container method. After months of tinkering, I have discovered the best and easiest way to restore dry Play-Doh to its perfect state (besides Hasbro's former suggestion that you buy a new can). Here's what you do:
1. Break the hard Play-Doh up into pieces the size of shelled peas and put them into a one-quart Ziploc bag.
2. Sprinkle some water in, enough to get all the pieces damp but not enough to leave a lot of excess water. Seal the bag.
3. After a few minutes, smoosh all of the Play-Doh into one corner of the bag. Let it sit this way overnight.
4. Open the bag in the morning and hand the Play-Doh to a delighted toddler. It's as good as new! (And then rinse the bag for reuse.)
If you liked this, you may enjoy some of my other household hints: how to unshrink a wool sweater, how to make tator tot hotdish, how to make the world's best pancakes, and how to slow-poach eggs. Look out, Heloise!
Tags: how to playdoh
Great op-ed from Paul Kedrosky and Brad Feld in today's WSJ proposing a startup visa. The challenge with getting something like this passed is having congresscritters understand this key point: "Would it work every time? Of course not. It would fail more often than not. Start-ups often fail."
Photo by Donna
Last post on the astonishing versatility of five parts flour, three parts water. First it was pizza (remember this awesome pizza?… hmm, maybe a bacon and egg pizza this weekend). More recently, I made these delicious pretzels. Same dough, different products. And here it is in yet another form.
Every now and then, when I or Donna stop at On the Rise bakery, where Adam Gidlow and staff bake bread, bread, bread—the best baguette in the land, as far as I’m concerned—we pick up a loaf of sandwich bread, which young James calls “the most awesome bread ever.” Last time I was there, jealous of the light airy crust and soft kid-friendly texture, I asked Adam, “What makes it sandwich bread?”
He said, “It’s the exact same dough as the baguette, but a longer ferment. And it’s baked in a loaf pan.”
“You mean second rise?” Bakers speak in curious tongues and I wanted to make sure. Traditionally what we at home call rising, some bakers call fermenting, referring to the delicious microbial activity. This is when the yeast does most of its work and generates most of its flavor. The second rise after it’s been shaped is sometimes called “proofing.” Which never made sense to me—it’s either proved itself in the first rise or it hasn’t. Adam nodded. That’s right, he explained, it goes for nearly twice the time an ordinary baguette goes after being shaped.
I’d already noticed how dense my Dutch oven bread could be if I didn’t let it rise long enough. For sandwich bread, it needed even more time to open up. I’d let it rise to within an inch of its life, then score it and put it in the oven. (See this post for bread baking basics and one of my favorite of all of Donna’s pix.)
Works like a charm. Want to throw in some extras? Honey? Egg white? Wheat germ for fiber? Rosemary? Go to town. Use a ratio as your starting point and you’re good to go. (If you don’t own the book, put it on the Xmas list you give to the loved ones who adore your cooking! Ratio: The Simple Codes Behind the Craft of Everyday Cooking.)
Everyday Sandwich Bread
20 ounces flour
12 ounces water
1 teaspoon dry yeast
2 teaspoons salt
Combine all the ingredients in the bowl of a standing mixer. (The standing mixer is a big ticket item but a powerhouse that’s well worth the investment; here’s the one I recommend, available at OpenSky; we WILL matching Amazon’s prices!) Mix with the dough hook until the dough is very elastic, about 10 minutes on medium speed. Remove the bowl from the stand, cover it with a pot lid or plastic and let it rise till it’s doubled in volume, 2 to 4 hours depending on how hot your kitchen is.
Remove the dough from the bowl, pound it down, knead it and get as much gas out as you can (you’re redistributing the yeast so it can get fresh food). Shape it into a rectangle about the size of a sheet of paper. Let it rest for 10 minutes covered with a towel. To shape it, fold it over on itself, starting from the top and pinching it solidly down with the heel of your hand—fold, pound pound pound pound pound—until it’s a round loaf. Drop it into an oiled loaf pan and cover with a towel, or better yet, put the entire loaf pan in a dutch oven and cover it. Preheat your oven to 450 degrees and let the dough rest till it looks like it won’t rise no more.
Draw a knife lengthwise down the center to help it rise and put it in the oven. Turn the oven down to 350 degrees. (If you’re cooking in a Dutch oven leave the lid on for the first half hour.) Bake for about an hour, till it’s done (internal temperature of 200 degrees or so). Let it cool (it’s still cooking and setting up inside!).
Today’s Matt Lauer, interviewing that LESBIAN Meredith Baxter, known to old people as Mrs. Keaton on Family Ties, this morning: “So this first relationship you had with another woman. Did it create one of those B-movie moments when you go home and you go into the bathroom and you look in the mirror and you go, ‘I’m gay!’ And then you repeat it six or seven times? Or was it a more subtle—” End verbatim transcript. So. How many questions do you have about this question? For starters, what B-movie is this, and on what cable channel may I watch it immediately, please? And what personal experience of his own does this draw upon? What does Matt Lauer say to his bathroom’s mirror? Is it all about Katie Couric still? And, and, and what?
Gawd, I’d kill to be able to do this: “Spend two weeks studying visual communication — especially typography — in Venice and Rome, the birthplace of Western typographic tradition.” This is another outpost in Steve Heller formidable design education empire, and he’ll be teaching there, but the rest of the faculty roster looks damn impressive on its own.
I just got work from our editor that iPhone SDK Development is “flying off shelves” and they need to rush to reprint. That’s a problem we’d like to have, of course!
Anyways, I’m taking a day off Next Exit to tend to small errata that can be fixed without major disruption… nothing that would take copy-editing or serious re-layout. There aren’t that many errata, and a few of them are my own (40984, for example), so it’s nice to have a chance to do a quick fix-up. There’s a little dust here and there where a Leopard screenshot already looks dated, but it’s nothing that should alarm anyone too badly. When Apple announces the inevitable iPhone SDK 4.0, then we’ll start sweating.
I haven’t had a lot of people asking about a Kindle version, so maybe that means the message has gotten out: if you buy the eBook and paper bundle directly from the Prags’ website, you get access to a Kindle-compatible
mobiversion, along with PDF, and aepubfor use with the lovely Stanza e-book reader for iPhone. Daniel also informed me that if you’ve bought the hard-copy elsewhere, you can still upgrade to the e-bundle if you want an electronic copy, by registering it on your Prags bookshelf.I do feel like my coding style has changed a little between writing a bigger app (Next Exit is about 7,000 LOC), and wonder how that would translate to a new edition or another book. My guess is that you’d see a lot more
#defines for starters. I’ve also adopted the practice of moving thedeallocmethod to the top of the file — right after whichever form ofinit...is used — to make memory management more prominent and remind me toreleasethose instance variables.
Artist Cory Arcangel was recently interviewed by Motherboard TV. The short clip walks through many of his most well known projects, like Super Mario Clouds (2002) and Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 (2009), with additional commentary by Arcangel.
Lady Gaga and Britney Spears share the cover of Elle's January 2010 issue.
They're either the oddest pair, or the most likely, depending on how you look at it. I probably like Lady Gaga less than any one else who works in fashion, but I actually like this image - she looks human.
Inside she says, "My album covers are not sexual at all, which was an issue at my record label. I fought for months, and I cried at meetings. They didn’t think the photos were commercial enough The last thing a young woman needs is another picture of a sexy pop star writhing in sand, covered in grease, touching herself," which is both true and refreshing.
She also says this, "I feel that if I can show my demise artistically to the public, I can somehow cure my own legend. I can show you so you’re not looking for it. I’m dying for you on domestic television—here’s what it looks like, so no one has to wonder."
And that, makes no sense.
I found this card on the sidewalk the weekend before a Thanksgiving trip to see my mom, dad, brother, sister-in-law, niece, and nephew, who all live in a pretty city in the hills of North Carolina now. It was a good visit. I ate a lot of food, got drunk one night with my wife and my brother and his wife while my mom babysat their kids, played games with and read stories to my sweet, boisterous four-year-old niece, laughed at the comedic stylings of my two-year-old nephew, went on a nice walk with my dad, and spent a lot of time with my mom and the new love of her life, a tender little chunk of fur named Shaggy that she rescued from the dog pound a few months ago.
“It’s nice to have something to take care of,” my mom said at one point, petting Shaggy, who doesn’t ever like to be apart from her for even a few minutes. My mom also helps take care of my niece and nephew now, and I got to witness some of this care, which brought back to me the way she was with my brother and me when we were little. It brought it back in a visceral way, something about the way she leaned down to help my niece and nephew color some pages with crayons. I could see it all happening years before, the soft voice encouraging my brother and me. She has always been a superstar of care, reaching out and holding tight to her loved ones.
So I’m thinking of that today as I return to my daily life, which of course often includes a stop at my baseball card collection to try to make sense of this world. The collection continues, by little inexplicable miracles, to grow. I keep finding cards! I found this 1991 Charlie Hayes card just after I had finished one of my morning jogs up and down the streets of my neighborhood. I was walking up Western Avenue to get some quarters from the machine in the laundromat on Thomas. I noticed a little flash of muted color and looked down. The card was wet and had almost fused itself to the ground. If I hadn’t noticed it and carefully pried it up it would have disintegrated soon. It’s supposed to snow tomorrow here in Chicago, signaling the start of a winter that this card would not have survived.
I don’t have any deep feelings toward Charlie Hayes, beyond that he makes me smile for his involvement in a comedic riff by a friend that I’m not capable of transferring to the page. (Also, I see him catching the last out of the 1996 World Series, but the angst I have over that moment, which signaled the Yankees’ return to league dominance, centers more on Wade Boggs, who soon followed the Hayes putout with some nauseating on-field equestrianism, and Graig Nettles, whose 1978 one-game playoff-ending catch of a pop fly was vaguely but painfully echoed by Hayes in 1996.)
Nonetheless, I’m glad to have rescued the card from the world’s relentless all-encompassing road to ruin. All cards will disintegrate. Cover them in plastic if you want. Shield them from the elements. Pray for them morning, noon, and night. It’s only a matter of time. It makes you wonder why you hold on at all. Last night, in bed, I dropped into and then out of a shallow sleep, then I guess I started thrashing around a little, a physical manifestation of some mental anguish that had seized me like an owl snatching a vole in its talons.
“Are you OK?” my wife asked.
“I don’t want to die,” I said.
She tried to calm me down, and her touch actually did help. She tried words too, but words only go so far. Words, at best, are like the plastic covering protecting cards. Plastic won’t hold back the inevitable.
“That won’t happen for a long time,” she said.
“Ah,” I said. (It was sort of a muted scream.) My thoughts were: But it might happen at any time and, more powerfully, But it will happen. There aren’t any words to stave off that fact, especially at certain times of the night when the veil of day-to-day life drops.
It will happen. So what do we do with our time here? What do we do with this thin disintegrating gift?
Filed under: OS, Software, Freeware, Open Source, Developer
Macworld notes that my absolute favorite application, and one of the reasons I became a Mac user in the first place, is not quite as dead and gone as many people suspected. Quicksilver has released their first new stable version in two years, besides the developer leaving for greener pastures and setting the project completely open source. Unfortunately, there aren't many new features, but as Macworld says, let's be honest: you don't understand everything that's in there already. No seriously. No, seriously, you don't.
What is new is compatibility with Snow Leopard (mostly -- some plugins are still lagging behind), and a host of background changes. Clang is being used as the default compiler, which the change notes say should speed up runtime significantly. Localization has been tweaked, and lots of previously buggy actions (mouse tracking on triggers, for one) have supposedly been smoothed out and improved. Not necessarily a marquee release, but at this point, any Quicksilver release is a good one.
And if you've never actually used Quicksilver, well, now's a great time to start. Ostensibly, it's a app/file launcher, but the more you learn and use it, the more it becomes a "connector" for everything on your Mac. Your mind is connected to your fingers, and your fingers connect to the keyboard to invoke Quicksilver, but Quicksilver is connected to everything else.TUAWQuicksilver releases new beta 57 originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Wed, 02 Dec 2009 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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I stopped by the old Rocketboom space today to finish closing the office. It was a 1200 square foot 4th floor walk up in SoHo (the elevator worked on good days.) When we talked about it as a staff yesterday, none of us were feeling very sentimental. Today, I can’t help but think of everything we were able to get done in this space.
20 months ago, Rocketboom was just four of us (plus a host named Joanne.) We had taken what was arguably the first famous web video series and operationalize it, reinforce the foundation, and turn it into a platform that was able to handle multiple productions and projects, simultaneously.
This is the place where we helped Sarah launch Pop17. It’s where we developed Ellie’s show, Rocketboom Tech. And it’s where Andrew greenlit what was a hobby of Jamie, Ellie, and mine and let us turn it into a fully supported web series and community site called Know Your Meme. Most importantly, imo, this is where Magma was born. Along the way, we’ve added new staff, replaced some, and continued to build what we think is a damn good organization.
1200 square feet. Yeah, it’s not much even by New York standards, but it was big to us at the time. It was all the space we needed to survive some lean years and flourish, to turn a team of 4(+1) into a staff of ten with a family (freelancers, interns, and contributors) over three times that in size.
About a year into our term, that 1200 sq. ft got cramped. Jamie and Greg moved to the west coast to open ‘Rocketboom San Francisco’. Chris (who’s always been remote) administers Know Your Meme from Minneapolis. And in New York, we’re working on our next move, securing a space 2-3 times as big as our previous one.
I’m going to miss this space. And I can’t wait for our space to feel cramped again.
I received a very unexpected email last week:
We recently purchased a building in Queens, and while clearing out the basement we discovered a two lane manual bowling alley in very good condition. We did some research and this basement was most probably a club during the prohibition era. Would you or someone you know be interested [in the space]?
A hidden prohibition-era bowling alley? Yes, definitely interested. I took a trip to see it today – Just incredible:
According to the owner, the bowling lanes were hidden under boxes and boxes of junk. After researching the property, the owner now believes the basement was a speak-easy club during the Prohibition Era, with two bowling lanes to entertain customers.
The building itself was once a small garment factory in the early 1900’s, employing local women to work the sewing machines and men to keep the equipment running smoothly (often husbands and wives). This is the main room, where as many as 50 ladies would be operating sewing machines (though I was told it was not the sweat shop conditions one would assume):
What was going on in the basement, however, is a different story…
Each lane features two shallow gutters…
…with wood panels set at the ends to keep pins from bouncing out of the lanes (the pins were set-up by hand, of course):
Incredibly, the right lane still has a hanging cushion to stop the balls:
You can see it better below. Also note the screen on the right:
Incredibly, the cushion still hangs to this day by a pair of rusty iron hooks:
Lining the outer lane are several decorative poles:
Each is a dark-stained wood and features several ornamental rings:
A close-up (one can only imagine the parties these have been around for):
The wood on the lanes is in great shape. There are a few holes toward the starts…
But this is pretty much the only damage for the entire run:
Numerous entrances and exits throughout the property would have facilitated discreet access.
The owner is interested in any offers for film, television, commercial, or photographic use. He suggested it as very appropriate for a show like Cold Case, and I totally agree. Pretty much any production looking for an authentic relic of a prohibition-era club could do wonders with this space, a VERY rare find. The upstairs is also available.
If you are interested, send me an e-mail and I will forward it on to the owner.
And PLEASE, if you have something like this in your basement or attic or rooftop or whatever, drop me a line!
-SCOUT
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A friend in Japan just sent me this recipe for chestnut rice (kuri gohan) and I cooked it tonight. Wow! So simple, but with such a play of delicate flavors. You have to try it. Chestnuts are a perfect expression of the season right now; steaming them with rice, Japanese-style, brings out their natural sweetness in a much more subtle and, to me, more satisfying way than caramelizing by roasting ("...on an open fire"). Also, the recipe calls for a mixture of Japanese short grain rice and sticky (glutinous or sweet) rice, which creates a delightful texture and infuses even more of that natural sweetness. Finally, the sake and the salt here nicely pop all these tastes. The complexity of flavor you find in this simple dish is just amazing. Ah, Japanese cooking... The only caveat is that peeling uncooked chestnuts is a laborious pain in the o-ketsu (rhymes with "pass"). Cut open the shells, then peel the skin as best you can with a small knife. Take your time, be careful not to cut yourself, and you'll be fine. Here's the recipe I used:
- 12 chestnuts
- 2 1/2 cups Japanese short grain rice
- 1/2 cup sticky rice (also called glutinous or sweet rice or mochi gohan)
- 3 cups water
- 1 teaspoon salt
- 1 tablespoon sake (use real sake! - my ongoing crusade against cruddy "cooking sake," which I hate)
- Peel the chestnuts and soak in a bowl of water.
- Mix the rice and wash. I like to wash rice in a colander inside a mixing bowl. Add water, swirl the rice, dump the cloudy water. Repeat until the water becomes clear, about 3 or 4 washings. Place the washed rice in a rice cooker.
- Drain the chestnuts and sprinkle over the uncooked rice in the rice cooker. Do not mix at this point. You want moisture to penetrate the rice grains evenly, and thereby cook evenly; mixing in the chestnuts will prevent that from happening. This, by the way, goes for any kind of Japanese mixed rice recipe.
- Add the water, salt and sake. Don't worry if the salt and sake aren't evenly dispersed, you'll be mixing once it's cooked.
- Close the rice cooker, turn it on and cook this puppy. (Of course you can use a traditional earthenware rice cooker, or a good ole' pot.)
- When it's done, fluff up and mix the rice. Here's how: First, wet a rice spatula. Now slice through the rice with the spatula, positioning it like a knife blade. Finally, go around the sides and fold over the rice.
- Serve and enjoy!
By the way, my wife (my favorite taster) commented that she thought this recipe would also work well with kabocha pumpkin or sweet potatoes, instead of the chestnuts. I'm going to give that a try, too.
The other day I awoke to an intense, sudden, and overwhelming awareness of the horror of the "morning zoo" style radio program. The circumstances under which this apprehension arose, as I lay in a guest room bed at ten minutes to seven, might make you think that it was inspired by some actual exposure to the thing.* But no, it was an unprompted revelation, beamed into my skull as a special gift from the goddess of banal pseudo insights.
Not that the fundamental notion that morning radio is horrible is incorrect or indeed news to anyone, but in my drowsy hypnagogic state I was convinced that it is truly the face of the abyss. The frenzied auditory capering, the pathetic sequence of zany set pieces and wacky songs about how unpleasant it is to get up in the morning, the jokey nicknames, the promotional photos displaying weary middle-aged radio personalities in labored 'funny' poses or costumes -- all too, too depressing to contemplate and surely the product of a species that has been beyond hope since at least 1981.
This, you will have noticed, is a profound and significant epiphany. I am almost deep enough to be fourteen again. (If I really were, though, I'd be far too busy practicing my newly crabbed handwriting by filling countless tiny green notebooks with an endless stream of cryptic phrases to tell you about it.)
They are really awful, though, aren't they? Or were. Actually I have no idea how widespread they are anymore. They used to be tremendously popular. There must still be something in that genre and time slot. I still see billboards advertising radio stations' Whatever Team and Loony Crew. How far-ranging was the zoo phenomenon, anyway? Are there radio presenters in New Zealand playing 'Fish Heads' at six in the morning and bumper music about how much the listener can be presumed to hate getting out of bed? Are there Spanish and Norwegian Zoo Crews? Ugandan?
It turns out that Glenn Beck, jackass 'political' 'commentator' extraordinaire, first made a name for himself on one of the earliest and most popular of those programs. And actually, once you know that, his whole spazzy, coked-out, goofy-voiced pile of tics suddenly snaps into focus as something with a provenance. Steve kindly suggests that thinking of Beck's career as one long run from the horrific maw of morning radio makes it slightly more sympathetic, but I'm afraid that's a vastly more generous interpretation than the facts can bear. Still, even the hint of sympathy for Glenn Beck suggests that my fourteen-year-old self is absolutely right about the abyssal qualities of the Zoo Crew.
* In fact, I awoke to the infinitely superior sound of 'Single Ladies.' Suck it, Nietzsche! No abyss for me.
Andrew O'Hagan talks to Sasha Weiss about Samuel Johnson's various and contradictory character, how his Rambler essays shaped our notion of literary talent and professional authorship, and why, in his tercentenary year, Johnson remains essential reading. To read O'Hagan's article, or his other work for the Review, please visit nybooks.com
It’s 2009 and I just aimed a TV antenna.
This is the only position that gives a useful level of reception.
From an evolutionary perspective, sex is close to the engine of the most important evolutionary process—differential reproduction. Consequently, sexuality will be a primary target for the evolution of adaptations—anatomical, physiological, and psychological adaptations. There’s a good reason why, wherever there exist written laws, they include laws about who can and can’t have sex with whom. There’s a good reason why sex, and who is having sex with whom, is something people in every culture find of great interest, importance, and fascination. It’s a primary topic of gossip, and something that draws our attention like no other. To paraphrase an old rock lyric, “Without sex, where would we be now?” via www.newyorker.com Sorry to blog the last paragraph, but it's the easiest quote to pull.
I’ve been banging away on Clojure for a few days now, and while it would obviously take months of study and grinding through a big serious real-world software project to become authoritative, I think that what I’ve learned is useful enough to share.
[This is part of the Concur.next series.]
1. It’s the Best Lisp Ever
I don’t see how this can be a controversial statement. Issues of language-design aside, every other Lisp I’ve worked with has been hobbled by lacklustre libraries and poor integration with the rest of the IT infrastructure. Running on the Java platform makes those problems go away, poof!
Let’s assume hypothetically that there are other Lisps where certain design choices are found to be better than Clojure’s. Well, you can pile all those design choices up on top of each other and the pile will have to be very high before they come close to balancing the value of Java’s huge library repertoire and ease of integration with, well, just about anything.
2. Being a Lisp Is a Handicap
There are a large number of people who find Lisp code hard to read. I’m one of them. I’m fully prepared to admit that this is a shortcoming in myself not Lisp, but I think the shortcoming is widely shared.
Perhaps if I’d learned Lisp before plunging into the procedural mainstream, I wouldn’t have this problem — but it’s not clear the results of MIT’s decades-long experiment in doing so would support that hypothesis.
I think it’s worse than that. In school, we all learn
3 + 4 = 7 and then
sin(π/2) = 1
and then many of us speak languages with infix verbs. So Lisp is fighting uphill.It also may be the case that there’s something about some human minds that has trouble with thinking about data list-at-a-time rather than item-at-a-time and thus reacts poorly to constructs like
(apply merge-with + (pmap count-lines (partition-all *batch-size* (line-seq (reader filename)))))I think I really totally understand the value of being homoiconic, and the awesome power of macros, and the notion of the reader. I want to like Lisp; but I think readability is an insanely important characteristic in programming systems.
Practically speaking, this means that it’d be hard for me to go out there on Sun’s (or Oracle’s) behalf and tell them that the way to take the best advantage of modern many-core hardware is to start with S-Expressions before breakfast.
3. Clojure’s Concurrency Features Are Awesome
They do what they say they’re going to do, they require amazingly little ceremony, and, near as I can tell, their design mostly frees you from having to worry about deadlocks and race conditions.
Rich Hickey has planted a flag on high ground, and from here on in I think anyone who wants to make any strong claims about doing concurrency had better explain clearly how their primitives are distinguished from, or better than, Clojure’s.
4. Agents Are Better Than Refs or Atoms
I’m using these terms in a Clojure-specific way: Specifically, I mean agents, refs, and atoms.
Agents are not actors nor are they processes in either the Operating-System or Erlang senses. I’m not actually sure how big a difference that makes; my suspicion is that programmers probably think about using all three in about the same way, and that’s OK.
Anyhow, agents solve concurrency problems in the simplest possible way: By removing concurrency. Send functions to an agent and they’ll get executed one at a time in whatever order, taking the agent variable as their first argument, replacing its value with their output.
Here is an example. I have a map (i.e. hash table) called
so-farin which the keys are strings and the values are integers counting how many times each string has been encountered. If I userefsto protect both the hash table and the counters, I get code like this:1 (defn new-counter [ so-far target ] 2 (dosync 3 (if-let [ c (@so-far target) ] 4 c 5 (let [counter (ref 0) ] 6 (ref-set so-far (assoc @so-far target counter)) 7 counter)))) 8 9 (defn record [target so-far] 10 (if-let [ counter (@so-far target) ] 11 (incr counter) 12 (incr (new-counter so-far target))))Let’s start with the
recordfunction on Line 9. Theif-letlooks up the target in the hash, ignoring concurrency issues with@, and usesincrto bump the counter, if there’s one there. If there isn’t, it callsnew-counterto make one.Lines 3 and 4, in
new-counter, are where it gets interesting. Since everything’s running concurrently, we can’t just go ahead and bash a new counter into theso-farhash table, because somebody might have come along and done that already, recorded a few values even, so we’re at risk of throwing away data. So after we’ve locked things down withdosync, we check once again to see if the counter is there and if so, just return it. Otherwise we create the new counter, load it into the hash, and return it.On the other hand, consider the
agent-based approach; once again we have a hash table calledso-far, but protected by an agent. If the code wants to increment the value for sometarget, it says
(send so-far add target)This will eventually call the
addfunction with the hash table (not a reference or anything, the actual table) as the first argument, andtargetas the second. Here’sadd:(defn add [so-far target] (if-let [count (so-far target)] (assoc so-far target (inc count)) (assoc so-far target 1)))Considerably simpler, and nothing (concurrency-wise) can go wrong.
I do have one nit with agents. Most of my code was infrastructure; a module that reads lines out of a file and passes them one at a time to a user-provided function. At one point, I made some of the code that fixes up the lines that span I/O-block boundaries agent-based, because it was simpler. Unfortunately that code also calls the user-provided function and when one of those also tried to send work off to an agent, everything blew up because you can’t have a
sendinside asend.Actually, I think my nit is more general; in an ideal world, concurrency primitives would all be orthogonal and friction-free. But anyhow it’s a nit, not an architectural black hole, I think.
5. Clojure Concurrency Does Buy Real-World Performance
The Wide Finder runs I was using to test were processing 45G of data in a way that turned out to be CPU-limited in Clojure (I think due to inefficiencies in Java’s bytes-on-disk-to-String-objects pipeline, but I’m not sure). So making this run fast on a high-core-count/low-clock-rate processor was actually a pretty useful benchmark.
The single most important result: Clojure’s concurrency tools reduced the elapsed run-time by a factor of four on an eight-core system, with a very moderate amount of easy-to-read (for Lisp) code.
6. Performance is Wonky But It Doesn’t Matter
Some more results:
The amount of extra CPU burned to achieve the 4× speedup was remarkably high, more than doubling the CPU of the whole job.
The costs of concurrency, as functions of whether you use refs, or map/reduce, or agents, and also of block-size and thread-count and so on, are wildly variable and exhibit no obvious pattern.
Well, agents did seem to be quite a bit more expensive than refs. But refs were pretty cheap; a low-concurrency map/reduce approach was not dramatically slower than doing the Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work with refs.
These results are irrelevant. Remember, this is Clojure 1.0 we’re working with. If we determine that the throughput of the agent handlers is unacceptable, or that the STM-based infrastructure is consuming excessive CPU overhead, I’m quite confident that can be fixed. For example, we could lock Rich Hickey in a basement and put him on a tofu-and-lettuce diet.
7. The Implementation Is Good
I pushed Clojure hard enough to have a couple of subtle code bugs blow out the whole JVM, which takes considerable blowing-out on a Sun T2000. But the bugs were mine not Clojure’s. In the course of quite a few days pounding away at this thing with big data and tons of concurrency, I only observed one bug that I’m pretty sure is in Clojure, and then I couldn’t reproduce it.
Also, I never observed code in Clojure running significantly slower than the equivalent code in Java.
So if I’m wrong and there’s scope for a Lisp to take hold in the mainstream, Clojure would really be a good Lisp to bet on.
8. The Documentation Is OK
The current sources are Stuart Halloway’s Programming Clojure, Mark Volkmann’s Clojure - Functional Programming for the JVM, and of course the online API reference.
I used the book most, and while it’s well-written and accurate, it’s either missing some coverage or a little out of date, as I discovered whenever I published code and helpful commenters pointed out all the newer and better functions that I could have used. I also found the apps they built the tutorial examples around less than compelling.
Also, you can look through the source code, which is mostly in Clojure, and even for someone like me who finds Lisp hard to read, that’s super-helpful. But it’s clear that there’s good scope for a “Camel” or “Pitchfork” style book to come along and grab the high ground.
9. The Community Is Excellent
As I’ve already observed, the Clojure community is terrific; we’ll see how well that stands the test of time. I suspect I may linger around #clojure even when I’ve moved on to other things, just because the company’s good.
10. The Tools Aren’t Bad
I used Enclojure and I recommend it; having it set up and manage my REPL was super-convenient, and it never introduced any bugs or inconsistencies that I spotted. It’s also very early on in its life and there are rough spots, but really it’s good stuff.
I gather that rather more people use Emacs and some favor of SLIME, and I’m sure I would have been just fine with that too.
11. Tail Optimization Is Still a Red Herring
I wrote admiringly in Tail Call Amputation about the virtues of Clojure’s
recurandloopforms, as opposed to traditional tail-call optimization. This is clearly a religious issue, and there’s lots of preaching in the comments to that piece. I read them all and I followed pointers, and here’s what I think:Clojure’s
loop/recurdelivers 80% of the value of TCO, with greater syntax clarity. Clojure’s trampoline delivers 80% of the remaining 20%.Near as I can tell, that leaves state-machine implementation as the big outstanding case that you really need TCO for. I’ve done a ton of state-machine work in my career, and while I recognize that you could implement them with a bunch of trampolining tail-called routines, I’ve never understood why that’s better than expressing them in some sort of (usually sparse) array.
So, my opinion is that post-Clojure, this argument is over. I suspect that this will convince exactly zero of the TCO fans, probably including Rich Hickey, and that once again the comments will fill up with people explaining how the real conclusion is that I don’t actually understand TCO. Oh well.
Thanks!
To Rich and the community for welcoming me and helping. I stuffed my code fragments into the SVN repository at the Kenai Divide and Conquer project; they ain’t pretty. If anyone wants to have a whack at the big dataset, send me a hail and if I think you’re serious I’ll get you an account.
The quest for the Java of Concurrency continues.
A British medical researcher has put forth a new theory on the disease that claimed Jane Austen’s life. While previous speculation centered around Addison’s disease or lymphoma, “Katherine White of the Addison’s Disease Self Help Group has written an article for the British Medical Journal’s Medical Humanities magazine in which she says that Austen probably died of tuberculosis caught from cattle.” This postulation is actually borne out if one reads letters Austen sent to her family at the time, as well as the original ending of Sense and Sensibility, which was changed because it was thought to be too bleak.
With an income quite sufficient to their wants thus secured to them, they had nothing to wait for after Edward was in possession of the living, but the readiness of the house, to which Colonel Brandon, with an eager desire for the accommodation of Elinor, was making considerable improvements; and after waiting some time for their completion, after experiencing, as usual, a thousand disappointments and delays from the unaccountable dilatoriness of the workmen, Elinor, as usual, broke through the first positive resolution of not marrying till every thing was ready, and the ceremony took place in Barton church early in the autumn.
The first month after their marriage was spent with their friend at the Mansion-house; from whence they could superintend the progress of the Parsonage, and direct every thing as they liked on the spot;—could chuse papers, project shrubberies, and invent a sweep. Mrs. Jennings’s prophecies, though rather jumbled together, were chiefly fulfilled; for she was able to visit Edward and his wife in their Parsonage by Michaelmas, and she found in Elinor and her husband, as she really believed, one of the happiest couples in the world. They had in fact nothing to wish for, but the marriage of Colonel Brandon and Marianne, and rather better pasturage for their cows.
The cows, in fact, were more than vexed. As Elinor walked thru the pasture one morning, a milk cow, familiarly known as Bessie, rose upon its hind feet, as if some kind of great beast.
“I shall kill you,” cried Bessie, quite startling Elinor, “I come to talk to you of your demise. This way of treating us is more than unflattering. So terrible you are!—You know how I dread to complain;—but the very moment I saw you pass by, there was such an anger in my temper as really should seem to say, I will see you shuffle off this mortal coil.”
“But, but—” stammered Elinor, so full of fear and confusion, “you are a cow! How could you kill me?”
“It’s called bovine disseminated tuberculosis, you annoying bitch, and now you’ve got it. You won’t see Christmas. MUHAHHAHAHA.”
Elinor was indeed dead within the month. Fucking cows.
THE END
Yep. It’s all there.
Jesus, this is nerdy (and hilarious): a Lady Gaga parody about a typeface.
(via @caterina)
Tags: Lady Gaga music remix typography video
Gourmet, Unbound is an online crowdsourcing project started by a few food bloggers (including our own Serious Beer columnist Maggie Hoffman), where Gourmet mourners can gather and reminisce about favorite recipes. Each month the site's editors post a roundup of recipe submissions. Their mantra: "They can kick us out of their offices. But they can't kick us out of our kitchens."
So over the Thanksgiving break I FINALLY made a BurdaStyle pattern ... this one above, Heidi. (The picture above is NOT the one I made, but one from Isobel M -- I'll get pictures of mine up soon, maybe even with me wearing them, ulp -- but I did want to show one all made up, and not just the pattern illustration. And anyway, Isobel's is LIBERTY!)
Anyway, I actually made this twice over the holiday break, which should tell you how easy it is. I thought I would dislike printing out and taping together the pattern, but in fact it was very easy and soothing. I also discovered Netflix streaming video over the holiday weekend, and managed to inhale Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend ... I have a BBC Dickens obsession. (Not to mention a "watching David Morrissey lose his shit" obsession, cf. Blackpool and State of Play.) Costume drama plus scotch tape is an incredibly relaxing combination.
I also liked the heavier paper -- compared to pattern tissue, it was super-easy to alter, and having all the sizes meant I was able to cut different pieces for the bodice and skirt without worrying about doing anything unfixable -- if I screwed up, I could just print those pages out again and start over. (And there's a nearly endless supply of BBC costume dramas, after all ...)
Alterations I made: I raised the neckline about an inch. I cut one size for the shoulders, another for the bust, and a third for the waist/hips, and it was simple to smooth the pattern lines to do that. I changed the tucks to darts on the front and back bodice (but left them as soft pleats in the skirt). I shortened it by about three inches, to hit just above the knee in one version and just below the knee in the other. I also made the pockets about an inch and a half deeper -- when I put things in my pockets, I like them to stay there (with the exception of my hands).
The pattern went together really quickly, even though the bodice is lined (my fabrics were heavy so I didn't line the skirt). And compared to what I usually sew, Heidi uses *no* fabric. Seriously, I got away with less than two yards of 54" for this one, with maybe another yard for the bodice lining. Needless to say, I am re-evaluating the "short cuts" in my fabric closet in the light of this new information. I have some green cotton satin that is begging to be this dress.
I really should post pictures of the ones I made. I'll try to get them up tomorrow, if I can find my camera connector cable. I'm planning on wearing them with a cardigan (quel surprise) and maybe even a belt, and I have to say it reminds me of nothing so much as the Michelle Obama look: nice dress, sensible cardigan, cute belt (link is to her Tussaud's figure, so if that's not iconic ...). If it's good enough for the First Lady of the United States, it's good enough for me ...
[Also, I haven't really looked at how the new FTC blogging rules affect me, but I should point out that while BurdaStyle is an advertiser here, I paid for this pattern (it wasn't a freebie).]
Jason Kottke pointing to Greg Allen's project building Enzo Mari's Autoprogettazione dining table out of Ikea parts (whoa) led me to a recent post of Greg's on Gerhard Richter's 4900 Colors Version II. Which he then connects nicely to John Cage's Roywholyover A Circus.
Watching the installation and listening to the several random elements Richter deployed reminds me of John Cage's rolywholyover exhibit from 1993-4. Using a a list and map created each day by an I Ching-based program, the museum's art handlers would essentially perform by installing, moving, and removing artworks selected for the show. When not on the walls, paintings and such were stored on rolling walls, still visible, in a roped off section of the gallery. One of my absolute favorite art experiences ever.
And mine. I've never since seen a museum used in quite the same way; Roberta Smith's New York Times review captures some great elements; worth quoting at length:
The exhibition's heart and its largest section is "The Circus," an exegesis on avant-garde practice in which Cage's idea of randomness is applied most aggressively. The 50 artists included, all chosen by Cage, count as his friends, colleagues or inspirations. ... To counter such deliberateness, nearly everything in this section is subject to change. Three times a day, every day that the museum is open, staff members shift five of the show's objects, moving them to different positions in the gallery, placing them in the Reservoir (the open storage area that is part of the show) or bringing them back out on view, all in accordance with an elaborate I Ching-derived score. The growing number of nail holes speak of the changes.
I have a copy of the exhibition catalog from that show, which is a book-sized aluminum box filled with dozens of reproduced artifacts from the show -- letters, musical scores, poetry, photographs, print reproductions, recipes, notes, essays and other miscellany.
Photo swiped from this auction.It's one of my favorite "books" -- it captured perfectly the nature of the show, and, like Cage's work, invites you to engage with it in an entirely different way than you would a typical exhibition catalog. It's out of print now; though you can find copies on eBay occasionally and from fine art book dealers.
Where was I? Oh, yeah. Enzo Mari tables out of Ikea spare parts. Whoa.
To be honest, I’m finding Tumblr a little confusing. Everyone has these cute site names and no one has an email address and I don’t really know which of you are in high school and which are 45 years old. (Though I know which of you have babies and/or are alcoholics, because parents and alcoholics talk about their obsessions equally frequently.) Still, so far, any confusion is well overmatched by enjoyment. I give Tumblr a strong B+, and an expected good score on its midterm will bring it to a solid A-.
Quintuple LIKE. (And this might be my first true REblog.)
It should be obvious to most readers of this blog that Basic Maths, the WordPress theme that Allan Cole and I released recently (and available here), is a direct descendant of the overall look and feel of Subtraction.com. There’s a good reason for this: over the years, I’ve been asked countless times by others if they can use the Subtraction.com ‘theme,’ even though none existed — even if it did, I would have been inclined to say no, wanting to preserve its uniqueness for myself. So when I sat down to design Basic Maths, the aim was to create something that would satisfy this desire to have something Subtraction.com-like in the marketplace — not a clone, but a reinterpretation. As reinterpretations go, it’s pretty straightforward, I think. Nevertheless, I thought it would be interesting to showcase some of the steps in its design evolution, and how I arrived at the theme as it stands today.
Show Your Work
The core of the Subtraction.com is of course the grid structure, which is composed of eight 95-pixel wide units each separated by 10-pixel wide gutters and forming four columns. In my first pass at designing Basic Maths (its working title was ‘Simple Maths,’ by the way) I tried to repurpose that same grid structure, which is a bit of a shortcut that I take all time simply because I find that it often works well, I’ve done the work to figure it out already and see little reason to reinvent the wheel each time.
In this case, I found that I needed to add a ninth unit, both to take more advantage of the width of modern browsers (Subtraction.com is rather narrow) and because I wanted two full columns of sidebars.
There were at least two design details that I had in mind from the start. The first was the table of contents-style tags/categories display that I feature at the bottom of most every page of Subtraction.com (shown in the left column in these mock-ups). Incorporating some version of that feature seemed like a fair way of offering some of the distinctive visual components of Subtraction.com to potential buyers without giving away the whole franchise, so to speak.
The second was some kind of simple, one-click setting that would allow users to overhaul the minimalist color scheme easily. Though Subtraction.com uses only black, the logic of a color system is nevertheless there — all links and highlights get the same treatment. So it was straightforward to translate that into a single point-of-control color setting; in these comps I tried to switch up the colors regularly to make sure that pretty much any color would make sense and look decent.
In this first round, I also played with the ability to house a large-scale image at the top of the home page, a common visual feature of not just Subtraction.com but blogs everywhere.
The result, I think, was really dissatisfying. To be honest, I’m not a fan of throwing amateur images at the top of blogs. I think if you’re going to put an image in such a prominent spot, it should be a really good one — chosen not just with a photographer’s eye but a designer’s eye, too. Most of the blogs that do this out there just don’t do it very well, in my opinion. What’s more, I realized that if I were to build this feature into the template, users would more less be obliged to use some kind of big image even if they didn’t have a good one to use; the effect would essentially be promoting the use of underwhelming photos at the top of blogs. That wasn’t a consequence that I was particularly excited about, so I ultimately discarded the image altogether.
This first pass turned out to be quite strongly reminiscent of Subtraction.com, which made me feel a bit uncomfortable. It certainly wasn’t my goal to propagate an army of what would basically appear to be Subtraction.com knock-offs. Rather I wanted something evocative of it, but distinctive on its own and able to stand on its own merits. So I tried to strike out a little further in the second round of design explorations.
In retrospect, I quite like the look of this mock-up, but it was a failure to me on at least two counts. First, it violated my rule for always placing the search box in its ‘natural position’ at the top right of the screen. This design guideline is certainly a debatable one, but I always find that you can’t go wrong putting the search feature in that position nearly as often as you might putting search anywhere else. Almost as a matter of principle, I wanted this theme to place its search box in the ‘right’ position.
My second criticism was that the tag/category display in the left-hand column was starting to overwhelm what should have been the central focus of the page: the column of blog posts themselves that runs down the middle. I’ve never really been a fan of what amounts to visually trapping the main content column between two sidebars of peripheral content; I generally think that content needs to breathe on one side or the other, if possible.
My next mock-up tried to remedy that dynamic by putting all of the sidebar content on the far right., as shown here.
There are pluses and minuses to this approach, and I ultimately returned to a version of this in the final theme. But at least in this mock-up, the net effect was to produce what felt to me like a profoundly unbalanced layout, so unbalanced that I felt the need to throw in a generic logotype on the top right. Of course, the assumption that a Basic Maths user would have as visually effective and counter-balancing a logo as this big dark circle was as unrealistic as assuming they’d have terrific photography, so I nixed this too.
Finally, in the next round, I started to hone in on a more workable solution. This mock-up shows most of the basic elements of the final theme: category/tags display across the top, a mostly untouched left-hand column of white space, and a sidebar on the right.
Now the dynamic felt essentially correct, but some re-calibration of the elements was necessary in order to achieve the right balance. Primarily, the negative space in the left column, the primary purpose of which is aesthetic, effectively ‘bleeds’ into the main column thanks to the somewhat fanciful ‘hanging’ style of the date stamps. The effect is to consume way more white space than is necessary.
My solution was to reconfigure the relationship between the date stamps and the headlines, enlarging the latter a bit and tucking the former into the header area of each post, and letting the paragraphs of each blog post run wider.
Here, then, visual balance was restored, but a new problem presented itself: the measure of each line of text started to run quite long, longer than I thought was comfortable to read.
I also began to wonder if the layout would be sufficiently accommodating to a wide range of needs. While I liked the simplicity of this mock-up, I started to feel that the navigation and tag/category display at the top seemed a bit anemic; they’d probably be fine for most users, but for a particularly prolific blogger, they would quickly feel limiting. The far-right column too seemed like it would be quite narrow to folks who like to trick out their WordPress blog with various widgets, and there are more than a few of those folks out there. What’s more, it occurred to me that it would be difficult to incorporate advertising into this layout.
Having come all this way with the same basic grid structure as I started out with, I began to wonder if it was the right one at all. Ultimately, I decided my concerns were valid enough to warrant switching over to a new grid altogether. This time I opted for eleven 80-pixel-wide units, again each separated by 10-pixel-wide gutters.
A side note on the grid: I know it’s unorthodox to use an odd number of units — eleven here, nine before — when building a typographic grid, but this is where I differ from grid traditionalists. Print designers have the luxury of creating grids with essentially unlimited resolution; the Web offers a much more restrictive resolution reality in which it’s effectively impossible to divide a canvas into a smaller unit of measurement than a pixel. This tends to frustrate most attempts to build grids the way traditionalists recommend, as the math just doesn’t bear out. My workaround to this is simple: use the number of units and columns that you need to use, and sleep easy at night.
This new grid allowed me to create space for more navigation elements at the top, to add a fourth column of tags, and to shorten the measure of the main text column so that it would be significantly more comfortable to read. Theoretically, it would even allow an enterprising blogger to run large display advertising in the right-hand columns, if she was willing to roll up her sleeves and do a bit of CSS work.
One complaint I’ve heard consistently about this layout is that with two sidebar columns capable of holding plenty of widgets, the overall page can look quite busy. Though I’d like to be able to impose some kind of control over that area, I ultimately felt like it would prove more useful to more bloggers to allow them to configure as many or as few widgets there as they like. By the way, there seems to be some misapprehension that all of the widgets displayed on the Basic Maths demo are mandatory; they are not. A blogger can place as many or as few widgets as she wants, and it’s the blogger who owns responsibility for how clean or cluttered the page looks.
There you have it folks: the evolution of Basic Maths — so far. It’s just the start, as Allan and I have plans to build upon this framework with future releases, both major and minor. Stay tuned. And if you haven’t already, buy your copy here.
Update added to end of post
When your startup accepts outside money (such as venture capital), you are obligated to focus on maximizing long-term shareholder value. For most startups this is directly based on your ability to grow (customers, revenue and eventually profit). Most entrepreneurs understand the importance of growth; the common mistake is trying to force growth prematurely. This is frustrating, expensive and unsustainable – killing many startups with otherwise strong potential.
Most successful entrepreneurs have a good balance of execution intuition and luck. This was definitely the case at the two startups where I ran marketing from launch through NASDAQ IPO filings. While we didn’t follow a specific methodology, our CEO was intuitive enough to know the right time to “hit the gas pedal.” We didn’t accelerate until verifying that the team had created a great product that met real customer needs and we could generate sufficient user revenue to support sustainable customer acquisition programs. It’s taken years for me to realize that our growth was less a function of clever marketing tactics than beginning with something that customers truly needed. Some growth would have been automatic; the marketing team simply accelerated this growth.
Several startups later I have a much better understanding of the key milestones needed for a startup to reach its full growth potential. These are based more on observing universal truths than inventing some type of methodology. Reaching the full growth potential of your startup requires focus, specifically focusing on what matters when it matters. In my post on the startup growth pyramid I talk about the high level milestones you must achieve in order to unlock sustainable growth. This post looks at it on a more granular level with links to several of my previous blog posts and other resources that provide additional details.
Day 1: Validate Need for Minimum Viable Product (MVP)
Before any coding begins it is important to validate that the problem/need you are trying to solve actually exists, is worth solving, and the proposed minimum feature set solves it. This can best be achieved by meeting with the prospects most likely to need your solution. Steve Blank published a great post on this today.
Eric Ries offers more details on the minimum viable product concept in this post/video.
Where’s the Love?
Vinod Khosla, one of the most successful Silicon Valley VCs in history, once suggested to me that startups should think of their early users as a flock of sheep. He explained “the flock always finds the best grass.”
For you this means you should start looking for a signal about who loves your product and why as soon as you release your MVP. Most products have at least a few people that truly consider it a must have. These people hold the keys to the kingdom. Learn everything you can about them including their specific use cases and demographic characteristics. Try to get more of these types of people.
A good place to start collecting this information is the survey I’ve made freely available on Survey.io (a KISSmetrics product). You can read more about this product/market fit survey in this blog post.
If you’re lucky you’ll be able to use this early signal to find the product/market fit.
Expose the Core Gratifying Experience
The majority of our project focus at 12in6 recently has been helping startups find their core user perceived value and exposing it in messaging optimized for response. Your objective should be to remove complexity from the initial user experience and messaging in order to highlight this core user perceived value. Often this means burying or even completely eliminating features that don’t relate to this gratifying experience.
Metrics
Metrics don’t matter until you achieve product/market fit – then they are critical to your success. Dave McClure has a great video on startup metrics that matter (relevant part is at about minute 2:20).
Most of the tools out there provide way too many irrelevant metrics and miss the essential few. Both Dave McClure and I are advising KISSmetrics on a solution to this problem.
Start Charging
Another key step before growing your business is to implement a business model. The ideal timing for implementing your business model is discussed in this blog post .
I’ve often heard the argument that startups are focused on user growth and prefer to delay revenue in the short term. I believe the fastest way to grow is with a business model and explain why in this blog post.
Extreme Customer Support
Now that you have a business model in place, your first marketing expense should be to expand the customer support team. Anyone that cares enough about your solution to contact customer support is a great source of insight about your target market. Also, customer support will uncover issues that will help you grow faster without spending. And fixing these issues will make it much easier to grow when you do start spending.
If your customer support team is overwhelmed now, I don’t recommend trying to grow until you address the issues driving most support calls. Once you’ve addressed these issues you’ll have fewer barriers to adoption and will be able to grow without overwhelming customer support.
This will enable customer support to go above and beyond expectations, which is an important way to drive customer loyalty and enhance word of mouth. This approach pays more dividends today than ever before – as I explain in this post on Social Media.
Update: See comments for additional thoughts on extreme customer support.
Brand Experience Over Brand Awareness
Back in the “Dotcom Bubble” days billions were wasted on brand awareness campaigns for startups. Today most entrepreneurs understand that brand awareness campaigns are a waste of money for startups.
Instead, it’s much cheaper and more effective for startups to focus on creating a fantastic brand experience. While startups often realize the importance of brand experience, they focus on it too early, fine tuning things that customers don’t care about. Instead, wait until you understand why certain customers love your product; then obsess over every element of this customer experience.
Apple is probably the best tech company out there on coordinating a perfect brand experience for its target users. I cover more on brand experience in this blog post.
Driving Growth
Once you’ve achieved all of the previous milestones, then you can focus on driving growth. CEOs must take an active role in driving customer growth whether or not they have an interest in marketing. Nearly all of the risk and upside in a startup is in your ability to gain customer traction and then drive scalable customer growth. The CEO should not abdicate this responsibility to the marketer.
It’s important to stay aggressive and take all slack out of the market (make it completely uninteresting to pursue the market for any other competitor). Your early advantage is the ability to iterate on the customer feedback loop and leverage strong customer loyalty to drive word of mouth.
While ROI lets you know if a user acquisition channel is sustainable, the key focus should be on exposing lots of the right people to your fantastic product experience. It’s much easier to get passionate and creative about this than purely thinking about things from an ROI perspective. Of course positive ROI is essential for any customer acquisition program to remain in the mix.
When it’s time to hire a marketing leader to partner with the CEO, this post explains my recommendations for an ideal startup marketing leader. The most effective startup marketers are relentless about experimenting with channels until finding things that work.
Start by building out free channels such as listing in directories and basic SEO. When you begin building paid channels, extra effort should be put into channels that show strong potential for scale.
Unfortunately you can’t count on effective online tactics working forever. I’ve seen many hot online marketing tactics lose their effectiveness over time. This is because online tracking makes it easier for marketers to quickly figure out what actually works. As a result we start piling into the most effective tactics. Eventually online tactics get saturated, as explained in this post.
Business building
Fast growing businesses are difficult to manage. This is the point where you should bring in some experienced operations people if they aren’t already on the team.
It Won’t be Easy
Finally, the top three risks to growing via these milestones are:
- You lose patience and decide that one or more of the milestones really aren’t that important.
- VCs and/or board of directors lose patience because you did not achieve conceptual agreement on this approach from beginning.
- You delude yourself into believing that for “our type of business” customers really don’t need to consider our product a “must have”. For us, “nice to have” is good enough.
Building a successful business is hard. Hopefully this milestone driven approach to growing your startup will make it a bit easier.
Update: It’s hard to write a blog post on “milestones to startup success” that covers every type of startup. Some startup types may need to reverse the order of some of these milestones. For example, with marketplaces (EBay, social networks, eduFire, dating sites, etc.) user gratification increases with more users so there is a bit of chicken and egg here… Ad supported sites also benefit from early scale. Many of the articles linked to from this blog post also cover exceptions such as when a startup should start charging (it’s different for enterprise targeted startups).
Let’s talk a bit more about what makes the Fan Projections different from those that Rally, Dan Szymborski, and Tango Tiger have and will continue to produce.
The most obvious difference is the amount of math involved. Frankly, we’re not requiring any. There’s no need to copy, paste, and weigh each season like these are your personal Marcels. Now, if that method is the most comfortable in your estimation, then sure, do as you please. Most will probably do a little eyeballing and nudge those up or down based on personal knowledge, anecdotal evidence, or just pure gut feelings.
For instance, yesterday I began filling out my Rays projections and up popped B.J. Upton’s name. Everyone – well, those who read that other site I’m on most of the time – knows about my fandom of Upton. I find him to be a fantastic talent with immense upside. The problem being A) how is his shoulder health and B) how much of the potential is left? He’s already a solid player, but after his 2007 the talk about him becoming a 30/30 producer has been left unfulfilled.
This all came to a head when I reached the home runs drop down. Upton hit 24 homers as a 22-year-old and has hit 20 since. The numbers said … well, I didn’t know what they said. I really, really wanted to go 20+. He has the quick wrists as everyone saw in the 2008 post-season. But then again, potential isn’t static and pitchers figured out how to pitch to his weaknesses last year.
To truncate this process which is probably interesting to no one, I chose 15-19 after a good three or four minutes of internal debate. All of these factors came into play. I added the scouting observations, subtracted the health concerns, and did math without really doing math. Only afterwards did I run the 5-4-3 weighting to find 13-14 homers as the average. Not a huge difference all told, but I think most people are going to have small conflicts like this throughout the process.
Ultimately, the resolutions will guide the final projections. Remember, we’re not asking you to submit the ZiPS, CHONE, or Marcels projections for these players. If we wanted that, we would consult with them. We want everyone to vote as they wish and if that means being a little optimistic or pessimistic about certain players, then so be it. Just remember, your ballot won’t be ditched if you disagree with CHONE.
It’s Paradox Week on Rocketboom. Today, Molly explains the ontological paradox. Story links: Quantum Leap: Thou Shalt Not, McFly & The Starlighters “Johnny B. Goode, Quantum Leap (TV Series), Slacker
The marginal cost of the arbitration offer is not the full value of the player’s potential 2010 salary. It is not even the dollars beyond that which a team would be happy to pay the player. It is only the dollars beyond what any one team in baseball would be happy to pay for that player that are actually being risked. Let’s use Adrian Beltre and the Mariners as an example. Based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’m presuming that the Mariners have approximately $25 million to spend this winter as they shop to fill various needs. That is one of the main reasons why Beltre probably won’t be back in Seattle next year, as he would eat up a significant chunk of that budget, limiting the teams options when pursuing other positions of need. In reality, Beltre would probably make at least $10 million if he accepted arbitration, and likely closer to the $13 million he earned in 2009. However, the Mariners aren’t risking $10 to $13 million by offering Beltre arbitration. His market value is significantly north of $0, and on a one year deal, it’s probably somewhere between $8 and $12 million, I’d imagine. So, in reality, the Mariners would be risking something like $4 million, as that would be the potential difference between the arbitration award and his free market value. Remember, a team is free to trade a player who accepts arbitration, so it wouldn’t be particularly hard for the Mariners to then ship Beltre to, say, Philadelphia along with some cash to cover the difference between what Philly wants to pay him and what he may get in arbitration. via www.fangraphs.com MLB's arbitration & draft pick compensation scheme is more byzantine than the NBA salary cap & the NFL's "signing bonus" and guaranteed-contract rules combined. This post by FanGraphs (quickly becoming the #1 baseball blog, in my book) helps clear up the principles and the problems facing GMS as they make (or don't make) their offers tomorrow. And do not miss Fangraph's crowdsourced 2010 player predictions, the best thing to happen for fantasy geeks since the PECOTA spreadsheet.
On my last pass through the $1 pile at the local bookstore I found a somewhat ragged but still perfectly readable copy of Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Shunryu Suzuki's slim but deeply engaging collection of lectures on Zen practice. Books like this are worth coming back to periodically, every couple of years, in much the same way a great film like 2001 or La Dolce Vita becomes a wholly different experience after you have passed through a bit of life. My first reading of Dropping Ashes on the Buddha -- another book in the same vein -- was punctuated with me saying to myself "Yeah, I know all that." On a more recent re-reading of the same book I instead found myself saying "Oh, I know exactly what he means by that..."
Suzuki emphasizes Zen practice -- sitting, training, encounters with one's master, etc. -- because the process and the experience acquired through it is far more important than any amount of talk about it. The talk is useful as an explanatory device, as an analogy, but it is not a substitute for making real in one's mind the crucial self-discoveries required along the way. One of my own slowly-accrued opinions about the process is that enlightenment is not about waking up one day and "seeing the light", but spending any number of years seeing everything in that light and acting accordingly. The doing of it well is the enlightenment. You don't have it unless you've already been in the thick of it for some time and made it into a part of your own nature.
It's the same as when a novice writer comes in the door and asks for advice about how to write that Great Book they have in their head. The first and hardest thing for them to give up is their preconceived notions -- not just of what their work is supposed to be, but how to go about making it. They see falling short of the target as unacceptable, even if their whole notion of the target, of the distance to the target, of hitting the target, is all based not on true experience but on seeing the process from the outside -- by bearing witness to nothing more than someone else's finishing product. Many of them aren't prepared to accept falling flat on their ass three, four, five times in a row. They think they have to get it RIGHT, or be shot in the back of the head.
The few who see falling flat on their ass as being no different from "getting what they want" -- no different for them emotionally, that is -- have far fewer hurdles to overcome. They see the whole process of trial and error and success as just that -- a total process, where the stuff you ditch is vital to the whole, too, even if you're the only one who ever sees it.
I shall have a great deal more to say about the parallels between Suzuki's explanations and my own experiences with creative work in future posts.
And at some point I'll tell the story of how I threw out the same novel twice -- once with tears and the second time without blinking.
Tomorrow represents the first real day of the hot stove league, as teams are required to make arbitration decisions their respective free agents. Once teams understand who will and who will not require draft pick compensation to sign, the process will accelerate, as teams will be able to more accurately assess the cost of signing a particular player.
For some players, the decision to offer arbitration or not is an easy one. The Angels will certainly be offering it to John Lackey and Chone Figgins, while the White Sox will not be offering it to Jermaine Dye. It doesn’t take much in the way of analysis to reach those conclusions.
However, there is a large pool of players for which the decision is not so cut-and-dried. Should the Dodgers offer Orlando Hudson arbitration, even though they don’t really want him back, in order to secure the compensation he would bring as a Type A free agent? How about Mike Cameron, who has already been replaced in Milwaukee and been told that he is not in their plans, but has the type of skillset not likely to be correctly valued in arbitration? Injury prone pitchers such as Rich Harden and Erik Bedard also present dilemmas to the Cubs and Mariners respectively.
For many of these players, teams will decide that the risk of an arbitration offer being accepted is too high, cutting ties with a player they either don’t want or don’t believe they can afford. However, in many of these cases, I believe that teams may be incorrectly valuing the actual cost of the offer.
The marginal cost of the arbitration offer is not the full value of the player’s potential 2010 salary. It is not even the dollars beyond that which a team would be happy to pay the player. It is only the dollars beyond what any one team in baseball would be happy to pay for that player that are actually being risked.
Let’s use Adrian Beltre and the Mariners as an example. Based on some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I’m presuming that the Mariners have approximately $25 million to spend this winter as they shop to fill various needs. That is one of the main reasons why Beltre probably won’t be back in Seattle next year, as he would eat up a significant chunk of that budget, limiting the teams options when pursuing other positions of need. In reality, Beltre would probably make at least $10 million if he accepted arbitration, and likely closer to the $13 million he earned in 2009.
However, the Mariners aren’t risking $10 to $13 million by offering Beltre arbitration. His market value is significantly north of $0, and on a one year deal, it’s probably somewhere between $8 and $12 million, I’d imagine. So, in reality, the Mariners would be risking something like $4 million, as that would be the potential difference between the arbitration award and his free market value. Remember, a team is free to trade a player who accepts arbitration, so it wouldn’t be particularly hard for the Mariners to then ship Beltre to, say, Philadelphia along with some cash to cover the difference between what Philly wants to pay him and what he may get in arbitration.
So, if the risk if ~$4 million, what is the actual cost of assuming that risk? That requires a probability calculation of how likely the player is to accept the offer. In many of these borderline cases, I’d assume the actual probability is probably around 50 percent, plus or minus 10 percent or so. That’s why they are borderline cases – it isn’t easy to figure out how the player would react to an arbitration offer.
With a probability of around 50 percent, that cuts the total risk in half. In the Beltre example, that would lower the cost of assuming that particular risk to $2 million, once the potential that he wouldn’t accept is factored in.
Is a supplemental pick in the #35-#45 range worth $2 million to the Mariners? Most of the research done on the subject would say yes, and that given these numbers, Seattle is better off taking the risk of Beltre accepting their offer to receive the potential reward of the compensation.
This is the calculation that teams should be doing – figuring the cost of a potential arbitration award over the market value of the player, adjusting for probability that he accepts the offer, and comparing the cost of that risk to the benefit of the compensation pick.
If a team is assessing their actual risk as the full potential salary that they would have to pay out if a player accepts, they’ll be overstating their own liability and miscalculating the costs and benefits of an arbitration offer. I would suspect we will see multiple teams do just this tomorrow, leaving value on the table by being overly risk averse.
And I agree with Winer about the iPhone: call quality sucks. It doesn’t matter if it’s technically AT&T’s fault or Apple’s, since we don’t have a choice.
It’s “projection week” here at FanGraphs, which is a nice coincidence, since I was going to post about projections, anyway. While I dabble with my own projections (which probably will never see the light of day), no one wants to hear about that. Instead, I’ve just assembled some (very) non-technical reminders that might be helpful when looking at projections.
I’ve often heard the complaint that projections are “arrogant,” “put too much faith in the numbers,” or the classic “they rely on what a player has already done, but they don’t tell you want a player will do.” I want to emphasize that projection systems are not based on esoteric “tricks,” but rather are based on the fact that we don’t know very much about the player from the numbers.
Projection is not divination. I’ve sometimes heard that projection systems aren’t worth looking at because “after all, they projected an .800 OPS for player x and he ended up with an .850 OPS.” That’s a straw man, but it gets at the general point: projections are not prophetic divinations of the future, but attempts to measure what the “true talent” of players at any given point in time. The “general formula” for player performance is: true talent + luck + environment. (I’ll table discussion of parks and aging for now.)
The problem is that we don’t know, at least from the raw stats, what exactly is “luck” and what represents a player’s “true talent.” Moreover, “luck” doesn’t just mean things like BABIP rates. Even a player getting 700 PA in a season will have varying levels of performance around his true talent, what we call “hot streaks” or “cold streaks.” (Cf. Willie Bloomquist, April 2009) To single these streaks out begs the question: how do we distinguish the “streaks” from the “true talent” parts of the seasons from which the projections draw? Projection systems use different methods; here I’ll mention basic factors that are used by most good projection systems. This may be old hat, but they are worth discussing because of how often they are passed over.
Regression to the mean. This is a very important concept, so important that I’m leery of screwing up the explanation. The best introductory piece I’ve read is one by Dave Studeman. In short: given a lack of any other information about a player, our “best guess” is that he’s an average member of (some particular) population. The more data we have on the player, the more we can separate him from the “average” population. This is one place where sample size issues come into play. [Note that there is a great deal of debate about how to regress, e.g., what the "population" should be. For examples, search at The Book Blog or Baseball Think Factory.]
Weighted average. Say a projection involves the last three years of performance. Do you simply take the three year average? Well, no, true talent can change from year to year. More recent years are thus weighted more heavily (5-4-3 for hitters and 5-3-2 for pitchers are common weights). Alex Gordon had a .321 major-league wOBA in 2009, and a .344 in 2008. Do we automatically assume that .321 is closer to his true talent? No, because the .321 was in only 189 PA, while the .344 was in 571 PA.
This isn’t all there is to projection, but you’d be surprised how much work those basic concepts do. Tom Tango’s Marcel works entirely from a weighted average, regression, and a very basic age adjustment, and it hangs in with the “big boys” pretty well. No projection system will ever be perfect, of course. Part of that is the influence of “luck” and the limited samples we have from all players. Part of it is also that some players don’t have that much information available on them. Players develop differently.
The point is that we simply don’t know ahead of time which players will be exceptions. Projection systems generally do better when looking at how the project groups of players, rather than focusing in on individual successes or failures, as in the case of Matt Wieters (ahem). The point I’ve been trying to make in a roundabout way is that regression, weighted averages, generic aging curves, etc. might miss out on certain players, but are based on studies that show how most players would do. They are humble confessions of ignorance on an individual level, but are still the best overall bet. Expecting anything more leads to folly.
One might express the difference as that between a making a conservative, diversified investment and “just knowing” that Enron stock will continue to rise. Tough choice.
More later this week on “breakouts,” “outliers,” and other traps.
I begin this book review by quoting the Haddaway classic ‘What is Love,’ which is familiar from many tv shows and movies (”A Night at the Roxbury”) but to me its quintessential deployment is in the “Life of Brian” aka”World Happiness Dance” episode of My So-Called Life. This clip is long-ish but contains so much wonderful stuff: Ricky’s gay angst, Ricky’s coming-out-via-dancefloor-freakout, Sharon Cherski’s terrible dress, and most of all this deathless and incredibly realistic dialogue:
Jordan: “Why are you like this?”
Angela: “Like what?”
Jordan: “Like how you are.”
Angela: “How am I?”
(exeunt Jordan with other delinquents)
Angela: “How … how am I?”
Also Brian’s voiceover about how Angela’s hair smells incredible, like an orange grove he drove past when he was eight “but that’s probably just her shampoo or whatever.” I mean, I want you to read my book review but I almost more want you to watch this.
via us.macmillan.com
Thought I would post it so everyone could see the nice cover which is about as close as we will get to reading it. The book is $85 for the 150+ page hardcover edition. Granted it is small point type so it could be like 225 pages. But still. He explained it was priced this way because it is being sold to research libraries and others who have to have it. What was the point of forcing him to have a keyword friendly title if no one other than an institution is going to buy it? But what gets me riled up is that his publisher is only giving him a discount that brings his copies to abut $45. Really shouldn't they be giving it to him for something a lot closer to the printing costs?
“Practical Common Lisp” http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/ made for some nice holiday reading
This page aggregates all of the lists related to 2009. via www.fimoculous.com
I don't want to oversell things, but there's a chance the above video might be the only one in the world featuring a member of Journey, John Walsh, the White House party crashers and former Skins offensive coordinator Al Saunders. It has something to do with polo. All I remember was Michaele, the female party crasher and fake ex-Redskins cheerleader, driving me and former Comcast SportsNet producer Adam Littlefield, up some back Loudoun County hill on a golf cart to a cabin to interview some Journey guitarist about polo. And me asking Saunders which of his players would be best on a polo pony. And John Walsh talking about Tiger Woods. Tareq Salahi, the male party crasher, appears around the 2:30 mark. Oh, and as Michaele drove us up that hill, she was shouting "Hi beautiful people!" at the crowd. "It's not a frumpy crowd; it's a good-looking crowd,"
Back in early 2008, I set out to create the definitive Top Ten list of the greatest Garbage Pail Kids cards of all-time. Knowing that my knowledge on the cult trading card set was limited, I set out to find an expert.
Wayne runs Garbage Pail Kids References and with his help we put together the best of the best. Since that time, it has been one of the most popular Wax Heaven articles in the site’s history thanks to Google traffic.
Well, Topps has brought back Garbage Pail Kids for a February 2010 release and I am proud to bring you some new, exclusive images and information on what is likely to be another great GPK release.
Garbage Pail Kids Flashback will include all the goodies that made the original release a pop culture classic but will also include elements of today’s trading card technology, like 1/1 sketch cards, printing plates, and parallels.
The sketch cards, with odds yet to be determined, will featured hand-drawn GPK artwork by all the familiar names. Printing plates will be “one of a kind” with different four colors, and there will be parallels; Gross Green, Punk Pink, Silver and Gold.
Perhaps the most exciting element of all will be the ‘Then and Now’ inserts which will dig up GPK favorites like Adam Bomb, Hot Marvin, and Nasty Nick and will update collectors on what they have been up to. There will also be ‘Loco Motion’ inserts which will feature lenticular technology.
Garbage Pail Kids Flashback will be available at Target, Shopko, Fred Meyer, and other retailers in February 2010. You can check out the official website, which will be updated periodically, HERE.
Emily Gould reads two books about love so you don’t have to—the Christina Nehring brief history of romance and Julie Metz’s crazy memoir. WARNING: the Metz book contains the sentence “I creamed the lacy panties I had bought for the occasion.” Wow.
Shared by Andrey
Great points, and completely compatible with Joe's points, IMO.Joe Hewitt garnered some remarkable press (for a developer) today by going on record saying he quit developing Facebook for iPhone because of Apple’s App Store review process. I am unimpressed. (With the article, that is — not with Joe and his paparazzi. Damn Joe, how’d you get TC in your pocket?) And I’m qualified to weigh in on this topic because…I wrote Pandora Radio for iPhone? Weak, but I’ll take the podium now, thank you very much.
Now, I understand that dealing with app review is a pain. No one likes it, it’s an imperfect process, it’s often arbitrary, blatant mistakes are made, etc etc. While some prognosticate a review-free ecosystem that is far superior to the status quo, let’s remember that such predictions are speculative, because no such mobile app ecosystem exists.
Read that last sentence again, because there’s a subtle trap in there. See it? Here’s a hint: name the platforms for which indy developers were writing apps prior to the App Store’s existence.
The moral of the story: the only reason indy developers are writing mobile apps today is because Apple let them when no one else would. So yeah, that review process is awful. But compared to the alternatives, the iPhone was unbridled freedom. Despite this, from day one we’ve heard endless harping about the evil review process and how bad it is for Apple and customers. Call it The Developer’s Thank You. And yet 100k apps later I’m still awaiting the flood of developers leaving the iPhone for greener pastures, and the flood of customers leaving the iPhone for other devices. Well, OK, there’s Joe Hewitt and Mike Arrington.
Apple is all about taste. The App Store is too. And there’s one thing I’ve learned from years of working for people with exceptional taste: to those without taste, tasteful decisions seem arbitrary and capricious. If you think the App Store would be better without a review process, ask yourself which criteria you’re judging. Can you honestly claim that the iPhone would be more tasteful if there was no review process?
Apple serves its customers, not its developers. And given Apple’s success with the iPhone product, it’s pretty hard to argue that they’ve been somehow missing the point. Quite the opposite. It’s always amusing to watch people question the sanity of product decisions for an insanely successful product. Are you crazy? This thing went off like a rocket ship! It’s hard for me to point to any iPhone product decision as an abject failure. It’s not about developer convenience. To misquote James Carville: it’s the product, stupid.
There may come a day when Apple’s review process causes it to lose customers. And if/when that day comes, I’m sure we’ll see Apple change its ways. Until then, can we give it a rest with the whole App-Store-review-process-sucks meme? The horse is dead. Hell, the whole farm is dead. Clearly, Apple and its detractors do not see eye-to-eye. The review process is a fact for now, there are alternative platforms for those who object, so let’s move along.
(p.s. Lest anyone take this post as criticism of Joe’s decision, it is not. To be clear, Joe was very respectful in his comments and he did what he needed to do: he voted with his feet. When I talk about “whining,” it’s not the Joe Hewitts of the world that I’m referring to.)
According to Mike Arrington, they got screwed by their hardware manufacturing partner at the last moment.
No word from Popular Mechanics yet on whether they get to keep their product of the year award.
I finally read Ken Auletta's New Yorker piece about Google this past weekend, and enjoyed the vignette of Karmazin complaining about Google's plan for advertising transparency... Nick Carr's piece in the Times this morning is a good companion...
It’s a wan reminder that all reigns are temporary, that the court of self-appointed media royalty was serving at the pleasure of an advertising economy that itself was built on inefficiency and excess. Google fixed that.
I found the 9/11 metaphor a bit over the top, however.
Those of us who covered media were told for years that the sky was falling, and nothing happened. And then it did. Great big chunks of the sky gave way and magazines tumbled — Gourmet!? — that seemed as if they were as solid as the skyline itself. But to those of us who were here back in September of 2001, we learned that even the edifice of Manhattan itself is subject to perforation and endless loss.
In Carr's world is Google the Al Qaeda of the media business? Please.
Today, David announced the newest addition to the site, and one we’re all pretty excited about it – Fan Projections. We’ve hosted the forecasts of most of the various top projection systems over the last few years, and you’ve probably become accustomed to hearing various writers quote CHONE, ZiPS, or Marcel. With FanGraphs now offering the ability to aggregate projections from various sources, we’ll have a new set of projections to offer this winter – those of the crowd.
If you’ve read James Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”, you’ll no doubt recognize the theory behind the endeavor. As Surowiecki suggests, there is evidence that certain groups of lay people can give better estimates than any single expert, due to the unique experiences we all have in life. By blending our understandings together, we can eliminate some of our individual biases and enhance the shared wisdom of the population.
Tom Tango has done some research on this as it pertains to projections in baseball, and Surowiecki’s theory holds up pretty well. In a four part series that matched up six projection systems against 165 fans, the aggregate projections of the fans was essentially the equal of the complex statistical models. Individual fans by themselves didn’t fare so well, but when all fans were combined into a single projection, they held their own.
This is, essentially, Surowiecki’s argument in a nutshell. We all have our limitations of understanding, but the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts.
So, in that spirit, we offer you the opportunity to make your voice heard. Use the Fan Projections to add your personal wisdom the crowd, based on your insights and experiences. Despite the fact that this is site is statistically inclined, we have a fairly broad base of readers, offering a wide variety of opinions and views – the kind of crowd where the wisdom of many can really shine through. Try projecting some players every day, putting real thought into what you expect from each player in 2010.
If we have the diverse, intelligent crowd that I think reads this site, don’t be too surprised if the Fan Projections end up hanging with the big boys. Let’s put the wisdom of the FanGraphs crowd to use and see what happens.
I shuttered Timely Demise today, 18 months after conceiving it, 16 months after launching it and three months after I generally lost my taste for publishing melancholy.
By most measures, the site was a success. I gained a ridiculous amount of knowledge about retail trends and the mechanics of restructuring. I received some fun press coverage. I developed a regular readership that, as of this writing, is still tuning in for news.
Google News added me as a source. I got the inestimable Choire Sicha to be my guestblogger. I began receiving anonymous tips, including one from an angry creditor pointing me to his debtor's bankruptcy. And I had one actual news scoop hand-delivered by a company's public relations firm.
I knew all along that this would be a tough subject to cover neatly. After all, I work for and with retailers; how can I be associated with bad news? So I tried to keep the blog objective and matter-of-fact, and that was usually enough. Yes, I know it had a rough name and a difficult topic. But at launch I felt a bit of provocation was appropriate for its moment in time. (See also: It Died, among others.)
Mostly, I found it all fascinating, as did my readers. I am much wiser about retail now than I was a year and a half ago. I suspect we all are.
A few months back, I registered timelyrevive.com with plans on shifting my focus toward expansion and profit statements. But I found that much harder to track from Timely Demise's dedicated angle, which focused on consumer-level impact and not corporate maneuvers. Stories of 90-year-old corner stores closing make for better (and more trackable) journalism than Applebee's #1997 opening in the local mall. I began running short on news.
So, three hundred and fourteen posts, five hundred fifty thousand page views, and eighty-nine dollars in ad revenue later, I'm hanging up my tough-news journalist's hat. We'll see if I can brew up something new--and more upbeat--for 2010.
It was so close I could taste it. Two weeks ago we were ready to publicly launch the CrunchPad. The device was stable enough for a demo. It went hours without crashing. We could even let people play with the device themselves – the user interface was intuitive enough that people “got it” without any instructions. And the look of pure joy on the handful of outsiders who had used it made the nearly 1.5 year effort completely worth it.
Our plan was to debut the CrunchPad on stage at the Real-Time Crunchup event on November 20, a little over a week ago. We even hoped to have devices hacked together with Google Chrome OS and Windows 7 to show people that you could hack this thing to run just about anything you want. We’d put 1,000 of the devices on pre-sale and take orders immediately. Larger scale production would begin early in 2010.
And then the entire project self destructed over nothing more than greed, jealousy and miscommunication.
On November 17, our deadline date for greenlighting the debut three days later, the CEO of our partner on the project, Chandra Rathakrishnan, sent me an email with the subject “no good news.” Yuck, I thought. Another delay, probably with the screen that had been giving us so much trouble – capacitive touch at 12 inches isn’t trivial. And sure enough, the email started off with “no good news to update. updated hardware is still on its way , so that’s a timing issue. friday will be a challenge now.”
But the email went on. Bizarrely, we were being notified that we were no longer involved with the project. Our project. Chandra said that based on pressure from his shareholders he had decided to move forward and sell the device directly through Fusion Garage, without our involvement.
Err, what? This is the equivalent of Foxconn, who build the iPhone, notifiying Apple a couple of days before launch that they’d be moving ahead and selling the iPhone directly without any involvement from Apple.
Chandra also forwarded an internal email from one of his shareholders. My favorite part of the email: “We still acknowledge that Arrington and TechCrunch bring some value to your business endeavor…If he agrees to our terms, we would have Arrington assume the role of visionary/evangelist/marketing head and Fusion Garage would acquire the rights to use the Crunchpad brand and name. Personally, I don’t think the name is all that important but you seem to be somewhat attached to the name.”
And with that, the entire project self destructed.
Neither we nor Fusion Garage own the intellectual property of the CrunchPad outright. Fusion Garage has a team of 13 or so employees, currently working here in Silicon Valley out of a home they rented and in our office. Their team has mixed with our CrunchPad team, which is led by Brian Kindle, the former Vice President Hardware Engineering and Manufacturing at Vudu and an early hardware engineer at TiVo. Development expenses have been shared, and our team has spent time in Singapore and Taiwan, and their team has spent time here. We chose to work with Fusion Garage on Prototype C and the launch prototype after we finished Prototype B internally.
We jointly own the CrunchPad product intellectual property, and we solely own the CrunchPad trademark.
So it’s legally impossible for them to simply build and sell the device without our agreement.
We’re still completely perplexed as to what happened. We think they were attempting to renegotiate the equity split on the company behind CrunchPad, which was to acquire Fusion Garage. Renegotiations are always fine. But holding a gun to our head two days before launching and insulting us isn’t the way to do that. We’ve spent the last week and a half trying unsuccessfully to communicate with them. Our calls and emails go unanswered, so we can’t even figure out exactly what’s happened.
Yesterday Chandra sent an email saying “Following our phone discussion, I had another round of discussions with my shareholders. The shareholders are not willing to move from their position as they believe their stand is justified. On the other hand, there isn’t an alternative offer on the table from Crunchpad.”
My response: “We have not come back to you with any counter offer to the email you forwarded because you and your shareholders have communicated to us that moving forward without us is something that you consider to be a legitimate and legal option. In other words, your “counter” offer is theft of intellectual property.”
Ultimately there are two sides to every story, and they’ll certainly have their side. We will almost certainly be filing multiple lawsuits against Fusion Garage, and possibly Chandra and his shareholders as individuals, shortly. The legal system will work it all out over time.
Mostly though I’m just sad. I never envisioned the CrunchPad as a huge business. I just wanted a tablet computer that I could use to consume the Internet while sitting on a couch. I’ve always pushed to open source all or parts of the project. So this isn’t really about money. It was about the thrill of building something with a team that had the same vision. Now that’s going to be impossible. And I’ve also lost a friend – Chandra spent months in our office this year and, until a week and a half ago, was the kind of young, determined entrepreneur that I admire. I thought we’d be friends for the rest of our lives.
And what’s really sad about all this is the incredible support we were getting from companies and people around the world to launch this device. A major multi-billion dollar retail partner has been patiently working with us for months, giving advice on manufacturing partners and offering to sell the CrunchPad at a zero margin to help us succeed in the early days. They were also willing to pay for the devices on order instead of 30 days after delivery, a crucial cash flow benefit that would allow us to ramp up volume without putting ourselves our of business. They were even willing to fly the devices from China on their own planes to eliminate our shipping costs. Intel, which would supply the Atom CPUs to power the device, has assisted us repeatedly with engineering and partner advice, and gave us pricing that was ridiculously generous given our projected first year sales volumes. Other partners were eager to promote and sell the device for little or no benefit on their end other than “supporting the project.” We even had sponsors lined up to help us sell the device near our $300ish cost.
And money wasn’t a problem, either. We had blue chip angel and venture capitalist investors in Silicon Valley waiting to invest in the company since late Spring. We were simply holding them off until we launched, to eliminate some of the risk.
It’s a sad day at TechCrunch HQ. Hitting the publish button on this post, which makes all of this so…final…is a very hard thing to do. I’m enraged, embarrassed, and just…sad. The CrunchPad is now in the DeadPool.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Somewhere down in the Flatiron, out in Brooklyn, over in Queens or up in Harlem, cabals of bright young things are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest. Their tiny netbooks and iPhones, which serve as portals to the cloud, contain more informational firepower than entire newsrooms possessed just two decades ago. And they are ginning content from their audiences in the form of social media or finding ways of making ambient information more useful. They are jaded in the way youth requires, but have the confidence that is a gift of their age as well.That’s David Carr, in his weekly media column, discussing the industry at present and in future. The column is vague in the way that the future of the media is vague—we all think we know how things might shape up but none of us are really sure—but it also contains what feels like the kind of forced optimism we all keep reminding ourselves to feel during These Troubled Times. Plus, it is an easy set-up for the Matrix joke, and who doesn’t love that?
I have been in a slightly philosophical mood of late. Perhaps it is due to the change of seasons, the closing out of what’s been a difficult and frustrating year. My mind generally operates in a fairly discursive manner, so my thoughts are perpetually ajumble (Not a word? It is now.) and non-specific, but here is what I’ve been thinking about.
This generation, our generation—and you know who you are—is at the dead center of a profound transition in the way we process information. This is not by any means an original observation, but I’m not sure that enough attention has been paid to those caught in the middle. For my parents and those who are older, it is too late. They will cling on to the old ways of thinking and knowing and will probably be relieved to die without having to make the switch, particularly since they can see where we’re all headed and it has absolutely no appeal. For the kids who have grown up plugged in, they know no other way, so they are spared the difficulties of change. They look at the old folks, or even the slightly-older-than-they folks with a mixture of idle curiosity and derision.
But what about us? We were brought up reading for totality. Sure, we were taught to grab the vital bits and pieces as necessary, but there was more of an understanding that a complete text was its own reward, and either by osmosis or unconscious analysis, the necessary information would implant itself within us. These days we’re trying to absorb everything new, everything that comes at us in endless waves, with a sorry combination of old tools and an unsettled and slightly faulty concept of the new ways in which words signify and convey. The most successful of this cohort will be those who are able to separate themselves from the lessons we were taught at the start and adopt the new methods while carefully maintaining previous understandings, but knowing when to avoid those understandings lest they interfere with the new process.
Does that make sense? Probably not. I am writing this for the Web (the driver, after all, of the new way) so my arguments are untested and my assertions are like Italian seaside resort construction—put up fast with cheap material on shoddy foundations. Then again, you are reading this on the Web, quickly scanning for relevant nuggets—good luck with that!—and automatically skipping typos or filling in missing words. We have this new agreement, you and I, that cogency and authority are no longer subject to the once-standard necessities of clarity and completeness.
There was once an time in this country where Roger Miller was able to have his own variety show on one of the three major networks. (The was a time on this country where there were three major networks.) I love Roger Miller, but that is a baffling fact to me, that this country once thought itself so uniform in its tastes that Roger Miller was a viable television host. And that’s me looking back at a time not a decade before my birth and being baffled by it. Can you imagine how this new generation will look back at, I don’t know, “Friends”? Or The Matrix?
Oh, right, the Matrix joke: The Matrix joke is something I do pretty much just to annoy my acquaintances. If I’m not in a mood for deep thinking—and if the Google era has done anything, it’s given me a perpetual lack of interest in deep thinking—I simply respond to anything that threatens to get thoughtful or profound with a learned nod and say, “It’s just like The Matrix.” Try it, it works with pretty much anything: From Mark Sanchez’s color-coded wristband to Joe Biden’s insistence on riding Amtrak each day, you can make everything sound like a Matrix scenario. I think it’s because we’re all so dependent on routine but none of us wants to admit it. Everyone likes to think that they’re Keanu Reeves, when, really, we’re all a bunch of, uh, some other guy from The Matrix who is not Keanu Reeves. (But not Larry Fishburne, he was pretty badass.)
And what of that cabal of bright young things who are watching all the disruption with more than an academic interest? Who is more Matrixy then they? If the future, as I suspect, is one of less gaudy but more frequent rewards—call them microrewards—who will have time to unplug, to read for pleasure, to think deeply? Change, it seems, is a forced march to small payouts for brief efforts.
But I could be wrong. I usually am. I was walking to the Awl offices this morning and I saw a poster for Lady Gaga’s Fame Monster. As you know, I have found the success of Lady Gaga not only inexplicable but almost personally offensive. Like, they’re making Lady Gaga a superstar to spite me, Alex Balk, because I cannot understand her at all. The entertainment industry is sending me a signal that I have now aged out of anything they might be interested in providing me. This morning, however, gazing briefly at that poster—it shows two iterations: her blonde version and then the dark-haired version with the fucked-up makeup—it suddenly all became clear: Lady Gaga is dance music’s version of Marilyn Manson. People from every generation want pretty much the same things, just in contemporary packages. So maybe there’s hope. Or maybe that’s more forced optimism. All I know is someone has probably already made the Gaga/Manson comparison, but I’ll be fucked if I’m going to Google it to check. Because I am old, and sometimes the old ways really are the best ways.
Exciting news over at the world’s last profitable (online) magazine company, Gawker Media! We’re hearing that the company’s widespread use of full-time yet non-employee contractors is finally being ended. Workers at the company’s various blogs will have the choice between going full-time, as actual employees, or staying as contract workers, but only working four days a week. This is awesome news for those among us who were afraid that in the hideous future, no one would ever find employee status anywhere again. On a day-to-day level, this is less awesome for Gawker Media employees, who have to choose between being squeezed into the office (where, exactly?) for every workday or retaining their freedom to take on additional work elsewhere. Still, we’re sure there are various benefits for the company in this, and for the employees as well. (And once they’re employees, they can more easily unionize. Ha ha, JUST JOSHING.)
It's t-minus twenty-four hours to Sonia Rykiel's H&M explosion.
We've just landed in Paris, but the team behind the launch has been working for weeks to create a pink fairy tale within the Grand Palais. Event Planner Ettiene Russo walks through the progress in this video, in awe of his own vision coming to life under the glass dome, "I want them to feel like kids," he says of the guests.
The lingerie might counter the childlike excitement, but we'll let you know tomorrow.
Editor's note: On Mondays, Kristen Swensson of Cheap, Healthy, Good swings by these parts to share healthy and delicious recipes with us. Take it away, Kristen!
[Photograph: Kristen Swensson]
Every year, my Ma sets aside one December day to bake Christmas cookies. In 12 short hours, she produces dozens upon dozens of almond crescents, pinwheels, rum balls, pfeffernusse, and the holy grail of holiday treats: peanut butter and jelly bars. Once she's finished, she passes out on the couch, leaving the family to descend upon the kitchen like so many sugar-starved cookie vultures. It's never the healthiest of evenings, but hell if it ain't one of the best.
So, I'll be the first to admit: substituting low-cal Christmas cookies for the real thing is morally akin to stabbing Santa with a rusty fork. What's nice about meringue cookies, though, is they're not supposed to replace anything. Instead, they're intended as delightfully airy add-ons to your standard cookie cache. The calorie count (10 to 15 per meringue) is completely incidental.
Other nice things about meringue cookies: the entire batch costs under a dollar, each serving is totally fat-free, and the flavor can be customized to whatever extract you have on hand. (Here, it's peppermint). Plus, they're feather-light and undeniably cute.
If you decide to make them yourself, know that excess humidity and/or underbeating the batter may result in flat cookies. Additionally, your mileage may vary on the number of servings. My batch yielded 44 medium-ish meringues, but anywhere between 30 and 50 sounds reasonable.
Here's looking at you, Christmas cookies. Whatever your calorie content, you'll always have a place in my gastrointestinal system.
Meringue Cookies
- makes 30 to 50 cookies -
Adapted from All Recipes.Ingredients
2 egg whites
1/8 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon cream of tartar
1/2 cup white sugar
1/4 to 1/2 teaspoon peppermint extract (optional)
4 drops green food coloring (optional)Procedure
1. Heat oven to 225°F and line two cookie sheets with aluminum foil.
2. Using a StandMixer or good hand mixer, beat egg whites, salt, and cream of tartar on medium-high speed until soft peaks form. Slowly add sugar and keep beating until stiff peaks form. (DO NOT underbeat.) If using extract and food coloring, add at the end and beat for another 2 or 3 minutes.
3. Spoon mixture into a plastic bag and squeeze out most of the air. Cut off one small corner of the bag and pipe cookie-sized dollops of meringue on to cookie sheets, about 1 inch apart. (If done correctly, the cookies will stay in those exact shapes when finished.)
4. Bake cookies for 90 minutes, making sure they don't brown. When done baking, kill the heat, open the oven door slightly, and let everything cool down completely, about 45 to 60 minutes. Serve.
From Tom Schaller on FiveThirtyEight about the idiots that snuck into a recent White House state dinner.
No, you're not famous; you're infamous. You're situated squarely at the bottom of an already too-deep and increasingly murky barrel of celebrity culture, celebrity journalism, and (un)reality TV, the depths of which are probably making even Andy Warhol cringe in his grave. I want this to be your fifteenth minute. I want your egg timer to ding now, so you can exit our national discourse as swiftly, completely and permanently as possible.
And, you know what? We can do something about it. We can let the producers of whatever crap program agrees to pay these creepy, pathetic, attention-starved goons for the rights to interview That Couple that not only will we tune out that specific broadcast, but we will tune out that program in the future as well. We can compound the effect by identifying the companies that sponsor the airing of the interview, and boycotting their products or services.
As I wrote last year, Just Don't Look. (via @tcarmody)
Tags: Tom Schaller
I'm about halfway through Toby Lester's Fourth Part of the World and hope to have a review for you soon. In the meantime, check out this brief review in the New York Times's travel section that covers both Lester's book and Frank Jacobs's Strange Maps. Via All Points Blog....
At his hiring, and after Sunday's game. (Real photo by John McDonnell - TWP) Now, I should say that the above images aren't an entirely fair comparison. The one on the left was taken by a professional photographer, on a day Jim Zorn had time to gather himself, inside an auditorium. The image on the left was grabbed from Internet video, on a day Zorn was coaching his guts out, on a field in Philadelphia. So bear that in mind. And yet still, I ask, does the Redskins' head coaching job age you more than being President of the United States? This happened over a span of 22 months in Ashburn, although if you didn't know you'd assume that Zorn had just finished a decade in Siberia. That "today" image comes from RedskinsTV.com, whose postgame interview with Zorn on Sunday was equally harrowing. "Let me tell you, it's just
For those of you who have been hanging around FanGraphs since at least last season, you’ll know that we carry various projections in the off-season, which are for the most part generated by computer programs.
This off-season, in addition to carrying the various computer generated projections, we’ve teamed up with Tangotiger of insidethebook.com to give you, the fans, a chance to generate your own projection line for each major league player. Hopefully our collective brains will be able to pinpoint things that computer systems don’t.
With that said, let me give you all a quick tour of a projection ballot:
Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.
After you’ve selected a team, there are 8 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2010, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.
That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.
As with all new features, we hope everything is bug free and we test things as much as possible, but if you do notice any issues, please let us know.
Justseeds tabled Arts vs Craft in Milwaukee this past Saturday in Milwaukee. Here's a few photos. Much thanks to Faythe Levine and company for organizing such a great event each year.
Nothing more but a bunch of cover songs that have been bubbling around in recent weeks. Enjoy!!
Tanya Morgan “Breakadawn”/ Skillz & Colin Munroe “Baby Phat” (De La Soul Covers)
Two highlight entries pulled from Mick Boogie & Terry Urban’s latest mixtape collabo, a multi-artist tribute compilation to De La Soul’s twenty-year strong legacy entitled Le Da Soul (download the full set here): the MJ-sampling groover “Breakadawn” see the unmistakably DLS-influenced Tanya Morgan cleverly weaving in their own spin to Pos and Trugoy’s script, while Skillz (assisted by longtime MM fave Colin Munroe) gives the curvalicious female sect a nice shout-out (”I like chicks thicker/ Imagine me dating a lil’ stick figure”) in a revamp of “Baby Phat”.
DL: “Breakadawn”
DL: “Baby Phat”
Ellie Goulding & Erik Hassle “Be Mine (Robyn Cover)”
In which two current blog-pop phenoms take a break from their respective on-the-rise careers for an acoustic guitar-backed duet rendition of Robyn’s 2005 single (best known for it’s drama-tastic spoken word bridge and one of the most heartwrenching opening lines ever put to pad-”It’s a good thing, tears never show in the pouring rain/ As if a good thing ever could make up for all the pain”).
Of course, for those who have heard Robyn’s own stripped-down take, Goulding and Hassle’s re-read won’t be that much of a mind-blower, but oh does their vocals meld beautifully when harmony time comes around.
DL: “Be Mine”
Snow Patrol “Ray of Light (Madonna Cover)”
True, the folk-y swing that Irish alt-rockers Snow Patrol build to on the hook of this Top 5 Madonna smash kind of feels pathetic when compared to the explosive epiphany Maddie brought to the table, but we must be honest with at least this much: hearing “Light”’s heavy verses under the band’s earnestly melancholy arrangement catches a pleasant lullaby-like mood we wouldn’t mind being soothed with at the end of a long and hard work-day.
DL: “Ray of Light”
VV Brown “Miss You (Rolling Stones Cover)”
Though England-born indie pop-punk/ soul-ster VV Brown was given a major hype push earlier this year when she was recognized as a Top Ten finalist in the BBC’s “One To Watch” poll, Sounds of 2009, she has so far struggled in earning much pop chart love (Out of four singles released, only one has managed to chart in the UK Top 40).
Still, we say keep following her. Not only because her critically-acclaimed debut album, Travelling Like The Light, has plenty of quirked-out, retro-pop/ rock/ soul goodies to offer (contrary to radio support), but also because she’s proven to be a hoot with her on-the-fly YouTube cover creations (check out her renditions of “Crazy In Love”, “Day N Nite” and “Best I Ever Had”).
There’s nothing silly about her take on the Rolling Stones’ 1978 classic “Miss You” though, which trades in the original’s bluesy-disco strut for a despair-drenched Southern-fried soul vibe.
DL: “Miss You”
Mumford & Sons “I’m Not Alone (Calvin Harris Cover)”
Part of the same London folk scene that has birthed the likes of Noah and The Whale and Laura Marling, the four-piece Mumford & Sons caught plenty of ears with their debut single, “Little Lion Man”, an enrapturing cut seething with self-loathing (”I really fucked it up this time/ Didn’t I my dear?”) and an edge-of-apocalypse hoedown rattle.
That same pluck-heavy furor is called upon for their surprisingly decent Live Lounge rendition of Calvin Harris’ ’90’s-dance tribute “I’m Not Alone”, their woodsy slant working wonders in an impressive mimicking of the same soft vocals/ loud music dichotomy that made the original so enticing.
DL: “I’m Not Alone”
Slim Twig “Behold A Lady (Outkast Cover)”
Toronto-based indie label Paper Bag Records turned seven this month (Happy birthday PB!!), and to help celebrate this event, they’ve unleashed the covers compilation, The Seven Year Itch, for free from their site.
Amongst it’s twelve-song tracklisting, plenty of fascinating grabs can be found (including Josh Reichmann’s rustic campfire take on Bat For Lashes’ “Daniel” and CFCF’s ’80’s new wave & vocoder-baked treatment of OMC’s quirky international fave “How Bizarre”), but the one perched atop our highlight picks would have to be a cover of Andre 3000’s The Love Below-housed tribute to the classy female, “Behold A Lady”, as handled by Canadian-born noise-art eccentric Slim Twig.
Sludging up the original’s lean digi-funk with a dense garage stomp and kooky, vampiric vocals that sound like they’re being emitted from a broken-down loudspeaker, Twig charmingly re-brands the song with a brush of his own unique “ice cold” cool, providing belated props to an oft-overlooked Below gem.
DL: “Behold A Lady”
Pixie Lott “When Love Takes Over (David Guetta/ Kelly Rowland Cover)”
Where David & Kelly’s original aimed to split open the heavens from it’s opening moments with all of it’s big dance diva grandeur, this Live Lounge version by English singer-songwriter Lott goes for a more organic lift-off.
Opening on a slow and meditative tip that plants a pleasant spotlight on the grainy squiggles of soul embedded in Pix’ pipes, the remake makes a better play at illustrating love taking over, growing more and more bold with each added layer of (mostly Coldplay-nicked) instrumentation and upgraded tempo notch until it explodes in a fireworks-like display of romantic euphoria.
There are three questions you have when you’re hiring a programmer (or anyone, for that matter): Are they smart? Can they get stuff done? Can you work with them? Someone who’s smart but doesn’t get stuff done should be your friend, not your employee. You can talk your problems over with them while they procrastinate on their actual job. Someone who gets stuff done but isn’t smart is inefficient: non-smart people get stuff done by doing it the hard way and working with them is slow and frustrating. Someone you can’t work with, you can’t work with. via www.aaronsw.com
Laundry Installation By Dag Designlab
David Pearson’s cover for an upcoming collection of Sherlock Holmes stories published by White’s Books. Be sure to checkout their other beautiful editions. Available for preorder at Amazon now.
You can view Pearson’s full portfolio here.
A horrible experience of unbearable length, briefly punctuated by three or four amusing moments. One of these involves a dog-like robot humping the leg of the heroine. Such are the meagre joys. If you want to save yourself the ticket price, go into the kitchen, cue up a male choir singing the music of hell, and get a kid to start banging pots and pans together. Then close your eyes and use your imagination. One star. via blogs.suntimes.com Happy Holidays from Roger Ebert. I did not think "Fast and Furious" sucked, but I won't argue too hard.
